Strangers (2 page)

So here I was in Mineral Springs, a stranger in a strange land, no less committed despite the second thoughts. All right, then what the hell was I doing sitting here stalling instead of getting on with it? It was not that I was reluctant to come face-to-face with Cheryl again … or maybe it was, a little. Meeting again under these circumstances, spending necessary time together, was bound to be awkward for both of us.

Cheryl Rosmond. One of three women I could honestly say I'd been in love with in my life. The first, Erica Coates, I'd asked to marry me and been turned down because she hated my job; the relationship had shriveled away as a result. Cheryl was the second, our time together brief, emotional, and painful for both of us. I'd wanted her very much at the time, and been hurt by an abrupt but understandable end to the affair. Would it have worked out if our relationship had not been destroyed by circumstances? I thought at this far remove that it might have, but I didn't really want to know because now I had Kerry, my third and last and one true love, and she was more important to me than anyone else ever could have been. The rapport I'd shared with Cheryl had died before it had really lived—the result of a tragedy that neither of us could have foreseen, or prevented even if we had.

I'd met her during the course of an investigation into the twenty-year-old disappearance of an Army master sergeant. You couldn't call the mutual attraction love at first sight, not for either of us, but it was strong enough to forge a bond between us that could easily and naturally have evolved into real love and marriage. But fate or divine perversity or whatever you wanted to call it decreed that the evolution would never take place, that we'd have only a short time together. The case had taken me away from San Francisco, on a twisting path to Oregon, West Germany, and back to California, a small town in the northern part of the state where it came to a sudden, bitter finish—the revelation that Cheryl's beloved brother Doug was a cold-blooded murderer, and his subsequent suicide.

What can you say to a woman you care deeply about after something like that happens? Nothing that has any meaning. How can you bridge the chasm between you? You can't. Can't bring her brother back to life, can't undo his criminal acts. Can't ignore the fact that he had addressed his long, rambling suicide note to me, the last line of it begging me to take care of his sister. The spark between Cheryl and me died with Doug Rosmond. Even if we had somehow been able to resurrect it, sooner or later his ghost would have doomed the relationship, and we both knew it.

But I tried. When you care for someone, you have to try. I saw her, I called her—a series of exercises in bleak futility. Her brother's ignominious death combined with the usual media publicity made it unbearable for Cheryl to stay in San Francisco; she gave up her job and her house and moved back to Truckee, where she'd grown up but no longer had family. I wrote her four times after that, and she'd answered each letter politely but with no encouragement, and then I'd stopped writing and stopped myself three times from getting into my car and driving up to Truckee. I had neither seen nor heard from her again until yesterday.

It had taken a while to stop thinking about her, for her image to fade into the mists of memory. A year, two years … I don't remember exactly how long. And once it had, I seldom thought about her except for blips every now and then, those odd moments when you wonder fleetingly whatever happened to someone you once knew. After I met and fell in love with Kerry, the blips stopped altogether. It had been years since I'd last had any kind of thought about Cheryl Rosmond.

Well, now I knew what had happened to her—some of it, with more to come. She'd found someone else and had a son and somehow made her way from Truckee to a backwater mining town in the northern Nevada desert, where she'd alluded on the phone to having lived for several years. Again I had difficulty picturing the sensitive, intelligent woman I'd known settled in this kind of environment. But then, people change over the course of twenty-some years, sometimes radically; the woman I'd known, like the man she'd known, was a product of another time and another world.…

Still stalling, dammit. Stupid, counterproductive. And unfair to her. Get off your ass, get moving.

In the car again, I thought about going to one of the restaurants for some food to appease the rumbling in my belly. Cheryl had said to come any time, don't bother calling first. But stopping to eat would have amounted to more stalling, and I didn't do it. She'd be waiting, watching the clock, alone with the anxiety eating at her; the sooner I put in an appearance at her home, the better for both of us.

