by Joanna Bell
"What?" I asked, baffled. "Of course I want to know. Unless it's something bad – I mean, I don't think it is because you sound happy. Well you did sound happy, a few minutes ago. Now you sound... scared."
"I guess I sound scared because I am."
"Of what?"
"Of what you're going to say. Of how you're going to react."
What the blue hell was my older brother talking about? "Have you robbed a bank or something?" I asked. "Now I am starting to get worried, Bill. Are you in some kind of trouble?"
"No," he told me, "I am not in any kind of trouble. I don't think I've been in less trouble in my entire life. Everything is going really, really well for me right now."
"Then what the hell are you talking –"
"I think maybe I asked you if you were seeing anyone because yeah, I am seeing someone. I, uh, I'm married, actually."
I couldn't help grinning. Of all my siblings – myself included – I kind of thought Bill would be the last one to marry and settle down. "Married?" I said. "Congratulations, man. That's – that's great! What's her name? Where's she from? In fact just tell me everything about her right now. And when did you –"
"Jack?" Bill stopped me in the middle of my giving him the third degree.
"Yeah?"
"I didn't marry a woman"
Oh," I blurted out, before what Bill had just said sunk in. "Oh. Well. Um. You – wait, Bill. What? What do you –"
"I didn't marry a woman, Jack – it's not complicated. I'm gay. I married a man. His name is Christopher."
Bill was gay. My head was an immediate jumbled mess of thoughts. I'd never known any gay people – how was I supposed to act? Was there something I was supposed to say? Why hadn't he told anyone? And along with the questions came something else, a sense of a whole bunch of things suddenly making a kind of sense. Bill never had any girlfriends in high school, and we all just wrote it off to his shyness and unsociable nature.
"So," I started, as guilt seized my heart. "You weren't just anti-social? You weren't – it wasn't just that you were quiet that you spent all that time in your room?"
"No," Bill responded simply. "I'm actually not quiet at all. What do you think would have happened, Jack? What do you think Blackjack would have said? Or dad? Can you even imagine? I mean, dad knew, but –"
"Dad knew?!"
Bill scoffed. "It's not like we had any of those oh son, I totally support you whoever you are talks, if that's what you're thinking. Hell no. But he did pull me aside one day when I was about seventeen and warn me never to let Blackjack know what I was. That it would kill him if he knew. When I asked dad what I was – because remember, I was a goddamned kid at the time, and a confused one at that – he just pretended like he hadn't said anything. Seriously, he just blanked me. Even now I'm not entirely sure I didn't hallucinate that whole conversation."
"Damn," I whispered, because I couldn't think of anything else to say. I knew one thing, though – I didn't want my brother to think that what was in my heart was in any way similar to what had been in our father's heart. "Bill?"
His voice, when he answered, was so quiet that I could barely hear it. "Yes?"
He was terrified. That was what I was hearing. My heart just about burst. "Don't sound like that!" I yelled. "Don't – just don't! I'm not like dad, Bill! I am not going to hate you for this, I promise. Now, I can't say as I know what to say but it's important that you know right now that this is – I am OK with this. I am good with this! You found someone? Good. Good for you. You deserve it. We all –"
My brother ended my emotional outburst by breaking into sobs and, Jesus, that almost broke me. It's not easy to listen to someone you always looked up to – your big, strong, independent brother who never seemed too bothered by anything – break down.
"I'm sorry," he cried. "Jack, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to embarrass you, I –"
"I'm not embarrassed," I told him, my words catching on the lump in my own throat. "I don't know what I am – happy for you, mainly. Happy that you're telling me, as well. Trying to call everyone today – you, Jake, Connor, Emily – we're estranged. All of us. It's so easy to just not think about it. Or to tell myself it's not true, we're not estranged, people just moved away from home and have their own lives."
"It's funny how that happened," Bill said. "We didn't really have huge issues with each other growing up, did we? All five of us? But now none of us have relationships. It's messed up. It's messed up that you and I have no relationship. There's not even a reason, is there?"
"I don't think there is," I replied, "unless there's some childhood resentments you're not telling me about."
