Authors: Virginia Swift
“Anyone with a shred of decency would have figured that right out,” Delice added.
Nattie knew she’d gone too far. Sally watched as she came close to biting a fingernail, recalled her fresh manicure, and got hold of herself. Nattie was regrouping, but couldn’t back all the way down.
“Sorry, but you can’t deny that Monette did have a way of running after trash,” she said, tossing her head, as if it was okay to say anything, no matter how revolting, as long as there was some truth to it. The manners bus must have skipped the stop at Nattie’s house. “It’s too bad, but if you want my opinion, I hope we can get this behind us as quick as possible,” Nattie continued. She looked around for help and settled on her husband. “You all may want a big to-do, but Dwayne and me have a real busy week. I’m handling my first make-or-break land swap deal. The investors are coming in this weekend, from California, and we’ve had this ecologist guy in town for the last few days checking out the properties. The whole thing has me so worked up I’m like to bust.”
“Take a Valium,” mumbled Delice. “Take ten.”
“Sam Branch has turned over a big land deal to you?” Sally asked, shocked. Sam Branch, the CEO of Branch Homes on the Range, was Nattie’s boss, and a man who made a point of calculating and maximizing his advantages. Sally knew Sam, all too well, and if the deal was any good, she couldn’t imagine him sharing the wealth.
“Nope,” said Nattie, who’d known Sam every which way too. “I’m putting this one together on my own, with a little help on the financing end from my banker over there.”
“So what are you swapping?” Sally wanted to know. Nattie inspected her nails, which had fortunately survived her moment of discomfiture. “I’ve been negotiating with Mary Louise Wood to get her to trade her place in the Centennial Valley for an inholding parcel in the national forest, up in the Laramies, which these California people have optioned.”
Land in the Laramies? Sally gulped, thinking of what she and Hawk had seen, only yesterday. “Your land swap isn’t near—” she started to ask, and stopped. It was a mountain range, for God’s sake, not a neighborhood. That land swap property was probably miles from the Devil’s Playground.
Brit looked up, sighing as if it was a tremendous effort to open her mouth, and then asked Nattie, “So your Californians want to trade some shut-in piece of mountain property for Wood’s Hole?”
“Wood’s Hole?” Jerry Jeff looked up. This was something he could understand. “That ranch where we used to go to ride? Why would Mrs. Wood want to sell? I thought she loved that place. She used to come out to the corral with her pockets full of apples for us to feed to the horses, and then she’d get all excited showing us the birds and antelope and stuff.” Realizing that he sounded like a little kid, he added, in sullen teenager mode, “Like it was some big deal or something.”
Surprisingly, it was Dwayne who answered, in a voice that sounded a little too much like Mr. Rogers having a soothing chat with the four-year-olds of America. “Well, JJ, part of the problem is that Mrs. Wood isn’t making a living raising horses or running cattle or much of anything anymore. She’s decided it’s more important to save the earth than pay the bills, and she’s sitting on a prime piece of real estate. Face it—pretty soon Laramie is going to be the next Jackson or Cody—heck, Wyoming’s going to be the next Montana. The reality is that people want fifteen-acre ranchettes, and ranchers can sell their property at top dollar to developers who’ll do a quality job subdividing.”
Sally hated it when people used the word “quality” without an adjective. Anybody who forked over real money for something called “quality goods” deserved, in her opinion, to learn too late that “quality” could be piss-poor too.
“I can’t imagine Molly Wood wants to sell Wood’s Hole,” Delice said. “She’s damn near made that place into a nature preserve. She hasn’t had a cow out there in ten years—says she’s resting the grass—and won’t let her horses near the pond or even the creek. Claims she’s trying to do riparian restoration.”
“Oh,
that
Molly Wood,” said Sally. “I read a piece about her in
High Country News
. She got some kind of award from the Nature Conservancy for ecologically sensitive range management.”
“Yeah, so sensitive, she’s liable to end up out on her fanny,” Nattie put in. “She’s in a pickle—ranchers generally are, but she’s even worse at business than most. What we’re trying to do is help her out—the Laramie Range property isn’t a tenth the size of Wood’s Hole, but it’s up off the Happy Jack Road, surrounded by national forest, which won’t ever be developed.”
Happy Jack was, as Sally had thought, miles from Vedauwoo and the Devil’s Playground. It was idiotic to imagine that there was any connection between the two places. “I still don’t see why Mrs. Wood would want to move,” she told Nattie.
“Nobody ever accused you of being a financial wizard, Sally,” Nattie tossed back. “Molly Wood could build a little house, watch birds to her heart’s content,
and
get a nice chunk of change out of the deal—plenty to live on, even something to pass on to her heirs.”
