Dead Dry Page 7

  The voice on the phone shouted, “Meet me in Sedalia. Do you know where that is?”

  Michele glanced at me. I nodded. “Sure.”

  “There’s a place there. The Sedalia Grill.”

  I mouthed, You can’t miss it.

  Michele said, “I’ll be there in …”

  I flashed fingers at her; both hands four times, then my right hand alone once.

  Michele said, “ … in forty-five minutes. How will I know you?”

  “That won’t be a problem, just get here,” she said, and ended the connection.

  Michele glanced at me. “She said ‘here.’ That means she’s already at the meeting place.”

  “Maybe that’s where she plugs in her phone to recharge it,” I said dryly and swept a hand to one side to indicate that she should lead the way to her car.

  DURING MOST OF THE DRIVE, I STARED STRAIGHT ahead at the traffic, which was already bunching up in the Friday afternoon scramble for cooler elevations. We were driving along the edge of the plains third of Colorado that I’d pointed out to Trevor Reed during our flight from Salt Lake City, about ten or fifteen miles from where the plains meet the mountainous third of Colorado. The air was clear and the view was gorgeous. Great billowing clouds were lining up for the afternoon’s thunderstorms, a view I can never get tired of—as long as I’m not just down a narrow gully from where the clouds squeeze out their water. Flash floods and gully-washers are exciting but no fun.

  As the traffic continued to thicken, I began to wonder if we’d get back to Denver in time for my dinner date with Fritz. I didn’t want to have to phone him and delay. That wouldn’t show him how I felt about him, however that was.

  I was so preoccupied with Fritz that I momentarily lost track of where we were. As we passed the turnoffs for Highlands Ranch, I sucked in my breath.

  “What is it?” Michele asked.

  “It’s grown even bigger!” I said.

  “What has?”

  “This housing development.” I gazed in horrified fascination out across the sea of houses. They were huge houses painted pale shades of gray and packed impossibly close together. The development flowed away from the highway over the rolling plains toward the majestic peaks of Colorado’s Front Range, which, with the lingering drought and summer’s heat, were naked of snow. I rummaged through my file of mental images, trying to decide what it all looked like. The only match that came to mind was an ice floe riding coldly over a frigid sea. Wrong, said my brain. It’s almost one hundred degrees out there, remember? And why do they call it Highlands Ranch when it’s down here on the lowlands?

  Michele said, “More things man does with his machines, huh?”

  “Huh. I wonder where they get enough water to flush all those toilets. Hell, even if this drought were to end tomorrow, this ecosystem couldn’t sustain this many people.”

  “What’s the population out here, anyway?”

  “Damned if I know. Metro Denver crested a million a while ago. And everyone wants to live here. Good-bye grazing land. Good-bye winter wheat. The land’s worth more as house lots, I guess.”

  “Somehow I don’t think you really believe that.”

  “No. I am the opposite of a cynic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘A cynic,’ according to Oscar Wilde, ‘is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.’ This land has a high price—too high to graze cattle on it now—but I look at something like this, and it has little value for me.”

  “But at what price?” she said, cheerfully twisting my words.

  I was trying to understand that myself. I was forty and single and childless, owned no home, barely owned a truck. In fact the bank owned more of that truck than I did. Was I taking my values too far? Was there a home on a nice piece of land with the right man and a bundle of joy waiting out there for me somewhere? And why, if I wanted all that so much, had I not found it yet?

  Michele broke into my thoughts. “You’re getting awfully quiet again.”

  “My thoughts cost more than a penny,” I muttered. I glared at the housing development. Down among those streets lay not happiness, but capitulation. I could never be happy in a place like that, and I knew it. Shaking these thoughts out of my head, I said, “I was just wondering where the resources for this housing development came from.”

  “Resources? What do you mean?”

  “All the lumber and the gypsum for the Sheetrock, the latex for the paint. And the water. Where do they get their water? It takes a lot of water to fill all those pipes.”

  Michele shrugged. “From a reservoir?”

  “Maybe. But where did the water come from that filled the reservoir?”

  “Rain?”

