Winterkill

by C. J. Box

  “Joe, can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot,” Joe said, as he finished up the damage claim.

  Klein tapped the morning Saddlestring Roundup on the table. “What in the hell is going on in Saddlestring these days?”

  The headline read SECOND FEDERAL EMPLOYEE ASSAULTED. There was a photo of Melinda Strickland holding a press conference on the steps of the Forest Service office the day before, deploring the “outrageous attack” on Birch Wardell of the BLM by “local thugs.”

  “Is there really a movement afoot to go after the Forest Service and the BLM?”

  Joe looked up. “That’s what she seems to think, Herman.” The press conference itself was a unique event in Twelve Sleep County.

  “Is she serious?”

  “I think she is.”

  “That’s complete bullshit,” Klein snorted, shaking his head.

  “Herman!” Mrs. Klein scolded, placing the cookies on the table. “Watch your language.”

  “I’ve heard much worse,” Joe smiled.

  “Not from Herman, you haven’t.”

  His cell phone was burring in his pickup when Joe climbed in. He plucked it from its holder on the dashboard.

  “Game Warden Joe Pickett.”

  “Joe Pickett?” asked a female voice he didn’t recognize.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Please hold for Melinda Strickland.”

  Joe moaned inwardly. Strickland was the last person he wanted to talk to. He was placed on hold. Background music played. He identified the song as “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees. Only the U.S. Forest Service would have a waiting tape that old, he thought.

  He held. Maxine watched him hold, and minutes passed. He assumed that when the President of the United States wanted to talk with the President of Russia, this was how it worked.

  “Joe?” It was Melinda Strickland. She sounded chirpy.

  “Yes.”

  “Joe, my friend, how are things going? Are you hanging in there?”

  Her tone was that of a lifelong chum who was concerned with his health and welfare, which puzzled him.

  “I’m fine,” he said haltingly. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m getting hammered by the press asking questions about how you found Birch Wardell out on that road. They want to know how he got hit by your car, and all of that, you know?”

  Joe took the phone away from his ear and stared at it. Hammered by the press?

  “I hit Birch Wardell with my car because he was standing in the middle of the road,” Joe said flatly. “It was an accident. Then I took him to the hospital and stayed with him until I was sure he was okay.”

  “Joe, you don’t need to use that tone,” she said soothingly. “I’m on your side here, you know? They just keep asking me about you being there when Lamar Gardiner was killed, then you being there again when Birch Wardell was hurt.”

  Joe felt a flush of anger. “Are you suggesting I had something to do with those incidents?”

  “Oh, God no,” she said. “I’m on your side.”

  “What other side is there?” Joe asked. “And who exactly is ‘hammering’ you with questions?” In Saddlestring, there was the Roundup, an FM radio station, and one local AM station that played preprogrammed music, stock reports, and CNN radio newsbreaks.

  There was a long pause, and then she filled the silence with a rush of words. “That’s not why I called, Joe. Lamar Gardiner scheduled a public meeting for Friday night on the USFS strategic plan for this district . . . you know, the road closures. He announced the meeting quite a few weeks ago and I’m going to go ahead and chair it. I was hoping you would come and offer support. I know Lamar’s policies were controversial, and I could use your help on this.”

  The quick change of direction caught Joe by surprise.

  “I can be there,” Joe said, although he immediately wished he hadn’t.

  “Great, great. Thank you, Joe.” Her chirpiness resumed. “You be careful out there, my friend. Things may be a little dicey until we get all this stuff figured out with the Sovereigns—and who knows if they’ll go after state government representatives as well as federal land managers.”

  “Are the Sovereigns being targeted for Birch Wardell’s ambush?” Joe asked. He had heard nothing of this.

  “I’m not at liberty to say,”

  Then she wished him a good day and hung up. Joe listened to the silence on the phone for a moment, still not sure what had just transpired.

