“Which campground?” Joe persisted.
“It says here they was at Crazy Woman Creek.”
Crazy Woman was the last developed U.S. Forest Service campground on Bighorn Road, a place generally used as a jumping-off site for hikers and horse-packers entering the mountains.
“Are you in radio contact with Sheriff Barnum?” Joe asked.
“I believe so.”
“Why don’t you give him a call and let him know that the man on horseback was Ote Keeley and that Ote is lying dead on the woodpile behind my house.”
Joe could hear Wendy gasp, then try to regain her composure.
“Say again?” she replied.
Joe hung up the telephone and started for the backdoor.
“You’re not going back out there?” Sheridan whispered.
“Just for a minute,” Joe said in what he hoped was a reassuring tone.
He shut the door behind him and slowly walked toward the body of Ote Keeley, his eyes sweeping across the yard, taking in the bloodstained walk, the woodpile, the canyon mouth behind the house. He wanted a clear picture of everything as it was right now, before the sheriff and deputies arrived. He didn’t want to screw up again.
Squatting near the plastic cooler, Joe drew two empty envelopes and a pencil from the pocket on his robe. Using the tip of the eraser, Joe flicked several small pieces of scat from the cooler into an envelope. He would send that to headquarters for analysis. He gathered several more pieces of scat and put them in another envelope. He sealed both and put them back in his pocket. He left the rest for the sheriff.
Back in the house, Joe dressed in his day-to-day uniform: blue jeans and his red, button-up chamois shirt with the pronghorn antelope patch on the sleeve. Over the breast pocket was his name plate, which read GAME WARDEN and under that J. PICKETT.
When he came downstairs, the girls were sprawled in front of the snowy television, and Marybeth was sitting at the table flanked by dirty dishes. She held a big mug of coffee in her hands and stared at something in the air between them.
Her eyes raised until they met Joe’s.
“It’ll be okay,” Joe said, forcing a smile. He asked Marybeth to gather up the children and some clothes and go into Saddlestring. They could check into a motel until this was over and the backyard was cleaned up. He didn’t want the kids seeing the dead man. Sheridan’s dreams were already vivid enough.
“Joe, who will pay for the room? Will the state pay for it?” Marybeth asked softly so the children couldn’t hear.
“You mean we can’t?” Joe replied, incredulous. She shook her head no. Marybeth kept the meager family budget under a tight rein. It was the end of the month. She would know if they were broke, and apparently that was the case. Joe felt his face flush. Maybe they could stay with somebody? Joe dismissed that. While they had made a few friends in town, they were still new, and he didn’t know who they could call to ask this kind of favor.
“Can we use the credit card?” he asked.
“Nearly maxed out.” She said. “It might work for a night or two, though.”
He felt another wave of heat wash up his neck.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he mumbled. He fitted his dusty black hat on his head and went outside to wait.
3
After measuring, marking, and photographing, the deputies sealed off the woodpile with yellow CRIME SCENE tape and unfurled a body bag.
Joe stationed himself outside with his back to the window so no one who looked out could see the deputies bend Ote Keeley into the bag, folding his stiff arms and legs inside so they could zip it up and carry it away. Ote was heavy, and the middle part of the bag hummed along the top of the grass as the deputies took the body out of the yard and around the side of the house to the ambulance.
Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum had arrived first and had briskly ordered Joe to show him where Ote Keeley’s body was. Despite his age, Barnum still moved with speed and stiff grace. His pale blue eyes were set in a pallid leather face and rimmed with paper-thin flaps of skin. Joe watched as the blue eyes swept the scene.
Joe had expected questions and was prepared for them. He informed Barnum that he had gathered the scat evidence to send to headquarters, but Barnum had waved him off.
“Yup, that’s Ote all right,” Barnum had said, before returning to his Blazer. “You’ll write up a report on it?” Joe nodded yes. That was all there was. No questions, no notes. Joe was surprised and felt useless.
