The Love of a Stranger Page 3

  “Fuck it,” he mumbled, giving up the debate. He dropped a slice of bread into the toaster, then pulled a plastic jug of milk from the refrigerator. He countered the tablets with the toast and a long cold pull from the milk jug, then pushed the jug back into the refrigerator. What he needed now was glorious hot water beating against his aching shoulder.

  As he dressed in jeans and a dark blue T-shirt that heralded UCLA, he wondered if Ted would recognize him after all these years. He had some gray hair at his temples and a few facial lines. At one-ninety, he was a good twenty pounds lighter than when they had last seen each other. Even so, he was thirty pounds heavier than the day he left the hospital in L.A. two years ago. Ted had no way of knowing that and there was no reason to tell him.

  Chapter 3

  As Alex stepped into Ted Benson’s US Forest Service office, he came from behind his desk with a huge smile. Laugh lines fanned at the corners of his deep brown eyes. “How you been while I’ve been gone, sweetie?” he asked.

  Alex relaxed, happy to see one of the few non-threatening men in her life. She placed her cheek against his and kissed air.

  They parted and he stepped back. “Hey, you've changed your hair.” Ted smiled and touched the ends of her shoulder-length hair. She’d had it highlighted a few days ago in Boise. “It looks pretty. I like it.”

  Uncomfortable when men fawned over her or even paid her compliments, Alex averted her eyes and slid the rubber band off the USGS map.

  Ted gestured toward a chair in front of his desk. “Want some tea?”

  “No, thanks. I’m in a hurry. I have an appointment with Frank Bagwell over at the cafe. He’s bringing someone from Boise to look at Carlton’s this morning.”

  “Ahh. A live one, huh?”

  Alex laughed. “I hope so. Maybe it’s a real buyer this time. I’ve got to get over there and make sure the place is all cleaned up and shining.”

  Ted nodded.

  Moving on to her reason for visiting Ted, Alex said, “I stopped by because I heard from Kenny a few days ago.”

  “Oh, yeah? What did he want?”

  “He wants to start logging Soldier Meadows and you know what that means. If you have time, maybe you would help me refresh my memory. Show me where my back line butts up to National Forest and where my south line joins Soldier Meadows.”

  “Sure. Let’s take a look.” Ted cleared off a large space in the center of his desk.

  She unrolled the map and spread it. “I have to be exact when I take up this access problem with Bob.”

  Ted’s head tilted, his eyes questioned. "Bob Culpepper? You’re getting a lawyer involved in this? I thought you hated lawyers.”

  “I had no choice. It’s already the middle of July and Kenny wants to start logging any day. I’ve told him he can’t take his trucks and equipment across the back of my property, but he says he’s going to anyway. He says he has the right. to do it. I left a message with Bob this morning to get a court order to stop him.”

  “Holy shit, Alex. Kenny won’t take that lying down. What does Charlie think? He’s in town, you know.”

  Alex felt the corner of her mouth twitch. Why her ex-husband continued to come to Callister when he had no property here, she didn’t know. No doubt he was up to no good. “Really? Have you seen him?”

  “No, but Pete and Mike saw him in the Rusty Spur.”

  The Rusty Spur was a saloon across the street from Carlton’s Lounge & Supper Club, usually drawing a more raucous crowd.

  Alex frowned. “I don’t care what he thinks. I might add that solving this access problem is mopping up another of his messes.”

  Ted’s eyes leveled on hers for a few seconds, reminding her just how much knowledge he had of her ex-husband’s shenanigans. He probably even knew the gory details of Charlie’s philandering. Men always seemed to be aware of those things about each other. “And you know how many times I’ve done that,” she added.

  “Point taken,” Ted said and ducked her gaze. “Let’s change the subject and look at the map.” He leaned over, the long bony fingers of his right hand pointing out defining landmarks. His left hand rested on her shoulder and she felt the comfort of friendship in his touch.

  ****

  When Doug entered the US Forest Service building, the first person he saw was a chubby girl with a toothpaste commercial smile and a deep dimple in one cheek. “Hi, you’re Ted’s friend, Doug,” she said. “He’s talked about you so much, we feel like we know you. I’m Gretchen. He’s in his office. I gave him your note.”

