The West End Historical Society occupied an old ranch house in the Radium Town Park, next to the rocky baseball fields where the town’s entire population gathered to watch their kids play in the spring and summer. The building’s yard was littered with rusty old ranching and mining equipment, far more of a junkyard than a museum exhibit.
Tom found Molly Buford behind the wooden desk just inside the door, patiently awaiting any tourists driving between Telluride and Moab who might have enough of an interest in local history – or enough time to kill – to stop in. Occasionally, she once told Tom, somebody actually did. In her 80s, Molly was the descendent of Utopianists, but she had not lived her entire life on the West End. She worked for a big book publisher in New York for most of her adult life. She had never married. When she retired, she returned home and devoted herself to recording the history of the West End, seeking out old timers and recording their stories. Tom published Molly’s weekly history column in the Forum.
“Ray Walker is not the first missing man around here,” Tom said, after they got through their greetings.
“I suppose that’s true,” Molly said. “In all these years….”
“Well, I was looking back through old newspapers,” Tom explained. “It seems like people died and took sick and even disappeared all the time back in the ’40s and ’50s, and I’m sure it was even worse before then.”
“Life here has always been hard,” Molly agreed. “Ranching and mining are the two most dangerous occupations a man can have, according to the government, and that’s all we’ve got here; it’s all we’ve ever had, mostly, except for a little tourism nowadays and people living here who commute to jobs in Telluride. And there are jobs at power plant. But as hard as it is now, it’s not like it used to be and that’s why something like Ray’s disappearance hits so hard the way it does. I suppose people took it more in stride when it was more common.”
“I was reading about Whispering Jim Stewart,” Tom said.
“He is one who disappeared, that’s right,” Molly said.
“The paper reported it, but as a story, it seemed to go away fast,” Tom said. “It’s not like this story now with Ray….”
“He was a bachelor, and as I recall, he was called Whispering Jim because he didn’t talk much.”
“Did people think it was, I don’t know, kind of convenient for Dick DeRichter that Jim disappeared when he did?” Tom ventured. “I mean, after he struck it so big not long after, was there talk or malicious gossip?”
“I suppose there was that sort of talk,” Molly said. “You know how people are. But nothing came of it and I don’t suppose there’d be any way to prove such a thing. What’s got you thinking about this all of a sudden?
“I was just reading old newspapers. That’s all.”
“DeRichter had a certain ruthlessness, I suppose, and was single-minded,” Molly said. “But he became so revered here that nobody would ever accuse him of something like that. He put Radium on the map; he built the mill and provided good jobs, and built the clinic and gave money to the schools, and set off fireworks every Fourth of July. He flew sick people on his private plane to the hospital in Denver.”
“I’ve heard the stories.”
“It didn’t last more than twenty years, but for as long as it did last he was so good to the people here that you’d just never think of him as greedy.”
“When they found Jim’s remains….”
“There wasn’t much left of him. Just a few bones, as I recall.”
“And a knife…”
“Oh, yes. His own knife, probably.”
“The newspaper story said he was trapped by a falling boulder and then cut off his own arm.”
“Can you imagine?”
“I can’t. I really can’t. It’s not possible. Nobody could cut off his own arm.”
“Well, in fact, a man can do just that,” Molly said. “Back in the late ’70s, early ’80s, there was a hiker out in the canyonlands over near Moab who somehow got himself trapped, just his arm, like Whispering Jim,” Molly said. “This boy’s arm was crushed under a boulder. He was stuck there for a few days, and he realized that nobody was going to find him and if he didn’t do something dramatic he was going to die there. So he tied a tourniquet around his arm and cut his own arm off at the elbow to set himself free, and he walked right out.”
“I do remember that,” Tom said. “It made the national news. I couldn’t do that. I’d just die waiting to be rescued.”
“People can do amazing things, things they don’t realize they are capable of doing,” Molly said.
“Do you know Ray Walker’s mother? Elizabeth Walker?”
“When I came back from New York on my vacations, I’d take my folks to the diner for dinner, and she always waited on us,” Molly said. “She was there for decades. She was such a fixture that when she retired, the diner just shut down.”
“She’s at the Manor Nursing Home in Cortez.”
“Is that right? She must be almost as old as I am.”
“She’s got some kind of dementia.”
“Oh, the poor thing.”
“Do you know that she was Dick DeRichter’s mistress?”
“She never made much of a secret of it,” Molly said. “It was the biggest thing in her life.” She paused, but only for a moment. “So if Dick DeRichter was capable of killing his partner back in the ’50s, maybe he has something to do with his bastard son’s disappearance now?”
“What do you think might have happened to Ray Walker?”
“Maybe he got himself trapped in a slot canyon by a falling boulder,” she shrugged. “I mean, without more to go on, one theory is as good as another. I can see why you find it interesting that he’s DeRichter’s son. But it’s not as if that was ever all that much of a secret and it sure doesn’t mean DeRichter had anything to do with his disappearance. It seems to me that before you can develop a hypothesis like that you need some evidence for it, or a motive at least.”