Slickrock (Gail McCarthy Mystery) (4 page)

"I'm not sure," Lonny said. "Bill would get depressed. He had these bouts of depression every few years. And he tended to drink when he was in one. It made for problems."

"I can see that."

"His wife left him a few years ago, I think because of his drinking. He's been worse ever since. But I had no idea he was thinking of killing himself."

"No," I said.

"Damn, Gail, I wish I'd known." Lonny sounded sad and ashamed; I thought I could guess what it was that had been in the air as the men looked down at their friend. Guilt. They all felt guilty that he had come to this and that they hadn't known, hadn't helped him.

"Ted threw him out of the bar last night because he was trying to pick fights with the customers. Told him to go sleep it off. Damn."

"Where did he stay?"

"In the lodge."

Faintly, in the distance, I heard a steady thump, thump, thump. Lonny heard it, too.

"Here they come."

I pressed my fingers to the man's carotid artery. The pulse was there, thin but steady. "He's still alive," I said.

The thumping grew louder; I could see the lights of the helicopter in the western sky. Ted and the boys were out in the meadow, waving their flashlights. Steadily the chopper approached, seeming to know where it was headed.

In a minute the noise was overwhelming-whump, whump, whump. Floodlights came on in the undercarriage as it hovered over the meadow, and the night receded instantly. The mountains seemed to disappear in harsh white light and the gigantic pounding heartbeat of the blades.

No point in talking; we couldn't have heard each other. Lonny and I stood in silence, watching the odd scene. Slowly the chopper lowered itself in a blaze of light and loud, whirling wind. Willows and grass bent away in waves as the machine touched down on the ground.

The intense noise diminished to an idle; the blades rotated gently; two men in white coats jumped out the door and ran toward Ted, who waved them on and turned in our direction. Help had arrived.

Twenty minutes later, Bill Evans was on a stretcher in the belly of the helicopter as the beast lifted off in the same flurry of noise with which it had arrived. Bill was still alive, they said. When asked if he would make it, they shrugged.

Ted and Lonny and I stood together watching the chopper disappear into the night sky. Luke approached and tapped Ted on the shoulder.

"The sheriffs are here," he said. "They want to ask you some questions."

FOUR

Two sheriff's deputies, as it turned out, a man and a woman. We all trooped back to the lodge, and over cups of coffee in the lobby, they questioned the five of us who had gone up to the meadow.

It wasn't terribly formal. They listened carefully to my recitation of how I had found the man, and the female deputy asked me, "He definitely said he was trying to kill himself?"

"Yes, several times. He said he wanted to be let alone to die." I didn't look at Lonny or Ted as I said this.

"Did he say anything else?"

"He talked about dying horses. At the time, it didn't make any sense to me, but now that I know he was a vet, I wonder if he wasn't talking about treating some colicked horses that died."

Both deputies nodded, apparently familiar enough with horses to understand this statement. This wasn't entirely surprising. They were from Sonora, which has the notion that it's a cowboy town; many people from that part of the world have some understanding of horses, and usually pretend to more.

"Did you see him shoot himself?" the woman deputy asked me. She was apparently the leader of the team, or at least the talker.

"No. Nor did I hear it. When I first saw the car, I didn't see the man. He could have shot himself before I ever got up there, or later, when I was off looking at the waterfall. It's noisy enough there that I might have missed the sound of a twenty-two pistol."

Both deputies nodded again. They had confiscated the pistol earlier, ascertaining that Lonny, Jake, and I had all handled it. We were duly fingerprinted; the pistol was sealed in an evidence bag.

"Did you know this man?" Once again the question was addressed to me by the female deputy. She was a big woman, tall and broad, with black hair, hazel eyes, even features, and a forthright manner. I was getting used to looking at her face.

"No." I left it at that.

"I take it the rest of you did." She glanced around the room as she spoke, but her gaze ended up on Ted.

"Yeah, we knew him. He was our vet." Ted sounded terse, his business manner. His playful streak only showed after a few drinks, or when faced with what he considered a pretty woman.

"So, do you have any idea why he would shoot himself?"

There it was-the big question. The female deputy was looking right at Ted; he kept his round blue eyes candidly on hers, another typical Ted ploy. He always looked customers candidly in the eye while he talked to them.

I glanced around the room. Lonny was seated next to me on the couch; he was staring at his boots, stuck out in front of him. Luke and Jake sat in a couple of battered armchairs off to the side-both of them looking down.

"I think Bill was depressed," Ted said. "He was up here last night and he got drunk, tried to pick a fight in the bar. I told him to go to bed."

The deputies took this in.

"Does anybody know why he was depressed?" the woman asked.

"Oh, Bill's like that. He's a damn good vet, though," Ted said. The woman made a note on the pad in her lap.

"Any other possible reasons?"

"Not that I know." Ted kept meeting the deputy's eyes. "He was staying in the lodge here, room number seven," he added.

"We'll check it out. And we'll take the car back down to the department, have a look at it." She stood up. "If you'll give me his room key?"

"Sure."

Ted went to the main desk, found a duplicate key, and handed it to the woman. She headed for the stairs, her quiet partner in tow, and turned back to give us a look.

''This seems pretty straightforward; however, I'd like to ask you all to stay here and be available for questioning tomorrow, in case there's a problem."

"Okay if I go out for a ride during the day?" I asked.

"As long as you come back." She smiled.

The two of them turned and creaked their way up the stairs.

We all stared at each other.

"I wonder if he made it?" Ted looked directly at me as he spoke.

