“You’d think so. He said she hadn’t had contact with her family since she was young. Said he’d written to them once, to an address in Tennessee, but he hadn’t gotten a response. I had some folks at the office do a little checking around. I gave them a call. Father said he didn’t have a daughter. A half hour or so later, the wife calls me back. She wants to know if their daughter is all right.”
“How long had it been since the mother had talked to her?”
“Fourteen years. The woman was scared and she was torn up. Scared about her husband finding out she’d called, and torn up as hell about her daughter.”
“Fourteen years is a long time,” I said.
There were people waiting to talk to Colm. I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll catch up with you later,” I said.
Jeff and I would be getting a few hours of sleep back at the hotel and then heading out again before the next storm picked up momentum. We decided to ride together and leave Jeff’s truck at the station. The gun and the hat had already been sent to CBI for forensic testing. But Colm felt certain the items belonged to Amy Raye. There were strands of dark blond hair with blood on them inside the hat.
“What if she was tracking an elk? What if she did get lost?” I said to Jeff as we made our way back to Rangely.
“What would you make of the gun, then?”
I knew Jeff was right. “If only we’d found her body,” I said.
Back at the hotel, Jeff checked in at the front desk. I went on up to my room with Kona. I sent Joseph a text, told him I’d call him in the morning, told him I loved him.
He should have been asleep. He texted back. Love you, too, Mom.
AMY RAYE
Hidden beneath the boughs of the tree, the rain dripping from the branches around her, she heard a rustle in the timber to her right, a lumbering sound, and immediately she thought of the elk. She turned slowly and reached for her bow. At close range she could put another arrow through the elk. To go for her gun in her pack would create too much noise. These were her thoughts when the large animal appeared no more than thirty yards in front of her. A bear’s sense of smell was seven times that of bloodhounds. He would have known she was there. And it was late in the season. Most of the bears had hibernated by now. At first Amy Raye startled. The animal was brown, and larger than most black bears, resembling a young grizzly, and if it was a young grizzly, there would be an angry mother somewhere close by. But Amy Raye knew there were no grizzlies in these parts. She was looking at a cinnamon bear, a color phase of the black bear. And though she’d never seen a cinnamon bear before, she’d heard of them and knew their habitat was in the drier climates of the western states, usually northeastern Utah and Wyoming. The animal lifted his head and looked at her, as if curious, and she wondered if he would come any closer. Instead he just stood there and watched her. She knew she should probably stand up and back away, make noise.
And yet she didn’t stand up and back away. She remained calm and watched the bear. She thought of the time she’d seen the grizzly. She could have returned to her small bunkhouse, cooked her dinner, kept Saddle safe.
And as she thought these things, the cinnamon bear walked on, crossed the meadow, and disappeared into the copse of Gambel oak and potentilla to Amy Raye’s left.
Almost six years had passed since that time she’d left Farrell. She remembered the people whom she’d met along the way, the cottonwoods that only grew along a riverbank, the hills dotted with ranches, the sandy ridges. She’d moved to Palisade that spring, on the Western Slope, where she’d found work on a peach orchard, and Saddle made friends with a border collie with a banged-up hip. She worked from sunup to early afternoon pruning trees, planting younger trees that had been grafted two years before, and operating the flail mower—mulching the smaller branches that had been pruned. And when she’d finish her work on the peach orchard, she’d drive her twelve-year-old white Chevy pickup to Delta, where she burned ditches with a cattle rancher named Lew who was too old to care if she was a woman or a man, but in the end, they’d both come to enjoy each other’s company. She slept in her truck, and bathed from the spigot and garden hose behind his barn. And once a week he treated her to dinner because he said she’d gotten too thin. He told her she was as capable as any man he’d ever known, and that comment alone made her like him more than most. He didn’t ask her too much about herself. He didn’t talk about himself either. Instead he talked about cattle and life and politics and the economy. He’d served in World War II, he’d sold carpet, he’d sold real estate, he’d been married three times, his middle name was Elwood. She learned these things from one of the other hires.