Only Flesh and Bones
Page 29
“What about it?” he murmured, his warm breath seeping into my hair.
“Do you have it?”
“No.”
Looking into the scene as in a dream, I said, “Did you see one at her rented ranch house the afternoon before she died? That was you, wasn’t it, who visited?”
He nodded again, the strong angle of his jaw massaging the crown of my head.
Yes, he had visited, or yes, he had seen her journal there that afternoon? “That last volume is missing,” I whispered.
He shook his head. Taking this for commiseration, I sighed again. Perhaps I would never see that volume. Perhaps the sheriff had it, and read it greedily in the evenings, when he wasn’t rubbing salve on his private parts. Or worse yet, when he was. The thought drifted away from me as the anger around it melted into sadness. “How’d you know she had gone ahead and rented the Broken Spoke Ranch?” I asked, asking anything to make the intimacy of the moment last. “Was it Po Bradley told you?”
“No. Cindey Howard.”
Click “Cindey. She didn’t like Miriam very much, did she?”
Chandler tipped his head to look down into my face. He shrugged. “The Cindeys of the world have no balls. I guess they envy the women who do.” He smiled lazily, making the comment into a comparison, a compliment.
I smiled back. I couldn’t help it. It was just too rich and heady an experience to be so near to this man, to share these easy confidences. I felt clever, as if I was winning him with my mind. “Why’d she tell you where Miriam was? I thought the whole idea was that Miriam was hiding Cecelia from you.”
“I guess she just wanted me to know.”
“Had you just told her you were on your way down to see Po?” I asked, now bouyed on a cloud of arrogance that said I was so clever that it was I who was seducing him.
Chandler’s cheek muscles twisted into a wry smile that bunched his mustache. He lifted one hand, drew a lock of hair from my forehead. “I don’t think I go around telling Cindey Howard my plans, Em Hansen.”
“Well, if—”
Chandler pulled me up close to his body again with both hands. Smiled at me without showing any teeth. Put an index finger over my lips. “Enough questions,” he said firmly. “Let’s enjoy what’s left of this fine evening.”
So we walked, and soon we reached the front steps of the inn. I paused next to my rental car, but he tightened his grip on my waist and drew me up the steps. Ever so softly, he said, “We’re not done here yet.”
A boost of warm adrenaline swept through my system, half fear and half anticipation. I looked quickly around, saw a middle-aged man sitting on the steps of a porch across the street, beyond Chandler’s back. The man raised one index finger in a brief salute, a quick motion that let me know he was watching. Ortega has been busy, I realized, half-glad and half-disappointed that this meeting was almost at an end. The sentinels are in place. They’ll move in soon, probably just waiting for a warrant, a final signal. I’m supposed to keep him in sight. To Chandler, I said, “Lead on.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
THERE was no chair in his room. Only the bed, a big queensized fantasy done up with wrought-iron head and foot, mountains of pillows, and an enormous soft goose-down duvet decked in lace. Chandler reached up under the pillows, grasped the top of the comforter and the crisp white top sheet underneath, and pulled them down to the foot of the bed. Then he knocked a few of the fluffy pillows off onto the floor, selected two that looked more like they were meant to be slept on, and plumped them down at the head of the bed. He swept me up into his arms and arranged me on the mattress, placing me so that my head landed squarely on one of the pillows. Trading hugs on the town square was one thing, but being thrown around like a doll in the silence of his lair unleashed another layer of fear. I tried to sit up again, but he placed one wide hand firmly on my abdomen and held me down while he kicked off his shoes. “Hey!” I squealed, trying to pass off uncertainty in a cloud of humor. “Don’t I even get kissed?”
Chandler smiled appreciatively at my joke. “That’s not what this is about, Em Hansen. Now you just relax and let the Chandler do his job.”
Job?
