Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 103, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 625 & 626, March 1994

© 1994 by Rebecca S. Rothenberg

Rebecca Rothenberg’s first novel, The Bulrush Murders, received nominations for both the Agatha and Anthony awards in 1992 and was named one of the ten best novels of the year by the Los Angeles Times. “Like the forthcoming Dandelion Murders (The Mysterious Press)” Ms. Rothenberg tells us, “ ‘Locoweed’ is set in the same world — the hot, dry, agricultural Central Valley of California — and involves the same cast of characters. ‘Locoweed,’ however, is told from the point of view of someone who ordinarily plays a supporting role in my series: Claire Sharpies’s boyfriend Sam, taciturn local boy, lover, father, borderline nerd...”

1.

“Let’s give a big hand to these little ladies from Tierra Buena,” the announcer said, his enthusiasm unwavering even though this was the fifth group of peanut-shaped, sequin-clad, baton-manipulating little girls to pass in the last half-hour.

The inhabitants of Riverdale, California, population fifteen thousand, elevation one thousand, cheered dutifully; Claire Sharpies, B.S., M.S., Ph.D. Microbiology (MIT 1980), the Diane Arbus of the San Joaquin Valley, snapped pictures ecstatically, loving every lip-sticked and mascaraed babyface. And Sam Cooper, M.S. Agronomy (Cal State 1978), read a magazine.

He had marched, if that was the word, in the Riverdale rodeo parade every year between the ages of six and sixteen: with the cub scouts, with 4-H, with the boy scouts, with his high school band, with Search-and-Rescue. The parade held no charm for him.

What he liked was the rodeo, which started in a few hours and which left Claire cold, being to her Eastern eyes tedious and to her photographer’s eyes messy. But after some negotiation, a constant feature of their unlikely relationship, each agreed to accompany the other.

He looked up briefly when Claire poked him in the ribs.

“It’s J. T. Cummings!” she hissed, and sure enough, here came the mounted posse of the county sheriff’s department, led by Sheriff Cummings himself. He was flanked by three pink and portly clones carrying aloft the standards of the United States, the Golden Bear Republic, and the County of Kaweah, and was followed by twenty-nine middle-aged men squeezed into smart uniforms, their mounts in far better shape than themselves. Still, they rode well and conveyed a certain Cossack menace.

“J. TVs always in the parade,” Sam said in a bored voice. “Usually competes in the rodeo, too, and makes a damn fool of himself.”

“I didn’t even know he could ride!”

“Most people who grow up here can ride, Claire.”

“Can you?”

“Of course!”

She looked at him respectfully and he savored the unfamiliar sensation — she was a hard woman to impress — then returned to this month’s featured article, “Biological Control of Powdery Mildew in Apricots.”

“—a special treat,” the announcer was saying. “Former Rodeo Princess, Rodeo Queen, and Western Belle Equestrienne, and currently owner of EastWind Arabian Horse Ranch. We’ve missed her the last few years here at the rodeo, but now here she is, on her prize-winning Arabian stallion Barney’s Pride. Let’s have a big hand for our own — GLENDA CANNON!”

Claire noticed that Sam had lowered his magazine and was standing very straight. At the far end of the street a slim figure on a white horse came slowly into view, the horse prancing and sidestepping in a nervous way. As they drew closer Claire could see that the rider was a woman, and that she was dressed like a Spanish caballero, her blond hair set off by a dark broad-brimmed hat, her slender body emphasized by tight-fitting trousers and short jacket. She favored the crowd with a professional smile and as she passed, Claire thought her gaze lingered on Sam — and herself.

“A friend?” she whispered to Sam.

“Sort of.”

At that moment a small dog ran yapping across the street, almost under the feet of the white horse. The stallion stopped dead in its tracks, pondered its next move, then started for the crowd at a dead run.

Glenda Cannon stood in the stirrups and pulled hard on the reins. Instead of responding, the horse reared up on its hind legs. For a moment it looked as if Glenda would be thrown. But she balanced like a skier as the stallion plunged and kicked. Slowly, with seemingly superhuman strength, she turned its head and contained its movements. Then, suddenly, the hellfire died in the horse’s eyes, the mutiny was over, and Glenda was back in control, composure and rictus smile intact.

It was a superb display, and Claire joined reluctantly in the spontaneous applause. Sam stood with his hands at his sides.

“That’s the kind of horsewomanship we expect from a Riverdale Rodeo Queen,” the announcer said warmly. “And now” — as a for-lorn-looking little girl whirled and twirled her way up the street — “we have another baton demonstration by little Rosie Jye — Jye—” (whispered consultation) “—Jimenez!” he pronounced triumphantly, “little Rosie Jimenez, of Parkerville...”

Claire clutched a plate of Farm Bureau barbecue in her left hand and Riverdale Civic Association barbecue in her right and paused to look towards the foothills of the Sierras. In April those hills were not yet their normal parched brown, but a lush green. And the sky was not the hard pewter of midsummer but a soft blue, with puffy clouds — a New England sky. Even the Central Valley, twelve miles to the west, looked good this time of year, and smelled intoxicatingly of orange blossoms.

Altogether a pleasing prospect. She looked down the rows of bleachers and found Sam, conspicuous as the only male not wearing a cowboy hat, leaning against the wooden arena railing. Three aisles to her right, a gleaming blond head caught her eye and she saw Riverdale’s Own Glenda Cannon, shading her eyes with her hand and staring down at the arena. Claire had the distinct impression that she, too, was watching Sam. Then she turned and vanished into the crowd.

Claire walked gingerly down the wooden risers to the railing. “Which one’s the Farm Bureau’s?” asked Sam, reaching for a plate.

She squelched her curiosity about Glenda, at least for the moment. “Uh-uh,” she admonished. “We’re going to conduct a blind taste-test here—”

“The Farm Bureau’s always the best,” he interrupted, snatching the plate from her left hand, “and they always have biscuits instead of bread. I’ll go get some beer.”

As she balanced the remaining flimsy paper plate on her knees, Tom Martelli wandered over, dressed in full Riverdale police chief regalia.

“Crowd control?” she asked.

“Mm-hmm. They can get ugly,” he said serenely, surveying the mothers and fathers and little kids and giggly teenagers and old geezers.

“You ever arrest anybody here?”

“Oh, once some kids got drunk and started stealing hubcaps out in the parking lot. You know,” he added very seriously, “the Farm Bureau’s barbecue is a lot better. They give you biscuits—”

“—instead of bread. I know.”

Sam appeared with two translucent plastic cups of beer and handed one to Claire.

“Say,” said Tom, “why don’t you all come over for a beer on Sunday? Marie’s going to be gone—”

“Can’t. I’m driving Claire down to L.A., to the airport,” Sam said after a moment.

“Going back East?”

“Yes,” she said, not looking at Sam, “for a couple of weeks.”

Once the rodeo began in earnest Claire slumped on the bleachers and checked out “Biological Control of Powdery Mildew in Apricots.” It didn’t tell her anything new, and at first she welcomed the frequent interruptions by other rodeo-goers more interested in socializing than in the calf-roping — which included almost all of Sam’s and her colleagues from the Agricultural Experimental Field Station. One by one they trooped by, families in tow, unfazed by Sam’s monosyllabic grunts and unshakable concentration on the arena; he was accepted as something of an eccentric. Claire, however, although by nature also reserved, felt compelled as a newcomer to be cordial, and wore herself out in twenty minutes.

Luckily, at this point there was a break in the action, and while the Western Belle Equestrienne Drill Team executed some convoluted maneuvers that were neither functional nor beautiful, Sam spotted someone he wanted to speak to. He climbed up on the bench, cupped his hands, and bellowed, “Eddie! Eddie Froelich!”

Fifty yards away a figure turned around, scanned the crowd, and waved. In a minute he was standing before them: lean, good-looking, youngish, thinning red hair, his eyes a hot blue under near-white eyebrows. A harassed-looking woman and two towheaded little girls trailed behind.

He and Sam pumped arms and thumped shoulders.

“Hey, buddy,” Eddie said, “it’s been too long!”

“Way too long! How’re things at Westside?” Westside was another Agricultural Field Station way over on the arid western side of the Valley, and Claire concluded that this Eddie person must be a friend from Ag school. Sam suddenly remembered the manners that Claire’s skillful nagging had drilled into him.

“Oh, uh, Eddie, this is Claire Sharpies,” he said, putting his arm around her. “She works down at Citrus Cove, too. She’s a microbiologist.”

“Oh, a real scientist, huh?” Eddie said with a trace of sarcasm that he diffused with a laugh and a friendly, “Pleased to meet you.”

There was a silence, during which all parties anticipated the introduction of Eddie’s wife and daughters — all parties excepting Eddie, whose next words were, “Well, listen, old buddy, what you been up to?” And he and Sam resumed talking.

The woman smiled ruefully. “I’m Mary Jo Froelich,” she said, “and this is Stacey” — resting her hand on the bigger girl’s shoulder — “and Kristin.” She smiled fondly at them.

“They’re adorable,” said Claire, a little mechanically. She was listening with half an ear to the men’s conversation; Sam was being deliberately charming and she wondered why.

“Not riding this year?” he was asking.

“Nope — my bones ain’t made of rubber like they used to be. And neither is my head!”

Sam laughed. “You used to be mighty good, Eddie,” he said, then added casually, “Played any ball lately?”

Claire suppressed a smile. Recruiting for softball; that explained most of these sudden spurts of sociability. She turned her attention back to Mary Jo and the girls.

Suddenly Kristin declared that she wanted a grape Slurpee.

“Not now, honey,” her mother said. “You just had one. Maybe before we go—”

“—I want one NOW!” Kristin wailed in her piercing three-year-old’s voice. Eddie Froelich whirled, his freckled face reddening.

“Kristin,” he said through clenched teeth, “if you don’t shut up I’m going to whomp you into next week!”

The little girl shrank against her mother, and Claire took a step backward, startled by the outburst, whose violence was so disproportionate to the offense. Mary Jo, however, seemed embarrassed but not really disturbed, and Eddie subsided as quickly as he had exploded.

“Kids!” he said with a weak grin. “She’s been ornery all day.”

“We’d better take them back to our seats,” said Mary Jo, casting him a look that said We’ll Talk About This Later. Eddie lingered for a moment.

“Let’s get together soon,” he said almost wistfully. “And I’ll call you about softball. Though I don’t have much free time these days,” he added with a sharp laugh, looking after his wife and daughters.

Sam watched his retreating back. “Used to be the best shortstop in Kaweah County,” he remarked, and after a moment added, “and the luckiest man in the lower San Joaquin Valley. Or unluckiest, depending on who you talk to.”

Claire looked at him curiously.

“Used to be married to Glenda Cannon.”

It rained Monday and again Tuesday. A mass of moist air parked over the Great Basin, just east of the Sierras, was sending these daily downpours, and the customary dry heat of the Valley became oppressively humid.

“A little preparation for Back East,” said Sam as they sat on the front steps of his house on Tuesday evening after the rain. Despite almost a year of cohabitation, Claire still regarded the little cabin high in the foothills as “Sam’s house.”

“Boston’s miserable in the summer,” she agreed, though they both knew she could hardly wait to leave. Bookstores. Seafood. Foreign films. Jazz on the radio. Good friends. She might even drop in on the conference that the Field Station was paying her to attend.

“How do you know Eddie?” she asked as a distraction.

“High school,” Sam replied briefly.

“And Glenda?” she asked after a moment.

“Same.”

“Was she your girlfriend?”

Sam gave a bark of laughter. “Good God, no! I wasn’t in her league. For one thing, the Cannons were rich. Otherwise, no Arabian horse-breeding ranch for little Glenda. It’s an expensive hobby. No, that’s not fair,” he corrected himself scrupulously. “She’s worked real hard at that business.” He paused, then said, “She loves those horses,” in a strangely muffled voice that held an echo of obscene adolescent speculations, Parkerville High boys’ locker room, circa 1966: Just exactly how did Glenda love those horses, anyway?

“Glenda wasn’t really anybody’s girlfriend,” he continued. “She was kind of wild; went out with a lot of guys, Eddie included. He was varsity football and basketball,” he added in irrefutable explanation, “but he really wasn’t good enough for her. Nobody was.

“But when I got back from Thailand, he and Glenda were married. To everybody’s surprise, most of all Eddie’s, I think. And personally, I figure she just needed somebody to help run the ranch. Because she divorced him. In two years. And Eddie didn’t get anything in the settlement, either, because the judge happened to be a golf buddy of Barney Cannon’s, and he ruled that everything had been Glenda’s before the marriage, so under common property Eddie wasn’t entitled to it. Well, Eddie sort of went nuts for a while: lawsuits, threatening letters — he even vandalized the ranch.”

