Joe and Marybeth looked over. “What?”
“You’ve established another theory,” Hand said, resting his chin on the top of his steepled fingers. “You’ve introduced a reasonable doubt in the prosecution narrative.
“Joe!” Marybeth said, surprised. Then to Hand: “But that doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t prove Mom is innocent.”
“Doesn’t have to,” Hand said to Marybeth, suddenly professorial. “Our job here isn’t to out the killer. That’s the job of law enforcement and the prosecution. This isn’t Perry Mason. Confessions on the stand just don’t happen. All we need—and what your clever husband Joe might have given us—is the eight percent of doubt I need to build on.”
Missy said nothing. Joe didn’t expect her to shower him with gratitude. She simply leaned back in her chair with her most pleasant face. As if she’d been anticipating this and it was all her due.
Joe and Marybeth went outside toward Joe’s pickup as Marcus Hand stayed behind to give a new set of marching orders to his team. Joe heard enough to know Hand was building on the new theory, and dispatching personnel to blanket Twelve Sleep County and others to start collecting affidavits and interviews.
Marybeth walked with Joe in silence. As Joe opened the door for her, she said, “I was hoping this would all be a matter of proving her innocence. Something clean.”
Joe said, “It’s rarely like that in a high-profile murder case or when money and ambition are involved on both sides. Or when the defendant . . .” He bit his lip.
“I’m going to check on Lucy and April to make sure they haven’t killed each other,” she said, digging her phone out of her purse. Joe reached across her lap and found his citation booklet in the box of documents and regulation books he kept on the floorboards. “Back in a second,” he said.
Missy met him at the front door. Over the years, both had made conscious efforts not to be anywhere alone with the other for fear of what would be said. Joe saw her standing in the shadow and he paused for a moment before continuing. She waited for him in silence. He realized she was sneaking a cigarette, and the cherry glowed red in the dark.
He said, “Here’s Marcus Hand’s ticket for poaching those grouse. See he gets it.”
She took it without a glance. “You never fail to disappoint,” she said, blowing smoke and keeping her voice down so her daughter couldn’t overhear her across the ranch yard.
“Thanks for the reminder,” Joe said.
“I know you’re doing what you’re doing more for your wife and daughters than for me. I understand that.”
Joe didn’t argue with her.
“You think I’m a heartless bitch,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes. You’ve nothing but contempt for me. Look around you,” she said. “Then think about it later. You think this has been easy, don’t you?”
Before he could respond, she said, “I was the last of eleven children and my parents never failed to remind me I was their mistake, as they put it. We moved every year to a new farm in Missouri or Arkansas, wherever my father could get hired. I never had a home. We slept two or three to a bed. The clothes I wore had been handed down through six different girls, so by the time I got them they were rags. I once was forced to go to school wearing boots my brother made of duct tape.”
She paused, and Joe shuffled his feet and looked down.
“I didn’t own a new dress until I was two years out of high school,” she said. “And I bought it myself. By then my parents were so old and broken they could barely remember my name. My older brothers and sisters all scattered and I don’t know—or care—where a single one of them is or if they’re even alive. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.”
“I gotta get going,” Joe said.
“You’ve only seen me as your wife’s gold-digger mother,” she said. “You’ve never seen or even thought about what made me this way, or how I clawed my way out of it. And you never give a thought to how tough that was to raise Marybeth right—with the right values—from the hole I crawled out of.”
“No,” Joe said, “I guess I haven’t given it much thought.”
She smiled triumphantly, but it morphed into a sneer. “If anyone thinks they’re going to take away all this, they don’t know me, either.”
“Did you do it, Missy?” Joe asked suddenly.
The sneer remained. There was no flinch. She took a long drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke at him and said, “What do you think?”
Then she turned on her heel and went back into her house. The citation Joe had given her fluttered to the ground.
“What was that about?” Marybeth asked, when Joe climbed into the pickup.
“She told me about her childhood,” he said. “Some details I hadn’t heard before.”
Marybeth sat back in her seat and looked over at Joe, puzzled. “What about her childhood?”
“About growing up moving around, all her siblings, her parents, the poverty and all that. Like it sort of explains the way she is, I guess.”
Marybeth was stunned. “She said that?”
“Yup.”
“She didn’t tell you about shoes made out of duct tape, did she?”
“Yes. I hadn’t heard that one before.”
“Joe, you know my grandfather owned a dozen car dealerships in Southern California and my grandmother was an actress. Mom was an only child who grew up with everything she ever wanted. She was spoiled and she makes things up.”
Joe said, “I know all that. She lies without blinking an eye.”
“And the way she was flirting with Marcus Hand at dinner,” Marybeth said, “it was disgusting. Earl Alden is barely cold.”
“He’ll never be as cold as your mother,” Joe said.
On the way home, they divided up duties. Even if Hand and his people developed the new theory, Marybeth thought it imperative that she know for sure what had happened, who had killed Earl even if Hand didn’t care as long as reasonable doubt could be established.
Joe agreed. He said, “I’m curious about what you’ll find out about Rope the Wind. How they came to be. Who they are—or were.”
“I’ll find out what I can about them,” she said.
“Also,” Joe said, “if Earl was such a big-time skimmer as Hand described him, why would he invest so much of his own money into actually building a wind farm? It seems out of character. Since Missy didn’t seem to know much about the initial financing—and I think she would—I wonder if maybe someone else was putting up the money? That seems more like Earl’s style. And if so, who?”
“I never thought of that,” Marybeth said. “I’ll find out what I can. The state has corporation filings, things like that. They’re all public documents.”
“I’m going to keep looking for Bud,” Joe said. “I have a feeling he’s not far. And despite what we talked about tonight, Hand knows Bud is still the key. If Bud takes the stand and comes across as credible, the rest is history. So I want to talk to Dulcie. She’s got to have more on Missy than we realize or she wouldn’t have pushed it as hard as she has. She can’t have based everything on Bud’s testimony.”
“Maybe she wants to beat Marcus Hand,” Marybeth said.
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe she wants to put my mother away.”
“Could be.”
“We know what Sheriff McLanahan’s motivation is,” Marybeth said. “He wants to get reelected.”
“Yup.”
“Joe?” Marybeth asked as they drove under the archway. “Do you really think the Lees had something to do with it?”