HOWLERS (4 page)

C
HAPTER 3

Quentin knew when he opened the car door that his life was going to change. He grabbed the door’s handle, but couldn’t make himself open it.  His eyes fixed on the red Denny’s sign showing through the falling snow. He’d been listening to the chatter on his police radio: Caltrans crews were about to blow a massive snowdrift on Emigrant Gap ridge. He knew that if the drift wasn’t blown, they were risking an avalanche that would close the road connecting Timberline to HHhighway 50, the town’s gateway to the outside world. Caltrans was broadcasting alerts to all police, sheriff departments, and Highway Patrol in the area. Quentin listened to an excited voice on the radio counting down. “Ten, nine, eight.” He switched the radio off.

You have to go on with your life. You’re only forty. Do you really want to be sitting by the fire alone the rest of your life?
Okay, like the commercial says: Just do it.

He felt the door handle depress, the car door cracked open, a two-year spell broken. The life he’d lived before now—the years with his wife, who had been everything to him—were sucked out into the lightly falling snow. It wasn’t a betrayal; his wife, Marie, was dead after all. He felt the pain of that cold separation one more time nonetheless.

Time changes everything
, he thought.

Quentin stepped out of his patrol car, slamming the door behind him. He looked up at the face of the Sierra, the sun nowhere to be seen.

You aren’t dead, you’re alive. So act like it, for Christ’s sake.

   Inside the packed restaurant he nodded to a table of Rotary Club members; the town’s prominent business people and ranchers ate at this Denny’s every Friday morning. The Rotary Club had contributed to all his campaigns over the years. He stopped and shook hands and made the necessary small talk about Founder’s Day, Timberline’s mid-winter holiday celebration that was right around the corner. They asked him about the possible highway closure and Quentin assured them the road would be back open in an hour, in plenty of time for the weekend’s festivities.

While he shook hands, Quentin searched the big dining room for Patty Tyson, the girl he’d come to meet. He saw her head bent over a newspaper in a booth in the back, along a row of windows with a view of the Emigrant Gap Ranger Station. Quentin lifted his cowboy hat, nervously slipped it off, and shook the last hand at the Rotary’s table. He made a passing joke to the business people, all old-time Timberline residents, about his not having had an opponent in the last election—an embarrassment, he told them with a smile, he was willing to undergo again.

   He left the Rotarians, most of whom he’d grown up with, and walked across the busy dining room. He tried to relax but couldn’t. The butterflies in his stomach rioted as he crossed the restaurant.

You’re an idiot for doing this. She probably just wants to talk about search and rescue, and now you’ve built yourself up for something else and you’ll be disappointed. She’s too pretty and young for you, anyway.

California State Park Ranger Patty Tyson watched the man she’d fallen in love with come into the Denny’s. For some reason, she immediately pretended she was immersed in the
San Francisco Chronicle
. She’d broken down and called Quentin at home, and, for all practical purposes, given herself away. She’d broken the Big Rule that she’d read in all the women’s magazines, but she didn’t give a damn.

What do rules have to do with it
, she thought.
Venus and Mars my ass
.

She wanted to hook up with Quentin Collier, it was a natural and powerful feeling, and she didn’t feel like fighting it anymore. Desire was exhausting her.

She had fallen in love with him that past summer up in the high country when they were together on a search for a little girl who had been kidnapped from her parents’ car at one of the freeway rest stops on the highway, just a mile from the ranger station. They’d never found the little girl, or her body. But they had found something else, she thought now, pretending to read her newspaper: a quiet understanding on horseback. For one whole week, that summer, the entire search and rescue community, from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe, had come out, hundreds of volunteers, into the Emigrant Gap Wilderness to help look for the little girl who’d come from Los Angeles with her young parents for a weekend in the mountains.

Patty let herself look up from the newspaper and study the sheriff as he stopped to talk with a table of older men and women. He was like a presence that wasn’t a presence, she thought. He was quiet and yet, when they’d talked those six July days—sometimes traveling on horseback, sometimes resting in the shade of a big pine tree with views of the Central Valley spread out green-beautiful below them—he’d told her stories about the Timberline he’d grown up in, stories about sheriffing, stories about deer hunting with his father and uncles in the Emigrant Gap Wilderness before it became a state park. As she’d come from the east coast, the stories fascinated her.

