Mac said, “How so?”
Jill picked up a piece of corn bread and shredded it. “Esta depended on Raya when it should have been the other way around. It was always like that. Raya had a lemonade stand when she was real little, then a paper route. In junior high she worked summers in the sugar beet fields. Most of that time, Esta was home lying on the couch, high out of her mind. And when she wasn’t high she was . . . scary. There’s no other word for it. As soon as Raya turned sixteen, she got a real job, working for SFCO. She got me a job there, too, but for me, it was just play money. Then after graduation, she went to Hollywood. We all hoped the next time we saw her, she’d be famous.”
Mac nodded sympathetically. “What did she do at SFCO?”
“Before she went to LA, it was just clerical. Answering phones, typing memos, filing. When she came back, she worked payroll.”
“What about you?”
Jill’s eyes were dark. “I’ll get to that.”
Mac nodded. “Okay. Go on.”
“When Raya came home from LA, she was a lot quieter. It’s always hard, right, giving up your dream? But Raya wasn’t one to cry over spilled milk. She moved on to the next dream pretty fast.” Jill’s smile was sad. “Raya always had a plan. And this was one of her crazier ones.”
“What was that?”
“She said she wasn’t ever going to be poor again and she decided the best way to make sure she always had enough money was to marry it. Or, if that didn’t work, to sleep with it. Raya wanted a sugar daddy.”
Mac’s eyes met mine. “Did she have someone in mind?”
Jill nodded. “A man from Denver she’d known before she left for LA. He was kind of her only choice. I mean, the options were pretty limited, right? Not a lot of rich men in Adams and Weld Counties, especially back then. For sure, there were plenty of men falling over Raya. One creep we used to call Devil Eye—he sent her love notes all the time. But the only men we knew with money were the ones who worked high-level positions at the railroad.”
“Someone like Alfred Tate?” Mac asked.
Jill laughed. The sound was girlish and almost merry. As if she and Raya had giggled about the idea in her bedroom a lifetime ago. “Alfred Tate was ug-ly. No, she wanted this man she’d met at a railroad conference in Denver when we were still in high school. She was only seventeen, but she begged to be allowed to go, and Tate finally agreed. Her job was to take minutes at the meetings. This guy was there. He was handsome, worldly. And rich. They flirted at the conference, he took her to dinner, and I think—I think there was more to it than that. Their relationship was one of the few things Raya never talked about. When she told him she was going to Hollywood to be an actress, he laughed and told her to look him up when she came home. So she did. He was still rich and still handsome and he found her beautiful and interesting. So that was that. She decided she was going to make Hiram Davenport fall in love with her.”
CHAPTER 22
Love is like falling off a cliff. It’s good for a moment, but it never ends well.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
The waitress came by with more coffee. At my feet, Clyde snored. Distantly, thunder bumped, and he lifted his head before resettling. Another storm on the way. The world was getting water-logged.
“You’re saying Hiram Davenport and Raya were lovers?” I dumped sugar in my mug. “Wasn’t he married then?”
“That was the sugar-daddy part,” Jill answered. “Raya claimed she didn’t want to marry someone that old, anyway. So at first, I thought it was just a game. A seduction, like in a movie. She’d get a few trinkets, get taken care of for a few months or years, then move on to the next guy. But over time I realized Raya was serious about Hiram, even if she pretended otherwise. It wasn’t the money. She actually loved him. She wanted him to leave his wife.”
“The na?veté of the young,” Mac said.
Jill nodded miserably.
I frowned. “I read suggestions in the press that Hiram’s wasn’t a happy marriage. But his wife was part of the key to his fortune. She was heir to the lion’s share of the railroad. What made Raya think she could get Hiram to leave her?”
“That’s where I came in,” Jill said in a voice so soft I had to lean forward to hear her. “She had a plan.”
Raya’s scheme to get Hiram to fall in love with her happened while Hiram was making his final push to take over T&W, Jill explained. Once Hiram bought the short line in and made it part of DPC, his success there would be unquestioned. He would no longer need his wife.
“So Raya and I decided if we could help Hiram win that case, he’d realize how much Raya loved him and that she was even more valuable to him than his wife.”
“How did you plan to do that?” Mac asked.
I pushed aside my empty coffee cup as understanding dawned. “You knew Alfred Tate wasn’t reporting the crossing accidents.”
“That’s right. But there was more. Alfred had a general policy for management: don’t spend money maintaining crossings. If there was an accident, employees were to go in after the fact and cover up anything that made the railroad liable. I worked in Engineering, in the signal department, and it was my job to type up memos ordering employees to cut back overgrown vegetation or fix broken crossing equipment. But the memos went out after an accident occurred.”
Mac and I swapped glances. We were both humming like piano wires now. I thought about all those reports that had never been filed. Reports that might have saved lives if the FRA had ever received them. Reports that would have forced Alfred Tate to maintain the crossings.
Six lives at Deadman’s Crossing. God only knew how many elsewhere.
The waitress came by with a coffee refill. After she left, I said, “So you started collecting this evidence for Raya to give to Hiram?”
“That’s right. I told Raya about it, asking her what I should do. It was wrong to know all this and do nothing. But if I went to a journalist with the evidence, I’d lose my job. And I couldn’t afford to. My husband had gotten laid off, and I was pregnant with our first child.”
“You figured if Hiram knew about the fraud, he’d use that information to blackmail Tate into agreeing to the merger.”
“That’s right. Hiram had already promised he wouldn’t lay off any employees if he took over. So I’d have my job, the crossings would get fixed, and—”
“And Raya would have her man,” Mac finished.
“But it didn’t go according to plan,” I said.
Outside, drops of rain spattered the glass, and a long, low roll of thunder rattled the windows. Clyde looked up at me. I dropped a hand to his head.
Jill said, “Hiram was thrilled with what Raya provided him to use against Alfred. He was building his case. But there was one key piece of information he wanted that I hadn’t been able to get. A stupid list of serial numbers for the parts in the lights at Deadman’s Crossing.”