Big Sky River

by Linda Lael Miller

  Leaving Manhattan, where she’d lived since college, had seemed like such a good idea, in theory, after a shattering divorce. She’d been emotionally bloodied and battered and in desperate need of a change after the breakup—the more drastic, the better. By then, her parents, to whom she’d never been particularly close in the first place, were divorced from each other, remarried and living on separate continents.

  Being an only child, Tara found herself with no one to turn to—most of her friends had drifted away since she’d tied the knot with James. She was always too busy with her husband, the demanding doctor, or with Elle and Erin, or her job, to make time for bistro lunches, heartfelt conversations and girls’ nights out.

  Sitting there on the porch step, though, with the dust whirling behind Darlene’s departing truck just beginning to settle, she’d wondered what on earth had possessed her to buy a farm outside a Podunk town like Parable.

  What did she, a city girl through and through, know about chickens, for pity’s sake? Never mind cows and horses. She knew all about makeup and wine, museums and books, and the posh parties James loved to attend. She knew that primary colors looked good on her and grasped the major political issues of the day.

  But she hadn’t a clue about country living in general, or chickens in particular, and now she had a coop full of tiny golden lint balls, all depending on her for protection and food and a hundred other needs she hadn’t thought of yet.

  Blessedly, Darlene had returned less than an hour after she’d left, bringing special warming lamps to set up in the coop, along with extension cords and lots of advice about fire prevention. Though some of the chicks didn’t make it through the next few weeks—this, according to Darlene and the man at the feed store and somebody she chatted with at the post office, was inevitable—the majority of the birds thrived, turning into honest-to-God chickens. The yellow down had given way to gleaming feathers, mostly russet in color and iridescent in the daylight, and Darlene, who stopped by often in those early days, had eventually hauled away all but one of the roosters, crated and crowing in protest, in the back of her truck.

  Tara had never asked what became of those roosters, though of course she’d had her suspicions, especially when she came down with a summer cold that August and Darlene showed up with a pot of chicken soup topped by dumplings.

  “Hello?” Elle chimed, waving a hand in front of Tara’s face and bringing her back from those not-so-thrilling days of yesteryear with a mild jolt.

  “Overalls,” Tara said, to show she’d followed the ongoing conversation, which, of course, she hadn’t.

  “Overalls are stupid,” Erin remarked, frowning across the table at Elle. “Why can’t we just wear jeans, like regular people?”

  Elle looked world-weary for a moment—a cute trick, for a twelve-year-old. “This is the country,” she said, frowning back. “We’ll look weird in our jeans—they have rhinestones and embroidery on them, remember?”

  “You think we wouldn’t look weird in overalls?” Erin countered.

  “We’ll go shopping,” Tara interjected, glad the twins were even interested in helping out with the chickens. Glad they were there, in her kitchen, on a sunny summer morning, eating scrambled eggs and toast. “Plain jeans, overalls, whatever strikes your fancy.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead in overalls,” Erin decreed, her mind made up.

  Tara wore them all the time, but reminding her stepdaughter of that would serve no purpose.

  “Fine,” Elle snapped back. “Whatever.”

  Lucy, waiting patiently nearby, looked from one woman-child to the other, hopeful and trusting that the formerly placid discussion would not give way to mayhem.

  Tara finished her orange juice, then toasted Elle and Erin with her empty glass. “I’m taking Lucy for a short walk after I clear the table,” she said. “Be ready to go into town by the time we get back, please.”

  With that, Elle and Erin left the table, bickering and giggling as they raced, elbowing each other up the back stairs to get dressed for the day.

  Humming contentedly, Tara rinsed off the breakfast dishes, stacked them in the machine and fetched Lucy’s leash from its hook just inside the laundry room door.

  Swishy-tailed with delight, Lucy was on her feet, eager for her walk.

  Their normal route took Tara and Lucy down the long driveway, amid roaming, clucking chickens, across the cattle guard, which the dog had learned to navigate safely long before. For the hundredth time, Tara thought of filling in the pit, using dirt and river rocks, but the prospect was daunting, especially in the summer heat, so she again tabled the idea.

