Katie came out of the kitchen with four bottles of Portland Ale. "We're real glad you could make it, Ned. I've been trying to persuade Holly to have a weekend off since Labor Day."
Ned raised his bottle to Holly and said, "I'm glad I could make it too. Here's to us, and here's to having a great time."
"To us," they chorused. "And to having a great time."
Ned Gets Serious
They went for lunch to Lyman's, a picturesque redbrick hotel built in 1905 and surrounded by larches. It stood on a promontory overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, and through the windows of the old-fashioned saloon bar they could see the river shining as it ran between the hazy, sun-gilded mountains. The water was wide here, and it was crisscrossed with the multicolored sails of sailboards, reds and yellows and blues.
"You ever tried windsurfing?" Ned asked Holly. "Amazing sport. Really amazing. And this is the best place in the whole darn world to do it. You got your strong, steady winds, anything between fifteen to thirty-five miles an hour, and at the same time you've got your strong opposing currents."
"I'm more into cycling. Well, I have a little girl and most weekends we take our bikes around Forest Park."
"A little girl, huh? How old?"
"She was eight in May. She's very good company."
"You ought to bring her along with you one weekend. I could teach her how to windsurf. You, too, if you like."
"That sounds exciting."
"Oh, believe me."
There was a long silence while Holly picked at her grilled chicken salad with smoky mayonnaise, and Doug made a spectacular mess of his Dungeness crab baguette, dropping lumps of crabmeat onto the tablecloth.
"Doug was raised by warthogs," said Katie. "That's why he eats like that."
"Hey, I enjoy my food," Doug protested. "Irelishit, unlike you. I like to get physically involved with it."
"So does the front of your sweater."
They drank another toast. Doug put his hand in front of his mouth to suppress a burp, and then there was another long silence. Eventually, Holly said, "So, Ned wood pulp."
He gave her what he obviously believed was a winning smile. "That's right. Wood pulp. Fascinating business, wood pulp."
"What is it you actually do?"
"I'm senior exec in charge of recycling. That means making the best use of residual fiber and other waste materials."
"Oh, right."
He put down his fork, with a neatly cut square of steak still on the end of it. "You see, not many people realize this, but there are all kinds of different waste materials. There'spreconsumer waste, which is leftover scrap generated in the paper-and box-manufacturing process. That's what we call 'clean' waste. Then there'spostconsumer waste, which is articles that have been used for their intended purpose and are ready to be discarded, such as OCC."
Holly looked blank.
"Sorry-that's short forold corrugated containers."
"I see."
Ned leaned closer. There was a shred of steak caught between his two front teeth. "Recycling is far more important than biodegradability, because very few items are actually biodegradable with current landfill practices. What I aim to do, Holly, is to capture used itemsbeforethey reach the landfill and put them to their best possible use."
"You make it sound like a mission."
"Itisa mission, Holly. You're right. At Hood River Forestry Industries, we consider it our duty to keep Oregon's forests protected and sustained, for the future of our children and our children's children."
"Andtheirchildren, too, I'll bet," added Doug. "And their children's children's children."
Katie nudged him and said, "How many beers have you had?"
Ned kept on smiling with those clear caramel eyes, and Holly did her best not to stare at the shred of steak.
"You ought to get Holly to tell you about her lipreading," said Doug as they finished their raisin ice creams. "She's so good that she can even tell what part of the state a person was raised in."
"It's nothing," said Holly, embarrassed. "It's a knack, that's all."
"Doesn't sound like nothing to me," said Ned. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs in his neatly pressed jeans. "Can you tell me what part of the stateIwas raised in?"
Holly hesitated but Doug said, "Go on, Holly. Tell him."
"I don't think so, really."
"Oh, come on," Ned coaxed her. "I've got twenty dollars that says you get it wrong."
Holly said, "Okay, it's a bet. Actually, you weren't raised in Oregon at all. Or at least your parents weren't."
"I wasn't?"
"No. Your accent is more like northeast Minnesota or northwest Wisconsin. Within a two-hundred-mile radius of Duluth, anyhow. Also, you twice used the wordsawbuckwhen you were talking about cutting wood, whereas in Oregon they tend to usebuckstandorbuck-horse."
Ned turned to Doug and said, "Did you tell her that?"
Doug grinned and shook his head.
"You're sure? That isamazing. That is an absolutely amazing talent. My father started a lumber company in Babbitt, Minnesota, and I lived in Minnesota until I was seventeen. Then my father's company was taken over by North Minnesota Timber, and I was offered a job with Hood River. Amazing. And how did you know that stuff about sawbucks?"
"I make a study of it-you know, local and colloquial phrases. It helps me to tell where somebody's from and what kind of person they are. You know, white-or blue-collar, city or country."
"She does it for the Portland Police Bureau," said Doug proudly. "She's the only court-accredited lipreader in Oregon."
Holly said, "Doug " She didn't like anybody to know about her police work. Obviously she had been obliged to take Doug and Katie into her confidence, because of the erratic times that she needed to take off from the Children's Welfare Department. But for her own protection she didn't want murderers and drug dealers and sexual perverts finding out whose evidence it was that had sent them to jail.
But Doug plowed on. "Only yesterday she was lipreading this guy who's going to have somebody's wife murdered. Can you believe that? There he was, in the Compass Hotel, arranging to have this woman killed like he's ordering lunch."
"That's amazing," said Ned. "You just don't realize what's going on all around you, do you, unless you know where to look."
"Doug," warned Holly. Then, to Ned, "You don't want to believe everything Doug says, especially after five beers."
"No, no, I haven't told you the best bit," said Doug. "The best bit is, this guy was talking about how they're going to dispose of this woman's body once they've killed her."
"Really? What were they going to do?"
"Doug!" snapped Holly, and Katie shook his arm and said, "For God's sake, Doug, it isn't funny."
"Of course it's funny. They're going to give the body to a guy they know in the wood-pulp business. Thewood-pulpbusiness! They're going to mush her up and turn her into cardboard boxes. So who's our number-one suspect?"
Doug slapped his thigh and let out a whoop of laughter. But then he realized that neither Holly, Katie, nor Ned was smiling at all, and his laughter petered out into a fit of coughing.