six:
monday morning

Morning cracked open the day.

Allison walked the well-worn path from her A-frame across the open field to Trudy’s place, tucked next to a grove of trees but in a spot that could catch sunlight during the day, at least in the summer. Colin led the way on the narrow, winding path that cut through the field.

A finger of smoke rose from Trudy’s chimney. There wasn’t a hint of a breeze. The agenda was simple—lead authorities to the torn-up body near Lumberjack Camp. Sulchuk and the others all had commitments and couldn’t return to the site.

They had managed to raise a cell and contact the police around 8 p.m. The 911 dispatcher had been thorough and detailed when Allison made the report, passing her off to someone to go over all the particulars again. The cop mentioned the shooting in Glenwood Springs and that explained why they were so short-handed. Allison couldn’t imagine it. The news explained her dispatcher’s somewhat harried state. The half-corpse was bad and unsettling enough—
Allison still felt certain that the mountain lion scenario held no credibility—but trying to imagine the attempted assassination was a double whammy.

“Smell anything yet?” said Allison.

“Bacon,” said Colin. “The fake stuff.”

“I’d eat a picture of bacon,” said Allison.

“I’d eat the camera before it took the picture,” said Colin.

Regular grocery store trips had not yet become part of their domestic—Allison hated the word—routine.

“One of us is going to have to maybe settle down and get that damn little house in order,” said Allison.

It was a running joke. Theirs was a match made deep in the woods and it worked. One of the reasons was that they both shared the notion that keeping house, cleaning house, repairing house, enjoying house, or thinking house was low on the list of priorities. It was nice to have a bed, for all the reasons it was nice to have a bed. In fact, the loft bedroom and spectacular views of the broad field and mountains to the east were now permanently part of the imagery that went with the memories of making love with Colin. The bed had become theirs, not hers. Beds were good things and Allison was also generally in favor of a roof, especially in winter, but all the rest of what came with the term “house” was vastly overrated.

Especially if you had a neighbor and friend whose talents in the kitchen were both innate and refined.

The kitchen hummed. Two cats lay about, completely unexcited by the guests. Batter bolstered with fat blueberries dripped from a spoon in gooey dollops onto a cookie sheet. Trudy aimed each dollop with care.

“Scones,” said Trudy when Colin asked. “To go with poached eggs and broiled tomatoes.”

“No bacon?” said Colin. Trudy shot him a look and a smile. “What I meant to say was yum.”

Colin liked to balance his intake of organic ingredients with a healthy portion of animal fat. You can lead a cowboy to bean sprouts, but you can’t make him chew.

Trudy poured coffee and they quizzed her for her version of events. Allison shook her head repeatedly, finding it hard to imagine being so close to the shots.

“Couldn’t sleep,” said Trudy. “I kept thinking about all the little things I could have done. You know, to make it all come out differently.”

“The cop sounds out of line,” said Colin. “Way out of line.”

“That was the capper,” said Trudy. “He probably thought he was helping me. Maybe he knows something, but he was so dire.”

Allison recalled the timid woman she had met when Trudy was still married to George Grumley, who ran a wicked world of rigged hunts behind Trudy’s back. Allison had knocked on Trudy’s door the first time they met and had found a meek flower child with little experience in the big wide world. In the end, Trudy had played no small role in helping learn the truth about her husband’s racket and it all came out, including his role as a double murderer, when the sheriff and the prosecutors were finally done. Trudy had shaken the experience like a snake shedding a skin. She would always broadcast more femininity than Allison—her curves were better—but she’d added confidence to the mix and the time she spent in the fields and gardens had added a glow to her beautiful skin, which she tended carefully with organic sunscreens. Trudy was wary of synthetics at every turn. The face Trudy once kept hidden behind too-long hair was now open to the world. She had lost a bit of the flower child earth woman and had gone with a look that was sleeker, but she still oozed all things wholesome and healthy.

They sat at a breakfast booth with oak benches and matching shoulder-height backs and a table worn and stained with character. There was room for six, three to a side, but Allison and Colin sat close, thigh to thigh. Over Trudy’s shoulder, a greenhouse jutted out and away from the house, bursting with herbs and plants.

