Only Flesh and Bones Read online

  May 8

  Julia took me driving in the mountains. We got to talking about things, and I opened my big mouth and told her how it is with Joe, and she said why did I put up with that? I had to admit of course that I don’t know why. Not really. Here’s Julia on her own and she seems so much happier and more at ease than when she was with Charlie. She says she doesn’t have as much money, but she doesn’t need as much because she doesn’t have as much need to cheer herself up with trips to the spa and lots of clothes and other indulgences. I wonder what my life would be like on my own.

  It seemed that Julia had a way of stirring things up:

  July 12

  Julia has been taking one of her workshops again. Last time it was Guru somebody teaching her meditation. This time I think it was Goddess worship. I don’t know what to think. Each time she comes back, she says that whatever she just learned or experienced is the answer, as if all of them could be the. She does have a certain glow about her, though.

  August 12

  Today I signed up for a weekend retreat with Julia. We’re going to a place in Steamboat Springs. There will be no one there but women, and we’re supposed to learn to love ourselves more. It’s worth a try. Maybe I can learn to like what my life is like.

  I turned the page, eager to learn what Miriam learned from her weekend away, but it was the last page of the journal, and as with previous volumes, it was filled with undecipherable notes and what looked like miscellaneous phone numbers. I slid out from under the covers and dug down through the cardboard box, only to find that I had just finished reading the last volume there.

  THIRTEEN

  FRIDAY morning, I put a call through to Cindey Howard just as early as I thought was decent. “Are you sure you gave me all of Miriam’s journals?” I asked, barging past the obvious question, which was: Had I been reading them? I was damned if I was going to feel guilty around someone who had pried open those taped pages before I did. Besides, addicts prefer not to confess.

  “Yes,” she whispered. Pause. “Why?”

  “The last entry is dated years ago. And there’s a closing date printed on the cover of that book, which leads me to believe she at least started another.”

  Pause. “No, that was all there was in that box. I’m sure of it.” Pause. Then, in an even more whispery tone meant to convey either conspiracy or scathing judgment—I wasn’t sure which—she said, “What did you think?”

  “Of what?”

  Silence.

  Cindey’s little games were beginning to annoy me. I spitefully decided to ignore her. Instead, I asked, “When did she store those with you exactly?”

  Pause. “Just before she went away one time.”

  “You mean the time in September a couple years ago, when she took off for a while?”

  “Yes.”

  It was my turn to pause as I tried to figure out to whom Miriam might have entrusted subsequent volumes. “Does Julia Richards still live in Denver?”

  “Yes … .”

  From between clenched teeth, I said, “Would you give me her phone number … please?”

  I could hear Cindey breathing, either as she thought or as she sifted quietly through papers or perhaps a Rolodex on her desk. Presently, she read the number off, very clearly and slowly, to make sure I’d gotten every number right. Then she said good-bye and hung up, never asking why I wanted to know. Which left me wanting to call her back to find out what she wasn’t telling me. Fuming at the ease with which Cindey seemed to manipulate me, I dialed Miriam’s other college friend instead.

  Julia Richards answered on the third ring, the classic American antitechnology “catch it before the answering machine” reflex. Her hello was brusque and throaty. I identified myself, wading into her private waters as smoothly as I could. “J. C. Menken asked me to look into this whole situation on Cecelia’s behalf. I was wondering if I could meet with you. I don’t like to pry into your life or Miriam’s,” I said, lying to myself as much as to her, “but I’m not sure how to help the daughter without knowing the mother better.”

  Julia’s response was swift but noncommittal: “Joe said you might be calling.”

  “Ah, good. Well, I understand you were one of her closest friends, and I was wondering if—”

  “Why haven’t you asked Joe about her?” she asked with a heavy note of irritation.

  That rocked me back on my heels. Why hadn’t I? And how did she know I hadn’t?

  Julia answered her own question. “Because he didn’t know her, that’s why. You knew that intuitively. They never know us as we know ourselves,” she said, putting a spin on the conversation that lost me entirely.

  “I suppose you’re right. What I was thinking was—”

  “Oh, I suppose we could meet. But really, I’m not sure how it could help.”

  “Well …” I drawled, stalling while I thought up a justification for our meeting, having temporarily lost the thread of reasoning that had prompted my call. “For instance, I understand that she kept a journal. As her closest friend, you—”

  “Did she? Where would it be?” Julia’s tone had shifted. It held sarcasm now.

  She has a missing volume, I thought. But only one? And why the rancor? “Um, could I—”

  “I’m off for the weekend, but hell, I see no reason you shouldn’t have a look at it, if you think it would help Cecelia. I mean, she’s dead now, isn’t she, and all things come to light. She was silly, you know, always hiding things, thinking she could shove the genie back in the bottle.”

  “Have you shown it to the police?”

  “The who? Why? What business does the Patriarchy have in the heart of a woman?”

  The what? Trying to keep up mentally with the merry chase Julia was leading, I suggested, “Well, being as how it’s an unsolved murder and all …”

  Her rancor turned to outright hostility. “Oh. Right. The Patriarchy kills her, so I’m supposed to let them paw through her things. Sure. Maybe I’ll withdraw my offer.”

