Chapter 12
The thing about that spring was that it was all happening at the same time.
Tess would think about that later and be annoyed by it. She had spent the whole of it believing she was running one story — permits, horses, a season — and it turned out there had been a second one going on underneath, in three-hour increments, in weather, with no audience, for months.
She found out about it the way you find out about anything up there. In pieces, from people who were not trying to tell her.
The first piece came from a man at the feed store in Steamboat in the last week of April.
She was loading forty sacks and he was talking, because he always talked, and somewhere in the middle of a story about a hay contract he said, "Oh — hey. Are you the Thayers?"
Tess put a sack down.
"I'm Tess Thayer."
"Right, right. It's just — this is a stupid thing.
" He rubbed his neck. "I had to get hold of that outfit in Denver in March about a load that went to the wrong place, and I've been calling that office for six years and you never get anybody, you get a girl, and she takes it, and then somebody calls you back in three days. "
"Okay."
"He answered."
"Who did?"
"Him," the man said. "First ring. Nine at night. I said who I was and he said, right, that's mine, tell me what happened. Twenty minutes, on the phone, about nine hundred dollars of hay." He shook his head. "I've never had that happen in my life. I thought there'd been a mistake."
Tess picked the sack back up.
"There wasn't a mistake," she said.
The second piece was Camille Fenwick, in May, at the luncheon, in the four minutes before everything else happened — and Tess had not thought about it since, because of everything else that happened.
It came back to her in June, in the truck, out of nowhere.
"He's become very odd, you know. He answers everything himself. Bill Ulrich rang his office about the Aspen thing and Porter picked up. It's not — people don't know what to make of it. There's a feeling it's a sort of penance."
That was the sentence. A sort of penance. Camille had said it with real distaste, the way she'd have said it about a diet.
Tess drove for a while and thought about the fact that in a certain kind of Denver, a man answering his own telephone reads as an eccentricity requiring an explanation.
The third piece was the fence, and the fence was the one that got her.
The east line was three quarters of a mile of ruin.
It had been ruin when she took the place over and she had gotten a hundred and fifty yards of it in February with a bad shoulder and had put the rest on a list of things that would have to wait until the outfit made money, which was going to be a year, minimum, maybe two.
She came back from four days in Grand Junction in the middle of May and the whole east line was done.
New posts, new wire, four strands and a stay every ninety feet, done properly, corners braced, and a gate rehung where the old one had been dragging since before she owned the place.
She stood in the road and looked at it for a long time.
Then she got in the truck and drove to Steamboat and found the fencing outfit, because there are three, and the second one she walked into had the invoice on the wall behind the counter in a stack of paid work.
"Elkhorn," Tess said. "East line. Who paid for that."
The woman looked at her screen. "It's paid."
"I know it's paid. I'd like to know by who."
"Ma'am, I can't—"
"It's my fence," Tess said, "on my ground, and I'm about to have paying clients riding past it, and I'd like to know whose insurance is on the work."
The woman thought about it and then turned the screen around.
The billing name was a Denver LLC. Tess did not recognize it. The job notes at the bottom said, in somebody's shorthand, cust on site both days, worked w/ crew, no invoice for labor.
"What does that mean," Tess said. "Worked with crew."
"Oh — that." The woman almost laughed. "Yeah.
Boss said there was a guy up there both days, said he was the owner's — I don't know.
He set posts. Kenny said he was the worst post man he'd ever had and wouldn't quit, and that he went and got everybody lunch in Clark on the second day and wouldn't let anybody pay him for it. "
"What did he look like."
"I wasn't there."
"What did Kenny say he looked like."
The woman consulted her memory.
"Tall guy," she said. "Real good coat, wrecked boots."
She got the rest of it out of Tate, eventually, and out of the girl from Yampa, who had been there for one of the two days and had assumed he was a hand.
It had happened while Tess was gone. He had done it twice — once in April in the wet snow, once in the middle of May — and both times he had checked, first, that she was off the place.
Nobody had told her, because nobody had known there was anything to tell. Tate had thought he was from the fencing outfit. Toni had been in Grand Junction. To everyone in that county, a tall man in a good coat had turned up and put in a fence, and that was not a story.
