Tattered Legacy (A Nora Abbott Mystery) (17 page)

twenty-six

After giving Abbey a
chance to stretch, water a tire, and get a drink, they settled back into the Jeep.

Abigail clicked her seat belt. “Those poor girls. I’m glad Marlene is helping them.”

Nora vowed to get involved when she got back to Boulder. Right now she had to figure out what had spooked Lisa and if it was related to the reason someone tampered with her brakes, if all of it led to Lisa’s death and why.

Nora squinted out the windshield.

Abigail scrutinized her. “What are you thinking?”

She started the Jeep and backed out of the parking place. “Want to take a drive?”

“No.”

Nora grinned. “Okay.”

“Where are we going?”

Nora pulled onto the street, working her way west out of town. “We’re going to the Tokpela Ranch.”

Abigail shook her head. “Marlene said to leave it alone.”

Nora nodded. “That’s a good enough reason to go.”

Abigail’s voice was tight. “Bad idea.”

“We’ll just look around, see if we find any reason it would have concerned Lisa.” Her heart picked up its pace.

Abigail sounded tense. “What could you possibly find?”

Nora shrugged. “Won’t know if we don’t try.”

Abigail put a hand on the wheel in protest. “Turn this around. We are not going snooping at someone’s ranch. Especially if you suspect it might be dangerous.”

“
We’ll pretend we’re tourists that got lost. What’s the harm in looking around?”

“Do you even know where it is?”

“Actually, I do.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Abigail pursed her lips and folded her arms.

They rode in silence for a while, nothing but Abbey’s panting and the knocking rhythm of the wheels on the highway to keep them company.

Finally Abigail spoke. “I’m sorry I never told you about Warren. It was a long time ago. I never liked him and he’s still creepy.”

Nora needed to tread gently, but to say she was curious would be to call Mount Everest a bunny hill. “What was he like in school?”

Abigail’s shoulders crept toward her ears with tension. “We actually met him here. He took a real liking to Dan.”

Nora held her breath and waited. Abigail didn’t continue. “Did a lot of people like Dan?” She corrected, “My father.”

Abigail considered the question. “Not really. You have to remember in those days, being a Native American wasn’t like it is now.”

“What do you mean?”

Abigail considered. “That was the seventies. A time of transition and we were living in Boulder, the epicenter of change.”

For Abigail, wherever she existed was the epicenter. But Boulder was probably an interesting place to experience that decade.

“The hippies and ‘enlightened’ people embraced the Indians and thought everything they did was superior to white people. The others, the older people and establishment types, thought of Indians as inferior and lazy. They believed the stereotypes of all Indians being drunks or on welfare.”

Nora tried to study Abigail out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t imagine her mother in bell bottoms with a bandana tied around her head, John Lennon sunglasses perched on her nose. She always pictured Abigail wearing a pink empire-waist mini dress with a white sash, carrying a white patent leather purse with matching go-go boots. Her hair would be teased in a
That Girl
flip.

But Abigail had fallen for Dan, a Native American. They’d backpacked and, even though it seemed more like science fiction than truth, probably slept together before marriage. Reconciling her lifelong image of young Abigail with the facts might be more than Nora could assimilate in a few days.

Nora tiptoed. “Which camp did Warren fall into?”

Abigail’s mouth twisted with distaste. “Warren honed his persuasive skills early. He didn’t seem to belong to either category. He showed up on campus right after we’d met him in Moab. He acted like he accidently bumped into us and then sort of weaseled his way into being Dan’s friend.”

“What do you mean?”

Abigail paused as if remembering. “Dan kept to himself a lot. He didn’t trust many people and he was serious about his classes.”

Nora interrupted. “What was he studying?”

A smile of pride crept onto Abigail’s face. “Physics. He wanted to go into the space program.”

This bit of new information shifted her mental image of her father. That was one thing she didn’t share with him. Nora’s science aptitude ranked even lower than her interest in the subject. And where she inherited her accounting acumen was anyone’s guess because Abigail couldn’t even balance her checkbook.

Abigail readjusted herself. “Warren wanted to hang out with us and hike and drink coffee, you know, just young people things.”

