Storm Vengeance

by Pamela Cowan

  The main entrance to the Lodge was a set of three pairs of doors at the top of a wide sweep of concrete steps. Inside, a long hallway stretched left to the reservation desk and rooms, and right to the restaurant. The walls of the hallway were hung with paintings whose subjects ranged from realistic landscapes to the truly bizarre. Even the exposed pipes near the ceiling had faces painted on them. Faces with pouting lips and winking eyes done in a whimsical style that jarred. Storm’s mood was anything but playful.

  Moving past the faux gold and gem-encrusted statue of the multi-armed Khali that greeted diners at the restaurant’s entrance, Storm found a booth and slid into a seat facing the door.

  The cavernous space was empty of diners except for three Asian men sharing a corner table and a dark-haired woman with glasses eating alone with a book for company. They were all far enough away to make Storm feel comfortable that she and Lauren wouldn’t be overheard.

  Lauren arrived ten minutes late and slid into the booth with a storm of excuses and apologies. Storm was struck again by how diminutive Lauren was and her unusual coloring, poreless skin that could only be described as pale porcelain, thick strawberry blond hair, and olive-green eyes. “You could be a model,” she said. “People love redheads.”

  “Thanks,” said Lauren. “My grandmother was from Northern Ireland. They say she was a knockout. I got the short genes though. Not too many short models.”

  “Oh right, I suppose I heard that somewhere.” It was funny how easily she could fall into small talk with Lauren. Something that had never come easily with anyone else, not even her best friend, Nicky. For a moment a flash memory brought her an image of Nicky, but she pushed it away and turned her attention back to Lauren.

  “It’s okay. I don’t mind. I’ve never had to work, and that beats modeling.”

  “That would be nice,” Storm agreed.

  After a few more minutes of idle chatter, their waitress appeared to take their orders. Once she’d walked away, Storm said, “Tell me what you’ve heard from your guy.”

  “My guy?”

  “Your PI. You told me you’d share what you learned about my parents.”

  Lauren opened her napkin and slid out the knife and fork it contained. She set them beside her plate then shook out the napkin and placed it on her lap. “The problem is,” she said, “he can’t find him. He seems to have fallen right off the damn planet.”

  Storm leaned back in her seat. Was she disappointed or glad? She wasn’t sure. Finding her father would have complicated things, made it harder to travel to New Mexico.

  “Don’t worry,” Lauren added. “He did say he’s got a good lead on your mom. He’s getting closer every day. Give me your cell number and if I hear anything while you’re gone I’ll text you.” She handed her phone to Storm.

  Storm took it and, after a moment’s hesitation, programmed her name and number into it and handed it back. Then, taking a deep breath, she said, “For a long time I thought my mother was dead.”

  “How come?”

  A beer coaster sat on the table. Storm slid it round and round with one fingertip, stared at it without really seeing it as she spoke.

  “While I was in the burn center, my mother disappeared. There was talk. People thought they’d had a fight and my father had killed her and hidden her body. I believed it. After all, why else would she leave without me? I would have confronted him about it, but before I got out of the hospital he was sent to prison for hitting you with his car. After that it didn’t matter. He was in prison where he belonged. I had no interest in seeing him.”

  Lauren nodded her understanding.

  “Then,” Storm continued, “my great aunt died. She left a letter for me telling me my mother was alive. In the letter she explained that after my accident my mother had a sort of psychotic break. She couldn’t deal with everything, so she ran away, sort of lost herself, even ended up living in homeless shelters for a while. Eventually she got some help and got better, but by then I was living with my great aunt and doing pretty well. She decided to stay out of my life. At that point I guess she thought staying away was the best thing she could do for me.”

  Storm’s fingers stilled. The unexpected burn of tears at the back of her eyes was a shock. She shook it off, tugged at the cuffs of her long-sleeved blouse. Looked up at Lauren.

