An Eye for Gold Read online

  21

  BACK OUT IN THE RENTAL CAR, FAYE WAS STILL shaking her head in amazement. “You sure got him going,” she said, stabbing the key into the ignition, started the engine, and pulled out into the stream of traffic.

  “What do you mean?” I said defensively. “I stuck my foot in my mouth, clearly, but what did I say that was so insulting?”

  “You should feel complimented, Em. You had him rolling like I’ve never seen him roll before. He set his whole line of jeweler-boy nonsense aside for you, and trotted out what really mattered to him. All I’ve ever rated was a show of his pretty stones. Shit, Em, who knows what else he would have pulled out of that safe if you hadn’t opened your big yap.”

  I stared straight forward, still flummoxed.

  Faye stopped for a traffic light and laughed. “I suppose he had to find his polar opposite one of these days. Rudolf of the understated elegance meets the renegade Boston Brahmin’s spawn, cowgirl Em, who values land over all things.”

  “How do you know that about me?” I snapped. She was right, of course; my mother had been raised with wealth and social standing back East and had run away to Wyoming, and land made lots more sense to me than gold.

  Pulling forward again with the stream of traffic, she said, “I’m sorry, that’s rude, you’re right. But Tom’s been telling me about you for months. Hey, I was jealous at first, but—”

  “Jesus Christ, Faye, this is scaring me!”

  Faye glanced at me with a look that suggested that she found me both sweet and naive. “Okay. I’m sorry. But tell the truth: If you hadn’t seen where the diamonds came from, you’d have thought they were costume jewelry, not because you’ve never seen wealth before, but because that kind of wealth—gaudy and ostentatious—seems foolish to you, and extreme.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but closed it again. She was right; I had found the diamonds howlingly impractical, what my grandmother called costume jewelry. But the ending to our visit with Rudolf hadn’t seemed the least bit funny to me. I felt embarrassed, and still wasn’t sure why.

  “It’s a cultural thing,” Faye said. “I read it in a course I took on the Puritan settlers. Wealth is okay, as long as it’s understated, but luxury is something that is . . . distrusted.”

  I bit my lip. If I’d thought for a moment that Faye was doing anything but expressing intellectual curiosity about my cultural heritage, I would have jumped out of the car at the next light and found my own way back to Salt Lake City.

  A soft warbling saved me from having to comment. Faye pushed her shoulder bag my way and said, “Dig my cell phone out of here and answer it, will you?”

  I did so, and struggled to open the thing and figure out how to speak into it. “Faye’s phone,” I said, for want of a better opener.

  There was silence, and then a man’s voice, familiar but distorted. “Em. That you?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Tom Latimer. Say, while you’re there in Denver with Faye, would you do me a favor?”

  I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. First a woman I’d just met was reading my mental tea leaves to me, arid now I was getting calls on her cell phone. And I was so stunned to hear that Tom wasn’t surprised to find me answering that phone that I just said, “Sure,” even as my brain spun into high speed to try to understand how he’d known where I was.

  He said, “Go and visit a woman named Gretchen MacCallum. She’s the wife of the guy everyone was looking for there in Nevada yesterday. She lives there in Denver, She works nights and turns in at about seven or eight, but she might be awake by now. Either way, go visit her, will you? I need your take on something.”

  I stared into the phone for a moment, as if it held the last shred of reason in the universe and I just couldn’t figure out how to pluck it out from between the funny little keys.

  He said, “Em?”

  I groaned, “Am I dreaming this?”

  “Just talk to her a for a while, try to find out what she thinks might be going on out there.”

  I continued to stare. Said nothing.

  He said, “Give me to Faye. I’ll give her the address, then I’ll call Ms. MacCallum to tell her you’re coming, and advise her of her rights pursuant to the Privacy Act and so forth.”

  I handed the phone to Faye and returned my gaze to the high walk of the Rockies.