“How do you know all this?” Claire broke in.

“Christ, everybody knew it!” (Stupid question; everybody always knew everything that happened in this county.) “He made a public spectacle of himself,” he said with exasperation, whether at her or at Eddie she couldn’t tell. “Finally settled down; went back to school, remarried, got himself a job at Westside. I guess his degree’s in animal husbandry, ’cause it’s mostly cattle ranching over there.” Silence. Suddenly Claire said, “Debby looks sort of like Glenda, doesn’t she?” Debby was Sam’s ex-wife.

“Well, they’re both blond.” He looked uncomfortable, then burst out, “Damn, Claire, that was twenty years ago!”

He had known exactly what she meant, which was provocative in itself. But really, she was merely curious — extremely curious. Sam’s emotional history was a barred and shuttered room. He could tell her with great accuracy where he had been and what he had done, but not how he had felt, and any glimpse into that black box was pursued eagerly. Jealousy had nothing to do with it.

“Oh,” he said, “I almost forgot. We’re invited to the Froelichs for dinner on Thursday.”

2.

The Froelichs lived in a trailer. It was a nice trailer — double-wide, sitting on several acres of dry grassland about ten miles west of Porterville — but still it was a trailer, and as they approached it Thursday evening Claire wondered how Eddie, who had once been married to the richest and most glamorous woman in Kaweah County, felt about that, and concluded that it didn’t improve his temper any.

Neither did a six-pack.

Eddie’s “conversation” consisted of a running indictment of the people who had at various times dedicated their lives to sabotaging his success and happiness — a long list including but not limited to his father, his older brother, his high school basketball coach, and his present boss. And, of course, Glenda. The commentary became increasingly self-pitying and vitriolic as the empty Coors cans accumulated on the table. Sam listened with patient politeness — anything for a first-class shortstop — but Claire was passionately grateful for the interruption of a phone call at about nine. Mary Jo handed Eddie the phone, and as he listened, he seemed to shrink and sharpen like a slide coming into focus.

“Oh my God,” he said huskily. “Did you call Bogosian? Okay, I’ll be right there.” He hung up, white-faced. Mary Jo touched his arm.

“That was Dwayne Patterson,” he said numbly. “Two of his calves have died, and a third is sick. The vet thinks it’s selenium poisoning.”

Mary Jo laughed with relief. “Is that all? I thought your father—”

He whirled on her. “Don’t you understand?” he hissed. “Those are the calves that I was treating!”

“Is this the selenium trial you were telling me about?” asked Sam, and Eddie nodded miserably.

“I have to get over there right away.”

He accepted Sam’s offer of company, and Claire and Sam squeezed into the front seat of the pickup. While Eddie drove with grim concentration, he told Claire about the experimental trials he was conducting with Dwayne Patterson’s stock, testing the effect of administering selenium to calves and to their mothers.

“I thought selenium was poisonous!” Claire said.

“It is,” Sam said, “in large amounts. But it’s also necessary to normal growth, and supplemental injections can increase calf size and milk production. A blood count under — what was it, Eddie—?”

Eddie wasn’t listening. “I’ve done it to dozens of cattle, with no problem,” he said. “I couldn’t have screwed up! Maybe my technician...” He trailed off, and Claire reflected sourly that Eddie’s first response to a crisis always would be to find someone else to blame.

They drove south and west, through the little towns of Poplar and Tipley, where the soil was rich and the people poor, and a church seemed to be paired with every orchard: plums, First Missionary. Oranges, Western Baptist. Walnuts, First Nazarene. Almonds, First Assembly of God. Oranges again, Freewill Baptist. Feedlot, Church of God of the Prophecy. Feedlot... FEEDLOT! WHEW!

“Do people over here ever get used to the smell?” Claire said while holding her breath.

“Yeah,” said Eddie, and, “I never have,” said Sam.

Finally they came to the Kettleman Hills. Here the land was bone-dry, but fertile if irrigated. But water had to be bought from various projects at various prices, so people did what Dwayne Patterson had done: raised cattle, not crops.

Eddie turned up the long dirt road to the Lazy D Ranch, towards a brightly lit modem structure at the end of the road that resembled a hospital. When they entered, two men looked up from their hay-side vigil. With his strong nose, silver-streaked black hair, and deep-set eyes, Armen Bogosian looked like a governor instead of a not-very-bright vet serving an obscure rural county, which was what he was.

Dwayne Patterson, on the other hand, could have been nothing but a rancher: big and capable-looking, eyes alert and humorous in a face weathered to manzanita red, he seemed ageless, but was probably in his mid-fifties. Claire liked him immediately — especially when he began talking in a rich Texas accent, slow as Kern County crude.

“Hey, Eddie,” he said, coolly but without hostility. “Come see what we got here.”

They knelt beside the limp brown animal. The calf didn’t look good, even to Claire’s ignorant eye; its hide was matted with sweat, its eyes open and glazed, and there was no rise and fall of respiration. All in all, Claire would have guessed that it was—

“Dead,” said Bogosian. “Died a couple of minutes ago.” He rose. “I’ve seen one or two cases of chronic selenium poisoning out in the Great Basin—”

“Used to have a fair amount in Texas,” put in Dwayne. “ ‘Blind staggers,’ we called it. But this ain’t nothin’ like that.”

“Nope, these animals have the symptoms of acute poisoning. Never come across it before. Truth is,” he added, “I probably wouldn’t have diagnosed it so fast if Dwayne here hadn’t told me about this experimental treatment.”

“But are you sure that’s what it is?” White-faced and perspiring, Eddie looked a lot like the calf.

“Of course I’m sure,” Bogosian said huffily. “I’ll have to do a postmortem to look for the characteristic lesions, but the symptoms are all present: anorexia... polyuria... dyspnea... coma and death through respiratory and myocardial failure,” he recited haltingly, reading from a fat blue book.

“Wayne, I swear I couldn’t have hurt those calves,” Eddie said pleadingly. “We’ve performed these trials on a hundred animals, and none of them has ever taken sick...”

“Got much of this on your land, Patterson?” Sam interjected suddenly. He held up a trailing bit of greenery.

Patterson squinted at it. “Locoweed?” he said. “Sure, it’s around, my stock gets into it sometimes. Never caused any problems. It ain’t like the Texas variety.”

Locoweed? Now what was the problem with loco weed? wondered Claire. Jimsonweed contained poisonous alkaloids, but all she could remember about locoweed was old wives’, or rather old cowpokes’, tales.

“This soil is selenium-poor,” Eddie commented, further obscuring the issue as far as Claire was concerned. “That’s why Dwayne called us in.”

Sam nodded. “But locoweed on top of the supplemental selenium,” he said tentatively, then snapped his fingers. “The pools!” he exclaimed. “The Westside drainage pools. Doesn’t this land adjoin them?”

“Yeah, but I got fences—”

“Fences break.”

“I’ll bet that’s it!” Eddie said, the color returning to his face. “Armen, can you find out what these critters have been eating?”

The vet shrugged. “Sure.” Then, turning to Sam, “You want me to give you a call, too? You seem to be the botanical expert around here.”

“I’d appreciate it. I’d be real interested.”

They helped the vet load the calves’ carcasses into his van. Patterson made them all come up to his house for coffee — “Least I can do after dragging you all out here for something that may have been my own damn fault” — and as he and Eddie walked on ahead, Sam finally explained the locoweed-selenium connection to Claire.

“Astragalus — that’s the primary genus called ‘locoweed’ — is kind of mysterious,” he said. “It seems to poison stock in a couple of ways, some of which aren’t really understood. But one thing it can do is accumulate toxic elements from the soil. Like molybdenum—”

“—or selenium,” she guessed.

“Exactly. Some locoweeds are ‘indicator’ species; that means they’re indicative of a seleniferous soil,” he continued, happily sliding into pedantry, “and some are actually ‘obligate,’ meaning they’ll only grow on selenium-rich soil.”

“So what’s growing around here?” She pointed to the locoweed Sam was still carrying.

“Oh, this is just plain old Spotted Loco, I think. Some variety of Astragalus lentiginosus — they’re damn hard to identify.”

“Oh.”

“But that doesn’t mean it can’t be toxic. For all I know, even Spotted Loco can take up enough selenium to be dangerous, in certain environments.”

“Like the drainage pools.”

“Like the drainage pools.”

“So it wasn’t Eddie’s fault after all,” she said.

“Looks like it. But hey, nothing’s ever Eddie’s fault,” Sam replied blandly, as they stepped into Patterson’s living room.

Dwayne had his arm around a sweet-faced woman about half his size and, apparently, half his age. In her frilly bathrobe, glossy braid of hair hanging halfway down her back, she seemed to have stepped out of a Victorian daguerreotype.

“My wife Cheryl,” he said tenderly; and when she emerged from the kitchen in a moment carrying mugs of coffee, he took the tray from her solicitously, saying, “I’ll get that, honey.”

Claire watched, touched, although she couldn’t help but note that the attentiveness seemed to be all on Dwayne’s side. Cheryl herself was silent, not sullen but... wooden. Without affect.

Old fool besotted by young wife, thought Claire wryly, though how Cheryl could resist that accent was beyond her. She would have married Patterson just to hear him talk; Sam’s inherited Oklahoma twang was one of his most appealing features.

“Well, Eddie,” Dwayne joked, “I was kinda hoping you all at the Station would increase my stock. Hell, I can knock ’em off myself!”

There was strained laughter. “Tough times for cattlemen,” Sam said sympathetically.

“You bet.” He settled back and took a sip of coffee. “To my way of thinking,” he said reflectively, “American-bred beef’s the best meal there is.” His speech had a halting, rural rhythm, as if words were as scarce a resource as everything else. “But them Yuppies is all eating fish, or tofu, or some damn thing, fast-food places ’re buyin’ beef from Brazil... plus I got some built-in problems over here.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll give it to you in a word. Water,” Dwayne said. “My natural forage here dries up in midsummer and then I gotta start buyin’ feed or irrigate — ’n my water rates is higher’n spit on a griddle.”

“You’re in the Westside Water District,” Sam remarked, and Dwayne laughed.

“Yep. State water, from the Aqueduct. One hundred twenty an acre foot. Just my luck; right across the road they’re gettin’ federal water at twenty.” Patterson sighed heavily. “I’m like one of them old wooly mammoths I seen in the tar pits down in L.A. Cain’t turn no way at all.” Claire felt enormous sympathy for him.

In the car on the way back, Eddie, garrulous with relief, actually managed to talk about something besides himself. Dr. Moreau meets Old MacDonald, thought Claire, listening to Eddie’s descriptions of livestock bio-engineering. Cows that produced oceans of milk. Chickens that squeezed out eggs like rounds of ammunition for a few weeks, then died, completely depleted. Legless chickens. Tailless pigs.

“Tailless pigs?” echoed Claire.

“Yeah. See, cannibalism is a big problem with pigs when they’re raised in confinement, and they always start with the tail.”

While she digested, so to speak, this information, Eddie moved on to Dwayne Patterson.

“He’s only owned the Lazy D for three years,” he said. “Came from Texas. Had some kind of windfall there, that’s how he came to buy it. He’s a good manager, knows his stock, keeps up with new developments. The selenium treatment is a case in point... ordinarily,” he finished, reddening. “But I’m afraid he’s going to go under, even so.”

On Saturday, Armen Bogosian called Sam to ask if he’d like to take a look at the contents of the dead calves’ stomachs. Sam excitedly agreed, sounding as if he’d been offered a peek at the Mona Lisa instead of some slimy, partially digested weeds, but Claire decided she’d pass. He returned in an hour looking puzzled.

“Definitely not any of the varieties of Spotted Loco I’m familiar with,” he declared, slapping his Flora of California down on the table. “I have a feeling it may be Astragalus hornii; they call it ‘sheep loco,’ which suggests that it’s toxic, and the habitat fits — ‘alkaline soil, sometimes about desiccating pools or on lake shores,’ ” he quoted. “What I need to do now is go over to the drainage pools and see if I can find it in some area where Patterson’s stock might have got at it—” He stopped suddenly.

Claire regarded him with resignation. She was leaving tomorrow, and they had agreed that they would spend the day together in romantic pursuits, not tramping around some desolate marshland keying out native plantlife.

“Why don’t we drive over to the nature preserve?” she said brightly.

He looked at her suspiciously, trying to divine if this was a genuine offer or a trap. “You really wouldn’t mind?”

“No. I’ve never seen that part of the Valley—” She halted. He was grinning at her.

