The Price Of Silence

“What do you mean, gone? Gone where?”

“Underground. The Great Basin is jealous. No water that goes in ever gets out again. Just the way it is.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Todd said. She finished her espresso and picked up her purse. “I have to be going. It’s nice meeting you, Dr. Rawleigh. Thanks for the prescription. It was exactly right.”

“Please,” he said. “Just Sam. The little kids call me Dr. Rawleigh because their moms make them, then it turns into Dr. Sam, and before you know it, just plain old Sam. We’re all on first names here, even us outsiders.”

“You’re an outsider?”

“Going on twenty-one years now. Came, married a local girl, stayed, but I’m an outsider. An observer. You get used to it.”

Although Johnny looked a little uncomfortable, he did not dispute the doctor’s words. He shrugged and waved to the waitress for the check, and Todd left them at the table, bemused. So far everyone had treated her exactly the way she would have expected, kindly, with friendliness, without a trace of suspicion or distrust.

That night she called Barney and told him about her day and he told her about his, then said huskily, “The movers will come on Tuesday, and the minute they’re out the door, so am I.”

Just as huskily she said, “Good. Then I will try to be patient and not run away with the handsome doctor.”

When she hung up, she closed her eyes tight and drew in a long breath. She had never been so lonesome in her life.

Four

“And on your left, is the one and only Coombs greenhouse where at this very moment an acre of tomatoes is getting sunburned, or sun dried, or something. The Coombs girls are both in their sixties.” Todd was the tour guide, pointing out the must-see sights to Barney as they strolled. They had been there a month, but this was the first weekend free of settling-in chores. “I have to take pictures at their mother’s funeral, at least at the cemetery, on Monday. Half the county will be there, according to Ruth Ann.” Sobering, she said. “Ruth Ann wrote a very touching obituary. She’s really a fine writer. Anyway, coming up on the right is Miss Lizzy’s gift shop, where you will find plates with the map of Oregon, Chief Joseph’s last stand, some of the loveliest carved or sculpted birds I’ve ever seen, a rendition of the Oregon Trail on bark—” She frowned at Barney, who had started to laugh.

“Sir, this is a serious business.”

“You’re babbling.”

“I know. You have to remember that as one of four children, and just a girl, no one ever paid any attention to anything I said, so I stopped saying much of anything until I found you—Oh, look. There’s Sam’s Explorer. He’s going into the rock shop. Come on, you can meet him. The owner is Jacko. No last name. Just Jacko.” She hurried him along.

During the past month, she had made it a point to enter every business establishment in town and introduce herself. Her cause, she had explained to Barney, was to be known so that if anything happened, someone would think to tell her. Also, she had said, Shinny, their star reporter, didn’t know the difference between a grocery list and a news story. So far the most compelling bit of news he had reported had been the town-council meeting; they were debating where on the highway to put a traffic light. North end of town, or at Crest Loop? The debate, she had added, had been raging for two years.

Jacko’s shop was a single room with aisles barely wide enough to maneuver in, crowded on both sides by bins of rocks, baskets of rocks, a long counter so cluttered with rocks there was never enough space to fill out a receipt, a showcase filled with cut and polished rocks, and another one with rocks that had been carved, inset into wooden frames, rested on black pedestals, or simply tumbled about. An agate-framed clock said nine fifteen, and always said nine fifteen, but its snowflake agate was beautiful. It was dark blue with white flecks that looked adrift throughout. In the rear of the shop was a workbench crowded with lapidary equipment.

When Todd and Barney entered the shop, Sam was leaning on the counter, where he and Jacko were examining something. Both men looked up.

“Hi,” Todd said. “This is Barney. My husband.” After the introductions, they all looked at a geode on the counter. The hollow rock was as big as a grapefruit, and had been cut into two pieces.

“I never saw one that big,” Todd said. “It’s awesome.” It was neatly halved, the cavity filled with glittering crystals of quartz streaked with pale blue. She looked at Jacko. “Is it for sale?”

“Ask him,” Jacko said, jerking his thumb at Sam. “He found it and sawed it open. He brings in stuff like that to rile me.” Jacko was short, no more than five feet five, and his head was totally bald, but he had a great beard with enough hair that if it had been amply divided between his pate and his chin there would have been hair left over.

Barney was examining the geode. “Wow, that is a beauty. How did you manage to saw it like that?”