Tess sat on the tailgate of her own truck for about twenty minutes over that.
Because that is the thing about a gesture: a gesture has an audience, and this had been specifically, carefully engineered not to have one.
He had paid for a fence she needed, on ground that was no longer his, in a company name she would not recognize, and then he had come and set posts badly for two days and made sure she was three hundred miles away while he did it.
There was no version where she was supposed to find out.
She found out because she is a person who reads the file.
Toni dropped a driveshaft on Rabbit Ears at ten past midnight on the ninth of June.
Tess got the call at half past twelve. She had been asleep about an hour.
"I'm fine. Truck's not."
"Where are you?"
"West side, about a mile below the top, in the pullout. And before you get up — I already called somebody, so lie back down."
Tess sat all the way up.
"Who did you call?"
There was a pause on the line that went on slightly too long.
"Toni."
"He's got a flatbed," Toni said. "I don't. You've got a trip going out on the fourteenth and a truck that's needed here in the morning, and I wasn't going to have you driving that pass at one in the morning, so I called the only person I have a number for who owns a flatbed and doesn't sleep."
Tess did not say anything at all.
"Say something."
"How long since you called him?"
"About forty minutes."
"Where was he?"
"Denver," Toni said. "He said three and a half hours. He said it like a weather report and then he hung up. Tess, I want to be clear that I did not enjoy any part of that phone call."
She drove up anyway, of course, because she was not going to have her partner sitting in a pullout at one in the morning at nine thousand feet.
She got there at ten past two. Toni was in the cab with a blanket and a thermos and a paperback and was completely fine and extremely annoyed to see her.
"I told you to lie down."
"I know what you told me."
They sat in Tess's truck with the heater running and did not talk about it for an hour and ten minutes, and then a set of headlights came up the west side with the particular slow deliberateness of a flatbed on a grade, and pulled into the pullout, and stopped.
Porter got out.
He had three days of beard and he was wearing the wrecked boots, and Tess sat in her own truck in the dark and watched her husband walk over to a dead pickup at half past three in the morning with a flashlight in his hand.
He looked at the driveshaft. He said something to Toni, and Toni said something back, and Tess could not hear either of them.
Then he winched it on, and chained it down, and did the whole thing in about twenty-five minutes, and he did not once look at the second truck sitting eight feet away with its lights off and its engine running.
He knew she was there. There was no possible way he did not know she was there.
When it was done he came around the side of the flatbed and stood in the open, in the wash of Toni's flashlight, and said — not loudly, and not to anybody in particular, and looking at the load —
"It'll be at Kilbride's in Steamboat by six. They open at seven. Tell them not to touch it till the insurance looks at it, because that's a shaft failure, not a wreck, and the difference is about four thousand dollars."
Then he got in the flatbed and drove down the hill.
Toni got in on the passenger side and shut the door and blew on her hands.
"Okay," she said. "I'm going to say one thing about that and then I'm going to sleep for a day."
"Toni."
"He didn't ask about you." Toni was looking straight ahead through the windshield.
"That's my whole thing. Three and a half hours up here in the middle of the night and twenty-five minutes on his back in the gravel, and he did not ask me one question about you.
Not how she's doing, not is she sleeping, not — nothing. He asked me whether I'd eaten."
Tess put the truck in gear.
"He knew you were sitting right there," Toni said.
"I know he did."
"That is not a normal thing for a man to be able to do."
"No," Tess said. "It isn't."
She went to Kilbride's on Tuesday to pay for the tow.
That was the plan, and she had worked it out in the truck on the way down: she would pay the bill, in full, in her own name, out of the outfit's account, and then it would be a service she had bought and not a thing she had been given, and she could put it down.
The man behind the counter looked her up.
"There's no bill."
"There's a tow and a two-day hold."
"There's no bill, ma'am. It come in Monday morning at ten to six on a flatbed and the paperwork's got no charge on it.
" He turned the screen around, because everybody in that county turns the screen around.
"It's not us that did the tow, see. It come in on a private truck.
So there's nothing to pay us for except the hold, and the hold's been paid. "
"By who."
"Cash," he said. "In an envelope, through the slot, before we opened."
Tess stood there.
"How much."