“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.”
“Oh, yeah? My mother-in-law reads those like the Bible and swears they’re true.” Shelly leaned across the table and whispered, “She’s crazy. Last year for my birthday, she paid the first installment toward a Ronco food dehydrator, then had me billed for the rest.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. I had to pay over a hundred bucks for that thing, and I’ve never used it.” She did a one-shoulder shrug. “But I guess it wasn’t as bad as the pig cookie jar she got for my sister-in-law. You lift the lid and it squeals like Ned Beatty in Deliverance.”
Hope leaned back in her chair and chuckled.
“Do you have a man in your life?”
Oh, Shelly was good. Real good. Trying to get Hope to relax, soften her up before she sneaked in a few personal questions. But Hope was better.
“Not right now,” she answered.
“There are a few available men in town. Some of them still have their own teeth and most of them have a job. Stay away from anyone with the last name Gropp. They look normal, but none of them are right in the head.”