Death Pans Out Read online

  Disappointed and puzzled, Neva sat down on the chopping block and tried to picture his progress through the dry, scrubby woods on the east side of the canyon. The old trails over there were even rougher than on this side of the creek, and only collapsed timbers remained of the shacks that had been scattered through the drainage during the heydays of gold mining. Skipper Dooley had not struck her as someone likely to explore for exploring’s sake. Her many years as a journalist had trained her to get information from people fast, and to sum them up neatly, but she also had learned how wrong first impressions could be. Even so, she would have bet that Dooley was a man with a purpose.

  The sound of the scooter ceased suddenly, leaving only the usual quiet of midmorning. Either Dooley had turned the scooter off or he’d gone over the top of the ridge and was headed down the other side into Jump Creek Canyon.

  With sudden decision Neva returned indoors. It was later than she usually set off, but she couldn’t let a stranger ruin her day. She would go ahead with the plan she’d made yesterday before he arrived. Today she would attempt the most ambitious hike yet. Today she would climb Billie Mountain, the highest point on the ridge at the head of Billie Creek Canyon. Working quickly, she damped down the stove, filled a water bottle, put cold bannock and dried fruit into the small bag she wore on her belt, took up her hat and binoculars, and left the cabin.

  Her step was light and easy. Gradually, she was exploring all four branches of the creek that lay between the cabin and the upper springs, each with its own mini-canyon. Twice she had made it to the spring line where the creeks originated on the lower slopes of Billie Mountain. There, the seeping waters created a bright mossy necklace across the dry sage. Now she felt ready to climb out of the spring basin to the top, where the view would stretch for miles.

  To reach the basin she was following the smallest branch of the creek for the first time, walking along an old mining road that now was little more than a game trail. The dusty track climbed gently through scattered trees, the canyon gradually narrowing until she could have hit either side with a tossed rock. After about two miles, the trail entered a dense stand of ponderosa pines, the needles soft and slippery underfoot and only glimpses of sky showing through the canopy. The strawberry smell of warm pitch was heavy and sweet.

  She walked slower, savoring the ripe air, and was considering whether to stretch out for a rest on the spongy needles when she saw a cabin ahead. Solid and dark, it stood close on the right of the trail. It was the first standing ruin she’d found, and she hurried toward it hoping the packrats had not done their worst, but it turned out to be airy and better suited to squirrels than the dark-loving rats. Even before she circled to the front, which faced away from the trail, she could see that the whole structure had slumped. Like a leaning drunk, it had sagged sideways against a large ponderosa that grew close on the downstream end. The front had popped out like a wall from a card house, leaving three tipsy sides and a caved-in roof, the single room fully visible despite collapsed timbers and scattered shakes. Everything was deeply layered in pine needles, and the squirrels had left their picnic remains—gnawed bracts from the pinecones—all over the plank table, the double bunk and the exposed shelves of a kitchen hutch.

  The furniture, handmade and unpainted, appeared sturdy under its brittle blanket, as though waiting to be swept and made useful again. A graniteware washbasin still hung from a whittled wall peg next to the hutch, though its bottom was rusted to lace. Next to the bed lay a heavily worn boot, a woman’s boot about Neva’s size, still contoured to the shape of a foot. Searching with her eyes for the mate, Neva imagined pulling the boot onto her bare foot, the old leather cool and scratchy. But it wasn’t her own wide brown foot she saw going into the boot. The foot was slim and pale, the ankle delicate enough to be elegant even when the boot was laced.

  Standing very still, her back suddenly warm as though someone had come up close behind her, Neva listened to the heavy air. Slowly she turned to face the creek that ran slow and shallow along the east side of the clearing. She scanned the opposite bank, the crowded trees, the small flat scattered with boards and rusting metal half buried in grass. Of course there was no one. She was alone, utterly and perfectly alone in the midday stillness, with nothing stirring except for the stream. No one had lived in the cabin for decades. Judging by the overgrown path, no one had even visited for a very long time.

