Dove in the Window (18 page)

“I know that one. It’s gorgeous. But then again, he’s gorgeous.”

She frowned and drained the wineglass in her hand. “Guess I wasn’t the only one who thought so.”

I widened my eyes in question.

“You haven’t heard about the infamous photographs? I’m surprised. With your contacts, I’d have thought you heard right off.”

I didn’t feel like going into—yet again—how little I knew about Gabe’s work so I just said, “Guess this one flew right by me.”

“Our friends Shelby and Bobby. Apparently I wasn’t the only person he enjoyed posing for.”

“So?” Bobby was certainly the consummate cowboy. It wasn’t surprising that Shelby would want to use him in her work.

“So, it would have been nice if he’d been wearing clothes.”

I tried to keep the shock off my face in an attempt to at least appear to have a modicum of sophistication. Nudity in art was a very acceptable thing. I tried not to think of Dove and Isaac. “Well ...” That was about all I could come up with to say.

“Well, it ticks me off, that little cheat. See if he gets any more free meals or clean sheets off this lady.”

So the rumors were true. Olivia and Bobby did have more going on in their relationship than strictly artist and model. I fidgeted in my seat, not sure how to answer her. Then again, she brought it up, so I let my curiosity win and asked, “How did you see the photographs?”

“They were in my mail today. They’re disgusting. Some are of the two of them together—out in the dunes somewhere. I guess she must have used a timer.” She set her glass under her folding chair. It was obvious to me now that, judging by the glassiness in her eyes, she’d been drinking long before coming to the auction. That would explain why she was being so free with such humiliating information.

“Do you have any idea who sent them?” I answered, and wondered if Gabe or the sheriff’s detectives knew about them. They might not be anything except what they were—a young photographer’s experiment with human form. On the other hand, they could be significant.

Olivia shook her head. “I should have known better than to get hooked up with a man younger than me. He was great in bed, but apparently he has the attention span of a fruit fly.”

I made a sympathetic noise in my throat simply because I didn’t know what else to say. Before she could continue, Emory came back with her wine, and we settled in to watch the auction.

It still amazed me, watching Gabe switch into his public persona. In the last year and a half he’d served as chief of police, he’d gotten to know many of the people in the audience, which ran the social gamut of university bigwigs, wealthy old ranching families, and influential people from all colors of the political spectrum. He teased and cajoled them by name into bidding on the donated sculptures, quilts, paintings, weekend-at-San-Celina-Inn packages, golf clubs, leather goods, and sides of custom-cut beef. Next to him, Pamela handed him a card describing each donation, looking as perky as Vanna White. I sighed and stared at the toes of my boots, dreading the party at the mayor’s house later on this week.

My attention was diverted when a familiar voice called out a bid over the murmuring crowd.

“Twenty dollars!” Dove’s loud voice called out.

I sat up higher in my chair and searched the crowd for her.

“I have twenty dollars for a signed print from Isaac Lyons, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer,” Gabe said into the microphone. “Do I hear thirty?” Immediately, people started shouting out bids.

“Oh, brother,” I said out of the side of my mouth to Emory when I finally spotted her. She leaned over and whispered something to Isaac, who put his huge arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer. When the bids reached three hundred, I stood up and scooted past Emory’s long legs. “I’ve seen enough. I’m going home. Would you give Gabe a ride?”

“Sure,” Emory said and left it at that.

Outside I stood for a moment, trying to decide if I wanted to go straight to the car or get a cup of coffee first. I nixed Blind Harry’s simply because too many people knew me there and I wasn’t in the mood to chitchat. Sweet Dreams was more popular with the college crowd, and though I didn’t always like the music they played, at least the regular patrons didn’t have a clue to my identity and didn’t care. Solitude in a crowd was what I was craving right now as I tried to organize my jumbled feelings about Dove and her new friend, Shelby’s death and its ramifications, and a mild depression brought on by watching Pamela, which proved, yet again, it was obvious that Gabe and I weren’t exactly a perfect fit.

“Looks like I wasn’t the only one who needed air,” a deep voice said behind me.

I turned around and looked up into Isaac Lyons’s genial face. He was dressed tonight in black Levi’s, a white snap-button cowboy shirt, and a chunky turquoise bolo tie. I didn’t respond to his words or his smile. My dislike of him was irrational, immature, and unfair. And I couldn’t help it one bit.

