See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

by Bart Paul

  The wind picked up and scattered the clouds, letting the setting moon shine. The wind slackened, and we caught the smell of wet sage from across the highway and the rotten burned smell of the old house and the gasoline fumes from the big tank and burnt vinyl and flesh of the bobtail’s interior. Fresh gusts stirred up embers from the house. Jack walked over just stiff as hell when the last EMT left. He leaned against the bed of the truck like it hurt. His bloody shirt was gone and he was wearing a red Frémont County Fire jacket. He pulled a pint of Knob Creek from the pocket.

  “Compliments of the volunteer fire department,” he said. “So where do we go from here?”

  “You’re going straight to the emergency room in Mammoth,” Sarah said.

  “I gotta write my report,” Jack said. “It’s gonna be freaky-deaky.”

  Sarah started to say something, then just laughed. We passed the Knob Creek around, watching the county medical examiner’s crew wheel VanOwen’s burned body away. I thought I saw Audie’s eyes open for a second to follow the corpse. If she was watching, I didn’t try to shield her from it. The kid was tougher than most grownups. Just as tough as a rasp.

  “Well,” Aaron said, “poetic justice for an arsonist.”

  “If Erika were still alive,” Sarah said, “what would the government have done with her?”

  “I learned a long time ago never to count on what should happen,” he said, “only what does.”

  “That’s a pretty mealy-mouthed answer.”

  Aaron almost laughed.

  “Well,” Sarah said, “she died thinking she was saving her brother’s life.”

  Audie raised her head. “That’s pretty brave, ain’t it?” I don’t know how long she’d been listening. “She was hella brave then, right?”

  The four of us didn’t quite have a grownup comeback to that.

  “Yeah, sweetie,” Sarah said. “It was totally brave.”

  Audie crawled deeper into Sarah’s arms and closed her eyes again. We chased the Knob Creek with the dregs of our coffee, then emptied what was left of the coffee on the dirt. Sorenson walked over and told Aaron he’d found the second rental truck exactly where VanOwen told me it would be, just off the highway less than a mile south. There was no trace of Carl. We watched Sorenson walk off.

  “So, Tommy,” Aaron said, “what about the money?”

  I pulled the thumb drive out of my jacket and held it out to him. He looked down at it a minute before he took it.

  “Doesn’t exactly look like a million bucks,” he said.

  “She got killed trying to get it to you.”

  Aaron took the drive and bounced it on his palm.

  Sarah told him what we’d learned from Erika about the account in the Cyprus bank. He made notes for his financial crew.

  “If she’d survived,” Aaron said, “all this would’ve helped her.”

  “That poor dope,” Sarah said. “What a waste of a life.”

  Finally, Sarah, Audie, and I drove out of the yard past the firetrucks and county law vehicles and the last milling first responders. Mitch gave us a wave as we drove by.

  “What? We’re all pals again?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “But I bet he’s relieved. Now he can close the book on a pretty big crime that’s stumped our department for almost a year, plus take part of the blame off somebody who still has a lot of friends in this valley. No matter how tough he talked, Mitch wasn’t looking forward to slapping the cuffs on Erika. The downside for him is he has to share the credit with you and Aaron.” She put an arm around my shoulders. “You always seem to frost his cookies. One of the many things I like about you.”

  We picked up Lorena from Becky Tyree and spent a quick fifteen minutes at her kitchen table telling her how her friend died. Becky sat in her bathrobe listening, dry-eyed but drained.

  “I’ve spent all night thinking about how a family that had everything going for it could just fall apart so fast,” she said.

  After a few more words, she thanked us and we left. We drove out her lane to the Summers Lake Road close to sunup. The dawn glow from the eastern hills was smudged with oily smoke.

  I was driving and Sarah was dozing. Audie slept between us, and the baby was secured on the back seat. I remembered the bit of wire in my shirt pocket and rooted around for it long enough to catch Sarah’s attention.

  “What is it, babe?”

