C Box - In Plain Sight

She had opened with, “So you’re the game warden who arrested the governor for fishing without a license?”

Joe nodded, already on the defensive.

She was small, trim, and wiry, dressed in a kind of casual western outdoor elegance that seemed reserved for people like her-faded jeans, Ariat boots, silver ranger set buckle, an open canvas barn jacket over a plaid shirt, silk scarf. Opal was a remarkably self-assured woman who had no qualms about charging a fee to boaters who passed through her ranch, and who seemed to make it clear without saying that she had thus far tolerated him being there in the county but there was a limit to her time and patience. She explained to Joe how her father-in-law and grandfather had established the ranch. Over the years, they had graciously maintained the flow of the river even though it was their right to divert as much of it as they pleased to irrigate their land, since they had the very first water right. By maintaining the flow over the years, she told Joe, the family had not only assured a supply of drinking water to the town of Saddlestring, but had preserved the natural ecology of the valley and also allowed for an extensive guided trout-fishing economy that would have otherwise not existed.

“In a way,” she said through a tight smile, “if it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t be here, and neither would Mr. Tommy Wayman.”

Without a hint of remorse, she led Joe down to the bank of the river and described the “tollgate” she wished to build in the future. She started by pointing across the river at an immense cottonwood.

“I want to tie a wire off over there on the trunk of that tree, and stretch it all the way over to my side. I’ll attach my end of the wire to a big lever I can work by myself, so I can raise and lower the wire as necessary,” she said, demonstrating how she would pull on the imaginary handle.

“What if you kill somebody?” Joe asked, incredulously.

She dismissed his concerns with a wave of her hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll tie orange flagging to the wire so all the floaters can see it plain as day. My objective is to collect my fee, not to decapitate my customers.”

“But you can’t do that, Mrs. Scarlett. It’s a public waterway.”

She turned from her imaginary tollgate, her eyes freezing him to his spot. “It’s a public waterway, Mr. Pickett,” she said, “because my family has allowed it to be so. The water in that river could just as easily be diverted, by me, to irrigate my ranch and turn this place into a Louisiana bayou and my home into Venice with all the beautiful canals. But I have chosen not to do that, but to instead collect a small fee in exchange for providing free drinking water and recreation to you and several thousand other residents of our sleepy little valley.

“This arrangement,” she continued, her unblinking eyes still on him, “has worked very well for three generations. Water in exchange for proper respect. I understand from others that you have a tendency to want to go your own way to some degree. I admire that in a man, generally. But I’d suggest this isn’t the best battle to choose to fight when there are other more worthy ones out there.”

Joe felt he’d been flayed by a rawhide whip. All he could think of to say in response was, “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Scarlett.”

So when Joe saw the wound on Tommy Wayman’s neck that evening, he was pretty sure he knew what had happened out on the river.

TOMMY WAYMAN CONFESSED that he had, in fact, tossed Opal in the river that morning. He said it happened like this:

He was scouting the Twelve Sleep River in his flat-bottomed Hyde drift boat, his first trip on the water since winter. After winter, there were always new hazards, new bends, new currents on the wild river to scout out. And it was a great time to fish for himself, before the spring runoff began and raised and muddied the river, before clients started to book, before he had to mess with the hassle of hiring guides and office help.

It was an unseasonably warm day and there was a mayfly hatch on. Tommy said he was alone on the river, and never saw another boat. The trout were hitting his flies so hard they were mutilating them, and he was hauling the fish in and releasing them in a steadied fury. It was an angler’s wet dream, he said, the kind of day that reminded him of why he loved to fish, why he loved the river.

He was putting on a dry fly and a dropper, concentrating on tying the tippet knots, as he floated through the Thunderhead Ranch. He never saw the silvery band of wire stretched across the river until it sliced through his leader and caught him under his chin, lifting him briefly off his boat seat. He felt the wire bite into his flesh and saw blood fleck down the front of his shirt, but was able to reach up and grab the wire with his hands before the momentum of the boat carried him forward even farther and cut his throat wide open. After plucking the wire out and ducking under it, Tommy grabbed the oars and took the boat to shore. Just as Opal Scarlett came out of her house, drying her hands on a towel.

“Damn you, Opal!” he shouted, hurtling out of the boat once he reached the shore. “You just about cut my head off with your damned wire!”

Opal just stood there regarding him with what he called the look of ownership. “Like she was disappointed in the behavior of a hired hand-or a slave.” Finally, she told Tommy if he had paid his river fee up front this year, as he knew he should have, he could have avoided the problem.

“There is no such thing as a river fee!” Tommy yelled.

“There is on my ranch,” Opal said, arching her eyebrows.

And with that, he rushed her, grabbed her by the collar with one hand and by the belt with the other, and swung her through the air and into the river.

“Damn, she was light,” Tommy said. “Like there wasn’t really anything to her, just clothes and a scowl. It was like tossing my nieces and nephews around the pool or something. She didn’t even struggle. I think that was the last thing she expected, to be thrown into the river like that.”

Tommy said he watched her floating away in the river. She was treading water, and howling at him saying, “Next time, Tommy Wayman, you’ll have to pay me a hundred dollars a trip!”

“Nuts to you, Opal,” he called after her. He said he watched her bob in the river, heard her curse at him, until she was carried around a bend two hundred yards from where he stood. He never once thought she didn’t simply swim to shore, he said later. He never even considered that she had drowned. That part of the river was too shallow and slow. And she was too mean to die, he said, which was something Joe had also heard from Reed.

No, Tommy said, he never saw her climb out on shore after he got back in his boat and floated downriver.

No, he never saw her body wedged in debris or trapped under the surface by an undertow. Besides, he said, in April the river was barely moving. The dangerous currents would come later, when the snow started to melt and the speed and volume of the river would increase two to three times.

No, he didn’t feel any need to turn himself in at the time because, well, Opal deserved to be thrown in the river.

“I’m surprised that river didn’t spit her right out,” Tommy said to Joe and Robey.

Proud of his feat, he’d immediately bragged about it to his wife, Nancy, not knowing that she had spent the entire day at home fuming over photos she had found: Tommy with his arms around attractive female clients and one shot in particular-a group of flight attendants in the boat who bared their breasts to the camera with Tommy at the oars-grinning like an idiot. She was angry enough that after he fell asleep in his lounge chair with a beer, she called the sheriff’s office and reported what Tommy had said. Nancy felt horrible about it now, though, since at the time she had no idea that Opal was missing.