Day Three — Thursday

THURSDAY

One issue withliving in the Mountain Time Zone instead of the Eastern was if I wanted to get people before they left for lunch I couldn't dawdle around as long as I liked to in the mornings.

That wasn't nearly as bad a problem as people from the East Coast forgetting it was two hours earlier where I was, but I'd solved that with an app that blocked calls until a civilized hour. Only problems, now, arose from the exceptions.

Specifically my mother, who ignored it was one hour earlier than her Illinois clock.

I needed an app that blocked Mom unless the call involved dire emergencies — my definition of dire emergencies. Not hers.

Yes, Mom woke me up to tell me the first RSVP to the wedding had come in. A cousin of my father's called Mom to say the invitation arrived and she planned to come to the wedding with her son and daughter-in-law.

I'd thought they'd be no's for sure. Uh-oh.

"It doesn't count unless she mails it back," I said.

We'd sent RSVP cards to all guests that could be mailed back, with an option to RSVP via the wedding website Jennifer made for us — not an option this woman would take. Jennifer called the site minimalist. I called it something I was really glad she was handling.

Mom said, "I can just tell Jennifer to add her and her kids—" Who were older than me. "—to the website."

"Jennifer's in a rigorous academic program and already doing a lot—"

"It won't take her but a second."

"Mom—"

"What? Aren't you excited? It's really happening, Elizabeth. It's really happening."

It didn't take a distant relative RSVPing to make marrying Tom real. But maybe it did firm up the blurry view of the wedding on the horizon.

"That's great, Mom. And thank you for all you're doing—"

"Stop thanking me. I love it."

"—but I need to get to work."

****

It wasn't thatsimple to wrap up the call with Mom and there was me to get ready and Shadow to care for, but I did get myself to the KWMT-TV newsroom in decent time.

A snowflake, big and sloppy, far more like an Illinois flake than a Wyoming flake, hit my forehead just before I reached the door and slid over my eyebrow onto my cheek.

"It's snowing," I announced to the group standing near Audrey's desk. After all, reporting is my business. "Snow. It's supposed to be spring. The snow sure doesn't know it's spring."

"Sure it does," Diana said cheerfully. "It's spring in Wyoming."

Nala chuckled.

She was fitting in here a little too well.

"I was just about to tell the others," Leona said, "I came up with a great idea for Mike for selling Sherman to prospective KWMT hires — we recreate Sally Rand's Nude Ranch. That should get some attention."

"Sally Rand?" Nala repeated, obviously not knowing who she was.

"Nude ranch?" I repeated. An instantaneous memory of a recent ride on Slinger, the sweet-mannered horse Tom and Tamantha gave me for Christmas, surfaced with the idea of doing it nude superimposed and produced an involuntary, "Ouch, ouch, ouch." It had been bad enough with the effects of cold weather. Take off protective layers and... Ouch, ouch, ouch didn't do it justice.

"Emphasis on the nude, not the ranch," Leona said dryly. "It was part of a World's Fair in San Francisco."

"San Francisco? Sally Rand was famous for doing her fan dance at the Chicago's World Fair — 1933," I added with some pride that I remembered the date. "It celebrated Chicago's centennial. The fair, not the dance."

Diana chuckled.

"And for a bunch of astronauts decades later. You should look that up," I added to Nala's wide eyes.

Leona stayed on topic. "Yeah, I guess. But there was another World's Fair in San Francisco in 1939. And that's the one that had Sally Rand's Nude Ranch — it said Dude, but the first D was crossed off and replaced by an N. The girls were in areas behind glass and the customers moved past... or sometimes stopped for a while... while different groups of girls did rope tricks or fed baby farm animals or played badminton."

"Badminton?" Nala repeated.

"Because one does on a ranch," Diana said dryly.

Audrey sighed. "Might get attention, but not the kind we want."

Leona appeared ready to argue the point. With an eye on the clock, I interrupted "I wanted to ask you, Leona, what you know about Wendy Barlow's uncle, the original owner of the Elk Rock Ranch."

"Not original. Far from original, even if you're just talking about it being a dude ranch. Started as a cattle operation when people were first starting that around here. Another family made it into a dude ranch for quite a while. Barlows were friends of theirs. Came out here for a couple weeks, then bought the place right out from under them."

And now Randall Kenyon was trying to repeat that history.

"Nice friends," Audrey said, "buying the ranch away from them."

"Didn't seem to bother the folks selling all that much. They went off and started another one. New Mexico, I think. They weren't from around here," she added, explaining their odd behavior in choosing to go anywhere else.

"That would have been Chester's father who bought it. A real warm and cuddly type." Her tone said the opposite. "Family came out for the summer for about a decade or so — except the father, who was back East piling up money. Kids got older and that stopped. Seemed like they forgot it. Left a foreman to run the place, which he did just fine with some locals.

