Only Flesh and Bones Page 9

  “Hi back at ya,” he boomed. He flexed his lips briefly into a smile, a motion that set a shock wave through the stubble on his fully inflated jaws. “Henry Clough,” he announced, then hooked one sausage-sized thumb over his shoulder, indicating a narrow woman with thick glasses and thin gray hair sitting next to him. “The wife, Beverly.” Next he pointed in turn at each of his other two companions, wind-wizened men in their early fifties with hat hair and deep creases about their eyes and mouths. “Win Downey. Jim Tretheway.”

  “Hi. Pleased to meet you all,” I said, looking each one in the eye, then planting my gaze back on Henry Clough. It took an effort of will not to feel intimidated. I told him where I was from and all, the full formal version with my begats.

  “I knew your pa,” he said. “I liked Clyde. The Stockgrowers’ Association’s the less for his passing.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and let the requisite moment of mournful silence pass between us before I said anything more. “So you heard what I was asking at the bar.”

  He lowered his eyelids briefly.

  “Actually, see, I’m here on the behalf of the family of the woman from Denver who was killed out there at Mr. Bradley’s place last summer. I used to work for the deceased’s husband. Daughter’s a little pal of mine.”

  Henry Clough shifted his bulk incrementally back in his chair and rearranged his gargantuan arms, resting his chins in one hand and cradling the elbow with the other. And waited.

  “I’m trying to help the family out,” I explained. “I’m told the girl was there at the time, but she remembers nothing.” I rolled my eyes a bit, suggesting that I was from here and the Menkens were from there, and what could you expect? “So I’m told this Po Bradley owns the house, and—”

  “Oh.” Henry returned to his original posture and hoisted another bunch of french fries to his lips. He thought about what I’d said. He was in no hurry; men his size don’t have to be. At length, he leaned onto the spindly little table and cleared his throat, an effort that started somewhere down beyond his knees and moved upward, ending with an elastic flexing of his lips. Then he informed me, as a teacher to a student, “Well, first you want to understand what happened didn’t happen at Po’s house. You want the old homestead. The home ranch. That’s what was leased to your friend’s mother. The Bradleys built a new place farther up—way up—the road years ago on another spread they got, better heating and all that, but them city folk seem to love the old houses, especially in the summertime.”

  “I see.” This was typical. To survive and prosper, most ranches acquired further land as it became available, and sometimes the parcels did not adjoin.

  “Yep, Po was up beyond. Mizz Menken was at the old place. Horse pasture and so forth. She brought her own, and all.”

  “Aha.”

  “So it wa’n’t at Po Bradley’s place a-tall.”

  “Of course.” And Po wasn’t there. And you want to make sure I get that straight. “Right. I spoke to Sheriff Duluth. He said I should talk to Po.”

  Henry Clough dropped a hand onto the pitiful little table with a thud. “Now don’t it just figger? That boy—”

  Beverly Clough leaned forward and spied me with bright eyes from around her husband’s far side. “He was after her, you see.”

  “The sheriff?” I asked. “After Miriam Menken?”

  Mrs. Clough nodded, screwed her eyes into knowing little dots. “He was boastful. Said he was going to nail her.”

  Henry put the back of one hand against his wife’s shoulder. “Now, Beverly, don’t you go filling this young lady’s ears full of such notions.”

  She brushed the enormous hand away as if it were a fly. “It’s the truth, Henry.”

  I pondered this. “You mean, the sheriff saw this city woman sitting out there all lonesome at the ranch, and thought …”

  “But he doesn’t have Po’s charm, now does he? Two of them been competin’ over women like that since high school.” She fixed her eyes on me again. “You a friend of the dead woman’s, you say?”

  “Yeah. Well, no, I never met her, actually. I worked for the husband down in Denver for a while, and taught the daughter some barrel racing. Nice horse she’s got.”

  Beverly nodded, her face stretched out long as if to say, Yeah, with enough money you, can get most anything.

  Money, a sore subject in Wyoming. Anyone who owns a ranch is worth millions on a balance sheet, but all the assets are tied up in land, livestock, and machinery. Cash is a rare commodity, and the lavish spending of it is conspicuous.

