For Good

Book 2: Out in Portland

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

Genres: Women's Fiction; LGBT Lesbian; Contemporary Romance; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

How do you choose between your life . . . and your heart? In this too-small, dusty town, brand-new district attorney Kristen Brock knows she'll never fit in. Still, the job will look great on her resume---if she can just keep her head down and play by the rules. Because in a town run by a self-serving, powerful family, the last thing Kristen needs is trouble . . . but one kiss from the beautiful ex-rodeo queen Marydale Rae turns her world upside down. And Marydale is definitely trouble. Marydale didn't intend to hide her past from Kristen, but the prospect of a friend who doesn't know she spent time in prison is too tempting to pass up. Add in the passionate night they share, and Marydale never wants Kristen to know the truth. But small towns don't keep secrets, and the powerful Holten clan is determined to destroy anything and anyone who makes Marydale happy.

Release date: July 5, 2016

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 368

Sample

Marydale Rae had never been in this part of the Holten Penitentiary, with its high windows and bars painted the same dull yellow as the walls. A uniformed guard sat behind a desk, reading. Marydale waited for a long time, watching the top of the guard’s head as he studied his paperwork or ignored her. She couldn’t tell which. There had been a time when she had known how to lean on a desk or a lamppost or a rangeland gate. She would have said, Whatcha doing, cowboy? and the man would have coughed and stuttered. Now Marydale said nothing. Finally the guard looked up.

“Damn parole board.” His lips pulled into a tight grimace. “After what you did. Six years with good behavior.” He glared at the paper before him. “Ridiculous! Some people don’t know right from wrong.”

“I was told to report,” Marydale said, keeping her gaze on the ID badge pinned to the guard’s shirt.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” he barked. “A written invitation?” He took a clear plastic bag from beneath the desk and pushed it across the table. “Bathroom’s back there. Make it quick.”

In the bathroom, Marydale opened the bag. She pulled out her jean jacket, the one with the pattern of hearts embellished in rhinestones, the one that had belonged to her mother. There was her Tristess High seniors T-shirt, too, and a skirt of some light material with tiny pink flowers printed on it. There was a name for that fabric. Six years ago she had known it and every word in her SAT flash card deck. She pressed the T-shirt to her face, but everything in the bag smelled of mildew. She changed quickly.

When she came out again, the guard tapped his desktop with an accusing look, as though Marydale might try to steal her orange jumpsuit and he had cleverly caught her in the act. Marydale dropped the folded prison-issued uniform on the desk, and the guard glared. Marydale lifted her eyes to his chin. He slid a piece of paper across the desk.

“You have forty-eight hours to report to your parole officer. He’ll go over the conditions of your supervision, but it’s pretty simple. No drugs. No guns. No fighting. No dating. No burner phones. Don’t leave the county. Don’t change your address. Don’t fraternize with felons or other deviants—” He picked at his tooth, staring directly at her. “Sign here.”

She signed.

The guard pressed a button beneath his desk, and behind Marydale, a set of metal gates rattled to life and drew back slowly. She turned without speaking and moved toward the exit. Her sandals felt like a foreign country.

At end of a long outdoor walkway, she arrived at a tiny kiosk. Inside, she heard a radio crackle. Another guard eyed her, or at least he directed his mirrored sunglasses at her. Marydale presented her release papers.

“I know you,” the guard said.

She felt his eyes on her. The guards were always looking, but her orange jumpsuit had hidden her body. Now she wished she had gone into Holten Penitentiary wearing jeans, but six years ago she wasn’t thinking about release. Six years ago she had just turned seventeen.

“If I had my way…pretty girl like you. A waste,” the guard said.

The last gate rolled open, its wheels grinding on loose gravel. Beyond the gate, a two-lane highway stretched into the vast rangeland of eastern Oregon. Marydale could almost hear her friends inside yelling, Just go, girl, before they change their minds!

She turned to the guard. “I wasn’t expecting to get out until Monday.” She tried to pitch her voice low and soft. It didn’t help to demand. “May I call my friend Aldean to come pick me up?”

“I don’t have a phone,” the guard said, although Marydale could see one on the desk in front of him.

“But how do I get to Tristess?” she asked.

The penitentiary was at least twenty miles from town. Around her the land was motionless. Only the heat rippled. The guard’s sunglasses traveled the length of the empty horizon.

“Guess you’ll be waiting a long time if you hitchhike.”

