The Stranger and Tessa Jones. Christine Rimmer

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СКАЧАТЬ image filled his mind: Early morning. Cold. Astride a horse that chuffed and shook a dark mane. High desert prairie stretched out around him, shadowed but for the slender ribbon of orange sun at the horizon. Someone beside him, also on horseback. He turned to look and see who it was…

      The image vanished.

      He closed his eyes and let out a low moan as he forced himself to rise from his crouch. The pain, which came in waves that swelled and diminished, was backing off again and his stomach had settled down. He lifted his face to the dark trees overhead.

      Snow. As the truck driver had predicted. On his cheeks. His brows. His eyelids. He opened his eyes. Yes. Snowing. Hard enough now that it even found its way through the dense canopy of evergreen above his head.

      And the wind was picking up, rustling the branches of the trees, making high-pitched moaning sounds. He started walking again, putting his head down, doggedly, into the wind, staggering a little in the deepening drifts, pondering the idea that he was probably going to die and just cold and miserable and hurting enough that death was starting to seem like a welcome relief.

      But then, out of nowhere, he heard the strangest sound. He paused in mid-stride and cocked his head, listening, not sure if the sound was inside his head.

      But no. There it came again—something shattering. Pottery or glass or…dishes.

      Someone was breaking dishes? Deep in the Sierras in the middle of a snowstorm?

      The white flakes whirled around him. And then he heard a voice.

      “Bill. How could you?” A woman’s voice. Another dish exploded. And another after that. “I hate you, Bill. You lied to me.” More dinnerware crashed against what was probably the trunk of a tree.

      Forgetting for the moment about encroaching death, almost certain he must be losing what remained of his mind, he left the road to forge into the trees and get closer to the bizarre sounds. It seemed crucial, for some reason, to see for himself if there was really a woman out here in the middle of nowhere, a woman throwing dishes and ranting at some guy named Bill.

      Not far into the trees, he stopped. Maybe thirty yards from where he stood, the trees ended in a clearing. At the far edge of the clear space, he saw a small, wood-sided house with a steep, red tin roof, smoke spiraling skyward from a gray metal chimney pipe. He sniffed. The smell of woodsmoke came to him sharply. He should have noticed it before.

      And there really was a woman. She was alone, as far as he could tell, and standing at a point about midway between the edge of the trees and the house. No sign of the guy she was yelling at. Just her and a big box of dishes near her snow-booted feet, and her target: a broad-trunked cedar tree.

      Littering the fallen snow at the base of the tree were a thousand shards of broken pottery in a variety of bright colors, all swiftly being buried by the increasingly heavy fall of new snow.

      Sudden dizziness assailed the man, accompanied by another bout of powerful nausea. He braced himself against the nearest tree. Blinking to clear his head, gulping to keep from hurling whatever he had in his stomach onto the pure, white snow, he focused on the woman.

      She was tall. A big woman, not fat, but…sturdy. Probably in her twenties. She wore a purple quilted jacket and a striped knit hat with a pom-pom on top. Tendrils of blond hair escaped from under the hat, clinging to her red cheeks and bunching at her collar. Beside her, the card-board box held plenty more dishes where the ones she’d thrown had come from. They were all different colors, those dishes. A rainbow of dinnerware waiting at her feet.

      As he gulped down his nausea and blinked to try and clear the dizziness, she bent and grabbed up a plate the color of a sunflower. “You jerk!” She growled the words low in her throat. For a moment, he was sure she must be talking to him. But no. She stared into the middle distance, totally unaware of him. Crash. He winced as the plate hit the target and yellow shards went flying. She bent for another. “You promised. Promised.” She tossed a purple soup bowl. It found its mark and exploded. She grabbed two plates—turquoise and light green—one in each hand. “You said you’d be here for the wedding, Bill. I told everyone—everyone—that you were coming.”

      She fired one plate and then the other, so fast that the second hit the first. Bits of pottery flew in all directions.

      “But no,” she growled. “Oh, no. You couldn’t just come to North Magdalene the way you always promised you would. Uh-uh. Instead, you took a little trip to Vegas to try your luck. Vegas…” A dark blue cup and a shamrock-green saucer met their end. “You fell in love with a showgirl. And she fell in love with you. A showgirl? You?” Another plate flew and shattered.

      The man in the trees knew he shouldn’t be hearing all this. He should show himself or go. But he did neither. He held on to a tree trunk to keep from passing out, as the big blonde in the clearing continued to rail at a guy who wasn’t there.

      “Tell me, Bill. How does a skinny tour bus driver with a space between his teeth, a guy too shy to string more than two sentences together in the presence of a woman, end up married to a showgirl? You tell me, Bill Toomey. How does that happen?” She fired three bread plates—white, black and orange—in swift succession.

      As soon as the last one hit, she went on, “Especially when last September you swore, Bill, you swore with all your heart that you loved me.” She threw a pink serving bowl. “Me, Bill.” The snow swirled around her and the pom-pom on her hat bounced in sympathetic fury. The hair that curled along her cheeks blew across her eyes. She swiped it away and bent to grab more ammunition. “You swore you loved me and wanted to spend your life only at my side…” A cardinal-red dish met a crashing fate.

      The man in the trees was frowning. He muttered, “Another damn drama queen,” and wondered a second later why he’d said that.

      And then he stepped forward, although some remnant of a survival instinct within him cautioned that it was unwise to approach a furious woman with a box full of dinnerware and an excellent throwing arm. She might choose him as her next target.

      He walked toward her anyway, slowly at first and then faster, as the snow came down harder and the wind whistled in the branches of the tall, green trees. In seconds, as dishes continued to shatter and the big blonde with the bobbing pom-pom went on telling off some guy named Bill, he emerged from the shelter of the pines.

      She’d just tossed a serving platter when she spotted him. A yelp of surprise escaped her. “What the…?” She reached into the box and came out with a second big platter. She waved it, a threat. “Stop. Don’t come one step closer.”

      He kept coming. The platter was big and heavy-looking. If she hit him with it, it would probably make his headache a whole lot worse. But somehow, he couldn’t stop moving toward her. “I need…I…Please…”

      She raised the platter higher. “Final warning. Stop right there.”

      He croaked, “Don’t…” as in his head a thousand bells began to ring. “Don’t…” He put his hands over his ears, a move he knew to be pointless. There was no protecting his ears from the ringing. It was coming from inside his head. And the ice pick was stabbing in there again. He groaned as he felt himself slowly dropping to the ground.

      It took forever to get there. It seemed to him that as the ice pick stabbed and stabbed again and the thousand bells kept pealing, he drifted downward—floating, like a leaf or maybe a feather.

      Then, after СКАЧАТЬ