“I’m sorry.”
“You have your mother. I had my grandmother.”
The food came.
“Looks good,” Jenny said. They’d both ordered simple bacon, eggs, and toast. “I love breakfast.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Do you think she knew her killer?” Jenny asked.
Ogden felt like a phony, a fraud. Who was he to be playing investigator? He was just supposed to go through the woman’s papers. “I don’t know.”
They sat without talking for a while and Ogden realized that he had nearly inhaled his food. He set his fork down. “I guess I was hungry,” he said.
“I guess I wasn’t,” she said. She pushed at her eggs and then ate a bit of toast.
“Robbins was your mother’s maiden name?”
Jenny nodded.
“Who is Lester G. Robbins?”
Jenny thought. “Lester?”
“The name was in your mother’s address book.”
“Where does he live?” she asked.
The waitress came and poured Ogden more coffee.
“Where does he live?” she asked again.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just a name in her book.”
It was nearly nine when they walked into the house. Ogden paused before closing the door just to look at how bright and clear the day was. The snow on the street had already become slushy, but the yards were still beautiful. Most of it would be gone by late afternoon. “It never lasts long,” he said.
Jenny looked at him.
“The snow. Around here, it falls and then the sun takes care of it pretty quickly.”
Jenny sat at the desk and looked at the pile of papers. “Where do I start?”
“I’ve been through it all,” he said. “I do have a couple of questions. I didn’t find any insurance policies. Do you know if she had any?”
“I don’t know.”
“And you’re the only child?”
Jenny looked as if she was contemplating being offended by the question. “As far as I know.”
“Then I guess you’re the new owner of a parcel of land ‘herein referred to as the southeast quarter of section 22, southwest quarter of Section 23, T16R71W in Plata County.’ ”
“Oh yeah?”
“Nearly a hundred acres as far as I can see from the deed.” Ogden handed the paper to her. “Can’t say I know where it is, from that description.’ ”
“I guess that’s a good thing,” she said.
“Maybe it’s a pretty place. Maybe there’s a house on it.” While she studied the document, Ogden slipped the address book into his jacket pocket. “I’ll get some wood for the fire while you look.” He walked through the house to the back and out the kitchen door. Ogden had had little interest in the old woman when she’d been alive, so he was amused at how much her death was affecting him. Perhaps it was as simple as a mystery to pass the time in a boring, sleepy village. Maybe it was some kind of sublimation for a stalled life, a life he was not pursuing. Or perhaps he just wanted to catch and stop a killer. Anyway, he thought he needed the address book.
He took the wood back in and got the fire going. He sat on the sofa and glanced through a People magazine while Jenny sifted through the papers. He looked around the house at the tacky pictures on the walls, the assortment of knickknacks. Then it hit him. Everything in this house could be bought at the local roadside gift shops. He walked around the front rooms. Several cheap ceramic storytellers were scattered about. A couple of bad landscape paintings of the gorge and the mountains were on the walls. A couple of saddle blankets were tossed over the backs of chairs. There was nothing that made him think of the Pacific Northwest or Montana or any other place where the old woman had supposedly lived. He noticed a photo on the table on the other side of the room and went to it. There was the old lady, not much younger, recognizable, standing with a man of about fifty in front of a landscape that could have been local terrain, but also parts of California, Arizona, or Utah.
“Excuse me,” Ogden said. “Do you know this man?”
Jenny walked over to the picture, leaning close to Ogden for a good look. He could smell her shampoo or some fragrance and he didn’t like that he liked it.
“He’s a big guy,” Ogden said.
“I’ve never seen him,” Jenny said.
He took the picture from the wall and took off the back of the frame. There was nothing written there, so he put the disassembled mess on the table. “You can go on back to the papers,” he said. “I’m going to look around again.”
He looked through all the drawers in the bedroom, the kitchen cabinets, and the refrigerator again. He found so much nothing that it left his head spinning. He returned to the front room and fell with a thud onto the sofa.
“Anything?” Jenny asked.
Ogden shook his head.
“At least she didn’t leave a lot of bills to be paid,” Jenny said.
The phone rang. Ogden answered. It was Felton, saying that the sheriff wanted Ogden up on Plata Ridge right away.
“What’s up?” Ogden asked.
“We got us some more bodies.”
~ ~ ~
It was fairly easy to find the dirt road that lead to the ridge from the highway because of all the traffic it had seen in the last hour or so. It was muddy and deeply rutted. Ogden could feel his heart racing and he wondered why and realized the answer to that was obvious. Nothing makes people more interesting than their being dead. Sad, but true. He really didn’t want to see dead people. It made him feel queasy to see dead people, but damn if it wasn’t interesting. The sky was so blue that it was almost ironic.
He saw the collection of vehicles and the superfluous twisting flash of a blue light atop one of the rigs. There was a white panel truck parked in the middle of it all and outside it were four covered bodies. Ogden got out and stood next to Warren Fragua, the only Native member of the department. He told Ogden that the sheriff was on the other side of the van.
Paz was leaning into the bay of the van, looking around floor to ceiling. Ogden stood behind, but he was staring at the bodies. “What happened here, Bucky?”
The sheriff turned around. “We got us a bunch of dead folks. Couple of cowboys come up here looking for strays and found this. Looks like they lit this little stove to keep warm and smothered to death.”
“But?”
Paz looked at him.
“There’s a but in your voice.”
Paz cracked his jaw. “Looky here.” He pointed to the stove. “We didn’t find any food.”
“You just said they lit the stove to keep warm.”
“Look at the stove.”
Ogden did. It was a typical ten-dollar hibachi from a hardware store. The two grills were sitting over the cold ashes. “Why put the grills on if you’re not cooking? But if they were stupid enough to light it in the first place.”
“Just bothers me,” the sheriff said.
Ogden looked at the stove, put on a glove, and removed one of the grills. Then he removed the glove to push his fingers into the ashes. “There aren’t a lot of ashes,” he said.
“We’ll have to get somebody who knows the science to tell us if there was enough fuel to kill them.”
Ogden followed Paz over to the bodies. “Do you know who they are?” he asked.
Paz pulled a Baggie of carrot sticks out of his pocket. “These three, we don’t know. But this one.” He knelt down and pulled back the cover from the face. “Fragua recognized him as José Marotta. His mother called this morning to say she hadn’t seen him for a few days. All of nineteen years old.”
“Jesus.”
“The other poor bastards are Anglos. There’s something else, Ogden.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t like the way they died,” Paz said.