Chapter Two
Marybeth grabbed her handbag and jacket.
She didn’t take the time to close her door as she left her office.
She strode through the nonfiction stacks and made a turn at the endcap displays and headed for the lobby doors.
As she passed the front desk, she suddenly stopped. Judith looked up, concerned.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Joe might be hurt. Please cancel all my calls and meetings for the rest of the day.”
Judith gasped and raised both of her hands to her mouth. Her eyes got big. “What happened?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But isn’t the budget hearing tonight?”
Marybeth glared at her, and Judith dropped her eyes to the top of the desk. “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Marybeth let it go. Several of the newly elected county commissioners were dead set against increased funding for the library, and there were rumors among the staff that they may try to defund it entirely.
One of the commissioners had even recently speculated in an article in the Saddlestring Roundup, “Why do we need libraries when we’ve got the internet?
Besides, I’ve never even set foot in the place. ”
Which was true, as far as Marybeth knew. Her staff was nervous, and she didn’t blame them. But now was not the time to discuss it.
—
As she pulled out of the library parking lot, Marybeth inadvertently intercepted a convoy of two sheriff’s department SUVs, a Saddlestring Police Department cruiser, and a Wyoming Highway Patrol car.
They were headed west with their wigwag lights flashing and their sirens on.
She pulled over to the side of the road to let them pass.
As she did, she nearly foundered in a deep bank of snow that had been plowed into a furrow several days before.
Remnants of a surprise November blizzard were all around her: furrows on the sides of roads, and mountains of plowed snow slowly melting in the centers of parking lots.
The high-altitude sun would make short work of the snow that remained—until another blizzard hit.
Marybeth eased back onto the street and followed the officers with her cell phone on her lap.
She wished she had a radio tuned to the mutual aid channel, like Joe did in his pickup.
She’d like to hear what the law enforcement officers were saying to each other, and to hear the first reports from the EMTs when they arrived at the scene.
As she followed, Marybeth glanced down at her speedometer when the convoy cleared the city limits. She was going eighty-five in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone, and she had to press on the accelerator of her Ford crossover to keep up.
Marybeth was grateful that the roads were clear after the blizzard that had shut down the area the week before.
There were still big snowdrifts in the swales of the terrain and impassable roads in the mountains.
There was enough snow on the ground in patches that it created perfect camouflage for the large herds of brown and white pronghorn antelope, which melded into the landscape.
Should she call her three daughters? she asked herself.
Sheridan, twenty-seven, was local, working as the CEO of Yarak, Inc.
, a bird abatement firm owned by Nate Romanowski.
April, twenty-five, was in Bozeman, Montana, at a private detective agency.
Lucy, the youngest at twenty-three, had just returned to Laramie and the University of Wyoming after a semester abroad in France.
Sheridan, of course, could probably get there first if she was working within cell phone range.
Marybeth decided against it. She didn’t want to alarm them with incomplete information.
At that moment, her phone lit up with a call. Sheridan. Marybeth enabled the Bluetooth feature in her car and the call appeared on the dashboard’s screen.
Sheridan said, “Mom, what’s going on? Is Dad okay? My cell phone started blowing up a few minutes ago.”
She’d heard. Marybeth said, “Let’s not panic, Sheridan. We don’t know what’s happened yet or if your dad is even involved.”
“My God,” Sheridan said, her voice trembling. “I got a text saying he was shot to death and found in his pickup.”
“Ignore it,” Marybeth said. “Don’t even look at any more texts until we know for sure. We don’t even know if your dad is injured, or if it’s somebody else in a Game and Fish truck.”
“Who the hell else could it be?” Sheridan said, her voice rising.
“Don’t lose it until you hear from me,” Marybeth said. “I’m following the first responders out to the scene right now. I should be there in fifteen minutes, or sooner at the rate we’re going.”
“I’m scared. This could be awful,” Sheridan said. “I can’t even wrap my head around it.”
“Just stay calm. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“You don’t sound calm,” Sheridan said.
“Don’t call your sisters just yet,” Marybeth said. “Not until we know something.”
