Larkspur Read online

  "We may have to have a fire sale. How's business with you? If the heat keeps up you'll be having a fire sale." I picked up the paperback. Fortunately books aren't fragile.

  Dennis looked blank then frowned. Forest fires were Serious. "They wanted to do a controlled burn at Castle Crags. Lots of underbrush. But it got hot too soon. There's already a big fire up across the border. We may have a bad fire season."

  "Again?" I had only been in Monte a year, but both summers had been dry. Drier than normal, everyone said. I had the sneaking suspicion dry was normal, and they just didn't like to admit it.

  As Ginger and Dennis made for the door I said, "Think about the Fourth, Ginge," and she nodded.

  I closed at nine. I had sold a climber's map of Black Butte and a guide to local flora. Not much for two hours' work.

  My bookstore is in a mall near the Interstate which also contains a dry cleaner/Laundromat, a liquor store, two small bad restaurants and a supermarket. Off by itself in weedy isolation lies the health club I belong to. I ran half a dozen half-hearted laps of the gym, swam, showered and drove home.

  Jay's Blazer was parked two slots down from the entry stair by the Calfirst Bank's big door. So he was home from Los Angeles. He might have given me a ring. I drove around back and parked in my specially reserved tenant slot next to the bank vice-president's BMW, grumbling to myself. My pulse quickened--naturally it did, who can suppress hormonal surges?--but Jay's presence in my apartment sans ceremony suggested he was taking his welcome for granted, and we had been bickering when he left. He'd been gone a week.

  I took my time on the back stairs.

  Jay was on my sofa, blinking himself awake, when I entered. I gave him a quick kiss and moved out of range.

  "Hey!" He levered himself up to a sitting position.

  "Time for a talk."

  "Uh-oh."

  I slid a disk in the CD and turned the volume low. Instrumental jazz. Jay thinks to jazz and makes love to classical--at least sometimes. "How was LA?"

  "Peachy keen."

  "I suppose you watched a lot of old movies on the motel cable."

  "I stayed with Ma in Beverly Hills and watched a lot of old movies on cable."

  "A week's worth?"

  "Freddy's on a 1940's kick." Freddy was his fifteen-year-old half-brother. "He says hi."

  I had met Freddy the previous summer, a nice shy kid. "How's your step-father?"

  Jay made a face. "Alf won't last a year, according to the doctors."

  "Heart?"

  "Yeah. Ma's pretty depressed."

  I commiserated. Jay had escorted a prisoner to Los Angeles and testified at the arraignment. It was unusual for him to stay with his family.

  He stood and stretched enormously, yawning, "On top of everything else, the flight from LAX to San Francisco was delayed half an hour and bounced around like a Ping-Pong ball on a geyser when it did take off. I missed dinner."

  "No foil-wrapped packets of delicious dry-roasted almonds on the turbo-prop?" Monte is served by a commuter line through the tiny airport at Weed.

  "I eschewed the cheese-flavored peanuts," he said gravely.

  "Ugh. Eschewed?"

  "Must be the opposite of chewed."

  "I'd better feed you." I made for the kitchen, nuked a frozen dinner, and poured two beers.

  He ate with exasperating slowness. I sipped my beer and stood at the front window which overlooks Main Street.

  The street lights were just coming on. They turned the geraniums in front of City Hall punk purple. A police car slid to a stop in the loading zone, and two uniformed cops got out and walked down the stairs that led to the police station. One of them was gesticulating, and the other was shaking his head. A Winnebago with bicycles on the roof made its sluggish way past City Hall and turned down a by-street. A kid on a skateboard whooshed by on the sidewalk below me. I like a cityscape, even if the city tops out at 17,347 counting dogs and bicycles.

  "You wanted to talk?" Jay joined me at the window.

  I wanted a Meaningful Discussion of our Relationship. I groped for an opening.

  Jay gave me his best negotiating-with-terrorists smile and smoothed his mustache.

  I chickened out. "I want us to spend the Fourth of July at Dai Llewellyn's lodge."

  "Die?" The mustache whiffled. Jay's eyebrows shot up.

  I spelled it, adding, "E. David Llewellyn. He has a lodge up past Murietta."

