Only Flesh and Bones (10 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

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“Yep. Brought a ’dozer in, made ’emselves a nice road, and built me a shed.”
“When they doing to spud?”
“Spud?”
“Start drilling.”
Po frowned. “Well, like I said, there’s been a slight delay. But they’re gonna do it. Already brought the mud in and everything.”
“Oh.”
“Where’s your folks’ ranch?” Po asked, pointedly changing the subject.
“Oh, down by Chugwater.”
Po’s eyebrows shot up with interest. “Your brother running the place, then?” he asked slyly. “I hear your pa passed on last summer. Dreadful sorry.”
“Ma’s running it,” I said simply, thinking that would end discussion of that uncomfortable topic. I knew he would
refrain from asking about the size of her holdings, just as I would never ask why in hell he was overgrazing his; either question would be unspeakably rude. One simply did not ask the size of a rancher’s spread; it was like asking how much money a person had in the bank. “So. How long this place been in your family?”
“My granddaddy homesteaded here back in 1888. Built the front room, wintered over, then went back to Illinois and got hisself a wife. She raised him a good brood, and they added on to the back. Got to be so many, they built a nice big Victorian house over on that rise, but that burned down when I was a kid, and my folks moved us back in here, put a big LP gas furnace in the living room. Suited me fine until my wife got to natterin’ at me ’bout needin’ a little privacy. So we moved up the way here to the other house.”
And then she outright left you, you lascivious old fool,
I wanted to add.
And where’d you dig up the money for the mortgage on your wife’s house in town, and a nice new truck?
I glanced at his hands, which looked used, but not any too recently. The callouses were clean and none too thick, and there was a fineness to them I don’t generally see in the hands of a man who’s just come from bucking bales and digging holes for fence posts.
Po opened the gate in the dooryard fence and let me in, then preceded me to the front door of the house, which he unlocked with a key he kept on a chain in his pocket. The inside of the house was as nice as the outside. The original small room, which now served as an open hall closet and mudroom, gave onto a nice-sized living room, with kitchen to the left and bedrooms beyond. The living room was cozy yet spacious, graced with old-fashioned log furniture and even an antler chair, and the kitchen, while not exactly modern, was well equipped with gas range, a large refrigerator-freezer, and even a dishwasher, for heaven’s sake.
Po stood staring fixedly at the left-hand door of three that led off the back of the living room. “That’s where it happened?” I asked.
He nodded.
I took a breath, paused, then marched resolutely across the room and opened the door.
 
Death is a mysterious ending to something as noteworthy as life. I’m not satisfied as to what happens next, if anything, but when some people die, they do seem to linger for a while around the portal through which they made their exit. Not so Miriam. She was simply gone.
When I pushed open that door, I saw nothing but a bare bed frame, a bureau, an open armoire, and a bedside table. Her clothes and all personal objects were gone from the hangers and bureau just like she’d checked out of a hotel, taking every scrap of habitation with her. No last exhaled breath, no comb, no loose hair, not even a slip of paper in a wastebasket waited in that room.
“Why no mattress?” I asked.
When I got no answer, I turned and looked at Po, who was hovering in the doorway, trying to settle himself against the frame as if for moral support. He glanced nervously at the bed frame and thrust his left hand into the pocket of his jeans as if to anchor it, but his right hand kept moving, touching his head, the back of his neck, his upper chest, the opposite arm. “There was … you know, a mess.”
“Oh.”
Po’s voice came out tiny, tightened by embarrassment and grief. “Sheriff said they needed it for evidence.”
“Um, stains.”
“Yeah.”
“Po, how did she die?”
He didn’t say anything for a while, then: “They said … well, they found she’d had some kind of poison.”
Poison?
“Any way it was suicide?”
“No, that was the funny thing. It was some kind of dose, but I saw the boys lookin’ about. They couldn’t find the bottle it come in.”
I knit my brow. “She die quietly, Po?”
“Oh, no … well, no. There were … signs of a struggle, and, well …” “What?”
Po’s face tightened into a wince as he continued to stare at the bed frame. “Well, don’t you suppose that you
would
kind of writhe around a bit if something like a poison was takin’ you? I mean, come on …”
I moved Po Bradley off my mental list of possible murderers. No way a man that squeamish over death could have caused it. Unless, of course, he was one hell of an actor. “Po, can I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure.”
“You and the sheriff not get along or something?”
“Huh?”
To distract him from feeling self-conscious, I moved farther into the room, eyed the old black telephone sitting on a bedside table, began pulling out the drawers of a bureau that stood under a window that looked south toward the mountains. In the months since Miriam’s death, spiders had built great fortresses between the curtains and the window frame, and the yellow dust kicked up from the road and pastures beyond had settled on the top of the dresser. There was nothing in the drawers. “Well, I saw the sheriff yesterday, and-”
“What’re you lookin’ for?” Po asked.