“Something for her heirs?” Delice asked, exchanging a skeptical look with Sally, then with Brit. All three of them had excellent bullshit detectors.
“In other words, her greedhead kids are trying to get their hands on some cash before their mommy runs their inheritance into the ground,” Brit offered. “Obviously they’re pressuring her to sell.”
Brit liked to cut to the chase.
“And you’re ‘helping her out’?” Delice said. “Boy, Nattie, I’d never pegged you as such a philanthropist. Next thing you know, you’ll be serving lunches at the senior center and driving the bookmobile.”
A quiet voice came from the couch. “Please, you guys. Do we have to do this? I thought we were just trying to get the, um, arrangements for Monette squared away. We couldn’t seem to do anything else for her, so I guess we can handle this much. Then everybody can get on with business, and rodeo, and partying, and whatever.”
Everyone looked guiltily at Mary. She was right. It wasn’t the time to argue.
Dickie knew it too. “Let’s get on it. Something for the family. Something for the community.” A look at Nattie and Dwayne. “Nothing that’ll take too much away from the goddamn celebration of Jubilee Days.” And then, taking his wife’s hand, “Most of all, something for Monette.”
Sally never got the chance to tell Dickie what she’d overheard at the Lifeway, or even to mention their encounter with Bone Bandy. First there was the matter of what to do about Monette’s body. The state crime lab had it, and wouldn’t be releasing it until after they’d done a whole lot of forensic stuff, along with an autopsy by the Albany County coroner. In any event, there wouldn’t ever be a burial—Monette’s mother had been cremated, her ashes scattered to the wind up Ninth Street Canyon. The same, Mary thought, should be done for Monette eventually. So they had to figure out a different approach. They had managed to agree on a Thursday morning memorial service, followed by a reception at the Ivinson Community Center, when Dickie got a call on his cell phone.
There was a fight down at the Torch Tavern, where the noontime drinkers tended to gather, and a few too many of the patrons had gotten involved. A bronc rider reported that his truck had been broken into, and several thousand dollars’ worth of gloves and chaps and boots and rigging were missing, along with all his CDs. South of town, on Route 287, a deputy had been kicked in the shins by a woman who claimed that by no means had she been doing ninety miles an hour when he put the radar gun on her, and then she’d pulled a gun of her own to emphasize her point.
“And this is just diddly-shit, on top of our usual traffic violations, domestic assaults, and wicked meth heads,” said Dickie, working hard at not moaning. “By tomorrow night there’ll be an extra five thousand people in town. By this weekend, if the weather holds, there could be twenty thousand more. If you combine my department and the city cops, we have a total of twenty-five people, including secretaries, dispatchers, and the motor pool guys. Even with everyone working around the clock, policing fifty thousand souls, a good half of them drunk and stupid, well, it’s a bitch.”
“So all this diddly on top of Monette’s murder,” said Sally. “How the hell can you cope?”
Dickie made a wry face and shook his head. “How can I not? It’s crazy, if you think about it. I figure I’ve got just this week to try to get some evidence and crack this mother of a case. And to be honest, I don’t know which is worse—the killer still walking around Laramie, or long gone. I will say I don’t mind having the community be upset. Maybe it’ll shake loose some information we might not get otherwise.”
“Information—oh yeah! Dickie, I—”
But he was already putting on his hat. “Sally, I gotta go. Maybe I’ll catch you later tonight. Figure I’ll drop by the Wrangler after I get done talking to people.”
Gone, like a cool breeze.
Dwayne and Nattie used Dickie’s departure as their ticket out too. Nattie was already getting into her Escalade before Dickie had finished holding and murmuring to his wife, but Dwayne took a moment to talk to Sally. “Hey, Mustang. Don’t forget about band practice tonight at seven, my place, as usual.”
“Oh yeah, of course,” she said. Band practice? Of all things. She’d forgotten completely. The Millionaires, the hobby band she was in, along with Dwayne, Sam Branch, and some other aging but unrepentant bar musicians. They were scheduled to play the benefit party that Delice threw, every year, on the Saturday night of Jubilee Days. It was one of those bands that never quite practiced enough, but usually managed to pull a few decent sets together by rehearsing their butts off the week before the gig. Sally turned to Delice. “What’s the benefit for this year?”
Delice loved historic preservation, so the Albany County Historical Society was a frequent beneficiary. She also gave money to the Ivinson Memorial Hospital, a couple of environmental groups, and, Sally and few others knew, to pro-choice organizations. Sally suspected that Delice also donated to one or two libertarian political organizations she preferred not to talk about with her knee-jerk big-government lefty friends.
Delice watched as Dwayne walked out to his BMW, and kept staring as Nattie’s Escalade pulled away, pursing her lips, narrowing her eyes. “I think this year we’ll donate the proceeds to the women’s shelter,” she said quietly.
