Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  “Exposure.”

  “What?”

  “I would have died of exposure first.”

  “Doesn’t matter; either way you’re dead meat.”

  I still couldn’t get my mind around what she was saying. “I thought they came because I’d had an accident, not because I was police!”

  “You think so? How many emergency calls do you think were on the line just then, in that storm, with trees coming down over lines and people getting hit by hailstones the size of bricks and not just your car skidding off the road, and just how many officers do you think the state patrol has just hanging out in Douglas County waiting for some half-wit geologist to get herself in trouble? Huh? How many on duty in the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department at that hour? Huh? Didn’t think about that, did you, Miss forensic, dirt-in-the-dead-man’s-shoes, I’m-done-now-and-I’m-out-of-here Hansen?”

  She was wearing me down. I tried to laugh and think her words funny, but I was tensing again. Fritz was still holding me, even massaging the center of my back, but from a distance. Had I said something to offend him? Or had I, once and for all, completely misgauged the range of ways he might be interested in me? His solid presence was my anchor. I tightened my arms around him and held on for dear life.

  To Michele I said, “You’re right. Whoever did that probably knew the road and the lay of the land around it. But I don’t think it was Johnson. His hands are pretty screwed up with arthritis.”

  “Your view was blurred and distorted by the rain.”

  Fritz said, “She’s about done, Michele.”

  He was right, the strain of talking and trying to think clearly and worrying if I was somehow offending Fritz was exhausting what little strength I had left. I said, “I’m getting tired, Michele. What else do you need right now?”

  “I need to find Attabury and his damned airplane, that’s what I need! And I’d like to know where in hell Gilda’s gotten herself to as well. She’s gone, her electric cart’s gone … so no, she’s not dead, because I checked this morning and that cart was in the barn at the ranch, and now it’s gone. The little creep has some kind of hidey-hole up there, or something. Guess she got nervous in the storm and made a run for it.”

  “She can’t have gotten far in that thing.” My voice was starting to sound frail even to me. I just wanted to get off the phone and collapse.

  “That’s what I thought, too. Damned strange behavior from a woman who’s supposed to be aggrieved and plotting the theft of a valuable estate.”

  “Maybe she’s shacked up with Johnson,” I suggested.

  “Now there’s a fun couple. Why do you say that?”

  Fritz took the phone out of my hand. “Michele, I’m putting Em to bed now,” he said.

  “Wait, you’re coming back down here tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  “Talk to you in the morning, Michele,” he said. His voice was still calm but as hard as granite. He switched off the phone and tossed it onto a couch.

  I waited to see if he’d put both arms back around me now that he no longer held the phone. He did not. Instead, guiding me with just one arm, he led me into the bedroom. I let myself hope that he would lie down on the bed beside me. He did not. Instead, he turned back the covers, took away my robe, and indicated that I should climb in between the soft, silky sheets alone.

  “My hair’s still wet,” I said. “I’ll screw up these sheets.”

  Fritz grabbed a dry towel and laid it across the near pillow. “Satisfied?”

  “Okay.” I smoothed the T-shirt down around my hips, sat down on the bed, and stared up at him. I had no idea what my face told him. Did I look as fragile and pathetic as I felt? I looked into his eyes, searching for that mirror, but all I saw was the quiet center of a man I was beginning to realize that I loved. As he gently supported my head and shoulders and lowered me onto the bed, I wondered, How long have I felt this way? He brought the covers up to my chin, tucked them carefully around my face, smoothed my still-damp hair, and switched out the bedside light.

  Soft light from the living room spilled through the doorway, lighting one side of his face. He looked at my forehead and touched it again, and then my cheek and chin. He smiled a sad smile. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Okay,” I said, uncertain what that meant. Would ever mean again.

  “I’ll be on the couch,” he whispered. “Call me if you need me. Anything at all.” He turned and started for the door.

  “Fritz.”

  He stopped. Turned and looked at me. “Yes, Em.”