  “Uh-oh,” Doug said, surprised at being recognized and known by the Forest Service receptionist. He gave her a wink. “Sounds like maybe I should be worried, huh?”

  The receptionist’s cheeks flushed. She pointed a finger toward the right. “There’s his office. Second door. He’s got somebody in there, but it’s just somebody he knows. You can go in.”

  Doug glanced to where she pointed. Ted Benson's name and title stood out in white letters painted on a rustic wooden plaque on a heavy wooden door: ASSISTANT RANGER AND RESOURCE MANAGER.

  Wow, Doug thought. Ted had made it. His name was on a door. Doug approached the office with a spring in his step.

  The door stood ajar. A woman's low laughter floated from behind it. Doug tapped with his knuckle and peeked through the opening.

  And there, before his eyes, perched stork-like on one foot in front of a government-issue metal desk, stood last night’s pissed-off blonde. The hand of the man he recognized as his old hometown friend rested on her shoulder. Heated blue eyes and steel jack handles flashed in Doug’s mind and his jaw tightened.

  “Doug Hawkins! Get in here!”

  Ted’s jubilant voice shook Doug from befuddlement. “Hey, Ted.”

  Doug willed his thoughts away from the blonde as Ted rounded one end of his desk with an outstretched hand.

  “Aw, hell,” Ted said. “I can’t just shake your hand, man. After all these years, I gotta hug you.”

  They man-hugged and backslapped until Doug stepped back. “Look at you. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  A hint of moisture showed in Ted’s eyes and Doug remembered how soft-hearted he always had been.

  “You either.” Ted laughed as he yanked a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed one eye. “Now we’re both lying. You really do look great, Doug. Are you?”

  “I’m good, Ted. Not like new, but good.”

  Throughout the conversation, Doug had watched the blonde from the corner of his eye. Now, she wrestled a huge map that was spread over the desk top. She looked taller than she had appeared last night, dwarfed as they had been by tall trees and steep canyon walls.

  “Gretchen found your note on the front door,” Ted was saying, stuffing his handkerchief back into his pocket. “I hated not being here when you hit town, but I had to go to school over in Missoula. If I hadn’t, they weren’t gonna let me fight fire this summer.”

  Doug redirected part of his attention back to Ted. “No problem. I had plenty to do, getting settled in. Fire fighting, huh? Is that part of your job?”

  “Naw, it’s volunteer. I do it every summer. If there’s a hot fire, believe me, they take all the free help they can get. Hard work, but I like it.” His mouth spread into another huge grin. “God, I’m glad to see you.”

  Meanwhile, the blonde lost control of the map and turned it into a heap of paper in the middle of Ted’s desk. Ted glanced back at her, then walked over and took charge of the map. “Here, sweetie, let me do it.” She stepped away, her cheeks flushed. Ted deftly rolled the map, snapped a rubber band around it and handed it to her.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today,” she said, hooking a sheaf of hair that looked to be twenty shades of gold behind her ear. “I’m fumble-fingered for some reason.”

  Doug knew what was wrong with her, but like the gentleman he sometimes wished he was, he suppressed a grin.

  Hanging onto the map, she moved behind a chair in the corner of the roo
m. Doug couldn’t keep from continuing to appraise her. In the looks department, she was something. The blind-filtered sunlight played on a classic face that could have come from a forties movie. The stark blue eyes that had confronted him last night now watched him with such intensity, he had to quell an urge to fidget.

  “Small world, huh?” Ted said, drawing Doug’s attention away from the woman. “Who would’ve thought we’d get together again after all these years? It’s gonna be like old times. Huntin’ and fishin’. Just like when we were kids.”

  “I’m counting on it. That’s part of why I decided to land here.”

  “You’ve come to the right place. This really is a sportsman’s paradise, like I’ve been telling you on the phone.” He turned to the blonde. “Alex, sweetie, I want you to meet someone.”

  She stiffened and stood straighter as Ted made the introduction. For the sake of decorum, Doug mustered a smile and extended his hand across the back of the chair she stood behind. He almost said they had met, but an anxious look in her eyes begged him not to.

