Rock Bottom (Imogene Museum Mystery #1) Page 4
Mac cordons off the stand-up bar at the far end of the tavern on Sundays to open up the rest of the large room for families. He doesn’t have a license to serve food beyond peanuts, pretzels and tortilla chips smothered in nacho cheese sauce from a #10 can, so everyone brings a hot dish to share and buys soft drinks, coffee or lemonade to thank Mac for his hospitality. I’m not sure the arrangement is strictly legal, but liquor license inspectors are rare in these parts and don’t work on Sundays anyway.
I pulled in beside the Levine family minivan. Pastor Mort was helping his wife, Sally, unload a crockpot and cooler. Sally waved.
“Hey, Meredith,” Pastor Mort said, sweating slightly. He’s pudgy, and I know why. Sally’s a great cook. “How’ve you been?”
“Good. Busy.”
“I heard you got a shipment at the museum. When can we see the new exhibit?” Sally asked.
“Thursday.”
“Wonderful! I’ll be there with my class.” Sally teaches kindergarten, an energetic jumble of five-year-olds.
I grinned. “I think you’ll find it very educational.”
I set my casserole on the designated table and found an empty seat next to Sheriff Marge in front of the Seattle Seahawks game.
Sheriff Marge was in uniform, but she’s always in uniform. With only three deputies besides herself to cover Sockeye County, she’s never really off-duty.
I can’t tell if the bullet-proof vest functions like a corset, lacing the sheriff’s torso into that thick, tubular shape, or if it just adds several inches of armored padding around what’s already there. Everything about Sheriff Marge is utilitarian.
“How’s preserving the peace going?”
Sheriff Marge shifted her no-nonsense bulk my direction. “Found a marijuana grow just off County Road 68. Booby trap mangled the leg of the deer hunter who stepped on it.” She shook her head. “Makes me sick the grow workers got away. They would have been low-level, but maybe they could have led us to the ringleaders. This problem is getting worse in a hurry. It’s so destructive — for people, plants, animals — everything.”
She leaned back and sighed. “Other than that, a couple punks shoplifted a pack of cigarettes from Junction General. And a handful of DUIs including one guy who knew he was too drunk to drive his truck but figured riding a quad on Highway 14 would be okay.” She shrugged. “Status quo.”
“I don’t know how you do it.”
“I watched Big John do it all those years. He always talked about investigations, asked what I thought about people and situations. I figured a couple decades of that was enough education to go on. Pays off, you know, knowing people.”
I wondered what it would be like to always refer to my husband with an adjective in front of his name. Steely Dan, Pistol Pete, Fat Albert. Maybe you got used to it. Maybe it was like those southern double names. Billy Bob. Bobby Ray. Big John. And by all reports, he had been big — well over three hundred pounds. Made Sheriff Marge look like a debutante by comparison.
The sheriff’s an elected position. Marge had been appointed to fill the role when her husband died of a heart attack mid-term. She’d run unopposed in every subsequent election.
“I saw you at the game — with Pete Sills,” Sheriff Marge said.
I blew out a breath and rolled my eyes.
“Uh-huh.” Sheriff Marge leveled gray eyes at me over the top of silver-rimmed reading glasses. She doesn’t bother with a beaded lanyard or even take the time to prop the glasses on the top of her head. She keeps them where she needs them and looks over them when she doesn’t.
“Hi, Meredith. Great to see you.” Mac leaned over the back of my chair, his callused hands weighing on my shoulders. “What can I get you to drink?”
From my vantage point, I had a rather disturbing view up his nostrils. It’s obvious the man works with sawdust. I was glad I was wearing a high-necked t-shirt, otherwise he would have had an equally disturbing view down my cleavage.
“Arnold Palmer?”
“Sure thing for a pretty thing.” He trotted toward the bar.
“Mmhmm.” Sheriff Marge grunted.
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“You know what they say about hick towns. And I can say this, ‘cause I’m from here.”
“What?”
“The odds may be good, but the goods may be odd.”
I screeched a very unladylike laugh before I was able to clamp a hand over my mouth. When I recovered, I asked, “What about you? Ever think about dating again?”
