Chapter 6
Like a Good Neighbor

Sally never got the chance to tell Dickie what she’d overheard at the Lifeway, or even to mention their encounter with Bone Bandy. First there was the matter of what to do about Monette’s body. The state crime lab had it, and wouldn’t be releasing it until after they’d done a whole lot of forensic stuff, along with an autopsy by the Albany County coroner. In any event, there wouldn’t ever be a burial—Monette’s mother had been cremated, her ashes scattered to the wind up Ninth Street Canyon. The same, Mary thought, should be done for Monette eventually. So they had to figure out a different approach. They had managed to agree on a Thursday morning memorial service, followed by a reception at the Ivinson Community Center, when Dickie got a call on his cell phone.

There was a fight down at the Torch Tavern, where the noontime drinkers tended to gather, and a few too many of the patrons had gotten involved. A bronc rider reported that his truck had been broken into, and several thousand dollars’ worth of gloves and chaps and boots and rigging were missing, along with all his CDs. South of town, on Route 287, a deputy had been kicked in the shins by a woman who claimed that by no means had she been doing ninety miles an hour when he put the radar gun on her, and then she’d pulled a gun of her own to emphasize her point.

“And this is just diddly-shit, on top of our usual traffic violations, domestic assaults, and wicked meth heads,” said Dickie, working hard at not moaning. “By tomorrow night there’ll be an extra five thousand people in town. By this weekend, if the weather holds, there could be twenty thousand more. If you combine my department and the city cops, we have a total of twenty-five people, including secretaries, dispatchers, and the motor pool guys. Even with everyone working around the clock, policing fifty thousand souls, a good half of them drunk and stupid, well, it’s a bitch.”

“So all this diddly on top of Monette’s murder,” said Sally. “How the hell can you cope?”

Dickie made a wry face and shook his head. “How can I not? It’s crazy, if you think about it. I figure I’ve got just this week to try to get some evidence and crack this mother of a case. And to be honest, I don’t know which is worse—the killer still walking around Laramie, or long gone. I will say I don’t mind having the community be upset. Maybe it’ll shake loose some information we might not get otherwise.”

“Information—oh yeah! Dickie, I—”

But he was already putting on his hat. “Sally, I gotta go. Maybe I’ll catch you later tonight. Figure I’ll drop by the Wrangler after I get done talking to people.”

Gone, like a cool breeze.

Dwayne and Nattie used Dickie’s departure as their ticket out too. Nattie was already getting into her Escalade before Dickie had finished holding and murmuring to his wife, but Dwayne took a moment to talk to Sally. “Hey, Mustang. Don’t forget about band practice tonight at seven, my place, as usual.”

“Oh yeah, of course,” she said. Band practice? Of all things. She’d forgotten completely. The Millionaires, the hobby band she was in, along with Dwayne, Sam Branch, and some other aging but unrepentant bar musicians. They were scheduled to play the benefit party that Delice threw, every year, on the Saturday night of Jubilee Days. It was one of those bands that never quite practiced enough, but usually managed to pull a few decent sets together by rehearsing their butts off the week before the gig. Sally turned to Delice. “What’s the benefit for this year?”

Delice loved historic preservation, so the Albany County Historical Society was a frequent beneficiary. She also gave money to the Ivinson Memorial Hospital, a couple of environmental groups, and, Sally and few others knew, to pro-choice organizations. Sally suspected that Delice also donated to one or two libertarian political organizations she preferred not to talk about with her knee-jerk big-government lefty friends.

Delice watched as Dwayne walked out to his BMW, and kept staring as Nattie’s Escalade pulled away, pursing her lips, narrowing her eyes. “I think this year we’ll donate the proceeds to the women’s shelter,” she said quietly.

With Dwayne and Nattie gone, it was possible to talk about whether there was something they ought to do about all the people who thought that Monette’s murder deserved some kind of community remembrance. List-lessly they batted around a few ideas, but by now they were feeling stale and tired, the phone was ringing again, and people had started trickling in. Delice told Sally to drop by the Wrangler later on, and they could talk about it. And then she turned to greet women bearing tuna casseroles and pea salad. Time, Sally thought, for the neighbors to take over.

And time, she realized with exasperation, to do a little good neighboring of her own. It was after two in the afternoon. She’d better get over to Edna’s and greet the un-invited houseguest.

