"Apparently she was sking off a cornice on a dare from a boy she wanted to impress. Landed funny and shattered her tibia. Dell called it a 'damn fool thing' but I never got the impression he was mad at her about it. It was just an example he used to show me what an adventurer she was. You know-how her judgment wasn't always that sound? Not that she was a bad kid but that sometimes she didn't think things through. I think he was trying to tell me that she was capable of making bad decisions. Impulsive decisions. That he feared one of them might have had something to do with her murder. Does that make sense?"
"Sure. She was a kid. She was a risk taker."
"Yeah. Like that. Dell was real aware that she was a kid."
Lauren stopped in her tracks and pointed at some birds flying in formation across the valley.
"It's interesting now that I hear you talk about Dell and where his memories take him. Because Cathy's memories take her someplace else.
She focused mainly on Tami playing around with adult things. Not kid things.
Alcohol, sex. Maybe Cathy wasn't comfortable with the child and adolescent part of her daughter." "Or maybe," I said, "she just needed her to be an adult."
"Maybe."
"Dell describes his daughter as strong-willed. Says Tami demanded an explanation for 'every damn thing' he ever wanted her to do or not do. Said she'd argue about anything. She'd hear the news on TV and she'd bark at the screen arguing with Larry Green about the five-day forecast. But Dell didn't think Tami was out of control. Far from it. In fact, he said that in many ways Joey was a tougher kid for him to raise. I'm left wondering what Cathy felt she was protecting Tami from. You know, why she felt she needed to keep so much from Dell? She say anything about discipline? Any problems? "
"What do you mean?"
"Any issues between Tami and her father?"
"You wondering about abuse?"
"I guess. Mostly I'm just trying to explain to myself why the parents ended up approaching this kid so differently."
"Well, Cathy didn't say anything about any concerns in that area, but I wasn't really asking. Did you hear anything from Dell about Mariko?"
I nodded.
"Dell liked her a lot. He called her Miko. Same as Tami did. Said she was polite, friendly, grateful. Full of life. He said if you took away most of Tami's orneriness and stubbornness, you'd end up with Miko Hamamoto."
"That's funny. I got the impression that Cathy wasn't too fond of Mariko. She calls her Mariko, by the way, not Miko. Told me that Mariko was one of Tami's projects."
"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.