Death Pans Out

by Ashna Graves

  Pleased to have taken care of this interesting errand efficiently, quite apart from whether it made sense, Neva filled her water bottle, laced the binoculars and lunch bag onto her belt, and set out walking, driving her body hard. She reached the highest point on the ridge in record time. Flowers were at their peak up here now. Mariposa lilies on slender stalks shimmying with every breeze, desert parsley, blue delphiniums, red paintbrush, and others she couldn’t name. So many bees worked over the flowers that she could feel their humming on her skin. The land was full and busy even though empty of people other than herself. Full of fierce joy that welled up despite the tragedy at the Barlow Mine, she walked with her shirt off and her shorts rolled to the tops of her thighs. Striding along the ridge road, singing until her throat was dry, she did not start down until the sun was below the horizon and soft shadows smudged the foothills.

  It was the latest she had stayed on the ridge apart from the involuntary evening with Reese, but she wanted to see the whole panorama washed in sunset gold as she descended. She was strong and fast enough now to get back to the cabin before it was fully dark. Confident and solid on her feet, she bounded downhill with Juju dashing ahead and even yelping with excitement at the unusual speed.

  The air grew cooler as the evening advanced. Wearing her shirt again, Neva jogged the last mile out of pure pleasure in the energy that still drove her despite the rugged five-hour hike. She was following a different path than she’d used before, which brought her out of the woods a bit west of the cabin, onto the lane. She stepped out of the trees, glanced up the track toward Billie Creek Road, and stopped in astonishment.

  “You’re a goddamn nuisance, Walkie-Talkie!” Skipper roared, and brought his quad to a stop in front of her. “You’re late. You always come down about seven o’clock and it’s damn near nine. I’ve been out looking for you. It’s a good thing you’re not my kid or I’d tan your butt.”

  “It’s a good thing I’m not your kid or you’d have a coronary worrying about me for no good reason.”

  They eyed each other in the twilight, fiercely, playfully, then whooped with laughter, triggering a barking duet by the dogs. Soon they were settled on the porch with mugs of miso and chocolate chip cookies that Skipper had baked in his little camper oven.

  “Now, here’s the deal, W.T.,” he said, wasting no time on chitchat. “I’ve been thinking, and I’ve changed my mind. There’s no point fighting the Forest Service. It’s time you cleared out of here and went back to town like a good girl.”

  Just able to see him in the lantern light that shone through the window, Neva studied the craggy, cagey face. When he left the creek a few days ago, he had been ready to fight the Feds on her behalf, possibly even with fists, if necessary. Such an about-face could have been triggered only by news of the murder. Despite feeling grateful for his concern, she could not help teasing. “I suppose you’re right. The government knows what it’s doing, and it’s not for people like us to question the rules. I’d hate to be a nuisance to those busy rangers.”

  The response was so satisfying it was difficult not to laugh but Neva managed to keep her expression serious as Skipper slammed his cup down on the porch railing and exploded, “Nuisance my ass. You know damn well that’s not what I’m saying. I just think it’s time to let the dust settle, you know what I mean?”

  “No,” she said with feigned innocence. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I thought you were an intelligent person. Do I have to spell it out? Okay then, here it is. You have a man dead, you have a man arrested for murder, you have a bad situation. It’s no place to be.”

  “Sheriff McCarty was here this morning. He didn’t seem to think there was any problem for me. He believes it was personal.”

  “It usually is when you kill somebody. Doesn’t mean that’s the end of it.”

  “I’ve rented out my house in Willamette for the summer so I can’t go home before September, Skipper. Anyway, I’m not finished here, and I’ve never felt safer anywhere in my life. It’s incredibly sad and bizarre, but it doesn’t involve me.”

  And so it went, back and forth, until Neva said she had to eat something more substantial than miso and cookies, and could he manage a bowl of canned black beans with hot sauce and olives? No, he said, he’d eaten a steak at the Angus Café and it was past his bedtime, but please to sleep on what he’d said and they’d decide in the morning.

