Chapter Six
With only morning classes on that Wednesday, Oliver Bowles left the campus of Cochise College shortly after noon. Rain had started a few minutes before he got out of the building, and by the time he reached his Subaru Outback it pelted him full force. As he drove east on Highway 80 and then north on 191, it sheeted down the front of the windshield, reducing visibility to almost nil. He fought to keep the car on an even keel, hydroplaning from time to time.
When he’d moved from San Diego to Arizona in late January, he had laughed at the signs along the roads that said Do Not Enter When Flooded. Then in early July, monsoon season had begun. Now that he’d lived through two months of it, he no longer laughed, and he understood the prevalence of high-clearance trucks and SUVs in the area. A four-foot dip didn’t seem like much in dry weather, but when it filled with rushing water, it could be treacherous.
He had learned to love the area, especially the border town of Douglas. Dining in the El Conquistador dining room of Douglas’s Gadsden Hotel every other Friday night had become a ritual for him and Jeannie, and was always complemented by a wonder-filled stroll around its gorgeous lobby, admiring the marble and gilt and huge Tiffany window and the taxidermied mountain lion that watched over it all from the landing of the sweeping marble staircase. He liked the small-town atmosphere—people at shops and the post office and library all seemed to know each other and welcomed them like old friends after the first few visits. He’d never lived near such a little country town, never dreamed he would take to it, but he had.
Lightning daggered the dark sky. Thunder boomed from everywhere at once. The wind, blowing toward the west, slapped wet tumbleweeds off Oliver’s windshield.
By the time he turned off Davis Road onto Larrimore forty minutes later, his shoulders ached from the tension and his hands felt frozen in place on the steering wheel. He stepped from the wagon into slick mud and opened the front gate to his property. Standing outside the car he saw activity at the Lavenders’ place, a couple hundred yards up the road. Big white SUVs, it looked like. Hard to tell through the driving rain, but they might have had light bars on top. Border Patrol or sheriffs, he guessed. He didn’t know what they might be doing at the neighbors’ house, and given the absurd public fascination with that missing girl over in Sierra Vista, he would have been surprised to learn that there were any deputies available to come out into the boonies.
Maybe Jeannie would know. She had started working a few hours a week at a little art gallery in Bisbee. Selling their expensive San Diego house and buying the little place here—even with a chunk of land most Californians could only dream of owning—had left them with a financial buffer, so working, for her, was more about getting out of the house than economic necessity. Since she hadn’t met many people in the area yet, most of her time was spent at home, trying to make their little ranch house livable. She had a knack for decorating, and she’d decided to veer away from the expected Western style, instead opting for a French country look.
Parking inside the detached, corrugated steel garage, Oliver splashed though quarter-inch puddles to the covered front walk. The wagon had made it okay, but Jeannie still drove her old Camry. They would have to trade that in before she was washed away in a flash flood.
“Are you soaked?” she called as he walked in the front door.
“Pretty much,” he admitted. He toed off his leather shoes and left them in the tiled entryway. “It’s as bad out there as I’ve seen it. Everything okay here?”
“Fine,” Jeannie said. She emerged from the spare bedroom, which she was turning into an office/library, with a paintbrush in her left hand, holding a can of sage paint under it with her right, to catch the drips. She wore splotches of the paint on her Abbey Road T-shirt. “The lights flickered a couple of times, but we never really lost power.”
Oliver ran his fingers through wet hair. “Guess I know why people wear cowboy hats and boots around here,” he said.
“Things like that don’t become customary without a reason,” she agreed. “Unless you maybe count parachute pants. And those oversized ball caps the kids wear cocked at a weird angle so the bill doesn’t shade their eyes or neck.”
Jeannie was thin, with pale skin and straight hair the color of straw framing a narrow face with high cheekbones. At thirty-six, she could pass for late twenties or so. The black T-shirt was cropped, lifted slightly by breasts that swelled beneath it, and Oliver admired the stretch of flat stomach he could see extending down into the waistband of her faded jeans. Her grin illuminated her whole face, glowing from her cornflower-blue eyes, crinkling the sides of her nose and making the freckles there stand out, and every time Oliver saw it he knew he was incredibly fortunate to have met her, luckier still that she’d stuck with him through everything.
“Those do look pretty ridiculous,” he said. “As I’m sure I do.”
She leaned in, kissed him hard on the lips. “Wet puppies turn me on,” she said. “Especially that puppy-dog smell.”
“All I smell is paint,” he countered. “You’ve been busy.”
“A little.”
“You know what’s going on at the Lavender place?”
“There’ve been cars there most of the morning,” she said. “From the sheriff’s office. I saw one drive by. But I’ve been listening to the radio and haven’t heard anything about it.”
“I guess it wouldn’t be the best time to walk down there,” Oliver said. “But Lulu wasn’t in class today. I just hope it’s nothing serious.”
“We could drive over if you’re worried.”
Oliver shook his head. “The road’s like soup,” he said. “I’ll call instead.”
Tugging his wet shirt away from his torso, he found the cordless and sat down at the dining room table. Cell phone service was spotty this far from town, but at least the local phone company had run landlines a few years before. He knew the number well enough—since they had moved in, Lulu had been an incredible help, happy to teach them about all the aspects of rural life they had never experienced. Dealing with private wells and septic tanks and Gila monsters and rattlers had all been new and different to the pair of suburbanites, and there had been times they wondered how they would have survived it without Lulu’s assistance.
A male voice he didn’t recognize answered the phone. “Maybe I misdialed,” Oliver said. “I’m looking for Lulu Lavender.”
“This is Lieutenant Shelton with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office,” the voice informed him. “Who am I speaking with?”
“My name is Oliver Bowles. I’m Lulu’s teacher, and her neighbor. Is everything okay?”
“You’re the fellow lives down Larrimore Trail from the Lavenders?”
“That’s right.”
“I’d like to come and see you directly if that’s okay.”
Oliver swallowed back his fear. “Sure. We’ll be here.”
He ended the call and looked at Jeannie, who watched him through narrowed eyes. “What’s up?” she asked when he didn’t speak right away.
“A sheriff’s officer answered the phone. He’s coming over to talk to us.”
Jeannie’s face blanched and she tugged at the lower hem of her Beatles shirt. Watching her chew her pale pink lower lip, Oliver couldn’t shake the feeling that a bad day was about to become much, much worse.