Chapter 5

 

Two days later, I dropped three fat envelopes through the mail slot at the main post office and walked out of there, carefree as a three-year-old. Tax season—done. Yeah, I know, it’s a weird kind of euphoria, something only an accountant can appreciate. I felt like celebrating.

Drake had rushed to the airport this morning to meet with some people from National Geographic about a photo shoot. I supposed I would get the details when the meeting was finished. Ron had said he was going to call Innocent Times and pretend to be a potential client to find out how their services worked. I promised to tell Victoria what he was up to and he threw a pad of sticky-notes at me.

Now, I stood beside my Jeep in the post office parking lot trying to decide what to do with my newfound freedom. The choices were many: I could go to the office and catch up on RJP billing and other tasks I’d not done in weeks; at home the roses still needed pruning and the lawn should be fertilized. Elsa’s busyness in her own yard reminded me I’d left several things half-finished in ours. A car waiting for a parking slot tooted at me, bringing me back to the fact I was uselessly taking up space woolgathering. I got in the Jeep, started the engine and backed out.

A block away, before I had to make the choice to turn left or right at Central, my phone chimed. Drake. I swung into a gas station lot and picked it up.

“Hey,” he said, “you in the middle of anything?”

“Happily, I’m not.”

“If you want to fly along, I’m taking a photographer for a little jaunt over the mountains. He claims there’s an old mining camp up there and he’s doing a story on such things.”

Mining camps in the mountains reminded me of the job we’d taken last summer in Alaska, one that unearthed some tragic old secrets, and I almost declined. But here I sat with a beautiful spring day at my disposal and my husband inviting me to spend it with him.

“We’ll pull pitch in about twenty minutes, and you can ride along if you’re here,” he said.

My decision was made. I told him I’d come, then took the on-ramp to I-40 and raced westward toward Double Eagle airport as fast as my Jeep and the moderate traffic allowed. Precisely nineteen minutes later I whipped into a parking spot and waved at him through the mesh fence. His blue and white helicopter sat on the skirt outside one of the maintenance hangars.

Watching Drake in his khaki green flight suit and leather bomber jacket, I was struck with a hundred memories of days like this—my handsome pilot doing the thing he did so proficiently. Love welled up in my heart. My favorite times were when it was just the two of us, on our way to or from a job, sometimes he would be at the controls, sometimes I took them. The presence of a man with a large camera bag slung over his shoulder reminded me we had company today.

I walked through the fixed base operator’s office, said hi to Jimmy at the counter and joined Drake as he was helping his customer with the seatbelt on the passenger side. A quick introduction—the guy’s name was Michael-something. I hopped into the back and settled in. While the rotors spun up, Drake gave the standard safety briefing, the stuff about doors and windows and not touching anything. Within a few minutes we were skirting the northern edge of the city toward the Sandia Mountains.

I hiked these mountains a lot in my teens and early twenties, but there are still a zillion places I’ve never seen. For our purposes today, Michael wanted a general view of the area. I supposed his photographer eye would know what he wanted when he saw it. Drake and I chatted as we crossed I-25, skirted a couple of the Indian pueblos and followed Highway 14 past the tiny town of Los Cerrillos.

“What’s that place?” Michael asked, pointing at something to the south.

From my seat behind him I couldn’t yet see it, but Drake circled and a little cabin came into view. Made of rough lumber, it had once sported a coat of white paint but most of that had flaked away. I spotted a woman’s touch—red-checked curtains at the two windows, a wooden flower box on the tiny covered porch. An outhouse sat a few yards behind. The one thing I didn’t see was a road leading to it.

“Can we land there?” the customer asked.

I was kind of wondering the same thing. For some reason, the place caught my fancy.

Drake brought the aircraft to a hover and looked around. The ground was barren and rocky but for a bunch of cottonwood trees near the little house. As we came in low, it became evident a dry arroyo ran through and there must still be enough underground water to keep those trees alive. There was a fairly level spot about fifty yards behind the cabin and he set us down there.

“I’d like to spend a little time, if that’s okay,” said Michael. “That bluff on the northern horizon is magnificent but the light isn’t quite there yet. If we hang out a half-hour or so, the shadows will catch those tiny crevices …”

His eye was far better than mine—I had no idea how he envisioned the high dirt ridge in that way. Drake shut down and we all got out. Michael immediately began roaming.

“Keep an eye out for snakes,” Drake called out to him.

“Really?” I scanned the ground nervously.

“I have no idea. Better safe than sorry. Can’t have a big magazine suing me for bringing their guy out to a dangerous place.” He took a deep breath and looked around. “Wow. Listen to the quiet.”

It’s one of those things you don’t hear when you live in a city. Even in a secluded neighborhood like ours there’s always noise—the distant roar of traffic on the freeway, a car starting up somewhere, someone’s TV through an open window.

“My place in Hawaii would be like this sometimes,” he said. “I’d get up around dawn and sit outside with my coffee, and the only thing I would hear would be a rooster crowing now and then. Even that didn’t last long, once people got up and headed for work.”

I stood still and really listened. Michael’s footsteps on the rocky ground made an occasional crunch-crunch. When he stopped, out of our sight beyond the dip of the arroyo, it was as if Drake and I were truly the only ones on the planet.

“Someone else loved it out here,” I said, pointing to the cabin. I would have felt guilty, intruding on their idyllic location, but the place had clearly been abandoned. From the look of it, decades ago. “There’s no road. How do you suppose they came and went?”

“There was a skinny little track down there.” He pointed downhill. “It’s probably washed out now and I have no idea what it connected to. We must be nearly a mile off the nearest road.”

“Look at this place, hon,” I said, facing the cabin.

For its age, the small building was in remarkably good condition. No doubt its distance from civilization played a part. No squatters or vandals would make the trek out here. Our high desert climate, with dry air and a cold enough winter to discourage termites, was most certainly another factor.

I could picture an old miner having built the place, catering to his wife’s desires for something sturdy where she could cozy up and create a home. But that wasn’t quite the whole story, either. The nearest mineshaft we’d seen was miles away, not exactly an arrangement conducive to a guy heading off to work each day and coming home every night. There was more to it. I squinted my eyes and envisioned the little house with its white paint fresh and bright and maybe some red trim around the window frames. I skimmed past the outhouse. I’d managed those fine when I was a kid out camping, but I’ve come to enjoy the finer points of indoor plumbing in recent years.

Drake had circled the structure. “You know, it’s not in bad shape at all. There’s a back door with no curtain over the window. The kitchen has a woodstove and I have no idea what they did for refrigeration. Nobody’s touched it, though there’s a double bed in there with a decent quilt on it.”

“If the bedding hasn’t been shredded by mice, the house must be incredibly tightly built.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” He raised his eyebrows.

In recent months, we’d had several conversations about buying a weekend place somewhere. With commitments to two businesses, there’s seldom time for us to go away on cruises or take typical vacations. We’d discussed a couple of ski areas in the northern part of the state—Taos, where we spent our honeymoon, is incredibly beautiful and less than three hours away. But this place … it was fifteen minutes by air and absolutely no one was going to come around.

I looked at it with a fresh eye. The outhouse was the first thing to catch my attention. “I don’t know …”

An exclamation from Drake’s client caught our attention. When we looked toward the bluff where the photographer had headed, I saw what he’d been talking about. The sun struck the tan earth now, bringing out incredible peachy tones and highlighting every fissure and boulder. My breath caught in my chest and all at once I could see myself spending time out here.