that was at the time. And he’d never heard any more about it. He just figured that men like Errol Wilson generated those kind of stories because they didn’t fit in.
Carter gave no more thought to either man as he rode. His mind was on Eve and the argument she’d had with her mother. What had sent Eve riding deep into the Breaks without food or water or proper clothing? Her horse coming back without her was a very bad sign. He was worried what they would find. If they managed to find her at all.
The sun moved across Montana’s big sky, drying the mud, heating the air to dragon’s breath. No breeze moved the air. Nothing stirred, but an occasional cricket in a clump of brush.
An hour later, Carter reined in as he lost Eve’s horse’s tracks in a rocky area. “Let’s spread out. Holler when you pick up the tracks again,” he told the two men.
Errol rode off to the west while Floyd went east, kicking up a bunch of antelope. Carter watched the antelope run across the horizon, disappearing as the land began to drop, funneling forward to the riverbed.
To the west Carter saw one of the other groups from the search party had stopped to clean the mud from their horses’hooves. A hawk soared overheard, picking up a thermal, and nearby a mule deer spooked, rising up from a rocky coulee, all big ears as it took off, kicking up clumps of dried earth. No sign of Eve Bailey.
Carter rode straight south to where the flat, high prairie broke into eroded fingers of land that dropped precariously to the river bottom. He kept to the higher ridges in hopes of seeing Eve’s blue T-shirt. The problem was that too much of this land looked exactly the same. That made it extremely easy to get lost. During the storm, Eve could have gotten turned around. If she’d tried to walk out on foot last night she might be anywhere.
At one point, he stopped and realized he could no longer see either Errol or Floyd. He hoped to hell the search party didn’t have to find them before the day was over.
He’d just reined in his horse on a narrow ridge, the sides falling dangerously toward the old river bottom when he caught sight of something light blue in the rocks far below him.
REPORTER GLEN WHITAKER couldn’t believe his timing. He made it to the Whitehorse Community Center just as Arlene Evans was unloading the pies from the front seat of her pickup.
“Let me help you with those,” he said.
Arlene was a gangly woman with an elongated horsy face and laugh that was more donkey’s bray. That alone would have put off most people, but there was also a nervous energy that at best made him jittery and at worse made the hair stand up on his arms.
“Violet, say hello to Glen,” Arlene ordered.
“Hi, Glen,” said a shy and bored voice behind him.
He turned to see Arlene’s daughter, Violet.
While better looking than her mother, Violet was still plain to the point of pitiful. Next to her mother, Violet seemed almost catatonic. “Hey,” he said.
He’d always suspected that Arlene fed off other people’s energy because, like her daughter, Glen found that after a matter of minutes around Arlene he barely had enough energy to escape. And right now escape was exactly what he wanted to do.
“Violet and I can get the pies if you’ll open the front door,” Arlene said, handing off a pie to her daughter then picking up another before kicking the pickup door shut in one smooth movement.
He had to almost run to get the community center door open before Arlene. They both had to wait for Violet, who moved like sludge.
“Violet, why don’t you get Glen a piece of the coconut-custard right away,” Arlene said. “He looks like he could use it.”
Violet nodded as she wandered off to do as she’d been told. Already trained to obey, she’d make someone the perfect wife, Glen thought. Just not him. At forty, he’d never married. His mother said it was because she’d spoiled him.
“Any news on Eve Bailey?” he asked.
“Apparently not,” Arlene said, as she shot a look at the somber group of women waiting in the community center.
All the women looked in his direction, then went back to visiting among themselves or occupying themselves with the needlework in their laps. Glen had never understood it. He was nice enough looking, but for some reason people didn’t seem to pay any attention to him.
Feeling like the invisible man, he drew out his notebook and pen as he and Arlene took a seat in a quiet corner and waited for Violet to bring the pie.
“It’s a shame,” Arlene was saying in a hushed voice so the others couldn’t hear. “She has been through so much and now this.”
“Eve?” Glen asked, wondering what was keeping Violet.
“Lila,” Arlene whispered, glancing in the woman’s direction. Lila was cleaning the sink near the back door, stopping periodically to look out, as if she hoped to see her daughter.
Glen wasn’t interested in Lila Bailey. No story there.
“Her husband left her, you know. Oh, she tells everyone he moved into Whitehorse to be closer to his job, but we all know the truth.”
Arlene took a breath and Glen jumped in, hoping to get some background material, “So what brought Eve Bailey back here?” He watched Arlene shift gears. Apparently she was just getting warmed up on the Lila and Chester Bailey story.
“A man,” Arlene said flatly. “It’s the only thing that brings a woman her age back to the ranch. You know she’s thirty-two. Just two years younger than my Violet.”
An old maid in Arlene’s eyes.
“I heard she became an interior designer.” Arlene lifted a brow as if to say what a waste of time and education that was. “You can bet some man broke her heart and she came running home with her tail tucked between her legs.”
Glen wrote on his notepad a new headline: Jilted, Whitehorse Woman Returns Home Only To Die Alone In Missouri Breaks.
Violet slid a plate with a large piece of coconut-custard pie in front of him and sank into a chair as if the chore had spent all of her energy.
He glanced at her as he picked up the fork. “Thanks.” She stared back with large, liquid, colorless eyes, but with just enough expectation in them to make him nervous. It hit him then that she would want to get married even more than her mother wanted her to. Marriage would be the only way to make her mother stop trying to hoist her off on men. Any man.
As he took a bite of pie, he noticed Arlene had stopped talking and was staring toward the front door.
A man in his early thirties who Glen had never seen before stood in the doorway as if looking for someone but not seeing them, turned and left, letting the door close behind him.
“Who was that?” Glen asked, seeing Arlene’s obvious interest.
“The fella who’s renting the old McAllister place,” Arlene whispered. “Bridger Duvall. Sounds like the name of an actor. Or a name he just made up. No one knows anything about him. Or why he rented that old farmhouse, since he hasn’t shown any
