Goose in the Pond Read Online Free PDF Page A

from my Spanish-style bungalow. I’d rented the neat, two-bedroom house when I moved off the Harper Ranch into town. It was perfect for one person, with square little rooms and a newly remodeled terra-cotta-and-white Southwestern tile kitchen. After Gabe and I married, he just sort of moved in his clothes and books, gradually mingling our possessions. Unfortunately he’d not planned on getting married when he came to San Celina and had paid for a year’s lease on a woodframe house over by Cal Poly. It had a huge garage and a yard full of mature shade trees; we’d discussed living there, but my house was closer to our jobs and homier, with all my quilts and mismatched antiques, so we nonverbally seemed to have decided on it. The lease on his house was up at the end of September, and he still had some things he hadn’t moved yet, though I’d subtly nagged him about getting to it. One thing that was still there was his stereo and a good part of his extensive collection of Southern jazz and blues CDs. I suspected there was a deeper motivation than laziness that kept him from moving everything he owned into my . . . our house.
    I carefully steered the Corvette into the narrow driveway. My own vehicle, a red 1977 one-ton Chevy pickup with HARPER’S HEREFORDS in chipped lettering on the doors, sat out on the street, having lost the honored driveway spot to the Corvette. Inside our minuscule one-car garage reigned the real star of our vehicular family, the newly restored blue 1950 Chevy pickup that Gabe’s father had owned and we’d had shipped back from Kansas two months ago.
    “Hey, Mr. Treton,” I said, climbing out of the car. “Hedges are looking good.”
    He grunted and continued trimming with his beat-up hand clippers. No newfangled, fancy electric ones for Mr. Treton. “Just another way the electric company’s trying to rip off honest Americans,” he’d grouse. He was a thirty-year army man who believed insubordination from anyone, including plant life, needed to be promptly nipped in the bud.
    “Talked to your grandmother lately?” he asked, his clippers never stopping their clop, clop, clop .
    “Not since yesterday,” I said, smiling good-naturedly. He knew Dove checked up on me almost every day. She used to say it was because I needed watching over since I was living alone in the city and didn’t have the sense God gave a duck. Now that I had the personal protection of the chief of police, she said she had to make sure, in the interest of public safety, that I wasn’t driving Gabe too crazy. “Do you need something?”
    “All out of honey,” he grumbled. He’d grown addicted to Dove’s fresh clover honey when she used it to bribe him into giving her reports on my daily activities. She didn’t require his detecting services any longer, but Mr. Treton still craved the honey.
    “I’ll swipe you a couple of jars next time I go out to the ranch,” I promised. He nodded his thanks and attacked a rebellious mock orange tree.
    Inside the house I kicked off my ruined shoes and peeled off my wet socks, gave them a satisfied smirk and padded across the room where the answering machine winked its red insect eye. A well-known and mostly well-loved voice brayed out, practically melting the wax in my left ear.
    “Where are y’all?” Dove asked. “Benni Harper, it’s seven o’clock in the morning, and you haven’t gotten up this early since you left the ranch. If you’re there and occupied, call me when you’re through. And you take it easy now. Gabe’s ticker isn’t as young as yours.”
    I snickered and didn’t rewind the tape so Gabe could hear Dove’s comment on his sexual endurance. Only my grandmother would have nerve enough to tease him that way. Glancing into the bedroom where the sheets and thin blanket were shoved in a tangled heap at the foot of the king-sized bed, I had to say she knew us better than we’d probably like to admit.
    I went into the kitchen and grabbed a Coke before