“That much food?” Rebecca exclaimed. “That’s a crime.”
“Not yet.” Pete smiled ruefully.
“I bet that ad cost her a pretty penny.” Whit appreciated Jeep’s effort. “She was damned good to us when we fell on hard times. Whatever Jeep wants, the Meadows will pitch in.”
Pete spoke up. “Dad, I bet she’d be happy to hear from you and Mom. I know she and Mags threw this ad together very fast and knowing it reached you two would make it worth the cost.”
“Ninety-six billion pounds.” Whit couldn’t get over it.
“The sight of all that wasted food ought to get people fired up,” Rebecca said as she passed the peas.
It did.
Patrick Wentworth happened to be home when his wife frantically called him into the den.
“Damn her!” he muttered as he watched the images.
His wife remained silent.
Patrick looked for his cellphone, cursing as he rummaged through the den.
Phillipa walked out into the hall, plucked it off the hall table, walked back into the den, and handed it to him.
He snatched it from her hand and dialed his campaign manager and brother.
“Norton, did you see Jeep Reed’s bullshit on Channel Two?”
“No.”
Patrick then went on to explain it as best he could, given his angry state.
“Calm down.”
Patrick fumed. “Calm down. I’ve built my campaign on cleaning up this city, on cleaning up this congressional district. That old rich bitch goes right down to Spring Street where that little faggot was found and asks for food? I’ll kill her.”
Norton replied wryly, “Not a good idea.”
“Don’t get smug, jackass. If I lose, you lose. I really will kill her.”
Watching the ad quite by accident was Michelle Speransky, who was working late at the office. A large computer monitor on her desk was always scrolling the stock market quotes while other windows displayed news sites. She wanted to be up to the minute on what other bank stocks were trading for as well as anything she thought might affect banking in general. Since the market had closed, she watched the local six-thirty news.
She was amazed at the mountains of wasted food. As the message unfolded, she stepped closer to the screen. When the ad closed out, she said out loud, “Wonder what this will really do to those house values?”
It’s one thing to see reportage of yet another disaster in Haiti, quite another thing to see something unsettling in your own backyard.
The appeal for help hit Reno like a bombshell. The website got twenty thousand hits in the hour right after the airing.
Jonas Forloines, the advertising director at CBS, had given Jeep good advice: Find the defining image. She did.
Even Zippy noticed the ad because Howie about fell off his chair when he viewed it.
A small group of people whom those images also affected worked at the topless bar on Fourth Street. Business, tepid at seven, would heat up at ten and stay wild until closing time.
Sitting at the bar, watching the lust of his life, Lark, Teton Benson called the girls over.
The girls watched, a flurry of comments and surprise coming from all of them.
Lark, her arm around Tu’Lia, stomped the floor with one high-heeled foot. “That’s terrible.”
Teton shrugged. “What can we do?”
“You go to the computer and go to the website. That will tell us.” Lark had grown accustomed to giving the besotted ex-addict orders. He was one of those guys in his late thirties who, given a choice, would usually make the wrong one.
Lark was actually helping him.
He’d been in love with her for over a year, finally making progress before last Christmas.
Lark tended to react to everything she encountered with emotion. Only later could she take a step back and think more about it.
The manager of the club let Teton use the computer. When he came out of the office, he told the girls the appeal was to organize a food caravan.
“We can do that.” Tu’Lia said enthusiastically as the others agreed.
It was to be a caravan with unintended consequences.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Friday night, eleven P.M., with a comforter pulled up to her waist and a shawl around her shoulders, Jeep sat in bed reading. Sound asleep in a sheepskin-lined bed was Toothpick. He’d been to the vet, was washed and spruced up. Poor little guy weighed half of a standard Manchester terrier’s eighteen pounds.
He’d slept downstairs his first two nights, but Jeep eventually let the dog follow her to bed.
The vet estimated his age to be two, a bit younger than Baxter. Apart from needing more meat on his bones, the vet was certain Toothpick would bounce back. She told Jeep that this breed of dog usually does not get along with other pets, but Toothpick liked everyone fine, disproving the stereotype.
King sprawled on the rug on the other side of the bed from Toothpick.
Jeep read the same paragraph on page fourteen of Diane Rehm’s Life with Maxie over and over. Her mind kept wandering.
The nightstand supported a stack of books, most of them concerning war through the ages. She placed Life with Maxie, a book about love, atop all those others. She’d delighted in love in her life, she just never thought much about it, hence the decision to read Life with Maxie; love for an animal was easier for her to understand than Romeo and Juliet.
Silver frames on a beautiful, graceful round table by the window caught the thin light from the lamp by the bed. She rose, put her feet in shearling slippers, and walked over to visit those she loved and who loved her who had gone before.
King raised his head off his paws, yawned, and got up to be with her.
She stopped at the table and picked up the frames one by one.
