Assumption (4 page)

She sat up, squared her shoulders.

“Where do you live, Ms. Bickers?”

“Santa Fe.”

“And can you tell me when you last spoke to your mother?” the sheriff asked.

“Two days ago. Tuesday morning.”

“You come up often?”

“Not really.”

“This might sound like a stupid question, but did your mother have any enemies?”

“She was an old woman,” Jenny Bickers said.

“I know. Still,” Paz said. “She ever mention any fight or disagreement she’d had with anybody?”

“No.”

Paz offered a tired glance toward Ogden, then asked, “Did you come up here for any particular reason?”

“No, not really. I hadn’t been up to see her in a month or so,” the woman said.

Paz nodded. He leaned back and looked at Ogden. “You find anything?”

“Nothing. There’s still some papers to go through.”

“Well, get over there and finish up,” Paz said to Ogden. He looked at Jenny Bickers. “I know this is difficult, but I can’t allow you to stay at your mother’s house. It’s a crime scene.”

“I can’t say when I’ll be through,” Ogden said.

“I wouldn’t be able to sleep there anyway,” she said. “I’ll get a motel room. I don’t really feel like driving back to Santa Fe.”

Paz looked out the window. “Deputy Walker will take you back to your car. If there’s anything you can think to tell us or that you want to ask us, just call.”

Jenny Bickers pushed herself to her feet and walked out of the office ahead of Ogden.

“Ogden, I want you to give me a call when you get back to the house,” Paz said.

Sitting beside him on the way back to her car, Jenny Bickers couldn’t contain herself. “Was that man trying to insinuate that I had something to do with my mother’s death?”

“No,” Ogden said.

She didn’t believe him and stared out the window. “Did you know my mother well?” she asked.

“No, just in passing. To tell the truth, I don’t think she liked me very much.”

“She was surly.”

Ogden looked at her angular face, masculine, handsome, not pretty. “You grow up in Santa Fe?”

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know why my mother moved up here in the middle of no place. No offense.”

“None taken. I like the middle of no place. It beats the far edge of no place.” Ogden examined the gray sky. “Sisters, brothers?”

“No.”

“I’m an only child, too,” Ogden said.

“Listen, do you mind if I come in and look around with you?” she asked.

“No can do. You’d be better off getting some rest anyway.” After a brief silence, Ogden asked, “So, what do you down there in Santa Fe?”

“I’m an assistant manager in a copy shop.”

“Like it?”

“I’m an assistant manager in a copy shop,” she repeated.

“Gotcha.”

“I moved to Santa Fe after my divorce.”

When he stopped she got out and went directly to her car. He climbed out and jogged to catch her before she pulled off.

“Ms. Bickers,” he said, “may I recommend a place to stay?”

She looked at him.

“My mother’s house.”

“I couldn’t,” she said.

“It’s cheap.” He paused. “I mean to say it’s inexpensive. If you consider free inexpensive. My mother wouldn’t like me calling her house cheap. That way I won’t have to track you down if I find something and need to ask you questions. What do you say?”

“How will your mother feel about it?”

“She’d be mad if I didn’t offer.”

Ogden called his mother.

The sheriff thought it was a good thing that Ogden had sent the woman to his mother’s house. Ogden listened to the list of details about the house that told no one anything: fingerprints known and unknown, an unflushed toilet, the fact that the old woman had been strangled, her windpipe crushed. One didn’t need a coroner to determine that.

“The toilet seat was up,” Ogden added. “So there was a man there, but we knew that.”

There was something in the fat man’s voice that puzzled Ogden, namely, the mere fact that he was telling Ogden all of this. “What is it, Bucky?”

“You didn’t happen to glance at the young Ms. Bickers’s ID, did you?”

“I didn’t think to.” Ogden felt stupid.

“It wouldn’t have occurred to me either, but try to get a look at it, okay?”

“Of course.”

Ogden went back to Mrs. Bickers’s address book. The two Bickerses who weren’t scratched out were a John and a Howard, but beside their names was neatly written
deceased.
The Bickers who had been crossed out was a Jennifer with an Arizona phone number. The book was stiff and felt unused, so Ogden thought that Jenny’s Santa Fe number might be written someplace else. He turned to the listing under Mrs. Bickers’s maiden name. Lester G. Robbins. He dialed the Arizona number. The phone rang without answer. On a back page he found the name Jenny written many times with various numbers—Arizona, Utah, and numbers without area codes.

