here, Serruto should still be there.
He was…and sounded solicitous until Garreth said, “I can’t come back yet, and maybe just ought to resign like I wanted to originally. Because I’m thinking no one will ever trust me to back them up again. I’ll always be the guy who went wacko and got Harry shot.”
More significantly, how could he tolerate working days? The very thought exhausted him.
An exasperated hiss came over the line. “You’re becoming a major hemorrhoid, Mikaelian. Look, if you’re worried about the review board, I don’t see them being too harsh with you. After all, they know you were — ”
“Non compos mentis?”
“Under unusual stress, I was going to say,” Serruto said dryly. “Of course it would be better if you hadn’t strong-armed your way out of the hospital, but I’m thinking you’ll just have to spend a lot of time with the shrink before you come back.”
“I need more than that.”
“Like I said, you’re a major hemorrhoid, but…” He sighed. “…I didn’t wake up on that slab. Don’t resign yet. I’ll see about setting you up a leave of absence.”
“Without pay.” Though his gut knotted at the thought.
Another sigh. “How long do you want?”
“Until the end of the year.” By which time, with any luck, he would have nailed Lane and removed himself from this unwanted life.
2
With inconspicuousness being impossible, he decided to turn conspicuousness into an asset. Let everyone know his business. Once they did and satisfied their curiosity, with luck they would begin overlooking him the same way socks in the bedroom chair became invisible if you left them long enough. So shortly after dawn, he replenished the ice in his ice chest, checked out of his motel, and headed for Baumen.
Yesterday he spotted a hotel as he came into town, the Driscoll…a three-story building on the west side of Kansas Avenue, built of buff colored sandstone, like almost all the buildings downtown here. He had been noticing that stone everywhere: in houses, Baumen’s City Hall, the high school, some barns, even fence posts. It looked nice, he thought, not just the earthy color but the way it gave human habitation an appearance of growing from the prairie around it.
Inside, the Driscoll’s decor looked aged but like a favorite sweatshirt or jeans…oak pillars, a braided rug in the sitting area over a plank floor, leather chairs with the patina of soft old leather jackets, vases of bright fall flowers on side tables and the front desk. He guessed the rooms would be small…but cheap, Garreth hoped. The main reason he had by-passed the modern motel south of town.
At the front desk the clerk greeted him cheerfully…plump, approaching middle age, wearing a name tag engraved
Facing the rising sun? He politely declined, then while signing in, told her all about his search for family. The way she hung on every word and prodded him for more information made him confident she would soon have the story spread around town.
His second floor room with its north-facing window — looking at the wall of the movie theater beyond the Chamber of Commerce next door — was cheap as he hoped, and smaller than he anticipated. Barely large enough for the bed, desk and chair, chest of drawers that also held the television, and a small arm chair and reading lamp. It had sacrificed size in some past remodel for the private bath Violet proudly touted for every room. Yet while small, the spotless bathroom and bedroom felt comfortable with themselves, like the lobby downstairs… unpretentious, I-am-what-I-am. More akin to a bed and breakfast than a hotel.
Violet did eye his ice chest warily. At the Holiday Inn he kept the chest in his car, but there the vehicle had been anonymous. Not here, parked on the street with his California plates conspicuous among the Kansas ones.
“What do you have there?”
She sounded suspicious, so he forced himself to open the chest, and even pull out a jug and unscrew the lid while giving her the protein drink story. Trying to keep cooler than he had been with Lien. People are curious about things someone seems reluctant to show or talk about, he reminded himself.
“Would you like to try some? It looks and smells weird but it’s very healthy.” Playing to the perception some people had of California as la-la land, he added, “All organic and natural ingredients. A holistic dietitian back home developed the formula.” He held the open top toward her.
She had already pulled back at
To avoid housekeeper curiosity, he shoved the chest under the bed with his suitcase and the rolled air mattress pallet in front of it.
The pallet he fingered longingly first. Daylight felt so much heavier today without the leavening of the hunt to make it bearable. How wonderful it would be forget the pretense of hunting ancestors and go comatose until sunset woke him.
After consideration, he wondered why not? As long as he spent the day away, people would assume he was hunting grandma. He just needed somewhere suitable to go to earth, as it were.
“Good luck,” Violet called as he passed the desk on the way out.
When he came back in the evening she greeted him with another smile. “You found your grandmother?”
He had been right about her assumption. Then the content of her question registered. Garreth blinked. “What makes you think that?”
“You look so pleased with yourself.”
Because he felt better than he had in days…even sleeping just three hours in the hideaway he spent most of the day hunting. Nothing like Dracula’s Carfax Abbey but appropriate to this part of the country, he thought, a barn behind the burned ruin of a farm house…roof falling in, leaning enough to keep people out. It seemed stable enough, though, when he pushed on its walls and support posts inside, and it felt and smelled wonderfully of earth. The shadows inside hid the car, and in deeper shadows yet where he spread a blanket from the car, he had stretched out and given himself to that earth.
The Garreth he played, though, would have another reason for his pleasure, which he would readily share. “I didn’t exactly find her, but a Mrs. Reed at the high school in Bellamy thinks she recognizes this girl.” He laid his photograph on the desk and pointed to a girl beside Grandma Doyle. “If she’s right, the name isn’t Mary Pfeifer — what I was afraid of — but Elizabeth something, maybe Pfannenstiel, and she lived in Trubel or on a farm around it.” He fought a temptation to embroider with gossip about a girl running off with an itinerant farm worker. Suspects tripped themselves up that way, talking too much. Did Kansas even have itinerant farm workers?
“There’s a nice trail in Pioneer Park,” Violet said. “Go north past the stock pens. The park entrance is on the left before you cross the river.”
With his interest being blood, not exercise, he set off with an empty bottle hidden in his jacket and stayed on Kansas Avenue after it narrowed to two lanes on the west side of the railroad tracks, passed the railroad station and the stock pens Violet mentioned, then crossed the Saline River and became Country Road 16. The countryside, which had dropped from the plateau Bellamy sat on into the river valley around Baumen, rose again to rolling hills, pastureland lit by the waxing moon and divided by barb wire fences.
He kept following the highway, jogging leisurely, noting the location of farm houses and sections where cattle grazed…square-built beef, black or red-and-white. The number pleased him…cattle enough to avoid preying on one group too much.
After what he judged to be four or five miles, he stopped to catch his breath, then started back. At a pasture