Dot’s big smile looked back at her. She was thirty-two in that photo, in her prime, wearing a stunning Dior gown for the Cattleman’s Ball. Gorgeous Dot did the gown justice. Danny, twenty-four, wearing his Army uniform, smiled at her from his frame. She picked up a photo of her mother and father, longing to once again hear their voices. Relatives, old friends, her copilot, Laura, their arms around each other, a P-47 behind them. Her first horse, Queenie, a quarter horse, who patiently endured her learning to ride as a child. Then the first horse she bought once she made money, Pedro, a sleek, fast animal. Oh, how she loved to fly along with him! She laughed looking at the photo of Thor, her goose who would attack people. She had a photo of the Ford brothers and their wives, the ranch’s original settlers and an old photo of the spread when they started it. Strong people with a dream had made Wings Ranch and made Nevada, too. Last, she ran her forefinger over the top of the frame of King’s grandmother, Nellie Melba, so named since she could sing.
“I loved your grandmother and mother, King. See, you look just like them.” She took a photo of each generation to show the dog, who dutifully put his nose on the glass.
Jeep just as dutifully wiped the moisture off. “King, I never really told the people in my life that I loved them. One didn’t in my day. If you cared for someone, you did for them. It’s all different now. People are more expressive. I try but somehow it doesn’t quite get out of my mouth. The old ways die hard.” Then she looked into his deep brown eyes, “But I always told your grandmother and mother that I loved them.”
“I love you, Mom.” He wagged his tail slightly.
“And I’ve really tried to tell Enrique, Carlotta, the grandchildren. Still, it just doesn’t come easily.” She sat in the chintz-covered deep chair with the big arms. “I can’t sleep.”
“If you can’t, I can’t.”
“I’m tired but I can’t shut off my mind. So many people have called to help and when I checked in with the kids running the website and the little phone bank I set up downtown, I couldn’t believe the responses. We are making our first big run after church on Sunday. Seems appropriate. That’s only one day’s notice but it will help us understand what we have to
do to really organize. Babs, that smarty, has called the city councilmen, the Sheriff’s Department, the Reno Gazette-Journal, the weekly paper, and all the television stations, only to alert them not to direct them. And God bless him, Enrique has organized his old soccer buddies. Mags is working hard, too. My family and my friends have been wonderful.”
“They love you,” King murmured.
Shifting in the chair, she tucked her feet up under her while she gave King the eye not to pick up her shearling slippers. King’s weaknesses for slippers had her buying a pair once a month, sometimes twice.
“You know what else I can’t get out of my mind? Now, King, this is really stupid. Here, I’ve bought the seed for the one thousand acres that will be irrigated. I’ve got to put up new fencing for the red Angus that Enrique is having shipped here, plus I really think I’d better build another good cattle shed. All that. It’s a big project, this feeding idea of mine, but you know what I can’t get out of my mind?” She leaned over a bit to speak directly to her attentive German shepherd mix. “The half silver ingot found on Howie Norris’s ranch. King, that stuff is buried somewhere on that ranch like the old gossips surmised. Where? I know Howie and Ronnie, God rest her soul, looked for it over the decades. But where?”
“Zippy will find it if anyone can.”
She heard the little grunt and leaned over farther to pet the glossy head. “I have got to get to sleep. Maybe if I turn the light out.”
She crawled back into bed, cut the light.
King waited a few minutes, then he jumped up on the bed.
“You’re not supposed to be up here.”
“The next two days will be big days. You need your sleep.”
Jeep, intending to tell King to get off, rolled over, put her arm around the big boy, and fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
As Jeep finally slept, Zippy at Peterson Ranch woke up, lifting her head. She strained, ears forward, hearing the calls of coyote. She thought she heard a car motor cut off in the far distance. Jumping off the bed she hurried to the back door, slipping through the dog door.
Howie and Tito, even awake in their separate rooms, couldn’t have heard the faint motor noise. They might have caught the coyote calls.
Zippy trotted to the first cattle shed, stood still, and listened intently.
One coyote called to another, “Stay out of your den for now. Keep the puppies with you.”
Wisps of clouds high in the sky and brilliant stars presided over a cold high-desert night.
Moving in the direction of the coyote call, Zippy headed toward the ridge where Howie had been shot. As she drew closer she saw out of the corner of her eye the mother coyote playing with her pups on a higher ridge beyond that. From time to time, the slender gray animal looked down to her den.
As Zippy approached the crest of the first ridge, the wind shifted and she caught scent of a human male. Dropping low, she moved quickly, stopping at the crest. To her left, a few feet below the crest, reaching into the coyote den was a man perhaps in his thirties.
Zippy could smell the crepe soles on his boots, soles that wouldn’t leave a track in this terrain unless there happened to be snow. Wearing a short heavy coat and a lumberjack cap, he used a pole with a hook. Whatever he was trying to recover proved difficult. Finally, he snagged a saddlebag, pulling it out.
On his left hip, he wore a revolver with a long barrel. Zippy heard him breathing hard as he fished around for another bag. Finally, he snagged that.
With effort he slung one saddlebag over each shoulder. The heavy contents slowed him as he headed east, sliding down the back side of the second ridge. The mother coyote observed him with as keen an interest as Zippy, who rose to follow him at a distance.
