When she was done, they were both shivering. “Let’s go outside and try to catch some water,” she said, “then we can build a fire, okay?”
They left the cave and heard a great crashing of water all around them in the darkness. Massive sheets of water came over the cliff tops. Sophia took her empty water bottle and held it in the rimfall. The bottle filled swiftly. She drank half and gave the bottle to Reinhardt, who drank the rest. She refilled the bottle and traded it with the cheap disposable bottles Reinhardt handed to her. Once they filled everything they had, they stood and listened to the immensity of it.
“This rain was foretold,” Reinhardt said. “I promised that man at the gas station that I would remember his warning, but I didn’t.”
Sophia looked at Reinhardt, afraid to answer him and unlock the full story.
After a while, they lit a fire and curled up in the sand to sleep. From time to time, Reinhardt rose and bolted from the cave into the darkness, returning after a few minutes. This happened over and over. Soon he began shivering again and asked if Sophia would get his sleeping bag from the car. He had other useful things there, too. Sophia jogged back to the car with the head lamp, which she kept dark. The rain had stopped, and her motion through the night helped warm her up and dry her off.
She returned with his sleeping bag, a fleece jacket, and an inflatable pad. The small fire had burned down to embers. She helped Reinhardt into the bag and zipped herself into the jacket, keeping the pad for herself.
She tried to sleep, but when it didn’t work, she sat up, listening for intrusions. Reinhardt drifted into an uneasy sleep, like a giant blue caterpillar writhing in the sand. She thought of the Caterpillar from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book she loved as a child. The Caterpillar posed a nagging question that Sophia often thought about: “Who are you?” Alice gave the best of all possible answers: “I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I’ve changed several times since then.”
Day Eight
An extra charge : Plenty of law and order : Staying upwind : Fried chicken and arrowheads : Untröstlich : Into thin air : Patsy Cline : The hermit’s inholding : A black hole
Scissors stood next to a rattling ice freezer outside of a travel oasis dialing a number on his phone. Despite the downpour last night, the pavement was dry, save for a few puddles gathered in the low spots of the concrete. Next to him was the silver Sebring, the wheel wells splattered again in mud, the single spare tire looking like a withered limb.
“Yes?” Frangos answered.
“The local bumblers are out of the picture.”
“But not out of the equation,” she said. “You just moved them to the other side.” Scissors took the phone from his ear, stared at it, then put it back. “This hasn’t been what you might call a surgical operation,” she continued.
“I know it. When I found them, they were tearing up the Antelope Flats site with a backhoe.”
“With a what? Who does that?”
“They aren’t going to do it again—can I back up to what you said before? Did you make a math joke?”
“It wasn’t over your head, was it?”
“Almost, but I think I got it now.” A woman came up to him and motioned to the freezer. Scissors stepped back and waited until she was done and gone. “I staged the situation to come across like our boys got interrupted by some law enforcement and decided to shoot their way out of it. It rained last night. The roads are a nightmare. I don’t think anyone will get out there for a couple of days.”
“I don’t want the details.”
“Okay. I got that. Let me say, though, it’s been impossible to execute a plan with these morons going off script.”
“Do you have my map?” Scissors looked up at the clear sky, then over at a car that was just pulling up for gas. A man and a woman in fresh hiking clothes got out. Before he could answer, Frangos asked, “Who does have it, Nicholas?”
He took a driver’s license from his shorts pocket.
“Somebody named Sophia Shepard. She’s from Princeton, New Jersey. Born in 1991.”
“I will call you back.”
Scissors closed his phone and pocketed the driver’s license. On the ground, by his feet, was a white plastic sack, out of which he removed a Little Debbie lemon pie. He opened the box and slid the pastry out and began eating it as the young couple fueled and cleaned their windshield. Beyond them lay the monument with its buttes and mesas. He thought about what that place looked like close up, and he decided there was a reason nobody lived out there. Those two were on a jaunt, but soon enough they’d be back to—he leaned enough so he could see their license plate—Illinois.
The phone buzzed, and he finished the last two bites of his pie and flicked the crumbs from his fingers before answering.
“That was fast,” he said.
“I’m changing the plan. Bring Sophia Shepard to me.”
Scissors looked at the ground and opened his grocery sack. There were two more pies in there, and a bottle of iced coffee. “Kidnapping is extra.”
“Do you think I’ll shortchange you?”
“I’m a contract man, right? What we’re doing is a contract renegotiation.”
“What are you asking me for?”
“Twenty-five,” he said.
She paused. “Okay.”
“In addition.”
“Wait, what? No. Absolutely not. Twenty.”
Scissors let his arm drop when Frangos began reading him the riot act, and when she finished, he put the phone back to his ear and said, “One thing about free-market types like yourself—you don’t really want freedom for everybody.”
“Fine. Twenty-five.”
“I can’t guarantee a delivery date,” he said.
“Why not?”
“This isn’t factory work. I have to hunt her down.”
“Then I want status reports.”
