Left Hanging

by Patricia McLinn

  “Like I said, Crossroads of the West,” Mike said.

  “Listen, Mr. Chamber of Commerce, go see what progress you can make with Ms. Blue Hair.”

  He grunted assent and headed off to intercept her.

  I climbed the fence and used the added height for a better view of the pens bounded on the east by the grandstand, on the south by the arena, and on the west by the sheriff’s department’s tarps. Oren Street was almost out of view to the east. About the same distance to the west, and just skirting the tarps, was a cowboy in a black hat. He turned, giving me his profile. Cas Newton. I looked to where Mike had caught up with Blue Hair.

  As a rough guess, each of the three had traveled about the same distance. As if they’d come together at the center of the triangle they now formed, then bounced away.

  Had Street come upon a moment of star-crossed love and turned away in embarrassment? That would fit his personality from what I’d seen.

  And Cas and Blue Hair? Maybe they didn’t want anyone to know about their meetings . . . though in that case the stock pen maze didn’t seem the best place for a rendezvous.

  Street, as a partner in the stock contracting firm, had contact with Stan Newton. Was that who Cas and Blue Hair were sidestepping? Or Richard and his cohorts? Or maybe it was anyone they didn’t want to know. Because if word reached Heather, or her mother, the safest place for young Caswell Newton might be inside the rodeo arena with hard-charging animals.

  I smiled when I spotted a familiar figure over by the concession stand, talking with a couple workers I didn’t recognize. Needham Bender, plying his trade. At least he knew his story would make the newspaper, since he owned it. What Mike and I found might never see the light of day.

  Mike ambled back, talking on his phone as he came. He hung up before he reached me. “Got to get to that tournament. You want the report with or without profanities?”

  “Without.”

  “That’ll speed things up. She was in the rodeo grounds to take a shower because she doesn’t want to stink like your friend Roy and his, uh, companion. But she also doesn’t have the money to throw around like those, uh, dim college kids.

  “But—”

  “Yeah, she’d need a grounds pass. I mentioned that. She said it was none of my business how she got in.”

  “Did you ask her anything about Cas Newton?”

  “No. I want to be able to keep talking to her.”

  “That’s great, but there’s a time when you have to risk open lines of communication with a source in order to push for information.”

  “Did you push Oren Street?”

  “No. I—”

  “I’ll push her if I think it’ll help us. And now, I’ve got to get going, or I’ll miss that tournament final. Coming?”

  “Not yet. I’ll get a ride to the station from somebody.”

  “I’ll give you a call tomorrow.” He started off. As a sight to watch, his rear view held its own with Grayson Zane.

  The rodeo office door opening pulled my head around. Linda Caswell came out, followed by Burrell.

  Fat lot I’d get out of her with him being all protective. I’d try her later. So I went after Mike, to catch a ride to the station.

  ON THAT EVENING’S foray to the Sherman Supermarket, I selected new dog food—after checking ingredients—paper towels, and glass cleaner. The last qualified as a talisman of faith that I’d get enough paint off the bathroom’s glass surfaces someday to need glass cleaner. Feeling virtuous with not a single package of cookies in my cart, I chose my spot in Penny’s monologue on how the rodeo wasn’t the same under Newt and rammed in my question.

  “What was that you said before about Grayson Zane, and something happening years ago, and not giving the heart orders, but he should have done right? Did he date somebody?”

  “—but give the devil his due, he dotes on that boy. Dated Linda Caswell, five years back.” It took a second to realize she’d shifted from Newton to Zane. “Now there’s a good woman. But not the least bit glamorous. Not even pretty. Surprised everybody when Grayson Zane took up with her for that spell. Didn’t surprise nobody when he dumped her, because it would take a brain to see her quality, and those rodeo cowboys wear their jeans so tight they’re forever squeezing the parts that do their thinking.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Men an’ snakes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. Even for a woman like that with a good head on her shoulders . . .”

  Penny went on, but I was stuck on that phrase. A woman with a good head on her shoulders. She’d said that before. She’d said it in connection with someone being taken in by—

  “Penny!”

  “. . . maybe he loved her, maybe not, but he never treated—”

  “Penny!” I nearly shouted it.

  Her eyes opened wide, but she stopped talking.

  “Who all dated Keith Landry?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know other places he’s—”

  “From here. From Sherman. Sonja, you said. And he was pursuing Heather Upton. Who else?”

  “Like I said, the rodeo queen if it was anybody. He goes way back with that. One way or another, it’s always a surprise the girls who go with him. Now when Mike Paycik goes with a girl—”

  “Who else did Landry date from around here?”

  Miracle of miracles, my question changed the direction of her flow. Like a twig turning the Mississippi.

  “Vicky Upton at the start. That surprised some, brought up strict the way she was. Jolie Graf a few years after that, then Barb Duncan, and Chrissy Baretski. Then Linda five years ago. Like I told you, that had jaws sagging. First off, she wasn’t no rodeo queen, and him going after rodeo queens had got to be a joke, and why she . . .” The flow went on, around and past me.

  Linda had been romantically involved with both Zane and Landry.

  “Elizabeth! You forget something?”