  “I … I’m scared.”

  “You’d be damned stupid if you weren’t.”

  “I mean, I … can I come sleep with you?” I blurted it out before I could worry that it might ruin our friendship forever. Suddenly, I could not bear the idea of life without him.

  Fritz came back to my bedside and knelt beside it. He clasped his hands at the very edge of the mattress and folded his great frame so that his chin was on them, as if in prayer, his lips just showing above his strong fingers. “Em,” he began, then fell silent again for a while. He lifted one hand to fiddle with the edge of the blankets, using that activity as an excuse to focus his eyes for a moment on something other than mine. “I care about you a lot. And you’ve just been through a terrible shock. I’m concerned that … you’ll want things from me because of what’s happened to you.”

  You mean sex, I thought, and, But what if I’m really in love with you? I said, “Sort of a Stockholm syndrome.”

  Fritz gazed into my eyes. “Stockholm syndrome describes the behavior of kidnap victims who become sympathetic to their captors,” he said. He gave me a twisted smile. “I don’t recall throwing you in a sack and dragging you here, Em, but it’s true I didn’t give you much choice about going to the emergency room. Are you sorry I did that?”

  “No, you did exactly the right thing.”

  “You’re afraid you won’t sleep. Shall I see if Trevor has any sedatives in his medicine cabinet?”

  “No. I just—”

  Fritz put one hand to my lips, gently quieting me. “I’ll sleep right here on the floor. I won’t let anyone near you.”

  “You can’t sleep on the floor!”

  “Watch me,” he said. He disappeared out the door only long enough to turn out the other lights and grab some cushions off the couch. These he plopped on the floor right by my side. He yanked the spare comforter off the foot of the bed and rolled up in it, making a joke out of it as if he were making a burrito out of himself, then made a very silly display out of lumbering down onto the floor thus attired. “Done,” he said. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m totally wiped.” He closed his eyes and let out a horrific snore.

  I laughed thinly. “Fritz! You don’t snore, do you?”

  In the thin light that found its way under the blinds, I could see his teeth appear as he smiled. “I am the worst! Why, are you changing your mind? I can still go out there and close the door.”

  I thought of taking one of the pillows and hitting him with it, but knew I was still just trying to provoke intimacy. Instead, I said, “No. Please stay.”

  My eyes were adjusting to the darkness. I could make out the rest of his face now. His smile was sublime.

  THIRTY

  FRIDAY MORNING, GILDA’S ELECTRIC CART WAS FOUND upside down and half full of wet gravel near the mouth of Jarre Canyon. The storm had done its work, wringing six inches of rain onto the Jarre and Plum Creek watershed in just over a two-hour period.

  The runoff had had no time to soak into the soil. It had cascaded off the rocky summits in sheets and funneled into rivulets that sprang gushing from every fold and cranny. These fresh waters had in turn joined like thickening fingers into laden hands, continuing down the narrowing valleys and coalescing into one growing, strengthening body that rushed, churning and grinding with its sediment load, into the jagged slot of the canyon before it burst out into the wider flood plain beyond the foothills. At the speed of a locomotive
, this flash flood had raised the sedate trickle at the bottom of Jarre Canyon into a thirty-foot wall of roiling, sand- and rock-choked water, surging like angry stallions over its upper banks, tearing out a bridge, and ripping away chunks of pavement the size of tennis courts from Route 67.

  I was amazed that the cart was spotted as quickly as it was. The powers that be had done a good job of educating the residents of Colorado’s canyons over the years following the Big Thompson flood. All permanent residents of Jarre Canyon had survived the deluge by leaving in time. But until the road was rebuilt, they would drive the long way around, climbing west over the first divide and connecting north along the Platte River toward Denver or south along the valleys of Horse Creek, Trout Creek and Fountain Creek to Colorado Springs.

