COYOTE

Chapter 2

Jessica was biting her nails in her sleep again, struggling through a recurring nightmare of riding her horse through a field, surrounded by fire, gasping for air, looking for an escape route. Sweating and thrashing, she rolled off the sofa bed and onto the shag carpet. She woke up and realized she was at Alpine Vista, her ancestral home.

Her mom was probably still in bed, sleeping off an all-nighter of booze, cigarettes, and online poker. The trailer smelled like a Montana bar after a rodeo, and Jessica was chomping at the bit to get out of there. Still half-asleep, she dialed Mike to ask when he was coming to pick her up to take her to Glacier to start her job; the park service provided room and board and just enough cash for the essentials: books and whiskey.

“This is Mike James, I’m either not home or in bed with a beautiful woman, so please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you when I can.” Mike’s voice on his answering machine shook her memory and punched her in the gut. No. No. No.

No. No. No.He was never coming back. His funeral was this afternoon. She’d never again hear his buttery voice call her “Bug,” or smell his cinnamon-roll sawdust scent, or see his easy, dimpled smile brighten his pale baby face. Never, ever again. He was dead forever. Jessica wiped tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands.

She untangled herself from the moth-eaten wool blanket wrapped around her legs, pulled herself back onto the lumpy mattress, where she’d been sleeping, then surveyed the dank, depressing living room.

Peeling paisley wallpaper bulged over swollen sheetrock. Stained ceiling tiles drooped, threatening to fall on her head. Heavy balding velvet curtains hung over the windows, sleepy eyelids closing over old eyes tired of looking without seeing. Jessica grabbed her jeans off the floor, tugged them on, then reached down the front of her pants to retrieve her stale socks, put them on, and jammed her feet into her boots.

Using the scuffed glass coffee table as a mirror, she tousled her dirty-blond hair to increase the bedhead effect, administered Visine drops to decrease the red-eye effect, and pinched her pale cheeks to counteract the corpse effect, then shuffled into the kitchen.

Scrounging around in the refrigerator and freezer to find something for breakfast, Jessica weighed her choices: a frozen waffle growing a full head of icy hair or swiss cheese growing a furry green beard. She settled on a toasted waffle covered in Hershey’s chocolate syrup and a shot of frozen vodka chaser.

After breakfast, she spent three hours tackling the overgrown dead grass with the push mower, then drove to Walmart and bought thick pink rubber gloves to battle the black mold growing on the bathroom grout. She’d been so busy running back and forth for paper plates, cups, napkins, and various cleaning supplies, she’d almost forgotten the miserable reason for the party.

As a last-ditch effort to tidy up the place, she dusted the picture frames on her mom’s collection of western art, taking special care with Cowboy Jesus, his long flowing hair streaming out of a Stetson as he sat on a mountaintop looking down at his father’s creation.

Growing up, Jessica had spent too many hours at The Adventures and Mysteries Bible Study escaping sappy sermons by retreating into imaginary adventures of her own. If God could see into her heart, he’d know she was a big fat liar. Even so, she wasn’t about to admit her darkest secrets to some priest with bad breath hiding in the confession box.

Her mom never made her go to confession again after Jessica “confessed” to playing with matches in the kitchen while her mom drank vodka and played poker on the porch. Jessica never had understood her mother’s faith in God or her belief that everything happens for the best, especially after the accident. If it wasn’t her dad’s fault he’d died, surely Jessica could blame an omnipotent God. And now she’d lost Mike, too. Who was to blame for that?

Who was to blame for that?After Mike’s cryptic comments the day before his death, she planned to find out, even if it meant meeting her maker and confronting him.

The funeral home sat across the street from a lumber yard, and the pallets of lumber wrapped in white plastic taunted her as she wound her way toward the squat building through the cars parked in the crowded lot.

Sitting behind the curtain partition at the funeral service, sobbing silently, Jessica listened to Mike’s friends talk about what a great guy he was. Even Old Man Specht, the mill owner, talked about Mike’s integrity and hard work. It was true; Mike wasn’t afraid of hard work. Even as a kid, he’d mown lawns and sold huckleberries, saving his money to buy a bike so he could deliver newspapers.

Jessica wanted to tell a story about the time he’d used his hard-earned cash to buy her a new saddle before her first barrel race at the Flathead County fair, but she was too choked up. She kicked herself all the way back to Alpine Vista for not pulling herself together enough to say something at the funeral.

The party on her mom’s front lawn was more like a high school reunion than a wake. Jessica saw kids she hadn’t seen since graduation. Most of her class hadn’t left Whitefish, and Mike was always popular, so the turnout was good. She’d spread the buffet out on folding card tables she’d found in her old bedroom, now cluttered with discarded junk. Back in the day, her dad had hosted raucous poker games with his friends from the mill on those rickety tables. For the party, she’d spruced them up with colorful paisley plastic tablecloths from Walmart.