  “Remember,” he said as he stood up to leave, “today’s the first day of the rest of your life. I read it on a bumper sticker on an old VW bus over at Sumpter, parked since I don’t know when, probably since the last hippie lived in it. Think about it. How many days do you want the rest of your life to be?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  He sat on the usual rock and rested his elbows on his knees to steady the binoculars. She was moving fast today, almost bounding uphill like she was running away from something.

  Well, he couldn’t blame her. If she had any sense, she’d keep on walking and never come back to the canyon. He’d miss her for a few days and then it would all be over anyway.

  The flowers were thick up there now. She stood in the middle of a bunch of white ones with her arms spread, her back to him. He focused on her shorts, which were rolled to the tops of her thighs.

  She squatted, almost disappearing into the flowers. She wasn’t going to pee! He flushed, lowered the glasses, raised them again and saw that she was moving out of the flowers. Strange woman, kind of like a kid. Did she expect to find her uncle’s remains? That’s what they were saying down at the café. And his gold, too.

  Well, she wouldn’t find any remains, and no gold either. The gold at Billie Creek didn’t come out of the ground.

  A sudden snort of laughter.

  It really was comic, in a way…His hands trembled and he lowered the glasses, set them on the ground, wiped his face with a rag from his back pocket. He wasn’t well these days, he was losing weight, but no one cared. They never had cared. And now there was the kid to worry about. They never should have bothered with the stupid kid. He said so at the time, but they didn’t listen to him.

  He grabbed up the binoculars, swept the side of the ridge, failed to find her, cursed under his breath, scanned the full expanse again, more slowly this time, and locked onto a figure silhouetted on top of a rock to the west of the summit—what was she doing?

  Dancing!

  The crazy woman was dancing up there, her arms flying and her feet kicking high.

  Again he let out a single snort, then leaned forward involuntarily, as though to get closer, realized what he had done and sat up straight with a jerk that threw his cap off.

  Holding the glasses with one hand, he groped on the ground behind him, feeling, leaning, keeping her in view, ah, he had the hat—she jumped from the rock out of sight and was gone, disappeared over the rim of the ridge.

  He lowered the glasses, replaced his cap, breathed deeply with his hands gripping his thighs. Just a few more days, a week maybe, it’s all they needed. He hadn’t told on her yet but it wasn’t looking good. Why had she come now, after all these years, a crazy woman walking everywhere, nosing into everything, causing trouble, half naked…He stood up, crammed the binoculars into the case without bothering about the dangling strap, and went back to work.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As promised, Skipper showed up for a summit conference in the morning and the upshot was that Neva refused to leave Billie Creek and therefore he said he was going to stick around to keep an eye on things. But first, he said, he had to go over to Idaho for two days to take care of some business and then he’d be back for the rest of the summer or until she had the sense to clear out.

  “You can’t change your plans because of me,” she protested, and almost added that people simply don’t do such things, particularly for someone they’ve known for less than two weeks, but his earnest expression checked her words.

  “One thing about being retired, I can do whatever I damn well
want with my time,” he growled. “I suppose you can take care of yourself for two days? I’d leave Cayuse but he goes crazy if I take off without him. That little excuse for a dog you’ve got there won’t be any help, so behave yourself, you hear me?”

  Skipper’s dust had barely settled on the road before Neva, too, headed down the mountain. Clouds had drifted in from the west and the air was heavy by the time she pulled into Elkhorn. She parked by the soda fountain and went in for two scoops of butter-brickle on a waffle cone. Licking ice cream, she drove one-handed to the library where she left the car windows down a few inches for Juju. She sat on a bench to finish the cone, then went into the library, requested a computer station, pulled up her email, and scrolled down to the reply from the Kalispell library.

