He looked for footprints but it was too dark to see and if there were any they were probably already covered by the snow. He kept wondering whose car it might be. It didn’t look like a police car and if it was the cops, surely there’d be a whole bunch of them, wouldn’t there? Maybe it was a neighbor who’d dropped by or someone who’d gotten lost. Or maybe Ty’s friend Jesse had come back. That had to be it. It was only when he reached the top of the climb and the cabin came into view that Josh got the feeling something was seriously wrong. Someone was shouting. Then a figure crossed the window. And it was neither Abbie nor Ty.
He was pacing to and fro across the cabin, the flames of the candles ducking as he passed and throwing jagged shadows on the bare wood walls. The two of them sat at the table as he’d told them to, watching him warily. Ty looked calmer than she knew he must be. Abbie was still in shock.
“How dare you? How fucking dare you?”
“Listen,” Ty said. “I’ve said I’m sorry. When he comes back, you can have it. Just take it and go.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do.”
Rolf looked at his watch again then peered out the window where all there was to see was the steady windless falling of the snow. The sight of him walking out of the twilight when they were leading the horses into the corral had almost made her faint. How he could possibly have found them, she still didn’t know and was too afraid to ask. The look in his eyes shattered at once any fond hope that the baby might have changed things. She must have been out of her mind to imagine it might make him want to give himself up.
If only Ty hadn’t been so goddamn pigheaded about what was on the laptop. She could still barely believe what he’d done, sending Josh off with it like that to call Freddie, without even mentioning it to her until they were out on the ride and it was too late to stop it. He’d been trying to convince Rolf that it was all quite innocent, that the computer just happened to be in the truck and that he could have it as soon as Josh got back. But Abbie could see that Rolf wasn’t buying it. The first sight of Ty had sent him into a rage and the missing laptop had given him an excuse to stoke it to a full-blown fury. He hadn’t hurt anyone yet, but the promise of violence was in his every word and action.
“Where the fuck is he?”
“It’ll be the snow,” Ty said. “Maybe the roads are blocked.”
Rolf looked out of the window again and in that same moment Ty darted another quick glance toward the foot of the bed and only now did Abbie understand why. It was where he kept the loaded shotgun. You could just see the protruding ribbed end of the butt. She glared at him. For the love of God, surely he wouldn’t be so dumb?
“Okay, that’s it,” Rolf said. “Put your coat on.”
“What?” Abbie said.
“I said put your coat on. We’re getting out of here.”
“No way,” Ty said, standing up.
“Was I talking to you? You just stay where you are. Sit down and shut up.”
Rolf snatched Abbie’s red ski jacket from the back of the door and threw it at her.
“Put it on!”
“Listen,” Ty said. “Can we just be reasonable here—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“You’re not taking her anywhere.”
Ty took a step toward him and Rolf turned to face him.
“If you don’t sit down, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Abbie hurriedly put on the jacket.
“It’s okay, Ty. I’ll go. We’ll see Josh on the road and he can have his computer and go.”
“There’s no way I’m letting you go with him. He’s done you enough harm already.”
“Why don’t you tell your little cowboy hero here to mind his own fucking business?”
He swung open the door and grabbed Abbie by the shoulder to steer her out. Ty made a lunge but Rolf saw it coming and hit him hard in the stomach then gave him a shove that sent him sprawling across the room, crashing into the table and knocking it over and the candle with it. Abbie screamed. Ty was badly winded but was getting to his feet again.
“For God’s sake!” Abbie yelled. “I’ll go. Just stop!”
The door was open now, the falling snow silently framed against the black of the night. Ty was moving sideways toward the bed.
“Ty, no!”
She shouldn’t have cried out because Rolf’s eyes at once scanned across to the bed and he saw the butt of the shotgun. In the same instant Ty dived for it and Rolf leapt at him and grabbed him around the hips and managed to drag him away before he could reach it. Dear God, she thought, please, not again. They were both on the floor now, trying to punch and grab each other’s necks and hair and Abbie just stood there by the doorway, screaming like a woman possessed for them to stop. But Rolf had tucked his knees up now and he jerked backward and kicked Ty hard in the chest then made a grab for the shotgun and got hold of it and started to pull it out from under the bed.
When the snowy figure burst past her through the doorway, it took her a moment to realize who it was. Josh flung himself on top of Rolf and got his arms around his neck and wrenched back his head.
“Abbie, go!” Ty shouted. “Just get out of here! Go!”
She didn’t need telling again. To watch three men she loved trying to tear each other to pieces was more than she could bear. She turned and ran out into the snow and around the side of the cabin and saw the horses still tethered to the rail where they’d left them when Rolf arrived, an inch of snow on their saddles. She untied hers and swung herself up and onto him and reined him hard around and jabbed him with her heels and he launched himself like a racehorse from the starting gate, up the trail and into the trees.
