The Wilding Probate: A Bucky McCrae Adventure

by D. J. Butler

  Evil also gave the sheriff Michael Fellows’s phone and I handed over the will. Dad saw the will and swore. He’s no nun, but he’s not a big one for blue streaks, either, so as soon as he’d cursed he looked at me and tried to explain himself.

  “I think that was stolen from our office,” he said.

  Our office. For no particular reason, I liked that a lot.

  Dad hugged me many times. He smelled like he hadn’t showered, but I knew I smelled worse.

  “Well, you both need to get to the Urgent Care,” the sheriff finally said. It felt like hours had passed since we’d come over the hill, but I’m sure it had only been minutes.

  “I’ll drive them,” Dad offered.

  “I’ll lead out,” the sheriff said. “And I’ll throw on the flashing lights so we can really kick some ass.”

  “Don’t you want to go catch Fellows?” I asked.

  Sutherland nodded in the direction of his men, disappearing over the ridge. “That’s my responsibility and I’ll take care of it. I owe a duty to you, too.” Then he reached inside his truck and hit the flashing lights.

  Evil practically fell into the back seat of the Taurus. I backed into the shotgun seat, feeling my entire body stiffen as I swung my feet into the car.

  “You did great, Bucky,” Dad said, as we followed Sheriff Sutherland’s flashing lights past the Stub and into town. “Only you could have called me last night, you know.”

  “Dad.” I didn’t really have a sentence to follow it, so the word just dropped into the hum of the car.

  “My guess is you were trying to protect me. But you could have called.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We passed the Law Offices of James F. McCrae and the Fun Lanes as I said it, and the parking lot caught my eye. It was full of cars.

  Three black SUVs. On the small side for SUVs, kind of sporty-looking.

  “What do you think?” I asked, pointing. “The feds?”

  “We’ll find out,” Dad said. “First things first.”

  Howard doesn’t have a hospital. You need a real hospital, you have to get down to Boise or over to Yakima, and for specialties you might need to go as far as Salt Lake or even Seattle. Howard has a couple of doctors, and it has the Urgent Care.

  The Urgent Care is owned by one of the big healthcare conglomerates that are eating up all the hospitals in this country, but since the sign on the front says Urgent Care in big red letters that glow at night, that’s what everyone calls it.

  In the lobby there was one guy with a bandage around his head and another fellow leaning over a wastebasket like he was going to throw up, both of them waiting for attention. But Sheriff Sutherland beat me, Evil, and Dad to the front desk by a minute or so, and when I limped up behind him he was saying, “Front of the line, Ginger. She’s been shot, and he got whacked upside the head.”

  I didn’t know the receptionist, but I guess her name was Ginger. I smiled at her, and she flashed me a grin full of snaggles. “Then they’re next.”

  It’s a small town. The sheriff asks you to do something, it’s a good idea to do it.

  Two hours later, I was sitting on the edge of a bed in one of the treatment rooms, my arm in a cast and the Percocet starting to kick in, when the door opened. Evil came in, and the sheriff followed. Evil had a bandage wrapped around the top of his head, neat enough it almost looked like a cap. His ankles were wrapped in bandages, too.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked. “Dealing with the feds?”

  “What feds?” The sheriff’s face could jump from a grin to a scowl in nothing flat, and it did so now.

  “I don’t really know if they’re feds,” I said. “There were trucks at the Fun Lanes when we passed.”

  Sheriff Sutherland shook his head and clucked his tongue. “I’m afraid you just failed the job interview, Miss McCrae. A trained officer would have looked at the license plate while she was passing and would have known that those vehicles did not belong to the federal government.”

  “Yeah,” I shot back, “but I’m not a trained officer. I’m just a job applicant, so you should hire me and train me to look at license plates.”

  The sheriff looked at Evil and bobbed his head back and forth, as if he were weighing the possibilities and looking for a second opinion. “It’s true you preserved the life of a suspect in an ongoing murder investigation.”

