The Stolen Blue Read online

  “I’m very, very sorry to have to tell you this, Kass, but Burke died during the night.”

  “Burke died? How did that happen?”

  “Exposure.”

  “Now, how the hell did Burke die of exposure?”

  Kass focused her faded blue eyes on Claire. “He was safe and warm when I left him.”

  “He went outside in the middle of the night and went to sleep under the cottonwood tree. He left his oxygen tank behind him.” It occurred to Claire that was more or less how Edward Abbey had tried to end his life, but he hadn’t succeeded. Abbey had gone out into the desert, but it hadn’t been winter and he hadn’t been seventy-five years old, either. Abbey had ended up dying in his own bed, a victim of cirrhosis of the liver.

  “Burke didn’t get out there by himself, did he?”

  “Mariah helped him. She said he told her last night was a good night to die. Apparently, he thought it would be quicker in the snow.”

  “Burke could have gone on for years the way he was. His mind was clear, he was well fed and taken care of. He wasn’t an eskimo who has to go out and die in the snow. He lived in this beautiful place surrounded by women who loved him. What’s so bad about that? I’ve seen many people who were a lot worse off than Burke Lovell. You don’t take your life just because it’s not on your own terms anymore. What the hell’s wrong with Mariah helpin’ him die like that? Hasn’t that girl got any conscience or any sense?”

  Claire was relieved she wouldn’t have to answer that question because at that moment Sheriff Henner arrived in a white and blue county car. She hadn’t decided whether Burke’s death was a matter of conscience or of courage. She had often wondered whether she would have had the courage to help her father die if he had asked her to, but he never did. He just grew weaker and sadder and more dependent.

  Claire let the sheriff and his deputy in. Henner was a big man, wearing jeans and boots and a sheepskin vest. He had long legs and a stomach that sagged across his belt buckle. There were deep vertical creases in his cheeks connected by horizontal creases across his forehead and the middle of his chin. Even when his eyes and mouth smiled, the lines locked his face into a puzzled frown. He took off his cowboy hat. “Morning, ladies.”

  “Morning,” Claire answered.

  “I’m Sheriff Henner. This here is Deputy Johnson.”

  “Mornin’,” the deputy said. He was younger and fairer than the weathered Sheriff.

  “How you doin’, Kass?” the sheriff asked.

  “Been better.”

  “It could be worse,” Henner replied. “Too often when I get these kinds of calls the man has blown his brains all over the map. Well…” He put his hat back on. “You mind showin’ me where the body is?”

  Claire put on her coat and led the sheriff, the deputy, and Kass out to the cottonwood. The oncesmooth snow was now crisscrossed by footprints. Corinne had cleared some ground under the tree and sat there hugging her knees trembling like the lone leaf on an aspen branch at the end of the season. Jed was hunkered down beside her.

  “I’m real sorry about this, Corinne,” Henner said, patting her arm and bending over to take a closer look at the body.

  The red blanket that spread out around Burke resembled a bloodstain, brilliant against the white snow. Claire wished there were some way a person could die and take his body along with him. A body shouldn’t be left behind to be poked and prodded and remembered like this. Death ought to be a black hole that you stepped into and pulled your physical being behind, stretching it out until it became thin and ephemeral as a cobweb.

  Kass stared at Burke and shook her head. “It didn’t have to end this way,” she said.

  Sheriff Henner stood up. “The ambulance will be here soon. You sure you don’t want to come inside, Corinne?”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  “I’ll stay with her,” Jed offered.

  “Deputy Johnson will keep you company,” Henner said.

  While Claire walked the sheriff and Kass back to the house, she noticed Mariah watching them from an upstairs window, holding Eric in her arms.

  “That’s the other daughter?” the sheriff asked Claire. “The one you told me helped Burke to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll need to talk to her and you. Kass, you stick around, too. I know you weren’t here when it happened, but you were taking care of him, weren’t you?”

  “Tryin’ to,” Kass said.

