True Confessions

by Rachel Gibson

  He looked at her closely and must have decided she was harmless, because he shook his head and smiled. “Yeah, that’s what Ada said.” He took her money, then counted out the change to her. “Too bad. I have a nephew working the mine up near Challis, and he sure could use an available woman. ‘Course, you don’t look like the kind of woman who’d be interested in Alvin.”

  He’d piqued her curiosity and she asked, “What kind of woman is that?”

  “A woman not in her right mind.” The ends of his mustache curled on his cheeks beneath his eyes.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. My name’s Stanley Caldwell. Me and my wife, Melba own this store, and if there’s something you need in the way of a special order, just let me know.”

  “I will.” She took the paper sack. “Do you know where I can get a cappuccino?”

  “Yep. Sun Valley.”

  She’d never wanted a cappuccino bad enough to drive an hour for it. She thanked him anyway and left the market. Her Porsche was parked by the front doors and she dropped the sack on the passenger seat. As she pulled from the parking lot, she slipped a CD in the player, pumped up the volume, and sang along with Sheryl Crow. “Run baby run baby run,” she sang as she drove down the main street of Gospel and continued around the lake to Timberline Road. It was just after eight when she pulled into the driveway of the house she’d leased. It looked just as bad as it had the day before.

  She wasn’t about to step foot inside until it was bat-free. Instead, she walked across the road and knocked on her neighbor’s door. A woman with red, curly hair and freckles, and wearing a blue chintz robe, answered. Hope introduced herself through the screen.

  “Dylan said you might be coming by.” She held the door open and Hope entered a living room decorated with a profusion of tole painting. It was everywhere, on pieces of driftwood, old saw blades, and metal milk jugs. “I’m Shelly Aberdeen.” She wore big bunny slippers and could not have stood much over five feet.

  “Did Sheriff Taber mention my problem with bats?”

  “Yeah, he did. I was just about to wake up the boys. Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll tell them what you need.”

  She disappeared down a hall and Hope sat in a swivel chair next to the stone fireplace. From the rear of the house she heard a door open.

  “Are you the one driving a Porsche?” Shelly called out.

  “Yes.”

  Silence and then, “Do you know Pamela Anderson or Carmen Electra?”

  “Ahh, no.”

  More silence and then Shelly reappeared. “Well, that’s a real disappointment to the boys, but they’ll help you out anyway.”

  Hope rose. “How much do they usually make an hour? I don’t even know what the minimum wage is anymore.”

  “Just pay them what you think is fair, then come back by around noon and I’ll make you lunch.”

  Hope didn’t know what to think of the offer, other than it made her uncomfortable.

  “I’ll make crab-stuffed pitas and we’ll get to know each other.”

  That was the part that made Hope uncomfortable. Shelly would naturally ask what Hope did for a living, and Hope didn’t talk about it with people she didn’t know. She didn’t want to talk about her personal life, either. Yet deep in a buried part of her soul, she wanted it so much she could feel it like a bubble working to get free. And that scared her. “I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble,” she said.

  “No trouble. Unless you say no and hurt my feelings.”

  Hope looked into Shelly’s big brown eyes, and what could she say except, “Okay, I’ll be here.”

  The Aberdeen twins, Andrew and Thomas, were tall and blond, and, except for the color of their eyes and the slight difference in the shape of their foreheads, looked exactly alike. A wad of tobacco bulged out their bottom lips in identical spots, and they both stood with their left shoulders higher than the right. They were quiet and well mannered and looked at each other first before they answered a question.

  Hope had them search the house for bats while she sat on her front porch. She heard thumping and yelling from the second floor, and about forty minutes later, Thomas came out with the news that they’d found five bats altogether. Two in one bedroom and three in the attic. He spit a stream of tobacco into a Coke can he held in his hand and assured her the bats were no longer a problem. She didn’t ask how. She didn’t care to know.