With Dwayne and Nattie gone, it was possible to talk about whether there was something they ought to do about all the people who thought that Monette’s murder deserved some kind of community remembrance. List-lessly they batted around a few ideas, but by now they were feeling stale and tired, the phone was ringing again, and people had started trickling in. Delice told Sally to drop by the Wrangler later on, and they could talk about it. And then she turned to greet women bearing tuna casseroles and pea salad. Time, Sally thought, for the neighbors to take over.
And time, she realized with exasperation, to do a little good neighboring of her own. It was after two in the afternoon. She’d better get over to Edna’s and greet the un-invited houseguest.
As she was about to leave, Delice pulled Sally and Brit aside and said, “Can I get you guys to do me a favor? I’m collecting stuff for the Historical Society white elephant sale we’re having Saturday morning, right before the parade. I rented a U-Haul trailer, and I’m going to do a run tomorrow. Would you two come along and help me lug furniture?”
“Sure,” said Sally. “You know me. Anything for history, and a little extra aerobic exercise.”
Brit said she had some time too. “I’ve got to work tomorrow night at the Yippie I O, but I can do anything during the day.”
“Great,” said Delice. “I’ll call Molly Wood and let her know we’ll be out there about ten tomorrow morning.”
“Molly Wood?” Sally asked, eyebrows raised. “We’re going to get furniture at Wood’s Hole? What a funny world it is.”
“Yeah,” said Delice Langham, one of the nosier, more interfering people on planet Earth, clearly up to something. “Hilarious.”
“But very neighborly,” Sally allowed. “Nice of Mrs. Wood to help out the Historical Society.”
“One good turn deserves another,” Delice said.
That was something Sally Alder actually believed. She didn’t deem it wise to make too many rules of conduct, and she had certainly never been that good at upholding most people’s idea of public morality.
But Sally had a rock-bottom belief in the idea that friends had to be honest and loyal to each other. Wyoming—all one hundred thousand square miles of it—was in some ways a village, dependent on honor and trust, on the idea that the person you screwed today, you’d have to face at a Rotary luncheon tomorrow. Obviously, too many people went ahead and did the screwing anyway, but the face-to-face reckoning probably prevented at least a few lapses in judgment.
If Nattie and Dwayne were really trying to work a deal that would help this Mrs. Wood while they helped themselves, then it wouldn’t hurt for Sally, Brit, and Delice to have a little more information about the land swap. If nothing else, it would give Sally something to think about besides Monette. And if, as Delice obviously suspected, her brother and sister-in-law were running a scam on a hapless ranch woman, then somebody had to warn the old lady about what she was getting herself into.
Besides, maybe there’d be some cool white elephants. Sally was looking for a desk chair for Hawk. Always a pleasure to be able to combine altruism and acquisitiveness. Was this how young State Farm agents felt when they sold tornado insurance in Wichita Falls, Texas?
The pleasure bloomed, then faded as Sally pulled up in front of Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood’s house. At this time of year, the neighborhoods in the tree district surrounding the university turned into gardeners’ paradise. The citizens of Laramie had the whole long winter to salivate over seed catalogues, start cuttings in bay windows, wait and wait for the ground to thaw enough to break up and turn. Sally had lived in Berkeley and L.A., where unspeakably fragrant flowers—jasmine and nasturtiums and even, in the south, gardenias— grew, well, promiscuously, with or without the commitment of some human to horticulture. But gardening in Wyoming had something in common with marriage. Hardy perennials—daffodils and tulips and irises, delphiniums and columbines, asparagus, strawberries— were invisible for nine months of the year. They sent out pale green shoots in May and reached glory in the weeks to come. Carefully tended annuals—peas and beans and lettuce and squash, marigolds and zinnias and petunias and pansies—thrived while they lasted, and it was always too soon when the first frost came to blast and blacken. Then you stuck it out, all over again, devoted and waiting for renewal.
Edna and Tom loved gardening. Alas.
Where Edna’s columbines ought to be, a few wisps of crackling dried stalks stood. Where her pansy and petunia bed had been, lovingly planted in a rush the week before she left, was parched dirt strewn with straggling stiff threads. The front lawn, which Tom kept lush and velvety, was overgrown in spots and clots, and dead in others. The window boxes where Edna liked to put fat red geraniums bore no sign of recent planting. How could plants the size of Edna’s geraniums simply disappear? Sally came up the front walk, looked into the window boxes, and had her answer. The planters were, it appeared, being used as bathrooms by the neighborhood cats.
She didn’t even want to think about the backyard. It was too late to replant the little vegetable garden, unless Edna preferred her green beans prefrozen.
