CHAPTER 1
August 1995
A little before sundown, I nosed the Mustang into a space marked "Reserved for Registration" at the Cimarron Motel on South Main in Pike's Bluff, Colorado. I had just driven in from Kayenta, Arizona. I had taken US 160 all the way east to its intersection with US 287/385 at the southern end of Springfield and then turned south for the drive to Pike's Bluff. US 160 isn't the easiest route from Arizona to Pike's Bluff, but I had a special reason for choosing it this trip. Twenty-five years before, Molly, the kids, and I had taken that route. Jack was ten and Katy seven, and we were driving from San Francisco to central Kansas to visit Mother. We had stopped in Kayenta to visit one of Molly's uncles, who was teaching on the reservation, and had visited the Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde. We'd stayed overnight at a Travelodge in Durango. But this time I was alone. I was at loose ends with my life. The kids were long since off on their own, and I'd lost Molly to a cerebral hemorrhage on March 15 the year before. And I'd just retired from thirty years on the law faculty at a small college in Northern California.
With the Oklahoma state line as its southern city limits, the town of Pike's Bluff derived its name from the legend that the Pike expedition party encamped there while on the trek that eventually led to the discovery of Pike's Peak. That Zebulon Pike and his party followed the Arkansas River and probably were never nearer than sixty miles from where the town is located never dissuaded the townspeople from promoting the legend.
Pike's Bluff is located near an outcropping overlooking the Cimarron River valley, fewer than ten miles north of the Cimarron Cutoff branch of the Santa Fe Trail. Its Main Street is the town's north-south thoroughfare for US 287/385. In the 1920s ambitious town leaders mounted an unsuccessful attempt to wrest the Baca County seat from Springfield, and in the 1930s the town rivaled Springfield in size and importance. But Springfield was more centrally located in the county and used its advantage as the county seat to eventually overshadow its competitor to the south.
During the years Dad spent share cropping on Walter Mitchell's spread, Pike's Bluff was our main destination for supplies that we couldn't get at Mr. Zdenka's Cactus Corner Store, the country store four miles from our house. Some twenty miles west of us, Pike's Bluff boasted a population of about 1,400. It had had a Rexall drugstore with a soda fountain and two pinball machines, a creamery, a general store, three filling stations, six churches, the Alhambra movie theater, and a dance hall. Pike's Bluff was where I saw my first Hopalong Cassidy movie, found the comic books from which I learned to read, and attended my first Pentecostal Holiness revival meeting. It was where I learned to do the two-step one Saturday night when my big brother Byron let me tag along on one of his trips into town.
The Cimarron Motel didn't exist yet when I was a boy. On the west side of Main Street and facing east, it was a two-story, L-shaped concrete block structure, with an asphalt parking lot that had room numbers painted in the parking slots. Outdoor staircases, one for each leg of the L, provided access to the upper decks. An overhang sheltered the balconies that served as passageways to the rooms. The exterior's paint looked fresh. Recent plantings adorned the perimeter of the parking lot. Eight or ten vehicles were parked in the lot. I hadn't known what I was getting myself into when in Durango I'd consulted an AAA Travel Guide to check available lodging. Listings in Pike's Bluff were meager, but I had called ahead to make the reservation anyway. I did know I wanted to be sure of a bed that night.
"Could be worse," I muttered to myself.
I turned off the ignition and sat there in the quiet for a couple of minutes, hoping the trembling caused by eleven hours of highway vibration would subside. It didn't. I swung open the car door and stepped out onto the asphalt pavement. A ninety-five-degree blast of August wind—smelling of dust, sage, and a feedlot—scorched my face.
Thank goodness for air-conditioning, I thought.
I was stiff from the long drive, and it felt good to stand on firm ground. I closed the car door. The sun was low in the sky, and clouds gleamed with the brilliance of crimson, gold, and purple. A vapor trail, probably from a flight from Dallas to Denver, shone white against the cerulean blue of the sky.
With only my memories and an old family snapshot, I had come to look for Dad.
CHAPTER 2
Entering the door marked "Office," I stepped up to the desk. No one was in sight. A TV was blaring a rerun of Gunsmoke from an adjacent room, and I caught the aroma of frying onions. A bell sat on the counter with a note: "Ring for service." I rang. While waiting for someone to respond, I surveyed the office. The waiting area was small, not more than twelve by fourteen feet. Two straight-backed chairs flanked a water cooler at the wall opposite the entrance. A Mr. Coffee machine, with a handwritten note—"Complimentary Coffee 6:30–9:30 a.m."—sat on a small table between the door and the desk. A rack containing brochures for local attractions hung on the back wall.
I was getting ready to ring again when a slender woman with blondish hair came through the door from the next room. She wasn't wearing much makeup, had tired lines around her eyes, and was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a "Colorado" logo. She was wearing rubber thongs, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. I guessed her to be in her thirties.
