“I slept all the way here?”
“Yep,” Chance confirms. “I don’t mind saying you’re scaring me, Al. Come on, let’s get you inside.”
The smell of food is still in the air as Chance leads Alma to the couch. Jayne hurries forward with questions. Out of the corner of her eye, Alma sees Chance silence her with a look and a gesture toward the liquor cabinet. As Chance stows Alma’s coat, Jayne appears before her with a water glass half full of whiskey and ice.
Alma takes the whiskey and sips. Low conversation moves away from her, into the kitchen. She hears Brittany’s and Mae’s animated, chattering voices come closer, then move off together, on the trail of invisible house dragons. She drains the glass, sets it on the floor, slips off her shoes, and curls up on the couch.
The house is dark and quiet when she wakes up again, feeling a prickling new alertness, like a spell has worn off. Someone has tucked a blanket around her. The fire in the stove burns low. She lifts her head to see Chance lying under a blanket in the extended recliner a few feet away. Her stirring rouses him.
“You feeling any better?” he asks through a yawn.
“I don’t know.” She sits up and looks around. “Where’s my bag?”
“Right there on the floor, next to you.”
Alma reaches down and snatches the leather purse to her chest. Chance observes without moving. “Whatever it is, we can deal with it,” he says. “Talk to me.”
Alma unfastens the latch and looks into her bag. “I’m surprised you want to hear another word out of me.”
The glow from the window of the wood stove lights Chance’s half smile. “You say that like I have a choice in the matter.”
“Don’t you?”
Chance just gives her a look.
“I’m sorry,” Alma says.
“Let’s not do apologies now.” Chance yawns and rubs at his face. “You were honest with me. Most people wouldn’t have been, in your situation. Let’s take that as a place to start. That’s the Alma I remember.”
“Okay.” Alma looks around the room, wondering where Jayne stowed that whiskey bottle. Chance catches her glance at the liquor cabinet and gets up to retrieve the bourbon and another glass.
“So what’s in the bag?” he asks as he pours them both a generous double shot.
With one hand, Alma lifts first the scarf, then the lease out of the bag and sets them on the small oval table.
Chance kneels on the other side of the table, staring at the display between them. “What is this?” he says.
“Evidence.”
“Of what?”
“Ray says that Vicky might have been smothered with something made of high quality gray wool, long fibers.” Alma lays her hands flat on either side of the scarf and the lease.
“Where did you get this?” Chance’s eyes grow wide and alarmed. “Walt?”
Alma shuts her eyes tight and shakes her head. She hears the sound of the table shifting. When she opens her eyes, Chance is leaning on the other side of the table, looking more closely at the bloodstains on the scarf without touching it. “Then I don’t understand— Who— But that doesn’t make any sense, not after what Brittany said about Rick. Not . . . Helen? But why? How? And if she killed Vicky, then what happened to Walt?”
“I think what Ray believes,” Alma begins, then pauses to throw back a sip of bourbon before continuing, “the conclusion he’ll come to, is that Walt killed Vicky, then committed suicide. There’s too little evidence to support any other conclusion. And that’s what we need him to go on believing.”
“But that’s not what happened.” Chance has abandoned his examination of the scarf to look at Alma as if she’s a wounded animal, capable of anything.
“No.”
“Alma—what happened to Walt?” There is an awful, careful blankness in Chance’s face. Alma lifts her eyes, lets him look into them and see the truth.
“No, it wasn’t me. He fell from his tree stand. He was”—Alma can’t meet Chance’s eyes anymore—“thrown from his tree stand.”
She sees Chance studying her face, the heartbroken sound of her voice, the anxious way her hand is reaching toward him across the table—Chance who understands animals without benefit of words, who always knew which songs she hated just by watching her. She pulls her hand away, but it’s too late. “Pete,” he says.
They sit in excruciating silence. Chance downs his whiskey. After several minutes, Alma offers the only change of topic she can think of, then regrets it the moment it’s out. “So, I, uh—broke up with Jean-Marc this morning.”
