I followed her over the rocks. The top of the hot pot had the rough, layered texture of an oyster’s shell. As I neared the rim, Aria took off her flip-flops and carefully picked her way down the rock to a small outcropping that jutted out about three feet below the rim. She smiled at me, then stepped off into the water. She came up with a loud sigh. “Come in. It feels so good.”
I looked down into the steaming crater. The dark pool looked bottomless and had an acrid sulfur smell. “I’ll be right there.”
I took off my robe and lay it over a rock next to Aria’s coat. Then, sitting on my robe, I removed my shoes and put them next to her flip-flops. I walked over to the crater’s rim.
“Is this where you get in?”
“Uh-huh.”
As I started lowering myself down the ledge I slipped, throwing myself into the middle of the pot. I came up, sputtering.
“Nice entrance,” she said, her voice slightly echoing in the cavernous rock. “You didn’t have to do that to impress me.”
“As long as you’re impressed.”
The water was hot but not uncomfortable. I swam over to her. She was holding on to a narrow ledge of rock. Six feet off to her side was a homemade rope ladder. It must have been there for a while, as it was white with mineral deposits.
“This is so healing for your body,” she said. “It’s perfect after a long day on your feet.”
“What kind of rock is this?”
“Limestone. This crater was formed by the minerals in this water. Actually, it has a name. Tufa. I remember that because it reminds me of tofu. The name, not its taste.”
“It probably tastes better than tofu,” I said, adding, “I hate tofu.” I swam over to the ladder and rested on it. “So, do many people know about this place?”
“Locals. But they don’t come here.”
“Because they’ll get shot?”
She smiled. “Maybe.” After a moment she said, “Actually, the man who owns this land is a customer of mine. I serve him ham and runny eggs on wheat toast every morning. He told me that I can come up here anytime.”
“So the shooting part . . .”
“I was just teasing.”
“Teasing or testing?”
“Pick one.” She swam over next to me. “Still cold?”
“No. How hot is the water?”
“Most of the hot pots in Midway are considered warm springs instead of hot springs. This one is ninety-eight degrees, a little below body temperature.” She floated closer to me. “Turn around.”
“How come?”
“You ask too many questions. Trust me.”
“All right.” I turned away from her.
“Now hold on to the ladder.”
I clutched the ladder and leaned into it, my forehead resting on one of the rungs. Aria put her hand on the back of my neck and began to rub it. The water had a slick, gel-like consistency that made her hand glide easily over my flesh.
“How does that feel?”
I softly groaned with pleasure.
“So you like it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m not a ma’am.”
After another minute of her massage I turned back and looked into her eyes.
“I don’t know what we’re doing, but I haven’t been this happy for a very long time.”
“Me too,” she said.
“And I think you just might be the most beautiful woman in the world.”
She smiled. “I think you’re beautiful too.” She moved in a little closer, her eyes locked on mine. “Very.”
“I have a question about your job,” I said.
“That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”
“It’s relevant. Do your customers always try to kiss you under the mistletoe?”
“How is that relevant?”
“You ask too many questions,” I said.
Her smile widened a little, then she said, “Only the wrong customers.”
“What would happen if I tried?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you find out?”
For a moment we just looked into each other’s eyes. Then I began to lean forward. She leaned forward too, until our lips met, lightly at first, then exploding into full passion.
I had one arm hooked through the ladder and reached out with the other and put it around her narrow waist, pulling her into me. She put both arms around me. The softness of her body and lips was the most exquisite thing I’d felt for a very long time.
I don’t know how long we’d been kissing when someone shouted, “What are you doing in there?”
We looked up to see an old man in a fringed leather rancher jacket and a cowboy hat standing above the rim of the crater. He was holding a shotgun.
Aria swam out away from me toward the center of the pool. “Cal, it’s me. Aria.”
The man bent down a little and squinted. “Aria?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
He still didn’t look happy. He lowered his gun. “Sorry. Didn’t know it was you. Earl Belnap called and said I had some hippies in my pot.”
Hippies in his pot?
He looked at me and his eyes flashed. “Who’s the boy?”
“This is Alex. He’s a friend of mine.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” I said.
He ignored me. “Sure you don’t need me to shoot him?”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious. He might have been. Aria stifled a laugh. “No. Not this time. I’ll let you know if that changes.”
“All right,” he said still looking a bit miffed. “Don’t drown or nothin’.”
“Thanks, Cal. Love you.”
“Yeah,” he drawled. He slowly picked his way back down the crater, mumbling and swinging his shotgun like a baton.
Aria turned back to me. “You thought you were going to get shot, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“So, was it worth it?”
“Was what worth it?”