Ogden finished his looking and rifling through the dead woman’s desk and panties and felt strangely dirty and weird for his effort. He tried to leave out what he thought Jenny would need to sort out her mother’s affairs. From what he could tell, Mrs. Bickers had died without owing too much money. There were a few outstanding medical bills, a power bill, all overdue by only days. Her bank statement showed a balance of thirteen hundred dollars.

Ogden locked up the house and went to his rig where he called in to Felton and told him he was going to grab a bite.

“You mean you’re going to be 10-7,” Felton said.

“I guess so.”

“Actually that would be a 10-7-B,” Felton crackled. “Or a 10-48.”

“What about a size 10 up your ass?”

“No time. No time for lunch either, cowboy. You gotta go out County 8 and check on a vandalized car. Mouth of Niebla Canyon.”

“Roger that.”

He drove out on Highway 8 as instructed and saw a couple of hikers waving, trying to flag him down at the little store about a mile away from the Niebla trailhead. They were neat-­looking young men with expensive boots, daypacks, and Nalgene bottles on their belts. They walked toward him as he got out.

“You the guys who called?” Ogden asked.

“It’s our car,” one of them said. “It’s up there.” He pointed up the dirt road.

“Get in,” Ogden said.

They did.

“Either of you hurt?” Ogden asked.

“Just our car.”

“They really trashed it, man.”

“We’ve had some complaints up here recently,” Ogden said. He cranked up the heat a bit.

He drove them up the washboard and rutted road to the trailhead. He whistled as he looked at the smashed windshield. “You came back to find it like this, eh?”

They got out and approached the school-bus yellow Nissan Pathfinder.

“We never even got going,” one of them said.

“We got about a quarter mile up the trail and heard the glass being smashed,” said the second. “It was scary. We didn’t know if we should run back or not.”

“We ran anyway,” the first said. “Nobody was here when we got back.”

“That’s probably a good thing,” Ogden said.

“Then we had to hoof it all the way down there to the pay phone. I couldn’t get a signal on my cell.”

“Mobile phones don’t work up here. Hardly in town either, for that matter.” Ogden looked again at the car. “You remember pissing anybody off?”

“Nah, man.”

“Anything missing? The CD player, cash, anything?”

“Nothing.”

“You got about a quarter mile up, you say?” Ogden asked.

“Maybe a little more.”

Ogden shook his head. He reached into the vehicle and popped the hood. He walked to the front and looked at the engine. It looked fine, all in place.

“I can drive you back to town, but I’d be nervous about leaving the car here if I was you.”

“You think we should wait here for a tow truck?”

“Or you could kick out the rest of that windshield and drive it to town. You’ll be cold as hell.”

“Yeah.”

“I say we just drive it and get the fucking hell out of here,” the other said.

Ogden looked at the damage again. “I can fill out a report for you to sign right now. You know, for insurance. That way you won’t have to come into the station.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Snow started to fall.

Ogden’s mother was holding the curtain aside and looking out the window when he drove up. She opened the door and stepped away to allow him in.

“It’s cold out there,” she said.

“It is that. How’s your visitor?”

“She’s doing fine considering all that’s happened. Poor thing. I simply can’t imagine.”

“Thanks for letting her stay here,” he said. He looked around for Jenny.

“You were right to suggest she stay here. Imagine losing your mother and having to sleep in some depressing motel. She’s been napping. And she’s lovely. Don’t you think she’s lovely?”

“I hadn’t noticed, Ma.”

“You’re a liar.”

Jenny Bickers came out of the guest bedroom, what had actually been Ogden’s bedroom. “Hello, Officer Walker,” she said.

“It’s Deputy,” Ogden said. “Seeing as you’re sleeping in my room, I think you can call me Ogden.”

“Okay, Ogden.”

“How are you, Jenny?” Eva asked. “Would you like some nice hot tea? Ogden, come sit down with us and have some tea. It’s the kind you like.”

“No, I’d better get going.”

“Pishposh,” his mother said.

“Okay. Just a cup and then I have to go.”