1

Kristen Brock was quickly realizing that her glamorous move from adjunct professor of legal writing to deputy district attorney of Tristess County was only glamorous as long as no one in Portland actually knew anything about Tristess, Oregon. She poked at the pile of iceberg lettuce and steak strips in front of her, the Ro-Day-O Diner’s take on market-fresh salad. The leaves were almost white. The steak had thought about visiting a frypan. If fresh meant raw, she had gotten what she ordered.

“You like the salad?” the waitress asked, gliding by, a pot of not-so-fresh coffee dangling from her long fingers. “I think the meat’s from Dan Otto’s ranch out by the quarry. Slaughtered a week ago Thursday.”

Kristen approved of locally sourced food, but something about knowing the animal’s date of death made her feel like a cannibal. Before she could reply, her phone buzzed on the table.

Kristen’s friend Donna Li greeted her in her usual clipped tone. “How’s Tristess? How’s living in the outback?”

“It’s all right,” Kristen said.

“You’re practicing real law,” Donna said. “Do you know what I’m doing? Rutger Falcon’s mother’s friend’s divorce! She’s decided she’s a lesbian. The husband’s run off with some thirty-year-old. They’re both in their seventies. And they’re fighting over a time-share in Lubbock, Texas. I mean, is there anyone who wants to go to Lubbock, Texas, on vacation?”

Kristen frowned. Four weeks living in a town the size of her graduating class, stuck at the far southeastern corner of Oregon, was making Lubbock, Texas, sound pretty good. The waitress passed by and shot Kristen a smile, as if to say, That’s life.

Donna must have been driving because she added, “Is this your first day on the planet, Prius?” To Kristen she said, “The Falcon Law Group. What was I thinking taking this job? You’re actually doing something. You’re practicing law!” To an unnamed traveler on the road, Donna added, “Stop maximizing your gas mileage and drive!”

Kristen heard Donna’s turn signal. If there was one thing she could say about Tristess—and there really was only one thing—it was that she got great cell phone reception. Some entrepreneurial spirit had wrecked the view of the Firesteed Summit by leasing space to every cell phone provider in Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada. Now the Summit bristled with towers.

“I guess,” Kristen said modestly. After almost two decades of intensely courteous competition, at which Kristen almost always failed, she had finally earned a hint of resentment in Donna’s voice. That was something. “How’s Elliot?” she asked.

“Elliot!” Donna said. “Gorgeous. Horrid. Wedded to the army. What am I doing with him?”

“Your mother would set you up with a nice accountant.”

“God! Yes, she would. How’s your sister?”

“She started community college.” Kristen rested her chin on her upturned palm. “On her first day she made friends with some guy named Frog. Apparently he’s a pansexual or polyamorous or something. She’s decided she’s a vegan, and she’s already dropped her math class. I told her I’d tutor her on Skype, but she’s mad I left Portland.”

“She’ll be fine.” Donna’s other line beeped through. “That’ll be Lubbock again. Gotta go.”

Kristen set the phone down and spread out a battered copy of the Tristess Tribune. The newspaper wasn’t even online. The whole place made her lonely.

Kristen felt someone at her elbow.

“Refill, hon?”

The waitress hovered her pot of stale coffee over Kristen’s cup. Kristen glanced up. Way up. The woman’s head barely cleared the little chains that dangled from the ceiling fans.

“You looking for a used gun?” the woman asked, peering at the FOR RENT/FOR SALE page.

“Do I look like I need a used gun?”

The woman—who was probably Kristen’s age, although it was hard to tell with women in Tristess—stepped back and looked Kristen up and down.

“No. You look like you can handle your own.” The waitress’s long blond curls hung almost to her waist. A silver cross dangled in the low-cut V of her blouse. And she was missing a front tooth. “I’m just playing with you.”

“I know. The girl from the city.” Kristen pushed her glasses up on her nose.

Almost everyone she’d met in Tristess had said it…in so many words. Kristen was from the city. She didn’t understand their good, old-fashioned country ways, but she sure was lucky to have escaped Portland, not that she’d have the good sense to stay in Tristess. She might as well have had a bumper sticker reading: HELLO FROM SODOM. But the waitress’s smile was kinder than most, and while Kristen expected a sneer, she just looked rueful. “Deputy DA Kristen Brock,” the waitress said, confirming what Kristen had already guessed: everyone knew everything in Tristess. She probably knew Kristen had killed the potted palm from the Chamber of Commerce. “You’re looking for an apartment.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re actually going to stay?”

