“Stop! She tried to force him to have sex with her! He didn’t mean to kill her! It just happened! And I don’t know, didn’t see—he came and got the broom, but I wouldn’t look. I can’t think about it, I won’t. Things just got out of control. That’s the way it goes, sometimes, right?”
Oh God. “What did you expect when you let him have the gun, Nattie? What in hell were you thinking?”
“I couldn’t imagine he’d do it. He’d been so sweet, all along. He said he just wanted an advantage. It was a complicated piece of business, and we worked so hard on it. Monette just, just . . . got in the way. I know, I know, it was horrible. I can’t tell you . . . but he promised me that once we’d put the deal through, I could go see him in California. I’d have all the money I’d ever need, and he’d have a big finder’s fee from his California friends who were putting up the cash. Once the deal went through, we could do anything we wanted. Maybe I could even move out there and be with him. You’re not from here. You’re from country clubs and fancy schools. You lived in Berkeley and L.A. How could you possibly imagine what it’s like, growing up poor, and afraid, and your whole world being Laramie?”
“Is that why you haven’t told Dickie what you know? Because you’re hoping Marsh Carhart is your ticket out of here?” But then the truth struck Sally. “Or are you afraid he’ll get rid of you the way he got rid of Monette?”
“She can’t understand, Nattie. I told you,” came a voice behind Sally’s back. She turned. Marsh Carhart stood in the door of Delice’s office, pistol in his hand. Cold blue steel in his grip and his eyes. But then he made the eyes go warm, looking at Nattie. “And I said I’d take care of you, didn’t I, baby?”
“Marsh, what are you doing?” Nattie asked, staring at the gun.
“Solving a problem I should have finished off at the rodeo,” he answered flatly.
“You pushed me in that bucking chute!” Sally exclaimed.
“Evidently not hard enough,” he said.
“But tonight you brought the gun to make sure. That’s what the duster is about,” Sally told Carhart, her anger growing. “You’re even more asinine than I thought. What are you going to do, Marsh, shoot me? Haven’t you noticed that there are about five hundred people in this place?”
“You can shut up any time, Sally,” Carhart said. “You always did have a big mouth.”
“Not to mention,” Sally continued, ignoring him, “that Hawk is undoubtedly looking for me at this very moment, and will probably show up here inside of two minutes.”
Carhart laughed. “Imagine how that terrifies me. After what I saw of how the two of you reacted to finding that kid’s body up in the mountains, puking and shaking, I’m not too worried about his quick wits or reflexes. He’s a good match for you, I guess,” he added, “not too challenging.”
“You saw us?” Oddly, the thought of Carhart watching them cut, for a moment, through the fear and the fury, and embarrassed the hell out of her.
“My only regret,” said Carhart, as if to himself, “is that you arrived too soon for me to do a decent job of stowing the body. It was almost comic, though—I thought I’d about gotten her stuffed down in that precipice, and suddenly Nattie here was right beside me, blubbering something about people coming across the meadow. She recognized you, of course. I probably should have just shot you both then and there. A simple answer to a simple problem.”
“It won’t do you any good to shoot me now,” Sally told him, desperate to keep him talking. “The cops are on the way. And you want to know something? You didn’t even have to kill Monette. It wouldn’t have mattered if she’d told about the groundwater pollution.”
“What are you talking about?” Nattie asked, eyes wide amid the ruins of her makeup.
“Who could she tell? The state? They aren’t doing anything about it. Molly Wood?” Sally laughed bitterly. “She knows. Hawk told her last night. But from what you say, she’s ready to go ahead with the deal, creosote and dioxin in her well and all. In other words, Monette didn’t have anything on you that she could use. Isn’t it ironic?”
For the first time in twenty years, Sally saw an emotion she’d never seen cross Nattie Langham’s face: shame. Then Nattie collected herself. “This has gone far enough, Marsh. Would you please put my gun away?” Nattie said, trying for bravado, but achieving only pathos.