“Tell you what,” he said, pulling her towards him. “Why don’t we drive over in about an hour?”

“An hour? Think you can stand it? How about five minutes?”

“No, an hour sounds about right. Maybe two.” He paused. “Actually” — kissing her neck — “I’ll check it out while you’re gone.”

3.

Sam eased onto the San Diego Freeway, slammed on the brakes as a Mercedes cut in front of him, and cursed absent-mindedly. His relief at this moment almost overwhelmed his distaste for L.A. and his churning impatience with the traffic; he had been dreading this day and now it was done. Claire was on the plane, headed for Boston, and in the hands of Fate.

It was not that he couldn’t do without her for three weeks. In fact, he was sort of looking forward to an orgy of botanical walks, frozen pizzas, and dumping of clothes on the floor, not to mention pure solitude, which he missed. But — Boston. He had never been there, and he regarded it with unmitigated suspicion; from Boston Claire had simply appeared one day, and by Boston she might as easily be resorbed.

She had been back to visit once and had stayed for almost two months. He had accepted the fact that he was never going to see her again. Not that he had been unprepared; the place seemed to be filled with old boyfriends of unimaginable sophistication and sex appeal, old friends of matchless wit, work far more glamorous and prestigious than what the Citrus Cove Experimental Field Station could offer. So he had been very sad but unsurprised.

But then she had come back, and he had been happy but completely mystified.

An exit sign caught his eye and involuntarily he glanced to his right. He had told himself he wasn’t going to think about this, but Terry and Shannon were right up that road, right there in Sherman Oaks — and entirely beyond his reach. It wasn’t “his time,” not for another month yet. He got to see them twice a year as long as Debby didn’t make trouble, and otherwise missed them with a depth of feeling he hadn’t known he possessed.

North on 1–5; a giant amusement park loomed off to the left. Teenagers by the carful were lined up at the exit ramp, avid for the ecstatic release of the Tidal Wave or the Tornado or the Death Wish, or whatever it was. He could see their eager faces and imagined a hot white flare of adrenaline above each one, like gas burning off in an oilfield. Kids that age were like oil or some other explosive natural resource, pumping hormones into the culture. Even his own still-prepubescent boys were absolutely fearless.

He had been fearless once. Oh, he had wanted a lot he didn’t have — Glenda Cannon, for instance — but he had been without fear because he had believed he had nothing to lose. Then he had begun to lose things. His father, in high school. Then his mother. His best friend Frank, in the war. Debby and the kids — not dead, but lost to him, and he had grieved for the boys as if they had died.

And now there was Claire. He was coming to accept on faith that she loved him, but it made him uneasy. He was a scientist; he might act on faith, but he trusted in reason.

So now he seemed to operate against this constant background of low-level anxiety. What if something happened to the boys? What if Debby tried to keep them from him? What if Claire just didn’t come back one day? More to the point, what if his old Valiant, which he had nursed for fifteen years and which was right now overheating dangerously, didn’t make it over the Tejon Pass this time?

He grimaced in disgust. This was maturity — trading that fierce ache of adolescent desire for a cold knot of fear and self-pity. It was pathetic.

The Valiant made it, the country around him opened up and cleared out, and by the time he had coasted down the Grapevine into the San Joaquin Valley he was feeling a lot better. The sight of new-leaved cotton fields and vineyards cheered him; he was heir to a long line of people who had attempted to induce the earth to bring forth. One of the most upsetting things about cities was the use of land merely as a platform. It struck him as a perversion. Especially L.A., where the conversion was so recent. You could see it in the place names — “Orange Grove Avenue,” meaning, there used to be an orange grove here.

But even in the Valley there were, as always, the new “For Sale — Zoned Commercial” signs on productive parcels, especially as he neared Bakersfield. Didn’t they understand, he thought with something close to panic, that once you built a highway, or a high-rise, or a shopping mall, the decision was irrevocable, the land irredeemable — so compacted it could never bear again?

Suddenly his own righteous indignation amused him. Another sign of age: every change was for the worse.

He passed the turn-off for McMinnville and EastWind Farm — “Stallions at Stud, Horses for Sale, Glenda Cannon, Proprietor” — and that distracted him for a while. Soon the road signs showed the pockmarks of bullet holes, legacy of some long-ago wild Saturday night, and he knew he was almost home. It was past nine-thirty when, drained and stiff, he rolled up the drive to his house.

Hoping for some cool evening air, he opened a beer and walked out onto the porch, but it was still hot and humid. It felt like Thailand. Maybe the climate had changed for good. He would become Extension Advisor for Opium; they would start growing bamboo and teak down the hill, instead of cotton and grapes.

4.

Monday was still muggy and overcast and the weather was the main topic of conversation at the Station. Not idle talk, either — atypical weather could ruin a crop. Stone fruit were his concern, and while a little spring rain might seem a blessing to some, to him it meant increased risk of leaf curl, brown rot, crown rot. He needed to make a couple of visits to local growers to inspect their trees for problems — but first he was going to drive to the drainage pools and look for Sheep’s Loco.

He parked under the sign for the nature preserve headquarters and began to walk west along the barbed wire that marked the boundary with Lazy D land to the south.

The first mile was open and dry. He stayed as close to the fence as possible, stopping to examine the tough, drought-tolerant plants that would look exactly the same months from now when the tender green carpet of filaree and wild oats under his feet had turned stiff and yellow. So far no locoweed.

Then he passed a feathery tamarisk, and just beyond saw a low mass of lavender, irregular blossoms. Locoweed, for sure, though color and size suggested they were benign Spotted Loco, not Sheep’s Loco.

Closer inspection confirmed this: lentiginosus variety variabilis, he thought. What he wanted was a bigger, rangier-looking plant, with three- or four-foot-long stems. The flowers would be more white or yellow, but Sheep’s Loco wasn’t supposed to bloom until June. Too bad it was only spring, because the seedpods would be a dead giveaway: in both species inflated like little sausages, but in Spotted Loco a distinctive mottled purple — thus its common name — and containing papery valves that curved inward to form a septum, so that in cross-section the pod had two cells.

He chased after several likely looking specimens that proved to be oversized Spotted Loco that hadn’t yet begun to bloom. Suddenly a wall of rushes appeared a few hundred yards to the north, and beyond them gleamed a drainage pool. Here by the fence there was no standing water, but the ground was saturated by seepage. Soon he was sinking in up to his ankles with every step and sweating like a hog in the sticky air; still, this was exactly where a calf might have wandered into the preserve, attracted by the pond itself and the luxuriant foliage around it, so he slogged on, checking for broken barbed wire on his left and locoweed on his right.

He saw both simultaneously. A section of newly strung wire testified to an old break, and about twenty feet north of it a stand of locoweed started his heart beating faster.

These were definitely different from anything else he had looked at: branches almost twice as long, flowers-to-be clumped in a dense flower-spike rather than a loose raceme. Now if he could just find a dried pod from last year... ah! Here!

He took out his Swiss Army knife and delicately sliced through the brittle balloon. It was completely hollow — one-celled, with no evidence of a septum. Sheep’s Loco, he was almost positive!

In fact, all the locoweed in the muck edging the pool seemed to be Sheep’s Loco. Evidently it had found a niche for itself here; the Spotted Loco seemed to prefer the higher, drier areas. But had Patterson’s calves grazed here? Well, those round impressions in the mud looked like the hoofprints of cattle. And several branches of the locoweed appeared to have been gnawed and stripped by leathery bovine tongues. Hell, it was good enough for him.

He snipped a few leaflets and a flower-spike, out of long habit taking no more than was necessary for definite ID. Then, realizing that he should get a bioassay to test for selenium, he broke off a long branch. It had a pungent, bitter odor.

His field calls ended in the southeast part of the county, and on his way home he detoured towards Dwayne Patterson’s land. He cut west through the oilfields, holding his breath against the sulfurous fumes, and then headed north on the McMinnville road, which formed the eastern boundary of the Lazy D.

About a quarter of a mile along the road, he saw a patch of locoweed along the shoulder and pulled off. Beyond the barbed wire a few crow-black cattle watched him fixedly as he examined the stuff briefly. He was pretty expert by now, and it was clearly Spotted Loco. Which was not to say there was no Sheep’s Loco anywhere on Patterson’s land, but he thought he could make a strong argument for the calves having browsed up by the drainage pools — in other words, he could save Eddie Froelich’s ass.

He looked up at the sound of a motor, and in a moment a blue Ford 250 pickup stopped about twenty yards away and Dwayne Patterson stepped out. Sam stood, dusted his hands on his jeans, and called a greeting.

“Howdy. Just checking out your indigenous flora.”

Patterson approached with his rolling cowboy gait and stopped beside him, staring down at the locoweed. “So this is what them poor little beasts ate, huh?”

“Close. It was a different species, though. There’s a type of locoweed over at the nature preserve that’s bigger and has flowers in sort of a — a ball, instead of strung out along a branch like this, and pods that aren’t speckled...” He trailed off. Patterson’s eyes had begun to glaze over in a familiar way. “Ever see anything like that on your land?” he finished hopelessly.

Patterson replied, inevitably, that hell, they all looked alike to him. “Fixed a break in my fence along the north boundary, though,” he remarked, then added, “I guess you got to know this plant stuff for your work.”

“Well, up to a point. It’s kind of a hobby, too.”

“Hobby,” Patterson repeated thoughtfully, by mere inflection suggesting that a hobby was a sinful extravagance when there were calves to be fed and fences to be mended and work to be done eighteen hours a day, six days a week. And on the Sabbath we rested and thanked Him for our meager and joyless lives; Sam could hear his father’s voice, harsh, weary, but insistent, like a rasp on hard wood...

He was lost in reverie for a few seconds. When he looked up, Patterson was grinning, and for a wild instant Sam imagined that Dwayne not only saw the painful memory he had evoked but had in fact deliberately conjured it up, like a redneck — who was that guy — Mephistopheles, and was enjoying it.

But when Patterson began to talk, the jovial Good Ol’ Boy was back.

“Guess you prob’ly know that locoweed’s mighty peculiar stuff,” he said. “Most stock’ll stay away from it, but I’ve known some animals to develop a taste for it. Dumb critters’ll seek it out even though it’s poisoning them.”

Sam gave a distracted reply. Suddenly eager to be free of Patterson’s company, he mumbled something about the office and made his escape.

Driving towards the Station, he reflected on that moment of revulsion. Not the kind of thing he usually experienced. He liked Patterson well enough, though as a lover of native flora he did harbor a mild prejudice against grazing and thus against cattlemen in general...

Well, it was deeper than that: he felt queasy about the whole enterprise of cattle ranching. There was a certain brutal pragmatism to rearing stock, a willingness to do anything necessary to maximize profit, that made him uneasy; he believed there had to be rules, even if you were raising an animal for food. But what were they? And what did it do to a person to treat sentient beings as a crop?

He had never been able to answer these questions, and at some level distrusted people like Dwayne who appeared to have done so — or more likely had never considered them.

All of which was hypocritical as hell. He enjoyed a burger as much as the next man, as long as he didn’t think too much about it. As a matter of fact, he himself had raised a calf once, for 4-H — though he clearly had not been cut out for it. For despite his stem resolve to maintain a professional distance, and his father’s admonitions that it wasn’t a pet but an investment that was destined for the feedlot in Poplar as soon as the county fair was over — he had ended up loving it anyway.

But Christ, how could you not love a fuzzy baby animal with big brown eyes that you had fed and brushed and nursed and talked to for a year? What had his parents been thinking of? Wanted to make a man out of him, he supposed; well, now he was a man, and he would never forget that trip to Poplar, and he would never encourage his kids to take on a similar project. Not that he had much opportunity to encourage them to do anything.

He arrived at the office at six o’clock and was finishing up the day’s paperwork when the phone rang. A female voice spoke.

“I’m trying to reach Sam Cooper.”

“You got him,” he said airily — and then froze. He knew that voice, its compelling huskiness, its imperiousness...

“Hello, Sam. This is Glenda Cannon.”

“Hello, Glenda. What can I do for you?” he replied after a pause, forcing himself to utter the cordial formula when what he wanted to say was, What do you want now?

But after all, they were a little old for him to do her chemistry homework for her. The time when he had run errands, tuned up her car, served as a marginally respectable and neuter escort between real boyfriends, and otherwise allowed himself — no, begged — to be thoroughly exploited, was long past. Long past.

“Sam,” she was saying, “I need your help.”

Resignedly he propped his feet on his desk and answered, deliberately obtuse. “I don’t handle horses, Glenda. Let me transfer you to our livestock expert—”

“This isn’t professional,” she interrupted impatiently. “It’s personal.”

