I scratched the big bay behind his ears and then ran my fingers under his chin where the bugs usually bit along the soft flesh beneath the jaw. The short hair was pebbled with small swellings, and he rocked his head back and forth, using my hand as a scratching post like some thousand-pound house cat.
I glanced back at Vic and Henry. “He’s got pictures of her all over his sheep wagon.”
“Who?”
I pulled my hand back, and the bay nibbled at my knuckles. “Mary Barsad. When I dropped Vanskike off at his trailer last night, I saw that he had pictures of her all over his walls.”
They looked at each other before resuming their communal looking at me, Henry the first to speak. “That is significant.”
I brushed the horse’s nose and stretched my other hand out to pet a roan. “Maybe. He also believes in the divine accordance of Kmart.” They both were still looking at me. “He buys these astrology scrolls at the checkout line at Kmart, and I think he really believes in them.”
Vic pushed off Rezdawg and walked over. She kept her distance; she didn’t much like horses. “He was on Sandy’s short list; we know he killed a guy, and he might’ve set a house on fire.”
“So?”
Her snort startled the little remuda. “Somebody once taught me that if you’re looking for a murderer, you start with the people who’ve killed people.” She took a step closer, and I could just see her in my bad eye, past the gaggle of horse noses. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s not like we’ve got a suspect behind every fucking tree.” She glanced around with purpose at the plains stretching to the horizon. “Not that there are a lot of those around here either.”
Henry stuffed the folder under his arm. “What are you thinking?”
I took a breath and watched the roiling of the over-grazed sweetgrass in the pasture; it was as if someone was stroking it just as I’d petted the horses. “I’m not getting a feeling for any of it, and that worries me.” The bay extended his muzzle and breathed in my breath as I laughed. “Hershel’s horses.”
Henry joined us, handing Vic back her flashlight. “What?”
I palmed the bay’s head slightly out of the way. “These horses must be some more of Hershel’s; they always want to identify you by sniffing your breath.”
“OIT.”
I glanced at him-Old Indian Trick. “Really?”
He nodded and extended his good hand to a dun mare. “I have heard of it done when gathering horses on the open range.”
I nodded. “Maybe Hershel has more Indian connections than we know about.”
Vic stuffed her hands in the pockets of her fleece. “So, how does that help us?”
“Damned if I know, but I don’t think it’s Hershel.”
“I thought it’s only women who have intuition.” She sighed in exasperation. “Then what about this Bill Nolan character?”
I thought about it. “He’s up to something, but then he’s been up to something ever since I’ve known him. I don’t think he’s a killer, even in the more abstract sense of setting the house or the barn on fire.”
Vic risked getting closer to the horses so that she could get into my line of sight. “So, now we’re thinking that Wade Barsad might’ve not set the barn fire?”
I ran my hand down the bay’s muscled throat. “I don’t know.”
“Then why did she kill him?” I turned and looked at her. “Walt, she’s the only one left.”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Then who? That’s everybody who was there the night of the murder.”
I reached out to pet the bay between his ears, but I guess he figured we didn’t have anything in the way of treats and decided to move on; the others followed. Henry started digging in his shirt pocket. He extended his unswollen hand with one of the high-grain sorghum treats-the kind that horses will walk through hell in a napalm saddle to get. The bay turned on a heel and took the horse cookie from the flat of the Bear’s palm. The others crowded near as he distributed a few into my shirt pocket where I’d hidden my star.
“Then it was someone who was not there.”
October 24: five days earlier, late morning.
Frymire had sounded irritated.
“I walked in here, and the prisoner was gone.”
I leaned on the counter at the nurse’s station and held the phone a little away from my ear. “We’re at the hospital. Mary’s getting a mandatory checkup; Vic and I brought her.”
“I thought that was supposed to be at two o’clock?”
“Isaac called and said he could fit her in sooner, so I figured we’d get it over with.”
“What’s the verdict?”
I glanced at the closed door that led to the examination room. “I don’t know, but Isaac, Vic, and Mary are still inside.”
“Well, I’m here serving and protecting. There was a drive-off at the gas station south of town, but the guy came back and paid while I was there.”
“Must’ve known that the International Man of Mystery was on his trail.”
Frymire hung up. My deputies did that to me a lot.
I was bored, and Ruby’s niece was working on the computer at the next desk, so I ambled over and looked down at the sandy-haired young woman. “How you doin’, Janine?” I was particularly proud of myself for remembering her name; it seemed as though I was forever forgetting it.
She didn’t look up. “I’m busy, Uncle Walter, so stop bothering me.”
I decided to take a walk down to the bank of machines by the door and get a bottle of water, seeing as how they didn’t have an apparatus that dispensed Rainier. I dropped in a few quarters, pushed the button, and retrieved the plastic bottle below. It was a nice day, so when the automatic doors that opened to the outside automatically swung wide, I took it as an invitation.
I stepped onto the sidewalk outside the emergency room. There was a grassy hillside that the hospital board had recently landscaped and dedicated to Mari Baroja. There was a conveniently placed bench that had her name inscribed on a small brass plaque, so I sat, sipped my water, and thought about Mari and her granddaughter.
Lana had stopped by the office a week ago to say hello, but I’d been out. Word was that the young baker was buying up a remarkable amount of property on Main Street with the millions her grandmother had left her, along with a large tract of land leading up to the mountains. The buzz was that she was attempting to gather enough land for a ski resort, but I was hoping for a Basque restaurant.
The locals had been predicting, with resigned and doom-filled voices, that Durant was the next Jackson before Jackson had been Jackson. I didn’t see it.
Jackson’s geography was a lot like that of Manhattan in size and restriction-the City of New York because it was an island surrounded by water, and the town of Jackson because it was a valley surrounded by state and national parks. There was a limited amount of land in both places, and a lot of people who wanted to live in either or both.
A ski resort would change things, but I doubted we’d be seeing espresso stands and full-length coyote coats on the sidewalks of Durant-other than the one on Omar, that is.
I sipped my water and looked across the parking lot where another of Kyle Straub’s signs proclaimed A MAN TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. What the hell did that mean, anyway? It wasn’t even particularly good English. The sign still made my ass hurt, but I was cheered by what was sitting on its top. A large, very yellow meadowlark periodically lifted its head and sang out with the gurgling, flutelike notes of its song.
A hardy bird that nests in the grasses of the plains, famous for that song, the meadowlark is the state bird of Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon. As a state bird choice, original it was not. The birds always arrive in the spring, but then seem to disappear in July until they come back in fall, like sentinel bookends for summer.