C. Box - Out of Range

Joe hadn't thought of the fact that suicide was exempted in most life insurance policies. He felt a stab of anger, wondered how Will could have been so selfish.

"Joe, when you leave a man you want him to regret it. You want him to sit and stew and feel lousy for driving you away. Then maybe, you want him to get his act together and come crawling back on his knees. You don't want him to kill himself and leave you with that."

"I understand."

"I hope you do," she said. "If Marybeth ever leaves you, go crawling back to her like a whipped puppy. Don't internalize it, and brood about it, and think there's no way out."

He nodded. He wasn't sure why she was giving him this advice. She drained her glass, ordered another.

"I need fortification to go back into that room," she said.

He had so many questions for her. "Where will you go?"

"The kids and I live in Casper," she said. "We moved there four months ago. I've got a job at the newspaper, and we live with my parents. I started selling ads, and recently moved up to marketing director. It's a hard job, but I'm very good at it. We're making more income now than we ever did."

Joe thought of the parallels with his own family, Marybeth's new business, the obvious conclusion that it would likely prosper if either Joe took a different job or the family moved out of Saddlestring. He asked, "How are the boys handling the move, and now this?"

"Terribly," she said, matter-of-factly. "Will was a god to them. You can guess what it's like. You have girls, right?"

"Yes."

"Imagine if you had boys. If every day they watched you strap on your gun after breakfast and put on your hat and go out into the mountains to catch bad guys and protect the herds." She said "protect the herds" in a well-practiced way, and Joe guessed it had been some kind of joke between Susan and Will. "They worshipped him," she said. "They still do. They didn't see him like I did those last terrible months, when I'd come visit from Casper and we'd try to reconcile. Something definitely changed with him. A couple of times he would roar around the house, stumbling and cursing me. He never used to do that. His mood swings got absolutely crazy and unpredictable. He'd be manic one day and sullen the next. I didn't know him anymore, and he scared me. If the boys saw or heard him like that, I don't know what they'd think of him now."

Joe winced as she talked. He had thought about saying that it might not be all that different with his girls, but he refrained. He didn't want to have that kind of discussion.

"Susan, what happened to him?"

She shrugged. "That's the big question, isn't it?" Her eyebrows arched. "He said a few times that the pressure was building, that he was being squeezed alive. But that wasn't unusual. Things have always been like that here, you'll see. Will had a gift for dealing with it, though. At least he did at one time. He just went into his cave."

"His cave?"

She took a long drink. "That's what we used to call it. It was a mental cave he could sit in and depressurize after a bad day. He'd sit and stare at the television, or out the window. Sometimes he took the dog for a walk, or messed with his horses. It didn't matter what he did, because even though he was there, he really wasn't there, you know?"

"I do," he said. "When I feel like that, Marybeth and the girls say I've gone into Joe-Zone."

She smiled sympathetically. "He used to come back from backcountry patrols feeling pretty good, though," she said. "He said they cleared his mind and gave him his good perspective back."

Joe understood that.

"I took the job in Casper to give Will the option of getting out of this pressure cooker. I thought he'd follow me to be with the boys. I even found a couple of opportunities for him there, but he never took them. He stayed here and things got worse."

Joe shook his head, trying to think what he would do in the same situation, if Marybeth said she'd had it with his absences and threatened to move away. He'd follow her, wouldn't he? When he realized he was missing some of what she said, he apologized and asked her to repeat it.

Susan said, "I said he didn't give a lot of thought to the fact that while he was away for nights on end sleeping under the stars or whatever he did, he was completely out of contact with the outside world. He liked that, I guess. But he had a family here in town who never heard from him. I worried so much about him out there, Joe, that I would cry myself to sleep. Then I'd hate him. But I always got over it when he came back. When I saw you at the funeral, that was what I thought of."

"But things changed with Will?"

"Did they ever," she said, tapping the rim of her glass to signal the bartender for a refill. "Especially after we left. It was like his cave door closed shut and locked him out. He couldn't find any relief, so the pressure just kept building. Of course, he never said anything to me or asked for help. Not Will." Susan didn't even try to keep the anger out of her voice.

"What caused the biggest problems?"

"Are you asking me because you want to know about Will, or because you want to know what you're going to be dealing with here? Joe, I know you're here to replace him. I'm still in the loop."

He flushed, sorry he hadn't said it earlier. "Both, I guess."

She thought that over for a moment. "Will thought-and he was right-that it seemed like things were coming at him from all sides. The animal liberation people were after him. I was surprised to see that Pi woman here, considering that she literally put a contract out on him on her website. Then there was Smoke Van Horn and his bunch, the old-timers. They rode Will hard, tried to get him fired a few times. Smoke always showed up at the public hearings and ripped Will as well as the state and the Feds. Smoke was hard on Will, and I hate him for that. Oh," Susan said, smiling bitterly, "then there's the developers. They come from other places and they want to do here what they did wherever they made their millions. It drove them crazy that somebody like Will, who made less money than what their cars probably cost, could stall their projects by writing an opinion that would affect their plans."

Joe interrupted. "Are you talking about Don Ennis?" he asked, thinking about the business card in his pocket.

Susan's face tightened. "Don Ennis. Do you know him?"

"I sort of met him last night. He sent over a drink."

"Don and Stella Ennis," Susan said, more to herself than to Joe, as if recalling something unpleasant.

Joe recalled Tassell's comments about breaking up an argument at the ski resort. He would need to follow up with Tassell to see if the other party was Don Ennis.

Susan's eyes burned into Joe, and her voice dropped as if someone might overhear her. "Joe, all I can tell you is to watch out for that man. He gets what he wants, and he doesn't care who gets hurt."

Joe blinked at her sudden intensity.

"As for Stella," she said, "she's playing a game that only she understands. She might be the most dangerous of them all."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Susan sat back, drained her glass. "I'm not sure what I mean. I just got this vibration from her. A dark kind of feeling. I think she's a predator. And Will," she said, drinking again although her glass was empty, "Will thought I was wrong about her. He thought I was jealous. And you know what? I probably was."

Joe felt that he needed to defend Stella. Did Susan see her crying during the funeral? Were those tears of a predator? But he didn't want to go there with Susan, not now. He changed the subject.

He asked, "What was he working on most recently?"

"I'm sorry, I can't help you with that," she said. "The boys and I had been gone for months. Even when we were together, he didn't talk about the specifics of his projects much. He tried to leave all of that at his office, or in his truck, or wherever. The only way I knew about the big things-like ALN, Smoke, or Ennis's Beargrass Village- was because sometimes he'd mention them in passing or I'd hear about it from someone or read about it in the newspaper."