Dead Dry Read online

  I was ready to start kicking over tables when somebody finally opened his mouth and said something. It was the big guy, Hugo Attabury. He said, “Surely there’s been some mistake.” The line sounded hideously contrived. He blushed angrily.

  Michele said, “No, Mr. Attabury, there has not. Did you know the deceased?”

  Attabury erupted into a relative frenzy of motion, swiveling his huge frame from side to side like the whale was now trying to stand on its tail. “Sure, we all knew Afton.”

  Knew.

  Michele’s body tensed. She had heard it, too.

  Attabury read her posture loud and clear. He said, “I mean, you just said he was dead, right?”

  Todd Upton spoke for the first time. His voice had a kind of nervy restraint to it that was decidedly unpleasant, and his eyes twitched into slits as he spoke, which exaggerated the narrowness of his face. “I think we should see some identification, Ms. Aldrich.”

  Michele whipped out her badge, showed it around, replaced it in her pocketbook. I realized that she’d had her thumb on it, ready for the question. She waited, watching each person’s moves. When the tension reached a level where it could have blistered paint, she said, “What have you been discussing here today?”

  No one answered.

  Michele asked the question again in a different way. “May I know what you’ve been talking about?”

  Gilda said, “The weather. There’s a drought on, you know. We were wondering if it might rain.”

  Wayne Entwhistle pushed his plate away as if the French fries on it had turned to worms. Bart Johnson shifted stiffly in his seat. Hugo Attabury put a thick hand to his lips as if trying to protect them. Todd Upton did not even blink.

  Michele said, “So, okay, the weather. And what else?”

  Bart Johnson said, “Michele, honey, we’ve just had some bad news here. You want to take it easy on us?”

  Michele opened her mouth to continue her interrogation, but just then Gilda swooned. I mean she slid back in her seat and laid a slender wrist across her forehead and groaned, the most delicate little groan you ever did hear.

  The men crowded forward to her aid.

  I wondered what kind of performance I was watching. This woman was either off her bean or on some kind of drug or she was blowing a smokescreen around a lack of real surprise in hearing that her lover was dead, and I was willing to bet on option three.

  A blur of activity that erupted around the table rendered Gilda onto her feet and out into the parking lot, where she stood wavering in the afternoon heat. In the full glare of the sun she looked peaked, even shocky, and I began to wonder if my prior judgment of her character might have been too harsh.

  She turned to Michele. “Do you have a car?” she asked. “Yes, of course you have a car. Take me to the ranch.”

  Todd Upton put out a hand to stop her. “I’ll take you there, Gilda.” He gestured toward a late-model BMW, beetle black with black leather seats.

  She turned and looked at him as if surprised to find him there, and said quite firmly, “No, Todd. This lady will run me home.”

  “But as your lawyer, I really think I should be there.”

  “No, I want to go without you.”

  He grasped her arm. “Don’t say anything,” he insisted.

  Gilda wrenched herself free and walked toward the parked vehicles. The men headed to their cars. Johnson headed to an old truck, Entwhistle and Attabury headed to the shiniest and newest SUVs, and Upton stalked off toward the black BMW.

  Michele unlocked the door of her rental car and hustled Gilda into it. “You just get yourself comfortable there and I’ll get you home straightaway,” she said.

  I hopped into the backseat and settled in to eavesdrop, but was disappointed. Apart from giving vague directions, Gilda said absolutely nothing all the way to the ranch. Neither did she ask any questions. I had a nice view of the back of her head, period.

  I followed Julia’s map as we turned off the highway and started up a paved road past a jarring eruption of swanky new three-bedroom ranchettes and then turned onto a graded gravel road that grew increasingly rustic. I didn’t have a good view of the odometer and was about to ask Michele where the turn to the ranch was when, just as Julia had indicated, a big, neurotic dog came barreling out of nowhere, barking its fool head off as it banked its trajectory to follow us along the far side of the obligatory barbed-wire fence. I saw flashes of fang and needed only a glimpse of the twin cowlicks of hair that ran the length of its back to know its breed. “A Rhodesian ridgeback,” I said. “Weird.”

  Gilda rolled her head laconically toward the dog. “Fucking psychotic,” she told the animal crooningly, and to Michele she said, “You turn here.”

