Mary Ann thrust the knitting down into her lap. “The nerve of these men! This is fraud!”
“Yes, it is. Your Realtor knew all about it, and so did the banker who made your loan.”
“Mr. Entwhistle! Why ever would he engage in something like this? He could lose his bank!”
Helga opened her hands palms up. “There’s an old saying about bankers, my dear: ‘If you owe the bank a hundred dollars, you’ve got a problem. If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem.’” She tapped one of the papers in her file. “Entwhistle’s bank has loaned money to finance most of the homes in this valley, and it has a great deal more money out to Hugo Attabury’s even bigger plans.”
Mary Ann shook her head. “This can’t be. I can’t believe these men would purposefully set out to steal from people.”
Helga leaned back in her chair. “I don’t suppose they woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s find someone to fleece.’ I think they got in the habit of making money in a certain way, just as we’re in the habit of getting water out a faucet. It’s hard to stop doing something you’ve always done, even when it becomes obvious that it doesn’t work anymore. The kindest thing I can say about these men is that they aren’t yet ready to notice that they are doing something wrong.”
Rita Mae said, “Henry’s notes from his conversations with Dr. McWain suggest that the land along these creeks used to be cattle ranches.”
“That’s correct,” said Helga. “Developers have been buying up and subdividing the old ranches all around here. They built your house. Attabury wanted the ranch that Afton McWain bought, but the man who owned it didn’t want it subdivided, so he sold it to Afton instead. Bart Johnson is ready to go in with them on their grand scheme, but they need an easement across Afton’s ranch to meet the county code.” She rapped a knuckle on a list of figures. “But I can’t see anyone investing money if they hear about the problem with the water.”
Mary Ann let out an angry snort. “We invested.”
“I know, dear.”
Rita Mae said, “We’ll have Mr. Upton refer us to a good lawyer.”
Helga did not mince words. “Todd Upton knows all about this situation.”
Rita Mae said, “But he sounded so surprised when he met with us!”
“He even came to his office on a Sunday,” Mary Ann added. “He opened the office himself. His secretary wasn’t even there.”
Helga said, “Well now, he wouldn’t want to meet on a day when there would be witnesses to your conversation, would he? Some people think the world exists for them to make a living, and I do believe your Mr. Upton is one of them. And then there’s the man who supplies the cement for the foundations, and the owner of the lumberyard, and so on and so forth. It’s not news to a one of them that these wells are going dry. Just ask the well drillers! They all play poker together. None of them wanted you to know you were buying a pig in a poke. They’re all making too much money drilling new wells.”
Tears swam in Mary Ann’s eyes. “Then how … you mean …”
Helga said, “People don’t like knowing that the comfortable life they’ve been living can’t go on like it’s been going.” She gestured around the kitchen, at the dishwasher, at the clothes washer, at the sink. “These houses are built for a water-consuming lifestyle, so we’re just going to have to change how we do things.”
“What can we do?”
Rita Mae noted this small change in her sister’s attitude: She had said “we.” She no longer saw herself alone.
Helga said, “We can vote. We can hold our elected officials accountable and work to get more balanced policies in place that don’t just follow the election campaign fund money, and think a little smaller than we have. And we can vote with every penny we spend. We can spend our money with people who supply products and services that will help us conserve, and we don’t have to buy from people who encourage a throw-away lifestyle. For instance, we can think locally. All those outlet stores down by the freeway don’t have their hearts and minds on local lifestyles, now do they? Decisions about what is sold in those stores are made in corporate offices in some other state, and the goods are manufactured on another continent. They sure aren’t worrying themselves about what is happening here. They don’t even know.”
Rita Mae said, “Aren’t you getting a bit off the point? They’re just shops, after all.”
Helga said, “I look at them as symptoms of the disease. We’ve all gotten so used to looking at price that we no longer know how to look at cost. When we build a house this way just because it’s how we’ve always done it, we set ourselves up for just the sort of financial disaster your sister is now facing.”
Rita Mae said, “But how is Mary Ann supposed to live out here with no water?”
Helga sighed heavily. “It’s going to be tough, but we’ve set up a course at the community center that could help, if you’re interested. We bring in specialists each week to teach us how to conserve, and we have a geologist who teaches us about our Earth systems, so we don’t stay so ignorant. It’s an interesting topic, once you get started.”
Mary Ann turned her face to look out the window at the marvelous, open landscape that Henry had so loved. The setting sun was picking out each rock and shrub with rosy light, but the very sight of it sickened her now. Her voice quavered as she said, “So what you’re saying is that even if I can find a way to pay for a new well, and even if it happens to have water in it, it’s only a matter of time before the new well will go dry, too. And that means that if I drill the well just to put the house on the market, I’ll be passing the fraud right along to the next poor person.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I can’t do that.”
Rita Mae studied the way the light played across her sister’s face. “Of course not, dear. You’re not that kind of person.”
Mary Ann stared out the window for quite a while longer before she said, “I can’t believe Henry knew this and didn’t tell me.”
Rita Mae said, “Put it out of your mind, dear. He was desperately ill. A man can’t bear to let his wife down.”
