Authors: Robert W. Walker
He shook his head, climbed up on the back of his truck, sat on the lawn mower, and turned the ignition key. He drove it down the ramp and out onto the thick grass, where he began the chore he would normally have completed by now if circumstances in his life hadn't gotten so hectic this morning. Riding high on the mower, Kemper thought he saw something shiny and reflective off in the trees down by the lake. When he looked again, it was gone, whatever it was. Likely just the way the sun had spanked the surface of the lake right now, he guessed. Damn beautiful lake, and unless you were native to the area, you'd never guess it a man-made lake.
After a moment of feeling odd, as if someone were watching him, Howard began cutting grass in earnest, and whenever he did so, his complete attention went to the job. He and his machine became one; for Howard, it was a kind of Zen thing, cutting grass.
In what other profession could a potbellied, middle- aged man with no education or desire for one, with a pickup and the right tools, make a living riding around on his rump, enjoying the sun, the fresh air, the view, the squirrels, and the birds in the trees? The Zen of Lawn Maintenance. He thought it'd make a great book title and a bundle of money, a book like that, but he wondered how he could get it written. Mr. Brody, across the lake, was rumored to have made his money writing paperback Westerns and suspense novels centering around a turn-of-the- century Sherlock Holmes type. He reportedly wrote two books a year—living off advances and royalties. Perhaps Brody'd be interested in co writing the lawn maintenance book if Howard proposed dictating it to him, but then Brody seemed pretty disinterested in his own damn lawn, leaving all decisions regarding that green nuisance, as he called it, to Howard's judgment. Brody claimed to hate grass and anything smacking of lawn work. How does any man ever cultivate such an attitude toward his own lawn? Kemper wondered.
CHAPTER 19
THE HORSEBACK RIDING at an end, Lucas and Meredyth found themselves invited by the horse wranglers, brothers Jeff and Tommy Farnsworth, to dine on steaming-hot tamales, burritos, and Texas chili cooked up by the boys' mother. Lucas learned that they lived in a small house at the end of the property. They ate off the back of their pickup, the gun rack in the cab displaying a bolt-action Remington rifle that fired a ,223-caliber bullet at high velocity. Lucas began talking guns with the young men, telling them of his handgun collection, and bragging that he owned a U.S. 7th Cavalry eight-shooter hanging on his wall at home, one which had been authenticated to have been taken off one of George Armstrong Custer's men by a Sioux warrior at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. He left one brother fascinated, the other squinting and skeptical.
"Damn!" responded the younger brother, Tommy. "Could it be Custer's gun?"
"No, but it definitely belonged to one of his men."
Jeff skeptically said, "Custer fought the Sioux. How'd it get into your family?"
"Came down to my family in a horse trade. My grandfather recognized the value of the thing. He was a shrewd man."
The boys were duly impressed. "Sure would like to see it sometime." said Tommy. "Think next time you're out this way that you could bring it along?"
"Sounds like it ought to be housed in a museum," said Meredyth, "and not carted about like a baseball trading card."
"I keep it in a gun case, and I transport it in a gun box, not a cereal box, Mere."
Lucas wound up handling the Remington bolt action .223-caliber rifle, looking down its sight, testing its scope. "Do you know this thing is loaded?" he asked the brothers.
"Keep it handy for runnin' off the occasional coyote," said Jeff matter-of-factly.
"And sometimes, real, real early in the morning," added Tommy, "you get a fox messin' round the henhouse. Lost some good layin' hens to foxes. Really got Ma pissed off."
Lucas's large red hands caressed the length of the Remington, his eyes taking in its every line and feature. "Damned pretty weapon."
"It's good for two hundred and fifty freakin' yards," boasted Jeff.
"Bagged a lot of deer with her," added Tommy.
Meredyth had begun humming the tune to "Pretty Woman," and then began singing, "Pretty weapon...firing down the street... pretty weapon... the kind I'd like to meet...to clean one day... come what may...."
The men ignored her. "What do you carry when you're on duty, Lieutenant?" asked Jeff.
"A Police Special .38, Smith & Wesson on the ankle, but in my shoulder holster I carry a German-made Glock nine-millimeter semiautomatic."
"You got it on you now?"
