White Lies (3 page)

By the time she reached a sign reading L
EAVENWORTH
, P
OP
2074, her mind had turned to her new future there, and she tried not to give the unsettling episode with the hitchhiker another thought.

“What can you tell me about this one?” Katrina asked, gently touching the leaves of a three-foot-tall strawberry plant.

“Oh, yes,” the bent, elderly woman said from beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat. They were walking side by side in the greenhouse out back of a nursery located in the heart of downtown Leavenworth. Dotted throughout the jungle of temperate and tropical plants were a good handful of fountains, sandstone statues, and garden gnomes for sale. The air was rich with the peaty smell of soil and the sweet fragrance of flowers. “We have several types of alpines. This is the white variety. Highly recommended since it doesn't attract the birds.”

“How do the berries taste?”

“The flavor is very intense. They need to be eaten soon after they're picked, as they deteriorate rapidly when they sit around. They don't freeze well either, but, my, do they make great preserves!”

Katrina was more of a jam person herself but, hey, she was always up for something different. She'd packed up her entire house and moved to a tiny village in the mountains after all. That thought still unleashed a whisper of uneasiness inside her. She hoped she hadn't been premature in deciding to come out here. She didn't think she had the energy or fortitude to start over yet again. Her nesting instincts were calling out to be heard more and more every day. “Okay,” she said. “I'll take this one also then.”

“Excellent! Now do you have a van, or a compact car? Because I can wrap your plants to fit—”

“Actually, I walked here today. If it's all right, I'll collect everything tomorrow.”

They returned inside and Katrina paid for her purchases. She scooped out several little fridge magnets from a bowl on the counter. One read
SAVE OUR EARTH, PLANT A TREE.
Another:
PLANT A LITTLE HAPPINESS.
The third:
I
MY MOM.
She added the first two to the bill; she returned the third to the bowl with a lump in her throat. A mother hen minus the chicks, that's what she was. It was slightly tragic.

She scribbled her signature on the Amex receipt and was just about to leave the shop when she froze. Outside on the other side of the glass door was
him
—the hitchhiker. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his loose jeans, his head down, his hair blowing in the wind. Katrina had only gotten a brief glimpse of his face before he'd passed by, but she knew she was not mistaken. She couldn't decide whether she wanted to chase him down and demand to know why he was stalking her, or run out the back door. In the end she merely stood there, second-guessing her initial suspicion. Stalking her? No, she wasn't thinking straight. It was just a coincidence. Had to be. Because even if he'd been crazy enough to spend the night tracking her down for whatever sick or vengeful reason, how had he done it? She'd told him she lived on Lake Wenatchee, not in Leavenworth. She'd never mentioned Leavenworth. She was sure of that. And it wasn't like someone could have told him a Katrina had just moved into town. She didn't know a soul in Leavenworth, and not a soul knew her. Unless—unless he'd contacted someone at the high school? No. Ridiculous. She'd only told him her first name. Certainly she hadn't told him she was a teacher. She was being paranoid.

But what was he doing here then?

There was only one answer. He lived here. Not in Peshastin or Dryden or some other nearby town. Right here in Leavenworth. Hell, maybe they were neighbors. She could invite him over for strawberry jam, and they could reenact their showdown on the highway for kicks.

Talk about starting out on the wrong foot.

“Dear?” the elderly woman said. “Is everything all right?”

Katrina nodded and left the shop. She glanced down the street, the way the hitchhiker had gone. A mother pushing a baby carriage. A rotund middle-aged man painting the sign outside his shop. No hitchhiker. She headed off in the opposite direction. The September sky was a bright azure blue, scrubbed clean from the thunderstorm the night before. The wind was sharp and crisp, carrying with it the hint of autumn. In the distance, behind the gingerbread-style storefronts, the snowcapped peaks of the Northern Cascade Mountains towered majestically. She turned off Front Street the first chance she got. Her earlier rationale aside, she couldn't shake the feeling Zach the hitchhiker was following her, ducking behind a mailbox or garbage can each time she looked back over her shoulder.

The bungalow she was renting on Wheeler Street was a quaint redbrick with white shutters and matching trim. It was set far back from the road and just visible through the branches of two massive Douglas firs and a ponderosa pine. The grass in the yard was shin high. The flower garden was dead. The ivy crawling up the front wall only reluctantly gave way to a large bay window. If she left it how it was, it would make a perfect haunted house for Halloween next month. However, becoming the town witch was not in the playbook, and with a little work—including the addition of the plants and flowers she'd purchased today—it would clean up nicely.

The reason she'd chosen this place, as opposed to something a little more up-market, was the space and privacy it offered. She'd spent most of her life living in tightly packed city neighborhoods. So when the real estate agent had mentioned a single-bedroom, single-bath bungalow on a four-acre lot, she'd driven down the following day for an in-person inspection, quickly snatching it up. Her little slice of nature, she'd thought then, and now.

Katrina followed the stone pavers to the front porch, unlocked the door, and stepped inside the foyer, closing the door again behind her. As an afterthought, she peeked through the beveled
glass in the door. The street was empty in both directions as far as she could see.

She slid the deadbolt solidly into place.

Unpacking.