  “This part of Colorado gets maybe fourteen inches of rain per year. There are two sources of drinking water: precipitation and ground water. Either way, it’s a reservoir. A surface-water reservoir is easy to understand; it fills a lake. A ground-water reservoir is more subtle.”

  “I’ve heard of underground rivers,” Michele said, “but not underground lakes.”

  “Neither term is accurate. Ground water resides in the tiny spaces between the grains of sand in sandstone, or in fractures in crystalline rocks like granite. Or in partially dissolved limestones it can be in small caverns.”

  “How does it get to the well? Through the underground river?”

  “You drill the well right into the reservoir rock,” I said. “Ground water does move, but the term ‘underground river’ is a misperception. It moves very slowly and flows through the whole layer of rock.” I smiled. “Denver has a true underground river called the Roberts Tunnel. It’s twenty-three miles long. Denver ran short of water years ago. It now gets its water from a network of reservoirs on the western side of the Continental Divide that flow through the tunnel.”

  “What do the people on the W side drink?” Michele asked.

  I waved a hand westward to indicate the far side of the Front Range of the Rockies. “Well, Denver doesn’t take it all, but you’re right, what Denver diverts to the eastern slope doesn’t make it into the Pacific Ocean. The Colorado River starts just the other side of the divide and runs westward down through Utah, Arizona, and the corners of Nevada and California.”

  “But don’t people downstream need that water?” Michele asked.

  “Sure. People … raccoons, fish, bacteria, birds …”

  “I did study ecology in school,” Michele said, a little defensively.

  “It’s tough thinking these things through,” I said. “It’s not like we’re aliens who just landed here to exploit the planet. We do manipulate our environment more than a raccoon or a fish does, but we’re part of the ecosystem, too. We know how to treat the water so that the bacteria don’t give us diarrhea, and we know how to dispose of our wastes in ways that don’t foul the water. So more of us live to grow up than used to—in countries with poor sanitation, infant mortality skyrockets, and it’s usually intestinal disease that gets them. But in places like this, we not only live to grow up, we live to grow old.”

  “Which is a good thing.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and we’ve learned how to build machines that can move earth resources all over the place, bringing the gypsum for all the Sheetrock walls in all those houses in over the mountains and bringing the two-by-fours in from Oregon and the nails in from Michigan, or from wherever the iron mines send their raw resources to have them formed into nails … maybe somewhere in China now, for all I know.”

  “So our population keeps increasing, which is a bad thing.”

  Probably not a Mormon, I decided. “Yeah, and we’ve developed medicines that can kill bacteria even if we do screw up and drink fouled water, and we can keep people alive who have all sorts of diseases that used to kill them, which is good, but it means that there are more and more of us, which I agree is a bad thing, because we are using up resources, living long enough to think up new ways of polluting, and crowding out othe
r species.”

  Michele said, “But we have effective means of birth control now.”

  Definitely not a Mormon. “Yes, we have birth control. But we also have huge appetites for comfort, which is only natural, so we build these huge houses, and we move in from Cincinnati where they have lawns, so we plant lawns here, too, and we have bigger closets now to hold all the clothes that were made for pennies over in China and we have to wash them all, and … well, getting back to that tunnel, all that uses a lot of water.”

  Michele said, “I’m glad I’m a homicide detective. There, things are black and white. Killing is bad. Figuring out who killed the dead person and putting them in jail is good. End of discussion.”

  I said, “But what if Afton McWain deserved to be killed?”

  “Did he?”

  “I don’t think so, but you’ve already had a taste of how royally he could piss people off.”

  Michele contemplated this a moment. “I don’t think anyone should get so mad he flattens someone an inch thick.”

  “We’ll be in Castle Rock in ten or fifteen minutes,” I said, changing the subject.

  Michele glanced at me. “You know this area well?” she asked, deciding to change the subject.

