Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries)

by Sarah Andrews

  It’s probably that your husband is the prime suspect this time, said another part of my brain.

  “Sit down,” Jerry said, shoving a chair up behind my legs. “Eat the oatmeal.”

  I did as she ordered. I took small spoonfuls and, between mouthfuls, did my best to outline how I hoped to open up the truth once we came off the river. We would return to paved roads, cell phone towers, and high-speed Internet via Peach Springs, a town on the Hualapai Reservation. An hour and a half down a two-lane highway lay Kingman, where, if there was to be any justice, the coroner would let me get a squint at Wink’s remains.

  My self-appointed village discussed the vectors each carload would follow upon leaving. Some would eventually go north into Utah, some would drive west toward California, and some would head east toward interstate highways that would lead them home to Colorado. But first, all agreed, we must spring Fritz.

  We launched soon after and made a beeline for Diamond Creek, not even stopping at Pumpkin Springs to look at its colorful travertine deposits. We were a village with a mission, and the sooner we got after it the better. Our shuttle arrangements were for early afternoon, and we meant to be there, de-rigged and ready to load up and get on up the gravel road toward some answers.

  Diamond Creek was an unintentionally ugly place, an abattoir for raft trips. Hualapai Indians checked our permits and pointed toward the route out. At the appointed hour, our shuttle drivers jounced down the road driving several of our vehicles and pulling a flatbed trailer that carried two more. I was never so glad to see Fritz’s SUV, which Brendan and I packed in a flaming hurry, hurling gear into the back. The rental company appeared next, and we had our rafts deflated and rolled up and loaded in no time. As I handed them the box containing the satellite phone, I said, “I’ll need to know all calls that have been made from this thing.”

  The agent from the rental company said, “Don’t you know who’s used it?”

  I wasn’t sure how much to tell him, so I said, “One of our party left before paying his tab, and I want to know if he made any calls first.”

  Maryann stepped forward and took the phone out of the man’s hands. “Sorry, but you’re right, Em; this is evidence.” She gave me an embarrassed wince. “Weber’s orders. Anything that might be evidence is evidence.”

  I gritted my teeth. “So Wink is still costing us even from the far side of the morgue.”

  Maryann said, “With my own eyes I saw you return this item. I am seizing it from the rental company, not you.” She stared up at the man. “I am a federally commissioned officer of the law. I hereby seize this for a federal case.”

  The man’s eyes widened. “Wow, bummer,” he said. “Someone died?”

  “Yeah, Wink Oberley,” said Maryann.

  “Oh. Shit. Oberley.” The man shrugged as if his skin had suddenly grown a layer of slime and he was trying to knock it loose. Having thus shaken himself into action, he began to walk around his load to cinch down his cam straps before leaving.

  That left only the dory, which Maryann had towed all the way to the pull-out. I asked her, “Does Weber want this thing, too? Fritz didn’t have time to tell me what we were supposed to do with it.”

  “The Man didn’t say anything about that bucket,” she said drily.

  “Either way, I’m going to give it a good going-over.”

  Don and Maryann helped me pull open hatches and shine a flashlight into far nooks and crannies.

  “I was wondering where these got to,” said Don, lifting a sodden granola bar from the hold. “But there’s not much else in here except his basic gear.”

  The tally of equipment was surprisingly short: Aside from a short Paco Pad and a much-battered sleeping bag, we found only his life vest and a cheap spare, his hat, a pair of flip-flop sandals, and a small dry bag containing three T-shirts, a pair of cargo shorts, a fleece jacket, a pair of athletic shoes, a minimal collection of toiletries, and a tattered paperback. “Well, I don’t know what I expected,” I said. “This is what Seth Farnsworth found when he came to Ledges, and nothing’s changed. Wink was carrying some of our fresh produce, but we ate all that. I wonder what he had in the forward hatch that he didn’t want me to see.”

  Maryann said, “He tried to keep you out of here?”

  I bent and stuck my head back inside that space. There was nothing there. I straightened up and faced the ranger. “Yeah, and he got pretty hotheaded about it when I got nosy, like there was something special in there he didn’t want me to see.”

