While Dulcie and Marybeth talked, he eased the pickup back out onto the highway.
He could not have predicted this turn of events. It was not at all satisfying to him. He couldn’t get over the fact that he wasn’t sure justice had been served at all.
Cudmore was a creep and a paranoid conspiracy theorist. The evidence was stacked against him. The things he had said and done at the arraignment hearing had almost convinced Joe he was capable of beating and dumping April. Dulcie obviously believed Cudmore had done it. Marybeth seemed to think the same thing.
Joe wasn’t so sure. And he couldn’t reach out to Nate for help because Nate was dying.
13
Two days later, Liv Brannan looked up when she heard the heavy oncoming footfalls approach the root cellar from outside. She’d come to recognize the day-to-day routine.
It was dinnertime on Friday night, March 21. It was her thirty-third birthday, but she didn’t plan on telling anyone about it because she knew they wouldn’t care. When a single tear leaked out of her left eye, she violently wiped it away.
She sat on a rickety hard-backed chair near the air mattress and a mass of rumpled sleeping bags. It was the only chair available.
By the looks of it, the cellar had been dug into the earth many years ago, probably before the motley collection of houses, double-wide trailers, and metal buildings had been assembled above ground. She’d seen glimpses of the compound through a tiny gap at the bottom of her blindfold when they brought her here after the shooting. There were old trucks and cars rusting in a field, a pack of dogs that had rushed out to greet the Suburban, and stray chickens in the yard. Elk, moose, and deer antlers whitened by age and sun covered the entire side of an old clapboard barn. She thought: White trash.
By the glow of a utility light that hung from a slit in the double doors, she’d studied every inch of the root cellar. She didn’t have anything else to do except reread the dozen magazines—American Hunter, National Enquirer, Taste of Home—they’d left for her. Someone had torn off the address labels on the front of each one so she wouldn’t know who the subscriptions were for—or the address they’d been sent to. All she knew was that the compound was about an hour from the HF Bar Ranch. She had no idea which direction they’d come from, and she hadn’t seen which roads they had taken, because she hadn’t been allowed to get off the floor of the second row of seats in the SUV until they arrived. She knew they’d been on gravel roads, asphalt, and finally a rutted dirt road that was a bruiser.
The walls of the cellar were hard dry clay. It had been dug by hand tools and she could make out the pick marks. Webs of dried roots reached out of the walls like gnarled hands. Several rows of empty shelving covered each wall, no doubt where someone used to store canned vegetables or jam. She’d heard that people out here used to can trout and wild game in Mason jars as well. The shelves were held up by rusted metal L-shaped braces. She’d tried to pull one out, but it was stuck fast. She’d continue to try to get one free because it was the only thing she had that could possibly serve as a weapon.
Plotting her escape was better than crying to herself. Liv was cried out.
The other items in the cellar—the blankets, the ancient thick sleeping bags lined with deer and elk montages that were no doubt used in a hunting camp, the humming electric space heater, the five-gallon white bucket that served as her toilet, the case of bottled water—were harmless.
—
THE HASP WAS THROWN on the double doors twelve feet above her. The left door was opened, then the right. The particular smell of the place—the mixture of spilled diesel fuel, manure, and sage—wafted down from outside. She could see a square of pure blue sky.
“Stand back,” the man said. “I’m puttin’ the ladder down.”
Liv stood and moved the chair, then retreated to the wall in back of her as the aluminum extension ladder was lowered until the feet were solidly on the floor. She looked up as the opening filled with the shoulders and head of a man. He wore a cowboy hat with sharp upturned side brims like he always did, and he appeared to be grinning.
“There you are,” he said finally. “It took me a minute to see where you were.”
“I’m here,” she said.
“I got your supper.”
He backed off for a second and then reappeared. His cowboy boots descended rung by rung. His back was to her as he came down, but he had his head turned so he could watch her and make sure she didn’t try anything. He steadied himself with his left hand on the rail. A black feed bucket with a small quilt over the mouth of it hung from his right.
“You’ve got a hell of a treat coming your way. Fried chicken, corn on a cob, rolls, butter, and salad with Thousand Island dressing,” he said.
When he got to the bottom, he turned. He was big, with wide shoulders and a barrel chest. His head was blocky and he had a lantern jaw and small, close-set eyes. As always, he had her Smith & Wesson Governor tucked into the front of his jeans and an electric hot-shot, designed for livestock, sticking out of his back pocket. She knew he wouldn’t hesitate to use it on her if he felt the need. Or maybe just for fun.
She could smell the aroma of fried chicken from the bucket.
“How long are you going to keep me down here?” she asked. “It gets really cold at night.”
He snorted and pointed at the space heater that glowed red.
“It doesn’t exactly keep it toasty in here.”
He said, “I woke up once in the woods with five inches of snow on me. This ain’t so bad.”
“It is for me.”
He shrugged. “That ain’t my call.”
“Whose call is it?”
“Why do we have to get into all this again?” he said. “Can’t we ever just have a nice conversation? Why do you always have to be so feisty?”
“I’m in a hole in the ground. What if it rains or snows?”
“That’s why we put them blankets down here, I think.”
“What if it rains hard and this cellar fills with water?”
“Yeah, well,” he said after a long pause. As if he really had to think that over, she thought.
“Why did you kill him?”
“I just do what I’m told to do for the good of the family. It wasn’t nothing personal. Mom always says we gotta cover all the bases.”
Those were the same words he’d used when she’d asked him the last time. The same words he used every time she asked.
“‘Cover all the bases’? What does that even mean?”
He shrugged again and said, “She’s always thinking a few steps ahead of everybody else. I don’t even try to outguess her on this kind of thing.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?” she asked.
That made him think. It was as if he’d never even considered the question.
He said, “We hit him with three full loads of buckshot. That’d kill any man.”
“Nate’s not any man. He’s a good man. And he was unarmed.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. Then: “Why was that? Why didn’t he have that famous gun of his on him?”
“The feds took it away.”
“Damned feds anyway,” he said. “That’s what they’re tryin’ to do with all of us—take away our guns. That’s what your president wants to do.”
Liv said, “Why is he my president?”
He reddened. “You know. Jeez, it seems like everything I say makes you mad.”
“I’m in a hole.”