  “Well enough. I grew up in Chugwater, Wyoming, a couple hours north of here along this interstate highway. I went to college in Colorado Springs, which is forty-five minutes south of here, also just off the highway. So yes, I’ve been through here a few times.” I watched the soft contours of the prairie open up now that we were escaping the buildup of homes. It was a landscape painted in the pale greens and yellows of sage and rabbit brush, broken by dry washes and stunted bluffs out into the country rock. How I loved the short-grass prairie in all its moods. Beyond us to the west, the high peaks of the Rockies danced in the summer’s heat, gathering up thunderheads with which to cool themselves in the coming hours. Call me romantic, but I love the drama of a good, pounding thunderstorm growling and flashing and hurling stones of ice—except of course if I’m caught out in it on horseback. “You turn off at the next exit and head west to Sedalia,” I told Michele.

  She piloted the rental car off the highway and headed along the two-lane blacktop toward our target. We passed a jolt of outlet stores—one of those clever streamers of modern consumer culture that attach themselves like remora on modest neighborhoods—but then the landscape grew increasingly rural, following the lower reaches of Plum Creek, where it was little more than a dry swale between undulating, tawny hills. Presently, we rounded a curve and came upon the Sedalia Grill. Michele turned left into the parking lot, nestled the rental car in amongst a crowd of motorcycles, and shut down the engine.

  The structure was as vernacular as the outlet stores had been alien: patriotic to a fault and decidedly—nay, elaborately—rustic, with signs indicating that this was one whopping good place to get victuals, and, the pièce de résistance, the wall nearest to the parking lot was painted up as a gigantic American flag.

  I let Michele lead the way into the building. Inside we found all the trimmings of your basic wayside Western watering hole: pool tables to the left, a well-stocked bar in the center, and to the right, a dining room packed with varnished rustic pine tables set into booths made from benches that featured hefty peeled and varnished pine logs for trim. Sad sucker songs twanging out of the juke box. Neon advertising Coors. Illuminated plastic sign displaying the Budweiser beer wagon and Clydesdales. Framed pictures of motorcycles. Menu listing jalapeño burgers. Local boys with tattoos and pool cues and summer cowboy hats with brims artistically bent and the sleeves of their cowboy shirts cut off. Ye-haw.

  It wasn’t difficult to figure out which member of the clientele was Gilda. She was the only woman in the place. Moreover, she glowed in the dark, or should I say she glowed in the carefully modulated gloom of the establishment. Gilda was golden. Her electric blond hair curled like a corona around her head, collecting and reflecting light the way clouds do at sunset. Her skin was smooth and creamy and seemed lit from within, and her eyes emitted the emotionless, glassy stare of an antique doll. She was dressed in an ankle-length, rose-colored knit chemise that draped like a million dollars. A necklace made of thin gold chains and tiny faceted gems lay across the oiled perfection of her neck, and on the patrician feet that extended from the hem of that dress, she wore the kind of sandals that come over trade routes on camels’ backs.

  But this was Nature Girl? Okay, maybe that dress was made of organic cotton, and she was drinking tea instead of the alcohol her companions preferred, and instead of hamburger, she had opened a lunch box filled with bean sprouts and, but really, now … Nature Girl? I calculated that she’d last about five seconds on a cattle drive, and if those pampered feet had ever stepped more than ten inches off a beaten path, I’d eat my Stetson.

  As we approached the table, she extended a delicate hand that had never gripped any tool heavier than a silver spoon, but instead of offering it to be shaken, she raised it up and ran it lovingly through her hair. “Michele?” she said in a breathy, ethereal voice.

  Michele gave her a nod that almost edged into a bow. “Yes, I’m Michele Aldrich. I’m sorry to interrupt your party. Who are your friends?” She indicated the men who had arrayed themselves around Gilda at the table.

  “Oh …” said Gilda, as if she hadn’t noticed them until Michele pointed them out to her. “Yes … may I introduce Hugo Attabury, Todd Upton, Bart Johnson, and …” She thought for a moment. “ … Wayne Entwhistle.” She stopped to breathe after this effort of mental acuity, her small but shapely breasts rising and falling slowly. She raised one eloquent eyebrow and glanced briefly at me. “Whoever you are, it seems you bring your own pilot.”

