Stranded (12 page)

“This is Charlotte Sterling,” Stella added to me. “She works part-time for Cutter Realty.”

Charlotte shot Stella a sour look, as if she thought her position warranted a more complimentary description than that. But what I was thinking was,
Sterling. Some relation to Kelli’s boyfriend?

I held out my hand and took a chance. “I believe I met your son yesterday.” Okay, lay it on thick. I needed this job. “The prominent lawyer, Chris Sterling? Kelli Keifer introduced us.”

“You’re the people living in her uncle’s house?” She gave me a sharper examination, and I nodded. “Chris mentioned Kelli was letting someone live there when I stopped by the office a few minutes ago.”

“She’s going to help investigate the murder,” Stella volunteered brightly.

“Really?” Charlotte asked. “Would you have time to do that and work here for the Historical Society too?”

I was a little surprised that none of the three women seemed to question the investigative capabilities I’d so rashly claimed, and that Charlotte was more concerned about the time element, but I was happy to take a detour down this path. “Actually, we haven’t discussed working hours yet. Or pay,” I said with deliberate emphasis.

Stella said they opened the Historical Society Building only three days a week at this time of year, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, with hours from ten to four, which is when I’d be expected to work. Victoria produced an hourly payment figure that was indeed at pittance level. No health insurance or other benefits, she emphasized. At that rate of pay both the motor home and I might turn to dust before I could buy a new engine.

I couldn’t produce cheers of joy, but a job is a job, and I said, “That sounds satisfactory.” We all looked at Charlotte Sterling as if she held the deciding vote.

“Sounds fine to me, if that’s what everyone else wants.” Surprising me, Charlotte turned to me and smiled with unexpected warmth. “I’m sure Ivy can handle the position most capably. Welcome to Hello.” She shook my hand with continuing warmth. “I think you’ll like it here.”

Maybe she thought I’d be buying real estate soon.

Stella told Charlotte she’d let her know if she located anything about the Randolph house, and Charlotte, with a brisk tapping of high-heeled boots, departed. I noted now that the open door to the side of the main room revealed a well-equipped kitchen, a TV set, and a number of round tables. Perhaps this was where the important business, CT & G, of the Society took place.

Stella was now poking through desk drawers. “There are probably some forms to fill out, but I’ll have to call Marianne and find out what they are. And where.”

“You can tell Kelli that we’ll have a truck at the house to pick up the books first thing tomorrow morning. You’ll be there to let the driver in, I presume?” Victoria said.

“Yes. And I’ll come down here and get started immediately afterward. Although it may be necessary to acquire a new software program for the computer to catalog the books properly.”

“Well, we’ll see about that,” Victoria agreed, although her lack of enthusiasm for such an expense was obvious.

“See you tomorrow, then.”

I walked home feeling quite buoyant and energized. I had a paying job!
Thank you, Lord.

10

I made a tuna sandwich and ate it with leftover coffee from the old blue pot for lunch. Abilene didn’t show up, so I assumed she was getting lunch elsewhere. Kelli arrived at the house at ten minutes after one. She picked up several books, including the UFO one from the bedroom, to take out to Norman. She apologized for being late, saying she’d gotten stuck on a lengthy phone call with a bank in Denver about one of Hiram’s accounts. A sack of chicken feed lay behind the backseat of the Bronco, plus several sacks of groceries and a copy of the latest
Hello Telegraph
.

We drove out past Nick’s Garage and turned right on a narrower but paved road, with a sign reading Lucky Queen Road. I told Kelli about getting the job.

“Congratulations! I’m glad to hear it. And I’ll be glad to get all those books out of the house too. Maybe when they’re gone I’ll find more of Uncle Hiram’s papers and records. I keep thinking there must be something more than I have.” She frowned. “For a man who dealt with wealth all his life and made plenty of shrewd deals, he seemed to have gotten careless about details in his old age. Or maybe it was his eyesight, which was definitely failing.”

