Neil McMahon - Lone Creek

I took that to mean that I was still a potentially valuable client.

There were a few phone messages on my machine, and I started to check them, then stopped. I didn't want any kind of news just now, good or bad-only to bask in the rapture of being back in my own place, with nobody trying to kill me. I was fried with fatigue but too wired to sleep. I started puttering around and trying to think about banal necessities like groceries, laundry, and a new used tire.

But I was uneasy, and after a few minutes, I couldn't ignore that a bad switch had flipped in my head. The privacy I'd always loved up here felt like emptiness, and the solitude, a loneliness that almost amounted to dread.

It wasn't because nobody else was around.

I knew it was temporary, just a function of the last couple of days' madness. But I couldn't get past the restlessness. I decided to take a shot at tying up one more loose end-following up my guess that Laurie had gotten her information about Celia from Beatrice Pettyjohn, Reuben's wife. I drove back to town.

Reuben had moved Beatrice to the Pineview Assisted Living Facility after her Alzheimer's disease got to be too much for him to handle. It was a nice new place out by the golf course. The woman at the admitting desk told me I was welcome to see Beatrice, but warned me that she got combative when something touched her off, and that this wasn't uncommon. I asked if she had many visitors. Yes, the desk lady said, obviously proud of this connection to ranching royalty. Reuben stopped by often, other old friends came occasionally, and a new friend had come by several times over the past couple of months-Mrs. Wesley Balcomb.

A young woman attendant went with me to Beatrice's private room. She was propped up in bed watching the Weather Channel on TV. Her formidable bearing had lessened-she'd become pale and thin. But she still had a sharpness in her eyes.

I hadn't been at all sure that she'd recognize me, or understand who I was if she did. But the instant she saw me, it was clear that she knew at least one thing-she didn't like me any better now than before. I'd thought I might have to coax her into conversation, but she took the bit and ran with it.

"Oh, the way you looked at her," she said witheringly. "You were the worst of them all."

The attendant gave me a glance that was wary but maybe also interested.

Clearly, there was no point in formalities here, or in trying to persuade Beatrice contrary to what was set in her mind.

"What did you think when she first came back, Beatrice?" I said.

"I told her she didn't have any more business here now than she ever did, and she could just turn around and leave again. That's what."

"But she didn't. She started coming to see you here, right? What did you talk about-the old days at the ranch?"

Beatrice's eyes took on a crafty look. "She asked about you plenty. So you're finally getting what you wanted, is that it?"

"No," I said, but it was futile-I had set her off. Her look changed again, this time to anger, and she struggled to get up out of bed, clenching one gnarled blue-veined hand into a fist and punching at me.

"Time for you to go-oh," the attendant said, in a playful singsong tone.

I backed away with a hasty apology, and left the building. I got into my truck, but then just sat there, watching the few golfers still strolling the links.

I could see why Beatrice would have grabbed at the connection with Celia the first time she'd seen Laurie, like she'd done with me just now. If there was one thing that would stick in her addled mind, it would be the obsession about what had destroyed her family.

That mistaken identity must have triggered the first part of Laurie's scheme. She'd then managed to pump Beatrice for information, maybe by overcoming the hostility and making friends, maybe by playing on fear-pretending that she'd come back from the dead to settle matters.

It didn't make me feel any better to think I might have fallen for the same trick as a delusional elderly woman.

I knew that being objective about Beatrice was impossible for me. Even before Celia's death, I hadn't liked her any better than she'd liked me. I knew that was uncharitable, what with her illness. I knew, too, that she'd had good reason for disapproving of Celia's attempt to work her way toward the Pettyjohn fortune in a time-honored, but not exactly honorable, fashion.

Still, to my mind, nothing justified the haughtiness that Beatrice had shown. In holding that Celia wasn't good enough for Pete, she'd really meant not good enough for herself. That and her coldness toward her husband had added a lot of fuel to the engine of the disaster. A less arrogant and more generous woman would have accepted her son's wishes in spite of her own feelings, or at least found a way to handle the situation without causing such grief.

In any event, learning about Laurie's visits here pretty well satisfied me as the solution to the mystery of how she'd gotten her information-except for one thread still hanging that I couldn't quite clip.

In the motel room, there'd been a few seconds when Laurie had seemed genuinely confused, and she'd said the words, "No to a horse, yes to a stallion." At the time, I could only think she was suggesting that Celia really had been thrown and killed like the Pettyjohns had claimed.

But now I knew for a fact that Pete had done it, and I'd started to wonder if Laurie could have meant stallion in the sense of stud, and she'd been referring to Reuben-the dominant male-as the baby's real father.

In all probability, she hadn't meant anything at all-those were just words that had slipped out during her prattle to con me. If she had known, she must have learned it from Beatrice-although I wasn't sure whether Beatrice had been aware of Reuben's affair with Celia, or even that Celia was pregnant. That was the main thing I'd hoped to pry out of her, but I never would.

It was a quarter after three in the afternoon. I decided that as long as I was in town, I might as well pay one more call. I started the truck and headed for a flower shop.

I walked into Sarah Lynn's office at twenty minutes to four, carrying a dozen long-stemmed roses wrapped in green paper, along with an envelope containing the rest of the cash I still owed her. The place was quite a contrast to Gary Varna's spartan digs-a corner room with big windows that let in a flood of light, walls of a delicate eggshell white that accentuated it, and a thick ecru carpet. The paintings and furnishings were very tasteful and very expensive.

She was sitting at her desk, wearing a deep blue dress that lit up her mane of tawny hair. She glanced at me, then turned right back to her computer screen, her fingers barely pausing at the keyboard.

"OK," I said. "I just want to leave these, tell you I'm sorry, and I want to take you to dinner if you'll ever talk to me again."

She kept typing for a few more seconds, but then sighed and held out her hand to take the flowers.

"They're beautiful, Huey," she said, and raised them to her face and inhaled. "So what is this? Payoff? Buyout? Drag bet?"

"I don't know what. But none of those."

Her voice turned angry, and her eyes, hurt. "Where've you been? Why didn't you call me, dammit?" My raw sense of unworthiness dug at me like a hair shirt around my heart.

"Things went from bad to worse," I said.

Her eyes turned concerned. That was even harder to take.

"Are you still in trouble?" she said.

"A better class of trouble. I'm straightened out with Gary, at least for now."

Sarah Lynn inhaled the flowers' scent again, watching me over their blossoms like a geisha with a fan.

"I'd love to have dinner with you," she said. "But I'm not going to be your fallback squeeze."