"'Scuse me," she said, swallowing. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand. "Just fixin' supper." She swallowed again. "Help you?"
"Perk Parker," I said. "I called from Durango this morning for a reservation."
She flipped through her Rolodex and came up with a card. "Right," she said. "You asked for a nonsmoking room?"
"That's right."
From below the desk she dug out a registration form and placed it on the counter. "See you got California plates. Just travelin' through?"
I busied myself filling out the registration form. "Actually," I said, "I lived in Baca County when I was a boy."
"Really? We just moved back here a couple of years ago ourselves. Grandma needed me to be here. She's not well."
I finished filling out the registration form and handed it to her.
"Your reservation's just for one night," she said. "Think you might be stayin' any longer?" She dusted a speck of lint off the desk.
"I don't know yet. Any chance I could stay on a few more days, if I need to?"
"Let me look here in the book." She flipped through several pages of what appeared to be a registration directory. From what I could see, the pages were not filled up.
"Prob'ly so," she said. "Just let us know as soon as you can."
"Fine."
She handed me a room key. "Nonsmoking rooms are upstairs. Room 27 is at the end of the balcony. Anything we can do, let me know. I'm Darlene."
"Thanks, Darlene. What's the best restaurant in town?"
"Santa Fe Trail Steak House is just across the street and up three blocks. Wednesday night's regulars' night, but there's travelers comin' through too."
"Thanks again," I said.
CHAPTER 3
I moved the Mustang to the parking space marked for room 27, dragged my bags from the trunk, and climbed the outdoor stairs to find my room. I had packed light for this trip, just a couple of duffels, a Dopp kit, an Igloo ice chest, and my laptop. I wasn't expecting to mix in high society. From what I could remember, there wasn't much of that in Baca County anyway. At least not that a sharecropper's kid would have known.
I let myself in, switched on the light, and examined the room. It was a basic motel unit. It had a queen-size bed, a chest of drawers with a twenty-seven-inch Magnavox TV on it, a small refrigerator, and a nightstand with a touch-tone telephone. There was a window air conditioner. The bathroom had a combination bath/shower. I was relieved to find a bathroom. My last stop had been Trinidad, two and a half hours earlier.
It was late in the afternoon, and the room felt stuffy. I switched on the air conditioner and popped open a can of Bud from the ice chest. I unpacked my bags and checked to see whether the room's telephone had a modem jack. It did. Before leaving from home, I had consulted the Earthlink directory for dial-in numbers and had been relieved and a little surprised to find one for Baca County. I connected the laptop to the modem jack with a telephone cable, booted up the computer, and tested the number. The motel's telephone system was old enough that I had to wait a couple of minutes for a connection, but it worked. No messages were waiting. I dashed off quick e-mails to Jack and Katy telling them I had arrived in Pike's Bluff and giving them the telephone number for the Cimarron Motel.
Jack and Katy knew I had come to Baca County to try to find out what had happened to my dad. They didn't know the whole story of his disappearance. From the time they were little, I'd told them about how their grandpa had gone off on an adventure with an old friend and never returned. I'd told them we never knew what happened to him. But I'd never burdened them with the details of the discovery of a dead body in an old mine or with Dad's being wanted for questioning in a murder investigation. Molly knew, and I wouldn't have lied or whitewashed the story if the kids had asked. But Molly and I had agreed it would serve no purpose to volunteer the information. Enough now just to keep them up to date on my search, I thought.
Before starting to look into the historical records in the county archives, I wanted to check in with Billy Ray Mitchell. Maybe he would know something about what had happened to Dad. Billy Ray was Walter Mitchell's oldest son. He had inherited the old family place when his father died and had lived there ever since, the same place we had lived while Dad was sharecropping for Walter. I had written Billy Ray from San Francisco to alert him that I was coming.
I liked Billy Ray and always had, although he was at least ten years older than I, closer to my big brother Byron's age than mine. He never spoke down to me but treated me as a friend. I looked forward to seeing him again. Most of all I wanted to pick his brain. I wondered whether he would be able to shed any light on the circumstances of Dad's disappearance. I had been only eleven years old when Mother and I left Baca County to move back to Flint Center. I wondered how much scuttlebutt the county natives hadn't wanted to tell us.
But I hadn't seen Billy Ray for forty years, and I wasn't sure how he would react to my getting in touch just to ask a favor. I thought of requests for letters of recommendation that had arrived out of the blue from former students I hadn't heard from for twenty-five years. Sometimes such requests were irksome, but for a college professor they were part of the job. Responding to my request for help was not part of Billy Ray's job description.
I looked up his number in the Baca County telephone directory and touched in the seven-digit number that was listed.
"I'm listenin'," he answered.
"Billy Ray?"
"That's me."
