by Cindy Brown
No go with any corporations, at least for now. But I could start investigating Nathan…Oh, right. I took a baggie with the napkin out of my purse and gave it to my uncle. “Guess what? I got Arnie’s DNA last night.”
“Nice,” he said. “See if you can get Nathan’s ASAP.”
I nodded. “I’m going out to Gold Bug today.” I had to leave in about a half hour, but that was enough time to plug Nathan’s name into the databases my uncle used for background checks. I found some info pretty quickly: Nathan had been born in Philly to a woman named Gabriella DiRienzi. He didn’t have a criminal past, unless you counted taking people’s money and losing it. Nathan had opened five restaurants, two gift shops, and a doggie spa, The Shiny Shih Tzu. Creditors and investors had taken him to court a number of times. Most of them had won their suits.
“So where did he get the money to buy Gold Bug?” I said aloud.
“You can conjecture all you want,” said Uncle Bob. “Or you could just ask him.”
Uncle Bob thought a lot of me. Too much. Sure, I was a good actor, but how in the world was I going to just ask someone where he got a million dollars after losing three times that much? Yep. Those were the figures. Nathan had lost three million dollars of other people’s money, then somehow come up with a million for Gold Bug Gulch. But how to approach him? Maybe take the professional approach, ask like I needed to know for the tour. Yep, I decided as I pulled into the Gulch’s parking lot. That could work.
I grabbed the small cooler I’d packed that morning and hopped out of the truck. I got stuck in traffic on the way out of Phoenix, so I had only fifteen minutes before my meeting with Frank. It’d have to do. I jogged over to the saloon. Arnie had told me Nathan’s onsite office was there, and he was usually in Wednesday through Sunday.
The saloon had wooden swinging doors like you saw in old Westerns, with real doors behind them so the place could be locked up. The real doors were propped open this morning, maybe to catch the cool breeze that blew up from the cottonwoods fringing the creek. I pushed open the swinging doors, my cowboy boots making satisfying thuds on the wooden floors. “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us,” I drawled. I couldn’t help it.
“Nice audition, but I think Arnie already hired you,” said Nathan, who was not in his office but behind the bar pouring a cup of coffee from a coffeemaker. Then, he said, “ThoIwodnhave.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” he said, clear as a cowbell. He turned his back on me and blew his nose. Into a handkerchief. This DNA collection business was not going to be easy.
“Nathan,” I said, in my strongest, most professional voice. “I’m still collecting all the information I need for the historical tour, and I’d like to speak—”
“Talk to Josh.”
“I have and I will. Plus, I’m meeting with Frank in a few—”
“Crazy Frank? Oh, for God’s sake, don’t let him pull his sad bat crap on you, alright? That’s all I need, some emowomatellpeopbatcra.”
“I am not an emotional woman and I will not tell people bat crap.” After years of living with my mother, passive-aggressive mumbling was my second language. “And I want to get the information correct, exactly the way you want it told. So, may I ask you a few questions about the inception of Gold Bug Gulch? Not the old ghost town but your new Western town.”
Nathan made a big show of looking at the clock that hung above the bar. “You’ve got five minutes.”
Chapter 19
It didn’t take five minutes. Nathan got his money from investors. There was a group from back East who liked Westerns and thought this town sounded like a good idea.
Arnie and Josh were the only other investors, for now. There were a couple of other interested parties, but he wouldn’t say who. Uncle Bob’s confidence in my acting/questioning abilities was definitely displaced.
I took my pathetic PI self out to the place where I’d met Frank. He was already there.
“I do love a woman who’s on time,” he said.
Good thing I wasn’t my usual ten minutes late.
“Thought we’d eat down by the creek. You been there yet?” I shook my head, and he started off downhill toward the cottonwoods, scrawny brown legs pumping. “Beautiful down there. You can hear the gods talk.” Hmm. Maybe Crazy Frank’s nickname was well-deserved. “Watch your step. It gets sandy pretty quick. Easy to twist an ankle. There’s even—”
I didn’t hear what Frank said next. We’d just reached the trees, and…ohhh.
