Brown-Eyed Girl (30 page)

After a completely miserable night, Hawk had decided in the morning he was in no shape to start driving to Texas. He'd made a big breakfast, futzed around his house, fixed a leaky faucet. Since he was around, he decided he'd go play in the Friday afternoon basketball game. The lack of sleep didn't improve his game. He was slow and sluggish and his shots kept clanking off the rim. His team got creamed.

Tom Youngblood knew love trouble when he saw it— Edna had given him his share of rough nights and draggy days. Joe—er, Hawk—looked like he needed a friend, so Tom asked him if he wanted to go get a beer after the game. Hawk, who had no other plans, said sure. Tom called Edna to tell her he'd be late getting home, and they decided to go to the Buckhorn, where nobody would mind that they needed a shower and they could get a little lost in the smoke and the crush.

They were standing at the bar, getting a couple of Budweisers, when Tom saw Sally, sitting at a table with a guy whose face he couldn't quite see. Hawk had his back to them. Tom thought about telling him she was there, then figured he'd better give Hawk a chance to vent a little before he mentioned that his supposed girlfriend appeared to be holding hands with some big stud in a fancy sportcoat.

“Sorry about the game,” Hawk said, tipping back his beer. “Bad night last night.”

“You having problems with Sally?”

“We had our first major fight yesterday,” Hawk admitted. “She backed out of going to Big Bend with me, said she had too much work. I planned to leave this morning, but I felt too lousy to do the drive. Guess I shouldn't have expected her to come. Probably try to leave tomorrow.”

Tom nodded, watching the blond guy lean over to put his hand on Sally's face. He was at the point of deciding whether to tell Hawk that Sally was there, in an apparently compromising situation, or to get him out of there and spare him the sight, when Sally noticed them standing at the bar and saw the disgust on Tom Youngblood's face.

“Thanks a lot, Sam!” she yelled, attracting the attention of five or six drinkers at nearby tables but her voice getting lost in the general hubbub. “I should have known why you were turning on the bogus charm. You
knew
Hawk was over at the bar, you asshole! And you're not gonna tell me jack about Bobby Helwigsen!”

Sam grinned. “That'll teach you to try to run people over,” he said. “We're even now.”

Before Sam was out of his seat, Sally was over at the bar, flinging herself at Hawk. “You're still here,” she cried. “I thought you'd be halfway to west Texas.”

Hawk just looked at her, face full of heartbreak. “What are you doing in the Buckhorn, Mustang? I thought you were chained to your basement.”

They had a rule. No lies; not even technical truths. “I've been having a drink with Sam Branch.” Sally had only seen Hawk's beautiful eyes look like that once before, and it killed her to see it again. She followed his gaze, watched Sam get up, shoot that Realtor finger at them, and walk out the door. “It has to do with work, I swear. I'll tell you all about it, but not here,” she said desperately, clinging to him. “I'm sorry about what I said, and about bailing out on you, and a whole lot of other stuff. I need you, Hawk. Will you come home with me and let me explain?”

At forty-five, Hawk Green was capable of contemplating things he hadn't been able to consider at twenty-five, or even thirty-five. Sally, he knew, had done some growing up, too. Hawk looked at Tom, who chose not to offer any opinion. He looked down at Sally, whose eyes were pleading with him. His jaw tightened in a hurt grimace. “I don't know why I should give you the chance,” he said.

“Why not? What does it cost you?” she asked reasonably.

It appeared to cost him his dignity. His freedom. His damn fool breaking heart, which he'd sworn would never ever happen again.

Sally was distraught, but she'd learned how to argue after so many years in academia. “Look at it this way, Hawk. If you tell me it's over, we both lose any chance of continuing to have fun together. If you listen to me, the fun might or might not continue, but you'll be able to make an informed choice. I'm not asking you to do any more than hear my side. And this isn't sixteen years ago. I
do
have a defensible side.”

Hawk liked a logical argument. It surprised and pleased him that she had developed the capacity to reason in tight places. And his night of thinking he might lose her had not been pleasant.

“You've got me,” he said. “I'll listen.” He turned to Tom. “You'll excuse us?” he asked.

“Naturally,” Tom replied. “I'm due at home anyway. Edna will be needing her merlot by now.”

They drove to her house in separate vehicles. A light freezing rain was falling, making the streets slick, but Sally's Mustang was handling like a champ. Hawk had given her new tires for Christmas.

Sally had to concede that some things about him never changed. He would always be the kind of man who didn't mind spending money on a woman, but thought tires were a better present for his sweetheart than diamond earrings. And that character trait in him would always both attract and frustrate her. Hawk would prefer lonely vacations in the back country to trips to New York or San Francisco or Paris. He would be off by himself for weeks and months at a time, even when she wanted him near. He would meet her volcanic eruptions of emotion with a calm rationality that would both soothe and drive her crazy. And yet, this man was a lover who pleased himself by seeing how much pleasure he could give her, who surprised her with his passion and delighted her by occasionally going helplessly wild in her hands. He was a maddeningly true man.