  Evil blushed. “Hey…”

  The sheriff laughed and clapped Evil lightly on the shoulder. “Truth is, if I’d been in your shoes, I might have shot the bastard. And if you’d done it, given all the circumstances…well, let’s just say that my office would not have investigated you for anything.”

  “Thanks,” Evil said.

  “Which doesn’t mean you got a license to go shooting people, kid. And which also doesn’t change the fact that it is slightly problematic that our suspect is not where you left him.”

  I felt a cold hand close around my heart. “Can you track him?”

  “We're working on it. Got a good old-fashioned manhunt going on, all my deputies and highway patrol helping out, cars watching all the major intersections.”

  “There just aren’t that many roads,” Evil said.

  Sheriff Sutherland nodded. “But there’s a lot of back country. If this guy’s comfortable in the woods, and he’s not hurt too bad, he might just hike out of state without ever being seen by anybody. And of course, if he’s not comfortable in the woods, he might freeze to death in some canyon and never get found.” He squinted at me. “What’s your sense?”

  I ignored the rushing sound of my own blood in my ears and tried to think. “His resume said he was from New York City, but that must have been fake.”

  Sheriff Sutherland nodded. “I called the New York State Bar. They don’t know a Michael Fellows.”

  “Cell phone number?” I asked. There must be some way to identify this guy.

  “Prepaid phone. Burner.”

  I thought about the sheriff’s question. “The impression I mostly got was competence,” I said finally. “I’d say this little trip to Howard isn’t his first rodeo.”

  “Green Beret, Ranger, something like that,” Evil threw in. “He was pretty comfortable shooting at people and tying them up.” I thought Evil seemed excited to imagine that he had gone up against a Green Beret and won…but I didn’t say anything.

  Sheriff Sutherland took off his big hat and spun it around one fist. “Any reason you can think of he might want to come after either of you?”

  “He wanted the will,” I said.

  “I think your dad’s gone off to file that with the court. Or at least a certified copy, since the original is in my evidence room. Curious he was so interested, isn’t it?”

  “We’re witnesses,” Evil pointed out.

  “Yeah.” Sutherland sighed. “There is that.”

  “Who do you think he was working for?” I asked.

  “Somebody interested in the will,” the sheriff said. “Which in itself is kind of odd, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah? What’s so odd?”

  “I read the will before I filed it away as evidence. It just gives everything to the wife.”

  “Marilyn,” I said.

  “Yep. And under state law, Marilyn probably gets everything, anyway. I suppose Aaron had wealth from before their marriage that you could isolate, but…community property, and they’ve been married a long time.”

  “So someone has gone to a lot of trouble over a will that doesn’t really matter,” I said. “That tells the court to do exactly what it would have done if there hadn’t been a will at all.”

  I thought about that.

  Evil grimaced as if he was thinking about it too, and the sheriff put his hat back on.

  “You’ll be glad to know this, though,” Sheriff Sutherland said.

  “Tell me.”

  “We did a uniform audit down at the station. A uniform’s missing. Stolen.”

  “So whoever killed Charlie Herbert, it wasn’t
one of your deputies.” That took one worry off my mind, but of course it only created another mystery. Why would anyone steal a uniform and pose as a deputy in the first place?

  “Probably wasn’t a deputy.” Sheriff Sutherland stepped into the door. “Now, as it turns out, I’m your ride. Where do you two want to go?”

  “The office.” I was tired, but if Dad was making court filings, I should be involved.

  “Home.” Evil grinned at me. “I could use the sleep.”

  We dropped Evil off first. The Pattens are sagebillies, but they live close to town, so it was only a couple of miles out into the Flats before the sheriff pulled over and Evil tumbled out. His parents hadn’t come to the Urgent Care and they weren’t at the trailer to meet him, either, but neither fact surprised me; Evil’s dad was a long-haul trucker who was more often than not out of state, and his mom worked at a rest home in Yakima, three days on and two off. During her work days, she just stayed in Yakima with her sister, which meant that Evil was frequently the closest thing there was to an adult at his family home.

