to start his own herd and to buy land of his own. I can’t match this Waterson’s offer, and I’m not sure I would even if I had the means.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Colt, he told me he wants to start over some place away from Madison Valley.” She paused. “Somewhere he can be just another rancher, just like everybody else.”
He was silent for a moment, his mouth set in a hard line, then he swore softly, pungently. “How can we argue with that?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t understand,” Maggie interjected with a frown.
Colt turned to his wife. “You know what it’s like for him in town. How people talk. He tries to pretend it doesn’t matter, but it obviously affects him more than any of us thought.”
The kettle whistled suddenly, shrilly, and Annie rose from the table to pour water for Maggie’s tea. “It just makes me so mad,” she muttered. “Why can’t people forget, just stop judging him for what happened years ago, for heaven’s sake? Why can’t they look at the man he’s made of himself?”
“We don’t have all that many murders around here, Annie. Of course people are going to remember it.”
“It wasn’t murder and you know it! And so does everybody else in town.”
“Not everybody. There are a lot of people who think Joe killed his father in cold blood and got off easy.”
In cold blood. It was an odd term to use for something as violent as taking the life of another human being.
“It was an accident.” She couldn’t help her vehemence, even though she knew she was preaching to the choir. “That’s why he pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. The only reason he served prison time at all was because he had alcohol in his system, even though it was under the legal limit, and because he was already on probation for that stupid bar fight when he was just a kid. Everybody with a brain in his head knows Joe was trying to protect his mother after Al beat her half to death.”
“You’ve heard the rumors that there was more to it than that.”
Yes, and she knew exactly who was behind them. She frowned. Charlie had kept his promise after he married her and hadn’t gone to his boss at the sheriff’s department with his version of events that night. But he hadn’t had any qualms whipping up the rumor mill in town.
Just another sin to lay at the door of her ex-husband.
She knew Joe hadn’t meant to kill his father when he had delivered that fateful punch. But even if he had, Albert Redhawk deserved everything he got and more.
He had spent his whole life and two marriages physically and emotionally abusing his entire family, turning one son into a mirror image of himself and the other into a stoic little boy who buried all his emotions so deeply it took nothing short of a cataclysmic event to ever bring them gushing out.
“It’s funny what people choose to remember of the dead.” Colt’s low voice jolted her back to the conversation. “Selective memory, I guess. Al was a real son of a bitch to just about everybody, but if you listened to some people in town, you’d think he was the next best thing to Santa Claus.”
“Is it any wonder Joe wants to make a fresh start somewhere else.”
“I guess.” Colt sipped his coffee glumly. “So what are we gonna do about it?”
She rested a hand on his shoulder. “Nothing we can do. Just miss him, I suppose. Just miss him.”
Colt and Maggie didn’t stay long after that, only long enough to finish their coffee and tea. When she had the house to herself again, she forced herself to stay in the office until she could make inroads toward finishing her paperwork.
The mysterious door opening completely slipped her mind until hours later, after Leah and C.J. came home, strewing their customary clutter throughout the mudroom and kitchen.
She was picking up backpacks and mittens and school books when she saw what looked like a white square of paper under one of C.J.’s wet boots near the back door. She gave an exasperated sigh. It was probably a permission slip for a school field trip or something equally important.
She lifted the boot away and picked up the soggy paper, then felt her whole body go stiff and cold.
It wasn’t a permission slip at all, but a photograph.
A Polaroid taken through her office window that afternoon, of her sitting behind her desk doing paperwork.
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