She didn’t know where she was going and didn’t care and, even if she had, her eyes were too blurred by snow and desolation to see more than a dim impression of the trail ahead. She kept her head low, her cheek against the horse’s snowy mane, and simply let him run. She knew the broad lay of the land by now but not at night or shrouded as it was by snow. As he galloped ever on and upward, the stems of lodgepole strobing darkly past, she heard beneath the thud and scuffle of his feet a deeper, sharper sound and then a rolling echo and she knew the shotgun had been fired and she cried out and in her anguish heeled the horse yet faster.
The trail veered to the left and down and suddenly they were splashing through a stream then leaping and jerking up the bank beyond, the horse stalling and skewing and scrambling, rocks clacking and clattering loose beneath his hooves. And now they were running again, the slope steeper than before, much steeper, the horse’s breath rasping and coughing like an engine choked with rust.
They were out of the trees now and high and the land was leveling out. Below her, to her right, all she could see behind the swirl of snow was a chasmic black and she realized that they must be on some kind of spine or ridge. And a second after the thought occurred they were suddenly on rock or ice or both and the horse’s hooves were skidding from under him and he lurched and squealed and she felt herself being launched like a missile from the stirrups into the darkness then hitting the slope and falling, tumbling, twisting, cartwheeling down and down, the snow flying and fluffing all around her and into her mouth and eyes. There was a sudden splintering shock of pain in her leg and a crunch in her shoulder and then her head hit something hard and the world went whiter than the snow and slower and she was sliding, slipping, gliding down. And her last sensations of the night and of the world were a long and weightless drop, like the twirl of a broken feather, and the icy embrace of water bubbling and closing above her.
THREE
THIRTY
They had been hearing the elk bugling all morning but not until now had they seen them. There was a herd of about twenty females down below them along the creek in the shadow of the valley and a big old bull with a fine rack of antlers standing watch. Sheriff Charlie Riggs gently reined his horse to a standstill on the ridge and Lucy, following on her cute little paint with its fine new saddle, came alongside
and did the same. Charlie pointed down the slope and handed her the binoculars.
“There you go,” he said. “See ’em?”
The sun was in her eyes and he took off his hat and used it as a visor for her.
“Yeah. Wow, he’s big.”
“Yep, he’s your main man, for sure.”
“How many points on those antlers?”
“You’re the one with the eyesight.”
“Seven, I’d say.”
They had been out for nearly three hours now and as the valley slowly filled with shadow you could feel the air growing cooler. They were making their way down to the trailhead where they’d left the trailer. Working weekends was one of the reasons things had gone wrong with Sheryl, so when he’d picked up Lucy that morning he’d thought it best not to mention that they were going to ride up around Goat Creek. Anyway, it didn’t feel like work and Lucy certainly didn’t see it that way. She knew, for sure, as everybody around these parts knew, about the girl’s body being found back in the early spring. But that was six months ago and nobody talked about it much anymore. What his daughter didn’t know—and Charlie wasn’t about to tell her—was that the elk were grazing the very spot where they’d cut Abbie Cooper from the ice.
When the creek unfroze at the end of April they’d combed it for clues but found nothing. And ever since, all through the spring and summer, Charlie had come up here again and again. Sometimes he rode, either with Lucy or alone, and sometimes he just hiked around. How many hundred miles he’d covered he had no idea but he must have walked or ridden every trail there was in a twenty-mile radius as well as a lot of untrailed land besides, scanning the ground for anything that might have been left or dropped or hidden. But in all those miles and hours he hadn’t found a single darned thing to cast a glimmer of light on how the poor kid might have died.
His obsession with the case had become something of a joke around the office. He could see the look on some of the deputies’ faces when he asked them to follow up on some tenuous line of inquiry or hunch he might have had. Even the folks down at the Grizzly Grill, where Charlie ate supper when he got bored of reading alone at home or had forgotten to get food in, had started teasing him about it, asking if he’d caught his killer yet. No, he’d say. Not yet. But I’m on your case, buddy. The truth was, he didn’t have either the time or the resources for such a case and should probably have handed it over months ago to the state DCI guys down in Helena.
“So why does one male have all those females?” Lucy asked.
“What makes you think it’s that way around? Maybe they’re holding him hostage.”
“Da-ad.”
“Have they taught you about genes and all that stuff at school yet?”
“Of course they have.”
“Okay, well. As I understand it, the male’s role is to spread his genes as far and wide as possible, so the strongest one tries to stop all the other guys from getting to the females.”
“That’s not fair to the females. The younger bucks are a whole lot cuter than that big ugly old thing.”
“Yeah, and someday one of them’ll beat him up and take over.”
“And the females don’t get any say at all?”
“Nope.”
“That’s sexist.”
“I guess it is. Probably makes life a whole lot easier though. Come on, I’m getting hungry.”
They eased the horses forward along the ridge and wound their way slowly down into the twilight of the trees where the air was cooler and smelled of fall. It was around this time last year that they’d had the big freeze and that heavy dump of snow. And though he had nothing to prove it, Charlie figured that might well have been when Abbie got herself killed. Throughout the winter there had been a number of thaws and refreezings. But from what he could gather, from Ned and Val Drummond and a few others, hunters and rangers and folks who liked to ride their snowmobiles up here, that first heavy snowfall and the ice that came with it had never fully cleared from the creek.
