Stone Cold

6

That night, Joe stood near the stove in his kitchen and idly watched a musical performance taking place in the living room. He ate a grilled cheese sandwich Marybeth had whipped up and drank a Shiner Bock beer. He’d missed dinner — again — because of the flight from Cheyenne.

The living room furniture had been pushed back against the walls to create enough floor space for the show. Lucy had the lead. She had an earthy, lovely tone to her voice. Harmonizing — and interjecting clever scripted phrases — were fellow students LeeAnne Dow and Hannah Roberson, Lucy’s best friend. They had all landed parts in a high school musical and had gotten together to practice their numbers. Marybeth told him LeeAnne and Hannah had made arrangements to spend the night as well.

April was bunkered in her room and had not eaten dinner or spoken to anyone since she got home from her shift at Welton’s Western Wear. When Joe had knocked on her door, April yelled, “Go away!” He’d decided to leave her alone, although he did hope he’d have the chance to say good-bye in the morning.

As he finished his sandwich, the girls harmonized the chorus:

“What are they singing about?” Joe whispered to Marybeth over his shoulder.

“Diversity.”

Joe said, “Well, I got that. Is this for that Rainbow-whatever production?”

“Rainbow Dreams,” Marybeth said. “Written and choreographed by the new music teacher, a Miss Shirley Lemmex, who is twenty-four and,” she continued in a dramatic stage whisper, “very enthusiastic.”

Joe nodded. He didn’t know LeeAnne well, but he certainly knew Hannah Roberson. Hannah visited her father, Butch — convicted of a double homicide the year before in the case Joe had been squarely in the middle of — once a month when she and her mother, Pam, made the long drive to Rawlins and the Wyoming State Penitentiary. Hannah had a secret she shared only with Joe, Marybeth, and perhaps Lucy. She’d weathered the last year, and Marybeth had gotten her into professional counseling and done her own kind of counseling as well: teaching Hannah how to care for and ride horses. She seemed to have taken to it, according to Marybeth.

Joe cringed. “Is that all there is to the lyrics?” he asked.

Marybeth patted him on the shoulder and said, “I’m sure there’s more to it.”

“I hope so. I mean, don’t we believe in right and wrong?”

“Don’t be a grump,” Marybeth said. “Appreciate how well they’re singing, not what they’re singing.”

He drank the last of his beer in silence.

“I’m going out to feed,” she said, patting him on the shoulder.

He nodded. It was her nightly routine.

He watched Marybeth pull on her canvas barn coat and slip into her high Bogs boots. Hannah broke from the song and asked her if she needed help with the horses.

Before Marybeth could answer, Joe said, “Thanks for asking, Hannah, but I’ll go out with her tonight. You girls keep practicing.”

“You will?” Marybeth asked him, surprised. Then she got it: Joe wanted to talk to her away from the singers.

The single bare lightbulb in the small barn threw harsh shadows through the bars of the sliding horse panels, making the inside where the horses shuffled look like a film noir jail. Marybeth measured out thick sections of hay between her hands from fifty-pound bales and pushed each through the hinged feeder panels into black rubber tubs on the other side. The three horses reestablished their nightly pecking order of who ate first: Rojo, Toby, and Poke.

Joe hung back near the barn door and admired his wife. When she was done dropping the feed into the stalls, she closed the panels and said, “How is Sheridan doing? You gave her that coat, right?”

“I did,” he said.

Obviously something in his tone made her pause and look at him with concern.

He told her about Erik Young, and how he’d talked to the university administrators and asked the FBI to run his name through their database. Marybeth listened with worry in her eyes. Joe said he’d told Sheridan he would be there as fast as he could if she called.

“I wish I — we — weren’t five hours away,” she said, lowering her head and hugging herself in an involuntary gesture of mother’s fear. “This is the kind of thing I have nightmares about.”

Joe said, “Sheridan’s smart, and she’s aware of her surroundings. Much more so than I would have thought, to be honest. She’ll do the right thing.”

Marybeth quizzed him on the steps Sheridan had taken so far and who she’d talked with. She agreed the bases had been covered but wondered if Sheridan would consider stepping down from her RA role and possibly moving. As she speculated, she shook her head. “No, she’d never do that. She’s like you,” she said to Joe. “She doesn’t have the sense to get out of the way of trouble.”

Joe shrugged.

“I’m going to call her tomorrow morning,” Marybeth said.

Joe said, “She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you so you’d worry. So this has to be between us.”

She winced. Joe was reminded of the special mother-and-daughter bond, and that by Sheridan reaching out to Joe first it would worry Marybeth even more.

“I guess she figured it was more up my alley,” Joe said, looking at his boots.

“I understand,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to look into this Erik Young myself.”

Marybeth often used library computers to access state and federal criminal databases. She wasn’t supposed to know the passwords, but she did. Her skill at research and investigation had aided Joe countless times.

