quilted teepee. I wondered mildly where she lived, then wondered where she worked this early in the morning. She had scribbled two numbers on the back of the folder at my side. I could have offered her a ride, but it seemed like she was anxious to be away from me. You get used to that kind of response from people when you’re in this line of work.
It looked like the plows had already made a pass or two, which meant that the little apex of downtown Durant was clear. I pulled off behind the courthouse and parked in my spot. Dog followed me into the office. I tossed the file onto my desk so that I wouldn’t be tempted to read it and continued into the holding area and cell 1. We only had two, but I tried not to use cell 2 or the jail downstairs because it wasn’t my pattern and, if something happened, no one would know where to find me. Dog jumped up and stretched out on the other bunk, and very soon we were both asleep. I don’t know if it was the quick once-over I had given Mari Baroja’s room or Lucian’s words, but it was dream filled and didn’t leave me particularly rested.
There was a house, just a little saltbox out along one of the spurs and ridges of the Powder River. There were arroyos that cut back along the foothills that headed for the Big Horns, and there were owls in the stunted black oaks and cottonwoods. It looked like the place I’d been to about a month ago, a place I didn’t want to go back to again. The house stood empty and deserted, desolate against a dark purpled sky. A screen door on rusted hinges slapped shut in the framework, and the windows were missing or broken; barren, empty eyes that stared out blindly. There was an old barn and a warped calving shed that leaned away from the wind. The missing slats looked like piano keys set on edge and, having grown tired of playing the same old song, had decided to quit.
It was a place of tangible dreams that could be touched like fingerprints and felt through the raised and weathered grain of the wood; whorls and swoops of passion and loss, of qualified success and absolute defeat. I was not alone in this place. There was a woman there with her face turned toward the mountains, the northwest breeze pulling at her dark hair like long fingers and pressing a threadbare, polka dot dress against her loins. She had strong calves planted a shoulder’s width apart, and she wore no shoes. Her hands held a silk scarf around her shoulders that was fringed and of an old world print, like nothing I’d ever seen before.
After a moment, she raised the scarf above her head. She held it there for an instant and then released it. I watched as it raced across the buffalo grass, where it snagged on a gnarled stub of sage and then disappeared. When I turned back to her, she was looking at me. Her eyes were like the black glass of last night and, as she moved past me toward the little house, she did not pause. I could see the delicate quality of her features, the careful shape of her lips. “A ver nire aitaren etxea defendituko, otsoen kontra.”
I tipped my hat up. Ruby was standing at the open cell door, Dog already having left his bunk to stand beside her. “Rough night at the Home for Assisted Living?”
I let the hat fall back over my eyes. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” As she turned, I called after her. “I might need DCI on the horn; it’s possible I’m going to need an ME for a general autopsy toot sweet.”
She was back with the coffee, toot sweeter. “It really must have been a rough night.”
I sat up, pushed my hat back on my head, and took my old Denver Broncos mug. “Thanks.”
“Sooooo?” She was petting Dog’s head, which rested on her knee, and was carefully sipping hers from her own Wall Drug mug, which proclaimed 5-cent coffee.
“Ever heard of any Barojas?”
I watched the binary computer in her eyes calculate an area the size of Vermont, divide it in a swift grid pattern, and locate the appropriate square. “Basque, down on Swayback, Four Brothers.”
“That’s them. Ever heard of Mari Baroja?”
She paused for a moment too long, and her eyes avoided me. “No.”
I sipped my coffee and let it go. “Then you missed your chance.”
“Does she have a granddaughter who just opened a bakery here in town?”
I yawned and covered my mouth with the cup. “We have a bakery in town?”
She continued to stroke Dog’s broad head. “What do you mean by might need a coroner?”
“Lucian thinks there might be some funny business going on.” I took a sip and looked at the snorting pony sticking out of the orange D. “Ruby, what do you know about Lucian?”
She thought for a moment. “I think he is a good man. I think he gets too caught up in the romance of things.” She raised an eyebrow. “You want to know about the romances of older men, ask a younger woman.” Her eyes stayed steady but then broke back to Dog. She crossed her legs and patted the bunk beside her. Dog was curled there in an instant. It took a while for her to gather her thoughts or decide to share them. “I was twenty-eight years old and between marriages when I came to work for Lucian.” I watched as she smiled, and the years unwrapped. She was like that; age would not pause for Ruby, since she would not pause for it. “I was quite a hottie back then.” I laughed, and she started to rise.
I reached out and took her hand. “I was laughing at the word choice. Where did you get the term hottie?”
The neon blue lie detector was scanning me for signs of falsehood. “Your daughter.”
“I thought so.” I held on to the thin hand and ran my thumb over the web between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ve got news for you, you’re still a hottie.” She actually blushed and pulled her hand away. “So, old Lucian cut quite a wide swath around these parts, huh?”
“Yes, he was very dashing for a man with one leg.”
“Did you know he had been married?” Big blue. It was the second time today I’d used surprise to get a look at the woman I was talking to. “I’ll take that for a no.” Ruby was the poster child for unflappable, so it was fun to watch her take flight for a change. “He was married to Mari Baroja.”
“When?”
“For about three hours back in the late forties. Or about as long as it took for her daddy and three uncles to catch them, take her, beat the hell out of Lucian, and annul the whole thing.”
“Well, I’ll be.” I waited for her to make the connection, and it didn’t take long. In the meantime, I listened to the soft ticking of the radiators outside the cell. Our jail had originally been one of the tiny Carnegie libraries. It had been erected behind the courthouse at the turn of the century, the last one. Red Angus, the sheriff before Lucian, had shrewdly appropriated the red granite building and had converted it. “She’s the one that Lucian wants the autopsy done on?”
“Yep.” We sat there looking at each other.
“Did you tell him you’d do it?”
I had been hoping that the conversation wasn’t going to go in this direction; the last thing I needed was Ruby’s help in backing myself into an ethically nonneutral corner. “Maybe.”
“Are you absolutely sure there is no reason for an autopsy?”
I groaned and leaned back against the wall with a thump, a few dribbles of coffee sloshing up and running down the side of my mug. I wiped the bottom on my pants. “Of course not, but I am also not absolutely sure that there is a reason for one.”
She took my coffee cup and started out of the cell. “Then you’ll know after you have one.”
“Is it still snowing?”
She looked down the hallway to the windows out front. “Yes.”
“Then the whole thing is academic, because no one from DCI is going to make it up here in this snowstorm.”
She wasn’t looking at me, and she wasn’t going to. It was one of her techniques for getting me to do what she considered to be the right thing. “You can get a medical examiner from Billings.” She disappeared around the corner, and the dog followed her.
I thought about the old sheriff. I thought about how Ruby had just lied about Mari Baroja. I thought about what I didn’t know, about how I knew the anecdotes but, perhaps, not the story.
When I got to my office, my steaming cup was full and resting at the center of my blotter, and the red light on line one was blinking from Cheyenne. I picked up the receiver and punched the angry little button. There was the commensurate pause after I explained the situation. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Things must be really slow up there in the hinterlands.”
I leaned back in my chair and tossed my hat onto my desk. It landed beside the mug. “I guess I’m going to need a general autopsy.”
“Do you want us to call Billings?”
