Winterkill (18 page)

J
eannie Keeley sat
in the dirty pickup wearing her best green dress and smoking a cigarette. The defroster didn’t work worth a damn, and every few minutes she leaned forward and wiped a clean oval on the foggy windshield. When it was clear, she could see the redbrick façade of Saddlestring Elementary. It was Wednesday morning, the second day the children were back at school.

A bell rang, and despite the cold, children filed out of a set of double doors on the side of the building and across a playground that was mottled with snow and frozen brown gravel. Jeannie noted that there was a playground supervisor—a teacher, she supposed—walking stiffly on the perimeter of the children.

Her eyes squinted and fixed on a blond girl wearing a red down coat with a hood rimmed with fake white fur. The girl was in the middle of a group of three other girls huddling near the building. The girls, presumably classmates, were talking and gesturing with animation.

“There she is,” Jeannie whispered, pressing her finger against the glass. “There’s my April.”

Clem, her man, cleaned a little oval for himself.

“Which one?”

“By the building. In that red coat.”

Clem hesitated. He obviously couldn’t pick her out. “Red coat?” he asked. “There’s about twenty red coats.”

Jeannie waved him off impatiently. “I goddamned know which one is my daughter, Clem.”

“Didn’t say you didn’t,” he answered, clearly looking to avoid a confrontation. She knew he would choose to do that. Usually, she wished he wouldn’t talk at all. Rarely did he say anything worthwhile. She wished he would just shut up and drive.

J
eannie
had met Clem in eastern Tennessee at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. She had been waitressing, just about to quit and move on, and he was seated in her section. He was alone. He had driven her crazy with the length and precision of his order—how,
exactly,
he wanted his eggs cooked (just shy of over-easy with a dollop of butter on the yolk), his gravy ladled (on the side, in a soup bowl and not a cup, with plenty of pieces of pork sausage in it), his fried apples prepared (a double order with extra cinnamon) and his toast toasted (hard on one side, soft on the other). She had stared at the man with his prison pallor and thin dark hair when he’d asked her politely to repeat his order back to him. She did, and then asked him where in the hell he was from that he could order a breakfast like that and expect to get it. Eastern Montana, he said. Jordan. And it wasn’t that he could get a breakfast exactly like that in Jordan. It was that he had been dreaming of this particular breakfast for three years in Deer Lodge, Montana, at the penitentiary. He told her his name was Clem. She told him her name was Suzy. She always lied about her name; it was habit. He ate his breakfast and read a newspaper, and didn’t move until lunch, when she came to take his order again.

“How come your name tag says ‘Jeannie’ if your name is Suzy?” he had asked her.

“If you want lunch, you’ll shut your goddamned pie-hole,” she answered, and was overheard by the manager, an overeager junior achievement type who didn’t even have the guts to fire her in person but sent the accountant to do it.

Jeannie had gathered her few belongings in a bundle and left the Cracker Barrel. Along with her possessions, she took
some silverware and a few frozen steaks from the walk-in to her car. But the battery was dead, or something, and the car wouldn’t start. She was furious at this turn of events, but Clem had been waiting for her in the parking lot and he had offered her a ride.

That was nine months ago now. Neither one of them had a place to stay, a place to go, or family to move in with. When Clem heard that a man named Wade Brockius planned to provide some refuge for people like him, he told Jeannie about it and they bought a twenty-year-old travel trailer with what little money they had and drove northwest. She had no idea at the time that she would end up in a place she knew, a place she hated, where her husband had been murdered and her daughter lost to her.

“You look purty in that dress,” Clem said. She shot a look at him.

Here was a man, she thought, a Montana Freeman, who had held out in a dirty farmhouse outside Jordan, Montana, for months in defiance of local, state, and federal law enforcement. A man who had patrolled the flat scrub earth of eastern Montana wearing a ski mask and carrying a Ruger Mini-14 with a banana clip. (His image had been broadcast around the world during the siege.) A man who had spent three years at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge rather than tell the authorities what he knew about the Freeman leadership. But a man who was so damned scared of
her
that he flinched when she turned on him and started crying like a eunuch when she threatened to leave him. Clem the Freeman, she thought.
Clem the Freeman
.

The bell rang again. Recess was over. Jeannie watched April and the other girls go back inside the building.

“That woman, Marybeth Pickett, thinks she’s a better mother to April than I am,” Jeannie said bitterly.

Clem grunted in disapproval of Marybeth.

“She took advantage of me, and my April,” Jeannie spat. “She took that child when I was at my worst, when I couldn’t care for her. Now that woman wants to keep her because she lost one of her own.”

Clem grunted again.

