They had run though their emotions so they just sat quietly at the drive-in, watching the lights come on in the town below, until it was dark. Radium didn’t cast much of a glow and the sky was full of bright stars, another quality of life on the West End that Tom appreciated far more fully than the natives, having come from places where the Milky Way and even the brightest planets were washed out.
“I have to go,” Sarah said. “I have to get Tyler from the sitter. I’m already late. If I’m not careful, they’ll take him away from me, too.”
“I’ll go with you.”
The foster home was yet another minimally rehabilitated miner’s shack on the edge of town, but with a rusty swing set in the yard and broken toys strewn about. To be a certified foster care home compensated by the state was undoubtedly one of best business opportunities on the West End.
Nobody answered when Sarah knocked on the door. She shouted, “Hello?”, but there was still no answer. She pushed the door open.
The place was unremarkable, furnished in the usual assortment of hand-me-downs, Wal-Mart merchandise, and domestic clutter, but there was nobody there. A crib was empty.
“Where’s Tyler?” Sarah asked, fighting back panic.
“Maybe the sitter went to look for you.”
“She wouldn’t. I’m not that late coming to get him. And her car is here.”
Tom stepped to the window, pulled back the curtain, and looked out at the car. A tumbleweed rolled past. He surveyed the kitchen. Then he heard Sarah gasp. She was standing in the door to a bedroom.
The babysitter, a fat woman with her hair pulled back by a dirty rubber band into a pony tail, dressed in a faded T-shirt and baggy sweatpants, was bound to a chair and gagged. Her eyes rolled as she struggled against the tape.
She inhaled wheezily when Tom loosened the gag.
“I told them I have trouble breathing,” she cried.
“Who?” Tom asked, working to free her.
“I almost died,” the woman sobbed.
“Where’s Tyler?” Sarah interjected.
But the woman was hyperventilating, still gasping for air, and having difficulty getting more words out.
“What happened to Tyler?” Sara asked again.
“They took him,” the woman finally said.
“Who took him?”
“Your daughter and her husband. I couldn’t stop them. He had a gun.”
Sarah was slow to understand.
“Angie?” she asked.
“I’m going to lose my license,” the woman gasped. “I told them I could only give him to you. But they were crazy, all hopped up. The husband was cussing and said he was going to kill me and the baby was crying…”
“Did they say where they were going?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” She was still struggling for air, wailing, and Sarah grabbed her hand to calm her down.
“It’s okay, you’re okay now,” Sarah said. “They didn’t hurt you.”
“But I’ll lose my license. I won’t get any more children. How will I survive?”
“They’ll understand that it’s not your fault,” Sarah said. “We’ll tell them it’s not.”
“I couldn’t protect him,” she wailed.
“We’ve got to find them,” Tom said. “Are you sure they didn’t say anything?”
“North Mountain,” the sitter said. “I think they said North Mountain.”
It seemed painfully obvious, after she said it. Tom could have guessed. All roads circled back to the DeRichters, sooner or later.
They raced through town down the highway and to the entrance to the Uranium King Ranch just as fast as Tom’s Corolla could go. Deputy Pederson rarely stopped anyone for speeding, but if by chance he were to stop them now, his help in rescuing Tyler would be welcome.
“They’ll know we’re coming,” Tom said as he turned into the ranch entrance. He pointed to a camera mounted on a tree. “There’s plenty of surveillance.”
Up the winding mountain road, deeper into a mature Ponderosa forest, peeling around sharp curves that forced Sarah to cling to the dashboard. Tom was prepared to race past the guard at the gatehouse, but it wasn’t necessary because it was unmanned. They reached the resort complex at the mountain’s summit in ten minutes.
Tom pulled into the main parking lot, even emptier than usual, and shut off the car engine. They were enveloped in silence. Apart from the fact that it was illuminated, the place appeared deserted. There were no attendants at the entrance to the main lodge. Birds chirped. Everything appeared peaceful. There were even a few elk grazing nearby.
“What now?” Sarah whispered.