As she was about to leave, Delice pulled Sally and Brit aside and said, “Can I get you guys to do me a favor? I’m collecting stuff for the Historical Society white elephant sale we’re having Saturday morning, right before the parade. I rented a U-Haul trailer, and I’m going to do a run tomorrow. Would you two come along and help me lug furniture?”

“Sure,” said Sally. “You know me. Anything for history, and a little extra aerobic exercise.”

Brit said she had some time too. “I’ve got to work tomorrow night at the Yippie I O, but I can do anything during the day.”

“Great,” said Delice. “I’ll call Molly Wood and let her know we’ll be out there about ten tomorrow morning.”

“Molly Wood?” Sally asked, eyebrows raised. “We’re going to get furniture at Wood’s Hole? What a funny world it is.”

“Yeah,” said Delice Langham, one of the nosier, more interfering people on planet Earth, clearly up to something. “Hilarious.”

“But very neighborly,” Sally allowed. “Nice of Mrs. Wood to help out the Historical Society.”

“One good turn deserves another,” Delice said.

That was something Sally Alder actually believed. She didn’t deem it wise to make too many rules of conduct, and she had certainly never been that good at upholding most people’s idea of public morality.

But Sally had a rock-bottom belief in the idea that friends had to be honest and loyal to each other. Wyoming—all one hundred thousand square miles of it—was in some ways a village, dependent on honor and trust, on the idea that the person you screwed today, you’d have to face at a Rotary luncheon tomorrow. Obviously, too many people went ahead and did the screwing anyway, but the face-to-face reckoning probably prevented at least a few lapses in judgment.

If Nattie and Dwayne were really trying to work a deal that would help this Mrs. Wood while they helped themselves, then it wouldn’t hurt for Sally, Brit, and Delice to have a little more information about the land swap. If nothing else, it would give Sally something to think about besides Monette. And if, as Delice obviously suspected, her brother and sister-in-law were running a scam on a hapless ranch woman, then somebody had to warn the old lady about what she was getting herself into.

Besides, maybe there’d be some cool white elephants. Sally was looking for a desk chair for Hawk. Always a pleasure to be able to combine altruism and acquisitiveness. Was this how young State Farm agents felt when they sold tornado insurance in Wichita Falls, Texas?

The pleasure bloomed, then faded as Sally pulled up in front of Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood’s house. At this time of year, the neighborhoods in the tree district surrounding the university turned into gardeners’ paradise. The citizens of Laramie had the whole long winter to salivate over seed catalogues, start cuttings in bay windows, wait and wait for the ground to thaw enough to break up and turn. Sally had lived in Berkeley and L.A., where unspeakably fragrant flowers—jasmine and nasturtiums and even, in the south, gardenias— grew, well, promiscuously, with or without the commitment of some human to horticulture. But gardening in Wyoming had something in common with marriage. Hardy perennials—daffodils and tulips and irises, delphiniums and columbines, asparagus, strawberries— were invisible for nine months of the year. They sent out pale green shoots in May and reached glory in the weeks to come. Carefully tended annuals—peas and beans and lettuce and squash, marigolds and zinnias and petunias and pansies—thrived while they lasted, and it was always too soon when the first frost came to blast and blacken. Then you stuck it out, all over again, devoted and waiting for renewal.

Edna and Tom loved gardening. Alas.

Where Edna’s columbines ought to be, a few wisps of crackling dried stalks stood. Where her pansy and petunia bed had been, lovingly planted in a rush the week before she left, was parched dirt strewn with straggling stiff threads. The front lawn, which Tom kept lush and velvety, was overgrown in spots and clots, and dead in others. The window boxes where Edna liked to put fat red geraniums bore no sign of recent planting. How could plants the size of Edna’s geraniums simply disappear? Sally came up the front walk, looked into the window boxes, and had her answer. The planters were, it appeared, being used as bathrooms by the neighborhood cats.

She didn’t even want to think about the backyard. It was too late to replant the little vegetable garden, unless Edna preferred her green beans prefrozen.

Better have a look at the house. Good thing this Sheldon Stover hadn’t shown up yet. She’d have the chance to see the place as Amber McCloskey, geranium murderer, had left it.

Sally took the key out of the mailbox and opened the front door. The place, as she’d expected, smelled like un-emptied garbage and dead houseplants, but also . . . like cat. She heard a thump and a crash, coming from the direction of Edna’s home office. Yep, she thought, as something furry twined around her ankle and went mrowwrr: definitely cat. Kitten, to be precise. A very skinny, sorry-looking piece of baby catwork.