Two big crystals had been split almost exactly in half, and the cut edges smoothed and polished to a mirror finish.

“Just luck,” Sam said. “No way of knowing what you’re going to find until you open one of them, and I happened to hit it right. I thought I’d have them made into bookends, juniper wood, curved like a wave breaking with these set in. If Thomas Bird will carve the stands, they’ll make a pretty pair.”

“A fantastic pair,” Barney said. “Where did you find it?”

Jacko snorted and Sam grinned, then said, “Does a fisherman tell where he caught the fifteen-pound trout? Out there.” He waved his hand generally toward the vast desert.

“You have equipment to cut rocks and polish them, all that?” Todd asked.

Jacko made his peculiar snort of laughter again. “He’s got stuff that makes mine look like a kid’s first tool kit.” He motioned to Todd to follow and started to move away, saying, “He had to build a special room to house his equipment. Look, I got some new crystals in last week.”

While she looked at the new crystals, Barney and Sam chatted about the desert and rock hounds. “It gets in the blood,” Sam said. “You always think that next time you’ll find something even better, or you find a streak and have to force yourself to leave it, hoping no one else will come along before you get back to it. Come up to the house sometime, let me show you my collection.”

Todd shook her head at Jacko. “I’m waiting for a clearance sale.” Turning to Sam she said, “We took that hike last weekend, up to the start of the creek. It’s beautiful up there. Thanks for telling me about it.” She glanced at her watch. “We should be going,” she said to Barney. They were on their way for a cookout with Jan and Seth MacMichaels.

Outside again, heading toward the manufactured houses where Jan and Seth lived, she said, “Chief Ollie Briscoe began calling Seth Sonny, and now almost everyone does, and he hates it. So don’t call him Sonny.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of it until you told me not to. Now, I don’t know. What if it pops out?”

“Ollie also said he’s a loaded gun looking for someone to shoot. So watch it. That’s all I can say.”

They both laughed. Jan worked at Safeway and Seth was fulfilling a two-year contract as a police officer in Brindle, his first job after finishing police academy. Eventually he wanted to work as a investigator for the state police, she told Barney, but he was too young and green, and with the budget cuts they had endured, the department wasn’t hiring anyway.

It was unfortunate, Todd thought a few minutes later, but Seth did look like someone who should be called Sonny. He was tall and broad, built like a football player, a high-school varsity player, with a lot of reddish-blond hair, a big open face, and candid blue eyes. He was sunburned, as if he never really tanned, but burned again and again. His nose was peeling. Jan was dimply and cute with masses of dark curly hair, heavy eye makeup, and a Barbie-doll figure.

They were seated under an awning at the rear of the house that was radiating heat, as was the concrete slab of a deck. “Bake in the summer, freeze in the winter,” Jan said. “I can’t tell you how jealous I was when I heard you got a real house. It wasn’t available when we were looking.” She took a long drink of beer from a can. Seth was grilling buffalo burgers. “When we get back out in the real world,” she said, “I intend to go back to school. I think it’s terrific that you’ve hung in there like you have.”

“To study what?” Barney asked.

“I don’t know. Something to do with people. No computers, and no numbers.”

Barney grinned and held up his beer can in a salute. “My sentiments exactly.”

“These are about ready,” Seth said. “Hon, you want to bring out that tray?”

Jan stood up and went inside, came back with a tray of salads from Safeway. “Chow,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind store salad. It’s too hot in there to cook. Thank God, it’s not as hot as last month, and by this time next month we’ll be freezing. That’s Brindle for you.”

After a bite or two of the buffalo burger, Todd said it was delicious. “Have you given up on beef?”

“Not if it’s local,” Seth said. He told them about a butcher shop out of Bend, local beef only. “If it comes from Grace Rawleigh’s ranch, you know it’s going to be great. Have you met her yet? She’s a direct descendant of the town’s founder, Joe Warden.”

They hadn’t. “You’re in for a treat,” Jan said with more than a touch of malice. “And now that her daughter Lisa’s in town for a visit, it’s like a two-scooper treat.”

Seth gave her a stern look and she grinned and shrugged. “Just repeating what I’ve heard. I haven’t met Lisa,” she said to Todd. “But from talk I hear at the store, she’s a bundle of fun. A ballbuster, if you get what I mean.”

Seth put his can down. “Jan, cut it out.”