  The conversation left him flummoxed. He wished he had recorded it so he could replay it later, and try to make sense of it. Melinda Strickland seemed to be implying things—that Joe was the subject of controversy and suspicion, that forces were out to get her, that maybe Joe was aligned with those forces—while at the same time assuring him that everything was fine and that she and Joe were working well together. Her backtracking, when he asked her for specifics, he thought wryly, left a smell of burning rubber as she floored it into reverse.

  He turned off his cell phone so she couldn’t call again.

  Instead of returning home and to his office, Joe turned toward the BLM joint range-management study area. He wanted a clearer picture of the crash site and the terrain that Birch Wardell described. It took nearly an hour and a half on drifted-in gravel roads to get to the place where Wardell had seen the light-colored pickup that had fled from him and led to the accident.

  Joe stopped in the road and looked up the gently rising hill where Wardell said he had first seen the other vehicle. Gunmetal-gray sagebrush dotted the hillside, each bush supporting a shark-fin wedge of drifted snow. The rest of the ground was blown clean of snow, revealing gray dirt and yellow grass. It was the first grass he had seen for a couple of weeks.

  From where he sat in the idling truck, Joe could make out tire tracks in the crushed grass that led from the road he was now on to the top of the hill. The tracks, he assumed, were Wardell’s. On the top of the hill, against the sky, he could see a broken signpost. It was all just as Wardell had described it.

  Joe reached down and shoved the pickup into four-wheel drive, and ascended the hill, staying in Wardell’s tracks. At the top, near the broken signpost, he stopped. Beyond him, the breaklands stretched for miles until they melted into the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. The terrain was deceptive. At first glance, it looked flat and barren, like gentle corduroy folds. But the folds obscured rugged draws and arroyos, and small sharp canyons. Pockets of thick, tall Rocky Mountain juniper punctuated the expanse.

  With his binoculars, Joe swept the bottom of the hill, where Wardell said he’d wrecked his pickup. Sure enough, through the thick brush, Joe saw the back bumper of a BLM pickup pointing toward the clouds. The truck had crashed headfirst into a steep draw. It had been there for two days, and the BLM had not yet sent a tow truck to pull it out. For once, Joe was pleased with bureaucratic inertia.

  Joe found another set of tracks on the opposite hill that led up and over the top. Those tracks no doubt belonged to the vehicle Birch Wardell had been chasing. Slowly, Joe studied the bottom of the hill and the sharp draw that stretched out from both sides of the wrecked truck like a stiletto slash. He could see no obvious place to cross. There was no place to cross. But, damn it, that other driver had done it somehow.

  Joe sighed and lowered his glasses. How in the hell did he do it? He thought about the possibility of a ramp or bridge that the vandal had carried with him. Maybe he carried it in the back of his truck, and laid it across the draw. But that was too far-fetched, Joe decided. The distance across the arroyo was too great, and the logistics of carrying, deploying, and retrieving a ramp while being pursued were impractical.

  He sat back and thought about it. Maxine crawled across the seat and put her large, warm head in his lap. He studied the opposite hill, the dual sets of tracks up from the bottom of the draw, and the bumper of the wrecked truck, sticking up obscenely from the heavy brush.

  While he thought, a pronghorn antelo
pe doe and her yearling twins crossed in front of him. Their coloring was perfect camouflage for this terrain—finely drawn patches of dark tan, white, and black that blended in with the grassy, windswept slopes with their dark brush and dirty snowdrifts. At a distance, they fused so well with the landscape that entire herds were virtually invisible.

  Joe smacked the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “Damn, Maxine,” he said aloud, “I just figured it out.”

  Now it would be a matter of finding the light pickup, and letting himself be drawn in.

  Sixteen

  That afternoon, Marybeth went to work at her part-time job at the stables. Her mother, who had not left the house since her New Year’s Eve sojourn, stayed at home with Lucy and April, and Sheridan was at basketball tryouts at school. Joe had left early that morning to respond to Herman Klein’s call.

