Five Fortunes (46 page)

“No thanks, buddy. I’ll be fine. Just check to make sure the phones are working, will you?”

He gave a laugh. Gallows humor. Widow woman in lonely farm-house finds her phone lines have been cut. He checked. “We have dial tone, Houston.”

“Okay. Turn the lights out when you leave. Will you come for me in the morning?”

“I don’t know who’s staffing you, I’ll check with Walter. One of us will give you a wake-up call.”

This was the way she liked it. She liked to know there would be a morning call; she had nightmares about the power going out and the alarm failing.

She was so tired, she didn’t even try to read. She stared into space as she drank the hot rum. Then she turned off the bedside lamp and went to sleep.

Five Fortunes / 367

It was no longer pitch dark when she heard the footsteps. The moon was up; there was light between the curtains, casting shadows.

At first she thought she was imagining it. No one was here. Even she wasn’t supposed to be here.

In another moment she knew it was real. She knew the noises of the stairs too well. Creak on the fifth step, then the eighth. There was someone coming up, in the dark. It was soft, creeping. As quietly as she could, she reached for the night table.

The person was looking for something. The footsteps went down the hall, away from her. She lay propped up in the dark, listening.

She had her eyes stretched open wide. She didn’t want to turn on the light; that would show him where she was. She wanted to get as used to the dark as she could.

The footsteps had found the twins’ room. That was evidently not what was wanted. They turned and started down the hall, toward her. They stopped at Anna’s room. She heard that door open. They moved on to the bathroom. She heard that door open. The steps were moving toward her. Her eyes fastened wide on the crack beneath the door, saw the glint of a beam from a flashlight. Good. He was using a light; he’d be night blind. Her heart was pounding so hard it seemed to be coming out her ears. The footsteps were right outside now; she heard her doorknob turn.

In the open door in the dark house stood the silhouette of a man.

He swept the flashlight up from the floor. Toward the bed, and saw there was somebody there. The man screamed. And at the same instant, Laurie shot him.

LAURA LOPEZ SHOOTS INTRUDER

blazed the headlines.

The senatorial candidate, home for a night of rest from the campaign trail, surprised an intruder in her house and shot him with a nine-millimeter pistol. The handgun was bought for her by her late husband, tennis star Roberto Lopez, and was properly registered.

The intruder, who is in “guarded” condition, has been identified as Thomas Tickner of Nampa. A source close to the Turnbull campaign confirms that Mr. Tickner has been used by the GOP in previous years for so-called “dirty tricks,”

but claim they have no idea what he was doing in Judge Lopez’s bedroom.

T
he uproar was amazing. The Turnbull campaign was spinning like mad, trying to distance itself from the mess and get back on message. Lloyd Prince said nothing could have surprised him less, it was just what these brand-name party hacks got up to and always would, the perfect reason to ignore them both and vote for him. The Natural Law candidate deplored both the breaking and entering and the violent response, and pointed out that Transcendental Meditation caused people to go to a better place within themselves so things like this wouldn’t happen.

As usual, it was Carrol Coney who captured the media’s hearts.

They charged out to Owyhee County to get his reaction.

368

Five Fortunes / 369

“Aw, what a buncha assholes,” said the candidate. He had to come outside and stand under the sky to be interviewed, as his dwelling was too cramped for a press conference.

“Who do you mean, Mr. Coney?” chorused the reporters.

“Those assholes who would have a guy break into a lady’s house in the night…a person’s home is their castle, man, this is America!

Even if your castle is made of hay, you don’t want no assholes showing up in the night and poking in your sock drawer! I’m just sorry she only drilled him in the shoulder, man. I wish she’d blown his nuts off.”

“What effect do you think this will have on the campaign, Mr.

Coney?”

“I’ll tell you what effect it will have. I don’t think this is fun anymore. As of right now, I am withdrawing from the race. I want everyone who was going to vote for me to vote for that shooter lady.

Buncha assholes.” He went back inside his hay house and stayed there.

“Laurie. Darling, are you all right?” Rae was on the phone from San Francisco.