“Okay. I’ll keep it clean. She and her ex are having a big fight over the spoils of a divorce, her third. From what I’ve heard, Lisa doesn’t feel like she’s met a man until she’s slept with him. And she’s a serial marrier who believes in marital freedom.” She rolled her eyes and grinned at Seth. “Clean enough?”

“Jesus,” he muttered. Before Jan could say more, he said, “Lisa lives down in L.A. She’s into movies, maybe produces or directs, something like that, not as an actress. She comes back every few years for a visit and sometimes, they tell me, there’s trouble while she’s here. And that’s all we know about her.” He gave Jan a warning look.

For a moment she met his look with an expression of defiance. Then she averted her gaze. “Plus she has mysterious plans for Brindle. She’s thirty-five. And that’s really all we know about her.”

But it wasn’t all, Todd thought. A new tension was in the air, the silence uncomfortable. “Are Sam and Grace still married?” she asked. “They don’t seem to live together.”

“They don’t,” Jan said promptly. “He lives in that big ugly stone house on Crest Loop, the one that looks like a gargoyle looming over the town. It’s Grace’s house but she hangs out at the ranch when she isn’t traveling. She’s gone a lot and hardly ever gets over here except to lay down the law about this or that. The hotel is hers, too. There’s a general manager or something who runs it. Mort Cline.”

“It seems to me that in such a small community, where everyone knows all about everyone else, there shouldn’t be any crime to speak of or any need to lay down the law,” Barney said.

Seth kept his gaze on a bun he was slathering with mustard as he said, “Just last week I had to break up a brawl. Three eight-year-olds in the park going at it. And yesterday I had to go tell an old man to stop burning trash outside. A real crime wave.” He put a burger on the bun and bit into it.

“Aha, so there’s more to Brindle than meets the eye,” Barney commented.

Jan looked at him, suddenly all traces of cuteness gone, her eyes narrowed, her face pinched. “Brindle is rotten to the core,” she said. “There’s something really foul about this place. I hate it!”

Seth put his hand on her arm and she drew back. “Sorry. Anyone, more beer?”

Walking home later, Todd asked, “What did you make of them?”

“Cute couple.”

“Come on, don’t be coy.”

He had his arm around her waist and hers was around him, but when they turned off First Street, lit with street lamps and shop windows, onto darker Juniper, his hand slid down to rest on her buttock. He said he liked to feel her muscles as she moved.

“Okay. She’s miserable, and he’s chomping at the bit, bored out of his skull. Enough?”

“More,” she said. “Something to do with Lisa. I guess we’re too new to let us in on whatever it is. Are you bored here?”

“No time to be bored.”

She believed that. He was working hard, and to her eye he was more contented than she had ever seen him.

“What about you?” he asked.

“No time,” she said. “Since the newspaper is in pretty good shape now, I’ll also be working with Ruth Ann on the centennial edition. Scanning stuff, enhancing old photographs. My kind of thing. And tomorrow we’ll meet the alluring Lisa and Grace. I’ll be watching you, kiddo. No funny stuff.”

He laughed and squeezed her bottom.

Seth scraped dishes as Jan loaded the dishwasher. “You can’t leave it alone, can you?” he asked, opening a can of beer.

“I thought he should be warned, or maybe she should be. Whatever.”

“You know nothing happened.”

“Not her fault.”

“Jesus, let’s drop it.”

They had been in Brindle three months when he’d seen a Corvette, speeding on the highway, make a squealing turn onto First and drive into the hotel parking lot. He had followed, and the memory of the encounter was still vivid.

“Miss, may I see your driver’s license?” he had asked the young woman walking toward the lobby. He already had his ticket book in his hand.

She stopped and turned, a thin young woman, blond, blue-eyed, who looked him over, then smiled slightly. “I’m afraid I don’t have it with me,” she said. “Are you the new policeman? Are you going to arrest me?” She held out her hands, as if waiting for handcuffs, smiling. “Or maybe we could go somewhere and talk it over. Privately.”

He backed up a step, her invitation as blatant as a prostitute’s in any red-light district. He felt his face flushing, heating. Then Ollie Briscoe, the chief, came from the lobby.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, drawing near them.

“He’s going to arrest me,” Lisa said. “Take me to a back room somewhere and…interrogate me.” She kept her gaze on Seth, her smile deepening.

“She was doing sixty coming into town, fifty pulling in the lot,” Seth said.

Ollie Briscoe waved him away. “You run along, Sonny. I’ll handle this.”