Something was compelling about the way he spoke to her. Something inside the story, something that he told with his eyes and his big cowboy smile. The way he patted a horse, or cinched a saddle, or stretched out by the campfire propped up on his saddle blanket, his shirt stained with sweat and grime. At those moments Quentin Collier looked like a man from another age. When she saw him back in town he seemed a little out of place. By the second day of the search, the others in the posse had disappeared for her.

The problem, she knew, was that she’d always loved cowboys. And Quentin Collier was a cowboy. It was the reason she’d come west from Virginia; it was the reason she’d gone to the University of Nevada. It was the reason she’d called the sheriff and made herself sound like a schoolgirl with a bad crush.

But it was more than just the physical attraction, which was very strong. He made her feel safe. She remembered standing next to him one morning in the ranger-station parking lot, after they’d come down from the mountain, empty-handed, and depressed that the little girl hadn’t been found. Quentin was talking to the assembled press, radio and television. She’d felt a sense of well-being just standing next to him in the late afternoon sunshine, sweaty and saddle-sore, his voice deep and sonorous. She could read his body language already; he was trying to say the right things, nothing the little girl’s family might read, or hear, later and be hurt by. It was like standing next to one of those big old pine trees up on the mountain. You knew, that no matter what, the tree could survive it.

Okay, I have a thing for cowboys
, she told herself as Quentin slipped into the booth.
He probably thinks I’m a nut and is just being polite.

“Hi,” she said.

“Good morning.” Quentin was stunned again by Tyson’s good looks every time he saw her. She was a tall willowy brunette with big blue eyes.

The police radio on his belt squawked and he turned it down. Quentin looked even bigger sitting in the booth, she thought, his shoulders square and straight. He was over six feet and lean, so he looked ten years younger than his forty years. A number he’d seemed to go out of his way to mention to her, as if he were old.

“Caltrans is closing the road to Timberline,” Quentin said. “They’re going to blow a potential slide. A couple of areas, I guess.”

“I heard they were going to,” Patty said. There was an awkward silence.

Quentin put his cowboy hat down on the seat next to him and smiled as if the idea of a slide were funny. “I hope we don’t have any problems,” he said. “If the road to 50 is closed for too long, everyone will be on my ass.” He saw her smile; she folded up her newspaper.

Quentin’s mind froze again while he watched her. She had that effect on him. Lust had an odd way of grinding your thoughts to dust. Patty moved her long hair out of her eyes and looked up at him, tucking it behind her ear. Even in the sexless green uniform of a California State Ranger, she looked attractive. There was something profoundly womanly about her, he thought. He remembered her in the saddle and he almost blushed. The curve of her hips, the way she rode, the way her hips rocked. Masterly. You could tell a lot about a person by the way they rode a horse. Jerks and city people always rode with their boot toes shoved way too far into the stirrups. It never failed. Not her. She had a good seat.

No, he thought, there were two kinds of people: the kind who hold on to the saddle horn at a trot and those who don’t need to. Patty Tyson held her reins easy with just two fingers. She was that kind of girl, and she was loping through his dreams most nights now. An easy-two-finger-on-the-reins kind of woman.

The sheriff glanced out at the freeway below the restaurant. All the cars zooming past looked dirty, their outlines obscured by the snowstorm.

“Coffee?” A waitress rescued them from an awkward silence. The woman poured coffee into Quentin’s cup, not waiting for an answer. Patty offered her cup, glad the waitress had come.

Did I make a mistake?
Patty tried to understand what was wrong.
Maybe he thinks I’m stupid.

He had ordered quickly, and it was her turn.

“Pancakes,” Patty said, not bothering to study the menu.

The waitress adjusted her glasses. Middle aged, the waitress wore heavy makeup and had red hair, about the same color as the Denny’s sign.

“Dear, we’ve got sixteen types of pancakes at this Denny’s. What kind would you like?” The waitress touched her glasses with bemused exasperation, reading the obvious first-date look on the couple’s faces.

“Buttermilk,” Patty said.

“Okay . . .  we’re short-handed this morning. Coffee is on the house today,” the waitress said.

“I talked to your daughter when I called. She’s nice,” Patty said, trying to think of something quick to say as the waitress turned and left.

“Which one?”

“I think the older one. Lacy.”