He waited. Eventually she continued, “It’s these letters, Sam. Anonymous letters. I’ve been getting them for a while and I sort of ignored them. But I just got another one, and it... it’s a little scary...” Her voice trailed off.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Glenda,” he said politely, suppressing the protective reflex she jerked in him — still, after twenty years. And she knew it, too. But why the hell was she telling him this? “Have you called the police?”

“No.” There was a long pause. “The thing is,” she went on, “I have a feeling that it’s Eddie.”

Ah.

“And in spite of what he thinks, I don’t especially want to get him into trouble. And since you and I used to be... so close, well, you’d be doing us both a favor if you’d just talk to him.”

So close, he thought acidly, remembering how he had once vibrated for days after accidentally brushing her left breast as he helped her into the car. “Glenda, I appreciate that, but I really think you ought to go to the police—”

“NO!” she said swiftly. “Not yet. That’s what I did when we broke up, and it just made things worse, it infuriated him!”

She really did sound scared. He felt himself start to weaken.

“I don’t have anybody else, Sam,” she was saying. “And we were so close when we were kids...”

That was twice she had used that phrase. If he had ever seen Casablanca he might have said, “I wouldn’t bring up high school if I were you, it’s bad strategy.” Or, “Cut the crap, Glenda, we had a sick adolescent relationship based on my sexual frustration and your convenience.” Or merely, “I’ve had a long day, Glenda, get to the point.”

In fact, being the well-brought-up, chivalrous, repressed American male he was, he just sat silently and thought very bad thoughts about Glenda Cannon. And eventually he realized that that Glenda was gone, gone these twenty years, gone as irrevocably as his sixteen-year-old self. And presently he heard himself say:

“What do you want me to do?”

Just an old talking doll whose string has been pulled once again, he thought disgustedly, listening.

5.

Barney Cannon had left his daughter about a hundred acres of prime pastureland west of Parkerville, south of McMinnville. Most of the western portion of it was now probably leased to other ranchers; Glenda was not interested in cattle. But set in the northeast corner, like an emerald in a haybale, was the twenty-acre parcel called EastWind Farm.

EastWind had always looked more like an artist’s conception of a ranch than a working operation. It’s perfectly white, straight fences enclosed lush, uniformly verdant fields (thanks to cheap federal water) where gamboled the Arabians, dainty but strong. Like Glenda herself.

But as Sam drove up the oleandered drive on Tuesday he noticed a few flaws in Xanadu. The horses were as sleek as ever, but a broken railing by the entrance was sloppily patched and stringy weeds wrapped themselves around fence posts. He passed the modest brick ranch house — luxury was reserved for the horses — and pulled up in front of the stables, where a window had been boarded up with plywood.

That broken window would have been replaced immediately in Barney’s day, he mused, getting out of the car. But then Barney had been dead for three years now. He wondered just how well Glenda and EastWind were doing without Daddy to fall back on.

The stables seemed to be bereft of human life, although several horses whinnied and stamped in their stalls. An intense, familiar aroma permeated the place: hay — no attar of roses but plain old alfalfa; horse manure — definitely the ordinary variety; horse urine, horse dander... he sneezed violently.

Damn.

Sam had not lied to Claire: he could ride perfectly well. He had learned young; all his little friends rode, and dreamed of rodeos and roundups. But his own cowboy aspirations had been squelched around age eleven when it became humiliatingly clear that he was acutely allergic to horses. Not to the animals themselves, perhaps, but to their by-products, and their whole way of life. Out on the trail he was fine, but as soon as he entered a barn...

He sneezed again and was fumbling for a Kleenex when a brusque “What do you want?” interrupted him. A teenage girl was regarding him suspiciously over the top of a stall door that said “Barney’s Pride”; her broad face was freckled and her reddish hair drawn back in a ponytail, and from the haze of dust settling behind her, it seemed that she had just mucked out the stall.

“Hi,” Sam said, backing away from the lethal cloud. “I’m supposed to meet Glenda here at two. I’m Sam Cooper.”

“She’s out riding,” Ponytail said in a hostile voice and turned back to her task. Sam walked back outside and settled onto a barrel; he was not a vain man, but he would just as soon have his nose stop dripping before Glenda showed up.

He had waited ten minutes and was starting to feel irritated when there was a thunder of hooves, a flash of white mane and gold hair, and Glenda rounded the barn and galloped straight towards him.

Well, he knew this game. He sat relaxed and unflinching, and at the last moment she pulled up five feet in front of him, slid off, and called commandingly, “PEGGY!” Ponytail came hurrying out of the barn and Glenda handed her the reins.

“Cool him down, I rode him pretty hard. Didn’t want to keep Sam waiting,” she said with a grin in his direction that seemed to intensify the girl’s sulkiness; she glared at him as she led the horse away.

Glenda pulled off her gloves and extended her hand.

“Howdy, Sam. How are you? You’re looking good,” she added with a frank glance that momentarily stripped away his composure. His face grew hot and his gaze shifted to his feet. He reminded himself that in the years since Glenda he had slept with a number of women quite successfully, had gained no weight and lost no — almost no — hair, and in fact probably looked better than usual since he was wearing a shirt Claire had bought him. He passed a hand over the soft material, obscurely reassured.

Neutrally he responded, “You’re looking good too,” which was expected but true. Breathtakingly true. He had thought she might have begun to erode, like EastWind — it had been impossible to tell what lay under the mask of makeup she had worn during the Rodeo Parade — but she looked great: taut, trim, tan, a little weathered, but all the more appealing for it. Her face, with its high cheekbones, slanting eyes, and delicate mouth, had been kittenish in youth. Now it was truly beautiful.

“Well,” she said after this moment of mutual appraisal, “I sure do appreciate your coming out, Sam. Let’s go into the tack room; I’ve got the letters in there. Wait a minute” — she sat on the barrel recently vacated by Sam — “let me get out of these boots.”

In an instant Peggy materialized. “I’ll do it, Glenda,” she said, kneeling at her feet in an attitude of adoration more abject than the act required. Pubescent hero-worship? wondered Sam. Or something more? Whatever the emotion, it probably explained her ill will towards him.

He followed Glenda down the length of the barn, struck by how small she suddenly was. He had forgotten that; on her white stallion she was an Amazon, and riding boots gave her height, but actually she was very petite. Back in high school, in that era of exaggerated gender differences, he had found her doll-like diminutiveness adorable, but now... he was six foot one, and Claire was tall and long-limbed, and he liked that, he realized with something like relief. With Glenda he would feel like a child molester—

“Got a cold?” she asked, looking back. He had sneezed.

He hesitated. “Yeah,” he said finally.

They entered the tack room, which was like a bunkhouse without the bunks: a potbellied stove, a cot in the comer, saddles, bridles, boots, and other horsey paraphernalia strewn about. Next to the door was a big oak roll-top desk, piled high with papers. Sam picked one up at random; it was a vet’s bill, second notice: “Is there some reason why you haven’t responded...?”

The letters were locked in the top drawer of the desk. There were five of them, printed in the completely anonymous typeface of a dot-matrix printer: so much for typewriters with “e”s out of alignment and letters snipped from the London Times. Perched on the comer of the desk, Sam held the letters gingerly and opened them one by one.

The first two were merely mildly pornographic, suggesting nothing that Sam hadn’t imagined himself once upon a time, and he was uncomfortably aware of Glenda watching him expressionlessly. The third was longer, and slightly sadistic. But the last was different: three ominous words in the middle of the page.

“Since I broke up with Eddie,” she said, “I’ve gotten letters twice.” She hesitated. “Both times, I was going out with somebody. He seemed to know, somehow. No matter how discreet I was. But this time — I don’t know what set him off.”

“Did he ever threaten you before?” By now it was tacitly accepted that they were talking about Eddie Froelich.

“In the letters, you mean? No. But when we were married he used to... to knock me around occasionally. Nothing serious.” She smiled wryly. “Nothing broken.”

Oh, of course. Of course Eddie would “knock around” women. He was a bully and a whiner, and Sam felt his face flush with anger.

But then why was she protecting him? Was it possible, after all this, that she still loved him? Had she ever loved him? He had always wanted to believe that she hadn’t, but knew very well his feelings about her couldn’t be trusted.

“What do you want me to do?” he said, once again expressing the motif of their relationship.

“Just talk to him. See why he’s so angry all of a sudden — or — or if you think it’s not him after all, then tell me. I trust your judgment. I’ve always trusted you, Sam,” she said, suddenly earnest.

His simultaneous translator was telling him, Yeah, she always trusted you — her loyal eunuch. Glenda always needs someone around to muck out the stalls and take her boots off. But part of him was saying, Give her a chance, people change.

She was talking, quietly, as if to herself. “I think I’ve just learned to value that kind of friendship in the last few years. Since Barney died.”

She stopped abruptly, and closed her eyes. “Oh God, Sam,” she exclaimed passionately, “I miss my father so much!”

There was a long silence. “I’ll talk to Eddie,” he promised, rising and holding out his hand.

On the way home he realized that he had better start thinking about another shortstop.

Dutifully he called Eddie, who sounded pathetically eager to meet for lunch; loneliness or, most likely, the nightly six-pack kicking in. He assumed the reason was softball and Sam didn’t correct him. He hung up, reflecting that whatever had attracted Glenda to Eddie, it obviously hadn’t been quick wit. On the other hand, he was pretty smart on a baseball diamond, so maybe he was smart in bed too. He dropped that idea in a hurry.

He stayed up late catching up on some reading for work. By eleven he gave up on the idea that Claire might call.

They had agreed that she would call him; she was going to be on the move, didn’t know where she would be from day to day. Which made sense, but also made him the one to sit by the phone and wait. Why did he still feel like she had him on probation? Why did he only fall in love with women who could hurt him?

But then he could hurt Claire, too. He hadn’t believed that for a long time, but now he knew it was true. Mutually assured destruction: each had the power to wound the other and refrained, for the most part, from exercising it.

In his marriage he had held all the power, had carefully chosen someone, in fact, whom he didn’t love too much. And no matter that he had never abused that power, that he had been unfailingly kind and faithful — they both knew the score, he and Debby. And so she had finally turned to someone who needed her.

He had felt so guilty he hadn’t even contested the custody settlement — and now, by God, he was paying for that.

6.

The heart of Parkerville was rotting despite every lame stunt the city council could think up to reverse the process. Increasingly, commerce was conducted at the malls that straggled along, and defined and enlarged, the city’s perimeter. More change for the worse, thought Sam grumpily as he pulled into the mini-mall comprised of Fred’s Western Wear, Parkerville Rainbow House of Carpets, the Safeway, and the McDonald’s. Eddie’s pickup was already there.

Half an hour later Eddie wiped the McDonald’s Special Sauce from his mouth with the back of his hand, stood up, and said sincerely, “I’d like to smash your nose. Teach you to keep it where it belongs!”

Sam considered this statement. Eddie probably didn’t have the edge on him that he had had in high school, but still he was a natural fighter; he had that reservoir of explosive rage that he could tap in an instant. Yes, he decided, Eddie could probably break his nose. He clenched his hands, just in case he couldn’t talk himself out of this.

The conversation had begun amicably enough, with anecdotes from high school, the war, and the softball team, but relations had disintegrated when Sam had cautiously introduced the matter of the letters. When he understood what was being said, Eddie had snarled, “Still Glenda’s little dog. I thought you’d gotten over that, Sam. But then maybe nobody gets over Glenda.”

“Speak for yourself,” Sam had retorted, stung. “She asked me to do her a favor, that’s all — and you too, as a matter of fact. She could have gone straight to the police and you’d be under investigation right now. That probably wouldn’t sit well with your boss!”

Temporarily chastened, Eddie had admitted, “No, probably not, on top of the Patterson fiasco. I’d probably be selling lawn mowers at Kavoian’s.” After a pause he had burst out, “But why? Why doesn’t she ever — I mean, if she really believes I’m sending these letters, why doesn’t she go to the police?”

“Who knows? Maybe she feels guilty about the divorce,” Sam had replied. “And maybe,” examining his tangle of greasy fries, “she still cares for you.”

Startled and then slightly dreamy expressions had flitted across Eddie’s face before it settled back into its customary resentful lines. But in that instant Sam was sure — almost sure — that Eddie had sent the letters. To see what she would do, to keep her from seeing other men, to stay connected to her somehow. He was desperate and pitiable, and also, possibly, dangerous.

“Glenda don’t care for nobody but Glenda,” Eddie had said sullenly. “Especially now that Barney’s dead. But I didn’t write those letters,” he had continued hotly. “And I’d still like to know why you volunteered to be her errand-boy.”

