The Love of a Stranger Read online

  In rating easy lays, she had to be close to the top. That conclusion didn’t require deep analysis. He had seen her for the first time ever today, when he went into the bar and asked if anybody knew the whereabouts of his old friend, Ted Benson. Tavern romances weren’t his style, but when she had come from behind the bar to his stool and all but unzipped his pants and put her hand inside his fly, good sense and sound reasons to reject what she offered had abandoned him.

  What took more thought than classifying the barmaid was sorting out his own behavior. Better than most people, he knew the inherent risks in a barroom hookup. Yet he had let himself be not only hooked up, but thrown into a fight in an isolated setting with a hard-ass loon.

  Thinking with the wrong organ, Buddy. Dumb.

  All of which proved that three years without up close and personal contact with a warm and willing female was too damn long.

  The lights of town came into sight, as welcome as an oasis. He could hardly wait to get back there.

  At the Rusty Spur, he parked near the front door.

  “Let’s go inside and have a beer,” Cindy said.

  He had no desire to re-enter the bar or to have a beer, but considering what he would have done with Cindy if they hadn’t been interrupted, dropping her off out front seemed too rude, even for somebody who thought as little of most women as he did.

  “You ain’t mad, are you?” Her eyes held a plea.

  Oh, he was mad all right, but more at himself than at her. He pulled on his door latch. “Let’s go inside.”

  She didn’t move. He scooted out, ducked his head back in and looked at her across the console. “Let’s go in.”

  She stared out her side window, but didn't open the door. “It ain’t me, Doug. It’s her. Nobody can get along with her.”

  “I can see that.”

  Boy, could he ever see that. The woman he had just tangled with had all the charm of a cornered badger. He rounded the rear of the truck and opened the passenger door. Cindy climbed out with a scowl on her face. He grasped her elbow and steered her toward the bar’s black front door.

  As they passed the Silverado’s dented fender, he stopped and looked at it. From a few feet away, a mercury vapor light on a utility pole cast the white truck in a gray color and exaggerated the wound on the fender. It was more than a foot long. Shit. The 4x4 was his pride and joy, the only vehicle he had ever bought new off the showroom floor. He closed his eyes, drew his hand down his face and shook his head. He guessed he should be grateful the headlight wasn’t broken. He had insurance, sure, but . . .

  Cindy looked up at him, biting down on one side of her lower lip. Doug blew out a breath, resigned. She couldn’t have known a loony blonde would spring out of the bushes swinging a tire tool. He caught her elbow again and guided her forward. “C’mon.”

  “My kids ain’t home. We could go to—”

  “Unh-unh. I've got an appointment early tomorrow.”

  That wasn’t a lie. Tomorrow morning, he intended to buy breakfast for Ted Benson, his best friend from high school, whom he hadn’t seen in fifteen years. “I need sleep. Let’s have a beer and call it a night.”

  She jerked her arm from his grip. “You ain’t gonna buy me a beer and just brush me off like I’m nothin’.”

  “Look, one hysterical female a day is my limit. I really do need to go home. That’s where I was headed when I stopped in here. C’mon.”

  Inside the Rusty Spur Doug sat at the bar and drank a beer with Cindy, sharing empty, inane conversation and reaffirming his vow to give up women. At nine-thirty, he checked the time and deemed he had wasted enough of it in the Rusty Spur. Over Cindy’s protests, he said good-night.

  During the twelve-mile trip from town to his new home, his thoughts settled on the pissed off blonde. Other than a few drunks and dopers back when he had been a street cop, no woman had ever stood toe to toe with him like she had. He had been hot under the collar himself, but she had been incensed—angrier than the circumstances warranted. For a few seconds, after she had gone off on his truck, he had thought she might swing at him with that tire tool, but he’d had it out of her hands in an instant and could have flattened her if he had wanted to. She must have been able to see her disadvantage, but that hadn’t stopped her. Maybe the barmaid had nailed it—the blonde was crazy. Hell. Maybe both of them were crazy.

