C Box - Trophy hunt

"Go ahead," Joe said, "I'm coming."

Assured, the Labrador bolted into the house.

After putting the rods, vests, and cooler into the garage, Joe walked around the house toward the corral. Toby, their eight-year-old paint gelding, nickered as soon as Joe was in sight which meant he was hungry. Doc, their new sorrel yearling, nickered as well, following the older horse's lead. Joe shooed them aside as he entered the corral, then fed them two flake sections each of grass hay. He filled the trough and checked the gate on his way out. While he did so, he wondered why Marybeth hadn't fed them earlier, because she usually did.

As he opened the door at the back of the house, Sheridan stormed out of it in a dark mood.

"Did you tell your mom about the moose?" Joe asked her.

"She's busy," Sheridan snapped, "maybe I should have made an appointment."

"Sherry…" Joe admonished, but Sheridan was out the back gate toward the corral.

He turned and entered the kitchen. Marybeth sat at the kitchen table wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, surrounded by manila files, stacks of paper, facedown open books, a calculator, and a laptop computer. Boxes of files were stacked on either side of her chair, their lids on the floor. She was concentrating on her laptop screen, and barely acknowledged him as he entered the kitchen.

"Hey, babe," he greeted her and swept her blond hair away from the side of her face and kissed her on the cheek.

"Just a second," she said, tapping on her keyboard.

Joe felt a pang of annoyance. It was obvious that nothing was cooking on the stove, and the oven light was dark. The table was a shambles, and so was Marybeth. It wasn't as if he expected dinner on the table every night. But she had asked him to be home early with the girls, for dinner, and he had lived up to his part of the bargain.

"Okay," she announced and snapped the screen down on her laptop. "Got it."

"Got what?"

"The Logue Country Realty account is finally reconciled," she said. "What a mess that one was."

"Well, good," he said flatly, opening the refrigerator to see if a covered dish was ready to heat. Nope.

"I don't know how they stayed in business after they bought it, Joe," she explained, filing bank statements and canceled checks into folders and envelopes. "The previous owners left them an unbelievable mess. Their cash flow was an absolute mystery for the last twelve quarters."

"Mmm."

There weren't even frozen pizzas in the freezer, he saw. Just some rock- hard packages of deer burger and elk roasts from the previous year, and a box of Popsicles that had been in the freezer as long as Joe could remember.

"I thought we'd go out tonight," Marybeth said. "Or maybe one of us could run into town to get something and bring it back."

He was surprised. "We can afford to?"

Marybeth's smile disappeared. "No, we really can't," she sighed. "Not until the end of the month, anyway."

"We could thaw out that burger in the microwave," Joe suggested.

"Do you mind grilling out?" she asked.

"That's fine," he said evenly.

"Honey…"

Joe held up his hand. "Don't worry about it. You got caught up in your work. It's okay."

For a second, he thought she would tear up. That happened more and more lately. But she didn't. Instead, she bit her lower lip and looked at him.

"Really," he said.

As he scraped the grate of the barbecue grill in the backyard, Joe battled with himself over his disappointment that there was no dinner planned and his growing worry about Marybeth and their marriage. There was no doubt that the violent death of April, their foster daughter, last winter had severely affected Marybeth. Joe had hoped that the dawn of spring would help Marybeth heal but it hadn't. Spring had only brought the realization that their situation in general was no different than it had been before.

Sometimes, he caught her staring. She would fix on the window, or sometimes on something that seemed to be between the window and her eyes. Her face would look slightly wistful, and her eyes softened. A couple of times he asked her what she was thinking about. When he did, she shook her head as if shaking off a vision, and said, "nothing."

He knew their finances troubled her, as they troubled him. There was a statewide budget crunch, and salaries had been frozen. In Joe's case, this meant he would make $32,000 a year as far ahead as he could see. The long hours he worked also meant that any kind of extra income was out of the question. The department provided housing and equipment, but recently the house, which had at one time seemed wonderful, felt like a trap.

After April died, Joe and Marybeth had discussed their future. They needed normalcy, they agreed, they needed routine. Faith and hope would return naturally, because they were strong people and they loved each other and, given time, they'd all heal. Joe had promised to look at other job options, or request a change of districts within the state. A change of scenery might help, they agreed. But he had not really researched the job postings recently, because in his heart he loved his job and never wanted to leave it. That reality shrouded him, at times, with secret guilt.