“People been taking things from me all of my damned life.
Just because I’m smaller, or had less school than them, they figure they can just
take
what they want from me.” Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she lit another cigarette. “My first husband, Ote, took my childhood and my future from me when he moved me out to this damned place so he could be a mountain man. Then that judge in Mississippi took my boy away after that. That damned judge said I abandoned my boy, which was a damned lie. Everybody has a right to go on a vacation, and that’s all I done. How could I be blamed for the fact that my baby-sitter, that little bitch, went on vacation, too? But that judge took my boy away anyway.”

Jeannie’s youngest, her three-year-old daughter, was with Ote’s parents in Jackson, Mississippi. They claimed they were going to keep her, but Jeannie had other plans.

She looked at Clem, her eyes blazing. He was shaking his head slowly.

“It’s a crying shame,” Clem said.

“You goddamned right it is,” she said, turning back to the windshield, which was fogging again. “Once we get April, we’ll go back for my baby.”

Jeannie pulled two envelopes from her purse. One was old and brown, and the other was crisp and white. She shook out a thin sheaf of photos from the brown envelope. Clem watched as she shuffled through the snapshots.

“I’m gonna show these to April to remind her where she comes from,” Jeannie said. “This one’s her and her brother when they was babies. April used to suck her two fingers all the time, instead of her thumb. Ote said that was unnatural.”

She went through all of the pictures again, smiling at some, riffling past others. Then she dropped them back into the brown envelope.

The white envelope contained a court order assigning immediate custody of April to Jeannie. The order was signed by Judge Potter Oliver of Kemmerer, Wyoming.

C
lem
had been the one who knew of Judge Oliver, and they had driven across the state to meet the judge, after hours waiting in his office. Clem had told her Judge Oliver was “eccentric,” but had his heart in the right place. What he meant, she found out, was that Judge Oliver was sympathetic to the
Freemen and had okayed several of their most outrageous financial schemes to fund their militia group. Despite petitions and threatened judicial and legislative action to have him removed from the court, Oliver had somehow stayed on. He was now being forced to retire within the year, he told them. Because of his age.

Judge Oliver was massively fat, with a wispy beard and heavy-lidded eyes. A single green-shaded banker’s lamp threw garish shadows across the judge and across the room. When he met with them, Oliver wore an ancient three-piece suit that was shiny from wear and stained with grease spots. Because of an attack of gout, Oliver explained, he was forced to wear slippers on his feet instead of shoes. She saw the slippers under his desk. They were big, like elephant slippers.

Jeannie had pleaded her case for April while Clem sat next to her, holding her hand. Judge Oliver listened impassively, his fingers intertwined across his stomach.

When she was through, the judge asked Jeannie to leave the room while he talked with Clem.

She had waited outside the door for less than ten minutes when Clem came outside to retrieve her. He nodded and told her things were going to be okay.

“I have remanded custody of your daughter to you upon your request,” Judge Oliver told Jeannie in a wheezy voice. “My clerk is preparing the order as we speak, and we will fax it to Twelve Sleep County.”

Jeannie actually cried with joy, and reached across the desk to shake his huge, crablike hand. She was so happy, and so grateful, thanks to Judge Oliver.

Oliver smiled back, but his eyes were on Clem.

Clem ushered Jeannie to the back of the room while the judge sat at his desk. She could tell when she looked at him that Clem had done something awful.

“The judge asked about compensation,” Clem had whispered nervously. “I told him we couldn’t pay him very much.”

“Clem, you asshole,” Jeannie had whispered back, furious. “We can’t pay him
anything
!”

Clem had hesitated, then gulped, then pulled at his collar.

“What, damn you?” she asked. Her whisper was loud enough, she thought, to be heard by the judge.

Clem continued to look at his own boots. Then she understood.
The judge wanted compensation
.

She turned toward Judge Oliver and smiled sweetly.

“I’ll wait for you out in the truck,” Clem mumbled, still looking down.

“You bet your bony ass you will,” Jeannie said over her shoulder, through smiling teeth.

“
I
guess I don’t get it why you want to go into that school and get her,” Clem said. “With that order and all, you could march right up to their house and take her.”

Jeannie sighed and rolled her eyes. “Clem, sometimes you’re even stupider than usual.”

He looked away, stung.

“It’s been three long years,” she said. “Do you want to drag a crying, screaming kid out of somebody’s house?”

Clem frowned. “But you’re her mother. She’ll want to go with you.”

She glared at him. “Who knows what kind of crap and filth about me they’ve put into her head? Who knows what they’ll tell her tonight, now that they know we’ve got this here order?”

Clem shook his head, confused. But it was obvious he didn’t want to argue.

“What this order means,” Jeannie said, “is that they can’t get her
back
.”

Clem dropped his eyes to the floorboards of the truck. “I’m just sorry what you had to do to get it.”

Jeannie snorted. “I’ve done worse.”

F
or
once, Jeannie Keeley was lucky. She remembered the layout of the school well enough to walk straight to the office without asking anyone where it was.

Her heels clicked on the tile floor and her green dress swished with purpose as she walked down the hallway. Most of the classroom doors were open, and the sounds of children and teachers came and went like radio stations set on “scan” as she walked.

