The Great Reminder

by R. R. Irvine

  39

  TRAVELER STOOD under the shower, massaging his sore shoulder until the hot water ran out. By then, he felt limber enough to make the pain bearable.

  When he came out of the bathroom, Martin was stretched out on one of the motel’s twin beds. “I prefer you with a sling on your arm, Mo. You’re less likely to get in trouble that way.”

  “When people lie to me, I want to have both hands free.”

  Martin raised his head from the pillow. “We’ve got worse trouble than the locals acting up.”

  Traveler ignored the gleam in his father’s eyes and concentrated on dressing—jeans, a heavy shirt, and work boots.

  “You saw Lael for yourself,” Martin went on. “It couldn’t be more obvious.”

  “All right. I’ll take the bait. What are you getting at?”

  “You’d have to be blind not to see the way her clothes fit. That girl’s put on weight. If you ask me, she’s pregnant.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Traveler said.

  “She didn’t drive all the way to Cowdery Junction to see an old coot like me.” Martin scratched his head. “In a pinch, I suppose I could marry her. What the hell. The juices haven’t dried up completely.”

  Rather than be diverted, Traveler said, “I wonder if the prophet knows she’s been here.”

  “Willis drove her. He doesn’t do anything unless Elton Woolley gives the nod.” Martin snorted. “If Woolley nods in your direction, you’ll be the one walking up the aisle, not me.”

  “Did you leave the pistol in the Jeep?”

  Martin reached under his pillow and brought out the .45 automatic. “It’s going to be dark in a few minutes. Why don’t we wait until morning. I feel safer in sunshine.”

  “So does everybody else.” Traveler went to the door and opened it. “Do you want to drive or should I?”

  “Where are we going to start?”

  “The Maw place.”

  Martin slid off the bed and handed his son the keys. “You’re the one who knows the way.”

  ******

  George Maw opened the door and said, “I don’t want you setting foot in my house, not after what you did to the Broadbents at the cemetery.”

  “Fine by me,” Traveler said from the small concrete slab that served as a porch. “I can always have the sheriff come by and wake up the neighborhood flashing his red lights and sounding his siren.”

  Martin was standing two steps lower down, beyond the shelter of the aluminum porch awning. “That ought to thrill your neighbors and keep them talking for a long time.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Maw said.

  “We found a body,” Traveler said.

  “I heard it was old Ethan Broadbent.”

  “We don’t think so. That’s why the prophet has experts working on it at BYU,” Traveler said, stretching a point.

  “The prophet.” Maw blinked. “I didn’t know about that. All I heard was there wasn’t much to identify.”

  “You know scientists these days. They can do miracles. It’s my guess they’ll be able to tell me it’s Karl Falke by tomorrow morning.”

  “That has nothing to do with me.”

  “We already know his back was broken.” Traveler stretched the point by adding, “That proves murder.”

  Maw backed away from the door. Traveler followed him inside; so did Martin.

  “Mother!” Maw called.

  “I’m drying the dishes,” his wife answered from the kitchen but didn’t show herself.

  Keeping his eyes on Traveler, Maw retreated slowly, one hand feeling behind him for the sofa. The moment his fingers touched fabric, he collapsed with a grunt.

  Traveler and his father sat on either side of the man, hemming him in.

  “You told me Falke’s body was sent home,” Traveler said. “If he’s buried in the cemetery, that means you lied. Or worse.”

  “I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Then why lie?”

  “Mother,” Maw said, an appeal.

  His wife appeared in the archway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Maw stared at her, then at the door. She shook her head. “Tell them the truth, old man.”

  Traveler left the sofa to take a facing chair, while his father put an arm around Maw’s shoulder. Mrs. Maw stayed where she was.

  Martin spoke gently. “We’re not the police. All we’re trying to do is help a man your age die in peace.”

