A dozen of the subscriptions to the Forum that Tom mailed out every week went to the Manor Nursing Home outside of Cortez. The home was filled largely with ex-miners and their wives, former uranium miners from Radium and former gold miners from Telluride. The two towns had traded their prosperity. First, after the debilitating labor wars of the late 1890s, through the late 1940s, Telluride was rich with well-compensated gold mine employees and their fabulously wealthy employers. Just when the cost of extracting precious minerals outpaced their value and Telluride started to decline into a ghost town, world war loomed and uranium became precious, even though at first its value was a highly classified government secret and widely misunderstood.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by bombs that were fueled by uranium secretly mined on the West End, the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union kept the region prosperous for another two decades. During that brief period, it was said that uranium was the most valuable substance on the planet. But then, abruptly, came the end of domestic uranium mining. America had more than enough bombs, the nuclear power industry was in steep decline after accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in the Ukraine, and the uranium ore for which there was still a market was extracted in places like South Africa, where there were far fewer environmental and health regulations for mine companies to contend with. By the late seventies it was Radium that was occupied largely by ghosts, while Telluride had found new prosperity as an elite mountain resort.
The former gold miners of Telluride and uranium miners of Radium shared their senescence in retirement homes in nearby cities. They were all children of great mining companies, with bittersweet memories of life in a company town in its heyday, when their employer provided every service from running the grocery store and the bowling alley to providing free dental care – and now, retirement benefits. The only differences between them were that the uranium families experienced far greater incidences of certain cancers and there were many more uranium miners’ widows.
“I’m here to see Elizabeth Walker,” Tom said to the orderly at the nursing home reception desk.
“Elizabeth Walker,” the orderly replied tentatively, as if he had never heard the name before.
“She lives here, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, but you’ll have to wait a minute,” he said. “Have a seat.” The orderly picked up the telephone and muttered into it. A few moments later Tom was approached by a tall, thin woman in her fifties, her red hair turning a pink shade of gray.
“Are you here to see Elizabeth?” she asked, extending a hand. “I’m Beverly Tarbell, the director here. We’ve all been very concerned about Elizabeth’s son. I don’t suppose you have any news.”
“No,” Tom said, handing her his card. “I’m Tom Austin. I publish the West End Forum.”
“I guess if anyone had news, it would be you,” Tarbell said. “We all learned Ray had gone missing from reading your paper. It’s been the talk of the home. We have many residents from Radium. But I don’t believe Elizabeth can tell you anything. She hasn’t seen Ray in at least a month.”
“Did he visit her often?”
“Every couple of months. He was here in October, I believe.”
“Does she know that he’s missing?”
Tarbell shook her head. “There didn’t seem to be much point in telling her until we learned something definite,” she said. “I’m not sure what we would say at this point. He’s all she’s got, and she upsets easily. I’m quite sure that nobody else has said anything for fear of that.”
“Can I see her?”
“I don’t know,” Tarbell said. “As I explained, she becomes upset so easily. I’ll have to ask her if she’d like a visit from a stranger. Somehow I doubt it. Why do you want to see her?”
“I didn’t think it would be a big deal,” Tom said.
“We are a private residence home, Mr. Austin,” Tarbell said firmly, looking at his card as a way of avoiding eye contact. “Our job is to protect our residents from disturbances. With Ray gone, we are all the more responsible for her.”
“Of course,” Tom said. “Is there anyone else who has visited her….?”
But she cut him off and looked him in the eye: “Let me stop you right there, Mr. Austin. I can’t tell you anything personal about one of our residents, even if you are a reporter. It’s against policy and would violate her privacy and I’ve probably said too much already. But I’ll tell you what I will do. Give me a few days to talk to Elizabeth and then I’ll call and I’ll let you know what she says.”
“Why I would really appreciate that,” Tom said, confident that the officious nursing home director had no intention of doing any such thing.
Tom retreated to his car and drove to a vantage point on a nearby street where he could safely observe the nursing home. He studied the building through a pair of binoculars that he kept in his glove compartment. He could see the director through her office window as she passed back and forth. He could see the front and rear entrances of the building and all of the cars in the parking lot. As darkness fell, the building lit up, including the light in Beverly Tarbell’s office window.