From the side of the house, Joe observed the sheriff as he held the mike of his police scanner to his mouth with one hand and gestured in the air with the other. By his movements, Joe could tell that Barnum was becoming frustrated with somebody or something. So was Joe, but he tried not to show it.
Joe went inside the house. Marybeth watched him nervously from her place on the couch.
“Is it gone?” she asked, referring to the body. She didn’t want to say Ote’s name.
Joe assured her that it was.
She was pale, Joe noticed. Her face was drawn tight. Marybeth rubbed her hand across her extended belly. She didn’t realize she was doing it. He remembered the gesture from before, when she was pregnant with Sheridan and then Lucy. It was something she did when she felt that things were on the verge of chaos. She held her arms across her unborn baby as if to shield it from whatever unpleasantness was happening outside. Marybeth was a good mother, Joe thought, and she reared the children with care. She resented it when outside events intruded on her family without her prior consent, permission, or planning.
“He’s the guy who took your gun a while back,” Marybeth said with dawning realization. “I’ve met his wife. In the obstetrician’s office. She’s at least five months along also.” She grimaced. “They have a little one about Sheridan’s age and I think one younger. Those poor kids . . .”
Joe nodded and poured some coffee in a mug to deliver to Sheriff Barnum out in his Blazer.
“I just wish it wouldn’t have happened here,” Marybeth said. “I know these things happen but why did he have to come here, to our house? Right to our house?”
It’s not our house, Joe said to himself. It belongs to the State of Wyoming. We just live here. But Joe didn’t say that and instead went out the front door after a quick “I’ll be right back.”
Barnum was signing off from a conversation, and he angrily hung up the microphone in its cradle on the dashboard. Joe handed him the cup of coffee, and Barnum took it without a word.
“What we know so far is that Keeley went into the mountains with two other guides to scout for elk and set up their camp last Thursday,” Barnum said, not looking directly at Joe. “They have an outfitters camp up there somewhere. They weren’t expected back until tomorrow so nobody had missed them yet.”
“Who were the other guides?” Joe asked.
“Kyle Lensegrav and Calvin Mendes,” Barnum replied, finally looking at him. “You know ’em?”
Joe nodded. “I’ve run into them a few times. Their names have come up along with Ote Keeley’s in connection with a poaching ring. But nobody’s caught them doing anything as far as I know.” Joe had once had a beer in the Stockman Bar with both of them. They were both in their mid-thirties, and both mountain-man throwback types. Lensegrav was tall and thin, and he wore thick glasses mounted on a hooked nose. He had a scraggle of blond beard. Mendes was short and stout, with dark eyes and a charming, flashbulb smile. Pickett had heard that Mendes and Ote Keeley had been in the army together and that they had both served in Desert Storm.
“Well, nobody’s seen Lensegrav or Mendes,” Barnum continued. “My guess is that they’re trying like hell to get out of state because they shot their good old pal Ote Keeley right in the chest a couple of times, for whatever reason.”
“Or they’re still up in the mountains,” Joe said.
“Yup.” Barnum paused, pursing his lips. “Or that. The word is out to the Highway Patrol statewide to watch out for ’em. Problem is I don’t know yet what they??
?re driving. Keeley’s truck and horse trailer are up at Crazy Woman Creek where they left it. We’re trying to find out if one of them took a vehicle up there as well.”
Joe nodded at Barnum and said “Hmmmm.” There was an uncomfortable minute of silence.
Sheriff Barnum was an institution in Twelve Sleep County, and he had been in office for 24 years. He rarely had opposition when he ran for election, and in the few times he had, he’d taken 70 percent of the vote. He was a hands-on sheriff, involved in everything from civic organizations to officiating at high school football and basketball games. He knew everybody in the county, and they in turn knew and respected him. Very little got by Sheriff Barnum. Over the years, he had become a storied and colorful character. Specific incidents had become legend. He had put a .357 Magnum bullet into the eyebrow of a ranch foreman who had just used an irrigation shovel to bludgeon to death his own mother, brother, and a Mexican hired hand. He had taken Polaroid snapshots of cows who had apparently been mutilated by alien beings who had arrived on earth in cigar-shaped flying objects. He had arrested a Basque sheepherder in his sheep wagon and confiscated a ewe named Maria that had been dyed pink. He had once turned back two dozen Hell’s Angels en route to Sturgis, South Dakota, by firing up a 24-inch chain saw while straddling the yellow line on the highway.
