by C. J. Box
Arlen nodded.
“Well, Opal’s approach was to start a file with a receipt from the first hayseed purchased for a specific meadow and go from there. She’s even put the purchase of a new tractor in that hay file if the tractor was used for cutting and baling. If one of your employees fell off the hay wagon and busted his arm, the workers’ compensation hearing materials would be put in the hay file.”
“We paid workers’ comp?” Arlen asked, surprised his mother had been so progressive.
“No, of course not,” Marybeth said, shaking her head. “Opal fought every single claim to the death. My point is that the only way to figure out what you’ve got here is to understand how Opal kept track of everything. It was her own system, and I still don’t have everything figured out yet, but I’m getting there. There are a few bundles of invoices I can’t assign to a specific project or category yet.”
“You’ve done a great job,” Arlen said. “I looked at that stuff for a month and couldn’t make anything out of it. My lawyer looked at it for ten hours, which he charged me a hundred dollars per hour for, and handed it all back and said there was no logic to it. But you figured it out. Damn, you’re good.”
Marybeth thought, Yes, I am.
“So?” Arlen said.
Marybeth arched her eyebrows, not sure what he was asking.
“Are we making money?”
“You’re making a ton of money.”
“Did you find anything that will help me in my battle with Hank?”
“Actually,” Marybeth said, “Hank’s side of the ranch seems to make more money than yours. It’s more efficient.”
Arlen said dismissively, “You mean he’s more ruthless.”
“If that’s possible,” Marybeth said, thinking of the workers’ comp claims.
Arlen’s cell phone rang and he jumped in his chair, clawing for it. Marybeth sat back and observed. He plucked the phone out of his pocket and stared at it for a moment while it rang. She realized he was unfamiliar with it, and didn’t know for sure how it worked.
“New phone,” he mumbled to her. “The buttons are so damned small . . .”
But he pushed one and held it up to his face, tentatively saying, “Yes? This is Arlen?”
From where she sat, Marybeth could hear a loud, deep voice on Arlen’s phone. As he listened, Arlen peered around her office. His expression was anticipatory.
“You’re here now?” Arlen said, looking at Marybeth as if she should be as amazed as he was at the identity of the caller. “You’re right outside on the street?”
Arlen signed off, dropped the phone in his pocket, and stood up. His face had drained of color.
“Meade Davis is outside,” Arlen said, referring to the lawyer Opal was rumored to have worked with to develop an updated will. “He just got back from Arizona today and he says everybody he meets tells him we’ve been looking for him. He said someone broke into his office while he was away and stole a bunch of records. But he says he’s got some news for me.” Arlen was clearly excited.
Marybeth said, “You’d better go meet with him, then. Maybe we’ll actually see a resolution to the dispute. Please let me know how it goes.”
“I will,” Arlen said, acting more nervous than Marybeth had ever seen him.
When he left her office his Stetson and barn coat were still on her couch, so she knew he would be back.
She stood up and watched him through blinds. He bounded outside and approached the dusty black Lincoln Continental that belonged to Meade Davis. Davis got out. He was portly, avuncular, with thinning hair and a white mustache and a quick smile. Arlen and Davis were of the same generation. Marybeth watched Davis shake Arlen’s hand, then place his other hand on it as well, as if offering condolences. Then he shook his head from side to side, and Arlen looked momentarily distraught.
It looked to Marybeth as if Davis was delivering bad news. Marybeth was surprised, but not as surprised, it seemed, as Arlen.
But Arlen quickly recovered. He spun Davis around, threw an arm over his shoulder, and they started walking away, Arlen bending his head toward Davis, putting his face in Davis’s ear, his jaw working, talking up a storm.
AN HOUR LATER, Arlen burst through her door. His eyes blazed.
“There was a secret will,” Arlen said excitedly. “Meade Davis drew it up last fall. Mother gave me the entire ranch, as I knew she would. Hank gets nothing.”
Marybeth was taken aback. But when she watched them it had looked like . . .
“Congratulations are in order, I guess.”
“You can say that again,” Arlen said, beaming.
“When I saw you outside, it looked as though Davis was telling you something awful. You looked unhappy with what he said.”
Arlen stared back at Marybeth as if frozen against a wall by a spotlight. He regrouped quickly, and fully, threw back his head and laughed too loudly for the room. “When he told me his office had been broken into and the will stolen, I thought Hank had beaten me once and for all. That’s probably what you saw. Then I realized that if Meade testifies to what it said, and what Mother’s wishes were, it’s as good as finding the will in the first place! You must have seen me before I figured that out.”
“That must be it,” she said, rising and holding out her hand. “Again, congratulations.” She said it not so much for Arlen but for the rest of the valley.
19
AFTER THE DINNER DISHES WERE CLEARED AWAY, Marybeth and her mother, Missy Vankueren-Longbrake, sat down at the kitchen table with cups of coffee. Joe had called from somewhere in the mountains to say he would be late and he would have to miss dinner because someone had reported a poacher allegedly firing at a herd of deer. Marybeth found it suspicious that the night her mother came to visit was the night Joe happened to be late.