Underfoot was soft grass. Grass. In the desert. And edging the small stream were honest-to-God bushes—not cactus or sage or desert broom, but soft-looking, autumn-yellow-tinged bushes. Statuesque cottonwoods stood guard, throwing lacy shadows on the ground while their leaves whispered overhead.
“The Hopis say that the sound of wind through the cottonwoods is the gods talking to us.” Frank looked up and cocked an ear, as if he were listening. “Cottonwoods are sacred to the Hopis. They carve Kachina dolls from their roots.”
I closed my eyes, the better to hear. It almost did sound like murmured conversation in the air above us.
A few rocks tumbled and splashed. I opened my eyes. Frank now sat on a fallen tree, parallel to the creek, in the shade.
“Our lunch seating, Madame.” He took off his khaki hat and set it next to him. He had about seven hairs on his head, all sprouting from his ears.
I scrambled over a few rocks and joined him on the log. I opened the cooler and placed our sandwiches and chips on the log-table between us. I nestled the beers in the sandy shallows of the stream to keep them cool.
“Three beers?” he asked.
“Two for you and one for me. I’ve got my water bottle too.” I didn’t usually drink in the middle of the day, especially before a rehearsal, but…
“Good. Don’t like drinking alone.”
Yep. Got that one right.
“So…” Frank reached down and grabbed one of the beers. “How much did Josh tell you?”
“Not much. Mostly about how the town was big, then it wasn’t.”
“Yeah, Josh has a hard time talking about it. Tough to be at the tail end of a dynasty. You can get a lot of the official history of the town from the Wickenburg historical society. They can also tell you about some of the characters who lived here, the saloon owner, the teacher, the madam, those sorts of folks. And about the murders.” He opened up his sandwich. “Praise the Lord—it’s not American cheese. Can’t stand the stuff. It’s not cheese; it’s chemicals. Oh, and there’s mustard. Nice touch.”
I was not about to be distracted by mustard and my fortuitous choice of cheddar cheese. “Murders?”
“This was the Wild West, you know. People shot each other over all sorts of things. Mostly the town’s three most valuable commodities: water, gold, and women.”
Two questions circled my mind. “Women were one of the top three? I would have thought cattle.”
“Supply and demand. Way more cattle than women. If a woman was smart, she could make a fortune out here.”
“By marrying a rich guy?”
Frank laughed. “Maybe. But I’m talking about working women.”
I seriously doubted women came west to make their fortunes in prostitution, but wanted to ask my second question. “Where’d you go to school?” Though Frank’s speech was mostly what you’d expect from a desert rat, it was also peppered with phrases like “valuable commodities.”
“Berkeley. One of the first to graduate in Environmental Science. That’s why I live out here. I’m protecting two of the most pristine desert riparian areas in the West.”
“By living here?”
“I’m like a caretaker. I pay attention to the flora and fauna, notice what’s doing well and what’s struggling. I measure the groundwater and test the creek water. I pick up the crap that people leave be
hind. Like water bottles.” He looked pointedly at my plastic bottle.
I gulped the last of my water and made a show of putting the empty bottle back into my cooler. “You said you were protecting two places?”
“Yeah, this one and…well, I don’t know you well enough tell you the location of the other, but I can tell you it’s in a little box canyon. The Hassayampa River surfaces there for a hundred feet or so. I did my spirit quest there. Really did hear the gods talk.” He deposited his empty beer can in my cooler, slid off the log, and reached into the creek for his second one. “You ready for yours?” I nodded and he handed me a can, cool and dripping with creek water. “This here, Gold Bug Creek, is a tributary of the Hassayampa, you know.”
“I didn’t.” This was interesting, but I was distracted by a thought fluttering around in my head.
