Joe thought,
When Marybeth opened the front door, saw the eagle in his arms wearing Joe’s sweatshirt and sock and the huge frankfurter-like dog at his feet who instantly fell in love with her, she said, “Joe, come inside.” Then: “So this is Tube. He’s very unusual.”
Joe nodded, “Did I tell you I caught the Mad Archer of Baggs?”
“Yes, twice on the phone. Congratulations, Joe. And welcome home.”
AFTER SETTING UP the eagle in the shed with water and rabbit roadkill he had picked up from the highway outside of town, Joe entered the house from the back to avoid seeing Nedney. It was warm and dark inside and smelled of cooking and his family. He was suddenly tired.
Marybeth was sitting on the couch in the front room with her laptop and Sheridan’s cell phone. She said, “Do you need to get some sleep? I’ve been dozing the last couple of hours waiting for you.”
“I do,” he said. But when he looked into her green eyes and saw the way she was curled up on the cushions of the couch, he said, “But first I need you.”
She smiled cautiously and shot a look toward the darkened hallway that lead to Sheridan’s and Lucy’s bedrooms. “Joe . . .”
He took her hand, she squeezed back, and he guided her to the bedroom.
For a few minutes they forgot about the text messages, Nedney, what time it was, and even Tube, who curled up on the rug at the foot of the bed like he owned the place.
“ I WAS UP a long time after the text-message exchange last night,” Marybeth said at the breakfast table, after Joe had slept hard for three hours but awakened only an hour past his usual time of six o’clock. She had made a fresh pot of coffee, and she poured a mug of it for him. She said, “I read and reread it and I’ll walk you through it. Then I got on the Internet and started plugging in the place names April mentioned in the past couple of weeks. You’re not going to like what I came up with any more than I do,” she said.
He was jarred. “You said April. You said her name. Not ‘whoever was contacting us’ or whatever.”
She returned the carafe to the coffeemaker. When she sat back down she said, “It’s her, Joe.”
He shook his head.
“You can decide for yourself, then,” she said, plucking Sheridan’s phone from the table and opening it up.
As she scrolled through the menu Joe said, “
Marybeth smiled. “Where have you been, Joe? Teenagers don’t talk. They text.”
“But two thousand? In a month? That’s crazy.”
She shrugged.
He did a quick calculation. “That’s nearly seventy texts a day. I don’t think I’ve sent that many in my life, I don’t think.”
“Are you through?”
“So this isn’t unusual?” he asked, thinking that the more time he spent away from his family, the more removed he was becoming from the day-to-day. He didn’t like the way it was going. He vowed to see the governor and either be reassigned back home or have to quit. Sheridan’s and Lucy’s lives were streaking past him, and at this rate he would someday look up and realize they were gone and he’d missed it. Sheridan was seventeen! Lucy was in middle school. In the blink of an eye, they’d be gone if he didn’t reconcile his situation.
Marybeth said, “Not at all. In fact, and I hate to tell you this, I’ve talked to other mothers and two thousand text messages in a month is actually quite low.”
He whistled.
“Anyway,” she said, scrolling, “Here it is. The first text came in at eleven-eighteen last night. Sheridan was in bed but she heard her phone chime. Remember, we told her to keep her phone on.”
She handed the phone to Joe, showed him how to scroll up through the thread:
From: AK
Sherry, is this U? I got your # from a dude named Jason at the old house. U R not gonna believe who this is. Reply by txt but DON’T CALL. DO NOT CALL.
ak
CB: 307-220-5038
Aug 24, 11:18 pm
Erase REPLY Options
He read it three times. “No way,” he said. “It’s a joke.”
“That’s when Sheridan came out and got me,” Marybeth said. “We sat down together on the couch and had a cry. Sheridan was beside herself, and she wasn’t sure what to answer or even if she wanted to. But we decided she should answer it for no other reason than to draw her out, to see if she—or he, or whoever—would reveal herself more.”
Joe noted the callback number with a Wyoming area code, as well as the exact time and date of the call. He wondered if text messages could be traced like calls could be.
“Scroll up,” she said. Joe did.
Sheridan replied:
From: Falconette