“Sonny,” Lisa said. “How adorable. I’ll be seeing you, Sonny.” She gave him another long appraising look, nodded, and repeated, “I’ll be seeing you.”

He had avoided her for the several days that she was in town, and now here she was back again. He took a long drink from his can, wishing that he had not told Jan about the incident. Her comment had been that if Lisa got anywhere near him, Jan would pull every hair out of Lisa’s head one by one, either before or after she scratched out her eyes.

Five

The alluring Lisa was a disappointment, Todd decided when they met at Ruth Ann’s house on Sunday. Lisa was too thin, brittle in a curious way with jerky movements, and if her jeans had been any tighter, she would have been immobilized. She had on high-heeled boots and a red silk shirt that could have been buttoned higher. Her hair was bottle platinum-blond, styled in a way that was meant to suggest no styling, pulled back over her ears, unevenly cut. When she met Barney, she held his hand too long and swayed toward him, moved in too close.

“Do you ride?” she asked. Her voice was low, throaty.

He extracted his hand, shaking his head. “Nope. Never was on a horse in my life.”

“What a shame. You’d be so handsome on a horse.”

Todd suppressed a smile as Barney moved out of Lisa’s range. She realized that Jan had been warning them about Lisa. But Grace Rawleigh, Lisa’s mother, was the real shock, she thought. She looked much older than Sam, and she was fighting it. Her hair was strawberry blond and carefully styled. Todd suspected more than one face-lift in her past, and the makeup she wore did little to hide the lines at her eyes or the vertical grooves on her forehead, and nothing at all for the look of disapproval that turned her mouth down. She smiled briefly at Todd, but the smile did not get beyond her thin lips.

Todd was relieved to see Johnny’s wife enter the living room. She liked Carol Colonna, a comfortable, handsome woman who had a very successful real-estate business in Bend. Carol smiled at her, then said, “Maria says brunch is up and waiting in the dining room.”

Ruth Ann was watching her guests with an amused expression. She had seen Lisa’s pass at Barney, and Todd’s dismissal of it as well as Barney’s polite withdrawal. And she liked the way Todd had behaved, like a well-bred, confident young woman. She knew Sam had watched his stepdaughter go into her act with annoyance. But Sam was always annoyed with Lisa, and usually did not even try to conceal it. He and Grace had exchanged brief nods when she had arrived, as if of recognition, and that was that. At least Grace had not found a reason to yell at him. That would have been awkward. Families, she thought, and led the way into the dining room.

She had told Maria to keep it simple, but Maria had done exactly as she pleased. Planked salmon, thin slices of beef in a sauce in a chafing dish, spiced shrimp, fruit salad, green salad, a platter of cheeses…It didn’t matter. The leftovers would make a good dinner. The food was on a long table, buffet style, and they started to help themselves.

“You’ll have to come out to the ranch,” Lisa was saying to Barney, her hand on his arm. “I’ll teach you to ride. We’ll have a real western barbecue. Next Saturday. Okay?”

He grinned and shook his head, moving as he did on down the buffet. “Thanks, but I’m afraid not. I’ll be in Corvallis until late Sunday.”

“Another time,” she said. “I’ll get you out there and on a horse. You’ll see.”

He filled his plate and went to the dining table where he sat next to Todd.

Johnny seated himself next to Lisa at the round table. “When do we announce it?” he asked her.

“You mean formally? As in the newspaper? Or just start a rumor?”

“Formally,” he said, turning to Todd and Barney. “We’re talking about turning Brindle into a destination resort. I’m building the mountain resort, and Lisa and Grace are considering a new hotel across the creek from Warden House. We’ll have wilderness hikes, skiing in winter, desert treks.”

“A mammoth heated swimming pool, a water slide, a wave machine,” Lisa said. “Live music, a dance floor. And we’ll have a dude ranch out at the ranch. We’ll coordinate it all, have a theme destination resort. We’ll put Brindle on the map.” She picked at her food, but ate little. “I’m all for putting up false fronts on the buildings on First Street, and maybe on Spruce, too, to recreate an old western town. I still think we should have horses in the park.” She put her fork down and said, “Llamas! We’ll have to use llamas as pack animals for the wilderness hikes. People love llamas!”

“You’ll have a part to play,” Johnny said to Todd. “We’ll need brochures, fancy proposals, all sorts of things. We’ll work that out at the press.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Lisa said. “We’ll need a real ad agency. I know just who to get when we’re ready.”