  FAYE PULLED THE rental car up in front of a sleepy-looking home on the west side of Denver. It seemed a comfortably affluent, residential neighborhood: ranch-style houses, mature landscaping, a late-model sedan in every driveway, a sport utility vehicle gleaming untouched in the garages of most. The houses across the street brandished wide picture windows at a glorious view of the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, which rose abruptly from the plains not many miles distant. As I glanced down the row of houses, I noticed that one homemaker was in the process of closing her blinds against the hot reach of the afternoon sun.

  The picture window on Gretchen MacCallum’s house, a gray brick job, was eclipsed by heavy drapes, the mark of a day sleeper. A ten-year-old station wagon sat in the driveway.

  I knocked. After a chorus of dog barks, the door clicked open and a petite woman about fifty years of age answered the door. Her hair was rich and wavy. She smiled pleasantly. “Em Hansen?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry about the interruption of your sleep.”

  She stepped aside to let a black and white mutt step out beside her and sniff me. She clipped his collar onto a long chain and shooed him out into the yard. “Oh, that’s okay. The kids will be home soon, anyway, and I try to be up by then. I’m just having breakfast. You want a cup of coffee? Come on in. And doesn’t your friend want to come, too? Or should I say, your associate.” She lifted her chin toward Faye, who had stayed in the car.

  “No, she’s working on her flight plan. She’s a pilot, and she’s about to fly back to Salt Lake. She has to have her paperwork ready. Coffee would be great.”

  “What’s she sticking to the window?”

  Alert and observant, I decided. I turned to see what Gretchen was looking at. Faye was sticking a black rod to the inside of the windshield with a suction cup. “I think that’s her GPS,” I said. “Global Positioning System. It’s a—”

  “I know what a GPS is,” Gretchen said, laughing. “My husband is a geologist, remember?” She led the way into her kitchen. “So what’s this the FBI needs to ask me about? This all sounds very mysterious.” Her laughter faded comfortably into a light titter as she set to pouring coffee into two celadon-green mugs. The room, which was both kitchen and breakfast room, enjoyed a wide glass door overlooking a semi-neglected garden. Several days’ worth of newspaper lay askew on the table, and three half-chewed dog rawhides were catching dust kitties underneath. The upper surface of the low bookshelf which lay beyond it held countless weeks of ejecta from kids’ school packs. The overall effect was one of peaceful disarray. Dust motes danced in the afternoon sunlight. I wanted to take my nasty errand and run.

  But it was too late. Gretchen now sat on one of the chairs at her kitchen table, her bare feet up on another. She sat leaning back, with her coffee mug resting against her chest as if it were a portable iron lung that was helping her to breathe. Caffeine addiction is something I understand in all its permutations.

  She was observing me calmly. Clearly, no one had told her that her husband was missing. Or so I thought. “I hope you haven’t come all this way to ask me where my husband is,” she offered conversationally. “Because I don’t know.”

  I sat down and poured some milk into my coffee, figuring I needed the protein for the work ahead. I picked up the mug, which I could see was handmade, subtly different from Gretchen’s. It was a nice shape, and fit my hands comfortably. “So you know he’s missing?”

  “Missing? Don? No; he’s not missing. Everyone else on earth might not know where he is, but he does.”

  “Oh. So he’s done this before?”

  Gretchen took a sip of her coffee and returne
d it to cuddling position. “Perhaps you should be a little more specific about what ‘this’ is.”

  I tensed. What had Tom told her? Nothing? And had anyone from Granville Resources yet phoned her? “Well, I take it he hasn’t exactly told anyone where he was going. Or that he was planning to be gone.”

  Gretchen raised one shoulder in dismissal. “That’s no big deal.”

  “So he does this kind of thing often?”

  “Well, not every day of the week. But Don has his moments when he likes his privacy. He hasn’t always worked for Granville. When he was independent, he sometimes went off the map and I wouldn’t hear from him for a week or more. Maybe two.”

