Winterkill (34 page)

J
oe Pickett stood
at the bar in the Stockman’s and ordered his third Jim Beam on the rocks. While darkness came and the snow fell outside and drinkers entered complaining about the weather, he stared at his face in the cracked mirror.

He felt impotent and defeated, and the slow warmth of the bourbon spreading through him didn’t assuage his humiliation. When the glass came he threw back his head and drained it, then signaled to the bartender. The man looked skeptically at Joe for a moment, but poured another drink.

It was probably dinnertime at home, but it didn’t register with him. Pool balls clicked in the back of the bar, but he barely heard them. He realized that somehow he had lost Nate as he walked the three blocks from the Forest Service office to the Stockman’s, and he hadn’t looked around for him until he was seated on the red leather stool. He didn’t want to think anymore. He wanted another drink.

He had never felt like such a failure. He was a poor father and a poor husband. He hadn’t protected April and she was dead as a result. She had died because of lack of protection, like winterkill. Now, in confronting Melinda Strickland, he had failed April once again.

Would it have been different if it had been Sheridan or
Lucy instead of April?
Joe wondered. Would he have reacted differently, been more aggressive early on and not depended on the legal system to work, if it had been one of his own flesh-and-blood daughters up there? Would he have “turned cowboy,” as Nate once put it, if it hadn’t been April? The question tortured him.

He stared at his face in the mirror. He wasn’t sure he liked what he saw.

“
W
aiting
for your wife to join you?”

The question startled Joe out of his malaise, and he spilled his drink on the bar. It was Herman Klein, the rancher. Joe hadn’t seen him walk into the Stockman’s, but he’d been so deep in thought that he hadn’t been noticing much. He was now on his fifth drink, and the bar lights were starting to shimmy.

“Nope. Have a seat.” Joe recognized the birth of a slur when he said “seat.”

Klein sat and removed his hat to shake the snow off.

“I’m glad to see this storm,” Klein said, ordering a shot and a beer and another drink for Joe. Joe ignored the skeptical glare of the bartender, who wiped up the spill with a rag. “We need the moisture. That’s a strange thing to say after this January, but it’s true.”

Joe nodded. He felt a burbling in his stomach. He wondered if he would need to throw up.

They drank for a moment.

“Why did you ask about Marybeth?” Joe said.

Klein raised his eyebrows. “Because I never see you in here, and I saw her getting out of her van down the block. I just figured you were meeting her.”

It took a moment for this information to filter through Joe’s lethargic brain. Then he was puzzled. What would Marybeth be doing in town? The kids would have been home from school for the last few hours, and she should have been at home with them. Was she looking for Joe? He hadn’t called her, after all. In fact, he had told her nothing of the plan he and Nate had come up with. It was rare for him not to consult with her, but this had seemed like something she didn’t need right now. Or more rightly, something
he
didn’t need. In the back of
his mind, knowing her feelings, he had been a little afraid of how far she would have wanted to go with Strickland. It wasn’t something he wanted to see in his wife, if he could help it, or something he wanted to give her the opportunity to act upon.

“How long ago was that?” Joe asked Klein.

He shrugged. “Half-hour, I guess.”

Joe had left his truck at the Forest Service office. Maybe, he thought, she saw it there on her way home from her job at the library and stopped.
Uh-oh.

Hastily but clumsily, he slid off his stool and threw his last twenty on the bar.

“Gotta go,” he mumbled, sliding his coat up over his shoulders.

“You need a ride somewhere?” Klein asked, assessing Joe’s condition.

“I’m fine.”

Joe pretended not to hear Klein’s protestations as he weaved his way toward the door.

He spilled out into the darkness, his boots sliding on the three inches of fresh powder on the pavement. He clamped down his hat and buttoned his coat as he walked as quickly as he could down the street.

If Marybeth saw his pickup in front of the Forest Service office, she would probably go inside. Would Melinda Strickland still be there? If that was the case, Joe could only guess what could happen.
I’ve never hated a woman as much as I hate her,
Marybeth had said. But Melinda Strickland would surely have left her office right after he and Nate left, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she?

He wished he were sober.