“I’m fine, just tired. The papers make it sound worse than it was.”

“I think I should come up there and give you a hug.”

“I’d love to have you do that.”

“All right, I’ll be there tonight. I’ll give you a hug, and then we can have some target practice.”

Rae flew into Hailey on a little jet she chartered, not wanting to be away from her new project for more than a day. Amy and Laurie met her at the airport, trailed by a battery of photographers and a reporter from
People
magazine.

“Walter’s with our pollster,” Laurie said. “He’ll be here tonight.

We’re having dinner at my brother’s house, is that all right? You’ll meet my dad, and the children.” Amy carried Rae’s overnight bag, and Rae beamed and exclaimed over the beauty of the mountains while flashbulbs popped. The photographers trailed them all the way back to the ranch, where Amy stopped the car, got out, and pointedly locked the gate across the road while reporters shouted questions at the car. “It makes me feel like Madonna,” said Rae happily.

370 / Beth Gutcheon

Dinner turned into the pure vacation Laurie had been needing—a long, noisy family gathering in which nobody mentioned politics.

Bliss wasn’t there; Billy said he was sulking in his tent because he had given the speech of his life in Moscow the night before and nobody had covered it. Nobody wrote about anything except the

“Nine-millimeter Judge,” as the papers were currently calling Laurie.

“I taught the children to shoot,” Hunt boasted to Rae. “They can all shoot rifles and handguns. I remember the time when Laurie was ten, she shot the head off a milk snake that was bothering the chickens. Shot it at ten paces, and it was moving.”

“I shot it at point-blank range, Daddy. Billy had his foot on it.”

“I think you better teach
me
how to shoot,” said Rae to Hunt. “I see now that you never know when it will come in handy.”

Hunt looked down the table at Rae, who was wearing some marvelous thing made of red feathers, although everyone else was in jeans and flannel. He said, “I’d be delighted. I’ve got some targets in the barn, we can start in the morning.”

“Why, that would be perfect,” said Rae. Suddenly Walter and Amy looked across the table at each other and started to laugh. They both knew that Rae had planned to be back in California for a breakfast meeting with the Oakland City Council.

“We’re back!” yelled Walter the next afternoon. The polls were coming in. It was only a half sample, but it looked as if more than half of Coney’s voters had switched to Laurie, along with a lot of Turnbull’s gun nuts, and an important chunk of the Undecideds.

“We’re going to stuff him in the killing jar!” Walter whooped. They were two points away from Jimbo Turnbull, and moving upward.

Laurie’s cough seemed to be cured. She did
Viewpoint, Newsmakers
, and
Boise This Week
, and was booked to do the Sunday national news shows.

C
arter was trying to remember how to be alone. She’d spent a week of evenings just wandering from room to room. She went to the track with her brother, Buddy, a few times and hit the daily double.

“So what do you think, kid? You going to live?” Buddy asked as she left the window counting a wad of money.

“You didn’t arrange that somehow, did you?”

“Kid, if I knew how to do that, would I be living in a trailer?”

She checked in with Jill. She told her that Flora had gone home to live with her aunt in a way that made Delia’s coming home sound like a miracle, and Carter’s losing Flora like No Big Deal. Jill was young enough that she believed her. Oddly, this made it easier for Carter.

So are we going to Fat Chance for our week?
Carter wrote.

Jill wrote back a long, chatty letter. She told Carter about Sweet2.

Did you tell him he nearly got you raped and killed?

Jill wrote back that she hadn’t told him that, but she had told about how John Henry Howard had heard her screaming when she hadn’t made a sound. As a mostly deaf person, Tom had a lot to say about that.

How is John Henry doing?

371

372 / Beth Gutcheon

He’s getting better. He started going to my mom’s church. He
sits by himself. At first he wouldn’t talk to anybody, he just
went to the coffee hour and ate all the cookies.

Does that mean you’re going to your mom’s church?

I go sometimes. Last week John Henry talked to me. He’s
taking some new drug and also some odd vitamin therapy.

He asked me how school was. He said he was thinking about
going back to school himself.