Sally wanted Hawk in her life.

She read him right. As he drove toward Sally's house, it occurred to Hawk that it was about time to get the snow tires off his truck. He really ought to switch them out before he drove to Texas and put all those miles on them. At this rate, it would take him two days to get packed and ready to go. By the time he got to Big Bend, he'd practically have to turn right around and come back. Sally had really messed up his plans.

This was true, of course, on a larger scale. God knew, Hawk hadn't intended to fall back in love with Sally Alder in Laramie. He'd made all his decisions with the expectation that after all that time, they'd find a way to make Laramie big enough for both of them. And he'd known, the instant he saw her again, that he would have to come up with an alternative plan.

She drove him nuts. Nobody made him laugh as much or think as hard, and yet they could be perfectly at ease sitting quietly with each other. They had great sex. But the things they'd never had in common could fill an average lifetime. Sally liked noisy big parties, and Hawk could hardly stand them. Cities made him want to scream. She was a fanatical Bronco fan, and he thought pro football was stupid and violent. He should never have told her about that afternoon in Houston—now she was always nagging him to go shopping.

And Hawk knew that if he had to go one more day thinking he might have to live without her, it'd split him in half. He wanted to be with her, right now. He didn't want to make bigger plans than that.

Sally put the Mustang in the garage and went around to open the front door. Hawk parked the truck and walked up to her. Their arms came around each other and their mouths came together. That was their apology. The explanations could wait.

They just had to have each other. They flew up the stairs and fell hard onto the bed, tangled up in damp coats and gloves. The basketball game had given him a head start on sweat, but by the time they got their clothes off, she had caught up. They were on fire.

He loomed over her, pinning her wrists above her head, and slammed into her with a force she lunged up to return. They bucked and arched and rolled and fell onto the floor, oblivious to everything except besieging each other. She would have teeth marks on her neck. He would have scratches on his back. Panting and begging, they took each other higher and higher, and then, miraculously, began to slow down. On long, slow strokes, he wrapped himself around her, kissed her, asked her to love him. They crashed to earth together.

Chapter 30
Anomalies

“Well, I guess it's time for me to give up and go through the financial stuff,” Sally told Brit one morning in May when brilliant skies and the bright nodding heads of daffodils belied the chill of the tireless wind. She'd been over and over the letters and the poetry, the news clips, the school files, and all the miscellaneous stuff that had captured her fancy. She hated anything that had numbers on it, though she knew numbers could be revealing. She'd saved the stuff she found most tedious for last.

“I've been done with the financial papers for weeks. They're sorted and filed in boxes twenty-five through thirty-one, according to category and document type— bank statements, stocks, bonds, real estate, mineral leases, estate and probate correspondence, tax returns and so on.”

“Boy, I bet those tax returns are gripping reading,” Sally commented.

Brit, as usual, shrugged. “We've got all her old checkbooks, too, if you want to look at them. I just put them in order and put them in box thirty-one, but the archives will probably throw them away.” Brit had long since finished the work Sally had originally hired her to do, but she was still putting in a few mornings a week, often doing again what she'd already done. She was pretty sure Sally kept her around because it made her feel that at least somebody was efficient, which Sally clearly wasn't. She'd set Brit to work this week listing and cataloguing the poetry manuscripts, a job Brit appeared to be enjoying immensely. As she'd told Sally, she lived with her parents, she didn't have a boyfriend, she didn't really have a job, and even this late in May, the weather continued chilly and windy. She might as well read poetry.

Sally watched Brit trying to act as if she wasn't absorbed in the poems. Brit was her father's child, a lover of poetry and intellectual puzzles hiding out in the guise of a Wyoming philistine. Sally approached her own morning task with resignation. She'd called the FOIA office at the State Department and been told only that they “would process her request.” They'd also said that if they found anything, they would of course excise any material that might have bearing on current matters of national interest. She asked what that meant, and the person on the phone explained, “That means that if we do find anything we can send to you, don't be surprised if passages are blacked out. If the federal government has had reason to collect information on individuals, it's generally because somebody considered the investigation relevant to national interests.”

That conversation had dampened Sally's hope that government records might solve the multiple mysteries of Meg Dunwoodie. She wasn't expecting that the endless tedium of bank printouts, stock statements and IRS forms would open the doors of perception, but she had to look them over, determined to be a thorough professional.

