Dark Paradise Read online

  “Ride me, Luanne! Eee-hah! Ride me! Ride me! Christ all-fucking mighty!”

  The verbal commentary disintegrated into animal grunts and groans and panting that rose in pitch and volume to a vulgar crescendo. Blessed silence followed.

  Mari cast a glance heavenward. “Please let them be dead.”

  Heaving a sigh, she bent her head and pinched the bridge of her nose between a thumb and forefinger. She stood slumped back against the imitation mahogany dresser, half sitting, half leaning, still dressed in her wilted jeans and wrinkled T-shirt and vest. She couldn't bring herself to take her shoes off and walk barefoot on the grungy carpet, let alone undress and crawl between the sheets.

  She had turned off the single sixty-watt lamp on the nightstand, but the room was still bright enough for her to see every depressing detail. The relentless white glare of the mercury vapor light in the parking lot burned through the thin drapes that refused to meet in the middle of the window. Adding to the ambience was a dull red glow from the old neon sign that beckoned the road-weary to the Paradise Motel.

  There was nothing vaguely resembling paradise here. A ghost of a cynical smile twisted Mari's lips at the thought that Luanne and Bob-Ray and his amazing gearshift of steel would probably say otherwise. It was all a matter of perspective, and Mari's perspective was bleak. She looked around the room with its tacky appointments and ratty shag carpet, a fist tightening in her chest. She hadn't envisioned her first night in Montana being spent in a fuck-stop for truckers.

  There would have been humor in the situation if Lucy had been here to share the entertainment and the six-pack of Miller Lite Mari had hauled with her all the way from Sacramento. But Lucy wasn't here.

  Mari lifted a can to her lips and sipped, beyond caring that it was flat and warm. She had found half a pack of cigarettes in her glove compartment and had lit them all in a relentless chain that left her throat raw and her mouth tasting like shit. Her eyes burned from the smoke and from the tears she had been holding at bay all night. Her head throbbed from the pressure and from the effects of beer on an empty stomach.

  She had been too shocked to cry in front of J. D. Rafferty, which was just as well. She doubted he would have offered her anything in the way of sympathy. He didn't even have the decency to pretend he was sorry for Lucy's death.

  “Jeez,” she muttered, shaking her head as she pushed away from the dresser to pace slowly along the foot of the bed. “Now I want a man to lie to me. There's a first. Bradford, where are you when I need you?”

  Back in Sacramento with the woman he had dumped her for, the jerk.

  After two years of “serious commitment,” as he had labeled it, Bradford Enright had dropped her like a hot rock. He had already moved in with Ms. Junior Partner before he bothered telling Mari about her demotion. Their relationship had suddenly become null and void in the face of more advantageous opportunities. Ms. Junior Partner was more in tune with him, he said. Ms. Junior Partner shared his goals and his philosophies.

  Their parting argument played through her mind like a videotape that had been shown and rewound again and again over the course of the past two weeks.

  “What philosophy is that, Brad? Screw everybody and bill them for double the hours?”

  “Jesus, Marilee, what a bitchy thing to say!”

  “Well, excuuuse me! Getting dumped has that effect, you know. It makes me cranky.”

  “It wasn't working, Mari, you know that. It hasn't been working for the last six months.”

  “Coincidentally, about the same amount of time has passed since the iron bun joined your firm.”

  “Leave Pauline out of this.”

  “That's kind of hard to do, seeing as how the two of you have been playing merger games after hours for—how long now?”

  “It doesn't matter.”

  “It matters to me.”

  “I wasn't getting much here, Marilee. You're always too tired or too stressed or—”

  “You! You have the gall to complain to me about our sex life?”

  “What are you saying? Are you saying I didn't satisfy you?”

  “I'm saying I've had better orgasms by myself!”

  “Fine. Reduce the conversation to a gutter level. The bottom line is we don't have a future together, Marilee. We don't want the same things professionally or socially. There's no point in going on with it.”

  “Bottom line. You want to talk bottom line? Fine. Here's a bottom line for you, Bradford. You owe me about three thousand dollars for services rendered in my professional capacity. Would you care to cough that up before you pack your toothbrush, or should I bill the firm?”

