Killer Summer (Walt Fleming)

by Ridley Pearson

  “Yeah. Same here.”

  The tailpipe didn’t sound all that terrific. And there was a low grinding noise coming from the back axle. Just her luck if the car broke down before tomorrow night.

  “How much farther?” she asked.

  “That’s the ski hill. Warm Springs side. Half Pipe’s on the other side. River Run. I board. Half Pipe is awesome.”

  “I’ve never skied.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Tennis.”

  “You any good?”

  Summer stared Kevin down, though at no time did he take his eyes off the road.

  “Yeah, okay, I get it,” he said.

  “I’m thinking of going pro.”

  “A friend of mine’s on the snowboarding circuit. He has endorsements and stuff like that. But I think his parents basically pay for everything. He hasn’t exactly won anything yet.” He added, “You won anything?”

  “Of course I’ve won . . . I’m a winner . . . I win.”

  “Anything big?”

  “Big enough.”

  The road narrowed, evergreens towering claustrophobically on either side. Sunset was fully an hour away, but the sky was all pink and turquoise and full of promise.

  “Wow,” Summer said about it, not meaning to sound so impressed.

  “Yeah, I know,” Kevin agreed.

  “It’s, like, the town just disappeared.”

  “That’s what happens here . . . the outdoors, the wilderness . . . it just kinda takes over. That’s what it’s all about.”

  “It’s awesome.”

  “L.A.?” he guessed.

  “Is it that obvious?” she asked.

  “I don’t mind, I’ve got a bunch of friends from there.”

  “They moved up here?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Whoa!”

  “You and your dad could.”

  “Ah . . . I don’t think so,” she said. “You don’t know my dad.”

  She leaned out the window to see the tops of the trees. A pair of birds crossed the sky.

  “Almost there,” he said. “Another couple of miles.”

  “Hey, just keep driving and don’t stop, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  They were quiet again. But there was nothing uncomfortable about it. Silence was usually a contest for her, a weapon. With the window rolled down, the wind was in her face, her hair whipping, and it made her laugh. Her father had been hammering this same message into her for the past two years: “You’re growing up too fast. Slow down and have some fun. Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up: it’s oversold.”

  “This is way cool,” she called into the wind.

  “Yeah?” he called back.

  Not long after that, Kevin parked the car in the beaten-down grass about thirty yards from the hot springs and well off the road. Steam rose from the springs.

  He turned the key off and set the parking brake. She got out of the car. Waiting to make sure he was looking, as he climbed out from behind the wheel, she reached down and pulled her T-shirt up over her head while she walked toward the springs. Then she popped the button on her jeans and unzipped the fly. She knew his heart would be racing by now. She knew what she was doing.

  Her own heart was racing too, but for a different reason. She didn’t want him decoding her embarrassment.

  He wouldn’t be able to get his pants off without some major awkwardness himself. She thought that might slow him down, give her more time to make a show of her striptease. But despite all her planning, as she wiggled the jeans over her hips and down to her knees, as she sat on a rock stalling for time while kicking off her sandals, her chest felt tight.

  She wasn’t sure she could go through with this. Only her father’s combativeness and certitude drove her on. If he hadn’t dragged her along on this trip, she wouldn’t be in a position of stripping naked in front of a virtual stranger.

  Now Summer’s sandals sat on the grass alongside the jeans. She stood.

  Kevin was looking right at her. He’d slipped out of his shirt but was taking his time with his pants. His state of arousal was apparent from across the steaming pool.

  It’s now or never, thought Summer.

  She unhooked her bra, taking a deep breath, hoping for courage, and let it slide down her arms. Goose bumps raced up her ribs. She squared her shoulders to make herself look even bigger than she was, hoping he was too far away to see her blush. She slid her fingers into the elastic of her bikini briefs.

  I’ve gone this far . . .

  She pulled down the briefs with both thumbs, and it was done. Dragging the liquor bag behind her, she slipped into the water, gasping at the heat.