“Getting shot just to kiss me.”
I reached out for her. “Definitely.”
A large smile crossed her face and she swam back to me, pushing her body up against mine. “Where were we?”
I put my arms back around her and we went back to kissing.
CHAPTER
Twenty-six
After a half hour she said, “We can go back to my place.”
“You’re not too tired?”
“I think I just got my second wind.”
We got out of the spring, the water on our bodies steaming in the freezing air. Fortunately, Aria had guessed that I would not think of bringing a towel and had brought two. She handed me one, and I quickly dried off and put on my robe. We slipped our shoes back on, then walked down to her Jeep.
“You drive,” she said.
“Where am I going?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. “Just go back toward the diner.”
I did a three-point turnaround and headed back to town, following Aria’s directions about a quarter mile past the diner to a small duplex just behind a gas station on Main.
“This is where you live?”
“Uh-huh. Cheap rent.”
“You’re close to the diner.”
“Yes. I usually just walk to work, unless it’s icy or I’m working late.” She unlocked the door and we went inside. The apartment was simple but tidy, with a few chairs and a simple black sofa behind a rectangular wooden coffee table. On one side of the room, next to the wall, was a computer table with an older-model PC.
There was a framed quote on the wall.
NOT ALL THOSE WHO
WANDER ARE LOST.
“I like that,” I said.
“I thought of getting a tattoo of it,” Aria replied.
r /> “Why didn’t you?”
She smiled. “I didn’t want a tattoo.” She walked out of the room, returning a minute later wearing sweats. “Would you like some herbal tea?”
“Yes, please.”
“I have peppermint and chamomile.”
“Chamomile will put me to sleep.”
“Peppermint it is.”
She boiled water in a kettle, then brought two cups out to the coffee table. After she sat I tried the tea, then said, “I have a question. I hope it’s not too personal.”
“Yes?”
“After Wade left, why didn’t you go back to Minnesota?”
She looked down for a moment, then said, “It wasn’t much of an option.”
“Why is that?”
“My mother’s there.” I could see the emotion this confession brought.
“You don’t get along with your mother?”
“No.” She took a sip of her tea, then set down her cup. “My mother was emotionally ill. She had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, but she wouldn’t get help and she wouldn’t take her medications.
“When I was seven she started telling everyone that my father was sexually abusing me—my schoolteachers, the neighbors, our pastor. Eventually the police came and arrested him.
“My mother was always telling me that men were bad. She made me tell the police that my father was abusing me, even though he wasn’t.” She shook her head. “She was sick. My father was a good man. Even with what she did, he tried to help her. He tried to protect me from her.
“Then she filed for divorce and a restraining order. I don’t know how she got the restraining order. The laws in this country are against fathers. They assume they’re guilty until proven innocent. But it was my testimony . . .” She teared up. “I betrayed the one person who was protecting me.”
The thought that she had falsely accused him made me sick, but it wasn’t her fault. It was her mother’s. “You weren’t old enough to know better.”
She wiped a tear from her cheek. “He wasn’t found guilty. But he left. After that my mother only got worse. She didn’t have him to torment, so she turned her crazy elsewhere.
“She believed that the government was spying on us. She told me that any red lights in the house meant that the CIA, the FBI, and a secret organization she couldn’t reveal were tracking our movements. Every night we would have to go around the house in the dark and unplug everything with a light—the microwave, clocks, everything. She said that they could shoot lasers through the lights that would control our minds.
“She had also read that the government had added chemicals to jet fuel so the tracks you see in the sky behind jets was really poison flying down on us to brainwash us.”
“When did you begin to see through it?”
“My first boyfriend helped me. I was fourteen, he was seventeen. He would laugh when I’d tell him things my mother said. He wasn’t the first person to tell me my mother was crazy, but he was the first I believed.
“Then something happened that really opened my eyes. At the time I was doing all of the cooking. One evening after dinner I heard her on the phone calling poison control. She told them that she had been poisoned.
“Then she ran to the store and bought these charcoal pills and started swallowing them. She must have taken too many of them because she started throwing up all over until she passed out. I called 911. The paramedics came, and they rushed her to emergency.
“When she came to, she told the doctors that I had poisoned her. The doctors knew she wasn’t well. They had a psychiatrist visit her. Afterward he took me aside and told me that my mother was schizophrenic and a borderline personality.” She took a deep breath. “The thing is, when crazy is normal, normal is crazy. I had to rebuild my entire world.”
“Do you have siblings?”
