“I’ve never met anyone who had a song written about them,” Joe said.
“Now you have,” she said dismissively. But he thought she was pleased that he knew. “I have a question for you.
You said Don looked like a reptile. Do you use animal metaphors often when describing people?” She looked straight at him, with boldness, as she had in the restaurant when he first saw her.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” Joe said, “but I guess I do.”
“Someone else I knew did that,” she said, and her recollection brought out an almost imperceptible flinch in her eyes. “I think it’s kind of charming.”
Joe grunted, wondering but not asking if she was referring to Will.
“What kind of animal would Pete Illoway be?”
Joe thought about it for a moment. “A wolf.”
She laughed, apparently delighted. “Jim Johnson?”
“Bear.”
Joe knew what was coming next.
“What animal would you say would describe me?”
He felt his face flush. “Can I get back to you on that?” he asked.
She smiled at him knowingly. “But will you?”
He hesitated. He liked being with her, liked watching her talk. She was an exotic species, charming and attractive, yet dangerous somehow. He was drawn to her, despite himself. He said, “I’m bound to see you again. This isn’t that big a place.”
“I’ve found it’s as big or as small as you want it to be,”
she said. “Jackson is unique that way.”
Joe reshuffled the files in his hands.
“You don’t need to do that,” she said. “I saw your ring last night. You saw mine. Is your wife here with you?”
“No, she’s not,” Joe said, “but she might as well be.”
“Good answer,” she said. Stella Ennis lowered her eyes and her lips tugged into a mischievous smile. It was as if she didn’t quite know where to put them, Joe thought.
“Stella’s Lips.”
“I had better be going.”
“Yes, you had better be going,” she said, agreeing with him.
Joe swung into the cab of his pickup, and when he looked back she was still there, beside his truck, looking like she wanted to say something else. He rolled the window down.
“Have you found the file on me in Will Jensen’s desk?”
she asked.
“File?”
“I assume there’s a file.” She nodded. “I had to sign a release form with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in order to go on ridealongs. You know, agreeing not to sue the state in case a horse bucked me off or a bear bit my leg.”
“You went out with Will?” Joe asked, his tone more urgent than he wanted it to be.
“Not my choice of words exactly,” she said. “I accompanied him on a few elk trend counts, and once to check an outfitter camp. I absolutely loved it.”
If possible, Joe felt even more flushed than he had a moment before.
“I loved the realness of it,” she said. “The rawness and the danger. I’m a junkie for authenticity, if there is such a term.”
Joe swallowed, looked at her. “I saw you at the funeral.”
She nodded.
“You knew Will pretty well, then? Were you and Will.. .”
“Yes, Joe,” she said. “We were.”
He tried to picture Will and Stella together. He could only picture Stella. He felt a surprising rush of jealousy.
She crossed her arms defensively. “I admired him. He was real. I thought he had a quiet honesty and dignity about him, unlike most of the species. He was straightforward and unpretentious. People mistook his earnestness for lack of intelligence, which was a tragedy. I respected him very much. You remind me of him.”
Joe wasn’t sure he bought it, but she seemed sincere.
“Even though your husband didn’t respect him?” he asked, deliberately not addressing the last part of her statement.
“Believe it or not, we don’t think alike,” she said, “much to Don’s chagrin. Actually, he prefers it if I don’t think at all, except to think about how much I admire him.”
Joe was on thin ice and tried to think of a way off it.
“Do you have any idea why Will chose to kill himself ?”
She stared at Joe for a long time, pursing her lips. He found himself staring at them, again.
“Maybe he didn’t like what he’d become,” she said vaguely.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning,” she said, “that I’ll need to decide what I should share with you and what I shouldn’t.”
“I’d like to know,” Joe said.
“You had better be going,” she said again, and displayed a little wave.
Joe fumbled in his breast pocket for a business card and handed one to her. She took it and slipped it into the pocket of her slacks in one quick movement, as if she didn’t want anyone to see. Joe glanced toward the building. Don was standing at the sliding glass door watching them.
