Page 7 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

As I headed for my SUV, I made sure to skirt the outer ring of police tape. I didn’t want to be shown inside the tape on video we shared with the Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department.

I’d nearly drained the mini bottle of water from my SUV when another vehicle pulled up behind ours.

It was a white pickup. That wasn’t particularly notable, since that’s the most common vehicle/color combo in Wyoming.

Trucks lose their gloss fast on ranches and this was no exception, but it was well-tended for its age.

A young woman emerged from the driver’s seat, holding a paper grocery bag flattened to her chest, with both arms protectively crossed over it.

“I remember you,” she said by way of a greeting.

After years of being on TV news, I’ve acquired a knack for telling who meant they recognized me from TV.

This woman wasn’t one of those.

And now that I looked at her more closely, I remembered her, too.

What threw me off initially was that her most notable characteristic when we’d previously encountered her was no longer apparent.

She’d been very pregnant then. She no longer was.

“Hannah Chaney,” I said.

She smiled quickly, then winced.

I take that back about the notable characteristic not being apparent. Rather, it had detached from her and established itself as a separate entity, currently caterwauling from inside the vehicle.

A small human visible in the backward-facing baby seat in the cab’s second row . . .

Not a babe in arms anymore, I realized.

I’d been in the vicinity at the birth, though Wayne Shelton delivered the baby. A girl.

Hannah’s wince coincided with an acceleration in the caterwauling through the open truck windows.

But the mother steadfastly remained focused on me.

Likely the result of experience with the caterwauling.

“Uh-huh. I was wondering . . . could I talk to you?”

You already are. Teeth impressions on my tongue kept me from saying that. Instead, I echoed her, “Uh-huh.”

“Thank you. I, uh . . .” More caterwauling.

Now that she had my permission to talk to me, Hannah appeared more distracted by the noise.

Belatedly, I recognized a single, repeated syllable.

Mamamamamamamamamamama.

Hannah took a couple steps toward her vehicle, then checked back to see if I was escaping.

I wasn’t. In fact, I shuffled a few steps in the same direction.

With that encouragement, she went to the truck, opened its back door and did something inside.

Presumably something that soothed the baby, because the caterwauling volume diminished.

Curious, I edged closer.

The father, Paul Chaney, had shown me a photo last fall. At that time, my main impression had been a baby with a square face and determined chin.

Both qualities remained. In fact, were stronger now, making her look even more like her father.

Her eyes were drifting closed as she sucked on a pacifier. From my experience as an aunt, I guessed the pacifier had dislodged, causing the caterwauling. Hannah restored it, and peace reigned.

She now rearranged a quilt, tucking in its edges between the interior of the seat and exterior of the child.

It was a patchwork quilt, with one set of squares devoted to a cow, a horse, a dog, a sheep, a pronghorn deer, a prairie dog, and presumably other local animals, that were out of sight.

Another set with various birds, including a robin, owl, and sparrow.

And another set with landscapes and skyscapes of mountains, ranchlands, storms, and fluffy clouds.

“That’s beautiful.”

She smiled. “Isn’t it? Irene made it for Vidalia.”

Had I heard right? They named their baby after an onion? I suppose the town was a possibility, although Hannah didn’t strike me as someone who would have traveled to Georgia.

“Of course, she wasn’t Vidalia yet because it was before she was born. Irene did such beautiful work. She taught me some, but nothing like what she did.

“After she died, the sergeant gave us another of her quilts she’d been working on for when Vidalia is a little older with the letters of the alphabet. She’d almost finished it. I did the final quilting — not near as good as hers, but finished. I have it hanging on the wall across from her crib.”

Her eyes abruptly filled with tears. I thought at both the generosity of the gift and the memory of the woman’s death.

But she didn’t speak of that when she added, “She had so many quilts. And, on top of everything else, to think of any of those beautiful quilts burning up . . . It’s what I thought about after I called the fire department—”

“You called the fire department?”