  It was approximately a quarter mile from her mailbox to Boone’s, and as she strolled, Lucy trotting happily at her side, she told herself she wouldn’t so much as glance toward the overgrown yard and the gloomy-looking double-wide. If she looked, she knew, she’d just get her back up again, and what good would that do?

  She concentrated on the gloriously blue sprawling sky overhead, the glistening green and Christmassy scent of the pine trees along either side of the winding road. She listened to the song of the river off in the near distance, and smiled in contented gratitude because Elle and Erin were staying with her, because she had her health and so did the twins, because she had good friends and wide-open spaces.

  She passed Boone’s place without so much as turning her head in that direction, walked, with Lucy, as far as the old covered bridge, with its weathered boards and long drop to another shallow, rocky tributary of Big Sky River, paused for a few moments to enjoy the sparkle of sunlight on clean, flowing water.

  For all the challenges, for all the early misgivings, Tara knew she’d made the right decision, moving to Montana and starting a new life. At some point, there had been an almost imperceptible shift in the place where her mind and spirit met, and Parable had become her home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BOONE HAD PICKED up his clean shirts over at the cleaner’s, and when he and Scamp got to the office, he ducked into the men’s restroom to change into one of them. He’d barely begun scrolling through his email—the day deputies were already out patrolling the county and the receptionist/dispatcher was supposedly sick at home—when a skinny girl no older than twelve or thirteen burst in, breathless and pale.

  Before Boone could place her, she blurted out, “Come quick! My brother just now fell off the water tower and his eyes are closed and he’s not moving!”

  Boone’s blood ran cold as the image crystalized in his mind. He bolted toward the now-trembling child, speaking rapidly into the microphone of the small radio attached to his shoulder, summoning an ambulance and any available deputy, on or off duty, steering the girl out into the corridor by the nape of her neck.

  “Stay here,” he ordered gruffly, when Scamp tried to follow.

  The dog obeyed, dropping to his belly and resting his muzzle on outstretched forelegs; evidently, this was a command he knew.

  Once Boone and the girl were both inside the squad car, he flipped on the lights and siren and laid plenty of rubber pulling away from the curb.

  Folks gawked from the sidewalks and other cars pulled to the side of the road as the cruiser streaked past.

  “What’s your name?” Boone snapped, instantly regretting the sharpness of his tone. The ambulance fell in behind him, siren shrieking, and various private vehicles trailed after, ordinary men who wanted to do whatever they could to help.

  Parable was that kind of town.

  The little girl, clad in a faded sundress and barefoot, shivered inside the passenger-side seat belt, her stick-thin arms wrapped around her upper body. She was sniffling now, and her freckles stood out against the waxen pallor of her cheeks. “Angie McCullough,” she said. “Maybe I should have gone to get Mama, but she’s way down at the Bide-A-Night Motel, cleaning rooms.” She paused, swallowed visibly. “My brother—Dawson—is he going to get in trouble?”

  Boone shook his head. “You did the right thing, coming to me,” he s
aid evenly, taking care to keep his voice gentle as he made a hard left onto the road leading to the water tower. He didn’t slow down for the ruts, deepened by decades of hard rains and wicked winters, and wondered briefly if the shocks on his squad car would hold up to the strain. “Nobody’s getting in trouble,” he reiterated. At the moment, this was all the reassurance he could offer.

  The water tower loomed up ahead in the middle of a large, meadowlike clearing, a part of the town and yet separate from it, too, hidden among towering pine trees that had probably been mere seedlings when it was built.

  A group of kids clustered in a circle, looking down. One of them, a gawky boy, all knees and elbows, turned to vomit into the tall grass.

  “Stay in the car,” Boone told Angie McCullough, who nodded, her ears poking between strands of long, stringy brown hair. He shut off the siren, put the cruiser in Park and leaped out, leaving the rig running as he sprinted toward the kids.

  They backed away as he approached, revealing a still form sprawled on the ground, arms and legs akimbo, eyes closed. The boy didn’t stir, either when Boone spoke his name or when he crouched beside him, feeling at the hollow of his throat for a pulse. He found one, but it was faint and dangerously irregular.

