by Gwen Moffat
‘No one,’ she said between sobs, and then, childishly trusting: ‘What would you do in my place?’
‘I’d hang on. As you say, you have everything, except love. You can do without that for a while; it’s not essential to survival. Try to enjoy the rest of life a little: the things that attracted you to America in the first place. I’m sorry I sound like a Dutch aunt but you really must admit that a situation without love must be easier to bear in the sunshine, with horses to ride, beautiful clothes—all the trappings of luxury, than, as you say, in London, out of work, and a cold wet winter on the way. Think about it.’
Emma stood up suddenly.
‘Don’t think I’m unsympathetic,’ Miss Pink went on, standing with her, ‘but you do have almost everything, and you’re beautiful, and young. The rest will come in time. Don’t be so impatient.’
‘It’s all slipping away,’ Emma said. ‘I don’t want to be left on my own.’
She gathered up her skirt and, without saying goodnight, she ran up the path as if she were trying to catch something. Miss Pink sighed and followed at her own leisurely pace. The situation wasn’t tragic because no nobility was involved. Rather, it was stupid. Chadwick appeared quite a pleasant fellow too.
Chapter 7
The owl stood its ground and regarded them pensively, although it would be aware only of a huge and harmless beast. Perhaps, thought Miss Pink, it was the size of a horse that wild animals focused on, not shape, and so they missed the presence of a rider.
There was a chink of metal. Breeches pricked his ears and pivoted. The owl took off, flying low and fast as Nielsen rode out of the mesquite.
‘I was watching a small owl with immensely long legs,’ she told him.
‘Burrowing owl. Myron told me you’d taken this route.’
‘Problems?’
‘In a way.’ He paused. ‘Yes.’ Another pause, then, morosely: ‘Ingrid’s leaving.’
‘Why?’ She was equable.
‘Let’s sit in the shade.’
They tied their horses and sat in the shade of the mesquite. There was no fire in him this morning and although his eyes followed the flight of a bird he was not watching it and he made no comment. When she asked again why Ingrid was leaving, he turned to her as if he had forgotten the subject. ‘It’s the business at Molten; she said it was the last straw. She wants clean air. She’s going to Kashmir.’
‘Why shouldn’t she go? She spends much of her time abroad, and I can understand the remark about clean air; she’d think the crime sordid—if the girls were murdered.’ Also unbearable in its associations, she thought; why was he being so insensitive? Abruptly he asked: ‘Would you go to Molten, try to get a line on what’s happening?’ Observing her frown, he rushed on: ‘It’s virtually next door to us; naturally we have an interest … and then you’re linked with the business—quite innocently, of course, but you met them. Aren’t you curious?’
‘I’m curious; so are you. Call Stuart and ask him what’s happening.’
‘Not after the way he walked out of my house last night: refusing to tell me what he heard on my own telephone.’
‘If it was the autopsy reports he wouldn’t want them publicized.’
‘Publicized? By us?’
‘There are the Indians and their grapevine. There must be Indians about Molten for news of the girls’ deaths to have reached here.’
He was staring at the sand between his feet, knees drawn up, hands hanging between them. He nodded slowly.
‘Jack! Are you worried about the Indians?’
‘No, no; it’s far too sophisticated a way of killing for them. They’d have used a gun and got rid of it. But Shoshone don’t go to white hookers; they don’t have the money.’
Miss Pink said nothing and after a while he sighed and looked at her as if he were an animal in the bottom of a pit. She studied him for a moment. ‘Every man who visited them is a potential suspect,’ she said, ‘and since it won’t be known who did visit them, that means every adult male in the locality and every traveller who passed through: truck drivers, salesmen, single men, men together. It means all the owners and tenants of the cabins on the Calcine road, the male residents of Calcine itself, possibly even Las Vegas—had you thought of that? I don’t expect last weekend was the first time Donna went there.