“Abilene and I will still be doing cleanup work on the house even if we’re both working.” I didn’t want her to think we were planning to freeload off her. “We can start there in the office/library after the books are out.”

“Don’t worry about it. Sometimes I think Chris has the right idea. Just put a match to the place.” She suddenly sounded gloomy.

“But then people would assume you’re trying to destroy evidence that would incriminate you.”

Kelli glanced at me and laughed. “Well, I wasn’t really serious about the match. But you’re right. That’s exactly what everyone would think.”

“Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. I met Chris’s mother while I was at the Historical Society. She was looking for information about a house she has listed. The Randolph place, she called it.”

The pavement ended with an abrupt edge that clattered my teeth when we bounced over it. There had been a few houses near the highway, but here there was only scenery. Incredible scenery, if you didn’t count the potholed road. Green forest, branches laden with snow that occasionally thundered to the ground, leaving the branch bouncing as if glad to be free of the load. Rushing creeks cut through the occasional snow-covered meadows, and sharp outcroppings of rock stuck out at odd angles on the hillsides, as if some giant hand had flung them just to see where they’d stick.

Sometimes I wonder if we take God’s plan of creation too seriously; I think he probably had great fun at it. Cutting a Grand Canyon here, lifting a Mount Everest there, stirring a cauldron of bubbling lava in a Mount Kilauea. And right here, covering rugged mountains with blankets of green trees, decorating them with a frosting of snow, adding a pair of deer drinking at a stream.
Good work, Lord!

“Mrs. Sterling seemed very nice,” I said tentatively, basing that mostly on her surprisingly warm welcome near the end of our meeting. “Good mother-in-law material?”

“Oh yes. She told me once that if ours was a culture where parents picked a wife for a son, I’d have been right at the top of her list.”

“That’s good. Married life is easier if the mother-in-law likes you.”

“Speaking from experience?” She gave me a sideways glance.

“Blessedly, Harley’s mother and I were the best of friends.”

“I guess I should feel lucky, because Chris’s mother wasn’t all that fond of the woman he was seeing before I came along.”

This was a subject that aroused my nosy interest, but we hit a washboardy section of road that rattled my teeth, jitterbugged my feet on the floorboards, and nearly crossed my eyes.

“Charlotte is a good real estate person,” Kelli continued after we were off the washboard and into rutted mud. “But I doubt she can do anything with that place before next summer when the tourists come through. I don’t think anyone local will buy it.”

“Not another murder!”

“Oh no. It’s just that Hello is an ‘economically challenged’ area, as one city councilman likes to put it. Economically dead might be more accurate. In any case, it’s especially bad in winter. Nothing sells. The unemployment rate goes out of sight. Most of the kids pick up and leave as soon as they get out of high school.”

“A few must stay or come back. Your Chris did.”

“But he had something to come back to. His father was a partner in the law firm, so Chris had a good spot waiting for him. Although I never knew his father. He’d passed away before I came.”

“You came back to Hello too.”

“I’d never lived here,” Kelli corrected. “I came because the law firm I was with in California was big, and everyone in it cutthroat competitive. Who could win the biggest awards in court, whose office light burned latest at night, who could bill clients for the most hours. They were also willing to take on cases I thought were ridiculous. Maybe I’m narrow-minded, but I do not want to be involved in helping a crook sue when he’s injured burglarizing a home.”

“Couldn’t you have changed law firms and stayed there?”

“I decided I wanted to be on my own. I wanted a slower pace of life and cases that were more meaningful. Hiram wanted me to come too, and I thought here I could be the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.” She smiled grimly. “It looks as if I was wrong.”

The road was getting ever rougher, the gravel only in scattered clumps between stretches of bare, bumpy bedrock or muddy holes. Branches had been laid across one bad spot. In another, a shallow stream of water ran right across the road. Kelli stopped and got out to put the wheels in four-wheel drive before we churned through that.