“Bet you also didn’t know that ‘Hassayampa’ means upside down. That’s what the Apaches used to call it, since most of the river flows underground.”
The thought flitted by me and I grabbed it. “Are there bats here?”
“There are bats everywhere. And good thing too. Keeps down the bug population. But I suspect you’re asking because someone said something about me being batshit crazy.”
“Not batshit crazy. Just bat crazy.”
“We all got pieces of crazy in us, some bigger pieces than others.” He took a long drink of his beer, his gaze on the creek studious and protective, like a really smart sheepdog. “Remember how I said I keep track of the animals around here? About a year ago, right after Nathan bought the place, I was doing some fix-up work on the reptile house. I worked past sunset that time and was just leaving when a bat swooped by me out of a nearby building. Something about it seemed different—its silhouette, I guess. So I stuck my head into the building, and there was a small colony just waking up. A colony of Lesser Long-nosed Bats, I later found out. Been on the endangered list for years. I started watching for them and discovered two more colonies, one in a building that hasn’t been repaired yet. And a big one in the mine.”
“Cool.”
“It would be, if it weren’t for the new Gold Bug Gulch. All those people are disturbing the bats.”
“Don’t they have to protect them? By law, I mean?”
“Sure. But first someone has to admit the bats are here. Someone has to fill out all the forms and such. Government moves slow these days, maybe always. And money talks. Oh, Nathan says they’re going to do the right thing—if they need to—but it won’t be enough. Used to be a big bat maternity colony in Colossal Cave down near Tucson. Until they opened it to the public.”
“Can’t Josh help? He must know everything about this place, since his family owned it for so long.”
“Josh…let’s just say he and I don’t see eye to eye about much. Never have. See this?” Frank pointed to his nose, which veered off to the left. “Punched me right in the face during a protest about ten years back. His temper’s better since he started working at the forge, smithing, but he’s not exactly the Zen Smithy he pretends to be.” He crumpled his beer can with one hand and put the empty in my cooler. “But that’s not what you came here to discuss, is it?”
Actually it was. “I want to know everything,” I said, “so I can help protect this place too.” It wasn’t a lie. Though I really wanted to know everything for PI purposes and to protect Arnie’s investment, I wanted to make sure this oasis stayed pristine too. I hoped the goals wouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
“Josh say anything about the Carvers?” Frank asked.
“That’s Mongo’s family, right? Josh said something about them maybe killing off his family’s cattle.”
Frank nodded. “Probably did. The animosity between the families goes way back. The Tates and the Carvers had ranches right next to each other, both big places and both along Gold Bug Creek. Started off fighting about rangeland right from the start, but water rights became a big thing during drought years. The Carvers owned the land upstream. When the creek started drying up, which it did at least some every summer, they’d dam it on their property. By the time the water made it to the Tate’s ranch, their cattle got mostly mud. The Tate boys would sneak out at night and bust up the dams, and the Carvers would build them back up again.”
“Wasn’t that against the law or something?”
“Sure, but remember where you are and when it was. Back then, the law in Wickenburg had their hands full of real criminals who shot people. Things calmed down a bit between the two families in the middle of the last century, until one day in the seventies. Josh’s dad and Mongo’s dad were playing a high-stakes poker game in some back room somewhere. It’d been going on for a day and a night with everybody drinking the whole time, so it wasn’t too surprising when Josh’s dad did something stupid.”
“He literally bet the ranch?”
“All his property except for this parcel the town’s on.”
“And the mine. He didn’t bet the mine.” I remembered he’d sold the mineral rights later, so he must have still owned them.
Frank shrugged. “The mine was played out. Not worth anything.”
“It’s like something out of a movie—Josh’s family losing the ranch in a poker game.”
“Not only that. Word is, John Carver cheated.”
We ate in silence for a minute. Or I did. Frank chewed his Fritos noisily, with his mouth open. I got the feeling he’d lived alone for a long time.
“I can’t believe Josh wouldn’t want to hold onto what was left of his family’s property.”
