Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  I switched on the gas under the kettle and stepped out onto the porch to get the other chair. A gust of wind from the coming storm slammed the door shut. Ray opened it for me, in a panic to not be left alone with Gilda an instant longer.

  I thought, He’s down past monosyllables, all the way to hand gestures. This woman really freaks him out.

  Without waiting for an invitation, Gilda picked up her gear, wandered into my bathroom, and closed the door behind her.

  Ray burst into action. He whipped out a pen and grabbed a piece of scrap paper off the table. Leaning it against the wall, he scribbled, Please remember everything you can get out of her. The sheriff likes her.

  I nodded. “Likes her” meant “thinks she killed him.”

  Ray crumpled the note and stuffed it into the kitchen trash, making sure it was buried underneath something wet. Then he froze in the middle of the room with his mouth open, as if there was something else he wanted desperately to say.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, keeping my voice down to a whisper. Then I mouthed, I’ll call you.

  Ray nodded, glanced once toward the bathroom door, and beat a hasty retreat down the stairs.

  The kettle whistled. I switched off the gas and pulled a coffee mug down out of a cupboard and put it on the table.

  The sound of water escaping the toilet, followed by more water swishing down the sink, emanated from the bathroom. I thought she’d be coming out then, but I heard still a third water sound now. The shower.

  I considered going through her gear but she had taken it in with her.

  I sat down and waited. Ten minutes passed, and the water kept running. I supposed that if I’d been up all night riding in a semi with some guy who hadn’t bathed recently, I’d be ready for a shower, too, but it annoyed me plenty that she hadn’t asked, and it downright smoked me that she was using up so much water. They don’t call Utah a desert for nothing.

  Fifteen minutes later, the water finally stopped running. I wondered sourly if she’d simply run out of hot.

  The door opened. Gilda emerged, her hair wet, rubbing it with one of my towels.

  We looked at each other.

  She said, “Don’t you have a hair dryer?”

  “No,” I said, although this wasn’t true. It was in a suitcase in my storage area in the basement, but I was damned if I was going to go get it for her.

  I gestured toward the mug. “The water already boiled,” I said. “The kettle’s over there on the stove.”

  She approached the table and inspected the mug without touching it.

  “It’s clean,” I said.

  She nodded but looked doubtful. “How long did you leave it boiling?”

  “It boiled. I turned it off. That was fifteen minutes ago, while you were showering.”

  “Would you turn it back on and this time leave the kettle boiling for a few minutes, please?”

  I considered telling her to take a walk through a cactus patch but instead reached over and switched the thing back on and flipped up the gadget so it wouldn’t scream. “I suppose you need something to eat, too,” I said.

  Gilda stared at me. “I have things in my bag,” she said. She opened it and pulled out a plastic container. She selected a small health-food bar featuring flax seeds and set it on the table next to the mug, her hand hovering for a moment as if she wasn’t quite certain it was safe to set it on my table even if it was still fully wrapped. As if finally noticing the rudeness of her manner, she said, “These are rich in anti-oxidants. I have to maintain my skin.” She then returned to the bathroom, which she had left strewn with tubes of cosmetics, combs, hairbrush, and lotions.

  My anger swelled like a balloon and then popped. Suddenly, I felt sorry for her. She had only one bit of merchandise to take to market, and it had a pitifully finite shelf life.

  Gilda folded her legs carefully to position herself over her satchel, dug through it, and produced a ceramic tea ball and a tin of tea marked with Chinese characters. She came back out into the room, busied herself about the task of decanting exactly one teaspoonful into the ball, screwed that shut, and set it gingerly into the mug. She stared at the kettle for a moment, then faced me again and addressed me as if I were an assistant attending her in surgery. “I suppose that’s long enough,” she said.

  My sympathy evaporated. Glaring at her, I sat down, leaving the pot boiling.

  Two pink spots appeared on her cheeks. She stared at me until she felt she had made her point—which was, no doubt, that I was a hideous host and cruelly lacking in compassion—and then picked up the kettle and poured. When she was done, she set the kettle down straight on the tabletop—no trivet—and sat down to dunk her tea ball.

