Somewhere Along the Way (3 page)

Maybe it was the fog, but all the world seemed lonely tonight.

TIMBER LINE ROAD

THE CHILI WOULD BE COLD BY THE TIME GABE WALKED the three miles home. He knew the back path well and had no problem moving through the shadows black as spilled oil across the land. He’d walked them all his life. First to school because he didn’t want to ride the school bus, then as therapy when he came home from the army wounded in both body and soul. And now he made the walk because it was Wednesday and he didn’t want to eat his own cooking.

He favored his left leg and knew he should have brought his cane, but he hated using it. The stick reminded him of a life he’d given up. One explosion, one glance in the wrong direction, and the world he’d known, the one he’d built on another man’s name, had vanished.

Holding on to a bare branch, he climbed out of the dry gully at the edge of town and began crossing open fields. Memories walked beside him tonight. He’d just turned seventeen when his father beat him for the last time for not completing all his endless chores. He’d packed a change of clothes, a dozen of his favorite comic books, and seventy-three dollars, then walked all night.

It was noon by the time he’d traveled the more than thirty miles to Bailee and caught a bus to Amarillo. From there, he tried a dozen businesses downtown before a sweet lady gave him a job at a little breakfast/lunch place called the Hickory Inn a block from the train tracks. Minimum wage and a meal on his break. She agreed to pay him in cash if he’d show up sober every morning at five and promise to stay for the lunch run. He figured out he could shower at a shelter a few blocks away and hang around there until late afternoon. Then, Gabe learned the hard way that it paid to be off the streets before dark. A storage shed behind the little café became his home for a year until he turned eighteen.

Gabe shivered remembering that cold shed. Sometimes it would take him a half hour to warm up enough to move at normal speed. He’d spent that year planning. The number one thing on his list was never to return to Harmony, but he had.

He crossed Timber Line Road and saw his father’s old house in the distance. It had been a Sears Kit home, shipped by train a hundred or so years ago. It was small, with only one story; the wind had beaten on it over the years until it blended into the landscape. This weather had a way of doing that to everything around. Sometimes Gabriel thought his whole world was the color of the dirt that constantly blew.

Part of him hated being back, even with his father long dead. Part of him knew this might be the only place left on the planet for him to hide.

A few minutes later when he entered the house, he checked the alarm system. Most folks driving by might think the old barn and house were abandoned. They’d never guess it had a hundred-thousand-dollar security system he’d installed himself.

Gabe pulled off the Glock strapped to his good leg and left it on a shelf by the door. The years in the army had taught him well. Never be unprepared.

He walked through the rooms stripped of all furniture except work tables and long desks loaded down with classic comic books and his own drawings. A living room or dining room would have been worthless to him. Gabe needed workspace and the basics. Nothing more.

A stray dog, who’d taken up residence with him a few years back, wandered in from the hallway, looking bothered that Gabe had awakened him. He was German shepherd tall, but greyhound thin and the color of wet sand.

“Some guard dog you are, Pirate,” Gabe said as he scratched the mutt’s head. “With only one eye you’d only see half a burglar anyway.”

Pirate followed him to the kitchen, his nose bumping into the sack of food with every other step Gabe took.

Gabe ignored the dog. Pirate had been hungry since the day he arrived with ribs poking through his chest. Someone had probably dropped him out on the road, thinking it kinder to let a car kill him than to have him put to sleep. Only Pirate was a survivor.

Sitting down, Gabe pulled the meal from the bag, remembering how he’d been walking the midnight streets of Harmony one night a few years ago, staying in the shadows, when Edith Franklin, from the Blue Moon, spotted him. She’d been a few years older than him in school, but she recognized him and stepped out into the cold.

“Gabriel!” she’d shouted in a voice a mother would use to call her children inside. “Come in for some coffee before you freeze. I’ve got a pot I’m about to toss.”

He’d circled around to the back door of the Blue Moon and sat in the diner’s kitchen drinking coffee as she cleaned. They didn’t talk much, not like old friends. He guessed neither had any memories of the past dozen years that they wanted to share. Life hadn’t treated her any better than it had him. He had a wide scar across his chest, a thin one along his jawline, and another that ran almost the length of his leg. Judging from her sad eyes, he’d guess her scars were more on the inside. She couldn’t be more than thirty-four, but she looked fifty.

So this is what happens to shy, gentle girls who marry at sixteen to get away from home,
he thought.

She’d packed him a takeout dinner that night without asking him what he liked and charged him two dollars.

He’d been returning every Wednesday since for whatever she packed in the bag. Sometimes, if it was cold outside, she’d invite him in for coffee, but most of the time she just thanked him for the business and told him to take care of himself.

Guessing from the premature age lines on her face and her tired eyes, Edith had her full quota of sorrow. She didn’t need any of his. So, he’d thank her for the meal and vanish back into the night.