“He had to sell. His dad left behind a ton of debt when he died. Josh needed money to pay off creditors.”
Frank stopped talking, but it wasn’t quiet. A mourning dove cooed softly to its mate, the creek sang to the rocks it skipped over, and the gods talked to themselves in the cottonwoods. I sat and listened, my heart full. I couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like to lose a place like this.
Chapter 20
“Sure do appreciate this lunch.” Frank belched. “And the beer. Nice to have a woman fix my meal.”
“My uncle is a better cook than me.” Not true, unless you counted chili cheese dogs, but I never did like the whole “women belong in the kitchen” thing. Always afraid it’d be followed up with “barefoot and pregnant.”
“I do love a good cheese sandwich. Especially after all this years of surviving on mice.”
“Mice?” I squeaked.
“Just kidding. I’m a vegetarian. Though I did eat a lot of weird shit for years—yucca, prickly pear, cholla buds. Mostly I ate—eat—beans, corn, and squash. Grow ’em myself.”
Though the area around the creek was almost lush (almost; this was Arizona), the desert began not even a hundred feet away. I looked toward the place Frank had pointed out as home. Dirt and rocks and cacti. “Kinda tough to grow all that out here, isn’t it?”
“I learned how. Tell you what, you bring me lunch again, and I’ll show you my place. Got a meeting tomorrow, so let’s make it Friday.” He squinted at me, and his leathery face scrunched up, his blue eyes barely visible in the wrinkles. “Deal?”
“You bet.”
I was a little early for the melodrama rehearsal (an unusual event, to say the least), so I sat on a bench on the wooden sidewalk in the sun until Billie walked up. “Hi!” I said, in my ditzy Ivy voice, then, “OMG, your eye. Did that just happen?” Of course I saw it yesterday, but figured the bright outdoor light gave me an excuse.
Billie held up a hand, as if to cover her eye from the paparazzi. “No.” She unlocked the door to the opera house and stepped into the darkness.
“What happened?”
“Stumbled. Face first into a door. The knob caught me just right.”
Uncle Bob had told me about some of his domestic violence cases. Billie’s explanation sounded a lot like the excuses he heard all too often. I took a c
hance.
“Listen…” I steeled myself for the lie. “I had a boyfriend once who—”
“This was not a boyfriend.” Billie pointed to her eye. “This was a door.” She strode into the theater ahead of me.
“Sorry, sorry.” I rushed after her. “I didn’t mean—”
She turned to me, her eyes hard. “Alright. So you’ve heard about me and Mongo. It’s not true.”
“Um, actually, I didn’t hear anything, except he was your boyfriend and…”
“Not anymore.” Chance had entered behind us.
“Chance.” Billie’s voice signaled a warning. “Listen, Ivy. Let’s get this out of the way. Mongo and I had been together for years. We lived together.”
“When he wasn’t out—”
“Chance.”
Chance, who seemed pretty macho to me, looked like a puppy who’d been told he was a bad dog.
“We have two hours to rehearse,” said Billie. “Let’s use them.”
Rehearsal went pretty well, though every time we stopped saying scripted words and used our own, the air became thick with tension. Chance seemed especially strained, his voice slightly guttural and his words clipped. As an actor and a person, I was really uncomfortable. As a PI, I sensed an opportunity.
So when we were finished with rehearsal, I said to Billie in my ditz voice, “I really am so sorry about your boyfriend.” Yep, Chance made a face as he bit off a reply. Definitely something there. “You two were, like, a long-term couple? My uncle and aunt in Utah are common-law married or whatever they call it,” I fibbed. I knew Arizona didn’t recognize common-law marriage, but I was curious about Mongo’s estate.
Billie shook her head. “We’re not.”
“So you don’t get any of his stuff? I mean, you won’t have to move or anything, right? That would suck, big time.” Again, I knew the house was in Billie’s name, but I wanted to push things a little.