Joe looked back at Stella, wondered if she’d seen Don watching them, if she cared.
“You felt it too?” she said. “When we met.”
He knew exactly what she meant, but feigned confusion. She smiled. “I thought so.”
He drove out of the lot into the sundappled trees. At the moment before the road curled into the timber, he chanced a look in his rearview mirror. She was at her car, opening the door, but looking back at him.
“Marybeth!” he heard himself shout into his cell phone.
“Joe, why are you calling now?” She sounded annoyed, her voice a loud whisper. “I’m in the middle of the audit at Barrett’s I told you about. So unless this is an emergency, I can’t talk.”
Was it? he asked himself. Yes! “No, no emergency.”
“Then call tonight, like we agreed.”
“Okay.”
“Joe, are you all right?”
“Dandy,” he said, feeling as if he were telling a lie.
Twenty
Bud Barnum was starting to get impatient. It had been a week since Randan Bello had come into the Stockman’s, and Barnum was starting to wonder if Bello was consciously avoiding him. He knew the tall man hadn’t moved on. Tubby Reeves, who managed the rifle range for the county, told Barnum that he had watched Bello put over a hundred rounds through each of his rifles the day before, and said they were nice rifles too. Bello shot long distance, peppering target after target with tight patterns at four hundred yards, the most distant standard available at the range. Reeves said Bello had three handguns as well: a heavycaliber revolver, a midrange semiautomatic with a fourteenshot clip, and a little .25 caliber he wore in an ankle holster. “More coffee?” Timberman asked, walking the length of the bar with the pot.
“Nearly changeover time,” Barnum said, putting his hand over the top of his cup.
“Changeover time is getting earlier every day, it seems,”
Timberman mumbled.
Barnum said, “Thanks for sharing your opinion on that.”
...
Bello had checked into the Holiday Inn at the edge of town and not moved since. The receptionist, a blocky woman named Sharon, had once let Barnum bed her, and she still had feelings for the retired sheriff. She was willing to tell Barnum what he wanted to know. According to Sharon, Bello was out of his room early every day and didn’t return until dark. He was a good guest, she said, an “easy keeper.” Meaning he was quiet, didn’t use many towels, kept his room neat, and put two dollars on the dresser for the maid, which was Sharon most days. He had paid cash a week in advance but told her he may be staying up to three weeks. When he left in the morning he took his rifle cases, as well as a briefcase and a heavy duffel bag. The only things he left in his room were his clothes and a few books on falconry.
Barnum had a good idea where Randan Bello went when he wasn’t at the range practicing. Bello was scouting, like the hunter he was.
Earlier, during coffee with the morning men, Barnum had almost said something. The mayor had been droning on about the possible annexation of some land near the river, Guy Allen was saying that the temperature in Yuma was in the nineties, a rancher was bitching about how cattle prices had dropped because another mad cow had been found in Alberta. The conversation was the same as the day before, and the day before that. Barnum had felt the urge to lean forward, get their attention, and say, “There’s going to be a killing.” But he restrained himself, thinking that instead of announcing it now, he would tell them later, after it had happened, that he had suspected it all along. Telling the story slowly would have more impact, he thought. He’d explain how he’d pieced it together but was powerless to stop it because the citizens of Twelve Sleep County, in their infinite wisdom, had voted him out of office and replaced him with a preening nitwit.
Twenty One
Mary Seels looked up from her reception desk Tuesday morning as Joe entered the lobby carrying his briefcase and the Good Meat files. She said sternly, “You should be parking in the back, in Will’s old spot. There’s no need to use visitor parking. You’re not a visitor.”
“Okay,” he said sheepishly, mounting the stairs to his office. At the top of the landing he stopped and looked down at her. She was hunched over paperwork, bent forward as if struggling under the weight of armor. He wanted to ask her about what she’d started to tell him the day before.
“Mary . . .”
“Not now,” she growled.
He sat at his desk and looked around the office. He felt much better today. He had finally talked to Marybeth. He had slept through the night for the first time in three nights—except for that dream involving Stella Ennis that excited and shamed him when he replayed it in his mind.