  “Dear Ms. Leopold, I’m sorry it has taken a few days to get the information you wanted, but it was a challenge to track down. Still, it kept us entertained for a while. The person of interest, Enid Gale, is still living but she moved away from Kalispell ten years ago. She is now in the town of Hatlee, Oregon, which, according to the map, isn’t far from Elkhorn. I thought you might be interested in the following small news item that appeared in the Kalispell Daily Inter Lake a few months before she left for Hatlee. Under the headline ‘Artist blames glue,’ was this: During a tea reception for her latest show, long-time Kalispell collage artist Enid Gale fainted to unconsciousness but was luckily seated at the time and escaped serious injury. The unfortunate episode occurred Friday in the activity room of the Kalispell Senior Center, where the exhibition is on display through the remainder of the month. Gale was revived through the efforts of friends before the arrival of an ambulance summoned by Senior Center staff. Refusing to go in the ambulance, she was driven home by Dial-a-Bus and is reportedly doing well despite the episode. She told a reporter who called to enquire after her condition that this had never happened to her before and she didn’t know why she passed out. ‘Maybe it’s that new glue I’ve been using,’ she said, assuring this reporter that she would henceforth refrain from it.’”

  Neva could not help smiling at the quaintness of the report, which shifted her mental image of Enid Gale away from the robust, striding figure that Gene had described to an elderly, fainting artist. No matter. She was a member of her uncle’s generation, not a relative youngster like Gene, and if any living person could tell her what kind of person Matthew Burt had been, it would be Enid Gale. Her own suspicions of a romantic link between Enid and her uncle had, it seemed, been mistaken, but the two must have been good friends to share the cabin for several years. Maybe this was even better than sweethearts because it meant that no disappointment or bitterness would be likely to color Enid’s memories.

  Neva printed the message, sent a grateful reply, and then sought an atlas. Located on Interstate 84 south of Elkhorn, Hatlee looked like a mere crossroads rather than a town. The postmistress surely would know where to find Enid, and if the town lacked a post office, she would knock on doors.

  Her plan to head for the jail next was sidetracked by Juju, who made it clear that she was tired of sitting in a hot car. Neva dug a length of laundry cord from the trunk, fixed one end around Juju’s neck, and set off through the old residential neighborhood adjacent to downtown. The architecture was just the sort she liked, the houses close-set, each one different from the last, with porches, gables, and bay windows.

  They had walked for about six blocks when large drops began splatting onto the sidewalk, filling the air with the dusty metallic smell of summer rain. Neva sheltered under a tree, debating whether to turn around, but a large open area at the end of the street drew her despite the shower, and by the time she reached what she had guessed correctly to be a cemetery, the little storm was spent. Seeing no one else about, she let Juju off the leash, and then located the old section of the graveyard, where darkly weathered angels, crosses and cherubs crowded together. It was easy, as usual, to find family plots with a patriarch and multiple wives, at least one of whom had died in her twenties and lay buried next to a tiny cross for the newborn who had died with her. Why she was drawn to these mournful testimonials to women’s vulnerability Neva didn’t know, but she sat for some time on a stone bench musing over the revolutionary power of easy birth control, sanitation, and antibiotics.

  Juju had disappeared but the little dog was too sensible to get into trouble, and would turn up soon, no doubt. Sure enough, Neva soon found her in the newer section of the cemetery where headstones gave way to simple markers flush with the lawn. The little dog was scratching at the ground where a new grave was being dug, or had at least been marked out by the removal of grass sod that exposed what appeared to be solid rock, a good challenge even for the small backhoe that stood nearby. Juju gave up the fruitless attempt to dig through rock, and sat by Neva’s feet, also contemplating the grave. As Neva bent to retie the rope, she heard a shout and looked up to see a stout little man barreling toward her across the grass.

  “What are you doing there?” he shouted while he was still some distance away.