He rounded the corner and could see through the waves of snow that a sheriff’s department Blazer, lights flashing, and a Saddlestring Police Department cruiser were parked in front of the Forest Service office. Blue and red wig-wag lights painted the street. The door of the Blazer hung open, as if the deputy had just jumped out. Joe’s truck was still parked in front, as was Melinda Strickland’s green Bronco. Marybeth’s van was not there, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

H
e
did not want to see Melinda Strickland again. Had she called the sheriff on him? Had something happened between her and Marybeth after he’d left?

Joe approached the building and eased the door open far enough to stick his head inside. The bourbon had made him bold—or foolhardy, he thought. Probably both. Inside, it was just as he had left it, except that Deputy Reed stood in the reception area, his radio raised to his mouth. The Saddlestring policeman sat on the vinyl couch, still bundled in his winter coat, with a vacant, drained look on his face, like he had seen something awful.

“Sheriff Barnum?” Reed said into the radio, “How fast can you get over to the Forest Service building? We just got a call about the fact that the door was left open and the lights were on at seven at night, so I checked it out and . . . well,
we’ve got a situation
.”

Joe looked quizzically at Reed, and Reed nodded toward the hallway where Melinda Strickland’s office was. Her door, like the front, was ajar.

He stepped inside and walked across the reception area. The Saddlestring cop was upset. Something he had seen down the hall made him lurch to one side and throw up in a small garbage can. Joe was grateful that both Reed and the cop were too preoccupied to ask him why he was there.

Joe rounded the reception desk and looked into Melinda Strickland’s office. What he saw seared the alcohol out of his system.

Strickland was still in her chair, but was slumped facedown over her desk in a dark red pool of blood. The wall with the framed cover of
Rumour
and photo of Bette was spattered with blood, brains, and stringy swatches of copper-colored hair. Strickland’s stainless-steel nine-millimeter Ruger semiautomatic pistol was clutched in her hand on top of the desk. A single shell casing on the carpet reflected the overhead light. The room smelled of hot blood.

Joe gagged, then swallowed. The bourbon tasted so bitter this time that he nearly choked on it.

He
knew
it wasn’t suicide. Just a couple of hours before, he had stared into that woman’s soul and there was nothing there to see. Strickland had not succumbed to some sudden
pang of guilt. No, Joe thought, someone had made it
look
like a suicide.

He started to push the door open farther but it stiffened. It wouldn’t open enough for him to get through. He looked down and saw that he had shoved the bottom of the door over something that had jammed it.

In a fog, he bent down to clear the door. He pulled the obstruction free, and looked at it.

It seemed as if something had sucked all the air out of his lungs and out of the room itself. He wasn’t entirely sure the groan he heard was his own.

The item jamming the door was a single Canadian-made Watson riding glove. It was one-half of Joe’s Christmas present to Marybeth.

J
oe checked both
ways as he left the Forest Service office in the heavy snowfall. There was no traffic on the street. He heard a siren fire up several blocks away. That would be either Barnum or the police chief. The glove was jammed in Joe’s pocket.

He was soon out of town and rolling on Bighorn Road toward his home before he allowed himself to think. He was ashamed of what he was thinking. It was unfathomable.

M
arybeth’s
van was parked in front of the garage and the porch light was on, but the windows were dark. When he entered, he noticed immediately that the house was cool and that the thermostat had not been turned up since they had left in the morning.

Sheridan and Lucy, who should have been watching television or doing homework, were nowhere to be seen.

“Marybeth?”

“Up here.” Her voice was faint. She was upstairs.

He bounded up the stairs and found his family in the bedroom. Lucy was sleeping on the top of the covers at the foot of the bed, and Sheridan and Marybeth were sitting on the side of the bed cuddling.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“We were just talking about April,” Sheridan said, her voice solemn. “We were feeling kind of sad tonight.”

Joe looked at Marybeth, trying to read her. She looked drained and wan. She did not look up at him.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

Sheridan shook her head.

“Please take Lucy downstairs and get yourselves something,” Joe said. “We’ll be down in a minute.”

Marybeth untangled herself from Sheridan, but she wouldn’t look at Joe.