  “And that was okay with you?” I set my mug down. “I’m sorry. That was a rude thing to ask.” Gretchen’s response had opened new doors of possibility, and suddenly I wanted to know: Could a husband and wife have this comfortable a relationship? Could one wander off as needed, and be allowed such privacy? Such freedom? Such trust?

  Gretchen tipped her head to one side and observed me as if I had some kind of problem she was being too polite to point out to me. “You’re not married, I take it.”

  “No. Never have been,” I answered, embarrassed.

  “Well, Don and I have been married for who knows how long. We met in college. He used to come visit a lot. Then one day I realized that he didn’t go home anymore. About then, my roommate decided it was time to find a little more privacy, and so there you have it, we were together. It was a long time after that that we got married. I think we needed paper to prove to some company he was working for that they should move my stuff along with his when he was shipped overseas for a couple years. Then we had the kids, and came back to the States. He quit the company he was working for and went out on his own as a consultant, and he’d sometimes be gone overseas a couple months at a time. He particularly liked Australia, because the Aboriginals there have this habit called ‘walkabout.’ When they get to feeling that special itch, they just wander off until they feel like being home again.”

  “And you’re okay with him going walkabout?”

  Gretchen considered my question. “He’s very considerate. He’ll always get in touch before it would occur to me to worry, albeit that’s a long time. But you see, I know him well. You just have to understand the man you’re living with. Don’s not just like everybody else, but if he was, he couldn’t do what he does. Finding gold, and other things people want found.”

  “It amazes me that you can understand that,” I said, thinking of how little Ray seemed to understand that I had other things on my mind than fitting in with his crowd.

  “Well, sometimes it’s kind of a hassle. The kids go through these stages where they’re really a handful. But I don’t know, sometimes it’s easier to deal with that kind of situation with the guy gone than if he’s always here. And then other times he’s home for months at a time just working out of the house, and then he does most of the kid care. It works out.”

  “How long has he been working in Nevada?”

  “You mean for Granville? He’s been with them . . . oh, five, six years, I guess. No, wait.” She glanced at the ceiling. “Yeah, Benny was in fifth grade. Six years. But not always in Nevada. They had him down in Chile awhile before Mettler—he was president and CEO of Granville—retired and was replaced by Roderick Chittenden.”

  “Chittenden changed the program?”

  “Well, he actually started a second company. A limited partnership. That’s because what he’s doing is risky, and this way he doesn’t risk the investments of the general stockholders of Granville Resources. The limited partnership uses Granville’s infrastructure—rents its employees, if you will—to get a second project going that would use the same offices and mill. Then the limited partnership will come in as a joint venture with Granville. You see, Chittenden started this new thing of buying up old claims and trying to put together bigger projects. It’s kind of high-risk.”

  “Is he getting anywhere with it?”

  Gretchen laughed. “Well, Don told him he was nuts.”

  “In so many words?”

  “Yes. I was sitting right across the table from them. This table, in fact. Chittenden had flown in to pitch the whole idea to him. He pointed out that Don had just found something just like it. The Gloriana project was put together from old claims that hadn’t been mined far enough to hit the main vein. And Chittenden pointed to the Carlin trend and then at the Gloriana and a couple of other mines that seemed to line up and said, ‘Why not a Gloriana trend?’ Well, Don about laughed his head off. He said, ‘Nice idea, but the Carlin mines are at least all in the same kind of rock and were generated by the same episode of mineralization. Your so-called Gloriana trend is so many apples and oranges.’ Chittenden came back with, ‘So I’ll open a fruit stand.’ Anyway, a job’s a job, and Chittenden treats him very wed, as I’ve said. So Don still goes over to Nevada a couple, three weeks at a time, then like I say, he’s home for a couple of months.”

  “He doesn’t go into an office?” This sounded great to me. I began to think that this guy MacCallum must glow in the dark to enjoy such freedom on the job.

