Called Home

by R. R. Irvine

  “That’s where it happened,” she said.

  He stared at her, trying to wait her out. Finally he said, “Are you talking about Melba Nibley?”

  “For heaven’s sake. What do you think this is all about? That’s why I brought you here. That’s the Nibley house across the street. Some of us thought, prayed, that her death might tip the scales and get some action.”

  “I understand it was suicide.”

  “I don’t care what you call it. We buried her like a Saint, which she was. A saint and a martyr.”

  “Why do you say that, Mrs. Colton?”

  “I don’t see how can you ask that if you’ve read our letters?”

  He took a quick breath. “Please, tell me why you think she killed herself.”

  She pursed her lips. “I should have known when I saw they sent a man. It’s what we were afraid of all along. You’re like all the rest. You’re here to protect the interests of the medical board. How many women do you have on that board, Mr. Traveler? No, you don’t have to answer. I can see the truth on your face.”

  He didn’t know what she was seeing, bewilderment probably. “I’m only trying to do my job.”

  She stared at him for a moment but didn’t speak until she was looking at the Nibley house. “Maybe you are. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I don’t know anything anymore.”

  She hugged herself again, so tightly her arms trembled. “Maybe God’s the only one who knows why Melba did it. Unless her husband, Ellis, is lying to us.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Traveler said.

  She backed up a couple of steps. “A woman owes respect and obedience to her husband. But if love gets in the way, the burden can become too heavy.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, but that sounds very cynical to me.”

  “Not at all. I’m practical. You have to be to survive nearly forty years of marriage like I have. But Melba. After thirty years with Ellis, she was still in love with him.”

  The thought crossed his mind that she might be playing games with him. That this conversation might have been cooked up by Sheriff Hickman to confuse a Gentile. Or maybe hurry him on his way out of town.

  “Is there anything specific you can tell me about Melba Nibley’s suicide?” he said.

  “How can you ask that after reading our letters?”

  “A good investigator has to keep an open mind at all times.”

  “Like I said before, Melba was a saint and martyr. Ask any woman in this town if you don’t believe me. They’ll all say the same thing. That he drove her to it.”

  “Who?”

  “I hate to say it, but men are all the same. In the church or out. You think we’re good for nothing more than sex.”

  Her eyes widened. She looked appalled by what she’d just said.

  “I’m here to help,” Traveler said.

  She turned and fled back the way they’d come. He knew better than to chase a woman down the street in a town like Wasatch.

  8

  A BLOCK down from Colton’s Hardware, sandwiched between Odell’s Drugs and the Wasatch Co-Op, stood the Uinta Hotel, a narrow red brick building, two rooms wide and two stories high. It reminded Traveler of a firehouse.

  The upstairs windows had their blinds drawn. The ones on the ground floor were obscured by age and faded black lettering: DAILY AND WEEKLY RATES on one side of the door, HAROLD MCCONKIE, PROP, on the other.

  Traveler hesitated outside the beveled-glass door. His reflection looked as faded as the hotel. He took a deep breath of fresh air as a precaution against a stale lobby, and smelled smoke. This time he saw its source, a column rising at the head of Main Street where it dead-ended against the foothills of the Wasatch Plateau. As far as he could tell the smoke was coming from a heavily wooded area.

  He hurried inside the hotel, intending to call the sheriff. But Mahonri Hickman was in the lobby ahead of him, talking to the man behind the desk.

  “You’ve got a fire in the hills,” Traveler said.

  “I already spotted it,” the sheriff answered. “But thanks anyway.”

  “Where is it?” the clerk said.

  “Looked to me like it’s up near Ellsworth Flats.”

  “It could be a camp fire then.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” the sheriff said. “To be on the safe side, I’ll drive up and take a look-see.”

  “You do that.”

  “I’m on my way then. I’ll be in touch, Hal. With you, too, Traveler.”

  As soon as the sheriff left, Traveler took his place in front of the registration book. Its pages were as blank as the clerk’s face. “I’d like a room, please.”