Until tonight, the pattern had never changed. He usually circled through the old part of town, feeling strangely at home there because nothing had changed since he’d been a kid. On warm nights, he’d stand by the storm drain outside the sheriff’s office and listen to people talk. Between dispatchers yelling and deputies passing time with stories and news, Gabe knew pretty much everything going on in town. On cool nights he liked to lift himself silently up in the old tree on the square and pick up conversations as folks passed. Legend was the town’s founder, Harmon Ely, planted the tree hoping his grandchildren would play beneath it. But his wife and children never came west and when Harmon died, he left all his land to the three men who worked for him. The McAllens, the Mathesons, and the Trumans either owned or had sold off all the property for miles around. They weren’t rich, but rooted. Gabe thought that might be more important.

The three families were also the town’s longest-running soap opera.

From what Gabe could tell, nothing much had changed in Harmony over the ten years he was gone. The three families still pretty much ran the town. Alexandra McAllen was sheriff, Hank Matheson was fire chief, and a half dozen of each family served on the town council. Only the Trumans hadn’t populated. As far as he knew, the girl he saw tonight would be the last Truman soon.

Gabe pulled out a bag of cookies from the takeout she’d given him and smiled. “Thanks, Reagan,” he said aloud, and wondered what the little redhead must have thought of him.
That I’m crazy
, he decided. Why not? Half the time Gabe thought he was nuts. When he’d come home five years ago he’d sworn he’d leave as soon as he could walk, and then his dad died and he decided to stay until he was ready to face the world again. Two tours of duty had left him craving solitude.

But the time to step back into life never seemed right, and thanks to the Internet he could order anything he needed and have it delivered. In the solitude of his farm, he’d found a way to make a living and no one around would ever know. The drawings he’d done as a child and his love for comic books had morphed into a career in graphic novels. He could step into his imaginary world and be whoever he wanted, without scars and fears.

“Someday, I’ll get back to the world,” he promised himself as he ate his supper. Chili, a ham sandwich, and cookies, plus he’d actually talked to someone tonight. For the first time in a long time, life was almost normal.

While he ate, he thought of Reagan. She was small, but probably grown as tall as she’d ever be. Her hair reminded him of the color of rust and seemed to bounce around her face. He’d watched her earlier from the side window of the diner. She had to stand on her toes and stretch to reach the shelf where all the paper goods were stacked.

She was brave too. Walked right out and handed him his meal. Now and then someone saw him moving about the town or across his fields. Most acted like they didn’t see him. A few darted away as if afraid. But Reagan Truman, despite her small frame, had shown Truman blood and stood her ground.

Gabe stopped eating and left his supper on the table. He needed to do something about the Truman girl, and the sooner he got started, the sooner he’d be headed back to town.

He’d barely made it out the kitchen door before Pirate raised his head table high and lived up to his name by finishing off the takeout.

JANUARY 10, 2008
OFFICE ON THE SQUARE

LIZ MATHESON CARRIED THE LAST BOX FROM THE MOVING truck into her first office and paid the two muscle men who’d unloaded the furniture. Nobody in Harmony thought she’d finish her law degree, but she’d fooled them all. A month short of thirty, she would hang her shingle tomorrow and wait for her first client. Her life was a string of false starts and broken dreams, but this time she’d get somewhere.

As she opened a box, she heard footsteps clanking up the metal stairs of her run-down office building facing the town square. A moment later someone pounded on her open door frame.

Liz watched her big brother step into her space without waiting to be invited. Hank Matheson was the only one in the family who always seemed to do everything right. Since he’d turned twenty-five, he’d run the ranch and the family of women like he had been appointed godfather. Tall, handsome, and always serious, he made her feel not only younger and smaller, but somehow dumber.

“Hi, Hank. Come on in.” She frowned as he looked around at the mess. “Oh, sorry, you’re already in.” Her brother constantly bugged her. He was perfect. Honest, responsible, caring, wise. Liz felt like she’d been forced to take what was left on the character chart. Flighty, unpredictable, absentminded, self-centered.

He hesitated, as if expecting the walls of her office to fall in like stacked dominoes, then smiled at her as if she were a child playing house. “Looks nice,” he said obviously lying.

Liz fought back anger. Her office was a run-down, neglected little place over a dry cleaners and bookstore. It was anything but nice. But then, her family always encouraged her, even though they never believed in her. “It’s a mess and you know it. I’m guessing it will take me a week to get everything in order.”

“Mom and Claire offered to come help paint.” Hank held his Stetson like a shield before him as he slowly maneuvered around a pair of wicker chairs with tiny chips of paint hanging on for dear life. “They could do wonders for this place.”

“No thanks.” Asking two artists to paint walls would evoke more drama than Liz could handle right now. She’d graduated from law school, broken up with the professor she’d been sleeping with, and moved out of her mother’s home for good this time, all within a month. The last thing she needed was conflict. Her older sister and her mother hadn’t agreed on anything since her older sister, Claire, moved back in at the ranch house three years ago with tiny little Saralynn in tow. Her sister and mother needed each other, loved each other, and conversations through Post-it notes seemed enough for them both.

Hank shrugged, as if he hadn’t expected her to take any help. He crossed to the wall of windows and looked out over the town square. “Nice view, at least. I can see the roof of the fire station from here and part of the roof of the Blue Moon at the wall of the diner. It almost looks like the moon is rising over the buildings between us,” he said more to himself than her, and then with a fluid movement of a man in great shape, he turned and met her gaze. “You didn’t say where you got an apartment, Liz. Mom asked me at breakfast.”