“Hey, JJ, too bad ’bout Mike.” Tommy Dalton sidled up to her at the buffet tables. “If only he ain’t switched shifts with that Injun, he’d…”

Jessica did a double take and blinked. “What?” She stared into Tommy’s broad face and wondered why she’d ever kissed that crooked mouth. He’d been her first steady boyfriend back in ninth grade, before he’d dropped out to work with his father at the mill. She hadn’t really liked him, but her mom had insisted she “be polite” and go out with him. Her heavily padded push-up b*a wasn’t the only reason she’d never let him get to second base. But the skinny kid with an infectious smile had become a muscular man with a hard demeanor, a tomcat with a head too big for his body.

“Then that Injun woulda been kilt ’stead of Mike.” He spit disgusting tobacco juice into a red plastic cup.

Jessica screwed up her face. “Tommy, surely, it’s not an either/or proposition—”

“Just Tom,” he interrupted.

“What?”

“Just Tom.”

“Okay, Just Tom.” Jessica looked over her shoulder to see if any of her friends were nearby.

“Hey, Jesse, what did the Injun say when his wife tied his d**k in a knot for cheatin’ on her?” He held up one hand like in a Western. “How come.” Cracking up, he repeated, “How come.”

HowShe flinched when he poked her shoulder with a sharp finger. She had to find an escape route and fast.

“I guess your d**k’s in a knot now you’re out of a job.” She gave him a fake smile.

“You ain’t heard?” Tommy asked, stifling his crazed laughter. “Old Specht is selling out to Knight Industries, so I’m goin’ back to work soon as the ink’s dry and gettin’ promoted, too. ’Course, I got other irons in the fire, ya know. I ain’t gonna work at the mill all my life. I’m gonna—”

“Knight Industries?” Jessica asked before he could finish. Richard Knight, the suit from the mill picnic?

Richard Knight, the suit from the mill picnic?“Yeah, you know, the big company that’s runnin’ all them oil rigs east of the mountains?”

“Really.” Jessica’s mind was racing.

“Knight’s been tryin’ to buy, but old man Specht wouldn’t sell. He’s a stubborn S.O.B.” When Tommy chuckled his mouth was so twisted he could swallow nails and spit out corkscrews. “Now with the…accidents, he ain’t got no choice.”

“Accidents.” The word was a sledgehammer crashing against an anvil, and it made her head hurt. She closed her eyes tight to keep from crying.

“Ain’t you heard? Last week, one a them Injuns is repairing the planer when it flattens him.” Tommy smirked and took a swig from a second plastic cup in his other hand. “By the time anybody notices he’s gone, he’s already bundled and loaded on trucks to Home Depot, lumber for them do-it-yourselfers.”

Jessica cringed and dumped her half-eaten lunch in the garbage can. She pulled Tommy away from the line of black-clad mourners, crows cawing around the buffet table. “Two accidents in two weeks, doesn’t that seem suspicious?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Tommy scooped a soggy wad of chewing tobacco out of his lower lip, flung it in the trash, and gawped at his shoes.

Jessica’s eyes followed his, and when she saw what looked like a bloodstain on his worn work boots, her pulse quickened. She looked around. He wasn’t the only dude wearing work boots. Others were wearing tennis shoes with holes in them, and some were wearing hiking boots held together with duct tape.

She stared down at her Ropers and heard her dad’s voice echoing in her head: “Don’t judge others, Jess, until you’ve ridden a mile in their saddle.” A homegrown philosopher, her dad also used to say, “The answer’s not in the bottom of a glass,” but she definitely needed another drink—or five—to get through this dreadful day.

“I’m parched.” She waved her empty glass. “I’m going to go get another. See ya later, Tommy.”

Tommy dipped a furry mound of fresh tobacco from the round tin he’d taken from his back pocket and then stuffed the wad into his lower lip.

Jessica did an about-face toward the drinks table and left Tommy “Just Tom” Dalton sputtering something about getting dinner together. Her stomach soured at the prospect of seeing him again.

She darted across the brown stubble yard, made a beeline for the back door, then ducked into the kitchen. Her mom, aunt, and some other ladies from town were sitting around the small Formica table, smoking cigarettes and drinking cocktails.

She tiptoed to the hutch in the alcove, what her mom called the “dining room,” and found the car keys in the top drawer where her mom had always kept them. Seeing her mom deep in conversation, she scratched out a note and tucked it under one of the dozen cat-shaped magnets attached to the refrigerator.

She sneaked out the back door, scooted around the side of the trailer, then jumped into the mustard Subaru Forester; the rattletrap was almost as old as she was. She rolled out of the driveway so no one would notice her leave. She couldn’t stand around making small talk with jerks from her childhood while Mike’s killer was on the loose. She drove halfway to the highway before she took a breath, and white-knuckled the steering wheel the rest of the way to town. Detective Clue Slow was on a mission.