During the two-hour drive to Dog Canyon-twelve miles on foot over the high country, nearly a hundred by road around the park's perimeter-Mrs. Thomas Drury told Anna more than she'd ever wanted to know about the Drury family in general and Sheila in particular.
Sheila's father had died when she was ten "… but in the sixth grade, not the fifth. Sheila may have been odd but she was always bright." Mrs. Drury had gone to work as a secretary then at Minnegasco in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was a good job. She still held it. During the drive from the Dark Canyon turnoff at Highway 62/180 to the Wildersens' goat farm six miles in, she listed the employee benefits.
At twenty-nine (Anna had been way off on Sheila's age. "She'd never use a decent night cream, though heaven knows I bought her enough jars-" Mrs. Drury explained), Sheila had still been on the company's life insurance plan. 108,000 would now come to Mrs. Drury. Five years' salary.
Anna had agreed that Minnegasco had an excellent employee benefit plan and Mrs. Drury's monologue moved on to new subjects. Sheila was an only child. Mrs. Drury's second pregnancy had ended in miscarriage and she hadn't the heart to try again, though she'd often thought it might have been better for Sheila if she had. Sheila was an odd girl, headstrong and wayward.
From the scraps of information dropped amidst the drawn-out recitals of people whose names and indiscretions meant nothing to Anna, she came to believe that Sheila's "waywardness" consisted mostly of a refusal to get her hair foiled though it was "… impossibly dark-almost like a Jewish person's"; her nails manicured "-though I offered to pay for it, and in the Cities manicures aren't cheap-"; and her steadfast refusal to date "nice boys."