Sweet Hearts (5 page)

“What do you think happened?”

“I have no idea, Sam. If he’d
gone hiking he would have told us. He always said where he was going and what
time he would be home. We would have known where to look. But this—this is too
weird.”

“You said you don’t believe he’s
dead, though.”

“Jolie and Tricia always get
birthday cards. They’re never signed and they come postmarked from all kinds of
places. But I know he sends them. He sent them for awhile even after Tricia
died.”

“Do you get mail from him too?”

“Sometimes. I got some cards too.
Once there was a package with a beautiful scarf, my favorite color. But nothing
signed. Nothing in writing at all.”

Sam set her empty teacup down.
“You said you need to find Tito now. What has changed?”

Marla stared at the leaves in the
bottom of her cup for a full minute. When she looked back at Sam her eyes were
filled with pain.

“I’m dying, Sam. It’s cancer and
the doctors don’t have any hope for me.” She answered Sam’s unasked question.
“Yes, I’ve done the whole, horrible round of chemo—two years ago when I was
diagnosed. It didn’t work and the cancer is too widespread now. I won’t do it
again. What I need now is for Tito to come home and get Jolie. Once I’m gone,
she’ll have no one at all.”

Sam walked out into the gathering
darkness, her heart heavy with the news from Marla. She thought of the
twelve-year-old Jolie, having lost both father and mother, now about to lose
the last of her family.

Her van sat alone at the side of
the road, about twenty yards from Marla’s driveway, barely visible out here
away from street lights. The houses sat on five to ten acre plots, fairly well
separated from each other, although Sam could make out lights in distant
windows of the homes on either side of Marla’s. It was sad to think of Jolie
leaving her friends and the only neighborhood she probably remembered.

Sam turned her vehicle around,
heading back toward Taos, noticing that a winter fog was moving into the low
lying areas. She dimmed her lights and visibility of the road improved a
little. But before she’d driven three miles, the fog became a thick shroud,
encasing her in cottony white. She slowed to a crawl, peering ahead and behind
in hopes that no other vehicles were nearby.

Trees loomed at the sides of the
narrow road, their dark shapes hovering, ghostlike, above. An occasional
structure stood dark and silent, more of them as she came to the center of the
tiny settlement of Arroyo Seco. She knew the small crossroads to be composed of
about a dozen adobe buildings, but in the eerie darkness they seemed to move
with the air, closer to the road, then farther away. Not a light shone from any
window, not a person moved in the night. She had a brief bizarre vision that
the entire earth had been abandoned and she was the only living being to
remain.

With one hand firmly on the
wheel, she reached for the electric door lock. It snapped with a satisfying
click that told her she was securely locked in on all sides. The town’s one
restaurant, where Sam distinctly remembered there being four or five cars when
she’d come out to Marla’s, sat dark and deserted now. She glanced at her
dashboard clock and saw that it was only seven o’clock. A profound sense of the
creeps edged its way up her arms.

The van crawled along, despite
Sam’s urge to stomp the gas pedal to the floor. It would be crazy to speed
through this winding stretch of road with her view so restricted.

She no sooner had that thought
than a dark shape emerged from between two of the hunched adobe buildings on
her left. Man-shaped, large, the figure stepped toward her van. He walked
straight to her driver’s side door, one arm waving, beckoning to her. She hit
the brakes, praying that no other vehicle would come up behind and crash into
her.

Sam peered through the mist,
wondering what there was about him that looked familiar to her. He reached up
and pushed back the cloak that covered his head. The garment fell across his
shoulders and Sam recognized the shape of a large brown coat that she knew
well. She lowered her window two inches.

“Bobul?” she croaked.

“
Da
, Miss Samantha, is
Bobul here. You are doing fine?”

“Bobul—what the hell?” She
glanced in all her mirrors. “I have to get off the road. Someone’s going to
come along and hit me.”

He took two large steps back and
waved her forward. She steered to the left, to what she hoped was the parking
lot of a small shop, although she could barely make out the shape of its
windows.