‘If it was murder the candidates are literally innumerable because no one, not even themselves, keeps track of a prostitute’s customers. It needn’t have been a customer; it could have been a jealous wife. Most unlikely though; who’d be jealous of a commercial transaction?’ She considered, nodding to herself. ‘Well, if the family were very poor, and money was going out of the house … and there’s a first time for everything, even jealousy. It’s a long list of suspects, at least until they’ve produced alibis. There will be a lot who can’t.’
‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘Myron came to me last night, and he’s worried. I see his point. Why did Stuart come to Sweetwater? To talk to you? A sergeant could have done that; they’re not so uncouth nowadays that they don’t know how to behave in a decent house. No, Stuart came himself because the situation needed kid gloves—and why? Because he reckons something’s pointing to its being an Indian crime—and who looks after the Indians?’ He glared at her. ‘No one except me. And Myron. Stuart knows he’s got me to reckon with.’
‘Are any Indians employed in Molten?’
‘Now and again they help the women out: cleaning and so on. Why?’
‘Stuart could be looking for a link between those people and yours. So you want me to go up there and try to find out if the police suspect an Indian. What happens if I find that they do?’
‘I’d want to know why they thought so. If I thought the evidence was sufficient, I would tell Myron to discover the culprit. Myron is head of the tribe; he’d get the truth.’
‘Perhaps he could discover the whole truth anyway, even if it wasn’t an Indian.’ Her scepticism was showing.
He accepted her remark at face value. ‘If it was a white man then Myron, and all the rest of the Indians, will have nothing to do with it. They let us work out our own problems.’
‘If it’s a Shoshone, and Myron identifies him, the police will demand proof.’
‘The police won’t know anything about it.’
‘You’ll deal with the killer on your own?’
He regarded her without expression—until he remembered that he needed her assistance when he made a visible effort to relax. On her part she remembered how much she was in his debt and in any event a visit to Molten would be at the very least interesting. He said: ‘This is what I suggest you do …’
There were two roads from Sweetwater to Calcine but they crossed passes so steep that Nielsen had decreed that each should be used as a one-way route. He had told her to approach the ranch initially via Molten because that was the way in; the exit road crossed Rattlesnake Pass some fifteen miles to the south of Sweetwater.
The following morning Miss Pink left the ranch after breakfast. As she started down the valley she saw that there were clouds in the south, not towering cumulus that she might have associated with a violent thunderstorm, but a high thin ceiling that had robbed the sun of power. Moreover it was windy, and suddenly the desert, which had become at least superficially familiar, held an air of menace. She tried to reassure herself with the comfort that her route was known at the ranch and they were expecting her back for dinner at the latest. If she did not return people would follow her road until she was found. This made no difference to her discomfiture, which was atavistic. The desert had something up its sleeve.
South of the ranch the valley was barren. She had seen it from a distance but not ridden there because it was almost devoid of life, animal or plant. White salt flats stretched across the valley floor and the road crawled round bays as if the salt were a lake. Indeed she had been warned not to take short cuts, however tempting, because her car would sink in the brine that lay below the apparently solid crust.
To the left of her road was a belt of arid brown ground in front of an eroded scarp of pink badlands like truncated tips of china clay. Behind the badlands the mountains rose, their western escarpment almost unshadowed, grey in the flat light. She drove at fifteen miles an hour which was as fast as she dared to go on the poor surface, and after about twelve miles the road bore east and started to climb to Rattlesnake Pass.
The sun showed watery now behind a milky cloud layer. In the north, mares’ tails swept the sky. The wind blew gustily, affecting her steering, picking up the sand to swirl it across the slopes. Flying grit forced her to keep the windows closed and the atmosphere in the car became stuffy and uncomfortable.
She came to the top of the pass and was thankful to see that the range was narrow here: there were no extensive uplands to traverse as there were on the northern route. Now the Molten Desert came into view, stippled with creosote bushes and smoking with windblown sand. Visibility to the south was limited, mountains and desert fading into obscurity behind a bank of something she could not immediately identify. It could be haze or smog. Or sand.
