Only Flesh and Bones Page 4

  Menken signaled the waiter and gestured toward the adjacent couch for his friend. “Emily, this is Fred Howard. I wanted you two to meet.”

  Fred Howard plopped down onto the couch and glanced quickly around the room, a habitual gesture, I supposed, designed to mark the locations of known or potential foes. He said nothing.

  Menken prattled onward. “Fred’s regional vice president at Boomer Oil. How’s business, Fred?”

  Fred’s face turned red as raw hamburger. “Hell, Joe, same old shit. Say, you see the game last night?”

  “Sure. You still following that sorry bunch of losers?”

  Fred’s eyes bulged with outrage. “Losers! You horse’s ass.” The two men swapped insults and epithets for a minute until the waiter arrived with Fred’s beer. “Ah, here’s my medicine,” he rasped, and, forgoing the iced glass, took a hard pull straight from the neck of the bottle. As he swung it back down, his head bobbled, as if he’d gotten foam up the back of his nose. He said, “Uhn. Here’s Cindey.”

  A fiftyish woman trying to look thirty was closing on our pair of couches, narrow fingers clamped tightly around a leather purse. She looked overly made up and underintelli-gent, her tiny pig eyes battling to stay open under the weight of a heavy bank of false eyelashes. The padded shoulders of her silk camp shirt struggled to redefine her collapsing figure, and her skirt, which had been cut short enough for someone with something to show off, unkindly emphasized both her legs, which were shapeless and narrow, and her burgeoning belly, which eclipsed her belt. Glancing back and forth between Menken and me, she extended a damp, limp hand my way. “Hello,” she whispered.

  “Emily Hansen, this is Cindey Howard,” Menken offered cheerfully, rising to his feet to give her a polite peck on the cheek, which she received with a mechanical tilt of her head. She looked expectantly at her husband, as if awaiting permission to sit down.

  Fred took another pull on his beer and barked, “Where’d you put the car, Cin?”

  “Valet,” she breathed, directing her husband’s attention toward the uniformed doorman.

  “What? That’s five bucks for nothing! You—”

  Menken cut in. “Emily’s the friend who’s helping me with Cecelia. Cindey, please sit down. Here, take my seat. Cecelia fairly worships this young woman, doesn’t she, Emily?” He smiled broadly. “Of course, I can see why. You’re a fine equestrienne, an accomplished geologist, a woman of insight … .”

  Fred leaned toward me, his slacks binding against his chubby crotch, and squinted at my face. “Ohhh, so that’s what this is. Yeah, Joe said he wanted me to meet a lady he knew. And I thought he was starting to date!” Laughter belched from his throat. “Here I was all excited! You looking for a job? We got nothing.”

  Menken broke in again. “You’d be lucky to get her, Fred. Emily’s been out of town for—a year, isn’t it?—and yes, she is now available again, should the right position appear, but I doubt you have anything that would interest a geologist of her caliber. I was hoping that she could interview you; you know, pick your brains for ideas about the current business climate, perhaps divine a few leads.”

  I smiled, tried to look alert and winning.

  Fred Howard forced his face into a smile, an effort that made him look like a toad on laughing gas. “Oh, uh-huh. Sure, honey, you call my secretary; she’ll set you right up, some day next week. But not now. I never talk shop with a beer in my hand. Might spill!” He roared, delighted with his own joke.

  Cindey’s shoulders contracted as if she’d been pinched. I sank back into the red leather of my couch and tried to disappear.

  “So!” said Menken, “We have a quorum. What say we drive up to Vail for dinner?”

  Fred Howard put down his beer. “Now you’re talking! You bring the Mercedes, Cin?”

  Cindey looked pained. “No, the RX-7.”

  “Balls! That two-seater ain’t worth shit for a road trip. Waiter!”

  As Fred hoisted his bottle in the universal “one more” salute, I heaved a sigh of relief that the beleaguered Cindey had brought the wrong car. That meant Menken would drive. He was not usually a heavy drinker, and his Mercedes was the biggest one built, a veritable Sherman tank among automobiles, warranted to withstand high-speed oral sex with a semi. I crossed one leg over the other, preparing to get comfortable while Fred sucked down his second dose of suds, and threw my mind out of gear. It was going to be a long evening.