Helga patted her wrist. “And he may not have known quite everything, dear. But you’re not alone now. Alone, we are kittens. Together, we are like a pride of lions.”
Mary Ann closed her eyes, dislodging a tear. “Doesn’t Dr. McWain offer any hope?”
Helga cleared her throat. When she spoke again, her voice had gone husky. “He made some suggestions. He believed in a policy of collecting rainwater for personal use, but that, sadly, is against the law. All surface waters in the state of Colorado are already owned and apportioned.”
“Then we should invite him over for dinner and get acquainted,” Mary Ann declared, popping her eyes open and stiffening her lips.
Helga said, “I’m afraid that’s not possible, dear.”
“Why not? He was pleased to come once, so he’ll come again, I’m sure of it!”
Helga closed her eyes. “I’m sorry to tell you that he’s been murdered.”
RAY SAT AT THE TABLE IN HIS HOUSE, LISTENING TO the sounds of evening through windows left open in the hope of a breeze. Physically, he was alone, as he had been in all the years since his wife had died, but in his heart he reached out to the company of a great many people. He stared at a framed photograph of himself as a boy, posed in the house he had lived in then, with his parents and all of his sisters. In his mind, he assembled the support offered by his sponsor and all of the people who attended Al-Anon meetings with him. To this list he added his mother, who smiled brightly in the photograph, all of her children right there in front of her, healthy, happy, safe. Sitting next to her was his father, the first taints of the illness that would take this man from them already carved at his face. He lived on by the strong example he had set. And to his mental gathering Ray added Em Hansen, about as strong a woman as he had ever met. Or maybe just hard-headed, Ray decided angrily. Hard-headed and uncompromising.
Ray squeezed
his eyes shut and bowed his head in frustration. There it goes again, my frustration coloring my judgment. Because she doesn’t share my beliefs, I decide that she’s wrong.
A car passed in the street. A dog barked. From somewhere down the block, a child shrieked.
I need to write a Tenth Step, Ray told himself. Acknowledge where I’m going wrong. How tough can that be? He flipped open The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, and read aloud: “Step Ten: Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.”
What did I do wrong? he asked himself in frustration. All his hard, painful work of two years in the Program seemed to vanish like sand washing out from under his feet, swept away by the flood of his emotions. Ray stared down at the book that lay on the table in front of him. He set it aside and laid a sheet of paper in its place. On that clean white plane he evoked God as he understood Him. A kind and loving God. An all-powerful God. A God capable of hard choices.
Ray’s heart raced with anxiety and confusion. Heavenly Father, you never make mistakes. You are divine. I am human, and full of error. Please, let me know Your will for me.
The page shone brighter.
Ray wrote: I judged Em Hansen harshly. I decided that she was a bad person, someone who is fornicating, having sex outside of marriage. I didn’t ask for the facts. I got angry without even knowing the truth.
Ray sat up straight and read his words over a few times. One side of his brain cheered him, telling him how good he was being. The other side of his brain growled like a chained dog. It doesn’t take a genius to read that picture, the dog snarled. She’s lying to you. She’s sleeping with that guy, plain and simple. She’s just another fornicating gentile, deviling God’s plan for her, making it tougher for the rest of us. Serves her right if she gets in trouble trying to be a detective, when she’s really just a geologist.
Ray tightened his grip on his pencil, trying to focus on the next thing he was supposed to do. Follow the Steps, as the Program and his sponsor had taught him. His sponsor was a good man, a devout Mormon with a Temple Recommend. It wasn’t his fault his wife had turned to drink.
Ray felt the room start to tilt. I must hang on to my wits, Ray told himself. I’m judging again! And where does judgment take me? Straight to hell.
He drove the pencil tip into the paper, writing as if he were trying to inscribe the words in stone: When people don’t do things my way, I feel insecure.
Ray closed his eyes and stared at the ghostly afterimage of the page.
Moments ticked past.
He opened his eyes and wrote: When Em follows her will, not mine, it hurts my self-esteem, and I get angry so I don’t have to feel that hurt. My anger is so strong that it feels like the Will of God to me, but it is not.
Ray dropped the pencil, snapped his hands together, and said the only Twelve-Step prayer he could think of: “God, help me not be angry at Em Hansen. She is a sick woman.”
As the words slithered out, he knew they were not right. Like a drowning man, he grabbed for another life ring, another prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference!”
The words rang against the naked walls of the room. The four naked walls. The walls that he had uncovered when his wife died. He had taken down her pictures—not just the photographs of her, and of himself and her together, smiling, looking fit and prosperous in God’s light—but also the other, more decorative pictures she had hung on the walls to make their house a home. Their home, this house that should have had her in it, and the children that had somehow never come to them.
His aloneness crowded in on him again, aloneness that followed him everywhere like a wolf, gaunt and hungry, dining on every shred of happiness that came his way.
