Discovering Duncan

“I guess so,” she lied. Being the youngest in a family with three brothers had been rough, but it did have its advantages when it came to disabling a car.

“And this happens a lot?” Annie asked.

“Off and on,” she said, looking ahead intently, and not chancing a look at the man close to her.

“Why haven’t you had it fixed?” Duncan asked—the same thing she would have asked.

She took a breath, taking her boss’s advice and sticking to the truth as much as possible when you weave a backstory on assignment. The theory was, you had less to remember, and less to fabricate. “The car was rewired when the engine was rebuilt, and I guess that the new wires were just that, new. And the car’s old. The match isn’t perfect.” He didn’t comment, so she guessed he bought the explanation. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and she tried to reroute the conversation. “You live in Silver Creek?”

“We both do,” Annie said before Duncan could say anything.

Annie was making this difficult, a talker who picked up when Duncan hesitated for any reason. So she tried to work around that by glancing at Duncan and making eye contact so he knew she was talking to him. “You like it?” she asked.

As she looked back at the road, he said, “Sure.”

One-word answers weren’t what she’d hoped for, so she regrouped and said, “You never told me your name.”

“Duncan,” he said, and that was that.

He didn’t say anything else, but Annie did, chattering on about Silver Creek and how she’d lived there all her life. She never said how she knew Duncan, but told her everything else about the town. She would have made a good tour guide, Lauren thought, trying not to be annoyed with the woman. She listened, waiting for Annie to stop. They were less than five miles from the town, and the glow from the ski slopes was starting to show in the night sky. Once they got there, she knew he’d be out of the car and gone before she could say goodbye.

“Duncan,” she said when Annie took a breath, trying to find something to say as she tapped the top of the steering wheel with the tip of her forefinger. Then she heard herself saying something totally ludicrous, but she couldn’t take it back once it was out there. “So, are you a highlander?”

“What?”

She looked at him, making a smile form on her lips. “A Scottish highlander. You’re in the right setting, a wild, cold country. Like the Highlands of Scotland, and your name, Duncan, it fits.”

“Sorry, my mother was Irish, and my father is…” He hesitated, then finally said, “Whatever he wants to be.”

D. R. Bishop would be whatever he wanted to be. That was dead on. “Good or bad?” she asked, hoping to get him to talk a bit about his father, but he gave his usual condensed one- or two-word answer.

“That depends.”

Thankfully, Annie had sat back in her seat, apparently gathering her strength for another bout of conversation. So Lauren kept going, trying to get Duncan to say something she could connect with. “So, are you a ski champion or something?”

“No.”

“I thought with all the snow and cold, that being a skier around here was a no-brainer.”

“There isn’t any snow,” Annie said, active again as she sat forward. “Not a flake. Nothing.”

Lauren glanced at the woman in her rearview mirror, then at Duncan. His eyes were narrowed on her, a look he shared with his father, that way of studying what was in front of him intently, and intensely. “There’s no snow?” she asked, the lament that had been everywhere on her short visit to Silver Creek.

Annie jumped in again, earnestly saying, “It’s the driest season yet, and the slopes are all being filled by machine.” She said that as if it were something horrible. “The skiing’s just awful, and the slopes are all but shut down.”

“What about that fancy resort?”

“They can have snow in July up there,” she said.

“I guess money buys just about anything,” she said, waiting to see how Duncan responded.

He didn’t. Annie did, giving a long tirade about how the resort had tried to eat up the town, and how it drew so many outsiders. But not once had Annie said anything personal to Duncan. There hadn’t been any “connection” between them, no touching, no smiles, nothing intimate at all. And Lauren wondered what they were to each other. Obviously they were close enough to go to Las Vegas together, but there was something missing between them.

“Do you need me to take you someplace to get your car towed?” she asked Duncan.

“Rollie’s Garage on the main street,” he said. “It’s just as you get into the old section of town.”

Lauren was tired of all this dancing around with words and decided time was short, so she went for a direct hit. “So, how long have you been in Silver Creek, Duncan?”

She felt Duncan look back at her, but it was Annie who spoke up once again, answering for him. “He walked in two, maybe three months ago. He came and never left.”

That told her nothing, except that there were three or four months unaccounted for. She stared ahead at the glow from the ski runs that was spreading in the dusky sky. Talking to Duncan with Annie around was next to useless, and she figured she had to take a different tack before the car stopped at Rollie’s Garage.

They were close to town now, going past the first scattering of houses digging into the foothills at the base of the soaring mountains on either side, their lights flashing in the night. Then more buildings, a huge stone structure to the right with a lit sign near the road, Silver Creek Clinic. A few small businesses were closing for the day at the beginning of the main street. The old-fashioned lampposts lined the way, and the Christmas lights twinkled everywhere.

“There’s Rollie’s,” Annie said, motioning just ahead of them to the left.

Lauren saw the sign set between the street and an island of gas pumps. Beyond the pumps was an older building with a false-wood fronted office and to the right, three service bays with their metal doors closed tightly. A neon red Closed sign shone in the window of the office.

“It’s closed,” Lauren said, grateful for the opportunity to buy more time and take Duncan to another garage.

“Just pull in. He’s there,” Duncan said, so she had no choice but to swing off the street and over toward the office.

She had to think fast because otherwise she’d lose even this weak connection. So she kept talking, making every attempt to draw him into a meaningful conversation. “The town is bigger than I thought it would be.”

“It’s huge,” Annie said. “Just huge. When I was growing up, there were only two hundred residents, and now look at it. Although it’s not all residents, not at all. I mean, I told you about the influx of all those people for skiing and the rich ones who go straight through and hide behind the walls at the inn.”

She’d told her that three times, Lauren thought, but who was keeping count? She stopped by the door of the closed offices, let the car idle and spoke off the top of her head to buy time. “I’ll wait for you.”

“You don’t have to,” Duncan said, his hand on the door handle. “We can walk.”

“Oh, no,” she said, glancing at Annie to include her in what she said, hoping she’d help her this time. “I can’t just drop the two of you off here.”

But Annie wasn’t an ally this time. “We’ll be just fine,” Annie said quickly, before Duncan could respond. “We’re just going down the street a bit.”

While Annie spoke, Duncan opened his door to get out, and Lauren did the same thing. She knew Annie was scrambling out of the back, then heard the door close, but she never took her eyes off Duncan who was striding to the offices. She caught up with him as he raised his hand to rap on the glass window.

“You don’t know for sure if anyone’s in there, and I feel responsible. It’s so cold, and—”

He looked down at her, his face shadowed by the lights behind him. “Rollie is here twenty-four seven.”

“But he’s not here. It looks empty,” she said.

“He lives out the back. He’ll be here,” he said and rapped on the window, harder this time.

“You could have whiplash or something.” She spoke quickly, and included Annie in what she was saying. “You could both have whiplash.”

He rotated his head, then shrugged. “Nothing.” And, damn it, Annie chimed in, cheerfully saying, “I’m just fine.”