In Plain Sight

14

THE WORD THAT POPPED INTO SHERIDAN PICKETT’S mind that evening, as the Scarletts sat down to dinner in the old dining room of the main ranch house, was Gothic. Ranch Gothic. Not the kind of Gothic she was used to, like those black-clad Goths in school who painted their nails and lips black and looked amazingly silly in P.E., but the older definition of Gothic, the kind she’d read about in novels. Until now, that definition had always been beyond her grasp, because she’d never encountered it. She never thought there was anyplace in Wyoming ancient enough or sinister enough to be considered Gothic. Until now. An image of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations wearing her wedding dress and riding a horse across the meadow outside popped into Sheridan’s head. She almost giggled at the thought but she was too on edge.

A ROILING BUT invisible cloud seemed to hang in the air of the dining room and throughout the house. She imagined the cloud to be made up of violent past emotions. The whole place, she thought, could use a good airing out.

The décor within the main ranch house had obviously not been changed—simply added onto—since it was built. The walls and wallpaper were dark and the trim ornate, the cornices were hand carved, each doorway a custom lark of intricate woodwork. Ancient wagon-wheel chandeliers hung from high ceilings on rough chains. The kitchen was big enough that when the cast-iron cookstoves were replaced by modern ovens there was no need to throw the old ones out. The dining room and sitting room were close and stuffy, with old paintings on the wall of Wyoming and Scottish landscapes. Sheridan had found herself staring at an entire wall of framed black-and-white photographs in the living room.

“This is the Scarlett Legacy Wall I told you about,” Julie had said, sweeping her hand through the air. “There are pictures here of all of my relatives.”

Sheridan had looked at her friend, expecting to see a smile on Julie’s face when she said “the Scarlett Legacy.” But she was serious, and much more solemn than Sheridan had seen her before. It was as if Julie had been schooled to be solemn in front of that wall the way a good Catholic would cross herself in midsentence as she passed by a cathedral.

Julie pointed out the photos of her great-great-grandparents who had founded the ranch, then her great-grandparents. Prominent within the display was a portrait of Opal Scarlett as a girl, the photo tinted with color to redden her cheeks and bring out her blue eyes. Even then, Sheridan thought, she looked like a tough bird. Her eyes, even through the blue tint, were sharp and hard and gave off a glint, like inset rock chips. In the photo, though, Opal had smiled an enigmatic smile that was disarming. Sheridan had only met Julie’s grandmother a couple of times before and had never seen the smile.

The high school portraits of Arlen, Hank, and Wyatt were fascinating, she thought. It was telling seeing Julie’s dad and uncles at ages more closely resembling her own, so she could look at them more as contemporaries than old men. Arlen looked then as he did now: handsome, confident, full of himself, and a little deceitful. Hank wore a fifties-style cowboy hat with the brim turned up sharply on both sides, his face sincere, serious, earnest, dark. It was the face of a boy who looked determined to stake a claim, a hard worker who would not be stopped. Wyatt looked big and soft, eager to please, proud of a mustache that was nothing to be proud of. Something about his face seemed wounded, as if he’d already met great disappointment. He was not a guy, Sheridan thought, you would pick first for your team if you wanted to win. Arlen would be, though, if the competition was a debate. And Hank would be the choice if there was a chance a fight might break out.

“Your dad looked cool,” Sheridan said.

Julie nodded. “He can be,” she said simply.

“But you live here with your uncle.”

“I moved to be with my grandmother and my mom.” Julie shrugged. “But my grandma, well, you know . . . she’s gone.”

AS SHE SAT across from Julie at the massive table that at one time fed twenty “strapping ranch hands,” as Arlen put it, Sheridan felt as if she were in a place and with people who shared a mutual faded glory that she wasn’t a part of.

She tried not to stare at Arlen or Wyatt as they ate, but she did observe them carefully. Wyatt tore into his food as if he were a starved animal. He pistoned forkfuls of food into his mouth with a mechanical fury, as if he couldn’t wait to complete his meal and punch off the clock. Arlen was leisurely, urbane, continuously refilling his wineglass before it was empty.

Julie appeared to be oblivious to both of them, picking at her food. She seemed put out by something. She kept stealing glances at Sheridan, and Sheridan had the feeling she was somehow disappointing her friend.

Sheridan was uncomfortable. It wasn’t the food, which was very good: steak, salad, fresh hot rolls with butter, garlic mashed potatoes, apple cobbler for dessert. Uncle Arlen was a great cook, and he told both girls so repeatedly.

It was interesting when Julie’s mother, Doris, returned from the kitchen with a plate filled with the cookies Julie and Sheridan had baked. As she served Sheridan, Doris leaned down and spoke in a tone so low the others at the table couldn’t hear her.

