by Helen Conrad
“It’s only a sensible thing to do, Blake. Officer Spanner,” she corrected herself. “You don’t want to hurt Mr. Mortimer’s feelings.”
Joe Bob nodded, but didn’t look Blake in the eye.
Blake sighed. One long damn day this was going to be. “Sure wouldn’t. Sorry, Mr. Mortimer. Now, Ms. Becker and I are going away. When I’m back, these sheep will be gone, isn’t that right?”
Joe Bob nodded like his head was on a spring, and started to pull the sheep off of the hood of the squad car. Kate rushed over to the driver side door and opened it. She stood there with her hands gripping the top metal bar of the door, blinking away raindrops as they fell to her eyes. The humidity had already soaked Blake’s shirt through, making it grip him like it was afraid he was going to leave it behind.
“What are you doing?” he asked Kate with a surly frown.
“Turnabout’s fair play. Get in the car so we can go,” she said.
Silently, he groaned. One long damn day.
Chapter Two
Blake knew that sooner or later his disinterested grunts were going to play out and he was going to have to condescend to conversation. Kate had asked him to take a pass through town so that she could take a look at the old burg for the first time in many years, and he didn’t think that he’d be able to win an argument against it.
Had he ever won an argument with Kate? If so, the memory had faded. Right now they were underneath Shoutin’ Pete, stopped and waiting for the red to go green even though there was no traffic. She was looking around as though she’d never really seen the place before.
“Wow, I can’t believe it. Not one Starbucks in town. In San Francisco, there’s more than 300.”
Blake grunted.
“Yeah, I don’t think they’re that great either. More of a harbinger of civilization than quality coffee. Hey, Blake?”
She turned to look at him but he kept his gaze straight ahead. He wasn’t going to look into those dark, cloudy eyes. He wasn’t going to look at her pretty face either. He was going to get this done and dump her at her car and hopefully, never see her again.
The only problem was, she was sitting so close, he didn’t really have to look at her to see her. There she was in his peripheral vision, big as life. And even more than that, he could feel her, smell her, sense her in ways that bothered the hell out of him.
“Hey Blake?” she said again.
Persistent as a toothache, he thought. But he finally answered. “Yeah?” he said in a gravely voice.
“Why are you so annoyed at me?” Kate asked, the smile never leaving her lips.
That’s why I’m so annoyed, Blake thought. The smile, and the easy manner of somebody who took everything in life for granted. The smile of the sort of person who would count the number of Starbucks in a city, and retain that information. He wasn’t even sure if he believed that reason, but it was good enough for him right now. But he couldn’t say any of that.
“Not annoyed, just surprised to see you. It has been a long time,” he said, nodding as in agreement with himself.
Kate smiled and shook her head. “When we were kids, you’d have had a smart-aleck quip for me. You could match me snottery for snottery.”
“So she finally admits she’s a snot,” he told the steering wheel. “When I called her that when we were kids, she put mud in my backpack.” Then he cut it off, cursing himself internally for falling for her tricks – she had goaded him into conversation, and it was about the past--his least favorite subject.
“Nope, not true,” she responded when the steering wheel didn’t answer. “The mud was a simple delivery system for the multitude of frogs and polliwogs that I put in there. It was a present, really. Had someone given me frogs, I would have been appreciative.”
“Right,” Blake said.
“Light’s green,” she said, and it was.
Blake stepped on the gas, going about ten miles per hour so that Kate could enjoy the sights. He was a well-trained crime-fighting welcome wagon. Great way to top off a career.
“Right,” he said again.
They pushed past the rest of Main Street, which consisted of a couple of fast food joints that even Whispering Pines could not avoid, a deli and, across the street, a cheap motel. It was right next to the gas station, and the owner of each had a deal with each other – the gas station would close early to visitors to help drum up business with the motel. Blake had tried to warn them off of it, but as with most extra-legal peculiarities in the small town, Sheriff Duffy hadn’t backed him.
