“I’ll hold my breath so I don’t disturb any dust or anything.”
“Clare,” Jodie said.
Omar put his hand on Jodie’s arm. “She can’t come into the building, but once we make sure all is clear, she can come into the walkway, right?”
Jodie blinked and frowned at her partner. “If we make sure it’s clear, then maybe.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I started walking toward Main Street before Jodie changed her mind.
At the bus stop sign and the overgrown vines, Jodie instructed me to wait until she and Omar could investigate. They tore the vines away and went through carefully, in cop mode, with their guns drawn but held low. I thought they were far more terrifying than Brian O’Malley had been. It seemed to take a long time, but I didn’t even peek into the space as I waited. They’d intimidated me well. No passersby seemed to have any idea what was going on, and only one bus stopped. The driver opened the door and looked at me expectantly. I told him thanks and waved him on.
“All right, Clare, we’ve cleared the walkway and the building. I’m not sure what you’re so curious about, but go on back. Jodie’s there. I’m going to stay out here while you take a look,” Omar said as he came through the opening, his gun safely holstered now.
“Thanks,” I said as I walked past him.
The slight jog to the right kept Jodie hidden from me for a couple of steps, but a second later I saw the full expanse of the walkway and where she was in it.
She’d crouched and was looking at something on the ground, next to the building.
“Clare, step back. Get Omar back here again,” she said without fully turning in my direction.
I did as she asked and then stayed close by Omar as he hurried to join her.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Look there. I think the techs missed something.” She pointed.
We were on The Rescued Word side, in between our back door and the empty store’s, which was currently wide open. Briefly, I wondered if it had been opened by Jodie and Omar or if they’d found it that way, but now wasn’t the time to ask. There was something much more interesting to see.
“Is that a license plate?” Omar said as he got a little closer to where Jodie was pointing.
“Looks like it. A motorcycle plate,” she said.
Omar took a couple pictures on his phone of the plate in its location before Jodie, with gloved hands, lifted it from the short tangle of weeds it had been mostly hidden in.
“Wyoming,” she said.
The plate had only four numbers, and the word “Wyoming” was set along the bottom. The background picture was of one of the state’s better-known natural features, Devils Tower, a circular butte in the land that had been a landmark throughout history but was famous for being the spot where Richard Dreyfuss met the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Jimmy and his friends had climbed it back when they were in high school.
“And a relatively new one at that.” Omar pointed at the year that was imprinted on one side. “They kept their registration up. The tags are current.”
“Well, this should help us find someone to talk to,” Jodie said. She looked back over her shoulder up at me. “At least someone who isn’t you.”
“Good news for me,” I said.
“Very,” Omar agreed.
16
A date for the evening with a geologist and his geode became solidified with one quick phone call. The day was pretty well shot when it came to getting any real work done, so I locked the front door one final time and decided to call on an old friend before I got ready for the date. Well, one of Chester’s old friends, technically.
I knew exactly where Homer Mayfair lived, if he was still alive, and I was pretty sure he was. I had a distinct memory of Chester taking me to his place when I was a teenager. Homer had three big scrapbooklike volumes of old newspapers, and he wondered if Chester would come out and see if there was any way to bring the paper and ink back to its former glory. Chester had told him over the phone that restoring newspaper wasn’t like restoring old books, that microfiche had been made to save the newspaper stories, but Homer still asked Chester to come out and look at the items himself. I went along so I could learn how to gently tell a potential customer that there wasn’t anything we could do for them.
I also remembered that there had been a moment of animosity between the two of them, though I couldn’t remember the exact details. Homer became suddenly upset with Chester about something, but they both ended up almost joking about it. Though the memories weren’t clear, I didn’t want to bother Chester or let him know what I was doing. If the moment was right, I’d ask Homer.
I made the short hike back up to my house and hurried in for the keys to my car. I did a quick search for the cards I’d written the goat relocation names on but couldn’t immediately find them. I’d have to search later.
Homer lived in Purple Springs Valley—well, along the perimeter of the valley, up the side a bit, opposite the monastery, and neatly hidden by a curtain of aspens. If he’d wanted, he could have observed the goat relocation activity from his front porch, and no one would have noticed him watching through the trees.
He’d been one of the first people to build a home in Purple Springs Valley. One of the attractive features of Star City is that even though it’s small, it has almost everything anyone would need. You could travel over a short mountain pass or around a mountain slope and build your house out in the woods, get away from it all but be back in the middle of it all in only a few minutes. If Star City didn’t have what you needed, you could drive thirty more minutes and be in Salt Lake City. If you couldn’t find what you were looking for in Salt Lake, then you truly didn’t need it.
When Homer built his home on the edge of the valley, he probably thought he would be out there on his own forever. Even though it was Utah, no one could have predicted that a polygamist family would have dared be so bold as to settle so close to the town that was “in Utah but not of Utah.” Over the years, a few other houses sprung up along the treeless valley floor as well as amidst the white-trunked aspens along the upward-sloping perimeter. There were even a few houses higher up, mostly hidden by the tall evergreen pines. It was always cold inside the tree line. Even though Homer’s abnormally wide log house wasn’t up far from the valley, I rubbed my arms from the chill before I knocked on the front door.
