Only Flesh and Bones Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  ACNOWLEDGMENTS

  TITLES IN THE EM HANSEN MYSTERY SERIES

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR THE NOVELS OF SARAH ANDREWS

  POSTSCRIPT

  BONE HUNTER

  A CONVENTONAL CORPSE - A CLAIRE MALLOY MYSTERY

  Mystery’s #1 Bestselling Author

  DON’T MISS THESE MYSTERIES BY

  Copyright Page

  FOR MARY ANN,

  WITH LOVE, AND:

  OY-OY-OY-BOP!

  ONE

  CALVING is a cruel season in Wyoming. My father always brought the pregnant cows, in their last weeks, up from the far pastures so he could keep an eye on them in case they needed help, but instinct always moved each cow, in her own time, down to the cover of cottonwood trees by the creek. The rare calf would come by daylight and warm weather, but far too many dropped soaking wet from their hundred-degree mothers into subzero air by the dead of night. The first part to freeze was their ears.

  In the morning we’d bring the calf up to the barn, if the coyotes didn’t find it first, and do what we could to warm it. I’d hold the frosty fur of its ears between the palms of my wool mittens while Dad weighed it and fussed about where to drive the earring spike that would hold its brightly colored ID tag. Eventually, the dead flesh along the crests of the ear would fall away, and I would try hard not to love the calf, because bad ears meant it almost always grew up to be meat.

  Our neighbors thought my father daft. They left their cows in the pastures and slept soundly, figuring that the loss of a few calves was simply Nature’s way. Life was tough, after all, and a rancher’s love for the land didn’t mean he had to get sentimental.

  Perhaps it was from holding those calves’ ears—and the endless kidding from other ranchers that followed—that I learned a sensitivity for all creatures who get caught by the extremes of life’s experiences, beast and human alike, and come to think that they need me. But that may be my ego speaking, and instead, those who face the challenges of life beyond the edge are the strongest. If I hadn’t found my own way to the edge, life might have been quite different for me. I might have had what it took to stay on my parents’ ranch, or found myself married up to a neighboring spread, instead of heading off into these other lives of mine. Certainly in my girlhood dreams I never imagined I’d become a geologist, and if anyone had told me I’d make a name for myself as a detective, I’d have laughed in his face. But here I am, footloose Em, making my way looking for rocks and other things that lie hidden.

  No matter. It’s just that all these thoughts get stuck together—those of calving, and of female needs and instincts, and of trying to make it alone and fly in the face of one’s fears—when I think of the time I went looking for Miriam Menken.

  She was already dead when I started. Had been for eight months, and I knew that, and at first it was not for her sake but for her daughter Cecelia that I took up the search. To me, Miriam’s death put Cecelia out in the night air by herself, with the temperature dropping and the coyotes on the hunt, and she’d be lucky to get out of the whole mess with something as metaphorically simple as frozen ears.

  TWO

  I’D just gotten in from checking on a new calf out in the corral when Miriam’s husband, Cecelia’s father, my ex-boss Josiah Carberry Menken himself, phoned to ask me for help. At first, it was easy to ignore his plea: I’d been up half the night with a heifer who wasn’t up to dropping a 114-pound bull calf. My mother and I had chased her into the trailer around 3:00 A.M., drawn straws, and, as I got the short one, I had driven the heifer into Wheatland, where a sleepy vet had had me hold various bits of stainless-steel equipment as he carved her open standing up, under local anesthesia, a nice long gash behind her last rib. It’s a strange sight, seeing a calf come into the world ahead of its mother’s hind legs, but the calf was fine and the cow had stood it like that was all part of the plan, and the vet had sewn her up with a big running blanket stitch, and just a few hours later she was munching hay back out on the ranch, enjoying the April sunrise, the calf bumping at her udder.

  But to J. C. Menken I said no. No, I’m a geologist second and a rancher first, damn it, not a detective; can’t you get that straight? No, I can’t help resolve your wife’s death. Sorry.

  Then two days later, he turned up at our door.

  That was a much grimmer morning. I had stood by ready to assist while Mother reached up inside the hot, moist regions of the last pregnant cow and wrangled her reluctant calf out into the world. She ran strong hands along the calf, checked the afterbirth, and gave the cow a tender pat. Such scenes bring a rise of heart most days, but this last birth meant the end of our labors together, and over breakfast, Mother and I had had a little chat, in which she informed me that, as she now had things pretty well in hand, it was time I moseyed. She said she had appreciated my helping her set the ranch to rights after Father’s death, and she knew I’d helped her save at least one cow and fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of calves that would otherwise have died, but it was time, she said, for us each to stand on our own respective two feet and either make it or not.

  It was the not that worried me; if she couldn’t make the spread go, then I wanted a try. What did an aging, newly recovering alcoholic think she was doing, trying to run a ranch by herself?

  As if she could read minds, Mother added rather baldly that it was her inheritance from her father that had bought this ranch, and not my ranch for her to maintain until I was ready to take it over.

  So Menken’s arrival found me on the phone at my father’s desk, trying to scare up a lead on a job. Answering the door seemed like a welcome break until I saw who it was, but some mornings life just kicks you in the shorts.