“Nope. Big John was my one and only. Besides, I’m too old and tired for that sort of thing. I’d rather bust meth-heads.”
People shushed each other until the room quieted except for the shuffling of hungry children. Pastor Mort stood on his tiptoes between the main dish table and the dessert table.
“Welcome, folks. Good to see so many of you here. I’m going to thank the Lord for the meal, then you can line up on both sides of the tables to fill your plates. As usual, we let families with small children go first.”
A little girl with blond ringlet pigtails stood on a chair next to her seated dad, her arms around his neck. “That’s me!”
Pastor Mort chuckled. “We should all come before God with the delightful hunger of children. He provides for us beyond measure.” He bowed his head. “Lord God, thank you for this food and this fellowship. Thanks for taking care of us. Help us to seek You, Your truth, Your Word and the salvation You provided through your Son when we deserve the opposite. Amen.”
An orderly rush to the food tables ensued. I hung back with Sheriff Marge and enjoyed the scene. There’s always more than enough food. The women consider cooking a competitive sport, measuring success by how much of their entry is consumed. Casserole dishes scraped down to the ceramic glaze score a 10.0.
“Here you are.” Mac slid into a chair beside me and handed me a tall glass of iced tea mixed with lemonade, dripping with condensation. He’d stuck an umbrella toothpick in a lemon wedge and floated it in the drink.
“Oh, thanks. It’s very — tropical."
“Hey, I thought I saw Bard Joseph the other day, driving through town,” Mac said.
Sheriff Marge’s eyebrows shot up.
Mac shrugged. “I was just surprised. That’s all.”
“How about some coffee? Black.” Sheriff Marge scowled.
“Comin’ up.” Mac stood and walked back to the bar.
“Troublemaker?” I asked.
“Hmmm?” Sheriff Marge wasn’t paying attention.
“The person Mac just mentioned. I don’t know any Josephs.”
“Wealthiest family — what’s left of it — in the county. Land rich, anyway. Maybe not cash rich. But you wouldn’t have met them. A bit reclusive.”
Sheriff Marge and I got in line and filled our plates from steaming crockpots and casserole dishes in quilted cozies. I’d left my embarrassing old blanket in the truck and let my casserole sit naked on the table.
I have a rule not to eat my own food at potlucks. That would be like stuffing the ballot box. Plus, it’s important to sample all the other goodness available. A couple times unpleasant surprises have marred my experience, but it’s still a risk I gladly take. I wedged a slice of pear pie with a crumble pecan topping next to scoops of beef stroganoff and rice pilaf.
Sheriff Marge stopped to talk to a family of migrant workers, some of the last remaining since the apple harvest had wrapped up a week or so ago.
I spied a single empty chair between the Levines and another church family with a whole passel of little kids. I knew I was being rude to Mac, but he has a tendency to over-interpret even a whiff of encouragement — or rather he has an ability to find encouragement in innocuous actions or words that completely baffles me.
I leaned across the table toward Sally. “Have you ever thought about putting together a recipe book as a community fundraiser? I think it would be a bestseller in the museum gift shop.” Certainly better than those dusty refrigerator magnets.
“I could help get quotes on printing if you did the recipe collecting.”
The mom of the young family on my other side raised her fork to hold her place in the conversation while she finished chewing. “I could do the page layouts and covers. I worked for an ad firm before I married Paul. I’m a little rusty, but I still have the software. I could work on it during nap times.”
I recognized Paul as a grain inspector from the port. He was busy trying to spoon what looked like pureed beets into a chubby baby’s clamped mouth.
“I could put an announcement in the church bulletin, an APB for recipes,” Sally said.
“APB?” Sheriff Marge’s antenna picked that up through thirty feet of mingled conversations, and she bustled over.
Sally laughed. “For your caramel brownie bar recipe.” She filled in until Sheriff Marge nodded.
“Ahh.” Sheriff Marge stabbed a stout finger at the gooey golden mound on her plate. “Then Meredith will have to share her recipe for these cheesy potatoes.”