  The authorities exhorted the local residents, newshounds, and disaster-stalkers to stay out of the afflicted drainages until repairs could be made, but some concerned citizen had flown over the canyon as soon as day broke looking for signs of distress and had called in a report over his radio. The FAA had relayed the sighting to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department, which deputized a ranch hand on a four-wheeler to drive down to the break in the roadway and take a look. The hand recognized Gilda’s eccentric conveyance and remembered “the lady with the nice tits” driving it. His excited description launched a sheriff’s helicopter, and soon the washed-out banks of Jarre Creek were dotted with searchers. They found bits of belongings scattered among the flood-washed willows and hung up on strands of barbed wire but no sign of the driver.

  Gilda had therefore, and with dramatic buzzing that befitted a community that still counted itself small and closely-knit, been listed as missing and presumed dead.

  All this I heard from Michele as she phoned three separate times, first asking and then begging me to return to Douglas County. Each time I said no. I considered turning off the phone, but I had left a message for Julia and was waiting for a return call. I had phoned her from the hospital and again when I arrived at Trevor Reed’s condo, but had only gotten her answering machine. I was beginning to worry about her, and the news about Gilda’s cart did not lessen my anxiety.

  The fourth time Michele called, Fritz answered the phone and asked her politely what part of “no” she didn’t understand. The fifth time, he evidenced his perturbation by asking her who had died and named her queen. Then he took matters even further into his own hands and himself turned off the phone.

  We sat on the sundeck looking out across the Platte River Valley. If you think that sounds scenic, you’ve never been to Denver, or you like your scenery industrial, or you’re some sort of transportation nut, because that’s where Denver’s railroad yards are and several viaducts that carry traffic in and out of town, not to mention Interstate 25. But even with the steady hum of traffic it was another sunny morning in paradise, the air washed clean by the previous day’s storm, and if I hadn’t ached from head to foot and had bandages all over the hands that held my cup of coffee, I might have thought I had hallucinated the entire previous day’s events.

  I turned to Fritz, who was leaning back in his deck chair with his eyes shut, lazily soaking up the sunshine, his thoughts a thousand miles away for all the trace they left on his face. I watched him for a while, wondering if there was any way his feelings for me were as strong or as sexual as mine now were for him.

  I said, “What are your plans today?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Don’t you have to get back to Salt Lake City?”

  “Faye can fly him over.”

  “Reed?”

  He nodded his head. “Something about not wanting to miss a party.”

  “But then who will mind the FBO?”

  He shrugged. Clearly, he was not concerned.

  “Fritz,” I said, “you’re not ditching work for me, are you?”

  He kept his eyes closed and didn’t answer.

  “Fritz?”

  “A long line of people have advised me not to have this conversation with you.”

  “What conversation?”

  “Somebody’s got to keep you safe,” he said.

  I picked at my bandages. “Thank you.”

  He opened one eye and looked at me. “You’re not going to fight me?”

  I shook my head. “In fact, I can’t remember if I’ve even thanked you for yesterday. For saving my life.”

  He opened the other eye now but looked out across the valley toward the old brick buildings on the far side. “You seemed to have that well in hand,” he said evenly, but I could see his jaw muscles tightening. “And … perhaps it’s Ray you need to thank.”

  “Ray?”

  “He came and got me. Said you were in trouble. And he didn’t stop at that. He was on the phone with the sheriff’s deputies when I arrived at the scene, telling them what kind of vehicle to look for.”

  “But how did he know what I was driving?”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “Ray came and got you?”

  Fritz nodded. “Nice guy. I’ll have to buy him a beer sometime.”

  I wrestled with half a dozen possible next lines, but none seemed right.

  The heat rising from the decking was beginning to make my head pound.

  I said, “I’m going to go call Carlos,” and went inside.

  CARLOS WAS A LITTLE MORE EMOTIONAL WHEN I reached him at his office ten minutes and three phone calls later. “¡Aiee! Emily! Well, I’m glad you’re alive, that’s all.”

