Daggrepont took it as a compliment.

“I’m still in shock, to tell you the truth,” she said. “I can’t think about the land yet. There are just so many unanswered questions. I was driving by and saw your lights on. Thought I’d just drop in and see if you might be able to answer any of them for me.”

His brow furrowed into burls of flesh. He rubbed his sausage fingers over his third chin. “What sort of questions? Financial questions?”

“Sort of.” She cast about for a place to sit, finally settling a minimal portion of her fanny on a chair taken up by a towering stack of old Life magazines and a shoebox half full of old military medals. She set the shoebox on the floor and leaned back against the magazines. “I thought you might know something about the inheritance Lucy came into before she moved here.”

Daggrepont heaved out a gust of pent-up breath. “’Fraid I can’t help you there, little lady. I wasn’t privy. She had me draw up her will, named me executor, that’s all.”

“Did she say why? I mean, she was young, healthy, not the kind of person given to planning that way.”

“She owned property and livestock. Had money in the bank. It’s just sound thinking!” he shouted up at the ceiling. His eyes narrowed and swam in Mari’s direction. “You ought to think about having one yourself. I’d be more than happy to take care of that for you. I’ve got the forms right here-”

“Not just now,” Mari said, halting his search of the desktop. “Thanks anyway.”

He stared at her hard, his fat hands dripping fishing tackle, his mind calculating what he might have made in additional fees. “Well, if you’re sure…”

“Maybe later on.”

She sighed and glanced around the room. This had been a shot in the dark, but now that nothing had come of it, she realized she had actually hoped Daggrepont might prove to be something other than chronically weird. Her gaze scanned the bookshelves that were crammed with legal tomes, collector’s price guides, and mail-order catalogues.

“Did you know anything about her finances at all?” God, what’s he supposed to say, Marilee? You mean, was Lucy a blackmailer? By golly, little missy, she sure was!

Daggrepont looked at her sideways. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, she seemed a lot more well off than when I knew her. I was just wondering how that came to be.”

The grin that split the lawyer’s face made him look like a cowboy-kitsch Buddha. Buddha with a string tie and Don King hair. The image didn’t faze Mari, which told her just how far gone she was.

“You’re the first client I ever had who worried about getting too much money!” He let loose a belly laugh that shook the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling.

“No. I was just curious, that’s all. Lucy and I kind of lost touch over the last year.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Yeah, well…” His collection of the Martindale-Hubbell directories caught her eye as she stood. He appeared to have volume nine dating back to the time of Moses. Also the volumes that included Idaho and Wyoming. No California A-O. “Mr. Daggrepont, Lucy didn’t leave anything else for me that you may have forgotten about, did she? She mentioned a book in her letter. I haven’t been able to find it.”

Daggrepont frowned like a bulldog as he rocked himself to his feet. The springs of his desk chair shrieked in relief. “No, ma’am, there was no book. If she’d left a book, I surely would have passed it along to you. I’m not the sort of unscrupulous shyster who keeps things he isn’t entitled to.”

He graciously offered her the use of a thirty-year-old umbrella to get out to her car. Mari was wrestling to get the thing closed, when an old pink Cadillac pulled up alongside her Honda on First Avenue. Nora Davis buzzed down the window on the passenger side and shouted to be heard above the rain.

“Hey, there, Mary Lee, let’s go honky-tonkin’!”

The umbrella turned itself inside out. It seemed like a sign.

The Hell and Gone was an oasis of life in a night canceled due to weather. Amber lights and Coors signs glowed a welcome out the windows and swinging front doors. Sweethearts of the Rodeo harmonized above the dull roar of pool games and high spirits.

Nora squeezed her boat in between a pair of ranch trucks a dozen feet from the side entrance of the bar.

“Aren’t you worried about getting your doors bashed in?” Mari asked. She had to hold her breath to get out of the car.

Nora laughed as they dashed up onto the boardwalk and out of the rain. “Honey, you won’t find a cowboy on this earth willing to get pink paint on his pickup. That’s a bonus to having that old car-the Mary Kaymobile I call it. My mama won that ugly thing selling miracle night cream to homely old ladies in Bozeman. It sucks gas by the gallon and uses a quart of oil every thousand miles, but there’s not a red-blooded man in Montana who’d steal it or put a dent in it.”

“You’re a wonder, Nora,” Mari drawled.

The waitress tossed her frizzy dark hair and grinned. “Don’t you forget it, girlfriend.”

Laughing, each slung an arm around the shoulders of her new friend and they headed inside.

The rain had driven the cowboys into town early. Most of them were well on their way to hangovers. All of them were glad to see unescorted females. Shouts went up as Nora and Mari walked in. They all knew Nora. She basked in the glow, waving to friends, shouting hellos and smart remarks as she led the way through the throng to a booth. She had traded her waitress uniform for a tight T-shirt with Garth Brooks’s likeness plastered across her flat chest and tighter jeans that hugged her wide hips and disappeared into the tops of red, high-heeled, looking-for-trouble cowboy boots.

They ordered beers. Mari ordered a Hell and Gone Bull Burger with the works and double onion rings.

Nora raised her thinly plucked brows. “You eating for two, honey?”

“I haven’t had anything since breakfast. I worked up an appetite.”

“Like a ranch hand. What you been doing all day-riding wild horses?”

“Something like that.” Mari glanced away, hoping the warmth of the bar would explain her blush.

She’d been in her share of working-class bars, not for the liquor or the horny tough guys, but for the music. A lot of great music got played in places like the Hell and Gone. A poster on the wall advertised a band called Cheyenne coming in on the weekend. She wondered if she might persuade J.D. to come listen with her, then almost laughed at herself. A date. God, what would he do if a woman asked him out? Was that done in Montana? The cowboy code would probably require him to perform ritual suicide.

Nora launched into a narrative of who’s who, pointing out this cowboy and that cowboy and the mechanic from the John Deere place and the best hairdresser at the Curl Up and Dye. Mari memorized their faces, their grins, their laughter. She took in everything about them and stored the images in her mind to be called upon later. She drank in the rowdy atmosphere of the bar, the smell of beer and cigarettes, and warm male bodies and strong perfume.

The Braves were playing baseball on the TV that was crammed up on a shelf above the bar. People booed them enthusiastically. Ted Turner was not a popular man hereabouts. He had bought up most of the next valley and promptly declared the land off limits to local hunters, then sold off his cattle and replaced them with buffalo, angering all the area ranchers who feared his buffalo herd might spread diseases to their cattle.

Over the speakers Alan Jackson shouted out above the hoopla-“Don’t Rock the Jukebox.” Half a dozen couples zoomed around the small dance floor, twisting and twirling, trying to impress one another in a courtship ritual as old as time.

A crowd gathered around an old Ping-Pong table on the far side of the room, where pinball machines blinked and billiard balls cracked together.