  “Well, I—”

  Her voice terse with exasperation, Julia said, “Listen, you want to know something about Miriam? Then meet me at a public place, so I can get a look at you first. I don’t like the sound of all this.”

  I counted to ten. “I understand. Or at least I think I do. Whatever you say. What’s convenient?”

  Julia named a bistro in downtown Denver. Eleven-thirty Monday, for lunch, she informed me, and not a moment later: Julia Richards was not going to be kept waiting while any jive business rats slurped their soup onto their neckties, no way no how. With that, she rang off, leaving me to sort out the etiquette of “doing” lunch with a law-unto-herself feminist who hides her friends’ secrets in plain sight.

  I put down the phone and sighed. This still left me with nothing to do until Monday, a situation I find very hard to weather in city or suburbs. I made a few calls to old oil-patch chums, trying to hook a lunch date for a little impromptu job-hunt networking, but no dice. Everyone was out of town, staring at a deadline, or already booked. So I decided to do a little early spring fishing up Boulder Creek, and if that didn’t settle me down, well, maybe I’d drive up to Douglas, Wyoming, the place where Miriam Menken had rented a ranch and met her fate. I told myself it would help me help Cecelia if I first did a little reconnaissance.

  I told Betty I’d be gone until Sunday or Monday. “What if some more of the shrinks call back?” she asked.

  “Would you ask them to call back on Monday, please?”

  “Why don’t I screen them for you, and make you some dates?” she suggested, a little glint lighting her eyes. “Just tell me what you’re looking for.”

  I grinned. “You’re a good judge of character; just listen to them talk, and if you don’t like them, tell them they must have a wrong number. If you like them and they’ll see me within the week, make a date. But leave the rest to me.”

  Betty feigned a pout, but shoved the coffeepot across the breakfast table so I could tank up for the drive,
and with decided vim scribbled down the paltry few dates and times I would not be available to meet with psychotherapists. Thanking her, I took a last swill of coffee, went out the parking slip, and turned the truck’s nose toward Boulder Creek.

  After a few hours thwacking a dry fly into a creek that was way too cloudy with runoff for a fish to see bait smaller than your average terrier, I quit kidding myself and headed toward the highway and the wide-open splendor of Wyoming. Besides, it was a splendid day, just right for a road trip. In my old bomb of a truck, the Boulder-to-Douglas run would occupy about four and a half hours of down-home AM radio.

  Sunlight danced along the spine of the Rockies to the west as I rolled northward over the undulating plains, humming past town after town that seemed bent on consuming what remained of the cropland that separated each from the next. I passed Longmont and Loveland, Greeley and Fort Collins, zipping past highway exits that hadn’t been there when I was a kid. Fort Collins had a Budweiser brewery north of town that wasn’t there when I was a college student, and it seemed to have spawned another suburb. Where farmers had once grown corn and winter wheat, pregnant mothers now wheeled strollers full of tomorrow’s voters down clean new sidewalks. I wondered idly what folks would do for food when every last inch of farmland was tilled under to make way for split-level houses, asphalt, and strip malls. I wondered also, as the rate of doubling of the human population on this planet accelerated faster than the BMW that careened off an entrance ramp past my laboring pickup, if I would get my answer in the next decade, the next year, or even the next week. My grip tightened on the steering wheel.

  But as I breached the border between Colorado and Wyoming, I felt the muscles along my neck and shoulders relax. The land still opens wider there, and the number of cars and trucks on the road dropped abruptly, thinning even further as the road unrolled its asphalt tongue past the capital, Cheyenne, which lay barely within the state’s borders. On that early spring day, the clouds spun eastward all wispy like a horse’s mane over the Laramie Range, trailing to gossamer tendrils half a county short of Nebraska. Cirrus clouds heralded a change of weather within twenty-four hours or so. Always colder than Colorado, the plains of Wyoming might yet see a return to winter, even a spring blizzard. My rancher’s brain recorded this evidence of weather automatically, remapping possible futures based on the constraints and stresses it would bring. Time to check the cattle and the feed, bring in the last few pregnant cows …

  I continued northward over the rolling short-grass prairie past Chugwater, where I nodded silently to the west toward the ranch my mother now ran without my father. A muscle tightened in my chest. I switched channels on my faltering old AM radio, dredging up the stock report to occupy my mind and hasten my wheels onward toward Wheatland and Glendo, where wheat and sugar beets engulfed those minds that didn’t dwell on beef. Just before the “blink and you’ll miss it” metropolis of Orin, the highway crossed over the braided channels of the North Platte, which flows north and then east as it rounds the nose of the Laramie Range. Gradually, the road bent westward around this obstacle also, and soon I was approaching Douglas.

  I arrived with three or four hours of daylight to spare. I took the second Douglas exit and stopped at the V/1 Gas for Less filling station on the right, across the road from McDonald’s. A full tank is a necessity in ranching country; one doesn’t leave town for a tour of the ranch roads without topping up. If one does, one can find oneself walking a long way.