  The EMTs broke through the small crowd just then, carrying their gear, kneeling on either side of Dawson McCullough’s unmoving body. Boone moved out of their way, herded the horrified teenagers back a few steps. His gaze sliced from one face to another.

  He knew every kid in town, by sight if not by name, and he’d had to chase this crew away from the water tower more than once in the past.

  “Exactly what happened here?” he prompted, when nobody spoke.

  “He fell,” offered one of the girls, in a tremulous voice. Boone focused on her.

  “It’s not like he jumped or anything,” added the boy who’d lost his breakfast a few moments before.

  Boone drew in a deep, slow breath, to steady himself, and rested his hands on his hips. A glance toward the cruiser showed Angie’s face floating behind the windshield, an oval moon, white as milk.

  “Is Dawson—is he—dead?” someone else asked.

  “No,” Boone said, aware that the EMTs were working fast, one talking to the unconscious boy as he rigged him up to an IV line, the other racing back to the ambulance for more equipment. “Not yet, anyway,” he added glumly, sweeping off his hat to run the splayed fingers of his right hand through his hair in frustration. “What part of stay away from this place did you people not understand?” he asked, addressing the first girl, because she seemed the most composed.

  The kids, cocky during previous encounters, exchanged meek glances.

  The girl answered. “Dawson was being stupid, that’s all,” she said, a sly note creeping into her voice. “Nobody dared him to climb up there or anything like that.”

  Boone knew a lie when he heard one, but he didn’t call her on it.

  This wasn’t the time or the place, he told himself. But for a moment, he didn’t dare speak or move, because he was red-zone pissed. A human being, one of their friends, was badly hurt, maybe already dying, and the whole sorry situation could have been avoided if they’d only listened.

  Did you listen? challenged a voice in the back of his mind. You and Hutch and Slade?

  He became aware of the pickups and cars that had followed him and the ambulance to the scene. Men got out of them, stood at a distance, with their arms folded and their hats low over their eyes, watching, waiting.

  That was when Deputy McQuillan roared up in his county car, stopped with a lurch and bounded out. A few more pieces fell into place in Boone’s mind when Patsy McCullough, mother of Angie and the still-unresponsive Dawson, leaped from the passenger seat and shot past the deputy.

  She was a thin, bedraggled woman, no older than Boone himself—he’d gone to high school with her—and, like Nancy Winchell, she looked hard-done-by and heart-bruised as she ran toward them. Her clothes, her face, her hair—all were colorless, as though she’d been slowly fading into invisibility from the day she was born.

  The EMTs put a neck brace on the boy, and one of them called to the onlookers to bring the board and a gurney.

  Boone stepped in front of Patsy, just when she would have flung herself on her son, screaming his name over and over, and took her firmly by the shoulders.

  “Let the paramedics do their job, Patsy,” Boone told her quietly.

  “I told him to stay away from this place,” Patsy sobbed, every word hitching in her throat, raw and hoarse, painful to hear. “I told him—” Then she paused, watching in bleak disbelief as the EMTs carefully eased Dawson onto the board that would, they hoped, keep his spine stable, and strapped him in place.

  With help from several of the other men, they hoisted the board onto the gurney, secured it. McQuillan, meanwhile, gathered the kids into a scared, sullen bunch and started grilling them.

  Boone was pretty sure no crime had been committed, but he didn’t interrupt the process. He was still holding Patsy upright, though he let her go when she turned, every nerve gravitating toward her injured son as he was carried past. By then Angie had bolted from the squad car and, once Dawson was loaded into the back of the ambulance, she and Patsy both scrambled in behind him.

  “Charlie told me to tell you that they’re calling for a helicopter,” a familiar voice said, from just behind Boone’s left elbow. “They’re going to airlift the kid to Missoula, or maybe Helena—whichever they can get to faster.”

  Boone turned his head, saw Hutch Carmody standing there, and felt a twinge of relief at the sight of his closest friend. He hadn’t noticed him before.

