roof dominated the scene. From a pole jutting above it a white wind sock dangled, awaiting a breeze to return it to duty. Chee noticed an east-west strip of the flat had been graded clear of brush. He also noticed that the road continued beyond this place, reduced to a set of parallel ruts and wandering across the flat to disappear over a ridge.
Chee pointed. “Where’s it go?”
“Another three, four miles, there’s another little ranch, the widow I told you about,” Dashee said. “It dead-ends there.”
“No outlet then? Back to the highway?”
“Unless you can fly,” Dashee said.
“I had been thinking that maybe the perps had turned off on this road figuring they’d circle past a roadblock on U.S. 191 up toward Bluff. I guess that would mean they didn’t know this country.”
“Yeah,” Dashee said, 'I thought about that. The feds figured it means they knew the Timms airplane was there waiting for them.”
“Or they knew a trail down into Gothic Canyon, and down that to the San Juan, and down the river to some other canyon.”
“Oh, man,” Dashee said. “Don’t even think of that.“ And he pulled the car into Eldon Timms’s dusty yard.
A woman was standing on the shady side of the house watching them. Wearing jeans, well-worn boots, a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled and a wide-brimmed straw hat. About middle seventies, Chee guessed. But maybe a little younger. Whites didn’t have the skin to deal with this dry sunshine. They wrinkled up about ten years early. She was walking toward the car as Chee and Dashee got out, squinting at them.
“That’s Eleanor Ashby,” Dashee said. “Widow living over the hill there. She looks after Timms’s livestock when he’s away. She said they trade off.”
“Sheriff,” Eleanor Ashby said, 'what brings you back over here? You forget something?”
“We were looking for Mr Timms,” Dashee said, and introduced Chee and himself. “I forgot some things I wanted to ask him.”
“You needed to go to Blanding to do that,” she said. “He headed up there this morning to talk to the insurance people.”
“Well, it’s nothing important. Just some details I needed to fill in for the paperwork. I forgot to ask him what time of day it was he got back here and found his airplane was missing. But it can wait. I’ll catch him next time I get back up this way.”
“Maybe I can help you with that,” Eleanor said. “Let me think just for a minute, and I can get close to it. He was supposed to bring me some stuff from Blanding, and I thought I’d heard an airplane, so I came on over. Thinking he’d gotten home, but he wasn’t back yet.”
“About noon?” Chee asked. “You’re lucky you weren’t here when the bandits were.”
“Don’t I know it,” Eleanor said. “They just might have shot me. Or taken me as a hostage. God knows what. Still scares me when I think about it.”
“That plane you heard. You think that was the bandits flying off in Mr Timms’s airplane?”
“No. I just figured Timms had flown over to take a look, and then went on over to the other little place he has over by Mexican Water.”
Chee looked at Dashee and found Dashee looking at him.
“Wait a minute,” Dashee said. “You mean Timms had flown the plane up to Blanding?”
Eleanor laughed. “Course not,” she said. “But that’s what I was thinking. Sometimes he took the plane, if he could land where he was going. Sometimes he took his truck.”
“But the plane was here when you came by at noon?” Chee asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. Locked in the barn.”
“You saw it in there?”
“I saw that big old lock he uses on the door hasp.' She chuckled. “You lock that old airplane in there, it can’t get out.”
“You didn’t see his truck?” Chee asked.
“It wasn’t here. He -' She frowned at Chee. “What do you mean. What are you thinking?”
“Does he just leave his truck out front?” Dashee asked. “Or somewhere you could have seen it?”
“He keeps it in that shed behind the house,” Mrs Eleanor Ashby said, and her expression suggested she suddenly was confronting a headful of
