‘A Prius? Yes. I still have electric heat in my house, though, and in Clark’s Fort we make electricity, as you know, by burning up heaps of high-carbon Wyoming coal. I know I should replace those old single-pane windows but I hate to spend the money.’
‘Thus ends this week’s come-to-Jesus meeting,’ Frank said, with another scornful laugh. ‘George, you better bring me more liquid refreshment before I start to cry again.’
She tried to buy him a few more rounds as she stood at the end of the bar, paying her tab. The bartender said, ‘Put your change away. It’s my turn to buy him a round, and about then he’ll probably fall off that stool. Then I’ll call his son or one of his nephews, and they’ll come and carry him home.’
‘You think he’ll be all right?’
‘Oh, sure.’ He shrugged. ‘Frank never used to be such a big drinker. He must be working too close to the fire this year. It’s giving him a hollow leg.’
‘I came to buy him lunch, but it seems like he’s not ready to think about food.’
‘I know. At least he’s not like some of these guys – after a few drinks they want to fight. Frank just gets philosophical.’
Another Frank Navarro appeared to be coming in from the street as Alice turned to leave. Younger and handsomer, but he had the same capable-looking body moving easily through the doorway, identical black curls growing close to his scalp. Ah, this must be Steve. She watched as his bright blue eyes surveyed the bar. What a beautiful young man.
As he moved nearer, though, she felt his anger. His cheeks were flushed and the air around him was hot. When he saw his father, who was waving his arms and shouting to make some point with George, he squared his shoulders and said softly, ‘Oh, shit.’
He sidled down the busy bar, exchanging a fist-bump with one drinker and a finger-point with another. Wedged at last into a space behind his father, he touched the older man’s shoulder. Frank turned abruptly, wobbled and clutched Steve’s arm for support. Then he looked up and smiled.
‘Hey, kid,’ Alice heard him say. ‘Want a beer?’ In profile as they were now, their handsome heads were strikingly similar.
While she stood watching them, buttoning her coat, a voice said, just behind her ear, ‘Alice Adams, what are you doing in this rowdy bar?’ She turned and found a sheriff’s deputy named Lyle Underwood looking down his nose at her, wearing his usual ironic expression.
She gave him the grudging smile you give an unexpected visitor at nap time on Sunday afternoon, and said, ‘I just finished an interview with one of the firefighters that found that red shoe. Are you looking for him too? He’s right over there – Frank Navarro.’
‘No, I’m looking for the other—’ He stopped, raised an eyebrow, gave her a mocking smile and asked, ‘You asking for the paper or just being small-town nosy?’
‘Oh, nosy of course,’ Alice said. ‘I’ve always been curious about what sheriff’s deputies actually do.’ As usual, he had annoyed her and goaded her into giving him a flip answer she already knew she’d regret.
She reminded herself, turning toward the door, that she had no business asking a sheriff’s deputy in uniform who he was looking for. But this was the Lyle Underwood who she’d known all her life, who’d had always had ways of making her feel foolish. Was he going to be more overbearing than ever now that he was working for the sheriff? Why did he think that was a step up from the police department? And why, right now, did the arrogant twit look spooked by her reasonable question?
‘Always a pleasure, Alice,’ he said behind her back as she took a step toward the door. It opened as she reached for it, and then she got a disorienting view of one more hard-bodied, handsome man with hair that curled tight around his head like a cap. She didn’t know him, quite, but was struck at once by how strongly he resembled the two men she’d just been admiring at the bar. What did I do? she wondered. Stumble into a clan meeting of the Navarros?
On the sidewalk, the sudden silence felt like a gift.
EIGHT
Stuart answered the phone at the newsroom. ‘Mort’s gone home,’ he said. ‘That’s what he calls Jerry’s Bar.’
‘Just now? Long day for him.’
‘Yeah. Sales calls took much longer than he expected, he said. He got a repeat sale on almost all his previous customers and referrals to several new ones. So he was all worn out.’
‘But satisfied with sales?’