"I don't know," I said. "It would depend on whether that bullet hit something vital"

"I'll call the hospital in Sacramento in the morning." Ted said it with decision-another Ted trait. I'd noticed before that he tended to deal with difficult situations in a black-and-white fashion.

Now, having settled the matter of Bill Evans, he stood up. "I'm going to bed."

He looked at Luke and Jake as he spoke; the two brothers stood up with him. Both tall and lean with light brown hair, brown eyes, fair skin, unremarkable faces, they were hard to tell apart from a distance. Closer up, Luke had a squarer jaw and looked older. Jake's hair was curlier, his expression shyer.

They followed Ted up the stairs now; we all knew that they would be up at 4:00 A.M. Saturday was a big day at Crazy Horse Creek-lots of pack parties going in. Feeding and saddling began early.

Once they were gone, I looked at Lonny. He still stared at his boots, his face withdrawn. Tracing his familiar features with my eyes, I felt a disturbing sense of frustration.

I'd been with this man for five years. Like all long-term relationships, ours had its ups and downs, but we'd survived them well, or so I thought. Until this last six months.

Lonny had finally gotten a divorce from the wife he'd been separated from for seven years. The divorce had entailed a fair amount of financial dickering; by the time all was said and done, Lonny had sold his home in Santa Cruz County and his interest in this pack station. True to his announced intention, he'd purchased sixty acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills and moved. Two months ago, to be exact. He'd packed up his furniture and his cats, put his three horses in the stock trailer, and gone.

Not without asking me to marry him, though. Which had caused me a lot of grief.

Lonny's idea was that I would marry him and move with him to the foothills, giving up my job and my home, in order to make a new life with him. Although the offer was flattering, it didn't fit into any of my plans, and therein began to lie a problem.

For Lonny was determined to pursue his plan, with me or without me, as I came to see; no amount of lobbying on my part for a compromise had much effect on him. Going back to the mountains was his goal, and back he was going.

I'd adjusted, in a sense. I'd acknowledged that it was my choice not to go with him. I'd agreed that we would continue to have a relationship. But as anyone who's ever been in one knows, a long-distance relationship is not the same as having a boyfriend a few miles down the road.

Lonny and I had never lived together, but we'd lived near each other, and we'd always spent most of our nights together. Suddenly I was sleeping alone. And Lonny lived three hours away.

I didn't like it. And I didn't know what to do about it. I loved Lonny, but I did not love the direction our relationship had taken.

"So," I said to him, "how's it going?"

He stared at his boots. "All right, I guess. Until this."

"How are things on the ranch?"

"Okay. The barn's getting built. Feels like I don't have a lot of time for anything else."

I studied him, mingled exasperation and affection welling up inside of me. I'd been with this big, untidy, rough-featured man for long enough to understand him pretty well.

He still stared at his feet; I was quite aware that he felt the estrangement between us and was as uncomfortable with it as I was, but there was no way in hell he was going to bring it up. Ignore it out of existence-that was Lonny's way. Pretend everything was all right.

What do you want out of him, I asked myself, looking at the lines framing his eyes, the strong, thick, callused hands that had touched me so often. An answer jumped into my mind: that he make some space for me in this relationship.

Lonny loved me, of that I was sure. But he loved me in much the same way he loved his horses. He'd do what he could to take care of me; he thought I was great. But I was supposed to be part of his life.

What I wanted, what I needed, was to have my feelings, my ideas, my agenda acknowledged. Especially when it was different from his. I needed to have him take my goals as seriously as he took his own.

I sighed. This dialogue was rattling around only in my head; Lonny and I still sat in silence, sipping our cooling coffee. And that was just the trouble. I'd spoken these thoughts aloud before, too many times, always with the same results.

Lonny gave lip service to the notion that my feelings and needs were important, but when it counted he followed his own road, as he always had. And I had to admit, I did the same. As I told him once, neither of us was really a team player.

Trying to distract myself from the direction my thoughts were leading me, I stared around the lobby. The Crazy Horse Creek Lodge had been built in the late 1800s and still looked the part of the stage stop it had once been. No one had ever remodeled, or "cuted up," the rugged post-and-beam construction or the utilitarian pine plank floors and siding. From earlier owners through Lonny and on to Ted, the proprietors had all been satisfied to repair what broke and leave what still functioned alone.

I smiled as I looked at the room. The armchairs and couches were threadbare and battered, the photos and prints tacked on the rough walls were torn and dusty, the floor was scuffed and none too clean. Crazy Horse Creek was no multi-star resort. But the fire chugged away in the woodstove, making the lobby warm on chilly mountain nights, feet were welcome on the furniture (as were dogs), and nobody had to take their boots off to come inside.

"So, is it good to be back up here again?" I asked Lonny.

"I guess. If this hadn't happened with Bill. I have a hard time getting it out of my mind."

"You said your father shot himself." I scooted closer to him on the couch.

"I never knew that. It must have been hard on you."

"I was in my early thirties. My mom had died a few years earlier and my dad came to live with me. We lived here in the summers. " He gestured in a general way at the lodge; I knew what he meant.

Lonny had owned a small ranch near Sonora where he kept the pack station horses and mules in the winter. But from May till October he and his family and his crew had lived here. The Crazy Horse Creek Pack Station opened every year on Memorial Day weekend and closed when the snow drove them out of the mountains.

"He seemed okay," Lonny went on. "I knew he drank too much; I knew he missed my mom. But he didn't complain. He wasn't really well a lot of the time, but he tended bar when he felt up to it. I thought he liked being here.

"And then one Monday morning he didn't show up at breakfast. It got later and later, and finally I went to check on him. He was living in the log cabin; you know where I mean?"