Sam had shrugged. “A favor, like I said.” He hesitated. “She seemed really alone.”

“Alone?” Eddie had shouted with laughter. “Listen, sucker, Glenda’s never alone! Don’t swallow that Poor-Little-Rich-Girl bullshit.”

It was at this point that his face got very red and he declared his desires regarding Sam’s nose. Now he drained his thick shake noisily, which seemed to cool him off, and added, “Except that I owe you something for saving my butt at Patterson’s.”

Well, no blood on the Formica today, thought Sam with mixed relief and disappointment; he had sort of wanted to take a crack at that arrogant mug...

“But you run back to Miss Glenda,” Eddie was saying, “and you tell her that if she’s got accusations to make, she can call me herself!”

Sam drove slowly back to the Station. If Eddie was telling the truth about the letters, he was probably telling the truth about Glenda, too, and he, Sam, was once again her willing patsy in some self-serving scheme. On the other hand, if Eddie was lying about the letters, he was probably wrong about Glenda. Naturally Sam favored this interpretation; he wanted to trust Glenda.

He had never exactly liked Eddie. He had just known him all his life — and competed with and envied him. He, Sam, had been a solid hitter and a better-than-good outfielder on their high-school team; Eddie had been a star. He had come back from the war happy merely to have survived; Eddie had come back a hero for having committed some stupid and totally unnecessary act, probably in the throes of a tantrum. Sam had married an attractive, nice, and reasonably intelligent woman; Eddie had married Glenda.

But that was in the past. Now Eddie was completely ordinary. Sub-ordinary, in fact; leaving aside the matter of the letters, he was still a jerk, full of self-pity, rude to his wife, hard on his kids—

Yeah, but at least he had his kids.

A sharp pain in his neck made him realize that he had been hunched forward over the steering wheel for some time, straining to see through a glaze of water; it was raining again.

The rain let up by midafternoon but, nevertheless, Sam decided to cancel the season’s first softball practice, which had been scheduled for that evening. He couldn’t afford to have his rather elderly players — mean age around thirty-five — slipping on a wet field and spraining ankles.

Last season there had been a moment when he had finally realized that he wasn’t going to become a better player. Up until then he had carried in the back of his mind the childish notion that he was still approaching some zenith of perfection, in everything, not just ball; that he was still a kid who was going to become bigger and faster and stronger and smarter and more attractive to women. Ridiculous! Almost forty years old!

Well, with no softball practice he could allow himself dinner. But first he stopped at Kavoian’s Feed and Supply in Parkerville; he needed to talk to their Pest Management Advisor.

He threaded his way through the aisles of western wear and found a young woman arranging bolo ties on a rack.

“Martinez around?”

“I’ll check in the back.”

While he waited he idly flipped through the sealed packets of western shirts. A lot of his friends wore this cowboy crap. He could never see the point. Boots, yes; jeans, yes; they were functional — if you really were riding a horse, not a desk chair — but these shirts. What was so important about having snaps instead of buttons?

Someone had come up beside him and was also leafing through the piles of shirts. He glanced over his right shoulder. Short, sturdily-built, red ponytail — it was Peggy.

Oblivious to him, she pulled out two shirts, looked at them uncertainly, and finally settled on a fancy number in blue plaid, shot with silver threads and decorated with curlicued stitching.

“That’ll look nice with your hair,” Sam remarked. Startled, she looked up and took a moment to place him. Then she flushed a dark red, so that her freckles disappeared.

“It’s for Glenda,” she muttered, and scuttled to the counter.

This happened to be where Sam was headed too, and he strolled along behind her. He was curious about Peggy.

“Well, it’ll look nice with Glenda’s hair, too,” he pursued. “How long have you worked for her?”

“I... I don’t exactly work for her...” she said, clutching the shirt to her bosom like a shield, “that is, she just lets me help out sometimes. After school, and on weekends.”

“For free?” he asked, trying to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity,” she said defensively. “I’m sort of an apprentice; I get to learn everything about the business. Glenda knows so much...”

Oh, yeah, she knows things you and I will never learn, he thought. Like how to exploit a teenage crush; she wrote the book on that.

John Martinez appeared behind the counter, and with mutual relief Sam and Peggy turned to their separate business.

At Konnie’s Koffee Kup, Monday was spaghetti with meatballs, Tuesday was barbecued beef, Wednesday breaded veal cutlet, Thursday ham and biscuits, Friday fried chicken, and Saturday prime rib. On Sunday, the bachelors, widowers, and otherwise single men for whom Konnie’s was home had to fend for themselves.

Even breaded veal cutlet was better than scrambled eggs for the third night in a row, so Sam wandered into Konnie’s around seven o’clock. To his surprise, he caught sight of Tom Martelli’s baby blues above a half-eaten Konnie Burger.

“Marie throw you out?” He plopped down on the stool next to him.

“Naw, she took the kids up to Fresno to visit her folks. She left some stuff in the freezer for me, but the house is kind of quiet,” Tom said sheepishly.

“Mmmm.” His cutlet arrived, a pale gray object in a sea of shoe-polish-brown gravy, and he eyed it unhappily. Why in God’s name had he ordered veal? Especially in his present mood; images from undergraduate Animal Husbandry flitted through his mind — calves immobilized in cages for all of their miserable short lives, deliberately kept anemic to produce that milk-white meat the consumer, i.e., he, desired... well, this probably wasn’t veal anyway; it was probably cow lips, or ears, or something, and in any case it was ninety percent breading...

He pushed the plate away from him. “Cathy,” he called apologetically, “I guess I’m not as hungry as I thought. Could you bring me a chef’s salad?”

“Stick with the burgers,” Tom said wisely. “Stay away from the specials.”

“Yeah. Listen, Tom, what would you do about anonymous letters?”

“Getting ’em? Or investigating ’em?”

“Investigating.”

“Well, same thing I do about any other crime. A little talk, a little walk, a little forensics...” He looked at Sam curiously. “Somebody sending you pornographic postcards?”

“No, no, it’s a friend... somebody at work.”

“Female?”

“Yeah.”

“Obscene letters? Or threatening?”

“Both.”

“Hmm. Probably an old boyfriend or ex-husband. I take it she hasn’t talked to the police.”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, well, she probably knows who’s sending them then. She should be careful. Old boyfriends and ex-husbands are a murderous bunch.”

That certainly seemed to describe Eddie Froelich.

The phone was ringing when he pulled into his driveway. He took the stairs three at a time, burst through the door, and grabbed it — and was rewarded with the mindless buzz of a dial tone.

Damn. It was undoubtedly Claire — maybe she would try later.

She didn’t.

Around four the next afternoon he stuck his head into Ray Copeland’s office to say hello. Ray, the station manager, was staring at his desk with puckered brow and chewed lip. He was an extraordinarily kind man, much-loved, who drove his colleagues crazy.

His face cleared momentarily when he saw Sam. “How’s bachelor life?”

“Okay,” Sam said. “I could get to like it.”

“Nora and I wondered if you’d like to come by for some home cooking. Any night.”

“Thanks, Ray, I’d like that,” he replied with special sincerity, remembering last night’s meal. “Maybe next week?” His eyes fell on the Parkerville Sentinel lying on Ray’s desk. “Is this today’s?”

“Yeah. Take it if you haven’t read it.”

He took one look at the front page and bolted for his office.

“Drainage Pools Claim Two More Victims,” the headline said.

“Two purebred Arabian horses died last night, apparently after ingesting selenium-contaminated forage near the Westside Nature Preserve. The horses were owned by Ms. Glenda Cannon of EastWind Arabian Horse Ranch, fifteen miles southwest of Parkerville. A similar incident occurred last week when two calves owned by Dwayne Patterson of McMinnville evidently grazed near the drainage pools and later died. The nature preserve wetlands are known to contain selenium levels toxic to waterfowl, but this is the first time injury to stock has been reported. The county has requested the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the preserve, to investigate...”

He called Glenda immediately.

“Yes, it’s really sad, Sam.” Her voice was hoarse. “Two of my geldings. They were insured, of course, but still, they were my babies... Thank God it wasn’t Barney’s Pride or one of the mares. I couldn’t have stood that. Or afforded it.” She laughed grimly.

“Glenda, are you sure it was an accident?”

There was a pause. “What do you mean?”

“I mean are you sure that... somebody didn’t just pump ’em full of selenium?”

“Oh no, Sam! There was a break in the fence on the north boundary, and Dr. Bogosian found traces of locoweed in their stomachs.”

“Yeah, but those letters—”

“This had nothing to do with the letters, Sam,” she said firmly. “It was an accident. The same thing happened to a rancher over here a few days ago... Peters, Peterson...”

“Patterson.”

“Right, Dwayne Patterson. He called me this morning. There’s some talk about bringing suit against the BLM.”

Well, that might bring Dwayne some needed cash, thought Sam, and he said abruptly, “Patterson’s ranch is due west of yours, isn’t it? I mean, his land adjoins EastWind.” Funny he hadn’t realized that before.

“Not quite. We’re separated by the McMinnville road.”

He hung up and called Armen Bogosian to arrange to see these latest deadly specimens of locoweed.

“Kinda thought you might be interested,” Bogosian said a half-hour later, indicating some shredded vegetation on a paper towel, “so I saved it. Looks just like what I took out of Patterson’s calves, though.”

Sam grunted noncommittally and tried to hide his dismay at the mash he beheld. The astragalus Bogosian had found in Patterson’s calves had been relatively intact, but horses didn’t store forage in their rumens for later enjoyment like cattle. This stuff was thoroughly masticated. How the hell was he going to identify it? Unless... He pulled out a hand lens and his knife and gently prodded a promising-looking fragment.

“Strange,” he muttered, “all this stock going for locoweed when there’s still good grass around.”

“Yes, it is a little strange,” Bogosian replied placidly.

“I mean, especially Glenda Cannon’s animals.” He crouched over the paper towel. Was that a septum or just a piece of the hull? “Those horses are pampered like lap dogs. I’m sure they’ve never gone hungry longer than forty-five seconds in their lives!”

“Horses are funny animals,” the vet said, chuckling inanely, as Sam straightened and glanced with irritation at his handsome, inexpressive face. Was the man stupid? Or just completely lacking normal human curiosity?

“How did you diagnose selenium poisoning?”

“Well, the symptoms were the same as Patterson’s calves’. And I found the characteristic lesions, and I knew Miss Cannon’s farm adjoins the nature preserve, like the Lazy D... Just put two and two together, I guess,” he finished modestly.

Two and two. Well, he had an extra variable to add to the equation. He knew that this locoweed had pods that were two-celled, and therefore was Spotted Loco and therefore had probably not come from the drainage pools. And he would bet there was no selenium in it, either.

“Can I have these specimens, Armen? I’ll take good care of them.”

7.

Someone had poisoned Glenda’s horses. He considered the possibility that the person responsible was not Eddie Froelich. The obvious suspect in any crime against Glenda was a spumed lover — or someone who had imagined himself a lover, or wished to be a lover — and that put Eddie right at the head of the list. But it was a long list, and included, technically, his own name; he wondered how many men nursed simmering resentment towards Glenda Cannon, and then remembered Peggy’s sullen, worshipful face and corrected himself: “people,” not “men.” Glenda’s appeal seemed to be universal, though he couldn’t speak for her tastes.

Of course, unrequited lust was not the only motive for revenge, he thought, turning west and flipping down a visor against the late afternoon sun. Anyway, this might have nothing to do with revenge, or passion, or anger. Maybe his own emotions were distorting his judgment in this matter; maybe this was about money. There might be simple, cold, economic reasons for killing Glenda’s horses.

Only he couldn’t think of any at the moment.

No, Eddie was still his number-one draft pick.

He turned east into East Wind’s drive. When he reached the stable it seemed deserted, but after a moment Peggy, red-eyed and dismal, emerged from an empty stall. Cleaning out the effects, he supposed.

“Hi, Glenda around?”

“She’s somewhere,” Peggy replied dully.

“This is a terrible thing.”

“It’s awful!” Peggy burst out, too distraught to remember she disliked him. “Glenda’s so upset...”

That would be her first concern.

“Nice of you to drop by,” said Glenda from behind him. “You can go now,” she said offhandedly to Peggy, who obediently stacked her pitchfork against the wall. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she called as she left. Glenda didn’t bother to respond.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, more curtly than he had intended; Peggy’s doglike devotion cut a little too close to the bone. He told her about the locoweed.

“And I’m sure,” he finished, “that a bioassay of those plants would show no selenium. Glenda, your horses were poisoned. And I think we both know by whom.” This statement would have had greater dramatic effect if it had not been punctuated by an explosive sneeze.

