Spider Web (15 page)

“Oh, my,” she said, stepping out of the truck. The rain had softened to a fine mist. “This is breathtaking.”

“Yes, it is,” I said, feeling pride though I had nothing to do with its beauty. “It’s even impressive in the summer when the hills are brown and tan, but in the spring, well, what can I say?” I leaned against the side of my truck. The cold, wet metal permeated my jeans.

Highway 46 ended at Pacific Coast Highway. A right turn would take us into the artsy town of Cambria, and a left turn south to Cayucos and Morro Bay, and eventually back to San Celina. After a quick drive through downtown Cambria, we headed south on Pacific Coast Highway.

I glanced at my watch. “I wish we could take the time to go through Cayucos and Morro Bay, but it’s already four o’clock, and I have to be somewhere at six.”

I had a meeting with the Coffin Star Quilt Guild at Oak Terrace Retirement Home. Normally our meetings took place during the day, but this meeting was a special one before the Memory Festival this Saturday. The ladies had been working on a quilt for the festival. It would be a silent auction item with the money going to the upkeep of the World War II veterans memorial in San Celina City Park. We planned on finishing it tonight.

“Oh, Benni, I’m sorry to take up so much of your time.” She appeared genuinely distressed.

“No problem. It was a lucky break that my afternoon was free.”

“I hope I’m not keeping you from a date with your husband.”

“No, that’s not it.” I told her about the Coffin Star Quilt Guild and our quilt. “Though I wish it were with Gabe; he’s been working triple time, what with this sniper out there shooting at police officers. I’m sure you’ve heard about it.”

She nodded. “Yes, it’s all over the news. It’s quite disconcerting.”

I quickly defended our town. “Nothing like this has ever happened here in San Celina. Gabe and his team will catch the person.”

“I’m sure they will. It must be very upsetting to your husband.”

“Yes, but Gabe’s handling it like he does everything, logically and carefully.”

“Like a true marine,” she said, smiling.

I smiled back. “Isn’t that the truth?”

We drove back to the folk art museum, and I dropped her off at her car.

It was only after I was halfway to Oak Terrace, while singing along with an old Tanya Tucker CD—“. . . some kind of trouble . . .”—that it occurred to me.

I’d never told her that Gabe had been a marine.

CHAPTER 8

A
BOUT THREE SECONDS LATER, I QUESTIONED MY OWN MEMORY. What had I said, exactly, about his military service? I remembered telling her he joined the service when he was eighteen and went to Vietnam.
Had
I mentioned he was a marine? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it in a court of law. Though I didn’t want to think it, my brain instantly started assessing everything about Lin Snider—her age, her backstory, that last bit of personal information about Gabe. Was she someone from his past? Another ex-lover wanting to rekindle a relationship? Was I doomed to repeat this same scenario as long as Gabe and I were married?

While waiting at Stern’s Bakery to purchase two dozen chocolate cherry chip brownies, a favorite of the Coffin Star ladies, my mind quickly replayed the day with Lin Snider, searching for other words that seemed suspect.

I hated this distrusting trait in myself and consciously tried to suppress it. But I’d acquired it out of defense. Being married to a man with a complicated past, one that had winnowed its way into our present life more than once, had changed how I viewed everything.

The line at Stern’s was long, and everyone’s order seemed to be inordinately complicated. I shifted from one foot to the other, wishing it would hurry, wishing I knew someone in line so I could talk about the weather; how, as always, the students were driving the locals crazy; how I thought the Memory Festival would fare this weekend.

Anything to keep my mind from shifting back to the past, to a memory triggered by Lin Snider’s comment. About another woman named Del. Gabe’s ex-partner. Gabe’s ex-lover.

In the privacy of the old Carnegie Library garden where underneath an ancient pepper tree I’d received my first grown-up kiss from Jack, I confronted Gabe with what I’d learned about his dinner with Del.

“What’s the big deal?” Gabe said, his voice rising in anger, telling me I was smart to find a private place for us to have this conversation. “Don’t people in this pathetic little town have anything better to do than gossip about innocent dinners between old partners?”

“Innocent dinners take place where people can see them,” I said.

“Benni, I’m telling you nothing happened.”

“Yet.”

He glared at me, his eyes a blazing blue against his brown skin. “Is that what you think of me? That I’m a person with so little self-control?
”

I stared up at him, silent for a moment, then said, “Just tell me one thing. Are you still in love with her?”

His face looked shocked for a moment, then grew still. Not a muscle moved. Around us, a mockingbird flew from the pepper tree to the edge of the museum’s roof to an old Martha Washington rosebush that was taller than me. His song was filled with distress and territorial anger and, I knew, a little bit of fear.

Finally, Gabe said in a voice low, rough, agonized. “I don’t know.”

“Next!” the counter clerk at Stern’s Bakery called out, bringing me back to the present. “What would you like, ma’am?”

After buying the cherry chocolate brownies, I headed for Oak Terrace, my mind still dissecting the day with Lin. Was she someone, like Del, from Gabe’s past? Had she and Gabe been lovers? It was not something I liked to dwell on, how many women he’d been with before me. But, sometimes, his past reared up, like a mythical dragon lolling in a cave, attacking when you least expected it.