  Michele turned onto a rutted pair of tracks that led over a very bashed-up cattle guard and then headed off to the left, taking us away from the now-slathering hound. The rental car bottomed out repeatedly. Clearly, Afton McWain had put no money into grading his entry road. It had more washouts than an Ivy League college.

  The ranch was a nice spread of grass and stands of Gambel oak tucked in among the hogbacks of red sandstone that flank the Front Range and I could see the first fists of the granites beyond them. It was a geologist’s dream—the layers of upturned rock spanned hundreds of millions of years. For such an easy drive from a decent place to buy hamburgers and shoot pool, it felt wonderfully remote, having neither pavement nor power lines coming in from the road.

  We came around a turn and into a small grove of cottonwoods, and there stood a strange assortment of small buildings: an old log cabin, a new prefabricated barn, a rickety privy, and a yurt. I hadn’t seen one of those fabric yak-herder’s tents in years, not since the last time I spent a weekend with chums from college who had been trying to have a commune. This layout seemed a bit more high-tech, in an eclectic sort of way. The log cabin had been retrofitted with solar panels, a satellite dish, and a glass lean-to filled with black fifty-five-gallon drums, no doubt for passive solar heating. A wild system of pipes led out of a big, black water tank up the hill, feeding what I presumed to be a solar shower and what I was certain was a bathtub for fresh-air fiends. And, most classy among these features, a very expensive-looking windmill stood hooked up to the first piece of electrical cable I’d seen since we had left the gravel road.

  “Just pull up by the house. I’ll hop out,” Gilda said.

  “Can I use your rest room?” Michele inquired.

  Gilda gave her a once-over. “I’d rather be alone. Can’t you pee along the road on your way out?”

  Michele gave her a broad grin. “That must be your outhouse over there. I won’t be but a moment.” Michele slapped the car into park and shut down the engine. She got out and headed for the little shack with the crescent moon on the door.

  I took my cue and got out, too. I began to wander around, my hands stuck deep in my pockets like I was browsing in an antiques shop.

  Gilda got out and stared at me. “Am I under arrest or something?”

  “Should you be?” I inquired.

  She shook her head, more like she was trying to snap out of a fog than to answer in the negative. “I just can’t believe this.”

  “What?”

  “Are you guys for real? I mean, I’m sitting minding my own business in a nice café, and you two drive up and tell me Afton’s dead. Am I really supposed to believe this? It’s not really true, is it?”

  I stopped wandering and watched her. “I knew Afton,” I said. “I may look like a pilot—well, I know how to fly an airplane, but not professionally, I don’t have a commercial license—but in fact, I’m a geologist.”

  Gilda blinked. She kept watching me, her face limp.

  “I knew Afton in Denver. I’m a friend of Julia’s.”

  Gilda waved a hand dismissively. “Oh. Julia.”

  “Yeah. I haven’t seen the kids since they were really little.” I was getting really angry at this woman. Why? Because she’d just insulted my friend? Surel
y I had more compassion than that; a woman in shock over a loss of this magnitude could be forgiven for a lapse of manners, but the beauty-parlor hair, the expensive “nothing” dress, the exotic sandals, and the air of privilege had gotten under my skin. I struggled to get a grip on myself. “Was Afton still doing any geology?” I asked.

  Gilda waved a hand toward the log cabin. “As long as you two aren’t going to take no for an answer, it’s up there,” she said as she disappeared into the yurt, closing the canvas door behind her.

  I headed over to the cabin double-quick. The door was locked, but I was able to see what I needed to see through the windows.

  The one-room structure was neat as a pin but was clearly a site where work was being done. Two walls were lined with bookcases filled with geological texts. There was a flat file for maps and an old-fashioned drafting table and stool with plenty of work laid out on it. Proudly displayed on top of an old-fashioned oak file cabinet rested a four-inch tri-cone drill bit that had been bronzed. I recognized it from his office in Denver years earlier, when it had sat on his desk there. It was the completion bit from his discovery well, which had made Afton McWain a millionaire.