  Maw stared at his wife for a long time. Finally, he sighed and started speaking. “When those six Krauts died, I never thought much of it. They were the enemy, after all. Then those high mucky-mucks, officers in their fancy uniforms, came down from Salt Lake and started looking for someone to blame. Everybody could see what they were up to. So us guards kept our mouths shut tight.”

  “Do you remember an officer named Lewis Stiles?” Martin asked, his arm still around the man.

  Maw shook his head. “It was an officer who came here day before yesterday and put me up to this, telling you that Falke was dead and sent home.”

  “Who?” Martin patted the man’s back.

  “He walked in here big as life, acting like he was still my commanding officer, like he expected me to salute or something. He showed me your ad in the Salt Lake paper and told me what to say. Captain Goddamn Hansen, we used to call him.”

  “Grant Hansen?”

  “Goddamn suits him better. I sure as hell didn’t salute him; I made him pay through the nose.”

  “Did he give you a reason?”

  “I asked him. ‘Who’s behind this?’ I said. Do you know what he told me? ‘I don’t have any choice and neither do you.’ ”

  Traveler said, “Hansen works for a man named Otto Klebe.”

  “Who’s he, another goddamned officer?”

  Absently, Traveler shook his head. Was Klebe involved, he wondered, or was Hansen trying to cover up for the army? Or himself?

  “I’ll tell you what,” Martin said. “Let’s stick closer to home. Tell us what you know about Owen Broadbent.”

  “A man starts talking about his neighbors, and pretty soon they’re talking about him.”

  “Nobody’s going to hear it from us.”

  Maw looked at his wife. “Rich people like the Broadbents take advantage,” she said. “They’ve never done anything for the likes of us.”

  “All right,” Maw said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell us what it was like around here right after the war,” Traveler said.

  “My memory’s not what it used to be, especially when it comes to names. But I can remember the old days well enough. I was working two jobs then, deputy sheriff and camp guard, to make ends meet. But your big farmers like Broadbent were cleaning up. Sugar was rationed, and he was planting every acre of land he could get his hands on in sugar beets. Always driving new cars, even back before the war, and then later those newfangled ones that disappeared.”

  “Kaiser-Frazers?” Traveler asked, remembering that Hansen’s family had taken Klebe into their failing auto business.

  “Those are the ones.”

  “A fool and his money,” Mrs. Maw said.

  “Mother’s right. Sometime in the early fifties, he started selling off his land to make ends meet. The Broadbent place used to be twice as big as it is now. Of course, they weren’t the only ones hurting when foreign sugar cane came back on the market. He switched crops and even got rid of his dairy herd, but too late. Old man Richards, though, he’s as big now as Broadbent used to be. There’s already a Richards Road and there’s been talk of renaming Broadbent Avenue.”

  “Old man Richards must be ninety by now,” Maw’s wife said.

  “Mother’s right. But he still runs the place, with the help of his son and daughter-in-law, and they’re no spring chickens either. Only last year Lamar was working his dairy right alongside his field hands until that stroke put him in a walker.”

  “I heard him offer to buy Morag’s field,” Traveler said.


  “What did Owen say to that?”

  “That it would be the last thing to go.”

  “I admire him for that,” Maw said. “You take those sons of his, now. Mark my words. When they inherit the place, they’ll sell out and take up city living before you can shake a stick.”

  “Why aren’t they growing anything in Morag’s field?” Martin asked.

  “With Owen Broadbent, there’s no telling. He’s a stubborn man when he sets his mind to something. Maybe he’s never forgiven Richards for taking away business. The Richards Dairy supplies milk to damn near everybody in this county. That why the old boy wants Morag’s field. It backs right up against his prime pasture land.”

  40

  THE CHURCH offices opened at nine in Salt Lake. Willis Tanner called the Cowdery Cottages at one minute after.

  “You’re lucky to catch us, Willis,” Traveler told him. “We were on our way out to get milk.”

  “Lael told me what you said to her.”

  Traveler raised an eyebrow at his father, who mouthed back, “Don’t trust him.”

  “I don’t remember saying anything important,” Traveler said.