"No, no. Left 'em up at the house, otherwise we'd get in some target shooting."
"Enough with the gunplay already," announced Meredyth, who then whispered, "Anyone would think you love your gun more than me."
"I hate to imagine what a good shrink might do with that," he replied, causing a snicker to erupt from Jeff. Tommy asked his big brother what was so funny.
Meredyth ignored Lucas's remark and said, "Are we or aren't we going fishing on the lake, Lucas?"
"Yeah, sure."
Jeff Famsworth replaced the Remington on the gun rack dangling across his rear window. Meredyth, looking off in the distance toward the lake, saw Howard Kemper puttering about on his lawn mower still. "Howard's working late," she muttered.
"Got a late start, 'bout an hour ago," said Jeff.
"What time is it?" she asked.
A glance at his watch told Lucas it was nearing six P.M. He showed her the watch face.
"We should see a beautiful sunset over the lake," she said.
Lucas offered her his arm, and they started in the direction of the boathouse. The closest neighbors were also on Lake Madera, but they were across the mile-wide water on the opposite shore. As Lucas and Meredyth walked off, behind them Jeff and Tommy shouted their good-byes.
Approaching the boathouse from a winding path leading away from the stables, they lost sight of Howard and his mower, but they could hear the motor growing fainter and fainter as it moved back up the hill toward the house and driveway.
Coming on a clearing, they saw that the gardener had done an uneven job of it, whole areas still thick and in need of cutting. "Got to be something wrong with Howard's mower," she said.
"Or Howard. Does he drink on the job?"
She playfully punched him in the shoulder. "No, not that I know of, that is."
Lucas watched the lawn man puttering about the back of his truck now, having climbed off the mower. Lucas had expected Howard to drive the mower back up the ramp and onto the flatbed of his large truck, but he simply shut it off and left it sitting alongside the rear tire in the drive. From this vantage point, looking up the steep knoll to the house, the spindly upturned rakes, hoes, and other garden tools looked like dead tree limbs reaching skyward, creating a bizarre mosaic against the darkening eastern sky.
Meredyth stared to where Lucas watched Howard grab some hedge clippers from the well of the truck, and slowly the middle-aged gardener began snipping away at the oleander bushes surrounding the house.
"Looks like he's fine, Mere. Just missed a section of grass is all."
"Damn, he's really hacking my oleander bushes all to hell. Maybe I'd better put a stop to that before we go out on the lake."
"Must know what he's doing. Mere. Isn't it true that the more you cut flowering bushes back, the more they flower?"
"I don't know. You're probably right." Her body language told him she opted for the lake over a confrontation with Howard Kemper. She now pulled Lucas onward toward the docks, and soon their shoes were making a pitter-patter against the weathered boards winding about the boathouse. On one side bobbed a canoc and a rowboat, and on the other, beneath the canopy of the boathouse, Lucas made out a motorboat hovering on davits just above the water.
She placed a hand over the switch that would send the motorboat down and into the water. "Your choice," she said. "I just want to enjoy the sunset from the lake."
"Rowboat. It's more romantic, and I can use the exercise."
She pointed out to where the fishing poles hung in the boathouse. adding, "And there's live bait in the cooler. We keep it stocked at all times. By the time we get out on the lake, the worms will've thawed, and you can count on their wiggling their behinds coming off hibernation. We'll have lake perch for dinner. You clean 'em, I'll cook 'em."
"Nothing better than lake perch," he replied, opening the cooler and staring at its empty contents. "No worms here. No ice either."
She looked over his shoulder, perplexed. "Must be those damn Farnsworth boys. They've emptied us of fresh bait and not replaced it."
"Forget about it. Let's just go boating," he suggested, replacing the fishing poles he'd lifted from their hooks.
As they boarded the rowboat, Meredyth continued berating the Farnsworth brothers. "Gotta talk to those two. I don't begrudge them enjoying the lake and using what's here while we're gone, but the least they could do is show a little respect for the property of—"
"It's only worms, Mere. Let's just enjoy the lake and the evening."
"You're right." She nodded, smiling. They went out on the water as the final rays of daylight began to wane in the west. Meredyth sat in rapt attention to the display of light, color, and brushwork across the sky created by the mix of sunset, cloud, and haze.