“Listen to me, honey.” Carhart’s voice was gentle, warm, as his eyes caressed Nattie, the .22 still pointed at Sally. “She’s the only one who can mess us up now. Her boyfriend may have figured out the problem with the land, but hey, he solved it for us by blabbing to Mrs. Wood. That’s good, very good, isn’t it sweetheart?”
Now his eyes glittered. His forehead was beaded with sweat. He licked his lips and spoke to Nattie again. “I put the money guys together with my old friend Sheldon and his land, didn’t I? I dealt with that little slut too. I can deal with Green later, but for now, we need to tie up this particular loose end. After I fire, I hand the gun to you. We’ll say she found your pistol in your purse. She tried to take it away from you, and you struggled, and it went off. An accident. I came in here and found you hysterical. It fits in your purse, right? It’s just a little gun, after all.”
Sally whirled and ducked just as the gunshot exploded in the tiny room. She felt something jerk her back as she hit the floor, heard Nattie scream.
She shook her head. A surge of unadulterated joy went through her as she realized that whatever had happened, she hadn’t been shot. She was shaking uncontrollably, but intact.
“That’s right,” said a voice. When she finally looked up, Hawk was kneeling in the doorway, inspecting the pistol on the floor. Carhart was still standing in the door, but there was an arm around his throat, the barrel of a 9-mm Glock up against his temple, the burning cold, clear eyes of Scotty Atkins just visible above the crown of Carhart’s black slouch hat. “It’s just a little gun,” Scotty said. “Mine’s bigger.”
Sunday
Chapter 29
Heaven and Hell
“Big, little, medium, tiny, behemoth, whatever, I hate them all!” Sally said, whisking green chiles into eggs for breakfast burritos. “I never, ever want to see another gun again. Half of what’s wrong with this country could be solved by banning guns. Look at my hat! It’s ruined.”
The 1907 Montgomery Ward hat sat in the middle of the kitchen table, a pair of matching bullet holes—entrance and exit—through the front and back of the crown.
“Oh, I don’t know. If it were me, I might hang it on the living room wall as a souvenir. Sort of a Wordsworth motif—intimations of mortality and all that,” said Hawk, sneaking up behind her to snitch some grated cheese. “And admit it, Sal, it’s not guns that made honky-tonk angels. You could take every weapon in the world, dig a hole two thousand feet deep, drop them in, and seal it all off with cement, and you’d still have more than enough cruelty, rage, horror, and just plain meanness in the world—hell, in the state of Wyoming alone. From what Scotty told me last night, Bone Bandy’s terrified of firearms, but what with his fists, and knives, and rocks, he’s done his share of harm.”
“Don’t you think it would be worse if he worshipped guns, like most people around here?” Sally slapped his hand as he pinched more cheese.
“You’re right, of course. Guns make bad things a lot worse. Look, can we stop having an argument where we both really agree, and just be relieved it’s all over? I’ve never been so glad in my life to see the end of Jubilee Days.” Hawk headed for the counter where they kept the coffee rig.
“All I want to do is sleep, cook real meals, take long walks, and read a million books, like a normal college professor,” Sally said.
“You want another latte?” Hawk asked her.
“What normal college professor wouldn’t?” she replied.
“Or even an abnormal one,” Hawk said. “I keep expecting Sheldon to show up demanding cappuccino. I still can’t believe you let him go back to Edna’s last night, even if he di
d promise to clear out of town at dawn.”
“As usual with him, there wasn’t any choice,” Sally said. “Obviously he couldn’t go to Dwayne and Nattie’s. He’s a greedy, self-obsessed little scumbucket, but he clearly didn’t know anything about the murder. He was really freaked about the whole thing.”
“If you ask me, he was more concerned about the idea that he wouldn’t be able to unload his land,” Hawk observed. “I don’t know why you cut him so much slack.”
“The slack ends if I go over there this afternoon and find him microwaving Dinty Moore Beef Stew in one of Edna’s pueblo pots,” Sally said. As Hawk busied himself with the espresso machine, she checked the hash browns in the frying pan. Almost crispy enough. “Do you think Nattie will have to go to jail?”
