Deep in the Valley (12 page)

T
ime off was something June just didn’t have…until John Stone came to town and began to share the load. It was yet another reason she wanted so desperately for him to work out. This was what she had been waiting for—a Sunday afternoon to call her own. She started off the day by going to church and ended it with Sunday dinner at her dad’s with Myrna.

Sunday dinner at Elmer’s had gone unchanged since June’s mother had died. He seared a roast on both sides and stuck it in the oven with vegetables, then went to church and let it do its magic. When he returned with June and Myrna in tow, he poured himself a cabernet, Myrna a martini, June a cup of tea in case there was doctoring to do, and they sat in the small living room that June’s mother had furnished far too many years ago.

On this day, June had said to her dad, “I’ll have a glass of that cabernet, Dad. John Stone is taking care of the town.”

“Well, hell’s bells and hallelujah!”

The afternoon waned and the late spring sun settled over the trees and rooftops. Mellowed by the red wine, June rocked on her porch, Sadie comfortable at her side. This was the life, she realized, though it took willpower to just sit there, to examine the tense feeling of doing nothing with her hands. She thought about her needlework, untouched for months; she considered the novel she’d been reading for weeks. There were at least ten videos she’d purchased and had yet to watch. But she sat idle for a change. The entire evening was hers. There was no reason to hurry, no reason to stay busy.

Christina Baker is probably just overreacting, she thought for the hundredth time. John Stone is probably one of the best doctors in California, and I’ve got him. These were her thoughts, maybe prayers, as she idled the time away.

He came up the long drive from the road, though June didn’t see a vehicle. He probably could have approached from either side of her house, out of the trees, but instead of surprising her, he gave her lots of time to get used to the idea that he was coming to her house. Unarmed.

He was clean shaven and freshly groomed. The sleeves on his red-and-black plaid shirt were rolled up to right below the elbow and he wore an oversize belt buckle. His shoulders were as broad as she remembered, his thighs hard in his crisp blue jeans. As he got closer, Sadie perked up and sat at attention. She made a throaty sound of greeting and whacked her tail on the porch floor a few times. He smiled at the dog. He braced one foot on the top porch step, leaned down and reached a callused hand out to Sadie. “Good idea. A dog.”

Sadie licked his hand. Sadie knew what she was doing.

“Not dressed in drag today, Jim?”

He chuckled.

“How’s your friend?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Haven’t seen him since that night.”

“Ah, that makes sense. I wouldn’t hang around a place where I’d taken a bullet either. Lemonade?”

“Thanks. You sure it’s okay?”

“I guess so. Anyway, what if I said it wasn’t?”

He spread his hands. “I’d have to try to talk you into it.”

That was a relief. She didn’t want him to leave, but she wouldn’t mind if he thought she had control of this situation. She went in the house and put the pitcher and two glasses on a tray.

Suddenly, she had a hard time remembering when she’d had feelings like this. A rush of excitement. Light-headedness. Her ears were hot. There was a giddy weakness behind her knees. How silly.

“So, what brings you out of the woods?” she asked, placing the tray on the porch table.

“I just wanted to thank you,” he said. He smiled devilishly, still scratching behind Sadie’s ears. Sadie’s eyes were closed and she strained toward him dramatically. She was in ecstasy.

“You thanked me the other night.”

“All right then. I wanted to see you.”

“Well, I guess you can never be too grateful. Make yourself comfortable.”

“You didn’t call the police while you were inside getting the lemonade, did you?”

“Of course not. I think you probably are the police.”

He was about to ascend the porch steps and came up short, a rather stricken look on his face. “Talk like that could get me killed.”

“By who? The good guys or the bad guys?”

“By all of them.”

“I probably won’t say anything to anyone.” Then she smiled a small sly smile. “If you behave yourself.”

“You shouldn’t make assumptions about people, Doc.” He drew his heavy eyebrows together and made his scary face. “You don’t really know anything about me.”

“I know you pretended to faint…and you winked at me. And don’t call me Doc. It makes me crane my neck looking for my father. It’s a family business, you know.”

“You know why I fainted?” he asked.

“So you could lose the gun without looking suspicious to your wounded friend.”