  Her heart beat noticeably as she turned back to the ruin, but she was not afraid. Of course, the cabin site was haunted—the entire drainage was haunted by history—but the spirits that lingered here weren’t angry or threatening. The broken tools, old graniteware pots, rusted chunks of metal and weathered timbers scattered throughout the canyon were mysterious and somewhat sad, but not frightening.

  Though now shut in by tall pines, the clearing would have been sunny during the mining years. The tree that supported the cabin must have been small then, but was now too big to encircle with her arms and the patchwork bark was deeply fissured. She went up to the tree, pressed her nose into a crack, and breathed in the ripe scent of vanilla. As she straightened she glanced to the left, at an object that was sticking out of the trunk at about the height of her shoulder. It was a small tobacco can, oval in shape and about five inches long, which had been nailed to the tree so many years ago the bark had shaped around it like a cup holder.

  Velvet Pipe and Cigarette Tobacco, The Smoothest Smoke in America, Burns Cool and Sweet in Pipe or Cigarette.

  The writing was just legible through patches of rust, and the narrow lid stuck at first, then opened with a squeak. Sitting inside on a layer of powdery rust was a glossy piece of obsidian about the size of a quarter. The canyon trails were littered with obsidian chunks, many with flake marks as though from ancient tool making. How had this piece come to be in the can? It wasn’t dusty so it couldn’t have been here for long—but what did “long” mean out in this territory? A month? A year? A decade?

  Like the lone boot and the cabin itself, the can and its obsidian clearly had a story, but there was no one left to tell it.

  ***

  The sun had dropped below the horizon by the time Neva came down from the ridge feeling shaky but jubilant. She had made it to the top where the view did go on forever, with mountains in every direction, the distant Wallowas and Elkhorns still snow-capped. Even more flowers bloomed on the bright ridge top than in the creek canyon, and butterflies danced over the flowers as though drunk on air. She, too, had felt drunk with new life as she strode along the ridge top with her T-shirt off, showing her scars to blue distance, her sweaty skin cooling in the breeze.

  But coming down the steep side of the ridge where rocks rolled underfoot, she had stopped to rest several times. Her food and water were long gone, her legs were bleeding from wading through brittle sagebrush, and for the last mile she had been driven by the thought of cold oranges. The oranges were in her cooler, a plastic tub sunk in the creek and weighted down with rocks, where she also stored cheese, potatoes, onions, carrots and tomatoes. The cooler was just upstream from Skipper Dooley’s camp but screened from sight by a stand of young aspens. Approaching carefully, she heard nothing but the stream and saw no sign of man or dog.

  Today she allowed herself two oranges, which she tore apart in her eagerness. She sank her sticky face and hands into the creek, resisting the temptation to drink. It was difficult to believe that such clear water was not pure, but giardia was now everywhere in the West. She sat back on her heels, dried her hands on her shirt, and considered the best way to get from here to the cabin without risking a meeting with her unwelcome neighbor. Ordinarily, she went downstream to cross the creek opposite the campsite and follow the road up, but now it seemed better to cross where she was and angle through the woods.

  Her hope that Dooley had left Billie Creek was dashed by the sight of his dimly lit camper window. A moment later, a dark form rushed from the shadows barking furiously.

  “Cayuse!” a voice roared. “You stupid son of
a bitch, shut up and show some manners.”

  Though she knew instantly that it was the dog, Neva’s heart pounded and she had to steady herself with a hand against a pine trunk as she searched for Skipper in the darkness under the trees.

  “You’re quiet as a spook going along there,” he said from close by, then detached himself from the shadow of a tree trunk and came toward her. “Where you been?”

  “Up on Billie Mountain.”

  “Whoa. That’s a distance.”

  “Where did you go?” she said, noting the smell of whiskey.

  “Over to Jump Creek. That’s the next drainage to the east, not that there’s anything in particular to see over there.”