“I don’t know.” He was whispering, too.
They sat for a moment, unnaturally becalmed at the eye of an emotional storm, and then a golf cart approached from the direction of the historic ranch house, Albert DeRichter behind the wheel. Tom and Sarah stepped out of their car to meet him.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he said in a strong voice, breaking the air of silence.
“Where’s the baby?” Sarah said. “Where’s Tyler?”
“He’s perfectly safe, with his parents,” DeRichter said. “Hop in. I was just enjoying a cocktail. And we have a lot to talk about.”
As he shuttled them the hundred yards to the family residence, he assumed a conversational air, as if they were any other resort guests.
“We’ve shut down the lodge for a couple of weeks, just during this slow season,” he explained, as he pulled to a stop in front of the expansive front porch. “It’s very quiet. Our peak season is in the summer, and again in mid-winter, when the skiing up in Telluride is good.”
He led them into the living room. Tom had a strong sense, more powerful than déjà vu, that he had been there before, in that same room, though it seemed smaller and more intimate than he remembered it. Had the photographs he’d studied when he was in Denver just a week earlier etched themselves into his then-meth-addled brain? Or was it that the house had been maintained like a museum and the room was utterly unchanged from the way it had been furnished a half-century before, hunting trophies alternating with undistinguished Old European paintings on the walls and the same cowhide sofa positioned before the mantle where Dick and Betty DeRichter had long ago posed for the portrait Tom had found at the library? The mid-twentieth century ranch-style elegance was intact but musty, and somehow disconcerting, and Tom felt the impulse that must have led Albert DeRichter to want to update it all, even if his own sense of more modern elegance in the new resort structures was every bit as off-kilter.
DeRichter led them to a picture window overlooking the back patio. His excessively calm demeanor cut sharply against Tom’s and Sarah’s sense of urgency, deliberately, Tom thought, as a way of controlling of the situation.
“The view from here in the daytime is something to see,” DeRichter said.
Right where he would have expected to find it, Tom noted the enormous flagstone barbecue where the King had once grilled hamburgers and hot dogs for the citizens of Radium on the Fourth of July. Even the utensils hanging on hooks were vintage. All that was missing from the scene was the King in his apron.
“You can see almost fifty miles,” Albert DeRichter said. “The town of Radium is that tiny cluster of lights right over there.” He pointed to the concentrated lights of the town, with fainter, more scattered lights surrounding it. Beyond those lights, there was a vast sea of darkness.
“And that way,” DeRichter pointed the other direction, “are the lights of Telluride.”
“Your kingdom,” Tom said. “When the old man goes.”
As if on cue, the Uranium King emerged from the shadows at the back of the living room, dressed in his bathrobe and slippers. His son barely acknowledged him as he sat nearby, seemingly absorbed in his own world.
“I do have a family legacy to protect,” Albert DeRichter said. “My father built an empire. Much of the land you can see from here and quite a bit more that you can’t see from this particular vantage point, all told almost a half million acres, all belongs to the DeRichter family. Most of the residents either worked for dad or worked for people who worked for him or for businesses that depended on his businesses. Even now, while uranium mining hasn’t geared back up yet, we’re providing jobs, with the resort here. And we have interests in Telluride, and many people from Radium commute to them.”
“I heard you had lost most of it,” Tom said. “That you’ve poured too much money into the resort up here and it hasn’t exactly worked out.”
“Oh, no, no,” he chuckled. “You shouldn’t listen to Frank and Richard. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Neither one of them has a mind for business and neither one has done anything productive with his life. They’ve grown bitter and vindictive as a result. My parents really had no choice but to disinherit them. It’s tragic, really, with all their advantages, how they’ve wasted their lives.”
“I want to see the baby,” Sarah said impatiently, oblivious to Albert’s jab at Tom, the implication that Albert knew Tom had spoken with Frank and Richard. Despite their mutual antagonisms, were the brothers in touch with each other? The family was more than twisted enough for that to be a real possibility. Or did Albert simply assume his affairs were a subject of speculation and that Frank and Richard were the probable source of any trash talk about him. In any case, Tom’s own sense of paranoia was every bit as unsettling as any intention by Albert to threaten him and the only reasonable response to feeling so endangered was for Tom to maintain his composure.
