An Eye for Gold Read online

  ‘Tell what?” I asked.

  “Unca Ray!” he squealed. “Unca Ray!”

  “What’s the matter?” I blustered, once again getting to my feet. I put an arm around him and brushed the sticky sand from his yellow hair.

  He planted two tiny hands against my ribs and wrestled himself away from me. I let him go. He ran down the beach, screaming and waving his hands until he caught his uncle’s attention. “Unca Ray!” he cried again and again, his voice rising.

  Ray cut the engine on his jet ski and sluiced the machine to a stop near his nephew and knelt, lowering his eye-level to the child’s, and spoke to him in words too soft for me to hear. The boy tumbled into his uncle’s embrace and buried his face against the wet life vest. Ray patted his hair, pursed his lips in soft cooing, then stood him up straight and chucked him under the chin like a good soldier. Ray then crossed the sand to me. “He says you said a bad word,” he said sharply. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his wrap-around sunglasses, but his lips had drawn tense.

  “A bad word? What bad word?”

  Ray’s chin lifted in challenge. “He’s been raised not to repeat such language. What did you say to him?”

  I peered up at my twin reflections in Ray’s sunglasses, incredulous. “Say? I counted to five and chased him. What’s so bad—” Then I remembered. “I told him he’d better run like hell. Aw, Ray, it was just an expression!”

  Ray took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He left them closed for a long moment and then opened them again. Examined his glasses. Wiped at a smudge that had marred their mirrored surface. Looked at me, his face flat. “I repeat—”

  “Fine,” I said, cutting him off. “I get the message. Now watch, I shall apologize to the child.” I turned toward Teddy, clenched my teeth, and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Where I come from . . .” I let that sentence trail off. It didn’t matter where I came from. I wasn’t there now. My rough-and-ready ranch heritage was his social screwup. I felt deeply embarrassed, but at the same time angry. I turned to the west and watched the scattered clouds turn to gold, my mind slipping easily to the happier prospect of what the morning would bring.

  “It’s getting late anyway,” Ray said.

  “Exactly,” I replied.

  4

  IN LOVELOCK, NEVADA , SHIRLEY COOK COUGHED and slipped her feet out from under her quilt, searching with her toes for her worn old slippers. The day was coming—she knew that, as she always woke at the same time, but her world stood always in darkness. She had been blind since girlhood. She knew the event that had blinded her had hurt her looks, too, but the march of the years had one by one plucked loose the threads of her blossoming vanity, and she had found that life without the hope of men held other interests far more perplexing and in their own ways just as satisfying. By long habit, she ran her right hand along the wall until she found the door and loosed her bathrobe from the hook near its top, wrapped it around her aging body, and cued her mental map for transit into the kitchen.

  She moved to the stove. The sun would soon rise and warm the house, but in the meantime, she would have a cup of tea. Plucking a match from the tin holder on the wall to the left of the stove and striking it, she delicately felt with her smallest finger for the edge of the burner and turned the knob with the other hand. Then she pushed the kettle into place, turned, and moved across the room to where the cat now stretched itself awake in greeting. So sensitive were her remaining four physical senses that, had she needed to, she could have reached out and found the cat by the tiny warmth it cast into the air around it. Or she could have listened for the minute smack that accompanied the opening of its mouth, or the whispery purr it emitted as it now rolled sensuously onto its back, baring its fur-lined stomach to be patted, or she could have flared her nostrils and tracked the ancient feline by the funk of its breath.

  But Shirley used a different sense for locating things that were living. She had learned, with practice, that she could sense the animal’s presence. To find the cat, she simply thought about it, then followed her sense of it, of what that cat seemed like to her—selfish, self-indulgent, and loving, compactly packaged—as mariners might follow a beacon, narrowing her search as the signal grew stronger, almost prickly, with increased proximity. On the rare occasions that the cat wasn’t there, there was simply no sense of its presence, and Shirley would call to it, or clink together two cans of cat food until it came.