“So what changed?”

Nora could almost see the ice form along Abigail’s spine. “He wasn’t a friend to Dan. Or to me.”

“What happened?”

Abigail snapped her head toward Nora. “Can we drop it, please? It doesn’t matter. Warren is and was an opportunist and takes what doesn’t belong to him.”

“He stole from Dan?”

Abigail’s eyes shot a ray of anger mixed with a hint of some
thing else. Revulsion? “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Nora turned off the highway. According to directions she’d looked up, getting to Tokpela Ranch meant driving south about twenty miles along questionable roads. The route outside of Moab twisted around what looked like industrial sites, complete with large Dumpsters overflowing with debris, broken blacktop parking lots, and giant Quonset garages with their gaping doors open and all manner of equipment and trash visible inside. Electrical wires with bright red balls crisscrossed the skyline as far as Nora could see. Despite its earth-loving, outdoors-enthusiast reputation, the area around Moab hosted pockets of environmental neglect.

The road turned south and after a few miles, the pavement gave way to gravel that pinged against the underside of the Jeep.

Abigail’s voice sounded pinched. “We should not be going there.”

Nora didn’t answer. She was more and more convinced Lee had something to do with Lisa’s death and maybe she’d find some proof at Tokpela Ranch.

The road wound along a creek in a narrow valley with oaks and elms and cottonwood trees shading sandy clearings and entrances to slot canyons. A monsoon rain could make the canyons deadly. A big storm upstream might send water flash flooding downstream where the weather was clear. With no way to climb the slick sides to safety and water roaring through them, the canyons could claim people caught unaware.

The road deteriorated even further. Washboards nearly rattled their teeth loose and grass grew thicker down here. They rumbled across a cattle guard and a wide valley spread before them. In dry weather, the valley would be a lush pasture. But in this unusually wet spring, a small lake had puddled in the low ground with tall reeds forming a circle, giving way to spongy ground.

Across the valley, a collection of buildings marked the headquarters of Tokpela Ranch. The narrow dirt road wound around the edge of the meadow, leading directly to headquarters. Nora followed the bumpy trail, closing in on the buildings. The traditionally shaped barn sat like a sentinel at the side of the road. The enormous wooden structure looked like it had been built over a hundred years ago and hadn’t been painted since. It blocked the view of the rest of the compound. A pit of anxiety formed in Nora’s stomach. What would they find at the Tokpela Ranch?

Nora’s foot was light on the gas pedal as they crawled past the barn. Weathered wood corrals opened off the barn and a gray workhorse stood dozing in the sun. He didn’t stir as they idled past. Another corral held a large, bony cow. Its white and black markings copied onto a rambunctious calf that kicked and sprinted across the enclosure. A fat, spotted pig lay on its side in the dirt of another corral.

An acre of fresh plowed ground showed evidence of soft green plants breaking through the rich, dark soil in neat rows, along with rows of bushy greens. A garden this size would feed a small village and take that many to tend it. The road curved into the center of the ranch compound, its area about a quarter of the size of a football field and the packed dirt spotted with patches of worn prairie grass.

A giant structure faced the aging barn across the center yard. Only two small windows graced the ground floor of the plain two-story building. A smattering of tiny windows lined the second story, evenly spaced, making it look like a barracks.

Off to the side of the barn, a cozy-looking stone house filled the gap between the barn and the looming building. It must have been the original homestead. A front porch faced the east and the sunrise. The chinking appeared to be falling out between the colored stones and the roof sagged with age. A lean-to jutted off to the south and a cellar door took up space to the north of the house, with a small building, no doubt an outhouse, off to the back. A kitchen garden added a bright spot of green to the front yard and a hitching post marked the transition from the rugged grass to the dirt.

Nora pulled the Jeep in front of the hitching post and shut it off.

Two young blonde girls and a dark-haired girl with a purple ribbon around her ponytail squatted in the grass of the front yard. The blondes each held a small tennis shoe and were banging them on the ground to watch them light up. The blondes’ pale eyes widened in their faces when they saw Nora and Abigail climb from the Jeep.