  Just as mysterious as the woman’s anger was his own reaction. He didn’t have altercations like the one he’d had with her. To do it went against his very nature and all his training. In his police career, back when he’d had one, his peers envied his self-control and calm approach to the most gut-wrenching situations.

  Crazy or not, from the looks of that house, the blonde probably was rich, like Cindy had said, especially if she really was in the real estate business in L.A. He had lived in Los Angeles for years. Almost everybody he had ever met in the real estate business in L.A. County was rich. She damn sure could afford to pay for repair of his fender.

  As he reached his driveway, what had been aggravating him all along dawned on him—the barmaid’s comment about the blonde having guns. Volatile women wielding guns made him uneasy. He didn’t doubt for a minute she had them. And something warned him she knew how to use them.

  Leave it alone, he told himself. Whatever is going on between those two women is none of your business.

  He drove behind his house into the battered old barn, his temporary makeshift garage. He climbed out and trudged through the fresh night air to his back door. Was this town big enough to have a body shop? He detested making a claim against his insurance for a fender repair and having his premium raised, but he also hated paying the bill out of his pocket. His every penny had a place to go. Maybe the pissed off blonde would feel remorse and ante up.

  And maybe pigs could fly.

  ****

  Morning. Alex awoke to the thrum of Robert Redford’s purr near her head. Maizie’s furry orange body stretched across her legs. Through the open window came the early morning cool. Without opening her eyes, she stretched inside the cocoon of covers, one foot, one leg at a time and finally arching her back and shoulders. She enjoyed the caressing feel of the warm bed linens—fine Egyptian cotton—against her naked body.

  As good as her bed felt, she couldn’t bask in it. She had many things to do, starting with an appointment in town at ten with Callister’s only working real estate broker. Today, he would be bringing a potential buyer from Boise to look over Carlton’s Lounge & Supper Club, a millstone to which she had been chained for five years, nine months and thirteen days.

  She threw back the covers. The cats bounded to the floor at the same time and followed her to the bathroom. They wanted to eat now.

  She turned on the water and stepped into the shower, her thoughts still centered on the stranger at Granite Pond. That nervous feeling she had noticed last night came back, that odd awareness of him as a man. Strange, because she wasn’t seeking a man and wouldn’t know what to do with one if she had him.

  She left the shower and wrapped in a thick terrycloth robe, then sat down and began to dry and style her long bob. Robert Redford weaved between the vanity stool legs and her ankles making little anxious chirrups. Doug. Where had she heard that name recently? She couldn’t think of a real estate deal to which she could tie it. The stranger looked like a Doug, though. Tall and muscled, not like a body builder, but extremely male and well-proportioned. Funny how you associated a certain appearance with a name.

  Her hair and makeup finished, she returned to the bedroom to dress. For her meeting with the Realtor and his customer, she wanted to look professional, but casual. She dressed in a pair of loose khaki slacks, a silk long-sleeved big shirt and brown alligator loafers. Then she set about tidying the bedroom.

  Books and folders were scattered over the foot of her bed—engineering studies from the Utah Department of Transportation, Salt Lake City zoning regulations and building codes and a 36 x 30-inch site plan of Gateways, a huge, multi-s
tory retirement center. It was proposed for construction in the upscale Avenues District in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. Last night after she had calmed down, she had studied the documents into the wee hours. In the coming Friday’s meeting in Salt Lake, she had too much at stake to risk the rise of some obscure question she couldn’t answer.

  She gathered the books and papers into a pile, re-folded the site plan and carted all of it to her office in the front corner of the house. Maizie and Robert Redford trotted along beside her.

  She didn’t like Friday meetings, she thought, as she slid file folders and documents in her big leather briefcase. If something went haywire in an end-of-the-week conference, no time was left for a defect to be cured. Problems in real estate deals had a way of festering like untreated wounds. Minds could change over a weekend and by Monday morning, a once viable project could be a dead duck. But with the Utah highway department’s tight schedule, Friday had been the only choice.

  Maizie strolled across the desktop expressing her annoyance in little squeaks.