I started to thrash, unwilling to be found naked with this man when the authorities moved in for the collar. But Chandler now had my feet in his hands, raised above mattress level. He lifted them a little farther and expertly swiveled himself underneath them, so that he wound up sitting at the foot of the bed with my feet in his lap. None too sensuously, he removed my shoes, and then my socks, and then, lest I worry about whether my feet were clean, he pulled off his socks, too, and pulled his feet up under him cross-legged. And began to massage the soles of my feet.
I love being massaged. Backs are great, legs and arms wonderful, heads terrific, but feet are the nectar of the gods. I was in heaven. He probed deeply with his two great thumbs, bracing his fingers along the tops of my feet, digging, bursting at tension, nudging, cajoling … .
“I’m in love,” I mumbled idiotically, some tiny part of my brain still wondering what I was doing on this man’s bed.
“Good.”
“More!” I said, deciding that I didn’t care what happened, that I knew exactly what I was doing, that—
“There’s no rush. You just relax, lady.”
And I did. I closed my eyes and slid slowly into a narcotic syrup of comfort, sank past the last tearful barriers that broke away like screaming timbers, sank through layers of tension that broke like shining bubbles touched by children. My mind wandered onward through mountains and across the prairies of my youth, hovering like a kestrel, gliding like an eagle. Chandler searched my feet with authority, seeking out each cramp and tightness, now pressing, now warming, now caressing with his great broad hands. And by and by, a tiny gem of light caught my mind’s eye, and I hovered downward, circling, trying to find the facet that had shattered the sky. I felt myself falling. Falling through the afternoon’s roiling clouds, stuck endlessly in the cockpit of that airplane, the angry clouds now parting, revealing a terrifying wall of rock and another and another, again and again, with no relief, the end looming but never quite coming.
Forcing the dreadful fantasy to a conclusion, I imagined that I rammed the little plane into the cliff, engulfing my own tiny spark in a ball of flames.
From flames, I fell into a pool of darkness. The darkness held a seed, half made of light and half of darkness. I moved toward it and found, to my sadness, my own self, all curled up tightly like an embryo in an egg. As I watched, I grew and uncurled, becoming now a child, now a young woman, and now … With horror, I stared into my own eyes and saw that they had become my mother’s.
I gasped.
“What is it?” Chandler’s voice asked, as if from far away.
“I’m afraid!” I cried.
“Dive through it!”
I did. My mother’s face vanished, leaving only an ache that spun like a wheel, now turning with a terrible strength. The strength hurled me into the darkness, and I was alone, yet still a wheel myself, turning, an endless carousel of life.
I saw myself then, in all my fear and vanity, wisdom and foolishness, pride and nakedness. And I began to cry.
Quick as that, Chandler was next to me, his great long body wrapped around me, holding me tightly as the first strangled sobs grew into a torrent. He held me and rocked me, the male strength of his body drawing the tears out fiercely. Tears of anger. Tears of sadness. Tears of loss. As my eyes leaked and grew wet, I blubbered something into his ear, in the confused, selfish madness of grief: “All I get is hugs? Miriam got sex!”
Chandler squeezed me harder. “That’s what she needed,” he whispered hotly into my ear. “She hadn’t reached as far as you.”
In the fullness of my grief, I roared onward, crying out each hurt and loss in the mad safety of Chandler’s arms. And as my eyes dried, I fell asleep.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I woke to the smells of black coffee and crisp bacon wafting up the stairs from th
e dining room.
I felt around under the covers. I was still clothed, and Chandler was gone.
My eyes shot open. The brilliant sunlight of a rare cloudless Jackson spring morning was streaming through the fussy lace curtains, spilling onto the bed. I threw back the covers, yanked on my shoes, and hurried downstairs.
In the dining room, I found a table laid for one. Steam rose encouragingly from a coffee urn beyond the plate. Uncertain how to proceed, I stopped, grasping the back of the pressed-wood chair.
“Ready for some waffles?” came a voice behind me. I turned, saw the innkeeper coming in from the kitchen. She offered me a preliminary smile as she peered at me through her sharp blue eyes.