“That’ll slow things down. I have to drive forever to get cell service.”
“Then you’ll drive forever.”
“Understood.” Scissors looked down into his open bag and pushed it with the tip of his shoe. “I got one more thing,” Scissors said. “There was an unintended amplification with a park ranger.”
“Who was it?”
“A guy named Paul Thrift.”
“He’s a troublemaker. A stunt he pulled in Denver has set me back months.”
“He’s not a troublemaker anymore,” Scissors said.
She paused for a long stretch. “Okay,” she said. “This will raise some red flags, but it is what it is.”
“It couldn’t be helped, but it should look like the two dingdongs did it.”
“This is what you staged?”
“That’s right. The average person is not hard to mystify,” he said.
“Well, that’s that,” she said, then hung up.
He closed the phone, put it in his pocket, picked up his bag, and went inside. There was a teenage girl at the register, looking at her phone. “Excuse me. I need to get a tire replaced. Does anyone around here do that?”
Without looking up, the girl said, “They got people in Fredonia or Colorado City. Take your pick.”
___
Dalton rang the bell at the front desk of the Beehive House, and after a short pause the receptionist stepped out of the break room brushing crumbs from the front of her blouse.
“I’m here to pick up Mrs. Cluff,” Dalton said. He kept one hand on his belt and handed a form to the woman. “We need Raylene to go over some evidence, but we can’t bring it here. Everything’s on the request. I had someone call over last week.”
“Evidence?” the receptionist asked. “Suicide doesn’t usually require evidence. That’s, like, for court, isn’t it? Seeing as how the victim is the perp.”
“Perp?” Dalton asked.
“Don’t you call them that? I’m a big Law and Order fan.”
“Oh,” Dalton said. “Didn’t know they still had that on.”
“You can stream anything now.”
“I get plenty of law and order in my day-to-day.”
“Right?” she laughed.
Dalton smiled, but he felt like he was showing too much teeth, so he relaxed his lips.
“So, you need her on the Sabbath?” the woman asked.
“We do.”
“Okay.” She took the paper, read it, put it into the top of a small desktop scanner and pulled it out of the bottom when it had gone through, then she handed it back. “That stuff they’re saying in the paper? That’s not true, is it?”
“I can’t say anything. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “It’s just got people talking.”
“That’s people for you. You probably know from your show that talk like this can mess up an investigation. I told Forsythe that myself.”
The receptionist picked up the phone and said, “Could you get Mrs. Cluff ready to go outside?”
“I appreciate it,” Dalton said. “We hate to put her through it, but we’re not sure what kind of memories we’re getting from her.”
“People not remembering is our day-to-day,” she said.
Dalton watched an old man through the wire-grill windows behind the desk. He was trying to evade two orderlies in light blue scrubs. The man crept along behind an aluminum walker. The orderlies kept their distance, advancing when he did. “Karl, that’s the puzzle corner. It’s a dead end,” one of them said. Karl looked back, heaved the walker out in front of him, and pulled himself toward it.
“Come on, Karl,” the other said, “you’ll miss American Ninja.”
The receptionist tidied her desk and did a little work at the computer. After a few minutes, she got a quick phone call. “Mrs. Cluff will be out in a minute. You can have a seat if you’d like.”
Dalton folded up his document and slipped it into his back pocket. He sat in an uncomfortable chair and looked around the room. The facility looked like somebody tried to make it nice back in the 1980s, then spent the next thirty-five years scrubbing the color out of it. A wood sign on the other side of the room read I TRY TO SEE THE GOOD IN EVERYBODY, AND I DON’T CARE WHO PEOPLE ARE AS LONG AS THEY’RE THEMSELVES, WHATEVER THAT IS. —DOLLY PARTON. He wondered about the person who thought that was the perfect message for this place. It obviously wasn’t for the residents. Dalton wondered if he tried to see the good in people. He wasn’t sure he did anymore. Mostly he saw behavior. Motive wasn’t relevant. That was for the lawyers.
He heard Raylene before he saw her. “Well, I don’t want to go anywhere. This isn’t North Korea. People are still allowed to choose!”
The orderly set the brake on her wheelchair. “It’s the sheriff, ma’am. We can’t really tell him no.”
“Where is he? I’ll tell him to blow it out his ass.”
Dalton stood and smiled. “I can blow it out my what?”
Raylene stopped trying to escape and sat back in the chair. “Patrick,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you can’t read minds,” she said.
The orderly said she needed to be back by five.
Dalton acknowledged the schedule, then wheeled Raylene down the ramp and helped her climb into the Bronco. She was slow and careful, shunning help at first, but finally giving in after a couple of valiant attempts. When she settled into her seat, she said, “Bruce has a step stool for me. It’s easier to get in that way.”
“He’s a man for all seasons,” Dalton said. “So, did Bruce take you onto the monument much?”
“Wasn’t a monument then.”
“True.”
When she noticed that Dalton wouldn’t accept that answer, she said, “We went out all the time. That place was his first love.”
