Authors: Earlene Fowler
Laughing, he sprinted ahead, then turned around to face me, jogging backward. After a mile and a half, he’d barely broken a sweat. Above us, a swirl of salty early-morning wind rattled the tops of the peeling eucalyptus. Pine trees scented the air with a sharp, lung-cleansing scent. “Benni, sweetheart, you’re getting close to middle age. Your heart and other significant parts of your body need the aerobic exercise.”
“I’m
not
middle-aged. I plan on living until I’m a hundred, so I won’t be middle-aged for fifteen years. Besides, I’m riding three times a week now that I’m helping Grace down at the stables. That’s aerobic exercise.”
He gave a derisive laugh. “Sure, for the horse.”
I slowed to a walk, looking down at the obscenely white hundred-twenty-dollar Adidas he’d talked me into buying. The bright orange stripes glowed in the pale California sunshine. For that much money, they should have come equipped with tiny oxygen tanks. I leaned against a sycamore carved with a heart and the words JULIO LOVES HIMSELF and held my aching side. “I can’t go any farther. Please, let me die in peace.”
He trotted up beside me. “Quit whining and turn around.”
I obliged and instinctively arched toward his hands as they kneaded my neck and shoulders, groaning out loud at the pleasurable feel of his strong fingers pressing deep into my muscles. He bent down and ran his bristly mustache down my damp neck, tickling it lightly with his tongue.
“Don’t tempt me like that in public,
querida,
” he whispered. “I’m used to hearing those sounds when I’ve got you flat on your back and naked.”
“You arrogant—” I clenched my fist, turned, and aimed for his stomach. He saw it coming and tightened his muscles. Those days at the gym were obviously helping. It was like hitting a concrete block.
“Ow,” I said, shaking my hand. “Do you realize you think about sex way too much for a
middle-aged
man?”
His blue-gray eyes, a startling anomaly against his tanned olive skin, sparkled with amusement. “I’m telling you, it’s the vitamin E. Not to mention how attractive you look in those shorts. I’m going around the park one more time. Want to join me?”
I glanced down the gravel trail we’d just run around Laguna Lake, one of the major attractions of San Celina’s Central Park. “No, thanks. I think I’ll walk back to the car and get some money to buy duck food.”
He checked his watch. “See you in about fifteen minutes.” He took off down the trail at an easy jog.
I watched him until he disappeared into the heavily wooded park. After almost seven months of marriage, the sight of his lean, powerful body could still make my heart beat faster. But he had lost ten pounds in the last month, and it showed on his six-foot frame, narrowing his face and causing his already prominent cheekbones to sharpen. Though I tried not to show it, I was worried. His mood had been light and cheerful lately. Too light and cheerful. Four weeks ago, his best friend, Aaron Davidson, San Celina’s former chief of police and Gabe’s first partner when he was a rookie cop, died from liver cancer. It was the Sunday before Labor Day weekend. We had just visited him at the hospice before attending a barbecue at my dad’s ranch. Later that evening, Aaron died, his wife, Rachel, dozing at his side. Gabe accepted his friend’s death with quiet dignity and no fuss, helping Rachel with the funeral arrangements and giving a eulogy at the service that left most of the congregation, including a bunch of tough, cynical cops, in tears. He had taken care of all the millions of irritating but necessary details that arise when someone dies. Esther, Aaron’s daughter and only child, told me they would have never made it through those first few weeks without Gabe’s calm, gentle strength. What no one knew but me was that he’d never taken the time to grieve himself. And still hadn’t. And that worried me.
I peered out over the Laguna Lake. The waterline was higher than usual this year due to the heavy spring rains that flooded most of California. The Central Coast had taken a particularly harsh beating. In North County, many of the small tourist-supported towns had experienced massive damage in their trendy art galleries, restaurants, and vineyards. Half the cattle roads on Daddy’s ranch had washed away, and Gabe and I had spent most of our spare weekends helping clear them with his Kubota tractor. Luckily San Celina’s new library resided safely on a high bluff overlooking the lake. Morning sun glinted off its dark tinted windows, causing a ripply reflection in the brown muddy water. The gray, prisonlike structure continued to win all sorts of architectural awards, but even a year after its completion, people still grumbled and complained about its land-scarring ugliness. Behind it rose the late September hills of San Celina, mountains of butterscotch gold marching all the way to the Pacific Ocean five miles away. I glanced back at the library. It was closed on Sundays, and the park was still relatively empty. Gabe and I had passed only two other people on our jog around the lake—an elderly man and woman walking a basset hound. But in the parking lot there were now three more cars parked next to Gabe’s sky-blue 1968 Corvette. I smiled at the license plate frame I’d had made at the mall for our six-month anniversary. GABE AND BENNI—IN LOVE FOREVER. With a good-natured shake of his head, he’d attached it to his car. Apparently he’d taken quite a bit of ribbing about it from his officers at the police department.