  The remaining two walls were papered with geologic cross-sections, a type of diagram that geologists create to examine how layers of rock connect from one location to another. They represent vertical slices into the Earth. If you cut a chocolate cake in half and just looked at the inside, you’d get the same sort of view, except that rock doesn’t tend to come in quite such tidy layers, and in fact, “layer-cake geology” is a term reserved for places where the rock layers are unusually flat and continuous.

  Judging by the labels he had put on them, Afton McWain’s cross-sections transected the Denver Basin north to south and west to east. Next to the “N” for “North” he’d also written “Greeley,” which is a city at the north edge of the basin, and next to “S” for “South” he’d inscribed “Colorado Springs,” which lies at the south. Instead of a town’s name by “W” for “West,” he’d written “Wildcat Mountain,” which was apparently a topographic feature somewhere nearby, as just to the right of that he’d written “Sedalia.” “E” for “East” was tagged “Last Chance,” a town on the eastern plains of Colorado, about as far from civilization as you’d ever want to get a flat tire. I ought to know, I’ve done it, driving a cattle trailer for my dad back when he was selling off some bulls.

  Remembering my cattle ranch beginnings was something that was bound to happen as I stood there staring into that log cabin. The original part of the house I grew up in on my father’s ranch wasn’t much bigger than this one, but Dad had kept it up proudly, leaving the insides of the logs showing as well as the outside, just as Afton McWain had done.

  Looking into his workspace, I began to remember the parts of Afton that I’d enjoyed knowing, the same parts that Julia first noticed: his intelligence and his fastidiousness and his interest in the quality of life. On that same field trip where he’d showed off his buttocks, he had also made sure that everyone ate well, a detail that escapes a lot of field-trip organizers. Instead of hustling the ubiquitous box lunches with gummy white bread sandwiches and tiny packets of potato chips, he’d supplied deli breads, whole hams that he’d had run through a slicer, bricks of cheese, nice lettuces, and crocks of condiments. He’d understood that to get his point across, we had to be capable of learning, and a well-fed troop is a troop agreeable to paying attention. And he had indeed been a damned good geologist.

  Michele came up behind me, fighting a smile that was clearly getting away from her.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s that outhouse,” she said. “It’s like a shrine to rustic elimination. They’ve got the old corncob in the glass case marked IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS, a 1962 Montgomery Ward’s catalog, and, the pièce de résistance, the toilet seat is lined with rabbit fur.”

  “No pucky!”

  “I sure couldn’t. Man!”

  “Well, Afton always was a sensualist,” I said. “I wonder what Ms. Glamorpuss thinks of all that?”

  “Oh, she left her mark. There’s a big, square candle with “om” in Sanskrit, some very artistic sprays of sagebrush flowers, a signed photograph of some guru, and the aroma has a strong overprint of eau de boudoir.”

  I said, “The guru might be Afton’s if he really got his butt enlightened.”

  Michele tried the door.

  “It’s locked,” I said. “I already tried it.”

  Michele peered in the window. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  “I was just trying to figure out what Afton’s been working on. It looks like the good old Denver-Julesburg Basin, just like old times.”

  “What do those diagrams tell you?”

  I tried to sort out what might have any relevance to his murder. “On the face of it, these charts tell me about the thicknesses of sedimentary rock layers around here and how they vary from place to place. See that layer at the bottom, labeled ‘Pierre Shale’? That’s a mudstone layer five thousand feet thick in places. Next up, the Fox Hills Sandstone, which is a stack of shales interlayered with sandstones. Then above that, you’ve got the Laramie Formation. Swamps that got squished down to make coal beds and such.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Above that, more sandstones—the Arapahoe, Denver, and Dawson. Some of those have more continuous sandstones. It looks like the Arapahoe is by far the best.”

  My geology lesson was interrupted by a sound from across the yard, a demure, “Shit!” We both turned to see Gilda emerging from the barn. She had a small satchel slung over one shoulder and grappled a cosmetics case in the opposite hand. “Good, you’re still here,” she called out. “I need a ride back to town.”

  Michele said, “Why?”

  “Because my cart has insufficient charge.”

  “Your cart?” We crossed the yard to join her at the barn. Inside, we saw what looked like the big sister of a golf cart. It was clad in white Fiberglas, had a silly roof, and looked like it could carry two passengers plus a few parcels. I was reminded of what certain characters in cartoons from my childhood drove, a kind of latter-day tin lizzie.