BY THE TIME I REACHED THE RETIREMENT HOME PARKING LOT fifteen minutes later, I concluded that my mind was lost somewhere along Interstate 101. Was I crazy? One slightly suspicious comment, and I had created a romantic scenario between my husband and Lin Snider. And the truth was, Gabe had rejected Del’s advances three years ago and had never given me any reason since to think anything except that he loved me and was happy in our marriage.

Still, a niggling little voice inside my head prodded: What if she was the person poking around the Harper Ranch and why did she ask you so many personal questions and how does she know he was a marine?

Why didn’t I just
ask
if she’d been out at the Harper Ranch? She probably had a logical explanation. I was making a mystery out of a molehill.

Wait and see. That was an adage that Gabe usually took with a situation when he didn’t have enough evidence to act. Before undercover narcotics, he’d worked homicide.

“Sometimes,” he’d once said to me about a stalled homicide investigation that was frustrating his detectives, “you simply have to wait for something to happen. You put out feelers, you gather information, you poke all the participants . . . then you wait. If something doesn’t happen . . . you start poking again. If you’re lucky, eventually someone talks or reacts.”

“Or you find out there was nothing there to begin with,” I muttered, pulling into the Oak Terrace parking lot.
Wait and see.
Gabe’s advice seemed like the wisest move for me right now considering Lin Snider.

Oak Terrace had been a part of my life for the last six years, even before Gabe and I met. Shortly after I started my job as museum curator, Maxine, the recreation coordinator at Oak Terrace, asked me to start a quilt guild for the residents. Maxine was a member of the Cattlewomen’s Association and, I suspected, she was put up to it by my sneaky but well-meaning gramma, who was trying to fill my lonely nights.

I reluctantly attended the first meeting of fifteen women, expecting a few sweet old ladies who smelled of Jean Naté cologne and needed someone to thread their needles and make them chamomile tea. What I found was a group of women who, though physically past their prime, were as mentally sharp and interesting as any of my friends. I did, indeed, thread their needles and make their tea, often spiked behind my back with someone’s hidden flask of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. I only knew this because I took a big gulp from my mug and almost sprayed my mouthful of whiskey tea all over the half-finished Courthouse Steps quilt stretched out on the quilting frame. They laughed and smacked each other like a bunch of preteen boys who’d put a tack on their teacher’s chair.

“I’m glad I’m wearing my Depends,” Thelma Rook said, laughing so hard tears ran from her eyes. To this day, I have no idea who spiked my tea. I just made sure to keep my tea mug close to me since I did have to drive home.

To say these lively women saved my life would be an exaggeration, but since every one of them was a widow, some more than once, they were certainly the best grief counselors a young widow could have. Over the years, we’d discussed everything from the sad state of 1930s birth control to how to make a delicious cake without sugar to the similarities between the Korean and Vietnam wars. There wasn’t a problem I could tell them without at least one of these women having encountered or experienced something similar.

They delighted in my and Gabe’s courtship and marriage, hanging on every emotional bump and pothole along our rocky road to marital bliss. To think I could hide anything from them was being naive. Maybe that’s why I moved slowly toward this meeting tonight. I wasn’t sure if I was up to delving into what was happening with Gabe. At least not yet. These ladies had helped me through many rough times, including when he didn’t know if he was still in love with his former girlfriend, Del. They were ready to take up arms (and canes) and go after her, making me laugh at their spirited solutions. Which, of course, was the point. We’d started out with fifteen women, but with deaths and additions, were holding at a steady ten or so, depending on who was having physical ailments.

“Father Always-On-Time is mowing us down like alfalfa,” Janet Bottroff said at the funeral of one of our original members. Janet had been a professional tailor her whole life and had worked in the costuming department of MGM back in the thirties and forties. She claimed to have once been kissed by Clark Gable. “I’ve thought about asking San Celina Floral to consider offering seniors a punch card—buy ten funeral bouquets, get one free.”

“Maybe we need to lower our age requirements,” said Martha Pickering, her roommate. When we’d initially formed the group, the women had decided a person had to be seventy-five to join Coffin Star Quilt Guild.

“One of the youngsters over in Building C was complaining of age discrimination,” Thelma said. That “youngster” was seventy-two. “Maybe we do need some younger blood.”

“I don’t know,” said Pat Tobin, another new member who had just moved here from Washington. Thin and elegant as a flamingo, she’d sailed around the world three times in her capacity as an activities director for Holland America cruise line. She often kept us in stitches with stories about the crazy things people requested on cruises. “Those under seventy-fivers are kind of flighty.” The other women murmured in agreement.

Before entering the pale pink and mint green lobby decorated with ivy wallpaper and pink baskets of fake Boston ferns, I dialed Gabe. Until this sniper was caught, I assumed every night would be a late one. There were task force meetings, meetings with the mayor, city council, and eventually, the FBI. All I could do was stand by and let him know I was there.

He answered on the second ring, his voice all business. “Chief Ortiz.”

“Hey, handsome, you doing okay?”

“Querida.”
His voice lowered, caressing the word that almost felt like my name now. “It’s crazy here. I won’t be home for dinner.”

“I didn’t think so. I’m at Oak Terrace with the Coffin Star ladies.”

His chuckle was a cheerful tune in my ear. He loved the ladies and their sense of humor, though I often wondered if he’d adore them quite as much if he knew how much they knew about him. “Give them my regards.”