“No, it’s not all right, Detective Robicheaux. You deceived me, and so did Clete Purcel.” Alicia Rosecrans raised a finger at me, her little glasses wobbling with light. “I won’t forget it, either.”
JAMIE SUE WELLSTONE’S favorite time of day had become the hour between false dawn and the first glow of blue light on the walled garden behind the main house. Even when the gar
den was still cold and speckled with night damp, she would take the morning newspaper from the cylinder out front and read it and drink coffee at the mosaic-tile table just inside the garden’s back gate, which allowed her a view of the sun when it first broke above the mountaintop and lit the hillsides on the far end of the valley.
This morning the lead story in the paper was about a shooting death in East Missoula. She started to skip over the story, then saw names inside the type that seemed as sharp in relief as lettering on a headstone. Quince Whitley was dead, killed instantly by a visiting private investigator from New Orleans, Louisiana. According to the story, Whitley had tried to throw acid in the face of a woman by the name of Candace Sweeney. A man named J. D. Gribble had thrown his guitar case in front of the woman when she was attacked by Whitley. Then Gribble had disappeared. The shooting was under investigation, and by press time no one had been charged or taken into custody. In the last paragraph, the article stated that Whitley was thought to be an employee of the Wellstone ranch in the Swan Lake area.
The sun had just broken above the mountaintop, shining through the trees on the crest. A shadow fell across the front page of the newspaper as Jamie Sue was reading it.
“The sheriff’s office called late last night,” Leslie said, standing behind her in a purple robe and slippers and a warm scarf wrapped around his throat. “The phone didn’t wake you, sleepyhead?”
“No, it didn’t,” she replied.
“I explained that we had to fire Quince yesterday. Poor fellow, it must have sent him over the edge.”
“Fire him?”
“I thought I told you. He’d become so ill tempered and disrespectful, I decided it was time we let him go. Are you coming upstairs?”
“I was going to have some dry toast.”
“Cook can bring it up. Would you like an egg-white omelet?”
“I really don’t feel well.”
“That’s too bad. Must be the weather. Fire season upon us again and all that. Looks like your fellow Mr. Purcel earned himself some ink this morning.”
She rested her forehead on her fingers. The print on the newspaper was swimming before her eyes.
“That’s quite a story, isn’t it? Wonder why this Gribble fellow ran away. You think he’d want to hang around and receive some gratitude for his good deed,” Leslie said. He stared at the back of her head. He waited a long time for her to reply, but she didn’t. “Nix came to Montana to catch up on old times with Jimmy Dale Greenwood. You think this J. D. Gribble fellow might be Jimmy Dale?”
“I don’t know, Leslie.”
“Sure you wouldn’t like to come upstairs?”
“It’s my stomach. The veal we had last night tasted strange,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“You think the pitcher of martinis might have had something to do with it?” he said. He waited. “No? I’m sure it was the veal, then. Maybe you haven’t quite developed a taste for it. Did you and Jimmy Dale eat very much of it?”
When she looked up at the burned mask that was Leslie’s face, his eyes seemed filled with concern, perhaps even pity. Then he patted her on the shoulder and went back into the house. Was he trying to drive her mad?
She sat for a long time inside a rectangle of cold sunlight, the sound of her own blood whirring in her ears. When she shut her eyes, she remembered a field of bluebonnets in Yoakum, Texas, and saw the wind denting the grass and the flowers, spinning the blades of a windmill while well water gushed out of an iron pipe into an aluminum tank. She wondered how the paintless house in the background, where her blind mother was hanging wash, could have become the most heartbreaking symbol of loss she could imagine.
She went upstairs and showered in her bathroom, locking the door before she undressed. After she dried off, she wrapped herself in the towel and went into her bedroom, keeping her eye on the door that opened into Leslie’s bedroom. She went into her walk-in closet and dressed in a pair of old jeans and a flannel shirt and suede boots lined with sheep’s wool. She sat on the side of her bed and looked at the heavy black guitar case propped against her desk. Inside it was the HD-28 Martin guitar Jimmy Dale Greenwood had given her. She started to open the case, then hesitated. Through the door she could hear Leslie moving around in his bedroom. He had disabled the lock when she had first moved into the house, claiming that she should have more than one exit in case of fire. But in one fashion or another, he always let her know that her privacy was subject to his consent.
She took a gold-leaf book from the shelf above her desk and opened the French doors onto the balcony and sat on a scrolled-iron chair that stayed there year-round, even when the balcony was banked with snow, so that the cushion on the seat had become dry and bleached of color and she could feel the hard frame of the chair against her buttocks. She opened the book on her lap and began to read. The temperature had dipped into the high thirties during the night, and the sunlight still had not penetrated the shade on the west side of the house. Down by the barn, there was frost on the spigot above the horse tank and steam was rising off the coats of the horses. It was hard to believe that fires were breaking out in the hills, started by either dry lightning or a bottle thrown on the ground by a careless hiker. How had this beautiful piece of countryside become harsh and cold and fouled by the smell of fire all at the same time, as though the season were out of sync with itself?
“I haven’t seen you read your Bible in a while,” Leslie said behind her.
She turned in her chair, and her mouth parted slightly. “What are you doing with that gun?” she said.
“This? It’s a single-action Ruger Buntline. It has interchangeable cylinders. One for twenty-two long-rifles, one for twenty-two Magnums. The Magnums will make you deaf. So I don’t use them a lot. Here, hold it in your hand.”
“No.”
“It’s a beautiful piece. It penetrates cleanly, but with a hollow-point, it can do some very effective damage.” He opened the loading gate and slowly rotated the cylinder, clicking each loaded chamber past the opened gate. “I can break a beer bottle at ninety yards with it, although I have to prop my arm across a tree limb when I do. I bet you’d be a fine shot with a little training. A Texas ranch girl and all that sort of stuff.”
He looked out across the yard and down the slope at a sugar maple whose leaves were so dark they were almost purple. A robin had built its nest in the fork of the tree, and a shaft of sunlight shone directly on the nest and the bird sitting atop its eggs.