“Waffles. Ah—”
“Chandler left me a note asking me to hold his breakfast for you. He said you’d probably sleep pretty late.” She laughed. “The rest of the guests ate an hour ago.”
“Chandler. Where—”
“He’s gone, darlin’. Gone, gone, gone. Caught a flight with a friend in a private jet to L.A. at midnight, I hear, and he’s on his way to Hong Kong by now.”
“Hong Kong?” I asked, completely flabbergasted.
“Or maybe they were really on their way to New York, and he’ll be seen in Paris next.”
“Paris?” My voice came out high and weepy.
“It’s the nature of the beast, dearie. Easy come, easy go. The nice thing is, he always pays in cash.”
“Do you think—”
“Someone’s after him? Oh, probably. Like those nice sheriff’s deputies who came by here a couple hours ago? They asked after you. I told them you were still upstairs sawing logs, but they insisted on taking a peek. Friends of yours? They said to tell you—let me make sure I get this right—‘Ortega says the coast is clear.’”
I shook my head slowly, dazed. Was the coast clear? In my rush, what had I failed to tell him? Ortega didn’t know about the man waiting with Po Bradley in Douglas. Would he just fold his tent and vanish if his boss was behind bars?
Reading my expression, she said, “Let it go, honey. If it wasn’t the law that chased Chandler away, it would be someone who wants him to pay a debt for some bigger frog in the pond, if you know what I mean. Boys like him can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Or was it you who scared him off?” she asked, bowing her head slightly, so that she was looking at me through her eyebrows.
“Shit.”
“Oh, relax. If anyone knows how to survive out there in the big bad world, it’s our Chandler. Now about your breakfast: you want yogurt and berries on those waffles, or are you strictly a butter and maple syrup type?”
An hour later, I was full past my eyebrows with freshly squeezed orange juice, herbed sausage, waffles, some truly great black coffee, and, why not, a muffin or two; I had luxuriated just a bit in the claw-foot tub down the hall from Chandler’s room, had wrestled a clean shirt and underwear out of the bag in my rental car, and was standing by the front door, trying to figure out what one says in farewell to an innkeeper like that one, when a middle-aged man came shambling out of what I presumed to be the innkeeper’s living quarters beyond the kitchen. He was a gray kind of man, quiet in his manner, one of those types who don’t seem to take up much room in the world, personality-wise. Shrugging his way into a heavy plaid shirt, he shuffled up to the innkeeper, kissed her sweetly on the cheek, and said, “Be back in a coupla days.”
“Have a good run, Tom.”
“Right. See you then, cupcake.” The man exited back through the kitchen, and a moment later I heard the deep growl of a diesel tractor starting up.
“My husband,” the innkeeper said. “He drives an eighteen-wheeler.”
“Seemed like a nice guy,” I said. The words flew out of my mouth before I thought, and I was immediately sorry, as they sounded as condescending as I felt. Couldn’t or hadn’t a woman who had the moxie to run as fine a place as this do better than that?
The innkeeper answered my unspoken question with her eyes. They said, Back down, sister.
I looked at the floor. My overcurious mind was on the way to giving me a sad comedown from the night’s relief and the more solitary pleasures of the morning. Uncertain what to say, I just stood there staring at my feet.
“You look to me like a woman who needs just one more cup of coffee,” she said.
I grinned. “Ain’t that the truth.”
The innkeeper took me into the inner sanctum of her kitchen and poured me another cup of her wonderful brew. When she was settled back with a cup of her own and had drawn a good strong draft from its depths, she leaned back and stared out the window toward her husband’s semitractor, which was now warmed up and ready to roll. He tooted a horn and she gave him a cheery wave. He shifted the truck into gear and it started to roll. “Chandler’s note said you were one of his Don Quixote types. What is it you’re trying to find out?”
“Ma’am?”
“Come on! You’re no ingenue. You know and I know that the Chandlers of the world have a whole string of women.”
“Listen here!”
The innkeeper waved a hand at me. “Simmer down, darlin’; this girl hasn’t a whole lot of room to go judging you.”