  I took a sip of my beer and spoke directly to Beverly, retracing ground to see if she’d offer more than her husband had. “Well, I was just wanting to see the place, you see. It’s Cecelia I really care about—she’s not been the same and all, since the—you know … it was a big shock for her, to say the least. Her dad asked me to talk to her about things, see if she can let it go, kind of move on with her life, you know? But like I say, the problem is she can’t remember anything of what’s bothering her so much. I just thought if I saw the place where it happened …”

  The tension lapsed from Henry’s face. “Well, if that’s all. But maybe you’d just as like to see Po’s wife. She has a set of keys, and she’s right here in town.” He swiveled his jowls around to Win Downey. “Right, Win?”

  Win closed his eyes and opened them again. “Yeah, she’s in town. That’s the person to see.”

  Henry looked back at me. “Right, that’s who you need to see. Gwen Bradley. Nice lady. She’ll help you out.”

  And that way I don’t meet Po Bradley, whom your sheriff would like to charge with this murder. Because he might have done it, you don’t know for sure. But either way you don’t want someone from outside—even some little old cowgirl from the next county—upsetting the local hay wagon. I understand, that’s just not good manners. Well, fine, if you like, I’ll start with the wife. But trust me, folks, if your boy did it, he should and will pay for it. I smiled equitably. “Okay then, Gwen Bradley. She likely to make an appearance tonight?”

  Henry looked a mite embarrassed. “Gwen? Well, y’see—”

  Henry was interrupted by the arrival of one more man in the bar. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, and at the same time saw the skin around Henry Clough’s rubber lips tighten. The new man was also a vessel in his fifties, but as slim and lithe as Henry Clough was overfleshed and stiff. I turned and measured him with my eyes. He was no longer in his prime of form and function, but there was something about him that registered as if he was; a liveliness about him, something in the spark of his eyes and the bounce of his step that said he was ready to play. His lips were already stretched in a friendly welcome, but when he saw me, the smile warmed up extraspecial.

  I smiled back. “Po Bradley?” I said.

  “The same.”

  Henry opened his mouth to reassert control of the conversation, but I cut him off, saying, “I’m Em Hansen from Chugwater, and I was wondering if I could visit your old homestead.”

  “Sure, no problem,” Po said, whipping two chairs around from the adjoining table. As he lowered himself into one chair, he slid the other expertly up to the backs of my knees, saying, “What’s a matter with you old sheep herds, don’t none of you never offer a chair to a lady?”

  SIXTEEN

  WELL, I made a date to meet Po the next morning at the place where Miriam and Cecelia had gone to pass the previous summer, but I never got another word out of him or anyone else about the topic that night. Henry Clough and his friends need not have worried, if their fear was that I’d find out anything untoward about their charming friend; he was a pro at dissembling, a master at redirecting a conversation, making the whole performance so entertaining that I almost forgot to care that I was being put off.

  Before the evening was out, I’d been ushered down the street to the Moose and had met almost everyone else in Douglas. Douglas might be the county seat and the jackalope capital of the universe, but it’s still a small town
, each and every soul.well tuned to the local hum. I could almost hear the telephones ringing with the news of my arrival echoing through the kitchens and living rooms of the farthest ranches out from town before I’d emptied my last beer.

  As Henry Clough took his leave at the end of the evening, he shifted his dark, ursine eyes back and forth between me and Po a few times. He began to turn toward the door, but then turned back, took my hand in his in a fatherly way, and said, “Now, you watch yourself, young lady. Any daughter of Clyde Hansen’s deserves a little warning about our Mr. Po. Just don’t you get drawn in by that smile of his, y’hear?”

  I laughed and made a “Go on with you” gesture, thinking, Po’s old enough to be my father. Perhaps it was the beer thinking for me.

  Henry tipped his enormous head anxiously to one side, said, “You be careful on all accounts, okay?” And with that he left, herding his wiry little wife ahead of him.

