Raising the Stakes

“I didn’t just sleep with Nora, I fell in love with her. She was a gentle woman with a kind heart and Ben—well, he just had no time in his life for what she needed.” His voice lowered. “She wouldn’t leave him. She said he was a decent man and that it was bad enough she’d broken one vow… Anyway, he found out. He came at me and I couldn’t blame him, so I didn’t do much to defend myself and he beat me up pretty bad. I didn’t want to leave without Nora but she begged me to go. She said she’d make it up to Ben, that he was her husband…but I could see the truth in her eyes, that she loved me, not him, that saying goodbye was going to break her heart but that she was a strong, decent woman and she’d do the right thing.”

Both men were silent, Jonas recalling the past, Gray recalling the picture of Nora Lincoln, the sad eyes and the resolute tilt to her chin. After a while, he touched his uncle’s arm.

“Jonas?” he said softly. “Are you all right?”

“Sure.” The old man swallowed hard. “It didn’t do her any good. Ben couldn’t forgive her. He divorced her. I didn’t know about it. Nora had written me off as a bad mistake and I suppose I was.”

His uncle stared over the meadows and gardens beyond the deck but Gray knew he didn’t see them. He was seeing another time and place, and a memory he’d carried inside him all these years.

“A few months ago, I heard from an old buddy. He talked about Nora, told me she’d had a baby after the divorce. Right after it, I mean.” Jonas looked at Gray. “And I need to know, son. Was that baby mine—or was it Ben’s?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Gray said softly, and his uncle laughed.

“Exactly. This girl in Las Vegas may be my granddaughter. If she is, I got to make it up to her. To her mama. To her grandma, too. Mostly to her grandma. You understand? If Dawn’s my flesh and blood, Graham, I got to do the right thing.”

* * *

The right thing, Gray thought hours later, as he stepped out of the airport at Flagstaff. What the hell was that?

He knew what it wasn’t.

Pretending he could just walk away from Dawn wasn’t the right thing. It was the biggest lie he’d ever told, even if he’d only told it to himself. She’d said she didn’t want to see him anymore and he’d let his ego do his thinking instead of his head.

She wanted to see him. It was in her eyes, even as she’d told him to go away. There had been something else in those haunted eyes, too.

Fear.

Dawn was afraid, but of what? Harman? That was a good bet. But of something else, too. He’d bet on it. Was her fear connected to the child she was supposed to have abandoned? He had to know the answer and she wasn’t going to tell him. But Harman would, he thought grimly, as he drove east from the airport at Flagstaff toward Queen City. He’d beat the answer out of Kitteridge, if he had to.

A hum of pleasurable anticipation raced through his blood at the thought.

He reached Queen City in late afternoon but he didn’t bother phoning Harman. Not this time. Instead he drove his rental car to that same gas station he’d stopped at before, bought a couple of bucks worth of gas he didn’t need and stood around talking with a kid working on a truck that looked more like an ad for chrome accessories than a usable vehicle until a fat man with a greasy bandanna tied around his neck came out of the back and told the kid to keep his mind on his work. After that, he drove across the street, went into the diner and ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie. The coffee was as bad as he remembered and the pie was worse, but the waitress—a younger one than before—was bored and friendly, and more than happy to gossip while she chewed a wad of gum and blew big pink bubbles.

Then he got back in his car, took Main Street to the end and followed a dirt road all the way up the mountain. Gray figured the man at the gas station might phone Harman to warn him he had a visitor after talking with the kid, so he wasn’t surprised to find him waiting on the sagging porch of a dilapidated-looking shack that gave cabins everywhere a bad name.

Dawn had lived in this place, he thought, and felt that knot of tension forming in his belly again.

He got out of the car, slammed the door and wasted no time on preliminaries.

“Kitteridge. You remember me?”

Harman’s sly grin curled across his face. “How could I forget you, Baron? It ain’t often we get such classy visitors in these parts.”

“I have a question.”

“Bet you do.” Harman strolled down the steps, thumbs looped in the waistband of his jeans, and spat on the ground. “You had questions last time, too.”

“You said your wife ran off and left you.”

“Yeah.” Harman gave a deep sigh and transformed his expression from sly to despairing. “She sure did.”

“And that she left her son.”

“That, too.”

Gray knotted his hands into fists. “That’s strange, because people in town say she took the boy with her.”

Harman spat again, closer to Gray’s feet. “People in town lie.”