  The man shook his head. “I made a special trip over from the church offices to be here when you arrived.”

  “How’d you know I was coming?” Traveler asked, knowing the answer already.

  “The sheriff makes it his business to keep me informed.”

  “You and who else?”

  “My name’s Harold McConkie. Bishop Harold McConkie. The sheriff said you’d be staying at the Sleep-Well Motel.”

  “I haven’t checked in anywhere yet.” Traveler stared into the man’s bland face. A perfect bishop’s face, Martin would have said. Unlined and worry-free. Confident and full of joy in its certainty of resurrection and everlasting life.

  “We have no rooms available.”

  “I didn’t know you had that many tourists here in Wasatch.”

  “I own the place. My wife runs it. There are only so many rooms she can keep open. Besides which, I’m also the volunteer fire chief. If that fire in the Wasatch turns into anything special, I won’t have time to waste around here cleaning rooms.”

  Traveler smiled at the man, knowing damn well that a Mormon male, particularly a bishop, wouldn’t be cleaning rooms in his own hotel.

  “You’ll like the Sleep-Well,” McConkie added. “Nat Beasley and his wife run a clean place.”

  “There’s clean and there’s clean,” a woman said behind him.

  Traveler turned to see her descending the granite-treaded staircase at the back of the lobby.

  She clicked her tongue. “Sleep-Well indeed.”

  Before McConkie could answer, a siren went off, a series of short, shrill blasts.

  “Darn it,” he said. “That was fast. Hickman must have spotted something from the road. I’ve got to go, Eliza. You look after things. By the way, this here is Mr. Traveler, the investigator I told you about.”

  With that he hurried out of the hotel. The woman took his place behind the desk.

  “I was looking for a room right here in town,” Traveler told her, testing the waters.

  “I’m Mrs. Bishop McConkie.”

  Like an army wife, she was letting him know the rank she derived from her husband.

  “I guess that means I don’t get a room.”

  “Half the rooms here I keep for my children.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Bishop McConkie bought the Uinta for its ten-room capacity. But God didn’t send us that many children.”

  “That leaves you room to spare, then.”

  “The bishop is very clear on that. When the siren goes, he says there’s always the chance that we might have to turn the Uinta into a hospital, since we don’t have one here in town. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’d better start getting things ready.”

  “What about the beds at the Sleep-Well Motel?”

  “Not up to hospital standards, I’m afraid. But they’d get the overflow from here if it came to that.”

  “You mean I might not have a room after all?” “Nat Beasley is on the volunteer fire list, too, but only in the event of a second alarm. Even if that happens, his wife, Norma, can see to you.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Anyone can tell you. I have work to do.”

  9

  THE SLEEP-WELL Motel was at the west end of town on Cannon Street just beyond a WPA bridge that crossed Cowdery Creek. This
late in the year the creek was nothing more than a series of stagnant pools.

  Traveler parked out front and shook his head at the prospect before him, a half dozen clapboard cabins, all linked by sagging breezeways, all facing onto a potholed gravel driveway. Opposite the cabins was a shabby, flat-roofed shack that had once been a filling station. The faded printing was still readable on the molting stucco—ZION REST SERVICE. A hand-lettered plywood sign, OFFICE, hung from one of the abandoned gas pumps out front.

  Swarming mosquitoes clouded around Traveler’s head the moment he stepped from the car. He hurried into the office, but not fast enough to escape the smell of rotting vegetation coming from the creek bed.

  “Shut the screen door after you, for heaven’s sake,” a woman said without looking up from a telephone switchboard that had to be older than the motel. Behind the switchboard a metal door still had the original REST ROOM sign on it. “Where were you raised, in a barn?”

  She, the switchboard, and an occupied playpen were crammed behind a pine lowboy that was serving as a counter. Traveler rested his elbows on the scarred top and leaned over to get a better look at the child. The boy blinked at him and made the kind of face that said tears were on the way. Traveler backed up a step.

