April was bunkered in her room and had not eaten dinner or spoken to anyone since she got home from her shift at Welton’s Western Wear. When Joe had knocked on her door, April yelled, “Go away!” He’d decided to leave her alone, although he did hope he’d have the chance to say good-bye in the morning.
As he finished his sandwich, the girls harmonized the chorus:
“What are they singing about?” Joe whispered to Marybeth over his shoulder.
“Diversity.”
Joe said, “Well, I got that. Is this for that Rainbow-whatever production?”
“Rainbow Dreams,” Marybeth said. “Written and choreographed by the new music teacher, a Miss Shirley Lemmex, who is twenty-four and,” she continued in a dramatic stage whisper, “very enthusiastic.”
Joe nodded. He didn’t know LeeAnne well, but he certainly knew Hannah Roberson. Hannah visited her father, Butch — convicted of a double homicide the year before in the case Joe had been squarely in the middle of — once a month when she and her mother, Pam, made the long drive to Rawlins and the Wyoming State Penitentiary. Hannah had a secret she shared only with Joe, Marybeth, and perhaps Lucy. She’d weathered the last year, and Marybeth had gotten her into professional counseling and done her own kind of counseling as welclass="underline" teaching Hannah how to care for and ride horses. She seemed to have taken to it, according to Marybeth.
Joe cringed. “Is that all there is to the lyrics?” he asked.
Marybeth patted him on the shoulder and said, “I’m sure there’s more to it.”
“I hope so. I mean, don’t we believe in right and wrong?”
“Don’t be a grump,” Marybeth said. “Appreciate how well they’re singing, not what they’re singing.”
He drank the last of his beer in silence.
“I’m going out to feed,” she said, patting him on the shoulder.
He nodded. It was her nightly routine.
He watched Marybeth pull on her canvas barn coat and slip into her high Bogs boots. Hannah broke from the song and asked her if she needed help with the horses.
Before Marybeth could answer, Joe said, “Thanks for asking, Hannah, but I’ll go out with her tonight. You girls keep practicing.”
“You will?” Marybeth asked him, surprised. Then she got it: Joe wanted to talk to her away from the singers.
The single bare lightbulb in the small barn threw harsh shadows through the bars of the sliding horse panels, making the inside where the horses shuffled look like a film noir jail. Marybeth measured out thick sections of hay between her hands from fifty-pound bales and pushed each through the hinged feeder panels into black rubber tubs on the other side. The three horses reestablished their nightly pecking order of who ate first: Rojo, Toby, and Poke.
Joe hung back near the barn door and admired his wife. When she was done dropping the feed into the stalls, she closed the panels and said, “How is Sheridan doing? You gave her that coat, right?”
“I did,” he said.
Obviously something in his tone made her pause and look at him with concern.
He told her about Erik Young, and how he’d talked to the university administrators and asked the FBI to run his name through their database. Marybeth listened with worry in her eyes. Joe said he’d told Sheridan he would be there as fast as he could if she called.
“I wish I — we — weren’t five hours away,” she said, lowering her head and hugging herself in an involuntary gesture of mother’s fear. “This is the kind of thing I have nightmares about.”
Joe said, “Sheridan’s smart, and she’s aware of her surroundings. Much more so than I would have thought, to be honest. She’ll do the right thing.”
Marybeth quizzed him on the steps Sheridan had taken so far and who she’d talked with. She agreed the bases had been covered but wondered if Sheridan would consider stepping down from her RA role and possibly moving. As she speculated, she shook her head. “No, she’d never do that. She’s like you,” she said to Joe. “She doesn’t have the sense to get out of the way of trouble.”
Joe shrugged.
“I’m going to call her tomorrow morning,” Marybeth said.
Joe said, “She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you so you’d worry. So this has to be between us.”
She winced. Joe was reminded of the special mother-and-daughter bond, and that by Sheridan reaching out to Joe first it would worry Marybeth even more.
“I guess she figured it was more up my alley,” Joe said, looking at his boots.
“I understand,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to look into this Erik Young myself.”
Marybeth often used library computers to access state and federal criminal databases. She wasn’t supposed to know the passwords, but she did. Her skill at research and investigation had aided Joe countless times.
She said, “If Erik Young fits the profile, he’s probably got a Facebook page or he’s posted some things online. If I can find them and they’re threatening, well, the university might have something to go on. These types don’t operate in complete secrecy, from what I understand. They generally telegraph what’s going on inside their heads.
“I won’t tell Sheridan I’m doing it,” Marybeth said, “but I’ll let you know what I find. And Joe, if I find something, you’ve got to drop whatever you’re doing and follow up that minute.”
Joe said, “Yup.”
“Oh,” she said, smiling wistfully, “life was so much easier when they were all my little chickens and I could keep an eye on them because they were close. Now Sheridan’s in another town, April’s going off the rails because of a cowboy, and Lucy wants to start dating. I feel like they’re all drifting away from me.”
There were tears in her eyes, and Joe pulled her close. He said, “We’ve done all we can. You’re the greatest mother I’ve ever been around — better than both of ours. Especially yours. They’ll be all right. You’ll be all right.”
“But I’ve lost control,” she said into his shoulder.
“That’s part of the deal, I think,” he said.
When she stepped away and wiped the tears from her cheeks, he outlined the assignment from the governor without going into many specifics and told her he was going away for a while and he didn’t know for how long. He left out names but explained that there was a suspicion that a wealthy rancher in Medicine Wheel County might also be a high-society hit man.
“That’s nuts,” Marybeth said, shaking her head. “In Wyoming?”
“They suspect he uses his ranch as his base. As far as I know, he hasn’t operated in the state. But I agree — it sounds nuts.”
“What if they’re right?”
He said, “Then maybe I can help bring him to justice. But like I told you, I’m under strict orders not to get too close. My job is to serve as eyes and ears only and to get out if the situation gets western.”
Her shoulders dropped and she said, “You’ve never been able to do that, Joe.”
It was cool enough in the barn that their breath puffed out in clouds of condensation. On the other side of the metal gates, the horses ate their hay in a methodic grum-grum-grum chorus.
“This time I will,” he said. “Count on it.”