“Deal.”
The Seahawks lost, as usual. The subdued crowd stacked folding chairs and wiped down tables. I collected my empty casserole dish. It was so clean it looked like Tuppence had had a go at it, except not as slimy. Perfect score.
I joined the throng of adults assembling the remains of tableware and sleepy children and packing them into cars for the ride home.
Pastor Mort ambled out with me. “We’d love to see you at church sometime.”
He wasn’t just saying that because he was supposed to. The Levines really mean it; they’re good people. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to church — a lifetime, a career and a fiancé ago. Church-going would probably do me some good, maybe make me less of the loner Greg and Pete had so helpfully pointed out lately.
“I’d like that, too.” I smiled at Pastor Mort. “And tell Sally to call me when she’s ready to brainstorm about the cookbook.”
o0o
On Monday, a free day all to myself, I layered jeans and a thermal long-sleeved t-shirt over silk long johns. I pulled on wool socks and hiking boots, found my fingerless mitts and flannel-lined canvas field coat.
After loading a backpack with a few sandwiches and several bottles of water, I called to my ecstatic hound and flopped a blanket on the passenger side of the bench seat so she could curl up on it. It was way too cold to drive with the windows down, so Tuppence would have to make do with leaving nose smears on the glass.
I drove east on Highway 14 to Lupine, the county seat and closest town substantial enough to have a hardware/household goods/craft supply/drug store. I took Greg’s suggestion and bought a bright yellow plastic potty chair. No pink and blue versions here, just utilitarian yellow.
Then I kept driving, up the gorge toward the empty expanse of rolling latte tan hills with the horizon rimmed by gleaming white wind turbine phalanxes. A thick drizzle misted the windshield. The truck was old enough not to have intermittent windshield wipers, so I flicked the lever every minute or so.
The gray Columbia churned with short whitecaps casting off flicks of spray. The river was a bit agitated. I wondered if salmon and sturgeon were hunkered at the bottom, sitting this one out.
I pulled into the empty gravel parking lot at a Lewis and Clark heritage trail marker. “Ready to get wet?”
Tuppence thumped her tail once and licked her chops. She was so ready she was salivating.
She had definitely been neglected the past couple months. With winter coming fast, we had to get our exploring in while we could, rain or no.
I put on my hat and opened the door, my booted feet landing in a puddle. Tuppence scrambled over and jumped into the same puddle. Had to start somewhere.
I flipped my coat collar up and inhaled deeply, grinning. This was the life. Who would have believed, two years ago, that I would go hiking in the rain without another human being in sight and love it.
We set off cross-country. Hard to get lost with nothing blocking the view of the biggest landmark — watermark — around. Even better, the landmark was directional. Downstream was west, toward home and eventually, if you kept going, Astoria and the Pacific Ocean.
The white tip of Tuppence’s tail waved like a flag marker in the tall grass. I forged a straight path across Tuppence’s zigzags. The grass would green up with just a few rainy days like this one, and the hills would magically transform into a land resembling the Emerald Isle.
I huffed up a hillock, my thighs and calves burning by the time I reached the top — the residual effect of too many late-night grilled cheese sandwiches.
I spun slowly to take in the entire panorama. Squalls were coming up from the southwest. Under the thick overcast layer, tight-fisted black cloud knots rushed low over the hills, trailing torrential downpours like veils. Several tempestuous, runaway brides on the Oregon side. There but for the grace of God. I shook my head, grinning again. It’s good to be free.
Tuppence poked her nose down a hole and sneezed.
“Not at home? Or they didn’t invite you in?”
Tuppence glanced at me over her shoulder, then started to dig.
“Come on, girl, leave them alone. Come on.” I whistled and trekked up the next incline.
Four hours later, we made our way back. Tuppence had definitely lost her zip. My legs wobbled. I’d sleep hard tonight and feel it tomorrow, but it was so worth it.
I scanned the river, soaking its wild frothiness into my soul — inhaling it. Fresh rain meeting the well-traveled water in the river tingled my senses. The Columbia held secrets — deep ones, old ones, plus new ones in the flotsam. Time and mystery flowed in its component molecules. Long ago, the local tribes buried their ancestors on islands in the river.