  “We’ve got enough bugs in here as it is. They’re eating Baby Joe alive.” She removed her headset, fussed with her dark hair for a moment, and then turned to face him. “You must be Mr. Traveler. I’m Norma Beasley. The sheriff called and told me to expect you. I hope it’s hot enough for you.”

  He’d been expecting someone much older, someone to match the motel. But the woman in front of him couldn’t have been more than thirty, about the same age as her flowered housedress if he was any judge. Sweat had pasted the thin material to her breasts and distended stomach.

  “I’ve put you in our back cabin for privacy,” she said. “It has the best view of the creek.”

  And the most mosquitoes, he thought. “What else did the sheriff have to say about me?”

  She shrugged. “Mahonri Hickman isn’t one to talk much.”

  “Not even to say that I’m an investigator?”

  She turned away from him to bend over the playpen, but not before he’d seen the flash of recognition in her eyes. The redheaded boy stretched out his arms to be picked up. She obliged, hugging him to her breasts and kissing him to keep from looking at Traveler.

  “How old is he?”

  “Baby Joe’s going on two,” she said, still not meeting Traveler’s eyes. “My husband is out back now, making up your room. I sent him on his way as soon as Mahonri called.”

  “The sheriff must have told you why I’m here.”

  “No,” she said into the baby’s ear.

  Ask any woman in town, Traveler thought. That’s what Shirley Colton had said. They’ll tell you that Melba Nibley was a saint and a martyr.

  “I’ve come about Mrs. Nibley.”

  That brought a stare, wide-eyed and fearful. After a moment, her head twitched as if she wanted to look away but couldn’t control her muscles.

  “How well did you know her?” he asked.

  She wet her lips. “Shirley . . . Mrs. Colton said she forgot to check your credentials before she talked to you. That’s something I won’t do.”

  He showed her his license.

  “You’re not from the State Medical Board?”

  That explained part of it, he thought. He’d been mistaken for a medical investigator. But the question was, why would they be expecting one in a town like Wasatch? The only thing that came to mind was Melba Nibley.

  He said, “I didn’t tell her I was from the state board.”

  “But Shirley understood . . .” Norma Beasley glanced through a grimy window that looked out onto the cabins. Beyond the cabins, thick smoke was now clearly visible in the foothills.

  “I spoke with Mrs. Colton because I was told that she was a close friend of Melba’s.”

  Mrs. Beasley stepped close enough to the window to touch it with her forehead. “Where is that man?”

  When Baby Joe began crying, she dumped him in the playpen and went back to her switchboard to plug in a line. She used a regular phone this time instead of a headset. “Nat, he’s here. I need you in the office right now.”

  Nathaniel Beasley was the same man Traveler had seen buying nails in Colton’s Hardware. He’d changed out of his overalls and was wearing tan slacks and a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt that revealed arms so thin that sharp edges of bone showed through.

  He ran skeletal fingers through his black, sweaty hair as he spoke. “I knew who you were right off.” His voice was nasal, and as sharp as the rest of him.

  “Did you find your nails?” Traveler asked.

  “I had to put up the window screen in your room. Otherwise the mosquitoes would have sucked you dry in the night.”

  He peered out the window as if looking for insects. “This time of year you’d think we’d get a cool breeze off the mountains, wouldn’t you? Come winter the wind off the Wasatch could freeze off your—”

  “Watch your language in front of the baby,” his wife interrupted.

  “. . . ears,” he concluded. “That’s all I was going to say, Norma. You know me.”

  “That’s the trouble.”

  “Don’t tell me about trouble. I’ve been watching the smoke. It’s only a matter of time before they put out the second alarm.”

  “You’ve got no business being a volunteer, not with me and the baby to watch out for.”

  Beasley ignored her. “Do you know the country around here, Mr. Traveler?”

  “I’ve driven Highway Eighty-nine before but never really stopped. I’ve hiked the Wasatch, too, but up around Salt Lake.”