“Your office should have called me this morning,” Joe said abruptly. “I was closer to the scene than anyone else.”
Barnum sipped the coffee and squinted at Joe as if sizing Joe up for the first time.
“You’re right,” Barnum answered. Then: “Wasn’t it Ote Keeley who took your gun away from you while you were giving him a citation?”
“Yes, it was,” Joe replied, feeling his ears flush hot.
“Strange he came here,” Barnum said.
Joe nodded.
“Maybe he wanted to take your gun away from you again.” Barnum smiled crookedly to show he was joking. Barnum was wily, no doubt about it. Joe hardly knew the sheriff, but Barnum had already tweaked one of his weak spots. There was a moment of hesitation before Joe asked if Barnum planned to investigate the elk hunting camp.
“I would, but right now I’m screwed,” Barnum said, banging the dashboard with his fist. “That camp is in a roadless area so we can’t get to it. Our chopper’s on loan to the Forest Service so they can fight that fire down in the Medicine Bow Forest. Tomorrow night’s the earliest we could get it back.
“And my horse posse guys are all in the mountains already because they’re all gettin’ ready to go hunting.” Barnum looked over at Joe, exasperated. “We can’t get to that camp unless we hoof it, and I’m not walking.”
Joe thought it over for a moment. “I know a guy who knows where that elk camp is located, and I’ve got a couple of horses.”
Barnum began to object, then caught himself.
“Well, I don’t see why not, since you’re volunteering. How soon could you get going?”
Joe rubbed his jaw. “This afternoon. I’ve got to fetch my horse trailer and get outfitted, but I’m pretty sure I could get on the trail by about two or three.”
“Take my guy McLanahan,” Barnum said. “I’ll get on the radio and tell him to grab his saddle and some heavy artillery and get his lazy butt out here. You guys might run into some bad business up there, and I want to make sure you’ve got ’em outgunned.”
Barnum grabbed his microphone but halted before he spoke into it.
“Who is it who knows where that hunting camp is?” Barnum asked.
“Wacey Hedeman,” Joe replied.
“Wacey Hedeman?” Barnum hissed. “He’s declared that he’s going to run against me in the next election, that blow-dried son of a bitch.”
Joe shrugged. Wacey was the game warden in the next district but had patrolled in the Twelve Sleep area temporarily after Vern left and before Joe was assigned the position. Wacey had once mapped out all of the licensed outfitters’ elk camps along the Crazy Woman drainage.
“Goddamnit,” Barnum spat vehemently. “I hate it when things turn cowboy.”
Barnum cursed again, then turned away to radio his dispatcher.
Wacey didn’t answer the telephone in his home office and didn’t respond to the radio call, but Joe had a good idea where to find him. Before he left in the truck to find Wacey, he kissed Marybeth and his girls good-bye. Lucy gave him a bored kiss. She didn’t approve of him leaving the house at any time for any reason, and this was how she showed it. Because she was so much younger and was wise beyond her years—she had absorbed, as if by osmosis, many of the lessons her older sister had learned the hard way—Joe often treated Lucy as a fellow adult conspirator, fighting the many emerging preadolescent forces of her animated older sister.
Sheridan and Lucy were confused by why they had to leave their house. Marybeth was telling them how exciting it would be to stay in a motel, but they weren’t yet convinced.
Joe stopped at the door and turned back. Sheridan was watching him closely.
“You okay, honey?” Joe asked her.
“I’m okay, Dad.”
“Next time you say you see a monster, I’m going to believe you.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“You remember who’s coming tomorrow night, don’t you?” Marybeth asked.
He had not thought about it at all with everything that had happened that morning.
“Your mother.”
“My mother,” Marybeth echoed. “So we’ll be back in the house by then. Hopefully, you will, too.”