We climbed into the truck, and I pulled off my outer layers. We stank in tandem of wet dog and sweat-soaked wool and steamed up the windows immediately. I shared the last sandwich with Tuppence while the defroster blasted.
I swung through Caffè-a-Go-Go on the way home in an attempt to keep myself awake. My rubbery body gelled into the seat contours. My hands felt like ten-pound weights, my fingertips barely able to keep them in place on the steering wheel. Tuppence snored.
As I passed the Imogene Museum a mile from home, Pete’s concern about Ford niggled at me. The small cabin was barely visible through the trees. I should check on him, when I was more alert.
CHAPTER 5
Late Tuesday afternoon, Mac backed his rusty step van up to the museum’s side door, lurching slowly as Ford gave him conflicting hand signals.
I yelled “Stop!” at the last moment — to save a large terracotta flower pot and to prevent yet another dent in Mac’s bumper.
Ford was so excited that spittle clung to his lips when he spoke. “Nice and easy. Nice and easy.” He unlatched the van’s roll-up door and gave it a push.
Ford was in his element when I asked him to lend his expertise in the form of strong back and shoulders to shove display cases into place. And Mac was so good with Ford — they were drinking buddies to the extent that teetotaler Ford enjoyed Dr. Pepper while Mac swigged an amber ale or two during SportsCenter at the Sidetrack.
Mac slammed the driver’s door closed and bounded around to the back. His legs must be made of springs. I quickly squashed the fleeting image of what he might look like in shorts. Sometimes my subconscious scares me.
Mac was bundled in a heavy flannel jacket with a watch cap pulled tight over his head. The first frost had come overnight, and the temperature hovered barely above freezing now — the warmest part of the day. Mac’s sparse mushroom beige hair doesn’t show up well on his balding scalp, so he shaves it off and has taken to wearing hats. The problem is, the hats emphasize the fact that something’s not quite symmetrical about his head.
Mac’s like those puzzles in kiddie activity books where there’s a lineup of the same person d
rawn five times and you’re supposed to find the identical two by discovering slight variances in the others — a belt buckle off-center or shoes different colors or freckles vs. no freckles. Mac’s eliminating feature is a missing left earlobe. Same incident when he lost his left pinkie finger down to the first knuckle.
I understand how fingers can get in the way when operating a table saw, but an earlobe? Still a mystery. Not that Mac hadn’t related the episode in great detail the first time we met. After a quick handshake, he said, “I suppose you noticed I’m missing an earlobe,” and then he didn’t shut up for half an hour.
But the focus of his story was more on the search for and final recovery of the earlobe from an open polyurethane container two days later. I hadn’t the stomach to ask for more information. Unfortunately, Mac missed out on the stoicism stereotypical of Scotsmen.
His chin and lower jaw were covered with scraggly red blotches as if he’d developed rosacea since Sunday. I stepped next to him to examine the cases in the back of the van and realized it was new beard growth. I know a couple of men whose beards came in a different color from their head hair, but the red surprised me.
“Hey, I missed saying good-bye to you on Sunday,” Mac said.
I thought back to my quick escape in the midst of the crowd. I hated to admit it was intentional, so I changed the subject. “Growing a beard?”
“Yeah,” he grunted. He turned to look at me. He has blue eyes, not sapphire blue like Pete’s, but pale, washed-out blue, like their vitality had leaked and left pinprick pupils behind. “Starting to get cold. Figured if I had hair on my face to keep me warm I wouldn’t have to heat the workshop so much. Save some money.”
Mac and Ford wheeled the first case down the ramp.
“Have you been going without sleep to work on these cases?” I asked.
I waited for the answer while Mac and Ford tipped the second case up and wedged dollies underneath.
“What? Nah.”
I was pretty sure he was lying.
“I wanted to ask you Sunday. I could always shave it off.” He looked at me hopefully, his warm breath coming in spurts on the cold air. “Pete Sills has a beard.”