  ******

  The sheriff set up headquarters in the kitchen with a pot of coffee at his elbow. He took out a pen and placed a pad on the kitchen table. Claire went upstairs and told Mariah that Henner wanted to talk to her. Mariah came down dressed in jeans and the same plaid shirt she’d worn the night before. She gave Eric to Kass to watch. Claire introduced her to the sheriff, then went back to the library. As she passed Burke’s room, she saw Kass sitting in an armchair staring vacantly out the window. Eric was on the floor playing with a truck. Roamer had curled up on Burke’s bed looking guilty and forlorn.

  Claire started a fire in the woodstove in the library. There was an iciness inside her that only a fire could melt. She was staring at the flames when Mariah came to the door to say it was her turn to be interviewed.

  The coffee was gone, so Claire brewed another pot, then sat down at the table across from the sheriff. The sun had come out, and the snow was melting and dripping from the eaves.

  “Mariah tells me she went to check on Burke in the middle of the night, and that’s when he asked her to take him outside.” Henner began. “She says she doesn’t know exactly what time that was. Did you hear anything?”

  “No,” Claire replied. “I woke up at some point, but the house seemed very quiet to me. I went to the window. It was snowing and starting to stick, but I didn’t see any prints in the snow.”

  “Mariah says this was a plan she and Burke hatched between themselves. Any idea why they put this plan into effect last night?”

  “Burke thought he’d die faster in the snow?”

  “It didn’t have anything to do with your being here did it?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “You and Burke go back a long time?”

  “A long time. Twenty-five years.”

  The sheriff put his pen down and studied Claire. Although his eyes were kindly, his face fell into the creases of a frown. “Why were you here?”

  “Burke called and asked me to come over. He was donating his rare book collection to the library at UNM where I work.”

  “He just wanted you to pick up the books?”

  “Yes, but he also made me his personal representative in his will. He signed it yesterday and had Kass and Jed witness his signature.”

  “Looks like he got his ducks all in row before he took his life.” Henner wrapped his hand around the pen and resumed taking notes in a script that resembled toy soldiers marching in formation across the page. “You didn’t see this coming?”

  “No.”

  “You mind telling me what the will says? It’s gonna be public property as soon as it gets filed anyway.”

  Claire did mind, but figured she had no choice. “Some money goes to the children, the ranch goes to Mariah, with the provision that Corinne can continue living here.”

  “This is a valuable property for a woman as young as Mariah to be inheriting. What does she know about ranching?”

  “It’s not going to be a ranch anymore. It’s going to be a nature preserve. The only way it can ever be sold is to the Nature Conservancy.”

  The sheriff put his pen down. “Burke’s lettin’ the Nature Conservancy into the Blue? The neighbors sure as hell won’t like that.”

  “Only if Mariah’s heirs decide to sell. The ranchers around here are likely to be long dead before the Nature Conservancy gets it.”

  “Well, their children won’t be dead and their children’s children won’t be dead.” The Blue was a place where people thought about what would be happening to their grandchildren
sixty years down the road. “You’ll be getting me a copy of that will?”

  Claire said she would. She heard the ambulance wailing as it came down the hill. The siren struck her as excessive, since the road could hardly be full of vehicles to warn away.

  “Just a few more questions, ma’am,” the sheriff brought her attention back to the matter at hand. “Do you believe Burke was a man who was capable of planning his own death?”

  “I do.”

  “And that death is the one he would have planned?”

  “I believe so,” Claire said.

  The siren alerted the neighboring ranchers who began arriving in their pickup trucks and gathering in the dining room. The sheriff interviewed Kass and Jed. Claire went into the kitchen and helped Corinne heat up the leftover stew. She was surprised by how hungry she was, until she remembered she hadn’t eaten anything all day. They put out the stew, and people began helping themselves from a serving dish on the dining room table.

