Assumption (3 page)

Ogden felt bad for having tied the dead cat up in a plastic bag to be taken to the lab in Santa Fe. He imagined that the old woman would have wanted the cat buried. He walked back to his rig and radioed in.

“Anything?” he asked Felton.

“No escapes from no place,” Felton said. “Checked the pen and the hospitals and the animal shelter. Everybody’s present and accounted for. Well, except the mental hospital. They want to know when you’re coming back.”

“Thanks.”

“They said your brain will be ready on Wednesday.”

“Thanks, again.”

“What’s your twenty?”

“I’m up here at the old lodge.”

“Don’t freeze up there.”

Ogden hung up the handset. He looked at the field of white against the backdrop of the slope of aspens, spindly and naked.

It was afternoon when Ogden received the call to go to Mrs. Bickers’s house. Bucky Paz’s car and two other rigs were already parked in front. Neighbors were hanging about on their porches and Ogden took this as a bad sign. Inside he found Paz just hanging up the telephone. He paused at the look on the big man’s face.

“I got a notion to come here and look around,” he said. He looked away and coughed into his fist.

Ogden didn’t speak. He waited.

“Well, I figured out why no one saw anything.”

“Why is that?”

Paz asked Ogden to follow him out of the parlor and across the hall to the room with the television. The rug was pulled back. Ogden stopped to observe the trapdoor in the floor.

Ogden hummed.

“I came in and found the rug turned back like that.” He paused and put a cigarette in his mouth. “The old lady’s still down there.”

Ogden felt his stomach turn a little.

“Just like the cat,” Paz said.

“Christ,” Ogden said.

“Christ ain’t got nothing to do with this, son.” Paz stomped his foot down on boards of the trapdoor. He took a slow breath and leveled his eyes on Ogden. “She knew whoever it was.”

“How do you know that?”

“The killer knew the house. At least that much is true. She sure as hell didn’t tell him about her trapdoor.”

That sounded reasonable to Ogden.

“Ogden, after we run through this place, I want you to go through her closets, drawers, desk, papers, everything.”

“Okay.” He wanted to climb down and look at the dead woman’s body.

“You okay?” Paz asked.

“Fine.”

“You want to see?”

Ogden nodded.

Paz took his foot off the door and stepped back. Ogden reached down and pried his fingers into the crack and pulled up the panel. Mrs. Bickers was lying right below, her pale skin easy to see against the dark ground. A spider crawled along her thigh. Her dress was hiked up, exposing her underwear. She was there, dirt-­covered, faceup, eyes open and death-­gazing, pupils finding different lines, her throat bruised. He let the door back down.

“Shouldn’t we pull her out?” Ogden asked.

“Pictures first. Coroner’s on his way.”

The men waited.

Morning. Ogden rolled over to answer his phone. It was his mother and she’d just heard about Mrs. Bickers. He agreed with her that it was terrible thing and how it just wasn’t safe to go out of your house anymore or even stay in. “I’ll be right over,” he said to her. He dressed and also packed a bag. His mother was frightened and rightly so, an old woman alone. He would stay with her for a few days.

Eva Walker had the door open before he was out of his truck. “You didn’t sleep,” she said.

“I slept. I didn’t sleep well, but I slept.” He followed her into the house and took off his jacket. He glanced over at the woodstove and saw the red glow behind the glass panel.

“But you didn’t eat.”

“You’ve got me there. I didn’t eat. Can you help me out?” He walked behind her into the kitchen.

“Isn’t it awful?” she said.

“It is that.”

“How could such a thing happen?” She pulled down the skillet and placed it on the stove. “Why?”

Ogden shrugged. He watched as she took eggs from the refrigerator, and sausage. “It’s a cruel world out there?”

“Any leads?” she asked.

“What?”

“Leads.” She dropped the sausages into the pan.

“You’ve been watching
Columbo
again. No, not yet. No leads.”

“Well, it’s just awful.”

“We believe Mrs. Bickers knew whoever mur—­killed her.”

“
Killed
doesn’t sound any better than
murdered,
” his mother said. “No fingerprints?”

“Plenty. Including mine. Prints seldom help. At least that’s what they tell me.”

