THIRTY-TWO
THE sound of Betty’s deep, rhythmic breathing was all but drowned out by Stanley’s heavy snores. I sat in the front seat of Betty’s Volvo, trying to read Miriam’s journal by the thin light that shone from the open glove compartment. I’d run out of food, my back was getting stiff, and I felt stupid and alone, even with Betty and her enormous beast laid out behind me. I’d stuck my nose in a hornet’s nest for sure this time, and blown my chances of building something with Jim in the process. With nowhere to be going and nothing to be doing until dawn, I needed desperately to escape the pain of losing Jim and fear of the men who wanted me gone. I needed a distraction as big as Miriam could offer. She did not disappoint me.
March 10
Joe and I are fighting already, or should I say I’m fighting? He just gives me that crimped-up smile of his. Didn’t he even notice that I was gone for five months? Can’t he move forward with me, even an inch? I try to detach and acknowledge what is, but it just gets under my skin that he doesn’t seem to listen to me, and I blow up and start screaming. I try to keep it together until the appointments I have with the therapist I’m supposed to work with down here, but then the new therapist urges me not to stuff my feelings like that. She’s assigned a book for me to read, which says that blowing up is just one thing I can do with anger. It says that anger is like a signal that something needs changing, but also an energy I can use to make the change happen. I have a choice: I can blow up, and just dissipate the energy (in which case, nothing changes), I can save it until later (time to think things over and decide what I want), I can decide to live with things the way they are (fat chance!), or I can use it like fuel to pull myself together and assert my needs. And thoughts. And desires.
April 5
I awoke this morning from a dream about Chandler. In the dream, he was old, and dressed in white robes. I was thanking him for everything he had taught me. I must be getting better if I can see the good along with the bad.
Cecelia’s not glad to have me back. At least she’s being reasonably pleasant, but she seems to have a private joke she’s not telling me about. She’s growing up at last, primping a little and wanting new clothes, something more than just another pair of jeans to wear while riding her horse. Life does go on. I took her to Denver to shop. The poor little dear is growing breasts!
I read on until two in the morning, following Miriam through her continuing visits to her therapist, over the hills and down into the valleys of her negotiations with her husband, and around to the autumn before the summer she died. There, the journal stopped. I closed the book and examined the cover, wondering why I hadn’t checked it earlier. Sure enough, there were both starting and ending dates, just as with all the previous volumes. I opened again to the back page, looking for more of her cryptic notes. The only one I could make out said simply, “Rambling Rose.” I shook my head. It could mean anything. Such as the state of her heart, or the prickliness of her mind. Or did it refer to Chandler, the man who made even Julia Richards sigh? Either way, I had one more volume to find, and I had a strong notion who had it.
THIRTY-THREE
BETTY dropped me at the airport as the sun rose over the eastern horizon, spreading tendrils of light out across the undulating plains. As I watched Betty’s Volvo disappear along the road that led back out onto Wadsworth Boulevard and her quick retreat into parts unknown, I stretched, working out the kinks born of trying to sleep spread across its front bucket seats and parking brake. My mind was a jumble of excitement over the coming flight and jitters over the search for the final volume of Miriam’s journal. I longed to know what she had learned in her final year of life. The last entries left her on the verge of discovery, faithfully recording each step on her rise from rage and depression to a life of self-direction.
Just to make certain no one knew where to find me, I switched planes at the last moment, and when I telephoned Flight Service to lay in my flight plan for Douglas, I gave them a false name. Then, moving briskly out onto the tarmac, I did my pilot’s walk-around, checking flaps, airframe, and fuel tanks, pitot tubes, and oil. All was in order: tanks topped off and tires inflated, no nicks or dings in the wings, fuselage, or propeller, no bird’s nests in the air inlets. Satisfied that she was airworthy, I unchained the wings and tail from the tie-downs and climbed aboard.
