The Big Dirt Nap

'You know that guy?' I asked, cracking open the bottle and taking a long pull.

'Sure. He'll be in later. I let him use the facilities—they don't let him hang around the gas station no more; owner says he scares people away,' Georgie said. 'I think it's the owner scares them away.'

'Give him this, okay?' I handed Georgie a twenty and walked out to my car.

I had the sinking feeling that Lucy was mixed up in all of this—it had two handsome guys and a good story. I drove back to Titans trying to figure out what to do next. Just before the turnoff into the Titans lot was a hidden driveway I hadn't noticed before and a small handwritten sign: PROPERTY OF QUEPOCHAS, STAY THE HELL OUT.

I didn't.

Twenty-nine

In the early seventeenth century, well before it was a state, the Connecticut colony gave the Quepochas 17,000 acres of prime farmland. Who knows why? Guilt over killing so many of them with guns or disease? Fear that they would encroach on lands inhabited by European settlers? Whatever the reason, there was an acknowledgment of their existence even before the Revolutionary War. And an attempt was made to live amicably with them. Over the years, members moved off or assimilated. Large tracts of tribal lands were sold by tribal leaders until the reservation reached its present size of approximately 300 acres—small for a reservation but huge for a property in Connecticut.

For some lucky tribes, the reservation is a tax-free gated community where few people work, but that's by choice. Why work when the money from gaming just keeps falling on your head? Other tribes suffer from as much as eighty-five percent unemployment—and that's not because the members are staying in their mansions, eating bonbons.

The Quepochas reservation was neither. From what I could see, most of the reservation's inhabitants seemed to be dead, as evidenced by the lack of homes and the dozens of listing, wafer-thin tombstones I passed driving the dirt road that ran through the property.

Betty Smallwood had told me that enrolled members of the tribe were not required to live on the reservation. Hell, most of them got away as soon as they could, and as far away as possible. Like Betty herself had done.

Unofficially, a handful did live there, scattered across the reservation, scratching out an existence in shacks and cabins and quietly dying out. Officially, it was just Chantel and Sean in a two-room cinder-block house close to the road.

The farther I drove the more the road narrowed and the potholes deepened. It reminded me of the road to Oksana's place; she was on a reservation, too, in a way. The switchbacks took me higher and although I hadn't noticed it on the way up, on one side of the mountain I could now see the top of Titans. There were fewer tombstones and still no houses, just the occasional dilapidated shack built into the side of the mountain. I pulled over to a carved-out spot on the road to enjoy the view.

Peak time was probably in the fall when the mountain would be awash in color, but it looked pretty good to me; I fished out my phone to take a picture.

Just then it rang.

'Where the hell have you been?' the woman asked.

It was Lucy.

She'd been trying to reach me for the past three days. When she called the hotel, I had checked out. When she tried me at home, I'd already left to come back to Titans. And the cell didn't work until I drove up the mountain and got a signal.

'Where the hell are you?' I asked.

'Well, I'm not one hundred percent sure.'

'Can you talk? Are you safe?'

'Yes. I'm alone now. I don't know when they'll be back. Come get me.'

Thirty

Before Lucy and I were to meet at Titans, she'd had an appointment. With Billy and Claude Crawford. They were her sources for an expose on casino gambling that involved some of the most prominent names in this part of the state and some pretty unsavory characters as well. The three of them had met in the parking lot outside of Titans. I watched the sun go down as she told me what happened.

'Didn't your mother ever tell you not to get into a car with two strange men?' I asked.

'I don't remember the stuff my mother told me. Besides, I didn't get in a car with two men; Billy had to meet someone in the hotel; he joined us later.' Lucy and Claude drove to the Crawfords' attorney to discuss what they knew and how best to reveal it.

'You went to Betty Smallwood's?' I asked, incredulous.

'You know her?' Now it was Lucy's turn to be surprised.

'I just came from her office. I showed her a picture of you and she didn't bat an eyelash. She didn't utter a word about having met you.' That was one cool customer.

'After I left the message for you I called this other guy I was supposed to meet,' she said.

'Nick Vigoriti?'

'How do you know this?' she asked, exasperated that I was cutting into her story.

'I met him instead.' Now I understood some of Nick's cryptic remarks. He had thought I was Lucy, in the hotel to interview him for the casino story. And so, obviously, did some other people who had showed an inordinate amount of interest in a woman who was there to write about the corpse flower. I told her Nick was dead but she already knew.

'Betty called Claude and told him. That's why the guys haven't wanted to drive back. Some local cop has a real hard-on for them and probably thinks they did it. The boys stashed their car in the woods and we walked the rest of the way here.'

'And where is here?'

She was somewhere on the reservation in a log cabin off a dirt road. 'It's kind of nice, like one of those places pictured in the Sunday Times real estate section with a view that you can never afford. High on the mountain, lake, there's even a small waterfall in the distance.'

Waterfront property notwithstanding, she was brought to a secret place, car stashed, and incommunicado for three days. Any minute she'd start speaking Swedish. I forced myself to stay calm and not scream at her.

'Okay, why are you still there?' There was a silence and after being Lucy's friend for many years and through many relationships I knew exactly what it meant.

'Jeez, Lucy, both of them?'

'No, just Claude. You have to see him, he's gorgeous. He's got this amazing hair and skin. Our kids would be phenomenal.'

Oh, brother. The only reservation in Lucy's future was at Balthazar, downtown, table by the window, but she was playing out some fantasy. One of us had to be the grown-up.

'It's not as if I just met him,' she rationalized. 'We've been e-mailing for weeks—I felt as if I knew him.' I tried not to be judgmental with friends, but my silence smacked of disapproval.

'Lucy, I just heard the cops say they had evidence that implicated the Crawfords in Nick's death. What do you know about that?'

'I know they've been persecuted by some psycho local cop with an ax to grind . . .'

'And hotel security at Titans has instructions not to admit the Crawfords,' I said. 'There's a restraining order against them entering the hotel, so Billy's got to be lying about meeting someone there. Luce, physical evidence. Ted Bundy was cute, too. Not my type, but someone thought he was cute.'

I checked my watch; it would be dark in about thirty minutes, and it was getting chilly. As it was, I didn't know if I could make it back down the mountain in the dark with all of those switchbacks—and the very real possibility of going over the side like poor Mrs. Mishkin made it an unattractive prospect. I had to find her, and