Murder on the Horizon (17 page)

23

G
RACIE
steered the Ranger around a slow-moving delivery truck and back onto the westbound highway lane leading into town. Behind her, the morning sun, still low in the sky, shone down the length of the valley, illuminating the sentinel pines lining the road.

Minnie's chin rested on her shoulder. She reached back and stroked the silky head.

Despite feeling as if she hadn't slept in weeks, Gracie spent the night of her disastrous day kicking off blankets, pulling them back up, staring into the darkness, sitting up, turning on the light, turning it off, lying back down, and turning the light on again. Once again, she was unable to stop the pinwheels of thoughts and images spinning around in her brain. Children carrying high-powered weapons. Baxter's tear-stained face and bruised body. Angry men marching and chanting angry, hateful words. Ralph's heart attack. Vivian and John's house burning. Ralph moving away. John's angry face leaning in toward hers. Tattoos. Swastikas.

At four thirty in the morning she finally fell asleep only
to slap the buzzing alarm clock off ninety minutes later. She sleepwalked through the day at camp. Practically comatose, she helped serve the breakfast, waved good-bye to the church group, spent several hours in the middle of the day supposedly catching up on paperwork, trying not to lay her head down on the desk lest she never pick it up again. In the late afternoon, she greeted the arriving group of a dozen corporate executives. Finally, after a steak dinner grilled outdoors next to the lake, she drove home and collapsed onto her bed, unconscious almost immediately, sleeping straight through until her alarm went off the following morning.

The new group in camp was small enough for Allen to handle preparing and serving the breakfast alone. Promising the head cook the afternoon off—he hadn't had time off in over a week—Gracie set her alarm for eighty thirty, allowing herself an additional three hours of sleep.

But thirteen hours of sleep and two panda mugs of Folgers Instant hadn't been enough. Her eyelids still felt as if tiny gnomes were perched there, pressing them closed. “Time for the big guns,” she mumbled and turned into the Safeway parking lot.

After parking, she told Minnie, “Be right back,” and walked into the store. Ten minutes later she reemerged, Venti Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino in hand.

She stopped just outside the double front doors and took a sip. “Ahhh.” She looked around, then glanced behind her at the newspaper and magazine stands lined up against the outer wall of the grocery store, wondering if she had read the most recent issue of the
Grizzly
, the local newspaper. She walked over, recognized the headlines concerning the Shady Oak Fire, dug in her pack for change, thumbed three quarters into the machine, opened the door, and pulled out a copy.

Coffee in hand, newspaper under an arm, she headed back to the truck.

Three vehicles down the row, she stopped at a white Toyota Tacoma pickup. No shell. Brown racing stripes.
Dents. Rust spots. Gun rack in the back window. Confederate flag decal.

This time there was no doubt it was the same truck she had seen parked along the street two days earlier in Desertview.

Setting her coffee and the newspaper on the ground, Gracie dug her cell phone out of the top pouch of her day pack and snapped pictures of the truck, the gun rack, the flag decal, and the license plate. What she was going to do with the pictures, she had no idea, except to positively identify the truck if she ever saw it again. She had no convenient contact in the California Department of Motor Vehicles to tell her who owned it.

“Looking to buy?” asked a male voice right next to her.

Gracie straightened with a yelp.

Glacier-blue eyes. Black goatee. Gold earring. Shaved head. Two feet away stood the same man she had seen marching in the neo-Nazi parade, the man she had recognized from the paramilitary training the previous Saturday.

“Is this your truck?” Gracie asked, face burning with the guilt of someone caught snooping.

“And if it is?”

“Nothing. I've seen it before. A couple of days ago in Desertview. And on my—” She stopped herself in time.

The man cocked his head, staring at her as if by looking long and hard enough, he could see into her head as to what she was going to say.

“I've seen you before, too,” she said. “In Desertview. And at the training in the woods.
Lord of the Flies
.”

The man nodded, icy eyes crinkling into the hint of a smile. “That would be correct.” Then he said, “Things aren't always as they seem.”

Gracie narrowed her eyes at him, trying to appear more stalwart, more menacing in order to hide the fact that she was shaking like an aspen leaf in a breeze. “And some things are exactly as they seem.”