“I don’t believe it,” she said flatly.

“How do you know that fence was broken?” he asked, groping for Kleenex.

“Joe Gutierrez saw it. He’s worked for me for four years.”

“Well, it’s a coincidence, then. Or a deliberate attempt to mislead. Glenda, Eddie has access to selenium, and he knows how to use it... I think you should call the police.”

“NO!” she said vehemently, then continued in a more normal voice, “Look, I appreciate your concern, I really do, but Eddie loves those horses as much as I do. You’ll just have to believe me, Sam. He would never do something like this. It was a — a tragic accident, that’s all.”

“All right, but I’m getting that locoweed assayed.” When? Normally he could have asked Claire. “Monday, I’ll get somebody on it Monday.”

Glenda looked preoccupied. “Suit yourself,” she said distractedly, and bent down to tug on a boot. When she rose her face was smooth and relaxed again. “Listen, I have a favor to ask. Another favor.”

“Shoot.”

“Come on into the tack room; it’s a little more comfortable.”

The tack room was hardly comfortable; it was dark and frigid, but at least the air was relatively dander-free and Sam could feel his nose start to clear. Glenda knelt by the wood-burning stove and began a fire, but the wood was green and smoked sourly. Patiently she fed it bits of kindling, coaxing it until a small bright flame rose up.

“Didn’t expect to need this again till October,” she remarked, echoing his thoughts about his car heater. When the wood started to crackle in earnest, she sat down on the cot and motioned for him to join her. He sat gingerly, keeping his distance.

“What’s the favor?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she tucked her feet under her and leaned back against the rough paneling. She was wearing the blue shirt that he had seen Peggy choose yesterday.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, Sam.”

Her husky voice was pitched a little higher than usual, as if she were nervous.

“I’ve been recalling old times...” She trailed off, and then started to giggle. “Remember when I called you at three in the morning from East Parkerville to come and get me?”

Sam clasped his hands between his knees and stared down at his shoes. Sure, he remembered. She had been desperate, drunk, and incoherent; her date, in an alcohol-enhanced fit of sexual frustration (Sam’s interpretation), had abandoned her in the middle of nowhere. Sam had snuck out of the house and taken the family car, found her shivering on a comer of the six-block stretch that was Parkerville’s “tough” neighborhood, filled her full of black coffee, helped her crawl through her bedroom window — and left. What a chump.

“What a savior,” Glenda was saying. “Daddy would’ve beat me black and blue, I swear he would.”

Sam glanced at her, bemused by the tone of fond nostalgia of this last statement, and she finally caught his eye.

“You were good to me, Sam. Real good. In fact I — well, I’ve been wondering if I didn’t make a mistake, letting you get away from me all those years ago.” Ignoring his expression of polite disbelief, she added, “Hey, scoot over here next to me, it’s cold in here.”

“Glenda,” he said mildly, speaking for the first time, “what the hell are you up to?” But he moved next to her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, historically speaking, every time you’re re-e-al nice to me you want something.”

She stiffened and pulled away. “That’s a hurtful thing to say.”

He knew that petulance so well. The old Glenda would now have demanded a half-hour of apologies to be civil again. But the new Sam resisted the tug of habit, and maybe Glenda had changed too. Because after a moment she settled back.

“Look, why don’t you put your arm around me — there, that’s better. You can’t believe that all I want is... your company?”

“All of a sudden.”

“All of a sudden.”

“No, can’t say as I believe it.” But he had positioned his arm around her shoulders.

Glenda began speaking haltingly and softly. “I’m sorry if I ever mistreated you, Sam. It seems like all my life people have been trying to get something out of me, and I guess I thought that’s how I was supposed to behave. But you — you’ve always been so gentle and so — so generous.”

“Like a cocker spaniel,” he heard himself say. Her voice was hypnotic.

“Like a friend,” she replied. “Aw, Sam, kids are such fools. I always went for the show — the tight jeans and the strut.” She laughed and brushed the hair away from her face. “I learned the hard way that they don’t mean anything.”

The room was warming and he was relaxing, letting the flow of her words wash over him, not trying to follow their sense. Images of high school — of Glenda — flooded his mind. Glenda sitting in front of him in History, her shiny hair flipped up like a wave of gold. Glenda walking down the hall towards him, wearing — he could see it vividly — a tight blue skirt, a soft blue sweater, and a string of pearls. Glenda in a white dress at the senior prom; by then he was dating Debby, but he was watching Glenda just the same. Glenda—

With a start he came back to the present. Glenda herself, in the flesh, seemed to be talking to him. “There’s something I notice about a man,” she was saying. “I can’t explain it, but something tells me when he knows how to please a woman. And when I saw you at the rodeo the other day...” She tilted her head back and looked at him directly. “I always knew you were a sweetheart, Sam. But I just noticed you’re a real sexy man.”

He looked down at her lazily; his body was seated on the cot but his brain, apparently, was dangling in a comer with the bridles and bits and other hardware.

She reached up and undid his top button.

Oh. Well, now he got it. Now he had it figured out. He was being seduced, he thought calmly, while his pulse rocketed from 60 to 220 minus his age. Seduced by Glenda Cannon twenty years too late. Sure, his sixteen-year-old self would have submitted to crucifixion for this, but now, now it meant nothing.

Nothing? The fire flickering and hissing, Glenda’s shirt stretched across her breasts, the blood pounding in his head? That meant nothing?

Yes, well, what about Claire?

What about her? If she weren’t off gallivanting in Boston doing God-knows-what with God-knows-who, he wouldn’t be here, and horny.

Yeah, but what if Glenda was just jerking him around one more time?

What if she wasn’t? And dammit, she owed him!

While he dithered, Glenda reached to unbuckle his belt.

Startled into roughness, he grabbed her wrist. “Don’t mess with me, Glenda, I’m not sixteen anymore.”

Her eyes widened. “Hell, no, you’re definitely full-growed.”

His brain was now completely out of the picture. He surged towards her. The snaps on her shirt popped open like tiny firecrackers — that was the point of the snaps! — her skin was warm and smooth and smelled of Ivory soap and sweet alfalfa and — and—

God DAMN!

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and dove for her again — and sneezed again, three times in rapid succession, a multiple nasal orgasm.

He sat upright. Glenda was understandably mystified.

“It’s this allergy,” he said dismally. “It’s — well, actually, I’m allergic to horses.”

She pursed her mouth, suppressing laughter. Then she managed to look concerned.

“Is it the room? We could move to the house.”

“No,” he muttered. “No, the truth is, I think... I think it’s your clothes. And maybe... your hair, too,” he added awkwardly. His shame was complete.

Glenda blinked and gave him a hard stare. Her hair? Her glorious golden hair? Then she graciously rose to the occasion.

“You stay right there — I’ll run over to the house and take a shower, I won’t be five minutes. Now don’t you move, darlin’!” And she whisked herself away.

There was something jarringly professional about that “darlin’ ” but it was lost in a nightmare of lust and embarrassment. He groaned and fell face forward on the cot, noting with passing interest that he hadn’t outgrown the capacity to be abysmally, absolutely humiliated. Forever young, that was him.

After a couple of minutes of no Glenda, his brain began cranking up like an old rusty generator. He began to think. And the first thing he thought about was Claire.

Could he do this without completely screwing things up with her? They had never promised fidelity, but it was a tacit rule of their relationship — at least he assumed it was.

Well, put it another way. Could he do this and not let Claire know?

Maybe. Possibly. But it was a moot question, because this was the culmination of twenty years of daydreaming and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let it get away!

Was he?

If he was so all-fired eager to have sex with Glenda, why had it taken him so long tonight to figure out what she wanted? He wasn’t stupid. Was it his natural modesty? His long history of thwarted desire?

Or was it that he knew, fundamentally, that Glenda was lying?

He tried to be logical. It wasn’t impossible that Glenda had succumbed to his manly charms — some remarkably attractive women had fallen for him over the years; he didn’t understand it, but there it was, it was data, it couldn’t be ignored. On the other hand—

On the other hand came another memory of Glenda, most unwelcome, repressed for twenty years.

It would have been eleventh grade or so, and he had taken her home. And Barney Cannon was breeding a mare; that is, someone had brought a mare to be serviced by the Cannons’ purebred stallion.

Only they didn’t just let the stallion have at her; oh no, old Al Sharif or whatever its name was might have been injured, and anyway, at four hundred dollars a pop this activity was too expensive to leave to nature. No, they had tethered the mare, led over some less illustrious drone of a stallion, let him mount her — roped, a man on either side of him — and just before the climactic moment had hauled him off. Then, when the mare was hot and ready, Al Sharif had deigned to perform.

It had been an excruciating experience for Sam. Not because of the robustly sexual nature of the proceedings — he was a farm boy, after all — but because he had identified so strongly with that pitiful, eternally frustrated stallion-without-a-name, and because he had been afraid to look over towards Glenda and see her watching him and smiling, knowing exactly what was going through his head.

That was how Glenda had thought of him. Could she have changed so much? He didn’t believe it. She didn’t want him. When two people really wanted each other it was undeniable, inexorable, like a fire laid with dry wood; each person’s heat reflected and intensified until both ignited. Well, he knew how that felt, and this wasn’t it; like the woodstove, he had been prodded expertly into flame. He was burning, but he was burning alone.

He should have guessed, he thought bitterly, his passion turning to anger — if his gonads hadn’t taken over, he would have guessed — that once again he was some bit player in one of her Byzantine intrigues, a line item on her private agenda. They would have sex, he would feel beholden, he would do what she wanted; that was the syllogism.

Glenda was standing in the doorway wrapped in a satin robe.

“Better?” she asked lightly. Her damp hair curled around her neck and the silky material flowed over her nipples and he watched, mesmerized, as her hands moved slowly to her sash.

Oh, Jesus. If she opened that robe he was done for.

“Glenda!” he croaked. She looked at his face and seemed to droop a little.

“Changed your mind?” she asked with forced perkiness.

“More like recovered it. At least enough to realize that whatever you want from me, it isn’t sex.”

“You think too much, that always was your problem,” she said. “What does it matter? I’m here, I’m willing—”

“It matters to me,” he retorted. “I don’t need your grudging sex, Glenda. I know what it feels like when somebody really wants me—”

“God’s gift to women,” she smirked, angry.

“No,” he said evenly, “just an ordinary guy — kind of a nerd, in fact. No tight pants, no strut. But amazingly enough, a few women have actually loved me!”

There was a moment’s silence. “I’m sorry, Sam,” she said, looking abashed — and God help him, he wondered what she was up to now. “I was a little insulted, I guess. Of course women have fallen in love with you. I said you were a sweetheart and a sexy man, and I meant it. Your girlfriend’s a lucky woman.” She paused and gave an irresistible grin. “ ’Course, you didn’t seem to be thinking about her a few minutes ago.”

He couldn’t help laughing. “Nope, can’t say I was. You’re a persuasive woman, Glenda — no,” he said bravely when her hands moved to the belt of her robe again. “Save it for someone you really want.”

She looked at him candidly — that is, with the appearance of candor. “You’re too nice a guy for me, Sam. Not my type at all, I’m afraid; you’re right. I’m a little sorry, though.”

“Me too.”

Glenda did want a favor. She was going to be out of town tomorrow night, and while Peggy would be “on duty,” sleeping here in the tack room, she wondered if Sam could stop in and check on things, just in case. Say around ten P.M.? He assented readily, happy for the opportunity to expiate the guilt he inevitably felt after having denied Glenda something.

The fire was smoking damply again and Glenda poked at it. “Might as well let it go out,” she said, her back to him. After a moment she added in a muffled voice, “Funny, this ol’ oak blew down two years ago. You wouldn’t think it would still be so tough.”

Somehow he knew she was thinking about that old bully, braggart, and swindler Barney Cannon.

“Must have been a hell of a tree,” he agreed.

8.

In a black mood, he drove away from EastWind. He supposed he was entitled to feel emancipated or triumphant at actually having turned Glenda down. But in fact he was as depressed and disgusted as if he had just left a Bangkok whorehouse — only now he was horny, too.

The whorehouses of Bangkok. He hadn’t thought about them in a long time: the dark rooms that smelled of incense and Thai stick; the skinny girls with their curtains of silky black hair. He had only visited them a few times. Guilt, that familiar companion, had overcome even his young-male lust. Not religious guilt — he had left the Baptist church behind, along with his virginity, some years earlier — but every other flavor: racial, national, class. Especially class. It was a new experience; he had been a poor boy all his life, but in Thailand he was a king, and the girls were so damned cheap! A few bhat, nothing to him, food and shelter and life to those fourteen-year-olds—

His train of thought was interrupted by the sight of a pickup pulled off by the break in the rail fence he had noticed Tuesday. A dark-haired man was neatly tacking a new board across it.