“All I know is what I see on the television.”

“Well, anyway,” he said. “I don’t think you need to worry.”

She turned the meat over.

“But I will sleep here for a couple of nights, if you don’t mind. It’ll save me a little driving.”

She beat the eggs. “I don’t need you here. I wish somebody would try to break in here. I’d pop him with this skillet and poke him with this fork and pour hot grease on him and then I’d get mad.” She tended the food in the pan. “I didn’t know her very well. Just to say hello. Not that I ever wanted to say hello to her.”

Ogden nodded.

“Did she suffer?”

“I don’t think so, Ma,” he lied.

She removed the meat and poured the eggs into the pan. She plugged in the toaster and grabbed a loaf of whole-wheat bread. “You do want toast.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Such good manners. I wonder who trained you.”

“Some crazy woman,” he said.

Eva put the food in front of her son, poured them both some coffee, and sat down to watch him eat. “What’s wrong, son?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Something’s bothering you. Tell me what’s on your mind. It’s been eating at you for a while now.”

“Nothing really,” he said. He sipped his coffee.

“That’s not fair. You come in here all the time and I can see the sadness on your face and I’m just supposed to ignore it? It’s not right. Either you talk about it or you learn to pretend you’re happy.”

Ogden put down his fork. She was right; it wasn’t fair and he told her that. He then said, “I just wonder what I’m doing. Am I wasting my time here? I don’t mean in this house. I mean in this town.”

“I know what you mean,” his mother said. “And, yes, you are.”

He looked at her.

“You really think that.”

“Yep.”

“What would Dad think?”

“He’d think the same thing. But, like me, he’d be proud of you.”

“For what? For hanging around here playing deputy? Not even that.”

Ogden’s mother leaned back and studied his face, smiled. “If you need to get out and live somewhere else, that’s fine. Son, that’s normal. But don’t think your father wouldn’t be proud of the man you are. He would be damn proud. I know that. You’re a good man, Ogden. There are not a lot of good men around.”

Ogden nodded. “Thanks, Ma.”

He finished his meal and then the two of them watched television. Ogden had to wake his mother and tell her to go to bed. Once she was off, he went into what had been his father’s tying room, where the man had made trout flies for the last twenty years of his life. His mother had kept it clean but pretty much as it had been when his father was alive. He sat at the desk and switched on the lamp. He put a number 12 down-­eye hook in the vise and began to wrap it with black thread. He would make something easy, some zug bugs. He tied on a little lead and imagined the nymph skipping the bottom of a riffle. His father had loved to catch trout, but for Ogden to simply have a trout take notice of his fly was reward enough. He wrapped the peacock herl around the hook and watched the bug take shape.

In the dream, ten cutthroat trout were facing upstream in a row in the Rio Grande. They were spaced evenly across the river just after its confluence with Arroyo Hondo. Their dorsal fins were exaggerated in size and stuck up over the rushing water. Ogden was in chest waders, standing in the middle of the Grande. The river up to his chin and his waders were full of water, but he felt stable, foot-­sure, and steady. The current wasn’t pushing him at all. He was casting the largest stonefly nymph he’d ever seen at the end of crazily long tippet. The wind was whipping but didn’t affect his casts in the least. The big fly landed perfectly on the water, no splash at all, no drag from the line. The fly would just drift past the nose of a trout. And the fish would ignore it, almost with disdain.

Ogden checked in at the station and then drove to Mrs. Bickers’s house to continue his so-­called investigation. He stood in the ­middle of the parlor, slapping at his sleeves in the cold, and wondered where he should start. He watched his breath condense and float away from him and decided he should begin with a fire. He brought in wood and got a fire going. Still cold, he again sifted through the uninformative papers at the old woman’s bedside. He sat on the edge of the bed and then stood immediately. The bed was unmade and it felt like a block of ice. He had been sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs. Bickers, knowing that something was wrong. He wondered if she had been trying to tell him something that he had been simply too dense to understand. He should have gotten up and kicked in the bedroom door, but he hadn’t known enough to even consider it, much less do it.

