It took me almost an hour to plunge through the northern congestion of Denver's metropolitan area and intersect with Interstate 70 on my journey toward Limon, the little town that is the geographic bull's-eye in the center of Colorado's eastern plains.
Many people who have never visited Colorado have a mental image that the state consists predominantly of mountains. Sharp juvenile peaks, high meadows, glacial faces, deep canyons. Travel magazine stuff.
But if a driver heads east away from the Front Range, especially if he's beyond the boundaries of Denver's metropolitan sprawl, and if he doesn't glance back into his rearview mirror, the state of Colorado is hardly distinguishable from Nebraska or Iowa or Kansas. Less corn, more wheat, but mostly mile after mile of mind-numbing Great Plains high prairie. Some people love it, others don't. Either way, the broad expanse of endless horizon and infinite sky takes up roughly half the state.
I'm convinced that if highway planners hadn't chosen the Limon-to-Agate spur for Interstate 70's northwest traverse across the eastern prairie toward Denver, virtually no one would have any reason to be aware exactly where either Agate or Limon is. Nor would anyone care much. In fact, absent the wide ribbon of interstate, Colorado's eastern plains are geographically pretty close to nowhere, and one look at the map confirms that Limon and Agate are about as close to the middle as is theoretically possible.
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.