“That’s the plan.” Kristen touched the ads with the tip of her pen. “But this one had a bucket full of cat litter in the heating grate. This one smelled like a dirty diaper. This one had a hole in the bathroom wall. And this one had a live squirrel.”

“That’s good eatin’,’” the waitress said, with a smile that said, Believe that, and I’ll tell you another.

She set her coffeepot down on the table and leaned over to look at the newspaper, her long curls almost brushing Kristen’s hand. Kristen caught a whiff of perfume. She tried to lean away without looking like she was leaning away. The waitress—whom Kristen had seen every day at breakfast and dinner for the past month—was the friendliest person she’d met in town, even if it was just her job to be nice to abhorrent out-of-towners.

“Try this one?” The waitress tapped an ad on the page.

“Rented,” Kristen said.

“There aren’t a lot of nice places. Not the kind of places you’re used to in the city.”

“There’re some rough places in the city, too.”

“But you must make a bundle.”

“Hardly,” Kristen said.

“Not like on TV?”

Across the street, Kristen’s current residence, the Almost Home Motel, looked like a postcard from the apocalypse, the faded sign flashing VACANCY on and off in the hot September sun.

“Nothing in my life is like TV,” Kristen said.

“I know that story. I live off Gulch Creek Road. It’s not much, but if you’re looking for a place and you don’t mind something a little rustic…”

Kristen leaned back so she could take in all of the woman’s corn-fed tallness. In Portland, the waitress would have been a hipster, an ironic version of the person this woman actually was, a Roller Derby girl with some cowgirl pseudonym who bowled over smaller women on the track. The waitress was big, Kristen thought, but all that blond hair and those large breasts just made her size more of a good thing. The thirty pounds Kristen had put on during law school made her more of a humanoid pear. She felt a little twinge of jealousy, but the missing tooth and the woman’s wry smile made her hard to dislike.

“The rent’s cheap. Really. A couple hundred dollars and you chip in for utilities and a cord of wood in the winter, and we could call it even. My name’s Marydale.”

A few tables over, Kristen saw one of the other waitresses watching them, her cherubic face registering both awe and disapproval.

“That’s nice of you,” Kristen said. “But I’m looking forward to living alone. I’ve had my sister with me for years.”

“Of course,” Marydale said, and ducked her head as if remembering the missing tooth.

“I mean, it’s not…” Kristen didn’t finish the sentence. Something about the way the waitress looked away made the refusal feel personal, and Kristen wanted to say, It’s not you. But of course it wasn’t her. Kristen was the one from Sodom and Gomorrah.

In the back of the diner, the chef hit the order-up bell.

“Marydale!” he called out. “If you wait long enough, this burger will get up and walk itself over to table four, but I don’t think anyone wants to wait.”

“Sorry, hon. That’s me.” Marydale picked up her coffeepot.

Kristen watched Marydale stride toward the kitchen until her phone vibrated on the table. Her sister, Sierra, had texted her a photograph. For a sickening second, Kristen thought it was a crime-scene photo: Sierra’s pretty blond hair snarled around a blunt force trauma to the head. Only there was no blood, just a rat’s nest of hair. The text below read, I’m growing dreadlocks. I am the Lion of Judah.

Kristen typed the words, You’re white! How are you going to get a job? Then she paused, deleted, and texted, How are classes going, sweetie?

Marydale glided by her table on the way to another customer. Kristen waited for her to turn around and give her that smile that seemed to say, Life! What are you going to do? But she didn’t, and Kristen tucked her phone into her briefcase and headed to work, stopping at the Arco Station to buy a Snickers bar to make up for the fleshy salad.

2

Just after sunset, Marydale Rae pulled to a stop in the gravel lot in front of the Pull-n-Pay junkyard where her childhood friend Aldean Dean lived with his grandfather, Pops. Aldean had lit a fire in the fire pit, illuminating the sea of wrecked cars. Marydale’s dog, Lilith, bounded from the cab of her truck and slipped through the narrow opening in the fence. Marydale followed, ducking under the locked chain.

“Aldean?” she called. “You out here?”

Marydale picked her way through the labyrinth of fenders and windshields. In the center of the yard, a shipping container stood rusted shut, its origins and its contents—if any—a mystery that Aldean and Marydale had spun into a thousand imaginary treasures when they were growing up.

“In here,” Aldean called from a shack tucked between the container and an old VW bus with the words not for sale, don’t ask spray-painted on its side. Inside, a single bulb illuminated several small barrels propped on their sides on a worktable.

