Dark Paradise (66 page)

shelves stocked with teat dip and fly spray and dehorning paste, its

racks full of old Louis L'Amour titles and hunting magazines and cheap

cookbooks printed on Xerox paper by the ladies auxiliary of the Lutheran

church, just down the street from M.E. Fratick's New Age bookstore with

its Zen master clerk and thousand-dollar quartz crystals.

Sadness seeped into her muscles and bones, and she curled her hands into

fists in the pockets of her old denim jacket. She jaywalked across the

street to the square and settled on a bench in front of the Carnegie

Library.

Across the park, Colleen Bentsen's sculpture, which Marilee had first

appreciated as a symbol of cooperation, was taking shape in its pen in

front of the courthouse. The courthouse had been built of red brick in

the 1890s. A pair of Doric columns held up the portico at the top of the

stone stairs. The paint was flaking off them like dandruff, but it was a

venerable old building. Not very big, not very fancy, but proud of its

heritage. Out in front of it the sculpture looked like a chunk of

wreckage from a collapsed suspension bridge. Out of time, out of place,

an unintentional insult on the place it was meant to honor.

Restless, and disgusted with herself for her melancholy mood, she left

the park and started back toward the Moose. She wouldn't stay there much

longer. A week or so. The suite Drew and Kevin had given her was

beautiful, but it wasn't a home. The ranch was a home. Hers. It was time

to accept it, to stop questioning Lucy's motives in leaving it to her.

She might never know exactly what had compelled Lucy. She might never

find the evidence that would explain so many things. That wouldn't

change the fact that the ranch was hers now. As soon as she felt

comfortable being out there at night alone, she would move into the

house for good. Work on her music. Hang with the llamas. Maybe start a

garden.

And up the mountain Rafferty would prowl the boundaries of his kingdom

and look down on her. She wanted to believe he would feel regret at the

chance he had missed with her. She wanted to lie in her bed at night and

imagine remorse squeezing his heart like a fist. She didn't want to

think that she had loved him and lost him in a scant week's time. Better

to think she'd never loved him at all. Better to dust herself off and

move on with her life.

Even as she told herself that she thought back to the night and wondered

what might have happened if she had let him kiss her.

The pickups were gathering in front of the Rainbow.

Ranch dogs patrolled the open truck beds with ears up and eyes eager for

the sights of town. No blue and gray Ford with a Stars and Bars bug

guard. No sign of Zip.

Marilee contemplated a cup of coffee and a plate of steak and eggs with

crisp hash browns on the side, but her heart wasn't in it. She wasn't in

the mood for camaraderie. Maybe she'd stop by for a late supper and she

and Nora could go honky-tonkin' after her shift was over.

The chance of running into Will dampened the promise of fun and she

discarded that idea too.

She cut through the lobby of the Moose, not expecting to see anyone but

Raoul at that hour, but Kevin stood behind the desk, scowling down at a

computer printout.

He glanced up at her with tired eyes and a face drawn from lack of

sleep. He looked like a man sorely in need of a shave and a cup of

coffee.

"Hey, Kev, what's up?" Marilee asked, propping herself against the

counter. "You pull the graveyard shift?"

The boyish smile made a halfhearted appearance, flickering and fading in

the blink of an eye. "Not exactly. I knew I wasn't going to get any

sleep, so I gave Raoul the night off."

"Insomnia?"

"Fight with Drew."

"Oh." She winced in empathy. "Ouch. I'm sorry."

"Me too," he mumbled, flipping a page of green-lined paper without even

looking at it.

"Bad one, huh?"

"Bad enough." He shook his head, staring across the lobby and into the

bar, his gaze fixed on the moose head that hung above the fireplace.

"You think you know someone and then suddenly you look at them and you

don't know them at all. . . ." His thoughts trailed off into a sigh of

frustration and confusion. He snapped his mouth shut and shook his head

again, his brown eyes bleak.

"Is he around?" Marilee asked. She didn't want to meddle in their

personal lives, but Kevin looked so forlorn, and then there was the

matter of Townsend. She wanted to bounce the news off Drew in hope of

getting something more from him. No harm in killing two birds with one

stone.

"I don't know where he is," Kevin mumbled, glaring down at the computer

paper. "He blew out of here last night. I haven't seen him since."

Marilee's eyebrows scaled her forehead. It had to have been some fight.

She wondered if there was any possibility it had to do with what Drew

knew of Lucy's life and times, then she chided herself for being a

mercenary.

Poor Kevin looked like a lost puppy. It was not her place to grill him

for information. He was a friend, as Drew was a friend. What he needed

from her was support and understanding.

"You'll work it out," she said softly, touching his sleeve.

He didn't meet her eyes. His face tightened and he flipped another page

on the printout. "Yeah. Sure. Umm-a-will you excuse me, Marilee?
 
I

think I hear the phone in my office."

He turned away and was gone through a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL

ONLY before Marilee could so much as nod.

She went into the empty lounge and slipped behind the ornate bar. A

multiline telephone sat beside the cash register. She hit an open line

and punched the number for the CHP computer room in Sacramento.

