“As you all know,” Dickie continued, “one Nina Cruz, owner of this property, was shot and killed not five hundred yards from this house, earlier this morning. At this moment, we are investigating her death as a hunting accident. This is not a homicide investigation, although that could change. We’ve secured the scene of the shooting, and Albany County deputies are currently collecting evidence. We’re awaiting the arrival of the state’s Mobile Crime Lab, but that may be some time from now.”
A young man with blond dreadlocks spoke up. “Are we in danger here?”
“Any time a person is shot, it should be considered a dangerous situation,” Dickie said. “But we’ve searched the property and the vicinity, as has the state game warden. We’ve secured the area. We haven’t found anybody out there runnin’ around with a rifle, if that’s what you’re worried about. At least not on this property. But I wouldn’t vouch for the rest of the county. It is hunting season, after all.”
Sally noticed that Dickie said nothing about the boot prints and tire tracks in the snow that the game warden had mentioned to Scotty.
A woman spoke up, indignant. “You can’t imagine that anybody here would shoot a deer, let alone a person! We’re all here because we believe in the sacredness of wilderness and the sanctity of life. I doubt there’s anybody here who even knows how to fire a gun!”
Dickie regarded the woman with bland amusement. “We’re not making any assumptions about anything, ma’am. That’s not our job. We will be asking you all a whole bunch of questions, and we’re gonna need the cooperation of every person here. You people may think we’re a bunch of dumb cowpokes, but I assure you that we are professional law enforcement officers.”
Several of the Dub-Dubs sniggered.
Dickie looked from one side of the room to the other, and then said, “I can understand your skepticism. You probably think we’re no more competent than, say, the Los Angeles Police Department. But I promise you that the Albany County Sheriff’s Department will hold to a higher standard than our less meticulous, more sophisticated, better-lookin’ big-city brethren. This is a high-profile case. The good news is that this is Wyoming. Maybe a dozen people will be dealing with the actual, physical evidence between now and the time the case comes to trial. Think about it, folks. Could we possibly fuck up as bad as the idiots who let O.J. walk?”
The Dub-Dubs regarded him in shock.
“Now we’ll get on with our business,” Dickie said, having made his point. “We surely do appreciate your help.”
Sally had to suppress a guffaw.
“I’m sure all these folks will be glad to do everything they can for you, Sheriff,” interjected Nels Willen, looking meaningfully around the room. Heads nodded, but Sally could see expressions on the faces that ranged from eager to perplexed to potentially resistant. Randy Whitebird didn’t even nod. Just sat on Nina’s couch, fingered his beads, inspected Dickie and Scotty with narrowed eyes.
“What would you like us to do?” Willen asked Dickie.
Dickie looked Willen up and down, regarded the motley crowd, and smiled a little, sympathy in his eyes. “For starters,” he said, “I’d suggest that everybody put on a shirt and pants, and somebody build a fire in the woodstove. That fire in the fireplace looks cozy, but you all need to concentrate on keeping warm. I assume you’ve all got sleeping bags or whatever around, and you’d best gather ’em up and bring ’em in here. This storm’s gonna get heavier before it lets up.”
Sally raised her hand. “I’ll get on the fire.”
Dickie nodded. “You might also think about organizing a detail to get something together to feed people. We’re liable to be here awhile.”
Trust Dickie to get somebody on the food. Sally had seen him power down not one but two Quarter Pounders, super-sized, on an average lunch day. At Shady Grove they probably ran more to buckwheat groats and steamed cabbage than buckets of french fries, but if that was all they had, Dickie Langham would certainly find a way to fill the void.
Pammie spoke up instantly. “I’m on it,” she said, touching a couple of people on the shoulder and beckoning them toward the kitchen. Sally was happy to see that Pammie was actually wearing a shirt, and intrigued to note that it was a Wyoming Cowboys football jersey.