And that was pretty much all he knew. For six long months of work, it wasn’t exactly going to win him a Detective of the Year award. All early leads had come to nothing. With the idea fixed in his head that she might have died at the time of that first heavy snowfall at the end of September, he’d trudged around town asking if anyone had seen any strangers at that time. The only sighting that seemed remotely promising was a young guy who’d filled up at the gas station on the very night of the storm. He’d paid cash and dropped all his coins on the floor. He had apparently told the girl at the register that he’d come down from Canada to see his dad and she’d noticed that the top part of his right first finger was missing.
Charlie had gotten all excited because they had security cameras there, both inside and on the forecourt. But it turned out they only kept the pictures for a month and these had long ago been wiped. She couldn’t remember what kind of vehicle he’d been driving but added helpfully that he seemed nice and not at all like a murderer.
For a while Charlie thought he was on to something with Ty Hawkins, the boy from Sheridan whom the FBI had at first mistakenly assumed to be Abbie’s accomplice. Charlie discovered that Ty was a friend of Jesse Wheeler, who looked after the Ponderosa. It was at the top of the next drainage and a fair few miles north of Goat Creek, but Charlie had nevertheless gone up there to see him.
He was glad he made the effort. Jesse seemed a little wary and fidgety when Charlie talked with him. It turned out he’d met Abbie once himself, about six or seven years earlier, at some dude ranch where he used to work summers. He swore he hadn’t seen her since and swore he hadn’t seen Ty in a long while either and that never in the three years he’d been working there had Ty once visited with him. But Charlie wasn’t completely convinced.
He drove over to Sheridan and talked with Ty himself and couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. As a horseman himself, Charlie knew of Ray Hawkins and had many years ago seen him in action at one of his famous clinics. Not only had the poor kid lost a fine father, not only had their ranch been drilled and trashed for coalbed methane, not only had he been wrongly jailed for several weeks and his name blackened as a terrorist, he had, quite clearly, also just lost the love of his life.
In his eyes and in his voice when he talked about Abbie, you could see that her death had plain broken his heart. He said he hadn’t seen her in years. And Charlie believed him. All his instincts cried out that the boy could no sooner have killed her than have murdered his own mother. There wasn’t a bad bone in him. Even so, Charlie had to do his job. He asked Ty if he could take a DNA sample and had it sent off to the crime lab in Missoula to be tested against the paternal DNA of Abbie’s fetus. And, thank God, there was no match.
They’d reached the trailer and the truck now. And Charlie watched while Lucy expertly led her pony up the ramp and then he did the same with his own horse. As they drove back through the fading light into town, he felt the sadness fall upon him the way it always did at the end of a day with his daughter, when he had to take her home to her mother. As his grandma used to say, what a muddle life was. What a mess and a muddle.
Every few weeks, even if there wasn’t anything new to tell them (and there rarely was), Charlie would call the Coopers. Just to keep in touch and let them know the case was still open and active. He had grown to like them and admired the dignified way they seemed to be handling the loss of their daughter. He once, tentatively, almost said as much to Ben and would never forget the little pause and the exact words of his reply.
“The real loss happened four years ago. At least we know now where she is.”
Charlie was careful to call both of them, but Sarah was the one he especially liked to call. Though he hardly admitted it to himself, she was the reason he was reluctant to hand the case over. Though he had only met her that one time in Missoula, when she came to collect the body, the image of her had stayed in his head. He enjoyed the sound of her voice on the phone, kind of regal and creamy, a little husky, the k
ind of voice a man could fall in love with. Sometimes they talked for half an hour or more, much longer than he could spin out any news of the so-called investigation.
In one of their conversations, about a month ago, she had somehow discovered he was a big reader and, what was more, that they had a few favorite authors in common. He imagined her taste was probably a lot classier than his own, but when he told her loved Elmore Leonard and Pat Conroy and Cormac McCarthy, she got excited and said The Prince of Tides and All the Pretty Horses were two of her all-time favorite books. She said it was such a pity that she had just sold the bookstore, because she could have sent him proofs and new books she had come across.
The next time they talked, the day after Charlie and Lucy had ridden up Goat Creek and seen the elk, Sarah told him she was trying to write something herself. About Abbie. And that she was planning a little research trip to Missoula. She asked him if he ever had cause to be there and he lied and said he often did. Maybe they could meet up, Sarah said. Charlie said he’d like that very much and then got worried that this didn’t sound sufficiently professional so added that he hoped there might be some developments by then that he could tell her about.
She called a few days later to tell him the date and said she’d booked herself into the Doubletree, just across the river from the university, and would he like to have lunch or dinner on the Tuesday? He lied again and said he had a lot to do that day and couldn’t make lunch but dinner would be fine. The food at the Doubletree was by all accounts terrific, he said. He spent the following ten days trying to stop thinking about it.
He got there three-quarters of an hour early and strolled along the river by the cottonwoods whose leaves glowed yellow in the dusk and then over the little wooden footbridge to the campus, where he stood watching some boys practicing football under the floodlights.