  I held it out to her and she took it. She didn’t look impressed.

  “It’s Erika’s,” she said. “Erika’s earring.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I saw her wearing them last night. I hadn’t seen her for years but she always wore those dangly things.”

  I crossed the tip of the sagebrush moraine just as the first bit of sunrise hit the timbered ridge up ahead.

  “Why?” she said. “Where did you get it?”

  “It was on the floor of the slaughterhouse right near the drain. Not three feet from Buddy’s body.”

  Sarah took it all in for a minute.

  “Then Erika knew he wasn’t in the house,” she said. “That he was already dead. My god, Tommy, she knew.”

  “Yeah. She wasn’t trying to save him.”

  “No. She was trying to join him.”

  The day after the killings at the Hornberg ranch, Harvey and I got back to work. We saddled up four horses for the Newport Beachers plus the two we would ride and four mules to pack out our party from their camp at Little Meadows. We saddled a fifth mule just for Harvey’s bedroll.

  I filled him in on what Bill had told me on the ride up. How his wife and Scottie had tracked me down so they could meet the stony-cold cowboy killer from the tiny article in the Los Angeles Times, which would be me. I knew I was in for a world of crap from Harv that would only last a year or two, but I wanted him to know why I was planning on being silent about the mess at Hornberg’s.

  It was a cloudless June morning with only a slight breeze waving through the early summer grass and fluttering the aspen. Bonner and Tyree cows and calves meandered across the meadows and hid in shady thickets and bogs along the creek. Snowmelt was running high, and the water was clear and chest deep on the horses in the crossings. Becky and Dan had packed Twister Creed’s body out for the county the day before.

  We climbed out of the canyon through the timber into the Wilderness Area, then kept climbing the trail to the pass. We reached the camp at Little Meadows by early afternoon. We hobbled the stock out to graze, then had some pricey IPAs Tess had chilled in the icy creek, and they told us about their adventures. Drew and Scottie climbed Hawksbeak the morning after Erika and I blasted out of their camp. Bill had hiked to Beartrap Lake to fish. Drew told me the morning had been windy and overcast, and they’d hit some snow, ice, and slick rock from the storms just like I said they might, but that with caution, they stayed out of trouble, and by the time they made it to the top the sun was out. He showed me pictures he’d taken from the summit. The country looked huge from that altitude, with no human scar to be seen and no human stain on the landscape.

  Bill said he expected Beartrap would be murky from storm runoff. Instead, the sky was breezy but cloudless and the lake was clear. He landed some nice brookies that he cleaned and packed in snow. This morning he and Drew had headed out early and climbed Tower Peak, while later Scottie and Tess hiked to an old Forest Service cabin to explore, then spent the afternoon reading Anne Cleeland mysteries and napping and drinking creek-chilled chardonnay. It was one of those perfectly warm but crisp days, and the four of them said it made the whole trip.

  “How about you, Tommy?” Tess said. “Any new adventures for the fearless wilderness guide?”

  “Nope.”

  “We didn’t get our extra days with you.” She laughed. “You owe us, cowboy.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  I felt a little guilty lying to them, especially Bill, but I didn’t want to rehash the last couple of days. Harvey pushed the people to get their gear semi-organized for
the next morning. Later he cooked us all dinner with Dutch oven biscuits, wild rice in garlic butter, steak tenderloin, then brook trout stuffed with elk sausage, plus cow-camp coffee and a couple kinds of outstanding wine that the folks shared with us poor packers, finished off with a Dutch oven chocolate cake. But not before he gave them a start by hauling out a cloth sack of potatoes and onions plus a can of Folgers.

  Riding out the next day we reached the forks by late morning. Though Creed’s body was gone, I’d kept a brisk pace as we passed the snow cabin. We took a lunch break at the Blue Rock, then I let Harvey take the lead with his string and had three of the folks follow him close. Coming into the second meadow I asked Bill to drop back to where I was leading the last three mules, and I told him what happened and asked him to keep it to himself. At least until they got back to civilization. He listened without a word. When I finished, I pulled up my horse.