  “Holy shit!” I shouted, jumping up to move the hot kettle back to the stove before it burned a mark into the wood. “What, can’t you—”

  I realized that she was crying.

  I sat down again. “Sorry,” I said.

  As if in mockery of her tears, rain began to pound the windows, great thudding drops that hit almost as loud as hail.

  I said, “I suppose you’ve been through a lot in the past twenty-four hours.”

  She swiped delicately at her nose with one fragile hand, not quite touching the nostrils, for that would be uncouth.

  I hoisted myself to my feet and found her a box of Kleenex. I sat down again and said, “So how’d it go down at the county?” I’m not subtle, but I figured that if I asked, she might say something.

  “Th—they wouldn’t let me see Afton,” she whimpered.

  I almost said, You wouldn’t want to see Afton, but I managed to quell the urge. Instead, I asked, “Why not?”

  “I’m—I have no record … of our … I have to present proof that I’m next of kin.”

  “Ah.”

  I waited, hoping she’d say more. Minutes slithered past, and she sipped her tea, keeping her eyes on the tabletop the entire time.

  I said, “Do you plan to keep the ranch?”

  She stopped and stared at me as if I’d just asked if the sky was blue. “Yes, of course.”

  “But that’s a lot of work for … well, you see, I grew up on a ranch, so I know a bit about how much work it is to live so far from town, and …”

  “Afton taught me to appreciate the land,” she said primly. Then she went back to sipping. When she was done with the tea, she removed the tea ball, emptied the spent leaves from it—into the cup—and stood up.

  I wondered what to do next. Was I supposed to keep an eye on her? I decided that such a task wouldn’t be difficult, as she would no doubt ask me to drive her wherever she wanted to go next, but she surprised me yet again. “I’ll just lie down for a while,” she said and without further ceremony walked over to my bed and stretched out on it. She turned once and looked at me expectantly. “It’s rather cold with that breeze blowing in,” she said, and added, rather accusingly, “My hair’s still wet.”

  At least she hadn’t presumed to climb in between my sheets, but then again, she probably found them lacking.

  I took in a long, slow breath and let it out. Then I got up and found her a blanket.

  THIRTEEN

  THE PHONE RANG AT 5 P.M. GILDA STIRRED, OPENED her eyes briefly, and then closed them again. I was amazed that she could sleep that long in a strange room and under that blanket. Thundershowers had cooled the neighborhood, but it was still pretty warm in that room.

  It had stopped raining, so I took the phone out onto the porch. It was Michele on her way in from the airport. “I have a visitor,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve been in communication with my office, and they put me through to Ray. What have you gotten out of her? Anything?”

  “She’s been asleep. I take it she was up all night.”

  “Rough way to travel,” Michele said. “So we can presume that the lady has no available cash.”

  “Perhaps it’s a part of the green lifestyle. Don’t waste resources. The truck is going through anyway so i
t can carry me, too.”

  “Nah, I’m calling her broke. So you think she killed him for his money?”

  “You like that diagram?” I asked.

  “What? Oh, I get it, you’re speaking in metaphor in case she’s listening.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I don’t think she’s the heavy lifter in this job, but I think she’s got a part in it.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Oh, as in, what did I learn after I dropped you in Denver?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not much, at first. It took me until this morning to get a warrant, and when I got back up to the ranch, there wasn’t much to see.”

  “Nothing there?” I asked.

  “Nothing at all. Well, the yurt just had clothes and stuff, nothing of interest, but McWain’s office had been stripped.”

  “No shit!”

  “None whatsoever. The question is of course who did that and, as importantly, why, and that’s your department. Who wanted that geological information he had there? Why was it important? Or worth killing and then breaking and entering to get?”

  I said, “Gotcha. I’m on it. But there’s another way to ask that question.”

  “Which one?”

  “The ‘Who wanted it?’ one. You can want the stuff, or you can want the stuff to go away.”

