Winterkill Read online

  “Christmas is over, ladies,” Joe told them. “Back to work we go.”

  Marybeth was quiet, her eyes tired. She had spent most of the previous night awake and crying about her encounter with Jeannie Keeley. Joe had held her, and shared her rage and frustration. Both Joe and Marybeth were painfully aware of the fact that this might be the last “normal” breakfast with the three girls for a while. And both were determined to see it go smoothly. Neither Marybeth nor Joe had said anything to April, or Sheridan and Lucy about Marybeth’s encounter with Jeannie Keeley the afternoon before. But April seemed prophetic, and was acutely alert. Throughout breakfast, her eyes darted furtively from Marybeth to Joe, as if trying to pick up a signal or read a glance. Just as Maxine always seemed to know when Joe was going to go out of town, April seemed to sense instinctively that something was afoot. Sheridan and Lucy, rubbing sleep from their eyes, were oblivious to the morning drama.

  After they’d gathered their coats and backpacks, Joe ushered all three girls outside to meet the bus. As the bus doors opened, April turned and threw her arms around Joe’s neck and kissed him goodbye. Joe couldn’t remember such an open display of affection from April before. When he returned to the house, it was obvious that Marybeth had seen them from the front window, and she was wiping away tears again.

  Before they could talk about it, the telephone rang. Marybeth picked the receiver up, and as she listened, Joe watched her face turn into an ivory mask.

  “Who is it?” Joe mouthed.

  “Robey Hersig,” Marybeth answered in a sharp voice. Joe could not hear the county attorney speaking, but he could tell what Hersig was saying by Marybeth’s reaction.

  “Robey, I appreciate you letting us know,” Marybeth said, and hung up the phone. She looked up at Joe and her eyes were flat and distant. “Robey said that Jeannie Keeley got a judge down in Kemmerer to issue an order for April’s return. The judge issued the order last week, and Robey just got a copy of it. He’s going to fax it to us.”

  Kemmerer was a small town in southwestern Wyoming. Joe was puzzled. Why Kemmerer?

  “Robey says the judge is a loose cannon, some kind of a nut,” Marybeth continued, still eerily matter-of-fact. “He said the order could probably be overturned in court, but until that happens we’re obligated to hand over April if Jeannie wants her.”

  Joe stood still, his eyes locked with Marybeth’s.

  “Joe, Robey says that if Jeannie comes for her and we don’t turn her over, that we could be charged.”

  Joe shook his head, as if trying to shake away the news.

  Her mask cracked and she broke down, and he welcomed her into his arms. “Joe,” she asked him, “What are we going to do?”

  After Marybeth regained control and seemed to hammer her emotions into the armor of icy resolve, she left for work at the library. Joe, frustrated, spent the day in the field. There was plenty to keep him busy, as always, and he threw himself into it in a barely controlled frenzy. Better to work himself hard physically, he thought, than to sit and contemplate what was happening at home.

  He loaded his snow machine and mounting ramps in the back of his pickup, drove up the Crazy Woman drainage as far as the road was plowed, then chained up and continued until he reached a trailhead. He backed the snowmobile down the ramps with a roar, then raced across untracked snow up and over the mountain. In the drainage below was a designated winter elk refuge, and he cruised down through it. Because of the deep snow, most of the elk that normally would have been there had moved to lower ground, even though a contractor had dropped hay for them. Instead of using the refuge, though, the elk were eating Herman Klein’s lowland hay, as well as the hay of other ranchers in the valley. Joe didn’t particularly blame the elk, but wished they would have stayed around. The few elk that were present on the range were emaciated. He could tell they weren’t likely to last through the winter. The storms and the coyotes would get them. They stood dark and mangy, looking pathetic, he thought.

  He fought a totally uncharacteristic urge to challenge them with his snowmobile, to charge at them and watch them run. Instead, he turned back and raced up the mountain he had come down, flying though the trees with a recklessness that both frightened and exhilarated him.