"California Highway Patrol."

"This is Marilee Jennings. Can I speak with Paul Kael, please?"

"Hang on."

She jammed the phone between her shoulder and her ear and passed the

time picking at her ragged cuticles.

When she had begun to think the connection had been cut, Paul came on

the line, out of breath.

"You owe me, Blue Eyes," he said without preamble.

"Not hardly," she scoffed. "Did I or did I not introduce you to the

lovely Mrs. Kael?"

"Irrelevant. She is outranked on the list of women who strike terror

into my heart by one Beverly Tarbon, my supervisor, who damn near caught

me violating about a million rules."

"Close only counts in horseshoes," Marilee said without sympathy. "Did

you find anything?"

"Yeah. You're not dating this guy, are you?"

"Don't make me gag. He's a major sleaze."

"You don't have to tell me; I got a peek at his report card. He flunks

social skills in a big way. The guy's had a dozen charges filed and

dropped. Two stuck and he went away to the state resort for a while."

"For what?"

"Criminal sexual conduct and assault. You sure know how to pick 'em,

Marilee."

Marilee's heart dropped into her stomach. "It's a talent."

She let herself out the side door of the bar and walked in a daze to the

parking lot, fishing in her purse for the keys to her Honda. The llamas

needed feeding. There were still rooms in the house that hadn't been put

to right.

Kendall Morton was a sex offender.

She shuddered at the thought and the implications.

Lucy's hired man had been a rapist. Was there any way she could have

known that?
 
More important, did it have anything to do with her death?

Marilee recalled the coroner's distinct lack of enthusiasm when she had

asked him whether Lucy had been sexually assaulted. He hadn't bothered

to check.

She stopped at the Gas N' Go on her way out of town, bought a jumbo

coffee to go, a bear claw, and a chocolate doughnut, hoping to pique her

appetite. She drove out the ridge road listening to Vince Gill's thin

sweet tenor voice lament the pains of love.

The fog dissipated bit by bit as she climbed up out of the floor of the

valley, tearing apart like wisps of cotton candy and disintegrating. But

the sun refused to shine.

The big sky hung like a leaden blanket, threatening rain but not making

good on it. Beneath the gray the shades of green on the hills and in the

valley looked deeper, richer. The wildflowers hid in the grass, their

heads bowed demurely in deference to the wind. The mountains looked

black in the distance, their snowcaps hidden by the bellies of

low-hanging clouds.

The day suited Marilee's mood. She sat at the table on the deck and had

her breakfast, trying to clear her mind of the clutter of suspects and

motives for a few minutes, trying halfheartedly to identify the birdsong

that went on continually in the trees around her. A mag-pie landed on

the railing and squawked at her indignantly, fanning out his

metallic-green tail and bobbing down and up, looking like a tuxedoed

dandy in his black-and-white plumage.

She left him the last bites of the bear claw and headed out to feed the

llamas.

The barn was as dim as a cave inside. Marilee flipped on the light and

wished there were a dozen more. She felt as if all her nerve endings

were reaching up out of her skin, humming with electric anticipation.

Her imagination conjured Kendall Morton lurking in every corner.

She pulled out the feed buckets and leaned down into the bin to scoop

out Clyde's grain first. The llama pellets were nearly gone and she

practically had to dive headfirst into the bin to reach the last of

them. She would have to make a trip to the Feed and Read. Order more

pellets, maybe pick up a copy of People. She dug into the feed with the

scoop and pried up the end of something heavy.

"What the-?"

A strange apprehension started in the pit of her stomach and traveled

outward as she straightened. The buried treasure had been upended. One

corner stuck up through the drift of feed pellets. A book sealed inside

a plastic bag. She knew without unearthing it what the title would be

and a part of her wanted nothing more than to turn and walk away,

pretend it wasn't there. Even though she had searched for the book,

certain it would shed some light on the puzzle Lucy had left behind, a

part of her had never really wanted to find it. She knew she wouldn't

like the answers it gave her, wouldn't like the truths it told about her

friend.

If she filled the bin with fresh llama feed, how long would it take

before she would be confronted by the evidence again?
 
A month?
 
Two?

Even as her brain pondered the question, though, she was bending over

into the bin again. She was all through avoiding truths about herself or

anyone else. She would confront this one head-on and deal with it and

get on with her life.

She pinched the end of the clear plastic bag and tugged. The brown

pellets rolled aside. She came up out of the bin with Martindale-Hubbell

volume 2, California's A-O, and a videotape labeled simply "Townsend."

Samantha drifted up toward consciousness like a diver drifting up toward

the surface from the depths of the ocean. Out of the blackness toward

rippling, shimmering light. But as soon as she broke the surface, she

wanted to go back down. The light stabbed into her eyes. Pain hit the

back of her head and exploded in bolts down through her back and arms

and legs, tumbling her stomach over en route.

Moaning, she tried to curl into a ball and turn on her side, but she

couldn't bring her knees up because her ankles were tied to the foot of

the bed on which she lay.

Her wrists were bound as well, each to a post in the iron headboard. It