  “Emily!” Menken proclaimed, ever-bouyant smile puckering his insipidly pleasant face. It had turned cold again, and his breath formed ghosts.

  “J. C., what a surprise,” I said mournfully, my words falling from my mouth like little ingots of lead.

  With a little wink that suggested that he found my greeting terribly clever, he said, “May I come in, Emily?”

  I threw the door wide in defeat. “Mother and I were just sitting down to lunch. You’ll join us, won’t you?”

  His smile bloomed to a grin. “Why, I’d love to. It just happens that I haven’t eaten, and I don’t believe I’ve met your mother.”

  I led the way back through the living room of our log house and into its kitchen. Rustic is the quaint term for its decor. There had been days when it looked spiffier, but things had gotten a little run-down in the years Mother was drinking, when Dad was still alive and trying to do everything himself. />
  Back in the kitchen, Mother was washing lettuce leaves for our baloney sandwiches. I said, “Don’t put the fixings away, Ma; we have company.”

  My mother straightened her patrician spine and turned around, adjusting the tilt of her head to aim the right slice of her trifocals at Menken. She’s still a beautiful woman at fifty-nine, austere and slender, a Brahmin recast in western wear. Always a class act whether she’s being particularly nice about it or not, she curved her lips hospitably, extended a wet hand, and said, “I’m Leila Hansen. And you are?”

  “Joe Menken. I’m afraid Emily still calls me J. C.”

  I said, “J. C. was president at Blackfeet Oil, before it went down the drain. That’s the oil company in Denver where I worked, remember?”

  “Ahh.” This had become my mother’s standard comment of late, and it could mean anything from an uninterested “Isn’t that interesting,” to a cagey “No, I don’t remember, and prefer not to comment on that particular ten years of alcoholic blackout,” to a more forward-looking “You filthy four-legged brute, I’ll have your balls for that.” Withdrawing her hand from Menken’s after the precisely correct span of time, Mother extended it now toward the table. “Joe, please sit down. Coffee? I’m afraid it’s this morning’s, but it’s from a decent bean, Em, get those olives out of the refrigerator and put them in a dish. And let’s have the last of that extrasharp Pennsylvanian cheddar your Aunt Frances sent, and the rye crackers.”

  “Coffee would be wonderful.” Menken strode across the wooden floor like a general on a goodwill tour of the troops, all tight ass and sucked-in gut. I took advantage of his preoccupation with Mother to check out his attire: Luccesi boots, preabused jeans, and the most conservative of western-style shirts, all straight out of the box. J. C. gone country. I wondered idly how I rated such a break in form; I’d never before seen him in anything but a business suit.

  Pulling out one of the mismatched chairs from the table, he sat down and leaned back, spreading his elbows across the backs of adjacent chairs. It was his throne pose, so familiar from the old days in the boardroom at Blackfeet Oil.

  “What brings you our way, J. C.?” I asked somewhat facetiously.

  “Why, Emily,” he crooned, “I’ve just arrived. Surely even here on the ranch it’s considered rude to speak of business so soon. Let’s have lunch, and then we’ll talk. Besides, I wouldn’t want to keep Leila from her fine repast.” He beamed up at her.

  Mother smiled back, or at least to Menken’s eyes she did. He would have had to have known her much better to catch the sarcasm spoken by that subtle lowering of her eyelids.

  While I bent myself to the task of building a sandwich for Menken, Mother descended into a chair and took up a line of chat about how very much I’d learned working for Blackfeet Oil. Cussing under my breath, I sawed into the hard, sharp cheese and laid it out on the squashy stuff that passed for bread at the local store. I needed to aim my face where they couldn’t see it for a minute or two, while I collected myself; not only did I have deep forebodings about what J. C. Menken wanted from me, but I knew that Mother would make me pay dearly for the last of that Pennsylvanian cheddar.

  “I have to tell you, Emily, it’s a bittersweet thing to find myself on a ranch again,” Menken confided in me when my mother had ushered us out into the front room after lunch. “I haven’t been back in Wyoming since Miriam’s death.” He sat in the middle of the couch, his arms stretched out across the back and one ankle at ease on the opposite knee. For a moment, he looked pensive.

  I perched on the arm of my father’s vacant easy chair and stared out the window across the rolling short-grass prairie toward the foothills of the Laramie Range. I hated it when people played on my sympathies. “I really was sorry to hear about all that, J. C.,” I muttered. In fact, I would have had to have been deaf not to hear, even though the killing had occurred two hours’ drive north of Chugwater, where we lived, on a ranch outside of Douglas. Eight months after the fact, it was still a favorite topic of conversation in cafés and saloons from Cheyenne to Sheridan and Casper to the Nebraska border. It had all the elements of soap opera: big-city woman found dead in her bed on a rented ranch and the daughter roaming the house, out of her mind with grief and terror. No suspects identified. No leads. A murder left unsolved through the long, otherwise uneventful autumn and winter that followed.