  Once the problem of the bats was solved, she put the boys to work cleaning and vacuuming the upstairs while she started in the kitchen. She cleaned the stove, tossed out the dead mouse, then washed out the oven and refrigerator. The pantry was empty except for a layer of dust, and she cleaned the dishes and pots and pans with soap she found beneath the sink. The windows could wait for another day.

  By eleven-thirty, the first floor of the house was close to finished. There was a dark brown stain on the hardwood floor in front of the hearth, and no amount of scrubbing got it up. At noon, she gave the twins the task of taking down the wall of antlers and storing them in a shed out back. Then she headed across the street.

  Shelly Aberdeen saw her coming and opened the front door before she had a chance to knock. “Let’s eat before the twins decide to come home for lunch. They eat like every meal is their last.”

  Shelly had dressed for the day in a Garth Brooks T-shirt, tight Wranglers with a belt buckle the size of a saucer, and snakeskin boots. Hope had been in town only a day, but she’d already noticed that snakeskin was a fashion must-have in Gospel.

  “How are the boys working out?” Shelly asked over her shoulder as Hope followed her into a small dining room off the kitchen.

  “They’re doing a good job. They’re very polite and didn’t even complain when I asked them to clean up the bat droppings.”

  “Shoot, why would they complain about that? Those two have been tossing cow patties at each other since they could walk. Last summer they worked slaughtering cows over at Wilson Packing.” She poured Hope a glass of iced tea. “I’m glad to hear they’re minding themselves. They’re going to be eighteen in about a week and think they know it all.” She handed the glass to Hope. “How’s the inside of the house look?”

  Hope took a drink and let the cool tea wash the dust from her throat. “Better than the outside. Lots of cobwebs and there was a dead mouse in the oven. The good news is that the electricity and the plumbing work.”

  “They should,” Shelly said as she set two plates loaded with pita sandwiches on the table covered in a white-and-blue checked cloth. “The realtor who bought the place this past fall had the whole place plumbed and wired. Couldn’t get the bloodstain up, though.”

  “Bloodstain?”

  “Hiram Donnelly killed himself with his hunting rifle right in front of the fireplace. Blood went everywhere. You might have noticed the stain on the floor.”

  Yes, she’d noticed that stain, but she’d assumed someone had skinned some unfortunate animal in the front room. The fact that it was a human bloodstain was kind of freaky. “Why’d he kill himself?”

  Shelly shrugged as she sat across from Hope. “He was caught embezzling money from the county to pay for kinky sex.”

  “Was he a judge?”

  “No, he was our sheriff.”

  Hope placed her napkin on her lap, then reached for her pita. Her curiosity piqued more than she wanted her neighbor to know, she asked as if she were inquiring about the weather, “How kinky?”

  “Bondage and domination, mostly, but he was into a lot of other weird stuff, too. A year after his wife died, he started getting hooked up with women through the Internet. I think it started out innocent enough. Just a lonely guy looking for some female company. But toward the end, he got real kinky and didn’t care if the women were single or married, their age, or how much it cost him. He was out of control and got careless.”

  Hope bit into her pita and tried to recall if she’d read anything about a sheriff embezzling money to pay for his sexual addiction. She d
idn’t think so, because if she had, she would have remembered. “When did all this happen?”

  “He killed himself about five years ago, but like I said, it started about a year before that. No one in town knew it, either, not until the FBI was about to arrest him and he shot himself.”

  “How out of control did he get?”

  Shelly glanced away, clearly uncomfortable talking about the details. “Use your imagination,” she said, then changed the subject. “What brings you to Gospel?”

  Hope knew when to push and when to back off. She tucked away the information and let it go for now. “It seemed like a nice area,” she answered, then, just as neatly as Shelly, turned the subject away from herself. “How long have you lived here?”

