Only Flesh and Bones

by Sarah Andrews

  “No, just him, at least at first. I met him in a bar. Seemed a nice-enough sort.”

  “But then he offered you cocaine, and got real friendly. Asked you a lot of questions about your ranch.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “So he starts coming out to the ranch, kind of has his self a look around. Says he has a friend wants to drill a test on your ranch, and he’ll pay good money for the lease, right?”

  “Right. I figger what the hell, I don’t have to tell him there’s no oil down these parts.”

  “So they front you the money. What was the name the investors used?”

  “The who?”

  “Whose name was on the check?”

  “Oh. Island Research Group.”

  “And what bank was it drawn on?”

  “Now, that was real interesting: it was from some bank down in the Caribbean. I figured that was where the island stuff come from. The money was good, though.”

  “But they stopped moving forward on the plans to drill when Miriam was killed.”

  Po considered this. “About then, yeah. I was real disappointed. Not to have no hole in my ranch, mind you, but they was going to send me to that island of theirs while the drilling was going on, just so I wouldn’t have to be bothered by all the noise.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said dryly, wondering just how dumb he thought I was. “The rental of your sister’s place, the old homestead—how’d you make that connection?”

  “One day, he’s making a visit and he says, ‘I know this woman as like to rent a place for the summer.’”

  “Chandler’s visiting.”

  Po looked at me quickly, as if he was afraid he’d suddenly given away too much. Shrugged. Went on. “Yeah. He says, ‘She needs a place to stay where they can keep horses. You know a place like that?’ And I say, ‘Sure.’ Well, I told Annie I’d take the money and put it in her bank account, see.”

  “With a nice little management fee for you.”

  Po looked hurt. “Of course.”

  My mind was going a mile a minute. “Did he say who had him looking for a ranch? Was it Miriam asked him to look?”

  Po thought, then gave me a look like he really had it figured. “No, I don’t think so, because after she came and he dropped in on her, she didn’t seem a-tall glad to see him. Sent him away. Told him, ‘Buzz off and stay away from my daughter.’”

  “You saw and heard this all.”

  “Yes—or no, I er … dropped by later on, and she told me then.”

  No, you were downwind behind the cover of those willows, right where the air would carry their words to you. “Of course. So after Sheriff Duluth and the others left the scene that night, you thought you’d better cut the water into the irrigation ditch to cover your eavesdropping old tracks.”

  Po twisted his face up and began to scratch the back of his head.

  I fired the engine, but before I drove off, I said, “No wonder ol’ Elwin thinks you did it.”

  Back in town, I dialed Sergeant Ortega, reaching him this time at his mother’s, where he’d gone for dinner. “Carlos, I’ll be hiding out in the car tonight and then heading due west tomorrow. It’ll be a long flight, but I’ll check in with you as soon’s I get there, and you can pull rank and track me though the FAA’s Flight Following Service, if you insist. But you can help me even more by getting into the records for commercial flights from Denver to Casper and back on the night of the murder. Here’s why. J C. was the one who put the idea in my head to fly here, like he’d done it a hundred times, and he even knew the flight times. But Gwen Bradley says he always arrived by car. And I got to believe that for the night of the murder, his whereabouts have already been checked, meaning he wasn’t out of sight long enough to have driven up here and back himself. But what if he flew? Just to be thorough, you could check the airport records for private landings and takeoffs into Casper. A person could land here in Douglas without being noticed, perhaps, except then he’d have to have a car waiting, which would defeat the process of slipping in and out anonymously by air. It’s a long shot, but y’know?”

  Then I phoned J. C. himself. He sounded puzzled. “Em? Where are you? I heard from Fred Howard this morning. He asked if I knew where you were. He said he offered you a job and—”

  “Never mind that. Please. I was just wondering—who was it found that ranch for Miriam to rent anyway?”