I’d come the same way Jodie and I had, but there were no motorcycles, no riders, no trucks, and, I assumed, no more goats in the valley. If the project had caused any damage to the land, it had sprung back quickly with wildflowers and tall grasses upright and filling the open spaces.
To the side of the house and back a little was an empty old barn and corral. I hadn’t remembered the barn and corral from my last visit, and I hadn’t noticed it until I got out of my car on this trip. The barn might have been painted at one time, but it was now just old splintered wood that looked to be one heavy snowfall away from collapsing. The only animal in sight was an old black Lab that had laboriously lifted himself up from his resting position next to the porch to greet me.
It seemed like there were no people anywhere. There were no cars. The dog looked old but well taken care of.
“Hey, boy,” I said as I held my fingers down so he could sniff me. “Not of the guard dog variety, huh?”
His tail wagged.
The front door of the house opened before I expected it to, a small slit at first, but then wide.
“Help you?” Homer said from the doorway. He was old, but that wasn’t a surprise. He’d been old when I was a teenager. He was older than Chester but I wasn’t sure by how much, small with deeply sunken wrinkled cheeks and only a few wisps of hair on his head. He wore a white sweatshirt and faded jeans. Winter attire on a summer mountain day. I resisted looking down to see if he still had the peg leg sticking out from the bottom of his jeans.
“Hi, I’m Clare Henry. I work with my grandfather, Chester, at The Rescued Word in Star City. May I come in?” I said.
“I know who you are. I know who your grandfather is too. You figure out a way to fix my newspapers?”
I was impressed that he remembered. “I’m afraid not. I have a few questions about your newspaper days though.”
“Really? Well, come on in, then.”
Homer stepped back and then disappeared somewhere inside. I heard the knock of the tip of his leg on the wooden floor, but I’d lost sight of him by the time the dog and I entered the house.
“Homer?” I’d said as the dog and I moved past a dark front room, blinds over all the windows shut tight, and then down what seemed like the main hallway.
“Back here. Come on. Be careful. I have some junk I need to get rid of,” Homer called from somewhere down the hallway. I hoped a wardrobe wouldn’t be waiting for me at the other end, beckoning me to come inside, but the house most definitely felt secretive and shut off from the rest of the world. A scent of old long-ago-read ink and dust filled the air. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, but it made me want to clean, and very few things had that effect on me.
When we came to a fork the dog took over, veering right. He looked over his shoulder so I obediently followed.
I wondered what the floor plan of the house had been titled. “Maze” came to mind. I passed two shut doors, one on my right and one on my left, before I came to an open door. Light blazed out into the hallway from inside, and I took two quick steps to reach the hopefully safe oasis.
“Come on over and have a seat.” Homer signaled.
I’d seen messy. I’d seen piles and stacks of stuff. Chester’s precarious book piles had always been a part of my life. I’d seen cramped rooms. But I had never seen anything like the room that Homer Mayfair’s dog and I walked into. It was a big room, probably almost the size of The Rescued Word’s retail space. I was reminded of a cave my parents had taken my brother and me to when we were little. The cave was full of stalactites and stalagmites. Earth formations protruding out from both the floor and the ceiling. There were so many varying-sized stacks of things in Homer’s room that I wished I’d remembered which ones—stalactites or stalagmites—had been the formations jutting up from the cave’s floor. Whichever it was, Homer’s office was so plentiful with them that between the mess and the closed-tight windows, an immediate sense of claustrophobia came over me.
The stacks weren’t made of earthy things though; they were made of newspapers, books, boxes, and pieces of paper. Homer’s desk was at the far end of the room, and the top of it was no less messy than the rest of the space, though the stacks were shorter. As he sat, I noticed an old fireplace behind him that looked like it hadn’t been used in some time. I decided that was a good thing. There was so much paper in the room that one tiny stray spark would quickly set the whole house ablaze, maybe the whole valley.
The dog at my heel, I wove my way carefully to a seat across from Homer. I didn’t trust myself to roam freely without toppling something, so I was glad to be seated. The dog had handled the journey like a pro, not tipping even one stack. Granted, he’d probably done the walk a thousand times, but I was still impressed. I patted his side as he sat at my feet.
After I sat down, a low bench behind Homer and to the right of the fireplace came into view. Lined up along the top of the bench was a row of old typewriters. None of them looked familiar, but there was an old No. 5 in the group, though it was in terrible shape.
“How’s your grandfather, Clare? He doing okay?” Homer asked, interrupting my typewriter perusal.
“He’s doing very well, thanks. He stays busy.”
“He knows the store will be in good hands when he kicks the bucket.”
I smiled. It was a reality, I supposed, but not one I liked to discuss.
“So, what can I do for you?” he asked.
