"It sounds good," he admitted.
"Are you willing to give it a try?"
He nodded.
"So, do you want to eat inside or on the porch?"
"On the porch."
She headed back toward the open door. "Food's on its way."
They left early the next morning, stopping first by the bakery for donuts, coffee, and chocolate milk. Trish was right, Doug thought as he drove out of town. Maybe they needed a short vacation, needed to get away in order to gain some perspective. The trees sailed by as he kept pace with the speed limit.
Already he felt easier, happier, more relaxed than he had in weeks. It was as if the mantle of responsibility he had placed upon himself had been left behind at the town limits. Although he knew it would be waiting for him when he got back, he was grateful to be rid of it even temporarily and was determined to enjoy the day. The forest grew thicker as they headed north. The narrow highway wound between cliffs and into gorges, following the lay of the land.Subforests of small saplings grew in the shade of huge ponderosas. Low bushes covered all available space. Here and there, they could see the stark leafless skeletons of trees hit by lightning, bare branches contrasting sharply with the surrounding lushness. Once, near a small pond in a grassy meadow, they saw a deer, frozen in place by the terror of seeing their car.
Then the trees tapered off, segueing from forest to high desert, and after another hour, the road hit Black Canyon Highway.
"Burger King," Billy said as they passed a sign that said it was forty miles to Sedona. "Let's eat at Burger King."
It was the most interest he'd shown in anything all day, and Doug was about to say okay, but Tritia said firmly, "No, we're going to eat at Tlaquepaque."
"Not that place again," Billy groaned.
"We haven't been there in over a year," his mother told him.
"Not long enough."
"You be quiet."
They were all silent after that, listening to the hum of the Bronco's wheels and the sounds of static and country music from the station in Flagstaff.
Fifteen minutes after they passed the turnoff for Montezuma's Castle, Doug pulled off Black Canyon Highway and headed down the two-lane road that led to Sedona. Of the three approaches to the town, this was the most spectacular.
There was no gradual shift in the color of the rocks as there was coming in from Camp Verde, and there were no obscuring plants and trees as there were along the road through Oak Creek Canyon. The land here was tailor-made for western movies:
great open expanses strategically broken by the dramatic shapes of the red rock cliffs. The colors were vivid: blue sky, white clouds, green trees, red rocks, sharp contrasts that could not be captured by any camera.
They drove past Bell Rock and past Frank Lloyd Wright's Church of the Holy Cross, the road gradually hugging closer to the creek and the cliffs as the first shops and resorts appeared.
They went directly to Tlaquepaque, a Spanish-styled complex of galleries, shops, and boutiques located in a wooded spot at the edge of Oak Creek. They strolled through the shops, taking their time. Billy soon grew bored and ran ahead, checking out the tiled fountains that seemed to be in every courtyard and counting the coins in the water while surreptitiously examining the bathing suited mannequins in the clothes store windows. Tritia fell in love with a Dan Naminghaprint she saw in one of the galleries, and while she and Billy continued on ahead, Doug doubled back on the pretext of going to the bathroom and bought the print, hiding it under a blanket in back of the car.
As Tritia had promised, they ate lunch in the outdoor patio of the small Mexican restaurant, listening to the burble of the creek. Their view was limited by the trees and the courtyard, but they could still see hills of red rock, the color made more brilliant in contrast with the green foliage.
It was a relaxing lunch, and for a moment Doug was almost able to forget about the mail, to forget about everything that had happened recently in Willis.
Then a blue-suited postal carrier, brown bag slung over his shoulder, stopped off and handed a stack of envelopes to the girl behind the cash register. The mailman smiled at the girl, seemingly normal and friendly, but for Doug the mood was spoiled, and as he ate his chilirelleno , he watched the mailman make the rounds of all the shops.
The trip home was uneventful. Billy slept in the back seat while he and Trish stared out at the passing scenery and listened to an old Emerson, Lake &
Palmer tape. They passed the green sign that announced the Willis town limit a little after four, and Doug drove past Henry's Garage and the Ponderosa Realty office, but just beyond the Texaco station, the road was blocked by two police cars with flashing lights. A single policeman stood next to each car, along with a crowd of motorists who had not been allowed to pass the barrier. Several local residents milled around nearby. Doug saw at the edge of the crowd the brown uniform of a member of the sheriffs posse.
Hepulled'to a stop in back of a battered jeep and told Trish and Billy to wait in the car as he got out to investigate. As he approached the makeshift blockade, he realized that one of the policemen was Mike Trenton. He strode up to the young cop. "Mike, what happened?"
"Please stay back, Mr.Albin . We can't let you through."
"What happened?"
"BenStockley went crazy. He took a pistol into the bank about an hour ago and started shooting."
"Oh my God," Doug breathed: "Was anyone hurt?"
The police officer's face was pale, tense. "Fourteen people are dead, Mr.
Albin."
23
The murders made national news. All three of Phoenix's network affiliates sent vans and reporters to Willis, and their stories were picked up for the national nightly newscasts. Channel 12 seemed to have the best coverage, and before going to bed Doug watched again as the cameraman's telephoto lens caught the white flash ofStockley's gun behind the smoked bank window at the precise moment that the editor killed himself. The suicide had happened live during the five-o'clock broadcast, and even the reporter had stopped talking as the sound of the shot echoed with a grim finality. Doug had known then thatStockley was dead, that he was not merely wounded or injured, and he'd watched with increasingly blurred vision as the remaining hostages ran out of the building and the police swarmed in.
By the time the commercial came on, he was openly crying.
He andStockley had not exactly been friends, but they were closer than acquaintances, and the man's death had affected him strongly. He had respected the editor. And he had liked him. It was strange watching it all on TV, seeing places he knew and people he knew in such a distanced and depersonalized form, and somehow it made him feel more depressed.
In an update, over a shot ofStockley's covered body being wheeled across the bank parking lot to an ambulance, the anchor said that a series of letters had been found in the editor's desk that police believed would give them a clue as to why he had suddenly gone on the killing rampage.
_Letters_.
Doug shut off the television and walked down the hall to the bedroom, where Trish was already asleep and snoring.
_Letters_.
The connection was so damn obvious that even that doltish police chief would have to see the pattern. But, no, he remembered seeing news coverage of similar events, friends and neighbors uniformly repeating how they couldn't believe the kind, considerate, normal person they knew could have committed such horrible acts. The man who suddenly went crazy and murdered innocent bystanders was becoming a regular feature of the nightly news; there was nothing really unusual about it anymore.
Of course, Doug himself was one of those people who could not imagine how Stockleycould have done such a horrible thing. He had no doubt that the mailman was at the bottom of this, behind it all, but try as he might, he could not imagine anything written in a letter that could so completely send 'a person around the bend, that could make an ostensibly sane man start killing innocent individuals. Much as he hated to admit it, much as it hurt him to admit it, there probably had been something wrong withStockley to begin with, some breaking point, some button the mailman had known how and when to push.