Better have a look at the house. Good thing this Sheldon Stover hadn’t shown up yet. She’d have the chance to see the place as Amber McCloskey, geranium murderer, had left it.
Sally took the key out of the mailbox and opened the front door. The place, as she’d expected, smelled like un-emptied garbage and dead houseplants, but also . . . like cat. She heard a thump and a crash, coming from the direction of Edna’s home office. Yep, she thought, as something furry twined around her ankle and went
mrowwrr
: definitely cat. Kitten, to be precise. A very skinny, sorry-looking piece of baby catwork.
Amber had left a note on the dining room table. “Hey there, Dr. Stover. Thanks for filling in for us.” (Us? Of course, the boyfriend had been living there too. Why not?) “We didn’t have time to clean up much, so we hope it’s okay. We adopted a kitty—please feed him. His name is Mr. Skittles and he doesn’t need any kind of special cat food. There are some cornflakes in the pantry, and he’ll eat them with water or anything. Kitties love home-cooked meals!”
A sodden saucer of cornflakes was slowly turning to cement in the corner of the kitchen floor. Poor Mr. Skittles. Sally was, to put it mildly, not a cat person, but she’d be damned if the sad little fur ball at her feet would go another hour without something decent to eat. She couldn’t leave the cat there, either—Edna was very allergic to cats. The whole house would have to be detoxed.
Amber’s note continued. “We’ll be back in two weeks. Please water the yard if you think of it. When you leave, just put the key back in the mailbox. Have fun!” The last exclamation point was dotted with a happy face.
Sally went into the kitchen, looking, without surprise, at the sink piled high with crusted dishes, the overflowing garbage can, dirty counters, dirty table. She decided she’d better see if there was something for Mr. Skittles to eat. She found a small can of imported, oil-packed Italian tuna, opened it, dumped it out on a plate, and set it outside by the back door, next to a bowl of water. As Mr. Skittles set to devouring what must be his first reasonable meal in days, Sally caught a glimpse of the shriveled wreckage of Edna McCaffrey’s vegetable garden. Members of the University of Wyoming College of Arts and Sciences would be paying for that, one way or another, all year long.
Then she returned to the kitchen, hauled the garbage out to the alley, came back in and tackled the mess. It wasn’t that bad—inside half an hour, she’d done the dishes and scrubbed the place down. She shared a silent thought with the benighted Bone Bandy: Kids these days.
Now Sally remembered the crash that had first alerted her to Mr. Skittles’s presence. With a gallows feeling in her heart, she went into Edna’s office. It was a pleasant, well-organized space, full of afternoon sunlight from a great, tall window sectioned off with wooden shelves that held Edna’s Pueblo pottery collection. One shelf must also have recently held Mr. Skittles, nestled among the pots for a sunny snooze. And when he’d been startled awake and come to investigate, he’d knocked off a black-glazed pot. Sally knew that Edna had one small, glossy black pot made by the Michelangelo of Pueblo pottery, María Martínez of San Ildefonso. Heaven help them all if that was the one.
Sally stooped down to pick up the fragments of the pot, lying desolate on the wood floor next to an Oriental rug that might have cushioned the impact if Mr. Skittles and Sally had been luckier. Praise Jesus, it was signed by some potter from Santa Clara (probably the Botticelli of the Pueblos, but still). She squatted there, picking up pieces, and wondered if she should give it to Hawk to get him to glue it back together. He was a genius with superglue.
“Hello!” came a voice from the doorway of the office. “Are you a housebreaker or a cleaning lady?”
She looked up at the man who’d asked the question: a long, thin face with a brushy mustache, wavy brown hair, a T-shirt and fishing vest above cargo shorts that hung straight down in back, as if God had forgotten to equip him behind. Black socks and walking shoes, skinny white legs. And he was staring at her like she must be retarded.
“Does a cleaning service come with the house?” he asked.
Cleaning service? Sally looked down at her Italian sandals, her Ann Taylor trousers, her black silk T-shirt. The gold jewelry she’d put on to dress up a bit more, out of respect for the morning’s somber errand.
This moron went to Princeton?
She rose slowly, holding in her hands the obsidian shards of what had once been art, and was now archaeology. “No. I’m not the cleaning woman. I’m Sally Alder, a friend of Edna’s from the university.”
“The university?” he asked.
“Of Wyoming,” she said. “I run the Dunwoodie Center for Women’s History.”
“Of Wyoming,” he repeated, as if trying to place the name. “Mmm. Well.”
Obviously the Dunwoodie Center and UW were too low-flying to register on the man’s Ivy League radar. Time to give this guy a clue whose turf he was on. “You must be Sheldon Stover. Edna and Tom’s house-sitter told me you were coming. I understand you’re a friend of Edna’s from back East?”