Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [113]
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Red. “When Billie Fitzgerald wants to make a point, she does it cleanly. Like dropping her lease here.”
“Has she done that?”
“Yup,” said Red. “I got the letter from her lawyer yesterday.”
“Jesus,” said Libby. “What are you going to do?”
“Oh, I’ll just give the lease to Sunkist. It doesn’t make much difference financially, but Billie took such personal interest in the trees.”
“I wish I knew what’s going on with her.”
“I heard she’s moving,” Red said. “This might be her way of saying goodbye, by pulling back. But I don’t think she’d stoop to flattening tires.”
Red put the spares on both of their cars and threw the flats into his truck, then drove over to the farm to pick up Lewis’s and David’s flats.
To distract herself, Libby reclined on the sofa and wrote thank-you notes for all the baby presents that were piling up.
IN VENTURA, after picking up a large grocery and dry-goods order and buying a set of luggage and a Yosemite guidebook at the mall, Red stopped at a coffeehouse to buy a decaf latte for the ride home. He tried calling Libby from the pay phone out front to tell her that he’d solved the mystery of all the flat tires, but he kept getting the Round Rock voice mail after one ring, which meant she or somebody else was talking on the office line. He didn’t leave a message; he wanted to hear her reaction, that peal of laughter.
“You have reached Round Rock Farm for Recovering Alcoholics.” Hearing his own voice gave him a momentary chill. He remembered how this morning, half awake, he’d reached for Yvette—the first time that had happened. Luckily, he stopped short of speaking Yvette’s name. “Nobody can come to the phone right now.”
That strange lapse had startled him, accompanied as it was by a brief, involuntary shiver. As he and Libby made love—they did so now with harrowing gentleness—and later, too, while he waited for the grocery order, he’d had a quick, dark, icy taste in his mouth. “It is important,” his voice said, “that you leave a message.”
The girl behind the counter was close to Joe’s age, and not unlike Joe in other ways as well: long and limber limbs, ash-brown hair, that lovely pearly skin. The girl seemed stuck on the boy working at the cash register. They talked back and forth about some friend who’d won a swimming award. “Decaf latte,” Red said.
He could’ve sworn the girl dispensed the ground coffee for his latte from the same glass container she’d been using for all the other orders. Taking the cardboard cup from her hand, he said, “Are you sure this is decaf?”
“Decaf?” She twisted a silver hoop in her ear as if it were a hearing device. “Sure.”
Outside, Red tried Libby again. Again, the voice mail picked up, so he dialed the kitchen number at the Blue House.
“Blue House, Lewis speaking.”
“Just me. I’m heading home now, unless you can think of anything else you need.”
“We’re fine here,” Lewis said.
“Hey, I figured out all those flat tires.” Red had to tell someone.
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s that tire biter of yours.”
“What’s that?” Lewis said.
“That tire-biting dog of yours.”
“Gustave?”
“I left the farm today, and he chased me down to the stop sign the way he always does. You know how he hurls himself against the car? On a whim, I got out to have a look, and I could actually see the punctures, plus a little dog saliva. I’m not kidding. The punctures weren’t all the way through yet, but by the time I got to Rito they’d worked their way deeper and the tire was losing air. I had to stop and get Fritz to put in a plug.”
“A dog can puncture a tire? Are you sure?”
“Those incisors are designed to bring down running animals.”
“Never thought of that,” said Lewis.
“Listen, don’t say anything to Libby,” Red said. “I want to see the look on her face when I tell her.”
“Don’t worry” said Lewis. “I’ll leave that to you.”
ALONG the coast it was cool and clear, but the temperature rose dramatically once Red