colleagues at morning coffee at the Burg-O-Pardner how much easier their lives had become since hiring her. She had filled a void none of them knew existed when she showed up with her laptop, spreadsheets, and no-nonsense practicality. She even had affiliate offices in Sheridan and Cody, manned by women much like herself who were mothers who knew what time management and prioritization really meant and could walk into a small business, dissect it, and make it run like, well, a
College funds for Sheridan and Lucy had been opened. All four burners worked on the stove. They had a new mini-van, and a television that revealed, for the first time, that most actors’ faces were not actually shades of green.
They had discussed the fact that MBP Management had quickly reached the point in business where Marybeth would need to make the choice to maintain what she had or expand. Maintenance, Marybeth explained, was the first step to stagnation, something she saw all the time with the businesses she managed. But expansion—hiring employees, finding bigger office space, changing her role from hands-on consultant to full-time executive of the business itself—was not what she thought she wanted to do. She enjoyed working with her clients, and expanding would mean more time away from the family and additional strain on the marriage. It was a difficult decision that faced them, she said, and one they needed to make together. Joe just wanted her to be happy, and said he’d support her in whatever she chose to do.
Before going upstairs to bed with his wife, Joe tiptoed into Lucy’s room and kissed her good night (she rolled over and said “um”), then rapped lightly on Sheridan’s door because he saw a band of light underneath it.
“Come in,” she said.
Joe stuck his head inside. Sheridan was reading in bed, wearing her glasses instead of her contacts. She smiled at her father, but then arched her eyebrows in a “do you need something?” way.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Fine. I feel sorry for Julie, though.”
Joe said, “Me too. I feel terrible about taking her out there. I hope she’ll be okay.”
Sheridan nodded.
“Has she ever told you about the situation out there?” Joe asked. “What the deal is with her father and her uncles?”
Sheridan shook her head. “I don’t think she really knows what is going on. I thought she’d call tonight, but she didn’t.”
Joe told Sheridan how the fight continued in the sheriff’s office, and that Tommy Wayman confessed to throwing Opal in the river.
“That’s just crazy,” she said.
“I’m curious about the Scarlett brothers,” Joe said. “How well do you know them? Does Julie talk about them much?”
Sheridan looked suspicious. “Some,” she said. “And I’ve met them all. Her dad, Hank. Uncle Arlen and Uncle Wyatt.”
“What do you think of them?”
“Dad, I don’t feel comfortable being your spy. Julie is my best friend.”
Joe held up his hand. “Okay, not now. I understand. But I’ll probably want to talk with you about them later, okay?”
Sheridan said, “Good night, Dad.”
MARYBETH WAS ASLEEP in bed with her table lamp on and a book opened on her chest. She was breathing deeply, so Joe tried not to wake her as he padded across the room. He changed out of his red uniform shirt and Wranglers and pulled on old University of Wyoming Cowboys sweats. Before he went back downstairs, he marked the page and closed Marybeth’s book, putting it aside. He hesitated as he reached to shut off her lamp, and took a moment to look at her. In sleep, her face was soft and relaxed, and there was the hint of a smile on her mouth. She was a beautiful woman, better than he deserved. She’d been so busy lately that she was dead tired at night. It had been over two weeks since they’d made love, and Joe scratched tonight off his list as well.
He missed the time they used to have together, before her company took off and before the girls required nonstop shuttling among school, home, and activities. And with his schedule and the problems at work, he knew he wasn’t helping the situation much.
Joe brushed her cheek lightly with the tips of his fingers, shut off the light, and went back down to his office.
He had never enjoyed the paperwork associated with his job, but considered it necessary—unlike some of Wyoming’s other fifty-four game wardens, who complained about it constantly. He viewed the memos, reports, requests for opinion, and general correspondence as the price he paid to spend the majority of his working day out in the field in his pickup, astride one of his horses, in his boat, or on his snowmobile. Joe Pickett still loved his job with a “pinch me” kind of passion that had yet to go away. He reveled in his fifteen-hundred-square-mile district that included haunting and savage breaklands, river lowlands, timbered ridges and treeless vistas, and landscape so big and wide that there were places where he parked his truck and perched where he could see the curvature of the earth.
He even used to get pleasure from writing his weekly reports, coming up with a well-turned phrase or making an argument that could persuade higher-ups. But things had changed, and he now dreaded entering his own office.
Joe listened to his telephone messages. There was a complaint from a local rancher about a vehicle driving around on his land at night, possibly a poacher. The next message was from Special Agent Tony Portenson of the FBI, asking Joe to call him. Portenson was heading up the investigation into the murder of ex-sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum and another still-unknown male the year before. Both of their badly deteriorated bodies had been found in a natural spring the year before. Joe had reported the crime. The prime suspect in the murders was Nate Romanowski,the falconer whom Joe and the rest of his family had befriended years before. Nate had vanished before the bodies had been discovered, and Portenson was trying to track him down. The agent called Joe every month or so to find out if Joe had heard from Nate, which he hadn’t. Joe felt no need to tell Portenson that he and Sheridan still went to Nate’s place to feed his falcons, and that they would continue to do so until Nate returned or
