“We sure did,” Amy said. And they actually had had a good time. Visiting the Cummingses was like visiting your aunt and uncle.
“I’d better get going,” she said.
“I hope the verdict goes your way.”
“Thanks,” she said, and went up the steps two at a time.
Dean Koontz. Stephen King. Robert R. McCammon. Anne Rice. Susan Kelly was stocking up on all her favorites this morning as she stood in the dusty little world of Half-Price Books, Crystal Falls’ only used-book store. When she died, she hoped that heaven had at least one used-book store. She loved these places.
She was a slight woman with dark hair cut to the shoulder, intelligent brown eyes, and a smile that was both innocent and knowing at the same time. She wore a man’s red flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots.
“You got yourself a new ’do,” Marie Sullivan said. Marie was a heavyset lady in her sixties who had apparently never heard about the dangers of smoking and obesity. Marie owned the bookstore so she got to smoke anytime she liked. And got to reach down beneath the counter of the checkout stand and sample one of the Russell Stover chocolates she always kept on hand. She usually wore a faded housedress and a festive little pink barrette in her short gray hair.
“Just cut some of it off,” Susan said.
“Looks nice.”
“Thanks.”
Marie raised her favorite inevitable subject. “Too bad you have to waste it.”
Susan smiled. “Uh-oh. I feel a speech coming on. Think I’ll head for the back of the store.”
“All I’ve got back there is romances, and I know you hate those.” She reached beneath the counter for a chocolate.
“So you haven’t found anybody yet, huh?”
Susan, having found what she wanted in the horror section, now moved to mysteries. The walls were lined with tightly packed shelves.
“Not yet.”
“I tell you about my friend in Iowa City?”
“The guy who runs the triple-X store?”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a nice guy.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
She bought a Dick Francis and a Lawrence Sanders and a Joan Hess and a Nancy Pickard.
“I’d probably do a better job than you, picking your next husband.”
“Meaning I haven’t done so well?”
“Two husbands before you’re thirty... you just don’t seem to have much luck.”
“I know,” Susan said. “The brazen hussy of Crystal Falls. That’s me.” She laughed at her own joke. There’d been a time when her reputation had bothered her. The women of this valley saw her as a destructive force... She’d married two of the most eligible men in this part of the state... and dumped them both. She was seen as a heartbreaker... and behind the closed curtains, women whispered about whom Susan would snare next. An upstanding married man? Maybe their own upstanding married man? That’s what the women feared.
“I don’t think Richie’s ever gonna settle down,” Marie said. “Not to be nosy or anything.”
“Oh, of course not. Who could think you were being nosy?”
“I mean, if I am nosy it’s only because I worry about you.”
In a weird way, Susan supposed, that was true. For all her gossiping, Marie was essentially a decent woman. Hell, Susan liked to gossip just as much as anybody else, so she could hardly fault Marie.
“I guess you could always get Steve Arnette to marry you.”
“I hate to remind you, Marie, but he’s already married.”
“Aw, hell, Susan. You know he’d dump that wife of his in a minute if you asked him to. The whole town knows it.”
And therein lay Susan’s conundrum. Richie McGuire, Steve Arnette, and Susan Kelly had all started kindergarten together. They’d been friends all the way through school. But around fourth grade, something ironic and terrible happened: Susan fell in love with Richie, and Steve fell in love with Susan. And it had never changed. Susan married two men to prove to herself that she no longer loved Richie, and Steve married a woman and had two children in order to prove that he didn’t love Susan any longer.
Things hadn’t changed any, either. She still chased after Richie, and Steve still chased after her.
Susan worked the big farm she’d inherited from her folks. She came to town three, four times a week, and every time she came she kind of cruised the streets looking for Richie. She was nearly thirty years old and she’d dumped two good husbands for the sake of her crazed, pathetic dream.
“Steve still has it in for Richie,” Marie said. “You ask me, it was excessive force, the way he beat up Richie.”
Richie had a drinking problem and a violent temper. Not a month went by without him getting into a fight of some sort. Three or four times, he’d beaten people badly enough to put them in the hospital briefly.
Steve Arnette was a cop who was also prone to violence. He would probably have been dumped from the force if his cousin wasn’t Senator David Cummings. Anyway, he’d tried to arrest Richie one night not long ago, and Richie had resisted. Steve had put a lot of damage on him. Richie, Susan had heard, was considering a lawsuit.
The front door of the bookstore opened, the bell above the doorframe tinkling.
Two women with armloads of romance novels came in and piled their wares on Marie’s desk.
Marie fell into an easy conversation with the two about a famous romance writer who’d done a signing in a Cedar Rapids bookstore. According to everybody who’d been there, the author had been pretty drunk, and occasionally abusive. She even told three women in the signing line to shut up because she couldn’t concentrate on autographing with the women jabbering away. Soon after, she had been whisked away by limo to the airport, where she was soon whisked away again, on to another triumph in Des Moines.
Susan checked out.
“Don’t forget my friend in Iowa City,” Marie said. Then to the two other women, “Trying to line her up, but she won’t go.”
But Susan could see that this pair was not as enamored of her as Marie was. This pair, in fact, judging by their steely gazes, did not approve of her at all. Crystal Falls’ leading femme fatale. That’s how they saw her — straight from Melrose Place and deep into southern Iowa.
Steve Arnette was leaning against her panel truck when she got outside.
“Hi,” he said.
“I thought you weren’t going to do this anymore, Steve. I thought we had an agreement.”
“Last I heard,” he said, “it was a free country.”
Steve was blond and slender and handsome. He had always been a heartbreaker in his own right. But there was an air of petulance about him that had become more pronounced with age, something of the whiner and the self-pitier. This translated into his violence. He had a terrible reputation as a cop. He beat people up whenever he got the chance.
He looked good this morning, trim in his khaki uniform.
“How about if we go out some night?”
She pushed him gently but firmly from the door and climbed inside. She leaned out the window and said, “Steve, you’ve got a wife and two kids. You should be spending your time with them.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s great hearing big moral speeches coming from you.”
She turned on the ignition. “I have to go.”
He reached in and seized her slender arm. “Maybe someday I’ll kill that son of a bitch Richie. And then you won’t have anybody to chase after anymore.”