  I spent the night stretched out in my old goose-down sleeping bag in the bed of my truck under a tent formed by the drape of a tarp, tucked out of sight behind a little butte off the road above La Prele Creek. After the cloying experience of being ogled by half the county, I didn’t feel like booking into a room at the LaBonte by myself, and besides, the night sky always calms my soul.

  I snuggled the edges of the bag up around my face, fighting off the deep chill that had ridden in with the westerly winds, thankful that the front hadn’t come from the south and brought a dump of freezing moisture from the Gulf Coast. I might see a sifting of fine westerly ice snow before morning, but the tarp would keep it off me and spare me a night folded up on the short bench seat in the cab of the truck.

  I needed time to think. If I’d been honest, I would have admitted to myself long before then that I wasn’t really on a mission to help Cecelia, much as my heart ached for her. No, I had turned my searchlights onto Miriam. As I’d read the first volumes of her journals, I had thought her boring and naive, but soon her words had begun to speak to me, or to something deep inside of me. I had come to know her by accident, through a candor few people share, and I found that for all her normalcy and plainness of thought, I liked her. I had consumed her simple words, wondering with her as she wondered, and griping with her as she griped.

  I had begun to compare her experiences with the mysterious Chandler with a few of my own, lining her sexual adventures up against my best moments with dear old Frank Barnes, the man I let get away. Even though Frank was married now and a father, I found that I kept on thinking of him, even as his new commitments sealed him away from me forever. But even now, as I lay out underneath the cold Wyoming sky, a feeling of sexual warmth flowed into me at the thought of him.

  And then there was shy but steady Jim Erikson, the man in California who kept on writing even though I seldom wrote him back. Did the mixture of feelings I held for him portend as much frustration as had Miriam’s for J. C. Menken? Or was there something important I needed to learn about the nice stable guys that I’d been too restless to learn before?

  When Miriam’s words had run out with the last volume in the box, I had felt a terrible letdown. I wanted to know more about her, and know her better, so much so that here I was, chasing like a bloodhound to the last place where she’d drawn breath. I suppose I was hoping I’d find a final volume of her journal resting by the bed where she’d slept, closed over her pen to mark the last entry. I wanted that entry to sound a note of resolution, completing a life I had come to care about. I knew this was foolish: Whoever had killed her had probably stolen those last words from her, tearing her from this life before the pen had cooled from the touch of her hand.

  Feelings of hope and resignation chased each another back and forth in my mind until I finally admitted to myself, under the privacy of the cloudy, wind-bitten sky, that this early ending to Miriam Menken’s story felt to me like theft, and the fact was that I wanted, deep in my guts, to know who had killed her.

  Losses. My father dead, and my mother firmly in charge of the ranch, and Frank was gone from my life. My father I could not bring back, but why had I let Frank go while he was still living? Frank had never sought to chain me; he had always understood, always let me roam as far as my crazy spirit led me. What in hell had I been thinking, roaming so far that he gave up hope of my return? Or was I kidding myself that I cared, safely investing my foolish grief in the man I could no longer have? And finally, why did I have to follow such a solitary path in this life?

  I rolled restlessly onto my back and traced the constellations that now shone through a parting in the drifting clouds. Orion. Hercules. Perseus. Greek heroes striding over Wyoming, journeying outward to embrace adventure, returning home to share with their tribes the wisdom gained through trial. Miriam had led a mundane life until her early forties, had run wild into the mountains with an unnamed man, and had returned. If she’d lived, could she have told me what might lie beyond the cramped perspective of my own thirty years?

  The breeze freshened, sealing up the rift in the clouds. I shifted into the lee of the upwind wall of the truck bed and tugged at the tarp to make sure the clips were holding. At length, my eyelids grew heavy, the clouds blurred into the soft underparts of my dreams, and I slid into the warm arms of sleep.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE first thought in my head on waking was that I had made the right choice in not driving right out to the ranch with Po the evening before, as he had none too subtly suggested. “You can stay at the house,” he’d said. “You’ll be snug as a bug in a rug with me. No problem. You don’t need to worry about no ghosts, neither, Emmy dear. Your friend’s mama’s gone away where she ain’t comin’ back.”