A small TV on the kitchen counter was tuned to CNN and Allison could see the images from Glenwood Springs and what appeared to be a well-seasoned, well-travelled male reporter recapping the news. The sound was low but from the occasional word she picked up there didn’t appear to be any fresh developments.

“Candidate’s Condition Stable” said the banner at the bottom of the screen.

In Trudy’s organic food, plant, herb, and cat emporium, the television stood out like an electronic pimple, but Allison knew Trudy liked to stay up on all the news. She was a reliable source of information on pending issues from Denver to Washington. Trudy’s updates about the world gave Allison a fleeting sense that she didn’t live completely in a black hole.

“Kerry London,” said Trudy.

“What?” said Allison.

“You’re staring at him,” said Trudy.

There was something oddly familiar about the reporter.

“Strange to see Glenwood Springs on national news.”

“And Kerry London too,” said Trudy. “He goes everywhere and now he’s right here. He’s sort of the master of disaster—earthquakes, hurricanes, and, you know, chaos. He always seems calm. Worried, but calm.”

“And familiar,” said Allison. “But back to you. I can’t imagine you do anything but operate by the book.”

“If you’re in trouble,” said Colin, “every business in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties needs to be checked. There are Mexicans everywhere, and most of them do the work Americans don’t want to touch.”

“Maybe,” said Trudy. “But he scared me, made me feel bad.”

“Hell, he’s the one who is probably scared,” said Colin. “The cops I’ve known don’t mind blaming others.”

Colin had taken out his atlatl, a foot-long beauty he had been refining all summer. He was making a grip with leather shoelaces, wrapping the leather tightly. The shaft of the weapon glowed with a golden sheen from the steady polishing and sanding. The notch was perfect. Colin could whip an arrow at such speed that she couldn’t follow its flight. He had fashioned three perfect oak arrows with duck feathers for stability. The points were honed to an exquisite sharpness, like X-Acto blades. She liked watching Colin bear down on a problem, refuse to give up, and make the step-by-step improvements until everything was just-so. In other words, perfect.

“I’ve got to re-check the whole staff,” said Trudy. “Maybe it’s a good thing. For my own reassurance.”

“You’re going to let someone go?” said Colin. “Just because their paperwork isn’t all together? If you do, they’ll find work somewhere else is all, somewhere right down the street, most likely.”

“I keep having images of a raid of some sort, like that nasty raid at that meat packing plant a few years back, the one that was in the news for weeks,” said Trudy. “They had all the buses waiting, went in and snatched workers right off the line, shipped ’em off.”

“That was in Greeley,” said Allison. “Kind of an ironic location. I guess the Utopian vision isn’t working out.”

“It’s not like it’s okay to be here if you’re not legit,” said Colin.

Colin put his atlatl aside, mopped up a bit of egg yolk with a last bite of scone. Trudy looked lost in thought. CNN switched to a volcano erupting in Chile, hundreds dead in the resulting mudslide that buried a rural village.

Allison itched to get going. She had lost a day of scouting and prep work. There were tents to clean, camp gear to sort out, authorities to escort to half-corpses.

Some thought chewed in her guts, but it remained safe and secure in that part of the so-called brain where good ideas turned to mush. Whatever the notion, it may as well have been written in the most impenetrable code ever devised by the CIA and buried in an ironclad vault with no doors a thousand feet down on the dark side of the moon. Allison had tried concentrating on it. She had tried ignoring it. Why they hadn’t yet invented some sort of implant to record every thought—some device you could rewind in case you missed something—was another indication of a world gone lazy. Whatever the idea, it had to do with confirming her point of view about the half-corpse: no mountain lion was involved in his demise.

Allison’s cell phone chirped. She didn’t recognize the number.

“Allison Coil?”

The voice was male, young and chipper.

“Yes,” she said.

“Brad Marker, Garfield County Sheriff.”

She glanced at the wall clock over Trudy’s sink. One minute before 7:00 a.m. Five stars for promptness.

