Cold River (7 page)

MANDY’S MIND WHIRLED
with questions as she made her way downstairs. Why was Grange demoted to assistant superintendent? Did it have anything to do with his frozen face? What sort of dynamics would that cause for the long term?

At the foot of the stairs, she saw the teenage clerk from the Qwik-E Market manning the reception desk. “Good morning, Elizabeth.” All she got in return was a muttered reply and lowered eyes.

Mandy persisted. “It’s nice to see a familiar face. You’re a busy lady, it seems. Could you tell me where Ms. Cooley’s office is?”

“Back there.” Without looking up, Elizabeth indicated a door behind the desk under the stairway. A faint, rosy tinge suffused her cheeks.

“Thank you.” Mandy stepped around and knocked on the door.

“Go on in,” Elizabeth said.

Mandy did. The door opened onto a large room with windows along one wall. The other three walls were lined with banks of five-drawer, oak file cabinets. In the middle stood a businesslike arrangement of two copy machines, a supply cabinet, and a work table. Two students, a boy and a girl, bent over the task of folding and stapling booklets together.

“Excuse me. I’m looking for Ms. Cooley.” When the teens looked up, Mandy introduced herself, feeling once more the disadvantage of being barely five feet tall.

The young man said, “Hey,” and smiled. “Mrs. Cooley is over there, behind the file cabinets.”

His coworker, slender, raven-haired, and sullen, wore black pants, a black T-shirt with a Maltese cross on it, and black boots. She simply stared.

Mandy said thanks and walked to where a cozy nook had been carved out of the room by a notch in the arrangement of the filing cabinets. Midge Cooley, sitting behind a stack of papers, looked up as Mandy walked through the keyway. She didn’t answer Mandy’s smile, but looked apprehensively past her as she brushed a limp tendril of hair away from her face.

“Hello, Ms. Cooley. May I sit down?”

Midge didn’t meet her eyes. “Yeah. Sit.”

“Mr. Timberlain said I could get some things from you. Would you tell me the protocol for your department? How you control who has access to the records, and how one goes about requesting files?”

Midge obliged, explaining the way the files were set up and how they were maintained. Every now and then, she glanced nervously over her shoulder as if she were afraid of being caught consorting with the enemy. After making a list of the files Mandy wanted, she produced them quickly, handing them silently over with her long jaw clenched.

Mandy said thanks and carried the stack back to her office, glancing through open office doors on her way. Grange was hunched over his desk again. Mrs. Berman was busy at her computer, but she frowned over her reading glasses, and her eyes slid to Mandy’s bare left arm. Without a change of expression, Mrs. Berman turned back to her work.

Mandy walked on to her own office, thinking for the first time that maybe she should have taken that job offer in the Alaskan bush, the one made on the same day as the one for North Cascade. The money had been better, but the remoteness and climate had weighed against it. As she set the files down on her desk, she looked out at the rain wrinkling the puddles in the parking lot and wondered if Chevak, Alaska, could have been much worse.

“Ahem.”

Mandy turned and instantly recognized the postman from earlier this morning. Standing in her open doorway, he was dressed casually in Levi’s and a Carhartt jacket, and as he met her gaze, she could tell by the tiny muscle movement around his clear blue eyes that he remembered her, too.

“Dr. Steenburg? I have three boxes for you. Where shall I put them?”

“Right next to the last filing cabinet, if you please. I’m so glad to see them. You do good work!”

“U.S. Postal Service. Neither rain nor snow, and all that jazz. We aim to please.” He stacked the cartons against the wall and leaned on his hand truck. “I saw your license plates. You’re a long way from New Mexico.”

“It would seem so.” It came out a little more wistful than she intended, so to cover, Mandy asked, “Do I have to sign anything?”

“No.” He regarded her for a moment and then offered his hand. “I’m Israel Timberlain. They call me Rael.”

“Rael. Glad to meet you. I’m Mandy.”

“Hello, Mandy. Have you found a place to stay yet?”

“Maybe. A lady I met last night at the Qwik-E Market has a rental. I’m going to look at it—” Mandy checked her watch. “—in just a minute.”

“That’s Fran. I was going to tell you about her place. It’s just down the road from mine.”

“Well, thanks. Maybe we’ll be neighbors.”