After adjusting my seat and seat belt, I turned off the avionics and carburetor heat, set the master switch and fuel pump at the on position, primed the throttle and set it at one-quarter open, and adjusted the fuel mixture to full rich. Popping open the side window, I observed the ritual of calling, “Clear prop!” even though no one was around, and fired the engine. It burst into life instantly, filling my ears with a satisfying roar that sounded extraloud, as I lacked the protection of Peggy’s excellent headphones. Sadly, the phones came and went with her and not the plane. For this flight, I would have to depend on the speaker and microphones that were mounted on the dashboard and just use my imagination to fill in the holes that engine noise and inferior speakers would bite in my communications.
Next, I moved through the final details of engine check, checking oil pressure, throttle, right and left carburetors, and the carburetor heater, switched the fuel pump off, turned on the anticollision light, the landing light, and the radios, set the transponder at standby, checked the settings on my instruments, and tipped the control wheel left and right and stepped on the rudder pedals to make sure the elevators and rudders were working.
Once the two radios were on, I set the top one to the local Air Traffic Information System frequency (126.25) and caught “Information Beta,” the current update. Beta told me the current wind speed and direction (light and variable), active runway (two-niner right), and the barometric pressure (a nice high-pressure day for a bright, sunny flight). I dialed the pressure setting into the control panel and reset the altitude to the runway elevation, 5,670 feet above sea level. Flipping to frequency 121.7, I unhitched the microphone from its cradle on the instrument panel and depressed the switch. “Jeffco Ground, this is Piper two two six two foxtrot at the Air Center with ‘Information Beta.’ Request taxi to two-niner right.”
“Six two foxtrot, okay to taxi beta, turn left onto alpha, hold short at A-one. Contact tower on one one eight point six.”
“Six two foxtrot,” I replied, glad that the radio was working. It was more difficult to hear the calls without Peggy’s headphones, but the course I was flying would not require that I communicate all that much anyway.
I taxied slowly down the taxiway, excitement kicking the butterflies in my stomach into a maelstrom. It had been many moons since I’d flown solo, and here I was flying clear to Douglas in one hop, a distance of nearly two hundred miles. I comforted myself that for all that distance, I had to make only one landing. Chugging along aloft is the easy part of flying; it’s that little interface between being airborne and becoming a three-wheeled landcraft that gives people problems.
I pulled the airplane to a stop and did my final run-up just short of the end of runway 29 left. When all proved to be in order, I picked up the microphone again, switched the radio setting to 118.6, and said, “Jeffco Tower, this is Piper two two six two foxtrot. Request permission to take off, straight-out departure.”
“Six two foxtrot, permission granted.”
“Six two foxtrot.” My heart swelling with the rush of adventure, I taxied the final thirty feet onto the runway, rammed the throttle to the dashboard, and headed for the sky.
Two and a half hours later, I put the little airplane down relatively smoothly on the sainted soil of Wyoming. Landing in Douglas was almost anticlimactic after skimming along over the plains and past the mountains I had seen every day during my childhood. The Converse County Airport is fairly new, a long strip of neatly laid tarmac along the north bank of the Platte River. I had radioed the airport’s unicom for advisory, was told by a bored and garbled voice that the current runway was 28, made sure I was lining up on the new airport north of
town and not the old one, which had been turned into a drag strip, and set up my landing. I squitched down at 8:30 A.M. to a welcoming committee of grazing antelope and scattering jackrabbits and taxied to the ramp. I had my choice of tie-downs. Mine was, in fact, the only plane there.
All was prim and proper and lovely. There was a small truck ready to fuel the plane. There was in fact very little else in sight, just one large blue hangar building and a tired old yellow tractor, which served both to plow the runway in the winter and mow the grass in the summer. Converse County Airport was my kind of airport.
After phoning the rental-car agency (Gubbels Ford/ Chrysler, actually; Charlie Burris said he would be out from town to pick me up in a nice new Taurus in just a few minutes, first hundred miles free), I put through a call to Sergeant Ortega. “I’m in Douglas,” I said into the mouthpiece. “I’ve got a rental car. Camouflage. No one will know me without my truck.”
