“She’s got a mouth on her,” Bull said as an aside to Liv. “And she could probably afford to miss a few meals, if you know what I mean.”
Liv forced herself to grin. She could tell he liked that.
“Bull, goddamnit!” Cora Lee yelled.
“I’m coming!” he yelled back. “I’m coming.”
Before he climbed back up the ladder, he asked, “You need anything?” His tone was much gentler than the one he’d used to answer Cora Lee.
“Yes. Let me out of here.”
“Very funny,” he said with a chuckle.
He climbed to the top. She heard Cora Lee say, “Jesus, man. There you are. Hurry the fuck up.”
“Shut up, Cora Lee,” Bull said as he pulled the ladder up and swung the doors closed and locked them.
—
TWO HOURS LATER, the footfalls came back. Lighter this time, but not much.
Instead of Bull, it was Cora Lee. Liv recognized her by her voice.
“I’m doin’ the shit run,” Cora Lee said, dropping the coil of thin rope to the floor. It nearly hit Liv. “Tie it on your feed bucket first. Then I’ll drop it back down for the chamber pot.”
While Liv bent down to fix the rope to the black bucket handle, Cora Lee said, “What is it you and Bull was talking about for so long?”
“I wasn’t the one talking,” Liv said.
“Goddamn that man,” Cora Lee said under her breath. “You just stay the hell away from him.”
Liv looked up, exasperated. “I’m not the one coming down the ladder.”
Cora Lee narrowed her eyes. She was a sturdy, rough-looking blonde. She looked like she’d lived hard. Liv could see where she had once been pretty, twenty years and fifty pounds ago. Now, though, she had a weathered face set in a scowl.
“Tell them to let me go and I’ll never breathe a word of this to anyone,” Liv said.
“Like I’m gonna believe that,” Cora Lee said, untying the feed bucket and setting it aside. She dropped the rope back down. “Now your shitter.”
As Cora Lee hoisted the white bucket, it thumped on each rung of the ladder. Liv retreated to the far corner of the cellar before any of the contents could splash out and hit her. A few foul drops stained the floor near the feet of the ladder.
“Oh, sorry,” Cora Lee said, not sorry at all.
Liv heard Cora Lee empty the bucket on the ground a few steps away from the cellar door, then she returned to lower it back down.
“Would you mind rinsing it out first?” Liv asked.
“Yeah, I mind,” Cora Lee said. “I gotta get myself ready. Me and Bull are goin’ to town later.”
Liv thought, His name again. Either Cora Lee was especially stupid or she knew Liv would never have the chance to identify them to anyone.
So there were four of them at least, Liv thought to herself. Bull and his wife, Cora Lee. A man—the father?—called Eldon. She knew that name because she’d heard Cora Lee call to him a day ago. Eldon had responded with “No names!” and Liv could picture him pointing toward the root cellar in the distance. At other times, though, she could hear conversations between family members where they seemed to either have forgotten about her or didn’t think she could overhear. Or they just didn’t care, like Cora Lee.
She’d heard a couple of references to someone named Dallas, but she’d not heard Dallas speak for himself. Either Dallas was away or he’d not left the house.
Then there was the mother. The woman who “covered all the bases.” The woman who originally claimed she was Kitty Wells. Liv cursed herself for falling for that. Kitty Wells had been a country singer back in the fifties and sixties. Liv’s mother used to sing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” around the house, and she sang it better than Kitty Wells.
Liv hummed,
Too many times married men think they’re still single
And that’s caused many a good girl to go wrong.
Her head snapped up when she recalled the lyrics. Maybe, she thought, she had a weapon after all.
She was still thinking it through later that night when she realized it had become remarkably colder in the cellar, and the outside seemed oddly hushed. Only when a few rivulets of precipitation trickled down the clay walls did she know it was snowing.
14
On Saturday afternoon, Joe Pickett rumbled his pickup slowly down the muddy two-track that cut through the sagebrush toward the site of what had once been Lek 64. Daisy sat in the passenger seat with her front paws on the dashboard. The four inches of heavy spring snow that had fallen the night before had mostly thawed, but the moisture released a panorama of scents that kept his dog’s attention.
Clouds shrouded the summits of the Bighorns, parked there as if gathering strength before they loosened their grip and snow descended again. There was no spring in the Rockies, Joe knew. There was winter, summer, fall, and March-through-June, which was made up of various highlights of the other three.
While he often worked weekends in the summer to check fishermen and -women and in the fall to check hunters, he tried to take weekends off during the winter and March-through-June. But the night before, he’d received an email from his director, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, with the subject line “CRISIS.” Most subject lines on LGD’s emails were versions of “CRISIS” or “EMERGENCY.” The body of the email was written in her particular style: all capital letters and no punctuation except “. . .” between thoughts. To Joe, her messages all came across like shouted rants. She wanted him to “GET OUT TO THE LOCATION OF LEK 64 . . . RECOVER ANY SURVIVORS OF THE SAGE GROUSE MASSACRE . . .”
Apparently, the news of the slaughter had gone viral within the agency due to notices sent out from the Sage Grouse Task Force. LGD wanted to mitigate her report to the governor about the incident by saying that her man in the district, game warden Joe Pickett, had rescued the survivors.
Joe had groaned. He knew there would be no survivors because it had been more than a week since he’d discovered the killing field. The few cripples he’d seen darting through the brush would have long ago been eaten by predators, because they lacked the protection of the concentric circle of birds. On their own, they were history. It was the brutal but natural circle of life and death in the wild.
He knew LGD wouldn’t be satisfied until he assured her he’d returned to the scene and looked it over. Even then, he knew she wouldn’t be pleased with his report. She was a political animal and not a favorite of Governor Rulon, who had appointed her as a favor to his wife. There were rumors that LGD was positioning herself to run for governor once Rulon completed his second and final term. She was sensitive to anything that might cause her a public relations hit—especially from the feds and her environmental support groups. Being in charge of an agency that let dozens of potentially endangered sage grouse be decimated on her watch wouldn’t help her ambitions. Her email to Joe was carefully crafted outrage that she could later use as evidence of the immediate action she had taken. She even referred to the loss of Lek 64 as “SPECIES GENOCIDE.”
LGD had not asked about April’s condition but, to be fair, Joe wasn’t sure she knew about what had happened.
—
IF HE HADN’T known the country intimately, Joe thought, he could have easily driven right through the site of Lek 64 without recognizing it. The snows had smoothed out the tire tracks through the sagebrush, and predators had cleaned up the remains of the dead sage grouse. There were no longer feathers scattered everywhere on the ground, although there were a few pinfeathers caught in the brush. It was almost as if the birds had never been there at all.