“Did you have a daddy?” Brenda asked. She sounded curious.
“He worked on shrimping boats,” Liv said. “He died when I was five.”
“Mmmmm.”
“I don’t remember much about him.”
“Better that,” Brenda said, her voice hardening, “than him showing up whenever he felt like it. My brothers were animals, and they needed a man around to set them straight. He wasn’t there when he should have been. He was mean when he got drunk and he knocked Mama around. Then he’d feel bad about it, but instead of making it up to everyone, he’d take off again.
“I swore back then that if I found a man, I’d make him stay close to me and his kids. I thought I could tame Eldon of his wild hairs, but over the years I’ve learned how to handle him instead. I’m close with my boys, and Eldon is . . . there. I wish he’d take more interest in them, but he’s not much for ambition in any department except hunting and fishing. So I wore him down, which is the next best thing to having a good man in the first place. He doesn’t even know how to think for himself anymore, which is a good thing, because I do it for him and I do it better. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s the best for the family.”
Liv thought: She’s proud of her boys?
And she realized right then that Brenda was even crazier than she’d realized.
—
“MEN ARE SUCH SIMPLE CREATURES,” Brenda said, keeping her voice down so that Bull couldn’t overhear. “You and me, we have a thousand things going on in our minds at all times. It gets noisy in there. But men are different. They can’t hold more than one thought in their brain at a time. It’s ‘I’m hungry,’ or ‘I’m horny,’ or ‘I need to fix the transmission or this truck won’t run.’ If they could ever get inside our brains, the hullabaloo going on would probably kill ’em in a few minutes. And if we could ever get inside theirs, I suspect we’d get bored real fast with all the peace and quiet.
“But you probably know that, because you’re pretty and they fall all over themselves to get next to you. But when you’re plain and you look like me and don’t know fashion from cow plop, you learn to appeal to other base instincts, like food.
“If you look like me, you learn to cook. You find out what they like and you give it to ’em—and plenty of it. If you do that, they’ll do anything you want. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken-fried steaks, pot roast—whatever. Waffles and fried chicken will be enough to convince them to go into a barn and gun down Nate Romanowski. It’s simple, girl. Do you cook?”
“A little.”
“Of course, you have other ways, don’t you?”
“Like what?” Liv asked.
Brenda bent closer. “Like luring Bull down here.”
“He did that himself.”
“Sure he did.”
—
“SO WHY DID BULL and Eldon beat up Dallas?” Liv asked. “I don’t understand.”
The question was met with silence. When Brenda spoke, her tone was flat.
“He had to look like a bull tore him up. He couldn’t just fake it.”
“But why?”
“I told you,” Brenda said with annoyance. “Dallas could have gotten in trouble. This way, he got hurt a little, but he didn’t get arrested or nothing. He’s still with us and he’s just about recovered.”
Liv asked, “Why did Eldon and Bull ambush Nate? Did they have something against him?”
“Not at all,” Brenda said. “In fact, I think they kind of liked him.”
“Then why did they do it?”
Brenda scoffed. She said, “Anyone around this county knows that when the game warden gets in a situation, Nate Romanowski shows up to help him out. No one wants Nate around on the other side. That guy is crazy.”
“I’m not following you,” Liv confessed.
“I told you. Dallas did something stupid. It involved the game warden’s daughter. We were able to handle the game warden—he’s by the book and not that bright. He even came out here and saw Dallas, and he seen for himself that the boy was injured after all.”
Liv recalled the item she’d read in the Casper newspaper about Joe’s middle daughter being found beaten on the side of a road. Liv’s stomach suddenly turned, but she tried hard not to show any reaction.
Brenda continued. “But Joe Pickett doesn’t let things go. I’ve watched him over the years and I know that about him. If he told his buddy Nate that he suspected Dallas, even though he couldn’t prove it, well, Nate may come a-calling. I didn’t want Nate after my boy. So we put the word out there and lured you up and took him out before he could get together with his friend Joe Pickett and hear the story. It was a precautionary thing. We bought ourselves insurance, is all. Any mother would do the same thing for their boy if they thought they had to do it to keep him alive.”
“So it was all a preliminary strike,” Liv said. “You killed Nate just in case.”
“Pretty much,” Brenda said. “And it wasn’t easy. I had to look my husband and son in the eye and say, ‘Get in that barn and get ready. He’s just a man. There’s nothing special about him.’ Finally, they went in there and got set up. I wasn’t sure they’d go through with it until I heard the shots.”
Liv boiled inside, but she tried not to show it.
“I didn’t know you’d be with him,” Brenda said. “You were sort of a kink in my plans.”
“What happened to the van?”
“Eldon’s good for something,” Brenda said. “He knows every inch of this country out here because he guides hunters in the fall. He knows where to hide a vehicle where no one can find it.”
“Why are you telling me all this now?”
Brenda went back to brushing Liv’s hair. “Might as well.”
Those words weren’t chosen at random, Liv thought.
“You said you had a plan for me. Can you tell me what it is?”
“I’m not sure you want to know.”
Liv said, “You could let me out of here. I could help you around the house. I could be the daughter you never had. Or I could leave and never say a word to anyone.”
“You know neither one of those is a good choice,” Brenda said. “If you stayed, somebody would see you and wonder why a black girl was living with us. They’d wonder where you came from and somebody would figure it out. And there’s no way you can convince me you’d keep this all to yourself. Women aren’t made that way.”
“I am.”
“Oh,” Brenda said, bending forward again and whispering a few inches from Liv’s ear, “if only that were true.”
Liv closed her eyes. She thought about wheeling in her chair and plunging her thumbs into Brenda’s throat. If Bull wasn’t up there, she would have done it.
“I want to know,” Liv said.
“I’m waiting on Eldon,” Brenda said. “He’s got to go get his tank filled up. Then instead of dumping it at the treatment plant, he’s going to bring it back here.”
It took a moment for Liv to realize what she’d just heard.
“He’s going to dump sewage in the cellar?”
“Pretty much,” Brenda said in a conversational tone. “Then he can fire up the Bobcat and fill the rest of the hole with dirt. If anybody ever gets a notion to dig it up, they’ll realize this hole is full of sewage. There’s no way they’d keep digging and eventually find a body. We’ll just tell ’em our septic tank must have leaked.”
Liv closed her eyes.
“So you were asking me about pork chops. Is that because it’s my last meal?”
Brenda snorted, stopped brushing, and backed away.
She said, “Bull, cover me. I’m coming up.”
Dirt sifted into the cellar from the edge as Bull bent over and peered in. Liv saw that he was holding her handgun.