Sitting in his car waiting for the director to leave, Tom had time to wonder why he had not simply been ushered in to visit Elizabeth Walker. Surely, most nursing home residents would welcome the distraction of a visitor, even a complete stranger. Why not in this case? The orderly had clearly been instructed to notify his boss if anyone asked about Elizabeth Walker, even though, to judge from his reaction, nobody ever had before; and the boss, Tarbell, tried to discourage him from meeting with her, stopping just short of simply saying that he couldn’t. But why? Was it as simple as Tarbell’s explanation that Elizabeth Walker was excitable and difficult to manage and that she wanted to protect her from the trauma of learning her son had disappeared until there was more definitive news? That could be both plausible and explanation enough for the nursing home director’s behavior. But given Tom’s growing sense that there was some degree of opposition to his investigating Ray Walker’s disappearance, there could be more, and that was enough to keep Tom engaged.
Shortly after dark, Tom saw the light flicker off in the director’s office and he watched the spindly Tarbell climb into her car in the parking lot and drive off. The orderly who Tom had first met had left earlier, leaving nobody at the nursing home who would recognize him.
The attendant at the front desk looked up when Tom walked in.
“I’m here to visit my great aunt Myrna Patterson,” Tom said.
Patterson was one of his subscribers, and one he knew had a large family – there were a dozen Pattersons still living in Radium and a dozen more between Cortez and Farmington to whom he mailed subscriptions – so Tom calculated that she was likely to receive frequent visitors and particularly at suppertime. She was also highly social, having called him more than once with detailed information about the recently departed.
The attendant nodded, proof that visitors generally were not carefully vetted, and Tom strolled past, down a corridor that opened up to the dining room where a number of residents were sitting down to supper, several of them joined by their adult children. At one table, the family included a couple of well-dressed, fidgety grandchildren. Nobody paid much attention to him, so Tom stopped one of the residents who pushed by with the aid of a walker on wheels and asked where he could find Elizabeth Walker.
“That old bird don’t eat much,” the old man said. “She’ll be in the day room.”
Elizabeth Walker sat in a rocking chair in the otherwise empty glassed-in dayroom overlooking a garden, knitting. She appeared to be in her early eighties. The man who’d told Tom where to find her was not speaking metaphorically: she did evoke an old bird, possibly a buzzard. She was all skin and bones. Her hair was pinned in a bun on top of her head, exposing a long white neck; her shoulder blades resembled wings, her nose a sharp beak, her eyes magnified by the thick lenses of her glasses.
“I’m Tom Austin, Mrs. Walker. I publish the West End Forum.”
She was not one of his subscribers and Tom could not tell if the mention of the newspaper stirred any recognition in her.
“I’d like to talk to you,” he said. “Can I sit down?”
She looked up at him and stopped her knitting for a moment, but didn’t say a word. Since she didn’t object, he sat in an armchair across from her.
“Did you call the gas company?” she asked sharply. “We need to get propane in soon, afore it gets any colder. I can’t do everything all by myself. I’m old.”
“How are you doing, Mrs. Walker? Are you okay?”
“How do you think I’m doing? I’m an old lady whose son never comes to visit me, not even on my goddamn birthday.” She choked back a theatrical sob. “Not one visit in ten years!”
“He was just here last month, wasn’t he?” Tom said.
“I’ve got a good mind to tell your father how bad you treat me,” she said. “He expects you to look after me. You know there ain’t nobody else to do it.”
“My father….?”
“Now don’t you go bitchin’ about him agin! He done what he could for us. This house we live in ain’t nothing. There’s not a one of us on this Earth chooses our parents. I’ve done right by you, as right as I could.”
“I know … mom,” Tom said. “Tell me again about you and dad … how you met.”
For the first time since he sat across from her, she set her knitting down in her lap. She pushed back in her rocker and closed her eyes.
“All the girls, they made eyes at him, but not me. I just served him up his bacon and eggs. Eggs over easy. But I’m the one he wanted. Mr. DeRichter, they called him the King, but I wasn’t afraid of him, not one little bit, and that’s why I was the one he liked. And there’s a lesson in that, boy.”
She looked Tom in the eye.
“You must never think you are not as good as some other person just because they got money and you ain’t. Being rich, well, you just take one look at your father and you know it ain’t everything. Money don’t make a man happy, not if he’s married to a bitch who won’t let him go!”
