"Projects?"
Lauren grabbed my wrist.
"Yeah, like the friendship was some kind of a charity thing. And I almost forgot. At one point she said that Tami adopted her, Mariko.
Said she was like a stray puppy that Tami brought home. Cathy said the friendship wasn't going to last."
After lunch Lauren napped. She didn't want to nap. But she napped. As soon as we got back to the room she kicked off her shoes, took off her bra, and pulled on a T-shirt. She claimed the middle of the queen bed, curled up, and slept.
She considered her almost daily afternoon sleep a reluctant sacrifice she offered to the MS gods. The interlude helped to refresh her only slightly more than half the time. The rest of the time, she woke from her nap groggy and disoriented, and the process of reacclimating to the day would debit another hour from her useful life. One hundred percent of the time, the absolute necessity of the daily interlude infuriated her.
We were staying in a bed-and-breakfast below Howelsen Hill. Our room was small and had big dormers on two walls. Everything that could be plastered with wallpaper was. The paper had an abundance of stripes that seemed to go every which way around the dormers. I found myself tilting my head involuntarily to try to straighten out the lines. The room also had a pleasant balcony that was about the size of an old clawfoot bathtub. While Lauren curled up, I squeezed a chair out to the deck and pecked out notes on my laptop, sipping occasionally on a diet soda I'd claimed from the downstairs refrigerator.
The air in Steamboat was light-almost feathery-and the blue hue of the sky seemed less fierce than it did in the resorts farther south in the Colorado Rockies. The almost inevitable afternoon summer thunderstorms were skirting north of town that day, and the distant thunder that they generated reminded me of the muted booms I would hear as I was trying to fall asleep while a fireworks show was still going on during some past Fourth of July.
I filled five pages with notes before I read them through once. I made some changes and easily typed three more. The excitement I felt at what we'd learned at the Franklins' ranch felt almost visceral. Tami was becoming real to me much faster than I'd anticipated, and the questions I had about her relationships with her parents-and their relationships with each other-felt swollen with possibilities that might lead to further discoveries.
At another level, I was aware that I'd already decided that I needed to talk with Joey Franklin. Not because I couldn't rule him out as a suspect-which, of course, I couldn't-but because I knew that by speaking with him, I would gain even greater perspective on the Franklins as a family. I needed Joey's perspective to try to sort out the discrepancies between Cathy's and Dells perspectives on their daughter. I assumed that A. J. Simes would have no objection to my expanding the horizon of my piece of the investigation a little.
Lauren walked out on the balcony just before four. She hugged me from behind, one of her breasts heavy on each side of my neck.
I liked the way it felt. I was about to tell her that I liked the way it felt when she said, "Before it gets dark, I want to go see the ranch."
I was surprised.
"You want to go back to the Franklins' ranch?"
Her voice was husky in my ears.
"No. I want to go see the Silky Road Ranch. The one where Gloria was killed. I don't know why, I just want to see it. It feels like, I don't know, a family thing. It feels unfinished."
I hadn't conjured up any plans for the late afternoon. Another drive in the country sounded fine.
"You know where it is?"
"Not really." I said, "Shouldn't be too hard to find out. I'm sure the owner of the B and B will know."
The owner of the B and B did know.
The Silky Road Ranch was up the same county road along the Elk River as the Franklins' ranch, but much closer to town. The directions she gave us were straightforward. I only got lost once, having to double back to the entrance to the Silky Road after crossing the bridge that ran over Mad Creek.
The ranch abutted the western-facing slope of a wide horseshoe canyon below Hahn's Peak, and most of the ranch's acreage was gently rolling high prairie.
How high? I was guessing it was about the same elevation as the base of the ski area at Mount Werner, which was about sixty-nine hundred feet or so. The setting, on this late spring day, was sublime. The southern sun lit green fields, set trees to shimmer, and sparkled off the ice-cold snowmelt in the Elk River. A serene quiet filled the narrow valley, broken only by an occasional gust of wind.
Along with directions, Libby, the owner of the B and B, had provided an abbreviated version of the ranch's recent history. Raymond Welle never sold the Silky Road after Gloria was killed by Brian Sample in 1992. After the murder Raymond lived in a rented condo near the ski area for a year before he felt that he was able to return to the ranch. He continued to practice clinical psychology but was also getting more and more involved in his radio show, which had been picked up by a few dozen small stations and was gaining a regional audience.
Within another year the show had gone national.
Ranelle and Jane-the "girls," our hostess called them-stayed on and looked after the big house at the Silky Road while Ray was living in town. But Raymond, who had never shared his wife's great love for horses, sold Gloria's herd and closed up the stable within a month or two of her death. The two cowboys moved on. Libby didn't know where those boys had gone.
Raymond did some minor renovations to the ranch house and moved back in quietly.
According to Libby, some said that the first night he slept there as a widower was the first anniversary of the day that his wife was murdered. Our hostess couldn't confirm that. The bunkhouse and stable had fallen into disuse. Raymond had never had any use for them. Eventually, Ranelle and Jane were let go.
Even though she knew that her onetime brother-in-law was still single, Lauren asked if Raymond had ever remarried.
"No, he never showed much interest in the local ladies. If he ever comes back here with a bride, you can bet it'll be some Jane Fonda type. Some society or Hollywood thing. You watch-when we're not looking he'll show up with some city girl and the two of them will go and fill the whole damn Elk River Valley with buffalo and ostriches.
Maybe even emus" She made her pronouncement with disappointment and a tiny hiss of venom, as though she was one of the local ladies who had been scorned by Raymond Welle.
I pulled in front of the main gate to the ranch and parked on the dust in the shadows of the trees that lined the Elk River. Traffic on the county road was sparse. After a minute or so, I killed the engine.
The gate was unassuming enough, a couple of long triangles of steel tubing that came together in the center. The structures that supported the gates were less modest, however. They were built of a rich red stone and they were big. Each footprint was at least four by four, and I knew if I stood next to one it would soar above my head.
A brass sign on one of the structures read
"Glorias Silky Road Ranch-No Visitors."
A box recessed into the other structure had a buzzer and a speaker on a stainless-steel plate that was about the size of a microwave oven.
Lauren and I both got out of the car. She pointed north and said, "I think that's the house Gloria built. Way back there. See? By the woods?"
I saw some structures and nodded.
"Were you ever there? At their home?"
"No. Not once."
A gust of wind kicked up a dust devil down the dirt lane that led into the ranch and we were both distracted watching it flourish and die.
I asked, "Do you want to see if we can drive around the perimeter? Doesn't look like we're going to be invited in."
"No, I don't think so. We can leave in a few minutes. I just want to get a feel for it."
I was listening to the wind whisper to me when the speaker in the far gate support blared.