“Oh, Em, that’s you. Okay, good. Listen, no one but you and I know where you are, so why don’t we keep it that way?”
“I’m just going to make a few visits here. Nothing risky, just a casual chat with a few ordinary citizens.”
“Em, I been on the phone all morning. Those nice gentlemen you met here yesterday agree with me you need to be in protective custody. You can’t trust anybody out there. Please, Em, you’d be safer back here in Denver. You can stay with my mother, okay?”
“Jesus, Carlos, what do you take me for, a moron?”
Sergeant Ortega said nothing.
Filling the silence, I said, “Ha, ha, ha. Fine, so I jump the gun sometimes. This time, I am being a good girl. I want to live long and be happy.”
“By flying straight to the scene of the crime. Estás loca, amiga. I don’t like it. Who are you seeing? Not Mr. Bradley?”
“I’m going to talk to a nice law-abiding sheriff, if he’ll see me. Would you please call him and see if he’ll let me hear that nine-one-one tape?”
“Em Hansen, you play with fire.”
“I’m doing the best I can, Carlos.”
Pain squeezed his voice into a whisper as he said, “Check in again soon, please.”
“Sure.”
“And Em …” he began again but stalled out.
“What?”
“Sorry about your boyfriend.”
“How did you know about that?” I squealed.
“I’m a detective, remember?”
“Betty—”
“Ms. Bloom is sitting across the desk from me right now. She is enjoying a nice safe cup of coffee and eating a nice ordinary doughnut. I find her very sane and charming, and her dog is a wonder among beasts.”
Now it was my turn to sigh. It was a beautiful brisk morning in Douglas, but yet the warmth and clutter of Sergeant Ortega’s office called to me. No, I wanted—just what did I want? I wanted Carlos to be my friend and not ask. I wanted not to feel foolish or guilty, and not dwell on the fact that I could have phoned the lawyer’s office to tell Jim I’d be late but hadn’t. What was I worrying about? The loss of possibilities didn’t even hurt much yet; I was too certain I didn’t want to wind up in a sexually suffocating marriage like Miriam’s. But did that mean I had to step over the edge and go looking for a man who was guaranteed to hurt me? “I’ll check in at noon,” I said, and hung up the phone.
I guess I lied to Carlos, at least if you count errors of omission. I didn’t go first to the sheriff’s office. I went to see Po Bradley’s estranged wife, Gwen, in her nice house down by the Douglas Community Club. I was willing to bet that she didn’t talk to Po a whole lot anymore, and I was right.
We had settled in her kitchen, I swinging nervously back and forth on a stool by the breakfast bar, she inhaling deeply from a cigarette, leaning on the counter as she squinted at me through the smoke, when I next called Denver. “Carlos,” I said into the mouthpiece, “I’m at Gwen Bradley’s house here in town. We’re having a nice chat. Were you able to arrange my next, ah, appointment okay?”
“Yes,” he said mournfully. “He says he’ll see you at two o’clock. But that’s it, Em. You give yourself into his protection or there’s no more help from me.”
“So you think he’s safe?” I asked wryly.
In reply, I heard some Spanish phrases that were new to me.
As I hung up the phone, Gwen Bradley handed me a freshly brewed cup of coffee and lit another cigarette off the butt of the last. “So where were we? You’re trying to find out who killed that woman,” she said gruffly.
“No. Well, as I said, I’m trying to help—”
“Oh hogwash. That daughter of hers was a fright; I wouldn’t drive five minutes out of my way for her, let alone come all the way up here from Denver twice.”
“As you wish.” I shrugged my shoulders. There was no merit in arguing with the Gwen Bradleys of the world.
“So you’re thinking Po might of done it.”
I shrugged again. “Did he?”
