“Why not?” Lucy asked.
Jessica shuddered. “They’re just icky. And they smell bad.”
Hailey laughed nervously. “Maybe now is a good time to ask about playing outside.”
The three girls looked at each other, knowing Hailey was right. There was no better time to ask parents to do something than when guests distracted them.
Lucy was the second down the stairs, after Jessica. There was a discussion going on between the Overstreet sisters and Jessica’s parents.
Jessica’s dad said, “Yes, I heard about those cows today.”
“And you know we’ve been losing stock that we can’t account for,” one of the sisters said.
“What will this do to the sale?” the other sister asked.
“I don’t know,” Jessica’s dad said. “But we may want to consider lowering the price to keep it attractive.”
“I knew you would say that.” “We’re against that, you know.”
“It’s just that . . .”
“Cam, we have visitors,” Jessica’s mother said, interrupting him.
Lucy watched as Mr. Logue and the Overstreet sisters paused and looked up toward the stairs.
“My, my,” one of the sisters said. “Look at them.”
Despite their dresses, the women looked hard, Lucy thought. There was no warmth in their stares. One of the sisters had blue eyes and the other green. Their eyes looked like old jewelry.
“They look like little tarts,” the other sister said, and received a glare from Jessica’s mom.
“What do you girls want?” Jessica’s dad asked.
“Can we play outside?” Jessica asked. “In the back?”
“Dressed like that?” the older Overstreet sister asked, smiling with her mouth only.
“We can change,” Jessica said weakly.
Jessica’s dad gestured toward Hailey. “Didn’t we agree to throw out those old clothes?” He looked upset, Lucy thought.
“It’s okay, girls,” Jessica’s mom said, standing up, not addressing Mr. Logue’s question. “You can go out back.”
Mr. Logue shot her a look, but didn’t intervene. The three girls fluttered down the stairs and across the foyer and out the back door.
“That worked,” Hailey said as soon as the door slammed behind them. “Did you smell them?” Jessica asked.
“I smelled something,” Lucy said. But even though they were outside and could play hide-and-seek, she wished she were home.
7
The next evening, after the dinner dishes were cleared, Joe entered his small office near the mudroom and shut the door. The office was cramped and poorly heated. It consisted of a metal government-surplus desk, two four- drawer filing cabinets, and bookshelves crammed with books of statutes, biology and range-management texts, the complete John McPhee collection, and spiral notebooks of department directives. A set of antlers from the first five-point buck he had ever shot hung from the wall behind him. Caps, hats, binoculars, and his gray, sweat-stained Stetson covered the tines. As he clicked on his desk lamp and booted up his computer, he glanced at the front page of the weekly Saddlestring Roundup that was delivered that morning.
THEY ’RE BAAAACK . . .mutilate d cattle discovered in county a bull moose another victim?
The photo on the front page that accompanied the article showed the carcasses on the Hawkins Ranch, with Sheriff Barnum standing in the middle of them. The story contained quotes from Don Hawkins, the sheriff, Deputy McLanahan, and Joe. Although the story was accurate, Joe winced while he read it. He could imagine Barnum doing the same. There was a disagreeable sense of unreality about it, he thought. It was the kind of subject matter he ignored with contempt when he saw something similar on the front of a supermarket tabloid.
At least a dozen cattle and a bull moose have been found recently in the county, bearing mutilations similar to those reported in the mid-1970s, according to Twelve Sleep County Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum . . .
The article summarized the scene at the ranch, describing the dead cattle as “gruesome and unearthly” and calling the mutilations “inexplicable” before jumping to inside pages.
Joe read on:
. . . In the mid-1970s, a rash of cattle mutilations were reported throughout the Mountain West, primarily in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah.
Cattle, as well as sheep and some domestic livestock, were reported dead, with genitals and other organs missing. In most of the documented incidents, skin had been removed from the faces of the victims as well as eyes, tongues, ears, and glands. Blood was reportedly drained from the bodies . . .
. . . Speculation as to the cause of the deaths ranged from government experiments to cults, as well as extraterrestrial visitations. Despite local investigations, no definitive cause was ever determined, although an FBI report issued in 1978 seemed to conclude that the deaths were natural and that the “mutilations” were a result of predation and decomposition. A review of county records revealed that the cattle mutilations seemed to have ceased after the initial reports, and there is no record of additional incidents . . .
The reporter had interviewed several area ranchers who had reported cattle mutilations thirty years earlier, as
