“Haven’t you heard?” Joe said. “He’s gone straight.”

“Riiiight,” she said, drawing out the word.

—

WHILE JOE WAS CLAMPING on his hat to go outside to his pickup and Daisy, Dulcie put her hands on her hips.

“Do you think there’s anything to Brenda’s denials?” she asked.

“No.”

“She’s right about one thing, though. We need to look beyond Dallas. We need to consider this other mystery cowboy or even the hitchhiking theory. And we need to be open to any other kind of idea, whether we heard it from Brenda Cates or not.”

Joe didn’t respond.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” she said. “We need to verify Brenda’s story and track down where April has been for the past month—who she was with, what rodeos she attended, all of that. We need to verify when Dallas was injured—if he was—in Houston. And I need to talk with Dallas himself, without his mother in the room.”

Joe nodded.

“Of course, if April recovers, she can tell us who did it, even though Brenda tried pretty hard to discount that even before it happens,” she said.

“Which is why her son is guilty as hell,” Joe said.

4

Joe sat sullenly in his pickup with his phone in his hand on the outer circle of Saddlestring High School, waiting for Lucy to come out. He was midway in a long line of parents in pickups and SUVs who were waiting for their teenagers to emerge. Even though, officially, he was prohibited from using his state pickup to transport family members, it seemed like the least of his worries at the moment.

He re-litigated the scene from Sheriff Reed’s office the hour before, trying to open himself up to the possibility that Dallas had nothing to do with April’s injuries. He mulled over Brenda’s theories. A mystery cowboy? A stranger picking up hitchhikers? He couldn’t square the circle.

He recalled how relentlessly Brenda and Eldon had defended their son. It bothered him on a couple of levels. Although it could be expected that parents would protect their own, it seemed not to have even occurred to them that Dallas could be responsible for the crime. They simply refused to believe it, which made them less than credible. To have such an unshakable belief that Dallas was innocent reminded Joe of other parents he’d encountered over the years: couples who attacked teachers because of their child’s failing grades, or coaches because their child was a poor athlete, or him because he’d given a citation to their boy for fishing without a valid license.

For some parents, their offspring were perfect beings. It was a cancer on society, he thought, and it was getting out of control. The Cateses were the worst example of it he’d encountered.

He grinned cruelly to himself when he imagined their reaction when Dallas was convicted and sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins. Oh, he thought, the rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth . . .

—

MARYBETH HAD SENT a series of cryptic texts while Joe waited.

Landing at the trauma center now.

Doctors evaluating her in the ICU.

Still hasn’t regained consciousness.

Good doctors, thank God.

Did you remember to pick up L?

He’d responded: Yup.

—

STUDENTS BEGAN TO POUR out of the front doors of the school moments after the bell rang. Groups of upperclassmen came out and turned for the parking lot and their cars. Tenth graders and those who didn’t have vehicles searched the line of cars for their rides.

Joe waited, and waited some more. No Lucy.

Only after he had raised his phone to call her did she come out. She wasn’t alone.

Joe had been cursed with three attractive daughters. They stood out in a crowd. Especially Lucy. She was blond, lithe, lively, and stylish. He cringed when he was in a public place with her and saw the looks males gave her, but he understood. She was not as studious as Sheridan or as brooding as April, and she’d come into her own as a genuinely warm personality who looked at the bright side of every situation. Marybeth had once said that Lucy seemed to move across the earth in her own personal sunbeam.

And she did so slowly, Joe thought as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Lucy was a girl without urgency, and she seemed to float through life at her own smiling but unhurried pace.

With her was Noah After Buffalo, her debate club partner. Lucy wore black leggings and knee-high boots with her golden hair cascading over the shoulders of her tight down coat.

Noah was a Northern Arapaho whose parents had recently moved off the reservation and into town. He was smart and polite and seemed to have grown a foot taller in the last few months. He was a year older than Lucy and had his own battered pickup. Sometimes he brought her home after school. Marybeth liked him, and Joe tolerated him as much as he tolerated any male in the vicinity of his daughters.

Lucy and Noah walked closer together than Joe would have liked, and he saw Lucy look over and scan the remaining cars for Marybeth’s van. When she saw Joe’s green pickup, she mouthed, “My dad is here” to Noah, who waved.

Joe waved back, and Lucy separated from Noah and made her way toward his pickup. But before she did, she reached back and squeezed Noah’s hand behind her back in an intimate gesture.

“I saw that,” Joe said as Lucy slid into the passenger side and Daisy greeted her by pressing her head under Lucy’s chin.

“Oh, Dad,” Lucy said, vigorously scratching Daisy until the dog moaned.

He thought: One daughter took up with a cowboy. Another is taking up with an Indian.

Joe wasn’t sure what to make of that.

—

AS THEY PULLED OUT, Lucy said, “Why isn’t Mom here? Not that I mind that you pick me up, but . . .”

She studied him and apparently sensed that bad news was coming. He could see it in her eyes. She was intuitive like that, and had the ability to read people in a way Joe never could. He attributed it to all the years that Lucy had hung back and observed family interactions from the standpoint of the youngest.

He said, “The sheriff’s office responded to a call today that a girl had been badly beaten and left by the side of a road. Lucy, it was—”

“April,” Lucy said, tears filling her eyes. “Is she okay?”

Joe took a deep breath and told Lucy all he knew, in workmanlike fashion. Lucy listened without comment, but the tears kept coming. She dried her cheeks with the back of her hand. He finished by telling her that Marybeth said the doctors were good.

“Maybe she’ll be okay,” Lucy said. “One thing about April—she’s tough. Sometimes that’s scary, like when she’s mad at me or thinks I stole her boots or something, but in this case it might get her through.”

Joe almost smiled. He recalled the incident a year before when April had launched across the dinner table at Lucy for borrowing her best cowboy boots. Later, they had been found under April’s bed. Lucy, to her credit, hadn’t backed down.

“So it’s you and me,” Joe said. “We can stop and get something to eat in town or I can fix you something at home for dinner.”

“What?” Lucy asked. “Red meat and bread?”

“What’s wrong with that?” He knew he had plenty of elk steaks in the freezer.