‘Very happy indeed. Patting himself on the back, in fact. How’s your day going?’
‘Fine, if you like conversations about dead bodies and burning trees.’
‘Well, those are the hot topics right now. There, I did it again – I can’t seem to stop making puns about this story.’
‘I’ll just overlook them, shall I? I did get a pretty good interview with Frank Navarro.’
‘Wonderful. Who’s Frank Navarro?’
‘One half of the crew that found the body. You think I could find Eddie Parrish this late in the day?’
‘With you it’s non sequiturs, isn’t it? You don’t have to find Eddie Parrish – I know where he is.’
‘You do? How come?’
‘I saw him half an hour ago when I stopped to get granola bars on my way back here. He’s bagging groceries at the Safeway store.’
‘Why would Ed Parrish—?’
‘Saving the job for his son, who’s in bed with flu.’
One good thing about small towns, Alice thought as she drove toward Safeway, people are easy to find.
She drove another block and thought, Unless, of course, they’re crazy enough to climb a mountain in a forest fire.
She drove another half a block before she said out loud, ‘But why would anybody …?’ When she realized she had slowed to ten miles an hour, she pulled into a space in front of the bookstore and parked. Elbows on the steering wheel, she rested her head in her hands and told herself, Talking to yourself and holding up traffic – this fire is making you crazy. You have got to collect your wits.
She didn’t have time for much collecting, though – she might miss Ed Parrish if she dawdled. The maddening irony of this fire story, all along, was that it was on her mind all the time but there was never any time to stop and think about it.
She spent the rest of the drive defending herself for her awkward encounter with Lyle Underwood. Taken by surprise when his voice sounded next to her ear, she had forgotten his new position in county law enforcement, and lapsed into treating him as the Lyle Underwood she had known all her life.
They were the same age, had gone all through school in the same classes, never dated or even flirted, made no effort to stay in touch when they went away to different colleges, or see each other when they came back. Not enemies, just never friends.
Alice taught for a year in Great Falls after graduation. But when she got a job offer in Clark’s Fort the next spring, she took it and moved back into her parents’ house to make her starting teacher’s pay feel more like a living wage. Lyle Underwood, she’d noticed then, was living in his parents’ basement with his pregnant wife.
‘Lyle Underwood married Mary Thorpe?’ she’d asked Betsy.
‘Isn’t it amazing? That sweet-faced cheerleader all the football players were hot for.’
‘How’d he do that so fast? Or at all, for that matter? I’ve always thought he was completely unlovable.’
‘Me too. But he must not be,’ Betsy had said. ‘She was already showing when they married three months ago.’
He was still working as a street cop on the town police force when Alice married Clifford Adams two years later. Mary became a legal secretary and gave birth to three offspring at five-year intervals. Alice raised two daughters close in age and taught school. Betsy, five years younger, got a degree in accounting and still planned to use it once she and Jamie finished raising five Campbell siblings.
Alice and Mary were pleasant acquaintances, sometimes shared committee work for some charity and once belonged to the same club for a couple of years. But they we
re never close because their husbands didn’t get along at all, so the two couples never formed a foursome or sat together at any town event. Cliff was more outspoken than Alice in declaring that Lyle Underwood was an irritating pest, a sarcastic spoiler who could wreck any party for him.
‘I guess we should be more understanding,’ Alice said. ‘I know it’s because of his—’ She stopped and pointed to her face. And then chastised herself. Why can’t I just say birthmark? Lyle had a big purple stain that covered half his face, and his personality had been twisted and strained by the effort to show he was too clever to let it bother him.
‘I tried being understanding,’ Cliff said, ‘for a long time. And for a reward, every time I talked to him he made me look like a fool. You know that saying about no good deed going unpunished? That’s me talking to Lyle Underwood, and I got sick of it. So now, whatever part of the room he’s in, I’m someplace else.’
Alice didn’t even try to argue; everything Cliff said was true. A sullen misfit as a child, as Lyle matured he’d increasingly tried to cover his friendlessness and lackluster career performance with biting putdowns of his peers. He was clever, so when he felt like it, he could make his little digs feel like major bites.
