Vixen 03

The potato salad was hearty with just the right amount of tartness. The baked beans were thick with honey. Pitt did not recognize the meat or its taste, but found it delicious. In spite of the fact that he had eaten with Loren only an hour before, the aroma of the home-cooked meal inspired him to put it away like a farmhand.

"You folks lived here long?" Pitt asked between mouthfuls.

"We used to vacation in the Sawatch as far back as the late fifties," said Lee. "Moved here after I retired from the Navy. I was a deep-water diver. Got a bad case of the bends and took an early discharge. Let's see, that must have been in the summer of seventy-one."

"Seventy," Maxine said, correcting him.

Lee Raferty winked at Pitt. "Max never forgets anything."

"Know of any wrecked aircraft, say within a ten-mile radius?"

"I don't recollect any." Lee looked at his wife. "How'bout it, Max?"

"Honest to Pete, Lee, where's your mind? Don't you remember that poor doctor and his family that was all killed when their plane crashed behind Diamond?… How's the beans, Mr. Pitt?"

"Excellent," Pitt said. "Is Diamond a town near here?"

"Used to be. Now it's only a crossroads and a dude ranch."

"I recall now," Lee said, reaching for seconds on the meat. "It was one of them little single-engine jobs. Burned to a crisp. Nothin' left. Took the sheriff's department over a week to identify the remains."

"Happened in April of seventy-four," Maxine said.

"I'm interested in a much larger plane," Pitt explained patiently. "An airliner. Probably came down thirty or forty year ago."

Maxine twisted her round face and stared unseeing at the ceiling. Finally she shook her head. "No, can't say as I ever heard of any air disaster of that magnitude. At least not around these parts."

"Why do you ask, Mr. Pitt?" Lee asked.

"I found some old aircraft parts in Miss Smith's garage. Her father must have put them there. I thought perhaps he found them somewhere nearby in the mountains."

"Charlie Smith," Maxine said wistfully. "God rest his soul. He used to dream up more schemes to get rich than an unemployed embezzler on welfare."

"Most likely bought them parts from some surplus store in Denver so's he could build another one of his nonworking contraptions."

"I get the impression Loren's father was a frustrated inventor."

"Poor old Charlie was that." Lee laughed. "I remember the time he tried to build an automatic fishing-pole caster. Damned thing threw the lure everywhere but in the water."

"Why do you say 'poor old Charlie'?"

A sorrowful expression came over Maxine's face. "I guess because of the horrible way he died. Didn't Loren tell you about it?"

"Only that it was three years ago."

Lee motioned to Pitt's nearly empty bottle. "Like another beer?"

"No thanks; this is fine."

"The truth of the matter is," Lee said, "Charlie blew up."

"Blew up?"

"Dynamite, I guess. Nobody never knew for sure. About all they ever found they could recognize was one boot and a thumb."

"Sheriff's report said it was another one of Charlie's inventions gone wrong," Maxine added.

"I still say bullshit!" Lee grunted.

"Shame on you." Maxine shot her husband a puritanical stare.

"That's the way I feel about it. Charlie knew more about explosives than any man alive. He used to be an Army demolitions expert. Why, hell, he defused bombs and artillery shells all across Europe in World War Two."

"Don't pay any attention to him," said Maxine haughtily. "Lee has it in his head Charles was murdered. Ridiculous. Charlie Smith didn't have an enemy in the world. His death was an accident pure and simple."

"Everyone's entitled to an opinion," Lee said.

"Some dessert, Mr. Pitt?" asked Maxine. "I made some apple turnovers."

"I can't manage another bite, thank you."

"And you, Lee?"

"I'm not hungry anymore," Raferty grumbled.

"Don't feel bad. Mr. Raferty," Pitt said consolingly. "It seems my imagination got the best of me also. Finding pieces of an aircraft in the middle of the mountains… I naturally thought they came from a crash site."

"Men can be such children sometimes." Max gave Pitt a little-girl smile. "I hope you enjoyed your lunch."

"Fit for a gourmet_," Pitt said.

"I should have cooked the Rocky Mountain oysters a little longer, though. They were a bit on the rare side. Didn't you think so. Lee?"

"Tasted okay to me."

"Rocky Mountain oysters?" asked Pitt.

"Yes, you know," said Maxine. "The fried bull testicles."

"You did say 'testicles."'

"Lee insists I serve them at least two times a week."

"Beats hell out of meat loaf," Lee said, suddenly laughing.

"That's not all it beats hell out of," Pitt murmured, looking down at his stomach, wondering if the Rafertys stocked AlkaSeltzer, and sorry now he'd skipped the fishing.

3

At three o'clock in the morning Pitt was wide awake. As he lay in bed with Loren snuggled against him and stared through the picture windows at the silhouetted mountains, his mind was throwing images inside his skull like a kaleidoscope. The last piece of what had turned out to be a perfectly credible puzzle refused to fit in its slot. The sky was begi

Loren's old jeep was sitting in the driveway. He reached in, took a flashlight from the glove compartment, and entered the garage. He pulled the drop cloth aside and studied the oxygen tank. Its shape was cylindrical, measuring, Pitt guessed, slightly more than one yard in length by eighteen inches in diameter. Its surface was scratched an dented, but it was the condition of the fittings that attracted his interest. After several minutes he turned his attention to the nose gear.

The twin wheels were joined by a common axle that was attached at their hubs like the head of a T to the center shaft. The tires were doughnut shaped and their treads relatively unworn. They stood roughly three feet high and, amazingly, still contained air.

The garage door creaked. Pitt turned and watched Loren peek into the darkened cavern. He shined the light on her.

She was wearing only a blue nylon peignoir. Her hair was tousled and her face reflected a mixture of fear and uncertainty.

"Is that you, Dirk?"

"No," he said, smiling in the dark. "It's your friendly mountain milkman."

She heaved a sigh of relief, came forward, and gripped his arm for security. "A comedian you're not. What are you doing down here, anyway?"

"Something bugged me about these things." He pointed the beam of light at the aircraft fragments. "Now I know what it was."

Loren stood and shivered in that dirty, dusty garage beneath the silent cabin. "You're making a big deal over nothing_," she murmured. "You said it yourself.. the Rafertys had a logical explanation for how this useless junk got here. Dad probably picked it up at some salvage yard."

"I'm not so sure," Pitt said.

"He was always buying up old scrap," she argued. "Look around you; the place is full of his weird, half-finished inventions."