  By the time she looked up, Kevin was in the pool waist-deep.

  “Oh . . . damn,” she said, sinking in up to her chin, hiding herself from his stare. But it was too hot to stay under for long.

  “Can you believe this just comes up out of the ground all on its own?” he asked.

  “Now I know what a McDonald’s French fry feels like.”

  Hearing herself, she thought she sounded about seven years old. He came toward her, and their legs touched. Terrified, she pulled away and retrieved the bag.

  She passed him a beer. It made her feel more in control.

  “Just one beer,” he said. “A woman died out here last year, getting drunk and staying in the pool too long. So if we’re going to get serious about drinking, it has to be out of the water.”

  She couldn’t stop herself from laughing.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You are, like, way different than most guys.”

  “Because?”

  “Because most guys would want to get a naked girl drunk in a hot springs. And here you are, all worried about it.”

  “I’m not all worried about it,” he said defensively. “But I also know what’s stupid, and getting drunk in a hot tub is stupid.” He chuckled to himself. “I guess when your uncle’s the sheriff . . .” He let it hang there.

  “Yeah, that can’t be perfect.”

  Chin-deep, she was far too hot. She felt his eyes search her as she stood up, the waterline at her waist. To his credit, he tried to keep his eyes off her chest, but he strayed.

  “You’re sweet,” she said, gulping some beer. She moved toward him, kissed him on the cheek, and made a point of rubbing her breast against his arm.

  She bumped against him below water as well, just to make sure she had his attention.

  Pleased with her accomplishment, she sipped some more of the beer. He was right: it went straight to her head.

  He rambled on about something to do with geology, but she didn’t hear him. She’d already moved on to phase two.

  She bobbed up and gave him another look at her front. “You want to take me down to the airport tomorrow night?” she said.

  “There’s a shuttle every—”

  “I don’t want to take the shuttle,” she cut him off.

  Summer sank back down in the water. She couldn’t have some driver remembering her. She had a plan, and her fake driver’s license was part of it, her father was part of it, Enrico was part of it. And now so was a boy named Kevin.

  “Yeah, okay, I guess. Why the airport?” he asked. “You going somewhere?”

  “I . . . ah . . . I just wondered if you’ve ever seen the inside of a Learjet.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Totally. I left something in the jet and I want to pick it up, and I don’t want to take the shuttle. I hate public transportation.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I don’t take public transportation,” she said.

  “And you’d show me around inside the jet.” Kevin made it a statement.

  “I’d show you lots of stuff.” She tried to make it sound sexy but wasn’t sure Kevin caught it.

  “You mean I could sit in the pilot’s seat?”

  She bit back a smile. Boys. “Whatever . . .”

&
nbsp; “How big is it?”

  “You won’t believe it. And the seats fold flat like a bed.”

  “No way.”

  He still didn’t get it.

  “It’ll be fun,” she said.

  That time, she thought he got it.

  She didn’t know he carried a pager until it suddenly beeped shrilly from his pile of clothes.

  Kevin moved to the edge of the pool and clawed for it. “Damn! I’m on call at the hotel,” he said. “Got to go.”

  Relieved, she turned and pulled herself up out of the water, offering him a view of her backside.

  No towel.

  Summer wasn’t about to wait around for a towel and just let his eyes dry her off, but getting into the clothes while wet proved challenging.

  “So, Kevin, what do you think, can we do this again around eight tomorrow night?” She tried to load the question with innuendo. Again, she wasn’t sure he got it.

  He stuffed himself into his jeans and zipped up, his back to her.

  “The cockpit?” he said. “Seriously?”

  “I’m a hundred percent serious,” she said. “You can definitely sit in the pilot’s seat.”

  She was in her briefs and bra by the time he turned around. Covering herself up gave her back her confidence.

  “Awesome,” he said.

  Her mother would have been proud.