Whenever Alice thought of him, she remembered an incident from years ago that was so petty, it enraged her that she could not forget it. She’d taken a personal day to meet a visiting friend downtown for lunch. Blinded by sunshine, she’d stood blinking in the doorway of the restaurant, smiling, wearing a new jacket she liked, looking forward to an interesting conversation. Then Lyle Underwood had said from a nearby booth, ‘What are you doing downtown on a school day, Alice? All gussied up, too – my goodness, for a minute I thought you were an airplane stewardess, standing there in that gaudy jacket.’
She’d felt instantly awkward and overdressed, and despite Cliff’s assurances later that the new jacket was a great choice, she’d never quite felt comfortable wearing it again. Nor had she forgiven Lyle Underwood for mocking it. Not being able to forget his sneer made her feel trivial, and she blamed him for that, too.
Mary Underwood continued to mystify her by being too nice to be Lyle’s wife. She’d been one of the parade of quietly sympathetic women bringing hot dishes to Alice’s house when calamity struck in the eighteenth year of her marriage. Working late stocking shelves in his hardware store after two of his clerks quit at once, Clifford Adams got a pain in his left arm and collapsed into a bin of number eight finish nails. A heart condition he had never suspected, combined with worry over the business, got Clifford carried to the emergency room and pronounced DOA.
Alice’s grief had been so acute she’d thought it was surely going to kill her. But she had two teenage daughters, so there was never a right day to die. She’d slogged through her widow’s chores – sold the store, saw her daughters through college. In time, she stopped feeling as if she was drudging through somebody else’s wretched life, and found her own path – more friends, better music, a wider reading list – enjoyed her daughters again, and was happy.
Through those years, despite living near her in a small town, Lyle Underwood never came close to making her list of reliable family friends, the kind you call when you lock yourself out of your house. If he happened by when she was stuck in the snow, she instinctively felt he would ridicule her driving skills first, and then perhaps, reluctantly, find somebody else to dig her out.
Sometime after Jim Tasker won his third election, Lyle Underwood achieved enough tenure to qualify for the lowest possible retirement stipend from the police department, took a lot of tests and transferred to the sheriff’s department. Alice remembered being surprised that such a reasonable person as Tasker would add a sour apple like Underwood to his barrel. But Lyle appeared to be thriving at the county, and in their few recent encounters he had not raked her with any new claw-marks, until today. In fact, she was giving him more thought right now than she had in years. Because why, she wondered as she drove haplessly around the jammed parking lot at Safeway, did he get so evasive today about who he was looking for in the Gandy Dancer’s Saloon?
She finally parked two blocks away, and walked back to find Eddie Parrish in the barely controlled chaos of a rush-hour checkout line at Safeway. He had a stoical face developed over years as an incident commander, looking after young firefighters who had not yet learned to watch their own backs. He stepped out of the line when Alice asked him to talk, promising ‘I’ll be quick’ to the person behind him.
They stood by the ice bins, where the shrill voices of tired housewives echoed off the cold metal doors. She asked him what he had done with the sneaker he got from Frank Navarro.
‘Actually, it was Clarence Simpson that brought it to me,’ Parrish said, ‘not that it makes any difference, I guess. I put it in a paper bag and took it to the sheriff’s office. That’s where all the evidence is supposed to go.’
‘Evidence. You think the sneaker belonged to the man who got burned?’
He shrugged. ‘I have no idea. But the sheriff said, “Nobody knows anything about this body, so assume anything you find is evidence and bring it to me.”’
‘Have you found anything else?’
‘Not on my turf. Couple guys working farther up Beaver Creek found a roach and lighter in a waterproof bag, I heard.’
‘Reefer stuff on the fire line? When would anybody have time to get high?’ Alice looked up from a note she was making and surprised a look of ironic amusement on Parrish’s face. It disappeared fast but she knew she’d revealed her naivety on the subject of toking. His expression was stolid again as he said, ‘The sheriff will know if there’s more.’