Homer’s forearms were on his desk, his fingers entwined. He wasn’t tall and his pose made him seem extra short, as if he was a kid peering over a candy counter, but a kid with an old face.
His brown eyes were bright with curiosity and intelligence, but though he’d welcomed me inside, I didn’t see much kindness in his expression. I saw impatience.
“I was wondering about your typewriters.” I nodded toward the bench.
“You were?” He looked over his shoulder at them. “You need something to fix?”
“No, actually we’re pretty busy.”
“So, what, then?”
“Back in your newspaper days, do you remember selling some typewriters?”
“Of course. We sold them all the time. We’d get new ones and have to do something with the old ones.”
“Do you remember selling one to Mirabelle Montgomery?”
Homer’s eyes actually lit brighter as he sat up straighter. “I’m sure I remember selling one or maybe even two to her. She used to write those dirty stories.” He laughed. “Oh, I so loved to read her stories. My colleagues did as well, but none of us could ever admit it because we were serious journalists, after all, no time for frivolous fiction. Wasn’t that silly? Mirabelle’s stories would be tame compared to some television commercials today let alone some books that are being written. Let me think. Oh, yes, she wrote a story about a sheik and his harem. She had a talent for describing what was going on behind their tent bedroom walls without ever giving the specifics. Gracious, she was a pro at it. She might still be.” He laughed again, the impatience gone. “Yes, I’m certain I sold her at least one typewriter.”
I smiled. “I just fixed one and she’s kept it in great condition. She still writes letters to her grandchildren on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still writes fiction too, but she says she doesn’t.”
“That’s a shame. She had a real talent, but perhaps not a good fit for this time period.” He shrugged.
“Well, I liked her typewriter so much that I was wondering if you had any more like it. Chester and I have talked about putting up a display in the store with some antique typewriters, and I thought I’d see if you had more and if they were for sale.”
As much sense as that might have made, it was a complete lie. In fact, Chester and I had once had a typewriter display, but every time we put a new typewriter out someone came in and wanted to buy it. Chester could never tell them no, so our display was always unfinished.
“Oh, well, let me think.” Homer sat back in the old squeaky chair. “Best guess is that I sold her an Underwood No. 5, but I can’t be totally sure. We sure went through a lot of them.”
“Oh, yes, that’s the one,” I said
“I have one over there,” he said. “But it’s in terrible condition. You wouldn’t want it. What was wrong with Mirabelle’s?”
“The ‘L.’ It was an easy fix.”
“Excellent, so she’s got it back, then? It’s working?”
There was nothing strange in his tone, nothing to make me think he was fishing as to the whereabouts of the typewriter. But I didn’t want him to know it was at her house. I might be paranoid, but I didn’t want anyone to know it was there.
“No, actually, the police took it.”
“The police? I don’t understand. Why?” he asked.
“Did you hear about the murder downtown?”
“No,” he said, and it sounded genuine. “You might find this hard to believe coming from an old newspaperman, but I don’t pay much attention to the news anymore. It’s either too awful to digest or in the case of the paper too loaded with error. It drives me batty wondering what happened to all the editing practices I put into place. Anyway”—he waved away his complaints—“no, what murder? Who was killed?”
“I don’t know, but the man who was killed had come into The Rescued Word asking specifically about Mirabelle’s typewriter. The next day his body was found in the walkway behind
Bygone.”
“That’s terrible. And strange. What would he have wanted with Mirabelle’s typewriter?”
“That’s also why I’m here. I wondered if you might know.”
“No idea.” He shook his head slowly, but I saw something else there. Or I thought I did.
Was I imagining that Homer was trying very hard not to show me that he did know why Mirabelle’s typewriter was wanted by a man who had ultimately been murdered? I thought I saw forced control in the push of his fingertips that were now on the on the top of his desk and the small catch in his breathing, as if his throat had tightened up but he was trying to will it loose without me noticing.
“Is it worth a lot of money?” he asked casually but with some of that tightness in his voice.
“Maybe a couple hundred dollars, at most,” I said.
“Then I have no idea,” he said, his eyes locked onto mine.
Were we playing chicken?
I nodded but didn’t break eye contact. “Homer, how’re your kids? Don’t you have a couple? And your grandkids?”
The transition was awkward at best, but he didn’t seem to notice. In fact, he seemed relieved to change the subject.
“Sure, two boys and a girl in Salt Lake City. Their kids are your age or older. Out of school, trying to make a life.”
“Are their kids in Salt Lake too?”
“Some are. A couple are south in St. George, and one granddaughter moved to Alabama. Why?”
“Just curious. I hope everyone is well.” When the silence continued two long beats, I asked, “Do you mind if I look at those typewriters?”
“Of course not. Make yourself at home.”
I inspected him to see if there was any hesitation, but there was only sincerity in his offer.
There was no polite way to ask him to leave his own office, but I wished there were. Or that he’d leave on his own, maybe offer to go get us some coffee or cold drinks. But he didn’t leave or offer anything. He remained in his chair, turning it so he could observe me as he rested his chin on his tented fingers.
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