Cole nodded his head, smiling grimly. Poetic justice, he thought. “How can I help you, Sheriff?”
“Well, I’ll cut to the chase. Two men disappear off your jobsite—two of your own contractors—and you have no idea where they went. And the thing is, your company would’ve owed those two men a lot of money. So, in my line of work, that sort of gives you a motive. ’Specially if they were gonna rat you out for all them drugs you boys were doing.”
Cole’s smile faded, and his lips pursed tightly.
“See,” the sheriff said, “the way I figure it, you boys did something to them two stonemasons. Now, I can’t yet prove that, but here’s the thing: Your old dealer was just found dead in his house. Gunshot, back of the head. Probably pissed off the wrong gang, is my theory. Older fella like that, working alone; he was vulnerable to competition.
“I got any number of people who put you and him together on multiple occasions. Got a waitress, a few building contractors, a gas station attendant. Even some checks written out to him. Gotta say, I wouldn’t a pegged you as an addict, Cole. You wouldn’t probably remember this, but a few years back, when you and your partners were just starting off, you did a fine job for my brother-in-law. Built a little stand-alone coffee shop in a parking lot by the grocery store.”
Cole smiled, remembering that project fondly. How little they’d even known about what they were doing back then.
“Hell, a year ago, I’da thought you were angling for great things. Maybe run for president of the Chamber of Commerce or Board of County Commissioners. But I heard you fell off. Got the junk in your system. Guess that’s why you’re down here.”
He spat into the desert gravel.
“Unless,” he said, staring at Cole, “you’re just hiding out, on the lam.”
Cole remained quiet.
“See, it took us a while to figure out Jerry owned himself an old ranch outside of town. Suppose it was originally his parents’ or somethin’. Lonely place. I took a walk around the perimeter. Thought I might find a grave or two. Never did come across anything like that. Them two men disappeared without a trace.”
The sheriff removed his hat and scratched at his head.
“Christ, it’s hot down here. Anyway, turns out, though, we did find something. Lo and behold, we come across a goddamned good-ole-fashion clue. In a locked-up barn of all places. Now what do you think we found, Cole?”
The two men stared at each other for a few seconds.
Cole took a deep breath. “A pickup truck.”
The sheriff, who must have been prepared for a battle of wits, took a step back then, sizing this fellow he was talking to anew.
Cole shook his head. “Now, I’m going to say two things, Sheriff, before I ask for my attorney,” Cole said, “and I hope like hell you’re listening to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“First, it was me that killed both those men. I was crazy on crystal meth and paranoid as all get-out. I was going days without sleep, hallucinating, the whole thing. Whatever you may think, it wasn’t about money. There was plenty of money to be had. We would have paid those men. Would have happily paid them. But I was a lunatic then. A fuckin’ zombie. And, well, I’m sincerely very sorry about what I done. I truly am.”
He took a deep breath and continued.
“Two, my partners didn’t know nothin’ about any of it. I hid it from them. All of it. They weren’t even at the house with me when I killed both them men or later, when I hid the bodies. Jerry was the one who helped me. So you want to pin it on someone other than me, you can pin it on him, that sumbitch who got me hooked on meth in the first place.
“And now I’d like to speak to my attorney,” Cole said, “if you please.”
He held up his arms for the handcuffs, an expensive watch encircling that right wrist, glinting brightly in the desert sun.
44
Gretchen Connors’s closest existing heirs were a forty-something insurance agent named Blake Connors, a younger cousin on her father’s side, and her mother’s sister, Rosalind. They bounced up the gravel road to the house, Aarav Reddy driving.
“How’s business?” Reddy asked Blake amiably enough.
“Oh, steady,” Blake replied, his eyes scanning the mountainsides to the right of the vehicle. He’d never intended to become an insurance agent but somehow slipped into that life after college, when he realized with a start that he had no entrepreneurial dreams, no skills, and no interest in further schooling. So he returned to his hometown, where his good looks, height, and smile combined with a generational understanding of the town’s dynamics to make him a natural-born salesperson of home, auto, and life insurance policies.
