Читать книгу Cornered In Conard County - Rachel Lee - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe next morning, Betty insisted on helping Dory move many of her belongings. Most of it was computer equipment, some very heavy, but Betty brought the clothes and lighter items for the kitchen.
The house was partially furnished, which made Dory’s life easier, and already contained the items she’d had shipped here, mostly work related office furniture, including the extra battered old chair that tipped back farther than the new one. She loved to sit in it sometimes just to think. Eventually she could spiff the house or her office up if she wanted, but with most of her attention on her job, on creating graphics with her team, she was seldom more than half-aware of her surroundings.
The pile of clothes on her bed amused Betty, however. Jeans. T-shirts. More jeans. Sweatshirts. “Lord, girl, don’t you ever dress up?”
“I don’t have any need.” But Dory laughed, too. It did look odd, all together like that. Add the plain undies and the three pairs of jogging shoes and she was sure she would appall most women.
“We have to do something about your fashion sense,” Betty remarked.
“Why?” Dory asked. And that really was the question. She worked long days, she had no desire to socialize and the one man who’d managed to pierce her desire for isolation had told her he wasn’t interested because he’d had a bad marriage. She didn’t need a neon sign.
Betty followed her into her office and watched as Dory unpacked the real center of her life. “You know I love you,” she said as Dory pulled out the first of six monitors.
“I know.” She braced herself for what she was certain was coming.
“You need more of a life than your job. Won’t you at least meet one or two people I think you’d like?”
“I met Cadell,” she reminded Betty. “Nice guy. Also seriously burned by life.”
Betty sighed, then said a bit sarcastically, “Well, at least you’re a pair, then.”
“Nope,” said Dory. “Nice and all that, great dog trainer...”
“And gorgeous as hell,” Betty said bluntly. “At least tell me you’re not blind.”
Dory paused, a power cord in her hand. “Betty? Please tell me you’re not going to keep pushing me this way. Because if that’s your goal, I’ll stop unpacking right now.”
The room nearly turned to ice as Betty stared at her. Then almost as quickly as it came, the ice thawed. “No, that’s not my goal. I just worry about you. None of my business, I guess.”
Betty turned and went to get some more items from the car. Dory stared after her, realizing she had just hurt her only friend in the world.
Well, take that as a warning, she told herself. All she brought was pain. Whatever lay at her core, it was locked away forever. And that hurt other people.
She returned to setting up her office, glad to know that soon she’d been in touch with her team, the nerds who were fun and smart and never demanded she get personal about anything. A meeting of minds. Who needed a meeting of hearts?
As she turned back to her desk and began to connect more cables, she felt herself easing back into her comfortable world where she could control everything she needed to. Even her desk, shipped from her old home, seemed like a warm greeting, encouraging a new life.
Her life. Then she thought of Flash. Okay, so maybe there was more to it than the digital world she lived in.
Betty returned, her voice announcing her. She was speaking with someone, and Dory instinctively stiffened. She pivoted quickly to see Betty enter the office space with a woman wearing a tool belt.
“Dory, this is Rhonda, your cable man.”
Rhonda laughed. “I’m your cable tech person.”
Dory couldn’t help grinning. “You get that, too?”
“All the time. Say, I hear you’re into graphics design?”
Dory nodded.
“Then I’ll make sure you have the best connection this company can offer. I’m a gamer. So what graphics cards do you use?”
Betty rolled her eyes. “I’ll go get the last few things, then make some coffee. I can see what’s coming.”
Dory and Rhonda both laughed but soon were involved in the nuts and bolts of computing and bandwidth and a whole range of technical subjects. While they gabbed, Rhonda busied herself putting the connectors in the wall, testing them and then adding the routers. “The best we have,” she said, placing the two routers on the desk. “Betty kind of rattled some bars, you know? So you’ll have two broadband connections. That’s what you wanted, right?”
“As long as they’re not piggybacking and sucking up the bandwidth from each other.”
“I’ll take care of that at the junction outside. It’s wonderful how far we’re coming. A federal grant is making it possible, you know. High-speed connections in rural areas. You wouldn’t have been able to stand it here a few years ago. We were still with the dinosaurs and dial-up.”
“Oh, man, dial-up was a nightmare.”
Rhonda finished quickly, considering all she had to do inside, including hooking up Dory’s TV and converter box, and that was just the beginning. A lot more to do outside. But she took time for a quick cup of coffee with Dory and Betty before getting to it.
“Hope to see you again,” she said cheerfully to Dory before she zipped out the door.
“Nice woman,” Dory remarked and went back screwing, snapping, plugging and otherwise turning a collection of expensive hardware into two expensive, smoothly running workstations. Everything top-of-the-line. The max.