It was mind-numbing work, day after day, but after a while a story emerged. She began with the files on Mac Dunwoodie's estate, and Meg's own. His estate, distributed in 1967, was based on a will he'd updated in 1962. Most of it went to Meg, although Sally noted that he'd earmarked charitable contributions to the American Cancer Society (homage to Gert, no doubt), the Committee for Cuban Liberation (anti-Castro, she assumed) and the John Birch Society (his favorite). His holdings had ranged from oil leases all over the west to a uranium mine in southern Wyoming and had included a diverse portfolio of blue chip stocks and long-term bonds. He owned large tracts of property—four cattle ranches in Wyoming, including the Woody D, three more ranch properties in Montana, and five in Colorado. He had retained the mineral rights on the ranches, and owned mining claims in a number of other places. His accounts at the Centennial Bank in Laramie totalled two hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash. His will also listed “coins, jewelry, and miscellaneous household items” bequeathed to his daughter, Margaret. The total was valued at eight million dollars.

By the time of her death, Meg had more than tripled the value of her substantial inheritance, acting often on the advice of Ezra Sonnenschein. She'd sold most of the ranches and invested in sizable parcels of land around Aspen, Vail, and Jackson Hole. She'd hung on to those holdings until the offers she was getting from developers were too huge to pass up. She had a stockbroker who did a nice, conservative job of managing her portfolio. The oil leases and uranium mine paid off big for a while and then slacked off, as such things did. At the time of her death, she'd disposed of most of the real estate, retaining only her house in Laramie, a cabin in Jackson Hole, and a house on Holmes Beach, near Bradenton, Florida, which she'd purchased in 1975. Sally wondered idly whether the beach house was still available. Maybe she and Hawk could go there sometime and have a vacation to make up for the one to Big Bend that hadn't happened.

It appeared that Meg hadn't been sentimental about ranching, not so surprising in the author of “Still Life of Fascists With Herefords.” The Woody D was her home, but she'd even let that go, as a gift to the Nature Conservancy in 1982. What the Nature Conservancy had done with it then, Sally couldn't tell from Meg's records. Or perhaps Meg had retained enough of an attachment to her home place that she wasn't willing to sell it to guys who'd want to turn every pasture into a ski condo. Then again, as far as Sally knew, no developer had ever seriously suggested that Encampment could be the next Steamboat Springs.

After a week of following the inheritance thread, Sally had done a lot of cross-checking the estate correspondence with the information in the various files. (Did the real estate transactions match up according to date and amount of money changing hands? How'd she do in the stock market between 1967 and 1994? Jeez.) But she soon gave up that game on the ground that Meg's business dealings had seemed straightforward enough. The estate records had turned out to be more revealing than she'd expected. But then, of course, she'd started with the most interesting stuff. It was time to get down to the really, really boring.

The bank statements. Brit had filed them in chronological order, dating all the way back to 1941, when Meg had opened an account at the Centennial Bank. Sally gawked at the fading sheets of ledger paper, hand-typed, all the information computed with an adding machine. Meg had received one every month for more than thirty years. Sometimes there were little handwritten notes clipped to the statements: “Don't forget to come in and get your Great Customer award for 1970, a Proctor Silex Toastmaster!” Those were the days when banking was work, Sally mused.

In 1976, the Centennial Bank went to computerized statements, Sally learned after seven hours of paging through, year by year. This glimpse of the automation of Wyoming gave her a pang of loss, but she brightened when she saw a note stapled to the statement for June congratulating Meg on her thirty-fifth year as a valued customer and reminding her that she hadn't yet picked up her electric can opener. They were holding it at the service desk.

To judge from the amounts in her account, Meg's fortunes had followed a path that Sally would have expected. From 1941 through 1967, her deposits had been meager, the paychecks of an English instructor at a poor state university. Her withdrawals were regular and careful. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year of her windfall, and the Centennial Bank was clearly delighted to participate in the management of all that money. Sally had followed only a few transactions from the last thirty years of Meg Dunwoodie's life, but of the large cash transfers listed, the ones Sally had traced looked like they matched up with business deals documented elsewhere.

Apart from the notes about toasters and can openers, every statement looked like every other one, columns listing deposits and withdrawals, monthly fees, starting and ending balances. Going through them was tortuous work, so mind-numbing that she almost paged right past the one anomaly in the whole stack. Sally had only gotten up to 1982. It was after six o'clock at night. She'd been at it since early morning, and she needed to quit and take a shower because Hawk was coming to take her out to dinner at seven-thirty. Crawford and Maria had come to town, and they were all going out to the Cavalryman. She'd been down to the bank the day before to get out Meg's diamonds to show to Hawk's father.

Maybe it was the thought of her visit to the safety deposit box that made her see it. There, on the August, 1982 statement, was a special entry she hadn't seen before, added on to the fee section at the bottom of the page. A five-hundred-dollar debiting of Meg's checking account, paid for rental of a safety deposit box for twenty years in advance at twenty-five dollars a year.