Chance nods. “Tiffany dumped me over the phone,” he replies. “Something about you and me sharing the same taste in lipstick.”
“Ah. I’m sorry. She seems nice.” Alma risks a look at Chance, but he’s observing the fire with an embarrassed expression.
“She is. Mom’s been trying to get us together for months. First time I’ve ever been called a two-timing son of a bitch.” Chance’s boot leather creaks as he levers himself to his feet.
“Your mom wasn’t too happy either.”
“I knew the minute she took you outside.” Chance cracks a smile as he opens the stove and throws in another log. His gaze falls on the hard-scribbled lease. “Have you looked at what Vicky wrote?”
“No.” Alma brings her head up and sniffles with renewed energy. “I should read it.”
“Do you mind if I look?” Chance puts out a hand but waits for permission.
“Go ahead.”
Chance sits on the floor, settles his back against the couch next to Alma, and unfolds the four-page document, so light and harmless to the eye for all that it conveys and condemns. The firelight is very dim. Alma clicks on the floor lamp beside her and leans over Chance’s shoulder. Vicky’s script looks like ants crawling across the page, tiny and wound in on itself. The notes are in no particular order, connected with arrows and lines in some places, heavily underlined and circled in others. Family names figure prominently, people Chance and Alma know, tied to home places in this valley and beyond. Vicky has been busy.
Chance reads for a few minutes before glancing over his shoulder at her. “This is incredible. It’s every family Harmony has contracted with since they started mining the valley. Some of them went for the money, but look—” Chance points a finger at Vince Guthrie’s name. “Burlington threatened to turn off his oxygen!”
“Renata Byer.” Alma points too, tracing a wavering line of print along the side of the page. “He forced her pickup off the road with her infant granddaughter in back. She signed standing on the side of the road, ‘shaking so hard she could barely hold the pen.’ ”
“I don’t get it. How’d she get these folks to talk to her? I’ve asked them the same questions and they won’t tell me anything,” Chance says. “She’s got numbers, dates, what Burlington threatened them with—everything. Can this be true?”
“More importantly, can it be admitted into evidence?” Alma picks up the first page to see if the second is scrawled as thoroughly. It is. More names. More numbers. “Unless these people will testify, it’s all hearsay. Even we don’t know whether to believe it or not. We need affidavits.”
“But now we know where to get them.” Chance’s voice takes on a tinge of excitement. “Somehow she got them to talk. Maybe I can use it to get them to go one more step.”
“How are you going to explain where you got it?”
Chance considers. “Nobody knew for sure Vicky had it that night, right? It could have been with Brittany’s things. It could have been anywhere.”
They sit for a few minutes, letting the patterns in their minds metamorphose and realign as they skim another page of Vicky’s notes.
“How long are you staying?” Chance asks when they’ve turned the last page, deciphered the last of Vicky’s hieroglyphs.
“My flight’s tomorrow at one thirty. I wish I could stay longer, but my job is in meltdown.” Alma presses fingers to her temples. The whiskey is moving in her b
lood, blurring the edges of her compromised brain.
Chance’s own hand is shaking as he holds the paper. “What did we do to bring these people here? This used to be the most peaceful place in the world.”
“That was only a veneer, wasn’t it?” Alma sits back. “Scratch a few layers in the dirt and there’s violence all around us. Blood feuds and massacres.”
“Vicky was trying to fight it.” Chance turns a little to look up at Alma. “At least you know this about her. You know she was fighting to save the home place.”
Alma feels more tears slip down her cheeks. She’s given up holding them. Vicky was fighting the coal company, and her own family did her in. “That’s my little sister. That’s what we’ll tell Brittany.” She stretches out a hand and this time Chance takes it.
“What are you going to do with this?” he asks, gesturing with the lease toward the scarf.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I even believe Helen, but she was pretty convincing. She scared the hell out of me.”
“Will you tell Curtis?”
