Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  The baby gurgled conversationally as she bobbed along behind my shoulders.

  “I’m going to take you to just one of the five museums housed in the Center,” I told her. “The Whitney Museum of Western Art. It’s time we started on your cultural education. You just stick with Auntie Emmy. I’ll start you out with some cool cowboys and Indians stuff, like Charlie Russell or my all-time favorite, Frederick Remington.”

  Of course I didn’t expect a seven-month-old baby to know a Remington from a Pokeémon card. My real reason for taking her to the art museum was so that her mother could take a much-needed nap. Her mother was my dear pal Faye Carter Latimer, although Faye didn’t use the Latimer part, out of rage. The baby was Sloane Renee Latimer, the most cheerful half-orphan you’ve ever met. At least, once we got her past the colic she was cheerful. The colic was dreadful. When Sloane Renee screamed, the world stunk.

  I truly hoped that Faye was getting some sleep, because it had been a long drive up from Salt Lake City, and the purpose of her visit was worrying her even worse than it was me. She was supposed to meet with a potential client. I should have been fairly relaxed. I was just along to fill in the cracks between single motherhood and her career. I could kick back and indulge in visiting my favorite museum in the whole world.

  My anxieties stemmed from a variety of stimuli, not least of all was the fight I had just had with Faye. I had left her staring at the wall in our room at the Pawnee Hotel. The Pawnee is a good old girl of a hotel, but many rungs below what Faye was used to on the great ladder of hostelries.

  It had been one of our small but deadly fights.

  “Why didn’t you book us a room at The Irma?” she had inquired, keeping her voice neutral.

  “This was cheaper,” I had replied, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

  She had come back quick and harsh: “Is this some kind of a joke, or are you trying to tell me you think it’s time I began to live within my diminished means?”

  She had given me the opening I had longed for, but I had diverted. “I’ll just take a walk while you get some rest,” I had said. “You’ll want to be fresh for your meeting.”

  “Fine,” she said, making it sound like it wasn’t. “I’m not sure I can sleep in a place like this, but we’ll see if fatigue can prevail where my silver spoon dumped me off.”

  I scrutinized her words as I continued down Sheridan Avenue, now passing various shops that sold Western-wear and Indian trinkets made in China. It had been the most direct communication we had had since before the baby was born, and I tried to tell myself that her efforts to get her business might therefore be a good thing. Perhaps the fresh stress of trying to function in the outside world would pry her out of the brooding silence she had dwelt in since her husband’s death.

  Further down the street, I noticed that I was doing some brooding of my own. It began to hit me that I was at least as tired as Faye. After all, we had gotten up at four and had been on the road since six, and I had done most of the driving. I cast a longing glance at a saddlery, wondering if I’d ever own a horse again. When I inherit the ranch, the first thing I’ll do is buy another horse, I told myself, but the thought brought its usual sadnesses. Life was marching by, and the viability of ranching continued to spiral downward. In the next block, I sniffed at the heady scent of cinnamon rolls that spilled from a cafeé, and wondered if I’d ever have a disposable income again, so I could indulge in the little goodies that somehow make life seem more secure.

  “Do you smell that, Sloane?” I asked the baby. “Just as soon as you grow more teeth, we’ll try some. You’re going to love cinnamon rolls.” I stopped, realizing that I had not had lunch. I knew that I should turn around and make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from my stash of ingredients in Faye’s car, but instead I followed my nose into the cafeé, saying, “But as your mother always says, there’s no better time than the present.”

  The rolls were fresh and sweet, without being cloyingly so, and rich in the spicy liquor that so delightfully oozes from the swirls of that pastry. I shared my prize frugally with the baby, giving her tiny bites and making mine last too, then dawdled over a cup of coffee, relieved at the way the sugar and caffeine revived me. But no matter how slowly I savored the treat, it was too soon gone, and someone else was waiting for the table, so I got up and prepared to leave.