At last, though, she was able to turn everything on and test it. All good. She sent an email blast letting her team know she was back on the grid. Almost immediately her computer pinged with the arrival of emails.
She was home.
* * *
CADELL LEFT FOR work a couple of hours early, carting two dogs with him, Flash and Dasher. Dasher was eager to get to work, recognizing the backseat cage of the sheriff’s department SUV as the beginning of adventure. Flash didn’t see it that way, but he was glad to take a car ride.
He hoped he didn’t unnerve Dory, dressed as he was in his khaki uniform, gun belt and tan Stetson. Not the guy she was used to seeing in shirts with rolled-up sleeves and jeans.
He pulled into Dory’s driveway, behind a blue Honda sedan that had seen better years. The house was small and old in the way of many in this part of town, but it had been recently painted white. The driveway was two wheel paths of concrete, the sidewalk cracked but not heaving yet, and the porch from a time when porches were inviting.
Not that Dory would probably care about that. Betty had mentioned that Dory wasn’t very sociable, and that she worried about her being too deeply mired in her work.
Being mired in work was something Cadell understood perfectly, so he didn’t hold that against her. Given the woman’s background, he wasn’t even surprised that she had told him she couldn’t trust. He figured Flash would be the best therapy he could offer her. Dogs had a way of getting past defenses.
He left Dasher in the car with the engine running so the air-conditioning would keep him cool and walked Flash on a leash to the front door.
“Your new home, Flash. You take good care of it.”
He knocked. There was a doorbell, but cops never used them and the habit was impossible to break. At least he didn’t use the heel of his fist or his big flashlight to resound through the house. A normal type of knock that shouldn’t startle her.
A couple of minutes passed while he looked around the neighborhood and wondered if she had decided to take a walk. Clearly her car was here.
Then the door opened, and Dory was blinking at him. “Oh! You look so different in uniform, I almost didn’t recognize you. I’m sorry, I forgot you were coming this afternoon.”
He smiled. “Not a problem. If you want to take Flash’s leash, I’ll go get his supplies. Can’t stay—my dog’s in the car, and while it’s specially built with heavy-duty air-conditioning to keep him cool...well, I never trust it too far.”
He hesitated, holding the leash out to her. She bit her lower lip, then blurted, “Can you bring Dasher inside, too?”
He glanced at his watch and saw that he still had plenty of time to grab a bite at Maude’s Diner and get to the station. “Sure. It might help Flash feel a little more at home.”
She smiled then, a faint smile, but it reached her eyes as she accepted the leash. “These dogs are practically people to you,” she remarked.
He had turned and now looked over his shoulder. “Nah. They’re nicer than a lot of people.”
That made her laugh quietly, and the sound followed him as he went to turn off his vehicle and get Dasher. He liked her, he realized. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. Oh, hell, he didn’t need the trouble.
But he brought Dasher inside anyway and left him with Dory while he returned to the back of his car. Two bowls, a large padded bed, several tennis balls, chew toys and forty pounds of dry dog food later, he was sitting at her rickety kitchen table, watching her search her fridge for a soft drink to give him.
“So it’s true computer types drink a lot of soda?” he asked casually.
“As long as it has caffeine. I can do a good job with a pot of coffee, as well. Orange, cola or lime?”
“Orange,” he decided. “Cheetos?”
“Now that’s a stereotype too far,” she said with humor as she passed him the bottle of soda. Evidently it didn’t come with a glass in her world. “Although,” she said as she slid into the one other chair, “I did have a friend in college who loved to eat them sometimes, but she didn’t like the grit on her keyboard. So she ate them with chopsticks.”
The image drew a hearty laugh from him, and her smile deepened.
She spoke again. “Thanks for bringing all the doggy stuff. You never said, but how much do I owe you? You’re giving me a well-trained guard dog that you must have spent a lot of time on.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m kinda thinking of Flash as an extension of my oath to serve and protect. He’s a gift, Dory, if that won’t offend you.”
Her eyes widened. “But, Cadell...”
“No buts. You can be my advertising around town, how’s that?”
Both dogs, trailing their leads, were sniffing their way around the house, checking out everything. Dory watched them for several minutes, the faint smile still on her face. After a bit she said, “I’ve never received a better gift.”
“I hope you’ll never need his finer skills.”
“Me, too.”
Silence fell. He glanced at his watch and saw he had a little longer. Somehow it didn’t feel right to just walk out.
Then Dory surprised him by asking, “What else do you teach the dogs to do? There must be a lot involved in police work.”