  Shirley flicked on the radio that rested on a shelf above the sink, then grunted as she bent to reach a fresh can of kidneys-’n-bits out of the lower cupboard. She had worked hard to fight the ravages of her advancing years, forcing herself to walk down the street with her cane each day, but with each decade she had nonetheless gained an inch or so in girth, and now, at sixty-eight, there was simply too much flesh in the way of her hinges for them to move efficiently. She fed the cat. “There you go, you old mooch,” she murmured affectionately. “You don’t do a lick of work around here. I don’t know why I tolerate you.”

  The twanging strains of country and western music on the radio gave way to news on the half hour. “A Winnemucca woman died last evening when the pickup truck she was driving left the road near Lovelock. Patricia Gilmore was twenty-eight years old, and was apparently driving home from her job near the Gloriana Mine when the accident occurred. And in the nation’s capital today—”

  The droning voice on the radio stopped short as Shirley yanked the unit from its shelf, ripping the power cord from the wall socket. Sucking in her breath on a tide of fury, she wound back and hurled the contraption as hard as she could against the floor. Shards of plastic ricocheted off the adjoining cabinetry. “Shit!” she screamed, so loud that the cat, who was already cowering, scattered for its hatch door and disappeared into the yard. “Shit! Patsy, Patsy, I told you to keep your goddam mouth shut!”

  IN DENVER COLORADO, Gretchen MacCallum sat on the edge of her bed, running a boar’s-bristle brush through her glorious dark hair. Continuing the rhythm of the strokes with her right hand, she turned over the handset of the bedside telephone and dialed a number in Lovelock, Nevada, then pinched the phone between her shoulder and her ear and listened to the far ringing. Fifty strokes she gave her hair each morning, as she readied herself for sleep. It was her habit to phone her husband before turning in. If she had just come off duty from her night shift work as a nurse, she would have placed this call from the hospital, such was the timing necessary to catch him before he got in his vehicle and headed out into the mountains to look for gold.

  Gretchen worked night shifts by preference. That made things awkward sometimes, during intervals when her husband was home and they wanted to have a connubial moment or two, as he was early to bed and preferred to rise by six so he could make a good breakfast for the kids and discuss soccer practice and geometry and laugh about what was being taught under the label “History.” But sometimes on Saturdays or Sundays he would open one eye as she slithered in between the sheets, and would muster up some middle-aged nookie and then fall back asleep with a long, hairy arm resting warm and sweaty across her freckled skin. They didn’t talk much, and didn’t need to. In fact, the phone call she placed to him each morning when he was away in Nevada—or the e-mail she sent to him in South Africa, or Chile, or Australia, or wherever else the world of gold exploration took him—was but a habit and a formality borne of the comfortable affection of almost thirty years of marriage and the smoothness that comes between two pebbles of differing shapes if they rub together long enough in the stream.

  This morning he was in Lovelock, a blip on the map along Interstate 80 ninety miles east of Reno. The phone rang six times before a voice answered it. “Desert View Motel,” it said nasally.

  “Donald MacCallum, please. Room two-twelve.”

  “Oh, good morning, Gretchen,” said the motel receptionist. “I’ll transfer your call.”

  As Gretchen pulled the brush through her hair a twentieth time, a twenty-first, and on and on to s
trokes number twenty-seven and -eight, she heard the impersonal clicks and buzzes of her call being transferred, and the line in her husband’s room ringing. Before the ninth ring, the line switched back to the front desk, and the nasal voice said, “He ain’t answering.

  “Oh. Did he go out early this morning, Rita?”

  “No, I ain’t seen him.”

  “Oh. Is he out at the mine, then?”

  “Wait, I’ll ask Kyle here.” The voice got weaker as the desk manager swung the boom microphone away from her mouth, opened a window, and shouted, “Hey, Kyle! You seen Don?”

  “MacCallum?” a male voice volleyed.

  “Yeah, yer Scottish buddy. He out drilling or something?”