“You’re off early,” Aldean said as she entered. “Try this.” He held out a red Solo cup.

Marydale held it to her nose and inhaled deeply.

“A bit of leather. Juniper reclamation fires.” She swirled and took a sip. Her mouth filled with smoky lighter fluid. “Oh God! Aldean, you’ve made it worse!”

Marydale eyed the wooden barrels lined up on the workbench, each marked in Sharpie on a piece of scrap wood: THREE MONTHS (MARYDALE), NINE MONTHS (MARYDALE), TWELVE MONTHS (ALDEAN), TWENTY-FOUR MONTHS (ALDEAN).

“No. That’s a good whiskey.” Aldean touched the brim of his battered Stetson. “You’re only jealous because it’s not yours.”

She was jealous. Twenty-four months ago Aldean was pouring Poisonwood whiskey into a barrel he had bought at the Burnville Flea Market, hoping that somehow aging Poisonwood in questionably cured wood would improve the flavor. Twenty-four months ago Marydale was in solitary—protective segregation, they called it—because a woman named Dixie-Lynn had tried to stab her with a shank fashioned out of a melted toothbrush.

She poured the dregs of the Solo cup onto the dirt floor and tried her own three-month infusion.

“Smooth. Slightly floral,” Marydale said. “High desert up front with a kind of sweet lost-youth aftertaste.”

Aldean took her cup from her, sipped, and handed it back.

“That’s a girl’s whiskey.” He clucked his tongue. “And I do like a girl who drinks whiskey.”

Aldean gestured for Marydale to follow him, and they headed out to the fire. He picked up a metal grate and set it over the pit. From a cooler nearby, he produced a package wrapped in white paper. Soon two steaks were sizzling on the fire. Marydale settled down in a lawn chair. Lilith circled around the fire, sniffing for the meat. Aldean pulled a cigarette from behind his ear, lit it, and inhaled. In the firelight, his face was all cheekbone and rugged stubble.

 “So. What about the new girl?” he asked.

“There’s a girl in Tristess you don’t already know?”

 “New to me. New to you.” He kicked his boots out in front of him. “She’s from the city. You know how they are.”

“No, I don’t, and neither do you.”

“I know how to rope a calf. Don’t matter where she comes from.” Aldean talked around his cigarette the way his Pops did, but he managed to make it look sexy. “You like her?”

“No.”

“She’s got that repressed-librarian thing going. Just makes you want to squeeze her.”

“No!” Marydale laughed. “It doesn’t.”

But the lawyer did have that repressed-librarian thing…No, it wasn’t repressed. It was focused. Marydale could see her with her tortoiseshell glasses, her brownish-blond hair that wasn’t any color and that she clearly didn’t care about dying. She always wore gray: gray suits, gray pumps, silky blue-gray blouses the color of winter skies. She was pretty the way the high desert was pretty: in muted shades. Marydale liked the way the lawyer concentrated on her phone or her papers, the way she hadn’t noticed the trio of rangeland firefighters who had admired her from their perch at the counter. She must have felt their gaze like a hand on her back, but she hadn’t looked up until Marydale had come by with a carafe of coffee. Then she had smiled shyly, a little embarrassed, like a good apostolic girl opening up her Bible on her lap. Well, Marydale, I’m so glad you asked about our Savior.

“So you gonna hit it and quit it?” Aldean asked.

“I asked her to move in with me.”

“No!”

“She can’t find a place to rent.”

“That’s not how you hit it and quit it.”

“I wouldn’t,” Marydale protested.

Aldean stood up again and retrieved a set of tin plates from somewhere in the darkness behind the fire. Lilith followed him, her muscular, white body glowing in the firelight. He handed a plate, fork, and knife to Marydale, then sat down with his own dinner. Lilith sat beside him while he cut up his steak. When he had reduced the meat to the same pea-sized bites he cut for Pops, he scraped a quarter of the meat onto the ground for Lilith.

“You spoil her,” Marydale said.

“What did she say?” Aldean asked. “She gonna come look at your place?”

“No.” Marydale stabbed the meat on her plate. “Of course she’s not going to rent from me. She’s the DA.”

“You gonna do anything about it?”

“No.”

“I know,” he said. “This fucking town.”

Marydale glanced over. Aldean nodded slowly, his eyes hidden in the shadow of his hat. Behind him the Firesteed Mountains stood in black relief against a navy sky.

“Back in the day, you would’ve,” he said.