“Hello!”

Nora turned to the greeting from a woman coming from the barn.

“Are you lost?” The solidly built blonde woman wore jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, smeared with dirt or mud or maybe something even earthier. Her round, flat face gave off a friendliness mixed with a good dose of wariness. She looked sturdy enough to dispatch Nora and Abigail with one solid swat. Nora’s chest tightened.

The woman strode across the dirt carrying a red plastic bucket. When she stopped in front of them, Nora saw the bucket contained a dozen or so brown eggs. She glanced behind the woman to a shack with a low roof in the shade of the barn. The door stood open and white hens pecked at the ground.

The woman held a hand up to shield the sun. “That curve to the highway can be easy to miss. You aren’t the first one to keep going straight and end up here instead of turning back toward the highway.”

A stooped slip of a woman stepped onto the porch of the stone house. She wore a housedress covered by a full apron in a pastel print. Wrinkles as deep as the slot canyons ran along her face. She descended the porch steps quicker than Nora would have thought possible. She tottered over to them in a rushed gait that rocked from one foot to another. The top of her balding head barely reached Abigail’s shoulder.

Abigail smiled at her. “Good afternoon. This is a lovely place.” She indicated the stone house behind the woman. “When was it built?”

The little woman’s face soured, as if detecting some sort of falseness in Abigail’s compliment. “It’s old. Like me. If you go back up the road a piece, you’ll see where you turned wrong. Won’t take but an extra fifteen minutes.”

What was Nora going to say to the woman? Should she tell them they weren’t lost tourists? What good would that do? While she debated her next move, she watched the blonde woman. Something about her looked familiar. Then it clicked.

Rachel. She looked like an older version—she had the same thin blonde hair, same blue eyes, round face, and guarded expression. She supposed that wasn’t unusual. The gene pool around here might be pretty shallow and the families large. Rachel had to be related to many of them.

Abigail stepped closer to the house. “The colors of the stone are really striking, especially in the sunlight. It looks like the house was built first and all the others sort of came along as money and need dictated.”

The old woman’s distaste showed in her beady eyes. “You from Salt Lake City? LDS?”

Abigail was undaunted. “How many generations have lived here? I’ll bet you are descended from the first homesteaders.”

The wizened woman frowned outright. “We mostly like it out here because no one bothers us.”

The younger woman, who was probably ten years or so older than Nora, maybe in her mid-forties, forced a smile. “Lydia doesn’t mean to be rude, but she’s right—we’re busy.”

Nora thought the old woman did, indeed, mean to be rude.

“Cassie and me got a lot to get done this time of year. Like I said, follow the road back out and you won’t get lost.”

The front door of the big house opened and another blonde woman emerged. From where Nora stood, about thirty yards away, she appeared much younger than the egg woman, Cassie. She resembled Rachel as well, and looked to be in the home stretch of pregnancy. A tow-headed toddler tumbled out the door after the her.

Abigail appeared not to notice. She addressed Cassie. “Your garden is very impressive. I like to think of myself as an amateur horticulturist, but even if I had the space, I couldn’t possibly raise a garden like that without a crew to help with the work or people to eat the produce. Do you raise other livestock, too?”

Abigail sounded too nosy for a random tourist and Cassie’s expression hardened by the second. “We make organic cheese and sell it at farmer’s markets.”

The pregnant woman stepped off the concrete slab that served as a front porch. She held the hand of the child as he, or she, tottered into the grass. Nora looked for the little girls sitting in the old woman’s yard. Sometime during the conversation they had sneaked off.

Abigail suddenly strode out, heading across the dirt toward the barn. “Was that chard I saw growing in your garden? Is it a particularly hardy hybrid to stand the cold nights this time of year? You know, I love the early vegetables. The peas and lettuces and broccoli.”

Cassie took off after her. Lydia scowled at Nora. “That’s a chattery old fool.”

The pregnant woman stretched and rubbed her lower back. She glanced over to where Nora and Lydia stood. Her head jerked to the Jeep. She bent over, scooped up the toddler, and hurried into the house.