  “Haven’t seen him. I’m thinking maybe he’s gone home to Denver.”

  “Wait. Gretch? You hear that?”

  “He’s not here,” Gretchen answered. “Otherwise why’d I be calling you?”

  “Oh, yeah. Here, you talk to Kyle.”

  A baritone voice came on the line as Gretchen completed strokes thirty-eight and thirty-nine. “That you, Gretchen? Has he called you since yesterday? I’m—I’m kind of wondering where he is.”

  Gretchen paused in her brushing and thought a moment, considering the hint of anxiety in Kyle’s voice, then continued, giving special attention to the hairs at the nape of her neck that seemed to always catch on the sweater she wore over her nurse’s uniform. “Oh, come on, Kyle. He’s probably gone out early to check some idea he had during the night. You know him. He woke up early and didn’t want to wake you or something.”

  “Gol, Gretch, I wish I could find a woman as cool as you are. Both times I was married, if I didn’t call in twice a day the little woman would get crazy.”

  “They shouldn’t have married a geologist, Kyle. It comes with the territory, right?”

  “Right,” he said. “Gone more than home sometimes.”

  Gretchen heard the self-pity in his voice, and decided to deflect it with humor. “Yeah, I’ve heard all the jokes. *If your wife not only knows what a thermocouple is, but knows how to replace one on the water heater, you might be a geologist’ ”

  Kyle said, “Yup. And, ‘If you wake up at home and can’t remember what motel you’re in, you might be a geologist.’ And if it’s Tuesday, I must be sampling saprohites in Australia.”

  “Oh, quit griping, Kyle. You guys have been cozy there in Lovelock on and off for years now.”

  “Yeah, if the desk manager at the motel knows not only your name but your wife’s and kids’, you might be a geologist”

  “Yeah, well . . . listen, if you see Don, tell him I called, okay?” Gretchen fought off a yawn. She was done with her brushing now, and even if she had reached her husband, she would be hanging up the phone now, switching off the light, and lying down to sleep. “G’night, Kyle.”

  “Yeah, sleep tight, Gretch.”

  Kyle’s final salutation faded as Gretchen’s hand drifted with the receiver over to its cradle. As her eyes closed and the fatigue of eight hours carrying needles, pills, and thermometers up and down the hard vinyl floors of the hospital pushed her underneath the first wave of sleep, she dully wondered why her wandering husband hadn’t been in his room to hear her say she loved him on this, the fifty-fifth anniversary of his birth.

  5

  THE MORNING LIGHT ON AVA RAYMOND’S BIG, lovely house had already shifted from liquid gold to the fuller spectrum of day when I walked out the front door to wait for the FBI agent. I was staying with Ava during my visit to Salt Lake City. She’s Ray’s mother. Strict Mormons observe such niceties of chaperonage. So anyway, when the man who called himself Tom Latimer pulled up in front of her house to pick me up for the flight to Nevada, she was just returning from her early morning jog. “Tom!” she called out, somewhat breathlessly, as she had just taken herfifty-two-year-old frame up and down a few hills that still lay in the shade of the towering Wasatch Mountains. “How nice to see you. Are you joining us for breakfast?” She gave him one of her efficient, take-charge, but surprisingly hearty smiles of welcome.

  “Ava,” he replied, “you are a sight for sore eyes. Wish I could stay, but I’m just here to spirit your star boarder off for a field trip. Can I take a rain check?”

  I looked back and forth between the two of them. They had not seen each other, to my knowledge, since the strained circumstances in which we had all become acquainted, a murder case that had involved me, the FBI, Ray, and because of Ray, Ava. Now I mapped the flush that was coming to Ava’s cheeks and the twinkle that was lighting the FBI agent’s eyes and wondered if more than good exercise and early morning sunlight were causing them. Yes, definitely: Ava shot me a look that said “back off” and the agent’s smile grew broad enough to uncover his eyeteeth.

  The tightness in Ava’s expression now shifted from defense to pending disapproval. “So this is your mysterious appointment Yes, I suppose we must be discrete when working with the FBI, but does Ray know about this?”