  I blinked myself back to the present. My groceries were bagged. Penny was ready for the next customer.

  “No. I . . . I just had an epiphany. Sorry.” I hurriedly paid, and pushed my cart out to my car.

  Next thing I knew, I heard my name again. “Elizabeth?”

  Once more I blinked back to the present. This time to find Tom Burrell standing beside me, with the trunk of my car yawning open.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “ARE YOU OKAY?” Tom asked.

  I blinked a couple more times, pulling myself back to the here and now. “Fine. Thinking about potatoes.”

  His mouth quirked. “Care to share?”

  “Too long and complicated for the Sherman Supermarket parking lot.”

  “Then how about a drink at the Kicking Cowboy?”

  My mind skittered sideways at that. “Where’s Tamantha?”

  “Sleepover. Like I said, she’s got quite the social life.”

  “Aren’t you here to shop?”

  “I can skip it. But if you have things you need to get home?”

  Abruptly, I realized he probably wanted an opportunity to come clean about his editing job on the phone call list. Everything settled into place. “We could go to my hovel. I have wine.”

  “Better not.”

  “Why, Thomas Burrell, are you trying to protect my reputation?”

  “Yes.” He was serious. “Or at least to protect your choices.”

  I sheered away from that. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “What about your groceries?”

  “Dog food, paper towels, and glass cleaner. They’ll keep.” I dropped the trunk closed. “See you there.”

  I didn’t wait for a response. When I pulled into the parking lot, he pulled in right behind me.

  Inside the Kicking Cowboy, I paused, getting my bearings. A bar stretched along the left side
, but tables were occupied by solid citizen types, mostly in couples.

  “Not what you expected?” Burrell put a large, warm hand briefly to the small of my back and leaned close to be heard over music from a speaker directly above us. “Table in the back corner.”

  I headed that way. “I had imagined a wilder scene.”

  “Come by during rodeo week.” He received and returned hellos from several solid citizen types sitting at tables. “On second thought, don’t. It can get rough.”

  “Hey, Tom. Good to see you here.” That greeting came from behind the bar.

  “Hey, Badger. Good to see you, too. How about a draft and . . .” He looked at me.

  “Vodka tonic.” I preferred wine, but VT was my fallback, figuring no one could mess that up.

  “Vodka tonic,” Burrell repeated, as if the bartender wouldn’t have heard me. Sometimes chivalry is downright weird. “At the back table.”

  “Sure thing.”

  The bartender’s response coincided with the last notes of a man’s song about writing a letter to his younger self.

  A slurred voice rose from a huddle of young men at the bar near the pool table. “—only been dead a month. And here he comes walking in with somebody new. It ain’t right he’s cattin’ around!”

  “They’ve been divorced for years, you moron.”

  A woman’s voice added, “And if you want to talk about catting around, Mona Burrell—” A new song opened with a hard drumbeat, smothering the voices.

  Burrell’s face showed no expression.

  I felt like an idiot. I shouldn’t have pushed him when he’d reconsidered being seen in a social setting with me, especially here, since this had been a favorite of his ex-wife.

  “Don’t let that jackass bother you none, Tom,” said the bartender as he delivered our drinks. “More beer than sense in him. Already took his keys.”

  “Thanks, Badger.” He went for his wallet.

  “After all you been through, it’s on the house.”

  Tom thanked him again.

  Turned out, I was wrong about not messing up a vodka tonic. With the bartender—Badger—beaming at us, I fought a grimace at the first sip of liquid so sweet he must have added sugar by the tablespoon, and managed a smile for his good intentions.

  After his departure, silence ballooned between us.

  I broke it. “Explain why having a drink with you in a bar is better for my reputation—” I skipped the topic of choices. “—than a civilized glass of wine at my house?”

  “Because everybody can see what we’re doing. And not doing. Now, what’s this about potatoes—growing, eating, or cooking?”

  “Cooking.” I’d rather get right to his apology over withholding some of the phone records, but perhaps he needed to ease into it. “First, for background, I am a decent cook. Some things I do quite well. Cookies, brownies, things like that. And you should taste my lemon bars.” Did that sound like an invitation? I slid my glass to the right, watching condensation trail behind it, took another swallow, and regretted it. “Plus, I can cook the complete Danniher Thanksgiving turkey dinner. That was self-preservation after I tasted restaurant turkey my first year away from home.”

  “Never understood the big deal with turkey. It’s dry. Give me a steak.”

  “Gee, could that be because you’re a cattle rancher? But no Danniher turkey is dry. Everybody loves it. However, early in my—” I skidded around the word marriage. “—cooking career, I had gaping holes. Especially baked potato. Yes, I know, it’s basic, it’s easy—”

  “Tamantha—”

  “Oh, no you don’t. You can’t make me feel bad by saying Tamantha can do something. That girl probably could have designed a suspension bridge in the cradle if it had occurred to her that she wanted to.”

  Fatherly pride shifted his Abraham Lincolnesque face closer to craggy handsomeness.

  “Anyway, if I tried to bake a potato, it came out like a rock. Oven, microwave, toaster oven, it didn’t matter. Potato rock. Wes took to calling me Potato the way couples call each other cabbage or muffin.” I caught myself before venturing deeper down memory lane.

