Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,93

the apex.”

After a moment, Mrs. Wish nodded and proclaimed, “Then it stays. If you’d please hand me that folder, though, while you’re up there.” She murmured something vague about “important documents” and “setting my affairs in order” and tucked the Reagan folder inside her robe like she was robbing a bank.

Tean carried the dining chair back to the front room, with Mrs. Wish dogging him.

“Violet will be very sorry to have missed you,” Mrs. Wish said. “She’ll be here in a couple of hours.”

Tean smiled and nodded.

“I’ll send her over with a plate of cookies.”

“That’s really not necessary.”

“She’s already got age lines, unfortunately,” Mrs. Wish said, tracing them on her own forehead to illustrate. “But I imagine if you squint, or perhaps if you close your eyes when you kiss her, they won’t bother you too much.”

“Uh. Yes. Well—”

“Twenty-seven, poor dear. Practically a spinster. We tell everyone she’s twenty-five because it’s just too embarrassing otherwise.”

Edging toward the doors, Tean nodded.

“I think she’s had the one dead tooth fixed,” Mrs. Wish was explaining, “so you won’t be bothered by that, at least.”

“I hear Scipio barking,” Tean said, throwing open the door. “I’ve got to run.”

“I don’t hear—”

But he was already sprinting down the hall.

When Tean let himself into the apartment, Scipio was waiting for him, pressing a cold nose against his arm, snuffling, trying to scent out all of the Irreconcilables that had dared get too close. Tean thought of Mrs. Wish’s granddaughter coming over with a plate of cookies that were the sugary equivalent of hard tack. He grabbed Scipio’s harness and asked the Lab, “What do you think about another walk? A really long one, this time?” The dog park, he thought, was far enough away to be safe.

2

“People suck,” Tean said, letting Scipio off the leash. The dog park was busy on Friday afternoon, and Scipio ran off to join Bear, a hundred-and-thirty-pound St. Bernard who dwarfed Tean’s black Lab but had still become a regular playmate.

“Ok,” Hannah said with a sigh. She was still removing the leash from her own dog, Divorcee. She worked with Tean at DWR, and she had called as he was leaving the apartment to ask if he was interested in being set up on a blind date with a guy she knew. When Tean tried to dodge by explaining he was going to the dog park, she had insisted on joining him. It was nice to have company, even if Hannah didn’t realize she was helping a fugitive.

October in the Salt Lake Valley was beautiful; the underbrush on the Wasatch Mountains to the east burned red, and the sun setting over the Great Salt Lake to the west painted everything else gold. Autumn in Utah was a precarious pleasure, always ready to slip early into winter and stay there. Days like this one, with the breeze coming off the mountains and the skies perfectly clear, made sure the dog park stayed busy.

“What does that mean?” Tean asked.

“It means you’re trying to get out of this date.”

“Everyone’s trying to set me up today. Why won’t anyone let me have forty or fifty years of peace before I die?”

“Go have fun, princess.” This was directed to Divorcee; the teacup Yorkie scampered five feet away, stopped, and looked back. “Go on.”

“I’m not trying to get out of a date,” Tean said.

“Ok.”

“I’m just pointing out an incontrovertible fact.”

“Here we go.”

“People suck,” Tean said, varying the tone a little in case she’d missed the point.

Hannah just sighed. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Miguel asked me if you were single today.”

“Did you tell him I’m married?” Hannah said.

“Yes.”

“Great. End of conversation.”

“I saw those reports you put together on—”

“Not work.”

“Well, I wanted to ask—”

“Nope. Work stays at work. I don’t want to think about work. Sook’s funeral is this weekend, and I don’t need anything else making me think about work.” Hannah studied the leash, which she wrapped around her hand as she asked, “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything new from the detectives.”

“I don’t think it’s that straightforward.” In fact, Tean thought, nothing had been straightforward about the case. Sook Hyeon, one of the DWR’s conservation officers, had been killed the week before. She had been in a bad part of town, late at night, and nobody could explain why a nice, smart Mormon girl with a 401k and a master’s degree, with a good job and a boyfriend, with overprotective parents who still called to make sure she was home safe at the end of every day—nobody