  I gritted my teeth. I could go along with staying with her instead of Ray if that’s what they all needed to feel kosher, but I was damned if I was going to hold still for cross-examination of my choices of how to kill time while he was working.

  The FBI agent said sweetly, “I asked Em to keep the object of our, ah . . . excursion mum. And it’s outside of Ray’s jurisdiction, so—”

  Ava cut him off. “Shall we expect you for dinner, Em?”

  I gave myself a moment to remember that I was a grown woman in my thirties, then answered, ‘Thanks, Ava, but as I said last evening, no thank you. I’ll be gone all day.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the FBI agent’s eyebrows rise. I did not acknowledge his puzzlement. It was none of his business what I planned to do after we returned from Nevada. It would be something simple, like taking myself to a movie. Or to a bar, where I’d down a nice, cold, micro-brewed beer. I needed a little time to myself. To think about the row I’d had with Ray the evening before. To cool off. To ask myself what in hell’s name I was doing here, and with the rest of my life.

  Ava turned toward the FBI agent and gave him a calculatedly polite smile. She said, “Have a nice excursion,” then went inside her big beautiful house to continue her inviolate life as widow of a beloved husband and reigning matriarch of a sprawling clan crammed full of personalities as strong as her own.

  I moved quickly toward the agent’s nondescript car. With more than a little venom, I said, “So that’s why you were so pleased to pick me up. You wanted to see Ava.”

  He grinned clear back to his molars. “And she was a pleasure to behold,” he replied.

  A HALF-HOUR LATER, the small twin-engine Piper Cheyenne II the FBI agent had chartered lifted smoothly out over the high desert, its shadow running ahead of us down the lake shore and out across the breeze-dappled waters of Great Salt Lake. We rose over the brown slopes of Antelope Island and continued westward, our airspeed rising as we leveled off at twelve thousand five hundred feet. As always, the world seemed softer and more comforting from the sky, a well-integrated stanza of poetry in which details that seemed daunting from close up—scorpions, quicksand, potential mothers-in-law—were brought as if by magic into a more comprehensible calibration. Down there was civilization, with burger stands and scurrying cars and stop lights and corporate concepts of aesthetics; up here was a limitless sky over arid landscape so beautiful that my heart recalled peace.

  The airplane cruised at 283 knots, which is something over three hundred miles per hour. About fifteen minutes into the flight, we passed over the western shore of the lake and headed out over the Bonneville salt flats, a stark white veneer of minerals that were precipitated from the lake as it shrank from its ice-age vastness to the relatively small, shallow expanse it is today. The twin ribbons of Interstate 80 and the Union Pacific Railroad ran straight as dies across the white expanse of salt. The flats are so smooth and so immense that motor daredevils have used it as a track table on which to test their cap
acities for demon speed. Far to the south I could see still other lands that God had left dry and open and which man had transformed into sere gardens for testing bombs.

  As I breathed in the parched air, I searched the ground below for any traces of the wagon trains that had crossed the flats a century and a half before, winding slowly along a spur of the Emigrant Trail toward dreams of greater fortunes in farming and mining. Then, the land I was flying over had been still part of Mexico, which had only recently wrested itself from Spanish colonial rule. Those who traveled the trail were from the eastern states truly emigrating to a new land. I knew well its trace where it passed from Nebraska through my native Wyoming. Most emigrants had skirted around what is now called Utah, passing instead through Idaho. A few, notably the ill-fated Donner party of 1846, had staggered across this salt desert, their oxen already ruined from crossing the Wasatch Mountains east of present-day Salt Lake City. For all, the challenges of the western two-thirds of the Great Basin still lay ahead.

  The Dormer party was part of the first pioneering trickle of emigrants. In 1848, the United States took these territories from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. That same year, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in the Californian foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and the flood gates of emigration opened. During the summer of 1849, twenty-five thousand people poured-along the trail.