  I was surprised by Menken’s answer. “Cindey Howard. Why?”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I planned the flight to Jackson over the small counter of the service window at the airport. The smooth surface lent itself to the job of marking out the long overland route on the air charts. I would need two charts to make the crossing, both the Cheyenne sectional and the Salt Lake City sectional. Both faces of each chart gave a detailed view of landmarks, flight obstructions, and airports over a strip of land eight degrees of longitude east to west and two and a half north to south, or about 400 miles by 120. Like an atlas, the charts showed ground elevations by contours, slices of color, and by shaded relief. The airstrip at Douglas rested at 4,929 feet. Most of the ground I would cover between there and Jackson would be higher. I would be flying a plane the size of a two-seater Volkswagen with only a 100-horsepower engine and an unpressurized cabin. I figured I had an effective ceiling on a cool day of about twelve thousand feet. On a hot day, I would be lucky to make ten.

  I laid out my course carefully, dodging well to one side or another of the mountains that lay between me and Jackson. It would be a small matter to swing north of Casper Mountain, avoiding the northern end of the Laramie Range, and from there I had a fairly clear shot two hundred miles westward along the Sweetwater River drainage to South Pass, the low point on the Continental Divide, over which the emigrants had climbed on the Oregon Trail. But South Pass was as far north as I could go: north of that lay the formidable barrier of the Wind River Range, a one-hundred-mile-long rampart of wilderness peaks soaring to twelve and thirteen thousand feet. From South Pass, I would fly northwestward up a valley past Big Piney and Pinedale, between the Wind Rivers and the Wyoming Range. The valley was high in elevation, replete with mesas rising to 7,500 feet, but it boasted several airports should I need to abort the trip, and it was plenty wide, so I would have plenty of room to maneuver. At the north end of the valley, where the mountain ranges met, I would need to turn west into the narrow confines of Hoback Canyon. Hoback was only a few miles wide, and I would need to make a few shallow dogleg turns to dodge minor kinks in the canyon and then turn ninety degrees to the north fifteen miles in, but I could stay below nine thousand feet all the way to Jackson Hole. All told, I would cover about 320 miles.

  The only alternative route would take me to the north end of the Wind River Range, past Riverton and Dubois and over Togwotee Pass, then southwest into Jackson Hole along the Snake River. This seemed a less good idea. Togwotee Pass lay at 9,658 feet, between peaks that soared thousands of feet higher. With the minimal ceiling the Piper could reach, I could barely skim the top of the pass, and I’d have little effective room to turn if turbulence or a downdraft was waiting for me at the top. Peggy was right: I wanted no part of mountain flying.

  I laid down my pencil and rubbed my eyes. Even on a nice day, I would face a head wind flying west, perhaps ten or fifteen knots. At full bore, the Piper could cruise at one hundred knots, or nautical miles, per hour. Subtract fifteen, and I would peak at eighty-five knots. Three hundred and twenty statute miles was 280 nautical miles. The math wasn’t pretty: three and a half hours—a long, buffeting, tiring ride for a beginner.

  The man behind the counter let me use his phone to call the Casper Flight Service station for a weather briefing. Casper forecast clear skies with a five- to ten-knot westerly wind until early the next afternoon, at which time the weather was going to deteriorate steadily toward evening, when storms were possible across the western half of the state.

  I then called a rental-car agency and arranged to pick up a car at the Jackson
Hole Airport at 11:00 A.M. I was able to choose among four rental car agencies: serving two major national parks, a skier’s paradise, and a fly fisherman’s nirvana, Jackson Hole’s was the busiest airport in the state.

  I reached for my figures. Three and a half hours’ flying would get me into Jackson well ahead of the weather, as long as I was in the air by 8:30. For safety, I’d make that seven, or earlier even. The sun would be up by 6:30 and shining along my tail, not into my eyes. Not a problem.

  Satisfied, I made notes of the radio frequencies I would need during the trip. Then I folded up my charts and nodded to the man who stood whistling behind the counter.

  “Heading out in the morning?” he asked.

  My heart skipped a beat. He had overheard my call. I was slipping. Sure, he looked like a nice paternal sort of guy, and I was up home in my own territory, but this was not a vacation trip I was on. Trying to look unperturbed, I said, “Yes. I’d like to pay my bill now, please.”