The directions she'd given me were easy enough to follow without technological assistance. Yucca Avenue was a block behind me; I'd noted it on the way in. Out Yucca past the rodeo grounds and across the Union Pacific tracks to the last street, Northwest 10th, before Yucca continued on into the desert; left turn past the Oasis Mobile Home Park, fourth house on the east side of the next block, big prickly pear cactus in front. Easy. You couldn't miss it.

And I didn't. Getting there took less than five minutes.

 

2

It was a small, boxy house in an older tract of small, boxy houses on the last street at the edge of open desert. No lawns and not much greenery in the yards; despite the nearby river, water was at something of a premium in this country. The big prickly pear cactus in Cheryl's yard must have been seven or eight feet tall; its jutting arms and flattened leaves had a grotesque appearance in the star-flecked darkness. The porch light was off. Drapes were drawn across the facing window, light leaking out around the edges.

A dust-streaked Ford Ranger was parked in front, two other vehicles in heavy shadow under a side portico. I pulled up behind the Ranger, sat there for ten or fifteen seconds—still stalling a little—and then went up onto the narrow front porch. The reason the light there was off was because the metal fixture was broken; it hung at a twisted off-angle, the jagged remains of the bulb visible inside, as if somebody had thrown or swung something at it. If there was a bell button, I couldn't find it in the darkness. So I thumped on the door panel, not too sharply.

It didn't take her long to open the door. The light that spilled into the foyer from the room behind her was not bright enough to give me a clear look at her face. Pale smile in a thin, pale oval, her eyes shadowed. Slender when I knew her, still slender now, but she seemed too thin, shorter somehow than I remembered her, as if the weight of her son's plight combined with the weight of years had bent and compressed her body.

She put out her hand—it felt dry and rough in mine—and said my name and “Please come in” and “I'm so glad you're here” in a voice that showed the strain she was under. When she stepped back and I was inside, I had a better look at her—and my stomach clenched up.

Her age was forty-five or so now, but she looked older. And so thin in a dark-brown sweater and light-brown skirt. Age lines slightly marred the elfin attractiveness of her face; the reddish-gold hair, worn short now, was shot through with gray. But her eyes … my God. Twenty years ago they'd had an almost mesmeric effect on me—large, very green, very bright; now they were squinty, the color dulled, the animation gone. The only thing about them that was the same was their pleading quality, back then like a child afraid of being hurt, now like an adult who'd been hurt too much.

I tried to keep my expression neutral, but some of what I was thinking must have shown through. She said, “You look well. I wish I could say the same about myself.”

“You're under a lot of stress.”

“Yes. I—”

A man's voice said, “So this is the big-city detective. Lot older than you let on, Cheryl.”

I hadn't known he was there because I'd been looking at her, only at her. And I'd expected her to be alone. He was standing off to one side of a living room plainly furnished except for a wall display of Native American craftwork, a bottle of beer in one meaty hand. Late forties, short, compact, with a heavy beard-stubbled face burnt dark by the desert sun and patchy tufts of coarse black hair on a mottled scalp. Dressed in a work shirt and Levi's stretched tight across a broad chest and thick thighs. The rugged-ugly type.

Cheryl said wearily, “For God's sake, Matt.”

“You really think he's gonna be able to do anything?”

“He's going to try. That's more than you or anybody else is doing for Cody.”

I said to Cheryl, “Who's this?”

“Matt Hatcher. My brother-in-law.”

“And about the only friend she's got left in Mineral Springs,” Hatcher said.

“Wrong. Now she has another.”

“You're an outsider, Pop.”

“We're not going to get along,” I said, “if you keep making snotty remarks about my age. How old I am has no bearing on how well I do my job.”

“Suppose I don't care if we get along or not?”

“Then you won't be acting in Ms. Rosmond's best interests.”

“Ms. Rosmond,” Hatcher said with an edge of contempt. He took a swig from the bottle of beer. “Her name's Hatcher, not Rosmond. Glen Hatcher's widow.”

Cheryl said, “Matt, please.”

“What's wrong with the Hatcher name? It was good enough for you for a lot of years, wasn't it?”