  She would never see a dime of it, not that she cared so much about the money. It was the idea that burned her cookies. She felt used. He had taken advantage of their relationship while he had been struggling to get a toehold at the firm. I have to share a secretary, Marilee. Please, can't you just type this up for me. Just this once (twice, three times, eighty-five times). Don't you want me to look good? Couldn't you just help out a little with those transcripts? It would make such a good impression if I could have this done . . . He had treated her as if she were his personal, free-of-charge legal secretary. Now that he was moving up in the world, he wouldn't have to save pennies by literally screwing a court reporter out of her fees.

  She felt like a fool. How she had ever managed to fall for a lawyer in the first place was beyond her. No. That was a lie. In her heart she knew what she had been doing with the upwardly mobile Bradford Enright, and it was so Freudian, it was depressing. Her family had approved of him. They may have seen her career as a court reporter as being a giant step down from their expectations for her, but Brad had made a nice consolation prize. They could look at him and still hold out some hope that she would settle into the life of pleasant snobbery to which they were all accustomed.

  What a hypocrite she was. In her heart she knew she'd never really loved Brad. He was right: they didn't want any of the same things—including each other. She had gone through the motions, pretended passion, lied to him and to herself time and again by saying she was happy, when the truth was a partner at Hawkins and Briggs didn't come close to making the list of things she wanted out of life. The time had come to admit that.

  She'd spent too much of her life as a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. She'd spent too much time trying to fit into the lifestyle her family thought of as normal. She wasn't Annaliese or Lisbeth. She was Mari the Misfit. She'd spent too much time trying to atone for that. No more.

  She sold her court reporter's equipment, sublet her apartment for the summer, loaded her suits and her guitar in the back of her Honda, and headed for Montana. She had made no plans beyond summer, beyond basking in the glow of enlightenment. She was free to be herself at last. Born anew at twenty-eight.

  Still, all the self-revelation of the past two weeks didn't completely dull the sting of Brad's betrayal. Lucy would have understood that, having won, lost, and dumped an astounding number of men herself. She and Lucy should have been sitting on Lucy's bed right now in their nightgowns, eating junk food and trashing Brad, and then trashing men in general until they ended up laughing themselves into tears.

  Dammit, Lucy.

  Guilt swept through her, chasing a current of resentment. She wanted Lucy to be there for her. How selfish was that? She had a case of wounded pride and jitters over finally finding the nerve to stand up and be herself. Lucy was dead. Dead was forever.

  Feeling disjointed, disembodied, Mari sank down on the edge of the bed. She reached out blindly for the guitar she had propped against a chair and pulled it into her arms like a child, hugging it against her. She held it at an angle so she could rest her cheek against its neck. The smell of the wood was familiar, welcome, a constant in a life that had too often seemed alien to her. This old guitar had been a friend for a lot of lonely years. It never found fault in her. It never cast judgment. It never abandoned her. It knew everything that was in her heart.
/>   Her fingers moved over the strings almost of their own volition, callused fingertips of her left hand pressing down above the frets, the fingers of her right hand plucking gently at a tune that came from a private well of pain deep inside her. The emotions that fought and tangled like wrestling bears crystallized simply in the music. In just a handful of notes the feelings were expressed more eloquently than she could ever have spoken them. Sweet, sad notes, as poignant as a mourning dove's call, filled the stale air of the room and pierced her skin like tiny daggers.

  The tears came hard, almost grudgingly, as if she didn't want to give them up without proof that her friend wasn't going to come waltzing through the door with a smirk on her face. That would be like Lucy. To Lucy, life was just one big practical joke perpetrated on the human race by bored and cynical gods.

  The joke's on you this time, Luce.

  A dry, broken sob tore Mari's throat and then she was spent, exhausted, drained as dry as the gas tank of her Honda. She set the guitar aside and fell back across the bed, staring through her tears at the water stains on the ceiling. The silence of the night rang in her ears. The loneliness of it swelled in her chest like a balloon. Above her the moose from the starving-artist painting gazed down on her with melancholy eyes.