  “She found a job in Crescent City, that’s a little town on the California coast near the Oregon border, cleaning and cooking for a bed and breakfast sort of place. The old man she worked for died. He must have liked her a lot because when he died he left her the place free and clear. I was planning to drive there and talk to her.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “She’s not there. I called and they told me she took off and no one knows where she is. I got a letter telling me my father was being released. I think she got one too. I think it may have made her flip out again.”

  “Or maybe she’s on her way to meet your father somewhere.”

  “No, if she’s running, it’s away from him, not to him.”

  “Are you really sure about that?”

  Again a wave of emotion washed over Storm, but this time it wasn’t sadness. This time it was the familiar crackle of repressed rage. “I’m sure.”

  “Your father, “ said Lauren. “He did some bad shit.”

  “He did.”

  “You weren’t lying to me in the basement just so I’d let you go, were you? You and me are going to set things right. That’s what you do, right? “

  “Yes,” Storm said. “That’s what I do.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THEY’D NEVER HAD A REALLY serious argument. Even during the worst of last year’s stress. In fact, the threat to their family had managed to bring them together, not tear them apart. She’d felt like even Howard had not been able to destroy what they had.

  New Mexico might.

  Storm had wanted to like New Mexico. She didn’t know much about the place, except what she’d seen in various travel magazines or on the Discovery Channel, but it seemed like an interesting place.

  She imagined sidewalks covered with bright woven blankets, and, placed lovingly atop them, wares of heavy silver and turquoise jewelry. She expected wizened brown faces, bartering and bargains, kids running unrestrained, sunburned and free.

  She saw some of that but she also saw snow, felt the cold wind that swept through. Winter in New Mexico was not big on the travel brochures, so she was surprised. She hated surprises and New Mexico held lots of them.

  It started before they’d even landed. The kids were curled in impossibly convoluted positons and sleeping hard as the plane began its descent.

  Storm had to admit that she’d enjoyed her view from the window seat. Flying through clouds like whipped meringue, spotting the sparkling thread of a river, farm fields covered in strange alien designs created by irrigation sprinklers. All of that was new to someone who’d rarely traveled.

  Then, as they broke from the clouds, she saw the small city of Albuquerque stretched out below and beyond it the infrastructure for another city, an oddly barren city, that was nearly as big.

  In that strangely empty city, for miles and miles, were streets, all laid out in a perfect grid, with plots obviously meant for parks and intersections where nothing moved but tumbleweeds. Only a few widely-spaced houses had been built. The flat brown rectangles that were mowed lawns and the white roofs reflecting the sunlight revealed the presence of only a handful of residents. She loved the mystery of it, until Tom explained it was an abandoned development, nothing more than a giant sign proclaiming a broken dream. It was a sad, brown place.

  That was the other thing. There was so much brown. Brown on brown with a side of brown. Maybe if you lived in the desert long enough, you’d come to appreciate the slight variations, the play of light and shadow across the sandblasted earth, the subtle beauty.

  But Storm was from the northwest corner of Oregon. There was nothing subtle about the beauty of vivid bursts of flower
s growing up, dripping down, climbing walls, and falling like pastel rain from windblown trees. There was nothing restrained in the wide corridors of forest that ran like great green arteries carrying the pulse of plant and animal life in and around the cities and towns.

  She was homesick from the moment she stepped onto the scorching tarmac, but willing to enjoy what she hoped was nothing more than a short getaway.

  “You’re not having a good time, are you?” Tom asked the second day. They were alone. The kids had gone off with one of the hotel’s nannies to watch a movie in the small theater.

  Stepping away from the window and it’s view of nothing of any interest, Storm shook her head in vehement denial. “Of course I am. Just a little tired is all.”

  It seemed like a good answer. So why was it that an hour later they were glaring daggers at each other?

  “The deal we had was that you’d work and get me through school, and then I’d work and you could quit and stay home,” he accused, stabbing the coffee table between them with his index finger.

  “But I don’t want to stay home. Home is boring. I need to work.”