  The Hualapai in charge ambled over to the dory. “What about this boat?” he asked. “I don’t see a trailer for it. You are taking it, eh?”

  Maryann explained what had happened to its owner.

  The Hualapai shook his head. “Bad,” he said. “But it still goes.”

  It began to occur to me that getting that hulk to Diamond Creek and off the river was only part of our requirement: We must now get it up a rutted, stony road to … where? I turned to Tiny. “Did Wink have a plan for getting this thing out of here?”

  Tiny looked worried. “He said he had a pal who’d show up with a trailer.”

  I said, “I wonder if he meant that, or if that was just some vague plan he had, or if he planned all the while to leave it to the rest of us to drag it out of here.”

  The man from the rental company shook his head. “Don’t look at me. We don’t have a place for it on our load. Maybe if you wanted we could pick it up another time?”

  “When indeed?” I muttered.

  “Damn it!” said Brendan. “When is Wink going to quit messing with us?”

  The head Hualapai adjusted his sunglasses. “We could make arrangements to keep it for a while as long as you can get it out of our way. There’d be an additional fee, of course.”

  So now we had to pass the hat to pay for the keep and removal of a dead dory? I wanted to kill the man all over again.

  “It’s evidence,” said Maryann. “I’ll haul it.”

  As I thought this thought a truck appeared at the top of the road with a trailer bouncing along behind it. It was Hank, Wink Oberley’s beleaguered friend. He bounced his rig down the road, kicking up dust, and, with the deliberation necessary when driving a rutted road, eventually pulled up next to the dory. The near truck window slid open, knocking loose a shroud of silt, and one skinny elbow appeared over the windowsill. “Where’s Wink?” he asked.

  “Gone,” said Mungo.

  “He left before I even got here? Gone where? Did he run off again? That sumbitch, he stole my new shirt! A nice plaid with buttons and a collar, even. I’d just got it in the mail from Cabela’s, on sale for $16.95. So where’s he hiding himself?”

  “In the morgue,” said Mungo.

  Hank threw open the door and jumped down to the ground. “He what?”

  “Gone. Dead. Not here. In the morgue. Sorry, lad.”

  Hank turned and leaned his face against the metal frame of the window of his truck and began to mumble to himself in little words I could not quite make out.

  I said, “Come to think of it, where is that plaid shirt? It’s not in his gear here. Did he have it on the night he disappeared?” A bit late for decent manners, I added, “Sorry, Hank, but as you can see we’ve got a mess on our hands, so we’re a bit distracted. Sorry for your loss.”

  Jerry Rasmussen opened Wink’s dry bag and peered inside. “Nope, no plaid shirt, and I could swear he was wearing something else that last evening by the fire. Glenda, do you remember?”

  “I went to bed, you’ll recall.”

  Jerry persisted. “He didn’t slip anything into your gear, perchance?”

  “God, no,” said Glenda. “Uh-unh. I repacked everything last night and I would have noticed.”

  I said, “All the more reason that we’ve got to get a look at that corpse. If he wasn’t wearing that shirt, then he had to have taken it somewhere else, and that proves that he left the Ledges alive.”

  “What the hell are you all talking about?” c
ried Hank.

  Mungo said, “Wink was murdered.”

  Hank began to shriek. “No! No, no, no! What am I going to tell Eleanor?”

  “Who’s Eleanor?” I asked. “Was that his wife?”

  “She’s my wife,” sobbed Hank. “Oh Jesus, she’s going to be so upset!”

  “Why? Did she know him?”

  “Know him? She’s his half sister! Oh hell, she’s going to be beside herself! She hated the asshole, but he was all the blood kin she had left.” He began to talk rapidly, blathering personal information out of shock. “They had the same daddy, and they were both in and out of homes when they were kids, but she kept finding him again and he’d run off and get into one kind of a fix or another, and then—” He broke off into a strange keening. “Oh, how am I going to tell her?”

  Maryann said, “So wait, then she’s a next of kin? Because we need someone to identify the body.” She caught my eye and nodded toward Hank, as if to say, Here’s your route into the coroner’s office.

