Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  “Then is there a way for a growing population to continue to prosper if it’s dependent on a finite resource like water?” another journalist asked.

  Brown replied, “Well, you can change the mix of industries or the technological base of the community, but that’s difficult to engineer. So on the whole, I have three answers for that question: yes, no, and it depends.”

  The audience laughed, but I didn’t. No one understood conservation of water resources better than a ranch child who had grown up helping her father cycle the same acre-foot of water downhill through three fields of alfalfa so there’d be enough left over to cycle through the bodies of their livestock. Ranchers knew to keep the water near the bottomlands, irrigating only near the creeks and saturated ground whence the water was lifted and leaving the dry lands to the short grasses of the prairie for grazing. Long gone was the era when excess people and cattle died directly of drought. Instead, the human species was now increasing its numbers and standard of living, now subdividing the ranches, building houses on the rolling prairie, and raising water from the ground to flush toilets and water lawns, always figuring we would find one more source of water, and another, and another …

  Brown’s lecture was followed by the announcement I knew was coming: the moderator returned to the dais with the chairman of the association that was hosting the conference, and, after the briefest of introductions, turned the microphone over to him. The chairman came to the microphone, hands trembling so strikingly that the piece of paper he held shook visibly, and said, “I am sorry to have to deliver some painful news. Afton McWain, who was going to deliver his talk on the aquifers of the Denver Basin here today, has been … we are advised by the police … that he’s been found dead.”

  The room burst into a rumble of sound. Geologists are not shy about opening their mouths and making noise when something surprises them, and in three-quarters of a second at least nine-tenths of the people in that room were talking at once. I glanced around the room, looking to see who was not surprised. The journalists were not, and were scanning the crowd as carefully as I was. Among the others, it was hard to tell. There were a lot of poker faces.

  The chairman waved his hands for quiet. “I’m—I don’t have any details. This is a terrible loss to the profession. As you know, Dr. McWain has … had a career spanning three decades, and his contributions to our understanding of Denver Basin stratigraphy are monumental. Would you all please join me in standing for a moment of silence?”

  The audience stumbled to its feet. Isolated coughs and astonished glances among colleagues punctuated a long half minute. Awkwardly, people began to settle back into their chairs. The chairman cleared his throat again and said, “Now, Afton’s talk was important to this meeting, so we’ve, uh, asked Bob Raynolds to step in for him. Now, Bob can’t just speak from Afton’s slides, and um, we don’t have those anyway, so … this is all very shocking. We were concerned when he didn’t check in with us, and we’d heard rumors, but as you all know, he’s … was … a bit unusual in his ways of doing things, and we figured he’d show. But Bob Raynolds is here and has his slides from that wonderful talk he gave on the Denver Basin last year, and he edited that volume in The Mountain Geologist on the Denver Basin, so, ah, here’s Bob.”

  As Raynolds took his place on the stage, you could have heard a pin drop. He was a slender, raw-boned man with an endearing mixture of intellectuality and disarming charm, which was lucky, considering that he had to grasp and hold the audience’s attention after such an announcement. But he succeeded magnificently. Hitting the switch to kill the overhead lights, he brought up the first slide and went to town.

  He spoke to us intimately, even confidentially. He got down and gritty about the rocks of the Denver Basin in general and the Arapahoe aquifer in particular. He showed evidence that the rocks had been deposited as great fans of sand by streams running onto the plains from the growing mountains. He gave examples of similar fans being deposited today along the sides of the southern Andes. It was a brilliant, classical presentation of what geologists do like few can: He took obscure and largely buried data about ancient rocks, compared it to modern deposits, and built it into a predictive model.

  “And here’s why this is important,” he said. “The previous estimates of how much water was in the Arapahoe aquifer were grossly inaccurate. They were wildly high. What happened was this: Engineers measured the porosity of the aquifer rocks—the percentage of void space—at the apex of one of the fans because that was the part of the rock that was sticking out of the ground as a hogback along the Rampart Range, where it could be easily studied. Engineers are engineers, not scientists; it’s not their job to know how rock varies. They just apply formulae to the numbers available to them and crunch them into more numbers, and where they lack numbers going in, they make assumptions. Because they could not see how the rock varied underground, they assumed that the porosity of the rock stays the same all the way down into the ground, where that layer becomes deeply buried, and continues the same as that layer extends under the eastern plains toward Kansas.