Ray yanked his wallet out of his back pocket and dug through it feverishly, prizing up the tiny school photographs of his nieces and nephews that he kept there. Their little faces smiled out at him, needing him, loving him. He lined their photographs up on the tabletop and brought nearer the big, framed photograph of his boyhood family. He peered in at himself as a ten-year-old and found a face intent with seriousness mixed with pride and terror, for he was the only son with so many to look after if—when—his father died. And now, as a forty-two-year-old man, Ray arranged all the photographs around his confessional sheet of paper, pulling together all the strength he could muster, adding the mental image of his sponsor.
The phone rang. He answered it. The welcome voice of his sponsor filled the line. “How’s it going, Ray?”
“Terrible,” Ray said, no longer surprised that this man somehow always knew when to call.
“Sounds like progress. I always thought you got through the first round of this program too easily.” He chuckled affectionately. “You mowed through the Steps first time like an Eagle Scout collecting merit badges.”
“Thanks.”
The jocular tone in the sponsor’s voice vanished, replaced by concern. “Oh, sorry … you’re down to one-word answers. You’re truly upset.”
“You know me well.”
“So, what have you written so far?”
Ray read the words to his sponsor.
The sponsor reflected back. “Security. Self-esteem. A powerful mixture. We all need them. What else?”
“I fell into self-pity.”
“Because …”
Ray’s voice escaped him. Em had put her finger right on it. She was terrifyingly smart. He opened his mouth several times but could not push out even a single word. Finally, on the fourth try, he whispered, “I miss my wife.”
“Yes.”
Ray’s voice cracked as he said, “Now you’re using single words.”
“How did she die, Ray?”
“Car crash.”
“Who was driving?”
The room went cold.
The sponsor whispered, “Who was driving, Ray?”
“I was.” The words drew out of him like a knife so sharp it cuts its scabbard.
“Was it your fault?”
“They … the officers that came to the scene … say it wasn’t. The other driver was drunk. They say he came out of a side street doing sixty. I never saw him.”
“Well, then.”
“But I told Em …” Ray’s face felt cold again, then his neck, then his chest, even in the heat of summer. It was as if his life was bleeding out of him, just as life had left his precious, innocent, beautiful wife in a steady, uncontrollable ooze.
“What did you tell Em?” the sponsor asked, when the silence had grown too long.
Ray yanked himself back from the image of his wife’s face turning gray even as she looked up into his eyes, a farewell lifting from her face without words. “I told her that … I wasn’t involved. Not there. I tell people she was alone.” A great sob broke loose from Ray’s chest, and in a voice as tiny and frightened as a child’s, he said, “She may as well have been. I have my whole family lying for me!”
“What’s Step One, Ray?”
“I admit—powerless—” Ray shifted the phone’s handset from his ear to his forehead and rapped it sharply against his skull. His face writhed, turned dark red with holding his breath in an effort to stanch the images. Pain shot through him like an arrow, bringing in its wake the whole chaotic night it happened—the sirens of approaching police, the hot ride to the hospital in the cruiser, trailing the ambulance, the looks of terror and heartbreak on the faces of everyone in his family, the blur that filled the days that followed. The void, the emptiness.
Then Em … Emily Bradstreet Hansen, the first face strong enough to dredge his heart and mind up from the past and into the present. A woman so much the same as him and yet so different—a match yet not a match, enough conundrum to last a lifetime. A woman he had almost killed in his pursuit of her. A woman who forgave him and offered him her rebellious friendship even after all of that.
“Ray?” His sponsor’s voice was a t
iny bee in the earpiece.
Ray returned the phone to his ear and let his breath out in a long, ragged stream. “I’m here.”
NINETEEN
WEDNESDAY I WAS AT MY DESK AT THE UGS EXAMINING some Utah marbles—iron concretions from the Navajo Sandstone, which geologist Marjorie Chan noted in the journal Nature are remarkably similar to the “blueberries” found by the Mars rover Opportunity—when Fritz phoned.
“Want to come for a spin after work?” he asked.
“Uh … well …”
“Come on, I’ll take you across the Bonneville Salt Flats a hundred feet off the deck. A little low-level zooming always improves the blood flow.”
“I’m kind of busy tonight,” I said, though I wasn’t. I stared at the marble in my hand. Was I losing the ones in my head?
“Okay,” he said. He sounded doubtful. “Maybe a hike this Saturday?”
I wanted to ask, Are you sure you’ll be available Saturday? What if you sleep in with whoever answered the phone at your house Saturday night? My heart contracted around that thought, telling me that the problem was there, not in my head. How could I tell him that I no longer wanted to be his pal, when I wanted to be so much more? But if I kept saying no, I wouldn’t see him at all, and that was unacceptable, too. “Call me as the week progresses,” I mumbled.
“Sure,” he said, his voice flat.
I remembered the touch of his hand against my back as we returned from dinner that Friday in Denver. Had that feeling flowed only one way?
Fritz didn’t say anything for several moments. Then, with concern in his voice, he asked, “Did they figure out who killed your friend?”
“No,” I said, glad to have something I could talk about that wasn’t about us. “We don’t even know how he got here from Colorado. He didn’t come on the airlines and ditto, public bus. It’s kind of difficult to track a hitchhiker, unless maybe he rode a truck like …” I stopped abruptly, wanting to kick myself for speaking so freely. I had very nearly spilled essential information.
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