She nodded, remembering. Then shook her head.
“When it happened, I mean when he just disappeared like that, I had my doubts. I always thought Elisa was a fine young lady. Good family. Raised right. She used to help take care of her grandmother when the old lady had the cancer. But you know, it sure did look suspicious. Hal inherits the Lazy B and then the very same week—or pretty close to that, anyway—he’s gone. So you start thinking she might of had herself another man somewhere and— well, you know.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Leaphorn said. “What do you think now?”
“I was wrong,” she said.
“You sound certain,” Leaphorn said.
“You live in Window Rock,” she said. “That’s a little town like Mancos. You think some widow woman there with a rich husband lost somewhere could have something going with a boyfriend and everybody wouldn’t know about it?” Leaphorn laughed. “I’m a widower,” he said. “And I met this nice lady from Flagstaff on some police work I was doing. The very first time I had lunch with her, when I got back to the office they were planning my wedding.”
“It’s the same way out here,” Mrs. Rivera said. “About the time everybody around here decided that Hal was gone for good, they started marrying Elisa off to the Castro boy.”
Leaphorn smiled. “You know,” he said, “we cops tend to get too high an opinion of ourselves. When I was up here asking around after Hal disappeared I went away thinking there wasn’t a boyfriend in the background.”
“You got here too quick,” Mrs. Rivera said. “Here at Mancos we let the body get cold before the talking starts.”
“I guess nothing came of that romance,” Leaphorn said. “At least she’s still a widow.”
“From what I heard, it wasn’t from lack of Tommy Castro’s trying. About the time she got out of high school everybody took for 38 of 102
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granted they were a pair. Then Hal showed up.” Mrs. Rivera shrugged, expression rueful. “They made a kind of foursome for a while.”
“Four?”
“Well, sometimes it was five of ’em. This George Shaw, he’d come out with Hal sometimes and Eldon would go. He and Castro were the old heads, the coaches. They’d go elk hunting together. Camping. Rock climbing. Growing up with her dad raising her, and then her big brother, Elisa was quite a tomboy.”
“What broke up the group? Was it the country boy couldn’t compete with the big-city glamour?”
“Oh, I guess that was some of it,” she said. “But Eldon had a falling-out with Tommy. They’re too much alike. Both bull-headed.” Leaphorn digested that. Emma’s big brother hadn’t liked him, either, but that hadn’t bothered Emma. “Do you know what happened?”
“I heard Eldon thought Tommy was out of line making a play for his little sister. She was just out of high school. Eight or ten years between ’em, I guess.”
“So Elisa was willing to let big brother monitor her love life,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t hear about that happening much these days.”
“Me neither,” Mrs. Rivera said, and laughed. “But you know,” she said, suddenly dead serious, “Elisa is an unusual person. Her mother died when she was about in the second grade, but Elisa takes after her. Has a heart big as a pumpkin and a cast-iron backbone, just like her mother. When old man Demott was losing the ranch it was Elisa’s mama who held everything together. Got her husband out of the bars, and out of jail a time or two. One of those people who are aways there in the background looking out for other people. You know?”
Mrs. Rivera paused at this to see what Leaphorn thought of it. Leaphorn, not sure of where this was leading, just nodded.
“So there Elisa was after Hal was out of the picture. Tommy was beginning to court her again, and Eldon wanted to run him off.
They even got into a yelling match down at the High Country Inn. So there’s Elisa with two men to take care of—and knowing how she is I have a theory about that.” She paused again. “It’s just a theory.”
“I’d like to hear it,” Leaphorn said.
“I think she loved them both,” Mrs. Rivera said. “But if she married the Castro boy, what in the wide world was Eldon going to do?
It was her ranch now. Eldon loved it but he wouldn’t stay around and work for Tommy, and Tommy wouldn’t want him to.” She sighed. “If we had a Shakespeare around here, they could have made a tragedy out of it.”
“So this Castro was a rock climber, too,” Leaphorn said. “Does he still live here?”
“If you got gas down at the Texaco station you might have seen him. That’s his garage.”
“What do you think? Did this affection for Castro linger on after she married Hal?”
“If it did, she didn’t let it show.” She thought about that awhile, looked sad, shook her head. “Far as you could tell being an outsider, she was the loyal wife. I couldn’t see much to love in Hal myself but every woman’s different about that and Elisa was the sort who—the more that was wrong with a man, the more she’d stand behind him. She mourned for him. Matter of fact, I think she still does. You hardly ever see her looking happy.”
“How about her brother, then? You said he was sort of strange.”
She shrugged. “Well, he liked to climb up cliffs. To me, that’s strange.”
“Somebody said he taught Hal the sport.”
