Chapter Six
On the night that Joe was shot and Marybeth held vigil at his bedside at the Billings hospital, their three daughters assembled at the kitchen table at Joe and Marybeth’s home on the bank of the Twelve Sleep River.
Sheridan had arrived first, since she was the closest. She’d found a frozen pizza in the freezer and was cooking it in the oven when April arrived from Montana with her dog, Boone, a Labrador/husky mix she’d adopted from a Bozeman shelter.
Lucy showed up an hour later, since she had to drive all the way from the University of Wyoming in Laramie, which was four hours away to the south.
Sheridan had complained about Boone’s presence immediately when the huge dog bounded through the house looking for the Pickett dogs: Biscuit, their new Labrador and Joe’s daily companion who had been delivered from the crime scene by a deputy, and Bert’s Dog, an unholy mixed-breed blue-eyed hound that included Catahoula.
Tube, a corgi and Labrador mix, had died the previous summer at the age of fourteen.
Even without Tube, the remaining dogs got along well and began chasing each other, wrestling on the floor, and knocking over end tables and lamps in the living room.
Sheridan and April managed to coax the dogs outside into the backyard before they knocked over all of the furniture.
With peace restored, April went straight for her mother’s wine stash in the pantry. She opened up a red blend and poured three glasses full.
She was on her second glass when Lucy arrived, wearing a beret and a long scarf that she’d apparently purchased in France during her recent semester abroad. Her light blond hair was short and stylish, making her look like a Euro-pixie.
“Oh, give me a break,” April snorted when she saw Lucy. “Please don’t tell me you’re going to start telling us how much better everything is in Europe, are you?”
“Oui, ma soeur,” Lucy said with a sardonic smile. “That’s ‘Yes, my sister,’ for you rubes from Montana.”
“Please don’t tell me you brought a dog, too,” Sheridan said.
“Non,” Lucy replied.
Then, as if a dam had broken, the three sisters embraced and wept together. April finally pushed away from the scrum.
—
“Let’s get started, then,” Sheridan declared after wiping her eyes. She pulled the pizza out of the oven, scoring the slices with a pizza cutter, and sliding it onto the tabletop. “How are we going to figure out who shot our dad?”
“Who made you the boss?” April asked. “I don’t remember when we had the vote to decide.”
“I’m the oldest and the most organized,” Sheridan replied.
“And I’m the one currently working for a private investigation firm,” April countered.
Sheridan turned to her youngest sister. “Lucy, do you vote for me?”
“Sure,” Lucy said with a coquettish eye roll.
“So there you have it,” Sheridan said.
April said, “This election was rigged, as usual. It’s always two against one.”
“That’s because we are the reasonable sisters in the family,” Sheridan said. “We have to stick together.”
“The word you were looking for is ‘collude,’ ” April said, her voice rising. “You two collude together.”
Lucy cut in. “Let’s change the subject.”
“You talked to Mom last,” Sheridan said to April. “What’s the latest?”
April pried out a wedge of pizza and placed it on a paper plate in front of her.
She said, “The surgeon told her there’s a possibility that the injury might not be as severe as it looked at first. Mom repeated a bunch of medical terminology I don’t understand, but the bottom line is that the trajectory of the bullet might have just clipped a single lobe, but not gone into any more of his brain.
If that’s the case, he might not have the worst kind of brain damage after all.
The bullet is lodged in his skull, though, and she said something about a ‘meninx’ that I don’t understand. ”
Lucy said, “The meninx surrounds the brain and keeps it from sloshing around in your skull all day. I read about it in a psychology class when we were studying the human brain. But I’d need to look it up again to make sure that’s the case.”
“So that’s where the bullet is lodged?” Sheridan asked April. “In the meninx?”
“I think that’s what she said. It was confusing, and Mom is wound really tight. Bottom line, though, his condition is stable for tonight and we should know more tomorrow.”
“Thank God he’s stable,” Lucy said. “I’m all cried out from the drive up.”
“He’s still in a coma and not able to talk?” Sheridan asked.
“That’s the situation,” April said. “How long he’ll be like that, nobody knows.”
“How did she sound?” Lucy asked. Lucy had always been keenly attuned to the motives and feelings of others, and she often picked up on cues her sisters missed.