The trouble was, he and Lindsay were still ninety-six grand deep in student loans between them, there was the new three-hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage on their house, two car payments, a new boat, and, of course, their annual spring vacation to Corpus Christi. It all added up. Or didn’t. Between their two jobs there was never anything extra to save—never—and the thing that kept him up at nights was the notion that, as their small town aged, so did his clients. One day soon enough, he worried, that well would run dry.
“I don’t know why she left any of this property to me,” Rosalind groused as Reddy eyeballed her in the rearview mirror. “I’m eighty-six years old in a week. I can’t be bumping up and down these roads.” She ran a pale, blue-veined hand over her wrist, consulting her watch. “I do hope we’ll be back to town before my television program comes on.”
“Not much for the mountains, I take it, Rosalind?” Blake said, turning in his seat to peer at the old woman.
No, indeed. She had no intention of ever living in this ridiculous house Gretchen had left her part of, and was already desperate to return to her condo on Hutchinson Island, Florida, where the vistas to her east were as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, while to the west, that comfortably predictable stretch of strip malls, chain restaurants, car dealerships, and golf courses running all the way to Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. Everything you could possibly want. And not a driveway or sidewalk to shovel ever. Whereas this wild place filled her with an unnameable dread, from the roaring of the river and the clouds scraping the mountaintops, to this godforsaken gravel road, pitted and rutted, it seemed, about every ten feet, which had the effect of making her feel as if they were driving to the end of the earth.
“I do want to see the house, though,” she sighed. “See what all the hullabaloo is about.”
“Yeah, just speaking for myself, it’s awful hard to imagine paying the taxes,” Blake said, shaking his head with exaggerated disbelief. “Especially given how rarely anyone’d even get out to use the place.”
“There is a condition in Gretchen’s will, I should mention,” Reddy said, “whereby all taxes will be paid by the estate for a period of ten years. It certainly was not her intention to bankrupt anyone with the gift of this house.”
“Buddy, I’ve got three kids,” Blake continued. “So, unless we were to just, you know, pick up and relocate . . . I mean, what kind of life would they have back up in here? We’d be like . . . homesteaders or something. The Swiss Family Robinson. Can you imagine all the driving you’d have to do? Into town for every soccer game or church function?” He glanced at his phone. “I mean—look at this, no signal. No signal. I don’t even see any telephone lines. It’s like the Stone Age out here.”
“With all due respect,” the attorney said, “I suspect one reason Gretchen left the house in part to you, Mr. Connors, is because you do have a family. Gretchen loved this land because it was where she spent summers as a kid. I imagine she thought that maybe you and your family might enjoy this land, too, and now, this house, set on it. Even if only as a place to occasionally vacation.”
Rosalind stared at this phony insurance man from the backseat, in which she jostled and shook like the palm trees outside her condo back
home. She found herself agreeing with the sap, even as she recognized in him the same self-loathing, snake-oil salesman streak she’d encountered hundreds of times in her life—from her own insurance man, to start with, to the Realtor she’d worked with down in Florida. That kind of job never ended; that was the thing. Every interaction was a future mark, or prospect, a lead that might open a new door to other leads, like wandering through an infinite mansion, where most of the doors were locked, but behind a very few were rooms of undeniable gain. It had to do something to a person, this kind of endless opportunism, had to rot them from the core on outwards.
She thought with fondness of her own living quarters back home: the small galley kitchen, the one small bedroom, the living room with a little deck overlooking the ocean, and that single tiny bathroom. Not much, maybe, but it was all hers, and she knew her neighbors; knew the deli workers at her local grocery store, who cut and weighed her shaved turkey; and trusted the men who changed the oil on her aged Cadillac. She walked six miles a day on the same stretch of beach, monitoring the delicate nests of the sea turtles and chatting with the same deeply tanned fishermen and beachcombers she saw every day, old men who greeted her kindly behind impenetrable sunglasses, who chatted about the weather around the Marlboros they smoked. And this was all she wanted for however many days she had left on this earth. It was more than enough for her.