"Oh, Lucas, look at it!"
"Beautiful," he agreed.
"It's like a light show, like I imagine the aurora borealis to be."
"I've seen the northern lights in Alaska."
"Alaska, really?"
"Now there's a show," he said. "Looks like God's version of a Navajo sand painting, only in the sky."
"When were you there?"
"On a trip last year, one of those adventure travel packages that followed the 1890s Gold Rush from Skagway to Dawson. Want to do it sometime? It's a rough trip but great fun. We can see the lights together."
"I'd like that. I really would."
"Alaska's incredible, Mere, a religious experience."
Lucas had rowed them out to the center of the lake, had rested the oars, and had allowed the boat to drift and glide, going about in a lazy circle with the wind and the eddies. Meredyth had gotten comfortable, her shoes kicked off, and she now lay nestled into him, her back to Lucas, and he leaned into her and wrapped his arms about her. They watched the changing, lavender sky, considering each unique, evolving reflection that changed with each drifting cloud in the western horizon.
The wind had grown cold and biting, lifting Meredyth's hair into his face, and Lucas laughed as he struggled with it. The rowboat twirled now in the wind like a Disneyland Tea Cup ride. They laughed at the joy of it, Meredyth shouting, "Horray! Whoa!" as if on a roller coaster.
"Wind's really gusting. I'd better get control of this thing," he finally said.
"Why? Let it be. I love seeing the sky and clouds go round and round."
Something hit them a hard, teeth-jarring thud that shook Lucas's oars off their gunwale rests, noisily jangling the oarlocks.
"What the hell was that?" she asked.
They were rammed by something large and threatening, and Lucas wondered aloud, "Some big-assed Texas alligator maybe?"
In order to look around, Lucas hefted her up to a sitting position and they both gasped, simultaneously seeing a loose rowboat on the now-dark waters. The moon had disappeared beneath scudding clouds, and the lake had become a black mirror image of the night sky.
"What the hell...a loose boat."
"Happens out here on occasion," she calmly replied. "Looks like it tore loose from the Brody pier."
The boat had ricocheted off and was drifting away from them. Flies hovered above the little ghost boat, and Lucas began swatting a few that had jumped ship and come aboard with them. Getting to his knees and using an oar, he began pulling the errant boat toward them. "We'll run it back across the lake to your neighbors," he said.
"Forget it. They'll find it in the morning."
But as the wayward little green boat approached under Lucas's control, they both saw the flesh of a dead man under returning moonbeams, the dead man lying stripped and cold against the bottom, covered in squirming, feeding worms.
"Your missing worms... thawed out hours ago."
The worms covered the man's features, and his blood- soaked throat, where they slithered like miniature snakes in and out of a gaping knife wound zigzagging from ear to ear below the rugged beard, creating a second mouth that crawled with life.
"My God, it's Howard Kemper!"
"The gardener? That's impossible."
"Yes, it is!"
"Then who the hell was up at the house on the mower in his clothes?"
"It's her, Lucas! Lauralie! She's somehow found us!"
"I need you calm, Meredyth! Calm down. Get a grip." He held her shoulders firm in his hands, shaking her.
"And here we sit, literally sitting ducks, in the middle of the fucking lake, defenseless!"
"We can row for the other shore, get to your neighbors, call for help!" He lifted one of the oars and pushed off the boat that had carried Howard Kemper's worm-eaten body to them. He then lifted the second oar and began rowing desperately for the opposite shore.
"There're no lights on at the Brody place," she shouted, shaking the boat. "There's always a light."
"Maybe they're away!"
"No... they'd use a timer. Something's terribly wrong. She's been there...used their place to watch us...used their boat to come across to my house, killed Kemper, and masqueraded as him." She recalled the ferocity with which Kemper had attacked her oleander hedges.
"Then we'll break in at the Brodys, sound an alarm, get people out here one way or the other, and snare her in her own trap."
"She's up there in my house. God knows where...doing what? Making a special delivery of some sort. God, what I'd give for my cell phone right now."
"And my guns."
A muffled thunderclap came tumbling down to the lake from the house, followed by a second identical clap. "What the hell was that?" asked Meredyth.