Patty let herself look up from the newspaper and study the sheriff as he stopped to talk with a table of older men and women. He was like a presence that wasn’t a presence, she thought. He was quiet and yet, when they’d talked those six July days—sometimes traveling on horseback, sometimes resting in the shade of a big pine tree with views of the Central Valley spread out green-beautiful below them—he’d told her stories about the Timberline he’d grown up in, stories about sheriffing, stories about deer hunting with his father and uncles in the Emigrant Gap Wilderness before it became a state park. As she’d come from the east coast, the stories fascinated her.
Something was compelling about the way he spoke to her. Something inside the story, something that he told with his eyes and his big cowboy smile. The way he patted a horse, or cinched a saddle, or stretched out by the campfire propped up on his saddle blanket, his shirt stained with sweat and grime. At those moments Quentin Collier looked like a man from another age. When she saw him back in town he seemed a little out of place. By the second day of the search, the others in the posse had disappeared for her.
The problem, she knew, was that she’d always loved cowboys. And Quentin Collier was a cowboy. It was the reason she’d come west from Virginia; it was the reason she’d gone to the University of Nevada. It was the reason she’d called the sheriff and made herself sound like a schoolgirl with a bad crush.
But it was more than just the physical attraction, which was very strong. He made her feel safe. She remembered standing next to him one morning in the ranger-station parking lot, after they’d come down from the mountain, empty-handed, and depressed that the little girl hadn’t been found. Quentin was talking to the assembled press, radio and television. She’d felt a sense of well-being just standing next to him in the late afternoon sunshine, sweaty and saddle-sore, his voice deep and sonorous. She could read his body language already; he was trying to say the right things, nothing the little girl’s family might read, or hear, later and be hurt by. It was like standing next to one of those big old pine trees up on the mountain. You knew, that no matter what, the tree could survive it.
Okay, I have a thing for cowboys, she told herself as Quentin slipped into the booth. He probably thinks I’m a nut and is just being polite.
“Hi,” she said.
“Good morning.” Quentin was stunned again by Tyson’s good looks every time he saw her. She was a tall willowy brunette with big blue eyes.
The police radio on his belt squawked and he turned it down. Quentin looked even bigger sitting in the booth, she thought, his shoulders square and straight. He was over six feet and lean, so he looked ten years younger than his forty years. A number he’d seemed to go out of his way to mention to her, as if he were old.
“Caltrans is closing the road to Timberline,” Quentin said. “They’re going to blow a potential slide. A couple of areas, I guess.”
“I heard they were going to,” Patty said. There was an awkward silence.
Quentin put his cowboy hat down on the seat next to him and smiled as if the idea of a slide were funny. “I hope we don’t have any problems,” he said. “If the road to 50 is closed for too long, everyone will be on my ass.” He saw her smile; she folded up her newspaper.
Quentin’s mind froze again while he watched her. She had that effect on him. Lust had an odd way of grinding your thoughts to dust. Patty moved her long hair out of her eyes and looked up at him, tucking it behind her ear. Even in the sexless green uniform of a California State Ranger, she looked attractive. There was something profoundly womanly about her, he thought. He remembered her in the saddle and he almost blushed. The curve of her hips, the way she rode, the way her hips rocked. Masterly. You could tell a lot about a person by the way they rode a horse. Jerks and city people always rode with their boot toes shoved way too far into the stirrups. It never failed. Not her. She had a good seat.
No, he thought, there were two kinds of people: the kind who hold on to the saddle horn at a trot and those who don’t need to. Patty Tyson held her reins easy with just two fingers. She was that kind of girl, and she was loping through his dreams most nights now. An easy-two-finger-on-the-reins kind of woman.
The sheriff glanced out at the freeway below the restaurant. All the cars zooming past looked dirty, their outlines obscured by the snowstorm.
“Coffee?” A waitress rescued them from an awkward silence. The woman poured coffee into Quentin’s cup, not waiting for an answer. Patty offered her cup, glad the waitress had come.
Did I make a mistake? Patty tried to understand what was wrong. Maybe he thinks I’m stupid.
He had ordered quickly, and it was her turn.
“Pancakes,” Patty said, not bothering to study the menu.
The waitress adjusted her glasses. Middle aged, the waitress wore heavy makeup and had red hair, about the same color as the Denny’s sign.
“Dear, we’ve got sixteen types of pancakes at this Denny’s. What kind would you like?” The waitress touched her glasses with bemused exasperation, reading the obvious first-date look on the couple’s faces.
“Buttermilk,” Patty said.
“Okay . . . we’re short-handed this morning. Coffee is on the house today,” the waitress said.
“I talked to your daughter when I called. She’s nice,” Patty said, trying to think of something quick to say as the waitress turned and left.
“Which one?”
“I think the older one. Lacy.”
“It’s like having two mothers,” Quentin said. “Especially Lacy. She’s going to Berkeley. She wants to be a doctor. She’s wanted that since we—” Quentin stopped himself. “Since I can remember. I keep reminding her she’s my daughter and not my mother, but it doesn’t seem to do much good.”
After the waitress brought them their breakfast, the conversation became easier. They talked about that summer when they’d met, about the fact the little girl was never found, how devastating it must have been for her mother and father. Quentin told her the father still called the office once a week just to check.
“It must be hard being a sheriff. I mean, having to see the bad guys win like that. I don’t think I would like that. I mean, to know that no matter what you do, how hard you try to find someone, you can’t,” Patty said.
“You never get used to it,” Quentin said, looking away. The waitress came and poured him another cup of coffee and told Quentin she’d voted for him. She said that he was doing a good job.
Quentin’s family went back to the Gold Rush. Because of that, people in Placer County viewed him differently from almost any other politician. People in Placer County didn’t think of Quentin as a politician; they thought of him as Sheriff Collier. People said Quentin Collier was a throwback to another, better time—before CNN, Fox News and cell phones. He was honest.
“How come you aren’t married?” Quentin said when the waitress left. He wanted to change the subject. The loss of the little girl had hurt him. He couldn’t talk about it. All the time he’d been searching the loss of his wife, her death, had been very fresh; in a way, he had been searching for them both. He didn’t want anyone else to go through what he was going through, but they’d failed. They hadn’t found the little girl. He’d had to come back down the mountain and face the girl’s young parents. The moment he looked into the father’s eyes he knew he was looking at himself. That someone was cutting something out of the father while he was still alive. Quentin had stood there and said what he had to say. And then, he’d wished he hadn’t said anything. Words, he knew, only made it worse. His words had stolen all hope, which was the last thing the little girl’s parents had left.