“So I’m crazy about my wife. Sue me,” he’d told them, according to his new secretary, Maggie, who kept me informed on all the office scuttlebutt.
After a long drink of bottled water, I stole a handful of parking-meter quarters from his glove compartment and purchased some veterinarian-approved duck chow from the dispensers the city had recently installed. The humane society and local wildlife lovers, concerned for the wild bird population’s long-term health, were attempting to discourage people from feeding them processed bread and junk food. The blue-and-white Wonder bread wrappers floating in the marshy grasses of the lake testified to the fact that they hadn’t quite persuaded everyone yet.
I stuck the pellets into the pocket of my zip-up sweatshirt and headed down to the lake, where I was enthusiastically greeted by a contingent of local waterfowl. The speckled brown ducks, white geese, and nervy seagulls were old hands at being fed by sentimental human beings and assumed that any person walking near the lakeshore was automatically a soft touch. As I tossed bird feed out to them they crowded around my feet, nudging each other aside like jealous schoolchildren. My thoughts drifted back to Gabe and how both our lives had radically changed in the last year.
It had been a little over a year and a half since my first husband and childhood sweetheart, Jack, was killed in a senseless car accident involving too much liquor and a split second of young, foolish judgment. A lot had happened in my life since Jack died—losing the ranch we owned with his brother, moving to San Celina and making the transition from being an “aggie” to a “townie,” landing the job as curator to the Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum and Artist’s Co-op, meeting Gabe in the circumstances surrounding a murder at the museum, falling in love, and getting married after knowing each other barely three months.
“You’ve certainly lived life this last year like it’s going out of style,” my Gramma Dove said yesterday when I was out at my father’s ranch helping her put up a batch of peaches. Though technically she is my paternal grandmother, she treats me more like a not-quite-bright-or-especially-responsible youngest daughter. That’s because my own mother died twenty-nine years ago when I was six years old and Dove moved out from Arkansas to help her oldest son, Ben, my father, raise me. Lugging my thirteen-year-old uncle Arnie, the youngest of her six children, her fabric and yarn collection, her favorite Visalia saddle, and her almost complete set of Erle Stanley Gardner books, she took charge of the Ramsey Ranch household and has, with cast iron claws, ruled the roost ever since.
“Well, Gabe’s been through a lot more than me,” I said, screwing the lid on the twenty-first jar of peach preserves.
“That’s the gospel truth,” she said, pouring me a glass of sweetened iced tea. “Comin’ here thinking he was just going to stay a few months and ending up taking the police chief’s job, all them murders, and then marrying you, which, Lord knows, would be life changing enough for any man—”
“Hey, just a minute—” I protested.
She ignored me and kept going. “Then there was that nasty business in Kansas with his friend and now Aaron passin’ on. And didn’t you say he hadn’t heard from his boy in a while? Heavens, by now a lesser man would have hightailed it to the hills to howl and lick his wounds.”
“He is under a lot of stress,” I agreed. “And not hearing from Sam for five weeks hasn’t made it any easier.” Gabe had finally grown used to the idea that his eighteen-year-old son, Sam, had dropped out of UC Santa Barbara and was working in a surfboard shop on Maui while trying to find the perfect wave. They’d even managed an amicable phone conversation or two in the last month. Then, when Gabe called the shop to break the news about Aaron, some clerk said Sam had quit six days before, and no one knew where he was. Gabe had discreetly used his law-enforcement connections, but so far there was no sign of Sam. “Gabe won’t talk about it, but I know he’s worried.”
