Steps to the Altar (7 page)

“Why would the guys tease you about her?”

“Not the guys,
her.
Don’t forget, she’s never seen me in a ‘suit’ position. She’s used to a whole other side of me. A definitely wilder side.”

I silently contemplated the meaning of his words.

After he left, I straightened up the kitchen, threw back the comforter on the bed, and dressed in my everyday working clothes of a plaid flannel shirt and faded Wranglers. As I cleaned my muddy boots in the bathtub, I worried his relationship with Del like a dog with a marrow-filled bone.

Let it go,
I commanded myself while drying my boots with an old towel. You knew this man had a very complicated personal life before he met you, so grow up and accept it. Quit being such a small-town girl. You have shower gifts to wrap, paperwork to do, a multitude of problems to be solved at the museum. Besides, she’ll be gone soon.
Get over it.

After that lecture, I called to Scout. He jumped into the back of the truck and I sat down in the driver’s seat, enjoying for a moment the still new car smell. To force myself into a more amiable mood, I slipped a Tish Hinojosa cassette into my new truck’s player and sang along with “La Rancherita”—“The Little Ranch Girl.” Its buoyant melody and touching love story never failed to make me smile.

My mood was much cheerier when I pulled into the folk art museum’s parking lot. The museum had become truly a home away from home for me. I knew every inch of its white-washed adobe interior as well as I did my rented bungalow. Better maybe. I parked under my favorite spot at the back of the lot, under an initial-scarred oak tree, where I noted with consternation a fresh carving—RICHARD LOVES KATHY. (Though I wished he’d found a different place to show his love, I also wished the couple well in their relationship.) The museum looked warm and welcoming under the gray February sky.

Once a ranchero for the Sinclair family, deeded to them by the then ruling Spanish government, the two-story adobe house and attached stables with their dusky red-tiled roofs now housed a constantly changing crew of folk artists and volunteer docents. Constance Sinclair, our own personal patron, donated the hacienda to the historical society about ten years ago and still helped out by hosting the occasional fund raiser and by paying my salary. But the museum and the artists’ co-op affiliated with it were supposed to be self-sustaining. Which meant I spent a lot of time writing grant proposals, figuring out fund raisers, and begging money from rich, hopefully folk-art-loving people. Now that Isaac Lyons was about to become my stepgrandpa, I was finding it much easier to acquire funds from people wanting to meet and mingle with him. At first I was hesitant to cash in on my relationship with him until he told me in no uncertain terms that we were going to be family and that he was more than happy to use any influence he had over people’s pocketbooks to help the museum.

“Frankly, Benni, I’d be supporting this museum even if you weren’t involved, so take advantage of me. Please.” He punctuated that last word with a huge bear hug, which was not just a cliché with him but a reality, seeing as he was six-four and large-boned as a grizzly.

That was why, even though he was to be married in three weeks, he was the main attraction at the Mardi Gras Costume Ball that Constance was holding at her mansion in Cambria, a small, affluent town north of Morro Bay. It was
the
social event of the season with a price tag that irked me a bit . . . three hundred dollars a person. It limited the people who could attend, giving it an exclusivity that pricked at my egalitarian sensibilities. But as Elvia pointed out with logical pragmaticism, the whole point of the event was to make money for the museum so it made sense to appeal to people who had most of the green stuff.

Of course, that meant I had to attend also . . . in costume. A costume I still had to pick up at Costume Capers downtown, a store owned by an old friend of mine. Cathy Gustavson and I had attended San Celina High School together and had shared not only the giggly experience of dissecting a sheep’s eye in sophomore biology (she held, I cut), but the wonderful agony of a crush on a young, bearded psychology teacher who didn’t know either of us existed. My time being so tight these last few weeks, I’d given her full authority to choose my costume with the only stipulation that I not be a cowgirl (too predictable) and it not be low cut. She knew me well enough to know that comfort was my main criteria for a costume so I was secure in the knowledge that a Mae West dress or skintight Cat Woman jumpsuit was not in my immediate future.