Sam stopped and walked over to him. “Mr. Gutierrez?” he guessed.

“Yeah?”

“I’m Sam Cooper, a friend of Glenda Cannon’s. I understand you found a break in the fence between her land and the drainage pools.”

“Yeah. A new break,” he said, stressing the word. “I was just up there two days ago — no matter what she say,” he finished resentfully.

“These things happen,” Sam said sympathetically. “What was it — a tree limb?”

“Yeah. Oak. Pinned the barbed wire right to the ground.”

“An oak?” Sam repeated sharply. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Big ol’ branch.” He looked at Sam challengingly.

“Okay... well, thanks. Thanks a lot.” He had walked along the nature preserve boundary for three miles and seen salt cedars, paloverdes, some shrub-sized willows by the ponds — but no oaks. It wasn’t the right kind of habitat. So where had that branch come from?

He arrived home and paced restlessly about the house, revved in mind and body. He pulled a dusty bottle of Scotch from the back of a cupboard and drank a little too much. He imagined in detail what he and Claire could do if she were there. Finally, in the grip of acute sexual longing, he swallowed his pride and tried her at her mother’s in western Massachusetts. But she had left for the Cape.

Tires squealed as he took the curves on 170 too fast for the road, the Valiant, and his level of sobriety. If he had had his shotgun he would have taken out a few road signs, too; hell, if he had to relive teenage traumas he might as well revert to teenage strategies for coping with them.

The world was black except for the stars and the sweep of his headlights, where oak and manzanita gleamed briefly, white and silver, before receding into darkness. He climbed steadily. At about three thousand feet he pulled off into a turnout, cut the engine, and sat breathing hard as if he had run all the way. After a moment he got out of the car and crouched by the edge of the canyon, peering down into the void, listening to the roar of the invisible river below.

It was cold. Above Slate Mountain to the east the stars had the hard glitter of winter. He pulled a windbreaker and the bottle of scotch from the car and returned to the ledge, and presently the stars, and the night air — thin but high octane — and the sound of the river began to calm him, as they had for thirty-odd years. For the first time in hours he was able to think about what had happened that afternoon.

He had been remembering something as he was driving away from Glenda’s. Oh yes, Bangkok, the whorehouses of Bangkok...

Well, Glenda might possibly be a whore. But she sure as hell wasn’t a cheap whore. What currency would she have demanded from him?

His silence, perhaps?

The more he considered, the more certain he was. Looking back, he could see that it was his suspicions that had prompted the historic invitation to step into her tack room. Glenda didn’t want to pursue the poisoning of her animals; she didn’t want him to assay the locoweed. She wanted the whole subject dropped.

Why? Why was she so adamant that the selenium poisoning was accidental? Was it really to protect Eddie? Sleeping with one man was a strange way to manifest love for another, though there were precedents.

But there was something else nagging at the back of his mind. Earlier that afternoon — it seemed like days ago — he had been unable to imagine a financial motive for poisoning the horses. Well, what about — insurance? What if Glenda was only covered for accidental death or injury to her animals? His insistence that they had been deliberately killed would prevent her from collecting.

Was he suggesting, then, that she had killed her own horses?

No. Impossible.

But she certainly might have grasped the opportunity to collect insurance after someone else had killed them; sentiment might not prevent that, and it would explain why she was bent on damping, by any means at her command, Sam’s scientific zeal.

It made sense. Still — who had killed the horses, and why? And did Glenda know? Lord help the killer if she did, because money or no, she wouldn’t let their murder pass. Somehow she would take revenge.

At nine-thirty on Saturday night Sam started for Glenda’s, then paused on the front porch. He turned back into the living room. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, pulled out his .45 revolver, and loaded it. He stuck it in the pocket of his jacket, where it swung awkwardly with every step, like a bowling ball in a pillowcase. Then he took Claire’s keys from the mantel, walked out to the Toyota, and drove to EastWind.

There was light coming from the tack room window when he pulled up to EastWind, but inside the stables it was dark and the smell was overpowering; he could feel his mucous membranes swell and itch as he walked down the row of stalls.

“Peggy?” he called, rapping softly at the tack room door. No answer. He pushed open the door a few inches.

A tiny television in the corner flickered and crackled to itself. Peggy was asleep on the cot, right arm doubled under her, left arm dangling towards the floor; it was a posture of such profound exhaustion that Sam felt uneasy. Could someone sleep with her head twisted like that? Should he wake her? He would scare the hell out of her — not to mention the fact that she might deck him. This was a tough little girl.

Nevertheless, he moved to the cot. “Peggy!” he said again, bending and nudging her lightly. Then he lifted her left arm and let it fall limply. She was completely out.

No smell of alcohol; a sleeping pill, maybe? But she was supposed to be on guard, more or less, and somehow he knew she would take her promise to Glenda very seriously. Abstractedly he leaned across her to switch off the TV.

It was then he saw the red, swollen mark on her jaw.

Cursing under his breath, he strode to the door and flipped off the light. Then he stood nervously listening to the sounds around him: the horses nickering and stamping restlessly, a dog barking somewhere, his own heart pounding. He stifled a sneeze, and in the midst of that intercranial explosion thought he heard a footstep. It wasn’t repeated. After five minutes, he fished his revolver from his pocket and slowly opened the door.

Some vestigial sense detected movement his conscious mind didn’t — otherwise there would have been one highly coveted office vacant at the Citrus Cove Agricultural Research Station. He lurched violently backwards and to his left and the blow landed on his right forearm instead of his head. But it was bad enough: the gun flew from his hand, he cried out in pain and fell to his knees.

His hindbrain was in complete control now. He rolled to his left and staggered to his feet as if coming up with a long drive to center field, and heard the vicious thwack of a shovel or rake hitting the floor where he had just been. With the horses neighing in alarm behind him, he lunged towards the open door at the end of the barn, agonizingly aware that he was silhouetted against the diffuse light of the night sky, expecting every second the crack of a shot and the searing pain between his shoulder blades. Somehow he reached the doorway, tore around the comer, and collapsed against the rough wood siding, gasping for breath.

Picking up a rock to defend himself, however feebly — his right arm was still completely useless — he waited. But no attack came. Presently he realized with a little shock that he now held the strategic advantage: for all the man in the barn knew, he was still armed and fully functional and lying in wait for an incautious move.

He smiled sardonically. Yeah, he was one dangerous dude all right, and now he was going to scuttle to his car and get the hell out of here. No horse, not even Glenda Cannon’s horse — not even Glenda Cannon’s gratitude — was worth this throbbing in his arm. This guy could split or go on with his work, depending on his zeal; it was all the same to Sam. He would just drive away and bring back Tom, and somebody to have a look at Peggy—

Peggy. Damnation.

Maybe she was just knocked out; maybe she was drugged; in any case, she was completely helpless. Could he leave her here?

He began to jog down the drive towards the Toyota and nearly fainted from the impact. Holding his arm against his side, he slowed to an ungainly lope, reached the car, opened the door, slammed it vehemently, gunned the motor, and took off, spinning out in the loose gravel. He wanted this fellow to know exactly what he was doing.

And “this fellow,” he felt sure, was Eddie Froelich.

Once out on the road, he tried rotating his wrist and drew in his breath sharply, as unnerved by the sound, a faint creaking, like trees rubbing together in the wind, as by the pain. Something was definitely broken, and under the circumstances it was tempting to just keep on going to the county sheriff’s office. After a half-mile he pulled off beside the Parkerville Water District sign.

He stared at its luminous letters as if one of the Commandments had just appeared, written in rivets on a bullet-riddled road sign. He looked at it for a long time, forgetting his pain.

Then he eased himself out of the car and rummaged through the trunk, coming up with the top to Claire’s bathing suit, which made a serviceable sling, a flashlight, and a jack handle. He started back towards Glenda’s.

The horses were quiet when he crept up to the bam door, as though the intruding biped had left. But when Sam cautiously poked his head around the comer there he was, smack in the center of the aisle, a black shape coalesced around a beam of light. After a moment Sam could see that the light was a flashlight he held in his teeth and directed towards his hands, which were assembling some sort of apparatus.

Sam retreated hastily and crouched behind the door again, thinking about his next move. Not planning it — he knew what he had to do — but thinking about it, summoning his nerve. From somewhere close came a sharp, fresh odor, and his outstretched hand brushed a burlap sack, half-filled. He brought up a fistful of sweet-smelling grass. Alfalfa. That’s why the horses were quiet; they had been bribed. Something else dangled between his fingers: a long, tough vine with — he squinted in the dim light — compound leaves and, no doubt, irregular flowers and bladder-shaped, two-celled pods. Spotted Loco.

He thought he knew what the man in the bam was fumbling with.

Picking up a piece of gravel from the driveway, he hefted it experimentally. Then he tossed it at the second stall, praying that long hours of practicing left-handed hook shots into the wastebasket at work were finally going to pay off. The pebble landed with a thunk, right on target, and immediately the stallion, what was his name — Barney’s Pride — neighed with alarm and began plunging and kicking.

The noise covered his approach until the last moment. Then his prey whirled to his left: a bad decision, as it turned out, since Sam’s swing with the tire iron caught him directly in the solar plexus. He grunted and doubled up, momentarily helpless; all according to plan, except that Sam himself nearly blacked out from the pain of the blow. Woozily he shoved his knee into the fellow’s back, forcing him to the floor, and felt for a weapon. There, stowed neatly in the back of his belt — more businesslike than a jacket pocket, he noted ruefully — was his own .45. Hurriedly, because his victim’s movements were becoming stronger, he patted under arms and along legs. Nothing. If he were real lucky, this guy wasn’t carrying anything else; if not, well, there was going to be trouble later.

He sprang up just as an arm reached purposefully around towards him; then he backed away and flipped the light switch with his elbow. “Get up, Dwayne,” he said.

Dwayne Patterson straightened slowly and turned to face him.

His eyes flicked from Sam’s face to his right arm, registered what they saw, then moved automatically to the shiny object on the ground beside him.

“Forget the hypodermic,” Sam growled, and saw with satisfaction that Patterson looked startled. “Go on into the tack room.” He motioned with the gun, hoping he looked more commanding than he felt.

The stallion had quieted, and in the still, heavy air Peggy’s breathing was ragged. Sam gestured towards the telephone on the desk and spoke carefully. “I want you to dial a number, push the receiver towards me, and then go sit against the wall.”

He watched while Dwayne followed these instructions, expressionless; then he laid down the gun for an instant to cradle the receiver against his shoulder. One ring. He had figured he could get one phone call out of Patterson, and had chosen carefully. But he might have chosen wrong. Two rings. He could feel the sweat on his forehead; if nobody answered he would execute Plan B, which was to make Patterson drive both of them into town. But he doubted he could maintain control in that situation. Three rings... four...

“Hi,” said Tom Martelli’s voice. “Tom!” Sam replied with relief, but Tom was still talking. “You have reached the Martelli residence. We’re unable to come to—”

Hell! The goddamn machine!

He glanced at Patterson. What had he heard? His face was impassive. Sam started speaking rapidly in what he hoped was a conversational manner, covering the electronic beep which sounded like a Chinese gong in the quiet room.

“Yeah, I’m out here at Glenda Cannon’s. With Dwayne Patterson — what?” He paused for Tom’s nonexistent interruption, then resumed. “I’ll explain when you get here. To EastWind. And better bring some backup.” Another pause, then, “Okay. See you soon.”

His hand shook as he replaced the receiver. Stage fright. He was no good at this kind of performance, and he thought he detected a sardonic smile on Patterson’s face. Maybe he had heard that 120-decibel beep and seen through the ruse immediately.

He looked at his watch. It was ten-fifteen. If he got home by ten-thirty, if he listened to his machine, if he understood Sam’s message and its urgency, he could be here by eleven...

The adrenaline was ebbing and his arm was throbbing. He tried to relax, setting the revolver casually on the desk and resting his hand on top of it. After all, this wasn’t a homicidal maniac he was dealing with; this guy had killed a couple of horses, that was all.

Somehow he wasn’t comforted. He looked at his watch again. 11:07, and damn! his arm hurt. He began to talk in a rambling, discursive fashion, ignoring Patterson’s stony stare.