Amber had left a note on the dining room table. “Hey there, Dr. Stover. Thanks for filling in for us.” (Us? Of course, the boyfriend had been living there too. Why not?) “We didn’t have time to clean up much, so we hope it’s okay. We adopted a kitty—please feed him. His name is Mr. Skittles and he doesn’t need any kind of special cat food. There are some cornflakes in the pantry, and he’ll eat them with water or anything. Kitties love home-cooked meals!”

A sodden saucer of cornflakes was slowly turning to cement in the corner of the kitchen floor. Poor Mr. Skittles. Sally was, to put it mildly, not a cat person, but she’d be damned if the sad little fur ball at her feet would go another hour without something decent to eat. She couldn’t leave the cat there, either—Edna was very allergic to cats. The whole house would have to be detoxed.

Amber’s note continued. “We’ll be back in two weeks. Please water the yard if you think of it. When you leave, just put the key back in the mailbox. Have fun!” The last exclamation point was dotted with a happy face.

Sally went into the kitchen, looking, without surprise, at the sink piled high with crusted dishes, the overflowing garbage can, dirty counters, dirty table. She decided she’d better see if there was something for Mr. Skittles to eat. She found a small can of imported, oil-packed Italian tuna, opened it, dumped it out on a plate, and set it outside by the back door, next to a bowl of water. As Mr. Skittles set to devouring what must be his first reasonable meal in days, Sally caught a glimpse of the shriveled wreckage of Edna McCaffrey’s vegetable garden. Members of the University of Wyoming College of Arts and Sciences would be paying for that, one way or another, all year long.

Then she returned to the kitchen, hauled the garbage out to the alley, came back in and tackled the mess. It wasn’t that bad—inside half an hour, she’d done the dishes and scrubbed the place down. She shared a silent thought with the benighted Bone Bandy: Kids these days.

Now Sally remembered the crash that had first alerted her to Mr. Skittles’s presence. With a gallows feeling in her heart, she went into Edna’s office. It was a pleasant, well-organized space, full of afternoon sunlight from a great, tall window sectioned off with wooden shelves that held Edna’s Pueblo pottery collection. One shelf must also have recently held Mr. Skittles, nestled among the pots for a sunny snooze. And when he’d been startled awake and come to investigate, he’d knocked off a black-glazed pot. Sally knew that Edna had one small, glossy black pot made by the Michelangelo of Pueblo pottery, María Martínez of San Ildefonso. Heaven help them all if that was the one.

Sally stooped down to pick up the fragments of the pot, lying desolate on the wood floor next to an Oriental rug that might have cushioned the impact if Mr. Skittles and Sally had been luckier. Praise Jesus, it was signed by some potter from Santa Clara (probably the Botticelli of the Pueblos, but still). She squatted there, picking up pieces, and wondered if she should give it to Hawk to get him to glue it back together. He was a genius with superglue.

“Hello!” came a voice from the doorway of the office. “Are you a housebreaker or a cleaning lady?”

She looked up at the man who’d asked the question: a long, thin face with a brushy mustache, wavy brown hair, a T-shirt and fishing vest above cargo shorts that hung straight down in back, as if God had forgotten to equip him behind. Black socks and walking shoes, skinny white legs. And he was staring at her like she must be retarded.

“Does a cleaning service come with the house?” he asked.

Cleaning service? Sally looked down at her Italian sandals, her Ann Taylor trousers, her black silk T-shirt. The gold jewelry she’d put on to dress up a bit more, out of respect for the morning’s somber errand.

This moron went to Princeton?

She rose slowly, holding in her hands the obsidian shards of what had once been art, and was now archaeology. “No. I’m not the cleaning woman. I’m Sally Alder, a friend of Edna’s from the university.”

“The university?” he asked.

“Of Wyoming,” she said. “I run the Dunwoodie Center for Women’s History.”

“Of Wyoming,” he repeated, as if trying to place the name. “Mmm. Well.”

Obviously the Dunwoodie Center and UW were too low-flying to register on the man’s Ivy League radar. Time to give this guy a clue whose turf he was on. “You must be Sheldon Stover. Edna and Tom’s house-sitter told me you were coming. I understand you’re a friend of Edna’s from back East?”

“Yes,” said Stover, “we were at the institute together.” Like there was only one institute in the world.

“Was Edna expecting a visit from you?” Sally inquired.