  “And here’s where my epiphany starts. One day I was helping a co-worker put a Band-Aid on his hand. I kept a supply, because he was always hurting himself. Later he nearly got shot by a kid in Indonesia on assignment, and it shook him up enough he finally got into AA, so— But that’s not the epiphany. I’m putting the Band-Aid on, and he says something about getting this puncture wound while pricking a potato with a fork before baking it.”

  I sat back. Burrell raised his eyebrows. “And?”

  “I grabbed him by the arm and demanded, ‘Pricking? What’s this about pricking a potato?’”

  “You didn’t know about that?”

  “No.” I moderated my voice. “No, I didn’t. Not until my co-worker said that. And there it was. The trick nobody had told me, because everybody thought everybody knew it. The one small trick that you have to know in order to make sense of what you’re dealing with.”

  He regarded me with those depthless eyes. “And?”

  “I can now bake a potato like nobody’s business.”

  “That wasn’t what had you staring into your car trunk at the supermarket like it held the answers of the universe. What do you know now that makes sense of something?”

  I was listening, but I wasn’t looking at him anymore.

  I would have sidestepped the answer, anyhow. Learning to bake a potato, yeah, I’d tell him about that. But he was inviting more. And I wasn’t accepting. Especially since what I knew now that made sense of several things involved his good friend Linda and her love life. It certainly added another dimension to Street’s hints that Linda held a grudge against Landry and his company.

  And now I had the perfect excuse for a change of subject.

  A familiar figure had caught the corner of my eye, and I tracked him to a seat at this end of the bar, with his back to us. Without waiting for an order, Badger put down two large doubles of something amber-colored, unpolluted by water or ice.

  Stan Newton upended the first in one long swallow, followed by a healthy draw on the second.

  I turned to Burrell. What I saw in his so-often unreadable expression said this was why he’d brought me here. “Been going on every night for nearly a month,” he said in his usual, unhurried voice. “Including Wednesday.”

  Had Stan lied about seeing Zane and Watt arrive at the rodeo grounds? Or, fueled by alcohol, had he gone there and had a confrontation with Landry?

  “The cause?” I asked Tom.

  He hitched a shoulder. “There’s talk of money. That’s not new. The pendulum has always swung back eventually. Usually going higher than where it started.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He passed a comment to someone when he was well into one session that a conscience was a detriment to a businessman.”

  Considering that Newton’s body language sent off waves of Leave Me Alone, I felt safe in assuming that someone was Badger—the one person Newton wouldn’t want to scare off.

  “Suggestive, possibly. Not conclusive.”

  “Not at all.” Without comment or fuss, he emptied most of my vodka tonic into his water glass. “You want something else?”

  “No, thanks. I better get going.” Newton was among the few who didn’t watch us leave.

  Tom walked me to my car door, holding it open. I got in. “Thanks for the drink.”

  “You didn’t drink much of it.”

  “I’ve had sweetened ice tea in the South, but that’s the first time I’ve had a sweetened vodka tonic.”

  “Badger’s idea of a girly drink. We’ll get it right next time.”

  “Not if he thinks I drank it all.”

  “No point hurting
his feelings right off.” He stood there. Not closing the car door. Looking at me.

  “Something more, Burrell?”

  “Yeah. I was waiting to hear you say that your epiphany was about how your ex-husband calling you Potato showed what a bastard he is.”

  He punctuated that by closing the door and walking away.

  MIKE HAD LEFT a voicemail.

  “Elizabeth, I was looking at the pictures I took. I can see that the deputy who hollered was holding something with a pair of tweezers, but can’t get detail.”

  DAY FOUR

  SUNDAY

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE KNOCK was at the hovel’s front door, shortly after eleven o’clock Sunday morning. I’d had no nasty ringing phone wake-ups today, thank heavens. I heard the knock, but felt no obligation to answer. There’s no law I know that you must answer your door just because someone knocks on it. Besides, I was sitting on the back steps, waiting to see if Shadow would return to eat while I was there.

  Some people’s pets do tricks. This dog’s only trick was disappearing.

  After Friday’s progress, I’d left Saturday before he ate. This morning he’d been halfway through his food when I came out, and he’d immediately vanished. Talk about persona non grata. Just the sight of me put a starving dog off his food.

  Yes, I was having a pity party.

  The track my mind had followed during the conversation with Mel had gotten fed up with being ignored and woke me this morning with its unvarnished conclusion: My family—including my professional representative—thought/believed/feared my success in broadcast journalism was thanks to my ex-husband.

  Morning is not my best time, which is why that conclusion had found the opening to mug me. Perhaps, too, my resistance had been weakened by the potato epiphany Burrell had forced me to see. Potato had not been an affectionate nickname. It had been a reminder of a failure.

  Now, there sat the conclusion, no longer ignored, but instead lodged in my head and fully-armed. My success was not mine.

  My ex had pushed. Prodded. Watched for opportunities. I would have stayed at our first jobs out of school, where we met. Wes had provided the kicks up the career ladder. Beyond that—?