The Australian kelpie, highly intelligent, shadowed him just out of range. Each time he’d stop to take a breath, putting down the heavy saddlebags, she laid down flat, head on her paws. He would have probably missed her in daylight but at night she looked like a small rock outcropping. Zippy marveled that he couldn’t smell her. Humans’ dulled senses never failed to amaze the dog. Much as she loved Howie, she couldn’t believe what he missed about his environment, about other people.
The longer the man carried his bounty, the more exhausted he became, stumbling at times. Finally, reaching the bottom of the second ridge, he sat for about five minutes. On his feet again, he crossed the flatter land to an old Jeep truck that he’d parked off the old access road. No one used that road since no one lived back there. The road occasionally was used by someone from the Bureau of Land Management.
Whoever this man was, he knew his way around. Zippy heard the door of the old truck creak as he opened it. Heaving one saddlebag in at a time, then himself, he slumped over the wheel for a moment. Somewhat restored, he cranked the motor, slowly driving away in the direction of a better unpaved road that would lead to Red Rock Road.
Zippy watched until she heard the wheels crunch as he turned onto the other road. Then she turned and flew back to the den.
She stopped short of the opening for she smelled the coyote and heard her pups.
“That’s mine,” one yelled.
“Prove it,” another little voice yipped.
“That’s enough,” the mother admonished her children.
A silence followed, then the mother wriggled out of the small den opening. “What are you doing here?”
“I heard the truck motor, came out, and found that human taking two bags out of your den.”
“This is the third time he’s been back, the pain in the ass. He was nearly spotted the second time. That’s when he shot at your human, the one you work with.”
“How’z ’at?” Zippy was becoming more and more curious about this.
“Your old man came along unexpectedly. This idiot thought he wasn’t around. He slunk down behind the ridge, made a big circle and then under cover, what cover there is, took a shot. Whenever I smell him, I stay away or he’d likely shoot me, too. He’s obsessed with the junk in here.”
“May I look inside?” Zippy inquired politely.
“Well”—the mother, on her haunches, rose, then turned—“for a minute. The puppies have bones everywhere.”
Zippy squeezed into the den behind her. Once inside, he saw that it was large with tunnels leading to other exits.
“Who are you?” a small, bright-eyed puppy asked.
“Zippy. I live in the ranch house.”
“Well, what are you doing here?” The bold little fellow sniffed the dog.
“Bats, go lie down. We have business.” She then said to Zippy, “I call him Bats because he drives me batty.”
“It’s huge in here.” Zippy marveled.
“The human who made it created rooms. They’re full of these saddlebags and boxes. I can’t move them. They’re very heavy.”
Zippy grabbed the strap of a saddlebag and pulled, only to drop it. “I’ll say.”
“He might get the saddlebags but he’ll never get the boxes out. They’re filled with metal. Why would anyone want metal?”
Zippy shook her head. “I don’t know. Humans desire so many things that aren’t useful. Even Howie—and I love him, I truly do—can get excited about dumb stuff. He’ll open his wife’s jewelry box, pull stuff out and tell me how great it is, how beautiful Ronnie looked wearing it. I mean, you can’t eat it, and it doesn’t keep you warm.”
“Strange animals.”
“Thank you for letting me come inside. Do you think you’ll be safe from that man?” Zippy asked.
“I think so. He smells strong. And like tonight, my friends warned me while the children and I were out not to come back.”
“Heard them. He smells like lemons. Cologne, I guess.”
“Could be worse.” The mother smiled as she walked Zippy to the entrance.
“I’ll bring a bone and put it nearby tomorrow. Thank you again.” Zippy then trotted toward home.
Small stones rolled downward as she descended the lower r
idge. Careful though she was, the freezing and thawing had loosened the rocks.
Zippy thought about what Howie, being a cattleman, had told her. He said that so much commercial feed is loaded with hormones, some even with antibiotics, that it changed the taste of meat and it changed hides. That had occurred to her as she tugged at the old saddlebag. The leather was tough, thick. The bags were made before hormones were introduced into feed. Were they more recent, they would have partially disintegrated.
She understood then that the well-disguised den hid the Garthwaite treasure.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Sunday at one o’clock, sun shining brightly, Jeep, Mags, King, and Baxter turned onto Spring Street. They had left Toothpick at the ranch, fearing he might become upset returning to his former home. Babs’s organizing ability shone as brightly as the sun on a day that felt like true spring. Cars were parked along the curb. People, many coming from church services, unloaded food, clothing, and games for children. Some even unloaded books in case anyone liked to read. All three television stations had newscasters there, as did the daily and weekly papers. The Sheriff’s Department, as well as the sheriff himself, helped.
“That’s interesting,” Mags noted.
“Means our good sheriff talked to city council.”
As Jeep parked, Pete, who’d been watching out for them, left his parents, and sprinted over.
Opening the door, he kissed Mags on the cheek as she disembarked.
“Weak mind, strong back,” he said. “Give me orders.”
Jeep, now outside herself, opened the door for the dogs. “Pete, isn’t this something?”
“Powerful ad.” He kissed Jeep on the cheek. “Powerful lady.”
She smiled. “All I did was give the people of Reno a chance to show their goodness.”
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