Cold Wind - C. J. Box [68]
Friday evening, Joe and Marybeth took Joe’s pickup to dinner at the Thunderhead Ranch. Missy had invited them, and Joe had been dreading the event all week. Lucy couldn’t join them because of play practice, and when they raised it with April, she said, “If I’m grounded, I’m friggin’ grounded.”
“Family events can be an exception,” Marybeth said.
“One of the problems with you people is you keep changing the rules,” April said, stalking back to her room and slamming the door.
Her favorite new phrase, besides “frigging” was now the accusatory you people.
Joe held the front door open for his wife. As she passed him, she said, “Marcus Hand better be as good as they say, because if he isn’t, April gains in power.”
“Ouch,” Joe said, flinching.
“I don’t want to do this,” Joe said, as they turned onto the highway.
“I know,” Marybeth said. “I can’t say I’m very excited myself. But my mother needs to know she’s got some support, Joe. Can you imagine how she feels?”
He bit his tongue and drove. If the woman had made any effort at all to befriend the locals or even show some respect for them, he thought, she might have a few allies.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Marybeth said.
“Can’t help it.”
He’d taken a shower and changed into jeans and a Cinch shirt, but his face still burned from being outside in the wind and sun all day. Mourning dove season had opened on the first, and he’d spent the last two days in the field checking hunters and limits. There was no other season where all a successful hunter had to show for himself was a small bag of the soft gray birds that would barely make a single meal—even though it was a tasty one. But because mourning doves migrated out of the area as quickly as they arrived, it was a furious few days of hunting and work and he’d not been able to pursue his investigation further.
Joe and Marybeth had not caught up because they’d been missing each other at home with his long days and her evening shift at the library.
As they turned off the highway and passed under the magnificent elk antler arches that marked the entrance to the Thunderhead Ranch, he said, “I guess this will give me the chance to ask Missy a couple of questions that have been nagging me since my talk with Bob Lee.”
“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. José 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,