In Plain Sight

Joe had been home an hour. When he heard what Tommy had to say, he called Robey and Sheriff McLanahan. McLanahan claimed he needed his “beauty sleep” and sent Deputy Reed, who was preferable anyway. The three of them sat around Joe’s kitchen table because there were too many big bodies to fit in his office. Marybeth went upstairs to read and the girls were in bed. Tommy was at the head of the table, nursing black coffee. He had asked Joe for a little shot of hooch in the coffee to “cut the bitterness,” but Joe had refused.

“She said something to you,” Robey asked. “What was it she said?”

“No,” Tommy said, shaking his head, starting to get angry at the repetition of the questions. “I said I thought she was telling me something, but I couldn’t hear the words over the sound of the river.”

Reed checked his notebook. “Earlier, you said she smiled at you. Are you serious? Is that really what you meant, that she smiled at you as you floated by?”

Reed looked from Joe to Robey and back to Tommy. He was clearly skeptical. “What kind of smile?” he asked. “A Hi-Tommy-happy-to-see-you-again smile? Or a Get-over-here-and-pay-me-my-fee smile?”

“Damn it,” Tommy said, thumping the table with the heel of his hand, “that’s what she was doing. And yeah, I guess it was sort of a, um, pleasant smile. Like she was, you know, happy.”

Reed rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

Although small details kept changing, which was very disconcerting if one wanted to believe Tommy Wayman’s story, the basic tale was the same: The outfitter took his fifteen-foot Hyde low-profile drift boat out on the Twelve Sleep River to do some fishing of his own after a pair of clients canceled. He brought along his cooler, which had been filled with beer for three. Fishing was good. The beer was cold. Tommy landed nothing smaller than twenty- two-inch rainbows on dry flies. He lost track of how many beers he had drunk after counting eleven, and how many fish he caught after twenty. He may have even dozed off. Yes, he did doze off, which wasn’t a good thing, generally.

Luckily, he thought to drop the anchor off the back of the boat before he settled back between the seats on a pile of life vests and took a little nap. No, he wasn’t sure how long exactly. Maybe a whole hour. When he awoke he didn’t know where he was at first. He raised the anchor and started to drift downriver, picking up speed. That’s when he saw her. Opal Scarlett, right on the shore, standing in thick brush. But close enough that he could see her face, even if he couldn’t hear what she was saying over the river sounds. He had drifted too far and was picking up too much speed to row back upstream to hear her words. Nevertheless, he had hollered back at her. “Turn yourself in, Opal, for Christ’s sake! Everybody thinks I drowned you in the river!”

“You said she was closer to Hank’s place than she was to her own house,” Robey said to Tommy. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

Tommy was getting annoyed with the questions, and a hangover of industrial strength was starting to settle in, which made him even tougher to deal with.

“The whole fucking thing strikes me as odd, Robey,” Tommy said. “What has she been doing out there for a month when she knows the whole county is wondering what happened to her?”

Reed reviewed his notes, sighing loudly. Tommy looked over at him.

“What?” he asked.

“When I first got here and wrote down your story, you said you were fishing and you looked up and there she was,” Reed said. “Then, an hour later, you say you passed out in your boat, and when you woke up there she was. Now you say you were drifting downriver and picking up speed, and you didn’t see her until you looked back and by then it was too late to go back. That’s three different versions of the same event, Tommy. Which one are we supposed to believe?”

Joe had noted the discrepancies as well. Tommy was turning red. Beads of sweat were breaking out on his scalp.

“The last one, goddammit,” he said. “It was the last one. The last version.”

“That doesn’t sound too credible,” Robey said, sounding more sympathetic to Tommy than Joe expected him to be.

“And what exactly was she wearing?” Reed asked, not kind at all. “You say she was in jeans and a plaid shirt. What color was the shirt?”

“Huh?”

“What color was it? You said earlier it was a certain color. Do you remember now?”

Tommy looked down at his coffee cup and mumbled something.

“What was that?” Reed asked.

“He said ‘light yellow,’” Joe repeated.

Reed rolled his eyes again. “Light yellow is the color of the shirt he originally claimed Opal was wearing that day he threw her into the river. Are we supposed to believe she’s been wearing the same clothes for a month?”

“Yeah,” Robey said, rubbing his jaw. “And I think you said earlier she was wearing a dress, didn’t you?”

“If I did, I didn’t mean it,” Tommy said.

“Tommy Wayman,” Deputy Reed said, snapping his notebook closed and shoving it in his shirt pocket, “you are full of shit.”

Tommy moaned and sat back in his chair.

“I did see her, you guys,” he said thickly. “I just can’t remember all of the little details ’cause I’d been drinking.”

Robey said, “Of course, it would just be a coincidence that if Opal were actually seen on her ranch then you’d be completely off the hook, right?”