"That's just it," Bill said sadly. "There isn't. We should do something about that. It depends on timing, of course, but if you need any help with moving when the time comes, Christopher and I would be happy to fly out there to give you a hand. It would be nice for him to see Sweetgrass Ranch, too, before it gets sold. I talk about the place enough."
An almost indescribable feeling of bittersweetness washed over me. The conversation with Bill was way more than I ever would have dared to hope for. Was an adult relationship with one of my brothers on the table, after all those years? It seemed to be. And he trusted me enough to tell me he was gay – and married! That was a big deal and I knew it. And now it seemed like maybe we were going to do one of the things that normal families do together – help each other through a tough situation. At the same time as my face almost felt like it was going to break from smiling so much during that conversation, I couldn't help a sense of regret, on top of the happiness. Regret at all those wasted years we could have been there for each other. Regret that my brother felt he had to keep a huge part of who he was from us – from me. We were never going to get that time back.
"That would be really good," I said. "I would appreciate the help. As you can imagine, this house is absolutely full of stuff. And it would really, uh, it would just be nice to not have to do this alone."
About ten seconds after ending the call with Bill, and full of an unfamiliar feeling of hope, I got a message from DeeDee. It included the number of a lawyer. Since it seemed to be the morning I was getting things done, rather than hiding from them, I called it immediately. Records would need to be found, the lawyer said, probably copies of records due to the originals appearing to be lost, and zoning would have to be checked – and zoning changes applied for if necessary – but he thought it wasn't totally out of the question that I might be able to keep a small piece of Sweetgrass Ranch. It would depend on the selling price of the rest of it, which wasn't assured by any means – but it wasn't an impossible dream.
That night, after all the chores were finished and I was sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner, I wondered if maybe it wasn't a better idea just to make a clean break. To forgo the possibility of clinging to the remnants of Sweetgrass Ranch for the forging of a totally new path. Of course, I had no idea what that path might be, but I was still only 28, there was no reason it couldn't be happy. I could get a degree. Travel. Take up BASE jumping. Find a wife.
A wife. There was a thought. It's not that I didn't think about women – I did. Quite a lot. I'd dated lots of girls in Little Falls, too. It had just never occurred to me to marry any of them. But if I got myself out of town, I would meet different women. Women more like Blaze Wilson.
I laughed out loud at myself, at my own brain throwing up Blaze Wilson again. Ridiculous. But it had been a good day, overall. Change was coming – change I never asked for – and I was starting to feel like maybe I could come out of it better off.
Chapter Ten
Blaze
If I squinted and held my head at a certain angle, I could tell myself that everything was getting back to normal. Almost two months after the trip to Montana and I was managing. It looked like I was managing, anyway. From the outside not much had changed. I got up in the mornings, went to work, went grocery shopping, paid bills, visited the farmer's market on Sundays with friends, made s
ure Lulu had adequate time at the dog park to burn off her crazy energy etc. To an observer it was same old, same old. What I was really managing, however, was simply to make it look like I wasn't holding onto a cliff's edge by my fingertips.
Dr. Haines referred me to a psychologist a week after first prescribing the Xanax, when I ended up back in his office after another series of increasingly severe panic attacks. I was taking medication at least three, sometimes up to five or six days a week, and increasingly terrified that someone was going to notice how tenuous my grip on my own sanity seemed to be getting.
The most frustrating part of it, to me, was that nothing about my daily life was different. I still followed all the same routines (with the additional one of making sure Lulu was properly taken care of), I still saw the same people, talked about the same things with them. Work got even better when Pender and I thoroughly nailed our first investigation after my return from Montana. And yet I still felt like I was walking through quicksand most of the time, like the color had been drained out of my world.
Therapy just seemed to add to the frustration by making me talk incessantly about my feelings without actually doing anything to improve them.
One day, after staying late at the office to finish up some reading for my latest case and arranging for Jessica to take Lulu for a sleepover at her house, I found myself in front of my computer, looking at a list of all the current active investigations. At first, it didn't even dawn on me what I was doing. Looking for the case I was working on, right? Freeley was the last name on that one. I scrolled down through the A's, B's, C's and right past the F's. Past the L's and right into the M's until there it was, staring me in the face.