  “He has a desk here in the house. A lot of the more established guys do that. Don couldn’t stand it if he had to go into an office.*’

  “And that works?” I asked wryly. I was beginning to feel like MacCallum was just me with a Y chromosome and a hardrock mineral hammer, and I wished I could find a job like his.

  Gretchen chuckled. “Yeah, he gets bored. Starts having too many beers. Puts on weight. Goes back to Nevada. Comes home rested and fit. He’s like a dog that needs a bone to chew on.” She laughed. “I sometimes think that if he was a dog, he’d be the type that constantly jumps the fence and gets into trouble.”

  I watched the dance of the dust motes in the bright slash of sunlight immediately over my coffee mug and wondered if Gretchen might be interested in adopting a slightly over-aged child. Or maybe she’d just let me hang out under her kitchen table and chew on one of the abandoned rawhides. “So you don’t think there’s anything special about this particular absence,” I asked, trying to focus for a moment on Tom Latimer’s question.

  “No. Well, yes, I did wonder why he wasn’t there when I called him on his birthday. But that was only yesterday, and I’d spoken to him the morning before.” She stared at me for a long moment over her cup, as if slowly reasoning something through, but still she was not alarmed, only perplexed. “Why are you guys worried about this, anyway?” She laughed again. “And why the FBI? Has Donny got himself messed up in something interesting this time?”

  “What do you mean, ‘This time’?”

  “Oh, you know, geologists are always out there snooping around. They find things they aren’t looking for sometimes.”

  I nodded. This I knew only too well. “Yeah, I’ve had my moments. But what’s Don found?”

  “Oh, once he was hired to work on a prospect that was really just a cover-up for a drug operation. He had a nice lunch with the patron and found his own way home. Another time, he found a corpse in a mine. But the guy’d been dead a while, and Don was able to show from his passport that he’d only been in the country a few days. That and a few pesos in the right pocket, and he was out of there again/That time was in Mexico. Mexicans are pretty nice to innocents like Don.”

  My own identification with him aside, I was beginning to get an interesting image of what Donald Paul MacCallum must be like. Smart and capable, if he’d stayed employed this easily in the waning job market of minerals, or so-called “economic,” geology. Easy going, a free agent in a world others found gummed by emotional stickum; yet faithfully settled into a family, or his wife would not be sitting with her feet up, so comfortably telling me all about him. I hoped he truly was okay, so I could hope to meet him. So I could ask for a few pointers on making a living while being the kind of dog who jumped fences.

  Gretchen smiled pleasantly, but cocked one eyebrow in question. “You hav
en’t told me why the FBI is interested in him.”

  I dodged the question. “Well, I don’t know for certain. I’m not exactly with the FBI. I’m a geologist, actually, but I’m consulting to the FBI on a case that involves the area where your husband’s been working. Something about an endangered rodent.”

  Gretchen put her coffee mug on the table and stretched. “Oh, yeah, that mouse. Did that biologist blow the whistle like she said she was going to?”

  My hands tensed on my mug. “She was going to blow the whistle? On whom?”

  “Ohhhhh, now I get it Yeah, this wildlife biologist—what’s her name, Pat somebody?—she was doing a study on this little mouse out there, and she told Don that this other guy at her company said it was rare and endangered, but she said they were all over the place. She cried all over Don’s shoulder about it one day when they happened onto each other out there in the field, because they were working the same area or something.”

  “What did she tell him?”

  “Oh, that the other biologist was making a big fuss about it and trying to make her look bad in the company. She said he was taking advantage of the fact that she’s this big, horsy kind of girl, by putting lesbian magazines in her desk drawers for other guys to find. You know how conservative business can be; if they think she’s an ‘out’ lesbian, she’s as good as cooked for trying to have any credibility around the workplace.”

  “So she was going to blow the whistle, you say. On the other biologist?” I asked, with a mixture of repugnance and thrill of the chase.

  “I guess SO.”

  “Was his name Umberto Rodriguez?”

  “Don didn’t say.”

  “So she was probably gathering evidence to show that the other biologist was the one who was falsifying data.”