  I was just putting on my mittens to push the door open and leave when I about collided with a man who was just coming in from outside. He had his collar turned up against the cold and his head tucked down, so I didn’t see his face at first, but something about him was instantly familiar: the thickset torso, the wild brush of hair, the humble clothing designed for manual labor. Recognition registered somewhere deep in my gut before it even hit my brain, and when he looked up, ready to dodge me, his eyes widened as he recognized me, too. It was Frank Barnes, my old oilfield boyfriend. I had not seen him since I had moved on to a better job in Denver. How many years had it been?

  I started to step back, unsure of my welcome, but he grinned, so I did, too. “Frank! How are you?” His hair had gone silvery gray. How old was he now? Fifty?

  He clasped my shoulders with his thick, rough hands and stared happily into my eyes, then his gaze slid sideways. As he took in the little creature that was riding papoose on my back, his mouth sagged open in happiness. “Em! You’ve got a … a baby!” His eyes shot next to my left hand, upon which I had already placed a mitten.

  My stomach tightened. “She’s … I’m babysitting for a friend.” Immediately I wished I had lied and claimed her as mine, because Frank had left me for—No, I left him, I asserted to myself—or more precisely, I left town to take that job, and while I was gone, he—but I suppose I was never really going to come back …

  We were being jostled now by other people who were trying to come into the restaurant, so Frank let go of my shoulders and stepped to one side, but his eyes stayed locked on Sloane Renee Latimer. His face had spread into a delighted grin. “She’s beautiful,” he said, offering her a callused finger to grab. He leaned his big face close to hers and said, “You certainly is. Yes, you certainly is.” The baby was totally enthralled by his big, grizzled smile. Her eyes had gone round, and she was giving him her best drop-dead-gorgeous dimpled grin.

  “Yes, she has me wrapped around her littlest finger. This one, right here.” I was relieved for the distraction. It gave me a moment to pick my wits up off the floor. Frank had passed on into the ranks of the Married People, and I was still Single, something of which I was not proud. I was beginning to wince, now that I was almost thirty-nine, when the headlines of supermarket tabloids trumpeted statistics about women who did not marry by thirty, or thirty-five.

  Too quickly, Frank’s gaze shifted back to me. “You’re just leaving. Can you stay? I was just going to grab some …”

  “Ah, sure.”

  Beaming with delight, he led me back toward one of the tables and helped me off with the backpack. He set it down expertly, flipping the bail out to steady it. He held out his hands and she gurgled. He offered me a quick may I? glance and then undid her shoulder harness and lifted her from the backpack.

  She made a sound of glee. Holding her in one arm, he unzipped his jacket with the other hand, spread wide the layers of goose down, and nestled her inside against his flannel shirt. Sloane laid her little heady right down against his neck and patted his chest with one tiny hand. I tried not to sigh audibly as the memory engulfed me of how secure I had always felt there.

  The woman behind the counter boomed, “Hey there, Frank! Who’s your buddy?”

  “Pretty little thing, huh? She’s with my old friend Emmy here.” He carried the baby over to the counter but lifted one finger away from his two-handed cuddle to indicate my presence. To Sloane, he said, “What you having, little one? Some nice salami and Swiss? Cup of coffee? Hm?”

  The woman behind the counter laughed. “Your usual.”

  “Yeah.”

  She reached out and t
ickled the baby by one ear. “That’ll be up in just a few. I’ll call ya.”

  Frank brought Sloane back to the table and sat down. The two of them seemed lost in a lovefest, he kissing and caressing, she settling down and looking drowsy for the first time all day. “What brings you to town?” he asked, his lips lost in the soft down of her hair.

  “I’m just babysitting while the baby’s mother takes care of some business here in Cody.”

  “What kind of business does she do?”

  “Oh, she’s a pilot, and she uses her airplane to transport things that need special or discrete handling. She calls her business, ‘Special Deliveries.”’

  Frank raised an eyebrow.