Joe grimaced.
4
While her mother packed a suitcase in the bedroom, Sheridan did exactly what she had been told not to do and went to the dining room window to watch. However, before she did, she made sure that Lucy was still wrapped in her blanket on the floor watching television. Lucy would gladly tell on her older sister.
The man her dad called Sheriff Barnum stood in the yard near the woodpile, and another man wearing the same kind of policeman’s uniform—he was younger than Sheriff Barnum but still old, like her dad—stood near him. The sheriff stood with his back to the woodpile, pointing toward the mountains and talking. His arm swept along the top of the mountains and up the road, and the younger man’s eyes followed the gesture. Sheridan couldn’t hear what the sheriff was saying. At one point, the sheriff walked from the woodpile to the house. He stopped squarely in front of Sheridan at the window, and Sheridan was too scared to move. Over his shoulder, to the other man, the sheriff called out the number of paces he had measured. Before turning back, he had looked down and grinned at her. It had been a kind of “get out of my way, kid” smile. Sheridan wasn’t sure she liked Sheriff Barnum. She didn’t like his pale eyes. She didn’t like cigarettes, either, and even through the screen in the window she could smell them on his uniform.
As Sheriff Barnum returned to the woodpile, Sheridan thought about how surprised she was that this thing had happened. How could it be that what she had thought the night before was a monster from her “overactive imagination” (as her mom called it) had turned out to be real. It was as if her dream world and the real world had merged for this event. Suddenly, adults were involved. She had had a strange notion: what if her imagination was so powerful that she could dream things into existence?
But she decided this wasn’t the case. If it was, she would have brought forth something much nicer than this. Like a pet—a real pet of her own.
Sheriff Barnum took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shook them, and flipped one up into his mouth. It was a neat trick, she thought. She had never seen it before. The man with Sheriff Barnum reached over and lighted the sheriff’s cigarette for him. A great roll of white smoke grew around the sheriff’s head.
Sheridan wore her glasses. She wished now she would have had her glasses on the night before, so she could have seen the man’s face in detail when he looked at her. If she would have seen him clearly, she would have trusted her own mind over her imagination and run to her parents’ roo
m instead of convincing herself that she had a nightmare about monsters coming down from the mountains.
She loved that she could see clearly now but hated the fact that she was the only student in her class who had to wear glasses. Her first day of school at Twelve Sleep Elementary was also her first day wearing glasses. She would never forget how tall she seemed to be when she looked down or how awkward she felt when she walked. The chalkboard and the words on it were in such sharp focus that they hurt her eyes. It was bad enough that she was one of the new girls in school, and the rude girls had already grouped her into a category called “Weird Country” that was made up of students who lived out of town. Or that she could already read books and say poetry she had memorized while they struggled with sentences. But on top of all of that, she also had to show up wearing glasses.
And she was the new game warden’s daughter in a place where the local game warden was a big deal because nearly everyone’s dad hunted. It was understood that Sheridan’s dad could put others in jail. So far, in the two weeks since school had begun, she had absolutely no friends in the second-grade class.
Sheridan’s only friends were her animals, had been her animals, and they had all disappeared. The loss of her cat, Jasmine, had devastated her. She had cried and prayed for Jasmine to come back, but she didn’t. She begged her parents for another pet to love, but they said she would have to wait until she got a little older. They told her she would have to get a fish or a bird in a cage, something that didn’t go outside or into the hills behind the house. She had overheard her dad telling her mom about coyotes (although she wasn’t supposed to know), and she had figured out that her cat Jasmine had been eaten. Just like her puppy before that. But while those pets were nice, they weren’t what she needed. She wanted a pet to cuddle with. She wished she had a secret pet, one that neither her parents, the rude girls at school, or the coyotes knew about. A secret pet that was just hers. A pet she could love and who would love her for who she was: a lonely girl who had moved from place to place before she could make friends and who had a little sister who was too adorable for words and a baby on the way who would command most of her parents’ love and attention for . . . maybe forever.