  All eight of the horses had stalls in the barn and twenty-four-foot fenced runs outside. They were in the runs when she drove up. She loved being around the horses, who had nickered a greeting when she arrived. There were four sorrels, three paints, and a buckskin. All belonged to boarders who paid monthly for shelter, hay, stall-mucking, and in some cases, grooming and exercise. All of the horses had grown hairy for the winter, and she liked the look of them: frosted muzzles billowing clouds of condensation, and thick, shaggy coats.

  She wore her thick canvas barn coat, Watson gloves, and a fleece headband over her ears and under her blond hair.

  The owner of the stables, Marsha Dibble, had left her an envelope pinned to the bulletin board inside the barn. In it was her paycheck for the hours worked in December, a “Happy New Year” card, and a Post-it note reminding Marybeth to add a nutritional supplement to the grain of one of the older mares. Because Marybeth’s arrival meant they would soon get their evening feed, all of the horses had come into their barn stalls to watch her. Using a long hay-hook, she tugged two sixty-pound bales of grass hay from the stack and cut the binding wires. She divided the hay into “flakes”—about one-fifth of a bale per horse—while the horses showed their impatience by stomping their hooves and switching their tails.

  It was while Marybeth mixed the granular supplement in a bucket with the grain that she noticed that several of the horses had turned their heads to look at something outside. Their ears were pricked up and alert. Then she heard the low rumble of a motor and the crunching of tires on snow. The engine was killed, and a moment later, a car door slammed shut.

  Assuming it was Marsha, Marybeth slid back the barn door to say hello. Her greeting caught in her throat.

  Jeannie Keeley stood ten feet away, looking hard at Marybeth through a rising halo of cigarette smoke and condensed breath. Behind Keeley was an old blue Dodge pickup. A man sat behind the wheel, looking straight ahead through the windshield toward the mountains.

  “Do you know who I am?” Jeannie Keeley asked. Her Mississippi accent was grating and hard. Dew you know who Ah yam?

  Keeley wore an oversized green quilted coat. Her small hands were thrust into her front jean pockets. She looked smaller and more frail than Marybeth remembered her from their brief introduction four years before at the obstetrician’s office. At that time, both were pregnant. Keeley had six-year-old April with her in the office at the time.

  “I know who you are,” Marybeth said, trying to keep her voice from catching in her throat. Behind her in the stalls, one of the buckskins kicked at the front of her stall to get her attention. Marybeth ignored the horse, her attention on the small woman in front of her.

  “I know who you are, too,” Keeley said. Her cigarette tip danced up and down as she spoke. “I want my April back.”

  The words struck Marybeth like a blow. Until this moment she hadn’t realized just how much she had hoped Jeannie Keeley’s arrival back in town was benign, that perhaps she was just passing through and making some noise.

  “We consider April our daughter now, Jeannie. We love her like our own.” Marybeth swallowed. “Joe and I are in the process of adopting her.”

  Keeley snorted and rolled her eyes.

  “That process don’t mean shit ’til it’s done. And it ain’t done if the biological mother don’t consent.”

  “She’s happy now,” Marybeth said, trying to talk to Jeannie mother-to-mother. “If you could see her . . .” Then she remembered the tracks in the snow and flushed with anger. “Or maybe you did see her. Jeannie, were you outside our house two nights ago? Were you looking into our windows?”

  A hint of a smile tugged at Keeley’s mouth, and she tipped her head back slightly.

  “Your house? That musta’ been somebody else.” Ay-else.

  Marybeth tried to keep her voice calm and measured, while what she wanted to do was scream and yell at Jeannie at the top of her lungs. In the back of her mind, Marybeth had been preparing for this fight ever since she heard that Jeannie Keeley was back. But she fought the urge to attack, choosing instead, and with difficulty, to try to appeal to Jeannie’s emotions.

  “Jeannie, you dropped April off at the bank with your house keys when you left town. I understand how painful losing your husband and your home must have been. But you made the choice to abandon your daughter. We didn’t take her from you.”

