Only Flesh and Bones Page 11

  Po jerked back in surprise, the creases in his face popping so wide open that their absence of tanning made them glow like a spider’s web catching the sun.

  Po was not half so surprised as I was. It was not like me to be so blunt. It just made me mad that a man my father’s age would, well …

  “Fine,” he said. His face relaxed back into its perennial smile. “Well, if I can help you any more, you just say. Anything a-tall. I’d like to see this thing put to rest, you know.”

  Recovering myself, I said, “Fine. You know what happened to that journal she was writing in?”

  He shook his head. “Didn’t that go back to Denver with the rest of her things?”

  “Oh. Okay, you see or hear anything that night it happened?”

  “No, ol’ Sheriff Elwin sure asked me that, too.” He shrugged charmingly, slipped his hat off and scratched his head in a considered parody of giving my question greater thought. “Well, lessee. I seem to recall a friend of hers dropped by earlier that afternoon.”

  “Friend?”

  “Yeah, big buck with a fancy car.”

  When my mouth began to sag open, Po continued. “Yellerish-haired guy, looks like he coulda played football in school, only he seemed more the type ’at was into intramural sports, if you know what I mean.”

  Screw your come-ons, I thought impatiently. “You catch his name?”

  He grinned. “Nope.”

  Ignoring the mischief in his eyes, I said, “This was someone her age, right? Not a suitor for the daughter.”

  “Nope, plenty of gray in that there mustache.”

  Big brawny guy, graying blond with a mustache. “What kind of car you say it was?”

  “Gold BMW ’at needs a tune-up.”

  “Out-of-state tags?”

  “Nope, Wyoming.” Po furrowed his brow in a mockery of great seriousness as he added, “I told that there sheriff all of this.”

  I dug around with another ten or twelve questions, but Po couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me any more about the unnamed caller, and I ran out of new angles for jogging his increasingly selective memory.

  Tired and aggravated, I turned the wheels of my truck toward town and the breakfast for which my stomach was beginning to scream, wondering just how deep the game between Po Bradley and the sheriff ran.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE Jackalope special at the LaBonte Inn coffee shop consisted of one egg, one pancake, and my choice of two pieces of bacon or sausage links for $2.95. The coffee was hot and the water cold, both features that are necessary to shroud the strong, rather soapy taste that comes out of the taps in Wyoming.

  I struck up a conversation with the waitress at the counter, but while she was plenty interested in the topic, she didn’t know anything about Miriam’s death I hadn’t already heard, and her opinion of Po Bradley was something she kept to herself, beyond a suggestive smile. After eating, I browsed around town a bit, finding a fine bookshop in the R-D Drugstore on the main drag. I scoped out the library, the post office, and the county offices, then tried to reach the county coroner, but was told he was out. A call to the hospital got me no closer to talking to the ambulance crew. I soon got restless, which is to say, people were getting a whole lot more out of ogling me than I was out of questioning them. It seemed that Saturday was a day to get ranch chores done, and what the hell was I doing hanging around expecting someone to hand me my answers on a silver platter?

  I phoned my uncle Skinny up in Kaycee to see if he wanted a visit, but got no answer. Which meant that I was officially at loose ends. Which meant what? Go back to Boulder and sit on my butt the rest of the weekend? Not a pleasant idea. Then I got to thinking about the peculiar matter of the drilling mud out on the Broken Spoke Ranch. While it had nothing to do with Miriam, I was sure, it had a lot to do with petroleum, and, well … I got into my truck and started driving back out the Cold Springs Road, figuring I’d just take a peek.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the shed, if you knew what you were looking for. Cat drivers that do subcontract work for oil companies have a certain style to the roads they blade in. They just drop that slab of metal and shove, drawing as straight and wide and flat a run as they can out to the location. The gate built for access—another dead giveaway that something was going on there, a cut in the barbed wire with extra sturdy new posts put in before a new wire fence was constructed—was a bit unorthodox. Usually a cattle guard is placed across the road, a trough topped with iron rails that spans the opening between the new fence posts, instead of a wire gate. Cattle stay away from the rails, not wanting to get their hooves caught in between them, but trucks can drive right over them, making a characteristic thrumming sound. Heaven knows, no oil-field workers want to be bothered opening and closing any gates, but perhaps the people who had built the well location just hadn’t gotten as far as putting in the guard, and had just strung up some wire to keep Po’s half-starved cattle in.