“No. I was an only child, thank God. She would have messed them up too. What I had was a string of boyfriends. But my mother’s crazy seeped into that as well. In a way, I was trying to match the paradigm my mother had programmed into me that men were bad, so I looked for bad men, the wild, mean ones. I think, in some wacked-out way, I was still trying to make my mother’s crazy right so I could make sense of the world.” She looked at me. “You think I’m crazy now, don’t you?”
“No. I think you’re resilient.”
“Thank you,” she said. “So I moved in with Wade when I was sixteen and we got married the day I turned eighteen. We were married on my birthday. Six months later, his cousin offered him a job in Midway, Utah, and here I am.”
“Here you are,” I said.
“And here you are,” she said, touching my arm. She took a deep breath. “Yesterday you asked me why I was waiting outside at the diner.”
“Yes.”
“Wade and I lived a few miles north of here. We only had one car, so he would drive me to and from work. He used to get raging mad at me if I wasn’t outside waiting for him after my shift. Sometimes he’d be almost an hour late picking me up. I’d be nearly frozen.” She slowly shook her head. “He was an angry man.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m glad he left town.”
I squeezed her hand. “How about your father now? Do you ever talk to him?”
She looked down for a moment. “Almost every day.” When she looked back up her eyes were moist. She said, “So I’ve told you all my secrets. Now you need to tell me one.”
“What would you like to know?”
“I’d like to know, Mr. Bartlett, what you are really doing in Midway.”
“You don’t believe that I’m here for work?”
She slowly shook her head. “No, we have two traffic signals. We don’t need software for that.”
“I should have known you were smarter than that.”
“The truth is, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, except I’ve had two customers tell me that there’s a stranger in town who looks just like you, making random visits to women.”
“Wow.”
“Like I’ve said, it’s a very small town.”
“Fair enough. But now I’m the one who’s going to sound crazy. I hope you’re still willing to give me the benefit of the doubt.”
“Try me.”
I clasped my hands together. “Here goes. I came here to find someone.”
“You’re a bounty hunter?”
I grinned. “No. It’s someone I met on the Internet. Actually, that’s not quite true. We’ve never actually met.” I looked up into her eyes. “This is going to sound really crazy. I mean, it’s the craziest thing I’ve ever done.”
“I know crazy,” she said.
“This person, this woman, she wrote a blog that really spoke to me.”
“What kind of blog?”
“She writes about loneliness and love. It was so honest and vulnerable . . . after all the lies in my marriage, to hear someone speak so honestly . . . I decided I had to meet her. But she didn’t leave any information on her website except her initials.”
“You came all the way to Midway to find someone with only their initials?”
“I know, crazy, right? I mean, if it was New York, I wouldn’t have tried. But, like you said, Midway’s a small town.”
“What are her initials?”
“LBH.”
Aria was quiet for a moment. I could see her thinking.
“Do you know anyone with those initials?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. Mrs. Harding. But she’s eighty years old.”
“Yeah, I found that out.”
“She’s one of the customers who told me about you.”
“She could talk like no one I’ve ever met,” I said.
Aria smiled. “She’s lonely. And she’s very sweet. She’s the only one who comes into the diner and brings u
s food.” She looked into my eyes. “So how do you even know this LBH is in Midway?”
“For a long time I didn’t. Then, in one of her blog entries she wrote about Swiss Days. I looked up Swiss Days on the Internet and Midway, Utah, was the only place that celebrated it at the time she wrote about. So I came out to see if I could find her.”
“And when you find her, what will you do?”
“I don’t know.” I took her hand. “Things aren’t the way I thought they’d be. I didn’t plan on meeting you.”
She smiled coyly. “That wasn’t in my script either. So, will you keep on looking?”
“I don’t know. Part of me feels like I need closure with this woman.”
“And the other part of you?”
I leaned into her and we kissed.
We talked and kissed until Aria couldn’t keep her eyes open and asked what time it was. “Almost three,” I whispered.
She lightly groaned. “I have to be at work in three hours.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She smiled dreamily. “I’m not.” I kissed her good night.
“I better let you sleep tomorrow,” I said.
“I don’t want to sleep.”
“You need sleep. Do you work on Saturday?”
“No.”
“Good. We’ll go cut down a Christmas tree,” I said.
“Why would I want to cut down a Christmas tree?”
“Because it’s almost Christmas. And I may never get another chance.”
“Whatever you say,” she said. “As long as I get to be with you.”
I got back to the inn about half past three. In spite of the hour, I didn’t fall right to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to relive the night in my memory. I just wanted to be with her. So why did I feel like I needed to keep looking for LBH?
CHAPTER
Twenty-seven
I didn’t wake the next morning until after ten. I pulled on the same clothes I’d worn the day before and walked down to the dining room. I sat in my usual place and ordered griddle cakes with a side of sausage.