"Get your little ass down here, Sheridan. If you don't, you're going to be in bigger trouble than you ever imagined!" He sounded crazy now.
When he said that, she resolved not to move an inch. Adults could be incredibly stupid. He had almost convinced her to answer before he lost his temper.
"Okay, then," he continued. "If you aren't coming down RIGHT NOW you had better stay exactly where you are tonight."
This was new. She listened. He was shouting. His voice was getting hoarse.
"Sheridan, there are going to be a lot of people here in a little while. Lots of lights and lots of policemen. You better not even think of coming down until after they're gone. If you do, if I see you, a lot more people are going to die. You're going to be the first one, and then I'm going to finish off your mother. JUST LIKE I'M GOING TO FRY ALL OF THESE FUCKING LITTLE WEASELS!"
It was the first thing he said that she truly believed.
She looked up, and the rock wall in front of her was glowing. Orange curls of light flickered across it, and for a moment she was sure she was witnessing a miracle. Then she climbed on the boulder that she had been sitting under and looked down. She was amazed at the distance she had covered, and how clearly she could see what was going on below her.
The woodpile was burning, the red flames rolling into the cold night air. Wacey was in the backyard, bathed in the light of the fire. He kept looking up into the foothills and it appeared he was looking directly at her. But he couldn't see her up there, so far away on top of that rock.
He turned and went inside the house. It was too far away to see into the house, to see her mother.
In his pickup, Joe crested the hill on the Bighorn Road and what he saw ahead in the distance was his worst nightmare come true--something that perhaps in the past he had dreamed about, or thought about just like every father inevitably does, but something he had suppressed into a place deep in his mind. But sometimes those unthinkable possibilities, no matter how far beaten back, are unleashed at terrible moments. Like now.
His house and the road in front of it was an explosion of strobing and flashing lights. Garish blue and red emergency lights spun on the tops of Saddlestring Police Department cars and county vehicles. Orange flames rose into the clear sky behind the house, the fire so large and bright it lit up the hillside beyond.
Then, from the center of it all, a Life Flight helicopter bristling with landing lights lifted off, looking clumsy as it cleared the roof of the house, then gaining altitude once it emerged from the spoor of wood smoke that was black on black in the night sky.
For a heart-stopping moment, Joe had forgotten that his family was at Eagle Mountain. But, after assuring himself that they seemed to be nowhere nearby, he wondered what he could be seeing. He pressed the accelerator to the floor and sped up. The horse trailer pulled sluggishly behind him. In the few minutes it took to get to his house, a half-dozen different scenarios occurred to him: the wiring in the house had always been bad, so a short caused a fire and the Life Flight helicopter contained an injured firefighter; or a drunk hunter, mad about something, had come to his vacant house and set the woodpile aflame and gotten burned in the process; or the people who had wiped out the Miller's weasels had come after him and something had gone wrong. All of the scenarios were possible but none made any sense.
The intensity of the multiple flashing emergency lights made it nearly impossible to see where he was driving. There were vehicles blocking the driveway and lining the road in front of the house. He pulled ahead and off to the side of the road and jumped out of his pickup. He left the motor running and the door open.
Sheriff's deputies in short dark jackets and Stetson's compared notes on the front lawn. No one seemed to notice him as he approached the house. Through the front picture window, Joe could see that there were men inside, standing in the living room and the kitchen, and every light in the house was on. Joe felt he was walking through some kind of movie scene where he was invisible to everyone else in it. He saw Sheriff Barnum's hangdog face through the window talking on the
telephone.
As he opened the door to go in, Wacey suddenly blocked it. He could tell by the drained, panicked look on Waceys face that something was horribly wrong. Joe tried to step around him, but Wacey made it clear he didn't want Joe to come any farther into the house.
"Move, damn it," Joe barked.
"Joe, Marybeth's been shot."
Joe stopped. The words hit him like a hammer. Wacey reached out and put his hands on Joe's shoulders both to steady him and to keep him in front of him.
"Joe, I was driving up the road about a half hour ago and I saw there was big fire behind your house. I saw Marybeth's car out front and the door was unlocked so I went in. I found her on the kitchen floor and there's a bullet hole in the kitchen window and the backdoor was kicked in."
Joe felt as if his insides had been sucked out. "Who ..."
"We don't know." Wacey had a desperate look on his face that disturbed Joe even more.
"Is Marybeth all right? Why was she even here?"
"She's alive, but we don't know how bad it is yet. The Life Flight chopper is on its way to Billings right now. She should be in surgery within a half an hour."
Joe was staring beyond Wacey and into the house. The kitchen floor was covered with dark red blood. It looked like gallons of it. A county photographer was taking shots of the floor and the window.
"Joe?"
Joe looked back to Wacey.
"Joe, do you have any idea at all who might have done something like this? Was anybody gunning for you? Any problems in the field with hunters or anything?"
Joe shook his head no. He didn't want to spend the time it would take to tell Wacey what he had learned in the elk camp, not knowing if it could possibly have any significance with what had happened to Marybeth, "Was she alone?" Joe asked.
"Did she have any of the kids with her?"
"She was alone, thank goodness," Wacey said. "God, I'm so sorry this happened to you. I really am."
"Jesus Christ," Joe sighed.
"Absolutely by herself," Wacey added for emphasis. "But don't worry, Joe, we'll find out who did it. We'll probably have 'em by midnight. My guess is drunk hunters."
Joe nodded, not really listening. "Wacey, will you help me out here?"
"You bet, Joe."
"I need to unhitch a horse trailer and get to Billings. Will you help me unhitch it and then call my mother-in-law at Eagle Mountain and tell her what's happened? I'll call her and the kids from the hospital as soon as I get there and find out what's what."
Wacey agreed, and the two of them went out to the road where Joe's pickup was.
Wacey asked Joe if he was sure he was okay to drive, and Joe mumbled that he was. He was still shaken from the sight of all of that blood on the kitchen floor. Marybeth's blood.
They unhitched the horse trailer from the truck and lowered the tongue to the ground. Joe asked Wacey to corral Lizzie and feed and water her.
"Do you want me to take that saddle, too?" Wacey asked, shining his flashlight in the back of the pickup on the saddle with its bulging saddlebags and the butt of the Wingmaster shotgun still in the
scabbard.
"No," Joe said. "That stays with me."
Joe ignored Wacey when he said he would be "more than glad" to take the saddle to the corrals.
As he pulled out into the road, in his rearview mirror, Joe could see Wacey leading his horse across the road and watching Joe's pickup drive away.