I looked out the window toward the spot where her husband’s truck had sat only moments before.
“Exactly,” she said. “Tom’s a good man, let there be no doubt. I will wash his clothes and keep his brand of beer in the fridge until the day one or both of us dies. But honey baby, that beer can go a little flat.”
There was nothing to say, so I just smiled that smile you offer someone who’s just told you this kind of thing about herself.
“The world needs more men like Chandler Jennings,” she went on. “He expects so little, and gives so much in return. What other kind of guy will sleep upstairs like a good boy when your husband’s home and clap him on the back and say ‘Hey there, buddy’ like they’re long-lost friends and then—” She broke off, stared a while into her coffee, then took another draft.
“Has he been coming here a long time?” I asked.
“Chandler? A few years.”
“I’m, ah, curious about him. I mean, I don’t really know him, past last night anyway. Aw hell, that’s the first time I ever met the guy—who am I kidding?”
“Not me, darling.” The innkeeper gazed at me, waiting. Clearly it was still my turn to speak.
I thought about telling her how I’d come to know about him and how and why I’d followed him here, but I couldn’t see the point. Much better just to ask, and let this woman celebrate her secret passion on her own terms and in her own time. “I got the feeling he’s here a lot, like he uses this place as a base of operations.”
“Operations? That’s as good a word as any other. God knows what our boy is up to. He’s forty-nine and doesn’t do any regular work that I know about. He shows up here on his own schedule, sometimes here for a week or maybe two, sometimes gone for months on end.” She shifted her gaze to the window, a look of forced patience, of endless waiting settling into her lovely face. “I store his car in the garage out back and he pays me for it, bless his heart, though I’d do it for free, even though it would get Tom to wondering. No one’s ever called him here except you, so he must get his messages somewhere else, though this is a small town and I’ve yet to figure out who he uses.”
It occurred to me that this woman, whose name I did not even know, was telling me things she did not tell other people. But then, I was not her usual type of guest. I was an interloper, a hunter who had flushed her fancy man out of her nest, and she knew it. He might not ever return. It was my job therefore to listen, to ask questions, to keep her company while she made her adjustment to the empty seasons that would follow. I didn’t know what to think of her, but my heart was full of fear. I knew only that I did not want to end up like her, eking out an ounce of gratification while the world passed by her table.
“Has anyone else ever tracked him here?” I asked. “I mean, other than me calling?”
I thought of Saratoga and of the imposingly large houses I’d seen surrounding the golf course on the plain south of the Jackson Hole Airport, recalibrating Chandler in my mind, adding the word chameleon to his list of virtues. For this woman, he had formed himself into a gentle has-been, a dilettante with an appetite for gin, no doubt. There was within his madness a gift for empathy and the odd flash of healing. He could tower up with the eyes of the hunter, or roll over and look like prey, easy to love, in a small way, and easy to discount if one needed to. It was all a matter of what one needed at the moment, as he had so simply explained to me. This woman didn’t know the Chandler who delivered powdered dreams of invulnerability to aging suburban housewives, or to ranch owners with dwindling resources and a taste for the wild side.
I wiped a red-and-white-checked napkin across my mouth and resolved to leave this one woman within the limits of her knowledge. “How about men? Any men come looking for him? Other than this morning, I mean.”
“Just that sheriff from Converse County.”
My eyebrows flew up. “Duluth? Duluth was here?”
“Guy that looks like he has a rash on his private parts? Yep, that’s our boy.”
“When?”
“Clear last August. He asked the same questions you did. Like where was Chandler the night of August third.”
“And you told him?”
The innkeeper turned toward me. “I told him the truth. Chandler pulled in here about eleven o’clock that night. Like I say, I was closed for everyone except him.”
“And you told this to Duluth.”
“I confirmed that he had arrived here at eleven o’clock, and that to the best of my knowledge, he was here the rest of the night. After all,” she said saucily, “a girl can sleep rather hard after heavy exercise.”