  “It’s bad then,” Boone muttered rhetorically. He hadn’t had a chance to ask about the boy’s condition, but part of him, he knew now, had been hoping for a miracle.

  Hutch’s gaze moved from the departing ambulance to the water tower. “It’s bad,” he confirmed, frowning at the structure standing tall against an innocent blue sky. “That thing should have been torn down years ago,” he finished. Some of the other men, standing nearby now that they’d done what they could to help the EMTs, nodded in solemn agreement.

  “Yeah,” Boone said, the word riding a raspy sigh. “Tell it to the town council and the mayor. Every time the subject comes up, some die-hard history buff backs them down.”

  “Maybe they’ll listen now,” said Art Farrington, a middle-aged rancher with a face as weather-beaten as the water tower itself. He adjusted his hat, a move that conveyed his agitation.

  “There’s been enough talk,” Hutch replied grimly. “It’s time to do something.”

  Art and the others did some more nodding.

  The ambulance screeched away, headed toward the town’s single airstrip, which was used mostly by the Hollywood types who came and went in private jets.

  Hutch was rolling up his shirtsleeves as he strode toward his rig, parked with the others at the edge of the clearing. “I’ve got a winch on my truck,” he called over one shoulder without bothering to look back. “Who’s with me?”

  To a man, the other locals trooped after him, rolling up their own sleeves as they went.

  A protest rose in Boone’s throat—he knew what they meant to do, of course—but he gulped it back. The water tower was town property and, since there was no municipal police force in Parable, it was his job to step in.

  Never, not once, had he looked the other way when somebody took the law into their own hands, not when he was a deputy and certainly not since he’d been elected sheriff, but the inevitable had finally happened. A kid had been critically injured, taking a fall from the damned thing. Dawson McCullough might be breathing his last at that very moment, and for what?

  “Get these kids out of here,” Boone told Treat McQuillan. “Take them home and tell their parents what happened, and that I’ll be stopping in for a word later on.”

  For once, McQuillan didn’t argue or drag his feet. “You heard the sheriff,” he said, addressing the
teenagers, who looked even more badly shaken than before. “Let’s go.”

  The kids straggled over to the deputy’s car and squeezed themselves in, heads down and evidently at a loss for the back talk that normally came so easily to them.

  Hutch backed his rig to within fifty yards of the tower and, at the flip of a switch on his dashboard, steel cable rolled off the cog beneath the bed of his truck. Moving purposefully, without one glance at Boone and no visible hesitation, he got out of the rig again, picked up the cable and strung it to the base of the tower. There he fastened it around one of the four unsteady poles that supported the structure and fastened a hook to lock it in place.

  Two other men did the same with cables unspooled from their own trucks. Normally, the winches would have been used to pull a rig out of a ditch or haul a cow from a mud hole. Today, they were being used for a very different purpose.

  Once again, Boone considered putting a stop to the proceedings, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He’d climbed that tower many times as a youth, and so had Hutch and Slade and practically everybody they knew—girls included. In a few years, his own boys would probably think it was smart to shinny up that rickety ladder, just as he had back in the day, on a dare or to impress some girl.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, but the image of young Dawson McCullough might as well have been branded on the insides of his lids, it was so vivid. In his mind, the deathly still face became Griffin’s, and then Fletcher’s.

  Bile scalded the back of Boone’s throat.

  “You might want to move to safer ground, Sheriff,” Hutch suggested mildly, as he walked past Boone on the way back to his truck.

  Boone hesitated for another moment, then shook his head and walked to his squad car, slipping behind the wheel but keeping one foot on the ground as he watched, as though he might spring out again, at the last moment, and put a stop to it all.

  But he didn’t.

  There were three separate winch lines attached to the legs of the tower now, and a loud, grinding sound filled the muggy air as the cables grew taut. The tower swayed, timbers creaking, swayed again. The winches roared as their operators ratcheted up the power. The tower swung wildly from side to side, the word Parable painted in fading letters across the face of the massive, rust-trimmed tank, and then it toppled, the whole works, striking the ground hard enough to cause a noticeable tremor.