She knew a moment of panic. When she left Sweetwater she had been concentrating first on the deaths of the two girls and how she might elicit further facts, but as she realized that the weather was deteriorating, she had started to wonder if the purpose of her journey might be affected by a storm. For instance, Nielsen had told her she must go clear to Calcine before turning back because her dust trail as she crossed the desert would surely be seen at Molten, only twelve miles to the north. But as the dust devils gyrated across the plain she started to wonder if, with so much movement in the landscape, she could risk her trail being mistaken for blown sand and not waste time going all the way to Calcine.
Now, glancing south, speculating on whether that brown wall could be an advancing sandstorm, the purpose behind her journey faded before the most primitive fear: not of death but of an unknown and violent enemy.
Miss Pink accepted the inevitability of death, knowing that she would put up a good fight if necessary at its approach, but that she must be beaten eventually. That was one thing. This brown enemy was different because she had the ability to outwit it but no method. She was not a sick old woman fighting pain in a terminal ward; she was a healthy mobile person with all her faculties but lacking experience. She took the sensible course. She fled.
Twenty miles ahead were the Superstition Mountains and the pass from which she had seen the smudge of Molten six days ago. All thoughts of Calcine had been driven from her mind but Molten bulked large: Molten, where there were buildings and people, where one could, figuratively speaking, dive into a hole occupied by your fellows, and close the entrance, shutting out the elements.
Twenty miles to the highway. She put her foot down, ran smoothly for fifty yards and crashed through a shallow pit. She slowed down. Had she broken a spring? Springs were not essential for mobility but an axle was. Reluctantly, gripping the wheel that was now slippery with sweat, she kept to fifteen, pushed a little higher, watching the front of the sandstorm, trying to calculate how fast it was moving.
She reached the paved highway, turned left, heard a splatter like shotgun pellets on the rear window, and pressed the accelerator.
She was a good driver but she did not like excessive speed. The rear view mirror showed as an oblong of brown glass but ahead she could see the desert and even the dark point that marked the cottonwoods above Fraser’s gas station, therefore she was not yet in the storm. There were only intermittent spatterings on the window: its forerunners. Her speed crept up to 65 and she kept it there, hot and tense, not daring to tell herself she had made it, but deliberately imagining the worst that could happen: a puncture. Then she would bump off the road, even off the verge to avoid another car hitting her, and plough into the desert. Then she would wait it out—but afterwards she must walk to Molten, and suppose another storm caught her without shelter?
She hit a bump and the car rattled like old bones. She was panicking; she must not think, must concentrate on the road surface. Immediately she was struck by the apparently random thought that Emma Chadwick exhibited wild volatility even if hers originated in revulsion and attraction: boredom with one aspect of her situation, cleaving to another. Was this what the desert did to strangers: rocked their sense of perspective?
Molten’s main street was empty of cars, but she had a fleeting glimpse of one parked in the lee of Vi’s store. Paper and torn plastic whirled crazily in the air. She rounded the garage and pulled up in the shelter of its north wall. The big doors in front had been closed. When she turned off the ignition the world was filled with the dull roar of the wind and the rattle of sheet iron trying to break free from its moorings.
There was a door in the wall but she passed it and walked towards the front of the building. There had been a light in the store. The wind whipped her hair and her skirt. As she reached the corner she was thrown sideways and went down, skinning her knees, her bag plucked from her shoulder. She grabbed its strap and, stooping to present less resistance, she flung herself back to the shelter of the building.
The side door would not budge. Panic struck again (had they abandoned the town?). She took off a brogue and hammered on the door with its heel.
It opened suddenly and she staggered past Orville Fraser who, before he closed the door, shouted urgently: ‘Are you alone? Anyone else out there?’ She shook her head and he closed and bolted the door.