That's how Katrina spent the remainder of the afternoon. Unpacking and making the house as comfortable as possible with the few belongings she'd managed to cram into the Honda. She placed her favorite African wood carvings around the living room and plugged her stereo system into a wall socket—leaving the stereo sitting on the floor, as there was no table to set it on. As she looked around at all the beige walls and empty floor space, she realized she was going to have to go on an even more extensive shopping spree than she'd originally planned. She greeted the prospect with a spark of excitement. Unlike many other small towns, whose main streets were lined with mom-and-pop diners and barbershops advertising ten-dollar haircuts, Leavenworth's Front Street was a string of pearls boasting fashionable clothing shops, specialty cheese and wine boutiques, and chic galleries. Not to mention its exotic foreign vibe, thanks to the authentic European architecture and store names such as Das Meisterstruck and Haus Lichtenstein.

After the Depression some eighty years ago, the Great Northern Railway Company had rerouted its railroad and the sawmill had subsequently closed, destroying the lumber industry and leaving Leavenworth little more than a ghost town. Thirty years onward, however, entrepreneuring—or desperate—community leaders concocted a plan to remodel their ailing hamlet into the form of a Bavarian village, complete with traditional festivals such as the Autumn Leaf Festival and the Christmas Lighting Ceremony. Consequently, Leavenworth was now a medieval-themed village that attracted over a million tourists a year. All that was missing were chubby men with dodgy facial hair dressed in lederhosen. And as far as Katrina was concerned, it was a refreshing contrast from the pollution and noise and general big cityness of Seattle. She did hope it had a good coffee shop though.

By five o'clock she was getting ravenous. Who would have
thought unpacking could work up such an appetite? She decided to open the last two boxes in front of her, then make something to eat for dinner, maybe the salmon she'd picked up today from Headwater Inn Grocery. Salmon with ginger sauce and steamed jasmine rice. Sounded good to her. She cut the masking tape that sealed the first box and extracted some paperbacks she hadn't read yet, a folder that contained recent credit card receipts, more books, and a thick pile of cards bound by an elastic band. The sympathy cards she'd received after Shawn's funeral. She'd donated all of Shawn's personal belongings of value to the Salvation Army, then disposed of anything else related to him except those items of sentimental worth. These she'd given to his parents. But she hadn't been able to let go of the cards. She needed to move on with her life, yes, understood. However, she also needed to keep at least one reminder of the man to whom she'd been engaged to marry. To erase him categorically was not therapy. It was cruelty— to the memory of the person and fiancé he'd been.

The second box contained her MacBook, a black nylon case that held her CD collection—Chopin, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and the gang, as well as some acid jazz and early rock—a bunch of wires the purpose of which she wasn't exactly sure, and her digital camera, a high-tech toy that had gotten very little use lately. Tucked down at the very bottom of the box were a number of framed photographs. She lifted them out. The top one was of her as a child: blue eyes bugging out of her heart-shaped face, blonde hair tied back in pigtails. She stared at the photo with the rusty, aged feeling you got when you reminisced. Her life seemed to flash before her eyes, her ups and downs, her moments of joy and sorrow, and out of the jumble of images emerged one long-forgotten memory, a show-and-tell session back in elementary school. A boy in her class named Greg—Greg something, something Greek—had shown a Japanese anime magazine his father had brought back from a business trip to Tokyo. Katrina's classmates had all seemed to think the girls in the comic-book pictures bore a striking resemblance to her, and for the rest of the year everybody teased her by calling her “Japrina.” She remembered only pretending to be insulted, because
she secretly enjoyed being compared to the beautiful anime girls with their bright eyes and colorful hair. She told Shawn the story on one of their first dates, and he surprised her over dinner a few days later with a Sailor Moon doll. Later that same evening, tipsy from a bottle of wine, they both agreed that some twenty-odd years down the road the likeness was still apparent.

She had thrown the doll out with the rest of his gifts to her.

Therapy that time, not cruelty.

The remaining pictures were of her close friends. Martha McGee, a happy Mrs. Cleaver with two young boys. Pamela Doherty, a New York City publishing manager who was currently on maternity leave and whose baby shower Katrina would be attending in the near future. And her best friend, Bianca Silverstein, a marketing executive for a big Seattle-based advertising company. Bianca was single but had a nine-year-old girl from a previous marriage to her high school sweetheart. Katrina felt that nesting urge once more, stronger than ever.

The last picture, larger than the rest and in a heavy silver frame, was of her parents, their arms around one another, happy, loving, the whole nine yards. Like Shawn, they had left her much too early. Unlike Shawn, they had not died peacefully but in an explosion of metal and glass. It happened two weeks before Christmas in 2002. Katrina had been working on her teacher certification degree at the University of Washington. She had been summoned from the lecture hall to the dean's office, where the dean had explained that her parents had been driving along State Route 99 just outside of Everett that morning when they'd hit a Shiras moose. The collision killed them instantly. Katrina had never before or again experienced such a ruthless emotion as the one that had clubbed her that morning, not even when Shawn died, because she'd at least had time to prepare for his sad fate. The dean wouldn't go into any more detail, but she later learned her parents' sedan took out the adult bull's legs, hurtling the seven-and-a-half-foot tall beast straight through the windshield. The impact crushed her mother's rib cage and vital organs, as well as broke her neck and back. A tine from the velvet antlers pierced
her father's chest, going straight through his heart and pinning him to the seat.

Katrina switched off the memory, banishing it for now, something she had become very good at over the years. She tried to bring up some pleasant ones of her parents, but she couldn't focus on any for longer than a few seconds before they wavered and broke up, like mirages. Unfortunately, they seemed to be getting more and more vague and insubstantial with the passing of time. She feared one day they may disappear forever. It wasn't fair, she'd always thought, at how the bad ones remained vivid while the good ones faded away.

Bandit, ever attuned to her rollicking emotions, padded over from where he'd been lying next to the fireplace. He flopped down beside her. She scratched his head, grateful for his company.