Whereas, this place? Who would she even talk to out here? And what if something were to happen to her? The thought of lying helpless on some wet marble bathroom floor, her hip in splinters, her screams booming and echoing in vain around some grandiose house no one needed . . . it was something out of a nightmare. A person might as well just stay quiet under those circumstances and wait for death to come. At least back at her condo the walls were thin enough that her neighbors would eventually come running, and the nearest hospital was all of three miles away. She could practically crawl to it.
“I think,” Reddy said evenly, “you may want to reserve any judgments until you actually see the house. Please—out of respect for Gretchen.”
At the bridge, they finally crossed onto new pavement and a relief settled over them all. The house ahead of them was indeed breathtaking in that morning light, the steam steadily rising up, framing that end of the house and the cliffs. . . .
The attorney helped Rosalind out of the vehicle as courteously as he knew how, and then rather meaningfully begged their pardon to retrieve a house key secreted away some hundred yards from the house. In truth, a copy of the house key dangled off his own keyring, but he wanted to give the heirs time to stand where they were, in that devastating silence, taking in the colors and smells and rarefied light of that place. After five minutes of pretending to look through the grasses and scree, he trotted back to the house, a key held triumphantly in one hand.
“Got it,” he called.
Blake dipped his long, thin, pale fingers into the hot springs as the attorney approached. “I’ve heard some cultures believe hot springs are entrances to hell,” he said. “I don’t know about that, but I did hear a rumor three men died here while it was under construction. Any truth to that?”
“Well,” Reddy began, “one of those deaths you’re referring to did happen here, that’s true. It was a terrible accident.”
“And the other two?” Blake asked.
“Those gentlemen worked on this house,” the attorney said, removing his glasses to breathe condensation on the lenses. “But I couldn’t say for sure exactly where they disappeared to. All of that is still being sorted out by the police. But it really doesn’t concern us here.”
“Sounds like lawyer-speak to me,” Rosalind said.
“Well, would you like to have a look at the house?” the attorney offered. “I know you’re both busy people.”
The attorney unlocked the front door, adjacent to the garage, and guided the old woman into an entryway-mudroom, a long, narrow rectangle of a room with a native stone floor, built-in cubbies for shoes, and a window offering a view up into the mountains. From the mudroom, they followed a hallway at the back of the foundation and garage and up the stairs to the main floor.
“I don’t like all this climbing,” she complained. “And the altitude. Yeesh. I feel a little dizzy.”
“I wonder how much she even had into this place,” Blake said. “Five mil? Ten? Fifteen?”
Reddy ignored him, and when they stood on the main floor and turned toward that bank of windows looking back toward the river and mountains, the attorney was pleased with their reactions. They stood where they were, mouths agape, like two pilgrims visiting a faraway cathedral.
“It is beautiful,” Rosalind whispered. “Like living in a painting. Or looking out of a painting.”
Blake began roaming the floor plan.
“Feels a little cold in here to me,” he complained. “You know? I think I’d feel like I was encased in a crystal or somethin’. Can’t really imagine my kids in this space. I’d be afraid they’d ruin it, for one thing. I mean, everything in here’s painted white and all brand-new. Kids need comfort.”
But it was not just a matter of taste or practicality; in his head, he imagined unlocking the value of the place, paying off all their debts and becoming instantly and unexpectedly free. Were they to set a good price on this rich woman’s folly, they could move to the biggest house back home. Or even to a city with more upside, more opportunities, more glitz. No destination was unthinkable. Their lives would be entirely different and, he could not help thinking, better.
Room to room they wandered, running their hands over the new satin-painted walls and granite counters, and standing before the windows to stare out at the mountains or down at the hot springs. After a half hour, Rosalind returned to Reddy’s side.
“Okay, then,” she said. “I believe I’m ready to go.”