  A young couple stood beside the table, and Corinne introduced them as Karen and Orin Stoner, the owners of the adjacent ranch. Their youth and good health made Corinne seem even more frail. Karen’s curly blonde hair was held in place with beaded barrettes. She wore stiff new jeans belted tight at the waist. Orin had a broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped cowboy build. He wore black jeans and a gray Western shirt reverse appliqued with black and white diamonds. His dark eyelashes emphasized his pale eyes, the eyes of a pilot or a quarterback that seemed focused on long distance. His cool manner indicated he was used to being looked up to. Claire knew that large landowners were considered aristocracy in small Western towns. For many people the role of rancher was an enviable one, a life spent outdoors without apparent compromise.

  “How long have you been in the Blue?” Claire asked them.

  “All my life,” Orin answered. “I’m the fourth generation to run the Black Diamond.”

  “You’re running it already?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

  “Orin’s dad died last year in a plane crash,” Karen said, hooking her arm through his. “That’s when we inherited the Black Diamond.”

  “You’re a friend of Burke’s?” Orin asked Claire.

  “We worked together for years.”

  “You didn’t play cards together, did you?”

  “Not me. I’m not in Burke’s league.”

  “Me, neither,” Orin laughed. “But that didn’t stop me from playing him. Good thing I never bet the ranch. Now, I didn’t always agree with Burke…”

  Who did? Claire wondered.

  “But he was my neighbor. We got along.” Roamer padded into the room, flopped down beside Burke’s chair, and rested his head on his paws. “That dog’s not going to be worth a damn without Burke. Never was much of a hunter anyway. Burke used to hunt with my dad when he first moved down here, but his heart wasn’t in it. We gave him Roamer when we saw he wasn’t going to work out for us. I hear Burke was talking about giving up his grazing rights and turning this place into some kind of nature preserve. You know if there’s any truth in that?” The pale eyes lost their remoteness as they focused on Claire, making her—for a moment—the most important person in the room.

  “You’d have to ask the family about their plans.”

  Corinne, the only family member present, had sat down at the far end of the table and was picking at her stew.

  “Have you ever been on a working ranch?” Orin asked.

  “It’s been awhile,” Claire said.

  “Stop by and see us before you go,” said Karen.

  “I’d like that,” Claire replied, but her thoughts were on getting back to Albuquerque.

  Mariah came into the dining room, followed by Eric, who was clutching a toy truck. She nodded curtly to the Stoners and helped herself to a bowl of stew.

  “Hi, darlin’,” Karen said to Eric.

  “Hi,” the little boy replied.

  “So sorry about your father, Mariah. I know how much you’ll miss him.” Karen’s voice dripped honey, but underneath the smoothness Claire detected a burr.

  “Thanks,” Mariah said. She took her stew in one hand and Eric in the other, and went back upstairs.

  ******

  When she finished eating, Claire returned to the library. She had already emptied the top shelves and began working her way through the H’s, the Tony Hillermans, the Dorothy Hughes, taking comfort in the rhythm of the work. She was expected back at the library on Monday for a meeting, and she had decided to return, thinking the family might prefer to be alone together in their grief.

  She wrapped the most valuable Hillerman, a first edition of his first mystery, The Blessing Way, signed before his angular signature had been smoothed out by years of signings. That book had a miniscule first printing, and Claire had recently seen one in mint condition priced at two thousand dollars. She put The Blessing Way into the box she was setting aside, along with a copy of A Thief of Time, her favorite Hillerman, illustrated on the title page by the Navajo artist Ernest Franklin. Claire liked Franklin’s illustrations, but his Leaphorn and Chee didn’t resemble her Leaphorn and Chee. She was aware that the books she valued most were fiction and modern firsts, and that if Burke had been doing the choosing, there would have been more history. She came across a local history mis-shelved in the H’s, and not wanting to pack it out of sequence, she set it aside.