Her wince suggested that the years with Glen Hatcher had not been easy ones. Understandable, if he'd been anything like his brother.

Hatcher came over in an aggressive, rolling gait to where we were. He said to me, “Just how do you figure you can prove Cody didn't rape those women?”

“I can't answer that. I've only just gotten here and I don't know all the details yet.”

“Damn good chance he's guilty. You know that, don't you?”

“I just told you, I don't know anything yet.”

“He's not guilty,” Cheryl said. “He's
not.
”

“I don't want him to be any more than you,” Hatcher said, “but that don't mean he ain't. He's always been a wild kid—”

“Wild? What do you mean, wild?”

“You know what I mean. Driving like a lunatic, drinking, getting into fights.” He added with what struck me as deliberate malice, “None of that would've happened if Glen was still alive.”

You could tell that hurt her. “I hate it when you say things like that, imply I didn't raise my son properly.”

“Well? Woman alone, when you don't have to be.”

“Oh, please, don't start that again—”

Ringing telephone.

The sudden sound turned her rigid for two or three seconds. Then, quickly, she pivoted away from me and started toward where the instrument sat on a table next to the living room doorway. But Hatcher caught her arm on the way past, brought her up short.

“Chrissake,” he said, “don't answer it.”

“I can't just let it ring.”

“All right, then let me—”

“No.”

Cheryl pulled away from him, hurried over, and got the handset up to her ear on the third ring. She listened for maybe five seconds; then her shoulders slumped and she broke the connection, cradled the receiver. Except for “hello,” she hadn't said a word.

Hatcher said disgustedly, “Another one. Why don't you stop putting yourself through that shit and leave the phone off the hook?”

“I told you before. It might be Cody, or Sam Parfrey.”

“Joe Felix won't let the kid call. And Parfrey's got nothing to tell you he hasn't already.”

She came slowly back to where I was, making a little loop around Hatcher. On the way she said without looking at him, “Leave me be, Matt,” the weariness heavy in her voice. “Please, just go away and leave me be.”

“So you can be alone with him.”

I'd had my fill, too. “Lay off, Hatcher. She's got enough troubles without you making them worse.”

“Why don't you mind your own business, Pop?”

“This is my business now,” I said with heat. “Cheryl made it mine by hiring me. One more crack about my age and you and I are going to have trouble.”

“Hah. Look at me shaking.”

“For God's sake, Matt, that's enough!” Heat in her voice, too, and exasperation. “If you don't get out of here right now, I'll never let you in this house again. I mean it.”

He was bright enough to see that she did and it cooled him down. Bully boy and frustrated, jealous suitor—a bad combination.

“All right,” he said, “but you better be careful.” Then to me, and without the sneer in his voice, “You, too. Outsiders poking their noses into local matters get short shrift around here.”

“So I gathered.”

“Just make sure Cheryl doesn't get hurt,” he said. He didn't have to add an “or else”; it was in his tone.

When he was gone, not quite slamming the door behind him, Cheryl let out a heavy breath and said, “I'm sorry you had to put up with all that. I didn't invite Matt here tonight, he just showed up like he sometimes does. I thought I could get him to leave by telling him about you, but it only made him want to stay. I should have known better.”

“It's all right. The sooner I know about a potential adversary, the better.”

“It won't come to that. Not with him. He isn't always so unpleasant, it's just that he's … attracted to me. And worried about me.”

“But not so much about your son.”

“Cody, too,” she said, but she didn't sound convinced.

I followed her into the living room. Prominently displayed on an end table next to a worn sofa were three silver-framed photographs, and I paused for a look. I didn't expect any of them to be of her dead brother, after all these years and the pain and grief his suicide had caused her, but it was a small relief not to see Doug Rosmond's face among the trio. They were all of the same young man, the two smaller ones candid full-body snaps at ages preteen and early teen, the third a posed head-and-shoulders portrait in a jacket and tie that he didn't look comfortable wearing.