A Rendezvous to Die For (19 page)

Then, without warning, I lost my
balance and tumbled backward onto the driveway. My arm shot out to
break the fall and, somehow, my finger hit a button that activated
the flash. An instantaneous flash of light burst forth from the
camera. Immediately, the voices inside stopped. Someone shouted from
the front door. “Turn on the damn yard light!”

I skittered behind the vehicle.
Light flooded the yard.

“
I tell you, I saw a light out
here,” Strothers said. I could hear him clomp down the few porch
steps and start cross the yard. I moved cautiously to the rear of the
SUV, praying that he was making too much noise to hear me. I couldn’t
make it to the barn shadows undetected. I had to stay close to the
vehicle.

“
Bring me a flashlight,”
Strothers ordered. He stood in the yard waiting for the light. A
minute later, he shined it around the yard, finally turning the light
toward his SUV. The beam lit up the area around the driver’s side
and moved to the back. I willed myself to blend into the side of the
vehicle. I cringed, terrified, as gravel crunched beneath his boots.
Three more steps. That’s all I had. He’d be on my side of the
vehicle.

BOOM
! Pop. Pop. Pop
. Just
as the light swung in my direction, fireworks rocketed into the sky
over the tree line. “Aw, hell,” one of the men said. “It’s
close to July 4th. Someone’s just shooting off a few rockets.
That’s the light you saw. Come on back to the house.”

I could hear Strothers spin
around and knew he was watching the last remaining sparks in the sky.
The sound of his footsteps heading back toward the house was a
welcome one. I took my first breath in minutes.

“
I’m all through for
tonight,” he said. “Follow up on what we talked about, and let me
know what’s going on by the end of the week. Don’t disappoint
me.” The porch door banged shut and, before I could take one step
toward freedom, I could hear Strothers stride toward the front of his
vehicle. I scooted to the rear. Once inside his vehicle, he started
the engine. He put the car in gear and started to back up to make a
U-turn. Feeling desperate, I grabbed the spare-tire frame mounted on
the back of the door, and fly-like, planted my feet on the back
bumper. As the vehicle rumbled down the driveway, I held on tightly,
praying all the while—
God,
don’t let me be visible to the men on the porch.

Fortunately, they had other
things on their minds. We were less than fifteen feet from the house,
when the yard light was turned off. We were plunged into darkness
again. When the SUV slowed to go up an incline, I let go and fell
back onto the end of the driveway, landing on my left side. The
gravel bit into my bare skin. Quickly, I rolled into the ditch. A
full minute later, I dared to sit up and access the damage. Nothing,
including my camera, appeared to be broken.

Not until I was halfway home did
I remember that my wadded-up shirt was lying in the dirt of the
farmhouse yard. My mouth went dry. What were the odds they’d find
the shirt? More to the point, what were the chances they’d hand it
over to Strothers and he’d recognize it as mine? The chances were
good, on all counts. For the first time, I regretted that my
red-shirt uniform was so easily identifiable.

As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t
wait until morning to see the results of my escapade. I had to spend
time in the darkroom immediately. An hour later, I examined the first
photo. All I saw was an indistinct blob. Ditto for photos two through
four. “Damn!” I had wasted my entire evening and lost a few
patches of skin for a dangerous stunt that yielded nothing. Worse, I
had left incriminating evidence behind.

Chapter
18

Friday—Week
Two

I awoke by 6:15 a.m., determined
to tease something out of the dismal digital images I’d downloaded
the night before. Again, three indistinct splotches filled the
thumbprint squares. Not good. Not completely disheartened, I turned
to my computer software for assistance. It had performed miracles
before. I saved the photos and clicked on Photoshop.

For several minutes, I
manipulated the first image for brightness and contrast, hoping to
work some magic on the dark smudge that filled my screen. As I viewed
the black blob, I relived my nighttime adventure. In my mind’s eye,
I saw my shirt lying in the driveway waiting to be discovered. A cold
chill ran through my body. I’d acted on impulse, something I’d
been prone to do most of my life. But this time, spying on a possibly
dangerous man, in the middle of the night and at a remote farmhouse,
was far more foolhardy than anything I’d ever done. There
would
be a consequence to pay. What kind, I couldn’t imagine.