  “You must be patient, love,” Alex told her. “We’ll go to the kitchen in a minute.” She scooped her up and set her on the floor. Robert Redford leaped up to the desktop and arranged himself on a large rolled U.S. Geological Survey map lying to one side, crushing the roll. She lifted him off the map and gently tapped him on the nose with it. “You’re too fat to be lying on my map. You’ll ruin it.”

  He meowed back at her.

  She sighed. “Okay, guys. You’ve got my attention. Let’s go to the kitchen.

  She marched in that direction and the cats raced ahead of her.

  She scooped cat food into dishes and set them on the floor in the utility room, then returned to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. She left her roommates happily munching while she returned to her office and the map she had rescued from Robert Redford. She spread it over her desk to make sure it hadn’t been creased or damaged. As she sipped her tea, she couldn’t keep from taking a moment to look at it again . It showed Granite Pond and the two and a half sections surrounding her house. It also showed the five sections that abutted the south side of her property, commonly known as Soldier Meadows. Thirty-two hundred acres of prime timber. Once she and Charlie had owned it. They had bought it along with the home in which she now lived.

  Now Kenny Miller, a local logger and Charlie’s partying friend, owned it. She and Charlie had sold it to him before the divorce. At the time of the sale, she, Charlie and Kenny all three had known that without ownership of the land surrounding Alex’s house, Soldier Meadows was landlocked by her house and the two sections on one side and Forest Service land on the other, but that fact hadn’t even been discussed—at least not by her and Kenny.

  A frown tugged at her brow. The map was a sobering reminder of the stupid situation she now found herself in. Kenny had called a few days ago and informed her he would start logging Soldier Meadows this year. He planned on building an access road across the right-of-way he claimed to have paid Charlie cash for in a separate handshake deal. The land in contention was a strip twenty feet wide that traversed the rear of her property and crossed Swede Creek a short distance above Granite Pond.

  She had received the deed to the house and acreage on Wolf Mountain in the divorce settlement, but she had seen no document that had given Miller Logging Company a right-of-way across her back fenceline. She didn’t believe for a minute that Kenny had paid Charlie cash for anything that had value. Kenny might be a crude lout, but he was a shrewd businessman. She suspected he saw Charlie for the irresponsible drunk that he was and was too smart to pay him cash without obtaining some kind of documentation to prove the sale. So in her opinion, the fact that he failed to produce one made him a liar.

  Many marketable trees grew in Soldier Meadows. She couldn’t begin to calculate the board-feet of timber. It was worth well over a million dollars. Logging it might last several years. Daily heavy truck traffic the length of a football field from her front door would devalue her home and property and make it unsalable. Her driveway would be changed—made wider, smoothed out. The grade would be reduced. Inaccessibility would cease to provide her security.

  With Soldier Meadows being landlocked, if Kenny forced the access issue, the law swung in his favor. How could she stop him? Nothing had worked so far—not flattery, reason or compromise.

  Maneuvering the map back into a roll and snapping a rubber band around it, she cursed her ex-husband for the umpteenth time. Since they were five years old, she had been cleaning up after him. Now one of his thoughtless acts might cost the thing that was most precious to her.

  She laid the map aside and rested her chin on her palms, thinking. Snafus and fubars were routine in her business. If Plan A failed, out of habit, she went to Plan B. Kenny would never agree to anything that didn’t put his interest first. Plan A didn’t have a chance. Plan B was the only choice. On a mental sigh, she picked up the phone and keyed in the number of her friend and lawyer in Boise. His assistant came on the line with a bubbly explanation that he was out of town.

  “I’m going out of town myself,” Alex said, “When Bob comes back, just tell him I think it’s a waste of time trying to negotiate with a hardhead like Kenny Miller. I want to go ahead with the injunction. Bob will know what I mean.”

  “I’ll tell him, Mrs. McGregor. By the way, he told me to give you this referral. It’s friends of his. Ed and Martha Anderson. They own an apple orchard out by Marsing where Bob grew up. They need to sell real bad. Poor Mrs. Anderson has cancer.”

