“I’m confused,” Joe said.
Tassell looked away. “What’s done is done. I don’t want it dredged up again.”
“You think I’m going to do that?”
“Maybe. That’s what Barnum said you’d do.”
Joe paused before responding. Tassell was obviously warning him off, but was it because there was something to hide or simply because a further inquiry would look bad and attract unwanted attention? Joe guessed the latter.
“Don’t worry,” Joe said. “It doesn’t seem like you’ve got anything to fear from me.”
“Let’s hope not,” Tassell said with finality. “Let’s hope not.”
Then he excused himself, saying, “I want another hit of that cheese.”
“About those keys,” Joe said.
“Come by the office around five,” Tassell said. “We should be done with our workshop by then.”
Joe watched as Randy Pope gave Susan Jensen a long hug. Joe thought Pope held the clench three beats too long, moving it into the category of inappropriate behavior. Susan didn’t appear to be hugging back.
Finally, Pope said something sincere to her and took his leave. As he passed Joe, Pope looked up.
“On behalf of the department, right?” Joe said.
“Don’t you have work to do?” Pope snapped, his face flushing pink.
Susan Jensen worked her way through a group of wellwishers and walked purposefully up to Joe and said, “May I have a few minutes, please?”
“Of course,” he said, following her through the room and into the hallway.
“I need a drink,” she told him, as if apologizing.
Joe didn’t need one, but didn’t say so. The lounge was at the end of the hall, and Susan looked inside before going in.
“All clear,” she said. She took a seat on a stool at the empty bar and ordered a glass of white wine. Joe liked her, and had from their first meeting. She was ebullient, smart, and a little caustic. Like Marybeth, Susan Jensen was a gogetter.
“Just tonic for me,” Joe said to the bartender, who was young, fit, and sunburned—the Jackson look.
“You’re not drinking, that’s good,” Susan said.
“Not today, anyway.”
She waited for the explanation.
“I had a couple of extras last night,” he said.
“Will used to be reasonable like that,” she said. “He’d have a few drinks and then he’d go for weeks without one.
It wouldn’t even occur to him. But then he changed.”
“Susan, I’m sorry,” Joe said.
“Everybody is,” she said, sipping, an edge creeping into her voice. “Everybody in that room is very sorry. We never had so many friends in Jackson who thought so well of us.”
Joe didn’t know how to respond.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s catty. A few people have shown the boys and me real kindness. Some anonymous person even paid for the costs of cremation, which helped us out a lot. Will’s life insurance policy won’t pay because of what happened. I have a new job, but still, I’ve got to think about the boys, how I’m going to pay for them to go to college.”
Joe hadn’t thought of the fact that suicide was exempted in most life insurance policies. He felt a stab of anger, wondered how Will could have been so selfish.
“Joe, when you leave a man you want him to regret it.
You want him to sit and stew and feel lousy for driving you away. Then maybe, you want him to get his act together and come crawling back on his knees. You don’t want him to kill himself and leave you with that.”
“I understand.”
“I hope you do,” she said. “If Marybeth ever leaves you, go crawling back to her like a whipped puppy. Don’t internalize it, and brood about it, and think there’s no way out.”
He nodded. He wasn’t sure why she was giving him this advice. She drained her glass, ordered another.
“I need fortification to go back into that room,” she said.
He had so many questions for her. “Where will you go?”
“The kids and I live in Casper,” she said. “We moved there four months ago. I’ve got a job at the newspaper, and we live with my parents. I started selling ads, and recently moved up to marketing director. It’s a hard job, but I’m very good at it. We’re making more income now than we ever did.”
Joe thought of the parallels with his own family, Marybeth’s new business, the obvious conclusion that it would likely prosper if either Joe took a different job or the family moved out of Saddlestring. He asked, “How are the boys handling the move, and now this?”
“Terribly,” she said, matteroffactly. “Will was a god to them. You can guess what it’s like. You have girls, right?”
“Yes.”
“Imagine if you had boys. If every day they watched you strap on your gun after breakfast and put on your hat and go out into the mountains to catch bad guys and protect the herds.” She said “protect the herds” in a wellpracticed way, and Joe guessed it had been some kind of joke between Susan and Will. “They worshipped him,” she said.
“They still do. They didn’t see him like I did those last terrible months, when I’d come visit from Casper and we’d try to reconcile. Something definitely changed with him. A couple of times he would roar around the house, stumbling and cursing me. He never used to do that. His mood swings got absolutely crazy and unpredictable. He’d be manic one day and sullen the next. I didn’t know him anymore, and he scared me. If the boys saw or heard him like that, I don’t know what they’d think of him now.”
Joe winced as she talked. He had thought about saying that it might not be all that different with his girls, but he refrained. He didn’t want to have that kind of discussion.
“Susan, what happened to him?”
She shrugged. “That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Her eyebrows arched. “He said a few times that the pressure was building, that he was being squeezed alive. But that wasn’t unusual. Things have always been like that here, you’ll see.
Will had a gift for dealing with it, though. At least he did at one time. He just went into his cave.”
“His cave?”
She took a long drink. “That’s what we used to call it. It was a mental cave he could sit in and depressurize after a bad day. He’d sit and stare at the television, or out the window. Sometimes he took the dog for a walk, or messed with his horses. It didn’t matter what he did, because even though he was there, he really wasn’t there, you know?”
“I do,” he said. “When I feel like that, Marybeth and the girls say I’ve gone into JoeZone.”
She smiled sympathetically. “He used to come back from backcountry patrols feeling pretty good, though,” she said. “He said they cleared his mind and gave him his good perspective back.”
Joe understood that.
“I took the job in Casper to give Will the option of getting out of this pressure cooker. I thought he’d follow me to be with the boys. I even found a couple of opportunities for him there, but he never took them. He stayed here and things got worse.”
Joe shook his head, trying to think what he would do in the same situation, if Marybeth said she’d had it with his absences and threatened to move away. He’d follow her, wouldn’t he? When he realized he was missing some of what she said, he apologized and asked her to repeat it.
Susan said, “I said he didn’t give a lot of thought to the fact that while he was away for nights on end sleeping under the stars or whatever he did, he was completely out of contact with the outside world. He liked that, I guess. But he had a family here in town who never heard from him. I worried so much about him out there, Joe, that I would cry myself to sleep. Then I’d hate him. But I always got over it when he came back. When I saw you at the funeral, that was what I thought of.”
“But things changed with Will?”