  She added Dorothy Hughes’s Ride the Pink Horse and John Nichols’s Milagro Beanfield War to her special box. The Hughes was printed in the forties on cheap wartime stock that turned paper-bag brown as it aged. It had never become very collectible, but it was a book Claire admired. She was called out of the library again in mid-afternoon when Burke’s son, James, arrived with his wife. Claire hadn’t seen James for years and had never met his current wife. When he was a teenager, James had been diagnosed as a manic depressive and put on lithium. Claire had witnessed a psychotic episode the summer after his freshman year at the U of A when James believed he was Mark Spitz, the Olympic swimmer. He climbed up on top of a library table to accept his imaginary medals and succeeded in terrifying everybody else in the library and embarrassing the hell out of his father. He had been up for days, but no one could restrain him. His eyes were wide and full of pain, and to Claire it looked as if the color of the iris was bleeding into the white. James in a manic phase was a clock that was wound too tight. He went at twice the speed of everyone else. When he crashed, he became a passive animal. Medicine was a leveling influence, but manic depressives didn’t always take it; they felt the highs were worth the lows. Claire didn’t know how James was faring with the illness and the medication. It had been hard to get Burke to talk about him.

  The James who arrived at the ranch seemed slower and heavier than the one Claire had known. His lips were thick, his eyes were dull, his stomach was paunchy. His hair was flecked with gray. He wore a navy blue running suit with red stripes down the sides. James had become an RV salesman, and he dressed the part. He introduced Claire to his wife, Laura, who also wore a running suit, although hers was powder blue. In spite of the casual outfit, Laura was carefully made up. Her hair was spun gold, sprayed into a neat helmet, a shape and color it took hours at the hairdresser to achieve. At first glance the hair gave her the appearance of being younger than James. But the lines that circled her neck said otherwise. Claire remembered Burke telling her that Laura held an administrative job. It could be what James needed, a woman who was older and better organized to keep him on his medication.

  “I’m so sorry about Burke,” Claire said.

  “It was a shock,” James answered. “I guess I thought he’d live forever. It’s easy to believe that about your parents.”

  “Burke mentioned you used to work together?” Laura asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “What brought you over here this weekend?”

  “Burke donated his rare book collection to the library, and he asked me to pick up the books.”

  Mariah came d
ownstairs alone to greet her half brother. “Eric is napping,” she said, giving James a hug. Seeing them together, Claire could find no resemblance. Different mothers, she thought. Different genes, different ways of being. Mariah seemed ready to conquer the world. James was struggling to get by.

  “Good to see you, Mariah,” Laura said, enunciating carefully. “Even under these difficult circumstances.”

  “You, too,” Mariah replied.

  The women did not touch, maintaining a wary distance that seemed quivering with tension to Claire. She excused herself and went back to the library. By late afternoon, her back was stiff and sore, but she’d reached the W’s and the end was near. Only the bottom shelves had any books left on them. One of Burke’s most prized books was a two-volume first edition of Ben Hur, written by Lew Wallace when he was governor of the Territory of New Mexico and inscribed in gratitude to Pat Garrett, the sheriff who killed Billy the Kid. It was a copy notable more for its inscription than its literary content. In a series of letters, Wallace had pretended to befriend the Kid, but had actually betrayed him. Double-crosser, Claire thought, but that didn’t make the book less valuable. Antiquarians know that qualities that seem despicable in life are often admired after death. She wrapped Ben Hur and placed it in her special box.

  When she finished the alphabet, she picked up the book that had been mis-shelved, a self-published history of the Blue by Benjamin deWitt, the rancher who left the ranch to Burke. Claire checked it against the inventory, but couldn’t find an entry for it. The history was a slim jacketless volume, a little brown bird in a collection of peacocks. She looked up to see James standing in the doorway.

  “It seems so empty in here without the books,” he said. As he walked across the floor, the sound of his footsteps echoed in the depleted room. He sat down and draped his arms over the side of the chair. “What do you think about the way my father died?”

  “I think he would have hated dying by inches in a nursing home,” Claire replied, choosing her words carefully.

  “Couldn’t he have left us a note?”

  In a way he had, Claire thought. His will said what Burke wanted to say. Eventually, she would have to relay the contents of the will to his heirs, but she didn’t think that now, when their grief was so raw and new, was the moment.