  Jay frowned. "Llewellyn...hey, 'Siskiyou Summit'! I'm damned. I didn't know the old guy was still alive."

  "My mother assures me he's history," I said when I overcame my chagrin. What was I, illiterate, that I'd never heard of the damned poem? I told Jay what I knew about the weekend festivities and watched his face as he processed the data. I expected him to cite a backlog of work and plead off, as he usually did when I suggested some kind of sustained social interaction. Jay was inclined to be reclusive, and he had a snug house out in the wilds for us to be reclusive in. I was half-hoping he'd refuse to come. When I described the guest-list, however, he just looked thoughtful and sipped at his beer.

  I finished outlining the horrors of four days of literary small-talk. "And the head of the English department will be there. He knows my mother, too." The culminating horror.

  Jay missed the point--or ignored it. "Four days, huh? Okay. I'll see if Kevin can hold the fort. He owes me."

  I must have been gaping.

  Jay gave me another grin and finished his beer, looking bland.

  I rallied. "I'll say Kevin owes you. Memorial Day, Easter, Christmas..."

  "Thanksgiving, Veterans' Day, Yom Kippur. I don't like holidays."

  "So I gathered when you refused to fly back home with me at Christmas." That was a sore point. However, it was not a new sore point, and I refused to let myself be distracted. "Why change your habits now? Think of all the DWI arrests you'll miss out on."

  "And the Domestic Assaults," he said nostalgically, "and the Reckless Endangerments and the Vehicular Manslaughters."

  "How can you give all that up?"

  He kissed me on the mouth, breaking my concentration. I slopped beer on the rug.

  We mopped together and sat on the carpet for a while, smelling like hops and roses. We made it to the bedroom eventually.

  However, the night was but young. Somewhere around midnight we drifted back out to the kitchen. I made tea, and we sat at my nice gate-legged table, sipping, and flirting with our eyes. A week without Jay was a long time.

  "Tell me the truth." I took a swallow of herb tea. "Why did you agree to go with me over the Fourth? I mean really," I added, rather cross, when he leered over his cup.

  "I was overcome by the irresistible attraction of the biggest pot-farm north of Fort Bragg."

  I set my cup down and gaped. "What?"

  "This guy Peltz..."

  I was completely at sea. "Angharad's husband?"

  "Name of Ted. A poet and a naturalist, so he says. They live in a cabin at the lake, and there's no visible means of support except the woman's job as a part-time English instructor. Her family's wealthy, of course, so that could explain the fancy van and the TV dish and the general air of laid-back post-hippy prosperity. Their movements in and out are suspicious, and we know he's a user."

  "Wow." I was revising my mental image of Ms. Peltz.

  "Of course, we leave the big pot-busts to the feds these days. But it's interesting. The place is interesting. Half the developers in northern California are lusting after that lake. I thought the title was in dispute or something, but if Llewellyn is still alive he may be the snag."

  "He doesn't like power boats, according to Lydia Huff."

  "He's not the only one." Jay's house overlooked a tiny lake that was technically on Forest Service territory, but he was apt to feel proprietary about it. Motorbikes and snowmobiles infuriated him, too. "Some outfit from Sacramento was nosing around the county commissioners' offices last winter, talking about putting in condos. The Sierra Club called out its tro
ops."

  I was feeling a lot more cheerful. Ecological protests. Pot busts. "Should be a great weekend."

  "Yeah. There's Denise, too. I'd like to meet her." He was eyeing me. "Are you sure Dennis Fromm is her son?"

  "Incongruous but true."

  He rose and carried his cup to the sink. "I saw her dance once. She must have been fifty, but she was graceful as all get out. She came out of retirement for a benefit."

  "Pardon me," I said politely, joining him at the sink, "if I have trouble imagining you at a modern dance concert."

  "My wife dragged me to it."

  "Your what?"

  He edged out of the kitchen. "My wife. I was married for about eight months to a psych major who was determined to improve my taste and my sanity."

  This was news to me. I followed him out of the kitchen like a basset on the scent. "You were married?"

  "About ten or, Jesus, twelve years ago. I was a senior at Northridge, and Linda was working on her masters. She thought I needed a shrink, and I thought she needed a husband. We were both wrong."