Marybeth was no longer working at the library and the stables, the two part-time jobs she had held. Even combined, they were too low-paying, and involved too much public contact, she told him. She was uncomfortable with library patrons who assessed her and asked her questions about April, and the events that had lead to her death.

But they needed additional income, and in the summer Marybeth had started her own business, setting up accounting, office management, and inventory control for small businesses in Saddlestring. Joe thought it was a perfect choice, with her education, toughness, and organizational skills. So far, her clients included Barrett's Pharmacy, Sandvick Taxidermy, the Saddlestring Burg-O-Pardner, and Logue Country Realty. She was working hard to get established, and the business was close to being a success.

Which made him feel even more guilty that he had been angry with her about dinner.

Tell me about that moose," she asked after dinner, while they washed and rinsed dishes in the sink. Joe was surprised by the question, because Sheridan and Lucy had described the incident in such graphic detail while they were eating that Joe had asked them to stop.

"What about it?" She smiled slyly. "For the past fifteen minutes, you've been thinking about it." He flushed. "How do you know that?" "You mean besides the fact that you've been staring off into space the entire time that we've been doing the dishes? Or that you're drying that glass for the fourth time?" she said, grinning. "You're standing right here but your mind is elsewhere." "It isn't fair that you do that," he said, "because I can never tell what you're thinking about." "As it should be," she said, giving him a mischievous hip-check as they stood side-by-side at the sink. "The girls described it pretty accurately," he said. "Not much I can add to that." "So why does it bother you?" He rinsed a plate and slid it into the drying rack, pausing until he could articulate what he had been thinking about. "I've seen a lot of dead animals," he said, looking over his shoulder at her. "And, unfortunately, some dead human beings." She nodded him on. "But everything about that scene was, well, different-extremely so." "Do you mean that you couldn't figure out what made the wounds?" "That too," he said. "But you just don't find a dead moose in the middle of a meadow like that. There were no tracks; no indication that whoever shot it went to check it out afterward. Even the really bad poachers, the ones who leave the bodies on the ground, usually go check out the target." "Maybe it was just sick and it died," she said reasonably. Joe had turned and was leaning back against the sink with the towel still over his forearm. He said, "Of course animals die of natural causes all the time. But you just never find them. You may find some bones if the skeleton hasn't been too scattered by predators, but you just don't happen upon animals that have died of old age. Or if you do, it's damned rare. Dying animals tend to seek out cover where nothing can find them. They don't just keel over in the middle of a meadow like that." "But you don't know that it wasn't shot, or hit by lightning or something," she said. "It wasn't lightning. There were no scorch marks. It may have been shot; I'll find that out tomorrow. But my gut tells me I won't find any lead." "Maybe it was poisoned somehow?" Marybeth asked. Joe was silent for a moment before answering, reviewing the scene in his head. He was pleased that Marybeth was so wrapped up in what had happened to the moose. She'd been so distracted by her new business that it had been a long time since she'd been interested in anything he'd been doing. "Again, I think the bull would have sought cover to die. Unless the poison killed him so quick he just dropped, which doesn't sound very likely to me. And those wounds…" "You described them as incisions earlier," Marybeth said. "Yes, they were more like surgery than butchery. No animal I know of makes perfect cuts like that. And the parts that were cut away were removed from the scene, taken away. As if they were trophies of some kind." Marybeth grimaced. "I'd hate to see that trophy collection." Joe laughed uncomfortably, agreeing with her. "It's almost as if the moose was dropped from the sky," Marybeth said. "Aw, jeez," he moaned. "I was hoping you wouldn't say that." She prodded him hard in the ribs with her finger. "But that's what you were thinking, weren't you, Joe?" At first he thought about denying it. But she was so damnably keyed into his thoughts that he didn't dare. "Yup," he said. "I can't wait to hear what you find out," she said, turning and reaching through the wash water for the plug. "Should I ask my mother what she thinks about it?" Joe bristled, as Marybeth knew he would, and she laughed to assure him she was kidding. Her mother, the former Missy Vankueran, was soon to marry a local rancher named Bud Longbrake. In addition to getting remarried (she had four ex-husbands), and discussing exactly how Joe had stifled Marybeth's potential, Missy's top passion was reading books and watching television shows and movies about the paranormal. She loved to speculate about situations and events around Twelve Sleep County-and the world-and ascribe supernatural explanations to them.