  “Ah.”

  “So what else can you tell me?”

  Michele hummed into the phone, thinking. “I can give you this: All four men we met at the Sedalia Grill had alibis. Or shall we say, I haven’t been able to bust them yet.”

  “And?”

  “And tell you more?”

  “Yeah!”

  Gilda opened one eye and looked at me. I offered her an apologetic grin and, after a moment, she sighed and turned her back to me.

  Michele said, “Well, I didn’t question them all myself, so what can I say? Ernie Mayhew—the sheriff’s deputy there—he questioned two of them without me present and he came along with me for the other two. That was pretty messy.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, like you told me as we were driving down there yesterday, the place until recently was a very small town. So they all knew each other. Seems all of those men played football together at Castle Rock High, along with Mayhew. It was almost like a social occasion, like, ‘Let’s all humor the female from Utah.’”

  “And you were spoiling their party with the questions you asked.”

  “Precisely. Mayhew as much as suggested that whatever happened to McWain happened in Utah and had nothing to do with anybody in Colorado.”

  “Could be.”

  “And pigs have wings.”

  I asked, “Which ones did you see personally?”

  “Upton and Attabury. The latter was particularly tight with Mayhew.”

  “Wait, of the other two, you say they all were on the team?”

  Michele said, “What? Oh, I get what you’re saying. No, Bart Johnson wasn’t on the team, but his son, Zachary, was. You didn’t meet him. He’s a hapless sort, pours drinks at a place in Sedalia called Bud’s Bar. And so you don’t have to figure out how to ask me, yes, it’s just the two of them—Bart and Zach—out there on that ranch. Mrs. Johnson is dead, and you’ll recall that Bart hasn’t much time left himself, by the looks of him.”

  “Okay. So what’s their beef?”

  “Ah, a cattle ranching joke, huh?”

  I smiled. “Don’t mess with me.”

  “Okay, here’s who those guys were: Attabury, the big one—”

  “Who knows something about flying,” I interjected.

  “He does? Yeah, well, Attabury is a Realtor. I asked him if he sold McWain his ranch, or rather, if he was the broker on that transaction, but he said no, and he seemed grouchy about that.”

  “He’s local?”

  “They all are, like I said. Anyway, uh, let’s see … Upton, the preppie guy with the narrow face and the BMW, he’s a lawyer. Specializes in real-estate law, estates, that kind of stuff. Then there’s Entwhistle. He has the local savings and loan, holds a lot of local mortgages.”

  “Belonging to anybody we know?”

  “I couldn’t find out about McWain’s ranch, whether that was mortgaged or not, but I’m working on it. I had hoped to get those records from his office, but as I said, by the time I got there, they weren’t.”

  “Ah.”

  “The last guy was Bart Johnson. He owns the adjoining ranch to the north.”

  “The one with …”

  “The barking dog. You’ll love this. The dog’s name is Barker.”

  “Perfect. And?”

  “And what?”

  “Gossip?”

  Michele didn’t say anything for a moment. Just when I thought we’d lost the connection, she said, “A woman at the ice cream shop in Sedalia says Attabury and Johnson are involved in a development project called Wildcat Estates, and that McWain is part of a citizens’ group that opposes it. I’ll bet—hey!” She broke off and hollered at someone who was cutting her off in traffic. Then, she said, “So I’ll come over to your house, okay?”

  I looked back into the room. Sleeping Beauty’s eyes were open and she was looking at me. “Fine. Let me give you directions.”

  Michele chuckled. “I know where you live. I’m a cop, remember?”

  “WHAT WAS DR. MCWAIN DOING IN SALT LAKE County?” Michele asked Gilda.

  Michele had asked her this in the car as we drove her to Denver the day before, and Gilda had stonewalled us. Today, she was merely uninformative. “I don’t really know,” she said, infusing her voice with the deep, breathy tone of the tragic heroine.