She thanked him and slogged back to her car. A small-town dweller all her life, she was indignant at having to walk so far. Uphill, too – damn! Why does everybody in this town have to come to Safeway at the same time?
Panting in the cold front seat, before she started the car, she thought, I bet Jim Tasker is still at work, and decided to see if she could confirm some of the facts in this story. She called the sheriff’s office, learned they were still hard at work, called the newsroom and got Stuart again.
He said, ‘Hey, don’t you know it’s quitting time?’
‘Yes, but I’m on my way to the sheriff’s office, to see the sneaker the firefighters found in a tree. You want to come along?’
‘A sneaker? Why is that exciting?’
‘Because the tree is just a few feet from where they found the burned body.’
‘Oh, well then – hell, yes, I’ll meet you there. Judy’s with me, we were just – well, she’ll want to see it, too. I’ll bring her along.’
He hung up while Alice was still wondering if bringing Judy was likely to turn off the gusher of information she seemed to have turned on. But when the sheriff saw them all come in, his tired face lit up. ‘Ah, Judy’s here too – good,’ he said. ‘She can tell us if she saw anybody up there in sneakers.’
‘In what?’ Stuart said. He looked at Judy with raised eyebrows. ‘Somebody wore sports shoes to the forest fire?’
‘Must have,’ Tasker said, and brought it out. ‘Look at this.’ It was smudged with black ashes, but was not just any old beat-up sneaker – obviously top-of-the-line sportswear with bronze grommets, and checked red-and-white laces with leather aglets.
‘Shee,’ Stuart said. ‘Wicked elegant.’
‘How do you suppose it got up in the tree?’
‘Well, I guess the fire really exploded in that gulch.’
But Judy was looking at the sneaker as if it had fangs. ‘Omigod,’ she said. ‘Dooley.’
Tasker said, ‘What?’
‘Not what, who. The shopper guy. He had a call-out from the editor of this new … um … weekly shopper, that’s what he called it. A freebie. In Bozeman. What was it called? I’ve got it in my files, back at the office. I’ll find it tomorrow.’
‘What would a reporter for a weekly shopper want at a forest fire?’
‘I asked him that, and
he said something like, “I know it’s offbeat, that’s the point. We want to get us some pro-file” – she drawled the word – “to jump-start the brand.” Coming out of Judy’s wholesome face, the imitation of uber-cool fashionisto was comical, and they all laughed.
But Judy was serious.
‘I said, “You don’t want to hike these trails in those shoes, do you?” He said, “What, you don’t like my Tommys?” Claimed he gets some crazy discount from Tommy Hilfiger because his magazine features the line. Anyway, he had all the right credentials, so I had him sign the roster and away we went. He stayed right with me until noon – never gave me any reason to be sorry I took him along. Then he signed out and rode back to town with the supply crew. I haven’t seen him since.’
‘But he could have come back by himself later?’
‘How would he get up there? Nobody would take him – I had his creds. And he sure didn’t seem like a risk-taker. Besides, where they found the body was well above where I took my group.’
‘Can you remember anything else he said?’
‘Not exactly. Just that he seemed … not fascinated by fire the way some people get … He was really quite horrified by everything he saw.’
Tasker said, ‘So you didn’t worry he might slip away?’
‘Not at all. He stuck to me like glue.’
‘Anything else about him?’
‘Well … he kept looking in the faces of everybody we met. I asked him if he was looking for anybody in particular. He said no, he was just curious as to what kind of a person becomes a firefighter. That’s all he asked questions about: what kind of people would sign up to take such risks?’
‘That’s a good question, isn’t it?’ Alice said. ‘What do you think, Stuart?’
‘They seem like anybody else to me – some nice guys, and some I wouldn’t want to be out with after dark. They’re all stronger than average, though. I’ve been climbing around these mountains all my life and it was all I could do to keep up with them.’
Burning Meredith Page 8