Forcing myself to keep working, I
saved the changes to a hopelessly indistinct “Photo #1” and
opened “Photo #2.” I reduced the brightness by ten percent and
increased the contrast.

A lifetime of acting impetuously
hadn’t turned out so badly, I decided, while attempting to console
myself. A string of impulses several years ago had factored in
putting me where I was—in front of my computer, trying to bring
some resolution to the damnably indistinct images. My mind drifted
back to the Insignia Club, a tiny bar-restaurant outside Minneapolis.
I’d landed there as a waitress after a couple of years at the
stables in Ridge Spring. Scott had landed there, too, snagging a solo
guitar-playing gig on Friday and Saturday nights. The guy had
mesmerized me from the get-go and the attraction was mutual. One
thing led to another, and when Scott left town for New York, I
followed him on a Greyhound bus a week later.

Life in New York was exciting. I
found another waitressing job and, on the weekends, I basked in the
reflection of Scott’s growing popularity as he played to
ever-increasing rave reviews. After six months, it seemed like a good
idea to get married. So we did.

I loved being Mrs. Scott LeCaro.
I loved the friends we made, who were mostly other musicians and
waiter-types hoping to make it big in something besides waiting
tables. Life was good. Life was fun. After a year, my Scott—who was
now dubbed by music writers as a “steel-string master of beguiling
chords and fast progressions,”—decided to take his show on the
road. I stayed in New York, at least at first, and waited for him to
come back.

Bored, I saw an ad to study
photography with master photographer and teacher Jules Antoine and
remembered how important taking pictures had been for me in high
school. I scraped together my waitressing tips and enrolled in one of
Jules’ one-on-one classes. That was when my picture taking took on
a new dimension and photography became a passion. I prowled the
streets of New York taking black and white photos with an
old-fashioned Rolleiflex 6 x 6 that I’d picked up cheap in a
secondhand store. Although I’d moved up to more high-tech cameras,
I still relied on my old Rollei to get special black and white
effects.

Jules was a master photographer
of people. He made amazing art out of men and women going about their
daily business, translating his emotions into visual form. He taught
that a curious, caring approach allows one to open up to the camera.
I applied his principles, not only in my “artsy” photographs, but
in my wedding ones as well. I’d always wanted to turn Jules loose
at one of my Minnesota weddings, to see how he would turn trite,
posed pictures into interesting, alive art. The fact that my wedding
business increased every year, while featuring unstaged pictures,
suggested I’d been reasonably successful. At any rate, some of my
more incautious actions had put me on a pretty good track. If I
hadn’t acted on impulse, I’d probably still be waiting tables.

Photoshop was teasing me as
insistently as Strothers’ SUV had tempted me in the driveway of the
farmhouse. I couldn’t hope for perfection, given the circumstances,
but maybe I’d find something I could use. Photo #2 was dark, as
expected. I manipulated it as much as I could, pulling out every
trick for brightness, contrast, and balance. No luck. I couldn’t
bring up any image at all. When I added brightness to the third
photo, however, a few lines began to take shape. Unable to figure out
what I was seeing, I added some contrast, zooming in as far as I
could go without losing the focus. A series of lines emerged, but I
couldn’t tell if the lines were scratches or something else. I
printed the enlarged image to get a better look. Taking the paper off
the printer, I pinned it to the wall and stepped back. I was looking
at vertical lines that could or could not be scratches.

Great. I had risked life and
limb, and this was all I had to show for it. So much for my midnight
caper. My detective skills had a long way to go.
Better not quit
your day job, Cassandra,
I thought, while toting my empty coffee
cup back into the kitchen.