“The police will be here soon,” he said, lobbing a grenade back. “The babysitter will have reported the kidnapping.”
“Yes, Sheriff Martin is on his way. I’ve already explained the situation to him,” Albert said. “And we’ve spoken to San Miguel County Social Services about Tyler, as well. I told them that I’m as much of a blood relative as Sarah is, and much better able to provide for a baby.”
Tom’s earlier supposition that the DeRichters controlled the Slickrock County sheriff was confirmed. And it was no surprise that his influence extended to the next county over. That specific fear was not paranoia at all. At the same time it was clear that he and Sarah had almost certainly failed to help Tyler and had only put themselves at risk by rushing heedlessly to North Mountain. They should have been less impulsive or should have sought help, Tom thought, but from whom? In the Uranium Kingdom, was there was no recourse other than to the royal family? If that was the case, they had their audience now.
Tom caught the eye of the older DeRichter, wondering how closely he was following the conversation, how much of it he understood, and whether he exercised any influence at all. Could Dick still sense clearly what other men couldn’t see, the very structures that lay hidden beneath the surface of things, and not least the earth itself? Or was he so enfeebled by age that he was firmly under his son’s thumb? Tom wasn’t sure, but thought that the King was possibly looking back at him kindly.
“What do you want from me?” Tom asked Albert, a little too sharply.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”
“I’m just interested in the truth.”
“Somehow I imagined that you, of all people, understood that truth is not something to be possessed or apprehended,” DeRichter said. “You can’t know the truth. Truth, like any ideal, can only be approached.”
“Is that right?”
“We all need our illusions,” DeRichter shrugged, as if his dictum was so self-evident that it was not worth expending much energy to defend it. “To encounter the full truth would destroy any of us.”
Sarah was growing more impatient, either unaware of Albert’s gamesmanship or bored by it. “I want to see Tyler and Angie, Albert,” she interrupted.
“Yes, of course,” DeRichter said, “but first, if you’ll excuse us for a moment, there’s something I want to show Tom.”
He gestured for Tom to join him and he put his arm on Tom’s shoulder, the better to share confidences, as they walked outside onto the patio. There in a corner under an eave, resting on spread-out newspaper – pages from old issues of The Forum – lay the fire poker with which Tom had killed Brubaker, still covered in Brubaker’s dried blood and, presumably, Tom’s fingerprints.
“I wanted you to know I found this,” DeRichter said. “I know it’s yours, but I don’t want you to worry about it. If you want me to, I’ll keep it safe for you. You know, Mark Brubaker was a piece of shit, but he was useful to me and it’s gonna cost me to replace him. So I kind of figure that you owe me one, know what I mean?”
It felt like a blow to the solar plexus, though Tom had half expected it, and he was at a loss for words.
“I’ve got something else that’s maybe not quite as valuable, but I like it,” DeRichter said, and he turned over a newspaper to reveal the edition of The Boston Mail with the headline Mail Reporter Fabricated Articles emblazoned on the front page, illustrated with Tom’s mug.
DeRichter clearly believed that this was the knockout blow, that he now owned Tom fully, and maybe he did. Tom hadn’t been paranoid at all, he realized; in fact, he was in far too deep.
“What’s that you were saying about the truth?”
Tom opened his mouth to respond, but stopped short. To DeRichter, precisely as he intended, Tom must have appeared to be in checkmate, with no possible move left to make, stunned but not quite ready to concede, shattered but not yet utterly destroyed.
“I can see you need a little time to think this over,” DeRichter said, almost kindly, “so here’s what I’m gonna do. There’s something else I’d like you and Sarah to see, and it will take just about half an hour to show it to you, and that’s right about when I expect Sheriff Martin to arrive. He may want to question you about the Brubaker murder. Or he might not. It’s really up to you.”