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“Remember when I saw the corn on your lawn?”
“What about it?”
“You were putting out feed for the injured doe and her fawn. I knew then I was wrong about you and that you were a kind man.”
“Maybe I knew that was exactly what you’d think. Maybe I did that for show. I got two sets of cops trying to put me back inside. I don’t need a Jezebel in my life.”
“I know I’ve hurt you deeply.”
“For somebody to hurt me, they got to mean something to me in the first place,” he said, rising from the couch.
“Please don’t say that, Wyatt.”
“I already did,” he replied.
Three seconds later, he was out the door, the window at the end of the corridor lit by dry lightning, a sound like a windstorm roaring in his ears.
FRIDAY MORNING HE woke early at his place up the Blackfoot River and put on a western-cut suit and buffed his boots and took a new Stetson from a hatbox in the back of his closet. He sorted through a drawer full of Indian and western jewelry and broken watches and rabbit-foot key rings and found an honorary sheriff’s badge that a barmaid in Prescott, Arizona, had given him years ago. He found an empty wallet and fitted the badge onto one side and slipped a photo ID he had gotten at the Houston livestock show into the celluloid compartment on the other side. An hour later, he pulled into the parking lot of the café on I-90 where Rhonda Fayhee had been employed.
“Howdy-doody. The name is Wyatt Dixon,” he said to the owner, opening his improvised badge holder. “I’d like to talk to you about the Fayhee lady.”
The owner was squirting a hose on the roof of the café to rinse off the ash drifting down from a fire that was burning out of control on the mountainside. He tried to study the badge, but Wyatt put it back in his coat pocket. “I’ve already told the sheriff’s department everything I know,” the owner replied.
“I’m running at it from a di
fferent angle,” Wyatt said. “I think the man who grabbed her was a little different from your normal motel guests and the regular customers at your café.”
“What do you mean, ‘different’? What makes you think one of my guests or customers abducted her?”
“I don’t think I said that. Maybe you weren’t listening. Maybe somebody followed her from work to her house.”
The owner’s eyes wandered over Wyatt’s face. “Let me turn off my hose.”
“What I’m really asking you is whether Ms. Fayhee would talk in a personal way with just anybody. Would she tell a trucker or a low-rider or a husband on the make where she lived or what time she got off work?”
“No, she’s not that kind of girl.”
“That’s my point. Do you remember her talking to an older man, maybe well dressed, with a comb-over, or a man who might own a big ranch, or maybe a family-type man?”
“Somebody she’d trust?” the owner said.
“Good, we’re on the right track.”
“That could be lots of people. Where’d you say you’re from?”
“Missoula. I told you.”
“You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”
“I ain’t the issue. Did you have a guest here who might impress a young gal that’s tired of guys who are always trying to get in her bread?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“What do you care? I’m assisting the state. Try to imagine what that girl might be going through while we’re out here talking and squirting a garden hose on the rooftop.”
“There was a minister here. He was a nice fellow. I saw him helping a lady unload her vehicle and carry her things inside.”
“Where’s his church at?”
