Winterkill - C. J. Box [46]
“I don’t know what to think, Marybeth,” he confessed. “And I’m not sure I know what to do about any of it either.”
“I wish Jeannie Keeley would have been up there, so you could see how serious she really was.” Marybeth was focusing on the part most important to her. Earlier in the evening she had told Joe she’d spoken with a lawyer and that the lawyer hadn’t been very optimistic about their chances if Jeannie Keeley sincerely wanted April back.
“Why is she back now? It’s been five years, Joe—why the hell is she back now?”
Joe looked at his wife, her face pale with anger and fear and wished he had an anwer for her.
The side door opened and Marybeth stepped in wearing her parka. Her arms were crossed, her hands clamped under her armpits.
“It’s not much warmer in here than outside,” she said, closing the door and huddling back against it. “Are you coming in soon?”
“Is everyone in bed?”
“You mean my mother?” Marybeth sighed. “Yes.”
“I’ll be in in a minute,” Joe said, ratcheting a plug in. It had been a year since he’d replaced the spark plugs.
“I’ve thought about what you told me tonight. Brockius, Romanowski, Strickland, all of it. I wish I had been with you.”
Joe looked up. “Me, too. Maybe you’d have a better read on these people than I do.”
“Do you put any stock into what Nate Romanowski said about Strickland?” Marybeth asked. “Could she really be that bad? Or does she just remind him of somebody he hated?”
Joe’s socket wrench slipped on a spark plug and he struck his knuckles hard against the engine block and cursed. He looked up. “I don’t know, Marybeth. But that woman gives me the willies. There’s something . . . off . . . about her.”
“Then you believe him? Do you think he’s innocent, like he claims?”
Joe pulled the wrench out of the engine, slipped off his glove, and examined his skinned knuckles. His bare fingers immediately stiffened in the cold.
“He’s either innocent, or he’s an excellent liar,” Joe said.
“I do know one thing he might not be lying about,” Marybeth said, arching her eyebrows. “Mary Longbrake was seeing a much younger man. It could have been Nate.”
“How in the . . .” Joe caught himself, and rephrased, “How could you possibly know that?”
“From the library,” Marybeth said, smiling. “A couple of the women who work there used to play bridge with Mary every week. I guess they talk about all sorts of things in that club. Apparently, Mary made it very clear that her life had changed for the better since she had met this man.”
Twelve
The closed-casket funeral for Lamar Gardiner was held on the morning of New Year’s Eve, while another dark winter storm front was forming and boiling in the northwest. The wind was icy and withering. The service took place at Kenneth Siman’s Memorial Chapel on Main Street in Saddlestring and was attended by about fifty mourners, most of whom were family, employees of the Forest Service office, or local law enforcement.
Joe sat with Marybeth in the next-to-last row of chairs. He wore a jacket and tie, and had left his hat on the coatrack. Carrie Gardiner, wearing black, sat in the front row with her two children. Behind them was Melinda Strickland, surrounded by Forest Service employees. Strickland’s hair, Joe noted, was a different color than when he had last seen her. Now it was tawny, almost blond. She wore her Forest Service uniform. Sheriff Barnum and his two deputies occupied a single row of chairs, but they all kept empty chairs between them. Elle Broxton-Howard, with her notebook in her lap, sat alone behind them all.
The ferocity of the wind outside made something flap and bang on the roof while the pastor spoke. Kenneth Siman, the earnestly sober funeral director and county coroner, appeared from a door near the front of the room, looked up to check that nothing within the building had been damaged, and silently disappeared.
When the pastor was done, Melinda Strickland approached the