Inhabited. Charlie Quimby

view overlooking the city was stunning.

      “Did you get my texts?”

      “Just opening them now, Jay.”

      “Well, take a look. It’s a travesty!”

      A photo of four large dirt mounds. The second shot showed the piles from a different angle. Another offered a close-up.

      “I’m not sure I see what’s going on here.” She didn’t do dirt, she sold houses.

      “It was supposed to be clean fill. The loads don’t match—brown, putty-colored, tan. This last one they delivered is pinkish and chunky, like somebody shelled shrimp in a sand box.”

      “It obviously came from different sites around the valley. Clean means it’s not polluted, that’s all. It’s just compaction fill. It doesn’t have to match.” She took a deep breath. Jesus. Artisanal fill. “What would you like me to do?”

      “You sold us the lot. You found us the builder. You fix it.”

      At least DeWitt had called her instead of raining down on the contractor, whose relationship was more important to her long term. Imported jerks like DeWitt tended to depart suddenly with enemies and severance packages, and his new house might be on the market before too long. To keep the door open, Meg left him with assurances she hoped sounded more cheerful than they felt.

      The morning’s trauma had drained her reserves. No more multitasking. Though it went against her grain, she set her phone to Do Not Disturb and slipped it in her bag. She had meant to bring her brightest, most vivacious self here, but in the lobby glass she saw a gypsy woman exhausted after a long day of telling fortunes. Pairing jangly beaded earrings with a messy bun pulled up in a silk scarf wasn’t such a festive disguise after all. Out in public, it took effort to maintain the super agent vibe when she disliked makeup and didn’t look like Norah Jones to start with. Clients expected to meet the woman in the photo on her website, the one whose headshot leapt out of the real estate section filled with agents posing confidently in their big hair and statement necklaces. She had spent two hours getting ready for her first photoshoot and another two under the lights, only to look like someone she had never seen before, had never been. The agency ran with the shot until she went off on her own and replaced it with something more realistic, more Grand Junction and less Palm Beach, but still stylish and warm and energetic and savvy. Meg Mogrin reduced to a one-inch thumbnail. That picture was always in her head somewhere, the standard, the summation, the brand. But it was nowhere on her face tonight.

      “You here solo?” a voice purred and an arm looped through hers. She turned into the piano-key grin of Donnie Barclay. Donnie glowed like someone half-famous, a second-rung character actor on his way to Telluride. Some moneyed people cultivated the blazer, boots and Levis look. Meg suspected Donnie merely lost interest in dressing up halfway down. Either way, it served his purpose. Without changing his costume, he could play the ranching patriarch with a little sideline gravel business or the prosperous entrepreneur who still clung to the old family homestead.

      “I was supposed to meet Eve,” said Meg. “Something must’ve come up.”

      “Oh, you know how that goes.” Donnie knew how everything went. “Eve runs behind ’cause it filters out the weak and the impatient.”

      He squeezed her arm against his ribs and leaned in so close Meg could smell wintergreen on his breath. Donnie wasn’t a flirt. He was interested in information. “Do you need to wait? I was hoping you could be my protector tonight.”

      “From Toby?” Toby Conifer, Senator Pinecone’s proper name.

      “From embarrassment. Toby’s let the kooks get to him. Used to be you could count on him to support ranching and drilling and stay-out-of-my-wallet. Now he wants to be sheriff and thinks we should run the county like its own damn country. Which I guess you can, if you like living in the eighteenth century. I need to find me another Republican.”

      “Well, that shouldn’t be hard around here,” she said.

      Donnie flicked his chaw into a waste bin. “He’s just started to tell a dirty joke. Let’s dive in while we have an opening.” They slipped through the entry, leaving the senator to wave a futile limb. “Now we gotta get past the lady from the history farm. Look at me like you’re fascinated as hell.”

      He had cheered her up already. “Maybe you should’ve brought Terri with you if you need protection so badly.”

      “Oh, Terri hates this shit. People who want to kiss my ass are always kissing hers just in case. The history farm wants Barclay Paving to buy some old Gilsonite mining cars for an interpretive asphalt exhibit, whatever the hell that is. I think it’s just a way to get a choo-choo train for the school kids.”

      “Kids need to learn about our agricultural heritage.”

      “I’m sure. But I already spend a ton to preserve it”—he winked—“every year I hang onto the ranch. You coming up this year?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe.”

      “You can’t work all the time. You gotta have some fun, too.”

      “The real estate market’s coming back. I have some years to make up for.”

      “Yup, I know.” He released her arm and turned to face her full on. “You gonna be okay tonight? You look a tad frazzled.”

      Donnie, bless him, thought he knew what weighed on her. More than two decades since Helen fell off Cold Shivers Point and Neulan Kornhauer came briefly under suspicion. Nearly a dozen years since Neulan’s role in other women’s deaths came to light. His flight and disappearance. Eight years ago, Meg took over funding the scholarship from her parents.

      “Who’s your girl this year?”

      “You can’t miss her. She’ll be the one with the purple streak in her hair. She sings in a band, plays piano and bass guitar, and her name’s Pandora Cox. How could I not pick her?”

      “Sounds like a handful,” he said.

      “That’s sort of the point.”

      “Is it a single-year deal or do you keep four scholarships going at a time?”

      She could see him doing the math in his head. “Depends. Some are two-year community college grants. Not all the kids finish.” Some who graduated had opted for marriage over career or assumed a bland adulthood. A few disappeared entirely. None had achieved the trajectory Meg had imagined for Helen.

      “I didn’t exactly know your sister.” Donnie’s gaze flicked out of the theater and came back to Meg. “But I feel your loss. I’m sure it’s not easy with that Kornhauer sonofabitch still out there.”

      “I put him out of my mind long ago,” she said.

      “Well, let’s hope he’s gone for good, and that it was a slow, nasty trip.”

      The scholarship winners trooped onstage. A boy led the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance and then a young woman stepped to a keyboard set up behind a microphone stand. In all black, she had a classical singer’s fullness and bearing, except for an amber wave through her purple hair. Pandora Cox rippled some opening chords. When her fingers reached the tonic, she rounded her lips into an 0 as if to say, you’re right, this is not going to be “The Star Spangled Banner.”

      In an earthy alto she sang “America the Beautiful,” drawing the nostalgia from the first verse’s spacious skies and fruited plain. After a quiet shedding of grace, she marched the next verse in a more military cadence past the alabaster cities. This time the refrain slipped into a minor key. Were others hearing this lamentation? A vision of America with gleaming cities walled away from human suffering. Where goodness and brotherhood dwindled into shining seas.

      “Well, that was different,” Donnie said.

      The daytime newscaster emcee asked a moment of silence from the already hushed audience for the quick recovery of our fallen police officer,