  He stopped short of his pickup and tried to collect his thoughts. He noted the elk population of the winter range—seventeen sick and starving animals—in his notebook. He would check the other ranges throughout the week, and compile a report for Terry Crump. Joe expected to find the same depressing results in the other refuges as well. A lot of elk were going to die this winter, he concluded. He couldn’t protect them. Too damned many would die of winterkill.

  One thing had crystallized in Joe’s mind during his breakneck rush up the mountain: He needed to talk with Jeannie Keeley. He drove toward Battle Mountain and the Sovereign Citizen compound but was stopped by a sheriff’s-department truck that was blocking the road. The Blazer was sidewise on the plowed one-track, its front and back bumpers almost touching the walls of snow.

  Joe slowed to a stop as Deputy McLanahan emerged from the Blazer and walked toward his truck. McLanahan raised a hood over his head as he approached. A short-barreled shotgun was clamped under his arm.

  Joe rolled his window down.

  McLanahan’s damaged nose was a grotesque blue-black color and there were half-moons of dark green under his eyes. He looked worse than Joe remembered.

  “Where are you heading, game warden?”

  The way McLanahan said it, “game warden” sounded to Joe like “son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Patrolling,” Joe said, which was not quite accurate. He had intended to go to the compound to see if Jeannie Keeley had returned. And to advise Wade Brockius that April should not be the pawn in the bitter game Jeannie was playing.

  “I thought the hunting seasons were over,” McLanahan stated. Joe could tell the deputy was in his hard-ass mode, and he guessed that being assigned to roadblock duty by the sheriff might have precipitated it.

  “They are,” Joe agreed. “But I’ve got winter range all over these mountains to check. What’s going on here, anyway?”

  McLanahan’s face looked raccoon-like inside the hood.

  “Roadblock. I’m supposed to check anyone coming in or going out.”

  “Because of the Sovereigns?”

  “Yep. They’ve overstayed their welcome as of today. The eight-day camping limit has done run out.”

  Joe didn’t understand. “What?”

  “Folks can camp for eight days in this national forest campground. That’s it. Then they have to move on. These yay-hoo extremists have not only overstayed their welcome, they’ve tapped into the electricity and the phone lines up there. I’m freezing my ass off down on this road and those assholes are up there surfing the Internet and using county power to heat their RVs.” McLanahan spat, but the cold spittle didn’t clear his lips. “Sheriff Barnum and Melinda Strickland want them to get the fuck out of our county. So they posted eviction posters up there last night, and I’m here to see if they leave.”

  So Barnum and Strickland are working together. How odd, Joe thought.

  “And if they don’t leave?” Joe asked.

  A grim smile broke across McLanahan’s face. “If they don’t leave there’s a plan in place to take care of business. We won’t stand for any more incidents like what happened with Lamar or that BLM guy.”

  Joe rubbed his eyes. He knew it was a nervous habit, something he had the strong desire to do as stress built up inside him. “What’s the connection between the Sovereigns and those two?” Joe asked. “Do they really think they’re connected in some way?”

  McLanahan’s eyes were flat pools of bad pond water. “The day the Sovereigns showed up was the day Lamar got killed,” he said, deadpan. “The BLM guy was a week later. Both are Feds. These Sovereign nutcases hate the government. We’ve got one of ’em in jail, but the rest are up in that camp. Is it really that hard to figure out, game warden?”

&nbs
p; McLanahan said “game warden” in that way again. Joe controlled his anger, and asked calmly, “What are they going to do?”

  “You mean, what are we going to do,” McLanahan said, the grin still stretched tight. “Melinda Strickland called in a couple of experts in the field. They’re in charge of the situation, and they’re a couple of bad-ass cowboys.”

  Joe thought of the two men who had questioned Sheridan, then driven to the Forest Service building. But he said nothing.

  “So what are you going to do if they don’t leave?” Joe asked again.

  McLanahan’s bruised and mottled face contorted even further into a kind of leer. Joe realized that McLanahan didn’t have a clue what Barnum, Strickland, and the two “bad-ass cowboys” were planning. But he didn’t want Joe to know that.