Inside the museum itself, it was quiet, since the doors didn’t officially open until 10 A.M. Behind the counter of our gift shop, Edna McClun was cleaning the glass counter top with a solution that, by the smell, contained a large amount of vinegar.

“Hey, Edna.” I walked behind the counter and checked my mail tray. Two letters and a catalog for leatherworking supplies. “We’re running into each other everywhere these days.”

“It’s because I’ve got too much on my plate,” she said. “The trunks are being brought over today by one of our young men volunteers. He’s a real sweetie. Been working every weekend on the octagonal barn. Real talented carpenter, this boy.”

“Trunks?” I said.

She reached over and thumped the top of my head. “Anyone home? Remember yesterday? Maple Sullivan’s trunks. The murderess. You said you’d catalog the contents.”

“Oh, those trunks,” I said, shaking my head. “I’d already forgotten about them.”

“Like I said, we aren’t in any hurry, but the sooner you do them, the sooner I can mark them off my list.” She gave me an encouraging smile and rubbed vigorously at a stubborn spot on the counter. I felt sorry for the spot.

“I’ll do my best,” I said, trying not to heave a big sigh. What difference did it make
when
this woman’s last effects got cataloged? She’d probably been dead for years. For a moment, I pondered on where she and her lover might have gone after she killed her husband and how she’d managed to stay uncaught all these years. The historian in me, the person who had irrationally decided to major in history in college and minor in agriculture rather than the other way around, couldn’t help wondering about her life before she came to San Celina, what drove her to murder her husband, a man, I assumed, she’d once loved.

No time for speculation, I told myself, sticking the mail in my back pocket and saying over my shoulder to Edna, “Just have your talented carpenter boy put them in my office. No, have him check with me first. My office is pretty small. I’ll have to find someplace else to work on them.”

“He said he can come by around noon. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine. Just send him back to my office.”

I walked through the current exhibits, both upstairs and down, making sure everything was in place and noting any repairs that I’d need to report to my very capable, senior citizen assistant, D-Daddy Boudreaux, a retired commercial fisherman from Louisiana. In theory and on paper, his work schedule was three days a week, two hours a day, because that was all the museum could afford. In reality, he worked many more hours than that and claimed he was paid in the joy of being needed.

The current exhibits were of local wedding and anniversary quilts and samplers. The samplers were upstairs, the quilts downstairs. There were many traditional Double Wedding Ring patterns, most of them in the pastel prints popular in the thirties when that pattern was in its heyday, but there were other more unpredictable patterns like Alaska Territory made for a local woman’s grandmother who married a man from Alaska whom she met through the mail, Bachelor’s Puzzle for a woman who’d been engaged for ten years before marrying another man she’d known only three days, and Steps to the Altar done in gold and white made for a woman who married the Church by becoming a nun. That was the pattern Dove and I had decided to make for Elvia and Emory’s wedding quilt, though we chose dark green, maroon, and off-white, the colors of her bedroom.

My favorite quilt was a story quilt made by a local artist who also taught women’s history at Cal Poly, our local university. In its colorful story squares it incorporated many of the folk sayings and superstitions about quilting:

If you’re the last to place a stitch in the quilt, you’ll have the next baby. Always make a deliberate error in your quilt to avoid bad luck. Don’t let your son or daughter sleep under a Drunkard’s Path quilt or they’ll turn to drink. The first person to sleep under a quilt just off the quilting frame will have their dreams come true. If you break a needle while quilting, you will have the next baby. If you begin a quilt on Friday, you will never live to finish it.

That last one gave me pause. What day
did
Dove and I start Elvia’s quilt?

All was well among the exhibits, which according to our daily head count, had been our most popular one so far, so I headed through the back, under the thick canopy of honeysuckle vines toward the old stables that now held the co-op workshops and my office. It was quiet for a weekday. No quilt guild was meeting here today to stitch a quilt, and even the wood shop held only one lone carver sitting on a stool hand-sanding to the sound of a classical music station.

