Below Zero (9 page)

Joe didn’t like his house, and every time he came back, he liked it less. It wasn’t the structure or the street; it was simply that he didn’t like living in town with neighbors so close, especially after years of waking up on Bighorn Road to the view of Wolf Mountain and the distant river. But it was where his family lived, and that fact far outweighed his dislike of the location.

His neighborhood was new in terms of Saddlestring itself—thirty years old—and had grown leafy and suburban. The Bighorns could be seen on the horizon as well as the neon bucking bronco atop the Stockman’s Bar downtown. The houses seemed to have been moved a few inches closer together since the last time he was home a week ago, but he knew that was just his tired eyes playing tricks on him.

He flipped a U-turn and parked behind Sheridan’s twenty-year-old pickup—
her first car!
—leaving the driveway open for Marybeth’s van. Tube bounded out as if he knew he was home at last, and Joe unstrapped the eagle from his pickup wall and picked the bird up to take to his shed in the backyard. It squirmed when he lifted it up but relaxed as he carried it, either resigned to its fate or calmly looking for an opportunity to blow up and escape. He carefully avoided the talons, aware that if the eagle gripped his hand or wrist it could take him down to his knees in pain. The eagle turned its sock-covered head from side to side as he carried it toward the house.

He didn’t hear Ed Nedney come out and stand on his front porch in his robe smoking his morning pipe. And he didn’t see him until Ed cleared his throat loudly to indicate his disapproval of Tube, who’d wandered from Joe’s lawn onto Nedney’s perfect grass to defecate. The pile was huge, steamy.

“Geez, I’m sorry,” Joe said. “I’ll clean that up.”

Nedney snorted, as if to say,
Of course you will.
Then: “So the game warden returns. How is life in
Baggs
?”

He said “Baggs” the way a rich San Franciscan would say “Iowa”—with disdain.

“Fine,” Joe said, regretting what Tube had done.

“What do you have there all wrapped up in swaddling clothes?”

“A bald eagle.”

“My God. Does it screech?”

“You should hear it. It can wake the dead.”

“As long as it doesn’t wake
me.
”

“I didn’t think you slept,” Joe said, “with all the lawn maintenance and all.”

“Well, I do. What’s wrong with that dog? Why does she look so . . . ridiculous? She looks like a sausage.”

“He’s a he. His name is Tube.”

“Going to be home for a while?”

“Yup,” Joe said, thinking,
Probably not.

“Maybe you’ll get a chance to get the house painted before the snow hits,” Nedney said casually.

“It’s not that bad,” Joe said, wishing he hadn’t sounded so defensive.

“Check out the north side under the eaves. The wind is starting to chip away at the paint. Believe me when I tell you this,” Nedney said, sighing, the weight of the unkempt world on his shoulders. “I have to look at it every day.”

Joe thought,
Tube, go over on Nedney’s lawn and take another dump . . .

When Marybeth opened the front door, saw the eagle in his arms wearing Joe’s sweatshirt and sock and the huge frankfurter-like dog at his feet who instantly fell in love with her, she said, “Joe, come inside.” Then: “So this is Tube. He’s very unusual.”

Joe nodded, “Did I tell you I caught the Mad Archer of Baggs?”

“Yes, twice on the phone. Congratulations, Joe. And welcome home.”

 

 

 

AFTER SETTING UP the eagle in the shed with water and rabbit roadkill he had picked up from the highway outside of town, Joe entered the house from the back to avoid seeing Nedney. It was warm and dark inside and smelled of cooking and his family. He was suddenly tired.

Marybeth was sitting on the couch in the front room with her laptop and Sheridan’s cell phone. She said, “Do you need to get some sleep? I’ve been dozing the last couple of hours waiting for you.”

“I do,” he said. But when he looked into her green eyes and saw the way she was curled up on the cushions of the couch, he said, “But first I need you.”

She smiled cautiously and shot a look toward the darkened hallway that lead to Sheridan’s and Lucy’s bedrooms. “Joe . . .”

He took her hand, she squeezed back, and he guided her to the bedroom.

For a few minutes they forgot about the text messages, Nedney, what time it was, and even Tube, who curled up on the rug at the foot of the bed like he owned the place.

 

 

 

“ I WAS UP a long time after the text-message exchange last night,” Marybeth said at the breakfast table, after Joe had slept hard for three hours but awakened only an hour past his usual time of six o’clock. She had made a fresh pot of coffee, and she poured a mug of it for him. She said, “I read and reread it and I’ll walk you through it. Then I got on the Internet and started plugging in the place names April mentioned in the past couple of weeks. You’re not going to like what I came up with any more than I do,” she said.

He was jarred. “You said April. You said her name. Not ‘whoever was contacting us’ or whatever.”

She returned the carafe to the coffeemaker. When she sat back down she said, “It’s her, Joe.”

He shook his head.

“You can decide for yourself, then,” she said, plucking Sheridan’s phone from the table and opening it up.

As she scrolled through the menu Joe said, “
Two thousand text messages?
How is that possible?”

Marybeth smiled. “Where have you been, Joe? Teenagers don’t talk. They text.”