  He waved at me as he loped through tall yellow grass toward the doublewide where he lived with his family. “Groundhog Day!” he called out.

  So I was going to get another movie invitation. I could live with that. I smiled and waved back, and then Sheriff Sutherland took me to the Law Offices of James F. McCrae.

  The canary yellow H3 was parked in front, right next to Dad’s Taurus. At the sight of it I hesitated, not opening the door to let myself out of the sheriff’s truck.

  “Bucky?” the sheriff prompted me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just…last time I saw this car, it was right before Evil got tied up in a bathtub and then I witnessed a murder.” I shuddered. “Two murders, actually, if you count the one I couldn’t actually see.”

  “I’ll come in if you like.” The sheriff turned off the truck.

  That did it. “Nope.” I opened the door and popped out. “Thanks. Dad’s here. Besides, the H3 belongs to Marilyn Wilding. She’s a client.”

  “You know,” Sheriff Sutherland said, leaning across the shotgun seat and lowering his voice, “I understand clients are hard to come by around here, and rich ones are even harder. But if it turns out Marilyn Wilding had anything to do with, say, Charlie Herbert’s death…”

  “Dad might get conflicted out of a client.”

  “For starters.” The sheriff looked me in the eye. His gaze was cold and clear, even though his face was warm. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to her yet about what happened today. About Fellows and the strange things he had you say.” He shrugged. “Maybe I should come in and talk to her in the presence of her lawyer.”

  This kind of stuff might not fly in the big city. It felt kind of incestuous. Conflict-prone. But in the big city, a woman like Marilyn might have five or six different lawyers. Here, there was Dad. His bad luck, or hers, that I happened to be his daughter.

  And besides, there might not actually be a conflict. Marilyn might not have anything to do with the burglary and murder committed in the Fun Lanes.

  I nodded and trundled slowly toward the door.

  The sheriff caught up to me as I entered. We both waved to Gladys. She opened her mouth when she saw me, as if she wanted to say something, but then she saw Sheriff Sutherland and just waved back. We turned and headed for the office.

  “You’d never believe it,” Sheriff Sutherland muttered under the crashing of pins, “but that woman was hell on wheels once.”

  “I believe it.”

  “In some ways, she still is.”

  I kind of wanted to ask what that meant, but I was also a little afraid of the answer. I held my tongue.

  The office door was shut, so I knocked. “Come in!” Dad called.

  The last time I’d been in the office, there had been a corpse on the floor. I stepped inside, half-expecting to see Charlie Herbert still lying there, even half-expecting he’d sit up and crack a hobo grin at me and tell me I’d been punked on national television.

  But I hadn’t been pranked, and he was dead. At least his body had been removed from my Dad’s floor. Someone had scrubbed out most of the blood, too, though the carpet still looked damp and a little dark.

  Dad sat behind his desk, and Marilyn Wilding sat on the other side. On the desk between them rested a photocopy with a blue-inked notary’s signature in the corner.

  “Rebecca, isn’t it?” Marilyn Wilding swooped down on me. “I’m so glad to see you’re alright. Your father has explained about…about that man.”

  “Right.” Sheriff Sutherland stepped forward. “This is a little messy, Ms. Wilding, and I regret that I haven’t been able to speak to you earlier. But I gather you saw Bucky…that is, Rebecca, earlier today.”

  “This morning, yes, I did.”

  “And can you tell me what happened then?”

  Marilyn seemed surprised to be asked the question. “Well, I had spoken to her yesterday about Aaron’s will, and she explained…she explained to me a little about the process. Probate, you know. And her father was supposed to have come around with the will in the morning, to read it with me one last time before filing it with the court, only he hadn’t.”

  “Just slept in, did he?”

  “No, his office was broken into. And the will had been taken.”

  “Anybody you know who would want to take the will, Ms. Wilding?”

  She shrugged. “I understand it’s been found again. This man Fellows had it, though I have no idea why he’d want it.”