  “How did you know about all this?” I asked. I’d said nothing, only “Hello.”

  “How? How? You think the law enforcement community has no interest in such events? Someone tries to kill one of us, it’s one end of Colorado to the other before breakfast, mi loca. Hey, you at that fancy place again? I’m coming right now!”

  I said, “Not now, Carlos. I just wanted to know you were near.”

  Silence.

  “I’m with Fritz. I may as well be under lock and key.”

  Carlos let his breath out like a balloon. “Okay. But you call me. Anything you need. Anything.”

  “Yes, Carlos.”

  “Mi amiga.”

  IT FINALLY OCCURRED TO ME THAT BUSINESS HOURS had arrived and that Julia must be at work. Perhaps, like me, she had spent the previous evening at the ER—though I hadn’t thought her knee was that bad—and then had picked up her children and had been too tired to even notice the light blinking on her answering machine.

  I dialed the number for McWain Geological Consultants but got the answering machine there. No Julia. I was now officially worried about her, even scared. Considering the law enforcement community’s reaction to the event, I could think of no reason why anyone would be stupid enough to go after me, so it had to be Julia the monster in the truck had been trying to kill. Unless of course someone thought I was Afton … But of course that made no sense. Who in such a small community would be ignorant that he was dead?

  Where in hell was Julia?

  I got the Denver white pages out of the drawer underneath the phone and dialed another number for a geological office in Duffy’s petroleum tower—Tina, the woman I had called to tend to Julia a week earlier when this whole mess had first sprung screaming into life.

  Tina was in. I asked if she’d seen Julia yet that morning.

  “She’s on a different floor, Em. I don’t give out the hall passes around here.”

  “We were in the field together yesterday,” I said, making it sound like nothing special, “and I was supposed to follow up with her today, but I’m not getting an answer at either her house or her office. Could you ask around?”

  “I’ve got to pitch a prospect here in ten minutes. I really don’t have time, Em.”

  “Then give me the name of someone on her floor.”

  She grunted. “Try Noel.” She gave me a number.

  Noel remembered me. He wanted to chat. I explained my problem, trying again to sound casual, but my urgency was beginning to leak throug
h.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, laughing. “Hold your horses.” He set the phone down. I could hear his swivel chair creak, and his footfalls as he walked down the hall and began to ask around. Presently he returned. “Hal says she trotted in here earlier, picked up her laptop and a few things, and hurried out.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “No.”

  “Would you please call me if she comes in?”

  “Why don’t you leave a message on her phone?”

  Now, that was a perfectly reasonable question, and I did not have a ready reply. “I’m just concerned about her is all. I was supposed to hear from her, and I haven’t.”

  “Okay, Em.” Noel had a soft, kindly voice, and he used it soothingly. “Give me your number and I’ll make sure to call you if I see her.”

  I gave him my cell number, told him to leave a message if I didn’t answer, and ended the call. Then I sat there in Trevor Reed’s big Denver condo and tried to sort out what I was going to do. Because not doing anything has never worked for me. I have, in the lingo of those bizarre people who make a profession of evaluating other people’s personalities, a bias for taking action. Me, I just call it impatience. So there I sat, impatient as hell. Sure, a scant eighteen hours earlier I had been flipping through a colossal storm in a Jeep that had just been rammed by a homicidal maniac, but that didn’t mean that I was ready to just say, Oh, gosh, I must be in the wrong movie, I’ll just stay home and do nothing. In fact, frightening events invariably have the opposite effect on me. If I hold still, I feel trapped, as if the whole experience were some kind of snare that has me by the nervous system. It’s more frightening—or shall I say, the experience of fear settles into me more absolutely—if I sit still and do nothing, like a rabbit who’s waiting for the hunter to come finish her off. Like a rabbit, I wanted to be up running for it, but unlike a rabbit, running away wouldn’t work for me; I wanted to run right straight into the object of my fear and blow it to smithereens.