C Box - In Plain Sight

Joe said, “My fault.”

Marybeth was silent, which meant she agreed with him that he’d screwed up. But at least she didn’t say it. For the past six months, since Joe returned from his assignment in Jackson, Marybeth had been unerringly patient with him, as if she were overcompensating for something that had happened while he was gone. While he wasn’t sure what that was, he knew it involved Nate Romanowski. He didn’t ask because he trusted her judgment more than his own and, frankly, he liked how things were going between them. Plus, he had a secret of his own-his surprising attraction to a married woman in Jackson. Nothing had happened, but it could have, which was nearly as bad. So things had been rocky for a while, like all marriages, he supposed, but the storm had passed over them without fatal damage. Now they were on smooth water again, which he preferred. He saw no good reason to dredge up past feelings with probing questions. She didn’t either. Life was good in general, as it should be, he thought. Except for his job, his boss, and now Opal Scarlett’s disappearance.

IN SPRING THE animals came out, so he was cautious as he drove. The deer, rabbits, badgers, elk, and occasional mountain lions were on the move, reestablishing their hierarchy and territory, having babies, kicking up their heels after a long winter. Joe imagined them puzzling over new human and natural developments on the land, processing the changes, and moving forward with slight instinctive variations. He slowed when two bright blue lights winked just beyond the arc of his headlights, and he stopped the truck while a badger, her belly fat quivering while she scuttled, crossed the two-lane blacktop. Her young one, which was sleek and shiny, froze in the roadway for a moment and displayed its attitude with a teeth-rattling display of juvenile aggression as it rocked from side to side, then followed her. Both vanished into the darkness of the barrow pit beside the road.

He was always grateful for the drive home, because it allowed him to wind down, to sort out the events of the day, to try to put them in a mental drawer for later.

Joe was still buzzing from what had happened at the sheriff’s office with the Scarlett brothers. Although the rift between them-especially Arlen and Hank-was the stuff of local fable, he had not seen it for himself in its fury.

TOMMY WAYMAN HAD been brought to the county building as Joe left. Before starting his truck, Joe watched as Wayman was pulled out of the car and steered toward the door by two sheriff’s deputies. Curiosity got the best of him, and Joe went back inside to hear what Tommy had to say.

Someone had tipped off the Saddlestring Roundup, and a reporter (who, to Joe, looked all of seventeen years old) had arrived with a digital camera. The flash popped and lit Tommy’s face in stark relief, freezing an image of tiny eyes set in a face of deep tan from spending so many hours on the river, and a bulbous red nose from drinking so many beers while spending so many hours on the river.

Tommy looked scared, Joe thought, as if he were ready to flinch from blows that could come from anywhere. Joe could see a bandage on Tommy’s neck. The adhesive strip holding on the gauze had pulled loose to reveal a wound that looked, at first, as if someone had tried to slit Tommy’s throat from ear to ear.

“What happened to your neck?” Joe asked.

“Opal Scarlett,” Tommy said. “Joe, she should have been stopped a long time ago.” His voice slurred with alcohol. Since his hands were cuffed behind him and he couldn’t point, Tommy raised his chin to indicate the wound across his throat. “This time, she just about cut my head off.”

Before he could say more, the deputies took him into the building to be processed.

Joe had watched Tommy’s thin back until the guide was taken into the building. Joe followed, pieces falling into place.

JOE HAD FIRST met Opal Scarlett three years before as a result of a complaint by the very same Tommy Wayman. Wayman had come to Joe’s office at his house and claimed Opal was blocking access to the river and charging fees for his boats to float through her ranch.

“She’s been doing it for years,” Wayman said, sitting down in the single chair across from Joe’s desk.

Joe said, “You’re kidding me, right?”

Wyoming law was long established and well known: it was perfectly legal for anyone to float in a boat through private land as long as the boaters didn’t stop and get out or pull the boat up to shore and trespass. The land belonged to the landowner but the water belonged to the public. While it was perfectly fine for a landowner to charge a fee for access to the river over private ground, it was illegal to charge for simply floating through private land.

“The rumor is that she collects enough money from float fees-as she calls ’em-to buy a new Cadillac at the end of every summer,” Tommy Wayman had said while cracking the top off a bottle of beer he had pulled from his fishing vest. “She’s been collecting money for years, but nobody turns her in because, well, she’s Opal Scarlett.”

Wayman told Joe that Opal collected her fee by standing on the bank near her house and calling to passing boats. Since Opal was white haired and tiny, most boatmen assumed there was something wrong when they heard her cries and beelined to help the old woman. When the boats pulled to shore, she pointed out to the passengers of the boat that they were now technically on her land and subject to fines or arrest. She would let it go, however, if the passengers paid a fee of $5 per person. Later, the fee was raised to $10, then $15, then $20. Word got around among fishermen to ignore Opal Scarlett when she hollered, no matter what she said.

Which led to more escalated measures on Opal’s part, and for a few years she got the attention of passing boats by firing a shotgun blast into the air and making it clear they were next if they didn’t pay up. That worked, Wayman said, for a while.

In order to avoid the embarrassment of paying fees in front of their customers, the outfitters and guides had learned to pay Opal up front and therefore pass through her ranch without trouble. Wayman told Joe he had done that for years, but Opal was getting forgetful and half the time couldn’t recall that he’d prepaid, so she would stand on the bank, shooting her shotgun in the air, demanding her tribute.

Joe noted at the time that Wayman had not brought the situation to his attention until it was literally out of control, only when Wayman was forced to double-pay Opal.

That was when Wayman first told Joe that Opal had threatened to string razor-sharp piano wire across the river, neck-high.

“If she does that she’s likely to kill somebody,” Wayman said. “She thinks everybody on the river is trying to shaft her by not paying the fee, even though most of us already coughed up. If she strings that wire, somebody’s going to get seriously hurt.”

After his meeting with Wayman, Joe drove out to the Thunderhead Ranch, feeling that his case against Opal Scarlett was remarkably cut and dried. It was his initial experience with the Scarlett mystique, his first real look into how deep the family roots were in the county and how something as straightforward and simple as river access turned out not to be that at all.

He found Opal working alone in her magnificent vegetable garden on the southern side of the massive stone ranch house where she lived. As he parked his pickup in the ranch yard and walked toward her, she leaned on her hoe and sized him up with a kind of interested, professional detachment that resided somewhere between a friendly greeting and a trespass warning. The set of her face seemed to say, “I’ve been dealing with your kind for sixty-odd years and have yet to be surprised.”