“Phew. They should hire you to write
Dragnet
episodes.” When he came up on the porch, the boards protested. He stood in front of the swing and judged the chains that held it to the ceiling. “Think she’ll take me?”

“Man about your size put it up. Let’s see if he’s any good.”

“I like the way you think,” he said, but he sat slowly, gradually letting his full weight rest on the swing. That’s when she saw he’d polished his boots. That was also when she wished she had some sewing in her lap, though she wasn’t entirely sure why.

“You said you’ve lived here all your life,” he began.

“The year I was born, there were 798 people in the town called Grace. We were incorporated years later as Grace Valley. There was a big fight about it. Some people wanted to pay homage to my grandfather—who I never knew, who my dad barely knew—and call the town Hudson Valley.”

“But they didn’t?”

“No. Funny thing, the surviving Hudsons—my dad and my wacky aunt Myrna—couldn’t have cared less. Myrna finally gave the town a thousand dollars toward a statue of Grandfather Hudson so they’d move on. Nothing gets a town moving like money.”

Jim frowned. “Where’s the statue?”

“Oh, there isn’t one. Probably never will be. Besides, my grandfather didn’t settle the town. It was already here. All he did was make money in the Bay Area, marry late in life and build his young wife a big house on a hill. I think he threw a few bucks at the town in the decade he lived here. And I think it was my grandmother, his young wife, who called the place Grace. She said people got here by the grace of God and angels.”

“A religious woman,” he said.

“Not really. More likely a grateful woman. She was a pretty but poor girl and married a man old enough to be her grandfather. People probably thought she was a gold digger, but if you ask the only living person to know her, Aunt Myrna, she’ll tell you her mother adored her father. She was kind and gentle and helped people whenever she could. She died in her early thirties. My brokenhearted grandfather followed soon after.”

June didn’t tell him about the resemblance. Erma Hudson had been reed thin, fair-skinned and with what they once called dishwater blond hair, like June. She’d been freckled like June, Myrna said, which of course didn’t show in the oil portrait. The moment little June Hudson saw the portrait of her long-deceased grandmother, she’d claimed her as her angel. Until her mother, Marilyn, died. Then she had two. Angels were a very big thing in Grace Valley.

“My aunt Myrna was only fourteen when her parents were both dead, and her little brother, my father, was two. She raised him.”

“Alone?”

“Uh-huh. Seventy years ago a girl that age might have married and had her own children, so it wasn’t exactly an oddity. But Myrna didn’t marry until my father was through medical school and married himself.”

“This seems like a good town. It would be good to be from here,” he said.

June told him about the legend of the road angel at the pass; about Morton Claypool, who Myrna had misplaced twenty years ago; about how the town rebuilt Leah Craven’s house and seeded her south field.

“Not all small towns have that kind of compassion,” he pointed out to her. “Sometimes they’re cruel and crazy and unforgiving.”

“We have more than one face, you know. We have our problems, our bad seeds. Leah’s house was fixed up and her field planted by folk who are so relieved her abusive husband, Gus, is finally behind bars. And have you ever been out to Dandies? I wouldn’t mind if that
place accidentally caught fire. Tom calls me out a couple of times a month to stitch up brawlers from there.

“But, in general, it’s a well-meaning town. I remember a particularly crazy period…about the bear.”

“The bear.”

“A black bear in a bad mood. A logger on the northeast rim was mauled…we almost lost his arm. The next day a rural woman just south of town spotted a bear tearing her laundry off the line, so we knew it was on the move. The woman shot at the bear and sent it into the woods, then she sent up the alarm.

“For a few days you could cut the tension around here with a knife. Women carried guns in their pails and laundry baskets, people drove their kids to school, Tom Toopeek sat on top of his Range Rover with a rifle near the schoolyard and the café was empty. Instead of meeting there for coffee, the local men were seen at various crossroads around the valley, exchanging information about where the bear might be found. I remember we kept our garbage inside, closed our windows and doors tight, and ate mostly cold food. It wasn’t a good time to cool a pie on a windowsill or have the aroma of freshly baked bread wafting through the woods.

“Forestry held a town meeting right away and asked the locals not to hunt the bear—they wanted to trap and remove it. They might as well have asked them not to take a breath. Bud Burnham accidentally shot out Ray Gilmore’s knee. That was a god-awful mess. He still has a peg leg. Never got mad at Bud though—which is another thing about that period. They took it as a
perilous time and knew there would be risks, what with every jittery person in town carrying a loaded gun and jumping at shadows.