  “But you’re not a miner?” Neva eyed the dog, which now sat by Skipper’s leg and returned her look with no appearance of threat.

  “No, ma’am. I’m what they call an artifact hunter, the legal kind, of course. I’ve plowed through just about every kind of site you’ve got out here, and most of Arizona and New Mexico too, just seeing what I can see.”

  “What do you see? I mean, what are you looking for?”

  “Just about anything historic. I’ve found everything from China cups as fine as frog hair to old wedding rings. You have tooth powder cans, hand-blown bottles, square nails, even the occasional nugget.”

  “How about old tobacco cans? I found one today, nailed to a tree.”

  “Is that so? I’m glad to hear it. The miners used to put their claim papers in those cans. Used to be you found them everywhere but now you have too many people running around helping themselves. I don’t keep much myself. I just like to find it.” He turned his head, spit expertly, then looked at her sidelong. “Now, what’s your excuse? You’re no miner yourself.”

  She should have been prepared for such a question, but she hadn’t expected to meet anyone out here, let alone someone curious about her. She had no secrets and didn’t much care one way or the other what people knew about her, but even so, Skipper Dooley was not a person she could talk to casually about breast cancer. She said, “I’m taking a break from my newspaper job over in the Willamette Valley. I just needed a rest. A long rest somewhere hot and quiet.”

  “You call hiking up Billie Mountain resting? Lady, most people when they want a break don’t go to the back of nowhere to do it, where you don’t even have a hot shower at the end of the day. Tell you what, if I was a judge and jury I wouldn’t believe a word of it.”

  Startled—he was as suspicious of her as she was of him—Neva resisted the sudden urge to laugh. She tried to think of an answer that would be truthful while not too personal, but before she could speak he went on with sudden earnestness. “See these hands?” He held them up for inspection, palms turned inward, and even in the near dark she could see that they were scarred by hard use. “I made a living with these hands for forty-six years, a good living, too, raised four boys, survived marriages to three women that would still like to see my hide on the wall. Anyway, I’ve been lucky. I’m sixty-nine now, an old man that can’t walk like I used to. So what? Well, it means something. But sometimes you just have to get away. You don’t have to tell me about it. Sometimes you just have to hit the road.”

  ***

  One of the glorious things about being at the mine was the opulent sleep that came so easily every night, but tonight for the first time Neva felt restless in bed. The image of Skipper Dooley hovered in her thoughts, a more complicated image now, and when she heard his truck in what felt like the small hours of the morning, she nodded as though she had been expecting just this sound. Her neighbor was leaving the mine. She sat up and held her breath in the dark to hear more clearly, and then, puzzled, got out of bed and went through the kitchen to the back door. She opened it and listened with a sense of déj vu to the uneven rumble that came from Billie Creek Road. For the second time in two days a stranger was invading her canyon. This wasn’t Dooley pulling out, but some larger vehicle making its way up the road beyond the cabin cutoff despite the rocks and potholes.

  Whoever it was would not get far. But where had they come from? There couldn’t be more than fifty people in the entire Dry River Valley, even counting Angus with its lone café, part-time post office, and boarded-up schoolhouse. Ranch kids looking for a place to park could find plenty of privacy without coming this far, and surely a diesel truck wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice for a date. Maybe someone had started mining higher up Billie Creek? Driving in on her first day she had seen two mines farther down the road, the Sufferin’ Smith Mine near the bottom of the canyon, and the Barlow Mine about halfway up. Both were active, although there had been nothing to see at the Sufferin’ Smith Mine aside from two plywood cabins sitting across the creek from the road. The Barlow Mine was a huge pit in the creek bottom. The road went around it without ever giving a view of the equipment or people working down below, but there was freshly bulldozed ground, and two pickup trucks were parked by the cabins at the upper rim of the pit. Both mines were marked on the area map along with Billie Creek Mine, but there was nothing higher up the canyon that she knew of.

