Sidonie appeared with a cup of espresso, properly made. She was wearing only her bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower. As she leaned down to hand him his coffee, the robe gapped to expose the moist roundness of her breasts. Spencer felt himself harden. He smiled and took the cup.
‘Do you want a croissant or anything?’ she asked.
‘No, I’m OK.’
She was barefoot. The perfume of her shower gel was still clinging to her, the robe short enough to show almost all of her long, long legs. He wanted to fuck her there and then. Spencer considered it, considered how they’d do it. He envisioned laying the robe open on the deck to make languid love there in the cool Montana morning sunshine.
Reality snapped back like a rubber band as the boy slid open the screen door and came out on to the deck. ‘Can I use your computer?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Spencer replied irritably.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I said so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I said no. I don’t want you messing up my stuff on it.’
The boy stood there. He was small for almost ten. Like his mother in that regard. Spencer had found Phoebe’s petite stature a turn-on when they’d first met. He liked his women young and nubile and Phoebe’s small size gave her a perkiness that had made her seem more youthful than she actually was. That small size wouldn’t do the boy any favours though. Women always preferred tall men.
‘Will you give me some money then?’ the kid asked.
‘What for?’
‘A game for my PlayStation.’
‘No,’ Spencer replied.
‘Why not?’
Spencer swung his arm out wide. ‘See this?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s called the out of doors.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘So go explore it.’
The kid quirked his lip up on one side in a disdainful expression. ‘And I want to do that because …?’
‘Because it’s there. Shit, Tennesee, what’s the matter with you? When I was your age, all I had was the street to play in. I would have killed to have somewhere wonderful as this.’
‘Good thing you didn’t get it then, huh? Or you’d be in prison now.’
Exasperated, Spencer rolled his eyes.
‘Can I go look around the stores in town then?’
‘When we drove through Abundance yesterday, did you see that big shopping mall?’ Spencer replied.
The boy’s expression lit up with interest. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Precisely.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘That Abundance has three thousand people living in it and it’s ninety miles from any place bigger, so you’re lucky to get milk and a newspaper. And that’s why we come here, Tennesee. That’s what we like about it. Otherwise we would stay in LA.’
‘There’s a DVD section at the back of the Pay’n Save. I could take him there,’ Sidonie offered. ‘Maybe they have games to rent.’
‘Yeah!’ the boy cried.
‘Sidonie, stay out of this. He can fucking well entertain himself.’ Spencer looked over at the boy. ‘Go down to the barn. Guff can show you the horses.’
‘I don’t like horses. They stink.’
‘I don’t care. Go down anyway. Hang out with Guff a while.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s a cowboy.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘A genuine cowboy, Tennesee.’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘So that’s cool. Cowboys are cool. He can teach you how to be a man.’
The look of contemptuous ennui on the boy’s face did away with any need for an answer.
‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ Spencer said. ‘Normal kids would be grateful for all this.’
‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ the boy replied. Then he turned and went back into the house.
Chapter Four
They buried Jamie Lee on Wednesday morning. It was a bright day, cooler than the previous ones, but very still. The sky was completely cloudless and the air so clear that it magnified the mountains, pulling them right up close to the small party at the graveside, as if they were family mourners.
Abundance had two cemeteries. The new one out on the edge of town looked like a park. In fact, it was a lot prettier than the real park. An irrigation system pumped water up from the river so that its grass stayed green even in the hottest part of the summer and there were ornamental cherries planted all around the perimeter. Because of the rule about only having flat headstones, you would have never known it was a cemetery if you were just driving past it, except for all the vases of plastic flowers.
The old cemetery, in contrast, sprawled over a dusty, treeless hillside east of town. It was seldom used any more because the county stopped maintaining it once the new one was built. A rusty wrought-iron fence was all that separated it from the vast, wild hillside beyond.
There had never been any question in Dixie’s mind about where to bury Jamie Lee. She had loved the old cemetery all her life, if ‘love’ was the kind of word you could use about such a place. Its location high up behind the town gave the most panoramic view you could find that included both the river basin that cupped Abundance and the enormous mountain range beyond. Throughout her growing-up years, Dixie had regularly made the three-mile uphill trek from home to the cemetery. She’d spent many hours wandering in the crowded solitude, reading the tombstones and speculating on the lives of the people beneath them. In one place six young children from a single family had died of diphtheria in the spring of 1901. The six slabs of stone marking their graves were amateurishly hewn, the names etched crudely on the stone by hand. Dixie visualized a heart-broken father struggling with chisel and hammer himself because he was unable to afford so many tombstones made by a stonemason. In a different part of the cemetery, a child of four named Laura Mae lay beneath a most exquisite white marble lamb. When Dixie was young, she would stroke its nose, cool even on the hottest day, and make chains of clover to hang around its neck. At the far back of the cemetery where the earliest residents of Abundance had been laid to rest, there used to be an old wooden tombstone inscribed ‘Charles Turner, aged 23. Hanged Nov. 1889’ and nothing more.
Daddy had asked her once why she spent so much time in a place full of