  “What were they doing on a ranch up there near Douglas?” I asked, immediately wishing I hadn’t. It wouldn’t do to show my curiosity. It would give him an edge to grab hold of me, drag me in where I definitely did not want to go. Besides, I had already heard the scuttlebutt: Miriam had gone to the ranch with their adolescent daughter, Cecelia, in order to relax away from the city for the summer, enjoy their horses, and, most importantly, remove Cecelia from the influence of some male of the species with big pecs and raging hormones who wanted to teach her some trick riding.

  “It was good for them to get away, spend a little time together before Cecelia grew up and flew the nest. And Miriam always had an affection for Wyoming. I had hoped to get up more, but business kept me in Denver entirely too much.” Drugstore gossip had Menken cast as the cold, aloof, money-baron husband, staying behind in Denver, glorying in the pursuit of yet another fortune investing other people’s money in risky ventures, and seldom showing his face at the ranch. “I made the five-hour drive every weekend I could break away. I’d arrive there late on a Friday evening and return to Denver on Sunday afternoon.” He stared at his hands, and with a subdued voice, he added, “Miriam was murdered on a Tuesday.”

  How quickly news had traveled. I had still been in Denver, living at Elyria Kretzmer’s, when she had come home from the office and told me the news that was whizzing like bees through Denver business circles. Now, as Menken maundered onward over the story, I regretted how little I had done by way of condolence to Cecelia. She was, after all, a friend of mine, my adolescent fan club of one, a wanna-be barrel racer, who had frequently asked me up to their place west of Denver to ride the finicky horses that rich folks kept in their stables. I had sent little more than the requisite card. I had meant to send flowers to the memorial service, but by then, my father was dead also, and I had little sympathy to offer anyone. “I kept meaning to visit,” I mumbled, “but you see, my father—”

  Menken held up a hand. “Say no more; we understood perfectly. Elyria told me everything.” He sighed. “What a woman she is. I must admit, when I found myself a widower, I thought of her, but by then she was seeing that Finney fellow, and the next I heard, she had married him! I’ve met him since,” he added abstractedly. “A decent sort, but she could have done better.” He shook his head, bemused. Suddenly, as in resolution, he sat up straight, indicating that the moment for action had come. “So I need your help, Emily. It’s been eight months, and the matter of ny departed wife’s murder has still not been resolved. knowing how talented you are as a detective, I—”

  I jumped up from my roost. “Stop right there. Listen to me, J. C.: I’ve hung up those spurs. The answer is no.”

  “Now, Emily …” His mouth began to widen into one of his most patronizing smiles.

  That tore it. Losing control, I blurted, “J. C., just when are you going to get it straight? My name is Em!”

  Menken feigned surprise. “Why, if it would help to call you that—”

  “No, it would not help.” I began to pace. “I’m looking for work, but not that kind of work. I—with respect—do not want to get involved uh … this way in your family’s dealings.” There, it was out. Settled.

  Menken leaned his elbows on his knees, stared into space. “Em, I want to know who killed Miriam, but that’s not what brings me here. What has brought me so far from Denver is the effect this whole experience has had on Cecelia. She’s morose, failing at school. You see, she was there when it happened, and—”

  “That’s all very sad, but I’m sure very private.”

  “No, Em, we think of you as a close family friend.” He l
eaned toward me, all amusement at the fun of persuasion dropping from his soft face as he began to plead in earnest. “My daughter is everything to me, Em. She’s all I have left of Miriam, all I have left of anything. She was there, but she can’t remember anything. It’s torturing her, knowing that on some level she knows who killed her mother, yet not knowing. I’ve had her to the best psychologist I could find, a specialist on these blocked memories, but six months in her care have bought us nothing. I’m asking you not for myself, but for Cecelia.”

  I hid my face in my hands. This was not my battle to fight; I felt that deeply. And my mother was right: I had a life to get on with, and the sooner the better. Jobs were scarce for geologists, and getting scarcer, and the longer I stayed out of action, the moldier my resume grew.

  As if he could read my thoughts, Menken said, “Even if all you do is talk to her, Em, I would be forever in your debt. And to prove that I know just exactly how to show my appreciation, I will open all the doors I can for you toward finding a new job.”

  The two of us looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. I saw a man who would not be deterred from his errand. He saw an out-of-work geologist who had just found her price.

  I took a deep breath and said, “I suppose I could pay her a call next week sometime. If you really think that my talking to her can help. But you know, all I can offer is just that—talk—and she may not—”

  “Good. I’ll expect you at the house on Monday for dinner, seven o’clock.”

  I saw Menken give his denim-encased knee a little swat, a gesture of business concluded which I remembered so well from the good old days when he paid me in cash.

  THREE

  THE first thing I needed was a place to stay near Denver. If I was going to find a job, I had to be right there sticking my face in the faces of potential employers, not hiding out on a ranch in the next state. And it was important to have a place to retreat to, so that Menken couldn’t insist that I stay with them.

  I phoned Elyria, who said she knew a woman in Boulder—a Betty Bloom—who rented a room by the week. She said Betty Bloom didn’t like renting to students, and wasn’t fond of long-term rental commitments. Tenants had a way of getting on her nerves after awhile, but a week or two, or ten, having a new face around the property was something of a tonic. Betty Bloom sounded like my kind of woman.