Wash Her Guilt Away (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 2)

by Michael Wallace

  “Fair enough,” said Peter, “but you’ve probably seen several owners at Harry’s over the years. You must be able to make some kind of comparison.”

  “All right, but you didn’t hear it from me. Don’s been willing to put some money into the place, which is more than a lot of the previous owners did. If what I hear is right, it’s his wife’s money, but I expect they both profit if it does well. And he’s been more liberal than some of the other owners about certain types of recreational behavior, if you catch my drift.”

  “You mean …” said Gordon.

  “Last summer, there was a band here most weekends, and there was talk that one of the musicians was selling some of the guests a few chemical concoctions that our sheriff might frown upon. I never saw anything conclusive myself, but it seemed as though it could be happening. And I do know that Don told April that if she’d like to supplement her income by providing a bit of private entertainment for willing customers, he’d have no objection. Almost seemed to think it would be a selling point for Harry’s in fact.”

  “Do you think she did it?” Gordon asked.

  “Once again, I’ve seen nothing conclusive, but there have been,” he paused and took a deep breath, “indications. Don thinks his wife doesn’t know about it, but I believe he may be mistaken. Of course it could be me who’s mistaken. Harry’s is a bit like a river. You can’t always see beneath the surface.”

  They finished their sandwiches in silence. As they were about to raise anchor and move on, Peter asked, “So, Johnny, do you think it’s going to snow today?”

  Johnny smiled. “It is a cold day, doctor. I grant you that. But we’re at thirty-five hundred feet here. We don’t get much snow in the winter — never mind May. But if you want to predict the weather, I can tell you something that the local TV station never seems to figure out.” He turned and pointed to the distance, where a conical mountain rose above the valley floor, its summit smothered in smudgy gray clouds. “That’s Cavalry Mountain over there. It’s to the northwest, and 90 percent of the time our weather comes from the other side of it. Now those clouds behind it are getting darker …”

  “How can you tell?” Peter said.

  “When you’ve seen as many clouds as I have over the years, you can tell the differences. If our weather’s coming from there today, we might be seeing a little rain by three o’clock.”

  4

  THE FIRST DROPS of rain fell at 2:54, quickly turning into a steady, soaking light shower. Within ten minutes, the men’s jeans were drenched and water was rolling off the brims of their hats. In another ten minutes the rain water was beginning to find every minute gap between their jackets and their bodies, seeping into the undergarments beneath. With the onset of the rain, the temperature dropped slightly, adding to the overall level of discomfort. Only the absence of wind and the prospect of fish made their situation endurable.

  “A good fisherman doesn’t mind a little rain,” Johnny said cheerfully, guiding the boat downstream and scanning the water with his professional eye. “The fish don’t mind it, and sometimes it actually gets ‘em hungry. No, sir. Give me rain over wind any day, as long as there’s no lightning or thunder.”

  “Good God,” Peter said. “I never thought of that. You’d be dead out here in a thunderstorm.”

  “Dangerous for sure,” Johnny replied. “At the first flash of lightning or the first rumble of thunder, no matter how far away, I get off the river and into a protected area. Being in these aluminum boats with graphite rods is like wrapping a lightning rod around your body. Bad odds.”

  He cut the motor and dropped the anchor.

  “Here,” he said. “Let’s do a little nymphing.” They were at a point where the river narrowed and deepened, with a channel running down the middle between two dense beds of weeds. He set up their rods with a small fly that imitated an emerging nymph, a recently hatched mayfly, and put a bright cork indicator on the line above it. If a fish took the artificial fly below the surface, the floating indicator would move, showing that they had a bite. He adjusted the distance between the fly and the indicator carefully.

  “You want it nine feet below the surface,” Johnny said.

  “How do you know it should be nine feet?” Peter said.

  “Because that’s where the fish are,” he replied. “Take it easy, doctor. Like Fats Waller used to say, it’s easy when you know how.”