  It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could choose not to go. Jobs, or even leads toward jobs, were still too hard to find.

  SEVEN

  AS Menken’s Mercedes hummed westward along Highway 6 through the western suburbs of Denver, Cindey briefly found something to say. “Freddie dear,” she breathed, “I just remembered. I have that early tennis game with Julia in the morning. Why don’t we go to The Fort instead?”

  Freddie dear coughed around his cigar. “Makes no difference to me.”

  Menken’s face fell a fraction. “Cindey, I’m sure we’ll be back by—”

  “Oh, please, Joe. You know how I do get nosebleeds at high altitudes.”

  Menken turned to me. “All the same to you?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Fine,” I said. The cigar was already starting to get to me, and it didn’t matter to me where we ate, as long as someone else was paying. Hence, we wound up at The Fort, a high-end place stuck between two of the hogbacks of rock that rise up against the mountain front west of Denver. The Fort looks from the outside like an old adobe frontier bastion, and it serves buffalo steaks. I ordered mine medium rare.

  Having gotten her way, Cindey sat through the meal in silence, her little eyes as glazed as green grapes in aspic and her short spine as stiff as concrete. I got to watching her in fascination. She chewed meditatively, like a cow, and sometimes stopped chewing altogether. I wondered now and then if she had fallen asleep with her eyes half-open, but each time, just when I was almost certain she had, her little hand would raise another forkful of salad to her almost lipless mouth. So lulled was I by this performance that I almost spilled my coffee into my lap when, after dinner, she suddenly snapped awake and insisted that we all go to their house for drinks. Her sudden earnestness stood out like a cow flop on a china plate. Something was up. Where my attention had been drifting, it was now instantly riveted, and I followed quickly on her heels to the car.

  The Howards lived in a house that was large even for Genesee, not far from the Menkens. We were hardly in the door at the Howards’ when Cindey announced that she was taking me on a tour of the house.

  “Women!” her husband roared. “Allus gotta show off. Joe, you and me’ll get down to it in the den.”

  Disappointment showed so baldly in Menken’s face that kindness compelled me to give him a wink, one of those “I’m on the job” signals. Menken’s eyes ignited with recognition, then warmed with feeling. “You go on your little house tour. I’ll be waiting here,” he said, and gave my shoulder a little squeeze.

  The buffalo steak in my stomach began to stampede in the opposite direction. I blinked, looked again into his eyes, hoping I had imagined what I’d just seen there. It was still there. I walked out from under his hand, following Cindey down the hall.

  House tour, hell. Cindey marched me straight to her private sitting room and right into her walk-in closet, where she scrabbled into a stack of boxes. “I hid them in here,” she wheezed. She opened one box, another, and another. Her eyes widened in alarm or consternation—I couldn’t tell which.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked, batting aside a sachet of potpourri that dangled from the light fixture in the middle of the closet.

  Cindey’s pale hands scratched their way into another box. “When Joe told us you were going to look into Miriam’s death, I can’t tell you how relieved I was. These things have been sitting here bothering me like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “What things? And I’m not exactly looking into Miriam’s death. I’m—”

  “Here they are! Now, h
ow are we going to get them past the men? I know, we’ll let them get into their little drinks; then you say you’re tired and I’ll say I’m taking you back to town to pick up your car. We’ll take these out to the garage right now and put them in the trunk.”

  “These what?” I insisted, leaning past piles of neatly stacked cashmere sweaters to get a look. Cindey spun and pushed the box abruptly into my arms like it was biting her hands. I wasn’t braced, and I dropped it. It crashed to the floor, landing on my feet with a heavy thud that split the cardboard all the way around the bottom. The smell of old paper wafted up from the open flap.

  Cindey’s little eyes were trained on the box as if it were about to spit snakes. “Her journals,” she hissed, whispering beneath her usual whisper.

  “Whose?” I hissed back.

  “Miriam’s.”

  “Huh?”

  “Ever since high school.”