  “Let’s just say that we’re not going to stand around and scratch our nuts like they did in Montana with those Freemen,” McLanahan finally said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That’s priveleged information,” McLanahan blustered. He stepped away. “I’m freezing to death standing out here,” he said. “I’m going to get in my truck and fire up the heater. You want to go up there you’re going to have to clear it with Barnum first.”

  “Have you seen an older-model blue Dodge pickup come up this road?” Joe asked. “With a man and a woman in it? Tennessee plates?”

  “Nope.”

  Joe watched McLanahan walk away. Joe’s mind was swirling with new implications. He rubbed his eyes.

  In the afternoon, Joe patrolled the breaklands. He drove the BLM roads boldly, and took the ones that would crest hills or traverse sagebrush clearings, choosing to fully expose himself. He was looking for the light-colored Ford. He hoped the driver of the Ford, the man (or men) who had lured Birch Wardell into the canyon, would try to do the same to him. He needed some kind of action that would make him feel he was doing something, and occupy his mind to delay the inevitable.

  The inevitable would be later in the evening, when he and Marybeth sat down with April to tell her that her mother wanted her back.

  Nineteen

  Jeannie Keeley sat in the dirty pickup wearing her best green dress and smoking a cigarette. The defroster didn’t work worth a damn, and every few minutes she leaned forward and wiped a clean oval on the foggy windshield. When it was clear, she could see the redbrick façade of Saddlestring Elementary. It was Wednesday morning, the second day the children were back at school.

  A bell rang, and despite the cold, children filed out of a set of double doors on the side of the building and across a playground that was mottled with snow and frozen brown gravel. Jeannie noted that there was a playground supervisor—a teacher, she supposed—walking stiffly on the perimeter of the children.

  Her eyes squinted and fixed on a blond girl wearing a red down coat with a hood rimmed with fake white fur. The girl was in the middle of a group of three other girls huddling near the building. The girls, presumably classmates, were talking and gesturing with animation.

  “There she is,” Jeannie whispered, pressing her finger against the glass. “There’s my April.”

  Clem, her man, cleaned a little oval for himself.

  “Which one?”

  “By the building. In that red coat.”

  Clem hesitated. He obviously couldn’t pick her out. “Red coat?” he asked. “There’s about twenty red coats.”

  Jeannie waved him off impatiently. “I goddamned know which one is my daughter, Clem.”

  “Didn’t say you didn’t,” he answered, clearly looking to avoid a confrontation. She knew he would choose to do that. Usually, she wished he wouldn’t talk at all. Rarely did he say anything worthwhile. She wished he would just shut up and drive.

  Jeannie had met Clem in eastern Tennessee at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. She had been waitressing, just about to quit and move on, and he was seated in her section. He was alone. He had driven her crazy with the length and precision of his order—how, exactly, he wanted his eggs cooked (just shy of over-easy with a dollop of butter on the yolk), his gravy ladled (on the side, in a soup bowl and not a cup, with plenty of pieces of pork sausage in it), his fried apples prepared (a double order with extra cinnamon) and his toast toasted (hard on one side, soft on the other). She had stared at the man with his prison pallor and thin dark hair when he’d asked her politely to repeat his order back to him. She did, and then asked him where in the hell he was from that he could order a breakfast like that and expect to get it. Eastern Montana, he said. Jordan. And it wasn’t that he could get a breakfast exactly like that in Jordan. It was that he had been dreaming of this particular breakfast for three years in Deer Lodge, Montana, at the penitentiary. He told her his name was Clem. She told him her name was Suzy. She always lied about her name; it was habit. He ate his breakfast and read a newspaper, and didn’t move until lunch, when she came to take his order again.

  “How come your name tag says ‘Jeannie’ if your name is Suzy?” he had asked her.

  “If you want lunch, you’ll shut your goddamned pie-hole,” she answered, and was overheard by the manager, an overeager junior achievement type who didn’t even have the guts to fire her in person but sent the accountant to do it.

