Authors: Mark Nykanen
I force myself to breathe. It is but a small inconsistency, and Ring Ding is unlikely to catch it, and even if he does I can ascribe it to the pressure of the pour. But the fact that I’ve put into proper play every other detail magnifies this nettlesome oversight. I rehearsed for the sheriff, knew my lines as well as the most accomplished thespian, then revealed her interest in abandoned mines, knowing that I needed to lead them away from me by degrees. I also knew that as soon as they found her bike, they’d think abduction; and with details that I let slip about her beau, they’d think of him in the next breath. Yes, all of it was so smartly accomplished, drawing them farther and farther from here, drawing their thoughts to roadways, to maps, to all the lines leading all over Utah and well beyond its borders, radiating from me, from the epicenter of the girl’s true distress. Perfect, perfect, perfect, until this admittedly minor error. But still it bothers me. It is the speck of dust that makes your eye tear, and if you tear enough the world becomes a blur. When the world of the artist becomes a blur, he might as well be blind.
L
AUREN LAY UNDER THE SHEET
, eyes still shut, willing away the demands of the day as she savored the scent of the night before. She could feel Ry’s warmth beside her, the gift of his presence, for that’s how she thought of him, a surprise to the solitude of her body. He lay on his side facing away from her, a marvelous position for viewing his shoulders. Her eyes came alive on his smooth, tan skin, so delicious to taste, if memory could be trusted this early in the morning. Two days of lovemaking had left her sleep deprived and yet still unsated, and not a little guilty too, for feeling so good with Kerry still missing.
The girl’s name formed a hard ball in her belly, a dark circle amid all this tender light. She worried that her pleasure might somehow shortchange the search, but it hadn’t. While Ry went out to Stassler’s yesterday to work in his foundry, to cast faces of all things, she had canvassed the entire town, posted more than fifty copies of a new photograph of the girl, and experienced a painful encounter with her mother outside the grocery store. The woman had pointed to Lauren and said in the saddest voice imaginable, “You sent her here.
You!
” Her father had shook his head, as if to say, Don’t worry, she’s just very upset. But hearing those words had rekindled Lauren’s misgivings, fed them as surely as tinder feeds a match.
She listened to Ry’s sleeping breath, those soft expirations such a contrast to his passion. Hers too. They’d been behaving like a couple of teenagers with a fresh infusion of libido. They’d made love seven times (she’d been keeping track, though there had been moments when counting to two would have proved a dizzying affair), and though she felt sore, she experienced this as a minor discomfort hardly capable of chilling her ardor. Even now she was snuggling up to Ry and kissing his shoulder.
He moaned, and she filled with pleasure. Her hand slipped under the sheet and squeezed his firm bottom. She couldn’t believe her hunger for him. It was almost embarrassing, and she’d told him twice that she’d never been like this before. But she was thirty-nine, in her prime, right? Giving license to her desire even now, rolling him toward her, finding him as stiff as a sixteen-year-old, his eyes yet unopened, but his mouth smiling mischievously.
For the first time their lovemaking assumed a relaxed rhythm, and gentle moments passed between them as easily as the dappled light that filtered through the motel room drapes. Absent was the frenetic groping of the previous two nights, but scarcely gone for good because he soon rolled her on top of him and buried his face in her breasts and began to make love in earnest. Her breath lost any semblance of control as the pressure of his pelvis enforced a small but spreading pleasure.
She yelped when she came, at least it sounded like that to her. To Leroy too, apparently, because he raised his sleepy head and groaned, not growled, mind you, but groaned as if in terminal envy.
Ry had that impish grin that often appears on a man’s face after a woman comes. She squeezed his chin and told him not to be so smug; but she was laughing, and so was he, laughing and fondling every bit of her that he could reach. And she was all too happy to accommodate him, to luxuriate in the feel of his hands on her chest and buttocks and back and belly, swimming over her thighs, reaching up between her legs to their rich contact, and then back to her face, where they’d first held her weeks ago on the porch outside her house.
“Tell me how you feel,” he whispered.