When the girls were gone, Joe eased the door shut and sat next to Marybeth on the bed.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said. “I can smell it.”

Joe grunted.

“Marybeth, we have to talk about this,” he said, pulling her glove from his coat pocket.

He watched her carefully when she looked at it.

“I didn’t realize I lost it,” she said, turning it over in her hand and squeezing it into a ball.

Joe felt something hot rising inside of him.

“You know where I found it, don’t you?”

She nodded. Finally, she raised her eyes to his.

“I saw your truck,” she said, her voice flat. “So I went inside the building. Melinda Strickland was sitting at her desk, and her blood was on the wall . . .”

The relief Joe felt was better than the bourbon ever was. Then he realized something that jarred him.

“You think
I
did it,” Joe said.

The same emotion Joe had felt a moment before was mirrored in Marybeth’s face.

“Joe, you didn’t do it?”

He shook his head. “I found her like that after you did. And I saw this glove . . .”

“Oh,” she cried, instantly aware of what he must have thought. “Oh, Joe, I knew you went there and I thought . . .”

They embraced in a furious swirl of redemption. Marybeth cried, and laughed, and cried again. After a few minutes, she pulled away.

“So did she kill herself?” she asked.

Joe shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“Then who?”

He paused a beat.

“Nate.”

She stood and walked to the window, looking out at the snow.

“He went back after we left, while I was in the bar. He must have watched me go into the Stockman’s to make sure I’d have a good alibi before he went back to her office. I thought I had just lost him. I wasn’t thinking very clearly at that point. Somehow, he got Melinda Strickland’s gun away from her and shot her point-blank in the head.”

“My God,” Marybeth said, turning it over in her mind.

“He told me once that he didn’t believe in the legal system, but he believed in justice,” Joe said. “We tried it my way and it didn’t work. His way worked.”

“What are you going to do?”

Joe sighed, and rubbed his face. He felt Marybeth watching him anxiously, felt her searching his face for an indication of what he was thinking.

He looked up at her and spoke softly.

“I’m going to make Melinda Strickland a hero,” he said.

She was clearly puzzled.

“There are some papers on her desk we left there. They’ll find them when they investigate the crime scene. But it will take a few days to analyze everything. Tomorrow, I’ll call Elle Broxton-Howard and give her that interview she wants. In fact, I’ll give her the
mother
of all interviews—the exclusive inside story of Melinda Strickland’s last day on earth. I’ll tell her that ever since the shoot-out at Battle Mountain, Melinda Strickland has been tortured by the death of April Keeley, that it was eating away at her. Strickland told me all about it in the meeting we had in her office, when she described the foundation she was creating. Her secretary will corroborate the meeting.

“She just couldn’t overcome the guilt,” Joe said. “So she took her own life. Before she did, though, she wrote out her resignation and established the April Keeley Foundation as her legacy.”

The story was taking shape as he spun it out, and he was becoming convinced it would work. He stopped for breath, and looked to Marybeth for confirmation.

Marybeth looked at him with eyes that shined. “Sometimes you amaze me,” she said.

“It’ll be a hell of a story,” he said, shaking his head.

There was a long pause.

“What are you going to do about Nate?”

Joe thought, and hesitated for a moment. He had crossed a line. He couldn’t go back and pretend he hadn’t crossed it. He would have to ride it out.

“I’m going to ask him to teach Sheridan about falconry.”

He rose and joined her at the window and they looked out at the storm. A burst of wind sent snow tumbling toward them, and Joe felt the lick of icy wind on his hand near the window frame. He would need to put some insulation in the crack later. He had forgotten about it.

He leaned forward and looked down into the front yard. The heavy, wet spring snow was being carried by the wind and was sticking to the sides of the fence and the power poles. There were three small Austrian pine trees in the front yard that Joe had put in the previous spring. The girls had helped him plant them and, at the time, each had claimed a tree. The tallest was Sheridan’s, the next was April’s, the smallest belonged to Lucy. Joe found himself staring at April’s tree, watching the blowing snow pack hard into the branches, changing it into a snow ghost, and felt oddly comforted.