A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge (20 page)

I ring the doorbell and get no answer. It's only 7:30, still light out, so I doubt Jenny has gone to bed. If she has, she won't thank me for getting her up. But I'm not going to let that get in the way of insisting that she answer her door. After the second ring, eventually the door opens, but there's no one there.

“Jenny?”

“Come on in.” She's standing behind the door. Her voice is slurred.

“I've been gone all day and didn't have a chance to talk to you last night so I wanted to check in and say hello.” I feel like a fool, with my voice sounding as cheerful as a high school cheerleader with the team behind ten points.

She doesn't reply, so I step in. She's drunk. There's no getting around it. She's standing up, but she's swaying and squinting at me like she's having trouble focusing. Her hair is all frowzed out as if she's been pulling at it, and she has food stains on the front of her T-shirt.

“Here now!” I say. “You're not feeling too good. Let's get you off your feet.”

“I'm drunk,” she says, and gives a soft belch that sends a cloud of alcohol fumes my way. “And happy to be.”

“I still think it's probably best to get you seated. It won't do your stitches any good if you fall down.” My heart is beating hard. I don't like to deal with people who are drunk—especially people I care for.

“Huh!” Her bark of laughter has an ugly sound to it. “You sound like Little Mary Sunshine,” she says.

“I don't feel like that,” I say. “I wish you'd tell me what makes you think it will do you any good to be drunk at 7:30 at night. Let's go into your living room and sit down.”

She lets me take her elbow, but then she wheels away toward the kitchen. “I need to get me another drink.”

“Let me get you situated, and then I'll get you a drink,” I say.

She peers at me, her head weaving. “I know you. You say you'll get me a drink, but then when you get me sat down, you'll think of some excuse not to.”

“If I promise to get you a drink, will you let me get you into the living room?”

“A stiff drink. Not some sissy drink.”

“Whatever you want.”

I guide her into the living room and keep a firm hold on her as she sinks onto the sofa. Her head flops against the back so she's staring at the ceiling. “Oh, it's like being on a carnival ride.”

“I imagine it is. What's your favorite ride?”

She starts laughing, and the sound is unpleasant. “Like I said, I knew you'd try to weasel out of it. You promised though. Bring me a drink. Please. Pretty please.”

“What do you want? Wine?”

“No, hell no! Whiskey. It's on the counter.”

“Mind if I get one, too?”

“Help yourself.”

I go into the kitchen and make a lot of noise, opening and closing cabinets, opening and closing the refrigerator, dropping ice cubes into glasses. And then I wait. After five minutes I walk back into the living room. Jenny has sagged sideways on the sofa. I go back in the kitchen and pour some water over one of the glasses of ice and bring it back in and sit down on the easy chair across from her. I don't know if she's taken pain medication, but if she has, I worry that it won't mix well with the alcohol. I'll stick around until I'm sure she's okay.

An hour into my vigil, Jenny wakes with a start and babbles something unintelligible, but then drops back to sleep. Somewhere along the line I realize that I'm in over my head with Jenny. She needs a therapist to help her through whatever has thrown her for a loop. I can imagine her response if I suggest such a thing. I drift off to sleep for a bit and then wake up.

Around ten o'clock I begin to think over my conversation with Eddie Sandstone today. He seems like a nice enough guy, but there's something I don't like about him. I haven't been around him enough to pin down what it is. But that doesn't mean he's lying when he says his spat with Jenny is because of her being jealous. His estranged wife said much the same thing, although I suppose whatever she understands of Jenny is through what Eddie said.

I get up and head outside. To stretch my legs, I go down to the barn to check on the horses. I surprise Alvin Carter propped up against the wall facing where the horses are quiet in their stalls. “What are you reading?”

Carter looks guilty. “Something stupid. I found it in the tack room and thought I'd see what all the fuss is about.” He holds up the book. He's reading a tattered copy of a thriller that was wildly popular years ago. I wonder what it was doing in the tack room.