  Her chin dipped in an almost indiscernible nod and she offered only her crimson-tipped fingers in a handshake. He captured her hand in his and tried to hold her gaze.

  She withdrew her hand and said to Ted, “I don't mean to be rude, but I have to get going. Frank’s waiting for me.” She rounded the chair, touched Ted’s cheek with hers and kissed air with heart-shaped lips. "Call me, okay?" She breezed through the doorway, leaving clean-smelling fragrance in her wake.

  Doug stared after her until she disappeared, then remembered Ted’s hand on her shoulder. “That the lady in your life?”

  Ted looked up the hallway as if she were still there, worry obvious in his expression. “Naw. She’s way out of my league. We’re pretty good friends, though. She lives alone, so I help her out now and then.”

  Friends, my ass, Doug thought. Unless he had suddenly forgotten everything he knew about people, what he saw in his old friend was a hell of a lot closer to worship. Still, the statement had answered Doug’s question and he felt a relief at hearing Ted say he wasn’t connected to her in an intimate way. After last night's set-to, which still chafed, the emotion didn’t make sense and Doug was annoyed at himself for having it.

  Ted turned back, devilment in his expression. “Of course, I'm not the outlaw with women you always were. You’ve never met a woman who was out of your league.”

  If Ted only knew. Doug chuckled.”Shit, man. Don’t think I haven’t been raked over the coals by the weaker sex. And don’t ever let anyone convince you they’re weaker.” Then trying to sound more casual than his second encounter with the blonde had left him feeling, he said, “Damn, Ted, it’s great to finally be here. I feel like I’ve reached the end of a real long tunnel.”

  They laughed together again, followed by a stretch of silence. Ted became serious. “What’s it been now, two years?”

  Doug knew he meant the shooting. His heartbeat quickened as it always did when someone mentioned it. Besides taking the lives of his partner and two ATF agents, the catastrophic incident had kept Doug in a hospital for months and caused him more physical and mental agony than he had imagined was possible. And it had cost his law enforcement career, which he would lament to his dying day. “Yeah.”

  “So what’s the truth? I heard you were shot up so bad they thought you were dead.”

  The curiosity from a friend shouldn’t be surprising, Doug supposed. The tragedy had been hashed over on national news for weeks and his trial had been on Court TV. Total strangers, if they recognized him, tried to open a discussion of it. “That’s what they said. Must not have been my turn.”

  Ted shook his head, staring at the floor. “It’s mean out there these days. I see it even in my job.”

  “Actually, I’m in pretty good shape, now.” Doug twisted and flexed his left arm to show it functioned, which was nothing short of a miracle. “I’m back to having my head screwed on right. I work out every day. Run a little. Don’t put any pressure on myself. I feel great.”

  “Sit down, sit down,” Ted said, gesturing to a chair in front of his desk. He moved to his own desk chair. “I want to hear everything you've been doing since you got lost in that Los Angeles jungle.”

  Digging up old bones was the last thing Doug wanted. He set his empty mug on Ted’s desk. “Plenty of time for that. Right now, I’m hungry. I still don’t have any food in my house. So let’s go get that breakfast.”

  Chapter 4

  “Dear God. Ted’s old friend from California.” Mumbling to herself and dodging dust-covered 4 x 4s, Alex strode toward Betty’s Road Kill Cafe two blocks up the street.

  No wonder Doug Hawkins had looked familiar last night. She had seen him any number of times in Ted’s photo albums, holding strings of fish. Ted had told her about his old friend moving here, that he had been a cop with LAPD and been nearly killed in some kind of police shootout. She had a vague recollection of seeing him on TV news two or three years ago, accused of murder or manslaughter or some kind of havoc. She should have picked up on who he was when she heard Cindy say his name, especially after seeing his pickup’s California plate.

  She had succeeded in swallowing a gasp when he stepped through the office doorway, but how could either he or Ted not have noticed her eyes almost leaping from their sockets or her knee-jerk reaction scrabbling with that map? How she hated being caught off-guard.