They discussed meet-up times, horses, pack mules. Marker’s team would be six all together, including the county coroner and a wildlife officer from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, who would also bring a houndsman and his three best Treeing Walkers. Allison would charge the standard daily fee for the horses and, with a thumbs-up from Trudy, provide lunch for the whole crew. They’d put that on the bill. Marker had some experience riding. He was just leaving New Castle, where he lived. They had two hours to get ready.

Allison checked her watch. By the time they got back to the half-corpse, it would have been exposed to the elements for an additional twenty-four hours.

“Now what?” said Trudy. “What happened?”

Allison gave Trudy the highlights. Trudy was rapt, uttering only an “oh my” at a couple of appropriate moments.

“So where are the rest of the legs?” she asked.

“Probably a pile of shit in the woods by now,” said Colin, always cutting to the chase.

“If it was a cat,” said Allison.

“It’s still a possibility,” said Colin. “If he was slight and not too tall, a mountain lion—a hungry mountain lion—might have taken the chance.”

“Not exactly the kind of reassuring story you want to see out there right before all your hunters start arriving, is it?” said Trudy.

“It won’t take them long to clear the mountain lion scenario,” said Allison. “And they’ll figure out the name and if he was alone in the woods.”

“He must have been alone,” said Colin. “Nobody has reported anything.”

“Haven’t heard anything,” said Trudy. “Maybe it’s not news until it’s been a couple days. Unless it’s a child that’s wandered off. “

“Think for sure it was not a child,” said Allison.

“Thanks for that,” said Trudy.

“And I still don’t get what makes you so sure about what it’s not,” said Colin.

The look from Colin suggested she dial up a dose of humility. Colin, no doubt drawing on the experience of his extended family of outdoorsmen, had more experience in the woods. Maybe she didn’t want to think about a mountain lion around her camps—a lion with a taste for human would complicate matters considerably. By day’s end, they’d have a better idea. Maybe she should back down.

“Just going on everything I feel,” she said. On the other hand, maybe she should stick with her guns. “And what I saw.”

“You’re guessing,” said Colin. “Not like you.”

“No squabbling,” said Trudy. “I won’t have it.”

“I wouldn’t call it a guess,” said Allison.

“Well, you’re jumping ahead.”

“You’ll see,” said Allison. “Wait. Observe. Discover.”

Of course it was absurd that the former city girl was attempting to school Daniel Boone Jr. His faint, fake smile said he knew it.

“You can show the cops all the ways you’re right, but it sounds like I’m staying here today,” said Colin. “I see that worried look in your eye.”

“All the prep for the hunters coming in,” said Allison. “You know.”

“We went over the list three times yesterday,” said Colin. “Think I got it. Clean, fold, straighten, organize, clean, count, sort, and clean some more. And feed the horses.”

“And don’t forget to clean,” said Allison. “Sharpest outfit in the West, that’s what we want.”

Trudy stood. “I suppose I’ve gotta get down to Glenwood and go through my records. Make sure the paperwork for my crew is copacetic.”

If everyone was as respectful of the law as Trudy, there would be little need for policemen, prosecutors, judges, or tax auditors. Trudy was a speed-limit queen. She did well with boundaries.

At the rate Trudy’s business had bloomed, the center of gravity in the culture might be shifting. You didn’t just buy Trudy’s products, you bought into a culture of eating well, of doing things the right way. A bottle of anything from Down to Earth in your grocery cart was a signal to yourself and the world that you understood that eating well was an active choice and that it went hand in hand with the idea of community togetherness. Like Birkenstock sandals or Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, the product shined a light on the user as a thoughtful citizen of the planet.

“I know you’ll square things up right with your business, even if there is a problem,” said Allison. “And I doubt there is one.”

“What if I have to let somebody go—just because their paperwork isn’t right?”

“Cross that bridge when you come to it,” said Allison. “And you’ll do it in the most humane way possible.”

Trudy looked quiet. She’d gone deep inside herself, still reeling. “I want to go back a day,” she said. “And start over.”