“I’d bet against it,” Hawk said. “The police will be needing her testimony against Carhart. The real estate deal is dead, and somehow I don’t think Molly will want to press charges for the attempt at fraud.”
“But Carhart’s already claiming that it was Nattie who killed Monette. It was her gun. Won’t she have to defend herself?” Sally poured the eggs into the sizzling frying pan.
“After last night? He shot at you, in case you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget.” Not even close.
“He’s the one they’re charging with the murder, and the assault on you at the rodeo, and last night. And can you imagine any Wyoming jury that would take the word of some slick-ass California ecologist over the local girl he done wrong? The author of Man, the Rapist? By the time it’s all over, they’ll probably award Nattie damages for pain and suffering.” Hawk poured milk in the steel pitcher.
“Did you see how Dwayne swooped right in to take care of her? I mean, there Nattie was, explaining to Scotty Atkins about the things she and her lover had been doing for the past week, while they’d obviously been keeping Dwayne in the dark about the tie plant pollution, not to mention the murder! And the whole time Dwayne sat right by her side, holding her hand, and wouldn’t let her open her mouth until he’d gotten that lawyer buddy of his in there, telling her exactly what to say.”
“If you were being interrogated by the police,” said Hawk, “I promise I’d get you an attorney.”
“I appreciate your devotion,” Sally said, scrambling eggs and chiles and cheese, warming tortillas on another burner. “But I wonder how you’d feel about listening to me talk about what a jerk I’d been while some other guy was seducing and deceiving me.”
“Aren’t you the one who sings a song called ‘Love Has No Pride’?” asked Hawk. “Maybe that’s Dwayne’s theme song.”
“And yours would be?” Sally inquired.
Hawk gave her a hard look. “I wouldn’t want to have to listen to any song that captured how I’d be feeling under those circumstances.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sally said quietly. “I think these eggs are about done.”
“Promise me something.” Hawk walked across the kitchen, wrapped his arms around her waist as she heaped potatoes on plates and folded the eggs into the tortillas. “Promise you’ll go back to being a normal college professor, and stop getting yourself into situations where guys pull guns on you.”
Sally said, “Am I too much trouble for you?”
A sigh escaped him. “Just enough, I guess.”
They were finishing their coffee and discussing whether they had the energy to go for a hike in the Snowy Range, or whether it would be more fun just hanging around the yard, reading novels and pulling weeds. It had, by any measure, been a taxing week. The phone rang. “Let the machine get it,” Hawk said. “It’s probably Delice wanting to rehash last night, or Maude, expecting the lowdown. They can wait.”
But when the answering machine clicked on, it was Molly Wood’s voice they heard. Hawk rushed to pick up the phone before she hung up.
“No . . . that’s not necessary. Really Molly, you don’t have to . . . but you don’t owe me anything. What you do with your land is your business ...Yes, Sally and I can get over there, if you want. But it’s really not . . . okay. I understand. We’ll see you in about an hour.”
Hawk hung up, scratched his chin, and sat back down with his coffee. “She wants to see us at the hospital. Said she owed me an explanation. Can’t imagine why.”
“You can’t? I can,” Sally told him. “At her request, you bust your ass digging up information on that mountain property and spend a night in the hospital, holding her hand, while her own grown children are snug in bed. I almost get shot over the deal, and in the meantime she announces that she’s ready to trade away her big piece of paradise for a bunch of cash and a much smaller property she knows is poisoned. I’d say that calls for an explanation.”
“I’m nothing to her,” Hawk said shortly. “It’s funny how you keep saying that. It’s almost as if you’re trying to convince yourself,” Sally told him.
“Oh yeah?” Hawk was on the defensive.
She took one of his hands in both of hers. “Okay, I’ll level with you. I like Molly Wood—I even admire her— but the New England schoolmarm thing works differently on you than me. It’s like she reminds you of some long-ago memory of your mother, and you’re fighting it, working hard to remember that she’s another person altogether. You’re doing the right thing, but it’s hard for you.”
“Thanks, Dr. Alder. I didn’t realize you were a psychiatrist as well as a historian,” Hawk said.
