“I do,” he said. “When I feel like that, Marybeth and the girls say I’ve gone into JoeZone.”
She smiled sympathetically. “He used to come back from backcountry patrols feeling pretty good, though,” she said. “He said they cleared his mind and gave him his good perspective back.”
Joe understood that.
“I took the job in Casper to give Will the option of getting out of this pressure cooker. I thought he’d follow me to be with the boys. I even found a couple of opportunities for him there, but he never took them. He stayed here and things got worse.”
Joe shook his head, trying to think what he would do in the same situation, if Marybeth said she’d had it with his absences and threatened to move away. He’d follow her, wouldn’t he? When he realized he was missing some of what she said, he apologized and asked her to repeat it.
Susan said, “I said he didn’t give a lot of thought to the fact that while he was away for nights on end sleeping under the stars or whatever he did, he was completely out of contact with the outside world. He liked that, I guess. But he had a family here in town who never heard from him. I worried so much about him out there, Joe, that I would cry myself to sleep. Then I’d hate him. But I always got over it when he came back. When I saw you at the funeral, that was what I thought of.”
“But things changed with Will?”
“Did they ever,” she said, tapping the rim of her glass to signal the bartender for a refill. “Especially after we left. It was like his cave door closed shut and locked him out. He couldn’t find any relief, so the pressure just kept building.
Of course, he never said anything to me or asked for help.
Not Will.” Susan didn’t even try to keep the anger out of her voice.
“What caused the biggest problems?”
“Are you asking me because you want to know about Will, or because you want to know what you’re going to be dealing with here? Joe, I know you’re here to replace him.
I’m still in the loop.”
He flushed, sorry he hadn’t said it earlier. “Both, I guess.”
She thought that over for a moment. “Will thought—and he was right—that it seemed like things were coming at him from all sides. The animal liberation people were after him. I was surprised to see that Pi woman here, considering that she literally put a contract out on him on her website.
Then there was Smoke Van Horn and his bunch, the oldtimers. They rode Will hard, tried to get him fired a few times. Smoke always showed up at the public hearings and ripped Will as well as the state and the Feds. Smoke was hard on Will, and I hate him for that. Oh,” Susan said, smiling bitterly, “then there’s the developers. They come from other places and they want to do here what they did wherever they made their millions. It drove them crazy that somebody like Will, who made less money than what their cars probably cost, could stall their projects by writing an opinion that would affect their plans.”
Joe interrupted. “Are you talking about Don Ennis?” he asked, thinking about the business card in his pocket.
Susan’s face tightened. “Don Ennis. Do you know him?”
“I sort of met him last night. He sent over a drink.”
“Don and Stella Ennis,” Susan said, more to herself than to Joe, as if recalling something unpleasant.
Joe recalled Tassell’s comments about breaking up an argument at the ski resort. He would need to follow up with Tassell to see if the other party was Don Ennis.
Susan’s eyes burned into Joe, and her voice dropped as if someone might overhear her. “Joe, all I can tell you is to watch out for that man. He gets what he wants, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt.”
Joe blinked at her sudden intensity.
“As for Stella,” she said, “she’s playing a game that only she understands. She might be the most dangerous of them all.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Susan sat back, drained her glass. “I’m not sure what I mean. I just got this vibration from her. A dark kind of feeling. I think she’s a predator. And Will,” she said, drinking again although her glass was empty, “Will thought I was wrong about her. He thought I was jealous. And you know what? I probably was.”
Joe felt that he needed to defend Stella. Did Susan see her crying during the funeral? Were those tears of a predator? But he didn’t want to go there with Susan, not now. He changed the subject.
He asked, “What was he working on most recently?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that,” she said. “The boys and I had been gone for months. Even when we were together, he didn’t talk about the specifics of his projects much. He tried to leave all of that at his office, or in his truck, or wherever. The only way I knew about the big things—like ALN, Smoke, or Ennis’s Beargrass Village— was because sometimes he’d mention them in passing or I’d hear about it from someone or read about it in the newspaper.”
“Susan, where did he keep his files? His notebooks?”
He realized he sounded like he was grilling her. “Sorry for my tone.”
“It’s okay,” she said, patting his hand. “I’m not sure about the files. I think at the office. He brought his notebook into the house some nights—he was always scribbling in those notebooks—but he never left papers or files around the house.”
“Do you mind if I look through the boxes of what he left?”
“Feel free, Joe. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them anyway. They probably belong to the state.”