“But two thousand? In a month? That’s crazy.”

She shrugged.

He did a quick calculation. “That’s nearly seventy texts a day. I don’t think I’ve sent that many in my life, I don’t think.”

“Are you through?”

“So this isn’t unusual?” he asked, thinking that the more time he spent away from his family, the more removed he was becoming from the day-to-day. He didn’t like the way it was going. He vowed to see the governor and either be reassigned back home or have to quit. Sheridan’s and Lucy’s lives were streaking past him, and at this rate he would someday look up and realize they were gone and he’d missed it. Sheridan was seventeen! Lucy was in middle school. In the blink of an eye, they’d be gone if he didn’t reconcile his situation.

Marybeth said, “Not at all. In fact, and I hate to tell you this, I’ve talked to other mothers and two thousand text messages in a month is actually quite low.”

He whistled.

“Anyway,” she said, scrolling, “Here it is. The first text came in at eleven-eighteen last night. Sheridan was in bed but she heard her phone chime. Remember, we told her to keep her phone on.”

She handed the phone to Joe, showed him how to scroll up through the thread:

He read it three times. “No way,” he said. “It’s a joke.”

“That’s when Sheridan came out and got me,” Marybeth said. “We sat down together on the couch and had a cry. Sheridan was beside herself, and she wasn’t sure what to answer or even if she wanted to. But we decided she should answer it for no other reason than to draw her out, to see if she—or he, or whoever—would reveal herself more.”

Joe noted the callback number with a Wyoming area code, as well as the exact time and date of the call. He wondered if text messages could be traced like calls could be.

“Scroll up,” she said. Joe did.

Sheridan replied:

Joe said, “Falconette?”

“It’s her user name, I guess.”

“Blame Nate,” Joe said. Nate Romanowski had taken Sheridan as his apprentice in falconry years before. The lessons had been stop/ start, but she’d embraced the cruel and beautiful art of falconry and Nate called her a natural. Since Nate had escaped federal custody a year ago, their lessons had ceased, but Sheridan continued to study up on the sport through books and falconry Internet forums.

“I wonder why she doesn’t want Sheridan to call her?” Joe said.

“Read on,” Marybeth said.

Joe felt a flutter in his stomach and looked up at Marybeth.

Said Marybeth, looking into the living room as if placing herself back there, “Imagine Sheridan and me sitting on the couch when that came up, the birthdays. Sheridan looked at me with tears in her eyes. We both wanted to believe, but at the same time we didn’t. I can’t remember ever feeling quite like that before. Remember what it was like when we lost April, Joe? My God, those days are still a blur, like being in a car wreck where your mind blots the worst parts out so you won’t go crazy recalling the details. And it all came back to me last night—cleaning out her bedroom, the funeral, relearning to say ‘the two girls’ instead of ‘the three girls,’ setting one less place at the table.”

Her words rushed out. “The mom in me wanted to believe, but I didn’t dare allow myself to do it yet. But Joe, I did. And I do. It’s like God is giving us a second chance with that poor girl, and I just want to believe even though it doesn’t make any logical sense. I wasn’t sure what to say to Sheridan.”

Joe reached across the table and took her hand. She turned her head, fighting tears.

“Anyone could find out their birthdays,” Joe said. “It just means whoever this is has done some homework. I mean, can’t anybody get this kind of stuff from MySpace or Facebook or someplace like that? Any kid in their school could know this stuff. After all, it’s a Wyoming phone number. It’s probably somebody local.”

“That thought crossed my mind,” Marybeth said, nodding toward the phone. “But we’re just getting started.”

Joe took a deep breath and continued.

Luce for Lucy. Only April called her that. Just as she called Sheridan Sherry.

“What’s this about?” Joe asked, his mouth dry.

Marybeth said, “I asked Sheridan. Remember when Lucy and April used to share the same bedroom? For a while—I think it was the November before we lost April—they started asking me to get specific clothes for them to wear in the morning. I remember questioning them why they couldn’t get the clothes themselves and they’d just look at each other and neither would tell me why. I knew something was going on but I didn’t know what. It wasn’t a big deal, and I’d forgotten about it. But now I find out it’s because Sheridan told them there was a witch in the closet and that was the reason she moved out of the bedroom and gave it to them. Sheridan also told them that the witch would stay in the closet and not come out to get them unless either they opened the doors or they told anyone about her. That’s why they were so secretive.”

“That was mean,” Joe said, frowning.

Marybeth shrugged. “It was mean, yes. But its what big sisters do to little sisters. And Joe, Lucy’s never told me about it to this day. So how could anyone know about it except April?”

“Sheridan or Lucy probably told someone in school about the witch in the closet,” Joe said, warming to his schoolmate theory. “Hey—we’ve been thinking this was someone Sheridan knows. But maybe it’s someone Lucy knows?”

Marybeth’s lack of response was her signal for him to keep reading.

Joe cringed and tried to swallow. No luck.

“At this point,” Marybeth said, “Sheridan is pretty sure she’s texting back and forth with April. I am, too. But Joe, it just can’t be, can it?”

“No it can’t,” he said, his stomach roiling.