  “Those are city mountains. Here it’s so damned rugged we won’t have a chance of stopping a fire if it really gets going in those canyons. Mark my words. We’ll just have to let it burn itself out. Unless, of course, it heads for town. Then we’ll have to make a stand.”

  He took a deep breath, expelling it noisily before grabbing a key from a hook on the wall next to the switchboard. “Come on. I’ll show you your room.”

  “I’ll bring fresh towels as soon as I change the baby,” his wife said.

  “I’ll get them, Norma.”

  “No. That’s my job. You go ahead.”

  Outside, the smell of smoke was as thick as the mosquitoes.

  Beasley batted at the bugs absentmindedly. “There hasn’t been lightning all summer. That means the fire’s man-made. It has to be. I don’t care what the bishop says.”

  “And what is that?” Traveler asks.

  Beasley scratched a red, bug-bitten cheek. “It’s no secret, I guess. He thinks it’s spontaneous combustion, because nobody around here would be stupid enough to start a camp fire in this kind of weather. A stranger might, though.” He squinted at Traveler.

  “I just got here,” Traveler reminded him.

  “We’re putting you in the end bungalow. Number six.” Beasley started down the gravel drive toward the creek. The mosquitoes increased with every step. “Norma tells me you’ve been talking to Shirley Colton. She says you’re here doing some kind of investigation. Is that right?”

  “Everyone in town seems to know about it.”

  “Men your size don’t usually like taking advice. But I’m offering it anyway. Don’t believe everything you hear in this town. Especially from some of the women.” He turned to look back at the office where his wife was watching them through the window. He raised his hand to her, more of a signal than a wave. “Some of them have gotten out of hand. My wife for one. Hysteria, I call it.”

  “She sounded all right when I talked to her.”

  “Thank God for that, eh?” Beasley said, still staring at her. He mouthed something that could have been I love you.

  She raised one hand to her mouth, pretending to lock her lips like a child.

  “Can you recommend someplace for dinner?” Traveler said.

  “W
e’ve got two places in town. The Main Street Dinette and the Wasatch Cafe back on the highway.” Beasley handed Traveler the key.

  “Make sure you lock yourself in at night.” He snorted. “To keep out the bugs.”

  10

  THE WASATCH Cafe stood at the last bend of the highway before it turned into Main Street. Traveler pulled into the graveled parking area out front just as the sun disappeared behind the San Pitch Mountains to the west. Without competition, the neon Coors sign turned everything—clapboard siding, gravel parking lot, Traveler’s skin—a jaundiced yellow.

  He hesitated. There were a dozen cars there ahead of him, a big crowd for a place that couldn’t have been more than thirty feet square. He couldn’t count heads, though, because steam had blinded the front window.

  Hunger started his stomach rumbling. His only alternative was the Main Street Dinette he’d seen while walking with Shirley Colton. Both places looked like worthy rivals to his mother’s Crisco-coated cuisine.

  What the hell. He had to have something, and a hamburger was a hamburger no matter where you got it.

  Crossing the threshold, he tallied ten counter stools and standing room where the tables should have been. The standing room was filled, and so were the stools. Half the town’s population seemed to be there, the male half. He was about to turn around and go looking for a grocery store when the counter emptied.

  Refusing to be intimidated, Traveler climbed onto a center stool, still warm, and smiled at the waitress behind the counter. Her answering smile quivered around the edges.

  The smell inside the steamy cafe reminded Traveler of Thanksgiving dinners from his childhood, when only the Jell-O mold was safe to eat.

  Widening his own smile, he swung around slowly so that everyone could get a good look at him. Half a dozen watchers immediately detached themselves from the crowd and left the cafe. They were probably runners being sent off to alert the rest of the town.

  He faced the waitress again and asked for a menu. A plastic pin over her heart said JOY.

  “Our special tonight is turkey pie with mashed potatoes.” She pointed a thumb over her shoulder to show him the grease-penciled note on the mirror behind the counter—$3.95 with all the trimmings.