Gustav Bobul, the chocolatier who
had showed up at Sweet’s Sweets on a snowy night in December, then vanished on
Christmas Eve, walked over to her door.

“Miss Samantha need help with
chocolates. Bobul know this.”

She stared at him. Now just
how
had he heard her plea for help? Had he somehow been spying on her, watching her
chocolate-making attempts that weren’t going so well?

He seemed to be waiting for an
answer but all she could do was nod like some stupid wobbly-headed doll.

“Bobul have answer.” He
unfastened three buttons of the huge brown coat that he’d always worn and
reached inside, pulling forth a big canvas bag that hung by a wide strap across
his chest, the one he’d brought every day to the bakery.

“Do you want to come back to work
for me?” Sam asked, feeling a spark of hope.

“Cannot. Bobul have other plans.”
He pulled the bag away from his body and practically stuffed his head inside
it. Both hands worked their way around in there. Finally, he came up with a
small reddish cloth pouch, which he extended to her with one hand while he
continued to stare into the bag. Another little drawstring pouch came out, then
a third, muddied shades of blue and green, respectively.

“There. All fix now.” He stepped
back and tucked the messenger bag back under his coat, then redid the buttons.

“What? What’s all fixed?”

“Miss Samantha chocolate problem,
all fix.”

She felt herself becoming
impatient and remembered what it had been like, having him around all the time.
“Bobul, explain. I don’t know what you mean.”

He pointed at the reddish pouch.
“One pinch.” Then, indicating the other two, “Two pinch.”

“A pinch of this,” she said,
holding up the first bag he’d handed her, “and two pinches of these? And then
what?”

“Put in chocolate, voilà—” His
large shoulders rose. “Is perfect.”

Huh?
She wanted to get out
and shake him. Or just drive away and ignore him. Or wake up from whatever
weird-ass dream this was.

Bobul patted the side of the van.
Then he turned and walked toward the building behind him. When Sam blinked, he
was gone. She stared toward the empty shop but saw no sign of the chocolatier
nor any clue as to where he’d gone.

She quickly raised her window and
rechecked the door locks.
That was just way too strange
. She put the van
in gear and slowly pulled away from the dirt parking lot.

At the next bend in the road, the
fog evaporated and a black sky with a million pinprick stars surrounded her.
Okay,
now I
am
going nuts
, she thought as she sped up.

Her arms and legs suddenly felt
jelly-like and she wanted more than anything to be off this road and out of the
van. When she spotted the turnoff to Beau’s place just ahead, she whipped the
wheel to the left.

The lights in his log house
glowed warmly in the dark night, and the trail of smoke from the chimney sent a
reassuring trace skyward. The dogs, Ranger and Nellie, set the alarm and Beau
stepped out to the porch as she parked in front.

“Hey, darlin’, didn’t know you
were coming out tonight,” he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and
pulling her in close for a kiss. “Wow, you’re toasty warm.”

She raised a hand to her
forehead. Maybe that was it—she had a fever and delirium.

“Come on in. I just poured myself
a drink. What would you like?”

His normalcy felt so reassuring
that Sam simply followed along, letting him take her jacket and hang it up. She
trailed along into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine from the
bottle she’d uncorked a couple of nights earlier when they’d eaten dinner here.
She’d been gradually getting used to the idea that this would soon be her home
too, trying to feel less like a guest.

“So, what’s up? Busy day at the
bakery?” Beau asked as they settled together on the sofa.

She took a deep breath. There was
no point in revealing how close to freaked-out she’d been just a few minutes
ago. Although Bobul had worked at the bakery for three weeks in December, and
Beau had certainly seen him there, he’d not really gotten to know the quirky
Romanian. In fact, there were a lot of things about Bobul that Sam had never
told her fiancé, mainly the fact that the man was in the country illegally.

“I was just out this way,
attending a sort of memorial for the son of a customer,” she said. She took a
long pull from her wine glass.

“Well, I’m glad you ended up
here. I actually got home on time, for once. Made myself a burger. Did you eat
yet? I could make you something.”