  “You going to leave your rental car here for Charlie Burris to pick up, or do you need a lift back from town in the morning? I’ll be going home soon, and no one’ll be out here all night.” He looked kind of concerned about me.

  That was the one wrinkle I hadn’t smoothed out. I had thought of turning in the car and sleeping in the sleeping bag I had in the plane, but that would mean two nights in a row sitting up, and I was already feeling the fatigue. Besides, Po knew the car now, would have figured out where I’d gotten it, and would know I had come by air. Turning in the car would be a signal that I was leaving town, and as mine was the only plane there, I would be easy to trace. “I was thinking of leaving it here tomorrow. I won’t be gone long,” I said, hoping that, at worst, this man would gossip around town that I was just going up for a spin and would be back soon.

  “No problem. Where you staying?”

  I didn’t answer fast enough.

  The man smiled kindly. “Camping out, huh? I couldn’t help but notice the gear you had in the plane. Listen, I got a daughter your age, so I know the score. Why not pull your car into the hangar here for the night? You’ll be a lot more comfortable inside. I’ll be back by seven tomorrow morning. Got to fly down to Denver.”

  I nodded. As he turned to leave, I said, “You mind not letting anyone know I’m out here? I’d feel safer that way.”

  He gave me a thumbs-up and headed toward the adjoining hangar to open the overhead door.

  I dreamed I was running from a airplane, a fast twin-engine job with a long snout and propellers that wanted to chew me to pieces. It grew closer and closer, the sound of its engines eating up the sky. I sat up abruptly in the car inside the hangar beside the airstrip, suddenly awake and aware that the sound, at least, was real.

  It was pitch-dark.

  Who’s coming in for a landing in the middle of the night? I wondered as the sound of the engines faded, turned, turned again, and began to increase in volume once again. Someone was flying a nice neat landing pattern in a fast airplane.

  I climbed out of my sleeping bag and out of the car, wandered out of the hangar area and into the darkened lounge that faced the runway. I was just in time to see the twin-engine Beechcraft roll up on the tie-down apron. It was a hot little plane, with enough windows down the side to suggest that it had seats for six or eight passengers. It came to a stop, and a door opened. Instinctively, I pulled back into the shadows at the edge of the row of windows. Even as my mind caught up with my reflexes, I knew that I had seen the man who now stood silhouetted in the doorway of the plane: Al Rosenblatt, the man who preferred not to be seen.

  The cold of the night air cut into me like a knife.

  A man stepped out of the shadows beside the building and walked toward the plane. Po Bradley. Rosenblatt withdrew into the airplane and was replaced by Fred Howard.

  I squeezed up against the wall and held my breath.

  Hushed conversation ripped back and forth among the three men. I could not hear what they were saying until Fred Howard left the plane and drew Po toward the building. Through the seam in the doorjamb, I could make out the following words: “You’re sure.”

  “Yeah, sure, she’s here. I seen her this afternoon pokin’ her nose about out at the ranch, just like I said on the phone.”

  “And she’s still here.”

  “Yeah! Look there! Her plane’s still tied down, like I told ya. I saw the sticker on her car, called the agency, asked around, and that’s the story. There are no secrets in a town this size. She flew that there plane here from Denver, and as you can see for yourself, it’s still here.”

  “Then you don’t know where she’s staying.”

  “Nope! I tell ya, I checked every motel and hotel in town, but no car. She’s a sly little thing, kind of slips in and out, thinks no one sees her.” Po laughed, as if it was a good joke. The sound sliced through the air.

  There was a pause, a scuffing of shoes on pavement. “Don’t let her leave,” said Fred Howard.

  “What? No, a’course not.”

  “No, I don’t think you understand.”

  “Well—”

  I heard a cough in the crisp air. Across the floor of the room, I saw a play of shadows as another man emerged from the lighted aircraft and moved toward the building. He was large and broad-shouldered, and he threw a shadow the size of a truck. As he neared the doorway, I heard Fred Howard say, “Hugh, you stay here with this man. He’ll point her out. You do the rest,” and then, in heavy disgust, he added, “Our friend Po here doesn’t have the stomach.”