  “But you don’t need to be a probation officer. You don’t know how it’s changed you. How you see bad guys everywhere you look.”

  “Because bad guys are everywhere I look.”

  “Or maybe you think that because this job has made you paranoid, and maybe you wouldn’t be so paranoid if you didn’t hang out with criminals all day.”

  “And maybe I wouldn’t have to be paranoid if you weren’t so damn naïve.”

  “What are you saying, that what happened last year was my fault? That I can’t protect my family?” Tom demanded.

  “What the hell are you talking about,” Storm shouted back. “What has that got to do with making me quit my job and leave my home?”

  “I thought your family was your home!”

  The flight back to Oregon was not comfortable, and it had nothing to do with the surly flight attendants, crowded seating, or dry recirculated air.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  STORM WAS HAPPY TO RETURN to the normalcy of work on Monday. The tension between she and Tom had continued through the drive home from the airport. It had survived their unpacking, and when they went to bed Tom pointedly slept on his side, his back a rigid barrier.

  Walking from the parking garage, Storm nodded or exchanged good mornings with several people: judges, assistants, police officers, even the girl who worked at the corner Starbucks. How was she supposed to give up those connections, casual as they might be?

  Sitting on a bench near the foot of the courthouse stairs, she saw another person she recognized and she gave her a smile and nod. The woman looked quickly away, so maybe she’d been mistaken.

  After dealing with the necessary but annoying metal detector, she rode the elevator to the second floor and Carrie buzzed her into the front office. Storm found her personal icon, a frog-shaped magnet, and moved it from the out to the in column on the in/out board.

  “Good morning,” she said to Carrie. The receptionist nodded glumly but didn’t say anything.

  Poor woman, thought Storm. It must be impossibly hard to see the man you’re in love with walk in every day and not be able to say a thing. She’d waited too long to let him know how she felt. A lesson in not putting things off.

  Storm was considering this as she walked to her office and was a little startled when one of her coworkers called out to her. “Hey Storm. How’s it going?”

  Storm recognized the voice and came to a stop outside an office much like her own. “Hi,” she replied. “It’s Monday, so how do you think it’s going?”

  “Oh come on, no county speak. How are you really? I heard your work buddy is asking to go full-time. You must be ticked.” Lisa was a one-time Olympic athlete who still competed in bike racing. She rarely bothered with office gossip, so Storm felt free to share her frustrations, knowing they wouldn’t be shared elsewhere.

  “Yes, I’m ticked. Not sure I’ll ever find someone who wants to go part-time. You don’t know anyone, do you?”

  “Nope. Wish I did.”

  “Oh well. Things change,” Storm said, shrugging her shoulders and twisting her lips into the semblance of a smile. “Not much you can do about it.”

  “Wish everyone was so easygoing about it. You see Carrie this morning?”

  “I did.”

  “Poor things a mess since Big Ed ran off and married Judge Docherty’s administrative assistant.”

  “I know.”

  Big Ed was head of the drug and property team and, therefore, her boss. His nickname was not ironic. He stood six foot four inches and weighed around 250 hard-earned pounds. Despite looking like he could throw a truck through a window, she’d never seen him lose his temper, and he was by far the most considerate boss Storm had ever had.

  “I don’t think he even knew Carrie had a crush on him,” Storm said.

  “Yeah, for a smart guy, he’s pretty darn clueless,” Lisa agreed.

  Storm thought it was strange that her boss, who looked like a young Dolph Lundgren, was clueless about the effect the combination of his good looks, size, and laid back attitude had on some of the women he worked with.

  “His new wife must have been pretty direct,” Storm mused.

  “Yeah, like hitting him over the head with a club and dragging him to her cave, direct. Nothing less would have worked,” said Lisa.