  She'd never felt so alone.

  Her dreams were a jumble of faces and places and sounds, all of it underscored by a low hum of tension and the dark, sinister sensation of falling into a deep black crevasse. J. D. Rafferty's granite countenance loomed over her, shadowed by the brim of his hat. She felt his big, work-roughened hands on her body, touching her breasts, which were exposed because—much to her dismay—she had forgotten to wear anything but an old pair of boxer shorts and hiking boots.

  Lucy lingered in the shadows, watching with wicked amusement. “Ride him, cowgirl. He'll let you be on top.”

  Rafferty ignored her. As he massaged Mari's breasts, he murmured to her in a low, coarse voice.

  “Man, Luanne, you've got the biggest tits I've ever seen.”

  She shivered. Her brain stumbled in confusion at the name. He pulled the revolver from the holster on his hip and fired it over his head. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Mari jolted awake in time to see the moose descending on her. She shrieked and brought her arms up to deflect the blow, knocking the painting onto the floor. The banging she had interpreted as gunshots in her dream went on without cease.

  Luanne and Bob-Ray were at it again.

  She tried to swing her legs over the side of the bed and discovered that in her fitful sleep she had rolled into the Grand Canyon of mattress valleys.

  “I think I saw this bed on The Twilight Zone,” she grumbled, trying to rock herself into a sitting position. “People fell through it into an alternate universe.”

  Wishing fleetingly she had stuck with one of the dozen aerobics classes she had signed up for in the last three years, she heaved herself out of the chasm and tumbled onto the floor. A shuddering groan vibrated through the room as the air conditioner kicked into high gear, blasting arctic air and the smell of mildew. The control knob was missing and the plug looked like something no certified electrician would touch without first shutting down power to the whole north end of town.

  Rubbing her frigid hands up and down her cold, bare arms, she peered out through the separation in the drapes to see the first faint pink tints of dawn streaking behind the snow-capped peaks to the east. At the edge of the parking lot, the Paradise Motel sign buzzed and flickered. Not a creature was stirring . . . except Bob-Ray and Li'l Sizzler, the Amazing Human Breakfast Sausage.

  “Goddamn, Luanne! You could suck the white off rice!”

  Mari groaned and rubbed her hands over her face.

  “I could never get enough of you, Bob-Ray.”

  “A sad truth that's been made abundantly clear in the last five hours,” Mari said through her teeth.

  “Well, come on up here, then, darlin.' I'll give you all you can handle.”

  Luanne squealed like a mare in heat and the banging—audio and physical—began again.

  Her temper frayed down to the ragged nub, Mari grabbed the Gideon Bible from the nightstand and used it as a gavel against the wall.

  “Hey, Mr. Piston!” she bellowed. “Give it a rest, will ya!”

  There was a moment of taut silence, then the perpetrators burst into giggles and the bed springs started squeaking again.

  Giving up on any hope of rest, she headed toward the bathroom.

  She hadn't taken in more than a glimpse of the town of New Eden on her way to Lucy's place. Coming back after her encounter with Rafferty, she had gone no farther than the motel on the north edge of town. Now she drove down the wide main street slowly, glancing at the ornate false fronts of brick buildings that had probably witnessed cattle drives and gunfights a century before. They were mixed with clapboard storefronts and the odd, low-slung “modern” building that had gone up in the sixties, when architects had been completely devoid of taste.

  New Eden had a rumpled, dusty look. Comfortable. Quiet. A curious mix of shabbiness and pride. Some of the shops were vacant and run-down, their windows staring blankly at the street. Others were being treated to cosmetic face-lifts. Painting scaffolds stood along their sides like giant Tinker Toys. Among the usual small-town businesses Mari counted four art galleries, three shops devoted to selling fly-fishing gear, and half a dozen places that advertised espresso.

  In the gray early morning, a trio of dogs trotted down the sidewalk and crossed the street in front of Mari, looking up at her but not seeming at all concerned that she wouldn't slow down for them. She chuckled as she watched them head directly for a place called the Rainbow Cafe. Trusting their judgment, she pulled her little Honda into a slot along a row of hulking, battered pickups and cut the engine.