“This place used to weird me out as well,” she said. “But you eventually get used to it.”

Sheridan nodded but didn’t meet her eyes.

BEFORE THEY WATCHED a DVD movie and went to bed, Uncle Arlen told them stories with a fire crackling in the fireplace. He was a good storyteller. He knew how to use words and inflection and would look right into Sheridan’s eyes as he made a point, as if it were the most important thing in the world that she hear him and hear him now.

Sheridan had been seated next to Julie on a bear rug at Arlen’s feet. The way Julie walked over, collapsed on the rug, and turned her immediate attention to her uncle suggested to Sheridan this Story Time was a very common occurrence.

“Tell about Grandpa Homer,” Julie had asked her uncle. And he complied. About how Homer had to confront a bear (“You’re sitting on it,” Arlen said). How he fought with the Indians. When Homer stood up to the ranch hands—there were dozens of cowboys living on the ranch back then—and told them either to get out or shape up when they threatened to walk off the job unless they got more pay and better food.

To hear Arlen tell it, the Scarlett family had been involved in everything that had ever happened in the valley, and in Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming. While haughty newcomers either tried to overreach and failed or panicked and ran, the Scarletts provided the grounding force. When locals ran around like “chickens with their heads cut off” about a drought, fire season, flash floods, or the fact that the world seemed to have passed Saddlestring by, the Scarletts were there to provide context, experience, and wisdom. Sheridan was aware of how Julie kept looking over at her as Arlen talked, as if to say, “See how lucky you are that I’m sharing this with you?”

Arlen called it “oral history,” and said he repeated the stories to Julie over the years so she could continue the tradition when she got older. “It’s sad that families don’t hand down stories anymore,” Arlen said. Then, shaking his head and clucking, he said, “Of course, maybe they don’t have much to tell.”

That stung Sheridan, because at the time he said it she was thinking she didn’t really know much about her own parents, where they came from, and therefore where she came from. Well, there was Grandma Missy, but she reminded Sheridan of some of the popular girls in her school. Missy was whatever she was at the time, but there wasn’t much more to her than that. Sheridan remembered her grandmother being the aristocratic wife of a real estate developer turned politician in Arizona whom they’d never seen. That’s when she first knew her, when her grandmother insisted she and Lucy call her “aunt.” Then Grandmother Missy moved to Wyoming, and now she was on the huge Longbrake Ranch. She’d done okay for herself, but Sheridan had no idea where she’d come from.

And she didn’t know much about her dad. Until that moment, when Arlen said it, she hadn’t given it much thought. Her dad didn’t talk much about growing up, but Sheridan always felt that it couldn’t have been too good. Once, when she asked him about his mom and dad, her grandparents whom she’d never met, he said, simply, “My parents drank.”

She had looked at him, waiting for more that never came.

“That’s one reason I wanted to be a game warden,” he said at the time, gesturing toward Wolf Mountain, as if he were explaining everything. There was also a hint about a younger brother, who would have been Sheridan’s only uncle. Something had happened to him. A car accident.

Unlike the Scarletts, who passed down everything, Sheridan’s family seemed to be starting anew, creating their own legacy and tradition. She didn’t know which was better. Or worse.

However, the longer Arlen talked, the happier Sheridan was that the family oral history in her household seemed to have started when her dad met her mom. What Arlen presented seemed to be too heavy a burden for a girl as shallow and frothy as Julie to carry on. It would be nice, though, to know more.

AS SHERIDAN AND Julie had gone upstairs for bed, Sheridan had noticed the pair of binoculars on a stand near a window in the hallway and had asked about them.

In response, Julie parted the curtain and pointed out across the ranch yard into a grove of trees, where Uncle Wyatt’s chicken coop could be seen in the distance.

“That way Uncle Arlen can check to see if Wyatt is around,” Julie said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“My grandma used to tell me stories,” Julie said to Sheridan when both girls were in Julie’s room for the night. “She’d tell me about my great-grandfather Homer, and my grandfather, her husband. And about my dad and my uncles. She had this really pretty voice that would put me to sleep. I really miss her, and that voice.”

Sheridan didn’t know quite how to respond. The Julie she knew from the bus and school—impetuous, fun loving, charismatic—was not the Julie she was with now. This Julie was cold, earnest, arrogant, superior—but at the same time very sad. She didn’t think she liked this Julie much, although she did feel sorry for her. This Julie just wanted to tell Sheridan things, not have a conversation. Although Julie’s monologues had, at first, been interesting, Sheridan had reached a point where she wished her friend would not make it so completely about her.