  “Right!” I said. “Let’s get this thing loaded up and get on up that hill and give your wife a call!” I felt bad asking a grieving sibling to crack into a morgue, but I had my priorities: Get Fritz out of custody first and make amends later. “Besides,” I said, “she’ll want to know who really killed him so she can spit straight.”

  Glenda kindly put an arm around the brother-in-law.

  Everyone grabbed hold of the dory and on Tiny’s one-two-three-lift got it up onto the Park Service trailer and cinched down before Hank quite knew what was happening. We strapped the oars across the top and the personal gear down through the forward hatch.

  I hurried over to Maryann, who was just climbing into the cab of a Park Service truck. “Okay if I make a couple more calls?” I asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  I took confiscated satellite phone and asked Hank to call his wife to tell her she was about to make a trip across the state in a private plane. “It’s a Piper Cheyenne, a big turboprop,” I said. “I’m having a commercial pilot fly down to pick her up and get her to Kingman so she can identify her brother’s remains.” Next I dialed Faye and said, “I need you to fly to Page, Arizona, and pick up a woman and bring her to Kingman, arriving in about two and a half hours. I’ll pick you and your passenger up at the airport and drive you into town. I’m passing the phone to a guy named Hank, and he’s going to give you the woman’s name and phone number in case she tries to stay home.”

  We thanked the Hualapais and paid our tab for using the pull-out and formed up a conga line of vehicles climbing the dusty slope. Glenda took the wheel in Hank’s truck and I made a mental note to thank her afterward. We climbed through a dusty desert, easing across places where flash floods had turned the road to a wash of naked cobbles, and continued past grazing burros and ocotillo and other desert scrub.

  At length we achieved Peach Springs, parked the vehicles at the first thing resembling a grocery store, and piled out under Mungo’s instructions to observe one last important ritual of raft trip communal living: our first taste of ice cream in three weeks. I had an ice cream sandwich, but was so wound up that I couldn’t eat more than two bites. Brendan went for one of the cones that had been rolled in nuts, and we bought two cones for Hank, who had suddenly become cavernously hungry.

  Gary, Nancy, and Olaf finished their ice creams first. “We’re on our way, then,” said Gary. “We’ll check the helicopter places in Las Vegas, and if we find anything, we’ll call you. If not, we’re on our way west, and we’ll try to catch up with that woman who had such lousy luck bird-watching, Kathryn Davy.”

  “Thanks, guys. Let’s all get together later in the summer.”

  Gary and Nancy each gave me a hug, and Olaf waved from the safety of Gary’s truck.

  “I’m not a mouse,” I told Olaf. “I don’t bite, and I sure won’t crawl on you in your sleep.”

  He gave me a thumbs-up but maintained his distance.

  So this is it, I thought. Three weeks living in close proximity with these rascals and now off we go, scattering to our separate corners of the real world. But I didn’t have time to grieve the loss of the camaraderie of the river. I switched on my cell phone and handed it to Brendan and asked him to monitor it while I found a restroom at the filling station across the road from the market. I had an overwhelming need to vomit and wanted to do so in peace. When I returned he was talking to someone on the gadget.

  “Yes,” he was saying. “Uh-huh, this is Brendan, Em’s stepson; you remember me! So what was it you needed to tell her? Oh, here she is now!” He turned to me, beaming. “It’s Holly Ann,” he told me, thrusting the phone toward me. “I think she’s got something for you.”

  I put the phone to my ear. “Holly Ann?”

  “Oh, I’m so glad I found you! Ms. Hansen, I—I don’t know if this is quite correct to ask you, but there’s something wrong, and I think it’s got to do with Dr. Oberley.”

  My mind raced: How much did she know? I said, “How can I help you, dear?”

  “Is he there? Can I talk to him?”

  I closed my eyes. “No, he’s not here, Holly Ann. I’m afraid we’ve got some very bad news for you.”

  Her voice went up an octave. “Please tell me he’s not dead!”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Las Vegas. Brendan said you’re in Peach Springs; that’s about three hours’ drive. Is Dr. Oberley all right?”