“Third,” said Dickie, “you folks have to promise me that you won’t talk amongst yourselves about what happened here this morning. Anybody here might have seen or heard something that can help us figure out what happened. But if you start comparing stories, pretty soon you won’t know what the hell—excuse me—what in the world you really did see. So do Detective Atkins and me a favor, and find some other way to entertain yourselves while we conduct our interviews. We’ll be using Ms. Cruz’s studio out back, talking with you one at a time. Meanwhile, my deputies over there”—he gestured at two poker-faced guys in khaki, one young, one middle-aged, both looking as if they’d sell their children for a cigarette just now—“will keep you company.”
The Dub-Dubs examined the deputies. The deputies glared back impassively. Quite a house party was shaping up, Sally thought.
“Is there any chance,” Atkins asked Pammie, “that it’d be possible to get a pot of coffee?”
Several Dub-Dubs gasped. Randy Whitebird, dressed now in Dockers, a long-sleeved T-shirt with a Greenpeace logo, and his trademark Birkenstocks with socks, stepped forward to take Scotty on. “Do you have any idea what coffee plantations have done to the rain forest?” he asked, his voice quivering with outrage. “Not to mention what they do to the indigenous people and the workers!”
Atkins sighed.
“I think,” Willen interjected, “that I might be able to scare up some coffee for you, Detective. I brought some of the stuff I mail order from an organic farming cooperative in Costa Rica.”
“Don’t worry about saving our souls,” said Dickie. “Gotta figure the acre of rain forest in my cup is already plowed under anyhow.”
Sally took her stand. “Guess I’ll have some, too. It’s as good a thing to go to hell for as any.”
Willen grinned at her. “And we’ve got some calming chamomile tea for those of you who aren’t going to hell. Meanwhile, let’s see if we can’t find a productive way to pass our time while the investigation goes on. Lark, how ’bout you lead a yoga class while we wait?”
And now Sally saw that what she’d taken for chaos was really a kind of social functioning she’d forgotten in the years since she’d been a grad student at Berzerkly. Skinny Lark, her trauma and her therapist evidently pacified, swung right into action. Within ten minutes, virtually everyone in the room (coffee drinkers and the cooking crew excepted), had gone off to find sleeping bags and yoga mats, had changed into loose pants and T-shirts, and had lined up ready to be put through their asanas.
For people who doubtless prided themselves on their technicolor nonconformity, the Dub-Dubs turned out to be remarkably tractable. All of them except Randy Whitebird. While the yoga practitioners put their hands palm to palm and got their breathing under control, Scotty Atkins asked Willen who might be considered in charge of things at Shady Grove, with Nina gone. Before Willen could answer, Whitebird stepped off his mat, stalked over to the detective, and stood an inch or two closer to Atkins than Americans generally found comfortable. He introduced himself, told Atkins that as the Wild West Foundation director, he felt it was his responsibility to facilitate all interactions between his people and local law enforcement.
“Are these your people?” Scotty asked Whitebird, raising his eyebrows. “Gosh, and I’d thought feudalism was, like, totally over in California.”
“What Detective Atkins is meaning to say, Mr. White-bird,” Dickie said, smoothly inserting his oversize self into the somewhat too-narrow space between them, “is that we’ll be needing to speak individually with everyone here, but we’re grateful for whatever you can do to help us with the investigation.” He smiled warmly into Whitebird’s eyes, and even patted him on the arm. Sally suppressed an urge to laugh or maybe puk
e again. “Now if you’d be so kind, we’d like it if you’d just step out back to Ms. Cruz’s studio with us, so we can get started.”
Sally followed them out, leaving the door ajar so she wouldn’t have to drop an armload of wood to open it back up, slogging through the snow toward the woodpile, next to the path between the house and the studio. She brushed snow off the pile and started digging down, looking for dry logs, when she noticed that one end of the pile was covered with a snow-laden tarp. There’d be dry stuff under it, she knew. Careful to keep snow from cascading onto the pile, she pulled the tarp off. And underneath, sitting on top of the pile, was what Sally believed to be the kind of rifle you’d use to kill a deer.
Her heart seemed to stop, then kick hard.
She ran toward the studio and managed to catch Scotty by the arm before they’d shut the door. “You need to come see what I just found out on the woodpile.”
“May I ask what you’re doing rooting through the wood-pile?”
Sally gritted her teeth. “I’m building a fire in the wood-stove. It would be useful to have wood.”