  “Why do you—”

  “Oh, was she ever worried about these things! You should have seen her. Didn’t want Joe to see them. Thought he’d get into them and divorce her. So here they sat in my closet. God knows, Fred never looks past the liquor cabinet.”

  “But what could be in here that—”

  “That’s what I wondered. When she gave it to me, the box was all sealed up, and I’m not one to pry, but then when she was murdered … .” She trailed off suggestively.

  “Well, of course that changed things,” I said reassuringly. “Why didn’t you just turn them over to the police?”

  Cindey Howard stared into my face like I’d just sprouted a second head. “The police? Are you raving?”

  “Well—”

  She sucked in her breath. “I shouldn’t have shown you!”

  “No! No, it’s okay. They’re secret, I can see, and your secret is mine,” I added hurriedly. “I just … I mean, is there something in here?”

  Her face went blank. “Well … I just read around in them.” She looked sideways, discomfort pinching her pudgy face. “Kind of looked over the bits when Cecelia was a baby, see if there was anything that might mean something to her.”

  “Find anything?”

  A bit too quickly, she said, “No, it was the usual stuff, all bitching about the diapers. Real drivel.”

  I asked questions automatically, a scientist’s knee-jerk reaction to incoming data. “Had you known Miriam a long time?”

  “Since college.”

  Speaking before I thought, I said, “But she didn’t write anything about you in there.”

  Cindey Howard stared at the floor. Her lips formed a word she could not speak: no.

  EIGHT

  IN Boulder two hours later, I pulled my truck over into the off-street parking slip Betty had pointed out to me and rattled the gate so that Stanley the dog would let me know if he was loose. As his answering chorus of barking was muffled through closed doors and windows, I risked the yard, crossing quickly to the outside stairs.

  Upstairs in my room, I tiredly dumped the box of journals on the floor, irritated to have them in my possession. During the drive home, I’d had time to think about the responsibility they represented, and I wanted no part of it. They had not been written for my eyes. I had never met Miriam Menken, had not worried about her existence while she was alive, and saw no greater reason to get to know her now that she was dead. I shucked off my boots and placed them on top of the box to keep the flaps firmly shut.

  Jeans off, sweater and underwear in a pile at the foot of the bed, I shuffled myself into the shower with the overhead light off and let the water pelt me, the better to wash away the accumulated poisons of the day. I stood in the steaming darkness, letting the waters melt the knots in my shoulders. The steam rose and thickened the air, sealing me in with my thoughts and my loneliness. How strange it had been to be Menken’s “date.” I wondered again if I had imagined that look he’d given me. Was the old satyr putting the moves on me? I compared him in my mind with Jim Erikson, the man I currently counted as my sexual distraction. The comparison was unfavorable, at least from a physical standpoint. Jim was young and fit, a man who worked with his hands. Menken was—well, it was silly to even look at him in that way. So why was I doing it?

  I decided that my imagination had run away with me. Yes, that was it—Menken was only being Menken, urging me on with the job. A little shoulder squeeze here and there wasn’t anything unusual coming from an older man. It was a sign of encouragement—at most, affection. I would put it out of my mind.

  I shifted, letting the water find the tenderest part of my back. The part Jim had found, that time I let him touch me, let him ease my timidness, my uncertainty, until I was ready for him to kiss my neck, my hands, my face … but I had stopped him there. Why did I still resist him? A kinder soul I’d never met, and he didn’t lack for looks. He had a steady job, a nice house, and friends who loved him. So what was stopping me? Was it just that tiny fact that he lived so far away? Or was he just not Frank?

  Frank! Frank was married now, a father no less; no backing out for that boy, that was for sure. And I’d let Frank go, not the other way around. Why did I long for him now, and not then?

  Stop! Quick, think about something safer!

  My mind circled back around to Menken.

