In the Clearing (Tracy Crosswhite #3)(7)
“Don’t sweat it,” Kins said. “Faz says you promised him a lunch if he helped out. You should have just bought him a car. It would have been cheaper.”
CHAPTER 3
By the time Tracy and Dan rolled their suitcases into the lobby of the Inn at Stoneridge, the sun had already set. The restaurant and garden patio had closed, and rather than the “awe-inspiring images of the mighty Columbia carving its path through canyon walls,” as the inn’s website proclaimed, the river looked like the world’s largest blacktop highway.
At least the room was as romantic as advertised. The soft light of the bedside lamp colored the cedarwood walls gold, and soft jazz played from the nightstand stereo. Dan pulled back the curtain covering a sliding glass door. “Can’t see the mountain,” he said. It was too dark and overcast to see the snowcapped peak of Mount Adams to the north.
“I’m sorry we didn’t make our dinner reservation,” Tracy said. Dan had gone to considerable effort to get them a table at the inn’s four-star restaurant. They’d had to cancel when it became apparent they wouldn’t get there in time. Instead, they stopped and ate fast food.
“But consider the carbo-loading we did for our morning run,” he said, smiling but not able to completely mask his disappointment.
“We’re running in the morning?” she said.
“We are now.”
“Ugh. I’m going to take a shower,” Tracy said. “Care to join me?”
Dan had picked up the remote control. He gave her a sheepish smile. “I’m really beat,” he said. “I know you are too. I vote we veg—watch some TV, and crash. That okay?”
She knew he was tired; Los Angeles lawyers were wearing him out in a contentious personal injury lawsuit, but she was concerned Dan was becoming frustrated at their inability to find quality time together. They’d grown up childhood friends but had lost touch until Tracy returned to their hometown of Cedar Grove for answers about her little sister’s disappearance twenty years before. Hunters had found Sarah’s remains buried in a shallow grave, and Tracy wanted a new trial for the man accused of killing her, because she’d believed he was innocent. She’d hired Dan, the best attorney in town, and they developed a romantic relationship. But Tracy lived in Seattle, two hours away, and no sooner had she returned home when she became embroiled in the hunt for the Cowboy.
She wrapped her arms around Dan’s neck. “Are you upset?”
He set down the remote. “If I was upset, I’d be upset at you, which I’m not. I’m disappointed at the situation—that we didn’t get to enjoy the evening we’d planned.”
“We can still have part of the weekend we had in mind,” she said.
“Sort of a ‘you wash my back and I’ll wash yours’?” he said.
She smiled. “That assumes you’re taking me up on my offer, and one of us is turning around in the shower.”
They didn’t make it to the shower, and Dan didn’t seem too disappointed he had to postpone watching ESPN. They made love on the bed until, exhausted, they fell asleep wrapped in the Egyptian cotton sheets.
CHAPTER 4
Buzz Almond’s funeral included all the pomp and circumstance befitting a man who’d served more than half his life as the sheriff. An honor guard of Marines and Klickitat County deputies stood stone-faced in crisp dress uniforms, white-gloved hands gripping the handles of a flag-draped casket. Jenny Almond, who’d succeeded her father as sheriff, stood with her two older sisters, their mother pinched tight between them, arms interlocked. Three spouses and seven grandchildren took their places behind the women.
Tracy had colleagues whose spouses worried each time they left the house, but in the end, it wasn’t bullets or bad guys that killed the large majority of cops. It was the same insidious diseases that befell all humanity. For Theodore Michael “Buzz” Almond Jr., it had been colon cancer. He was sixty-seven.
The procession stopped at the foot of brick steps leading to the entrance of Saint Peter’s Catholic Church. A priest and two altar boys, their robes rippling in the breeze, descended the steps and greeted the family. Tracy knew they would remember little of this day, as she remembered little of her father’s funeral. She took Dan’s hand as the members of the honor guard lifted the casket onto their shoulders and two bagpipers blew the mournful wail of the Highland pipes that had carried her father and now would carry Buzz Almond home.
They held the public reception at the Stoneridge High School gymnasium, the only building in town large enough to accommodate the crowd who’d come to pay their respects. A private reception followed at the family home, and Jenny had invited Tracy and Dan. As she and Dan drove there, they passed orchards of fruit trees and rolling fields. The only disruption to the open space was a construction site for an impressive athletic complex rising above a manicured football field. A billboard-size sign staked in the lawn identified the contractor as Reynolds Construction.
State Route 141 wound farther into the foothills, and after another five minutes they left the pavement altogether for a dirt-and-gravel road that led to an expanse of lawn and a scene out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Young boys in khakis and barefoot girls in Sunday dresses ran around cradling a football and swinging on a rope swing in the yard of a two-story white clapboard farmhouse partially shaded by the limbs of cottonwood and birch trees. The home had a pitched roof, black shutters, and a wraparound porch with ornate pillars and a spindle railing, where several adults stood watching the children.