  I laughed. “It’s nothing too complicated, really. She’s got a potential client here—some old guy who’s a family friend or something—who’s here for some special meeting at the art museum. Bunch of specialists in for some reason. The one Faye’s meeting has some artwork that the museum wants to include in an exhibit. Collectors can be fussy about who handles their treasure, and how it gets where it’s going. Insurance and such. So the idea is that she’ll meet with the guy and the curator, and they’ll see if they can work things out.” I smiled, thinking of the early days I knew Faye. “The fact is that she doesn’t really have a business. It used to be that her biggest problem in life was figuring out how to use her trust fund to dispel boredom. She bought a hot twin-engine plane and got to tooting around with expensive stuff, like jewels. Growing up with the trust fund set, I guess she knew a lot of people who needed things moved on the quiet. It was a good day when it covered her expenses.”

  “But then she became a mother.”

  “Right. Then she got pregnant, and decided that she truly loved the man and wanted to do it by the book, so she married him. Unfortunately, her trust fund turned into a pumpkin the instant she got hitched.” I shook my head. “And like you, I don’t know how well her flying service is going to mix with motherhood. I picked up a pilot’s license myself along the way—”

  “Really?” he said, obviously impressed.

  I was glad I had at least slipped that success into the discussion. “It’s nothing as fancy as Faye has; just the basic single-engine VFR rating—but it taught me that you’ve got to stay sharp and concentrate or you shouldn’t be at the controls. Well, the baby doesn’t seem to need as much sleep as most babies, and when she does konk out, Faye often lies awake.”

  “Sleep deprivation,” Frank mumbled. “Worry.” He grunted empathetically. “Well, Em, you always did get yourself involved in interesting things.”

  I smiled uncomfortably. Yes, Frank knew that I traveled in strange circles, going places and hanging out with people he was unlikely to meet. He had all but never left northwest Wyoming, except to go to Vietnam. Now he was married, and had a son. How old would that child be now? “How’s your wife?” I asked, unerringly coming up with a sure way to jam a wedge into the conversation.

  Frank turned and looked at me squarely, the pleasure in his eyes suddenly extinguished. “She drinks,” he said bluntly. “I’m just in town to attend an Al-Anon meeting.”

  I made a quick study of my boots. “I’m sorry to hear.”

  “Yeah. Well.” Suddenly he laughed, like wasn’t life crazy? “Hey, that’s what I get for foolin’ around. Ya knock the lady up before you know her, and ya take home what ya catch.”

  I gave him an embarrassed grimace. “Tell me about your son.”

  Frank glanced away. “He’s fine,” he said too quickly. “Growing gangbusters. Great kid.” His voice caught. “A couple challenges. School stuff. But what did he expect, with me for his dad?” Fighting his way out of his emotional logjam, he said, “How long you be in town?”

  “Just until tomorrow, I think.”

  “You gotta meet him.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Now his gaze once again dropped to my left hand, from which I had removed the mitten. “You married?” he asked, trying to make it sound like an idle question.

  “No.”

  “Seeing someone?”

  I met his eyes. This was a new Frank, a more blunt and inquiring Frank, not the reclusive soul I had known and had somehow left so long ago. But the turbulence was still there, and the pain, now mixed with new agonies, and the joy his son had brought him. Had all this blown the restraints off his personality? “Yes, I’m seeing someone,” I said, steeling myself for his reaction. “He’s overseas. The Middle East. Military reservist who got called up with this current fracas. You know the pace.”

  Frank gave me a compassionate stare.

  I couldn’t stand his caring. “I’m doing great, Frank. I’ve been working on my Master’s in geology at the University of Utah. I’ve almost got the coursework done.”

  His face brightened. “That’s great, Emmy.”

  “Thanks. I’ve been living at Faye’s so I can help with the baby while I go to school.” Realizing that this sounded pretty shiftless for a person my age, I added, “The baby’s dad was killed, and … I figured she needed a friend.”

  “Killed?”

  I closed my eyes. This wasn’t going well. Each time I tried to divert the focus of the conversation away from myself, I managed to open another door into a room I did not want to enter. “Tom was an FBI agent,” I said, picking the version of the truth that was easiest to say, and easiest to understand. “He was killed in the line of duty.” This wasn’t precisely accurate: It avoided certain facts, such as that with the baby coming, Tom had left the Bureau so that he wouldn’t have to take on risky projects. That there was “just one more job” that he felt he had to do. That I was with him when he died.