  Keeley eyed Marybeth with naked contempt. “You don’t understand nothin’ at all. I fuckin’ hate people who say they understand things about me they don’t.” Her eyes narrowed into slits. “There’s nothing for you to understand, Miss Marybeth Pickett, except that I want my baby back. She needs to be with her real mama, the one who changed her diapers. She was a hard birth, lady. She got me to bleedin’. I like to bled to death to bring her into this world.” Keeley’s voice lowered: “I want my daughter . . . back . . . now.”

  Marybeth glared back. She felt her rage, and her frustration, building. This woman hated her. This stupid, trashy woman hated her.

  “We love April,” Marybeth said evenly. The words just hung there.

  “That’s mighty white of you,” Keeley smirked. Tha’s mahty waht uv you. “But it don’t matter. She’s not your child. She’s my child.” Chile.

  Marybeth realized that Jeannie was trying to bait her, trying to get her to lose her cool and say or do something that would look bad if they ever ended up in court. Jeannie had even brought a witness with her.

  Again, Marybeth forced back her rage, and spoke softly.

  “Jeannie, I do understand what it’s like to lose someone. I lost my baby four years ago. Did you know that? Remember when we met at the doctor’s office when we were both pregnant? I lost that baby when a man shot me. He was the same man who killed your husband.” Marybeth’s eyes probed for a sense of connection or compassion, but neither was forthcoming. “After I got out of the hospital, we found out about April. We took her in as our own. She’s part of our family now. She’s got wonderful sisters who care for her. Joe and I care for her. Can’t you see that . . .”

  Marybeth needed to be careful here, and she tried to be. “Can’t you see that April is happy, and has adjusted? That the greatest gift a mother can give is to make sure her child is loved and cared for?”

  Jeannie Keeley took her eyes off Marybeth, and seemed to be searching the snow for something. Absently, she dug in her coat pocket for another cigarette and placed it in her mouth, unlit.

  Marybeth noticed that the man driving the pickup had finally turned his head to look at her. He was severe-looking, older than Jeannie, with an unkempt growth of beard. He wore a dirty John Deere cap. His eyes were sunken and dark, his pupils hard dots.

  A match flared, and Marybeth looked back to Keeley as she lit her cigarette. Was it possible she was reconsidering, that Marybeth had touched her?

  Keeley let two streams of smoke curl out of her nose. “Fuck you, princess,” she hissed. “I want my April back.”

  Marybeth clenched her teeth, and her eyes fluttered. She thought that in four steps she could be on this horrible woman, pummeling her head with the hay hook that hung within easy reach on
an upside-down horseshoe inside the door.

  It was as if the man behind the wheel could read her mind, and he quickly opened his door and walked around the front of the truck. He stopped and casually pulled open his coat so that Marybeth could see the faux-pearl grip of a heavy stainless-steel pistol stuck into his greasy jeans.

  “We best go, honey,” the man said to Jeannie Keeley.

  Keeley snorted, her eyes locked in hatred on Marybeth. The man reached up and put his hand on Keeley’s shoulder but she shook it off.

  “We best go.”

  “Look at that bitch,” Keeley said, her voice barely a whisper. “Look at her standin’ there like some kind of goddamned princess. She loses her baby so she thinks she can just steal mine to make up for it.”

  That tore at Marybeth, but she stood still and firm. Four steps, she thought.

  The man moved behind Keeley, and put his arms around her, squeezing her into him, his head close to her ear, “I said let’s go. We’ll get April back. The judge said we would.”

  Jeannie started to resist, but was obviously overpowered. She relaxed, and he released his grip. She never broke off her glare at Marybeth.

  “What was that about a judge?” Marybeth asked, not able to stop a tremble in her voice.

  Keeley smiled, shaking her head instead of speaking. “Never mind that,” she said, and backed up past the man, never taking her eyes off of Marybeth until she bumped up against the door of the truck. “You just better be packing her stuff up so’s she’ll be ready when we come get her and take her home.”