She forced aside her deepest concerns, and in response kissed his ear and neck and cheek and mouth, and rubbed her breasts against him. She felt him stiffening beneath her, climaxing almost as loudly as she had, his face suddenly so taut that it could have been cast, so stark were its lines, so pronounced were its features.
“You’re good,” he said when he caught his breath.
“Yeah? You’re just saying that because you’ve got me where you want me.”
“And I’m not letting you go.”
She raised herself up and looked down at him.
“You have to. There’s lots to do. You,” she poked him playfully in the chest, “are supposed to call that helicopter place to confirm that we’ve got a pilot, and I’m,” now she poked herself in the chest, “going to take a shower, and then I’m going to take Mr. Bad Bad Leroy Brown out for his morning constitutional.”
She rushed off to the bathroom, threw open the faucets, and stepped under the nozzle before the water had a chance to warm up.
Now that the day had begun, she couldn’t move it along fast enough.
The water had finally warmed when she turned it off and grabbed a towel. She dressed quickly, and told Ry she’d be back in ten minutes.
“And then I’ve
got
to go by my place for a change of clothes.”
Al Jenkins sat at the front desk doing a crossword puzzle as Lauren and Leroy breezed through the lobby. They’d left Ry to scout the eateries to see if it was possible to find a decent breakfast in this town. Jenkins didn’t look up until he spoke.
“Never came in last night. I was worried about you. Thought you might have gotten yourself sucked into one of those abandoned mines.”
“No, nothing like that,” she said as she hurried up the stairs.
She unlocked her door and tossed off her clothes almost as hastily as she had the night before when they’d entered Ry’s room. She found fresh underwear, and a clean pair of shorts and a top that
kind
of matched. It would have to do. She brushed her hair, which had dried rapidly in the desert air, and spiced her lips and eyes with touches of makeup.
Sensible shoes, she told herself as she kicked aside a pair of mules for her cross-trainers.
She took the stairs two at a time on her way back down to the lobby, and was almost out the door when Al said,
“Hold on. Is Prince Leroy going to the spa today?”
“No, he’s going to hang out with us, aren’t you, buddy?”
Leroy wagged his stump appreciatively.
“Okay, just checking. I thought I’d offer to dog-sit, if you wanted me to.”
“That’s really nice,” Lauren said, genuinely touched. “Thanks, but we’re going to keep him with us. The other day we had so much running around to do that I figured he’d be better off in a kennel, but he’s getting with the program now.”
She turned to leave once more.
“May I have a word with you?”
Al sounded serious. She looked back at him. Very serious.
“Sure.”
“You remember what I said about those people getting themselves pushed into mines?”
She nodded.
“If I were you, I’d go down to the County Building and check with the state Division of Mines. I’d find out if Stassler has an abandoned mine on that property of his.”
“You would?”
Now it was Al’s turn to nod. “I sure would.”
“And what do you think I’ll find?”
“No telling what you’ll find.” His hands rose in a helpless gesture, as if he really didn’t know. “But the folks that owned that place before him were peculiar as all get out, and about as private as he is. No surprise that he bought it. They were ranchers, but they might have done some mining out there in the early days. They had the whole spread in the family for four generations. Some of the mines in these parts have more shafts running through them than New York City has subways.”
Lauren walked up to the front desk. “Are you saying that you think I’ll find—”
Al’s hands shot up again, this time in the universal sign of surrender. “I’m just telling you what I’d do. I wouldn’t assume anything when it comes to the old Johnson Ranch. Strangest bunch of folks ever lived around here.”
“You don’t like Ashley Stassler either, do you?”
Al shrugged. “Can’t say as I care for his so-called sculpture. No, can’t say as I care for it one bit. He had a show here a few years ago, and made a big to-do of standing up and telling us what we were
supposed
to see when we looked at his ‘art.’ But you want to know something? You don’t need to tell people what they’re supposed to see. People can see things well enough on their own. I know what I saw. It wasn’t any of those big ideas he claimed for himself. It was just some poor folks who looked like the world had gotten its teeth into them and never let go.”
“The world?”
“That’s right, the world. Or someone in it. So I’d check with the Division of Mines. You might have to find the plot number for the ranch. That’s over in the tax department.”
