Death Without Company by Craig Johnson Page B

there thinking.
    Lucian had lied. Lucian had lied when he said that he hadn’t seen her for all those years. I looked up at the large map of the county that was illuminated by the flat, winter sun and wondered where in the hell I was. The place on the wall wasn’t where I happened to be as of late; I was in a strange new place, a place where the people I had safely put on shelves were wandering around getting into messy things.
    Lois came back into the room, placed a large ledger on the cast-off library table, and opened it to the exact page held by her index finger. I pulled out a chair. It amused me that the two places that had computers couldn’t seem to slap their asses with both hands, but the nice little old lady in the assessor’s office could conjure Charlie Nurburn in a matter of moments. Always follow the money; rendering unto Caesar what is his may not be pleasurable, but the records are great. I was having second thoughts about the computer; maybe I didn’t need one after all. I could use the extra money for a lie detector.
    We have ledgers like these back at the office, three of them to be precise. They are beautiful, handbound leather with golden edging and marbled inner leaves with information that stretched back to the mid-1800s. Now we have floppy discs. The ledger was alphabetically organized, so it didn’t take long to find Charlie on the open page; he was the only Nurburn in the county. He had bought a small property in 1946, about 260 acres adjacent to the 50,000-acre Four Brothers Ranch; the brothers had sold it to him. Both Mari and Charlie were on the deed. He had paid the taxes on the property until 1950, whereupon he must have piled his syphilitic, wife-beating ass into his Kaiser, whatever it looked like, and driven off into the sunset. Or not.
    Mari had paid the taxes on the property beginning in 1951. The Four Brothers had been split between her and her cousin, the priest, according to the Will of her father, the last of the four brothers to die. I asked for the B book. She said that it had been a popular letter lately. I asked her why, and she said that Kay Baroja-Lofton had been in yesterday to check things out on her mother’s behalf and that Carol Baroja-Calloway had requested information to be faxed to Calloway, Moore, and Gardner in Miami; the letters in Mari’s room were from that firm. It just kept getting better and better.
    Where was Charlie Nurburn? I looked at the nine-numeral scrawl that I had made on the scrap pad. It was time to use my own resources. I left the courthouse, completely forgetting to set fire to it.
    I keyed the mic. “Charlie Nurburn.” I read her the number from the piece of paper.
    Static. “Who is this character?”
    “Somebody I’m not so sure I want to find.”
     
 
It was only forty-five miles south to Swayback Road, then another three miles east toward the Wallows where the Four Brothers Ranch was located, or where I thought it was located. As I drove down the interstate, the tailgate of my truck buffeted by the gusts from the northwest, I started feeling like I was being pushed.
    I had stood there in the doorway of Lana’s shop. It was one of those moments when you weren’t quite sure if what you heard was what you thought you had heard. In the second that it took me to make up my mind, she laughed. It was a wonderfully musical laugh, one that you couldn’t help but join. After I did, questions didn’t seem appropriate. I told her that if she wanted to see her grandmother, she could probably do it this evening; but, on the lonely stretch of highway between Durant and Powder Junction, with the Big Horn Mountains guarding my right and the Powder River flats racing east, my mind began to wander back to a man who had had the one woman in his life taken away. It’s one thing if she’d been gone but, as near as I could tell, she had only been forty-five miles distant.
    There’s no way I’d have been able to stay away. I flattered myself by