  The gate was secured with a heavy padlock, another irregularity. Locked gates are considered somewhat rude in Wyoming. Figuring the builders could screw their bad manners, I parked my truck outside the gate, climbed over it, and marched on in to inspect the shed. It was not far from the fence, but situated around behind the shoulder of the hill, just as Po had described it. A very strange place for a drilling location, when there was all that nice flat land farther away from the shoulder of the hill. Why hug topography?

  I cast my mudlogger’s eye about the site. A pad had been bladed in, and a preliminary gouge cut where the lined mud pond would sit. Not very big. Was this to be a shallow well, or were the drillers going to bring in tanks to hold the overflow mud? And that shed-it wasn’t any bigger than usual, but it sure was fancy. And it sure was locked. Why, to protect a few hundred dollars’ worth of clay? I walked right up to it and squinted in through the crack between the door and the jamb. Nothing was there.

  “Nice, huh?” said a voice behind me.

  I jumped sideways, spun around. “Po!”

  “Emily,” he purred, eyes going all sleepy on me, like a cat does while it’s digging its claws into your lap.

  “Hey, nice location!” I said stupidly.

  “Real nice,” he replied, advancing on me, his thumbs hooked into his belt.

  “Hey, sorry, just got curious,” I prattled, circling around him toward my truck. How in hell had this man sneaked up on me? I looked down at his feet, which he moved slowly, artfully, like the smooth dancer he was. “Okay, hell, I owe you an apology, skulking onto your land like this. But you know, I just wondered about how these guys said they were going to drill you a well and then didn’t.” The words spewed out of my mouth, an idiotic jumble of excuses trying to sound like reasons.

  But it worked. Po stopped, thought. “You think there’s something funny about this?” he asked. His eyes had gone hard. -

  I kept walking toward my truck, and he followed me, matching my pace.

  “Speak,” he said.

  “I dunno, Po, but it seems damned weird to me to grade you a location and put you up a shed and then there’s nothing in it and you got a gate but no cattle guard. I mean, when they gonna get the rig in here, anyway?”

  “Like I say—”

  “No, I mean really. Shit, Po, there’re a lot of guys in the oil business as don’t mind takin’ advantage of a man,” I said in my best down-home Wyoming us-versus-them talk. “So who’s drilling this hole, for starts?”

  Po was quiet for a moment. Then he opened his mouth and said just two words: “Boomer Oil.”

  NINETEEN

  BOOMER Oil? That was Fred Howard’s company! As I recall, I said something stupid to Po, like “Oh, Boomer? Sure, I heard of Boomer,” then kind of hurried the rest of the way to my truck and gave him a cheery wave and started driving. Fast. I just didn’t like the way things seemed to be so close and familylike. But then, perhaps Miriam had known about Po’s sister’s ranch for rent because Boomer was working in the area, or Boomer had known about Po because of Miriam, or
—

  But it still didn’t make sense. Why drill a wildcat south of the Platte River when no one was making a nickel in more likely places?

  I told myself I’d ask J. C. Menken. Maybe. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know if they were all mixed up in a doomed-to-be-duster rank wildcat project. It was unseemly. It stank of tax dodging and money laundering.

  Back in Douglas, I stopped at the McDonald’s for a burger and use of the telephone, and called information. I asked for the number for an old friend of mine named Nick, who lived in Casper and knew the mud business. Second generation. If it was a driving location this side of the Tetons, Nick would know it. I found him in. Which was not unusual, considering how slow the oil business had been of late. “Emmy! What can I do you for?” he drawled in his soft little voice.

  “You know anything about a wildcat location Boomer Oil’s got going southwest of Douglas?”

