The Price Of Silence

“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.