Crime Times Two Page 3

  Honey sighed, her ample bosom rising and falling. “I can only imagine.” She frowned at the rabbit in disapproval, as though these things were its fault. “With my kids, the worry was someone would tell them the truth about Santa Claus. Today, they’re talking about mass murder.”

  “Oh,” Meredith exclaimed, snatching her fingers away from the hutch. “I hope not. Just movies.”

  “You’ve heard the saying ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ Kids are little sponges. They do and say whatever they’re exposed to.”

  Meredith wondered if she should convince Jamie to change the rabbit’s name to something less lethal. Her headstrong child was unlikely to be persuaded now she’d settled on a name her friends were talking about.

  “Heard from our sheriff lately?”

  Meredith fumbled the bag of rabbit food she’d picked up, then dropped to the ground. She felt foolish for being clumsy at the mention of Curtis. She grabbed the bag and filled the rabbit’s dish. “He stops by from time to time. Why?”

  “Oh, no reason,” her friend said, an exaggerated innocent tone to her voice. “No reason at all.”

  “Honey,” warned Meredith.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “We’re just friends, okay?”

  The woman rolled her eyes. “I know. I was just wondering how friendly things had gotten.”

  The thing was, Meredith wasn’t exactly sure. She and Curtis had settled into a routine of sorts. He would visit, they’d have a cup of coffee, and then take the kids out for a walk. He taught Jamie the names of mountain peaks and warned her of the dangers from rattlesnakes and ticks. Sometimes, he performed minor chores around the house, showing Meredith how to replace the windshield wipers on the car or installing smoke alarms in the bedrooms. The last time he visited, he cleaned out a pellet stove in the corner of the living room, removed a dead bat that had dropped down the flue, and taught her how to prime and light the stove. They would chat about her class or his job or the kids. But…that was all. Every once in a while, she would catch him staring at her but he’d quickly glance away.

  There was a spark between them from the first, but of course she'd been married at the time. After Brian was murdered, Curtis questioned her as his prime suspect. It was an awkward start to a relationship, to say the least. It was true she’d reflected about the appropriate time to wait after a spouse’s murder…a spouse she feared. At one point, she told him she needed to learn to stand on her own two feet before starting anything new with another man. She was gun shy and worried about the effect a new relationship would have on her children. He respected those words, a fact that both frustrated her and made her care for him all the more. He was infuriatingly decent.

  “Just friends,” she repeated, trying to keep irritation out of her voice.

  In recent weeks, with Jamie in school and Atticus settled in a new routine, she debated anew whether it was fair to force one more change upon them. She and Curtis were stuck in a holding pattern for now, and she wondered if he was just as tired as she was at waiting. Maybe, for him, the spark was fading.

  Haven’t I learned by now I can’t have it all?

  The two women turned back toward the house, walking slow and enjoying the mid-fall afternoon. Evenings cooled as soon as the sun touched the western mountaintops, conveying a rapid chill to the nights, but the days were warm and still. Meredith wished she could hold her breath and keep the world from moving forward. Her life wasn’t perfect, but she didn’t need perfect. I could be happy in this place forever, she realized.

  Honey stopped in the driveway next to her car and regarded the property. “You’ve done a lot here in a short time. The house looks better than it has in years.”

  Meredith basked in the compliment. She worked hard to fix up the run-down house. She’d not only painted inside, she also ripped out all the moldy carpet and scrubbed the old wood floors. New curtains, a vegetable garden and several new shingles on the rotting roof helped make the house appear lived in. There was so much more to do. Like new paint on the outside, replacing the peeling kitchen linoleum and re-caulking the windows. She tried to ignore a strange moldy smell emanating from inside the walls somewhere, but time and money limited the pace of repairs. She’d lived in worse places. At least they had a roof over their heads. Determined to give her children a stable home, she refused to behave like her mother: fleeing each place as soon as a challenge arose.

  Honey opened her car door and paused. “That bunny mama. You know she’s pregnant, right?”

  Meredith felt a sinking sensation as Honey backed down the drive. Pregnant. She thought Grendel was just pleasingly plump, as pet rabbits should be. “Pregnant,” she repeated, twisting her lips to one side. “Right.”

  What in the world was she going to do with a herd of rabbits?

  Chapter Three

  Rain pelting on the windows woke Meredith before the alarm sounded. When the sound finally registered, it gave her a twinge of anxiety about the coming winter weather. The brief warm summer lingered in her memory, with its long lazy days, nightfall not descending until nearly ten p.m.

  Soon enough, snow would follow the rain, turning the hills white and blanketing her world into a polar freeze. Adjusting to the idea of layers of clothing, heavy blankets and cold noses was difficult. She didn’t want to think about how she would manage driving Jamie to school and herself to work, as well as going somewhere to get her classwork done. All this in a beater of a car that she couldn’t afford to replace on a minimum wage job that didn't cover the bills.

  Rising from bed, she murmured her new mantra: “One day at a time. One day at a time.”

  The words calmed her and kept her functioning when she started to feel overwhelmed. She learned the technique from a book she found at the Twin Lakes library on coping with stress and grief. Those two words summed up her life: grief at losing a life she’d thought was real, grief at losing her marriage and husband, grief for her children growing up under the shadow Brian left, and stress over everything else.

