Lucy Gets Her Life Back

"That stretch of Timberline Highway by the golf course looks like a slaughterhouse floor." The blue Idaho sky with its popcorn-shaped clouds reflected in the sheriff's sunglasses. "I don't recall such a massacre so close to town before." Lucy Carpenter grabbed her two sons by their shoulders and drew them in close. Her lanky sixteen-year-old, Jason, shrugged out of her protective embrace, while her twelve-year-old, Matt, stuck next to her as his mouth dropped open. The deputy, a whipcord thin man wearing a cowboy hat and sporting a red Fu Manchu mustache, remarked, "It'll be one hell of a job scraping off the pavement." The lump forming in Lucy's throat ached, making it more difficult to swallow. Her skin grew clammy. The band of her bra seemed to constrict and cause a thin line of perspiration to roll between her breasts. With one hand, she flipped open the top two buttons on her wool jacket, welcoming the chill air through her knit shirt. Suddenly, moving to Red Duck seemed like a horribly ill conceived idea. How could these two men talk so casually about a dead body on the road? Jason's voice regressed to a prepuberty squeak. "Mom, I told you Boise wasn'tthatbad!" "I never said it was a crime capital." Lucy's response was a little too abrupt, and perhaps on the defensive side, when she didn't intend for it to be. "I simply said the city was a bad influence on you." "I only smoked some pot. They kill people up here!" That last part, or rather that first part, had both law officials looking at her son as if he were a notorious drug dealer. "We don't tolerate any mary-wanna-go-to-jail in this town," Sheriff Roger Lewis cautioned, his small eyes narrowing to slits. He had a dark tropical tan that George Hamilton would envy. Silver hair framed his long face, and his teeth were a blinding white. He sported a felt-brimmed cowboy hat in the same silver color that accessorized both law-enforcement uniforms. And each officer had a very large revolver in a holster. Lucy's eyes felt dry. She blinked and tried to focus. The deputy ran his forefinger under his nose, scratched it, then shifted his weight to an exaggerated stance. "Back in the late nineties, a few bad apples from Boise brought some cocaine with them, and several fledgling businesses went up some noses." He traded glances with the sheriff, the pair obviously recollecting the damage. "The Iron Mountain Paragliding School was one of them." "What Deputy Cooper's saying--" the sheriff hitched his pants to high-water level while looking directly at her son "--is we won't tolerate any big-city trouble." The crispness in the late May day seemed to evaporate, Lucy's cheeks growing warm. Indignance threaded through her. She laid a hand on Jason's shoulder, drew him close. This time he didn't resist. "We don't smoke marijuana and I wouldn't dream of bringing any drugs into town." But as she spoke, she recalled her firsthand encounter with drugs and her son. Jason had been caught with a marijuana cigarette in his hall locker. He'd been put on suspension, but it wasn't his first violation in the nearly two years since her divorce. There had been the day he'd cut class to go fishing with his buddies, and received his second speeding ticket on the way home. He'd had his driver's license taken away for thirty days. His rebellious behavior after her ex-husband left them was why she'd made the decision to move her two boys to the small town of Red Duck. The glossy travel brochures touted that tourists might flock to Timberline, but they played in Red Duck. Golf, biking, skiing. Red Duck had a year-round population of three thousand that swelled to six thousand depending on the season. Nestled in a flat valley at the base of the Wood Ridge Mountains, Red Duck only had two traffic signals on Main Street. All the buildings had the same false-fronted design--from the old Mule Shoe Bar to the new Blockbuster oHolm, Stef Ann is the author of 'Lucy Gets Her Life Back', published 2006 under ISBN 9780778323440 and ISBN 0778323447.