THE RAIN STILL hadn’t started to fall by the time Laurie walked to Bailey’s Bar & Grill for supper, letting the wind whip her hair and blow around her bare legs. She’d been so hot all day that the new cool temperature felt good. She felt good. She’d had a luxurious long bath, washed her hair, shaved her legs, made a couple of phone calls that left her feeling excited, and then changed into white shorts, sandals, and a rose-colored T-shirt that flattered her flawless complexion. She knew she should take her car, because of the weather, but assumed she could get a ride whenever she wanted one. Her sister-in-law had agreed to meet her there, so Belle could drive her home, if it came to that. If Belle couldn’t, then Laurie figured she could bat her eyelashes and several men would hop off their bar stools to help her.
When she walked into Bailey’s, heads turned, which pleased her.
A few people called out her name, but she walked on toward the back.
I’m meant for bigger things than this, she thought with scorn.
When they had more money, Hugh-Jay could take her to places she’d always wanted to see, like New York and Paris. Maybe she’d take trips without him, too, like the one she’d talked Annabelle into giving her.
As she walked confidently toward the rear, Laurie smiled to herself.
The Broadmoor Hotel. That was more like it, where she belonged.
Rose never had fit her right; it felt like a granny dress that nobody with any style would wear. She’d hoped that marrying a Linder could move her up and out in the world, but all it did was plant her deeper. She felt buried here, suffocated, with all her best talents wasted.
On the other hand, she was unique here, and she liked that.
Feeling the pleasure of being admired and the relief of being without her child for a night, she slid onto the long wooden bench in a booth across from Belle. Laurie liked being with Belle, because she looked so pretty and full of personality by comparison. A glass of beer was already sitting in front of her sister-in-law. The scent of grilled burgers, onions, and steaks permeated the big room, and Laurie sniffed appreciatively. “I may get a rib eye tonight,” she announced, with the confidence of a woman who never gained an ounce. When a waitress came by, she ordered a bottle of Bud “with a frosty glass and a slice of lime.” She’d heard they did that in Mexico -put lime in beer. There was a bowl of peanuts in the shell, and she dipped a hand into it. By evening’s end the floor of the grill would be littered with shells and crunchy underfoot.
“Where’s Meryl?” she asked Belle.
“At the office. Where’s Hugh-Jay?”
“Your dad sent him out to the Colorado place.”
“Did you hear what happened last night?”
“At the ranch? Yeah.” Laurie took a sip from the beer the waitress brought her, and looked back toward the front door of the grill. “Oh, God, look what the rain dragged in.”
Belle looked where she pointed and saw her two younger brothers coming in the door with rain dripping off their slickers and plastic-covered hats. The storm had finally arrived in Rose. A downpour was visible in the brief moment before Bobby closed the front door again. At the same time, the music got drowned out by the sound of rain pounding on the tavern’s tin roof.
“I can’t go anywhere,” Belle groused, “without my family showing up.”
“At least you’ve got family in town,” Laurie complained. She was still bitter about her own parents leaving her to fend with marriage and motherhood on her own.
“Got room for a couple of thirsty cowboys?” Chase asked when he and Bobby walked up to the booth.
“Don’t you have any other friends?” Belle demanded.
“Yeah,” Chase said with a grin, “but they’re not as pretty as yours.”
Belle rolled her eyes, which made Chase laugh.
Bobby started to slide in beside Laurie, but Chase grabbed his shirt and said, “You’re not sitting there.”
“Why not?”
“Because she doesn’t want to sit by you, do you, Laurie?”
“You’re too big for this booth,” she told Bobby.
He wasn’t fat, but his broad back and big arms and shoulders made him wide. Flushing, he got up without arguing.
Laurie scooted over to give Chase room to sit beside her. He was as tall as his younger brother, but not as bulky; his width was in his shoulders, so his slim hips didn’t crowd her, though they somehow ended up touching hers anyway.
They made a striking couple, both dark-haired and good-looking.
Instead of taking the seat beside his sister, Bobby pulled up a chair at the open end of their booth and straddled it backward. “Man,” he said, shaking water off his left hand. “Wet out there.”
“Don’t shake that thing on me,” Laurie complained, which made Chase laugh again.
“You,” Belle said with a disgusted look, “have a dirty mind.”
“Takes one to know one,” he told her with a smirk.
“And you’re one, all right,” an unexpected male voice said, beside him.
“Meryl!” Chase said, looking up at his older brother’s best friend. Meryl had the look of an ex-football player who might one day put on weight, but at the age of twenty-four he was still fit. Unlike Bobby and Chase in their blue jeans, Meryl had on a blue suit and a white shirt accented with a bolo tie-with a sterling silver clasp in the shape of a rearing horse-that Belle had given him for Valentine’s Day.