Wow

Carter tapped. Another time she wrote:

How’s your dad? Has he figured out where your mother is?

I don’t think so. He went to Paris in August and hung around
the Georges U and the Crillon looking for her.

That sounds depressing.

He said it was.

One evening just before Halloween, Carter was sorting her mail when she heard a car drive up to her house. She glanced out and saw to her surprise that it was Jerry. He was walking up the walk, bent forward, eyes on the ground, the way he usually did. He was carrying a bottle of wine. She opened the door.

“Trick or treat,” he said.

“Please, no tricks. I’ve had enough of those.”

“That makes two of us. I brought you some wine. Can I come in?”

She opened the door, smiling, and he closed it behind him and
Five Fortunes / 373

followed her into the kitchen. She opened the wine and poured two glasses. They raised them to each other.

There was a long silence. Jerry walked across the room and opened a cupboard, then another.

“Do you want to go sit down?” Carter asked.

“No, I like kitchens. Is this what we used to keep in these shelves?”

He was looking at a collection of half-used boxes of rice, sugar, and cornstarch behind one door, two shelves of mismatched glasses behind the other.

“Let me think. No, I think we had those big green plates in there on the left. Remember those? Do you still have them?”

“I remember. I think Niki didn’t like them. I think she gave them to the maid.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“They didn’t go with her dining room.”

“I never saw that dining room.”

“It had a lot of swags.”

They sipped their wine.

“I miss the baby,” Jerry said.

“Oh. That. Join the club.”

“I was thinking I’d like to set up a little trust fund for her.”

“Jerry!”

“Nothing big. Just enough so that Delia can keep the house in good repair, and afford schools and camp. I wouldn’t want Flora to ever know where it came from.”

“I think that’s a wonderful idea. I wish I’d thought of it.” There was a silence. Carter said, “You sure you don’t want to sit in the living room?”

“No, this is fine.”

“Okay. Let’s sit.”

They settled down at the kitchen table with the bottle between them.

“You were great with her,” said Jerry. “Flora.”

Carter couldn’t speak. They sat in silence for a while. Jerry crossed his long legs under the table and the chair creaked. Carter wanted to go into the living room because sitting here made her des-374 / Beth Gutcheon

perately want to reach into the drawer where she used to keep her cigarettes.

Jerry shifted himself all around in his chair again, and finished his wine. He poured another glass and drank half of it.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you would think about marrying me.”

“Jerry!”

She started to laugh.

“I knew you’d do that,” he said morosely.

“No, it’s just that…well, for starters, aren’t you married?”

“Not so much as you might think.” He glowered.

“What happened to Graciela?”

“She’s in Buenos Aires. My own Evita.”

“Since when?”

“Since about March.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure what it meant.”

“You mean, whether you cared?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she alone?”

“Oh, I doubt it,” he said. He finished his wine again, and refilled their glasses.

“Give me some help here—did you…? Or did she?”

“Quite a lot of both.”

“But why? Tell me it wasn’t the painting with the plates stuck in it.”

“No, it was me. It was just Niki all over again. Somebody said to me lately that relationships—you know, you get in the ones you need, for some reason, karma or something, that you have to go through.” He looked so darkly glum she didn’t dare laugh. “The falling in love part, that’s just to keep you out of your mind until you’re good and hooked, then the anesthetic wears off.”

“So what was it all about? With Graciela?”

“With both of them. I’ve thought about it and what I come up with is, I must have really needed to learn what an awful intellectual snob I am.”

Five Fortunes / 375

Carter roared. What was funny was the idea that anyone needed to learn that about Jerry. It was the most obvious thing about him.

“Fine. Laugh. I’d keep marrying these women and then about three years later, I’d wake up and realize it wasn’t like having a…wife, I don’t know, a partner…it was more like having one of those little poodles. Like having a gorgeous animal in the house that’s too stupid to housetrain. Everyone looks at this thing prancing around and says ooh, ahh, what a physical specimen, and you’re just worrying when it’s going to chew your shoes apart, or piss on the rug.” He glowered. Carter was trying not to laugh out loud.