Missy had retained her previous name and added the “Longbrake” after marrying local rancher Bud Longbrake six months before, saying she liked the way it sounded all together. Sort of patrician, she explained.
Sheridan and Lucy were in their room, ostensibly doing their homework. Missy favored Lucy, and Lucy played her grandmother like a musical instrument. Sheridan seemed to hold both of them in disdain when they were together because she claimed they fed off each other and thrived in a place she called “Girlieville.”
Marybeth had just told her mother about the Miller’s weasel stuck to the front door and the elk heads on the fence the week before. Missy shook her head in disgust while she listened. Marybeth knew Missy’s ire was aimed at Joe as much as the incidents themselves. It was no coincidence that Missy and Joe were rarely in the same house together. She tried to time it that way. The two of them had been operating under a kind of uneasy truce borne of necessity: they had to live in the same county and there were children and grandchildren involved, so therefore they couldn’t avoid each other. But they did their best.
“SO WHERE ARE the elk heads?” Missy asked, raising her coffee cup and looking at Marybeth over the rim.
“Joe buried them somewhere out in the woods. I think he was ashamed of them.”
“My God. You can’t imagine some of the things people are saying in town,” Missy said. “They loved those elk. The people can’t understand how someone could just shoot them right under the nose of the local game warden.”
“Mom, Joe’s district is fifteen hundred square miles. He can’t be everywhere.”
“Still . . .” Missy said, sighing. That “still” seemed to hang in the air for quite some time, like an odor. Then Missy leaned forward conspiratorially. “I can’t help but think it has something to do with the situation on Thunderhead Ranch. Your husband must have done something to make one side or the other angry.”
Missy said your husband instead of using Joe’s name when she was making a point.
“My guess is he angered Hank,” Missy continued. “Hank would do something like that. I’ve heard he’s hired a bunch of thugs to do his dirty work. I know Arlen pretty well and he’s a good man a
t heart, a good man. He’s the majority floor leader in the Senate, for goodness sake! We serve together on the library board.”
“I know you do,” Marybeth said, looking away.
“You don’t have to say it like that. I’ve had several long conversations with Arlen.”
“Mom, Joe and I have been here for six years and we can’t figure out all the history in this valley with the Scarletts. No one can who hasn’t grown up here. There’s just so much to know. Yet you’ve been here two and a half years and you’re an expert?”
Missy raised her eyebrows and narrowed her eyes. She had a glass doll-like face that belied her age. It tightened with arrogance. Marybeth hoped she hadn’t inherited that particular look.
“Some of us have the ability to get to the bottom of things quickly.” Her eyes flicked in the direction of Joe’s tiny office, then her voice turned to ice: “Some of us don’t.”
SHERIDAN INTERRUPTED THEM when she brought her math book and work sheet out of her room and asked Marybeth to help her with a problem.
“Don’t ask me,” Missy said, raising her coffee cup to her lips with two hands. “Math is like Greek to me.”
“That’s why I didn’t,” Sheridan said brusquely.
SHERIDAN RETURNED TO her room with her homework and closed the door. There was a long pause as Marybeth felt her mother assessing her, wearing the most profound and concerned expression. It was a look Marybeth knew always preceded some kind of dire statement. It was another look Marybeth hoped she didn’t share.
“I’m just thinking about the children when I say this,” Missy said, “so don’t take it wrong.”
Marybeth braced herself. She knew what was coming by the tone.
“But given what’s been happening here, with the dead animals and the severed heads and all, and the fact that whoever is doing this seems to be able to come and go as he pleases, I would strongly suggest—for the sake of your children and my grandchildren—that you pack up and move out to the ranch with me for a while.”
Marybeth said nothing.
Missy put down her cup, leaned across the table, and stroked Marybeth’s hand. “Honey, I don’t want to have to say this, but you’re putting your children in danger staying here. Obviously, there isn’t much your husband can do to stop it. Whoever is doing this has no qualms about coming right to your home, literally, and doing these things. What if they get worse? What if whoever is doing this gets worse? Can you live with that?”
Marybeth sighed, started to speak, then didn’t. Her mother had a point, and one she’d considered herself.
“I’ve got a five-bedroom ranch house,” Missy said, “meaning we’ve got four empty rooms. You and the girls would be safer there.”
“What about Joe?”
Missy made a face as if she’d been squirted in the eye with a lemon. “Your husband would be welcome, of course,” she said without enthusiasm.
Marybeth nodded, thinking it over.
“You deserve better. My granddaughters deserve better.”
“I thought this was about our safety,” Marybeth said.
“Well that too,” Missy sniffed.
MISSY LOOKED AT her watch and prepared to go. “Thanks for dinner, honey,” she said, pulling on her jacket. “Please think seriously about what we spoke about. I’ll talk to Bud to make sure it works with him.”
“You haven’t discussed it with him?”
Missy smiled and batted her eyes coquettishly. “It’s not a problem, dear. Bud doesn’t argue with me.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
Marybeth nodded. She planned to raise the issue with Joe when he got home that night. It should be about an hour or so, she figured.