He continued talking as if I hadn’t snubbed him. “I still hate it when my work is on display and I’m being judged. You’d think after all these years I’d get used to it, but I haven’t. I had this horrible fear that no one would want it. Bless your grandmother’s kind heart—that’s why she started the bidding.”

“Excuse me,” I said, knowing if I stayed much longer I’d say something I’d regret, “but I’m not feeling well.”

“Hope you feel better,” he called to my back.

I walked up the street toward Sweet Dreams feeling like a real jerk. What was it about that guy that made me so prickly? Didn’t I think that Dove deserved to have someone in her life? What was I really afraid of?

Her being hurt,
I told myself. I saw him as a sophisticated man of the world and was afraid he would just use her or make fun of her. And I was worried that she didn’t see it—would believe that he really found her attractive.
Face it, my more blunt side said, what you’re saying is that a man like that couldn’t possibly be interested in your unsophisticated grandmother.

Or, the nasty little voice continued,
maybe what’s really bothering you is that you’re feeling the exact same thing about you and Gabe.

Stop it
, I told myself.
I like who I am. I don’t want to change. I don’t need to compete with the Pamela Howells of the world. Life was so much easier when I was married to Jack.

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and closed my eyes, not believing I actually thought those words. I loved Gabe—more than I could imagine loving any man. Yet a part of me longed to go back to when the world was safer, when I had more control, when I knew who I was.
When Jack was alive
.

“Whatcha doin‘, blondie, communing with nature?” Jack said.

My eyes flew open. It wasn’t Jack, of course. Wade grinned at me.

“I just left the auction at the Forum,” I said. “It was getting too crowded for me, and I needed a cup of coffee.” I continued walking and he fell in beside me.

“Want some company?”

I didn’t, really. People were exactly what I was trying to escape from at the moment, but the look of loneliness on his face pricked at my raw emotions.

“Sure,” I said reluctantly.

We passed by the Mission Newsstand, closed now, and he grabbed my arm when we were in front of The Steerhead Tavern.

“Let’s go in here. I want a beer. Coffee’ll keep me up all night.”

“Wade, that place is a dive.” The Steerhead Tavern was the last of the old cowboy/oilfield worker hangouts left in downtown San Celina. Most of the bars now were either upscale yuppie hangouts full of expensive wood, ferns, and mirrors, or buck-a-bottle beer joints, catering to the college students, where the lines were long and the music loud. The Steerhead, squeezed between the Mission Newsstand and a boot and saddle repair shop that had been there for as long as I could remember, had a neon sign with a cowgirl holding a glowing cow skull perched over the front door and the requisite fifties glass brick windows and Coors beer signs. It was dark inside and loud with men’s competitive beer-bright voices. I squinted through the smoky haze at the Bud Light flags draped across the wall. “They have decaf at Sweet Dreams.”

He took my hand and led me to an open booth in back. “Ah, blondie, loosen up. Just one beer, okay? Then we can go have coffee at one of your frou-frou places.”

“Get me a Coke,” I called as he went over to the bar. “In a bottle.” I wasn’t about to trust a glass in this place. I ran my fingers lightly over the knife-carved formica table in front of me, trying to read the Braille-like messages in the dim light. Across the room, two men and their dates shot pool under a long plastic pool table light advertising Miller High Life. From the glowing jukebox came the sounds of Dwight Yoakum and Buck Owens walking the streets of Bakersfield.

“One Coke in a bottle,” Wade said, sliding into the seat across from me. I picked it up, wiped off the lip with my sleeve, and took a drink.

“Aren’t we Miss Priss tonight?” he mocked lightly, taking a long drag off his foamy mug of beer.

“Wade, you know I hate places like this.”

“Just one beer, okay? I just wanted to sit in some place I remember. I heard that Trigger’s went under a few months ago.”

I nodded. Trigger’s was a bar over by the bus station where he and Jack used to meet their friends for a beer whenever they came to town to buy feed or order some part from the Farm Supply. It was also the place where, almost two years ago, Wade had fought with Jack over the running of the Harper ranch and then left him there. Jack had continued drinking and had ended up dead after his old Jeep overturned on a desolate stretch of Highway One. When I’d read in the
Tribune
that Trigger’s owners had lost their liquor license and filed for bankruptcy, I gave a silent hallelujah.