  After presenting a credit card on which to float the price of a fill-up and a jumbo bag of Fritos, I ever so casually got to chatting with the woman behind the counter. She was a tired-looking sort with thin blond hair lying long and straight as straw over cushiony shoulders that melted downward into a tremendous girth. Her eyes moved from my credit-card slip to the signature on the back of my card and then to my face with enough certainty to suggest intelligence, however buried it might be beneath whatever circumstances goaded her to eat. “Where’s the sheriff’s office in this town?” I asked, knowing full well where it was.

  She told me, elevating one great sloshing arm to aim her words. Her eyes fixed on me, a tacit question.

  I smiled. “I need to talk to him about that woman who was murdered out at that ranch last summer. I’m a friend of her daughter’s,” I said, as if tossing of a bit of chat for the sake of companionship. “I’m Em Hansen, from Chugwater. Don’t I know you from barrel racing, back in high school?”

  The woman gave me an “in your dreams” chuckle. “Since when do I sit on anything that don’t have a motor?” she drawled. “I used to attend the rodeos, though. Chugwater? You Clyde Hansen’s daughter?”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised. Surely she didn’t recognize me. I was far too great a wallflower to have caught anyone’s notice, much less be remembered by someone I didn’t recognize myself. Or would I have known her without the weight? “You knew my father?” I asked, still uncomfortable speaking of him in the past tense.

  “My dad did. Sorry to hear ’bout his passing.”

  I averted my eyes. She leaned onto the counter and gazed into space. I sighed, said, “Thanks,” and let a moment pass, releasing myself into the familiar, slower pacing of ranch conversations, where there’s nothing and everything to say and no time and forever in which to say it.

  The woman stared out the plate-glass window beyond the racks of snack food. “My dad said your dad was a good man,” she offered kindly.

  “Mmm.” The conversation seemed headed down a track I didn’t want to travel.

  “Your ma’s running the ranch now, I hear.”

  “Mm-hmm.” This topic I definitely did not want to discuss.

  “Yeah, well, times is tough,” she said, apropos of nothing and everything. She continued to stare out the window.

  “Hmm.” I stared at the credit-card machine.

  The woman seemed to notice me again, out of the corner of one eye. “You say you know the daughter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm.” Her eyes focussed back on inner space.

  “Yeah, Cecelia’s a nice kid. A little wild-looking, but she rides a horse okay.” I gave her a knowing look, as if this was all that really mattered.

  “’At’s what I hear.”

  “She’s still pretty darned upset. Flunking out of school.” I shook my head dolefully.

  This bit of melodrama proved a sufficient offering to start the gossip pumps. My informant straightened up and regarded her long shell pink fingernails. “Yeah, sheriff couldn’t get no sense outta her when it happened, you know. Poor kid,” she intoned, now folding her hands into her enormous armpits and feigning total absorption in the scene outside the station window, which I daresay had not changed in the decade since high school had dumped her out the far portal of her educational journey.

  “Mmm?”

  “Yeah, clean outta her head, way I hear it. She better now?”

  “Well, that’s why I’m here, actually. Like I say, flunking out of school. Seems she can’t get past it. Imagine witnessing something like that.”

  “Oh, uh-huh,” she agreed, nodding her head. Two of her chins eclipsed and reappeared several times. “That’s how they go.” Her eyes met mine with a desolate frankness she likely did not intend.

  “Yeah, so I said I’d come up here and look around a little. You know, kind of scare the ghosts away for her.” I lowered my gaze in modesty. “Sweet kid. Trusts me.” All of which was true, I hoped.

  “Mmm.”

  “Thought if I could find out a little more of … how it happened, you know, she could get her memory back and all. Maybe we can figure out who did it, set her mind to rest.”

  The woman grew suddenly mute.

  “Well, thanks for the directions,” I said, snapping up the receipt and turning slowly toward the door. When twenty seconds had passed and the woman still had not moved or even shifted her gaze my way, I wandered back out to my truck. As I gave the truck door a good yank to slam it shut against the noncoope
ration of its aging hinges, it occurred to me that the woman’s final silence had spoken volumes. It meant that she knew something about the killing, or at least had an opinion she was disinclined to express, and that meant there was more she could have said, but wouldn’t say it to an outsider, even one about whose father she had heard good things.

  I turned the key, put the truck in gear, and pulled back onto the road.

  Munching happily at my junk food, I passed the state fair grounds, where I had done my time in 4-H competitions and ridden my share of races. Always before, I had come to this town as a ranch child, a member of the greater Wyoming community, but this time, it was clear, I walked the thin line between insider (friend) and inquisitor (foe). I wasn’t sure I felt comfortable in either role. But as I nodded to the giant jackalope statue that graces the edge of downtown Douglas, my mind ever so quietly slipped into its inquisitive groove, and it came to me that the woman at the V/1 Gas for Less had not told me her name when I told her mine, even though she knew of my father.

  That meant that in gossiping terms, I had been worked over by a real pro. She was not only a pro but a pro who did not want to go quoted by name as not having said what she had so carefully not said. But a pro also exults in having information, and can’t help but flaunt it, even if that means in some small way passing it on.

  I smiled, my heart rising to the challenge of interpreting whatever message she had left hidden in plain sight.