It was only 8:20 a.m., but I set
about spending the next hour industriously dusting and pushing the
vacuum over the floors and carpeting. Whoever my parents were, they
hadn’t passed down a cleaning gene to their daughter. I cranked up
the CD player, hoping to drown out depressing thoughts with music
from the Chicago soundtrack, stuffed another load into the washer,
and plodded over to the closet for my meager housecleaning supplies.
I worked in tempo to “When You’re Good to Mama,” and, at least
temporarily, shelved images of myself decked out in prison orange.

As I transferred my first load of
wash to the dryer and threw my jeans into the washer, something
clinked against the bottom of the washer. I felt around for the
errant quarter or dime I must have missed when going through the
pockets. It wasn’t a coin or even a big button. To my utter
surprise, it was a hundred-dollar CF memory card from my digital
camera. I stared at it, bringing the palm of my hand closer to my
face. What was on the chip? I couldn’t remember misplacing any
wedding pictures. I stuffed the card into the pocket of my shirt and
packed the rest of my jeans into the washer. Then, curiosity
outstripping my need to do any more cleaning, I took the card to my
office.

Once I had
fired up my Mac, I fed the errant card into the card reader. I
punched “Import Photos” on my computer and dozens of thumbnail
images filled the screen. Pictures of buckskin- and calico-clad
characters emerged. Ah, a card I’d shot up at the Rendezvous. I
vaguely remembered slipping it into the watch pocket of my jeans and
replacing it with a new one when I returned to my vehicle while
waiting for the tomahawk competition to start.
I’d
taken so many photos at the Rendezvous, I hadn’t missed the shots
on this wayward card.

The photos made me smile despite the Rendezvous turn of events.
Hundreds of local citizens had earnestly tried to turn back the clock
for one weekend out of their busy twenty-first century lives. I went
to work creating files for separate categories.
Trades-people—silversmiths, leather workers, blacksmiths—went
into one file. The tomahawk-throwing competition got its own.
Children went into another. I created files for women, gear,
campsites, and goods.

With most of the photos
categorized, I looked more closely at the dozen left over. I had
snapped several to simply fill up the disc on the way to the parking
lot for new batteries. I zoomed in on them, one by one, to see if
they would fit into one of the other categories, or if they even
deserved to be saved. Pictures of vehicles in a parking lot left me
cold, creatively speaking.

After reviewing a half dozen
mind-numbing photos, I was ready to tuck the rest, unviewed, into a
catchall category, when a few marks on a pickup door caught my eye.
Zooming in on the vehicle’s door, I saw why they seemed familiar.
They were the same lines I had photographed in the farmyard! In this
photo, however, the lines were clearly part of a company logo . . .
Bridgewater Land Development Company.

My heart was playing a drum solo
as a startling thought reached my consciousness. A Bridgewater truck
in the Rendezvous parking lot could place Strothers at the event! The
photo might be enough to convince Shaw of the value in investigating
him and dropping his focus on me. My hand trembled as I reached for
the phone and punched in Jack’s number. No one answered at the
stables. I punched in his cell phone number.
He answered on
the first ring. “Jack, where are you?” I practically shouted into
the phone. “I tried calling you at the stables.”

“
I’m just coming in from the
pasture,” he said, audibly breathless. “I’m about to ride out
to look for Jim Tuttle, Frank Kyopa’s nephew.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
He’s been missing for
several days.”

“
Is . . . is that unusual?”

“
He’s sometimes gone for a
couple of days to tend a trap line, but he didn’t show up for his
job as county dispatcher and that’s not like him. I’m worried.”

“
I have something I need to
talk to you about, Jack. If you saddle Midnight for me, I’ll ride
with you. Please wait for me.” A half hour later, I was seated on
Midnight’s back. I suggested we search in a direction where I
hadn’t ridden before.

“
It’s kind of wild in there,
Cass,” Jack said, eying the heavy brush. “I don’t think we
should . . . .”

But Midnight had committed
himself. We followed the faint trace of a path that led to somewhere
in the middle of the island. Sometimes the trail was so narrow,
branches threatened to pull me out of the saddle. I filled Jack in on
finding Strothers’ truck in the photos.