“Books,” I said, without considering my words.
“Like that one she used to write in?”
I turned. “Yes. Black, with a marbly white pattern on the cover, like they’re pretending to be leather.”
Po smiled into the internal space of memory. “Yeah, she had one of them. I’d find her settin’ out on the front porch writin’. Real serious she was about all that. Wore her glasses for it, and always snapped it shut when anyone approached.” The smile grew even warmer, wider, as he remembered. “I’d tease her I was going to sneak up one day and read over her shoulder, but she said, ‘Po Bradley, you stay out of a woman’s business.’ Feisty, she was.”
“You liked her.”
“What wasn’t there to like?” Po’s eyes shifted onto me with a gleam, his social appetites suddenly rekindled and ready to shift into the present tense.
“Good dancer?” I asked slyly.
“Great
dancer.
How
that woman could move.”
I decided that it was time to get the hell out of the bedroom, mattress or no. I had to brush past his shoulder to get out, as this man of fancy manners did not move to give me room.
Taking a deep breath, I strode around to the second door, opened it, only leaned rather than taking a step inside, so I wouldn’t get cornered again. I found myself looking into a bathroom. Next door gave onto a short hallway with two other doors. I sprinted down and opened one, then the other. Both were bedrooms. “Which one was Cecelia’s?” I asked, my voice coming out half a pitch high. I told myself to calm down, not let this man worry me, reminded myself that he was a rake who preferred to ooze into position and let his charm and the heat of his body do the work for him, rather than force his luck. Vain old rooster that he was.
I turned and found him once again leaning against the door frame behind me, this time lounging, his posture clearly seductive. “Room on the right,” he said. “Bed’s still made in there … .”
I took a perfunctory glance, noted the position of the bed, the armoire, the telephone, and the bureau, said, “How nice,” slammed the door, and bustled back past him. And through the living room. And out the door into the yard. And was in my truck buckling the seat belt before he caught up to me, somehow managing to look like he hadn’t sped up the rate of his saunter. “Well, thanks, Mr. Bradley,” I said abruptly, closing the door and rolling down the window, rather than having to leave the door open to talk to him. Nothing like a quarter inch of steel to limit a man’s ability to grope.
“Po. You can call me Po, you know that.”
“Sure. Well, gotta get to that next appointment of mine.”
“Sure, sweetie.” He reached in through the open window and grasped my near hand.
I narrowed my eyes and stared, fury leaping into my
heart. “Mr. Bradley, sir, I’m not being feisty; I’m just plain not interested.”
Po jerked back in surprise, the creases in his face popping so wide open that their absence of tanning made them glow like a spider’s web catching the sun.
Po was not half so surprised as I was. It was not like me to be so blunt. It just made me mad that a man my father’s age would, well …
“Fine,” he said. His face relaxed back into its perennial smile. “Well, if I can help you any more, you just say. Anything a-tall. I’d like to see this thing put to rest, you know.”
Recovering myself, I said, “Fine. You know what happened to that journal she was writing in?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t that go back to Denver with the rest of her things?”
“Oh. Okay, you see or hear anything that night it happened?”
“No, ol’ Sheriff Elwin sure asked me that, too.” He shrugged charmingly, slipped his hat off and scratched his head in a considered parody of giving my question greater thought. “Well, lessee. I seem to recall a friend of hers dropped by earlier that afternoon.”
“Friend?”
“Yeah, big buck with a fancy car.”
When my mouth began to sag open, Po continued. “Yellerish-haired guy, looks like he coulda played football in school, only he seemed more the type ’at was into intramural sports, if you know what I mean.”
Screw your come-ons,
I thought impatiently. “You catch his name?”
He grinned. “Nope.”
Ignoring the mischief in his eyes, I said, “This was someone her age, right? Not a suitor for the daughter.”
“Nope, plenty of gray in that there mustache.”
Big brawny guy, graying blond with a mustache. “What kind of car you say it was?”
“Gold BMW ’at needs a tune-up.”
“Out-of-state tags?”
“Nope, Wyoming.” Po furrowed his brow in a mockery of great seriousness as he added, “I told that there sheriff all of this.”
I dug around with another ten or twelve questions, but Po couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me any more about the unnamed caller, and I ran out of new angles for jogging his increasingly selective memory.
Tired and aggravated, I turned the wheels of my truck toward town and the breakfast for which my stomach was beginning to scream, wondering just how deep the game between Po Bradley and the sheriff ran.