  Jeannie had gathered her few belongings in a bundle and left the Cracker Barrel. Along with her possessions, she took some silverware and a few frozen steaks from the walk-in to her car. But the battery was dead, or something, and the car wouldn’t start. She was furious at this turn of events, but Clem had been waiting for her in the parking lot and he had offered her a ride.

  That was nine months ago now. Neither one of them had a place to stay, a place to go, or family to move in with. When Clem heard that a man named Wade Brockius planned to provide some refuge for people like him, he told Jeannie about it and they bought a twenty-year-old travel trailer with what little money they had and drove northwest. She had no idea at the time that she would end up in a place she knew, a place she hated, where her husband had been murdered and her daughter lost to her.

  “You look purty in that dress,” Clem said. She shot a look at him.

  Here was a man, she thought, a Montana Freeman, who had held out in a dirty farmhouse outside Jordan, Montana, for months in defiance of local, state, and federal law enforcement. A man who had patrolled the flat scrub earth of eastern Montana wearing a ski mask and carrying a Ruger Mini-14 with a banana clip. (His image had been broadcast around the world during the siege.) A man who had spent three years at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge rather than tell the authorities what he knew about the Freeman leadership. But a man who was so damned scared of her that he flinched when she turned on him and started crying like a eunuch when she threatened to leave him. Clem the Freeman, she thought. Clem the Freeman.

  The bell rang again. Recess was over. Jeannie watched April and the other girls go back inside the building.

  “That woman, Marybeth Pickett, thinks she’s a better mother to April than I am,” Jeannie said bitterly.

  Clem grunted in disapproval of Marybeth.

  “She took advantage of me, and my April,” Jeannie spat. “She took that child when I was at my worst, when I couldn’t care for her. Now that woman wants to keep her because she lost one of her own.”

  Clem grunted again.

  “People been taking things from me all of my damned life. Just because I’m smaller, or had less school than them, they figure they can just take what they want from me.” Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she lit another cigarette. “My first husband, Ote, took my childhood and my future from me when he moved me out to this damned place so he could be a mountain man. Then that judge in Mississippi took my boy away after that. That damned judge said I abandoned my boy, which was a damned lie. Everybody has a right to go on a vacation, and that’s all I done. How could I be blamed for the fact that my baby-sitter, that little bitch, went on vacation, too? But that judge took my boy away anyway.”

  Jeannie’s youngest, her three-y
ear-old daughter, was with Ote’s parents in Jackson, Mississippi. They claimed they were going to keep her, but Jeannie had other plans.

  She looked at Clem, her eyes blazing. He was shaking his head slowly.

  “It’s a crying shame,” Clem said.

  “You goddamned right it is,” she said, turning back to the windshield, which was fogging again. “Once we get April, we’ll go back for my baby.”

  Jeannie pulled two envelopes from her purse. One was old and brown, and the other was crisp and white. She shook out a thin sheaf of photos from the brown envelope. Clem watched as she shuffled through the snapshots.

  “I’m gonna show these to April to remind her where she comes from,” Jeannie said. “This one’s her and her brother when they was babies. April used to suck her two fingers all the time, instead of her thumb. Ote said that was unnatural.”

  She went through all of the pictures again, smiling at some, riffling past others. Then she dropped them back into the brown envelope.

  The white envelope contained a court order assigning immediate custody of April to Jeannie. The order was signed by Judge Potter Oliver of Kemmerer, Wyoming.

  Clem had been the one who knew of Judge Oliver, and they had driven across the state to meet the judge, after hours waiting in his office. Clem had told her Judge Oliver was “eccentric,” but had his heart in the right place. What he meant, she found out, was that Judge Oliver was sympathetic to the Freemen and had okayed several of their most outrageous financial schemes to fund their militia group. Despite petitions and threatened judicial and legislative action to have him removed from the court, Oliver had somehow stayed on. He was now being forced to retire within the year, he told them. Because of his age.