“So you met him at the Maverick….”
“Not the Maverick, no, no,” she said, annoyed. “The diner!”
“Right, the diner….”
“Then he invited me to the drive-in picture show, but I said no. I made him ask me again and again. He knew then that I’m not some kind of cheap tart. But there was a Lana Turner picture and he had a nice big car for watching pictures, a Cadillac. And I wanted to see that picture. He had a bar right there in the car, with ice and Scotch whiskey. We saw other pictures, too, with Betty Grable and Joan Crawford, and he said I was prettier than any one of them. He loved me…. He did love me. And then I got pregnant with you….” Her voice drifted. “Mr. DeRichter, he is a very important man, a very busy man, and of course he couldn’t lose his entire company because of a nasty divorce. That woman would take him right down, I know she would, and we couldn’t let that happen, of course not, so when I got pregnant, well, he bought us this house and he never, never once, forgot your goddamn birthday.”
She wiped away a tear and resumed her knitting.
“My, my we had fun,” she said.
“But there were a lot of hard years,” Tom ventured.
“Now don’t you start in with your whinin’,” she said. “There is hardship in life. Who in this world doesn’t know that? People get sick. There’s war and there’s pestilence. Sometimes the river runs dry and there’s heartbreak, too. You just remember that your daddy loves you, like your momma loves you. There are things that make it hard for him, he has important work, and you just need to understand… that he can’t always do everything we…. Did you order the propane? It will be cold soon and we’ll need propane.”
Tom reached over to touch her hand.
She sighed. “I don’t know why we have to have this same old, same old argument all the time,” she said, shaking her head. “You are a stubborn boy, Ray Walker. A stubborn boy. Always have been. Since you was three years old.”
Tom drove back from Cortez, across the vast Disappointment Valley, under a full moon. On North Mountain, looming ahead, he could see a cluster of lights near the summit: the Uranium King Ranch, lately converted into a luxury guest ranch operated by the family, overlooking the DeRichter empire consisting of hundreds of thousands of acres and the entire town of Radium, of which Tom himself, like it or not, was now a subject.
Tom reordered the list of theories that could explain Ray Walker’s disappearance. Perhaps Ray had gone to his father and had asked for something, for money, for a future. Or maybe he tried to blackmail DeRichter, threatening him with exposure. As an obviously resentful child of a poor single mother, Ray would have been under her control, and it was obvious that she knew a thing or two about control. But she was senile now, powerless, and Ray had grown, and there would have been nothing to stop him from trying to take matters into his own hands and make demands of his father, to claim some inheritance. Maybe he thought he was simply testing his mother’s theory that his father, appearances notwithstanding, cared about him.
How would Dick DeRichter react to having his bastard son show up on his doorstep with some kind of demand? Probably not well. But at this point, with DeRichter himself in his 80s, a demand might have been directed to Albert DeRichter, the half-brother, and that might be met with even less forbearance. If either DeRichter turned Ray back, how would Ray have reacted? With anger? In a conflict between Ray Walker and the DeRichters, who would prevail? There was little question about that. The DeRichters were never known to be reticent about exercising their power and influence or protecting their interests.
Ten miles outside of Radium, Tom stopped his car at the entrance to the ranch. He got out of his car to stretch his legs. The gate was imposing in a style typical of large Western ranches, constructed of rough-hewn logs, the name Uranium King and the brand, an entwined U and K, burned into the log that formed the overhead arch. The gravel road beyond curved into the woods before it began a series of switchbacks to the flat, forested summit.
In his younger days, DeRichter hosted legendary events there; he invited the whole town to meet a candidate for governor or to celebrate the Fourth of July. Since its conversion by Albert DeRichter into a resort, Tom had been there several times, when it had been first opened up to the public and for several promotional events since. He was torn between an impulse to drive up the road and talk to Dick DeRichter or Albert DeRichter to investigate further and find the truth, and a sharply competing impulse to drive by and forget the entire thing. He couldn’t see the percentage, at that moment, in questioning the Uranium King about his illegitimate son or Prince Albert about his interloper half-brother. On the other hand, he was drawn by the pull of the mystery and a growing conviction that if he didn’t solve it, nobody would.
It was no contest, really. Tom got back in his car and drove home.