I made only one wrong turn as I was navigating the grid of county roads east of Agate, and found the Ramp spread on my first try. As I made the last turn, I spotted Lucy's red Volvo parked in the shadow of a huge stack of hay. The lead-gray color of the straw told me that it hadn't been baled or stacked recently. I stopped and got out of my car.
"You been waiting long?" I asked Lucy.
"Half an hour, forty minutes."
"Sorry, I went as fast as I could."
"It's okay, I'm just killing time today anyway. The house is right down there. Why don't we leave your car here, just take mine. I don't want to spook her any more than we already will."
The Ramp home was a sixties-style suburban ranch house that seemed out of place without a few dozen clones crammed around it on six-thousand-square-foot lots. An uninterrupted line of spreading junipers was the only vegetation around the house. A solitary tree-I thought it was a hackberry-stood at the edge of a field about fifty yards to the east.
Lucy drove past the house once before she doubled back toward the driveway. I wasted a moment trying to decide how nearby Ella Ramp's closest neighbor lived. Distances were great out there, and I guessed it was almost a mile between houses.
An impeccably preserved brown Ford pickup-the vintage was late sixties or early seventies-was parked on the dirt drive, not far from the house. Lucy parked behind the truck and we walked to the front door. She knocked. I was already having second thoughts about being out there; a good-sized part of me wished that I'd instead stayed in Boulder and moved up my appointment with Naomi Bigg.
There's another bomb, she'd said. That lawyer.
I nearly jumped when I heard somebody say, "Hell!"
Half a minute or so later the door opened. "What?" squealed the woman who stood in the doorway. She was a wiry woman who'd once been of average height, but her frame was beginning to bow to gravity and osteoporosis. Her hair was as gray as slate and her eyes were a blue that glowed like the ocean in the tropics.
"What?" the woman repeated in the same acidic tone. Despite her posture, I pegged her at only about sixty.
Lucy said, "Hello, I'm, um, Lucy Tanner. I-"
"So what?"
Lucy moved back six or eight inches. "We spoke on the phone. I called about your grandson. Do you remember? May I come in?"
"Are you nuts? No, you can't come in. Didn't your mother ever tell you to wait to be invited? Where are your manners? And of course I remember. How many calls like that do you think I get? I'm not feeble."
At the first hollered "Hell!" I'd shifted into clinical mode. This woman-who answered her door by squealing "What?" and who had just called Lucy nuts-was now questioning her manners. I said, "Hello, I, um-"
She stepped right on my words, ignoring me, instead retaining her focus on Lucy. "You a cop?" she asked.
"Excuse me?" Lucy said.
"On TV, the cops always ask to come in. They never wait till they're invited. Something happen to my boy? Are you a cop?"
"I am actually, but I'm not here today as-"
Ella Ramp pushed out the door and shuffled past us. "Come on. I have to check on the chickens. I bet my ass you've never checked on a chicken in your life. I'm right, ain't I? Never mind, I know I'm right. That," she said, pointing at Lucy's Volvo, "ain't no chicken-checker's car."
The henhouse was about thirty yards away, out back. Lucy and I waited while Ella disappeared inside for about three or four minutes. Because she was stooped over, she fit right inside the coop door.
Lucy whispered, "She's… interesting, isn't she?"
"Yes," I said. "She is."
Ella shuffled back out and double-checked the clasp on the fence around the henhouse.
I asked, "Has he been out to visit you lately? Your boy?" I was careful to mimic the language she'd used to describe her grandson.
"What's it to you? And who the hell are you, anyway?" Her tone lightened suddenly as she said, "The chickens are fine, by the way, thanks for asking."
"My name is Alan Gregory, and I'm-"
"Well, whoop-dee-do." She turned to Lucy. "You his new girlfriend, missy? He knock you up? Is that why you've come out here? He's got a thing with the girls. And they certainly have a thing with him. But knocking up a cop? Did he? He didn't. Hell's another."
Hell's another? Hell's a mother? I wasn't sure what Ella had said or what on earth it was supposed to mean.
"No, I'm, um, not pregnant."
Ella stopped. She had to crane her neck to look up at Lucy. "Dearest God, you're tall. You're taller than he is. That'd be awkward in my book. But you're not… you and he, you're not…?"
"No, we're not."
"That's for the best, I suppose. But you haven't told me why you are here, have you?"
While Lucy sputtered to find a way to reply, I said, "It's about the explosives, Mrs. Ramp."
"Oh, that," Ella replied in a dismissive voice as she shuffled back toward the house. "I thought he was in trouble or something."
Ella busied herself fixing coffee and I agreed to accept a cup even though I would've preferred a glass of water. Lucy, who despised coffee, took one, too. On the way from the front door to the kitchen, I'd tried to spot a collection of framed family photographs, hoping to see a photo of Ella's grandson. But the living room was spare in its decor and the only photographs in sight were of pets. Mostly horses, but also a dog. A huge dog. I thought it was a mastiff, but I wasn't sure.
Ella's kitchen was as spotless as her truck. The pristine room could have been lifted out of the house in one chunk and installed-intact-in some granite edifice as a museum exhibit about life in 1962. Maybe part of a Dwight-and-Mamie-Eisenhower-at-home exhibit at the Smithsonian. The old refrigerator was a Norge and it hummed at a volume that screamed for someone to clean its coils.
The only modern appliance in the kitchen was a little white color television. Ella had it tuned to one of the Denver stations. She turned the sound down all the way before she served the coffee.
Ella said, "Milk? Sugar? I don't use 'em, but I can find 'em if you want 'em."
"No, thank you," I said.
Lucy added, "Black is fine."
"He came by the explosives legal, by the way. They were Herbert's. I told the boy he could experiment with them the way Herbert taught him. The neighbors don't mind; they're used to it by now. It's been going on for at least a quarter century. You know you're getting old when you hear yourself talking in quarter centuries."
I hesitated a moment to see if Lucy was planning to take the lead. She wasn't. I raised the cup to my lips and tried to sound nonchalant as I replied, "The explosives were Herbert's?"
"Who did you say you were? Are you like her lawyer or something?"
"No, I'm Alan Gregory, Dr. Alan Gregory. I'm a psychologist in Boulder."
"Well, what the hell are you doing out here?"
"The explosives," I said. "We came to talk with you about the explosives."
She harrumphed. "You ever been to Las Vegas?" asked Ella.
Lucy said she had driven through, but never stopped. I added, "I've been there a few times."
"Well, I'm proud to say that my Herbert blew up half that damn town. Maybe more than half."
"He did? He blew up half the town?" I didn't have a clue what she was talking about, but was eager to keep her talking about it.
"You know the company called Demolition Specialists? Doesn't matter whether you do or you don't. They're some of the boys who blow up those big buildings all over the place. You always see 'em on the national news, usually on Sunday. They blow most of the big buildings on Sunday on account of there aren't so many people around. People are drawn to explosions for some reason. Like bugs to light, I think. What they do is they implode the buildings actually, so that they fall in on themselves.