Cold Wind

“Like what?” she asked.

Joe chinned toward the north in the direction of the Rope the Wind turbine project. “The wind,” he said. “It blows.”

Dinner was served at the regal long table in the rarely used dining room. Jose Maria had been pulled from duty with the cows and dressed in a black jacket to serve ranch-raised beef tenderloin, asparagus with hollandaise, garlic-roasted sharp-tail grouse, and red-skinned new potatoes. Missy sat at one end picking, as usual, at tiny bits of food. She wore pearls and a black cocktail dress that showed off her trim figure and youthful legs, and Joe wondered if she could possibly be the same wan person he had seen in the courtroom.

Marcus Hand occupied the other end of the table. He wore a loose guayabera shirt over jeans and cowboy boots. His reading glasses hung from a chain around his neck. He ate huge portions and loudly enjoyed them and washed down each bite with alternate gulps of either red or white wine. Hand was well known as a gourmand, and he’d penned dozens of unapologetic essays about eating large quantities of rich food. In one piece Joe had read in a national magazine, Hand lamented that fried chicken was rarely offered in local restaurants and that elites should stop looking down on big eaters who enjoyed their food in quantity. Hand dismembered a grouse by pulling it apart and gnawed the meat off the carcass. Then he snapped the thighbones in two and sucked out the marrow.

Joe and Marybeth faced each other in the middle, shooting glances toward either end and exchanging puzzlement to each other when their eyes met. Joe had expected angst and gravity to accompany the meal, but not this. He couldn’t help but stare at the lawyer, who enjoyed his food with a kind of moaning passion that nearly made Joe feel like a voyeur.

“This grouse,” Hand swooned, sitting back and letting his eyes roll back into his head while a half-eaten thigh jutted out of his mouth like a fat cigar, “may be one of the most succulent dishes I’ve ever had. And I’ve eaten well all over the world, as you know.”

“It is good,” Missy said from the other end of the table. Her face beamed, and she seemed oddly relaxed. Marybeth obviously thought the same thing, and she had trouble hiding her agitation.

“Fresh grouse,” Hand said, “is like fine wine. You can taste the pine nuts and the sage they eat in the meat itself, as if master chefs infused it. Few culinary artists in the world can come close to replicating the savory flavor of freshly roasted grouse no matter how many fancy sauces they cover the fowl with, or what they stuff it with.”

“All these years,” Missy said, talking softly and directly to Hand as if Joe and Marybeth weren’t in the room, “I didn’t know how wonderful these birds could be. There they were, just flying around the place. I didn’t even know they were grouse. I thought they were just fat little birds.”

Hand laughed and shook his woolly head. He was charmed by her, or doing a very good impression of it.

“It’s like this dining room,” Missy said. “Earl never wanted to eat in here. He said it was too dark and he never liked to linger over fine food and wine. To Earl, food was just fuel. But it’s lovely, isn’t it? A lovely room to eat wonderful fresh grouse in.”

“Mom,” Marybeth said sharply, “are you okay?”

“I’m wonderful, honey,” Missy said, inflecting a slight Southern accent Joe had never heard before. He noted how the lilt made Hand smile in appreciation, as if she’d triggered something from his youth just the two of them understood.

Joe felt his scalp crawl. She was flirting with him.

“Marcus shot them,” Missy said. “He brought them to me this afternoon and said they would be as magnificent as they turned out to be.”

“I find upland shooting relaxing,” Hand said, still looking at Missy. “I take my Purdey side-by-side shotgun with me everywhere I go, just in case. Hunting and shooting helps me clear my mind and focus only on the things that matter.”

Missy turned her head slightly to hide her blush and her smile.

Joe said, “Grouse season doesn’t open for two weeks.”

“Excuse me?” Hand said.

“You’re poaching.”

It was suddenly very silent in the room. In his peripheral vision, Joe could see Jose Maria step backwards from Missy’s side into a dark corner.

“Those are my birds,” Missy said. “They’re on my ranch.”

“Nope,” Joe said. “They’re wild and managed by the state.”

“I didn’t realize we lived in Communist China,” Missy said.

Joe shrugged.

“Marybeth,” Missy said, an edge in her voice, “your husband is a kill-buzz.”

“That would be ‘buzzkill,’ ” Joe corrected. To Hand, he said, “I’ll drop off the citation later. Don’t worry. You can afford the fine.”

Marcus Hand grinned at Joe, but his eyes couldn’t completely hide his anger and resentment.

The rest of dinner proceeded awkwardly. Joe pretended not to notice. The grouse was delicious. Marybeth and Missy filled the vacuum with small talk about the girls, the library, the weather. Anything but the case.

Marcus Hand studied his wineglasses and filled them often. Joe could hear the rest of Hand’s Jackson Hole legal team in the small dining area beyond the door. He thought there must be six or seven people eating dinner in the other room, like the kids’ table at Thanksgiving. He doubted they were being treated to grouse.

As Jose Maria brought out small dishes of vanilla ice cream with bourbon sauce, Joe turned to Missy.

“How involved were you with The Earl’s wind project?”

Missy’s smile turned hard. “Why do you ask?”