Iris Avenue (5 page)

“Sam always comes back,” Patrick said.

“That he keeps leaving her is the problem,” Curtis said. “I know he had a bad experience in the war, and I know he has things to overcome, but there’s only so much a woman can be asked to bear. I’m afraid my girl’s at the end of her rope.”

“Hannah’s tough,” Patrick said. “She’ll be alright.”

“Every woman’s got her limit,” Curtis said. “Most men don’t realize that until it’s too late.”

Hannah left Fitzpatrick’s bakery and drove the animal control truck out to Bear Lake to look for a stray dog reported near there. She stopped at a small convenience store called “Roush’s Bait Shop,” which sold more beer than bait. There was a group of old men huddled around the ancient coal stove inside, smoking and chewing the fat, just like at her dad’s service station. They all knew Hannah, of course; before she quit smoking she used to join them on many a cold, snowy day.

Owners Fred and Fanny Roush were working behind the counter. Fred was running the register and Fanny was deep frying fish and chips for a lunch order. Fanny motioned Hannah back around the counter.

“Hi, honey,” Fanny said. “The fella who reported the dog said it had a collar but no tags, and was real friendly like. It’s hanging around the roadside picnic spot between here and Fleurmania.”

Hannah thanked her but declined the free order of french fries Fanny scooped up for her. Her stomach felt queasy. She bought a package of hotdogs to use to catch the stray.

Hannah had run into Hatch several times over the years. Fleurmania wasn’t in Pine County, but nevertheless, it was a small community out in the same neck of the woods, and Hatch was a fixture. Hannah kept track of him through local gossip, and she knew pretty well at all times what was going on with him. When he passed her truck at the roadside picnic area he turned around, came back, and parked his truck nose to nose with hers.

“Hey, you!” he hollered over the hill, to where Hannah was trying to coax a dog to come to her using a hotdog as bait.

“Hey yourself!” she hollered back. “You know this dog?”

The dog in question was a hound mix with big long ears and a dopey expression. He was standing on the other side of a shallow creek. Hannah could tell he was tempted by the smell of the raw hotdog but didn’t like the look of the loop lead she was holding. Hatch came half-walking, half-sliding down the hillside to stand next to her.

“I think that’s Hollis Marcum’s pooch,” he said. “Now, what’s that dern dog’s name?”

Hannah threw the dog a little piece of hotdog. The dog gobbled it up and looked interested in having more. She broke off another piece and threw it to the side of where she was standing, hoping to at least get him on her side of the creek.

“I’ll run up and call Hollis,” Hatch said. “If it’s his I’m sure he’ll come down and fetch him.”

By the time Hatch returned Hannah had the dog on the lead, and was dragging him up the hill.

“Come on, Randy!” Hatch said, and the dog leapt the rest of the way up the hillside, pulling Hannah toward Hatch.

“Thanks,” Hannah said.

“Hollis is on his way,” Hatch said. “He said he just left Friendsville, so he’ll be here in about a half hour. You want me to take him back to the station?”

“I don’t mind to wait,” Hannah said. “I have to fill out a report to justify my mileage and I’ll need him to sign it.”

“I’ll wait with you, if you don’t mind,” Hatch said. “It’ll give us a chance to catch up.”

Hannah put the dog in one of the compartments on her truck, and then sat with Hatch in the cold sunshine, on top of a picnic table. Hatch pulled out a rolled up pouch of chewing tobacco and stuffed a little wad in between his cheek and gum.

“I keep meaning to give this up, but at least it keeps me from smoking,” he said.

Hatch told her what was going on with his sisters and brothers, and about keeping his nephew. He told her about Marvin dying, and wanting to buy the station.

“I need twenty thousand dollars down to get the loan,” he said. “It might as well be twenty million. It seems a shame that an honest man can’t get ahead, and there’s my sister’s man covered up in money from selling drugs.”

“You ever hear about some big drug ring involving Theo Eldridge and the man who used to live with Maggie?”