Alma stretches her neck, still trying to work out the crick from sleeping in the pickup. “Chance, I can’t. That’s what you have to understand. She asked me to represent her. What she told me is privileged. I could be disbarred for telling you. And now I’m tampering with evidence, which is crossing over from unethical to criminal behavior.” She gestures at the scarf in frustration.
“But couldn’t you mail the pages to the county attorney or something? Somebody ought to see this.”
“The one thing we can’t do is show this to anyone else. Helen gave it to me as her attorney. We can ask more questions, but this is our secret.” She tugs at Chance’s hand until he looks up.
Chance rests his hand on his chest with hers held tightly under it. “I promise.”
“This might sound awful, but we need the case to close as a murder-suicide. If it wasn’t, they might start looking at Pete. Helen will be gone so soon. She’s no danger to anybody else, and I don’t want Brittany having to think of her . . . doing that, on top of what she’s going to find out about Walt. Let it all be Walt. I don’t want a trial. We need the investigation to end now.”
Chance stares down at the small hand in his, considering. “I know where to hide this,” he says, rising. He gets his coat, gingerly dumps the scarf and lease into a big Ziploc bag, and disappears out the front door. Several long minutes tick by. A log snaps in the stove and Alma startles.
When he comes back, Chance sits down hard on the couch beside her, as if his task has exhausted him. “I’m sorry I brought all this into your life,” Alma says in a voice barely audible above the crackling of the reinvigorated fire.
“Your life is part of my life,” Chance answers. “I never had much choice about that. I guess I’m glad I got to share a few more days of it.” It’s not quite bitterness she hears in his voice, but deep frustration.
“I’ve been thinking about Seattle.” Alma is cautious now, trying not to do damage with her ragged, unpolished words, torn from a place in her that doesn’t speak, not anymore. “While I’m out there, it’s like things aren’t happening in real time. Here, every little wide place in the road from Sarpy to Three Forks has some memory attached to it, some family story or something. All our ghosts. All our kin. I get this feeling when I’m away like I’m . . . like I’m . . .” Alma gropes for words and fails.
“Like you’re a desperate woman. Like you’re underwater, trying to get back to the surface to breathe again,” Chance says with certainty. How does he do that? It’s damned irritating. No way should he be able to escort her into his parents’ living room after all these years and casually tell her what’s in her soul. Maybe this is why she’s been with Jean-Marc. All this time, she’s believed that if she stays at the office and scorns the closest kinds of human contact, she’ll be safe from the kind of pain she left in Montana. Now it turns out that the pain was with her all along, padding along invisible like Burro, waiting to be cared for.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She pulls the blanket snug around her. It will never do to let Chance know how he gets to her. “I don’t know about desperate. But I’ll tell you this. Sometimes out there I just stand up against a building, something big enough to block out the sky, so I can pretend that on the other side there’s open plains, and the Big Horns in the distance.”
“Did that in San Francisco a few times myself.” Chance smiles and there’s a hint of the shyness Alma remembers, a peek behind the steady man he’s become, into the skinny high school boy who carried pictures of his horses and her in his wallet and had problems with premature ejaculation. “I’m glad you’re back, even if it’s just for a few days.” He waves a hand, open-palmed, releasing.
Alma had forgotten about Chance’s hands, how much she likes them. Heavier now than she remembers, they are chapped and hard, hammers forged by the perpetual hard work of ranch life, old-fashioned hands, with fingers as big around as quarters. Tus manos son dos martillos que clavan y desclavan alegres la mañana. Your hands are two hammers that joyfully nail down and pry up the morning. She settles down on the couch again and pillows her head on his leg. His hand smooths her hair and settles on her shoulder, the kind of anchor that holds ships in a storm.
Jayne finds them that way in the earliest morning light, the room cold, the fire out, Chance’s head nodding at an awkward angle against the back of the couch, Alma coiled under his arm. “Damn,” she whispers.