T
HE Jackalope special at the LaBonte Inn coffee shop consisted of one egg, one pancake, and my choice of two pieces of bacon or sausage links for $2.95. The coffee was hot and the water cold, both features that are necessary to shroud the strong, rather soapy taste that comes out of the taps in Wyoming.
I struck up a conversation with the waitress at the counter, but while she was plenty interested in the topic, she didn’t know anything about Miriam’s death I hadn’t already heard, and her opinion of Po Bradley was something she kept to herself, beyond a suggestive smile. After eating, I browsed around town a bit, finding a fine bookshop in the R-D Drugstore on the main drag. I scoped out the library, the post office, and the county offices, then tried to reach the county coroner, but was told he was out. A call to the hospital got me no closer to talking to the ambulance crew. I soon got restless, which is to say, people were getting a whole lot more out of ogling me than I was out of questioning them. It seemed that Saturday was a day to get ranch chores done, and what the hell was I doing hanging around expecting someone to hand me my answers on a silver platter?
I phoned my uncle Skinny up in Kaycee to see if he wanted a visit, but got no answer. Which meant that I was officially at loose ends. Which meant what? Go back to Boulder and sit on my butt the rest of the weekend? Not a pleasant idea. Then I got to thinking about the peculiar matter of the drilling mud out on the Broken Spoke Ranch. While it had nothing to do with Miriam, I was sure, it had
a lot to do with petroleum, and, well … I got into my truck and started driving back out the Cold Springs Road, figuring I’d just take a peek.
It wasn’t difficult to find the shed, if you knew what you were looking for. Cat drivers that do subcontract work for oil companies have a certain style to the roads they blade in. They just drop that slab of metal and shove, drawing as straight and wide and flat a run as they can out to the location. The gate built for access—another dead giveaway that something was going on there, a cut in the barbed wire with extra sturdy new posts put in before a new wire fence was constructed—was a bit unorthodox. Usually a cattle guard is placed across the road, a trough topped with iron rails that spans the opening between the new fence posts, instead of a wire gate. Cattle stay away from the rails, not wanting to get their hooves caught in between them, but trucks can drive right over them, making a characteristic thrumming sound. Heaven knows, no oil-field workers want to be bothered opening and closing any gates, but perhaps the people who had built the well location just hadn’t gotten as far as putting in the guard, and had just strung up some wire to keep Po’s half-starved cattle in.
The gate was secured with a heavy padlock, another irregularity. Locked gates are considered somewhat rude in Wyoming. Figuring the builders could screw their bad manners, I parked my truck outside the gate, climbed over it, and marched on in to inspect the shed. It was not far from the fence, but situated around behind the shoulder of the hill, just as Po had described it. A very strange place for a drilling location, when there was all that nice flat land farther away from the shoulder of the hill. Why hug topography?
I cast my mudlogger’s eye about the site. A pad had been bladed in, and a preliminary gouge cut where the lined mud pond would sit. Not very big. Was this to be a shallow well, or were the drillers going to bring in tanks to hold the overflow mud? And that shed-it wasn’t any bigger than usual, but it sure was fancy. And it sure was locked. Why, to
protect a few hundred dollars’ worth of clay? I walked right up to it and squinted in through the crack between the door and the jamb. Nothing was there.
“Nice, huh?” said a voice behind me.
I jumped sideways, spun around. “Po!”
“Emily,” he purred, eyes going all sleepy on me, like a cat does while it’s digging its claws into your lap.
“Hey, nice location!” I said stupidly.
“Real nice,” he replied, advancing on me, his thumbs hooked into his belt.
“Hey, sorry, just got curious,” I prattled, circling around him toward my truck. How in hell had this man sneaked up on me? I looked down at his feet, which he moved slowly, artfully, like the smooth dancer he was. “Okay, hell, I owe you an apology, skulking onto your land like this. But you know, I just wondered about how these guys said they were going to drill you a well and then didn’t.” The words spewed out of my mouth, an idiotic jumble of excuses trying to sound like reasons.
But it worked. Po stopped, thought. “You think there’s something funny about this?” he asked. His eyes had gone hard. -
I kept walking toward my truck, and he followed me, matching my pace.
“Speak,” he said.
“I dunno, Po, but it seems damned weird to me to grade you a location and put you up a shed and then there’s nothing in it and you got a gate but no cattle guard. I mean, when they gonna get the rig in here, anyway?”
“Like I say—”
“No, I mean really. Shit, Po, there’re a lot of guys in the oil business as don’t mind takin’ advantage of a man,” I said in my best down-home Wyoming us-versus-them talk. “So who’s drilling this hole, for starts?”
Po was quiet for a moment. Then he opened his mouth and said just two words: “Boomer Oil.”

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