Sally shook her head to clear it. She didn't remember having come across any mention of a safety deposit box at the Centennial Bank in any of the files. Nothing about it in the will, or the executor's report on provisions for disbursement of Meg's estate, or any other damned place. Maude hadn't mentioned it, and neither had Ezra. Maybe she'd just missed something, but she didn't think so. Meg had put something away and made sure that it could stay put away for twenty years, if need be.

Who the hell rented a safety deposit box paying for twenty years up front? Why? Who else knew?

Excitement growing, she dashed upstairs to call Ezra and found him at home in Denver. “Listen, Ezra,” she began breathlessly, “I've just been slogging through all of Meg's Centennial bank statements, and I came across an entry for a safety deposit box rental paid up twenty years in advance, back in 1982. What do you know about it?”

“Safety deposit box?” he asked in a puzzled tone that had Sally all but leaping up and down. “Noooooo, I don't recall her ever having mentioned a safety deposit box. There wasn't anything about it in any of the estate documents. You saw what was in that closet—I was under the impression that she didn't bother putting her valuables in the bank. Typical Wyoming attitude.” He laughed. “I wonder if Maude knows anything about it.”

“She'll be back finally, on Sunday. I'll ask her then,” Sally said, congratulating herself on her patience during the weeks Maude had been gone. “But since she hasn't mentioned it to you either, I bet she doesn't.”

“Maybe not. One way or the other, it's an interesting development,” said Ezra. “I certainly hope she does, and that she's just forgotten about it. If there is something we don't know about, sitting in a safety deposit box in the bank in Laramie, it would be convenient if Maude happened to have the key,” Ezra observed.

“And if she doesn't?” Sally asked.

“Well then, I guess you'll have to look for it,” he told her.

The daffodils were in full bloom, the tulips were beginning to open, and there were pale green buds, and even a few tentative leaves, on the gray branches of the trees. The cleaned-up Sally went to answer the door and was stunned to see that, despite the chill in the evening air, spring had come at last.

The excitement of her discovery sparkled in her eyes, but then so did the knowledge that she had a small fortune in diamonds stowed in the little black silk bag she carried as a going-out-to-dinner purse. She wore a fitted red dress, high heels, and sheer black stockings.

“Are those your high-heeled sneakers?” asked Hawk, looking her over approvingly. He knew she was bringing the diamonds, and diamonds did make him nervous. He had a loaded Smith and Wesson .38 in the glove box of his truck.

She kissed him, smearing her red lipstick all over him. “'Cause we're goin' out tonight,” she sang, fishing in her bag for a tissue to wipe her lipstick smile off his face. “Forgot my wig-hat and my boxing gloves.”

“Don't think you'll need 'em,” said Hawk, who gave her a look that said maybe he should just take her upstairs and see whether all his hints about garter belts were getting through. “Looks like you had a good day in the dungeon.”

“Maybe,” Sally said, turning to the hall mirror and getting out her lipstick to make repairs. He was making it hard for her, wrapped all around her and working her from both ends, his lips moving down the back of her neck while his hands headed up under her skirt. “Wait 'til you hear.”

Hawk had warned his father that Sally had some gems she wanted him to look over, but everyone agreed that they should save that part of the program for later in the evening, when they would all return to Hawk's house. So they all enjoyed a conversation about Crawford and Maria's summer plans along with their beef. Laramie was their second stop on a summer-long North American odyssey. Crawford and Maria had plans to travel up through Wyoming and Montana into Canada, all the way to Alaska, getting home some time in September. They were traveling in a Toyota Land Cruiser packed to the roof with camping and fishing gear and supplies, but Maria confided to Sally that she'd booked some reservations at nice hotels along the way.

“Crawford will complain that staying in hotels is a waste of money when you could be camping, and that you see the country in a different way when you sleep in a tent. But even he gets tired of swatting mosquitos and picking dirt clods out of his dinner.”

After two hours of avoiding the subject everyone was plainly ready to discuss, Maria was running out of conversational ploys, Sally was ready to burst, and even the two men, who competed at giving the word
laconic
new meaning, seemed a little jumpy. Once they got back to Hawk's house, Crawford's deliberate preparations had Sally nearly leaping out of her skin. Telling Hawk to open a bottle of wine, Crawford went into the bedroom, where he and Maria were staying, and got his daypack. He took out a rectangular pad, covered in black velvet, a jeweler's loupe, a pair of tweezers, and a small binocular microscope. Taking a seat in Hawk's only chair, he instructed everyone else to make themselves comfortable. Then he motioned to Sally. She got out the velvet pouch and handed it to Crawford. He opened it, unfolded the paper envelopes, and set the diamonds out on the velvet pad, face up. Crawford's face was completely blank.