“That’s going to be hard,” Sheridan said.
“I know. It’s hard on me as well.”
“Okay. For now.”
“Stay off your phone. I’ll call you the minute I know what’s happened,” Marybeth said. “I promise.”
After a beat, Sheridan said, “Growing up, we all knew something might happen someday. I mean, just about everybody Dad runs across out in the field during hunting season is armed. But…”
“I know. I know, believe me. Honey, I’ll call you the second I know something,” Marybeth said, disconnecting the call and wiping hot tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand.
Marybeth was untethered.
If it was Joe in that shot-up pickup on Antler Creek Road, she needed to know what happened and why. And she needed to know if she could hold it together.
But there had always been a lingering fear, she admitted to herself. A fear that Joe would encounter a situation that he couldn’t reason his way out of. A situation where he was ambushed, overwhelmed, or outgunned.
As a law enforcement officer, and one who had been called a “shit magnet” for his propensity to attract trouble and controversy for doing his job by the book and without qualms, Joe had made enemies over the years.
He also had a knack for walking into—or bumbling into—situations that put his life in danger.
It was a trait she both loved and hated about her husband.
Joe seemed unable to understand that it was possible, at times, to simply walk away.
—
Antler Creek Road was an anomaly of sorts, Marybeth had learned from Joe.
It started out near Saddlestring as County Road 402, and it coursed along the base of Wolf Mountain, where the foothills flattened out into sagebrush prairie.
It ended abruptly at a junction near an ancient buffalo wallow, where it split off into three forks that looked from the sky like the foot track of a wild turkey.
At the junction, the public road ended and the three roads emerging from it were private.
Each was posted with signs to warn the public that to proceed on them amounted to trespassing.
The road that went to the north led eventually to the magnificent Double Diamond Ranch, one of the largest landholdings in the Twelve Sleep River Valley.
The middle road continued on to the Bucholz Cattle Company.
And the southern spur led to the McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch holdings.
All three ranches were longtime, multigenerational properties with distinct characteristics.
The Double Diamond was owned by a wealthy southern mogul and his much younger wife.
The Bucholz place was run by a fourth-generation couple who, rumor had it, had acquired the ranch in a shady transaction that was still whispered about.
The owners of the McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch were sisters who were notorious for committing hunting and fishing violations, bending the law to fit their needs, and being involved in large-scale criminal schemes, though they’d never been charged. Joe said he hated going out there.
Although Joe and Marybeth had lived in the valley for over twenty years, they still felt like newcomers when it came to the personalities, backgrounds, and conflicts that had erupted between the principals of the three ranches.
What Marybeth had heard about the three ranches often had dark and gothic overtones.
Rumors of water wars, cattle rustling, spouse-swapping, missing ranch hands, cut fences, and feuds spanning several generations.
—
Marybeth was upon Antler Creek Junction when she topped a hill and the swale with the roads cutting through it appeared before her.
A green Game and Fish Department pickup sat squarely in the middle of the road where the three ranch road spurs began.
At first glance, there was no hint which fork the truck was going to take before being shot at.
Beside the pickup was the EMT van, its lights flashing.
The law enforcement vehicles ahead of her sped to the location and surrounded it.
The scene before her made her take in a sharp breath and hold it. Her heart raced and her mouth went dry.
She followed the LE vehicles to the junction and parked away from them. No one seemed to notice her back there.
Marybeth climbed out of her car and hugged herself tightly against the icy wind.
Her eyes teared up from both the sharp wind and what she saw as she walked toward the pickup, her hair whipping around her face.
The sheriff’s deputies, a town cop, and a state trooper had already emerged from their vehicles to jog to the scene.
It was Joe’s truck. Clearly stenciled on the side panel was GF-10, his call signal.
As if to underscore her terrible realization, their black Lab, Biscuit, appeared at the back of the pickup frantically hopping up and down.
Marybeth knew she did that when she was scared or stressed-out.
Biscuit had likely been in the cab when it happened and she hoped the dog wouldn’t be forever traumatized.