“Your name's Grace, right?”

“Perhaps.”

The man smiled and reached out a hand. “Name's Boojum.”

“Boojum.”

“That's right.”

The hand was still outstretched.

Gracie reached out slowly and took it, hard, callused, but warm.

She tried to let go, but Boojum held on. Alarmed, she looked into his face, even with hers.

The ice-blue eyes were surprisingly feminine with long lashes, thick and black. And they were filled with a profound sadness.

Boojum put his other hand on top of Gracie's and leaned forward so that his mouth was only inches from hers, a surprising, but nonthreatening invasion of space, so close she could see the whisker stubble on his upper lip. “You don't want to be a part of this, Grace,” he said, his voice gentle. “Any of it.”

Trying to pull away was like trying to remove her hand from a vise grip. “What are you . . . talking about?”

“I don't know what you think you're doing, but do not get involved in what's going on here. Any of it.”

“These aren't the droids I'm looking for?”

He chuckled. “Something like that.”

He leaned even closer and put his mouth next to her ear, his breath tickling her ear. “Do not . . . get involved here.” he said again. “Do you hear what I'm telling you?”

“I don't—”

“Do you hear what I'm telling you?”

She looked back at him. “I hear what you're telling me.”

“Good.” Boojum let go of her hand, stepped back, spun around, and disappeared among the parked cars.

*   *   *

HUNCHED ON THE
three-legged stool in the camp kitchen, Gracie sat with her elbows on the butcher-block table, chin on her hands, staring into space and puzzling over the man named
Boojum. He didn't seem to fit with the rest of the Edwards clan. He was different. He seemed nice. But then, crappy judge of character that she was turning out to be, so had Winston.

As soon as Boojum disappeared among the cars in the parking lot, Gracie regretted she didn't have enough time to play private investigator, hanging around, skulking in the shadows, to see if he eventually returned to the truck, climbed inside, and drove away.

She would have known then whether the truck had a hole in the muffler, which would point even more convincingly to it being the same truck she had seen on Arcturus a couple of days before the Robinsons' house had been firebombed. And it would confirm that the truck belonged to a man who was affiliated with a white supremacist group. Everything tied up in a neat little package.

But she hadn't had the time.

Boojum had given her a very specific warning to not get involved in any of it. But what exactly was
it
? The Edwards/Ferguson clan? White supremacists in general? And why? Was he trying to keep her from learning more about what the group was involved in, what nefarious plots they might be hatching? Or was he trying to keep her from tying the family in general or him specifically with the firebombing of an elderly black couple's home? There was no way of knowing.

Gracie sighed, slid off the stool, and picked up the newspaper from on top of her day pack propped up against the table leg. She sat back down again and studied the four-color map comprising the entire front page, depicting which areas the Shady Oak Fire had already burned, which areas had been contained, the neighborhoods that had already been evacuated, and those designated for pre-evacuation.

She sighed again and flipped through the rest of the paper, scanning the pages. Her eye caught on a headline at the bottom of page four, an article so small she almost missed it. She read how the human remains discovered weeks before in the desert along the I-15 corridor near
Barstow had been identified as belonging to two people, a man and a woman. Names were being held pending notification of the families.

Gracie stared down at the article and thought again about the hands they had found in the plastic bag, about the tattoo on the inside of one of the wrists.

Tattoos again, she noted, mentally filing the information away for later. She was tired of thinking. Tired of feeling. Tired, in fact, of everything.

She paged through the rest of the paper, past real estate ads and articles about valley schools reopening for the year, and so-and-so running for reelection for city council.

She closed the paper. Headlines at the top of the back page read:
NEW RESIDENT DIES IN LOC
AL HOUSE FIRE
.

“Oh, my
God
!”

Gracie's eyes flew down the article, reading how Vivian Robinson, sixty-four, a new resident to the valley, had died Friday night of smoke inhalation sustained in a house fire. Her husband, John, had sustained minor injuries. A granddaughter, aged nine, was unhurt. The cause of the blaze was still under investigation.

Gracie covered her face with her hands. “She's dead!” Tears seeped out between her fingers. With a stabbing pain of emptiness, she wept for the loss of an innocent life, a gentle spirit, a wise mind, a compassionate heart, for a rosebud of a friendship cut short, and for lives blasted to shrapnel by a single despicable act.