  “Walking my dog,” she said with determined friendliness. “I was just thinking it’s a good thing graves aren’t dug with shovels anymore or you wouldn’t get far in this rock. It looks like hard work.”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  Standing straight with the rope coiled around her hand, Neva eyed the little man warily. Wouldn’t it be nice for a change to scowl back at him and snarl, “You are a stupid ass,” rather than try to be pleasant? Why did she always make an effort to pacify rude people, to smooth things over and create a pleasant mood? Just sling it back, Jeneva, just let him have it with both barrels like you did Reese that night on the ridge. But already she was speaking as though the little man were the very soul of cordiality.

  “I’d also like to find a young friend’s grave, just recently buried. Roy DeRoos?”

  The gravedigger continued to glare with his hands on his hips until it occurred to her that it might be due to a mental problem rather than temper. Maybe grave digging, like janitorial service, was now contracted out as a charitable enterprise to employ people incapable of more demanding work? Juju tugged on the leash. As Neva turned to go, the man climbed onto the backhoe with an air of such stiff self-importance that she had to restrain a smile. He wasn’t a stupid ass, but only a backward character with a chip on his shoulder.

  Even so, his rudeness had put her back up. Rather than head for the car as she had intended, she strolled about in search of Roy’s grave. It proved difficult to spot because rather than the new mound she expected, the grave was as flat and tidy as all the others around it, the seams between the individual rectangles of turf barely showing.

  Standing with her head bowed, she felt sudden resentment of the grave, of its colossal insufficiency. A young man had vanished from life mere days ago, yet the grave had closed over him like a calm sea, leaving almost no trace. The plain marker, like all the markers in the new section, was flush with the ground and bore only his name and the dates, with no ornamentation or further inscription. To a casual glance, the modern part of the cemetery seemed no more than a vast lawn, perfectly cultured and mowed like a golf green. How different it was from the old graveyards of New Orleans, or Père Lachaise in Paris, that extravagant city of the dead crowded with miniature mansions, chateaux and chapels like elaborate children’s playhouses, the whole crisscrossed with small streets named for the famous figures interred there, each grave with its own street address. When she walked there years ago with Ethan it had stunned her with excess, but surely this was too little. Why bother at all? What kind of special feeling could family members find here when they returned to remember and mourn? The modern cemetery was a suburb for the dead, mass-produced and featureless.

  And yet, what more would she do if she did bury Frances’ ashes at the mine? A hole in the ground, some handsome local stone for a marker, and that would be it.

  Juju whined and looked up with an anxious air.

  “Okay, lit
tle pup,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

  As she turned away, Neva looked for the backhoe driver, suddenly aware that she had not heard the machine start up. He sat where she had left him, gesturing in her direction and talking to a man who stood next to the backhoe. The man looked around, spotted her, and started across the lawn.

  Was this a private cemetery? She’d been a walker in graveyards all her life and not once had anyone paid her the slightest attention, yet these two men clearly were bothered. If it was Juju that worried them, at least she was now on the leash.

  Neva walked to meet the newcomer, noted his long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the collar, and recognized Darrell from the Garden of Eternal Peace. “Hello,” she said. “I haven’t found any cucumber beetles out here, but there are a few butterflies.”

  “You don’t get so many interesting ones in these places.” His vague gesture indicated the cemetery around them. “I never collected here.” He considered Juju for a moment, and then inquired with an air of formal politeness, “Are you particularly interested in the funeral business?”

  “Funeral business? I—oh, I see what you mean. First I turn up at the mortuary and then here. No, actually quite the opposite, I’ve never even been to a funeral. But I find graveyards interesting, particularly the old parts like your pioneer corner over there. I came here to walk the dog. My family doesn’t believe in funerals. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude.”

  He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Fine by me. It’s a family business.”

  His apparent indifference felt like permission to continue her thoughts out loud. She said, “Why is it all so flat?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The sudden flush of color in his face made it plain that he was not indifferent after all. Clearly, she had committed a funeral business faux pas, but before she could explain, he protested, “We use the most modern burial procedures. The material is placed back in the hole precisely, leaving no unsightly mounds. Our gravedigger is a certified expert with twenty years’ experience.”