  I heard Po say, “But—”

  “You want to make yourself as unpopular as Hansen? It’s your ballgame, shithead.” After a moment, footfalls whispered away toward the plane, and Fred Howard’s shadow came careening through the empty lounge.

  As the twin fired its engines for takeoff, I heard the new man ask, “There a man here during business hours?” His voice was easy, matter-of-fact.

  “Yes,” said Po. “You’re not really gonna—”

  “I don’t like this setup. Too out in the open.”

  Suddenly, the doorknob rattled. I stopped breathing altogether.

  The man said, “Locked. And that hangar door is buttoned down tight. How ’bout this entrance road? There more than the one way in here?”

  Po’s voice came smaller, tighter. “No. She’d have to come this way.”

  “Then we’ll set up down there.”

  As the sound of their feet crunching on the pavement receded toward the parking lot, I slid to the floor and buried my head in my arms.

  The weak glow from the numbers on my wristwatch counted out the hours and minutes. I had pulled my sleeping bag out of the car, and now I sat huddled behind a stack of boxes on the cold concrete floor at one corner of the hangar, waiting, listening. I thought of finding the telephone in the darkness, of calling the Sheriff’s Department, but that guaranteed nothing. The big man might just as easily shoot me through the door of a police cruiser as through the window of my car or the plane, and what if he heard me placing the call? I had certainly heard him easily enough. No, I would wait until dawn, when I could see where he was hiding, and then call the Sheriff’s Department. Duluth would take pleasure in rousting Po out of his stakeout, I told myself, and I would have a chance to get away by air.

  In those long, cramped hours of fear, I had oceans of time to contemplate each fact and dark trail that led outward from the scene of Miriam’s killing, and I faced the fact that I had no real confidence in Sheriff Duluth. Po Bradley was up to his eye sockets in the trouble that swarmed all around me, but that didn’t mean he had killed Miriam Menken. What had the sheriff been doing before he answered Cecelia’s call?

  As the long minutes stretched into hours, I formulated one detailed plan of escape after another, but none seemed safer than staying where I was. I could unchain the airplane and fly away, but I had no experience flying in the dark, had no flashlight with me in case I lost the cabin lights and could not read the dash. Depths and di
stances read differently in the dark from altitude, Peggy had told me, and it was easy to misgage how far away a lighted city or even the end of a runway was. I could try instead to drive like hell with my headlights off and hope that the element of surprise worked in my favor, but I knew from having watched the airport attendant raise and lower the enormous hangar door to put in my car that anyone within a mile of the place would hear it and have plenty of time to notice my car leaving the building. Or I could try to take the road on foot, but I had no idea from which direction I must conceal myself.

  I dreamed of calling Sergeant Ortega. I would admit my foolishness and say good-bye, hear a kind and trusted voice before I died. As fear and fatigue danced and multiplied, I resolved finally to proceed as planned. I would wait until the attendant returned at seven. He would distract the men who waited for me while I unchained the plane from the tie-down apron, and I’d be off. They wouldn’t know where I was going. They couldn’t follow. I would be away. All I had to do was get the plane off the ground without winning a bullet through the gas tanks.

  With the first glimmerings of daylight, I heard a truck engine boom to life at the far corner of the parking lot. So they had been there all night, waiting, only a breath away. Po’s truck moved stealthily away from the building and purred into the distance, its sound quickly swallowed by those of other cars and trucks passing on the highway beyond the entrance road. Where were they now? Had they gone only as far as the nearest cover and parked again? Tears burning anew, I pulled the sleeping bag up over my ears and allowed myself the luxury of a groan.

  At 6:45, I heard the sound of a car arriving, then a key scratching in a lock beyond the service counter. Then I heard whistling.

  I fairly slid out from behind the stack of boxes behind which I had been hiding. Gathering up my sleeping bag, I staggered toward the door into the lounge. “Good morning,” I said quietly.

  The airport attendant turned. “Oh, there you are!” he said.