  He had recognized her, too, but, thank God, he hadn’t humiliated her by mentioning the ridiculous scene at Granite Pond, an outburst she didn’t plan on sharing with anyone.

  Ted’s snapshots didn’t do the man justice. They showed an athletic-looking boy, a description hardly fitting the flesh and blood man. He looked too clean-cut to be a criminal. Tall and lean, with tanned biceps bulging against the short sleeves of a yellow polo shirt, he looked like the jock Ted said he had once been. She could well imagine him in a football uniform, fading back to hurl a pass while a ton of human muscle rushed at him.

  The snapshots hadn’t shown his gray eyes either, sentry eyes that had touched her everywhere. She didn’t doubt the veracity of Ted’s stories about him and women.

  She conducted her professional life in a world of men, commingled with her share of knuckle-draggers suffering from testosterone overload. She neither liked nor trusted most of them. Encountering one under normal circumstances, she kept a calculated distance, hid behind sarcastic remarks and refused to be intimidated.

  This one made her warier than usual and she knew why. She had seen him in a state of arousal with his fly undone. The memory had flown into her mind the instant she saw him in Ted’s office and it was vivid, down to the color of his blue shorts. What was worse, that strange uneasiness had come back and escaping him was the only relief she could think of.

  “What’s wrong with you, idiot?” she muttered. “You live in Los Angeles. Tanned, sculpted males are thicker than fleas on a stray dog.” That was true enough. But what she hadn’t seen in a long, long time was a real live man with a hard-on. She felt as if she had been caught window-peeping.

  Betty’s Road Kill Café loomed a few steps ahead, its modern plate-glass door conflicting with a battered brick façade. The building was like the rest of Callister—old, used and dusty, with stories to tell of pioneer beginnings. The upstairs had been a brothel in the 1850s. It was still in use, but the rooms were no longer let by the hour. Betty rented them by the month to railroaders and seasonal Forest Service employees.

  No rivalry existed between Carlton’s Lounge & Supper Club and Betty’s Road Kill as far as Alex and Betty were concerned. Alex frequently ate at the café and Betty and her husband were customers at Carlton’s.

  She was greeted by the clatter of a cowbell Betty had tied to the glass door. The sound diverted her from mental hand-wringing. She stopped in the entry and bought a Boise newspaper, then pushed through the doorway. The beat and twang of Brooks & Dunn bounced off the walls and the air was redolent with the aromas of sausage and
bacon and fresh, strong coffee. Customers filled every table. Alex recognized most of them as Callister citizens, but sprinkled among them were a few men dressed in suits and ties, conspicuous out-of-towners. A trial must be going on at the courthouse, she determined. The room hummed with conversation.

  She spotted Frank Bagwell, the only working real estate broker in Callister, sitting in a high-backed wooden booth by a window overlooking the street. He stood and beckoned her over with a wave and she threaded her way toward him through well-used tables and chairs.

  Their meeting lasted only long enough to cover a few details. Afterward, Fred left her alone with the newspaper.

  ****

  Doug followed Ted out the front door of the Forest Service office building into the morning sun’s eye-watering brilliance. The shrill screech of steel against steel in the distance pierced his ears. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Sawmill’s just up the road,” Ted answered. “Can’t you smell the pine? That’s fresh-sawn lumber.”

  Doug drew in a deep sniff, filling his nostrils with the piney scent and his lungs with fresh air. He doubted a sawmill existed anywhere near Los Angeles County. “Cool. I love it.” He looked up at the clear azure sky. “And I love that sky. Is there anything else in the world that blue?”

  An unbidden image of Alex McGregor's eyes flew into his mind. He pushed it aside as nonsense and stuffed his fingers into his jeans pockets as he strolled up the street beside his old pal.

  Inside Betty’s Road Kill Cafe, Ted made a bee-line toward the back of the room. Most of the diners nodded greetings as he passed. At a table near the kitchen, he swung one skinny leg over the chair seat and nodded for Doug to take the opposite chair.

  Heavy ceramic mugs waited upside down at four places. A yellowed laminated menu stood between the condiment jars and bottles. Doug reached for it and studied the choices.