“Does seem like you could use some help.”
“Can’t afford that either, right now. Not with the tight new BLM quotas.”
“Bureau of Land Management. Right?”
“Right. They own most of our grazing land; we lease it from them. They tell us how many cows we can run, how long they can stay on public land, how many new calves we can add each year.”
“Ecological reasons?”
“Too many wildlife species headed for extinction on account of livestock grazing on public land — that’s what they say. So they regulate the number of cows on a parcel by how much grazing they figure the land will support, no input from us. Shit, this is sagebrush desert. Cattle couldn’t do any real ecological damage in country like this if every rancher out here ran five times as many head.”
“The BLM must know what it’s doing.”
“That’s what you think.” Sore subject; Lonnie changed it with a question: “So what do you want this time?”
“Want?”
“With my ma.”
“A little more talk, that’s all. I guess she told you about our conversation yesterday.”
“She told me,” Lonnie said. “You got her all lathered again before you left.”
“I didn’t mean to. That’s another reason I’m here: I want to apologize to her.”
“Yeah, well, the best way you can do that is to go away and leave us alone. We got enough grief to deal with.”
“Adding to your grief is the last thing I want, Lonnie.”
“Maybe so, but it’s what you’re doing. She killed them. Why do you want to make out she didn’t?”
“What makes you so sure your aunt was guilty?”
“She’s the only one who had enough cause to do it. My uncle deserved killing, he sure as hell did, but she didn’t have to hurt Tess, too. It wasn’t Tess’s fault.”
“What wasn’t Tess’s fault?”
“That she had a son of a bitch for a father.”
“You hated him,” Messenger said. “Why? All the women he cheated with?”
“That’s one reason.”
“What’s another?”
“I don’t want to talk about him. He’s dead. They’re all dead now and Ma and me just want to forget about it. Why don’t you let us do that, huh?”
Messenger let the question pass. How do you explain a need and a conviction like his to a fifteen-year-old? He couldn’t explain it even to himself.
He said, “Where’s she mending fence, Lonnie?”
“Old mine road.”
“Where’s that?”
“West. First left up toward the hills.”
“The road to the Bootstrap Mine? Where your aunt hunted for gold?”
“Not enough gold left in that mine to fill two of your teeth.”
“But she did go prospecting there. She could’ve been there the day of the murders, just as she said.”
“She was home killing Tess that day.”
“Were you here? Did you see her pass by at any time?”
“I wasn’t here, I was in school. Ma was away, too. All right? She killed them and nobody was here to stop her. I wish to God I had been!”
The sudden angry outburst set Buster off again, barking and lunging at his chain.
“Lonnie, I’m sorry if I—”
“I’ve got work to finish,” Lonnie said. He turned toward the shed. All the way there he swung the wrench in short, chopping air blows, as if it were a weapon being wielded at an enemy’s head.
He knows something, Messenger thought.
The feeling was as clear and sharp as the insight he’d had here yesterday about Anna’s move to San Francisco. It wasn’t actual knowledge of the crimes; Lonnie’s belief that his aunt had committed them seemed genuine. Something else. But what? What could he know?
12
The old mine road was little more than a half-formed series of ruts that hadn’t been graded or repaired since it was built. A metal arrow sign, rusted and bent and bullet-pocked, said BOOTSTRAP MINE, with a mileage figure that had been worn away. Bullet holes in the center of the two O’s in Bootstrap made them look like a pair of dead, staring eyes.
Messenger saw the Jeep and then Dacy Burgess less than a minute after he turned onto the ruts. The terrain here was rumpled, just beginning to rise into the stark, sunburnt hills. A narrow arroyo, steep-sided and strewn with fractured rock, angled down from the higher elevations, and where it paralleled the road for fifty yards or so the Jeep was drawn up in the meager shade of an overhang. On the far side of the wash, barbed-wire fencing stretched upward in an irregular line — obviously put there to keep cattle from straying into the wash. That was where Dacy was, standing now with her back to the fence, watching as he drove up behind the Jeep.
He walked to the edge of the wash. “Morning.”
She said, “I figured it was you soon as I saw the dust. Lonnie tell you where to find me?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a good kid but he talks too much.”
“All right if I come over where you are?”
“Better not — you’re liable to bust a leg. I’ll come over there. I’m done here anyway.”
At her feet was an open tool kit. She closed and hoisted it, then made her way quickly and agilely down into the arroyo and up the loose-shale bank to where he stood. The look she gave him was neither friendly nor unfriendly. Tolerant, he thought. A little speculative, too, as if she were seeing something in him that she hadn’t noticed yesterday.
“What happened to the fence?” he asked.
“Wind blew a section down. Happens all the time. Damn soil is too loose to keep a post down tight.”
“Hard work, repairing it?”
“Not so hard, if you don’t have to string new wire. I didn’t, this time.” She put the tool kit into the Jeep, shed the heavy work gloves she’d been wearing. “Why’d you come back?”
“For one thing, to apologize. I didn’t handle our talk very well yesterday.”
Dacy shrugged and adjusted her sweat-stained Stetson. “No need. I didn’t handle it very well, either. What else?”
“To give you this,” and he handed her the paper he’d written out before leaving the motel earlier.
“Who’s George Del Carlo?” she asked after she’d glanced at it.
“Police inspector in San Francisco. He’s the one to contact to identify Anna. He’ll explain the procedures to you.”
“What procedures? I told you yesterday, I don’t want Anna’s blood money.”
“You don’t have to keep it, but you might think about claiming it. This seems to be a fairly poor county; give it to charity here. Otherwise, it’ll go to the state of California, and that’s not right.”
She seemed about to argue, changed her mind and said, “Maybe it isn’t. All right, I’ll think about it.”
“You’ll have to make arrangements for burial or cremation, too. Del Carlo will put you in touch with whoever handles that in the coroner’s office.”
“Christ, they still have her in the morgue?”
“Yes. Frozen storage.”
One corner of Dacy’s mouth twitched. “Well, I can’t afford to have the body shipped back here for burial. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t. Put her in the damn ground out there.”
“That’s up to you. But at least give her a marker with her real name on it. She deserves that much.”
“Does she? If you think so, why don’t you pay for a headstone?”
“Maybe I will, if you don’t.”
She shook her head, tight-lipped, and tucked the paper into her shirt pocket. “Now if that’s all, how about if you head out to Vegas or wherever you’re going and let me get on with my work.”
“I’m not going anywhere just yet,” he said.