“Back in the day,” Marydale said, “was a long time ago.”

3

Kristen stood in front of her boss’s desk, her pen poised over a notepad. District Attorney Boyd Relington hadn’t asked her to sit down, and the moment to sit anyway—because they were colleagues and she shouldn’t need an invitation—had passed. Now sitting felt like a statement.

“These are your case files for next week,” Relington said.

“Are these all the cases that came in?” Kristen asked.

“We got a stack of cases from the police. The new chief sends everything our way.”

Kristen was fairly sure she’d heard someone say that the “new” chief had been in his position for more than ten years.

“Back in the day,” Relington went on, “some people knew when to leave well enough alone, but I went through the paperwork from the police. I’ll be prosecuting the O’Rourke case. You’ll be doing Alioto, Esso, Scappa, De La Pedraja.” He rattled off a few more names.

“Can I see the rest of the files that came in from the police?” Kristen asked.

“Not every arrest warrants a prosecution.”

Everything Relington said was a counterargument. He was like all law students she had gone to school with and then taught in first-year legal writing, only older and untempered by the constant influx of more brilliant, young legal minds.

 “I mean is there a selection process?” Kristen had rehearsed her speech. I trust your judgment, but I’d like to select my own cases.

“Do you really want to discuss this now?”

Relington checked his watch. It was Friday, four thirty. The afternoon sun cut through the sagging venetian blinds, illuminating the Tristess memorabilia that filled Relington’s office: football jersey behind glass, a set of old stirrups. It was like the Western-themed Silver Rush Bar in Portland…only not ironic.

“Yes,” Kristen said. “Now is fine.”

“Okay. What’s this about, really? Sit.”

“I’d like to select the cases I try.” Kristen lowered herself into a chair.

“These are good cases.” Relington leaned forward and tapped the stack of files on his desk. “I selected them.”

“I’m sure they’re good cases.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About a month.”

“And how long are you planning to stay?”

Kristen had lain awake for the past week, working on the equation. Leaving in less than a year would negate the benefit of having deputy DA on her résumé, but two years would be more than plenty.

“I don’t have any plans to leave,” she said.

Relington snorted. “Do you know why I hired you?”

Kristen could feel the insult coming.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is that I’m here, and I want to do my job. I want to serve this community, and I want to help you.”

“This community.” Relington rose and walked over to one of the framed photographs on the wall. “That’s my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. This man here—” He pointed. “That’s Ronald Holten.” He spoke the name reverently. The municipal building that housed the court, the elementary school, and the nearby penitentiary all bore the name Holten.

“Tristess is my family,” Relington went on. “Every case we try, I know them. I know what happened to them as children. I know their parents, their grandparents. Let me ask you, Ms. Brock, if you got in trouble and you had to go to court, would you want someone who’d been in town for a whole month deciding your fate, or would you want someone who knew your story? Some of these guys, if they go to jail for a week, they don’t get their herd in for the first round of auction. Their hay goes sour. They’re not there to call the vet for a breech. People don’t have money here, like they do in the city. Honestly, tell me what you’d want?”

Kristen felt her face flush. “I’d want the law to decide.”

“We are the law,” Relington said in a tone that said I not we. He pushed a slip of paper across the desk. “Speaking of Mr. Holten. He heard you were having trouble finding a place to rent. Meet him here at twelve thirty tomorrow.”

“Ronald Holten?” Kristen asked, but Relington’s expression told her the conversation was over.

4

Saturday noontime found Kristen gazing up at a three-story Victorian sandwiched between a nail salon and a used tire dealer. If she narrowed her field of vision, it looked exactly like what she had optimistically hoped all of Tristess would be: elegant and windswept, with just a touch of Wild West brothel. Kristen took out her phone, cropped out Sandy’s Nails and the tire shop, and texted the picture to Donna. Donna loved architecture. She’d gone through a whole mansard-roof period.

Kristen heard an engine come to a stop behind her. She turned. A man had just pulled up in the largest, shiniest pickup truck she had ever seen. He stepped out of the enormous vehicle.

“She is a beauty, isn’t she?” he called out, nodding toward the house. “It is so good to finally meet you. I’m Ronald Holten.” Holten came toward her, hand extended. “Please call me Ronnie. Everyone calls me Ronnie.” His wide, sunburned face opened in a smile, but his teeth were perfect and shadowless, like dentures or the carefully filed teeth of actors.

No one calls you Ronnie, Kristen tho. . .