Belle suddenly looked happy. “How’d you get away from work?”
Meryl winked at her. “Got lucky. Power went out.”
“Bobby,” Chase ordered, “get out of the way and let Meryl sit by his girlfriend.” He shook his head in mock befuddlement. “Although what he sees in you, I’ll never know-”
“Shut up, Chase,” Meryl said.
“No, really,” Chase continued to tease. “She can’t take a joke, she’s oversensitive, and when she talks about all that history stuff, she can bore a stuffed bear to death-”
“Don’t talk about your sister like that,” Meryl said in a tone that surprised them all into silence. He sounded angry and serious. He looked down on his best friend’s brother, his girlfriend’s brother, his own potential brother-in-law, and said, “Has it ever occurred to you that Belle is just sensitive like normal people, and she only seems oversensitive to you because you’re such an insensitive lout? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe your jokes aren’t funny? Have you ever thought that she might be interesting to people with brains, people who are actually interested in things like history?”
“Lighten up, Meryl.”
“No, you lighten up, Chase. Lighten up on your sister. It’s time you gave up that teasing crap. She’s put up with it for years, but I’m the one who’s sick of it. I ever hear you talk like that about Belle again, I’ll stuff a fist down your mouth to shut you up.”
For a moment nobody moved.
Laurie looked impressed with Meryl’s aggressive defense of Belle.
Belle’s eyes shone with tearful gratitude.
Ever irrepressible, Chase grinned. “Did you forget you’re a lawyer now? You don’t have to get tough. You can just sue me. So if you love her so much, when are you going to marry her?”
Meryl slid into the booth beside Belle and put both of his arms around her, pulling her close to him and then kissing her deeply enough to make his future brothers-in-law hoot at the couple.
When he finally stopped kissing her, he still didn’t let her go.
“This isn’t how I’m going to ask you,” he said, “not here, not in front of them.”
“Some people are just born into the wrong families,” she told him.
“You’re telling me!” Meryl exclaimed, and as the mood lightened, he kissed her again, quick and hard and affectionately, taking all of her lipstick and leaving her looking proudly thrilled.
A little later, when Belle excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, Chase leaned across the table and said, “Come on. You’re telling me you think my sister is easy to get along with?”
“She is for me, Chase. I don’t know what your problem is.”
“And you really think the history of this county is fascinating?”
“I’m interested in what she’s interested in. You might try that sometime.”
Chase leaned back and laughed. “I’m interested in women who are interested in me.”
Meryl laughed, too. “Well, there’s a surprise.”
TWO HOURS and several beers later, after they’d all had steaks, the owner of the grill, Bailey Wright, walked up to the head of the booth, behind Bobby. He was a big man in his thirties, beefy, as befit the proprietor of a joint that specialized in hamburgers. Grease from cooking them stained the white chef’s apron tied at the back of his neck and around his girth. The jukebox was blaring over the rain and thunder, and his place was festive and cozy with talk and laughter, good smells and flowing drinks. Every now and then the lights blinked on and off, which made the jukebox stop, but each time it happened, Bailey just yelled in his foghorn voice, “No worries! We’ve got a generator! We’ll keep cookin’, you keep eatin’.”
That always got a laugh, even from the locals who’d heard it many times before.
“I just talked to your dad,” Bailey Wright informed the three siblings.
“Here?” Chase started to get up.
Bailey waved him back down. “He’s not here. He called on the phone. He gave me a message. He said you three-” He looked from Chase to Belle, then put a hand briefly on Bobby’s right shoulder. “-shouldn’t even try to get back out to the ranch tonight. You can’t get through. He said the highway’s washed out in that low place, and you’ll get swept away if you try. So he’s got a room at the Rose Motel for you boys, and another one for himself-”
“What’s he doing in town?” Bobby asked.
“That’s what I just told you,” Bailey said patiently, if not quite accurately. “He took a horse to Doc Cramer, tried to get home, but got stopped by the water over the highway.” He looked at Belle. “You’re supposed to stay with Laurie tonight.”
“I can stay at the museum,” she said in an argumentative tone.
“We could all stay at Laurie’s,” Chase said.
“No, you can’t!” Meryl Tapper and Bailey Wright said at the same time, sharply.
Chase made a show of jumping backward in comic reaction, and Bobby snorted.
“Your father specifically told me to tell you not to do that,” Bailey said to him. “He said Laurie’s got enough on her hands with a three-year-old, and the last thing she needs is the extra trouble you’d cause her.”
“That sounds like Mom talking,” Belle said, sounding grumpy about it.
“Jody’s at the ranch tonight,” Laurie said.
Bailey shrugged. “He must not have known that when he said it.”