We talk of this and that for a few minutes. He tells me he's decided to go back to college, and we kick it around a little bit, me encouraging his decision.

Jenny's still passed out, but her pulse is strong. Back when my daddy drank, I always worried that he'd pass out and not wake up. My mamma didn't seem to take it seriously. I wonder whether I ought to wake Jenny and make her get into her bed, but instead I drape a blanket over her and prop her up on pillows.

As I get up to go, I notice a box shoved off to one side of the living room. There are letters scattered around the floor next to the box. I go over to put them back in the box and see they are all torn halfway across.

I pick up two of the halves and piece them together. It's a short letter to Vera from Eddie, saying he's fine and was glad to hear from her, that he is busy with work and he'll write more next time. Curious, I pick up a few more. They are all from Eddie and have the same kind of impersonal tone. There are dozens of these letters in the box. The return address on them is Temple. Why would Eddie be writing letters to his mother when he could as easily have picked up the phone? Or driven to see her in a couple of hours?

I dig down to find some of the oldest ones. Maybe they will tell me more about the family's problems. At the bottom I find a partial answer. A letter written a dozen years ago says, “I'm going to keep writing to you. I don't think it's fair that you took Jenny's side against me. You don't know the whole story. If you knew, you'd understand.” Vera's nurse told me that she thought Vera didn't like Eddie very much. If that's the case, I wonder why Vera kept the letters, and why Jenny tore them up—why not just pitch them out?

When I get home it's hard for me to get to sleep. To listen to Eddie, you'd think he was the wronged party. But Vera Sandstone was a sensible woman. Why would she keep such an uneasy distance from her son unless she had a good reason? She changed her mind and left him her house at the last minute, but if the nurse's description is right, it sounds like he intimidated her in some way to make that happen.

CHAPTER 26

After two nights of too little sleep, the next morning I feel like I'm the one who was drunk last night. I feel sore all over and like my eyes aren't working the way they ought to. Coffee. I usually wait until after I see to my cows before I brew up a pot, but this morning I need it first thing. It's later than usual when I get down to the pasture, and I give the cows less attention than I usually do. Surely it's my imagination that they glare after me resentfully when I head back up to the house.

When Loretta comes by after church, she's tactful and doesn't tell me I look like something my cat dragged in. “Did you go by Jenny's last night?”

“I did. She'll be okay.”

“What can I do? Should I go by and see her? Should I tell people to stay away?”

“I'd say maybe people should let her alone for a while. She's got some things to work out.”

“I still might take her something.”

I consider how Jenny's going to feel this morning and say, “Wait until tomorrow.”

Loretta has no sooner left than I get a call from Ellen Forester. “I tried to locate you yesterday, but they said you were out and about and I didn't want to bother you. Can you come by the studio this morning?”

I tell her I will and realize I'm looking forward to seeing her. I hope she's calling to tell me she's decided to get that restraining order. But either way, I'm glad to see her. She's the only person in town who really understands why I enjoy my art so much. We don't have the same taste, but she at least knows how art can feed the spirit. With that in mind, while I finish up my coffee and a piece of buttered toast, I walk over to the mantel and rest my eyes on the painting that draws me this morning—a landscape with quiet colors that somehow captures the idea of early morning in a gray time of year, a little desolate but soothing nevertheless.

Without my really thinking about it, I've decided that Monday I need to go to Temple to talk to Eddie Sandstone's first wife. He won't like it, but I'm doing it anyway. Maybe he told her what happened to bust up the family.

Before I leave, I need to do clean-up detail from the prom. Sure enough, when I get to the station, there are half a dozen calls from people complaining that something happened over the weekend that they attribute to “those rowdy high school kids.” There are some I'm sure are legitimate—a missing lawn gnome; someone's trees draped in toilet paper; a picket fence spray-painted in school colors; and an old, abandoned outhouse tipped over. I call Jim Krueger and tell him to hunt for culprits and get them to make amends. Sometimes kids do own up to their mischief—a fence gets miraculously repainted, a gnome reappears, and the t.p. gets taken down. However, I'd guess that the outhouse isn't going to be put back upright.