“Uh-huh.”

When she didn’t elaborate, I asked, “You spotted the fire?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You came by here and saw the fire?”

“Oh, no. I didn’t come here until after I called.”

“How did you spot it?”

“I was weeding a patch where we’re growing tomatoes. Hoping for better than we had last year. I don’t know what I did wrong—”

“They’re hard around here, with the short season.” That was not personal experience. That was the result of listening to my next-door neighbor Zeb Undlin describe the travails he went through to produce a crop. Could almost make me feel guilty for eating the ones he brought over.

Almost.

“What caught your attention?”

“Smoke first. Then flames, too.”

Smoke would rise well above the fire, but . . . “You saw flames?”

“Uh-huh. From the house.”

I’d been to the Chaney house during a previous inquiry. If I had my geography right, their place was off another road, well to the south of here. Twists and turns might put the two places closer for any crows flying around, but nothing like next-door neighbors.

“You can see — could see—” I amended. “—this cabin from there?”

“Not usually. Not even during winter. But sometimes in the winter, we’d see smoke from their chimney, you know?

But this smoke wasn’t anything like that.

It was way too big and . . .” She searched for a term.

“Angry. It was rising way up above the tree line and then, when I followed it down with my eyes, I saw something between the trees. I was on the phone with the fire department because of the smoke, when I realized there were flames. Big ones. Couldn’t believe my eyes at first. That’s what I told them, too.

“After, I got the baby in the truck and came this way — getting her loaded up takes some doing and the first fire tanker was already here. I made sure I didn’t park in the way, so it took us a while to get close enough to see the cabin and then the firefighters told us to keep back.

I wouldn’t have gotten too close anyhow because of Vidalia and the heat. It was really, really hot.”

“Were there other people there?”

“A few. Otto.” That was Paul’s uncle. “A couple of the Walterston boys. And the McCrackens came to see if they could help. They said they’d seen smoke, too.”

The baby yelped in indignation. Hannah reached through the window opening to retrieve, wipe, and return the pacifier with the ease of practice.

I don’t think the kid even fully woke up.

Even better, the interruption didn’t waylay Hannah’s account.

“The flames, they surprised me, because of all the rain we’ve had.

The whole place was going up so fast. It wasn’t even still a whole cabin when we got here.

The walls were open-like . . . like . . .

like lace or something. They stood there, longer than you would think they could and then they’d crumble. ”

Tears came into her eyes.

“It came down so fast then. Pieces falling in on themselves.” She shook her head. “As wet as it’s been and even with the trees and brush kept back, it would’ve been scary if the fire guys hadn’t been here.”

“Did you know any of the firefighters?”

She looked at me like I wasn’t very bright. “All of them. Some at the end were from Horse County. I know them, too.”

“Who was in charge?”

“Ned Irvin.”

“Anybody else who might know a lot about the fire, how they fought it, what they found?”

She stared at me for a long moment. As I was about to give up, she listed three more names, adding, “They were telling the others to do this, do that.” Her brows folded. “I don’t remember exactly what they said. There were, you know, terms they were using I didn’t know.”

“I understand. Were you here when they found the body?”

Her eyes rounded in imagined horror — imagined, because she shook her head decisively.

“From what we heard — Paul and me — that happened after we came by the day after the fire. We’d heard the firefighters had the fire beat by then and we came by to see if there was anything from the cabin we could save for . . . well, not for the sergeant, because . . .”

Because he was dead, which she did not want to say, because she didn’t want to accept it.

“But maybe there was family we didn’t know about, who’d come along later or . . . something.”

Her impulse to preserve physical belongings of her neighbor said something about her. Her inability to explain it also did, though I wasn’t going to parse out either.

“That was thoughtful of you,” I said blandly.

She dropped her head, as if overwhelmed by effusive praise.

“Wasn’t much there. Not much there to start, I suppose.