  “One day at a time,” she chanted while dressing for the day and making coffee. By the time Jamie and Atticus were up, she was ready for the day.

  ****

  Driving up the mountain took long enough to shake loose the role of a mother with two young children and take on the persona of a college student. For a while, she was young and free, racing up the road to an exciting future. Jamie was at school and Atticus was at Honey’s. One by one, troubles fell away as the narrow road climbed higher, twisting and turning toward the darkening sky.

  The rain tailed off into an off-and-on drizzle, making the roads just slick enough that Meredith had to focus on driving to Twin Lakes rather than her problems or dreams. The winding road hugged the steep mountain as she drove its twining path and climbed higher, and higher still, seeing the terrain fill with emerald pines shooting straight up from the side of the mountain to the slate gray sky. Once, she braked hard and swerved when, coming around a curve, two deer appeared in the road. Her heart leaped as she missed hitting them, not quite knowing how. In the rear view mirror, she saw them trot into the underbrush, flashing their tails and white hindquarters, innocent of how close they’d all come to death.

  Her mood was tense again when she arrived at the library, made worse by seeing a light frosting of snow on the ground. Of course, she thought, Twin Lake’s elevation would get icy weather sooner than Hay City, which lay down in the long valley.

  “Snow already?” she asked by way of conversation with the librarian when she strode in, stamping the wetness off her shoes.

  “Huh.” The woman shifted the graphic novel on her lap, vibrant color illustrations leaping off the page. “This is nothing. You lowlanders.”

  Meredith paused at the counter. She hadn’t meant to really engage the librarian in conversation but being called a ‘lowlander’ seemed to be some kind of insult. She made herself smile at the woman in a cheerful manner and considered whether introductions were in order. “It was just an obse
rvation. This will be my first true winter out here.”

  “Well, buckle up, dearie,” the librarian said with a mirthless chuckle. “Your little car out there isn’t going to cut it on our roads much longer.”

  The car was visible from the narrow, front window. The vehicle was old and dented, with cracks spider-webbed across the windshield, and protested like a crotchety geezer when woken in the morning. The car wasn’t likely to cut it on any roads at all soon. She couldn’t risk sliding off the road. She didn’t have medical or car insurance. The choice came down to insurance for the car or heat for her house; medical insurance or groceries. Which, she reminded herself, is why she was at the library: to be able to provide a layer of security for herself and her children. For now, they had a home, a car, food, and each other. It was a start.

  “I’d better get to work then.” She turned from the librarian, another person to list in High County’s “hostile” column and headed to the computers.

  One relieved glance told her no one else was at the bank of machines in the back. She settled in, determined to keep her mind on chemistry for the next hour and was able to fly through the online quiz without interruptions. She shuffled her notebook pages, proud to be a hard-working college student despite the challenges in her life. Her mother would be proud. There was only her homework left to type into the system, and she’d be done.

  A figure appeared at her shoulder. “I was hoping you’d be here.”

  Heart sinking, Meredith swiveled on her chair. The man who’d bugged her before stood next to her. The man who talked non-stop about paranoid fears and whose wife might be trying to kill him.

  She spoke quickly before he could say anything more. “I really can’t talk today. I’m in a hurry.”

  “I don’t have much time left either,” he countered in a morose voice. “You’re the only one I don’t know in this town. Who doesn’t know my wife, I mean. You’re the only one I can talk to.”

  She shook her head at this backward reasoning. “You need to talk to the authorities…or one of your own friends.” She wondered, as she spoke, whether he had any friends. His slovenly appearance would turn off even the most loyal of buddies.

  “No, no, they all know her too well,” he protested. “They’d never believe it of her.”

  In Meredith’s mind, that was a character endorsement of sorts for his wife, if indeed she existed. From his description, she was religious, worked hard at a stable job, had friends who believed in her, including whatever local authorities there must be in Twin Lakes.

  He scooted up a chair next to her and leaned in close. “There’s just the sheriff. You know him.”

  She sat back. How did everyone know who she was and think they knew everything about her? Wasn’t there any sense of privacy in these parts? She put her hands up, warding him off, and shook her head again. “I just come here to get my work done. Please. This is very important to me.”

  He prattled on as though she hadn’t said anything at all. “Something changed. I don’t know what, but I feel like I’m losing my wife. I’ve probably lost her already.”

  She considered getting up and leaving. There simply wasn’t the time to be this guy’s confessor. Her homework was due, though, and she’d already driven a long way to get to this library. One way or another, she needed to finish before she left.

  She tried to sound firm but heard the hesitation in her voice. “I really have to get my work done.”

  He leaned in even closer and spoke in a hushed tone, breathing out the fumes of a tuna sandwich breakfast. “You were married.”

  The remark cut deep. People who knew she’d been married had to also know Brian was murdered. They’d been newcomers in a place where nothing much changed from year to year. Married and murdered; those were the two things people knew about Brian. The two things were intertwined with her name too, one and the same.

  “I was,” she admitted faintly.

