Stephen White - Warning Signs

I could feel the pressure building. "Can it wait till then? Do you want to take a minute right now, Naomi, and tell me what-"

She hung up.

"I guess not," I said aloud.

"You guess not what?" Lauren asked from the doorway. Grace was asleep in her arms.

"A patient hung up on me in the middle of our conversation."

"Oh," she said, disinterested. She tilted her head back toward the kitchen. "The story about Lucy's mother is on the news. They make it sound awful. As though the fact that Susan is Lucy's mother gives Lucy a reason to murder Royal. It doesn't make any sense."

"They don't know about the wet spot?"

Lauren covered Grace's ears.

"No, they don't know about the wet spot."

"Well, I'm not surprised the press is making it look bad. That seems to be their job," I said. "I'm late-I need to get downtown. You're okay with Grace until Viv gets here?"

"I'm fine," she replied. She kissed the top of the baby's head. "We're great."

T he previous night'ssnow was history. The faintest reminder of the storm still clung as transparent white frosting feathering the highest reaches of the Flatirons, but otherwise the morning was brilliant and warm and the city bore no evidence of the midnight flurries.

Lucy didn't answer her cell when I tried her a few minutes before nine, nor when I tried again at nine forty-five.

I finished with my nine forty-five patient right on time at ten-thirty. As soon as he was out the door, I checked my voice mail and retrieved two messages. One was a cancellation by my one o'clock, the other another call from Naomi.

"It's me again. I'm sorry I'm so scattered. You said four-thirty, didn't you? If that's not right, call me at the office. I can't tell you how much I need to see you. There's another bomb. That lawyer."

That was it.

There's another bomb. That lawyer.

I replayed the message to assure myself that that was what she had said.

There's another bomb. That lawyer.

Shit. I decided that I couldn't wait any longer to find out what Ramp was up to. I called Lucy one more time. Finally, she answered. She was already far from Boulder-at a diner outside Fort Lupton where she'd stopped to have a late breakfast-on her way to the eastern plains. She didn't argue when I told her that I wanted to meet her. I jotted down directions to Ella Ramp's ranch, which was almost precisely halfway between Limon and Agate, and I hustled out the door. From my car I canceled lunch with a colleague and all my remaining therapy appointments until my four-thirty emergency session with Naomi.

I t took mealmost an hour to plunge through the northern congestion of Denver's metropolitan area and intersect with Interstate 70 on my journey toward Limon, the little town that is the geographic bull's-eye in the center of Colorado's eastern plains.

Many people who have never visited Colorado have a mental image that the state consists predominantly of mountains. Sharp juvenile peaks, high meadows, glacial faces, deep canyons. Travel magazine stuff.

But if a driver heads east away from the Front Range, especially if he's beyond the boundaries of Denver's metropolitan sprawl, and if he doesn't glance back into his rearview mirror, the state of Colorado is hardly distinguishable from Nebraska or Iowa or Kansas. Less corn, more wheat, but mostly mile after mile of mind-numbing Great Plains high prairie. Some people love it, others don't. Either way, the broad expanse of endless horizon and infinite sky takes up roughly half the state.

I'm convinced that if highway planners hadn't chosen the Limon-to-Agate spur for Interstate 70's northwest traverse across the eastern prairie toward Denver, virtually no one would have any reason to be aware exactly where either Agate or Limon is. Nor would anyone care much. In fact, absent the wide ribbon of interstate, Colorado's eastern plains are geographically pretty close to nowhere, and one look at the map confirms that Limon and Agate are about as close to the middle as is theoretically possible.

I made only one wrong turn as I was navigating the grid of county roads east of Agate, and found the Ramp spread on my first try. As I made the last turn, I spotted Lucy's red Volvo parked in the shadow of a huge stack of hay. The lead-gray color of the straw told me that it hadn't been baled or stacked recently. I stopped and got out of my car.

"You been waiting long?" I asked Lucy.

"Half an hour, forty minutes."

"Sorry, I went as fast as I could."

"It's okay, I'm just killing time today anyway. The house is right down there. Why don't we leave your car here, just take mine. I don't want to spook her any more than we already will."

The Ramp home was a sixties-style suburban ranch house that seemed out of place without a few dozen clones crammed around it on six-thousand-square-foot lots. An uninterrupted line of spreading junipers was the only vegetation around the house. A solitary tree-I thought it was a hackberry-stood at the edge of a field about fifty yards to the east.

Lucy drove past the house once before she doubled back toward the driveway. I wasted a moment trying to decide how nearby Ella Ramp's closest neighbor lived. Distances were great out there, and I guessed it was almost a mile between houses.

An impeccably preserved brown Ford pickup-the vintage was late sixties or early seventies-was parked on the dirt drive, not far from the house. Lucy parked behind the truck and we walked to the front door. She knocked. I was already having second thoughts about being out there; a good-sized part of me wished that I'd instead stayed in Boulder and moved up my appointment with Naomi Bigg.

There's another bomb, she'd said. That lawyer.

I nearly jumped when I heard somebody say, "Hell!"

Half a minute or so later the door opened. "What?" squealed the woman who stood in the doorway. She was a wiry woman who'd once been of average height, but her frame was beginning to bow to gravity and osteoporosis. Her hair was as gray as slate and her eyes were a blue that glowed like the ocean in the tropics.

"What?" the woman repeated in the same acidic tone. Despite her posture, I pegged her at only about sixty.

Lucy said, "Hello, I'm, um, Lucy Tanner. I-"

"So what?"

Lucy moved back six or eight inches. "We spoke on the phone. I called about your grandson. Do you remember? May I come in?"

"Are you nuts? No, you can't come in. Didn't your mother ever tell you to wait to be invited? Where are your manners? And of course I remember. How many calls like that do you think I get? I'm not feeble."

At the first hollered "Hell!" I'd shifted into clinical mode. This woman-who answered her door by squealing "What?" and who had just called Lucy nuts-was now questioning her manners. I said, "Hello, I, um-"

She stepped right on my words, ignoring me, instead retaining her focus on Lucy. "You a cop?" she asked.

"Excuse me?" Lucy said.

"On TV, the cops always ask to come in. They never wait till they're invited. Something happen to my boy? Are you a cop?"

"I am actually, but I'm not here today as-"

Ella Ramp pushed out the door and shuffled past us. "Come on. I have to check on the chickens. I bet my ass you've never checked on a chicken in your life. I'm right, ain't I? Never mind, I know I'm right. That," she said, pointing at Lucy's Volvo, "ain't no chicken-checker's car."

The henhouse was about thirty yards away, out back. Lucy and I waited while Ella disappeared inside for about three or four minutes. Because she was stooped over, she fit right inside the coop door.

Lucy whispered, "She's… interesting, isn't she?"

"Yes," I said. "She is."

Ella shuffled back out and double-checked the clasp on the fence around the henhouse.