  Michele decided to be blunt. She said, “You know, Gilda, there’s some mutual back-scratching to be done here. You give me information and I’ll see if I can open doors for you at the morgue. You understand?”

  Gilda put a hand to her heart. “Would you take me there?” she cried.

  Michele raised an eyebrow. “Surely he said something to you. How long he’d be gone, who he’d be with?”

  Gilda turned both palms upward in a poetic gesture of innocence. “He just said, ‘See you in a few. Hold down the fort.’”

  “A few days? A few hours?”

  “You know men.” Gilda sighed. It was quite a performance. She was playing the We-Poor-Girls chip. “Afton was a … a free spirit.”

  That was an image for the ages. Nature Girl meets Free Spirit, coming to a theater near you. I asked, “Was he out here to do geology? I mean, was it a professional trip?”

  “He really didn’t do much of that anymore.”

  “He’d given up geology?”

  “Pretty much.”

  I said, “But when I looked in the windows of his study I saw that he had work spread out. It looked to me like he was working on something.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “He fiddled around a little, I suppose. There’s not much to do on a ranch with no electricity or running water, you know.”

  I suppressed a derisive smile. Sure, nothing to do but water the stock, keep the buildings and fences repaired, cook three meals a day …

  Michele asked, “Did Dr. McWain take any luggage with him when he left home?”

  Gilda waxed prim. She was sitting on the edge of my bed with one leg folded over the other, and she now drew herself up narrow and steepled her fingers over her knee. “Such as?”

  “A suitcase with a change of clothes,” Michele said. She managed to keep her voice even through this ridiculous question.

  Gilda blinked glassily.

  I said, “How about an attaché or a small backpack? Surely he had to carry notes or field gear.”

  Gilda’s eyes widened ever so slightly, but both Michele and I saw it. She said, a bit too emphatically, “Afton never took anything with him, anywhere.”

  “Why?”

  She hesitated, then said daintily, “Afton had taken a vow against consumerism.”

  Michele said, “A vow?”

 
; “Yes. One should not purchase that which is being cast off as waste.”

  “Wow,” I said, “I’d like to see the other nine commandments on that list. So you mean he was into scrounging pens and paper if he needed to write something down.”

  Gilda fluttered her lavish eyelashes and waited for the next question.

  In the afternoon light that was coming in the west windows of my room, I took a good look at her. Yes, there were decided crow’s feet forming around those genteelly made-up eyes, and the skin underneath her jawline was just starting to soften. What did that make her, forty-five? Had she ever actually married, or was she just an itinerant opportunist who moved in with wealthy men to the detriment of their marriages? She couldn’t play that game forever. She must be feeling the need to nail down a nest egg before her flesh descended any further.

  Michele asked, “So does that mean he was into hitching rides the way you do?”

  “Oh, yes,” Gilda said. “In fact, he taught me that ethic.”

  Ethic? This was an ethic?

  Michele said, “So then, is that how he got to Salt Lake County? We’ve checked all the public transit for the past several days and have come up dry. And you say he didn’t own a car.”

  Gilda raised her bird-like shoulders in a tiny shrug. “He hitched a ride, I imagine.”

  “In a truck, like you did?”

  I had to be paying very close attention to catch the everso-slight tensing that whipped through Gilda’s body. How I would have liked to have her wired up to a polygraph machine.

  Michele let silence hang for a full minute. She had seen Gilda’s lapse, too. She asked her question again in two different forms, but Gilda had seen her error in this chess game and had moved her queen back into the defense of her king, whoever that might be now that Afton was dead.

  At length, Michele said, “Why was he dressed the way he was dressed?”

  Gilda countered with, “How exactly was he dressed?”

  While Michele pondered her next move, my mind tumbled down a rabbit hole of speculation. What had someone as vain and arrogant as Afton McWain been doing wearing worn-out clothes? It didn’t jibe with the prosperous Afton I remembered strutting his masculine stuff in the hot springs and lavishing his field trips with top-end foods. Where had his money gone? And what had drawn him away from his professional circle to a run-down ranch?