  Had I heard sadness in his tone, or an attempt at getting sympathy? My mind didn’t have to rummage far, in the relative clarity of daylight, reduced state of fatigue, and dissipating beer buzz, to realize that Po Bradley had found Miriam Menken more than a bit attractive. Of course he had; if he found me worth smiling at, then a lively woman spending the summer off the leash would have caught his attention in the blink of a gnat’s eyelash. Had he pursued her? Maybe. Won her? Nah, I thought, Miriam liked her men—

  No, wait, Po can dance—

  Yes. He had turned me around the dance floor nicely. And among other returning memories of the previous evening was the image of Po, his lean backbone swaying with the music, dancing Beverly Clough across the floor at the Moose, his eyes locked on her as if he’d found heaven in her soft gray peepers. She had held her spine primly away, but she hadn’t otherwise fought him. Yes, Po could dance. I made a mental note to ask him if he had ever danced with Miriam Menken.

  The road in to Po Bradley’s new ranch house was marked by a rough-hewn timber arch that spelled out BROKEN SPOKE RANCH in tall, proud letters. My truck rolled off asphalt and onto dirt twenty feet off the county road, then jounced over the horizontal bars of a cattle guard as I crossed the line of a barbed-wire fence. I paused and looked around, aghast. As I’d crossed this boundary, I’d moved from a good strong stand of grass into a mixed scrub of sage, squaw brush, and the dispirited remnants of grass, all chewed down to nothing. Even the previous year’s growth on the sage was bitten off, a sure sign that whatever cow had foraged there had been hard up for dinner. Even under the half inch of fine snow that had collected during the night, the range looked sad and forlorn.

  I sighed. Po Bradley was no kind of rancher, or at least no custodian of the grass, which was saying about the same thing. Any cattleman worth his salt knew what he was really doing was keeping the range healthy first and worrying about the cows second. Perhaps Po was too busy dancing to worry at all.

  Before putting the truck back into gear, I noticed that the mailbox was a navy blue job with white letters that crisply read A. BRADLEY. I continued half a mile in off the pavement before I found Po’s house. “What’s the A for?” I asked, as he met me at the door.

  He smiled a cheerful good morning and handed me a cup of coffee. “Huh?”

  “On your mailbox. Wa
s A your daddy’s first initial or something?”

  Po grinned ear to ear, ready to tell me something cute about himself. “A for Arapaho, my full given name. My older sister couldn’t say it right, or so the story goes; she called me ‘Apapapo.’ Got shortened pretty quick. Folks never gave me no middle name; guess they figgered Apapapo was enough name for one little guy.”

  “Ah. What’s your sister’s name? Cheyenne?”

  “Nope, just Annie. As in Oakley. ’Cause she ain’t shy. Ma didn’t give up cowboys for Indians until I came along.”

  I sipped my coffee, grateful as ever to the magic of the sacred bean as it shook awake the far timbers of my brain. Yep, Po Bradley sure was an engaging sort of fellow. I watched him as he moved about his living room, picking up his boots and socks where they’d been tossed off the night before, and wondered if there could be anything in the sheriff’s apparent notion that this man had killed Miriam Menken. He sure didn’t look like a murderer to me: no shifty eyes, no furtive movements, no smoking gun; but then, of the three murderers I’d already met in my short career, only one of them had fit that stereotype, and it was the two I hadn’t spotted who made the lasting stuff of nightmares.

  And, I told myself firmly, there was the little matter of motivation. I couldn’t imagine why Po Bradley or any other rancher would want to kill a woman who was paying good money to rent the old homestead of his ranch; it wasn’t practical, and practicality goes a long way toward making up people’s minds in Wyoming. And it wasn’t just financial expediency that had to be considered. There was the fact that, sentimental matters aside, women in Wyoming still ranked in value somewhere between the new John Deere tractor and the prize bull, for all a man would want to risk going to jail over killing one. And, like the tractor and the bull, a woman served a function on a ranch, and a man wouldn’t want to have to go around getting a new one if he could avoid it.