  “Southwest?” he said, appalled. “No, can’t say as I do. You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Nope. Not according to what the landowner says. I figured you’d know about it. They already brought in the mud, according to him.”

  “Didn’t buy it from us,” Nick replied. “You sure? Whose ranch?”

  “Po Bradley’s. Broken Spoke.”

  “Oh, I heard about that daydream.”

  “Daydream?”

  “Yeah. He talks that up to everyone, big show-off. But that well was never even permitted.”

  “Not permitted? They bladed a location.”

  “The hell.”

  “Yeah, they did. Well, the whole thing’s screwy, so why am I surprised it was never permitted?”

  “Got me there. Yeah, we all figured it had to do with that murder out there on the ranch.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, well, ol’ Po was talking the well up real big up to the time that lady was killed, and then alla sudden that was the last we heard.”

  I thought about this. Why would a murder on the ranch scare off a drilling deal?

  Nick was talking. “You say they got mud stored in a shed?”

  “Well, no,” I replied, realizing I was spouting Po’s line rather than what I’d observed with my own eyes. “But there’s a shed.”

  “Funny.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, well …” Nick said, letting his voice rise and trail off to express with tone what words can only approximate.

  I thanked him and got back on the road to Denver, telling myself I’d stop by my, er … mother’s ranch to see if she maybe needed a hand with things, as long as I was passing by. Better to think and identify with the ranching side of the equation rather than the oily side. At the moment, it had more dignity.

  Two hours later, I rolled to a stop in the familiar ruts of the dooryard of the ranch, climbed out of the truck, and wandered inside. I found Mother writing out the bills. She looked up over her glasses and before I even said anything, she growled, “Everything’s under control, thank you.”

  “Well, I was just passing through, and—”

  Mother snatched her glasses off her face and dropped them onto the desktop. “Damn it, Emily, you’re always just passing through this way or that. When are you going to quit that wandering and start living your damned life?”

  I just stood there, staring at her, my heart turning to dust. As cruel as she had sometimes been to me while she was drinking, I’d always been able to write it off to just that, drinking.

  She turned her head and stared out the window, took a deep breath, clenched her teeth, and said, “I’m sorry.”

  I decided that she didn’t mean her apology, that she was just running through the ritual of her Alcoholics Anonymous form. I said nothing. She could damned well live with what she had said.

  Still staring out the window, she said, “You’ll find sandwich makings and some mail in the kitchen,” and bent back over her checkbook.

  I suppose most people would have left, but so much of me was so used to this kind of parley with her that I went out to that kitchen, made a cheese toasty sandwich, and sat down to consume it and some milk that I soon discovered had gone sour. Replacing the milk with cold coffee from that morning’s pot, I settled in to read my mail. Which amounted to an alumni begging letter from my college, two pieces of junk trying to look like something I’d want to open right away, a credit-card bill, and a letter from Jim Erikson.

  Jim. A welcome distraction. I glanced back out at my mother to make sure she wasn’t watching. What would this be, another of his shy notes asking when I was coming to California again? Why couldn’t he just phone me, and we could maybe get to know each other a little more, and then … but then, I hadn’t exactly phoned him either, had I?

  I ran a thumb over the plain, practical little stamp he had selected to carry his missive on its way. Jim was a genuinely nice guy, the kind you dream of taking home and showing off, if you don’t have a mother that might bite him; polite, a team player, tall, good-looking, employed. And it had been a while. Why wasn’t I more interested?

  I opened up the note to find yes, a very short note and a photograph of the sun setting over the Pacific. Very dreamy surf with dark angular rocks offshore. I remembered the scene: it was Goat Rock State Beach, a place he’d taken me on our one honest-to-gosh date. A hint, right? I gazed at the photograph for a while, trying to catch the allure of endless ocean, trying to believe I could make it substitute for the vastness of the prairie I loved.

  The note was short and sweet:

  Dear Em,

  Seems I have to be in Denver next week Friday on family business, closing my great-aunt Joline’s estate. So unless I hear otherwise from you, I’m going to come and see you.