  “Do you know Michael Fellows?”

  Marilyn Wilding only shook her head.

  “Hmmm.” Sheriff Sutherland took off his hat and carefully hung it on Dad’s hat rack. “So Jim McCrae called to say he couldn’t make it, and then what happened?”

  “Then Rebecca showed up at my door. And she…forgive me for saying this, dear…she looked terrible. She looked like a mess. Like she’d been camping.” She gestured at my jeans, which were still filthy. I nodded. “And she said something I didn’t understand.”

  “Like, in Swahili?” Sheriff Sutherland didn’t actually wink at me, but it felt like he did.

  Marilyn shook her head. “I mean, she said her boss had the thing I wanted, and her boss wanted money. Oh, but she said her boss wasn’t James.”

  All this, I had told the sheriff and Dad already.

  “And could that thing, that Bucky was being made to offer…could it have been the stolen will?”

  “I don’t understand why. I don’t think the will’s remarkable at all.”

  The sheriff chewed on that thought a moment, nodding. “Then a man came out and chased Rebecca,” he said.

  “Yes.” She looked at me with big, pleading eyes. “I’m really sorry about that. That was Nick. He didn’t understand, he thought I’d been threatened, and he…I’m afraid he wanted to scare Rebecca off.”

  “How did he try to do that?”

  “With a gun. A shotgun. He chased her, but then that…Michael Fellows…shot him.” As she said these words, Marilyn’s voice slowed down, and a tear formed in the corner of each eye.

  “And who was Nick, exactly? Some kind of family?”

  “Oh, no.” Marilyn looked at the two men, and then at me. “This is awkward,” she said. “You’re going to think the wrong thing.”

  “I think that’s a risk you’d better take,” the sheriff suggested. “Don’t you?”

  “You’re not going to like me.” Marilyn Wilding nodded and took a deep breath. “Nick was my lover. But you don’t understand.”

  “I think I understand,” the sheriff said quietly. He avoided looking at Dad.

  “No, you see—Aaron knew.”

  I don’t feel like I’m a sheltered person, and although I still can’t buy beer or cigarettes in this state, I’m not a kid.

  But I was pretty taken by surprise by what Marilyn Wilding had to say. I was surprised enough that I had to catch myself against the wall to avoid falling.

  “
Oh?” Sheriff Sutherland’s voice showed no surprise at all. I guess he had years of experience taking things in stride. “Open marriage, was it? You both getting a little bit on the side?”

  Now Marilyn looked away. “Not generally, no. But Aaron was ill for a while. And he…he wanted me to be happy.”

  I tried to set aside my personal shock and read Marilyn’s face. She dared everyone in the room to judge her. I tried to imagine Dad saying anything similar to Mom, and it just didn’t feel real.

  “And you’re sure you didn’t know Michael Fellows? Or did Nick know him?” Sheriff Sutherland asked.

  “No.” She said it very quickly. “I mean, I don’t think so. I don’t know the name. Why?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Fellows shot Nick from behind. It wasn’t self-defense, he didn’t have to do it. In fact, it seems to me he probably lured Nick out into the open by sending Bucky here to offer to sell you something. One reason he might do that would be if Fellows had a grudge against Nick.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, the other possibilities are stranger. Because if he didn’t have a grudge against Nick, then Fellows wanted Nick out of the way. That suggests that maybe he wanted something in your house. Any idea what that could be?”

  “I…no.”

  “Or maybe he wanted Nick dead first, so he could get a clear shot at you. Only, no, you answered the door. If he’d wanted you dead, he could have shot you then. Or maybe Rebecca kept him from getting off a clean shot.”

  “Sheriff, this is…macabre.”

  “Yeah.” The sheriff nodded, and showed no signs of stopping. “And it also suggests he knew he could get Nick out by claiming he had something to sell. Fellows thought you were in the market for something. You sure you have no idea what that could have been?”

  “He had the will. Maybe he thought I wanted that so much I’d pay for it.”

  “Did you?”