  “My family moved here when I was about six. My husband, Paul, was born in this house. I graduated from Gospel High School with most of the people around here.” Shelly counted them off as if Hope naturally knew whom she was talking about. “Paul and me, Lon Wilson and Angie Bright, Bart and Annie Turner, Paris Fernwood, Jenny Richards. Kim Howe and Dylan, but that was back when Dylan still lived at the Double T with his folks. His mom, sister, and brother-in-law still run the place. And, of course, Kim ran off with a trucker right after graduation and lives somewhere in the Midwest. I can’t remember what happened to Jenny.” Shelly took a bite of her sandwich, then asked, “You married?”

  “No.” Hope’s neighbor looked at her as if she thought Hope might elaborate. She didn’t. If she mentioned the word “divorce,” other questions would follow, and there was no way Hope would share that ugly and clichéd part of her life with anyone. Especially not a stranger. She reached for her tea and as she took a long drink, she tried to remember the last time she’d had lunch with someone, other than for business. She wasn’t positive, but thought it probably had been right after her divorce. As was usual for a lot of married couples, her friends had been their friends, and whether they’d stopped calling or she stopped calling them didn’t matter. The end result was the same. Their lives had changed and they’d drifted apart. “Where did you live before you moved to Gospel?” she asked.

  “Outside Rock Springs, Wyoming. So it wasn’t much of a shock moving here. Not like I imagine it is for you.”

  That was so true it made Hope chuckle. “Well, I don’t think I’m very popular at the Sandman.”

  “Don’t worry about Ada Dover. She thinks she’s running the Ritz.” Without much of a pause, she asked, “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a freelance writer.” Which was partly true. In the past, she’d certainly done freelance under a lot of different pseudonyms, and if she wanted, she could again. For now, she liked writing bizarre fictional articles. Although she had to admit that she was intrigued by the bizarre history of Number Two Timberline and the sheriff who’d lived there.

  “What do you write?”

  Hope was asked that question a lot, and she usually fudged. Not that she was ashamed of what she did, but in her experience, people had one of three reactions.

  One, they were condescending, which Hope didn’t appreciate but could handle. Two, they wanted to tell her about the time they’d been abducted and had an alien probe stuck up their anus. Or three, if they weren’t crazy themselves, they knew someone who was. And they always wanted her to do an article on their great-aunt so-and-so who was possessed by the spirit of her dead dog.

  Hope never knew when she’d run into one of these crazy people, could never tell from appearances. They were like peanut M &M’s; they had a normal-looking shell but were hiding a nut inside. Hope wrote fiction and wasn’t interested in real nuts.

  “I write whatever interests me.” Then she did what she did best: She added a lie into the mix of truths and half-truths. “Right now, I’m interested in flora and fauna of the Northwest, and I’m writing an article for a Northwest magazine.”

  “Wow, a writer! That must be a really fun job.”

  Fun? Hope took another bite of her sandwich and thought about Shelly’s remark for a moment. “Sometimes it is fun,” she said after she swallowed. “Sometimes it’s so cool I can’t believe I’m doing it.”

  “A couple of summers ago, we had a guy who was here writing some sort of backpacking guide. Before that, a lady wrote about bicycling trails in the Northwest. Last summer, there was someone else in the area writing about something. I can’t remember what that was, though.” Shelly took a drink of her tea. “What have you written that I might have read?”

  “Let’s see… about two years ago, I did a piece for Cosmo on hysterectomies.”

  “I don’t read Cosmo.”

  “Redbook?”

  “No. Have you written anything for People?”

  “I submitted an outline once.” Hope set down her sandwich and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “But I got a form rejection.”

  “The Enquirer?”

  Not recently, but at one time, not only had she written for them, she’d also been their “inside source” on who had had their faces lifted and their breasts enlarged. “No, I don’t like to write articles about real people,” she said. At least not anymore. She much preferred to make up stories about a fifty-pound locust.

  “Hmm… Paul subscribes to Guns and Ammo. I don’t suppose you ever wrote an article about elk hunting?”

  Hope looked across the table at her neighbor, at the laughter creasing the corners of Shelly’s eyes, and she relaxed a bit.