  “But that assumption was incorrect. They knew nothing of the architecture of the rock. At the outcrop where they measured it, at the apex of the alluvial fan, they found a high-quality aquifer, but they did not know that with every mile eastward, the quality of the rock drops precipitously. As the streams carrying the sediments that would become the sandstone of the Arapahoe aquifer burst from the steep slopes of the youthful Rocky Mountains, choked with gravel and sand and silt and clay, they hit a shallower slope and dropped the coarsest grains in their load of grit, but the smaller particles tumbled onward, and the finest sediments—the silts and clays—enjoyed the ride farther before the slope became so shallow that these least permeable also dropped to the bottom. Thus the rock has yielded copiously near the outcrop, but just a few miles downstream, it tightens down to something less productive than a brick.

  “I say has yielded. Early wells in the area yielded abundantly for decades. Now, they decline quickly and many are going dry. Add that to the miscalculation that the engineers made. Their estimates of water available to be pumped out and run through taps in kitchens and bathrooms and horse troughs and car washes and laundries and garden hoses in all the existing homes and businesses and ranches, and in all the homes and businesses under construction has been cut by 30 or 40 percent. Those homes and businesses and ranches were dependent on well water drawn from that aquifer. And the rate at which the water is disappearing is accelerating.

  “Homeowners had been assured they had over one hundred years of water supply,” Raynolds said. “But this promised water is not really there. It is ‘paper water.’ Simply drilling more wells will not be a solution because although each new well briefly yields a small local supply, the cost per gallon produced becomes prohibitive.

  “On average,” he said, “the water table in the Arapahoe aquifer is dropping one inch per day. That’s thirty feet per year, in an aquifer that is only four hundred feet thick. Where will these people get their water when it’s gone? They’ll have to import it, but from where? All the surrounding water rights are going fast, and hundreds of thousands of people are projected to move into Douglas County in the coming decades.” He looked from face to face within the audience. With evident pain he said, “Douglas County proudly advertises itself as one of the fastest-growing counties in America.”

  Raynolds set down his pointer. “We have time for a few questions,” he said.

  A hand shot up. “Dr. Raynolds, can you comment on the fact that Afton McWain was scheduled to testify against the proposed Wildcat Estates development? Is that lawsuit going to go forward?”

  My ears pricked to attention. Wildcat Estates was the name of the project Michele had mentioned. What lawsuit? And who was involved?

  The question was way off the scientific basis of Raynolds’ talk, and no scientific colleague would have addressed him as “Doctor.” By simple deduction, I guessed that the question had be
en asked by one of the journalists in attendance, and not just a science journalist, but an investigative journalist, the kind that digs into malfeasance and corporate misconduct. I couldn’t believe that the Salt Lake City papers would have sent a reporter to cover a development in Colorado, so that meant it had to be someone from The Denver Post or the Rocky Mountain News.

  In the jumble of events of the past two and a half days, this bit of information had slid past me, but now it clicked into place with the rest: Johnson had a ranch to sell, Attabury could sell or perhaps develop it, Entwhistle could handle the loans, and Upton would push the paperwork.

  And Gilda? What was her part in the deal? It had to be more than a coincidence that we had found them all together.

  And these high-powered journalists were circling like sharks. And that meant that there was more stuck to Afton’s murder and the Wildcat Estates project than four men and a woman sitting in a roadside bar.