And then with the fire . . . Although it sort of was hit and miss, the way you see tornados on the news, ripping one wall off here, leaving a table set there.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that,” she amended carefully, “but I suppose I expected it to be all ash. And some was, but not all.”

Having covered the full range of ash/not-ash, she ground to a halt.

“But you saved a few things?”

“Uh-huh. A metal box with his medals, photos, and a flag. A stool his father had made for him when he was little that we thought maybe he’d approve of us having for Vidalia, because he didn’t have any family we know of. Though, if some show up, we’ll give it to them, right away. Told Ned that.”

“Ned Irvin, who you said was in charge of the fire scene? He said it was okay to take those things?”

“Uh-huh. The other thing in the box was this.”

Her arms tightened around the bag she held.

“A paper bag?”

“Not the bag. The bag was ours. I put it inside to hold them all together.”

It indicated one item. Them indicated multiple. Had to choose one to ask my question. “What is it?”

“It’s the book Irene was writing. Pages from it. She never got to finish it.”

“Pages?” I eyed the bag. It matched the height and width of typewriter paper. The depth was less apparent. Maybe two inches? “They survived the fire?”

“I know. It’s like a miracle, isn’t it? Even though different areas got burned worse than others. And the things we saved were all where it wasn’t burned so bad.

“The manuscript was inside the metal box with his medals and things, but we didn’t know that until today. It was too hot to open — too hot to handle. Paul wrapped it in a padded horse blanket he had in the truck to move it. And we left it out to cool off.”

I looked back to the rough square of burnt-out cabin.

Hannah Chaney was right. The damage was irregular. In fact, if I squinted at it from this distance, the pattern seemed suspiciously clear . . . Although maybe that was an illusion after seeing it through Diana’s camera up above.

“The pages were in the metal box, still, some pages got sort of singed, brittle. They slid around in the box and the edges broke off, like cookies that got too thin, you know? I hoped they’d be better in this bag.”

It was amazing a paper manuscript survived the fire, even in a metal box. A digital copy might have been someplace. Although if it was in a drive, the fire would have taken care of that. In the cloud? But where and how could someone find out which corner of the cloud?

“I heard you were coming here from Otto—”

Her husband’s uncle whose truck I’d passed on the way here.

“—he figured I could get you to take the pages without going into town.”

“Me?”

She nodded. “You’ll know what to do with them.”

“But you were the sergeant’s friend—”

“Not really. Neighbors, and friendly, but his friends were the other ones. The ones he saw a lot.”

“The other ones?” I asked.

“Who live way back.”

Way back?

Her head tip toward the west gave me a better clue.

“In the woods? The forests?”

“Uh-huh. Veterans.”

I’d heard murmurs about a scattering of people living not only off the grid, but nomadically in the far northwestern part of the county.

From the flat and semiarid eastern part of Cottonwood County called the low side, the land rose to the west, more fertile and more tightly folded into ridges and valleys.

This high side of the county was where Tom’s ranch was, with grazing areas for his cattle interspersed with forests as the land stretched toward the mountains.

The western-most part was too rugged for grazing.

So rugged that on our rides, as he and Tamantha expanded my horseback skills, we observed it as landscape, but didn’t ride into it.

“I guess he understood them,” Hannah said, “because he was a veteran, too. But not one who went into the woods.”

That was the other murmur I’d heard, that these people had sought the forests’ solitude. If you didn’t bother them, they wouldn’t bother you. To my knowledge, no one tested the reverse — that if you bothered them, they’d bother you.

In some locations, that theory might not be tested because of fear and maybe that was a factor for a few here. But my impression was that most people in Cottonwood County followed live and let live.

“So . . .”

Hannah’s introductory syllable brought my attention back to her.

She immediately followed up with, “Here,” and straightened her arms, so the paper bag lightly contacted my midsection.

Automatically, I grasped it.

“It’s Irene’s book. She was working on it right up to the end, poor lady.”

“But why give it to me?”

“Oh, because the sergeant said to.”