  “No games, Moroni.”

  “Tell me what you want, Willis.”

  “Was your answer to Lael final? I don’t want you changing your mind at the last minute.”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “Doctrine and Covenants, Mo. ‘The unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife.’ ”

  “Take it from me, Willis. I’m a lost cause, beyond sanctification.”

  “You’re not going to marry, then?”

  “Is that you asking or the prophet?”

  “You know how he feels about you and your father. His two Moronis.”

  “Tell him that his grandniece is safe from the likes of me.”

  “Amen,” Tanner whispered.

  “I have work to do, Willis.”

  “You are my work, Moroni. I’ve just had a report from BYU. We have a tentative video match on that skull. It’s your prisoner of war, all right. As for his crushed spine, that’s probably what killed him.”

  “Do they think it was murder?”

  “Does it matter after fifty years?”

  “What do you think, Willis?”

  “I know you, Moroni. I can read you like I do our good book. ‘I will take vengeance upon the wicked, for they will not repent; for the cup of mine indignation is full.’ ”

  ******

  Traveler and Martin found Lamar Richards, who’d traded his aluminum walker for a motorized wheelchair, in one of his modern milking buildings.

  “I used to get up in the dark to milk my cows,” he told them. “I still rise with the sun to make sure things get done right around here.”

  Despite the smell of cow manure, the concrete building was immaculate. The concrete walkway on which they stood looked as if it had been hosed down within the last few minutes. A waist-high metal railing separated them from the cows in their milking stalls. Soft background music was coming from speakers placed high on the brick walls.

  “I used to know my animals by sight,” Richards went on. “Now I’ve got so many they have to have numbers tagged to their ears.”

  “I find the name Morag fascinating,” Traveler said.

  “She was a fine Holstein. I tried to buy her once from Owen Broadbent. That was early in the war, before things started turning around. Turning ugly, too, for that matter.”

  “Tell us about those days,” Martin said.

  Richards wheeled his chair around so that his back was to the railing. He locked the brakes and stared at them for several seconds. Finally, he said, “Most people won’t take the time to listen to an old man’s stories. Of course, you being detectives gives you incentive. You’re getting paid to listen to the likes of me.”

  He rubbed his hands together in expectation of a captive audience. “The war years were good to me, good to Broadbent, too, for that matter. As long as the fighting lasted, we were raking in money growing sugar beets for the government. After the war, I invested in land for the future, for farming and for dairy cattle, while Broadbent opted for quick profit. I knew better, thanks to my father, who was a dairyman in the old country before joining up with Brigham Young. ‘Son,’ he’d say to me, ‘buy land. It lasts forever.’

  “Owen must know that too. He’s no fool. No spendthrift either. But you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. When he came to me offering to sell off part of his land, I couldn’t believe my luck. He must have been desperate, because he took my first offer, though I would have gone higher. Hell, look what I’ve offered for Morag’s field over the years. Well over market value. The fact is, I never could understand his attitude, allowing good land like that to go to waste. If you ask me, it’s a sin.”

  He released the brakes and pivoted his chair in a tight circle. “Look around you, for God’s sake. Owen Broadbent could have had a dairy like this one. Instead, he gave up after Morag died. ‘You can’t fall in love with your livestock,’ I told him. ‘Not in this business.’ But he wouldn’t listen.”

  The old man leaned back and closed his eyes. Traveler waited out the silence.

  Martin spoke finally. “Those six prisoners who died had been working in Morag’s field?”

  “It was bad luck, pure and simple. I had my share of POWs. It could have been them just as easily.”

  “Do you have any idea what killed them?” Traveler said.

  Richards spread his hands. “They hushed it up, young fella. When I asked Owen about it, he told me it was none of my business. It was a sad thing, though, those young men dying that way after their war was already over.”

  “Some say they were poisoned.”

  “I heard that rumor.”

  “Their tongues turned brown,” Traveler said, relating the symptoms provided by Nurse Sorenson. “They were nauseated and thirsty. Then they seemed to get better for a while and suddenly they were dead.”