“Aw, hell, I got no use for the man, but he ain’t no murderer. Too busy running around stickin’ his pecker where it don’t belong to kill anyone. And let me tell you, missy, as you like to know already being raised in these parts, a man don’t go killing anybody less he’s got a good reason to. It’s just too wasteful of his Godalmighty freedom if he gets caught. Not that no one would get all that upset about it ’cept old Elwin.”
“Tell me about the sheriff. What’s he got against your husband?”
“Aw, Po swiped his girlfriend back senior year, just for sport. Don’t reflect well on me that I married him anyway when he was done with her, does it? ’Cept he had me pumped up already.”
“So Po’s cast his charms around right along.”
“Po’s a horse’s butt end. Swiping women out from under Elwin’s nose is a lifelong hobby for that boy. It gets Elwin so riled, see.”
“Just for sport.”
“Just for sport.”
“Then he and Elwin competed for Miriam Menken’s attention, too?”
“Of course.”
“Funny, I didn’t get the impression Duluth had personal feelings for the deceased.”
“Feelings? You mean like emotions? He ain’t got but the one, and hatred’s got nothing to do with affection, let me tell you.” Her hard eyes glittered.
“How’d he get elected, then? Seems to me we usually get someone up for sheriff we can at least respect.”
“Oh, we did. Took early retirement for a heart attack. Ol’ Elwin’s just finishing out his term for him. But he’ll probably get reelected; we’re used to him now.”
“You think he does a good job?”
“I think he does an average job. But let’s get back to the meat of this here chat. I don’t think either one of them Don Juans scored with that one. She had a little self-respect, Lord love her.” A nasty grin spread across Gwen’s smoke-furrowed face, revealing a line of dentistry that spoke of too little care and too many cigarettes. “Wouldn’t bow to the level of no local cowboy types.”
I was beginning to have a hard time telling who Gwen Bradley held in the greatest contempt: her husband, the sheriff, men in general, or everyone ever born. “Did she get to know anyone in town before it happened?”
“Nope, just lallygagged out there on that ranch. Had everything delivered.”
But Po knew that Miriam could dance. “She ever come down to the Moose?”
“Not that I heard. Course, I don’t frequent the place, myself,” she said loftily.
No, you just hide out here licking your abscesses, but your stooges are down there each and every Friday night, aren’t they.
Gwen lit another cigarette off the butt of the last. “Course, that husband of hers showed up every weekend, sure as death and taxes. You could set your watch by seeing that Mercedes-Benz roll onto the Cold Springs Road off the interstate.”
“He always drove?”
“How else you gonna get anywhere in these parts? Ride a horse?” She laughed at her own joke, a long, rasping, rhyth
mic cough.
I was about to reply, No, you can fly into Casper and rent a car, as he suggested I do, but instead I said, “Yeah, well, J. C. Menken is something of a creature of habit.”
“In Friday evening, out Sunday afternoon. Good doggy.” She laughed again.
“You were telling me about Po’s attentions to Miriam. The bad doggy.”
Gwen almost hacked herself unconscious with bitter mirth. “Yep, he paid her court all right. Made every excuse to show up at that homestead, I hear.
“Po liked to play the big man,” she continued cuttingly, “pretending he had a spread the size of Texas with a hundred thousand cows eating grass as green as Astroturf. Even started to carouse with them rattlesnake jetsetters up there in Saratoga, he did.”
“Oh?”
Gwen picked at a bit of tobacco from her unflitered cigarette that had gotten stuck to the tip of her tongue. “Well, that’s how it is when you inherit a ranch but you ain’t got the talent to work it. Lazy old good-for-nothing leases the land out to anyone or their brother, lets them graze it to sagebrush, and they know that.” To her cigarette, she added, “Never would work an hour if he could spend two figuring out how to avoid it.”
I decided the time was right to cut a bit deeper. “That how he got involved with those high rollers down in Saratoga?”
Gwen looked at me askance, thought a while before answering. Making her mind up, she flicked her cigarette in disgust and said, “Yeah, when that started, that’s when I got out, made him buy this house in cash quick, before he put us both out on the street.”
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