Ogden still felt grimy from his day. “Sorry I’m so filthy.” He looked at Jenny’s eyes. They were tired. “I think I’m finished at your mother’s house. I’ll have to get the okay from the sheriff, but I think you can get in there tomorrow.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Eva’s old cat walked across the room and rubbed against Ogden’s leg. He reached down and scratched his back. “Hey, Moose.” His father had given the cat that name almost fifteen years ago, a kitten as big as a Labrador puppy. “You’re feeding him too much.”

“I can’t control what he eats when he’s cruising.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t let him out so much.”

“Hey, I just let the guy enjoy what’s left of his life,” the old woman said.

Ogden thought about Moose out there prowling yards in the night and then he thought about Mrs. Bickers’s cat. He looked at Jenny. “Do you like cats?”

“I love cats,” Jenny said. Then, “Excuse me.” She left the table and walked into the bathroom.

“Poor thing,” Eva said. She shook her head and then looked at her son. “Why do you have to run off?”

“I’m filthy.”

“You can shower here. You’ve got clothes here, too.”

“I have to go,” he said.

“She needs people around her,” Eva said.

Ogden shook his finger. “Ma, you don’t know this woman. You don’t know what she needs. You hear me? Now, she’s got to make arrangements for her mother’s funeral and sort through—

Eva stopped him. “Already started.” Eva got up to see to the whistling kettle.

“What?”

“I got her in touch with Fonda today and we’re taking care of it. I know everybody here. I can get everything for a reasonable price.”

“Good Lord.”

Jenny came out of the bathroom. Mother and son shut up. Jenny sat. “Am I in the way?” she asked.

“Don’t be silly,” Eva said.

Jenny looked at Ogden.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. While they sat and talked about weather, Ogden wondered how he might get a look at the woman’s driver’s license. “What was your mother like?”

“Ogden,” Eva said.

“I don’t mind. I’d like to talk about her.” Jenny sipped her tea. “My mother was independent, ornery, and secretive.”

“Sounds familiar,” Ogden said.

“At least that’s what I imagine she was like,” Jenny said. “Sadly, I didn’t know her that well. I was raised by my grandmother.” She smiled at some memory. “My grandmother, she was from Kansas, she was a wonderful woman. She never said a negative thing about my mother, though I’m sure there was plenty negative to say. That stuff comes out, you know. Emma Bickers was a lousy mother and apparently an even worse judge of men.”

Ogden glanced up at the clock hanging slightly crooked on the wall behind Jenny.

“She was married to my father for a couple of years and then he left. I don’t know anything about him. My grandmother refused to acknowledge his existence. Then my mother left me with her. My mother lived in Seattle, Portland, Butte, and then here. She never remarried, but always moved because of a man. That’s what I got from my grandmother. She always blamed it on the men.”

“It’s always the men,” Eva said.

Jenny pulled her hair from her face and stared down into her tea cup. “I was trying to get to know her these last few months. I had only seen her three times since I moved to New Mexico. You probably knew her better than I did.”

“I doubt that,” Ogden said.

“Did you like her?” Jenny asked Ogden.

“Yes,” he lied.

“She was a fine person, I’m sure,” Eva said.

Ogden stood, looked at his watch. “Okay, I’ve been dirty long enough. If you ladies will excuse me?”

Ogden got up after a restive night and drank orange juice from the carton. He looked out his window at the landscape. He deeply loved the place, the mountains, the desert, the rivers, the fish, but he felt like a failure remaining there. It had been different for his father, he thought. The man had come there from someplace and carved out a life. He’d worked house construction and driven cats and plows in the winter and seemed happy with that, while instilling in his son the notion that there was more out there.

He dressed and drove toward town. He decided he would go over a few things at Mrs. Bickers’s house with Jenny and then ask her to sign a receipt and claim to need her driver’s license number on it. The sky was clear and cerulean and he felt lighter.

He arrived at the station to find Jenny waiting.

“You’re up early,” Ogden said.

Felton watched the two of them from his desk.

Ogden saw that Paz wasn’t in yet. “Well, let’s go have breakfast and then we can go to the house.” He felt himself intentionally say
the
house instead of
your mother’s
house and wondered what difference that sort of thing made.