  Storm agreed and then broke away, heading down the hall to her small, windowless office. The gray on gray décor was not exactly cheerful, but it did offer a familiar place where she could think. She closed the door and sank into her chair. There was so much to think about. All the issues she’d struggled with last week were still there, like small pebbles in her shoe that she couldn’t quite ignore. Work might distract her, but the problems weren’t going away until she made some decisions.

  What should she do? Could she give up her job and go with Tom to New Mexico? Sure. Could she give up access to the database? That was a tougher question. Would she lose her new partner if she moved? That was a question she’d have to ask Lauren. “Oh shoot, Lauren.”

  Storm sat up and dug her cell phone out of the back pocket of her black slacks and selected her messages.

  She found the one she wanted and it opened to a short set of texts between she and Lauren. They were innocuous enough. Lauren asking how her trip went. Her responding it was fine and were there any updates. Then Lauren asking if she wanted to have lunch. The final message was her response, letting Lauren know she’d love to have lunch.

  She’d been thinking about it, and one of the things she should do is ask Lauren to go out and buy some burner phones, the kind she and Howard had used. She’d never wanted anything to connect Howard to her beyond the expected connection between a probation officer and her client.

  In fact, just by giving Lauren her phone number, she had broken one of her own rules. There was now a connection between them that she would be unable to deny. She wasn’t sure why she’d done that. Maybe because she’d primarily enforced the rule as a way to keep Howard at a distance.

  But Howard was not Lauren. He had been a different kind of partner, uncontrollable and mentally unstable. She would never have given Howard her cell phone number. Lauren having it didn’t bother her that much. Still, for some conversations, a burner would be a much better option.

  Storm’s desk phone rang and she answered it.

  “Storm, it’s Carrie. Your nine o’clock is here.”

  “Be right there.”

  The work day had begun.

  Lunch was at a café in Beaverton, a good half hour away from work and with less chance of there being potentially nosy coworkers around. Lauren listened to Storm’s description of New Mexico with keen interest. “It can’t be that bad,” she said, once Storm was done.

  “It’s not,” she admitted. “There’s this fabulous mountain that of rises up out of the desert and sort of looms over the town. Then there’s this
flat cactus. I mean, cactus, really? That’s pretty cool and the sky goes on forever, this wide sweep of blue. It’s different, and the people seemed nice. There were some dressed more cowboy than you see around here, but that was about the biggest difference. It could be an interesting place to live. Plus, I don’t think it rains much.”

  The two women looked pointedly at the rain-washed window near their table. Dark clouds raced low across the sky. Sheets of rain hammered the street, the cars, the people. There were no umbrellas in sight. Strong winds made umbrellas a poor choice. Instead, everyone ran with heads bent, hair tucked into the hoods of their rain jackets. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to get inside. Even the dark-haired woman wearing glasses that Storm recognized as the same woman she’d seen at the restaurant last week

  and in front of the courthouse that morning. Small world, she decided, and gave it no more thought.

  “No rain would be sweet,” agreed Lauren. “Though maybe then we’d go from green to brown, and I’ve already heard how you feel about that.”

  Feeling sheepish, Storm said, “Yeah, I know, I’m too opinionated. I don’t usually share my opinions quite so freely though.”

  “You can tell me anything,” Lauren said.

  “Thanks. I guess the thing with New Mexico is that I might want to live there awhile, but I don’t want to be dragged there.”

  “You sound really stressed.”

  “I am stressed,” Storm admitted.

  Arriving home at her usual time, Storm found her family parked in front of the TV watching one of the Shrek movies.

  “Hey, whatcha doing?” she asked, stepping into the darkened room. “Anybody hungry?”

  “I’m hungry,” said Joel, bouncing up and down on the couch.

  “I’m hungry,” said Lindsey, curled up and half asleep in the big wing-backed recliner that was usually Tom’s chair.

  “I’m an ogre,” said Tom, who’d been sitting on the couch with Joel. “When I get hungry, I eat children. Rahwr!” He turned toward Joel with his hands up, fingers curled into claws. The claws descended and Joel shrieked happily as his father tickled him.