  Peter caught a fish on his first cast, and Gordon on his second, proving Johnny right. They drifted downriver to two other spots, and at each one Johnny moved the indicator up or down the line to get the fly to the depth he wanted. Each time the fish took the fly where Johnny had them fishing. At 4:30, he suggested heading back upstream.

  “We’re about an hour and a half from Harry’s now,” he said. “If we’re making good time, there are a couple of other places we can try on the way back.”

  As they moved slowly upriver, the clouds were darker and lower. The forward progress of the boat took their faces straight into the falling rain, the water rolling off their cheeks, chins and noses. On the positive side, the temperature had reached a comparatively toasty 50 degrees.

  A half-mile from Harry’s the rain stopped abruptly, an insect hatch broke out, and several fish began feeding on the surface. Chilled and tired as they were, the men leaned forward and checked out the action. Johnny focused on the left bank of the river.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “If you gentlemen don’t mind, let’s finish the day at the office.” Gordon and Peter looked at each other. “There’s a place here I call the office because there’s almost always a nice fish working there. Not easy, though. Not at all. You up for giving it a try?”

  They agreed, and Johnny pointed to where an almost sheer slope rose about 25 feet above the water at a slight bend of the river. Along the base of the cliff, there was a moderately fast current, unlike the glassy surface of the rest of Eden River. Johnny pulled even with the rise and dropped anchor about 60 feet away.

  “I see it,” Gordon said, pointing with his rod to a trout rising regularly a foot from shore, where the current was washing a steady chow line of insects to it.

  “A very difficult cast, gentlemen,” Johnny said. “You have to put the fly no more than three or four feet above that fish. That’s as far as it’ll drift naturally before the current grabs the line and starts to pull the fly out into the main part of the river. You also have to put it 12 to 18 inches from the cliff edge; any less, and you miss the current going to that fish. It’s as fine a test of precision casting as you’ll find on any river. Want to go first, doctor?”

  Peter nodded and stood up in the boat to get the best possible leverage for his cast. He made several false casts, gradually letting out enough line to hit the spot he was trying for. With a deep breath, he finally made his cast. The line shot toward the cliff wall in a picture-perfect tight loop, but Peter had overestimated the distance. The fly and tippet drove directly into a shrub growing out of the vertical wall four feet above where the fish was feeding and immediately became hopelessly entangled. He let out a torrent of profanity.

  “So tell me,” Gordon said smiling, “is this what you say when you screw up a surgery?”

  “I don’t screw up surgery,” Peter snapped. “That’s easy compared to this.”

  “Frustrating to be sure,” Johnny said, “but don’t take it personally. It’s part of the game — like going into the rough when you play golf.”

  Pulling on Peter’s line, Johnny broke off the leader and fly. “Would you like to try, Mr. Gordon?”

  Gordon nodded and stood to make his cast. He did everything Peter had done, but so smoothly there seemed to be almost no effort involved. He was spot-on. The fly landed a foot from the bank and two and a half feet above where the fish had been rising, and in a second the trout took it.

  “I think you have another Brown,” Johnny said, as Gordon worked the fish closer to the boat.

  “Don’t tell me,” Peter said. “You saw his
nose when he took the fly.”

  Several minutes later, Gordon had brought in a 20-inch Brown trout. Johnny scooped it out of the water with his bare hand, twisted the hook out of its upper lip with a confident snap of the wrist, and put the fish back in the river, where it swam back in the direction of the office. They realized it had started raining again.

  “What say we call it a day, gentlemen?” Johnny said. “That was a mighty fine piece of fishing. You’ll not make a better cast today. Perhaps not all year. That’s the memory you want to take back to your cabin.”

  No one argued with that, and they motored back to Harry’s.

  5

  BACK AT THE CABIN, they tossed a coin for first shower, and Gordon won. It made him feel much better, but the day in the rough weather had left a nagging inner chill that the hot water couldn’t entirely soak away. After drying off, he put on khakis and a blue button-down shirt. Undressing for his own shower, Peter took notice.

