It wasn’t until after the freight train had passed that Sue was finally able to get her fumbling fingers to press the necessary numbers.
“Nine one one,” a businesslike voice said in her ear. “What are you reporting?”
Sue Lammers took a deep breath. “I’m out walking south of Vail, south of Fast Horse Ranch,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “My dog just found somebody’s arm. A bloody human arm!”
Distracted, Erik gave himself permission to stop short of the summit. With his back resting against a warm cliff face in a solitary canyon well below Finger Rock, he pulled out his peanut butter sandwich and savored the first bite. It was made the right way-the way Grandma always made it-with butter on both slices of bread and with the peanut butter slathered in between.
He had traded lunches one day in the lunch room at Hollinger Elementary and had been surprised when his friend’s peanut butter sandwich was hard to swallow. It had stuck in his throat, and once he finally realized what the difference was, he had asked Gladys about it that evening.
“Grandma,” he said, “did you know some people make peanut butter sandwiches without buttering the bread first?”
“Yes.”
“How come you always put butter on it?”
“Because that’s the way you’re supposed to do it,” Gladys Johnson returned. “There’s always a right way to do something and a wrong way. Buttering the bread first is the right way.”
“Is that how your mother did it?”
Gladys nodded. “My mother,” she said. “And my aunt Selma, too. It’s the way everybody did it back home. Peanut butter was a lot stiffer in those days.”
All these years later, even though Erik LaGrange had never met those fabled relatives he had heard so many stories about, he was glad he shared that one small trait with people who would forever be nothing but faceless names. Peanut butter on buttered bread was a tiny fragment of his own lost heritage.
It’s the way I do it, too, he thought.
That fateful President’s Ball had been on a Saturday night. The following Tuesday afternoon, Gayle Stryker rang Erik at his office.
“I offered you a job the other night,” she said after identifying herself. “I thought you would have called about it by now.”
Erik was so taken aback he could barely reply. “I wasn’t really thinking about making a change right now,” he stammered, sounding like a total dork.
“Really,” Gayle Stryker said. “Are they paying you that much?”
That was laughable because the truth was, they were paying him hardly anything at all. “Not really,” he admitted finally.
In actual fact, Erik LaGrange was someone who resisted change wherever it presented itself. For him, staying in a less-than-optimal situation was better than striking off into the unknown. It made for a stable if relatively boring life.
“How about if we get together tomorrow and have lunch?” Gayle suggested. “At El Charro downtown, say, about a quarter to one?”
Erik thought about his ten-year-old plug-ugly but still-running Volvo with its faded orange paint and crimped front bumper. He was supposed to meet the lady for lunch driving that? And what the hell was he supposed to wear? And what was he going to say to his boss? “Well, Dick, I guess I’ll take a long lunch and see about getting a job somewhere else.”
Richard Mathers was a guy who believed in running a tight ship. He was a micromanaging busybody who had to know where his people were at all times. He expected to be apprised of what each was doing and whether it would improve his departmental bottom line. If Erik showed up at work wearing something unusual-for Erik a sports coat and tie would definitely be out of character-Dick would ask a million questions, none of which Erik wanted to answer.
“Okay,” Erik heard himself saying. “A quarter to one.”
Gayle Stryker laughed. “Don’t sound so worried. I’m going to offer you a job. It isn’t exactly an invitation to a beheading.”
But it could just as well have been. Two margaritas-blended with no salt-were waiting on the table when Erik showed up. In order to avoid rousing Dick Mathers’s suspicion, Erik had left his tie and blazer in the car when he arrived at work that morning. He donned them only after pulling into the parking lot across from the restaurant.
Gayle, in a lime-green silk shirt with a pair of matching slacks, was already seated. A discreet glance at her plunging neckline left little to the imagination. She welcomed him to the table with a cordial peck on the cheek.
“So good of you to come,” she murmured in his ear. The look she gave him as she resumed her seat left no doubt in Erik’s mind that the double entendre he thought he’d heard had indeed been intended. Once again, Erik blushed. The bones in his legs turned to mush, and he tumbled into the chair opposite her.
Knowing Dick Mathers disapproved of what he called “boozy lunches” and hoping for something a little less volatile than tequila, Erik started to push the margarita glass away. Gayle pointed a diamond-bedecked finger in his direction and shook it reprovingly.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she warned. “I didn’t come here to drink alone. We’re going to have a lovely lunch and get to know each other. Cheers.” She raised her glass in Erik’s direction and smiled when he followed suit. “Tell me about yourself,” she said after tasting her drink.
Whether it was nerves or not, Erik laid the whole story out on the table. “I’m thirty years old,” he said. “My mother died shortly after I was born. I never met my father. I was raised by my grandmother right here in Tucson. I’m not married, never have been. No children, either.”
Erik felt like a complete idiot. This wasn’t the kind of information he should have blurted out if this really was a job interview, but he was fairly certain a change of employment for him was a long way down on Gayle Stryker’s list of priorities. Her response confirmed his suspicions.
“I see,” she said with a smile. “You’re saying you’re what could be called a blank slate?”
Several weeks earlier Erik had watched The Graduate on Turner Classic Movies. Poor Dustin Hoffman had been putty in Anne Bancroft’s very capable hands. Somehow Erik knew at once that he was headed in the same direction.
“I guess,” he replied uneasily, fingering the stem of his chilled glass.
“Well,” she said. “We’ll have to do something about that now, won’t we.”
They ate lunch. Gayle had two more margaritas while Erik had another as well. When they left the restaurant a little before four, Erik drove off in Gayle Stryker’s silver Lexus, leaving his own battered Volvo sitting forlorn and forgotten in the parking lot.
She directed Erik to El Encanto, a part of town he had visited as a worker bee during top-dollar alumni fund- raising parties. Elegant El Encanto was a long way from the tiny bungalow in a predominantly Hispanic part of the Old Pueblo where Erik had been raised. After meandering aimlessly through the wheels-and-spokes confusion of the subdivision’s streets, they pulled into the gate of a two-story brown stucco mansion. A copper-colored gate opened at the touch of a remote on the Lexus’s visor. So did the garage door. Gayle waited only long enough for the garage door to close behind them before reaching across the seat, pulling Erik toward her, and kissing him in a fashion that was calculated to take his breath away. And did.
“Come on,” she whispered finally. “Let’s go someplace comfortable.”
Paying only the barest attention to his surroundings, he followed her into the house and then up a curved stairway. She began stripping off her clothes as she crossed the threshold into an enormous bedroom and was standing naked before him by the time he had unfastened his belt.
“Come on,” she said impatiently. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Until that afternoon, Erik LaGrange had thought of himself as a reasonably experienced person when it came to sex, but Gayle Stryker had tricks up her discarded sleeve that went far beyond anything he’d ever considered or imagined, and her stamina was unbelievable. When she finally had her fill of him, some two hours later, she got out