  “Hell, son, that sounds like the milk sickness. I haven’t seen it in sixty years. When I was a boy, we used to treat it with joe-pye weed and boneset, though that didn’t stop it from killing most times.”

  “Are you saying they died from drinking milk?”

  “Snakeroot causes it. It’s like loco weed, only worse. No wonder Owen lost old Morag. Your cows feed on it, then they get the shakes and die. You drink their milk and the same thing happens to you. But like I say, the milk sickness has been long gone around here, so it’s no wonder nobody recognized it for what it was.”

  The old man snorted. “That’s what they get for trying to keep secrets, son. They should have come to me. If they had, I’d have told them what was wrong.”

  41

  AS THEY neared Temple Road, Traveler pulled the Jeep onto the shoulder of Broadbent Avenue and switched off the engine. The sky was clear except for the usual thunderheads over the mountains. The temperature was somewhere in the seventies. The air smelled of growing things and hummed with insects.

  Martin opened the glove box, flooding the Jeep with the stink of gun oil. He took out the .45, a trophy from his own wartime experiences, ejected the ammunition clip and examined it.

  “I don’t think we’ll need it,” Traveler said.

  “Old men can be dangerous, too. I ought to know.”

  Traveler sighed. “All right. When we get to the Broadbents’, you cover me while I do the talking.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  Traveler pulled back onto the asphalt and continued south on Broadbent until they came to the farm. They parked in front of the main house and got out. Traveler had been expecting pickup trucks with gun racks, but his father’s Jeep was the only car in sight.

  “It’s a workday,” Martin said, pulling out his shirttails to hide the .45. “The men are probably in the fields.”

  Mahlon’s widow, Fern, answered their knock.

  “We’d like to see your father-in-law,” Traveler said.

  The
woman stepped out onto the porch. “I’d ask you in but the place is a wreck. I’m still unpacking. That’s why Owen went for a walk. He couldn’t stand the mess. You’d think a man his age would know better than to exercise on a full stomach.”

  Her hands went to the small of her back. “Here I am, my first day on the job, and I’m expected to cook not only for my father-in-law but for Lowell and Thelma, too.”

  Fern glared at the house next door. Traveler turned to see her sister-in-law watching them from a window.

  “She’s too busy to cook, what with making curtains and God knows what,” Fern said. “But me, I’m a widowed housekeeper with time on my hands.”

  “Which way did your father-in-law go?” Martin asked.

  “Do you think I have nothing better to do than keep track of his comings and goings? Why don’t you ask Thelma? She’s the one at the window all the time, spying instead of sewing.”

  Nodding, Martin started back down the front steps.

  “If you must know,” Fern called after him, “I saw my father-in-law walking toward Richards Road, though he still calls it the Broadbent Annex.”

  “Isn’t that the back way to the cemetery?” Martin said.

  She nodded before shading her eyes and staring west toward Richards Road. “I’ll get the car out of the shed in a little while and go looking for him. If I neglected him, Mahlon would come back and haunt me.”

  “We’ll save you the trouble,” Traveler said.

  “Make sure he’s wearing his hat, what with the sun being so hot.”

  Traveler drove slowly, watching one side of the road while his father kept an eye on the other. They didn’t catch up with Owen Broadbent for a couple of miles. By then, he was sitting on a fallen tree at the side of the road.

  “You wouldn’t have something to drink, would you?” he asked the moment they stopped for him.

  “Come on,” Martin said. “We’ll get you something back at the house.”

  Broadbent shook his head. “I’m going to the cemetery to talk to Mahlon.”

  Traveler got out and opened the rear door. “We’ll save you the walk.”

  “I could have made it on my own, but it wouldn’t be polite to turn down your offer.”

  When they reached the cemetery, Traveler drove through the open gates and followed the grassy tracks through the trees to the family’s private burial ground. Broadbent bypassed his son’s grave for the open hole the archaeologists had left behind.