“Maybe.” Rael wheeled his hand truck ahead of him to the door. “Nice to meet you, Mandy.”

“Wait. You said your name was Timberlain? Are you and Grange—”

“Identical twins,” he deadpanned. Then, grinning at the look on Mandy’s face, he confessed, “First cousins. See you around.”

Mandy watched as Rael sauntered down the hall and stopped to lean a shoulder against the doorframe as he talked to Grange. The difference in the cousins was stark. Grange was tall, dark, broad shouldered, and well kempt in a rugged, backwoods sort of way. Rael was slight and angular, about five foot six, with high cheekbones and unruly hair.

“Identical twins.” She chuckled as she gathered up her purse and keys.

She let Mrs. Berman know she would be out for a couple of hours and drove to the Qwik-E Market, where Fran was waiting. Of medium height, trim and fit, Fran looked to be about forty. Though her face was too round and flat to be attractive, she played up her dark eyes and shiny, shoulder-length hair.

Mandy got in Fran’s pickup, and they headed east on Highway 20 for several miles before angling off on a secondary road. Mandy read the sign out loud. “Timberlain Road? There sure are lots of Timberlains around here.”

“They’ve been here a long time. Rael Timberlain lives on the original property. It’s on this road.”

A huge wooden bear stood upright by a gravel driveway where a double-wide mobile home and a large, metal-sided pole building occupied a clearing. Other, smaller wooden statues were scattered around the front yard.

“That’s quite a carving!” Mandy kept her eyes on the bear as they drove past.

“That’s where Wesley Gallant lives. Have you heard of him?”

“No. Should I have?”

“He sells his stuff all over the U.S. He’s on the school board, too. I thought, one way or the other, you might know the name.”

Mandy shook her head. The woods closed around them again. Bright green leaves burst out of low-growing bushes, relieving the darkness of the forest wall. “It’s good of you to take me out to see the house,” she said.

“Glad to do it. If you want the house, it’ll be good for you and good for me. Finding responsible renters isn’t easy, especially in a place this small.”

“Do you have other rentals?”

“One. It’s a tiny house in town. I buy fixer-uppers.”

“Who does the work for you? Fixing them up, I mean?”

“I do it myself.” Fran explained how she had taken some manual arts classes a few years ago. Her first project was a bookcase, but before the year was out, she had remodeled a house. As they rounded a bend, the river appeared below them, a metallic gash in the valley floor.

“That’s quite a river,” Mandy said. “What we call rivers in New Mexico are a lot smaller than that.”

“Whereabouts in New Mexico are you from?”

“Albuquerque.”

“I’ve been there. Nice town.” Fran pointed to a small story-and-a-half farmhouse sitting beside a gravel road that veered off the asphalt. “That’s where I live.”

Mandy noted the white siding, the green shutters, the well-kept grass with daffodils blooming in random patches along a low fence. “Was it a fixer-upper?”

“Yes, you should have seen it!” Fran took the gravel road that dropped down below her house and ran closer to the river’s edge. “I had to rewire it and put in all new plumbing. The house is eighty years old.”

“And you did it all yourself?” Mandy never got an answer, because they rounded a bend, and she exclaimed, “Oh!”

Before her, a rustic A-frame nestled in the woods, facing the road that ran alongside the river. The front wall was completely made of windows, with a deck across the whole width.

“I’ll take it,” said Mandy as they parked in front.

Fran laughed. “You haven’t seen inside yet.”

“It’s charming. I love it already.”

“Let me show it to you first.”

They got out, and Fran let them into the living room, a space that opened to the roof and had a wrought-iron, circular stairway leading to the master loft. Mandy looked around. Watery winter light flooded into the room, taking away some of March’s chill. A faint musty scent hung in the air.

Fran went to a green porcelain gas fireplace and lit it. Immediately, orange flames danced against the dark wood of the wall.

“I’ll take it,” Mandy said.

“Let me show it all to you first,” Fran said again. “This fireplace heats the downstairs. It has a blower that forces air through heat exchangers in the back, so it’s very efficient.”

Mandy followed Fran to the open kitchen area, enchanted to discover she could work in the kitchen and still see the cheery flames in the fireplace. A door to the right opened to the laundry room, and a sliding glass door opened to the back deck. Mandy noted the stainless-steel appliances. “I’m serious. I’ll take it.”