Other complaints I have to deal with one at a time. Bernice Lindauer is pretty sure somebody moved her car, and I call to find out if the car is okay (yes) and if she knows who moved it (no). Bernice is growing forgetful. I call her son, and he sighs and tells me that she knew he was taking it to be serviced—she forgot. Then there's Ben Graham, who calls to tell me that someone sideswiped his car Friday night. I tell him I'll look into it, although I have no intention of doing so. His car got sideswiped five years ago. He received the insurance money for it but never had it fixed and keeps trying to call it in as a new incident to get more insurance money.

The only one I take seriously is a call from Brenda Sears. She says somebody broke in and stole her cell phone and money out of her wallet. I go over to take a report. She finally breaks down and says she's scared that her grown son stole the things—that she thinks he's got a drug problem and stole the money to buy drugs. “He knew I'd taken money out of the bank to pay for some work I had done on the house. When I found out the money was gone, I confronted him and he got mad and said he was going down to Galveston to get a job.” She's crying a little bit. “He said he didn't want to be around if I was going to accuse him of stealing.”

“You call me the minute he comes back and I'll come over and have a talk with him.” I have no doubt he'll be back as soon as he uses up the $300 he stole.

It's almost noon by the time I get to Ellen's art gallery, and her morning class is ending. Her students are packing up to leave. They've been working on watercolors, and some of the pieces are nice to look at. Ellen is a good teacher. The students are a mix of men and women, all seniors, and all seeming to be in a good mood. I wasn't sure when Ellen opened the gallery and workshop that she could make a go of it. I'm surprised at the number of people who want to try their hand at art.

I hang back until everyone leaves. It's not until I see Ellen close up that I notice a bruise on her cheekbone below her right eye. “How'd you get that?”

She waves me away. “I know it's a cliché to say I walked into a door, but I promise I really did.”

“You'd tell me if your ex-husband hit you, wouldn't you?”

“He didn't. But listen, that's not why I asked you to stop by. I want to show you something.”

She beckons me to follow her to the work area where people leave their work to sit until the next class. She picks up a watercolor done on a nine-by-twelve paper and holds it up for me to see. “One of my students in a beginning class did this,” she says.

“Doesn't look like any beginner I ever saw.” It's a simple composition of a pitcher and a couple of lemons. I glance at the other works done from the same still life and see that most of them, although reasonably accurate, are stilted and tense. The one she's holding up has a free, relaxed feel to it. Instead of sticking exactly to the subject and painting it in the middle of the paper, small and painstakingly accurate, like a beginner, this painter has filled the whole page with it and added a bit of drapery at the back, suggesting a table.

“Looks like somebody has talent. Maybe they've had some other classes.”

“She swears she hasn't.”

I don't understand why she's showing me this. “It's nice,” I say.

“Your friend Loretta did this.”

“Loretta?” I'm dumbfounded. “When?”

“She got back from her trip to Washington and she called and said she thought she'd like to try a class. This beginner class had already started, but I told her to come ahead. I was as surprised as you are when I saw what she came up with. I know you're a friend of hers and I wanted to share this with you. I love to discover when somebody has talent they didn't know they had.”

I laugh.

“What's funny?”

“Loretta never has had the least interest in my art. I wouldn't have thought she'd have it in her to even attempt a painting, much less do such nice work.”

Ellen beams. “She said she wanted to try it out. She said she's too busy to do much with it, but she thought it would be fun. I wouldn't be surprised if she starts forgetting about making her rounds with those sinful treats and starts putting time in painting.”

“Sinful treats? You don't look like you're tempted.”

Color rises to her cheeks quickly. “Well, I am.”