“Me, too,” Blake said. “It’s a beautiful house. No doubt about that.”
Aarav Reddy had known Gretchen since graduating from law school. Though they worked at separate firms and in separate areas of practice, Gretchen often sent him referrals because, as he remembered her often writing in emails, “Aarav is not only diligent and talented, he represents his clients with dignity, compassion, and a true understanding of their final intentions. . . . ” He thought about her then and realized he knew very little about her, save for the fact that she was the most responsive attorney he had ever dealt with, returning emails efficiently in completely transparent and readable messages. And when it was needed, she often called him, if for only a matter of minutes, to iron out some detail or to confirm that her clients had managed to get in contact with him. In their final meeting together, he had asked her about the wisdom of leaving something as personal as a house like this to these two heirs, but she’d insisted.
“This land is sacred to me, Aarav,” she had said, “and to my family, and I just know that once they see the house and the springs, they’ll want to preserve it, too. I’m sure of it.”
“What about your aunt?” Reddy pressed. “Isn’t she a little old to make this kind of move? To such a remote house? Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”
“If Rosalind isn’t interested, then Blake will be, I know it. He’s got a young family, and I know this place will resonate with him. The hot springs, the hiking, the skiing. Can you imagine, Aarav? Having exclusive access to something like this? It’s the very definition of priceless.”
Gretchen’s health was clearly failing during that final face-to-face meeting. She seemed to have been whittled away, her arms and legs painfully thin, her once red hair streaked with so much more gray, her skin taking on a pale, yellowish cast. Still, she was as animated as ever when she talked about the house.
Aarav locked the door and turned, somewhat defeatedly, to leave. He stood now, holding a gleaming, polished wood box in his hands.
“There is one final thing,” Aarav said, “Gretchen asked to hav
e her ashes spread here. Would either of the two of you care to . . .” Aarav’s voice trailed off.
Neither Blake nor Rosalind stepped forward, so it was Aarav who quickly gauged the direction of the light wind before opening the box’s lid and shaking Gretchen’s ashes out and into the hot springs.
Then they stood quietly for several moments, watching as the ashes drifted down into the pool. Blake and Rosalind were polite but it was clear that both parties wanted to sell the house, and that was that.
By and by they slowly walked down the driveway to Aarav’s vehicle, making the trip back to Jackson without so much as a single word.
45
A month later, Loney Wilkins sat at his kitchen table eating oatmeal with blueberries as he absent-mindedly pored over the Jackson Hole News & Guide.
“Mornin’, hon,” his wife said, pecking him on the top of his head.
“Mornin’,” he said.
“Where you off to today?”
He checked his watch, wiped his mustache, and stretched his arms over his head. “I don’t know yet, but I’m glad you asked.”
“You are?” she said, smiling.
Loney and Eula had been married almost forty years, and there were few occasions left where he might surprise her, but this perhaps was one; he saw something in her eyes like delight.
“Care to take a ride with me today?” he asked, pushing back from the table.
She kissed him lightly on the lips and then rose to pour herself a cup of coffee.
“Well, I had planned on some grocery shopping, and maybe to swing by church, but . . .”
“Oh, all that can wait,” he said, waving off her excuses. “Come on now, it’s a beautiful day.”
“All right,” she agreed. “I’ll pack us a picnic.”
The work was part-time but kept him busy, and the real estate company didn’t trouble him much. Report to the office each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. Collect a list of addresses in need of for sale signs, and another list indicating where to pick up signs from properties successfully sold. Thirty hours a week, no benefits. But the company covered his oil changes and mileage, they never quibbled about his hours, and the pay wasn’t half bad. Fifty-nine years old, Loney knew his options were limited. Ranching hadn’t been for him, and he wasn’t much for the new tourism in town; couldn’t imagine working at a ski resort or helping a bunch of flatlanders up into the saddle of some nag. No, this work suited him fine. Left him to drive around in his truck with his books-on-tape, his Garcia y Vega cigars, and a handy gazetteer for finding those out-of-the-way places.
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