“Aw,” Chase said, “but we could make it a party.”
“I wouldn’t advise that,” Bailey said as he walked away.
“Oh, well, he’s got us a room.” Chase lifted his latest beer and took a drink, “He’d be pissed if he had to pay for something we didn’t use.” He twinkled at Laurie. “But, hey, if you want, maybe I can slip out of the motel a little later.”
She blushed and threw a handful of peanuts at him.
Meryl, his brother’s best friend, eyed him over the top of a beer glass, and said, “You wouldn’t want to stay at Laurie’s house, Chase. She’s not ‘interested’ in you, are you, Laurie?”
“Not like that,” she said, and blushed again.
ALL EVENING LONG a progression of people dropped by their booth to say howdy, to ask about what Billy Crosby had done, and to send along regards to Annabelle and Hugh Senior. The four Linders and Meryl didn’t notice when the door opened one more time and the din of noise suddenly quieted. They didn’t think anything of it when they heard one more voice addressing them.
“Got you a special place back here, huh?”
They looked up and saw Billy Crosby standing behind Bobby’s chair.
“Oh my God,” Belle whispered to Meryl, who took her hand again.
Billy wore a distinctive straw cowboy hat with its brim tightly rolled on each side and the straw blackened as if it had been burnt. Tied up over the crown of it was a leather chin strap he pulled down when he needed to secure the hat atop his head. He was known for his hat, and perversely proud of being teased that it was ugly.
Chase slid out of the booth and stood up. “What are you doing here?”
“Out of jail, you mean? Why would a man who didn’t do nothin’ be in jail in the first place, Chase?”
Bobby was standing by then, too. “Answer the question, Billy.”
The other man laughed in his face. “No evidence, Bobby. You can’t hold a man when there’s no evidence. Not even in this county named after your goddamned grandfather, or whoever it was.” Billy looked all puffed up with victory and with drink. “There’s still some justice in this world!”
“Take it easy, Billy,” Chase said in a low voice.
“Ain’t nothin’ easy, Chase,” Billy retorted. Holding a long-necked beer bottle in his right hand, a drink he appeared to have brought in with him, he was swaying on his cowboy boots. “But I guess you wouldn’t know that, would you? Everything comes easy for you Linders, don’t it?”
Bobby pushed back his chair.
Chase shook his head at his brother, to head him off.
“You got all the money you’ll ever need,” Billy went on, while the women stared at him, and the men waited tensely to see what might happen next. “Everything you ever want. College, all paid for. Even you, Meryl. They never offered me that-”
“You never got straight A’s,” Bobby said sarcastically.
“Neither did you,” Billy shot back. “But that don’t mean you don’t get everything all paid for by your mommy and daddy. You just got nothin’ to complain about in this life, do you, Chase? Do you, big Bobby? Or you, either,” he said, looking straight at Belle. Then he stared at Laurie. “Smart of you to marry a rich rancher, Laurie, instead of some poor-ass county lawyer like Belle’s gonna do. Or maybe you’re marryin’ Belle ’cause you don’t wanna be a poor country lawyer, is that it, Meryl?”
Meryl let go of Belle’s hand and got out of the booth.
“Time for you to take a nap, Billy,” he said.
Bobby grabbed the back of Billy’s shirt collar.
“Take your fuckin’ hands off me, Bobby!”
“Shut up, Billy,” Chase snapped.
“What’s wrong with you?” Laurie said, looking with disdain at Billy.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” Billy said, staring first at her breasts and then at her face. “What’s wrong is how some people treat other people like shit-”
“Nobody has treated you like shit, Billy,” Meryl said. “Haven’t you had lots of regular work from them? Haven’t they paid you what they owed you, and probably extra over that? Haven’t they given you the only real chances you ever had? People like Hugh and Annabelle Linder don’t come along in every man’s life, and you ought to recognize how lucky you are that they came along in yours. Seems like if anybody has treated anybody else like shit, it’s you who’s treated them-”
“You can’t goddamn prove that!”
“I don’t hear you saying that you didn’t do it, Billy,” Meryl observed.
“Why should I? Are you saying any of you’d believe me?”
The bar’s owner stepped into the scene again, this time saying, “What’s the matter here, Chase? Is he bothering you people?”
“He’s drunk,” Belle said, stating the obvious.
“I got good reason to be drunk,” Billy shot back at her. “Your dad’s never going to hire me again, and he’ll tell everybody else not to hire me. I got no job. I got a wife and kid and no money. I got no wheels.” He glared at Chase. “I got nothin’, and you people got everything. What am I gonna do ’cept get drunk? What am I supposed to do?”
“Go to hell,” Laurie suggested in a cold voice.
Billy shocked them all by taking a wild swing in her direction.