Todd felt Barney’s leg nudging hers, and on the other side of her Sam said, “Last time Lisa was in town she had a scheme to bottle water and start a business to compete with Evian. Now it’s Disney in her crosshairs.”

Lisa gave him a contemptuous look. “Some of us have visions, dreams. This hellhole of a town is going to shrink down to nothing and blow away in the wind unless someone does something. Not that it would be a great loss.”

Sam put his napkin on the table and stood up. “Thanks, Ruth Ann. Marvelous brunch as usual. But I have a patient I’m monitoring closely. I have to run.”

He nodded at the others and walked out. For a moment there was silence, then Carol began to tell Grace about a new development being planned on the outskirts of Bend.

A little while later, Todd felt Barney’s hand take hers under the table, and squeeze three distinct and separate times. She suppressed a smile and returned the signal. They did not linger much longer.

When they left, Lisa and Johnny were huddled talking and Ruth Ann looked tired, or perhaps simply bored. Grace and Carol had begun to talk about a dude ranch in a way that implied Grace was serious about it.

The day was pleasantly cool. They had walked up, and now took their time walking down Ruth Ann’s winding drive to Crest Loop. The road was narrow, with a gorge on one side, and the mountain rising like basalt stair steps meant for a giant on the other. At a curve before the footbridge, there was a view of the entire town, pretty and postcard peaceful. The creek, fifteen feet down, tumbled and splashed over rocks in a little waterfall, causing a spray that glittered like diamonds in the sunlight.

“What did you make of them?” Todd asked.

“Grace is an embittered woman,” Barney said. “You didn’t feel anything around Lisa, did you?”

“Like what?”

“Or sense anything either, I guess,” he said. “You don’t have the right receptors. She walks in a cloud of pheromones. And she knows it.”

“Well, there’s no love lost in that family, that’s for sure,” Todd said. “I don’t think Sam even spoke to Grace. And you saw the look Lisa gave him.”

They reached the footbridge and crossed the rushing creek, on its way to nowhere, she thought. All that busy rushing only to vanish in the desert. “Do you think they’ll carry through with plans for a resort here?”

“No idea.” He laughed and took her hand. “But no matter, you’re out of it. She wants a real ad agency.”

“And you would look handsome on a horse.”

He laughed harder. Then he said, “I wonder why Ruth Ann invited us.”

“She said so that we could meet a few more people,” Todd said after a moment.

He said, “Um,” in a noncommittal way. “Well, this life in the fast lane, high society, upper-crust brunches, it’s taking a toll. I feel a nap coming on.”

They were skirting the park where some boys were flying kites.

“Why are we walking so fast?” Todd asked.

“All those pheromones floating around. They gave me ideas.”

This time she laughed.

After Grace and Lisa left, while Carol helped Maria carry dishes to the kitchen, Johnny turned to Ruth Ann. “Why did you invite Todd and Barney? You knew I wanted some time with you and Lisa. We have to talk about this idea.”

“I got the impression that it was all settled. Is there anything in writing yet?”

“No. This is preliminary, the planning stage. We’ll get to that.”

Carol came back and picked up the last chafing dish. “I won’t be long,” she said to Johnny. “I want to get that shrimp recipe.”

When she was out of the room again, Ruth Ann said, “Johnny, just a suggestion. Watch your step. Don’t get too wound up with Lisa.”

He stiffened. “What exactly does that mean?”

“I think you know as well as I do what I mean.” For a moment neither of them moved, then he jerked around, faced away from her. “I know, Johnny. I’ve always known. And I know what it did to you before.”

“We might become business associates, Mother. Nothing more than that. Business.”

“Good,” she murmured. “I’ll see if I’m needed in the kitchen.”

If she had been honest, Ruth Ann reflected after all her guests had left, she would have told Johnny that she had invited Barney and Todd to protect him. She smiled slightly as she imagined his indignant reply. But it would have been truthful. She had seen Barney and Todd together enough times to consider Barney safe from Lisa, but she was not at all certain Johnny was. Lisa had snared him once when she was twenty and he was single and twenty-seven, home from college, home from a couple of years of knocking around, uncertain what he intended to do. He would have followed her to California, Ruth Ann knew, but Lisa had met an actor and no longer had time for Johnny. He had been devastated, possibly suicidal for a time. Within a year, he and Carol were married with a child on the way.