“Nothin’s the same,” Wade said, his mouth turning downward. The song on the jukebox changed to an Alan Jackson song—“Chattahoochee.” Its brave and hopeful words about young boys just on the verge of manhood, talkin‘ about cars and dreamin’ about women, made my limbs feel weighted and old.

“Things change, Wade.” I ran my fingers up and down the round ridges of my Coke bottle. “People change.”

“Yeah, I guess they do. Look at you. Mrs. Chief-of-Police-Society-Lady. Who would have ever thunk it?”

His challenging tone was just this side of picking a fight, so I sipped my Coke and didn’t answer his question. A fight was definitely one thing I wasn’t looking for tonight. “Who have you seen since you’ve been here?”

“Your daddy was nice enough to loan me one of his trucks, and I’ve been dropping in on a few people, but I haven’t stayed long. You know how it goes. People don’t much like being around someone who failed.”

I nodded and didn’t reply. I knew exactly what he meant. So many ranches were on the edge of going under these days that seeing one of their own who hadn’t made it was an unwelcome reminder of what might lie in their future.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.
Go back to Texas,
I wanted to say.
Beg your wife to take you back.

He shrugged. “It’s kinda hard. I guess you know the police have been hassling me. They’re sure I was the one who killed Shelby. I’d like to go back to Texas, but I don’t want to leave with people thinkin‘ I’m running from something I didn’t do. I do have some pride left.” He stared down into his beer, not meeting my eyes. “But nobody believes I didn’t kill that girl. I can see it in their eyes.”

I reached over and took his hand, rough and scarred and so much like Jack’s that the sweetness of the Coke coating my tongue turned slightly salty. “Wade, I’m sorry. Really, I am.”

He looked up at me, his eyes glittering in the bar’s umber light. “You think it, too, don’t you? It’s ‘cause of that hard-ass cop you married. You’ve changed.
He’s
changed you. Shit, Benni, why’d you have to go and do that? How could you do that so soon after Jack died? Didn’t you love my brother?”

I jerked my hand out of his. “What a rotten thing to say.”

“If the boot fits.”

I took a deep breath before answering. “Wade Harper, you know I loved Jack. How dare you imply—”

“Then why’d you jump so fast into the sack with the first man to come sniffing around? And a Mexican on top of it. It makes me want to puke, and it would have Jack, too.”

Trembling with anger, I slid out of the booth. “That’s where you’re wrong. I knew your brother a lot better than you ever did, and he would have wanted me to be happy because unlike you, he really understood what love was. Maybe if you’d listened to him more closely, you not only wouldn’t have lost our ranch, but you wouldn’t have lost your wife.”

I ran out of the bar, ignoring his voice calling my name. Outside, I almost knocked over Tracianne Doyle and her husband, William, a local orthodontist who himself had a slight overbite. Tracianne and Pamela Howell belonged to all the same clubs and lived in the same exclusive neighborhood where their expensive houses sat directly on the golf course—the second and ninth tees respectively.

“Benni Harper!” she exclaimed, her tone surprised and smug. Smug was her specialty. “Are you all right?”

I stared at her a moment, speechless, my heart flowing like a microwaved Hershey bar into my stomach. The police chief’s wife seen fleeing the one cheap bar left in San Celina, her face on the verge of tears, would no doubt be the juiciest topic of conversation with the country club lunch crowd tomorrow.

“Fine,” I struggled out, knowing there was no saving the situation now. Tracianne was nicknamed Tell-all Traci for a good reason. I walked away, feeling her eyes on my back until I turned the corner.

When I got home I took a long shower, holding my face under the spray, resisting the urge to break down and sob. Not wanting to face Gabe’s questions as to why I left the auction early, I turned out the bedroom lights and crawled in bed, hiding in the cool darkness. Wade’s words had struck a nerve deep inside me; he’d voiced a question that I was sure had been on many people’s minds and probably had been whispered behind my back. How much had I really loved Jack if I could marry another man so quickly? Had this situation happened to someone else when I was with Jack, I would have been right there with everyone else commenting on the fickle nature of the woman involved. How different things were when it was you. I fell into a troubled sleep, images of Jack and Gabe intermingling in my dreams.