“You probably don’t know what it’s like to be a part of a famous family,” Julie said. “I mean, if it weren’t for the Scarletts, there would be no Saddlestring, and no nothing out there. Like, without us, you wouldn’t even be here. No offense, of course.”

“Of course not,” Sheridan said, sarcastically.

“You don’t have to be like that,” Julie said, sounding insulted. “I’m just telling you what is, you know? That’s what my grandma used to do. She made sure I knew I was special, and that my dad and uncles are special too. We have the Scarlett Legacy and nobody can take it from us. I’m the sole heir, that’s what she told me from the time I was little, how special that is.”

Sheridan simply nodded. This was going to be a long night.

“I miss her,” Julie said.

SHERIDAN LAY WIDE awake in her sleeping bag on the floor of Julie’s bedroom. Julie was next to her in a sleeping bag of her own. It was one of the rules of sleepovers: both the guests and the host slept on the floor, so there would be no jockeying or fighting over the bed. Sheridan could hear Julie’s deep, rhythmic breathing. Her friend was asleep.

Sheridan felt both scared and guilty. The house itself frightened her, and she felt silly about it. What Julie’s mom had said about “getting used to it” helped a little, but not much. The house was so big, so dark, so creepy. There were sounds, the soft moaning of old boards in the roof, the pop or squeak of a floorboard. She thought of what Julie had told her once about Uncle Wyatt rambling through the hallways in the middle of the night because he couldn’t sleep. She wondered if he was out there now.

And there was something about how Julie, Doris, Arlen, and Wyatt looked at one another, as though they were sharing a secret. It was probably just intimacy, she knew. Her own family probably displayed the same thing to strangers, a familiarity so comfortable that others could only wonder what was going on. But in this case, she felt remarkably like an outsider.

Jeez, she thought, her dad had given her a chance—more than one chance, actually—to back out of this sleepover.

Now, though, she tried to persuade herself there was no need to be scared. It had been years since she had felt this way. She wondered if it was the house, or the odd way Julie had acted, those photographs, the dinner, what? Maybe a combination of all of them. She wished she had a cell phone. Really wished it. If she had one, she could call her dad to come get her.

Then the guilt came in. Where she once saw Julie and thought of royalty, it seemed what Julie had inherited was a kind of genetic disease. The poor girl had been reared by relations who disliked one another, a kind of parents’ committee made up of her separated father and mother, her uncle, grandmother, and a number of domestics and ranch employees who treated her with barely disguised contempt simply for who she was. She grew up isolated from other kids, in the middle of a simmering stew of anger and resentment. That she’d turned out halfway normal was a testament not only to her mom but also to Julie herself. And it wasn’t as if Julie had lots of friends, even though it seemed like it at school. When it really mattered, like tonight, Julie had only one friend: Sheridan. No one else showed up.

Julie needed Sheridan’s friendship and understanding. Sheridan vowed to try harder to give it to her. She only wished she didn’t have the feeling Julie needed much more than Sheridan could provide.

SHERIDAN HAD TO go to the bathroom but didn’t want to get out of bed to do it so she lay there in the dark, studying the ceiling, wondering if she could hold out all night. And deciding she couldn’t.

She slid out of her bag wearing her pajama pants and a T-shirt. Julie didn’t wake up, even when Sheridan stepped over her and took a thin fleece blanket from Julie’s bed to wrap herself in against the chill in the house. Opening the bedroom door, Sheridan stuck her head out and looked both ways in the hallway. It was dark, although there was some kind of light coming from the first floor, down the staircase. There was a bathroom at the end of the hall next to Arlen’s bedroom. Although his door was closed and there was no light under it, Sheridan thought it best to go downstairs to use the guest bathroom.

SHERIDAN PADDED DOWN the stairs in her bare feet, wrapping the blanket around her. She found herself drawn to the Scarlett Legacy Wall, and specifically to the tinted photo of Opal she had seen earlier that night. It was one of those portraits that drew you in, she thought. Something about that woman’s eyes and that confident but mysterious half-smile. She broke away and quickly used the bathroom, washed up, crept out, and shut the door. Since the bathroom didn’t have a cup near the sink and she wanted a drink of water, she followed the light.

The kitchen was empty and stark, and she had the feeling the light hadn’t been left on by mistake. Then she saw the loaf of bread and a knife on a cutting board on the counter, the cold cuts near it, and wondered who had been up making a sandwich but wasn’t there now. And she decided she was in the process of scaring herself silly, so she must stop it. The main house of the Thunderhead Ranch wasn’t simply the home for Julie and Uncle Arlen. It was also the business headquarters of a large enterprise. Employees could come and go. Maybe one of them wanted a midnight snack, she thought. There was nothing frightening in that.