  As I pondered this new view of the puzzle, Raynolds stared at the top of the lectern, composing a response. “For those of you who are unfamiliar with this situation,” he said finally, “citizens have brought a landmark lawsuit against a group of people who have proposed yet another housing development in the Castle Rock area—ironically named Wildcat Estates after the small mountain that forms the apex of the Arapahoe aquifer fan. The wells for Wildcat Estates would of course tap this already over-drafted aquifer. The suit will test the rights of defendant landowners to build at certain densities if they are dependent on ground water to supply their houses, and the rights of the plaintiffs—existing homeowners—to demand that their dwindling water supplies not be further tapped. As expert witness, Afton McWain’s testimony was expected to be pivotal. I shall be watching the fate of this lawsuit with acute interest.”

  Like so much boiling oatmeal, a hubbub of conversations broke out around the room. I felt an itch to stand up and announce that someone had emptied every last shred of paper out of Afton’s log-cabin office, just to really get everyone riled, but I managed to stay in my seat.

  The questioner asked, “But didn’t McWain have a conflict of interest in this case?”

  Raynolds replied, “I assume you refer to the fact that Afton owned the adjoining ranch, which makes him a stakeholder in the outcome of the case.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it a conflict of interest to tell the truth? Next question.”

  Someone asked, “Why is his testimony so important?”

  Raynolds said, “Because Afton McWain was, first and last, a scientist of peerless reputation. And he was unimpeachable on the witness stand. If anyone could make the claimants’ arguments stick, he could.”

  Another journalist asked the next question. “Can you comment on the plaintiffs’ assertions that the money behind this proposed development has ties to organized crime? Do you think Dr. McWain’s killers were sending a message?”

  Raynolds smiled sadly. “That would be a matter for a different sort of an investigator than I am. I study rocks and the modern landforms that are the keys to understanding them, while you are asking me to shed light on human interactions.” He shook his head. “I cannot comprehend murder. You’re asking the wrong man.”

  I began to squirm in my chair. Perhaps the killer had sent a message. He had bashed in a face and cut off fingertips, and burying the corpse in that quarry almost guaranteed that it would be located. The West was riddled with lonely stream banks and abandoned mines where a body could rest for eternity without being found.

  For an instant, I imagined my own body lying six feet underground, grown cold and damp in a place no one ever visited. The image of such loneliness seeped into my bones, and I fought back the urge to phone Fritz and beg him to put that second arm around me and touch me again in that way that had made me feel alive. Instead, I got up from my chair, hurried to my truck, and drove down the canyon to the solitude of my apartment and the loneliness of my bed.

  SIXTEEN

  RAY RAYMOND SAT ON A ROCK BESIDE THE TRAIL THAT led up City Creek, trying to decide what to do with himself. After the previous evening’s miserable trip up Little Cottonwood Canyon, he had gone to a late Al-Anon meeting and in the morning had attended church with his mother, but even these comforts had failed to set his soul at ease. Em was in danger, and he blamed himself. By fetching her Friday morning, he had done his job but had gone against some deeper principle. By bringing Gilda to her Saturday afternoon, and then through the tacit encouragement of letting her use his badge to gain information at that conference, he had abandoned her even more deeply to her fate.

  Now the McWain case was all over the Denver papers, totally blowing what little cover Em had enjoyed during her rash rush to Colorado. He had to do something to warn her, to stop her, to protect her, but he knew there was nothing.

  Ray shook his head ruefully. Em was her own woman, she had made that clear time and again. Why did her care and protection hang over him like this? Each time she came into his life, everything became a sweet but terrifying chaos, and when he closed his eyes in prayer to try to bring order, Em was right there like a shard of light, ripping at his heart, telling him something he could not bear to know.

  The jagged edges of the rock he was sitting on dug into the palms of Ray’s hands, but he welcomed the sensation, trying desperately to feel his own body.

  Suddenly he rose to his feet. This time he would settle things with Em, with her help or without it.

  MARY ANN NETTLETON’S SISTER DECANTED BOTTLED water into a pan and turned on the LP gas underneath it. “There,” she said, “a little tea is just the thing after an experience like that. It’ll be ready in a minute.”

  “Don’t pour too much, Rita Mae. That bottle is all I’ve got until the delivery man comes.”

  “When exactly did your well run dry?”