“Water. That’s what it’s all about; that’s what you need, Dwayne, right? Well, Glenda’s land adjoins yours, and I just realized tonight that she’s over the line. She’s in the Parkerville Irrigation District, not in Westside. So she’s got cheap water; you pay a hundred twenty dollars an acre foot and she pays twenty, right? You need this ranch, Dwayne. And Glenda won’t sell it.

“And then I thought about the horses. Sure, Eddie Froelich could have poisoned ’em; he knew all about selenium and locoweed. But so did you. Hell, I told you!”

He laughed, but stopped abruptly as the shock waves radiated up his arm. Patterson still watched impassively.

“I guess you figured you’d either scare her out or bankrupt her. You might even have written those letters!” he added, moving the revolver to the edge of the desk. He opened the drawer and glanced down for a moment, looking for aspirin, whiskey, anything to numb himself a little.

Suddenly Peggy moaned and stirred. He looked toward the cot, frowning in concern, as she drew a long, uneven breath. When he turned back again, Dwayne was standing, a tight smile stretched across his face. It took Sam a few seconds to see the small-caliber pistol pointed at his head.

9.

“The difference between you and me, Sam,” Patterson said in his relaxed Texas drawl, “is credibility. I never believed you would use that thing,” motioning towards the .45, “and I never believed you could hit anything with it left-handed, even if you did. I, on the other hand, am fully prepared to blow your head off. And hers. I know it, and you’re about to find out.” The gun clicked.

“But Martelli knows you’re here! You heard me tell him!”

“Yep. But that’s my problem. Stand up.”

Sam complied very slowly, wondering what his chances were of scooping up his gun, aiming, and shooting before Dwayne’s bullet entered his brain. Nil, he concluded. But it looked like his only chance—

The door of the tack room scraped open behind him.

He saw Dwayne’s eyes widen and felt a brief surge of hope: Martelli!

“What are you doing here?” Patterson demanded. Not Martelli, then; who could it possibly—

“I came to see what was taking so long,” said a husky voice.

Glenda’s voice.

Sam whirled. “Glenda,” he yelled, in a stupid, abortive attempt to warn her — and then he took in what she had said.

“Get over here,” Patterson growled. She walked slowly past Sam, not looking at him until she reached Patterson. Then she turned and faced him. Dwayne grabbed her in a kind of chokehold, left forearm across her throat as if holding her hostage, and for a moment Sam thought he had misunderstood her after all. Then she settled back against Patterson’s bulky body with a small proud smile.

Glenda and Dwayne?

Listen, sucker, Glenda’s never alone.

But Dwayne Patterson? He was fat, and old — old enough to be her father!

And she really missed her father.

“Bastard got away,” Patterson grunted.

“Got away?” echoed Glenda. “What’s he doing here, then?”

“He came back.”

She looked curiously at Sam, who was dizzy with pain and incomprehension. “Peggy,” he mumbled in answer to her unspoken question.

“Peggy!” She shook her head disbelievingly. “Poor Sam. Sucker to the last.”

Ignoring that chilling to the last, he made a real effort to pull himself together. “I don’t understand, Glenda. You were killing your own horses?”

“Just the two,” she said unhappily. “It was Dwayne’s idea, it was the only way. We were going to merge the ranches, but we needed capital—”

“The insurance money,” Sam broke in, and she nodded. “And the deaths had to be accidental for you to collect, and I was about to screw that up.” She nodded again. “But why, Glenda,” he burst out, “why did you involve me in the first place? Was it pure malice? What had I ever done to you?”

“It was nothing personal, Sam,” she said reprovingly. “It was the letters from Eddie, just like I said. He knew I was seeing somebody, though he didn’t know who, and Dwayne and I were afraid he was going to make trouble while we were trying to pull this thing off—”

“Shut up,” Patterson interrupted curtly. “I got to figure this out.”

“Figure out how you’re going to murder me and explain it to Tom Martelli when he shows up?” Sam said a little shakily. “That’s some mighty heavy figurin’... fact is, it can’t be done!”

Unmoved, Patterson eyed him speculatively. Deciding where to put the bullet, probably; he would dispatch him as coolly as he would a sickly calf. Glenda was his only chance; out of some glimmer of genuine affection for him — or, barring that, a desire to save her own skin — she might listen.

He took a deep breath and said, “Give it up, Glenda. Quit while you can. There’s a big difference between insurance fraud and murder. You want to be in prison for the rest of your life?”

Glenda looked troubled. “Honey...” she began uncertainly.

“Sugar, I can still make this work!” Patterson said fiercely. Without moving his eyes from Sam, he shifted his arm down to Glenda’s ribcage, just below her breasts, and gathered her against him. “We can’t stop now! You got to believe in me!” Despairingly, Sam felt the power of his personality, saw Glenda’s face harden again.

“All right. But how...?”

“Okay, we can’t have him and Peggy shoot each other, like we figured first. But listen to this. Last night in the tack room—”

“Nothing happened last night, I told you,” she said impatiently.

“Listen to me!” he said. “Something did happen. He came here and tried to force himself on you, and you... you finally let him, because you felt sorry for him and you figured it was the easiest way to get rid of him. That’s believable; you told me he’s had the hots for you since high school.”

Sam flushed. “And then he came back tonight,” Patterson continued, “and found me here, and came after me in... in a fit of jealous rage—” He laughed, jazzed by his own invention.

“But why would he have called the police?”

“Because of the letters!” he finished triumphantly. “He convinced himself I had sent the anonymous letters and that I was here to threaten you — and when he realized it wasn’t that way at all, and that I was your lover, and that you didn’t have any feeling for him, well, he went berserk and attacked me, and we struggled for the gun...”

Where did he get this stuff? It was like a bad episode of a rotten TV show — and yet, in Sam’s panicked state, it sounded terrifyingly plausible.

“What about her?” Glenda was saying, indicating Peggy.

Patterson considered her for a moment. “Stray bullet,” he replied briefly, and then turned back to Sam. “Now move over here.” He motioned with the gun.

Oh, sure, move into close range so the “struggle for the gun” would be credible. “Not a chance,” he replied, and then suddenly, overcome by sheer frustration, he exclaimed, “Dwayne, this is crazy! Killing two people over a couple of horses?”

“It ain’t just a couple of horses. I’m in deeper’n that. I got nothing to lose.”

Nothing to lose. Sam thought of how much he himself had to lose; he felt the weight of it, the pull of his life, as he looked at Patterson’s hard eyes. He was afraid.

And out of fear came inspiration. Glenda was indifferent to his fate, she was too much in love with Patterson to protect herself; okay. But there was one thing she did care about.

“Glenda,” he said feverishly, “did you say it was just the two horses? You weren’t going to kill any more?”

“That’s right,” she replied, puzzled.

“Then what was Dwayne doing with the hypodermic?”

She pulled away from Patterson and looked at him questioningly. Evidently she found some kind of answer, because she struck her fist sharply against her thigh.

“No! No more! You promised, Dwayne!” Then her eyes widened in horror. “Not the stallion,” she whispered. “Not Barney’s Pride.”

“We need the money, Glenda,” Dwayne said coldly. “You said yourself he was past his prime.”

“You BASTARD!” she shouted, twisting away from his grip and rushing towards the door.

“Glenda, I didn’t touch him!” Patterson yelled — and Sam dropped on all fours below the big oak desk.

Immediately a shot splintered the wall behind him, followed by another, whining like a dentist’s drill as it careened off a brass table lamp. Then an interminable silence, while Sam wondered desperately what would be next: himself, crouched heroically in fetal position, plugged right between the eyes? Peggy, falling prey to the “stray bullet”? Should he fish for the gun on top of the de—

The next instant there was a mind-shattering explosion of simultaneous noises: the sharp crack of a pistol, the crash of glass high overhead, the door slamming against the wall, shouts, more gunshots, a scream of pain. Then it was quiet.

Sam opened his eyes to see Tom Martelli, Enrique Santiago, and two other uniformed men, feet planted wide, guns trained on a target across the room. Glenda was standing in the doorway with both hands pressed against her mouth. He struggled to his feet and stood swaying slightly, looking at Dwayne Patterson crumpled against the wall.

10.

“Thank God for answering machines,” Sam said. The paramedics had labored over Patterson, who was seriously but not fatally injured, and had moved on to Peggy, who had a concussion. His turn would come, but in the meantime he’d discovered part of a bottle of tequila in the back of a drawer and was feeling a whole lot better. “When’d you get my message?”

“What message?” asked Tom distractedly; he was reading over Sam’s statement.

“The one I left on your machine about an hour ago,” replied Sam, bewildered.

“Never got it. What did it say?”

“Wait a minute. Why are you here if you didn’t hear the message?”

Tom finally looked up. “To question Dwayne Patterson regarding the murder of a loan shark in Houston.”

Sam stared at him, dumbfounded. “Patterson killed a loan shark in Houston?”

“Actually, I don’t think so. They’re just investigatin’ everybody who was in pretty deep to this fella, and Dwayne’s name came up. People who owed this guy had an unfortunate tendency to disappear.”

Windfall in Texas... I’m in deeper’n that...

“He wasn’t at his ranch,” Tom was saying, “but his wife told us to try here. Guess she knew about him and Glenda.”

They were both silent for a moment. “Jesus,” Sam said suddenly, shaking his head.

“What?”

“I was just thinking — I never would have come back to the bam, knowing what I now know about Dwayne Patterson. Peggy or no Peggy!”

Tom looked at him sceptically. “Sure you would have,” he said flatly. “You’re a smart guy, Sam, but you’re a born sucker.”

Sucker to the last. Not a bad epitaph.

Claire forced herself to gaze with simulated interest at the brown and blue relief map below. An experienced and usually nerveless flyer, she was in a frenzy of impatience for the flight to end, and obsessed by visions of flaming doom. They would crash, this random collection of crying babies and businessmen and students and smiling flight attendants and microbiologists; strangers united in death, they would be obliterated to charred body parts strewn for miles across the desert; they would crash, and her final contact with Sam would have been last night’s brusque telephone conversation: “Flight four forty-five.” “I’ll be there.”

With agonizing slowness they crept across deserts and mountains; then suddenly the basin below was filled with an impenetrable brown soup. “Air looks pretty good in L.A. today,” the pilot said imperturbably as they dropped down into it.

She walked briskly up the ramp with heart unaccountably pounding, searching the waiting crowd for Sam’s face. When she didn’t see it she first thought, crazily, that she had somehow forgotten what he looked like, and began to construct a mental image. Tall and thin with dark hair, right?

No. He definitely wasn’t there.

Sagging with disappointment and worry and irrational anger, she made her way to the baggage area and waited. And waited.

“Claire!” someone said breathlessly behind her, and she turned to see a tall, thin, dark-haired stranger whose smile faded as he beheld her blank countenance. “Sorry I’m late,” he said in a familiar-sounding voice. “The Valiant overheated coming up the Grapevine.”

“The Valiant?” she heard herself say. “Why didn’t you bring the Toyota?”

“Because I can’t shift!” he answered plaintively, and she saw that his right arm was in a sling.

“Sam!” So this must be Sam. “What happened?” She reached out tentatively to touch his shoulder. Then her bags arrived, and they fought their way to the parking lot. Despite his protests that the Valiant was easy to maneuver one-handed, she insisted on driving. “It’s sorta pulling to the left,” he said apologetically — a phenomenon she never got to experience, since as soon as they left the airport they were stopped dead by rush-hour traffic.

How high did your blood pressure have to rise before you had a stroke? she wondered, as they sat, silent, gridlocked, two blocks from the airport. “What happened to your arm?”

“It’s a complicated story,” he said, and that was all he said. She could see he was hurt by her coldness. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t want to be cold, she didn’t even know why she was cold — well, numb was a more exact description — except that everything seemed so alien: the murky air, the extraterrestrial palm trees, the ocean on the left instead of the right... and why couldn’t she simply explain this to Sam?

Instead she asked inanely, “Is that a new shirt?” It was Western-style, with pointy pocket flaps and snaps instead of buttons.

“No. I just never wear it.”

“It’s nice.”

It was nice. And Sam himself was beginning to come into focus. And if she spent one more second sitting on her behind in a vehicle she was going to explode.

Leaning on the horn like a New York cabdriver, she forced her way into the rightmost lane and then, oblivious to Sam’s protests, drove along the shoulder for a few hundred yards, finally turning into the driveway of the airport Hilton.

She came to an abrupt halt in front of the motel office.

“It... it’s a long way to Riverdale,” she said, staring intently at the steering wheel. “And we might be stuck in traffic for hours, or the damn car might overheat again, or we might have an accident, or...”

She broke off. Sam was grinning like a fool. He put his good arm around her neck, and she grasped the lapels of his shirt and pulled them apart. The snaps made a wonderful popping sound.