Whoever had firebombed Vivian and John's house had moved up in the world. Whereas before, guilty of only arson, that person was now also guilty of murder.

The final scene from
West Side Story
stepped to center stage in her brain. Maria standing in the harsh spotlight of the playground, gun in hand, new husband Tony lying dead at her feet, shot and killed by a rival gang member. In grief and anger, Maria points the gun at first to one man, then another, and another, screaming that they were all guilty of murdering Tony
and his friend Riff, and her own brother, Nardo, because of their hatred for each other, and that now she can kill, too.

“‘Because now,'” Gracie whispered the quote. “‘I have hate.'”

She dropped her hands and stared straight ahead, eyes cold, half-closed. Thinking. Considering.

She climbed down from the stool, walked down the back hallway, past Minnie on her bed in the closet, and pushed out through the screen door, letting it slap closed behind her. She pulled open the passenger door of the Ranger, flipped open the glove compartment, and pulled out a scrap of paper lying inside.

She walked back into the kitchen, lifted the receiver from the telephone on the wall, and dialed the number scribbled on the paper in blue ink.

She listened to the telephone ringing on the other end of the line.

A voice answered.

“Winston? It's Grace Kinkaid. I wondered if your offer to have coffee still stands.”

24

G
RACIE
took a sip of her iced tea and resisted the urge to pick at the sandal strap digging into her left heel.

For the second time in almost a decade, she was wearing a dress, the same simple black shift she had worn to Jett's memorial service the first time she had met Winston, the same one he had noticed enough to remember and remark on several months later.

Jumping late into the shower had left her without enough time to let her thick, shoulder-length hair air-dry. For the first time in years, she had blown it dry, whipping it into a voluminous auburn cloud. “I look like the Flying Nun,” she squawked to her reflection in the mirror. “One good gust of wind and I'll be in Barstow.” She gathered her hair up and clipped it in a heap at the top of her head.

The first thing Winston said as he walked up the sidewalk outside the Ancient Mariner restaurant was, “You look beautiful, Gracie. You have your hair up. And you're wearing that dress I like.”

The man, almost a full foot taller than Gracie, wore a
white short-sleeved dress shirt, red-and-blue-striped tie, the ever-present red suspenders holding up gray dress slacks, and steel-toed boots with red laces. For the first time, his cleanly shaved head remained uncovered.

In true gentlemanly fashion, Winston held the front door open for her. She fought the temptation to shrug off his hand on her lower back as he escorted her inside the nautical-themed restaurant dominated by navy blue and white, polished wood, and walls adorned with sea lanterns and signal flags in bright primaries: yellow, red, and blue.

At a table looking out over Timber Lake, Winston pulled back Gracie's chair. As she took her seat, she glanced down at his left hand. No wedding ring.

Over an uninspired dinner of dry sea scallops with sides of overcooked broccoli and bland rice, Gracie engaged in conversation with the man who most definitely was a polygamist, who might or might not be a white supremacist and the instigator of hatred, bigotry, and violence in children, possibly complicit in the firebombing of a house with its owners sleeping inside.

Three minutes into the meal, Gracie realized Winston was information gathering, asking Gracie so many questions about herself she began to feel like she was sitting in an interview for potential wifehood, which, she figured, she was. She wouldn't have been surprised if he had pulled out a pencil and checklist from his shirt pocket. Where did you grow up? In and around Detroit, Michigan. Check. What were your favorite subjects in grade school? Reading and geography. Check. Are you fertile? Presumably. Check.

On a fishing expedition of her own, Gracie countered with, Where did you grow up? Canon City, Colorado. How far did you get in school? Graduated high school. What was your favorite subject? Phys ed. Oh, and shop, too. He liked the band saw. When she tried to steer the dialogue toward what he did for a living, Winston adroitly flipped the conversation back in her direction by asking her about Search and Rescue,
specifically if she had any survival training, to which she replied with her most winning smile, “But of course.”

Over tasteless peach cobbler, Winston got down to the nitty-gritty, remarking, “I seem to remember that you're not married.”