“Sure have. They got this old lady what bankrolls the whole operation, likes to slit people’s throats and throw them in the river when they make her mad. Did you know your cousin Brian has a price tag on his head?”

“Same old lady?”

“One and the same. If he’s smart he’ll get as far away from here as possible, pretty dern quick.”

“How did you know he’s escaped? I only heard that this morning.”

“I hear stuff, you know,” he said, and shifted uncomfortably.

Hannah looked at Hatch and saw the gawky sixteen-year-old kid he’d once been. He had long, silky black hair back then and now it was buzz cut. He looked older and tired.

“You doin’ alright?” Hatch asked her. “Yer old man treatin’ you right?”

“We’re fine,” Hannah said. “We still live on the family farm, and Sam works out of an office there, doing computer stuff. I keep busy rounding up these old dogs.”

“You know I heard tell of a man raises dogs to fight over in Blacknell Furnace. I don’t cotton to that, no ways. You want the address?”

Hannah got out her notebook and took down the information.

“Now, don’t you go over there by yourself,” Hatch warned. “They’re a rotten bunch what tend to shoot first and ask questions later.”

“I won’t be called in until after they’re arrested,” Hannah said. “I just take custody of the dogs when it’s all over.”

“Well, like I said, I don’t cotton to it.”

“Thanks, Hatch,” Hannah said.

When the dog owner arrived, Hannah had him sign the official form before she brought Randy out of his container. The dog seemed glad to see him. She waved to Hatch and the dog owner and got back in her truck. She’d let herself get chilled, so she let the heater warm up the cab before she started back to Rose Hill.

As she waited for the cab to warm up, she thought about Hatch, and wondered how it was Hatch knew Brian had escaped when it was still supposed to be a secret, and how he knew so much about the drug ring his sister’s boyfriend was involved with.

She wondered what her life might have been like had she married him instead of Sam. She’d have helped him raise all those kids, for one thing. They may have had some of their own. She could easily picture him on the farm, and working for her dad, which was their plan before he broke up with her.

Funny, she thought, how life can turn out completely different than how you think it’s going to. In high school Sam Campbell was the star athlete who dated the prettiest cheerleader. Hannah didn’t think he even knew she was alive.

When Sam returned from the war with a broken body and spirit, the pretty cheerleader quickly decided this wasn’t how her life should turn out. Hannah was a waitress at the Rose and Thorn around that time, and served Sam beers whenever Patrick, Ed, and Scott could convince him to come out with them. He didn’t say much but was never rude to her. He sat with his wheelchair situated so that his back was to the wall, keeping one eye on the door at all times. He seemed painfully uncomfortable in his own skin.

After he’d been home a few months Sam started working out with the wrestling team at the high school. The coach had been Sam’s coach, and he and Patrick conspired to get Sam involved in “helping out” with the team. Hannah observed his mood began to improve and he started talking and laughing a little more.

One night in the bar Hannah and Patrick were giving each other the usual hard time about something, and Sam said to Hannah, “I don’t remember you being such a smart-ass in high school.”

Without thinking, Hannah retorted, “I don’t remember you being so short.”

You could have heard a pin drop in the few seconds of silence between the moment the words left her lips and when Sam threw his head back and laughed a deep belly laugh. There had been tears in his eyes when he stopped.

“I needed that, Fitzpatrick,” he said to her afterward. “Thank you.”

Hannah decided right then to make it her life’s mission to keep Sam laughing, and had eventually won his heart through her efforts.

Sam had undergone many years of therapy, both mental and physical, in order to recover from losing both his lower legs below the knee in an attack on his convoy outside Kuwait. He persevered through a strong will to survive and with the support of his loyal friends Patrick, Scott, and Ed.

After completing physical therapy, Sam returned to college on the GI Bill, and graduated from MIT with a degree in Information Technology. After a few years working as a contractor he started a network security consulting business he ran from his home.