She said, “If Erik Young fits the profile, he’s probably got a Facebook page or he’s posted some things online. If I can find them and they’re threatening, well, the university might have something to go on. These types don’t operate in complete secrecy, from what I understand. They generally telegraph what’s going on inside their heads.

“I won’t tell Sheridan I’m doing it,” Marybeth said, “but I’ll let you know what I find. And Joe, if I find something, you’ve got to drop whatever you’re doing and follow up that minute.”

Joe said, “Yup.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling wistfully, “life was so much easier when they were all my little chickens and I could keep an eye on them because they were close. Now Sheridan’s in another town, April’s going off the rails because of a cowboy, and Lucy wants to start dating. I feel like they’re all drifting away from me.”

There were tears in her eyes, and Joe pulled her close. He said, “We’ve done all we can. You’re the greatest mother I’ve ever been around — better than both of ours. Especially yours. They’ll be all right. You’ll be all right.”

“But I’ve lost control,” she said into his shoulder.

“That’s part of the deal, I think,” he said.

When she stepped away and wiped the tears from her cheeks, he outlined the assignment from the governor without going into many specifics and told her he was going away for a while and he didn’t know for how long. He left out names but explained that there was a suspicion that a wealthy rancher in Medicine Wheel County might also be a high-society hit man.

“That’s nuts,” Marybeth said, shaking her head. “In Wyoming?”

“They suspect he uses his ranch as his base. As far as I know, he hasn’t operated in the state. But I agree — it sounds nuts.”

“What if they’re right?”

He said, “Then maybe I can help bring him to justice. But like I told you, I’m under strict orders not to get too close. My job is to serve as eyes and ears only and to get out if the situation gets western.”

Her shoulders dropped and she said, “You’ve never been able to do that, Joe.”

It was cool enough in the barn that their breath puffed out in clouds of condensation. On the other side of the metal gates, the horses ate their hay in a methodic grum-grum-grum chorus.

“This time I will,” he said. “Count on it.”

She looked at him sadly, as if she knew more about him than he did.

Then he told her about the photos.

“It couldn’t be our Nate, could it?” she asked, incredulous.

“Sure looked like him.”

“There has to be an explanation,” she said. “Maybe he was somewhere where he wasn’t supposed to be, or it was someone who just looked like him from a distance.”

“Could be.”

She paused. “When he was here last year, there did seem to be something different about him. He seemed kind of unmoored, don’t you think? Like he was really struggling with his own code?”

Joe nodded. They’d talked about it several times. He tried not to get miffed when Marybeth’s thoughts turned to Nate after she’d had several glasses of wine, but they often did.

She said, “I know he’s been through a lot and I can’t even imagine what that would be like. But still, I can’t see him turning into some kind of killer, can you?”

Joe said, “That’s what I hope to clear up.”

“I hope you do,” she said, gathering the thick plastic grain buckets and stacking them together near the hay bales.

While she did, Joe turned and pulled down a thick turnout blanket Marybeth used to cover her horses in cold weather after she rode them. The blanket was wide and covered with canvas on the outside but had soft fleece on the inside. He flipped it inside out and unfurled it with a gentle snap.

The sound made Marybeth turn around.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He spread the blanket over a two-foot-high shelf of hay bales.

She said, “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

When he didn’t respond, she said, “Are you?”

He reached behind him and turned off the light. It was suddenly dark, and the only light was from starlight outside the stall doors. The horses continued with the grum-grum-grum sound.

“Joe,” Marybeth whispered, “this is crazy. What if one of those girls comes out to check on us?”

He said, “Listen.”

From inside the house, he could faintly hear:

Black, yellow, brown, and white

Diversity makes the world seem right

Diversity, Dee-verse-i-teeeeee

Joe said, “Our house is filled with girls and I’m going to be gone for a while. Watching you and listening to you tonight… well, you know.”

“Oh, Joe,” she said. But she wasn’t angry.

When they were through, Joe buckled his belt in the dark and helped Marybeth find her missing boot. The singing inside still went on.

She said, “I can’t believe we just did that. I think I have hay stuck inside my pants.”

He laughed.

“And my horses probably watched the whole time. They probably thought you were attacking me or something.”

Joe pulled her close and tilted her head up and kissed her.

They held hands on the way to the house and didn’t let go until they reached the back door. Marybeth took a moment to comb bits of hay out of her hair with her fingers and smooth out her coat. She reached up and brushed several stalks of hay from Joe’s shoulders.

“I think we’re presentable now,” she said. Before going inside, she said, “I hope it’s not Nate.”

Slightly deflated, Joe said, “Me too.”

“And you promise you’ll get out of Medicine Wheel County if it gets dangerous?”

“Of course.”

“By the way,” she said, swatting him gently on his backside, “thanks for the roll in the hay.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.”

“Don’t make it a habit,” she said, with gentle admonishment. “I don’t want you to get the impression I’m easy.”