  “I don’t feel good about any of this, but at least we got those kids out safe.”

  Bill sat his horse just as still as could be. Then he laughed, his eyes down-trail on his friends skirting the meadow.

  “They are just going to flip out—a gunfight with bank robbers and sex traffickers breaking bad just across the valley while we were all so close, but having no damn clue?” he said. “They will be so pissed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In late June, Paiute Meadows saw two funerals. They happened one week and a hundred fifty feet apart. The first funeral was big. Several hundred people, about half the population of the valley, stood on the bare ground on a slope east of the town. A few dresses, fewer ties, mostly cowboy hats and clean jeans. It was at the old Hornberg plot, the gravestones surrounded by an iron fence. Mourners circled a new chunk of black marble with both Erika’s and Buddy’s names freshly chiseled on either side of a badly rendered horseman. The birthdates on the stone were four years apart. The dates of the deaths were identical. The marble said that Buddy’s given name was Claus Wolfgang Hornberg, but not one in ten of us had known that.

  The black monument stood apart from the tilting century-old pink and white angel with engraving worn by wind and sand. And apart from white marble slabs carved to look like axe-hewn tree trunks, stones with old forgotten names and the birthdates rendered in block letters that went back a hundred fifty years, and newer names from early in the last century right up to Erika and Buddy’s father, who had died twelve years before. All ranchers, well remembered by old timers in the crowd, their Masonic symbols carved in stone above the men’s names. The names were all there were. Hard old-country names with no Beloved Mother or anything else so frivolous or so kind.

  The family wasn’t the earliest to work the valley, and their ranch wasn’t the biggest. Becky’s great-grandfather had them beat by fifty years and fifteen hundred acres, and the Allisons, who’d hired my dad before I was born, had a few more years and a thousand acres more than that. Unspoken was the obvious thing. We were seeing the end of a family. The end of a ranch. For a lot of us, this ceremony was a reminder that the life we’d chosen was not forever. There was talk of an older cousin from Evanston, Illinois, who had visited the ranch once forty years before. The woman got sunburned bad enough to never come back, and told her uncle Kurt that his ranch house was a disgusting dump and should be bulldozed and Erika and Buddy sent to boarding school in Santa Barbara or Lake Forest. Now, that woman was the only heir. She had paid for her cousins’ headstone but wouldn’t pay to embalm a slacker like Buddy. She told the sheriff over the phone that he could be cremated like his sister, which even Mitch thought was a crass thing to say. After hanging up, he sent Sorenson to scoop up ash from the ruin of the ranch-house so there would be something of Erika to bury. It went against his image, but I was glad he did it, though I’d never tell him so. At the Sierra Peaks bar that night, Sorenson talked about gathering the fake ashes, which started the first rumor that Erika might still be alive. The county not paying for a forensic sifting of the ruins after sworn deputy Jack Harney had seen the woman run into the flames and not seen her come out just added to bar-room speculation. Folks remarked that there was no actual grave, just a little round hole in the ground at the foot of the marble where the canisters of ashes would go.

  There was talk the Illinois woman would sell out fast. If no ranching interest stepped up to keep the land in cattle, she might sell part of it as a mobile home park. That would be more Sonny VanOwen’s style than Erika’s. Sarah and I stood with her father and my mom and Mom’s boyfriend, Burt, who was fresh from the base in his Marine Utilities. Everyone had known everyone. What we kept hearing in both the testimonials and the whispers was how much they all thought of Erika, even from folks who’d trashed her in life. Of her kindness and forgiveness to her brother and of her hard work, both on the place and in the bank, and her contrariness in taking the risks she took even when those risks were beyond foolish. Becky Tyree spoke last. She wore a dress and talked from the heart about Erika’s love of the high country and of her family, and how she gave herself to save her brother and the way of life they were born to. She stood pretty and strong and optimistic, reminding folks that no matter what, the land endures. I heard the word legacy more than once. As was fitting, nobody mentioned VanOwen or the trouble he brought with him.

