Reno Rendezvous. Leslie Ford

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      Reno

      Rendezvous

       by Leslie Ford

       Reno Rendezvous

      Copyright © 1939, renewed 1966, by Zenith Brown.

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

      1

      Out of the enormous white letters scattered over the smooth dun-colored mountains of Nevada—as if some petulant giant baby had chucked the whole alphabet out of his soup—I at long last spotted the “R” that stands for Reno. But not before the blonde girl in black had put her tiny veil down from her smart close-fitting black straw hat and gathered her handsome silver foxes on her arm. It was the first move she’d made, except to order a sandwich she’d hardly touched. Through half a dozen states she had not turned her eyes from the tiny window at her side. The merry quips that even sensible people can’t resist making at the merest mention of Reno, and that the other passengers, all men, had been tossing off since one of them had asked me where I was going, had left her cold. We knew she was going there too; her parchment bag said so. And she looked it, some way—the set of her round jaw and the droop at the corner of her hard red mouth, and her fixed gaze out of the window.

      I’d been wondering about her, across the shining green corn carpet of Nebraska, wondering if this was another of what people call the tragedies of Reno. Not that she looked particularly tragic, or even unhappy for that matter. She looked moody and disturbed, but on the whole more like a gal who knew what she wanted and was jolly well on her way to get it than like any frail blossom broken by the iron heel of Life. Would Judy Bonner be like this, I wondered? . . . and for the three hundredth time, I suppose, since I’d got it two days before, I took out the cable that was bringing me, Grace Latham, widow—by act of God, not Court—to Reno instead of to Maine to spend the summer with my two boys as originally planned. It was from London, from my brother-in-law. From my husband’s sister Mildred’s husband, to be precise.

      “Judith in Reno divorcing Clem,” I read. “Urgently beg you go out and try make her listen to reason. Mildred in state of collapse. Nothing gained by her going out which she insists doing unless you agree go. Reports from Reno disquieting. Beg you go at once great favor me and Mildred.”

      And I was going—but the favor, if any, was to Judy, not her parents. I didn’t know what had happened to take Judith Bonner—twenty-two, and married three years—to Reno. I did know very well that it wouldn’t help to have her mother, who is probably the most charming and utterly silly woman in the world, out there in one of her periodic states of collapse, trying to persuade Judy to listen to reason. That in itself sounded pretty ominous. I’d never, some way, thought of reason and Judy in the same breath, or dreamed her parents would . . . though in the years I’ve known her I’ve been from time to time almost reduced to tears by her sudden young sweetness, and her almost childlike loyalty and honesty, and the stanch passionate little spirit that she wears like a banner.

      —And Clem, I wondered again? Her mother had collapsed because she married him, and was now collapsing because she was divorcing him. What could have happened? How would he be taking this? He’d been married and divorced before he married Judy. That was part of the disgrace that had reduced Judy’s mother to the point where she’d had to take a six months’ cruise around the world to put her on her feet again. Though that divorce hadn’t been Clem Bonner’s fault—or so I’d always understood. In fact I remembered, as well as if it had been the day before, Judy standing in front of the marble fireplace in her parents’ apartment overlooking Central Park, her chin up, her red-gold curls tossed back, her wide-set sea-gray eyes dark shining pools, saying quietly, “I’m sorry, Mother—but I’m going to marry him. I love him . . . and I do know what it means. It means everything’s all different, and everything I’ve ever done seems stupid, and empty. And he’s all there is! Oh, don’t you see!”

      I still remember her mother, weeping in the corner of the sofa: “But, Judy . . . he’s divorced!”

      And Judy, the light of heaven in her lovely sun-gold face, passionately loyal, defending him. “But it wasn’t his fault, Mother! She only married him because his family had money, and when they lost it she left him cold—just walked out on him! Everybody knows that. She married again the minute she got her divorce—the papers were full of it!”

      And I could still see Judy’s father, haggard and upset, torn between the two of them. “We only want you to be happy, Judy . . . not to make a mess of your life!”

      “I’m not going to make a mess of it! The mess would be if I didn’t! I love him—and I’m going to marry him! Nobody can stop me!”

      And nobody could. They drove down to Elkton in Maryland and got one of those people with the lighted signs on their lawn—“MINISTER, MARRIAGE LICENSE”—out of bed at two in the morning.

      So that’s why I was going to Reno . . . not to try to reason with her, but to keep her mother, who can collapse from anything from sudden death to underdone soufflé, from trying to do it; for I couldn’t believe that a marriage like that could go on the rocks without leaving bitter heartache.

      It seems strange now the way it all worked out. I’m sure I didn’t, when I left Washington, have the slightest inkling that anything more serious than domestic tragedy was waiting for me beyond the plains. I did telephone Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. Army, Retired, the night before I left; but I only did it because he was in San Francisco, as special agent for the Treasury Department on a counterfeiting case, and getting ready to leave for home. I hoped when I did it that he and not his man Friday—if that’s not too frivolous a thing to call Phineas T. Buck, First Sergeant 92nd Engineers, U. S. A., Retired—would answer the phone. But things don’t happen that way, not in my life. When I heard Sergeant Buck answer, it didn’t take television for me to see his lantern-jawed granite pan congeal and his dead fish-gray eyes narrow as he recognized my voice. Nor did his sinister tones saying “I’ll call the Colonel, ma’am,” in any way conceal the fact that he was thinking bitterly that not even a continent between us was sufficient to keep his Colonel from my designing clutches. For Sergeant Buck has long been convinced that no widow of thirty-eight can meet a man—any man, but especially one as engaging as his Colonel, even if he has successfully avoided the shoals of matrimony for fifty-one years—and not have definitely dishonorable intentions.

      And, of course, for her to telephone from the East Coast that she’d be in Reno in three days, and do stop and see her, was just to confirm Sergeant Buck’s worst fears and most horrible imaginings. I knew that from Colonel Primrose’s chuckle coming over three thousand miles of wire, and wished instantly that I hadn’t been so stupid, and had let them pass me somewhere in Nebraska, and given Sergeant Buck the pleasure of finding me gone when they got home. I was even sorrier I hadn’t, a day or so later.

      The blonde girl put on her gloves. The plane bounced gently, and taxied steadily to a stop. Outside, the hot desert air struck like a draft from a blast furnace. I stood there for an instant, a little bewildered in the general confusion. It seemed curious to me then, and I never did get used to it, about Reno, how so comparatively few people could make so much turmoil. There weren’t more than seven or eight there, milling about, all lit in varying degrees, shouting and screaming, waving good-bye to a girl with a spray of battered gardenias long enough for a gangster’s funeral on her shoulder. She was rather tighter than the rest.

      The co-pilot grinned at me.

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