  “Pretty snappy for Harry’s,” he said. “Who are you dressing for — Wendy or Rachel?”

  “I’m dressing for myself. Like I said, I leave married women alone.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’ll leave you alone. Remind me some time to tell you about some of the gunshot wounds I treated when I was working ER. None of the poor bastards would have had to come in if they’d had the sense not to hang around out of uniform, so to speak, until the husband came home.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to tell me this week. OK if I head over to the Fireside Lounge and meet you when you’re ready?”

  Peter shrugged assent, and Gordon put on a leather jacket and wool driving cap. He stepped outside into a darkening gloom. According to the almanac, an hour of daylight remained, but the thick clouds and rain had brought on premature nightfall. The rain had let up a bit, but the drizzle was steady enough that by the time he reached the front door of Harry’s, half his trousers were wet spots, and raindrops that had hit his jacket were forming rivulets that ran down the front and back. The fire in the lounge, noticeably bigger than the day before, looked particularly inviting.

  “What can I get you?” April asked from behind the bar.

  “I’ll wait for Peter, thanks.” He walked to the fire and took off his jacket, looking for a place to hang it, but finding none.

  “Just toss it on the couch,” April said. “A little water won’t hurt it.”

  He did, adding his cap to it, and stood with his back to the fire, as close as was comfortable, for a few minutes, then turned around and faced it. The heat and light of the fire were putting him into a trance-like state, and he was standing, motionless, looking down at the wisps of steam rising from his drying khakis when he was jerked back to the rest of the world by a voice almost at his ear.

  “A penny for your thoughts, Gordon,” said Wendy. As he turned to face her, she shouted across the room to April, “Hey, can you make me a Zombie?”

  “I’m sorry,” said April, with strained politeness. “I’m afraid I don’t know that one.”

  “Hell!” Wendy muttered. “All right, make it a double vodka martini with two olives.”

  “Coming right up.”

  “Bitch,” Wendy whispered to Gordon. “She could make it if she wanted to.” Then, raising her voice to conversational level, “Sit down, Gordon, and tell me about the quest for Moby Trout today.”

  He joined her on the couch, taking care to sit as far away as possible. “I doubt it would be very interesting,” he said. “Fishing’s like golf. If you don’t do it yourself, it’s boring when other people talk about it.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “Charles plays golf, too, and some of his friends definitely bore the living daylights out of even the other golfers. But I can already tell you’re not boring. I want to hear somebody explain what it’s like being out on a day like this. What do you get out of it that makes you keep coming back? All Charles ever says is ‘Good day’ or ‘Bad day,’ followed by ‘caught blah-blah number of fish.’ There has to be more to it than that.”

  Gordon was vaguely uncomfortable. On its face, her question was an innocent conversation starter, but she had a voice and a way of looking at a man that made the simplest remark seem sultry and weighted with a hidden invitation to wickedness.

  “Your martini, ma’am,” April said. “I recall you like it with Grey Goose.”

  “Thank you, I’m sure.” The strained formality in both voices would have fooled no one.

  Wendy took a gulp of her drink, leaving a faint imprint of cherry lipstick on the rim of the glass. “Tell me what it’s all about,” she said, putting extra breath into her voice so that she was almost exhaling the words. “I want to know, and I think you can tell me.”

  She crossed her legs and leaned forward in his direction, balancing the martini glass on her knee, and resting her left elbow on the back of the couch with her hand under her chin. Gordon realized that her eggplant-colored dress, of fine cut and fabric, was shorter and lower cut than he first thought. He tried to focus on his answer.