Scout settled down on his rug and I was in the middle of writing the short speech I’d have to give at the Mardi Gras ball thanking everyone for their generous support of the folk art museum, when from the doorway, there came the sound of a clearing voice. I turned my head toward the sound and resisted the urge to groan out loud.

Lydia, Gabe’s ex-wife, stood in the doorway in a dark green suit looking gorgeous and a little embarrassed.

My first thought was,
Dang it all, what does she want?

6

GABE

HE POURED HIMSELF a cup of coffee and took it back to his desk. Del would be here any minute. His heart sounded like a drum in his ears.

He’d never expected to see her again after Rudy’s funeral. There was so much going on then, so many people, they had only a few minutes to speak. Long enough for him to say how sorry he was, what a great guy Rudy was, how much he would be missed. He remembered the look in her eyes, a fear he’d never seen before, not in all the dangerous situations they’d encountered. Like a wild cat he’d caught once in a trap back in Kansas. That same glossy, panicked look.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said. “Del, I’m so sorry.”

She’d grabbed his hand with both of hers for a second, her look as intense as a lover’s, and for a moment, he remembered those hands on his naked back and his brain sizzled in his skull.

He didn’t go to the house afterward, though her brothers had invited him. He was smart enough, wise enough, he thought, to avoid that situation. He loved Benni. She possessed his heart like no woman ever had. He had no business dwelling in a past he wasn’t especially proud of.

But seeing Del brought back memories of a time when he was young, when he felt powerful, invincible. When the only thing that meant anything was the cat-and-mouse game of undercover narcotics, the feint and jab of psychological fencing between buyer and seller, between bad guy and good guy, when sometimes you almost couldn’t tell who was who and all that mattered was the game of “gotcha.”

When Del had walked into his office yesterday, a flood of physical memories had hit him in the stomach like a fist. Of nights that he’d long since relegated to the dark corners of his brain. Nights only half remembered, of the drive back to her place and later his, after Lydia had left taking Sam; half remembered because they were punctuated with that crazy, hysterical euphoria brought on by a successful buy and the “choir practice” they attended afterward in bar after bar, drink after drink, all running into each other like one long highway of blurred neon signs. Lydia could take him stumbling in drunk and exhausted at 4 A.M. for only so long. He couldn’t blame her. But he also couldn’t explain to her how alive he felt after a successful buy, how it brought back the adrenaline high of combat, which he inexplicably missed. He could never tell her how narcotics work felt like a war, the planning of a buy like the planning of a battle. And like Vietnam, it didn’t seem to matter who won and who didn’t. How, at the moment he was doing it, when the buys went down, the sellers in cuffs, and he survived, it felt like he would live forever.

And Del was a big part of that. She was just as crazy, maybe crazier, than the rest of them. Would try anything, go anywhere. No matter how many times her tits and ass were grabbed by the sellers, no matter how crude their remarks, she never lost her cool. Practically every buy she and Gabe made were good ones. Yes, Del Hernandez was as crazy and committed as they come. Would not back down for anyone. And they all loved her for it. Gabe, most of all.

Everyone knew she was his from the moment she joined the squad. She made that clear to any guy who hit on her. She’d waited a long time for Gabe and wasn’t about to waste a second with anyone else.

He leaned back in his chair and glanced at the clock on his desk. She would be here any moment. He closed his eyes, feeling for a moment as if the world were tilting. He wondered what Benni was doing, felt irrationally guilty for a past that did not include her, did not even touch the life they had now. An image of the pale, downy skin on the back of Benni’s neck came to him and his heart felt enlarged and throbbing. There was so much about him she didn’t know, so much he never wanted her to know. He wanted to remain in her eyes as she first saw him, in control and strong, a man of integrity, a man to be admired.