  When I opened my eyes, Frank was staring at the baby, his face raw with emotion. He gave Sloane Renee a squeeze, as if she was a life ring cast off a boat in a storm. Kissed her hair. Nuzzled his nose against her scalp. She began to fuss. “Oh, there, there,” he whispered. “There, there. I’m just old Frank. I don’t bite.”

  The woman at the counter called his name, and he handed me the baby while he got his sandwich. Back at the table, he ate quickly, taking in huge bites without tasting his food. The coffee he bolted after adding three little tubs of cream. As he slurped it down, he asked, “Where you staying?”

  “We’re just down at the Pawnee.”

  He nodded. His kind of place, cheap, comfortable, and unpretentious. “I’ll walk you there.”

  I said, “Actually, we’re on our way to the museums.”

  “My truck’s parked halfway down.”

  We loaded up and left the cafeé. I toted the backpack over one shoulder and he carried baby Sloane. A block down the sidewalk, Frank asked, “So your friend has an airplane?”

  “Yes, a twin-engine turboprop job, goes like spit. But it’s just been sitting in a tie-down in Florida, and she wants to bring it home to Utah. She worries about corrosion from the sea air. So if ol’ Mr. Krehbeil has the bucks, I guess she’ll be doing some flying again. Or maybe I hope he says no, and she gets reasonable and sells the plane.”

  Frank stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. “Who’d you say her client is?”

  I spun around and slapped my hands over my face in embarrassment. I couldn’t believe I had spilled the client’s name. What was I thinking, that just because Frank never left Wyoming he wasn’t part of the world? “Oh, nobody,” I said lamely. “Just some old geezer who needs some paintings moved.”

  The look on Frank’s face was scaring me. “You said, ‘Krehbeil.’ It’s not a common name.”

  “Yeah … but you didn’t hear that. She’s supposed to be real discreet about this stuff, you know? Tell me you don’t know him! Oh hell, Frank, I thought he was from back east somewhere. It never occurred to me that he might be from here, and that she might be taking the artwork somewhere else!”

  Frank’s face tightened further. “If he’s any relation to the Krehbeils I’m thinking … well, you don’t want to get mixed up with that bunch, Em.”

&
nbsp; “No, wait! I’m sure he’s from somewhere back east. The contact was some guy Faye knew in college, and this is his dad or something.”

  He shook his head. “You know there’s a lot of fancy people from the East who come out here for the summer, especially that artsy set. The Krehbeils got a hobby ranch outside of town here, up beyond the reservoir.”

  I winced, realizing how thoroughly I had stepped in it. “Old money?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “Yeah, if you mean the guys who have it didn’t make it. Miz Krehbeil was in her eighties, and the place goes back a generation or two.”

  “What do you mean, was in her eighties?”

  Frank looked both ways and lowered his voice before he said, “She died a few months ago.”

  I didn’t understand his clandestine behavior.

  “That’s not unusual for someone in her eighties, is it?”

  Frank had begun to hunch his shoulders like he always did when he was half mad and half worried. “No, but there’s rumors that everything wasn’t quite right.”

  “It must be a different Krehbeil.”

  Frank hugged the baby more tightly with one hand and reached out the other to cup my elbow. “Em, this isn’t good. I know you. You wind up right in the middle of every fight that’s going down. It’s an instinct of yours.”

  Sloane had picked up on the tones of our voices and was beginning to fuss. I reached out and took her into my arms, shaking my head vehemently. “No way, Frank. I was a headstrong little twit when I worked around here, but I’ve grown up a lot, I swear it. Hey, this little baby here has taught me a lot about being responsible and covering my butt. It’s Faye that’s out chasing trouble this time, not me. And the job won’t go through anyway. Even if the old guy does want her to do it, he won’t pay enough to cover the avgas it would take to fly the plane, let alone what it would take to make the plane legal to fly. It has to go through its annual airworthiness check, and there are always expensive repairs, and Faye’s annual FAA flight review to fly commercially is overdue. She’s kidding herself. She doesn’t even have a current medical clearance. Hasn’t flown since she was seven months pregnant.”