  In keeping with its name, the front of the Rainbow Cafe had been painted in stripes of five different pastel colors. The wooden sign that swung gently from a rusted iron arm was hand-lettered in a fashion that made Mari think of teenage doodling—free-form, naively artistic. It promised good food and lots of it. Her stomach growled.

  A small, dark-haired waitress stood holding the front door open with one hand, letting the smell of breakfast and sound of George Strait on the jukebox drift out. The other hand was propped on a wide hip, a limp dishrag dangling from the fingertips. Her attention was on the trio of dogs that sat on the stoop. They gazed up at her with the kind of pitiful, hopeful look all dogs instinctively know people are suckers for. She frowned at them, her wide ruby mouth pulling down at the corners.

  “You all go around to the back,” she said irritably. “I won't have you stealing steaks off the customers' plates on your way through to the kitchen.”

  The leader of the pack, a black and white border collie with one blue eye and one brown eye, tipped his head to one side, ears perked, and hummed a little note that sounded for all the world like a canine version of please. The waitress narrowed her eyes at him and stood fast. After a minute, the dog gave in and led his cohorts down the narrow space between the buildings.

  “Moocher,” the waitress grumbled, her lips twitching into a smile.

  Someone should have captured her on film, Mari thought, her artist's eye assessing and memorizing. The woman whose name tag identified her as Nora was pushing forty, and every day of it was etched in fine lines on her face. But that didn't keep her from being beautiful in an earthy, real way. Beneath the dime-store makeup, hers was a face that radiated character, broken hearts, and honest hard work. It was heart-shaped with prominent cheekbones and a slim, straight nose, lean-cheeked and bony, as if the fat beneath the skin had been boiled away in the steamy heat of the diner kitchen. Her mane of dark hair was as frizzy as a Brillo pad, its thickness clamped back with a silver barrette. The pink and white polyester uniform was a holdover from the seventies. It buttoned over nonexistent breasts, nipped in on a slender waist, and hugged a set of hips that looked as if they had been specifically designed f
or a man to hang on to during sex.

  “This must be the best restaurant in town,” Mari said, clutching an armload of Montana travel books against the front of her oversize denim jacket.

  “You better believe it, honey,” the waitress said with a grin. “If there's a line of pickups out front and dogs begging at the door, you know you'll get a good, honest meal. No skimping here, and the coffee's always hot and strong.”

  “I'm sold.”

  Nora shot a discreet glance at the brown and white polka dot dress that swirled around Mari's calves and the paddock boots and baggy crew socks, but there was no flash of disapproval in her eyes. Mari liked her instantly.

  “I love your hair,” the waitress said. “That your real color?”

  Mari grinned. “Yep.”

  She followed Nora inside and slid into a high-backed booth that gave her a view out the wide front window.

  She deposited her books on the Formica table and forgot them as she tried to absorb everything she could about this first experience in the Rainbow. She had read every travel guide and tourist brochure there was anyway. One of her vows to herself when she had decided on a new life was not to let it speed past her while she was too busy trying to fit in. She had spent too much time with her nose to the grindstone, the world and its people hurtling past her in a blur. When she had decided to come to Montana, she had gone to the library and checked out and read every book available about the state. She had immersed herself in tales of cattle barons and copper barons and robber barons, and in descriptions of mountain ranges and meadows and high plains. But the Rainbow was the real thing, and she didn't want to miss a sliver of it.

  The air in the restaurant was warm and moist, redolent with the rich, greasy scents of bacon and sausage, and the sweet perfume of pancake syrup. Beneath it all lingered the strong aromas of coffee and men, and above it hung a pall of cigarette smoke. The tables were cheap, the chairs serviceable chrome and red vinyl that had probably been sitting there for three or four decades. Mari wondered if anyone realized the decor would have been considered trendy kitsch in the hip diners of northern California. Somehow, she didn't think anyone at the Rainbow Cafe in New Eden, Montana, would give a good damn. The thought made her smile.