“I don’t understand about Hello,” I said. “In all honesty, you seem like a nice young woman, and I don’t see why people have decided you murdered Hiram, instead of giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

Kelli gave a wry snort. “Some of them were ready to lynch me well before the murder.”

“I presume there was a reason?”

She sighed. “I’ll have to tell you about the mine.”

“First off, how far is it?” I was beginning to feel as if we’d left civilization far behind, maybe even stepped back a century. Out here, it felt as if at any moment we might meet a stagecoach dashing down the road, maybe with outlaws in pursuit.

“About twenty miles from town. About four miles to go yet. I’m hoping we can get all the way and not have to carry this stuff in to Norman.” She dodged a mud hole that looked as if it could bury a stagecoach. “Okay, about the mine.”

“The Lucky Queen.”

“Right. Hiram’s grandfather discovered the gold and made good money off it, but it was Hiram’s father who actually developed it as a mine and got rich. A lot of gold came out of it. Norman still pans a little gold dust and sometimes even finds a nugget, but, as a producing mine, the area gave out years ago. But there’s still gold there. It’s just that it’s microscopic in size. It can take forty tons of ore to produce an ounce of gold.”

“Not practical to mine it, then.”

“That was true for years. But now, there are new techniques and equipment available that make it both possible and profitable to get the gold out. And that’s what Uncle Hiram wanted to do, reopen the mine. He was dealing with some big mining corporation that was interested. Although he didn’t confide in me about that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was so strongly against it.”

We hit a huge bump in the road, a chunk of bedrock rising through the surface like the beginning of a new mountain, and only the seat belt kept my head from colliding with the roof of the Bronco. I reached around and tightened the belt a notch.

“Why was that?”

“Because it would totally devastate the area again, even worse than the earlier mining did. Look around. We’re within a mile or so of the mine now. See how the trees look different? They’re all much younger here. The area was scalped when the mine was operating. They needed trees, lots of trees, to make support timbers for the mine shafts. And out of those shafts came huge, ugly piles of bare tailings where nothing will grow. The wildlife disappeared, their habitat destroyed. Because the trees were gone and there was nothing to hold the ground together, water runoff cut huge, raw gulches. I’ve seen photos from back then. It looked like a bombed-out war zone, and it’s taken all these years for nature to bring it even partway back to what it once was.”

I could hear the passion in her voice even over the roar of the engine. The road, if it could be called that, was solid mud now, chunks and spatters flying from the churning wheels. I expected any moment that we’d flounder to a halt and instantly sink to the door handles. Kelli didn’t seem to see anything unusual in the situation, however. She just shifted to a lower gear and tromped down on the gas.

“It would be different now,” she went on. “Different and much worse. This time it would be an enormous open-pit-type mine rather than shafts. It would cover acres and acres of ground, like some huge meteor crater destroying everything. There’d be huge equipment to dig out and move the ore, and they’d have to build a big processing plant. From an environmental viewpoint, it would be total disaster.”

“You’re an environmentalist?”

“I never thought much about it before, but maybe I am now.”

“And this had something to do with the town’s antagonism toward you?”

“The townspeople, the Historical Society, the town council, the businessmen, practically everybody, were all in favor of Hiram’s project. They were extremely unhappy that I opposed it. They were afraid I’d talk Hiram out of it and ruin all their big plans.”

“I still don’t understand. It would seem the Historical Society would be against this sort of thing, that they’d want to preserve everything as it was and keep development out. That’s the stand historical societies usually take, isn’t it?”

“I think, before I came, there were a few rumbles of dissent. But, in the long run, money rules. Uncle Hiram gave all that money to the Historical Society for the new library. And, as Lucinda said, everybody who’s anybody in Hello belongs to the Society, so it has a lot of influence. Hiram made promises about fixing up the old hotel, and then said he’d give more money for the job you have. I think he promised money to individual businesses that are floundering too.”