  Crazy old J. C. Menken, alone with his moping daughter in that huge house in Genesee. I thought back to the first time Menken had taken me there, two years before, when I was a newcomer to his now-defunct Blackfeet Oil Company. The two had been alone together even then. She had been a stringy girl of fourteen, wild in her rage and sorrow over her mother’s departure. Where was it Miriam had gone? I tried to remember if Cecelia had ever told me. Surely Menken never would have; he’d been bent on pretending she’d never gone. How quickly he had moved to erase the damning limerick Cecelia had scrawled that day on the refrigerator door, begging for her father’s attention:

  Oh, Mommy’s up in Aspen snorting coke

  She left Friday wath a friendly looking dope

  Dear old Dad’s in the Jacuzzi

  With his brand new buddy Suzie

  Trying to see if they can make the bourbon float

  It had seemed pretty good doggerel, for an adolescent. I hadn’t thought at the time about the implications, beyond the obvious assertion that J. C. had been dumped or cuckolded, but now that I knew him better, I wondered. Would the suburban wife of smooth, conventional old J. C. Menken have been the sort to snort cocaine? And would she have been so obvious about it that her daughter would have known, or, for that matter, would she have let the child know about it if she’d been running off with a dope fiend to a fast town like Aspen? This image of Miriam didn’t seem to fit with what I knew of Menken, but then, it was hard to feature any woman living with him for long without losing her grasp on reality.

  During Miriam’s absence, J. C. had encouraged me to visit Cecelia. I had always met her at the stables, the better to avoid the awkward social contact with my boss. We had gone for rides together on their quarter horses, I on Miriam’s gelding, Cecelia on her wonderful chestnut mare. Cecelia had proved an okay kid once she relaxed: bright, capable on horseback, and deeply motivated to improve her barrel-racing skills. We’d set up the oil drums in the arena and ridden the barrels again and again, I schooling the horses and demonstrating the tricks and postures that spun horse and rider around the turns, she doggedly practicing until she began to master them. But I had never met Miriam, even when she quietly returned. She hadn’t come to the office, hadn’t answered the telephone when I’d called to set up subsequent riding visits with Cecelia. In fact, if Menken’s secretary hadn’t passed the word to the troops, I’d never have known she was back.

  Then in the merry month of May, not quite a year ago, Blackfeet had gone belly-up, and we had all been out of work. I’d looked for other jobs for a while, but quickly ran out of steam as hope dwindled. It was natural that I hadn’t thought to call Cecelia to go riding; I had been busy. And then I’d heard that she and Miriam had gone to Wyom
ing for the summer, and then my father died, and …

  I hadn’t been in touch with much of anyone after that. Autumn followed summer, with winter hard on its heels. And now it was spring again, time for new beginnings.

  The shower began to run cold. I turned the cold tap off, but the water only warmed for a minute or so, just long enough to rinse my hair. Bundling out of the water and into some thick towels Betty had left out for me, I settled on the foot of the bed and rubbed my scalp with vigor, trying to shake myself back into feeling warm. I dug out my blow-dryer and let it rip, then pulled on a flannel nightshirt, dove under the down comforter, and crimped my body into the time-honored pose of the fetus.

  Why had Miriam come back? The question caught me by surprise, amusing me with its opposite supposition, an understanding that any woman in her right mind would eventually have left J. C. Menken. He was just that strange a man. But then, why had she married him in the first place?

  I peeked out from under the comforter. Stared at the box.

  Some thoughts are as seductive as chocolate or liquor. This thought—this question, Why had she married him?—picked at me, wheedled at me until it finally launched me out of bed and across the floor to that box held shut by the laughable protection of my boots.

  I removed my boots and pulled back the cardboard flap. I was confronted with a stack of cheap record books, the kind bound in cardboard that’s printed in black and white to look like leather. The bracket on the front of each was neatly lettered, indicating inclusive dates in a tidy, if somewhat looping and naïve, hand.

  I carried the first volume back to bed and climbed in. And, with the dreadful sinking of conscience a glutton must feel on the way to the refrigerator, I opened the journal and began to read.

  NINE

  THE first entry was dated October 17, 1965:

  Dear Journal,

  It’s my fourteenth birthday and Dad gave me this book so I could write things down. He says that keeping a journal is good practice for writing, and I can keep things secret that should be secret. Here goes. Today when I walked home from school Tom Jarret threw a snowball at me. He’s real cute. I never thought he’d notice me, but wow!