  19

  Walt had Brandon to thank, and he was not about to do it. Brandon had apparently correctly written down the registration to the car driven by the wine-party crasher. Walt had feared it would come back a rental, but to his surprise it was a Blaine County plate registered to Nick Gilman. The mailing address was a post office box in Hailey, but the residence was in the Starweather subdivision.

  Having transferred the Adams bottles to a safe-deposit box in a Ketchum bank following the tasting, Walt headed down valley.

  Walt knew Nick and L’Anne Gilman well enough to say hello. He was a builder; she owned an art gallery on Sun Valley Road. They had three kids, the oldest in fifth grade along with Walt’s daughters.

  The Gilmans had installed a controversial steel sculpture, a nude giving birth to the earth, on their front lawn that had twice been vandalized, requiring investigation by his office. She had also installed a quarter-million-dollar cairn of rocks on the back lawn by a British landscape artist, which had fueled rumors of unexpected wealth. Not just anyone in the valley could afford to fly in British stonemasons to stack rocks. And those stonemasons, being big brutes and not averse to ending the day with a few pints at the local pub, had made themselves known to the Sheriff’s Office by putting their rock-hard fists in the faces of some locals who found it necessary to deride them for their thick accents.

  It was those brawls—three in all—that had introduced Walt to the Gilmans. And Nick, having a welcoming smile, and L’Anne, having an abundance of confidence and shrewd negotiating skills, meant the masons had been cleared of all charges. By way of thanks, L’Anne had sent Walt a tin of toffee at Christmastime.

  The Gilmans lived in a sprawling log home on the Big Wood.

  Walt was greeted at the front door by a female employee of the Gilmans’, who introduced herself as Betty. He was told the Gilmans were attending one of the wine-auction preview dinners.

  Walt asked about the whereabouts of their Toyota Land Cruiser, having its registration number in his top pocket.

  “Janet has it,” Betty answered, “a friend visiting from California, a grad student at UC Davis. She’s staying in the Sheep Wagon. The Land Cruiser goes with the Sheep Wagon.”

  “Sheep Wagon . . . ?”

  “I’m sorry. L’Anne names everything.” Betty pointed up the drive. “It’s the guest cabin. Your first right, on the way out, you’ll see a sheep wagon. Turn there, keep going until you see a cabin . . . Is everything all right?”

  A uniform always generated curiosity. People had no right to ask, but they always did.

  “Nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m not sure she’s around. I thought I heard her leave a while ago,” Betty said, “but maybe I’m wrong. I could tell her to call you.” She was fishing for information.

  Walt thanked her, told her there was no reason to bother the Gilmans about his visit, and drove off in search of the Sheep Wagon.

  He found the Land Cruiser parked beside the cabin, if one could call an eighteen-hundred-square-foot log home a cabin. It appeared to have been dropped into the middle of the aspen grove where it stood, the white-barked trees seemingly glowing in the darkness. It also abutted the Big Wood, the gurgling river reminding Walt of his aborted fly-fishing with Kevin. He owed the kid a rain check.

  Walt was about to knock on the cabin’s door when a blur of movement caught his eye. He froze, believing it an elk or deer or even a moose watering at the river. He cherished such sights—one of the reasons for living here. But the shadow moved again. It was clearly a human being.

  “Hey!” Walt called out, instinctively reaching for his sidearm.

  A trespassing fisherman, maybe. But with a woman in the cabin he couldn’t rule out a Peeping Tom, and that required a discussion. A thief would go for the main house, not a guest cabin. Or a transient, one of the dozens of mountain men who squatted in the national forest during the summer, causing his office no end of trouble.

  He eased his hand off of his weapon. He might be able to run this guy down, or at least run him off the property.

  As the shadow took off, so did Walt, his Maglite in hand. The light briefly caught the man from the back, but it was enough to spot the gloves he was wearing. Gloves in late July.

  Walt dodged through the maze of white-barked trees.

  “HALT!” he shouted.

  Back at the cabin a floodlight came on and the trees made prison-bar shadows.