“Not you?”
“We have different passions.”
Dalton made sure she was buckled in, then he pulled around in a half circle and drove on. “Where did he take you?”
She seemed to be more at ease outside of the facility. “Everywhere,” she said. “When we were young, we went everywhere. A lot of it on horses. It’s a lot nicer than these four-wheelers. What a racket.”
“I don’t like them either.” Dalton was unsure how direct he should be or if that would make her withdraw. If he beat around the bush, she’d think he was up to something. He looked at her with her hands folded on her lap, her head turned to the window. The knowledge that her husband had been murdered ate at his stomach. She didn’t even know that he’d died. Or maybe the memory was somewhere inside of her, overlooked or hiding. He’d been to a training once on dissociation and what to do when people were under extreme stress. He had many blank spots himself, left over from when he was deployed. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. He decided to back off and allow things to come up on their own. “That sure was some storm last night. Did you hear it?”
“Was it monsoons?”
“I think so.”
“I didn’t hear anything. They put us down early.”
“Down, huh?”
“That’s how it feels.”
“We need the water,” he said. “I just wish it didn’t come down all at once.”
“Bruce says water is the master, not the slave.” Raylene took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped the inside of the window in small circular motions.
“My dad used to say that, too.”
“Bruce loves your father dearly. He was brokenhearted when he passed.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“Sometimes when you marry, you have to say goodbye to old friendships, but Bruce and your father didn’t.”
They turned onto Main Street and headed to the south. Because it was tourist season, the roads were busy with people heading in all directions.
“Raylene, my dad used to talk about Bruce’s maps.”
“He made a lot of them a long time ago, before the government got involved in everything.”
“That’s what Dad said. Has anyone besides me been asking about them? NPS folks, BLM, collectors, or anything?”
“Well, he doesn’t talk to anybody about those maps. He says they just want to go out there to loot the place—oh, look. They’re building another motel. All the shit has to go somewhere. I don’t think people consider that.”
“All the shit, indeed.” Dalton laughed.
“We charge them for the food,” she said, “but not for the other part of it.”
“I can honestly say I’ve never thought of it that way.”
“Well you have to, Patrick. People think the mining business will save them, but there’s no market for uranium. And you can’t compete with ranching outfits in Florida or California out here. Tourism is the only business anymore.”
Raylene was nobody’s fool. Dalton didn’t understand how she could pull these facts up in an instant but struggle to recall anything else. Her foul language was also a mystery. His own parents died sick but lucid. He wasn’t sure which was the blessing and which the curse.
They came to a stop, and he watched her glancing around with a half smile on her face. Dalton thought he’d toss something out and see what took. “Raylene, we found some things missing from Bruce’s study.” He had talked to her about this before, and he figured any variations in her answer would give him a better sense of what was going on with her memories. “A lot of his pots were gone. I’m thinking about a specific pot you said was from the Swallow Valley, and he kept a book you called the inventory.”
“How do you know about that?”
“We were talking about it the other day.”
“I don’t know why I would have done that. Bruce doesn’t like me talking about those things. He says bullshit like that just attracts flies. You should ask him.”
Dalton loved talking to this new version of Raylene. “I was hoping to get your help,” he said.
“What could I possibly do?”
Dalton had a deception prepared, and h
e hated himself for it. “Raylene, the library is working on an oral history project, and we’d like to record you talking about some of your favorite places. The library asked for you specifically.”
“Oh,” she said. “I tried to get something like that started years ago, but there was no money for it.”
“Well, I thought we’d go down to that scale model of the monument over at the BLM visitor’s center. We can see if that gets the juices flowing.”
“What’s the BLM got to do with Bruce’s things?”
“The folks putting it together thought we might start there, that’s all. I was looking for a good excuse to bust you out of that jail for a bit.”
Raylene reached across the cab and squeezed Dalton’s wrist. “Those things you’re asking about are gone because Bruce has been putting them back.”
Dalton was still trying to work out what that meant. She had said it before and it sat funny with him the whole time. He had never heard of somebody putting things back on their own. Museums, yes. That was happening more and more, but not for individual people, not without the law telling them they had to. Bruce wasn’t the kind of man to lick anyone’s boots, so why was he doing it? The answer was probably the key to the whole thing, but could he trust her memory of it? He’d have to. “Raylene,” Dalton asked, worried to put it out there, “Bruce put in a lot of years finding that stuff. Why would he start—”
“Bruce says when he’s gone, people will carry everything off to the four corners of the earth. If we had children, maybe he wouldn’t worry. He’d have heirs. But people have been after him to sell, and he hates that.”
This version was different from what she’d said the last time. She said Bruce was worried about the meaning getting lost. The way she’s saying it now, maybe he was worried about somebody coming after him. The radio crackled. “Sheriff, this is dispatch. I’ve got LaRae for you.”
“Go ahead.”
LaRae’s voice came through. “I hate to bother you.”
“You’re okay.”
Picnic in the Ruins Page 24