Dylan looked out the window above the sink. In the dirt driveway, the setting sun cast long shadows on his Ford truck, parked next to the sheriff’s Blazer. He wondered what Hope was doing over on Timberline. He wondered if she was watching TV or getting ready for bed. Adam had mentioned something about her taking pictures. Maybe she really was writing an article for an outdoors magazine. Maybe she hadn’t been lying about that. Yeah, maybe, but that still made her a writer.
He could always run a check on her. He could run an NCIC and see if she had a criminal past. He could also run her license plates through his computer to find out anything he might want to know about MZBHAVN, but he wasn’t going to do that. Not only was it against police ethics, it was against Dylan’s. Unless she broke the law, she had a right to her privacy. She had a right to have all the people mind their own business.
Dylan understood privacy. Unfortunately, in Gospel, he seemed to be the only one.
Hope waited until Monday afternoon to drive to the M & S Market to buy a copy of The Weekly News of the Universe. She grabbed a blue plastic shopping basket and reached for a copy. The headline for her chicken bone article appeared beneath the picture of a crazed-looking chicken in the bottom left corner of the paper. Her gaze lifted to the At-a-Glance box and she flipped to page fourteen. Dang, she’d been stuck behind “Tinsel Town Gossip.” At least the feature was a full page with a photograph of fairly normal looking women dancing around chickens, and the cutline: “Bizarre cult eats the bones of chickens.” As she walked to the produce section, she flipped to the middle of the magazine. Clive Freeman’s alien cow-mutilation article had been given the center spread.
Good, alien features were still hot. She’d sent off her own alien article the day before, complete with the slightly blurred shore of Gospel Lake and a few fuzzy aliens she’d retrieved from her CD-ROM library. She’d lined them up behind a rustic-looking table, and beneath the photograph she’d written the cutline, “Aliens
place bets on unsuspecting tourist in Northwest wilderness area.” She was extremely happy with the way the feature had come together and was already working on a follow-up article.
She’d also read the newspaper articles she’d photocopied at the library, and she’d thought there was an interesting story to be told. Not about the salaciousness of it all, although there was plenty of that, but of a man whose personal and public lives were so diametrically opposed. How his personal choices had slowly consumed him until he’d become morally bankrupt in the end.
Hope slid the paper into her basket and picked through the sorriest bunch of avocados she’d ever seen. She’d been invited to the Aberdeen boys’ eighteenth-birthday barbecue that night, and afterward she planned to ask Shelly a few questions about Hiram Donnelly.
The cantaloupe weren’t much better than the avocados, but the lettuce was decent. Shelly had told her they were serving hot dogs, hamburgers, and the boys’ favorite-Rocky Mountain oysters. Hope was taking a salad with sweet dressing, which was wonderful with seafood. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d made her famous salad. Well, actually, when she thought hard enough, she could remember, but it had been a long time ago and was a sad commentary on her social life. Funny, she thought as she picked up a few household items, how moving to such a small town had emphasized the empty holes in her life. Funny how a few lunches with a woman she hardly knew, and an invitation to barbecue with her neighbors had left her wanting to get out more.
She thought about taking a bottle of wine to loosen Shelly’s tongue, but Dylan and Adam had been invited, and she didn’t want the sheriff to think she was a big boozer. She didn’t know why she cared, and she didn’t know what to think of the man who glanced at her from beneath the brim of his hat and stopped her heart. It was probably best not to think of him at all.
Hope took her place in line behind a couple decked out in REI and holding bottled water. Behind the counter, Stanley Caldwell rang up the purchases while his wife, Melba, bagged.
When it was Hope’s turn, she set her basket on the counter.
“How’re things out at the Donnelly place?” Stanley asked.
“They’re good. How are you, Mr. Caldwell?”
“I’ve got a bit of lower back pain, but I’m doing okay.” He took the avocados out of the basket and rang them up. “I hear you’re a writer.”
Hope raised her gaze from the basket to Stanley’s face. “Where did you hear that?”
“Regina Cladis,” he answered as he handed his wife the avocados to bag. “She says you’re writing a story about Hiram Donnelly.”
She glanced at Melba, then looked back at Stanley. “That’s right. Did you know him?”
“Of course we knew him. He was the sheriff,” Melba replied. “His wife was a good Christian woman who never knew sin.”
“At least that’s what she told everyone,” Stanley scoffed, ringing up the cantaloupe. “Makes you wonder, though.”
“Makes you wonder what, Mr. Caldwell?” Hope asked. Melba took the melon and placed it in the bag.
“Well, I don’t think just because a man’s wife dies, he goes so far off the deep end that he wakes up one morning and suddenly wants to put on leather underwear and get his hairy backside paddled.”
Melba shoved one hand on her hip. “Are you saying Minnie was like Hiram? For the love of Pete, her daddy was a preacher.”
“Yep, and you know how they are.” He handed Melba Hope’s copy of The Weekly News of the Universe.
Melba’s brows lowered and then a light seemed to dawn in her eyes. “Well, that’s true.” She shrugged and glanced at the tabloid in her hand. “There’s a really good story in there about an eighty-pound woman giving birth to a twenty-pound baby.”
Finally, a person who admitted to reading a tabloid.
“And another good one,” Stanley added, “is that article on aliens doing all those cow mutilations in New Mexico. Sure glad we don’t have alien shenanigans going on around here.”
Oh, you’re about to, Hope thought and wondered if they’d recognize themselves in her alien story. “Did you read about the cult of women who eat chicken bones? One of them choked to death and they tried to revive her in a ritualistic chicken ceremony.”
“Didn’t get to that one yet.” Stanley laughed and shook his head. “Who makes that stuff up?”
Hope laughed, too. “Someone with a creative imagination.”