And he was right, Blake had finally decided reluctantly. Allowing an even keel, maintaining a status quo if that status quo meant peace, that was the best that they could hope for.
“Wow, this is all so weird. It’s like visiting a personal ghost town. Not one thing has changed.”
“You haven’t been gone all that long, you know.”
“Ten years. Two presidents. Back before I’d left here, the world only had one Kardashian, and he was involved with O.J. Simpson.”
Blake sighed as he slowed down for the stop sign at the end of Main Street. There were a few businesses off a few side streets – folksy stuff that seemed ready for a tourist boom that never came. Whispering Pines wasn’t the sort of place that packed in the tourists.
“That’s an odd time scale.”
“How would you measure the last decade?”
“As ten years.”
“Boring. Hey, Blake?”
“Mhhmm?”
“You went to college in Seattle, right?”
“Right.”
“And then stayed there and joined the police force, right?”
This time it took him longer to answer. He wasn’t sure he liked where she was going with this. “Yeah.”
“So how come you came back here? What happened to Seattle?”
Blake pressed on the gas past the stop sign and barreling out of nowhere, a car zipped past, not even slowing down.
“What the…?” he said, and he flipped a switch off the dash. The siren started blaring and the lights started to flash. He gunned the squad car after the speeder.
“And the question is deftly avoided,” Kate said, smiling out the window.
Blake ignored her. “It’s not like we’ve painted this squad car weird colors,” he grumbled. “If you see black and white, don’t you think it’d be a better plan to obey traffic laws?”
“Maybe they couldn’t see the stop sign because of some big black and white car that was idling there, obstructing it with the hopes that an unsuspecting motorist would miss it and allow the black and white car to give a ticket, thus generating revenue for the town?”
“Lawyers!” Blake muttered. The road started to curve up a mountain, and just ahead was a by-road that led to the house where Kate would be staying. Blake wished he could just swing by there and drop her off, but duty called.
As it climbed the mountain, the road narrowed and became more dangerous for traffic stops. Naturally, this was where the scofflaw became aware of the oncoming police car and flashing lights. The car, a bright blue S.U.V., pulled to as much of the side of the road as existed, and Blake pulled in right behind them. He turned off the siren, but left the lights blazing.
Opening his door, he glanced back down the road to make sure no oncoming traffic was imminent.
“You stay here, Kate. This will only take a minute,” he said.
Kate nodded, looking very mock-serious.
Lawyers, Blake thought again, slamming the door.
The air outside was still humid as a sweat sock, but the rain had stopped. It left behind a musty-basement odor, like the entire mountain basin had just been left out to dry after a long time in storage.
Blake glanced out along the far side of the road, saw how steeply the lip of the road broke down, and the great valley of trees that dipped down, and then climbed up the mountains that enclosed the horizon. One misstep and he could be part of the accident statistics for the month.
At least he wasn
’t so far gone that the possibility was a comfort. Yet.
***
If only he wasn’t so serious, Blake would be a lot of fun, Kate thought. Like he used to be. He could have grown up into a dynamic figure, but the way he was now was so stodgy and focused and… straight arrow. Kate didn’t go for bad boys, per se – in her line of work, she saw enough of the worst of humanity that her idea of a “bad boy” was something much more Jeff Dahmer than James Dean – but she didn’t buy this tight-lipped act that Blake was putting on. He’d never been much of a talker, but he’d always had a devilish light in his eyes. That was gone. She wondered what had stolen it from him.
He was bending over now, grabbing his ticket book. He was a handsome man, but there was something about having gotten into mud fights that made it hard to separate the boy she knew from the man that he was—despite the well-muscled body he’d somehow acquired in the meantime.