“Apart from what we taught Flash to do? Plenty. A dog has a wonderful nose, hundreds of times more sensitive than ours. It can follow scents that are weeks old, and even those that are high in the air. That’s an extremely useful tool in searching, particularly search and rescue.”
“Do you do a lot of search and rescue?”
“Around here? In the mountains, quite enough. Hikers, mainly. Then there are elderly people who sometimes ramble and forget where they are. Earlier this summer we had to hunt for an autistic girl. She’d wandered off, become frightened and hid in a culvert out of sight.”
“Her parents must have been terrified. My word, she must have been terrified!”
He smiled. “She didn’t trust us, but she trusted the dog.”
He watched her smile again. For a woman who had come here to escape a possible threat, and who, according to Betty, suffered from a lot of nightmares, she smiled easily. Props to her, he thought.
“Anyway,” he continued, “it’s possible to train the dogs to hunt only for specific scents, too. Like explosives. Or drugs. Or cadavers.”
Her smile faded. “Dead tissue?”
“We train them to distinguish human tissue from animal tissue, and their success rate is about ninety-five percent. They can find buried bodies a century old. And they can smell them down to at least fifteen feet, and some say up to thirty.”
Her eyes had grown wider. “So they don’t get confused?”
“No.” But he didn’t want to get into the details. Some things just didn’t need to be talked about.
She looked down, then lifted her head and drank from her own bottle of orange soda. “How do they learn all this stuff? I mean, isn’t it hard to teach them?”
“A little patience and they pick it up pretty quickly. They’re remarkable, and they’re eager to please.” Dasher came over and laid his head on Cadell’s thigh. “I think he’s ready to go to work.”
Dory popped to her feet immediately. “I’m sorry, I’ve been holding you up.”
“Actually, no. I allowed some extra time.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper. “Feeding directions and all that. If you have any questions, call me. And if you don’t mind, I’ll drop by every day or so to see how you two are getting on.”
Holding the paper, she looked at him. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough, Cadell.”
He chuckled. “Tell me that again when you have fur all over the place. He doesn’t shed a lot, but he’s going to shed. See you tomorrow afternoon.”
He headed for the door with Dasher and heard Dory behind him telling Flash to stay. The dog needed to learn his new home. He figured Dory was going to make it easy on him.
As he climbed into his vehicle with Dasher in the cage behind him, he realized something. Betty unintentionally had painted Dory unfairly. She might not be prepared to trust people and allow them within her circle; she might be scared to death of her brother’s imminent release from prison; she might be haunted by terrible nightmares.
But Dory had grit. Real inner strength.
He liked her. He respected her. And he needed to watch his step, because he sure as hell didn’t ever want to make another woman miserable.
* * *
DORY AND FLASH regarded each other in the kitchen. She’d removed his leash, but he sat there staring up at her as if he were pleading.
She tapped the piece of paper Cadell had given her. “It says here you don’t get supper for another two hours.”
Flash lowered his head a bit.
Feeling like the wicked witch, Dory scanned the paper again. “But you can have your dental chew. What the heck is that?”
She looked at the heap of supplies in one corner of her kitchen, then rose to look through it. She discovered a plastic bag behind the huge bag of food. In it was a nubby nylon or plastic bone of some kind. Unzipping the bag, she pulled it out and turned to hold it out to Flash. “Is this what you want?”
He stared at it and licked his lips.
There could be a minor problem with a dog so well trained, she thought. Was he just going to sit there like a statue or let her know what he wanted? “Take it, Flash,” she said finally in desperation.
He apparently understood that. In one leap he reached the bone and took it from her hand with amazing delicacy before settling down to gnaw on it.
“Well, cool,” she said. “We have communication!”
Flash barely glanced at her. Almost grinning, she sat down at the table to read the directions from Cadell more carefully. From the other room she heard her email dinging, but she ignored it. Flash was more important.
She nearly giggled when she read what Cadell had typed at the top of the page: The care and feeding of your personal K-9. She wondered if he gave that to all his trainees.
Flash looked up at her, forgetting his bone for a few seconds as he wagged his tail at her. He seemed so happy right now, it was impossible not to feel the same.
* * *
LATER, AFTER SHE had caught up on email and reopened her participation in the project, she felt a nose gently prod her thigh. A glance at the clock told her it was after eleven...and she hadn’t walked Flash since he arrived.
She put her conference on hold, explaining she needed to walk her dog. Hoping she didn’t get the slew of jokes she half expected, she found Flash’s leash. The dog gave one joyful bark, then stood perfectly still while she hooked it to his collar.
