Good.
No messages had been left on his answering machine. He strapped on his service revolver, grabbed his official hat and keys and strolled out to his truck.
Driving down River Road, he decided not to bother Kidro, just take a turn around the driveway, see everything’s okay and come back into town. He’d had these jitters before. They'd never amounted to much.
Boy, his second cup of coffee tasted good. His taste buds worked better while driving, time to think.
Life had been good up here in these mountains. He'd grown up in the village. He’d learned to ride a horse at age three, still a horseback community back then. They’d lived in the brick cottage behind the jail when his father had served as sheriff. Nancy’s clinic beat the tail off of that place.
The schoolhouse had already been built when he started school at age six. Their first teacher hadn’t been as good as Vicar Twilby or Nancy, but Nason had a pretty good education, especially by today’s standards.
After high school, he'd spent two years studying criminology down at Colombia Community College in Sonora where he'd played varsity football, starting middle linebacker.
After community college, he'd joined the Coast Guard for four years and had spent the next eight years with the Modesto Police Department. He'd taken a bullet in a gang shootout that had broken his hip, leaving him with a limp. The city had pensioned him out and ended his desire for living down below. After returning to this valley, his limp had vanished within three months. The pain had vanished at the same time.
Maybe it’s the water.
Living down below, he’d missed the clean water and air in this valley, and neighbors who actually knew one another. The pattern of life here didn’t require complex psychological systems of self defense.
Soon after his return to this valley, he’d helped out around Jacobsen’s Emporium. Then he'd helped build the new bank with Kidro’s Sonora contractor. Helfred Jacobsen had hired that contractor to build her new house and Nason had helped with that too.
Ten years ago, when all the trouble had taken place, Nason had still been living down below. His father had explained everything he knew and how they’d accidentally discovered this new system, the ritual of staking out the bull calf in Potter’s upper meadow. That ritual had been working now for ten years. He hoped it had worked last night.
Since there was never any real crime here, not in the usual sense, his duties as sheriff consisted of maintaining this ritual and helping out with traffic accidents out on Sonora Pass Highway, a rare occurrence on a seldom used mountain road.
When his dad retired six years back, his folks moved down to Grass Valley where they were getting old fast. He tried talking them into moving back but his dad had seen too much. He still had restless nights over what had happened ten years ago. And that, as they say, was that. His dad didn't care that the ritual had been working.
Dad said the ritual gave him a bad feeling in his soul. His dreams still kept him up at night.
Call it a ritual or whatever you want. It worked.
He turned up Kidro’s driveway and drove over the crest. He rolled downhill toward the house and barn and slowed near the front of the house.
“Damn.”
Kidro’s front door stood wide open, still too cold out for that, Scooter nowhere in sight.
He parked at the bottom of the steps, got out of his truck and put on his official hat. He stood on the bottom step, not wanting to go any farther.
"Damn." The hinge rail of Kidro's new door had been shattered. He climbed onto the porch, entered the foyer and turned toward the living room.
Scooter’s dead body lay against the far wall, big green flies buzzing around. He didn’t need to see more, not right now.
Anger pushed from inside his gut. He needed to keep hold of that.
Nason reached the Gilpin turnoff at 8:18am. In the three minutes driving over here, his anger had grown to rage, thinking how easily one person could tear it all down, how one person could ruin things for everybody else.
Stupid pud-head.
Sand and gravel road-base churned under new tires on his way to the suspension bridge, a bridge built with Potter money. Kidro hadn’t liked it, but, while his mother lived, she’d been head of the family. Kidro had grudgingly maintained this stretch of gravel road and the bridge itself but nothing beyond.
Not anymore.
None of the Gilpins had ever shown a lick of gratitude. Before the bridge, they’d had to ride horses across at the shallows two miles upriver. They hadn’t even been able to get a truck or car over to their place before this bridge.
Bruce was his father’s son, stupid to the bone. His pot addiction didn’t help.
Building the suspension bridge had been no small feat. It took soils engineers from Sonora more than two years of testing different locations for proper geology before they could even hire the structural engineer. The foundation rock at this location was solid granite. It was an awesome sight for such a short span. The river gorge was deep under the bridge, water boiling over rocks thirty feet below.
Sight unseen, Lamar Gilpin, Bruce’s grandfather, had filed his homestead claim in Sacramento back around 1960. He was stupid too. He’d never even entered the valley, had never looked at the map and apparently had not known he needed to cross the river for access.
Back then, even now, they crossed over from unused Potter land. Jethro and Mary Lou had welcomed them, happy to have more neighbors for Kidro to grow up with.
“Damn.” Nason chuckled and shook his head.
Growing up with the Gilpins.
Odd.
As much as Kidro liked to complain, Nason had never heard a complaint about the maintenance of the bridge and access road, only his wince and nod, his sign of