  The man slalomed through the aspens, increasing his lead.

  Walt, who prided himself on his fitness, pushed hard but failed to catch up. He broke out of the aspen grove, stumbling over an asphalt curb and falling down hard, and found himself on a neighbor’s driveway.

  The whine of a car engine starting interrupted the river’s growl. By the time Walt made it to his feet, the sound grew smaller.

  He took hold of his radio but had nothing to call in—no description of the suspect or vehicle. He stubbed his boot into the driveway’s gravel. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  Walt wiped his sweating face with a handkerchief and banged on the cabin’s front door. The same young woman he’d seen at the wine tasting answered the door, her reaction to his uniform typical.

  “Janet . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “Walt Fleming, county sheriff. I was at the reception tonight.”

  For the moment, Walt held off telling her about the man outside her cabin.

  Janet had a sharp Roman nose, some faint acne scarring in her sunken cheeks. Her pale eyes were a remarkable grayish blue. She appeared tired, even drained. He wondered if she might be ill.

  “I crashed it, I know. Guilty. Okay? I didn’t realize I’d broken a law. Is there a fine, or what?”

  “Or what,” he said. “I’d like to talk with you about Arthur Remy.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  She waved him inside. The cabin would have qualified as a Native American extension museum.

  “Blackfoot?” he asked, looking around.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  “Northern Paiute,” he said, correcting himself, identifying an impressive horsehair basket. “Bannock, probably. Uto-Aztecans.”

  “Are you a collector?”

  “I dabble. An uncle of mine—kind of an uncle, not by blood—is a Blackfoot. He got me interested in the culture.” He fingered a blanket, wondering if the Gilmans knew it was a fake, and studied two pieces of pottery in a glass case.

  “Your interest in Mr. Remy is . . . ?” he asked.

  She’d taken a seat in a willow-branch chair on the other side of
a walnut-slab coffee table. She motioned for him to take the couch, but he declined and continued studying the collection.

  “Arthur Remy,” Walt repeated.

  “Did he lodge some kind of complaint?” she asked. “What a jerk.”

  “No complaint. Should he have?”

  Her forehead creased.

  “I didn’t catch your last name,” Walt said.

  “Finch . . . Janet Finch. What’s this about, exactly?”

  “My office is providing security for the Adams bottles,” Walt said.

  “Well, then, you’re wasting your resources.”

  “Because?”

  “There are no Adams bottles. Something Arthur Remy does not want to hear evidently.”

  “Okay. You’ve got my attention,” he said. He took a seat across from her.

  “I’m a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis, Sheriff. Oenology . . . wine-making,” she finally said, answering his blank expression. “My thesis concerns the Jefferson collection.” She searched his face. “Are you familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s obsession with wine?”

  “The Adams bottles,” he said, “they were a gift from Jefferson, right?”

  “Fiction,” she scoffed. “That’s Arthur Remy’s story, but that’s all it is, a story.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The so-called Jefferson bottles were discovered by Arthur Remy in nineteen eighty-five and were sold at auction for nearly two hundred thousand dollars, in part because the wine was judged to have survived the centuries . . . no easy feat. Remy claims the Adams bottles are also from Jefferson’s Parisian cellar, which is, like . . . totally far-fetched. And quite frankly brings into question the authenticity of the original find.”

  She made eye contact. “They’re fakes, Sheriff. It’s a hoax. An elaborate and expensive hoax, but a hoax just the same.”

  Walt heard the compressor of the kitchen refrigerator kick in. There was a TV or radio playing upstairs.

  “I don’t imagine that’s a popular opinion,” he said.

  “All I’m asking for is access to the bottles, and the test results. I want to know that I haven’t wasted nearly three years of my life. The point is that Arthur Remy is a liar and a cheat, and everyone is so carried away by the story he’s invented that they’ve blinded themselves to this hoax he’s perpetrated. He’s going to make off with a zillion dollars for some Rothschild bottled as something quite different.”