"Hi, Billy Ray. It's Perk Parker."
"Hey, how the hell are ya? Where ya at, anyway?" He spoke with authority, his voice a bit gravelly.
"I'm bushed. Drove in from Kayenta today. I'm at the Cimarron Motel in Pike's Bluff."
"Hey, high style! How's it look? We heard Darlene and Johnny's been sprucin' it up."
I took a sip of beer. "It serves my needs," I said.
"Good. Got your letter. Be good to see ya, anytime."
"Okay if I come down late tomorrow morning?"
"Mighty fine," he said.
"Great," I said. "See you then."
"Remember how to get here?"
"I'll find my way," I said. "It'll be good to see you."
We said our goodbyes. He hadn't seemed annoyed. I heaved a sigh of relief.
CHAPTER 4
I had been rehearsing the next move all the way from San Francisco. I took a deep breath and touched in a Morton County, Kansas, number. The connection seemed to take forever; then I heard the rings on the other end of the line. One ring ... two ... three ...
"Hello?" The voice was familiar, a little husky, musical, in the mezzo range. Even after all these years, years happily married to Molly, years faithful to Molly, I felt a pang in my heart.
"Jodie Mae?"
There was a long pause. I heard the sound of rhythm and blues faintly in the background.
"Yes?"
I tried not to make a sound as I cleared my throat.
"It's Perk. Perk Parker."
* * *
Jodie Mae Henderson had been my childhood sweetheart. We first met at the Pike's Bluff Creamery when I was six and she was four. My mother, Rebecca, and her mother, Johanna, were at the creamery selling cream and eggs, cash crops from the farms, and they struck up a conversation, commiserating about hard times. They discovered that they had common interests in patchwork quilts and sewing. Before we left the creamery, they agreed to see each other again, to share recipes and trade handwork patterns. They became lifelong friends. I fell in love with Jodie Mae on the spot. She was a slender child with brown ringlets that fell to her shoulders, limpid brown eyes, and laughter that tinkled like the song of a meadowlark. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. A few years later, when her family moved into the school district where we lived, she and I were schoolmates for a couple of years, and she and Johanna came to visit us frequently.
It was during one of these visits, when she was eight and I was ten, that I made my first awkward attempt to seduce her.
Mother and Johanna had been working on a patchwork quilt they were designing together. Jodie Mae and I were playing with dominoes, setting them up on end, one after the other, knocking down the first one, and watching as the whole chain collapsed. After a while I suggested we go looking for arrowheads.
"Watch out for rattlesnakes!" Johanna said as we left the house, her predictable refrain.
Jodie Mae and I wandered away from the house, down by the draw that usually was dry but where, after thunderstorms, rainwater rushed to the Cimarron, carrying precious seed from our fields. After half an hour of finding no arrowheads, we sat down to rest on a bank of the draw. We were out of sight of the house. I mustered my courage.
"Do you know how to kiss?" I asked.
Youngsters raised on hardscrabble farms recovering from the Dust Bowl didn't retain their innocence very long. Already, at that age, I was obsessed with sex. What I really wanted was to ask her whether she would let me pull down her panties, but I didn't have the nerve. I was afraid that one way or another, word would get back to Mother and that she would not be pleased. I was beginning to learn that fear of being found out can be a powerful motivator.
"Do you know how to kiss?" I asked instead.
"'Course," she said, giving me a little peck on the cheek.
"That's not what I mean," I said. "I mean like big kids do."
She looked at me intently, her brow furrowed. "You mean with lipstick and tongues and spit and everything?"
I gazed into her eyes, trying to act grown up. "Yes."
"Yuck." She stood up and brushed sand from her skirt.
"Please?"
"No, Perky," she said. She started walking toward the house. A few yards away, she looked back over her shoulder. "I won't tell," she said.
Our families moved apart after my fifth grade at country school. The Hendersons moved to a farm Jodie Mae's dad bought across the state line in Kansas. Mother and I moved back to Flint Center, Kansas, after Dad disappeared. Jodie Mae and I dated a few times years later when I came back after my freshman year in college to work in the fields during broomcorn harvest.
Even as a boy, I had learned to help harvest broomcorn. It had been our major cash crop when Dad was sharecropping for Walter Mitchell. An annual grass, a variety of sorghum, it develops long seed-bearing fibers used to make brooms and whiskbroom, but harvesting is labor-intensive because it must be done by hand. Thus, experienced broomcorn workers always were in high demand during harvesting season. I was virtually guaranteed work. It also gave me an opportunity to see Jodie Mae.
But when I returned the following summer, after my sophomore year of college, she was married to Hank Corwin. Since then, I hadn't seen or spoken to her. It had been forty years.
* * *
"You son of a bitch. It took you long enough to call."
I had decided in advance that I wasn't going to argue with her.