She explained about the buffet
dinner at Marla’s, and the longer she talked the more she relaxed.

“Beau, do you remember a
missing-person case from about ten years ago, a man named Tito Fresques? He’s
Marla’s son and she says there is evidence that he’s still alive but she felt
that the authorities didn’t do much to find him at the time, and then they
dropped the case.”

He set his drink on the end
table. “Well, I wasn’t yet with the department back then, so the name doesn’t
ring a bell. There’s probably a cold case file on it somewhere. I suppose I
could check on it.”

“Why wouldn’t they have
investigated more thoroughly?”

“There could be a hundred
reasons. Our department has been understaffed forever, and there’s only so much
we can do, maybe we just ran out of leads. And you mentioned that Fresques
lived in Albuquerque. It could be that the case was handed over to APD. After
that, it wouldn’t have been our concern anymore.”

“But—”

“Darlin’, grown men go missing
all the time, and it’s usually because they want to. There’s trouble in the
marriage or frustration with the job and the desire to start over somewhere
new. Unless there’s evidence of foul play . . . sometimes there just isn’t much
we can do.”

“I guess.” She sipped from her
wineglass. “But there’s more. Marla has terminal cancer. There’s no one to care
for Tito’s daughter once she’s gone, so it’s really important to her to find
him.”

“Sorry to hear that. Tomorrow
I’ll dig around and find the file. But I can’t promise much. We’re buried, and
I don’t see the workload letting up anytime soon. I don’t know how I could
assign anyone to it right now.”

“Could I take a look?” Even as
she uttered the words, she wondered when, exactly, she thought she would have
time to do anything with the information.

Beside her, Beau yawned widely.

“I better get—”

“Just stay. There’s no reason for
you to drive all the way into town tonight.” He pulled her closer and she
welcomed the warmth from his chest. It had been an intense day, with the
frantic pace at the bakery, the revelations from Marla, and then the strange
encounter in the fog.

They climbed the stairs to the
spacious master bedroom. Sam loved the golden lamp glow on the log walls. She
turned down the bed. Standing side by side at the double sinks, brushing their
teeth, she realized this was how it would be every night of their married life.
The little things, like both reaching for the toothpaste at the same moment,
brushing fallen hairs from the vanity into the waste basket, her robe hanging
on the hook behind the door—it would all become part of the pattern of her
life. From this day forward, as they said, a comfortable pattern.

Beau’s eyes looked droopy as he
reached to switch off the lamp on his side of the bed. He murmured as she
turned off her lamp and then reached to drape his arm over her. In the dark,
she let the muddled thoughts of the day drift out of her mind as she heard his
breathing become deep and steady.

A dream—one of those you know is
a dream, even as it unfolds—put Sam in a garden somewhere, wearing a long white
gown. The dress didn’t fit properly and the train snagged on something every
time she took a step. She kept thinking,
this is not the wedding dress I
bought, why am I wearing this fluffy monstrosity?
Chimes began to play and
she tried to turn toward the spot where she knew Beau must be standing. Then
the chimes became an alarm clock, and the tangled dress was the bed sheet
wrapped around her legs.

Beau groaned and muttered
something that included, “Already . . .” and some other choice words.

She really needed to bring her
own clock. He could grab an extra hour’s sleep if he didn’t have to wake on her
schedule.

“Roll back over,” she whispered.
“I’ll leave quietly.”

“No, no, it’s all right.” He
rubbed his face and sat up. “I can use the time. Feed the animals early and get
to the office in time to find that file you asked about.”

Bless him, she thought as she
stood under the hot shower. Making time for her inquiry about an old case was
really beyond the call of duty.

From the bathroom window she
could see him walking toward the barn in the dark, a strong flashlight beam
marking the frosty path. The horses whickered softly, glad to see him, and she
caught glimpses of the two dogs scampering near his legs. The barn door opened
and a light came on.

Sam got dressed, found blusher
and lipstick in the small cosmetic kit she’d left in Beau’s bathroom, and was
ready to head for the bakery by the time he came in through the kitchen door,
stomping his boots on the deck outside.