‘My God,’ she said shakily, looking around for somewhere to sit down. He led her into the empty store and seated her at the stool behind the check-out counter. The far side of the street was invisible. ‘The brown helm,’ she said, and laughed.
He left her for a moment and came back with a bottle and a packet of plastic beakers. She saw the word ‘Brandy’ and he poured a good measure. It was not Martell but it possessed a raw fire.
‘You just made it,’ he said, regarding her thoughtfully.
‘How long will it last?’
He shrugged. ‘A few hours? Twelve? As long as the wind keeps up. What was that you said: a brown what?’
‘Helm. In the north of England, when there’s a lot of fresh snow on the ground, there’s a violent wind gets up and lifts the snow and makes a kind of ground blizzard of powder. They call it the helm. It’s more dangerous than this because temperatures are way below freezing with the wind-chill. All the same, I’d rather have the helm. It’s less—peculiar. The first time you meet something it can be terrifying.’
He nodded. ‘Did you come from Calcine?’
She nodded in her turn and took small sips of brandy. ‘That was badly needed. I shouldn’t have set out but the morning was quite clear, early on. It was cool and breezy but I didn’t expect this.’
‘They shouldn’t have let you go.’
‘I was away early and probably no one had heard a forecast. I must admit it was a big risk to take for film.’
‘I have film for cameras. So they have at Sweetwater.’
‘Black and white? 136 plus X?’
‘No, I don’t carry black and white film.’
Miss Pink looked around a little helplessly. ‘This is a repeat performance, isn’t it? Your coming to my rescue a second time. I hope I can go on soon. They’ll worry if I’m not back for dinner.’ He said nothing. ‘Were the police here?’ she asked chattily.
‘They were here.’ He was not surprised at the question. Verne Stuart would have been observed taking the Sweetwater road.
‘A terrible thing to happen.’
‘Terrible.’
‘I knew them, you see. I had supper with them that night I stayed at the motel.’
‘You did?’ He looked at her with interest.
‘Nice girls.’ She paused, considered, and added cheerfully: ‘I hope I’m broad-minded.’
He did not respond. His eyes were thoughtful again, straying to the street. In a lull the petrol pumps loomed against a beige mist.
‘Have they got any f
urther?’ she asked brightly.
‘Who, ma’am?’
‘The police. With the investigation.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘They think it odd that the car should have left the road without the driver taking any avoiding action.’
‘Well, she might not have been sober.’
‘But she’d driven over twenty miles! She’d crossed the pass.’
‘I’ve never been much of a drinking man myself but I’ve seen others. Couldn’t the drink take effect suddenly, like delayed action? Men can be fighting mad for a time and collapse without warning. Something like that could have happened. Particularly if they were on drugs.’ He winced.
‘No.’ She looked mulish. ‘They weren’t on drugs.’
‘It doesn’t always show. And there’s far too much of it about. Girls like that, mixed up with criminals, they’re bound to smoke grass. Most likely they were on cocaine.’
‘I’m sure Donna and Bunny weren’t involved with criminals. They hadn’t gone wrong in that sense.’
‘I don’t think you know much about those sort of girls, ma’am.’
‘I’m a very good judge of character.’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’ It was placatory, not sarcastic.
‘And then there were no signs of criminal activity. No stolen goods in the room; not visible anyway. They were very shabby, poor things, down on their luck.’ She coughed, then said flatly, as if striving to be objective: ‘Of course they had no clients. They couldn’t even pay the rent, they told me.’
‘No ma’am. Donna went to Vegas and played the tables. She must have won because she was able to pay the rent when she came back.’
‘That’s not what the police said.’
‘They ran up a bill after that, and left owing it.’
‘I can’t imagine Mrs Webber letting—Oh dear, I’m gossiping.’
He gave a snort of laughter. ‘You judged character correct there. Muriel Webber wouldn’t have let them get away owing rent, if she’d known. They went in the middle of the night. And they made sure no one heard them going, didn’t even bring that old car up to the room, must have parked it all of half a mile away.’