“Kids,” Dove said, shaking her head and spooning more cooked peaches into a Mason jar. “Dang little heartbreakers. Every last one of them. Ought to line ’em all up when they’re twelve and smack ’em with a wet rope just for the heartache they’re gonna give you.”
“Please, spare me the dramatics,” I said wryly.
“Ain’t nothin’ dramatic about it. I’ve spent over fifty-five years of my life worrying about one youngun or another. I’m seventy-six years old and I deserve a break.” She was referring to my uncle Arnie from Montana, who’d moved in on Daddy and her four months ago because his wife had finally kicked his lazy butt out. He and my father argued like two polecats tied at the tail, and Dove was getting fit to send them both to Alaska. Permanently.
A brazen peck at the toe of my Adidas brought me back from my musing. A green-necked mallard gave a brassy quack and ruffled his neat wing feathers. He’d pushed ahead of all the dull brown girl mallards and was demanding more than his fair share.
“Men,” I said, throwing him the last of my food just because of his noisy persistence. “You’re all so pushy.” He honked again, and I showed him my empty hands. “That’s all, buddy.” He gave me a disgusted look and waddled away.
The sky flushed a salmon pink, and the sun peeked through the dense trees, warming the chilly air a few degrees. I dug around in my sweatshirt pocket for a rubber band and pulled my curly shoulder-length hair into a high ponytail. While I picked my way along the marshy shoreline, my mind drifted over the other problems facing me this week.
The folk-art museum was hosting the first San Celina Storytelling Festival in connection with our latest exhibits—a display of story quilts designed by California quilters and in our newly remodeled upstairs gallery, a collection of Pueblo storytelling dolls on loan from Constance Sinclair, great-granddaughter of our museum’s namesake as well as our temperamental and very rich benefactress. It was a joint effort with the San Celina Storytellers Guild. We were all keeping our fingers crossed and hoping it would show a profit and consequently turn into an annual event. Storytellers from as far away as Reno, Nevada, and Yuma, Arizona, were registered for the festival, which started this Friday night at six o’clock.
We obtained permission from the city to turn the large empty pasture next to the museum into a temporary campground so the visiting storytellers didn’t have to spend much for accommodations. Our shoestring budget had been augmented by a community arts grant from San Celina County, advertising and booth space sold to local merchants, and a generous sum from Constance Sinclair herself, who had recently taken a fancy to the art of storytelling thanks to the influence of her niece, Jillian. I’d arranged for portable restrooms, trash removal, booths for the artists to sell their crafts, and volunteer docents to give tours of the exhibits.
The three-day event was turning out to be the biggest project the museum and co-op had ever attempted. Everything had run smoothly . . . so far. The co-op board and the board of the Storytellers Guild had gotten along as well as you could expect from a bunch of temperamental artists. It helped that some of the storytellers were also co-op members. They were the ones I unabashedly begged to serve on the festival committee.
A loud quacking distracted me again. From my shoreline perch, I peered toward the sound into the brush and reeds hugging the shore. It was the high, frantic call of a bird in trouble. Just last week, Gabe and I had to free a seagull’s wing from a plastic six-pack carrier left by some littering idiot. I moved through the tall grasses toward the panicked screeching, my shoes making soggy depressions in the soil. The sounds seemed to radiate from an undergrowth of trees drooping over the water. A thick forest of cattails rustled. Water splashed and fluttered; brown wings flashed. I glimpsed a movement of something white and blue in the algae-covered water. Someone had dumped a load of trash that had trapped a helpless bird. Unfortunately the whole mess was just far enough into the lake to be out of my reach.
I made a disgusted sound and glanced at my new Adidas. Removing them and wading into the cold ankle-deep water was one option, but I’d be risking more than expensive jogging shoes. People were also known to throw away beer cans, broken bottles, and other objects dangerous to bare feet. I looked around for a stick. After a few seconds of searching, I found one that appeared long enough and stretched out as far as possible. I was at least a foot short. The squawking grew more frantic. There seemed to be no choice but to brave the lake. The first step was the worst; freezing water rushed into my shoes and instantly soaked my socks. Mud swirled around my ankles like milk in black coffee. A mental picture flashed through my mind of Gabe’s irritated expression when he saw my once pristine shoes. He’d think I did it on purpose to avoid jogging. The idea certainly had merit. It
was
possible I might not get around to replacing them for a very long time.