“Oh, I just saw one on the road yesterday. Hadn’t seen one since I was a kid. I thought if somebody local owned it I’d like to have a closer look.”
The sheriff looked relieved. “Oh. Well, nobody around here has one I know of. Sutherland sold his in the fifties some time. I remember, it was still in perfect shape. I’d of bought it myself if I’d had the money.” He glanced at his watch. “Hey, I gotta get going. Just thought I’d drop in and say hello.”
Howell nodded, then, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, leaped again. “Bo, do you ever have dreams?”
Scully emptied his coffee cup and looked out over the lake, his eyes red and cloudy. “Nah,” he said, getting to his feet and shuffling toward the door. “Just nightmares.”
From the cabin door, Howell watched the sheriff drive away. Last night, he remembered, he had been another man. He wondered if he had been Bo Scully. Or, perhaps, just having Bo’s nightmare.
For the better part of the morning, Scotty was busy with the phone, the radio and with visitors to the office. Finally, near lunch time, the place was empty and quiet. She went to the door and looked up and down the street. No sign of Bo or a patrol car. She fished the key from her bra, walked quickly into Scully’s office and unlocked the new filing cabinet. She tucked the key back into her bra, then lifted out the steel bar and leaned it against the door, glancing every few moments through the glass partition for visitors.
For ten minutes she combed through the drawers, file by file. By the time she got to the third drawer, her excitement was turning to exasperation. There was nothing but old department files – old traffic tickets, old payroll forms, old everything. She opened the bottom drawer and started on that. More of the same. Why the hell would he order an elaborate, security file cabinet and then shift useless old files into it that nobody would be interested in anyway? She finished flipping through the last of the files, and closed the drawer. Then she glanced across the street and saw, over the tops of parked cars, the blue lights of a patrol car gliding to a halt across the street.
Scotty quickly threaded the steel bar through the file drawer handles, mated the lock to its closure, and pressed. Nothing happened, the bolt of the lock, instead of retracting and snapping into the closure, remained rigid. The goddamned thing had to be locked with the key. She looked around in time to see Bo Scully starting across the street toward the office, looking both ways at traffic. Panicked, she dug a hand into her bra for the key, but just as her fingers reached it, it fell through the elastic to her waist, under her blouse. There was no time to pull out her shirttail and dig for the key. She dived sideways out of Bo’s office toward the coffee maker. As Bo came through the door, she was shakily pouring a cup.
“Hi,” she said, brightly. “Want some coffee?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I need some.” He went into his office. “I only got as far as John’s place on my rounds, then I didn’t feel so good.”
She took her time fixing the coffee, trying to get her breathing back to normal. Then she realized that he was in there with the unlocked file cabinet and she should be in there distracting him until she could find a way to get the thing locked again. She hurried into his office with the coffee.
She set down his cup. “I think I’ll join you,” she said. She took her own cup across the room and leaned against the file cabinet, the lock behind her.
“Have a seat,” Scully said.
“Oh, I’ve been sitting all morning. Do me good to stretch.”
“I like that blouse,” he said, finally. He grinned. “How does it come off?”
“With great difficulty.” They both laughed. Scotty realized it was the first time she’d ever been alone in the office with him. She still found him attractive in a bearlike way. She wondered for a moment what it would be like to have that great weight on top of her, and her breathing grew a little quicker.
“Well,” he said. “You been up here, what… a month, now. How do you like us?”
“I like you all right,” she smiled.
“You know, if I didn’t have a rule about fooling around in the office, I’d of asked you out by now.”
“Oh? I never paid too much attention to rules, myself.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. He really was quite good looking; she thought he knew it, too.
“You’ve been seeing a good bit of John Howell, right?”
She nodded. She’d rather he hadn’t known that, but what the hell, it was a small town.
“Well, John’s a friend of mine, and I’m not going to go tracking up his territory. But if that cools off, I’d like to know about it. Okay?”
She smiled. “Okay.” She meant it, too. Then, Bo reached for his coffee; his hand struck the edge of the desk blotter, which bumped against a paperweight, which fell onto the floor and rolled toward her. Instinctively, she bent to catch it, and before she could straighten she heard him say “Shit,” and knew he had seen the lock. As she straightened, the heavy paperweight in her hand, he was coming around the desk toward her. She could hit him with the paperweight, she thought, and run. But run where? She’d have to talk her way out.
“Damn lock,” he said, brushing past her. He fished in his pocket and brought out the keys. “I guess I haven’t learned how to work the damn thing right.” He inserted the key, banged on the lock with his fist a couple of times and jangled it to make sure it was closed.
At that moment a deputy walked into the station waving a fist full of traffic summonses, Scully went out to talk with him, and Scotty was left standing in his office, breathing deep breaths.
14
Howell sat at the desk and let the droning voice of Lurton Pitts wash over him. He searched through the self-serving mush for a way to begin, and just as he thought he might have an idea, there was a soft rap on the door. He quickly switched off the tape recorder. Pitts’s voice was familiar to millions from his television commercials for the fried chicken chain, and he wanted no one to hear it. He walked to the door, wondering who it might be. He had not heard a car. He opened the door and found Leonie Kelly standing on his doorstep.
She looked quite different today, more contemporary. She was wearing jeans instead of the rather dowdy dress of the day before, and a blue man’s workshirt was tied in a knot above her waist, showing three or four inches of powdery, freckled skin. She wore newish sneakers without socks, and her hair was pulled back into a pony tail.
She gave a little laugh. “Well, you did invite me to drop by, didn’t you?”
“Oh, sure,” he replied, suddenly aware that he had been standing, staring at her. “Come on in.”
“Here’s your mail,” she said, handing him some letters.
He winced. The top one was from Elizabeth. “Thanks,” he said, tossing them on his desk.
She wandered about the room, looking carefully at things. “I’ve never been inside here,” she said, poking her head into the kitchen, then lingering for a longer look at the bedroom.
“Don’t you know Denham White? He’s been coming up here for years.”
“I’ve seen him in town a couple of times, I guess.” She strolled out onto the deck, and he followed. The midday sun was hot. She motioned toward the broken railing. “That looks kind of dangerous. You better fix it.”
Howell stared at the railing. “Yes, I’d better take a hammer and a nail to that, I guess,” he said.
“I remember this place from a long time ago,” she said. “When I was a little girl.” She seemed about to say something else, but then suddenly blurted out, “It’s a gorgeous day, how about a swim?”
“Sure,” he said, while she was already untying the knot of her shirt. She ran down the stairs to the dock, leaving her shirt, jeans, and shoes in a trail behind her. There was no underwear. Struggling with his own clothes, he saw only a flash of the tall, full body before she was into the water. A moment later, he dove in and surfaced, shouting, gasping. He had forgotten how cold the water was. She still had not come up, and he looked around for her. Ten seconds passed, then another ten. She must have been under for nearly a minute, he thought. He forgot the cold and started to worry.