  I stuffed my hands into my pockets in a subtly insolent way and took a long squint at Gilda. I’ll make no bones that I wasn’t liking her very much. There was something funny about her, the kind of funny you don’t want to laugh at. Nature Girl, my ass.

  I tried to reckon her age. Were those the first crow’s feet of advancing years I saw beside those dazzlingly spacy eyes, or was that just a shadow cast by her artfully arranged hair? I decided that she was my age or perhaps a bit younger. One never knows, when surgery can play such tricks.

  After letting the conversation hang until the tension had built to a point of ripeness, Michele offered a smile but said only, “This is Em Hansen.”

  I measured the three men who were seated around Gilda. Only one of them, Bart Johnson, looked like he belonged in a cowboy bar. He looked like a cattle rancher who’d been reprocessed through an upscale Western-wear shop. He was considerably older than the rest, and, under the fancy pearl-snapped shirt and greased-back tatters of silvered hair, he was considerably more beat-up. He sat stiffly, and the one hand I could see was bent with osteoarthritis.

  Hugo Attabury was a big, meaty fellow with a brush of colorless hair and a forty-dollar polo shirt, who was drinking an American beer out of a bottle. His arms crowded the tabletop, and his burgeoning paunch pressed against its edge.

  Wayne Entwhistle had his beer in a glass. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a short-sleeved dress shirt and looked like he’d been worked over with furniture polish along every inch of his rather globular body, including his caterpillar-like mustache. He had an over-compacted look to him that suggested to me that he was trying to go unnoticed.

  Todd Upton sat under an antique sign with a bucking bronco that advertised explosives and blasting caps. He had a highball in front of him, serious drinking for so early in the afternoon. He was tall but built narrow and wiry, like a ferret. He had dark eyes that took in but emitted no light, and his thin shellac of hair had forsaken the crest of his skull. He wore a pressed, blue pinpoint cotton shirt with button-down collar, and one knuckle of his left hand was encrusted with a heavy gold class ring. I thought at first that the ring didn’t go with the shirt but then glanced at Attabury’s and Entwhistle’s hands and spotted matching jewelry, right down to the color of the faux stones. Home-
town boys. Judging by the variation in clothing, each had gone his own way for a while after high school but had returned to the fold and had fleeced it for a good living.

  “What do you fly?” Hugo Attabury asked me, his tone an odd mixture of aggression and charm.

  I locked eyes with him long enough to say, “Piper Cheyenne II,” then returned my gaze to Gilda. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him purse his lips appraisingly. Faye’s plane is a fast, sleek, twin-engine job. If the big guy knew what a Cheyenne II was, that meant he was a pilot, too. But apparently a rude pilot: neither he nor any of his friends had gotten to his feet on our arrival or offered us seats.

  Still standing, Michele got down to business. “Thank you for meeting with me. I’m afraid I bring bad news.”

  No one moved. Gilda did not even blink. The men stared at Michele like so many parts of one big animal, tense and ready to spring.

  Michele took her time looking each in the eye, then announced, “I am with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department. Afton McWain was found dead this morning.”

  Nobody moved.

  The moaning, groaning music from the jukebox, some sodden she-done-left-me song, flowed through the scene like molasses.

  Michele put her hands on her hips. I realized that there was no place under that thin summer dress where she could have hidden a gun. Her slender body suddenly looked vulnerable, even as her face hardened.

  Gilda began blinking at a hypnotically slow rate. Her great long eyelashes floated up and down like the peacock feather fans Indian servants wave over sahibs in B movies.

  Several more long moments passed before Michele again dropped words into the strangely non-reactive tableau. “You are Mr. McWain’s … ah …”

  Michele at a loss for words? This was new.

  Gilda opened her perfect lips and pronounced, “Doctor McWain.”

  “Did you hear what I said, ma’ am?”

  I felt blood pounding in my temples.

  Gilda said nothing. One of the men cleared his throat. I think it was Todd Upton. Hugo Attabury began to shift his bulk in his seat, like a whale attempting to remove barnacles. Wayne Entwhistle chewed at one corner of his mustache, his eyes darting from one face to another.