“Hawk, missing your mother doesn’t mean you love your father or your stepmother any less.” Sally leaned over and kissed him. “There’s enough to go around.”
“You’re making too much of this,” he insisted. “I just think Molly Wood’s business isn’t mine.”
“Then don’t go to the hospital. I, for one, am curious about what she has to say. I can fill you in later,” Sally said, picking up the empty plates and heading for the sink.
Hawk eyed her over his coffee cup. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. The last thing I want is you going up there to read her the riot act about dragging me into this thing.”
Sally grinned. “Still think I’m just enough trouble?”
Hawk grunted, staring at the Montgomery Ward hat, still in the middle of the table. “It’s one of those William Blake ‘heaven and hell’ things. You never know what’s enough until you know what’s more than enough.”
She’d always wanted a man who’d quote poetry to her. But she’d had in mind love sonnets, Shakespeare, or maybe John Donne. Not Wordsworth’s meditations on death or Blake’s odes to excess.
Still, he’d do. As she watched Hawk head out to the backyard to water the garden, smart and strong and serious and so very solidly hers, she knew he’d more than do.
The flowers were, of course, her idea. Hawk had put plenty of work into growing the cosmos and zinnias and marigolds that had only just begun to bloom in their garden, but it would never have occurred to him to suggest that they take Molly Wood a bouquet. It was Sally who cut the first bright blossoms, wrapped the stems in a wet paper towel, and then in aluminum foil. When they arrived Molly was cranked way up in the bed, reading glasses perched on her nose, doing a crossword puzzle.
“I’m surprised to find you alone,” Sally told Molly, putting the flowers into a water carafe on the bedside table. “I’d have thought your kids would be here.”
“Alice flew back to New Jersey this morning,” Molly said, taking her glasses off and letting them dangle. “Once she learned that the Centennial Bank had withdrawn financing for the land swap, she said she didn’t see a need to be here, and she really had to get back to work. I agreed with her. Evidently she’s having some problems with her business.” Molly’s blue eyes were very cool. “The orthopedist says I can go home tomorrow, and Philip is going to stay a couple of days and help me get settled. He’s off at the drugstore and the grocery now, getting the things I need. Thank you again for staying with me Friday night.”
“It’s good to see you feeling better,” Hawk told Molly.
“And good to know you’re being taken care of,” Sally added, struggling for compassion—and failing. “Sorry to hear that your real estate deal went south.”
Something flickered in Molly’s eyes, and she smiled very slightly. “No sense wasting time on the niceties, eh Sally? Well then, all right.” She aimed her gaze at Hawk. “Josiah, I think you have the right to know why, after all the trouble you took to warn me about the groundwater pollution on that land up at Happy Jack, I was willing to go through with the trade.”
Hawk stared out the window. “I told you, it’s none of my business. You asked me to check out the land, so I did. It wasn’t up to me to tell you what to do.”
Molly searched his face, finally managing to make him look at her (schoolmarm voodoo?). “No. And though you’ve no way of knowing it, I do know that country well, myself. I’ve been going up there to look at birds almost sixty years, after all.”
“Birds?” Sally asked, something starting to hum in her brain.
“Yes. When Ezekiel and I were first married, we used to birdwatch up there all the time. It was even better than it is now. The eagles were especially abundant.”
“Golden eagles,” Sally said.
Hawk stared at Molly. “You knew about the tie plant,” he said.
“We owned it,” Molly told him. “That was Zeke’s first big war contract. It was the beginning of his business. He named that company after the birds we saw. And of course, without it, we’d never have been able to dream of buying a place like Wood’s Hole. He always had a sentimental attachment to Golden Eagle.”
Hawk anticipated her. “But something happened to change that.”
Molly lay her crossword puzzle and her pencil next to her on the bed, and folded her hands. “Yes. Back in June of 1962. I remember the day quite precisely. We’d taken a picnic up to Happy Jack, figuring the eagles would be nesting. We’d seen half a dozen nests in years past, so we knew where to look. We were right, but there was something terribly wrong.”
Bad Company Page 32