  “No, he’s not.” I was calculating drive times, mentally running between Kingman, South Rim Village, and Las Vegas. “I’m afraid he has passed from among us,” I said, sliding automatically into the kind of language I thought fundamentalist Christians might use. I preferred to use the more direct term: “dead.”

  Holly Ann paused awhile, then said only, “I thought so.”

  “Excuse me? How did you—I mean, did you have some kind of a clue that this was going to happen?”

  “No. But I felt it.” She sounded resigned. “I can’t explain these things. It’s like a knowledge. Mom says it’s a gift from God, but I can’t say as I like it.”

  “And when did this … knowledge descend upon you? I mean about W—Dr. Oberley?”

  She began to stutter. “I don’t know. Well, it was a couple of days ago, I guess. Listen, I gotta go. I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “Wait! I need your help! Can we meet?”

  She was silent for a long while, and I wondered if she had broken the connection. I said, “Holly Ann?”

  “Give me a minute. I’m praying over it.” There was a silence. “Okay, yes. We can meet.”

  I said, “Great! Would you please keep your cell phone switched on? We just got off the river, and we’re trying to make plans, and I’ll need to figure out how soon I can get there, so can I call you back?”

  “Certainly. And God bless you, Ms. Hansen.”

  “Thank you, Holly Ann. Right now I need all the blessings I can get.”

  Jerry appeared at my side. “Watch what you pray for, dear,” she said with a smile and handed me something in a paper sack. “I picked this up for you at the drugstore over there. Don and I are off to the South Rim, and we’ll report in as soon as we’ve seen Fritz with our own eyes. You be careful and don’t overdo, you hear me?” She shook a finger at me and, still staring at me with mock sternness, climbed into her side of their SUV.

  As their vehicle turned onto the highway, I opened the drugstore bag and peered inside to see what on earth Jerry had purchased for me. What I found did not compute, though of course nothing in my life made much sense just then. Why would she think I needed a home pregnancy test?

  APRIL 21: KINGMAN

  Faye made her final approach in the Cheyenne, touched down smooth as silk, taxied, and pulled up at Air’Zona Aircraft Services, Kingman airport’s fixed base operation.

  Eleanor climbed down out of the aircraft looking dazed. She was a round woman, built squarely like her brother but gone to flab, but for all her mass she drifted acro
ss the tarmac like a dry leaf caught in the wind. She scanned our faces, and when Hank stepped forward to greet her, she grasped his hand as if it were the handle on a cane and leaned on it. “Am I dreaming all this?” she asked him.

  He reached out his free hand and brushed a lock of hair tenderly from her forehead. “I wish it were just some bad hallucination,” he said.

  I led the way with Faye and Brendan in our vehicle, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror to make sure that Glenda, Hank, and Eleanor didn’t get lost. The airport was eight miles out of town, and we had a few turns to make once we breached the city limits. Kingman was typical of desert towns, simultaneously bleak and homey in its square, sun-drenched architecture and its spare attempts to look like an oasis. We pulled up along West Andy Devine Avenue in front of the county offices, strolled in, and inquired where we might find the morgue.

  A man seated at a desk dialed a few numbers and talked and eventually told us to take a seat. We waited. I focused my nerves on a copy of the Kingman Daily Miner, which brandished the motto TRUSTED LOCAL NEWS LEADER FOR KINGMAN, ARIZONA & MOHAVE COUNTY. The day’s headline was KINGMAN HOMES GET MAKEOVERS IN ROCK AND ROLL PAINTATHON. I decided that if anyone was beginning to hallucinate, it was me. I gave up on reading and got up and began to pace, and Brendan got out of his chair and paced with me.

  “I wonder what Dad’s day is like,” he said.

  “We have to just keep putting one foot in front of the other,” I said.

  “We’re detectives,” he said.

  I nodded. “You’re doing very well at this, Brendan. You have good instincts, and you use the right kind of logic and make excellent observations and you never forget a thing.”

  He smiled faintly. “That’s the scientist part of me. Like you said, we make observations and come up with hypotheses and then we test them.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And we have to believe, too.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “I do not believe that my father killed that stupid man.”