He went to the desk in the parlor and sat. He found some trashy celebrity magazines and some back issues of
Time
and starts of letters that didn’t say much and the old woman’s address book. In the Bs he found three other Bickerses listed and one of those had been scratched out. The woman’s purse was on the floor beside the desk. Her identification revealed that her maiden name was Robbins. The bag also contained two hundred dollars and change. In the address book he found one Robbins, a Lester G. in Tempe, Arizona.

He went through the desk twice and found nothing out of the ordinary and nothing of any particular interest. There were some payment-­due bills from the clinic, some through-­the-­mail insurance offers that the old woman had saved in a stack, and a deed to a parcel of land that was identified by quadrant number and all Ogden could determine was that it was in the county.

He went again into her bedroom and stood there awhile. He opened a dresser drawer. He moved her underwear around and looked behind her blouses. He searched behind her socks and stockings, nightgowns and sweaters. Nothing.

He walked into the room with the television and stood next to the open trapdoor. He looked at the space under the house and then lowered himself into it. He squatted and looked around in the dark a bit before switching on his little flashlight. The old woman’s impression was still in the dirt. He wouldn’t know a clue if it jumped up and bit him on his pecker. But he had known that something was wrong. He’d known and hadn’t done a single thing and now Mrs. Bickers, as objectionable and miserable as she was, was dead. Detective or not, he collected himself and scoured the ground for anything the other cops might have missed—a hair, a broken-­off fingernail, a wad of gum, a signed confession with an address, anything.

The front door opened with a complaint from its hinges. Ogden stood and saw legs in tights.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. He pulled himself to sitting on the wood floor, brushed off his clothes.

“I’m Jenny Bickers,” the woman said. She was in her mid-­thirties, maybe older. She looked around the room, at Ogden, and into the hole.

“I’m Deputy Ogden Walker.” Ogden stood.

“Where’s my mother?”

Ogden’s stomach fell hollow and cold against his back. The woman didn’t know.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

It was a reasonable question. Ogden knew he had to provide an answer. “Miss Bickers, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Your mother is dead.”

The woman became unsteady. Ogden was berating himself for not suggesting that she sit first. She didn’t move.

“Where’s my mother? What’s going on?”

“You mother is dead,” he said again, realizing that there was no softening it. He reached out and helped the woman balance herself as she took a seat on the sofa.

Ogden stood beside her. “I’m very sorry.”

“Are you sure?”

“She was killed,” he said.

“Murdered?” the woman cried.

Ogden didn’t say anything. He sat next to her while she cried. He moved to put a hand on her shoulder, but decided that that might seem patronizing. He went to the bathroom and brought back some tissue.

“I don’t understand,” she said. Her face was twisted. She was beginning to hyperventilate.

“Take deep breaths,” Ogden said. He watched her for what felt like several minutes and then said, “We don’t know who killed her. I’m very, very sorry.”

She continued to try to breathe deeply.

Ogden resolved to say no more. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her how they believed her mother had died or that her cat had been crushed in the killer’s hands or that he had been sitting in the house with the woman minutes before she had been murdered.

“How?” Jenny Bickers asked.

“The sheriff will tell you everything. I’m going to call him now, okay?”

She nodded.

Ogden went to the phone in the parlor and called Paz. He told him that the old woman’s daughter had shown up and that he’d had to tell her the news.

“How is she?” Paz asked.

“What do you think? I didn’t go into any details with her. I’m about to bring her over.”

“Okay. How about you? You all right?”

“See you in a few.”

Ogden hung up and turned to Jenny Bickers. “I’ll take you to the station now.” He helped her up and they walked out.

“Murdered,” the woman said to herself as Ogden turned to padlock and tape the door.

Ogden repeated the word in his head as they walked to his rig. It was a bad thing, no matter how you said it.

Ogden walked Jenny Bickers past Felton and right into Paz’s office where she fell into a chair without an invitation. Paz wasn’t there, so Ogden stood silently by while the woman massaged her temples. It seemed her crying had given way to a headache.

Paz walked in and moved directly to the woman, very business­like. “I’m Sheriff Paz.” He shook her hand. “I’m very sorry about your mother.” He moved to the other side of his desk. “Let’s see if you can help us find out who killed her.”