CHAPTER 21
FRIDAY, 2:50 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
The flight touches down early at Sea-Tac. Downloaded work has kept her busy the whole way, while Brittany thumbs video games and watches the clouds. The distractions were almost enough to keep Alma from thinking about the hiss of wheels leaving asphalt, wings banking west, the stark outlines of cliffs and river, the stretch and break from home. As the plane slows in a classic Puget Sound drizzle, she rotates her head and takes a long swig of cold coffee.
When she takes back her phone from Brittany, there’s a voice mail from Ray Curtis. “Alma. Ray. Just wanted to update you. Walt’s autopsy indicates death on impact after falling headfirst out of his deer stand. No sign of foul play. BPD executed a search warrant on the Terrebonnes’ house and found nothing significant. Barring anything unexpected in the remaining tox screens, we plan to close the investigation fairly soon. Murder-suicides are all too common in this part of the world.” Ray’s digitized voice descends as he speaks. “I’m very sorry it played out this way, but frequently there’s a family member involved. At least you can go back to Seattle with some closure.” Alma shuts her eyes and clicks Delete.
She takes a cab straight to the office, working through another set of auctioneer-speed voice mails from Amanda while Brittany presses her cheek to the glass and stares at the sodden city, drawing graffiti with her finger in the condensation. Alma’s floor is buzzing with the sound of Louis shouting and junior associates running up and down the halls. Duncan’s due diligence review failed to discover some dubious offshore transactions in the accounts of the merger partner, revealed by Alma’s phone interviews. At best, it’s minor financial information that should have been in the dealbook. At worst, the target is hiding assets and the whispered rumors about money laundering are true. When Alma steps out of the elevator, pulling her suitcase and leading Brittany, Duncan is chasing Louis up the hall, whining about everything he did that should have turned up the Cayman transactions and didn’t.
“There was no trail!” Duncan protests. “We went through everything, every last document. We were in a warehouse for six weeks. You know that! This isn’t my fault.” He spots Alma and points to her. “She set me up!” With a quick, whispered word, Alma sends Brittany down the hall to where Amanda is waiting.
Louis marches straight to her. “How did you find this? Where did this come from?” he demands, waving a printout.
“I interviewed their administrative staff by phone earlier this week. They were very forthcoming once they h
eard about the layoffs.” Alma keeps walking toward her office, pulling off her coat.
“She just got lucky,” Duncan snarls. “I suppose I could have spent my time chatting with the secretaries, but I was busy with actual legal work.”
“It was your job!” Louis stops to shout into Duncan’s face. “You can’t pass the buck on this one, Duncan. You knew there were questions about the status of the pension fund. Why didn’t you talk to these people Alma found? Where were they? You’re just damn lucky she covered your ass on this, in the middle of her sister’s fucking funeral, or we’d all be up shit creek. I ought to fire your ass right now!”
“You can’t fire me.” Duncan lets out a little laugh. There it is—he’s playing his trump card. Alma smiles as she turns on the lights in her office. Louis is still a junior partner, and Alma is getting close to partnership review. Both of them stand to lose big in a standoff with the entrenched powers of the firm—people like Duncan’s uncle.
Louis’s and Alma’s eyes meet behind Duncan’s back. They openly dislike each other, but the stakes have gotten too high. Duncan’s amateurish error could have brought down both of them. He’s a third-year associate. He should know better. Louis and Alma both know that Duncan didn’t bother interviewing the administrative staff because he’s been busy romancing one of them and billing their dinners as business expenses.
With the slightest nod to Alma, Louis turns back to Duncan. “Clean out your desk,” he says. “I’ve had it with you.”
“What?” Duncan starts a hiccupping, hysterical laugh. “You know you can’t do that. You don’t have the power!”
“I’m an equity partner in this firm, Mr. Moi.” Louis returns to old-fashioned lawyerly formality, to emphasize that he knows what he’s doing, and to whom. “We’ll find out if that’s still worth something around here. Now clean out your desk, give me your key card, and get out. I give you fifteen minutes. Alma, go with him and see that he doesn’t touch his computer. I want all the files as they are, especially the e-mail.”
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