  The hard winters clean this hard country. I don’t know what they do down in Southern Cal where VanOwen came from, down where it never freezes and people like him never get a rest from the evil worm inside them. It just feeds and feeds. A Tecate-born medic in my unit in the Hindu Kush called it the gusanillo, that worm inside you. That passion. Passion for good or passion for evil. He said it’s what makes bullfighters fight bulls, and makes kiddie pool parties turn bloody when drunken dads whip out their pistols.

  By the time the last tears dried in the June heat and the last cars pulled out of the cemetery gate toward town, the dead woman had got a share of her reputation back. The idea that Erika might have faked her death a second time hadn’t caught on just yet.

  There were barely a dozen of us standing around the second grave a week later. Audie, my mom and Burt, Becky Tyree and Dan, Harvey and May, Sarah’s dad, Jack Harney, Sarah—just off duty and still in uniform—the baby, and me. That was it. The site was just a hole in the sand at the edge of the paupers’ lot. Last stop for the indigent dead. The forsaken prostitute. The markers, where there were any, were white-painted steel crosses welded from sections of highway signposts or snowplow markers provided by the county road crew. Or short pine planks ruined by mountain winters and half-buried in the sand that marked the oldest Paiute graves, those names long gone. My mom and Becky had raised hell to keep the county from cremating the friendless woman, though they had no legal claim on the remains. They thought Audie should have one spot in this world where she could always go to remember her mother, a woman murdered trying to protect her child. We’d all chipped in, and a headstone had been ordered but not yet delivered. Aaron Fuchs rattled some cages at the FBI to track down the woman’s birthplace outside of Coeur d’Alene, and her true name, Jennifer Leigh Ravenswood. It was a pretty name. She was just fifteen when Audie was born and twenty-four last fall when Sonny VanOwen, her rapist and her pimp, put a bullet in her brain. Aaron emailed us a juvi court photo of Jenny taken at around sixteen when her motherhood was new to her. She was beautiful. There was no other way to say it. In spite of the life she’d been dealt, she just glowed and had a smile that would break your heart. There was a passing resemblance to Erika in color and frame and bone structure but little resemblance in beauty. Just enough for VanOwen to think he could pull a switch when he had a body to dispose of. And he came close to getting away with it. Sarah said, looking at the picture of Jenny, that we could see what Audie would look like in a few years. Mom printed out the picture on good paper and framed it for Audie, who said it was the only picture of her mother she’d ever even seen.

  She wore a dress my mom had bought for her to the cemetery. We carried the coffin to the grave with the marks o
f backhoe teeth still fresh in the cut. Audie’s tears poured out along with the tears from people who’d never known the dead woman. After all the months in the lifeless water of the airless bog, we lowered her down into dry ground. Staring into that sandy hole, I got the idea that we hadn’t gone on a false hunt after all. The search for a missing child was real. And we’d found her. We found Audie.

  The first handful of dirt hit the coffin lid, and she wailed loud enough to wake the dead Spaniard in his cave.

  When it was over and the tears were wiped and the noses blown, we walked back to our pickups for the drive to town. We were heading to the Sno-Cone for bacon cheeseburgers and chocolate malts, which was Audie’s choice. I noticed a little German convertible parked under some runty spruce trees along the cemetery chain-link. It was a hot day to leave the top up. I walked next to the car and pulled my skinning knife so the driver couldn’t miss it. Holding the knife in my right hand I ran the back of my thumb across the ragtop so it sounded like I was cutting into it. Carl had the door open quick enough.

  His hair and Hawaiian shirt were plastered down with sweat. He looked more scared than pissed.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re the one scopin’ us out. That’ll stop right now.” I sheathed my knife. “You’re not in Reno anymore, so you got no jurisdiction and no cause if you did. Plus, your boss is dead.”