Sheridan and Lucy were now in their pajamas and they came out so Grandmother Missy could kiss them good night. Lucy was dutiful; Sheridan shot a glance at her mom about the good-bye ritual that Marybeth pretended she didn’t catch. Missy turned to go.
Marybeth was behind her mother and snapped on the porch light as Missy opened the front door.
Missy froze on the porch.
“Marybeth, who is out there?” she asked.
Marybeth felt her legs almost go limp. Oh, no, she thought. What now? The way her mother asked . . .
She looked over her mother’s shoulder. The porch light reflected back from the lenses of a pair of dark headlights as well as the windshield of a vehicle parked and pointed at the house in the dark.
“Someone’s just sitting there,” Missy said, backing up into Marybeth, “staring at us.”
“Come back in the house,” Marybeth said, stepping aside, thinking of the loaded lever-action Winchester rifle in the closet in Joe’s office.
When she looked at the profile of the vehicle in the darkness, she recognized the squared-off roofline and the toothy grille.
“Oh my,” Marybeth said, pushing past her mother onto the pathway that led through the lawn toward the gate.
She heard Sheridan come to the door behind her and say, “Who is it out there?”
“Nate!” Marybeth said over her shoulder.
“That’s not Nate’s Jeep.”
And it wasn’t, Marybeth realized as she went out through the gate and practically skipped to the driver’s-side window. It wasn’t Nate at all, and in an instant her fear returned, canceling out the surprisingly strong burst of elation. Instead of Nate Romanowski, a man she couldn’t see well slumped against the window from the inside, his cheek pressed against the glass in a smear of drool.
Marybeth felt foolish for jumping to conclusions. She rapped against the driver’s-side window with one knuckle.
Tommy Wayman sat up with a start, then turned and looked at her, his eyes wide for a moment until he seemed to recognize where he was, who she was.
She opened the door. “Tommy, are you all right? Why are you here?”
“Is Joe here?” the river guide gushed. She could smell the fetid smell of alcohol. As he spoke he moved in his seat and Marybeth could hear empty bottles clink at his feet.
“No,” she said, stepping back.
“I saw her,” Tommy said, his eyes comically widening, as if he’d suddenly remembered why he came in the first place and everything was just rushing back to him as he sat there. “I fucking saw her today!”
“Who?” Marybeth said coolly. “And please watch your language at my home.”
“Opal Scarlett!” Tommy hissed.
“What?”
“Opal. I saw Opal.”
“I doubt that,” Marybeth said to Tommy, then turned back to the grouping of her mother, Sheridan, and Lucy on the porch looking out. “It’s all right,” Marybeth said. “It’s Tommy Wayman. He’s drunk.”
Missy gestured “whew!” by wiping her brow dramatically.
“I really did see her,” Tommy said, reaching out and grasping Marybeth’s arm, imploring her with his eyes. “I need to tell Joe! I need to tell the world she’s alive!”
“You can wait for him out here or in his office,” Marybeth said, hoping Tommy would chose the former. “He should be home anytime now. I’ll call and tell him you’re here.”
“Tell him who I saw!”
Marybeth went back into the yard. This was the kind of thing she hated, these late-night adventures with drunken men who wanted to talk to Joe. Add this to the fact that someone was harassing them, and Missy’s idea about moving to the ranch sounded better all the time.
“Watch out for that guy,” Marybeth heard Sheridan telling Missy. “He throws old ladies in the river.”
“I’m not an old lady,” Missy said icily.
As Marybeth passed her daughter, trying not to smile at the exchange, Sheridan leaned toward her mother and said under her breath, “Nate, huh?”
Marybeth was grateful it was dark, because she knew she was blushing.
20
“SO YOU CLAIM YOU SAW HER EXACTLY WHERE?” Robey Hersig asked Tommy Wayman, who was drinking his second cup of coffee.
“I
told you three times,” Tommy said, raising his mug with two hands but not successfully disguising how they trembled. “At that big bend of the river before you get to the old landing. Closer to Hank’s side of the ranch than Arlen’s. She was just standing there in the reeds looking at me as I floated by. Scared me half to death.”
Joe had been home an hour. When he heard what Tommy had to say, he called Robey and Sheriff McLanahan. McLanahan claimed he needed his “beauty sleep” and sent Deputy Reed, who was preferable anyway. The three of them sat around Joe’s kitchen table because there were too many big bodies to fit in his office. Marybeth went upstairs to read and the girls were in bed. Tommy was at the head of the table, nursing black coffee. He had asked Joe for a little shot of hooch in the coffee to “cut the bitterness,” but Joe had refused.
“She said something to you,” Robey asked. “What was it she said?”
“No,” Tommy said, shaking his head, starting to get angry at the repetition of the questions. “I said I thought she was telling me something, but I couldn’t hear the words over the sound of the river.”
Reed checked his notebook. “Earlier, you said she smiled at you. Are you serious? Is that really what you meant, that she smiled at you as you floated by?”
Reed looked from Joe to Robey and back to Tommy. He was clearly skeptical. “What kind of smile?” he asked. “A Hi-Tommy-happy-to-see-you-again smile? Or a Get-over-here-and-pay-me-my-fee smile?”