  “I don’t usually deal in residential property, but—”

  “Oh, Bob knows that, but this is more than a hundred acres and it’s already fallen into the commercial arena. He says it looks like a good place for a sub-division. And Hayes Winfield has made them an offer.”

  Alex sat forward with piqued interest. “The sub-division developer?”

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  Dirty old man. But rich. “Only by reputation.”

  “Bob said to tell you he doesn’t want these folks to get—well, to be taken advantage of. They need the help of someone who’s smart and mean enough to either deal with Hayes or find someone else to buy the property out from under him.”

  The assistant’s last remark stung, revealing an opinion that had come from the mouth of someone she considered a friend. Alex moved past her hurt feelings, as she always did, with sarcasm. “Tell Bob I said, ‘Gee, thanks.’”

  “Bob meant it as a compliment, Mrs. McGregor. Honest.”

  “I know. It isn’t important. What did Hayes offer them?”

  “I don’t know, but Bob says, knowing Hayes, the orchard could be worth a lot more. I have the legal description for you and the directions to get out there.”

  Alex reached for a pencil. “Okay, shoot.” She dashed off the information. “I appreciate the referral. I don’t have time to deal with it right now. I’m going to Salt Lake, but I’ll be back by Monday. I should be able to get down to Marsing on Tuesday. Be sure the Andersons don’t sign anything. Do we know how to get in touch with Hayes?”

  “He’s in Alaska. Should be back in August. Oh! I almost forgot. Bob and Mrs. Culpepper are hosting a party the end of August. They haven’t decided on an exact day yet, but they want you to come. It’s a fundraiser for Ralph Cumley’s re-election. And here’s a tip. Mr. Winfield is invited.”

  “That’s a long way off, but yes, that would give me a chance to talk to Hayes. And I do need to meet Senator Cumley.” Alex scribbled a note reminding herself to put it on her calendar. Schmoozing with a politician was important. One never knew when such an acquaintance might come in handy. In this instance, it probably meant a campaign contribution, but that, too, was business. “Tell Bob to call me after he files the injunction.”

  “I will. You have a good day, Mrs. McGregor.”

  “Right. And thanks.” She hung up. “Yes, I’ll do that.” she muttered. “If someone buys Carlton’s, I’ll have a great day
.”

  Her living room clock chimed. No more time to dally. She picked up the USGS map. Her acreage backed up to national forest land. Ted would know it thoroughly. While she was in town, she would stop by his office first and ask him to help her pinpoint some obscure landmarks that would reaffirm in her mind the side and back boundaries of her property. She knew one thing for certain. To do combat with Kenny, she needed all the ammunition she could gather. When it came to plain old toughness in a backroom battle over money, many of the high-rollers in L.A’s plush offices stood short in the shadow of the poorly educated logger, Kenny Miller.

  ****

  Doug finished the last phase of his workout sitting on a dining room chair with a hand weight. For more than a year he had ended either a run of several miles or a vigorous skiing workout on his NordicTrack the same way—repeatedly lifting ten-pounds with his damaged left arm to a position parallel to the floor, then returning the weight to hang loosely by his side. The workout used to bring groans of pain, but most times now, it brought only grimaces.

  His Mickey Mouse wall clock—it had been a gift from a fatherless teenage boy he had once mentored in Los Angeles—told him he had to hurry to be on time to take his old pal, Ted Benson, to breakfast.

  He reached for the towel he had flung across the back of his chair and wiped sweat from his face and chest. Then he rose and crossed the antiquated kitchen where his friend Motrin waited in a dull green cupboard weighted by eighty years of paint layers. He hesitated before taking the tablets on an empty stomach.

  The debate was absurd under the circumstances. In the past two years, he had swallowed or been injected with every pain killer out there, from narcotics to over-the counter analgesics. Now, he used only non-prescription drugs. They dulled rather than killed the pain, but they didn’t cloud his thinking. He could live with pain. It had become as much a part of him as his leg or the left arm he had almost lost. What he couldn’t live with was going through the remainder of his life muddle-headed. He had stood eye-to-eye with the grim reaper and he no longer took tomorrow for granted.