The Price Of Silence

“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.