Will’s notebooks were still stacked on the desktop, and he rifled through them, not sure what he was looking for. There was unopened mail in the inbox. The huge topo map dominated the wall, seemed to lean on him, the outfitter camp pushpins looking like an unclasped beaded necklace. I need to get up there, he told himself. But there were other matters at hand. He rubbed his face and eyes, thought, Where in the hell do I start?
But all he could think of, as he stared at the notebooks, the files, the map on the wall, was Stella Ennis and that dream. He could see why someone would write a song about her. He was attracted to her, no doubt. Entranced would be a better word. A dark shroud of guilt, like a thunderhead, had begun to nose over the mountains.
He needed to divert his thoughts and concentrate on something that was appropriate to the situation.
Thankfully, there was something else that rankled him.
Something Sheriff Tassell had said, a throwaway line at the time that had struck Joe as slightly off. He’d forgotten about it, but it resurfaced after he had talked through the situation with Marybeth the night before.
He called the sheriff ’s office and got Tassell.
“Who was the medical examiner called to Will Jensen’s house?”
He heard Tassell sigh. “I’m in the middle of another meeting with the Secret Service right now. Can I call you back later?”
“No,” Joe said abruptly. “All I want is the name. It’s a real simple question.”
“Your tone is inappropriate,” Tassell said.
“It probably is,” Joe said. “But all I need is the name.”
“What is the problem?” Tassell asked.
“There may not be one at all,” Joe said. Then: “I thought you were in a meeting. That you didn’t have time for this?”
“I don’t have time,” Tassell said. “But—”
“Sheriff, it’s public information. I just wanted to save some time instead of looking it up.”
Tassell sighed again. “Shane Graves. Dr. Shane Graves. He lives between here and Pinedale. We share him with Sublette County on account of neither of us needs him much.”
“Thank you.”
“Joe,” Tassell said, “keep me informed if you find anything.”
“I will,” Joe said, thinking, Was that so damned hard?
Dr. Graves was at his ranch, and told Joe that the files and photographs were there also. Graves sounded refined, cultured, aristocratic, and not at all what Joe had expected. “If I drive down, can I look at the report?” Joe asked.
Graves hesitated. “I’m busy all day, and I was kind of planning on spending the evening with my companion tonight. Is this an urgent request?”
“Yes,” Joe said, figuring that anything that would take his mind off Stella Ennis and back to Will’s suicide was urgent. “I’ve got to get up into the backcountry as soon as possible, and I’d like to wrap up as much as I can here before I go.”
“Okay, then,” Graves said unenthusiastically. “You can come tonight around six. I’ll give you directions.”
Joe wrote them down.
“I’ll see you tonight, then,” Joe said.
“You didn’t say anything. I’m surprised,” Graves said coyly.
“About what?”
“About my name. Graves. Most people comment on the fact that I’m the medical examiner and my name is Graves.”
“I’m not that clever,” Joe said. He was glad he hadn’t said anything—he had assumed Graves was talking about his use of the word companion.
...
Joe spent the afternoon in the corrals, learning the personalities of Will Jensen’s packhorses. There were two he really liked, a black gelding and a buckskin mare who reminded him of a horse he used to have. Both seemed calm and tough, and neither balked when he saddled them or put on the boxy saddle panniers that, when filled, would carry his gear. The horses looked well fed and in good shape. They would have to be, he thought, for where he would be taking them.
There were frequent delays along the highway south of Jackson, as Joe drove his pickup and followed a school bus dropping off children at the mouths of rural lanes. While stopped, he surveyed the homes splayed out across the floodplain valley below him, and was struck by the overall neatness. He was reminded that because Jackson was bordered on all sides by mountainous federal land, the valley itself was like a glittering island in a sea of tenthousandfoot waves.
The bus made the turn at Hoback Canyon toward Pinedale, and Joe sighed and looked at his wristwatch. He would be late to Dr. Graves’s.