  Maybe it was a rancher bringing in cows by truck. She had smelled the pungent manure odor of cows up the creek today although she had not seen any. But no rancher would haul cattle in the dead of night. Or would he? Maybe it would be cooler for the cows this way. She really didn’t know. In fact, she didn’t know much about this high desert world of mines and ranches, not much at all.

  Quiet returned to the creek, but as she got back into bed, the familiar coyotes started their midnight serenade, the usual long, wavering calls punctuated with short yips that made her smile. Her uncle must have heard the same chorus hundreds of times while lying in this same room. Maybe he, too, had enjoyed picturing the coyote pups pointing their noses at the sky to howl with the grownups and instead letting out excited barks. Uncle Matthew…She had met him when she was nine and had never seen him again. On that one occasion, she had come to the mine with her father. Her mother had stayed behind at home even though Matthew had been her only sibling. Too young then to wonder why, or why there were no other visits with her uncle, Neva hadn’t asked her mother for an explanation until many years later, after they were told that Matthew had disappeared from the mine leaving no clue to where he’d gone.

  “It’s an old story,” Frances had said, putting off Neva’s questions. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  Her father had said only, “Families are peculiar things, Neva. Sometimes it’s best just to let the past alone.”

  Now she wished she had pushed harder for information about the family’s black sheep, as she had come to think of her uncle, but when he disappeared she had been married to Carlo, with a small son to raise. Then Carlo also had died, leaving her with five-year-old Ethan to bring up on her own. Digging for information about a wayward relative had been a long way from her thoughts back then, but with every day that passed at the mine her curiosity about Uncle Matthew Burt deepened along with her regret. The family was too small as it was, and could not afford to let a relative simply vanish, not only from the known world but from family memory as well. She had tried to say this when her mother also lay dying, tried to persuade her to talk about Matthew, but it had been too late.

  “You tell him I’m sorry,” Frances had said through tears. “He’ll come home someday. Please tell him I’m sorry, truly sorry. I know I misjudged him, I just know it now.”

  And this was all she would say even when Neva pressed, unable to believe that her gentle mother could have done anything deserving such regret. “Sorry for what?”

  “He’ll know. He’ll know.”

  No information regarding his whereabouts or fate had ever turned up, but because his body was never found, her mother refused to believe that Matthew had met a bad end at the mine. Until her own death two years ago, she had insisted that he had left by choice and would return someday. Neva had not tried to talk her mother out of what she herself considered to be a fantasy, but now she cou
ld not help wishing that Frances had been right. Living at his mine, cooking with his pots, sleeping in his bed, she felt a growing bond to her uncle, and half expected to step out onto the porch some evening to discover him sitting in the twilight. She pictured him striding alongside her on walks even though, if still alive, he would be over eighty by now and possibly feeble like his partner, Orson Gale.

  Poor Orson. Her uncle’s disappearance had been the end of him as well, at least the end of his meaningful life. He gave up mining within a year, suffered a stroke, and ended up in the nursing home where he still remained, unable to speak or communicate in any way. Her mother had sent him a Christmas card every year, and Neva had carried on the tradition even though there was never a response. And more for the sake of form than because she thought it was really necessary she had sent him a note saying she would be in the cabin all summer. She had said nothing about the surgery or the depression that followed, only that she needed a quiet place to be alone for a while.

  Chapter Four

  He first noticed her as a light speck zigzagging up the rocky slope above the head of the creek. Not a deer. Not a coyote. He took out his field glasses, scanned, focused, and made a wordless sound. It was a woman. She was naked. His arm twitched and he lost her.

  He steadied his elbow against a juniper trunk and searched the slope, too fast at first, but then with self-control. There she was, not quite naked but she wore no shirt and the shorts were rolled high on her legs. Her bare back was dark from the sun…shoulder blades, grooved spine, muscles moving as her arms swung.