  "Why have you never mentioned this interesting fact?"

  "It never came up," he said mildly. "Don't you have skeletons in your closet, Lark? I seem to remember a pro football player."

  "Yeah, but I told you about him. And anyway I didn't marry the jerk. You're so damned secretive." I grumbled at him, but I was more dumbfounded than angry. We had some communications gap.

  The next morning I sent Llewellyn a note, accepting the invitation for myself and Jay, and then my bookstore started drawing a respectable number of customers, and I got too busy to brood. Lydia Huff came by again just to make sure we were coming. That set my teeth on edge, but the Huffs didn't know Mother so it wasn't collusion. I also ordered a copy of The Collected Poems of E. David Llewellyn. I figured I'd better read "Siskiyou Summit."

  Chapter II

  "I begin to see what the old boy meant by summit." I peered over the shoulder of the county road and about two hundred feet straight down.

  Jay shifted into second and the Blazer rumbled. "We're only twenty-two miles from downtown Monte."

  "As the crow flies." I am not fond of heights. "Let me know when both edges of the road go up." I shut my eyes.

  "Did you bring firecrackers?"

  "Dennis would not approve." The fire danger was Extreme, red on the Forest Service's little pie-wedge scales. They had closed down logging and were discouraging people from camping in the mountains. Five weeks of ninety degree heat and no rain in sight. It was six-thirty and stinko hot even at that altitude. Jay had the air-conditioner on for a change. He rarely uses it.

  "You can look now."

  I opened one eye. We were tooling along a high, wooded plateau, but a bend ahead promised more winding.

  "So," he said, as if picking up the thread of an argument, "do we tell everybody I'm a cop, or do we play it cool?"

  "For heaven's sake, Jay." I swallowed, and my ears popped. "Bill Huff knows what you do. He's a journalist."

  Jay grimaced. He was not fond of journalists but was usually prepared to tolerate them. "You have to admit my job tends to create awkward pauses in the conversation."

  That was depressing but true. Otherwise mild and law-abiding citizens edge off muttering about traffic tickets when they find themselves in social contact with a policeman.

  My brother, who is a lawyer, says people at parties pump him for free advice, and I've heard doctors say the same thing, but the only professionals besides cops who evoke the guilt reaction are English teachers. Or so I've noticed. "Guess I'll have to watch my grammar." It's the same reaction cops get. There's a big difference, though, between cops and English teachers. Cops tend to associate only with cops, whereas English teachers have no shame.

  I explained English teacher-avoidance and told Jay he could hang out with Winton D'Angelo when we got to the lodge. Still, I wasn't surprised to hear Jay say he worked for the county, as Dai Llewellyn, cocktail in hand, began introducing us to the others.

  We were the last set of guests to arrive. That afternoon Jay had been buried in paperwork, and I got nervous about my bookstore, so we weren't on the road until five-thirty. Everyone else was well-lubricated and anticipating dinner by the time we showed up at the lodge. We gave our bags over to the chauffeur-houseboy, Miguel, who was indeed young and pretty, as Ginger had promised.

  Llewellyn himself was a handsome, white-haired old gentleman with marvelous waxed mustachios and a warm voice. I had seen his photo on the jacket of Collected Poems, so I expected the mustache. I didn't expect him to be short.

  I am six feet tall. A little over, in fact. My mother, who is five-foot two, didn't mention her mentor's stature. Maybe it didn't occur to her that he was short. To be accurate, he was probably five six--not tiny. Still, he had to look up at me, and I could see him blink as he shook hands. He was too suave or too kind to ask how the weather was up there, and he accepted Jay with every sign of pleasure. I liked him.

  I was surprised to find everyone indoors, because the natural setting was spectacular even for that spectacular country. We had taken a good look before we knocked at the vast wooden door.

  A rolled lawn starred with daisies embraced the narrow arm of a lake so deep the water was blue-black. The lowering sun cast a lazy gold light over madrones and Douglas fir, yellow pine and incense cedar. Low, shiny-leaved clumps of manzanita were pruned back from a path that led to a gleaming beach and a long narrow wooden boat dock. Two red canoes reposed upside down on the dock, and I saw a couple of rowboats bobbing on the water. By that time the lawn was in half shadow, and a dim porch light across the water already showed at the Peltz's cabin, the only other sign of habitation.