Lauren let her elbow find the counter.
“What were you doing before you bought this place?”
Al smiled. “I was a professional busybody. And I was nobody’s best friend.”
He let her think.
“I was the county tax assessor.” Now his smile spread across his crinkly face. “Why do you think I run a business catering to strangers? I’ve got no friends around here. But I know more secrets than Paris has parks.”
His smile turned into a wheezy laugh, and he smacked the counter with a hand as wrinkled and mottled as the skin on an old peach.
“I guess we could check it out,” Ry said after they’d picked up their drive-through breakfast; they’d settled for fast food because they were running late for the helicopter flight. “But I’m not all that optimistic.”
“We’ll do it later,” Lauren said. “We’ve got to move.”
They’d reserved the flight in her name so Ry’s link wouldn’t be obvious to Stassler, if he took umbrage over another aircraft flying over his land. The chopper’s owner, Bob Flanders, had assured them that Leroy would be fine at the hangar.
Ry handed Lauren the headphones and helped her put them on, positioning the attached mike so it was right in front of her mouth.
She’d taken the front seat next to Flanders, who said his own first ride in a helicopter came at the behest of Uncle Sam more than thirty years ago.
“Mekong Delta. They dropped us off and said ‘good luck.’”
Lauren’s stomach did its elevator dance as the chopper roared off. The ground fell away as if it had been kicked free.
“It’s a Bell Jet Ranger,” Flanders explained over the headphones. “We can cover a lot of territory quickly in one of these.”
“We don’t want to go
too
quickly,” she said.
Flanders acknowledged this with a nod. “You’re the third group I’ve taken up to look for that girl.”
“Who were the other two?” Lauren looked at the town far below them, spotting mountain bikers teeming on the slick rock like brightly colored ants. She forced a breath and tried to adjust to the exposed feeling of the chopper, the bubble of glass that seemed to barely enclose them, that made her feel as if she were flying on terms a little too intimate with the sky.
“First time up it was with the sheriff and his chief detective. They didn’t want to wait for the state police to free up a bird, so I had them up for four hours. We practically plowed up Stassler’s ranch that day. Second group, oh, that was a sad one,” Flanders shook his head, “the girl’s mom and dad and grandfather. I let them pay for fuel, that’s all. I can’t imagine losing one of my girls out there.” His eye swept over the spread of canyons, mountains, and desert.
“You have daughters?” Lauren said.
“Two of them.” Flanders perked up. “Both at the University of Utah up in Salt Lake. The oldest graduates next month with a degree in biology,” he said with pride.
“Congratulations.”
Flanders flew them over Stassler’s compound at about four hundred feet, which was, he explained, a violation of air space, “but the hell with him. What’s he going to do? Send me back to Vietnam?”
Lauren was beginning to note a distinctly chilly trend in the feelings locals had for their famous neighbor.
“That must be the foundry.” Lauren pointed to a square brick building to their right.
“That’s it,” Ry said from the seat behind her.
“It’s big,” she added.
Flanders swung the chopper around so they were facing the foundry. “I heard it said that he built that place himself, brick by brick. I got to hand it to him for that. Not every rich son of a bitch is willing to work that hard.”
Lauren agreed. A foundry was a huge undertaking, and this one was larger than most, even bigger than the one at the university.
The foothills that had seemed so close to his compound when she’d viewed them during her bicycle ride, now appeared a good two miles away. As they approached them, she made out lovely wave patterns in the petrified sandstone, along with immense boulders and slender stone towers that rose to dizzying heights. Miles beyond the first of these natural marvels, she spied the chasm for the Green River.
“Can we go over there?” She pointed to the canyon, wondering if Kerry had been curious about the river. She herself would have been.
“You want to go down in there?”
“Can we?”
“It’ll be a squeeze, but we can do it. I don’t think you’re going to find much.”
As soon as Flanders dropped the Jet Ranger into the river canyon, the narrow corridor seemed to grow perilously tight. A gust of wind shook them, and she flinched when she saw his hands tighten on the controls. He looked over and told her not to worry.