Scotty looked down at her hand, gripping his arm, and she let go, then led the way to where she’d found the rifle.
Scotty picked up the gun and drew the bolt back. A spent shell popped out of the chamber. Sally smelled burnt gunpowder. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Now, if you please, get your wood, go back inside, and make that fire.”
By this time Dickie and Whitebird had joined them. And several of the people inside stood at the back door, looking out.
“Huh,” Dickie said. “Winchester .270. Deal with the weapon,” he told Scotty. “There are evidence bags in the studio. I’d better go talk to the folks.”
Back inside, they were met with puzzled looks, apprehensive expressions, and horror all around. Or mostly around.
“I understand you folks just got a look at a rifle Professor Alder found. Anybody know anything about it?” Dickie asked.
“Yeah,” said Nels Willen. “I do. I was planning to tell you about that. That there’s my rifle. I used to be quite a hunter in my time. Nowadays, of course, I have a problem with it.”
“Nels!” exclaimed Whitebird. “How could you bring a gun up here?”
“When I called Nina yesterday to say I was coming up, she asked me if I had a gun I could bring. She knew I used to collect guns. I sold ’em all off, except that one I kept. Shot my last deer with it,” Willen said.
“But why?” Whitebird said. “Why would she want you to bring it? Nina, of all people!”
Willen pressed his lips together. “She said with all the shooting that had gone on around her place this fall, she felt like she had to have some way to defend herself. I thought it sounded crazy. That she’d gone into some kind of paranoid state. That was one reason I came. She scared me with that kind of talk. I didn’t want to bring the gun. But she told me she had to have it. She said she was sure somebody was trying to kill her.”
Chapter 5
The Soul Mates
Nels Willen disappeared out the backdoor with Dickie, leaving shocked silence, then muddled murmuring in his wake.
Suddenly there was a shrill whistle, and Sally looked around to see Pammie, of all people, with her little fingers stuck in either side of her mouth. “Listen up, people!” Pammie said loudly, commanding attention. “I’m sure Nels hasn’t done anything wrong, and the police will be getting to the bottom of this. Meanwhile, why don’t we just do what we were doing anyhow? I’m gonna get dinner together. Why don’t you all go ahead with the yoga class? I think we should focus on the healthiest, most healing things we can think of, while we wait to talk to the sheriff.”
Well, hell, why not? What else could they do? Given that other muttered suggestions had included everyone heading out to get stuck somewhere on the road to Laramie, or banding together and storming Nina’s studio to liberate Nels Willen from the clutches of the fascist Albany County pigs, Pammie’s notion seemed an eminently sensible plan. Sally assessed her choices. The yoga class actually looked pretty good, but yoga pants weren’t included in the survival gear Sally had stuffed in the Mustang. She elected to help Pammie’s crew with dinner.
Which turned out to be something of a revelation. Start with the food. Sally wasn’t one of those people who believed that vegetarian meals basically boiled down to negative eating, to making do with what you didn’t want, because what you wanted, you couldn’t have. She was, after all, a former hippie, a longtime Californian, and a woman of the world. She’d relished porcini-and-morel-mushroom risotto at a trendy hot spot in Santa Monica, crunched savory masala dosas in Delhi, feasted at Berkeley vegetarian potlucks thrown by and for organic epicures. She had put in her time as a passionate gardener, shoveling compost and picking snails off lettuce leaves, and she possessed some succulent recipes for tomatoes and, yes, even eggplant.
But she’d also had maybe hundreds of meals consisting of greasy stir-fried cabbage and limp broccoli and brown rice that had been pressure-cooked to a fault, all soaked in a tamari sauce that had probably spent its youth as motor oil. In short, her expectations regarding cuisine at Shady Grove were modest at best.
She hadn’t reckoned on the chef. Sally’s impression of Pammie was that she was well intentioned but seriously scrambled. After all, this was a person she’d first encountered naked in the snow. Sally figured that the preparation of dinner would entail a fair bit of joint smoking, giggling, and haphazard assembling of meatless messes.