  “It’s complicated, but it really isn’t,” he said. “How can I put this? Maybe the best way is to say that a good day of fly fishing is as close as you can get to escaping completely from the rest of the world. You have to totally concentrate on it. You have to read the water, figure out where and how to cast, follow what the fly is doing on the water. When you’re moving from one spot to another, or taking a break from fishing, you’re completely in the moment, noticing the water, the mountains, the sky, the wind rustling through the trees. You can show up on a trout stream with a world of worries on your shoulders, and for eight hours, they’re gone. It’s like drugs, only without complications.”

  Wendy took her left hand out from under her chin and ran it through the hair on the side of her head as she tossed her head. “But what about a day like today, when it’s cold and miserable?”

  “You’re still completely focused, concentrating on what you’re doing, aware of now. It’s like Woody Hayes used to say …”

  “Who’s Woody Hayes?”

  “Football coach. A bit before your time. He used to stand on the sidelines in games played in the Midwest in November, when it was in the twenties, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with a tie. If his players complained about the cold, he’d tell them it was all in their heads, and the way he was dressed, they couldn’t argue. But to get back to fishing, when you’re concentrating on that, you don’t think about the cold and the wind and the rain. It catches up to you when you stop, but when you’re out there fishing, it’s a minor distraction.”

  She took a languid sip of her martini. “I’m not sure I buy that,” she purred, “but at least it makes some sense.”

  A brief silence ensued, and Gordon quickly glanced toward the entrance to the lounge. No relief was in sight, so he tried to pivot the conversation.

  “How about you?” he said. “What brings you to Harry’s, and did I detect a bit of East Coast in your voice?”

  “Thanks for asking,” she said. “Most men don’t.” Another sip of the drink took it below the halfway mark. “I’m here with Charles, obviously. He wanted to come, had been here years ago and had fond memories or something. I was promised cocktails on the deck on a warm spring night with a beautiful sunset.” She gestured toward the dark windows. “You can see what I got instead.”

  “And the East Coast?”

  “Right again. Upstate New York. Syracuse, if you have to know. Grew up in a conservative, Catholic family, went to the U, got bored and dropped out for a year and a half, kicked around in some jobs. Three years ago I parked my car on the street one night in February and went in to work the evening shift. When I came out a few hours later, two feet of snow had fallen and I couldn’t find the car. I had to walk two miles home. That was it. As soon as the snow melted, and it took two fricking weeks, I packed a suitcase, threw it in the trunk of the car and started out for California. A friend who lived just outside San Francisco let me have her couch for a bit, and I found a
help wanted ad for a receptionist at Charles’s office. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  Gordon tried to think of a way to lead up to the obvious question, but everything he came up with lacked class, tact, sensitivity, or all three. Abhorring a silence, Wendy saved him the trouble.

  “His wife didn’t understand him,” she said. “They used to have awful, screaming arguments over the phone. One day she called, and when I told her he wasn’t in (and he really wasn’t), she read me the riot act. When Charles found out about it, he took me out to lunch to make up for it. I guess that was our first date. The divorce was final the day before Thanksgiving last year. We got married the first Friday in December and honeymooned in Maui for two weeks. More to my liking than this.”

  “Maui’s nice,” Gordon said, trying to process the story. He was spared further reflection when the front door to the lodge opened, and Charles Van Holland came in. He looked at the two of them on the couch with an impassive face, and Gordon was overcome with a pang of guilt, as though he’d been caught naked in someone else’s bedroom.

  “There you are, darling,” Wendy said, standing up. “Mr. Gordon was just telling me all about his day fishing. I hope you had a better day than he did.” She turned slightly toward Gordon and winked at him with the eye that was out of her husband’s view. Gordon rose as well.

  “I probably owe your wife an apology,” he said. “I tend to ramble when you get me going about fishing.”

  Van Holland cracked a slight smile and appeared to relax. “That’s quite all right. So do I. She’ll get used to it if she hasn’t already.”

  Wendy crossed the room, threw her arms around her husband and gave him a kiss at the line where his jaw met his throat, making him squirm with pleasure.

  “Are we going to have dinner now, darling? I’m famished.”