“They got a black bear. Shot her dead. Some Forestry people backtracked her trail and found two cubs that had to be transported to a game refuge. One of Mama’s paws was deformed—she was missing two claws and pads. She might have had an accident or fight years earlier and she was fully healed. But see, her claws didn’t match the injury. She hadn’t mauled the logger. They got the wrong bear.”

“Did they go back out?”

“Nope. Blood lust satisfied, they all went home. Then they told their families that no matter, they should always be on the lookout for a bear that comes this far down into the valley. You never know.”

He leaned on the swing, head back, thinking through the logic. Then he came forward and said, “You remind me of my grandmother.”

She smiled. “You old sweet-talker.”

“She used to talk to me while she ironed, and she ironed all the time. She ironed everything. That’s when she’d tell me stories from her childhood.”

June realized she’d been talking for a couple of hours. It was dusk and would soon be dark. She shivered as the chill crept into the air, and she wondered what she was to do with him after dark. Invite him in for dinner? Offer to drive him back to wherever he’d left his vehicle?

“Tell me something about yourself,” she said. “Anything.”

“Hmm. Well, if things were different, I might ask you out to a fancy restaurant for dinner.”

“That’s really not about you, now, is it?”

“That’s about the best I can do right now.”

“Okay…. How different would things have to be?” she asked.

“Very.”
He laughed. “I’ll bet you look incredible in—what do they call ’em? A little black dress?”

“That’s what they call them, and I don’t have one. I used to, but—”
But I stopped having dates.
“We don’t have a fancy restaurant around here anyway.”

“But things would be different, remember. Do you dance?”

“I don’t remember.”

He laughed again. “We could get us one of those floor maps with the feet on ’em. Or fake it.”

“There’s no dancing around here, either.”

“You look like a dancer. Long legged and skinny.”

“Great come-on, Jim. Skinny. You should throw in flat chested for good measure.”

“I like skinny girls….” he murmured.

“Fortunately, I like stupid guys….”

He began to glower, then slowly a broad smile took over. “I’m smarter than I look. I just don’t want you to notice…I’m seducing you.”

“Well, lucky you, I didn’t notice. At all.”

“So, what have people said about you?”

She thought for a minute. “That I’m sturdy. And plain.”

“Plain?” he repeated, shocked. “Gimme a break!”

“In fact, it was Arlise Cruise, the mother of my childhood rival and nemesis, Nancy Cruise—no relation to Tom. She used to say things like, ‘She does real well for a plain girl.’ God, she hated me.”

“You must have gotten all the good-looking boys.”

“I got at least one, who played touch tag with me and Nancy all through school. If I ever see him again I’m going to sedate and torture him.”

“There’s nothing more pure than a woman’s revenge, now is there.”

“You don’t want to cross me,” she said threateningly. She shivered again.

“We’d better decide,” he suggested.

“Decide what?”

“If I’m going in or going away.”

“I’d like to shiver for a few more minutes, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“Take your time,” he said. But he stood, reached out a hand to her and drew her slowly to her feet. “Take all the time you need,” he said, pulling her closer.

“Inviting you in might be moving a little too fast, even for us. After all, I only know you by way of a criminal gunshot wound.”

That made him laugh, but low in his throat. She moved closer to him, just as he moved his hands to her hips, drawing her. It was better…warmer against him. He slipped an arm around her waist, and with his other hand, lifted her chin. In the twilight, he looked down into her eyes. “You’re beautiful…for a skinny girl….”

“You’re not that bad looking…for a dope….” she answered.

He bent his head, his lips just barely touching hers…

The phone rang.

His head immediately snapped up as though the sound were a signal. He scanned the tree line but held
her against him. “It’s okay,” she whispered. But still he searched his surroundings, his eyes narrowed, his body tense. “We’ll let the machine get it,” she said, but she couldn’t seem to recapture his attention. It was the only time she’d ever seen a man appear to prowl while standing completely still. “Oh, hell,” she said, reaching up and plunging her fingers into the thick hair at his temples, pulling his mouth down to meet hers, where his initial surprise melted into unmistakable appreciation.