  "We dine tonight," Llewellyn said reaching up to guide me across the shadowy lounge by the elbow. "Tomorrow we picnic." I was, alas, dressed for a picnic and I somehow didn't think he'd delay the banquet while I changed. I blinked my vision clear and felt the welcome brush of refrigerated air on my bare arms.

  A woman a couple of years younger than I and Angharad Pot, sorry, Peltz, raised languid glasses to greet me. Angharad was wearing one of those dresses that look like Victorian underwear. Bill Huff's daughter Janey was a librarian home on vacation, Llewellyn explained. I said something polite. Lydia was leading Jay clockwise around the huge room.

  I stumbled on a throw rug that had to be hand woven Navajo and nearly fell on Denise. She extended a graceful hand as if she expected me to kiss it. I didn't. Dennis was off fighting a fire. I wondered if he'd been invited. Ginger hadn't been.

  "Let Miguel pour the poor child a drink, Dai, darling. She looks hot."

  I do not enjoy being referred to in my presence in the third person. Lark was not hot. She was embarrassed.

  Denise patted the leathery couch she was sitting on, and I had to sink down beside her. Darn it, basketball players are coordinated, even if they're not graceful. The couch was very, very deep. I peered out at the others between my jeans-clad knees as my host drifted off to find me a glass of white wine.

  Jay was standing by D'Angelo and a surly bear in bib overalls I took to be Ted Peltz. D'Angelo was saying something earnest. I met Jay's eyes, and he crossed his. Briefly. I grinned and decided I'd better listen to what Denise was saying.

  "...dancing for my oldest friends to your mother's little tone poems. One of my fondest memories."

  "Uh, how nice."

  "Poor Hal did the score."

  Hal? Poor Hal--Llewellyn's friend who had been killed in a wreck. "I didn't realize he was a composer."

  Denise's dramatic eyes flashed. "Superb. Of course that dreadful bank kept him busy most of the time. If he'd been able to devote himself to music he would have rivaled Schoenberg."

  Schoenberg. Atonality. I felt as if I were trying to follow the dialog in a foreign movie with bad titles.

  Denise raised her glass in melancholy salute to the departed Hal and sipped. "My dear, as you grow older you will find memory a bittersweet gift. All
your golden days shadowed by the fell hand of death."

  "Now, Denise." Llewellyn had returned. He handed me a delicate fluteful of good stuff.

  "I know, Dai. I promised." Her voice throbbed. "No more repining."

  "Isn't Denise's diction wonderful?" He sat on a straight-backed chair that looked as if it had come from someone's dining room. "Right out of Swinburne."

  La belle Denise did not look amused. She had very little sense of humor.

  "I don't see Bill Huff," I murmured.

  The silence continued a beat too long. Then Llewellyn said lightly, "Bill's putting his paper to bed. A special for the Fourth." He brushed imaginary lint from the sleeve of his natty blue blazer. "He'll be along after dinner. Tell me about your bookstore, my dear. Lydia says it's splendid."

  "Did I hear my name?" Lydia swarmed up, lacy shawl awhirl. I contrived to rise from my leathern pit. We shook hands.

  "Have you met my sweet step-daughter? Of course you have. You and Janey have so much in common. She wind-surfs."

  I must have looked blank.

  "So athletic," Lydia murmured. "I'm sure you'll get along famously."

  I had never tried wind-surfing. I said something polite and let Lydia sink into my spot on the couch. I perched on the arm of the couch between Lydia and Llewellyn, and we talked bookstore for awhile, Llewellyn listening with cocked head, like a white-plumed egret. He made several surprisingly practical suggestions, seconded by Lydia, who was, after all, in the business of selling books, too. Denise sipped at her drink, probably something poisonous like absinthe, and brooded. I was grateful to Lydia for coming over to us and to Llewellyn for existing. I began to relax and settle into a discussion of computerized inventory systems.

  "A cop? Jesus H. Christ!"

  I craned around. Across the room, the bear in bib overalls had turned purple and swollen several sizes.

  D'Angelo made anxious, soothing noises. Jay was looking into his beer.