“I’ve seen it,” Leaphorn said.
“You seen it before and after?”
“I haven’t been there for years,” Leaphorn said. “I remember a beautiful trout stream, maybe a little bigger than your creek here, winding through a narrow valley. Steeper than this one. High mountains on both sides. Beautiful place.”
“They ripped the top right off of one of those mountains,” Demott said. “Left a great whitish heap of crushed stone miles long. And the holding ponds they built to catch the effluent spill over and that nasty stuff pours down into Red River. They use cyanide in some sort of solution to free up the metal and that kills trout and everything else.”
“I haven’t been up there for years,” Leaphorn said.
“Cyanide,” Demott repeated. “Mixed with sludge. That’s what we’d have pouring down Cache Creek if the Breedlove Corporation had its way. That slimy white silt brewed with cyanide.”
Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. He spent a few minutes letting Demott get used to him being there, listening to the music of Cache Creek bubbling over its rocky floor, watching a puffy white cloud just barely making it over the ridge upstream. It was dragging its bottom through the tips of the fir trees, leaving rags of mist behind. A beautiful day, a beautiful place. A cedar waxwing flew by. It perched in the aspens across the creek and watched them, chirping bird comments.
Demott was watching him, too, still absently picking at the resin and dirt on his left hand. “Well, enough of that,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I got no letters and neither did Elisa. If she had, I would have known it. We’re a family that don’t keep secrets, not from one another. And we didn’t hear anything, either. Nothing.”
“You’d think there’d be rumors,” Leaphorn said. “You know how people are.” 51 of 102
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“I do,” Demott said. “I thought it was strange, too. I’m sure there must have been a lot of talk about it up at Mancos and around. Hal disappearing was the most exciting thing that happened around here in years. I’m sure some people would say Elisa killed her husband so she could get the ranch, or she had a secret boyfriend do it, or I killed him so the ranch would come back into the Demott family.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “I’d think that would be the natural kind of speculation, considering the circumstances. But you didn’t hear any of that kind of talk?”
Demott looked shocked. “Why, they wouldn’t say things like that around me. Or Elisa either, of course. And you know, the funny thing was Elisa loved Hal, and I think folks around here understood that.”
“How about you? What did you think of him?”
“Oh, I got pretty sick of Hal,” Demott said. “I won’t lie about it. He was a pain in the butt. But you know in a lot of ways I liked him. He had a good heart, and he was good for Elisa. Treated her like a quality lady, and that’s what she is. And it made you feel sad, you know. I think he could have amounted to something if he’d been raised right.” Demott despaired of getting the hand suitably clean by rubbing at it. He got up, squatted by the stream, and washed it.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Leaphorn said. “What went wrong?” Finished with his ablutions, Demott resumed his seat and thought about how to tell this.
“Hard to put it exactly,” he said. “But when he was just a kid his folks would send him out here and we’d get him on a horse, and he’d do his share of work just like everybody else. Made a good enough hand, for a youngster. When we was baling hay, or moving the cows or anything, he’d do the twelve-hour day right along with us. And when the work was laid by, he’d go rock climbing with me and Elisa. In fact he got good at it before she did.” Demott exhaled hugely, shook his head.
No mention of Tommy Castro. “Just the three of you?” Leaphorn asked.
Demott hesitated. “Pretty much.”
“Tommy Castro didn’t go along?”
Demott flushed. “Where’d you hear about him?”
Leaphorn shrugged.
Demott drew in a deep breath. “Castro and I were friends in high school and, yeah, he and I climbed together some. But then when Elisa got big enough to learn and she’d come along, Tommy began to make a move on her. I told him she was way too young and to knock it off. I put a stop to that.”
“He still climb?”
“I have no idea,” Demott said. “I stay away from him. He stays away from me.”
“No problem with Hal, though.”
“He was more her age and more her type, even though he was citified and born with the old silver spoon.” Demott thought about that. “You know,” he said, “I think he really did love this place as much as we did. He’d talk about getting his family to leave it to him as his part of the estate. Had it all figured out on paper. It wasn’t worth near as much as the share he’d get otherwise, but it was what he wanted. That’s what he’d say. Prettiest place on earth, and he’d make it better. Improve the stream where it was eroding.
Plant out some ponderosa seedlings where we had a fire kill. Keep the herd down to where there wouldn’t be any more overgrazing.”
“I didn’t see much sign of overgrazing now,” Leaphorn said.
“Not now, you don’t. But before Hal’s daddy died he always wanted this place to carry a lot more livestock than the grass could stand. He was always putting the pressure on my dad, and after dad passed away, putting it on me. As a matter of fact he was threatening to fire me if I didn’t get the income up to where he thought it ought to be.”
“You think he would have done it?”