Bobby’s arms came around him so fast and hard that it knocked his fancy straw hat onto the floor and also knocked the wind out of the drunk man. He struggled for breath and gagged, nearly vomiting.
“You’re disgusting!” Laurie looked nauseated herself.
Bailey and Bobby hauled him away from the booth.
“Did he hit you?” Belle asked, breathless with shock.
Chase slid back into the booth beside Laurie and put a hand on her shoulder.
Looking half scared and half excited now that Billy was gone, Laurie shook her head no. Chase didn’t move his hand, and she didn’t brush it off.
“My God,” Meryl said, looking stunned. “I can’t believe he’d do that.”
“Hit a woman?” Chase turned to stare after the other men while they made their way to the front door. “Why not? He doesn’t mind hitting his wife. Why would he mind hitting somebody else’s wife?”
Belle muttered something.
“What, Belle?” her brother asked her.
“I said, at least he didn’t hit on someone else’s wife.”
Chase took his hand off his sister-in-law’s shoulder.
The whole restaurant and bar had gone quiet, all other conversations ceasing as diners and drinkers watched Billy Crosby being thrown out.
“You going to put him out in this weather?” a man at a front table asked.
At that moment lightning flashed, and the electricity in the bar flickered again, causing a murmur of disquiet to go around the restaurant and bar.
“He’s not staying in here to bother anybody else tonight,” Bailey informed everybody who was listening. “Maybe some nice cool rain on his face will cool him off.”
“I don’t think you ought to put anything out there tonight,” a woman said.
“Not even a drunk,” somebody else called out.
“Not even Billy!” a man said, and a few people laughed.
Bailey ordered, “Open the door, Bobby.”
They threw him outside into the pouring rain.
The storm, already loud enough to cover conversations, sounded like kettle drums when Bailey opened the door, and when he shut it again, the interior of the grill seemed silent by comparison until a few people broke into applause.
Bailey turned around, his hands on his hips, and looked at some of his customers who weren’t clapping. “Don’t be mad at me,” he advised them. “Billy started it, like he starts any trouble he gets into. I’m just ending it. Everything bad that ever happens to Billy Crosby? You can bet he caused it, and it’s about time he suffered some consequences for it.”
A LITTLE LATER, after Bobby had returned to the booth and the restaurant settled down, Chase turned to his sister-in-law. “Did you drive over? I didn’t see your car outside.”
“I walked.” Laurie raised her right hand and put it palm up to the ceiling as if to catch some of the raindrops thundering on the tin roof. The din was now so loud that she had to raise her voice so they could hear her even just across their table. “So who’s taking me home?”
“We can’t,” Meryl said, glancing at Belle. “I’ve got my backseat full of files.”
“I’m too drunk,” Bobby said. He was too young to drink legally, but that hadn’t stopped him from guzzling what his brother provided when Bailey wasn’t looking.
“Oh, all right, I will,” Chase volunteered, with a feigned sigh of resignation.
On the way out, Laurie noticed they hadn’t tossed Billy Crosby’s cowboy hat out with him. It still lay where it had fallen on the floor, where it had been trampled in the melee. Serves him right, she thought, remembering the nasty way he had looked at her chest, to say nothing of the swing he had taken at her. Serves him right if it was ruined and he never got it back. She grabbed it from the floor and carried it with her outside to make sure it got soaked in the rain.
IT WAS 10:00 P.M. when they ran through the rain to their vehicles.
Meryl let Belle off at the bank and then left to check on the power situation at his office.
Chase chauffeured his sister-in-law to the big stone house.
When they were inside, dripping all over the kitchen floor, he went upstairs, after saying he would gather up a change of clothing to take over to the motel with him. Laurie stood in the kitchen for a few moments, listening to the thunder and lightning and the powerful downpour that sounded as if it might batter down the walls and wash them all away. She was chilled and shivering and longed to strip off her wet clothes and get warm. Hot shower or bare warm arms-either sounded delicious to her at that moment. Both at the same time would be even better. When she realized she still held Billy’s ruined hat, she contemptuously tossed it aside. She followed her brother-in-law up the stairs, trembling from cold and desire, trailing her wet fingers along the banister.
A LITTLE LATER young Red Bosch drove by Bailey’s Bar & Grill and thought he saw somebody lying flat on the pavement in the parking lot in the pouring rain. He turned in to take a look, shone the headlights of his pickup truck on the object of his concern and saw it was Billy Crosby lying there. Red put his truck in park, threw open his driver’s side door and ran through the rain to see if Billy was dead. He wasn’t. He was just dead drunk, from what the teenager could tell. Red managed to prod Billy to his feet, more or less, and guide him to the truck with the heavens nearly drowning both of them before they got there.
He drove Billy home to Valentine and their little boy.