Fran smiled and shook her head. “Let’s look at the upstairs.”

They climbed the metal corkscrew to a master bedroom that was separated from the downstairs living area only by a balustrade. To the left, a walk-through closet led to a three-quarter bathroom. On the back wall, French doors opened onto a balcony, inviting the outside in. Skylights in the bedroom, closet, and bath made everything light and airy.

“I’ll take it,” Mandy said for the fourth time. “When can I move in?”

“I’ve still got a few things to do. If you don’t mind me working while you’re living here, you can move in today. Do you need help?”

Mandy laughed. “I’ve got a suitcase and three boxes. I can manage.”

“What are you going to sleep on?”

“I shipped up an air mattress. I can survive until my things come. My furniture is sitting in a warehouse in Seattle. They can have it here day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll need you to sign a year’s lease.”

Mandy hesitated. The few hours she had spent at North Cascade School District didn’t recommend it as a dream job. She thought of Grange, with his half-dead face and his reason to bear a grudge. She thought of the district staff, all clearly demonstrating they felt Mandy didn’t belong here. Could she stay a year? Did she want to?

She walked to the loft railing and looked through the living-room windows out to the river. Most of the clouds had lifted, and she could see the tops of the mountains on the other side, but cottony, low-lying stragglers lay in the vertical ravines gouged into the mountain’s rugged flanks. As she watched, a blue hole opened in the sky downriver, and just for a moment, the sun shot rays through the wispy vapors and made silvery shafts that spread like an angel’s fan.

Mandy stood transfixed. “I’ll sign the lease.”

“Great. Let’s go back to my office and get the paperwork done.”

As they turned around in the A-frame’s driveway, Mandy asked, “Where does this road go?”

“It continues on about a mile to where a sawmill used to sit. The clearing has grown back in cottonwoods, and we get a few mushroomers coming by each spring to hunt morels. But I guarantee you won’t be bothered by traffic.”

When they reached Fran’s house, they went in the back door and climbed a steep flight of stairs to an attic office. As Fran filled out the papers, Mandy examined the room, appreciating the paint and wallpaper and the inventively designed cupboard space.

Fran finished filling in the blanks on the lease and turned it around for Mandy to read.

Taking a big breath, Mandy signed her name. “First and last, is that what you said?” She pulled her checkbook out of her purse.

“And damage deposit. It’s there in the lease.” Fran laid a set of keys on the desk. “Utilities are already on. Just call to get them put in your name. I’ve written the numbers on the bottom. If you’ve got a phone card, you can call downriver on the phone, but until you get it set up, no one can call you.”

Mandy wrote the check and gave it to Fran. “Thank you very much,” she said. “It’s lucky I met you last night, though Rael Timberlain told me about your place this morning.”

“Rael lives down Timberlain Road about a mile. He’s as near to the river as you are, but he’s on a high bank.” Fran looked at her watch. “Would you like to have lunch with me?”

“That sounds great.” Mandy stood and followed Fran down the narrow stairs. They turned right at the bottom to enter a small kitchen with white cupboards and a table painted to match.

“I hope you don’t mind a low-carb lunch. I don’t keep bread in the house.”

“I’m grateful for anything. I had Top Ramen for breakfast.”

Fran opened the fridge. “I try to stay below fifty carbs. One piece of bread has thirty-five. We’ll need knives and forks. In that drawer over there.”

By the time Mandy had the table set, Fran brought plates with ham, cheese, celery, cauliflower, and snap peas.

“That looks good.” Mandy pulled out her chair. “I’m glad for the chance to visit with you, too. I haven’t met with a lot of openness, and I’d like to ask a couple of questions.”

Fran set ranch dressing on the table and sat down. “Limestone is your typical small town. People are cliquish. Well, maybe it’s not typical. Most folks here are descendants of settlers who came from the backwoods of North Carolina during the Depression. They came to work in the lumber industry.”

“Is that where the ‘Tarheel’ comes from?”

Fran nodded. “They brought a lot of their culture and customs with them, coon dogs and whisky stills included. In fact, just last year the police arrested someone for operating a still about five miles upriver.”

“They didn’t include that in the fact sheet about the district,” Mandy said.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Fran said. “They’re proud of who they are, but it’s a little hard to get to know them, get them to trust you. I’ve been here three years, and I’m just now feeling at home.”