Before he’d shut the door, Blake had done a curious thing. He wore a belt holster, and had a standard issue pistol packed in there. Guns bothered Kate as a kid, but even though she was on the other side of the judicial system, seeing them in the hands of cops eased the disquiet that the weapons normally filled her with. Blake unclipped the pistol from his belt, gave it a quick and thoughtful look, then placed in on his car seat.
What’s up with that? Kate thought.
She watched him saunter in an easy manner over to the car, the easy steps showing a man who seemed very much in charge of himself and his situation. But traffic stops were potentially dangerous. Why would he leave his gun right before he placed himself in harm’s way? There was something more to Blake’s mood than growing up. Or at least putting on a show of growing up.
She gazed out at the tall pines that rimmed the valley. Had the trees always been this thick? Had the atmosphere always been this eerie? For a moment, she expected scary music to come wending it’s way into the car, like the soundtrack to Twin Peaks or something. She waited for a moment, realizing she was tense. But nothing happened, no music filled the air, and she finally shrugged and gave up.
Blake had told her to stay put. Seriously? Since when had she followed anyone’s directions? Opening her own car door, she followed after him. He didn’t notice until he reached the car, and before he could order her back, the other driver’s window was down, and he was asking “What seems to be the problem, officer?”
“Didn’t you see that stop sign back there?” Blake asked.
“Stop sign?” the man said. “I…I guess I didn’t see it.”
He must have been in his mid-40s, Kate decided, and he was alone in the car. He glanced out the window towards Kate, looking confused at her presence. She came up next to Blake, who gave her a startled look.
“Please return to the vehicle, Ms. Becker,” he said, before turning back to the driver. “Can I see your license and registration, please?”
The man started to reach for his wallet, but Kate was frowning. She just couldn’t resist.
“On what grounds?” she asked pertly. Both the man in the car and Blake stared at her. She managed to remain poker-faced.
“What?” Blake said.
“What?” the driver said as well. He pulled out his registration and his i.d. and gave them to Blake. Kate glanced at the driver’s license.
“You don’t have to stand for this, Mr. Harvey. Has the officer informed you of what law you violated?”
“Running the stop sign,” Mr. Harvey and Blake said at the same time.
“Please, Officer Spanner, I’m trying to consult with my client,” Kate said.
“Client?” Mr. Harvey said in a high, worried voice. “I…I… .” He looked at Blake, who was starting to go red in the face.
I ought to stop, Kate thought, but she’d gone this far.
“That’s right, client. Can you be sure that Officer Spanner actually saw you run the stop sign?” she said.
“He says he did,” Mr. Harvey said, looking to Officer Spanner for help. “I…I believe him. Why would he lie?”
Blake didn’t say a word, he just wrote out the ticket.
“He ‘says’, sure. But can he produce any witnesses?”
The man was beginning to look desperate. “You?”
“Not if I’m your attorney. I can’t be compelled to reveal the secrets of my client. Once I’m retained, I’ll… um… Mr. Harvey?” she said.
“Uh…, never mind, Miss,” he said in a strangled voice, accepting the ticket and hurriedly starting his car. “I’m thinking of taking the fifth.” He drove off with only a glance back at the deranged woman who wanted to be his lawyer.
Blake stood for a moment, ticket book in hand, looking at Kate with the veins in his forehead sticking out and a major throbbing at his temple.
“I think you’re taking this much too seriously,” Kate said. Glancing at the steep bank and the fall off to nowhere below, for just a moment she had a tremor of disquiet. It wouldn’t take much of a move to send her over the edge and then she could be as missing as her sister.
“I’m taking this too seriously?” Blake said, his voice low and hard and barely masking an anger she hadn’t anticipated.
“I was just trying to make sure that Mr. Harvey’s rights were being given proper consideration,” she said quickly. “ Just because I’m not near the office doesn’t mean I stop doing my job. Just like you.”
Kate was starting to feel a little bad, though-- just a little. Maybe she’d taken things a little far. Funny how often that seemed to happen with her. But what the heck! Blake had to take some responsibility. He was so dour, it was like he was begging for a comeuppance of some sort.