“It’s like having two mothers,” Quentin said. “Especially Lacy. She’s going to Berkeley. She wants to be a doctor. She’s wanted that since we—” Quentin stopped himself. “Since I can remember. I keep reminding her she’s my daughter and not my mother, but it doesn’t seem to do much good.”

After the waitress brought them their breakfast, the conversation became easier. They talked about that summer when they’d met, about the fact the little girl was never found, how devastating it must have been for her mother and father. Quentin told her the father still called the office once a week just to check.

“It must be hard being a sheriff. I mean, having to see the bad guys win like that. I don’t think I would like that. I mean, to know that no matter what you do, how hard you try to find someone, you can’t,” Patty said.

“You never get used to it,” Quentin said, looking away. The waitress came and poured him another cup of coffee and told Quentin she’d voted for him. She said that he was doing a good job.

Quentin’s family went back to the Gold Rush. Because of that, people in Placer County viewed him differently from almost any other politician. People in Placer County didn’t think of Quentin as a politician; they thought of him as Sheriff Collier. People said Quentin Collier was a throwback to another, better time—before CNN, Fox News and cell phones. He was honest.

“How come you aren’t married?” Quentin said when the waitress left. He wanted to change the subject. The loss of the little girl had hurt him. He couldn’t talk about it. All the time he’d been searching the loss of his wife, her death, had been very fresh; in a way, he had been searching for them both. He didn’t want anyone else to go through what he was going through, but they’d failed. They hadn’t found the little girl. He’d had to come back down the mountain and face the girl’s young parents. The moment he looked into the father’s eyes he knew he was looking at himself. That someone was cutting something out of the father while he was still alive. Quentin had stood there and said what he had to say. And then, he’d wished he hadn’t said anything. Words, he knew, only made it worse. His words had stolen all hope, which was the last thing the little girl’s parents had left.

“I was,” Patty said.

“What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“We found out we didn’t like each other.  In fact, I found out he was a real jerk.” The lights in the restaurant flickered.

“Trees popping,” Quentin said. “New snow brings down old trees and cuts the power. How would you like to go to the movies tomorrow night?
Osage County
finally came to Timberline.” Quentin surprised himself with the question. But he had the bit in his mouth. He was determined to reach for Life. The girl was life, if he’d ever seen it. He’d debated which movie she might like and decided against
Need For Speed
in favor of the popular woman-friendly, Meryl Streep movie.

“I’d love to,” Patty said. The lights flickered again, then went off completely, leaving the restaurant in semi-darkness. The diners gasped.

“Maybe that’s the first sign of an alien attack,” Quentin said in the semi-dark. “I don’t think they’ll like Placer County, though. We got more guns here than at the Remington factory.”  He heard her laugh. She still had a girl’s laugh. “I think everyone gets one the day they’re born. Girls and boys,” Quentin said. “The aliens will be shot at by five-year olds.”

“I don’t get off until six on Saturdays,” she said.

“We’ll go to the late show. Why don’t you come down to the ranch and you can see the place, have dinner and we’ll go from there. You can meet my two mothers. But they’ll probably demand you have me back by ten o’clock. And they’ll ask you how you drive. Also, they won’t let me go out with anyone who smokes.”

“Whatever they want,” she said.
I’d like to have you in bed by ten o’clock
, Patty thought.

The lights came back on and everyone clapped. He’d taken his first big step back into Life. Quentin Collier’s heart was pounding.

I might as well be sixteen again. It feels good to be alive
, he thought.

        *   *   *

Chuck Phelps looked behind him at his idling snowmobile. It was snowing harder than what he would have liked. He had a checklist in his gloved hand. Chuck put it down for a moment and looked at his beautiful, albeit small, log cabin. He felt a tremendous sense of pride. It, and he, were ready for Armageddon. He had done everything a man could do to prepare for what he was sure was coming. He looked at the cabin he’d built with his own two hands. It had taken him almost twenty years to finish it. No one looking at it would think it was, in fact, a modern-day fortress.

People in Timberline thought he was crazy, but he didn’t care. They would be sorry. He wouldn’t be able to help most of them, he thought as he walked toward the porch, built six feet above the snowy ground. He’d built so many traps, fields of fire, and automobile traps, that he couldn’t remember them all. So he’d gotten a computer and begun a small log of the cabin’s military-style defenses; he’d employed a lot of what he’d learned during his three tours of duty in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. The cabin was a state-of-the-art bunker disguised as a cabin.