“Exhausted,” April said. “She said she was going to find a hotel near the hospital and try to get some sleep. I don’t think we should bug her until tomorrow.”
“Agreed,” Sheridan said.
April said, “I could tell she wasn’t very excited by the prospect of us getting together to try and figure this out.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Sheridan asked. “Sit on our hands? Sometimes I think she still thinks of us as her little chickens waddling in a row behind her.”
“Take it easy on her,” Lucy said. “She probably sees her control slipping away. I’m sure she wouldn’t admit that, but it’s got to be tough to watch her husband stuck in one place in a coma and not sure if he’s going to make it, and her three daughters are someplace else, going off without her.
She’s probably feeling a lot of things right now. ”
April chewed on another slice of pizza, and said to Lucy, “You’re the expert on other people’s feelings. I defer to you on that one. I just want to find the bad guy who did this.”
“Me too,” Sheridan said. “So let’s make a plan.”
April said, “Since we don’t have Dad’s phone, we need to access his office computer. We need to find out his last searches and emails.”
“Do we have his password to get in?” Lucy asked.
—
They tried 1-2-3-4-5 but couldn’t access the phone. The sisters looked through drawers and scrap paper for what could be the password, but came up empty.
“Would Mom know?” Lucy asked.
“I’ll text her,” Sheridan said.
In the next minute, she received a reply. Sheridan looked up and shook her head. “She doesn’t know his password and he can’t tell us, of course.”
“Crap,” April said. “It was a good idea.”
—
After a second bottle of wine was opened, Sheridan said, “I know exactly where that road junction is on Antler Creek Road. The land goes from public to private at that spot. It splits off and goes in three directions from there—to the Double D, the McElwee Ranch, and the Bucholz Ranch. Dad was obviously headed out to one of them when this happened. So who is the most likely of the three to ambush him?”
Lucy looked up. “Do we need a whiteboard so we can put up photos of our suspects and draw lines between them, like they do on TV?”
“That’s bullshit,” April said. “I’ve been on dozens of investigations with Cassie Dewell, and we’ve never used a friggin’ whiteboard.”
“Just asking,” Lucy said meekly.
“Anyway, Mom thinks the prime suspects are the McElwees,” April said, referring to the owners of McElwee Land and Cattle. “She said they’re suspected to be operating a poaching ring and that Dad had been out there before.”
“Does she know that’s where he was headed this morning?” Sheridan asked.
“No, she doesn’t. She said she has no idea where he was going this morning at all, and neither does dispatch in Cheyenne,” April said.
“That’s no help,” Sheridan said. Then: “So we start with the McElwees. I know they’re fourth- or fifth-generation landowners, and I know the other ranchers in the area don’t think much of them.
The two owners are sisters named Lisa and Lainie.
Both have been married a few times each, but I don’t think there are any current husbands in the picture.
And they’re both just mean as bobcats. They’ve had lots of disputes over the years with all of their neighbors. ”
“What kind of disputes?” Lucy asked. As she did so, she was searching their names on her phone.
“Problems over water, fences, missing horses and cattle, that kind of thing,” Sheridan responded.
“The usual stuff out in ranch country. But since I’ve been back, I’ve heard some other things about them.
I’ve heard they might allow shady hunters to take trophy animals on their place without licenses and out of season.
And apparently a couple of the ex-husbands have just disappeared off the face of the earth.
I’ve also heard that a few of the men who work on their place are ex-cons who might be involved in dealing.
But all those things are just rumors. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge that any of it is true. ”
“They sound fun,” Lucy said, deadpan. Then: “Lisa and Lainie McElwee don’t seem to exist on social media. All I can find is a crummy-looking website for ‘McElwee Trophy Hunting.’ There aren’t any photos of the sisters that I can find, just a bunch of dead-animal shots.”
“I’m not surprised,” Sheridan said. “They don’t strike me as social media types.”
“But going forward, I wouldn’t rule out the Bucholz folks,” Sheridan said. “John and Shelby. They come across as really nice people at first, but the more you get to know them and the more you hear about them…”
“What?” April asked.
Sheridan said, “Well, I was hired last spring to go out to the Bucholz place with my falcons to chase a bunch of starlings out of their barns. They seemed nice enough. But one of their hired men pulled me aside and told me to watch out for them—that they weren’t at all who they seemed.