"Then, out of the blue, here comes Chester back to take over, turning it back to a dude ranch. What we learned soon enough was he'd mostly broken with his family — or vice versa — after some hijinks back East. Had to be about thirty by then, so he'd had a lot of years of hijinks.

"Guess the other Barlows accused Chester of playing around with the ranch, ignoring the real work of the corporation. Easy to tell they'd never done any ranch work. Give Chester credit, he did work hard at running the Elk Rock. Expect his family thought he'd come crawling back. Not him. He told them to — well, you get the idea. And the rift continued into the next generation. Except Wendy, who came out here to work one summer she was in college. Apparently, she was something of a rebel, too, and the family thought a summer of hard work would cure her, though not prepared to hand her over to just anybody to administer her discipline. So they sent her to Elk Rock for a summer under her uncle. And she never left."

"How'd that go over with the Barlows?"

"Major, major tizzy. Her father was the big muckety-muck in the family business by that time and he restructured the trust or something or other so she'd only get an equal share if she came back into the fold. She blew raspberries at him and his trust. Not that she was cut off entirely. Still was part of her grandfather's trust, though most of that rolled into the next generation — except Chester, of course. Still, Wendy probably got more each month than Cottonwood County's version of big earners make in a year or so. But nowhere near what her brothers got when their father died. And keep getting.

"Still, she's made a go of the ranch with enough left over for winters away. And, as far as I hear and see, she's happy with that."

"She's not part of the social scene in the county?"

"Not the core group, that's for sure. More connected with the businesses around that are useful to her for running the ranch or entertaining the dudes. Oh, she'll donate now and then. But seeing her at any of the events meant to be fun or going to be seen and see others? Not the past ten, twelve years, I'd say."

"I heard she was Cottonwood County's representative in the billionaire set."

"Could be from the trust along with the land value of Elk Rock. But like the rest of them? No way. Pretty sure the current chairman of the board's her brother. For sure her father was. And other brothers are in the stratosphere, too — power and money. But she parted ways from the family ages ago."

Leona's turn to check the time.

"I gotta go," she said. "I'm invited to a planning lunch for a charity event and I'm going home first to get ready like a normal person, despite this wretched job. Don't worry, Audrey, I'll be back in plenty of time to prep for the Five. Might not be totally sober, but I'll be here."

She was kidding about that last part. Pretty sure she was.

****

I called mylongtime friend Matt Lester in Philadelphia.

We'd gone to grad school together. He and his wife Bonnie and my now-ex Wes and I had all been close.

They not only stuck with me during the divorce, but took me in after the worst of Wes' skulduggery.

I'd talked with both Matt and Bonnie a few weeks ago. A lot of that conversation revolved around family, friends, and the unrelenting buyouts and layoffs of journalists by newspapers. So far, Matt was still standing.

Now, after a brief catch-up, he said, "So what can I do for you?"

I told him.

"Want me to research? Or off the top of my head."

"Start with off the top of your head."

"The Barlows are more Connecticut than Pennsylvania, but one branch migrated down here in the early twentieth century and immediately built a mansion in Gladwyne — still occupied by Barlows. Because of them, we keep an eye on the activities of the Connecticut crowd, too."

"Ever hear of Chester Barlow? He's been dead for decades, but he owned a ranch out here that his niece, Wendy, now owns and runs."

"Oh, yeah, Chester is famous. Outsiders might view him as a rebel or renegade, but to the Barlows, he was Benedict Arnold. It was quite a story at the time. His father basically cut him out of the trust, gave him a lump sum, which presumably he used to buy this ranch you're talking about, and the other Barlows washed their hands of him.

"Of the Connecticut branch, his older brother and their sister never had kids — probably too busy piling up cash. His younger brother had three boys and a girl—"

"Wendy."

"Right. Who was considered cut from the same cloth as Chester. In other words, the black sheep of her generation. Though from what I'm hearing, this generation is overachieving in the black sheep department. A couple have been in jail — and one wasn't even for white collar crime. How the mighty have fallen. I mean, fraud, insider trading, that's not really criminal, that's just playing the game hard. At least in their circles.

"Anyway, back to Wendy. She was given pretty much the same treatment as Chester. Not quite as severe from what I understand. Little contact with the rest of the family, but that seems to be more apathy than a never-darken-my-door-again decree. And the word is she does get a subsistence level income from the trust. You know, enough for her to live on like a regular person, but not like a Barlow."

"Any idea how much?"

"Dollar amount? No. The Barlows are strictly Don't Tell. Anything. Ever. That'll have to do for now, Elizabeth. I've got a lunch."

See? I knew it.