  Jim

  He’d written his phone number across the bottom, just in case I’d lost it.

  Friday? I looked at the postmark. This coming Friday, just seven days hence? I was surprised to find that my pulse had quickened. Was it that Jim had just shown a little grit to go with his dogged persistence? Or was it the thought that he was going to appear in my scenery, instead of requiring that I melt into his? I smiled, suddenly glad at the thought of looking into those bright blue eyes of his. And maybe running a hand through his mane of golden curls. Hmmm.

  I hopped up and grabbed the phone off its cradle on the wall and dialed. After four rings, I got his answering machine. “Ah, this is Jim Erikson, ah, please leave a message,” it began shyly, and then, as always, revving up at the shift from private to public self, his voice continued quite strongly: “If this is an emergency, please dial nine-one-one or call the firehouse directly at …”

  That’s my boy, I thought, once a volunteer fireman, always a volunteer fireman. I was surprised to find myself wondering if he could be as happy in a firehouse right here in Wyoming. My mother wanted me to get a life? I’d show her what a life could truly be.

  Laughing scornfully at the direction my mind was taking, I left a message saying where I was staying, gave Betty Bloom’s number in Boulder, pocketed the credit-card bill, shuffled my remaining mail into the circular file, and nodded good-bye to my mother’s back. Outside, I headed into the barn, pulled my dad’s old spin casting rod off its hooks on the wall in the tack room, and headed south to the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado, where the spring runoff was farther progressed and the fish might just be turning their crafty minds toward food.

  TWENTY

  AFTE R a good half hour’s consideration of what to wear to my meeting with Julia Richards, I decided to go as myself, and put on jeans. Which was part of why I felt so out of place as I hiked from the parking lot down Seventeenth Street, passing all the young slicks in their well-tailored suits and tight shoes. I shoved my hands into my pockets and trudged onward down the bottom of that canyon made of office buildings, turned right at Champa, and soon hove onto Eighteenth.

  The Rocky Mountain Diner is a nice, trendy little joint stuffed into an ornate three-story Victorian office block that has miraculously escaped the hungry wrecker’s ball
of Denver’s skyscraper-happy 1980s. The legend GET IN HERE graces its genteel front door, and its menu admonishes patrons to “Check your guns at the bar,” and suggests that you “Don’t squat with your spurs on.” Its interior designers managed to maintain an anachronistic atmosphere while satisfying the modern taste in seating, and its cooks know their ways around buffalo meat loaf and Rocky Mountain oysters. I was in the middle of scowling at the menu, wondering why I was in such a lousy mood if my near future held a ration of their wonderful mashed potatoes with brown onion gravy, when I heard my name spoken.

  I looked up, to find myself eyeball-to-eyeball with a very electric woman.

  Julia Richards. She didn’t top my five foot five, but she tallied in mentally as a very tall person. Present. Erect. Assertive. In charge. She had an attractive face with wide cheekbones and a tousle of dark curls that left her neck naked but tagged the tops of a pair of those large-framed glasses that seem to say, I’m fine with wearing glasses, what’s your problem? Behind them, her eyes were sharply blue. Her lips were wide, her cheeks a well-scrubbed pink. She wore a dark suit of a soft wool and a crisp white blouse open wide at the collar. Beyond that, it was no makeup, no jewelry, and definitely no bullshit.

  I extended a hand. “Hi, you must be Julia.”

  She pumped my hand and looked deep into my eyes. “Let’s sit.”

  She commandeered a booth for us at the far end of the room, ordered a green salad and herb tea without opening the menu, told me which soups and salads were worth having, and folded her hands on the tabletop to indicate to me and to the waiter that the clock was ticking. I muttered something about having the same, then called the waiter back and added a cheeseburger deluxe, medium rare. And black coffee. None of this lily-livered tea stuff for old ironguts Hansen.

  I had about a second and a half to wish I could get past being a reactionary dip before Julia called the meeting to order. “You want to know about Miriam Menken.”