The school office was empty except for a secretary who sat at a computer behind the front counter. Jeannie had been thinking about this for a long time. This was a small town.
Everybody knew damned near everybody else. She had not been inside the school for four years, since April was in kindergarten. She doubted she had made enough of an impression to be remembered. When she finally decided how to play it, it was simple. She operated on one premise:
What would Marybeth Pickett do?
When the secretary looked up, Jeannie smiled at her.

“Hi again. I’m April Keeley’s mother,” Jeannie said with such familiarity and assurance that the secretary should be ashamed for not recognizing her. “Third grade. I’m here to take her to the dentist.”

The secretary looked befuddled, and plunged into a spiral notebook on her desk. “I’m filling in today for the secretary because she came back from Christmas vacation with the flu,” the woman explained. “I’m trying to figure out how this works.”

Jeannie tried not to whoop with jubilation. She hoped she hadn’t looked too elated.

What would Marybeth Pickett do?

“No hurry at all,” Jeannie said. “I sent the note with April this morning, so it could be that it didn’t even get to you. I don’t mean to cause any problems.”

The secretary flipped page after page in the notebook, then looked up. Her face was red with embarrassment. “There’s nothing here, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t bring in the note.”

Jeannie made a “What can you do?” gesture.

S
heridan and Lucy
stood waiting at the curb when their father pulled up to the school to pick them up. Sheridan held Lucy’s hand. It was darker than it had been all day, and mist tendrils reached down from the sky like cold fingers. It wasn’t really snowing, but ice crystals hung suspended in the air.

“Where’s April?” her dad asked, as Lucy climbed over the bench seat to the narrow crew-cab backseat and Sheridan jumped up beside him.

“Mom came and got her this afternoon,” Sheridan said, pulling the seatbelt across her.

Her dad nodded, and began to pull away from the curb. Then something seemed to hit him and he slammed on the brakes. Lucy yelled
“Dad!”
to admonish him, but Sheridan turned in her seat to face her father.

“Sheridan,” he said slowly, enunciating clearly, each word dropping like a stone.
“How do you know your mother came and got her?”

“I heard the announcement from the other room,” she said. “The secretary came on and asked for April to report to the principal’s office. That’s what they do.”

Lucy came to her older sister’s defense. “They made an announcement like that for me when Mom came and got me to
take me to the dentist. Whenever they do that it means your mom or dad is waiting in the office for you.”

“Did you see her?” her dad asked.
“Did you see your mom?”

Both girls shook their heads. Sheridan had seen a woman in a green dress pass by her classroom door. But it wasn’t her mother. She had no idea why their father seemed so upset. Then she realized what must have happened—Jeannie Keeley must have come for April and taken her away. Sheridan clapped her hand to her mouth. She had been afraid something like this would happen. Her parents had never spelled out what was happening with April, but Sheridan knew whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

“Your mom was at work all day at the library and the stables,” he said.

And their sister April was gone.

Sheridan began to sob, and Lucy joined her. Sheridan felt awful. April was her responsibility because she was the oldest. Her dad closed his eyes tightly, then opened them and drove. He did not say
It’s okay, it’s not your fault
.

“I need to call your mother,” her dad said, his voice resigned.

J
oe
lay awake in bed and waited for Marybeth to join him. It was late, and he was exhausted. He watched Marybeth brush her teeth and clean her face in the vanity mirror. He could hear the murmur of late-night television from downstairs, a nightly habit of Missy Vankueren’s.

Marybeth had amazed him once again that night. By the time Joe got home, Marybeth had again channeled her rage and frustration into usefulness. Her ability to push her emotion aside and develop a strategy was stunning, Joe thought.

She had calmed Sheridan and Lucy as well as she could, and made dinner for them all. While she cooked, she methodically called both the principal and the sheriff to notify them of what had happened. She left after-hours messages with the county attorney and three local attorneys, asking them to call her in the morning.

While the girls bathed and watched television with Missy, Marybeth filled a suitcase and several boxes with April’s
clothing and toys. At the first opportunity, she announced to Joe, they must make sure Jeannie received April’s belongings. She said it with a kind of chilly determination that had unnerved him.

“Jeannie got April before we could prepare our little girl, or kiss her goodbye,” Marybeth said. “I will never forgive her for that.”

Missy always thought—and often said—that Marybeth would have made an excellent corporate lawyer if she hadn’t married Joe Pickett and started having children. Now Joe could see what an efficient and cold-blooded lawyer she could have become.

Marybeth turned the vanity light off and came to bed. Joe held her.

“We’re going to get April back,” Marybeth said through gritted teeth. “We’re going to get her back, Joe.”

Three times during the night, Marybeth left the bedroom. Joe slept so fitfully that he woke up and noted her comings and goings each time. He knew what she was doing. She was checking to make sure that her other two girls were still there.