  “No, I don’t really go in for the violent stuff, but when I was first starting out, I did write several articles for True Crime magazine. I needed publishing credits, so I wrote a few stories about a serial-killing hooker who got caught when traces of her victims’ blood were found on her stilettos.”

  “Oh, yeah? My mother-in-law reads those like the Bible and swears they’re true.” Shelly leaned across the table and whispered, “She’s crazy. Last year for my birthday, she paid the first installment toward a Ronco food dehydrator, then had me billed for the rest.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. I had to pay over a hundred bucks for that thing, and I’ve never used it.” She did a one-shoulder shrug. “But I guess it wasn’t as bad as the pig cookie jar she got for my sister-in-law. You lift the lid and it squeals like Ned Beatty in Deliverance.”

  Hope leaned back in her chair and chuckled.

  “Do you have a man in your life?”

  Oh, Shelly was good. Real good. Trying to get Hope to relax, soften her up before she sneaked in a few personal questions. But Hope was better.

  “Not right now,” she answered.

  “There are a few available men in town. Some of them still have their own teeth and most of them have a job. Stay away from anyone with the last name Gropp. They look normal, but none of them are right in the head.”

  “That’s okay,” Hope assured her. “I’m not looking for a man.”

  Chapter Four

  LIZARD TASTES JUST LIKE CHICKEN!

  Hope rinsed her plate, then washed her hands with Lemon Joy. When she turned off the water, the sound of Shelly’s bootheels and the low hum of a motorboat out on the lake filled the silence.

  “Sounds like Paul and the boys are back,” Shelly said as she walked across the kitchen.

  Hope reached for a towel and dried her hands. She glanced out the back screen door into the shaded yard but couldn’t see anything. “I better get back across the street.”

  “Stay a minute and meet my husband.” Shelly stuck her head into the refrigerator, looking for something. She was nosy, but Hope could appreciate her style. She’d invite Hope to lunch to pump her for info, nonchalantly slipping in personal questions between amusing stories, bits of gossip, and bites of crab. “Are you staying in the Donnelly house tonight?”

  Out of habit, Hope hung the towel over her shoulder. “That’s the plan. My things are supposed to be delivered later today.” She leaned her behind against the counter and folded her arms beneath her breasts. “But the way my luck is running, my
stuff is probably lost in transit. Probably fell off the truck in Vegas.”

  The screen door opened, then slammed. “Gotta piss so bad my back teeth are floatin‘,” Adam Taber said as he ran through the kitchen.

  “Where’s Wally?” Shelly called after him.

  “At the boat,” he answered, then was gone.

  “Hey, there, Adam.” A deeper voice spoke from just outside the door. “You know better than to go into somebody’s house without knocking.”

  Only that morning, Hope had heard the same voice ask if she liked passion fruit. She straightened and dropped her arms to her sides.

  “Why should he knock when his daddy never does?” Shelly asked.

  Dylan raised one hand above his head and rapped his knuckles against the wooden frame. “Knock, knock,” he drawled. “Can I come in?”

  “No,” Shelly replied and shut the refrigerator door. “You smell like fish guts.”

  He came in anyway and walked toward Shelly. From across the kitchen, his broad back and shoulders filled Hope’s vision. He wasn’t wearing the battered hat he’d worn that morning, and his short hair stuck to the back of his neck. He advanced on Shelly, his hands out in front of him as if he meant to touch her.

  “Stay away, Dylan Taber, and I mean it!”

  He chuckled, three deep “huh-huh-huhs,” then asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll beat you up like I did in the fifth grade.”

  “Come on, now, you didn’t beat me up. You kicked me in the bean bags, Shelly. It’s not right kicking a guy in the bean bags.”

  “You touch me,” she warned, “and I’ll tell Dixie Howe you love the way she looked in that sequined tube top she wore to the T-ball game last night.”

  He dropped his hands. “There you go. Hitting below the belt again.”

  “Paul, get in here,” Shelly called out. “We have company.”

  “Dylan’s not company.”

  “I’m not talking about Dylan. Hope Spencer from across the street is here.”