  He plowed ahead, barely hearing her. “You know what this is like, to love someone.”

  She sat unmoving. She didn’t know about this kind of love, the kind where you were desperate about losing the other person, about wanting them to be there with you forever. Would this kind of love ever come into her life, she wondered. The thought made her sad. She was twenty-four, with two children and lived in the middle of nowhere; when would she have time or the opportunity to meet anyone again?

  Curtis, a voice whispered in her mind. She tried to shut the door on this thought, but it shouldered in. He didn’t signify in her life. They were just friends and, anyway, it was too soon. Way too soon. Brian had been murdered just seven months ago. Even though their marriage soured long before, her emotions were still raw. It was still possible to mourn a husband who hurt her, who was unkind and denigrating. Her heart was wounded in so many ways.

  Still. She liked him. She got flutters in her stomach every time he was near, but who knew if he’d be interested when her heart was ready. He could be married with kids of his own by then.

  The man took advantage of her silence and forged ahead with his story. “We’ve known each other since the fourth grade. Dated since junior high, engaged right out of high school. We’ll be twenty years married next spring. We’re going to Hawaii to celebrate. I’m planning on going deep-sea fishing for swordfish. Brooke wants to go to a luau.”

  Meredith nodded absently. Would he ever stop? She glanced over at the counter to the gun-packing librarian. Was it possible to ask for help? Perhaps the man could be redirected to tell the librarian his story. Or maybe the librarian already heard his concerns. She turned to her computer and started typing in her homework as quickly as she could.

  Undeterred, he continued relating his childhood sweetheart story, now gone sour. “She’ll never divorce me,” he asserted. “We dealt with some troubles a couple of years ago. There was someone else…but…the church doesn’t approve of…that kind of behavior.”

  She couldn’t help turning to him at the remark. “I don’t think churches approve of murder either.”

  He held up a shaking finger. “Here’s the thing. There’s confession. She can be absolved if she confesses a mortal sin. But she can’t confess to divorce. The Pope is the only one who can undo a marriage. In the church, it’s better to murder than to divorce.”

  She nearly choked. She didn’t know much about religion but she was pretty confident on this point. “I doubt that very much. No priest would stand for your reasoning.”

  She saved her work on the computer, logged off and stood. She’d had enough of this conversation. The man was nuts. Her homework would have to be finished somewhere else. Meredith grabbed her purse and papers. “I’m not your confessor, either. Please stop telling me your personal problems. I have plenty of my own to deal with.”

  ****

  She wasn’t a rude person.

  The pines flashed by as she raced back down the mountain, taking the curves expertly now. If she made it to Curtis’ office soon enough, she’d be able to use his computer and finish her homework before she needed to pick up Jamie and Atticus.

  She hated to ask him to use his work computer, wasn’t sure using government equipment was even appropriate or legal. But there were few options available, and Curtis was likely to say yes.

  I’m not a rude person, she thought again. She hadn’t wanted to hurt the man’s feelings. His pleading affected her more than she wanted to admit. His tale of a wife who could be considering murder sounded too much like her own story. In fact, this was her story.

  The light snow from earlier had melted off and afternoon sun beat against the windshield. Meredith felt warm and safe in the sanctuary of her car. She still couldn’t get used to the idea of being safe, having a home and car, not worrying about Brian and his temper. Hay City was remote from the world at large, a haven from the troubles of big cities. She tried to push away the fear this new evolving life of hers would evaporate at any moment. The man in the library made her feel that way, with his talk of marriage
and murder. The ramblings reminded her of way-too-recent tribulations. Whether or not his wife wanted to kill him was his problem. His wife probably did want to murder him. Didn’t most wives think about it at least once? But telling him this probably wouldn’t be helpful.

  Ugh. Stop this! I have enough worries of my own without thinking about the problems of strangers.

  Next time, she would buy earplugs. Then he couldn’t interrupt her. He couldn’t hijack her library time, homework time, and serenity with his insistence she counsel him. She wouldn’t let another man push her around.

  ****

  “You’re leaving?”

  Curtis dropped his keys, startled at her abrupt greeting. She noticed with dismay he was in the process of locking the door to Hay City’s only official city building. Tall, sandy-haired and solid-looking with an easy grin that melted her heart, he was the youngest sheriff in the history of Hay City. He wore a silver star on a chamois vest like something out of an old western movie, and she knew he took great pride in his role. As sheriff, he shared the small office with the city clerk and the mayor, a rancher who held most of his office hours in Crusty Connery’s bar.

  He grimaced and picked up the keys. “Accident down at milepost thirty-seven. A semi jack-knifed. No one hurt, fortunately.”

  Meredith bit her lip, wondering if she should leave. The options for computers with Internet were limited though in Hay City. If she didn’t turn her homework in on time, she’d flunk the assignment.

  He peered at her. “Anything wrong? I need to get down there, but if anything’s wrong…”

  “No, nothing,” she said, and right away chastised herself for being a coward. Of course, she needed something. She gestured with her schoolwork and took a step toward him. “Well, one thing, I guess. If it’s okay, I was hoping to use your office computer, to send my homework in. I only have about an hour left to get the work done, before I need to get Jamie from school.”