“I’m taking this too seriously?” he said again, his blue eyes filled with fury.
“You asked that already,” Kate said. “Oh come on, I was just fooling around.”
He didn’t smile and she headed back to the car. She opened the door and sat down inside. For a long moment, Blake did not move. Rain started to fall, and it splashed down on the windshield, wetting anew the streaks that the earlier rain had caused there. Blake finally walked down to the car. He opened the door and sat down on his gun, cursed, and put the gun back on his belt clip.
“Why did you leave your gun in the car?” Kate asked.
“So you’d have the opportunity to shoot me and end this miserable afternoon,” he said.
She bit her lip. Yes, she’d probably overdone it. He just didn’t seem to be able to bounce back the way he used to do. No sense of humor, maybe.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” she said, and suddenly she really meant it. Blake was an old friend. Probably her oldest friend. She didn’t seem to be able to calm down and let him be. “I know I’m being a brat.”
“Reverting to type, I’d say. Looks like somebody hasn’t grown up at all.”
“But what happened to you, Blake?” she wanted to say. “How come you grew up so different? So dark, so uptight, so… unhappy?”
But for once, she held her tongue. Something told her his issues were too deep and painful to treat in her usual glib fashion. Still, she had to say something.
“But you haven’t been that nice either,” she said. “Is it such a chore to see an old friend and do her a favor?”
He was silent so long, she thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“As I remember,” he said at last, staring out at the overgrown landscape, “we didn’t part on terrific terms.”
Oh boy. Now he’d done it. For just a moment she sat very still and remembered that last time. It was just after she’d hunted him down, after he’d stood her up at her Senior Prom. Some rough things had been said on both sides. She swallowed hard. Funny how something from so long ago could still hurt.
“And as I remember, you were never on good terms with anybody,” she said, pushing the memory away. “But at least you were fun in those days. What happened?”
He turned to look at her. For just a moment, his bright gaze seemed to see right through all her shenanigans, right back dow
n to the real Kate he’d known before. She shivered, but managed to hide it.
“So, you’re saying I was a fun jerk then, but I’m just a regular jerk now?”
“You hit the nail right on the head,” Kate said, though she was beginning to regret she’d ever started down this road. She could tell he was taking her much more seriously than she was taking herself, but she couldn’t help it. If there was going to be an argument here, she was going to win it. Professional pride.
He was studying her much too closely. She had to fight not to squirm.
“Look, why are we doing this?” he asked softly. “Aren’t you worried about your sister?”
Kate didn’t respond. Sure, she was worried about Susan. She’d been worried about her for years. But the truth was she didn’t really think her sister was missing – not in the way that the police could help her with. If she was candid, she would probably say, “No, Susan’s most likely strung out somewhere, or decided to drive up to Eugene for the Shakespeare Festival, or catching a ride with some guy to Idaho or any number of things.”
So what was this all about? Partly about Susan. But she couldn’t admit to Blake that she was just afraid of being alone back in the old house she’d never wanted to come back to. She’d only just admitted it to herself.
“Say, I think we’d better get a move on to catch that S.U.V,” she said instead.
“Huh?” Blake replied.
Kate pointed to the ticket book, still in his hands. Tucked inside was Mr. Harvey’s driver’s license and registration.
“Oh shoot,” Blake said, and he started up the car.
“So when you going to tell me why you left Seattle?” Kate asked again, and, just as she expected, Blake ignored her.
***
The drive-around didn’t yield any new information about Susan. They stopped and talked to Joyce Previn who was Susan’s piano teacher when she was six and to Matt Gregg who bred chinchillas on an acre of land nearby and a number of other old neighbors, but no one had seen her sister. Still, it was heart-warming how many people remembered the Becker girls. Kate felt welcomed back by many of them. There was one thing she noticed, though. No one her own age seemed to have stayed in the town.