That was when it struck her how late it was. Ordinarily she worked well into the night, but before she hadn’t been afraid of anything. Now she was afraid. Her brother might already be out of prison. They’d given her the exact date, but she’d run the letter through the shredder as soon as the shock had passed. She wanted nothing with his name on it.
So today. Maybe tomorrow, but most probably today. Betty knew for sure because Dory had told her, but it was too late to call and verify it.
Point was...she was suddenly frightened of the night and its secrets, a fear she hadn’t felt in a long time.
She looked at Flash and saw him watching her, not a muscle twitching. He must have felt her abrupt burst of dread.
“I shouldn’t be silly about this,” she said aloud, not entirely believing herself. “I have you, after all.”
The slightest wag of Flash’s tail. God, the dog seemed to be reading her like an open book. Could he do that?
“I promised to take good care of you. I’m sorry I didn’t walk you sooner, but do you think you could manage with just a short trip to the backyard?”
He looked agreeable, but he probably didn’t understand a word of her prattle. God, she had grown so completely unnerved for no good reason. George, even if he wanted to find her, couldn’t have located her yet. She hadn’t even needed to leave a forwarding address, because she paid all her bills online and the rest was junk. She’d established no real connections here yet except the broadband and that didn’t have her full name on it. She was truly off the grid as far as the world was concerned.
She would be very hard to find, she assured herself as she began to walk toward the back door. “Flash, heel,” she said quietly, and he walked right beside her.
Besides, she had a guard dog. Flash would make George’s life hell. So she was safe, yeah?
She just wished she could believe it.
The night beyond the door felt pregnant with threat. But it was the same backyard that had been there when she rented the place. With a locked six-foot wooden privacy fence around it. She’d know if anybody tried to get past that.
And there was Flash, of course. Oddly, however, as impressed as she was by the dog, she didn’t know if she was prepared to put her life in his paws.
God, she was losing it. Stiffening her back, she pulled the door open and let herself out with the dog. Should she unleash him?
But Flash seemed to be reading the situation well. As soon as they reached grass near a shrub, he did his business, then turned around to face the house again. He sensed she wanted to get back behind locked doors.
Tonight she was in no mood to disagree, or to even try to reason through her probably unreasonable fear. Just get back inside and give Flash a treat. Tomorrow in the daylight she could give him a longer walk, even work with him.
But not tonight. She felt as if evil lurked out there, and she didn’t want to find out if she was right.
* * *
GEORGE NEEDED MONEY to travel. Everything else was on hold until he had more than the pittance he’d received at his release late that afternoon, fourteen hours earlier than he’d expected. But then, he’d been a model prisoner, and he noticed they’d dated the paperwork for the next morning.
But he didn’t have enough money to travel on or eat while he figured out exactly how he was going to deal with Dory. The bus ticket they’d given him was nonrefundable, meant only to take him back to the place where he’d originally lived—a small suburb of Saint Louis.
He’d been given the address of a halfway house, so he went there, arriving late at night, and resigned himself to spending some time figuring out how to get his hands on some money quickly. He sure as hell didn’t intend to work any of the low-paying menial jobs they probably would point him to. He had bigger things to hunt.
Even though it was late, with his release papers he got inside the door. They showed him to a bedroom and didn’t seem particularly worried that he asked to use a computer. The residents had one in a public room downstairs. Help himself.
So he did. He was too keyed up to just go to sleep. He’d dozed on the bus anyway. The only thing about this that shocked him was his surprising discomfort at not being surrounded by walls when he’d walked from the bus to this place. Not having his every movement watched or directed.
He’d never imagined the world could feel so big, and he suspected that once tomorrow began and life resumed out there, it was going to overwhelm him with chaos. He wasn’t used to chaos anymore. The order of his days had become deeply embedded over twenty-five years.
But so had sitting at a computer and hunting for information about his sister. She had vanished from the town where she had grown up. She was reputed to be a partner in a graphics business that had no address other than a web URL and email. The godparents who had raised her were dead.
He needed to know more about her than this, but he suspected if he called people around here in their old hometown he’d meet a brick wall. Well, unless he could somehow convince them he was someone else. Not likely. He feared too many local people might remember him. Maybe not young people, but the older ones who had probably devoured all the lurid details in the newspaper and on the evening news.
With that thought in mind, he headed upstairs to his room, where his bed was ready to be made. His own room. It had been a while. Not big, but bigger than a cell, without a cell mate.
For a little while the space bothered him, but then he settled down. Room was a good thing. If he thought back very hard to his early days in the slammer, he remembered how claustrophobic he had felt. No more of that.
Now there was infinite freedom.
He needed to remember how to enjoy it. To use it.
