In Plain Sight

7

TWO DAYS LATER, MARYBETH PICKETT THREW OPEN the front door after her morning walk and shook their copy of the Saddlestring Roundup. Joe and the girls were having breakfast.

“Wacey Hedeman is dead, that bastard,” she said, showing Joe the front page.

Sheridan said, “Good!”

Lucy said, “You probably shouldn’t say ‘good,’ Sherry.”

“But I mean it,” Sheridan said fiercely. “I hate—hated—that man.”

Joe glanced at his wife and saw that Marybeth had the same reaction as Sheridan. Because Wacey had been the man who had shot her, causing the loss of their baby.

“You know how you wish things, bad things, on people?” Marybeth said. “I have wished harm to Wacey ever since he shot me. But to read now that he’s really dead . . . it’s strange. I feel sort of cheated. I wanted him to know how much I hated him.”

Joe was not surprised at Sheridan’s and Marybeth’s reaction, but it was disconcerting to see such mutual anger on display.

Joe looked at Lucy, trying to gauge what she was thinking of all this. Lucy shot her eyes back and forth between her mother and her sister. She had been three at the time, while Sheridan had been seven. Lucy seemed to take the comments in stride, probably since she’d grown up with the whole Wacey Hedeman thing—it was part of the family history.

“It says he had some kind of seizure,” Marybeth said, reading the story. “They’re still investigating. He might have been poisoned.”

“Poisoned? By another inmate?” Joe asked.

“It doesn’t say,” she said. “But I guess I really don’t care, considering what he did to us.”

“But we’re tough!” Lucy said, repeating something she’d heard over the years. It made Marybeth smile, and wipe a tear from her cheek.

“We’re tough, all right,” Marybeth said.