  Gilda’s cheeks flushed with anger. “That is my cart. My electric cart. It is not much, but it can make it to Castle Rock and in fact has, on many occasions.” She put down her case and pointed at the windmill. “But that thing has not been turning enough to charge it. Do you understand English? The wind has not been blowing. When the wind does not blow, the blades do not turn. When the blades do not turn, the batteries do not charge. When the batteries do not charge, my cart does not make it to the nearest pavement, let alone as far as Castle Rock.” She stamped her elegant little foot. “So I need a fucking ride, get it?”

  Michele looked past the electric cart at a big, white truck parked behind it and asked, in her matter-of-fact way, “Why don’t you take that truck?”

  I added, “There’s a loading dock just outside the barn here. I’d be glad to help you push that electric cart up onto the ramp and into the back of that truck. Then you can take it to town and plug it into the house current at the Sedalia Grill.”

  Gilda said, “That truck runs on gas. We don’t use fossil fuels on this ranch! And the electricity at the Sedalia Grill is generated by coal-fired turbines, another unscrupulous waste of fossil fuel!”

  I had to hand it to her, she had her consumption of the Earth’s resources spot-on. I began to wonder if she had, in fact, adopted a low-impact lifestyle and wasn’t just freeloading off of a rich man. Was every last cosmetic in the case she was carrying environmentally friendly? Or was there a little petrolatum hiding in one of her tubes or jars? I said, “I hate to tell you, but the resins in the Fiberglas your cart is made out of probably came out of an oil well.”

  Gilda opened her mouth to deliver additional invective, but she hung fire in mid-curse, her eyes going blank with thought. Suddenly her brow unkinked and her cosseted lips softened i
nto an O. In the blink of an eye, her manner changed from shrewish to polite, even winsome. Fetching. Coquettish. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Why don’t I just ride with you to Salt Lake City in your airplane?”

  Michele said, “I flew commercially. It’s Em here that came by private plane.”

  Without missing a beat, Gilda turned and focused her charm on me. “Oh, then can I hitch a ride to Salt Lake City with you?”

  I glanced at Michele, hoping for a cue as to how she wanted me to play this. “I, uh … don’t own the airplane. I was flying a charter, see, and—”

  Gilda’s charm evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. “Then just into town will have to do. Unless you’re going as far as Denver, in which case you can drop me there. Shall we go?”

  It was Michele’s turn to put on a winning smile. “What do you need in Salt Lake City?” she inquired. “Perhaps I can save you the trip.”

  Gilda gave her a “You dummy” look, then quickly transformed it into one of bereavement. “The sad task I must do can only be done by me,” she said. “You see”—she paused for dramatic emphasis—“I have to claim my husband’s body.”

  Michele said cheerily, “I didn’t realize you and Dr. McWain were married.”

  Gilda raised her chin regally. “Common law, my dear. We were man and wife under Colorado common law. Now, will you be so kind as to give me a ride to town … from my ranch?”

  EIGHT

  MARY ANN NETTLETON DROVE DOWN THE ROAD IN search of retribution. None of the men she had telephoned had returned her calls, and that made her angry, and that anger was now all mixed up in the anger she felt about her well going dry.

  If they couldn’t return her calls, she would pay calls on them.

  She would go first to Hugo Attabury, the real-estate agent who had helped her and her dear Henry purchase the now waterless property, and, if she didn’t get the answers she needed from him, she’d go to Todd Upton, the real-estate lawyer, and if that did not bear fruit, she would visit her banker, Wayne Entwhistle, at Castle Rock Savings and Loan. She did not know much about how these things worked—that had always been dear, departed Henry’s domain—but it seemed reasonable to her that a purchase as expensive as real estate should come with some sort of guarantee, and if that guarantee was not backed by the real-estate agent who showed them the property and helped them sign all those papers that tied up their life’s savings to purchase it, why then, a lawyer could tell her who was responsible, and if the lawyer was no help, then surely the banker would understand that it was in his interest as much as hers that she be able to maintain the value of the property. Thirty thousand dollars to drill a well—ridiculous! She needed every penny she had just to make the payments on the mortgage!