“Do you think Nate knows she’s missing?” Marybeth asked, trying to act nonchalant. “I think he’d want to know, don’t you?”
He grunted.
“I know what you’re thinking, that she’s with him. But she wouldn’t leave that little girl without letting her grandmother know.”
“Has anyone called the sheriff?”
Marybeth rolled her eyes. “Eleanor said they called yesterday. She said one of McLanahan’s flunkies said Alisha hadn’t been missing long enough to do anything yet. He implied keeping track of local Indians wasn’t their first priority since they almost always show up eventually.”
“He said that?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know whether he said it outright. Either way, Eleanor was angry about it. But that doesn’t matter. If Alisha is missing, that’s a big deal.”
She let it hang there.
Joe finally broke the silence. “Honey, I’m not sure whether you’re asking me to try to find Bud, clear your mother, try to find Alisha, call Nate, go to the school play, lecture April, or do everything at once. I’m only one guy, and I have a job to do on the side.”
Her eyes narrowed and shut him down. He was immediately sorry he’d let his frustration boil to the surface. He reached out and squeezed her hand. The one without the fork in it.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I think if we traded minds for an hour there’d be so much going on in yours I’d drive off a cliff because I couldn’t take all the voices. You, however, would probably be able to relax because it’s so quiet and not much is going on except maybe you’d want to take a little nap.”
She simply stared at him for a moment before she burst out laughing.
“That’s what I wanted to see,” he said, and chanced a smile back.
But on the haphazard list he’d created in his mind, he added another task: Find Alisha.
Joe pulled into the library parking lot and they sat there a minute before Marybeth went in. He could tell she was processing what she’d heard and sorting it out. He told her about Bud’s absence the week before, hesitating when he confessed forcing the lock, but she seemed unfazed.
“So they don’t know where Bud is, either?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. I can only imagine the scene when McLanahan tells Dulcie Schalk he’s misplaced the star witness.”
“What do they have if they don’t have Bud?”
Joe shrugged. “They may not have the airtight case they thought they had. I could see Hand blowing it wide open.”
“They still have his statements, though?”
“I assume so. We don’t know what he said, but we can assume it’s pretty bad for Missy. But without Bud . . .”
“Dulcie wouldn’t hide him, would she?” Marybeth asked. “From what you described, it sounds like he packed up for a few days. It’s not like someone kidnapped him and took him away?”
“There were no signs of a struggle,” Joe said. “I doubt kidnappers would tell him to grab his toothbrush before they took him somewhere.”
“I’ll bet Dulcie will be in full panic mode,” she said. “Same with the sheriff.”
Joe agreed.
“What if we find him first?” she asked.
Joe said nothing. He wasn’t sure he liked where she seemed to be headed. “What if we did?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. But maybe he ran because he’s been making this up all along and his conscience got the best of him? Maybe he’d like a chance to recant his part in the frame-up?”
“Marybeth,” Joe said, reaching out and touching her hand. “There’s still the rifle. And if Earl really was in the process of divorcing her . . . well, it still doesn’t look very good.”
“How do they know he was going to leave her?” she asked. “Was that from Bud, too?”
Joe shrugged. He hadn’t thought of that.
“Where would Bud go to hide out?” she asked. “We know him pretty well. You know him. Where would he go?”
AUGUST 31
The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
20
The next day, after checking the licenses and stamps for a group of antelope hunters from Texas, Joe drove across the break lands to the home of Bob and Dode Lee of the Lee Ranch, which bordered Missy and Earl’s property. Cumulus clouds scudded across the expanse of sky as a cold front approached, as if fleeing the state for warmer climates. As he approached the ranch headquarters, Joe was cognizant of the tops of the wind turbines peeking over the southern horizon, their tri-blades turning. There was the snap of fall in the air, and he’d had to scrape frost from his windshield that morning before leaving his sleeping house.
After the arraignment and posting of bail, Marcus Hand had driven Missy home. According to Marybeth, Hand had sent for a large team of paralegals and additional lawyers from his Jackson Hole office. Team Missy, as Hand had taken to calling it, would occupy most of the bedrooms of the ranch house to prepare for the next stage of the trial. Cable news satellite trucks rumbled into Saddlestring, and a half-dozen legal reporters from newspapers as far away as New York and Los Angeles booked rooms at the Holiday Inn.
There had been no news in regard to either Bud Longbrake or Alisha Whiteplume. Joe had placed a call to the sheriff’s office to check on Alisha and gotten Sollis, who said they were giving it another day or two before opening an inquiry. When Joe asked why, Sollis said he didn’t appreciate the implication and hung up on him.
Unlike the spectacular stone headquarters on the adjoining Thunderhead Ranch once occupied by Missy and Earl Alden and now serving as command central for Team Missy, the Lees’ place was clapboard, tired, and utilitarian. The once white house needed a coat of paint and the old gray shingles on the roof were warped and cracked from sun and weather. It sat in a wind-whipped grove of Austrian pines—the only standing trees for miles—on the high prairie at the end of a rough two-track. The trees all leaned to the south. The windward sides were flattened and the southern sides were bushy and gnarly as if they’d all been shot in the back and were reaching out with branch-hands to break their fall. Joe thought the word “hardscrabble” would have had to be invented to describe the Lee Ranch if it didn’t already exist.
The ranch compound consisted of the house, three battered metal Quonsets that served as garages, an oversized peeling wooden barn, and an intricate set of corrals and chutes built with crooked poles sunk into the hard ground and linked with haphazard railings. Hereford cattle and bony horses fed on piles of hay scattered across the ground within the corrals and looked up at the approaching green pickup.
He didn’t know the Lees well. They weren’t the kind of ranchers who participated in the community or in public meetings, politics, or even the state livestock organizations. They kept to themselves, making no demands when it came to problem game animals or hunters, for that matter. Joe had heard the rumor that Bob Lee once took care of elk feeding on his hay by mowing them down with a .30-06 rifle and burying the carcasses with his front-end loader, but there’d never been a call or report on him.
Hollow-eyed mixed-breed ranch dogs came boiling out from beneath the front porch as Joe got out. He quickly jumped back in his pickup next to Tube, who was alarmed but not exactly motivated to protect him from the snarling pack. The dogs circled his pickup as if they’d treed it, snapping their teeth in the air and yapping. It was obvious there were people around; the lights were on inside and five vehicles—two battered ranch pickups, a later model Jeep Cherokee, and two low-slung restored muscle cars from the 1970s—were parked around him. Joe waited for someone inside the house to come out and call the dogs back.