  Mary Ann heaved a shuddering sigh that hovered on the raw edge of tears. “It never did well, but about a month after Henry died I began to run out when I was doing the laundry. Sand would come out into the machine. Then I’d have my hair all soaped in the morning, and it would go to a dribble. Now, I can run the faucet only two minutes a day at a trickle.” She sniffled a bit, daubed at her nose with a crumpled tissue. “It was so nice of you to drive down here to be with me.”

  “Sisters have to stick together. Besides, it’s nice to get away from Denver for a while. So you need a new well. So you’ll get a new well, and then you’ll be fine.”

  Mary Ann hung her head. “Somehow I don’t think that will be the end of it, Rita Mae.”

  “Mr. Upton seemed to feel that you can get Mr. Attabury to pay for it, or at least get you a discount through his development firm.”

  Mary Ann twisted her tissue into a knot. “I just couldn’t believe what Mr. Upton had to say about Mr. Attabury! I’d always thought Mr. Attabury was such a nice man.”

  Rita Mae patted her sister on the shoulder. It was an easy gesture, one she’d made many times in their long life, but now she noticed how frail Mary Ann had become. How old was she now? Sixty-eight? “Well, I didn’t like hearing what he had to say either, dear, but sometimes we have to take our medicine even when we didn’t ask to catch the disease. It was nice of him to see you on a Sunday. He came into his office just for you, opened it himself, just to be nice because he couldn’t attend to your message earlier. He didn’t even have a secretary there to look after him.”

  “He called Mr. Attabury a ‘shady dealer.’ Imagine!”

  “Well, he did say he’s known him all his life. You’ve known Mr. Attabury less than a year, and he wanted your business. Anybody can seem sweet and nice that long.”

  “But to say he was cheating people clear back in high school! He called him a swindler!”

  The water boiled, and Rita Mae poured it over the tea bags she had set in the two nice china cups. “I think you should sue him.”

  Mary Ann said, “Mr. Upton seemed hesitant to do that.”

  “His hesitancy had more to do with his conflict of
interest than anything else.”

  “Rita Mae, I don’t understand these things.”

  “Well, dear, a conflict of interest means that Mr. Attabury is also his client. So he can’t represent one client in suing another. That’s all it means.”

  “But if Mr. Attabury is a dishonorable man, why does he represent him?”

  Rita Mae shook her head. “I don’t know, dear, but when you’ve known someone since high school, things get complicated. Men are difficult to understand sometimes.” She arched her eyebrows knowingly. “So we’ll just find someone competent for you up in Denver, and that will make it nice and clean.”

  “Meanwhile, I don’t have any water. And how am I to afford hiring a lawyer in the first place?”

  Rita Mae set the cups down on the table and got the half and half out of the refrigerator. “You need a new well. You’ll drill the well and then take the bill to Mr. Attabury. Mr. Upton says he must have known there was no water when he sold the property to you. I’m sure there’s a law about that kind of thing. Or there should be.”

  Rita Mae tapped the file of notes that Henry Nettleton had made when Afton McWain came to visit him. “Meanwhile, I’ll put on my thinking cap and see if I can make heads or tails out of all this information.”

  Mary Ann cuddled the hot teacup between her aging hands. She felt chilled to the bone even in the terrible heat of the day. “All right,” she said. “But if we find out that Mr. Attabury swindled my dear departed Henry, he’s going to be sorry he was ever born!”

  SEVENTEEN

  MICHELE PHONED AS I WAS MAKING MYSELF A DINNER of cottage cheese and yogurt, a favorite when it’s hot out and I just can’t conjure anything worth eating. After I told her what I had learned at the conference, she said, “So you’re saying that McWain’s expert witness testimony was key to the upcoming lawsuit. So killing McWain is killing the star witness. That puts the spotlight on … well, each one of them had a stake in the outcome of that case. Even Gilda. I don’t believe this pap about wanting to stay on that ranch, not after the performance we saw when she couldn’t get her cart to run. She’s into this case up to her eye sockets.”