Stover gave her a look that asked what business it was of hers. “As a matter of fact, no. I don’t have a fixed itinerary, so I can’t commit to being anyplace in particular at any given time. But as it happened, a California colleague I’ve been planning to hook up with is here this week, so I thought I’d drop in. Edna told me in Princeton that I should look her up if I ever got out West. When I called and the girl asked if I’d be willing to fill in as house-sitter, it just seemed like it was meant to be.”

Weird. “So it doesn’t matter to you whether Edna’s here or not?”

“Naturally,” said Stover, “I’d like to see her. I was hoping to talk with her about my current project.”

Now Sally was supposed to ask him about his work. “Your project?” she inquired obligingly.

“I’m an experimental ethnographer,” he said, as if he were saying, “I’m a farmer.”

“I’m part of the Insurgency.”

First an institute; now an insurgency. “Yes?” Sally prodded.

“Surely you’ve heard of the Insurgency?”

“Something to do with Central American revolutions?” Sally tried.

Stover chuckled maddeningly. “Only as intellectual fellow traveling,” he said, illuminating nothing and obviously talking for his own benefit. He looked as if he didn’t think she understood a word he said, and cared not a bit whether she did. “This summer I’m developing a concept that will destroy, once and for all, the confining canons of ethnographic fieldwork.”

“Destroying the canons?” Sally asked. With guys like Sheldon Stover, you could appear to make conversation simply by repeating combinations of words they’d just said, but phrasing them as questions. The tactic had gotten her through more academic cocktail parties than she cared to remember. Edna too was a master of getting through cocktail parties, but she wasn’t known for her easy sufferance of blockheads. Sheldon Stover could not actually be a friend of hers.

“Exactly,” said Stover, shifting into lecture mode. “Consider the phrase ‘ethnographic fieldwork.’ ‘Ethno’— having to do with a folk or tribe or culture, all terms we’ve come to hold in disrepute. ‘Graphic’—asking questions and writing down answers and observations about folk life or culture. But as postmodernists have proven, nobody ever gives answers to questions that the questioner can really understand. And writing down oral traditions, or trying to describe visual or material symbols or objects, simply deadens living things. ‘Field’—it implies that there’s something ‘out there,’ as opposed to the observer’s perspective. A highly suspect notion. And, of course, ‘work.’ Here in the modern, industrialized world, we’ve divided the undifferentiated flux of experience into artificial categories—‘work’ and ‘play’ for example.”

“Or day and night,” Sally offered.

“Yes, that’s right,” Stover nodded indulgently. “Stark dichotomies. Utterly Western and arbitrary. My summer project is to reveal the subjectivities at work in all these canonical notions.”

Was he knave as well as fool? “So, if I get this straight, this summer you’re just rambling around wherever and whenever you please, not observing, not asking questions, not writing, and above all, not working. Very insurgent.”

“Why yes,” said Stover. “Have you read Roland Barthes?”

Sally’d had enough. “How long are you planning to stay?” she asked, knowing and dreading the answer.

Stover looked skyward, his patience taxed. “I guess you don’t really get it.”

“Get this,” said Sally. “I am hereby asserting my authority as Wyoming agent for Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood, who own what we literal-minded souls would refer to as ‘this house.’ I could kick you out. In fact, I probably should kick you out. But by now every motel between Cheyenne and Rawlins is probably booked solid. Maybe you should just ease on down the road, huh?”

“Actually,” said Stover, “I need to be in town a few more days. It’s not just that I want to see this colleague. I’m having my last fellowship check forwarded to general delivery in Laramie.”

“You’re broke?” Sally asked, unnecessarily.

“Just a little cash flow problem,” Stover explained cheerfully. “I’m sure it’ll be solved shortly.”

Uh-huh. Sally sighed. “All right. You can stay, for the moment. I’ll email Edna and let her know you’re here, but if I don’t hear from her by this weekend indicating otherwise, I’ll expect you to leave. And you stay only on the conditions that you keep the place clean, water the yard, and don’t have any guests of your own.”

She put the potsherds down on Edna’s desk, found a piece of paper and a pen, and wrote down her phone number. “Call me if you need anything, and be sure to let me know before you take off. I’ll drop by from time to time, just to make sure things are going okay. And you leave absolutely no later than Sunday, unless Edna writes and tells me to let you stay. Understand, Mr. Stover?”

“It’s Dr. Stover, but you can call me Sheldon, Susie,” he said. “I don’t believe in hierarchical designations of rank.”

“It’s Sally, but you can call me Dr. Alder,” she said. “I do.”