Sam had a genius IQ and a fierce determination. Nonetheless, he occasionally succumbed to dark bouts of depression that strained the bonds of their marriage. About a month earlier Hannah had found a body in the deeply packed snow at the Rose Hill Winter Festival. Sam blamed himself for not being there doing the work Hannah was doing when she made her gruesome discovery, and for not being physically able to get to her when she needed him. After days of bitter fighting with Hannah, and suffering from a vicious combination of self-pity and self-recrimination, Sam had gone on a “business trip,” and had not been in touch with his wife since.

Hannah spent part of the afternoon crawling under a house on Lilac Avenue, retrieving some feral cats. The mother cat was a skinny gray she-devil who hissed and screeched at Hannah. Once she was in a crate, Hannah scooped up her two blue-eyed kittens: one gray-striped and the other gray like her mama.

The home owner agreed to look after the kittens until Hannah could find homes for them, even though Hannah was well known for leaving kittens with people temporarily and then never returning to pick them up. Hannah took the mother cat and kittens to Drew’s veterinary, where she left mama to get spayed and the kittens to get wormed and inoculated. Tired, dirty, wet, and cold, Hannah then headed home.

Wally and Jax, the housedogs, met Hannah’s truck at the top of their driveway. The farm lay in a rolling valley surrounded by hills, off Hollyhock Ridge Road, about ten crooked miles from Rose Hill. Hannah rubbed and patted her dogs as she walked out to the kennel where she kept her “inmates.” She only had room for six dogs and often found that many strays in a week. Hannah had thirty days to find each dog a home or place it in a no kill shelter before the county sent the local vet on rotation to put it down.

Hannah had a fair success rate, and was always looking for homes for the dogs that were well-behaved enough to place. Rose Hill was also infested with feral cats, which seemed to multiply faster than Hannah could catch, spay or neuter, and release them. There were a dozen feral cats in her own barn, and she tipped out some chow for them before she fed and watered the canine prisoners.

The four inmates currently incarcerated in her barn were pit bulls rescued during a raid on a dogfighting ring. Two of the dogs had been well-behaved enough to place in homes. The more severely injured dogs had been put down.

Hannah had been trying, with no success, to socialize these last four survivors so that they, too, could be placed in homes. They were like ticking time bombs, unfortunately, poised to go off in a frenzy of sharp teeth at the slightest provocation. Although she pretended otherwise, Hannah knew her socialization program for them was a complete failure.

After she exercised the dogs and cleaned their kennels, Hannah trudged back to the house, followed by Jax, a husky mix, and Wally, a border collie. There were no messages on the answering machine, and no e-mails from Sam on her computer. She turned up the heat and made herself a meal of scrambled eggs and toast, then gagged at the smell of the eggs and dumped them in the dog bowls instead. She sat at the kitchen table, eating dry toast and drinking some hot, sweet tea, thinking about what she was calling her “calendar problem.”

For a few weeks now, Hannah had thought she might be pregnant, something she first began to suspect when looking at her kitchen calendar right before Sam left. From the start of their marriage Hannah wanted babies, as many as she could pop out. Although they never used birth control she never got pregnant.

Tests taken early in their marriage revealed there was nothing in her physiology that would prevent her from having a child. She didn’t have the heart to ask Sam to be tested. After he returned from the war he’d spent a long, difficult time in a hospital, and had come home dangerously depressed. Hannah was afraid if it did turn out to be his fault they couldn’t conceive he would fall into another deep depression. So they didn’t talk about it. Hannah’s periods were not regular, and she sometimes skipped one, but never three in a row.

Hannah went upstairs to take a shower. After she stripped, she looked at her belly in the mirror. It looked as flat as ever. Her breasts were tender like they were right before her period. She’d been an emotional mess recently, but that could be because she found a dead body a few weeks ago, and then her husband left her.

As she showered, she let herself imagine being pregnant, and thought it couldn’t come at a worse time. She wasn’t sure where Sam was or if he was coming back. She certainly didn’t want him to come back because she might be pregnant. She tried to imagine what her life would be like without Sam and with a baby. She’d have to leave the farm, for one thing, and move into town, where she had family who could help. Furthermore, she couldn’t imagine crawling under a house to rescue kittens when she was eight months pregnant.