“I wouldn't be out with you if I were,” Gracie shot back, and decided if this was going to work, she would need to work harder at suppressing her animosity. She gave him what she hoped was another dazzling smile and softened her tone. “No. I'm not married. I'm hoping that you aren't either,” she said, ending on the up note of a question.

Winston grunted noncommittally and said, “I do have two kids. You met . . . er, well, those were my kids you met the other day. Out in the woods. The girl and boy.”

“Jordan and Heather.”

“Good memory! I like that in a woman.”

Unable to stop herself, she said, “I tend to remember the names of people who point guns at me.”

Rather than take offense, Winston chuckled. “Yeah, I still feel really bad about that. It'll never happen again. We learned our lesson there. From now on, every group has at least one adult.”

As he launched into a discourse on the brilliant potential of his children, Gracie studied the man's face. No part in and of itself was noteworthy, rendering the whole unremarkable: fleshy cheeks, sharp nose, flaring nostrils, thin lips.

She remembered thinking the first time she had met him that the soft, blue eyes were kind. But now she noticed that when he smiled, the sparkle never reached his eyes. She couldn't help comparing him to Boojum, where, she felt, if one burrowed beneath the tough exterior, one would find a soul. If one burrowed beneath to Winston Ferguson's core, Gracie suspected one would strike stone.

When Winston had reached the end of his soliloquy, Gracie took in a deep breath and asked, “Did you hear about that house fire? The one that killed that woman?”

Winston's eyes moved up to meet hers, then down again to his peach cobbler, revealing nothing. “Read about it,” he said.

“It's a tragedy, don't you think?”

Winston made another noncommittal sound, not looking up.

“They say it's arson.”

No response.

“Who would do such a thing?” Gracie crossed her arms on the table in front of her. “Who would set fire to someone's house? While they were sleeping? I know the family. Vivian was a good woman. Smart. Articulate. She used to teach English. High school. She was full of wisdom and compassion. An old soul, you know what I mean?”

Winston scraped his dessert bowl with his spoon. “No.”

“I heard someone firebombed the house.”

The blue eyes met hers again, then dropped back to the bowl.

“Vivian was an asset to her community, her world, her universe. And now she's gone. Poof!” Words poured out of Gracie's mouth. “Why? Because of the willful hatred of some sick Neanderthal lacking the most basic brainpower? Because of vile, twisted, perverted minds of people who hate others simply because their skin is a different color?”

Winston had stopped moving.

“They're the types who drive around in those
biiig
daddy mambo trucks with
biiig
daddy mambo tires and
loud
engines. They're the types who have to overcompensate for their piss-poor self-images by hating somebody because they don't look like they do or act like they do.”

Heads in the restaurant turned in Gracie's direction.

“How do people end up that way?” It was as if someone else were controlling her brain, as if once the floodgates were opened, it was impossible to stanch the flow of words. “They're sick, that's what they are. They're demented and bigoted, with shit for brains. Don't you think so, Winston?” Gracie leaned forward. “Don't you
?”

Winston had dropped his hand to the table, fork in his
fist, tines up. He sat unmoving except for the muscle working in his jaw and the blue vein pulsing visibly on his temple. Shoulders hunched, nostrils flared, he looked as if, at any second, he would lunge forward across the table and plunge the fork into the side of Gracie's neck.

He looked up with eyes as dead as a shark's and said in a flat voice that sent a jolt of adrenaline sizzling right down to Gracie's toes, “No,
Grace Louise
. I don't think so.”

Then he stood up so fast and hard, the heavy wooden chair fell backward with a crash, making everyone in the restaurant, including Gracie, jump.

With the dead eyes fixed on Gracie, Winston slid his wallet out of his back pocket, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it on the table. Then he turned and walked away.

Before reaching the outer door, he grabbed up another heavy chair, lifted it high over his head, and smashed it down on the glass display case. Glass flew everywhere. Diners screamed.

Winston pulled a sheaf of bills from his wallet and threw them up into the air. Hundred-dollar bills floated down to the floor like autumn leaves. With blood oozing from cuts on his forehead and cheeks, Winston shot one last searing look back at Gracie and pushed through the door out of the restaurant.

Gracie plopped back in her chair. “Wow,” she said. “Guess my having his babies is o-u-t.”