Day of the Dead by J. A. Jance Page A

heard the distant rumble of a train. Ranger heard it, too. The dog had been a long way ahead of her. Now he came loping back. As he drew closer, Sue saw he had something in his mouth. At first she thought it was a stick, but it wasn’t a stick. It was an arm—a bloodied human arm.
    “Drop it!” Sue screamed in horror. “Drop it right now!”
    Ranger did as he was told, then scampered to her side as the train rumbled nearer.
    Feeling faint, Sue Lammers struggled to get her cell phone out of her pocket. Her fingers felt like thick, clumsy sausages. The phone slipped from her grasp and fell to the ground. Landing on a rock, it bounced once and exploded. The plastic back fell off and the battery popped free. As Sue knelt to retrieve the scattered pieces of her phone, Ranger made another grab at his prize.
    “Leave it!” she exclaimed, but by then the train was right beside them, drowning out everything. Whether he heard her or not, Ranger complied, leaving Sue scrambling on her hands and knees as she reassembled the broken phone.
    It wasn’t until after the freight train had passed that Sue was finally able to get her fumbling fingers to press the necessary numbers.
    “Nine one one,” a businesslike voice said in her ear. “What are you reporting?”
    Sue Lammers took a deep breath. “I’m out walking south of Vail, south of Fast Horse Ranch,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “My dog just found somebody’s arm. A bloody human arm!”
    ***
    Distracted, Erik gave himself permission to stop short of the summit. With his back resting against a warm cliff face in a solitary canyon well below Finger Rock, he pulled out his peanut butter sandwich and savored the first bite. It was made the right way—the way Grandma always made it—with butter on both slices of bread and with the peanut butter slathered in between.
    He had traded lunches one day in the lunch room at Hollinger Elementary and had been surprised when his friend’s peanut butter sandwich was hard to swallow. It had stuck in his throat, and once he finally realized what the difference was, he had asked Gladys about it that evening.
    “Grandma,” he said, “did you know some people make peanut butter sandwiches without buttering the bread first?”
    “Yes.”
    “How come you always put butter on it?”
    “Because that’s the way you’re supposed to do it,” Gladys Johnson returned. “There’s always a right way to do something and a wrong way. Buttering the bread first is the right way.”
    “Is that how your mother did it?”
    Gladys nodded. “My mother,” she said. “And my aunt Selma, too. It’s the way everybody did it back home. Peanut butter was a lot stiffer in those days.”
    All these years later, even though Erik LaGrange had never met those fabled relatives he had heard so many stories about, he was glad he shared that one small trait with people who would forever be nothing but faceless names. Peanut butter on buttered bread was a tiny fragment of his own lost heritage.
    It’s the way I do it, too, he thought.
    ***
    That fateful President’s Ball had been on a Saturday night. The following Tuesday afternoon, Gayle Stryker rang Erik at his office.
    “I offered you a job the other night,” she said after identifying herself. “I thought you would have called about it by now.”
    Erik was so taken aback he could barely reply. “I wasn’t really thinking about making a change right now,” he stammered, sounding like a total dork.
    “Really,” Gayle Stryker said. “Are they paying you that much?”
    That was laughable because the truth was, they were paying him hardly anything at all. “Not really,” he admitted finally.
    In actual fact, Erik LaGrange was someone who resisted change wherever it presented itself. For him, staying in a less-than-optimal situation was better than striking off into the unknown. It made for a stable if relatively boring life.
    “How about if we get together tomorrow and have lunch?” Gayle