by David Kearns
Chapter Four
After Eccles left, I drove over to the Cascade Gold Creamery. It was a sunny summer afternoon, and the parking area was filled to capacity with cars and recreational vehicles, many with California and Washington license plates. I’d parked at the edge of the parking lot in my beaten-down Mustang GT. The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, and a warm breeze blew through the parking lot. The creamery is at the western edge of many acres of picturesque, emerald-green fields where cattle graze at the base of the Oregon Coast Range. The downside to the picturesque experience is that on warm afternoons the smell of the cattle overpowers the beauty of the scenery. At the moment, the smell of fresh manure was trapped inside the car with me. I lowered the top and then rolled the windows all the way down to try to get some air moving through the car. Unfortunately, there was no wind that afternoon, so my efforts at odor abatement didn’t bear fruit.
The Cascade Gold cheese factory is housed in a multi-story building painted the color of a brick of cheddar cheese. The building covers several acres of land, and a dark blue stripe encircles the top floor with the words “Cascade Gold Cheese” superimposed in yellow lettering. I wanted to see where Emily French worked, but the way most people get to the visitor center inside the creamery is to take the self-guided factory tour first. Since I was pretending to be a tourist, I took the tour through the factory. The path went past viewpoints of the highly automated cheese factory, past life-sized dioramas of Holstein cattle, and finished at a tasting station for cheese curd, pepper jack, and sharp cheddar cheese. Did you know that cheese curd squeaks when you chew it? It does. The tour finally ended in the visitor center where the ice cream counter, fudge counter, and creamery cafe were. I queued up for ice cream, waited my turn, and then Emily French asked me what I’d like.
I was so taken aback that I just stared at her. She was wearing a shapeless white apron, a hairnet, and no makeup, but she was something special to look at. Piercing blue eyes, porcelain skin, honey blond hair, full lips, and bright smile. The picture that Eric had shown me didn’t do her justice.
She smiled at me. “What would you like?” she asked a second time.
“What do you recommend?” I said.
“It’s all good,” she said. “My favorite is the Oregon Strawberry. The berries were picked just a few days ago.”
“I’ll try that,” I said.
While she was scooping the ice cream into my waffle cone, she asked me if I was in Tillamook on vacation.
“No,” I said. “I live in Oceanside.”
She wrapped a napkin around the waffle cone and handed it to me. “Well then,” she said. “We’re practically neighbors. Enjoy your day.”
I walked over to the cash register, paid for my cone, and took a seat at one of the tables in the guest area. I worked on the cone as slowly as I could without letting the ice cream drip all over my hands. I sat off to the side where I could watch Emily without her seeing me. None of the customers bothered her. She smiled and had a short conversation with each person who came through the ice cream line. None of the other employees stared at her or interrupted her work. I was trying to make a connection between this lady in the hairnet and the person who was worried about being stalked, and I just didn’t see it. She didn’t seem stressed or worried. I left the guest area about fifteen minutes later. I knew that Emily’s shift ended thirty minutes after I’d gone through the line, so I put the top up on the Mustang to get some shade. I cast my imagination to places where manure and summer heat do not co-exist, and I waited patiently for Emily.
She came out of the building about a half hour later in a pair of tight jeans, a red sleeveless blouse, and white tennis shoes. She didn’t look over her shoulder as she walked to her car, and she didn’t check under the car for a bomb, either. She got into an old grey Buick Century sedan that was parked fifty yards from where I sat, and then she exited the parking lot without any theatrics. She didn’t make the tires smoke, fishtail the rear end of the car on the gravel, or run the stop light when she turned south on Highway 101. I let several other cars get between us as I followed her in what passed for rush-hour traffic in the small town of Tillamook, Oregon. When we reached the downtown area, she took a right on Third Street, then turned left onto Stillwater Avenue and drove most of the way down the block before pulling into the driveway of a grey and white one story Craftsman style home. As soon as she pulled the car into her driveway, I eased to the curb and parked. I was seven houses down from her house and on the opposite side of the street. She got out of her car and went into her house without checking her surroundings or moving with any haste. I adjusted my car seat to make myself comfortable, and I waited to see what would happen.
I was struck by how ordinary the neighborhood felt to me. No other cars followed us onto her street. No one lurked behind the shrubbery near her house. No eerie music played in the background. Crows didn’t congregate by the hundreds on the roofs of the houses. There weren’t burning barrels of trash at the end of the block. It just looked like a working class neighborhood. Some houses looked like they’d been kept in good repair, others less so. Some cars were newer and well maintained, one tilted to the side on flat tires. Emily’s house had grass that had been cut in the last few days, and the paint looked recent on the siding, the window frames, and the pillars that supported the awning over the front porch.
She came outside a few minutes later with a small female Doberman on a leash. They turned away from me as they left the house and walked down the sidewalk. Emily had a bright yellow tennis ball in her free hand and a small plastic bag hanging out of her back pocket. The dog was excited to be outdoors and bounced from side to side as it tugged at the end of the leash. When they reached a vacant lot at the end of the street, Emily took the dog off leash and threw the tennis ball for the dog to retrieve. Every time the dog came back with the ball, she patted the dog’s head and scratched it between the ears. Then the dog would drop the ball and its body would tense like a coiled spring as it waited for her to throw the ball again. After a dozen throws the dog took a break to do its business. Emily picked up the mess with the plastic bag, clipped the leash back onto the dog’s collar, and walked down the sidewalk and into her house.
I sat in the Mustang for another thirty minutes, then went home and made dinner. I grilled some mushrooms and diced ham and mixed them into an omelet with several eggs. I sat out on the newly-painted deck for a few minutes while I ate my meal, then drove back over to Tillamook. I put the top down on the Mustang so I could enjoy the evening.
As I pulled onto Stillwater Avenue, I saw a pair of taillights pulling away from the curb near Emily French’s house. They were too far away for me to read the license plate, and the car accelerated quickly down the street before turning the corner at the end of the block. I pulled to the curb in front of Emily’s house and parked.
I could see through the front window that Emily was inside, and that she had the television on. She stood up from the sofa, went over to the television, and shut it off. The living room light went off, and then the light for her bedroom came on, illuminating the eaves of the next door neighbor’s house. An hour later the light in her bedroom window went off, and that was that. The street was as quiet, dark, and still as a tomb.