Nevertheless, when she heard a set of deep men’s voices outside approaching the house, Sheridan reached out, grasped the handle of a steak knife from a collection of them near the cutting board, and pulled it inside the blanket. As the front door swung open and heavy boots scraped the hardwood floor in the living room, Sheridan had a choice to make: either dash through toward the stairs and be seen by the men, run out the back door into the ranch yard, or stay where she was.

She quickly reasoned that just as there was nothing wrong with making a snack in the middle of the night, there was nothing wrong with her getting a drink of water from the kitchen sink. But she would also keep the knife under her wrap, and return it later when the coast was clear.

She recognized one of the voices as Arlen’s. The other was unfamiliar, a guttural but syrupy southern drawl. They were coming toward the kitchen. She would be caught unless she made the decision—now—to run out the back door into the ranch yard. She froze.

Arlen was saying, “So he’s got all you boys building fence . . .” when he swung the kitchen door open and saw Sheridan standing there by the counter. He was obviously startled, and what Sheridan took as genuine anger flashed across his face for a brief second. Then his semiauthentic smile returned.

“Sheridan, what are you doing up?” he asked.

“I wanted a drink of water,” she said as boldly as she could.

The man with Arlen squeezed into the kitchen behind his host, his eyes fixed on her. He was medium height, rangy, with pinched-together eyes, a taut skeletal face, and thin lips stretched over a big mouthful of teeth. His brown ponytail spilled down his back from beneath his hat over the shoulders of his denim jacket.

Arlen stepped aside stiffly, as if embarrassed by the situation he was in. “Sheridan, this is Bill,” he said.

“Bill Monroe,” the man said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sheridan Pickett.”

His voice, Sheridan thought, chilled her to the bone—and the way he looked at her, with familiarity even though she was sure she had never seen him before. She was glad she had the knife hidden under the blanket in her fist.

Then it hit her. “How’d you know my name is Pickett?” she asked.

The question made the man blink, as if it startled him. Uncle Arlen looked over, intrigued.

“Why, everybody’s heard of Sheridan Pickett,” the man said, making a lame joke as if he were saying the first thing that popped into his mind while trying to think of something better. “Actually, I believe Arlen here might have said your name.”

Sheridan didn’t reply, and felt threatened the way Monroe looked at her, with a kind of leering familiarity.

“I don’t remember saying anything,” Arlen said. “But whatever . . .”

“Or maybe I heard it from Hank,” the man said with sudden confidence, as if he liked this version much better. “Yeah, I heard it from Hank. You’re a friend of Julie’s, right?”

“Right,” Sheridan said.

Bill Monroe nodded knowingly, then tilted his head to the side without once taking his eyes off her. “That’s what it is,” he said. There was an awkward silence. Sheridan wanted to leave, but the men crowded the door. Obviously, Arlen expected her to go back to bed. Bill Monroe—who knew what he wanted? Whatever it was, he wouldn’t stop staring at her, sizing her up. He scared her to death.

Then she thought: the man knows both Arlen and Hank, and knows them well enough that he could say Hank’s name in Arlen’s house without retribution. What did that mean?

Finally, Arlen said, “Well, Sheridan, did you get your drink? You can take a glass of water upstairs with you if you want. I was about to make a couple of sandwiches for Bill and me while we talked a little business. Can I make you one?”

“No, thank you,” Sheridan said.

“Good night,” Arlen said, stepping aside as she sidled around the counter and headed for the doorway.

“ ’Night,” she replied. She was close enough to Bill Monroe as she passed to smell him—tobacco smoke, dust, and bad sweet cologne.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Bill Monroe said to her back.

As she went up the stairs, she looked over her shoulder to see him watching her carefully, a hint of a smile on his lips, and for a second it felt as if a bolt of electricity had shot through her.

WHEN SHE AWOKE she could hear Julie still sleeping beside her, a burr of a snore in her breathing. Her dreams had been awful, once she finally got to sleep. In one, a vivid dream, Bill Monroe was outside their house, on the lawn, looking through the window at Lucy and her as they slept.

In another dream, Sheridan went back out into the hallway in the dark to where the window was and parted the curtain. A yellow square could be seen through the distant trees, the light from Wyatt’s chicken coop.

She raised the eyepieces of the binoculars to her eyes and adjusted the focus tight on the square. Then something or somebody passed by the window inside, blocking out the light like a finger waved in front of a candle flame. And when the person passed, she could see the slightly smiling face of a woman, her expression paused in mid-conversation.

It was Opal Scarlett.