Rachel Gibson - True Confessions

Hope took a drink and let the cool tea wash the dust from her throat. “Better than the outside. Lots of cobwebs and there was a dead mouse in the oven. The good news is that the electricity and the plumbing work.”

“They should,” Shelly said as she set two plates loaded with pita sandwiches on the table covered in a white-and-blue checked cloth. “The realtor who bought the place this past fall had the whole place plumbed and wired. Couldn’t get the bloodstain up, though.”

“Bloodstain?”

“Hiram Donnelly killed himself with his hunting rifle right in front of the fireplace. Blood went everywhere. You might have noticed the stain on the floor.”

Yes, she’d noticed that stain, but she’d assumed someone had skinned some unfortunate animal in the front room. The fact that it was a human bloodstain was kind of freaky. “Why’d he kill himself?”

Shelly shrugged as she sat across from Hope. “He was caught embezzling money from the county to pay for kinky sex.”

“Was he a judge?”

“No, he was our sheriff.”

Hope placed her napkin on her lap, then reached for her pita. Her curiosity piqued more than she wanted her neighbor to know, she asked as if she were inquiring about the weather, “How kinky?”

“Bondage and domination, mostly, but he was into a lot of other weird stuff, too. A year after his wife died, he started getting hooked up with women through the Internet. I think it started out innocent enough. Just a lonely guy looking for some female company. But toward the end, he got real kinky and didn’t care if the women were single or married, their age, or how much it cost him. He was out of control and got careless.”

Hope bit into her pita and tried to recall if she’d read anything about a sheriff embezzling money to pay for his sexual addiction. She didn’t think so, because if she had, she would have remembered. “When did all this happen?”

“He killed himself about five years ago, but like I said, it started about a year before that. No one in town knew it, either, not until the FBI was about to arrest him and he shot himself.”

“How out of control did he get?”

Shelly glanced away, clearly uncomfortable talking about the details. “Use your imagination,” she said, then changed the subject. “What brings you to Gospel?”

Hope knew when to push and when to back off. She tucked away the information and let it go for now. “It seemed like a nice area,” she answered, then, just as neatly as Shelly, turned the subject away from herself. “How long have you lived here?”

“My family moved here when I was about six. My husband, Paul, was born in this house. I graduated from Gospel High School with most of the people around here.” Shelly counted them off as if Hope naturally knew whom she was talking about. “Paul and me, Lon Wilson and Angie Bright, Bart and Annie Turner, Paris Fernwood, Jenny Richards. Kim Howe and Dylan, but that was back when Dylan still lived at the Double T with his folks. His mom, sister, and brother-in-law still run the place. And, of course, Kim ran off with a trucker right after graduation and lives somewhere in the Midwest. I can’t remember what happened to Jenny.” Shelly took a bite of her sandwich, then asked, “You married?”

“No.” Hope’s neighbor looked at her as if she thought Hope might elaborate. She didn’t. If she mentioned the word “divorce,” other questions would follow, and there was no way Hope would share that ugly and clichéd part of her life with anyone. Especially not a stranger. She reached for her tea and as she took a long drink, she tried to remember the last time she’d had lunch with someone, other than for business. She wasn’t positive, but thought it probably had been right after her divorce. As was usual for a lot of married couples, her friends had been their friends, and whether they’d stopped calling or she stopped calling them didn’t matter. The end result was the same. Their lives had changed and they’d drifted apart. “Where did you live before you moved to Gospel?” she asked.

“Outside Rock Springs, Wyoming. So it wasn’t much of a shock moving here. Not like I imagine it is for you.”

That was so true it made Hope chuckle. “Well, I don’t think I’m very popular at the Sandman.”

“Don’t worry about Ada Dover. She thinks she’s running the Ritz.” Without much of a pause, she asked, “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a freelance writer.” Which was partly true. In the past, she’d certainly done freelance under a lot of different pseudonyms, and if she wanted, she could again. For now, she liked writing bizarre fictional articles. Although she had to admit that she was intrigued by the bizarre history of Number Two Timberline and the sheriff who’d lived there.

“What do you write?”

Hope was asked that question a lot, and she usually fudged. Not that she was ashamed of what she did, but in her experience, people had one of three reactions.

One, they were condescending, which Hope didn’t appreciate but could handle. Two, they wanted to tell her about the time they’d been abducted and had an alien probe stuck up their anus. Or three, if they weren’t crazy themselves, they knew someone who was. And they always wanted her to do an article on their great-aunt so-and-so who was possessed by the spirit of her dead dog.

Hope never knew when she’d run into one of these crazy people, could never tell from appearances. They were like peanut M &M’s; they had a normal-looking shell but were hiding a nut inside. Hope wrote fiction and wasn’t interested in real nuts.

“I write whatever interests me.” Then she did what she did best: She added a lie into the mix of truths and half-truths. “Right now, I’m interested in flora and fauna of the Northwest, and I’m writing an article for a Northwest magazine.”

“Wow, a writer! That must be a really fun job.”

Fun? Hope took another bite of her sandwich and thought about Shelly’s remark for a moment. “Sometimes it is fun,” she said after she swallowed. “Sometimes it’s so cool I can’t believe I’m doing it.”

“A couple of summers ago, we had a guy who was here writing some sort of backpacking guide. Before that, a lady wrote about bicycling trails in the Northwest. Last summer, there was someone else in the area writing about something. I can’t remember what that was, though.” Shelly took a drink of her tea. “What have you written that I might have read?”

“Let’s see… about two years ago, I did a piece for Cosmo on hysterectomies.”

“I don’t read Cosmo .”

“Redbook?”

“No. Have you written anything for People ?”

“I submitted an outline once.” Hope set down her sandwich and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “But I got a form rejection.”

“The Enquirer ?”

Not recently, but at one time, not only had she written for them, she’d also been their “inside source” on who had had their faces lifted and their breasts enlarged. “No, I don’t like to write articles about real people,” she said. At least not anymore. She much preferred to make up stories about a fifty-pound locust.

“Hmm… Paul subscribes to Guns and Ammo. I don’t suppose you ever wrote an article about elk hunting?”

Hope looked across the table at her neighbor, at the laughter creasing the corners of Shelly’s eyes, and she relaxed a bit.

“No, I don’t really go in for the violent stuff, but when I was first starting out, I did write several articles for True Crime magazine. I needed publishing credits, so I wrote a few stories about a serial-killing hooker who got caught when traces of her victims’ blood were found on her stilettos.”