What a shock to discover that a person named Pammie was a born-and-ruthless kitchen general. She quickly assigned her three assistants their particular tasks (chopping vegetables for soup and salad, mixing bread dough, working up a couple of apple pies), as Pammie herself located ingredients, set up work stations for each assistant, and took upon herself the tasks of creating the soup, kneading and tending the dough, and finishing the salad.
Sally volunteered to chop. She nearly severed a hand discovering that somebody (doubtless at Pammie’s direction) kept Nina Cruz’s knives sharp enough to gut a rhinoceros. As Sally took three deep breaths and resumed chopping at a more deliberate pace, she looked around and noticed that Nina’s kitchen was elaborately stocked and brilliantly organized. Open shelves held spices and cans and boxes, big glass jars filled with grains, pastas and beans, oils, vinegars, dried fruits and vegetables, aromatic herbs. There was a Sub-Zero refrigerator, a stand-up freezer, and a commercial range, all done in stainless steel. Sally would have loved to check out the freezer, to see what kinds of vegetarian culinary essentials lay within (vats of brown stock made from potatoes and leeks and carrots? Bags of flash-frozen berries? Gallons of golden curries?), but she’d have had to shove Pammie out of the way to take a peek.
Before long, the house filled with the splendid aroma produced by somebody who knew what she was doing, sautéing down the layers of a proper base for a perfect minestrone à la Milanese.
The formerly naked boy, clad now in jeans and a Phish T-shirt, stood at Sally’s shoulder, meticulously slicing apples into a hand-thrown ceramic bowl decorated with petroglyph symbols. He glanced at Pammie stirring the contents of her stockpot, turned back to Sally, and said, “Give it five minutes, and then check out what you’re smelling.” He grinned goofily and sighed.
Obviously he was in love.
His name, he said, was Quartz. Sally assumed the worst (self-selection of an unfortunate nature name under the influence of shallow knowledge and hallucinogenics) but then felt ashamed of herself when she learned that “Quartz” was a contraction of his actual name: Quentin Schwartz. He’d grown up in Portland, in a devoutly Unitarian family (if that wasn’t an oxymoron), had converted to environmentalism at the age of twelve. He’d been volunteering in the office of Deep Nature, an Oregon group dedicated to returning the state to the way it had been in 1800. He’d met Randy White-bird and Kali, the director and administrator of Wild West, at a conference in Eugene. They’d convinced him that Wyoming was a whole lot m
ore like it had been in 1800 than Oregon was, due to the fact that hardly anybody lived in Wyoming, or ever had. It seemed pressing, said Quartz, to make sure that hardly anybody ever would.
Sally was pretty sure overpopulation would never be a problem in a state where the fainthearted would flee winter by February, the stouter of mien might last through April, and those still desperate or crazy enough to be around by Memorial Day would still be waiting for spring. Not to say that there weren’t plenty of ways Wyoming could permanently wreck itself (or already had; the state, after all, had a long and abusive love affair with mining and drilling, fertilizers and pesticides). If Quartz wanted to imagine that he was single-handedly keeping the population down, he’d at least have reason to feel successful.
He said that Randy and Kali even offered to pay him, whereas he’d been working at Deep Nature for the Experience. So he’d put a new clutch in his parents’ aging school bus and headed east to the Rockies.
“It must have been my karma,” said Quartz. How long since Sally’d heard somebody say that? “I mean, I guess I was meant to come here. If I hadn’t, I’d never have met my soul mate,” Quartz avowed.
“Soul mate,” she said, logging one more expression that hadn’t often fallen on her ears since the fall of Saigon. “Pammie?” Sally inquired, watching the soul mate in question pull a small jar labeled FLEUR DE SEL off a shelf, extract a large pinch between two fingers and a thumb, and swirl an artful sprinkle onto her aromatics.
“Yeah,” breathed Quartz, adding cinnamon, nutmeg, all-spice, and brown sugar to his sliced apples. “There’s no chance our paths would have crossed if I hadn’t come here. She grew up in Laramie and she still goes to the university. The farthest she’s been from her hometown is Denver.”
Sally watched as Pammie critically examined the potatoes she was adding to her pot. “I wouldn’t have thought growing up in Laramie would turn somebody into a future four-star chef.”
Bye, Bye, Love Page 5