'McMurtry, Jack III'
Don't click on it. It's not your case anymore. It doesn't matter, and your name will be logged.
I clicked. There was no rule against looking at other cases. Of course, that assumed you had a reason to look at them. A reason beyond snooping, or checking up on a man you felt something for – in spite of all your protests to the contrary.
There was a lot more information than the last time I'd looked at the file. I skimmed it until I got to the 'Current Status Summary' at the bottom of the page and a pit formed in my stomach as I read it through.
'Property (including dwelling) has been listed for sale. Re-zoning rejected by town and land cannot be broken up or used for non-agricultural or multi-residential purposes by current or future owner. Property is expected to sell for significantly less than funds owed.'
I read that last sentence again, and then again. 'Property is expected to sell for significantly less than funds owed.' Such bloodless words – words I'd seen multiple times before, pertaining to other cases. But that time, I knew the property – and the house, and the person – they pertained to. Sweetgrass Ranch. Jack McMurtry. Jack McMurtry who risked his own life to save me, a stranger, from a flash flood. Jack McMurtry who didn't know anything else except life in Little Falls, Montana.
Those words meant that there would be no clean break for Jack. There would be debt – probably a lot of debt – and it would follow him wherever he went – as would our investigators and, if it came to that, lawyers and debt collectors.
I clicked off the active investigations page and entered the address for Sweetgrass Ranch into Google. It had already been listed, for 1.1 million dollars. The short write-up mentioned that the house needed 'extensive work' and, buried in the fine print at the very end, that there was a tax lien against the property. So any interested buyer was obviously going to ask the amount of that lien as a first step, find out it was almost double the sale price, and immediately lose interest. No one was going to buy Sweetgrass Ranch. Jack had probably been given a set amount of time to try and sell it, after which, if it didn't sell, the IRS would seize it outright.
There was no way around it – Jack's life was ruined. A 28 year old man with no actual responsibility for the situation was about to be saddled with the kind of debt you don't escape for decades, if ever. I felt sick. I clicked back to the open investigations page and found the name of the lead investigator. David McMillan. I entered it into my phone so I wouldn't forget and, aware that I was poking my nose where I really shouldn't, turned the computer off and made my way home.
Without Lulu's irrepressible presence that night, I found it even easier to brood. I spent most of the evening on my phone. David McMillan. Who was he? I e-mailed Pender to ask if he knew him. And then I e-mailed David McMillan directly, telling myself it was all perfectly fine and above board, just simple interest in an investigation I had once been assigned to.
I had trouble falling asleep afterwards, too. Maybe it was Lulu's absence. Maybe it was something more. I thought about Jack. About where he would go and what he would do. About the kind of life he might have, with that kind of debt hanging over him. It wasn't my fault, was it? If it hadn't been me in Montana it would have been someone else from the IRS. Hell, if I'd decided to get that English degree I toyed with during my first year of college – and never joined the IRS in the first place – Jack McMurtry would still owe two million dollars in taxes.
Was it that easy, though? I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be cut and dried, legal versus illegal. But the thing is, life isn't like that – and I was only just starting to see it. Legal doesn't always mean fair. It doesn't always mean morally right. Sometimes, it even means destroying a young man's life for a situation he had no fault in.
I tossed and turned, trying to come up with some way to justify it all to myself. When I couldn't, I rolled over and grabbed my phone, logging into the investigations section of the IRS website and finding Jack's case again. That time, I clicked on the 'Documentation' link. Just what had David McMillan found? Not much. We had our own records, of the money owed and not paid. We had Jack's grandfather's bank records and a copy of the death certificate. We had Jack's own banking records. But we didn't have anything on the rest of the family. Had David even contacted the other siblings? Had they been informed of the situation? Had their own financials been looked at? Not that they could be compelled to pay anything, as they weren't the owners of Sweetgrass Ranch, but sometimes in these cases involving a single person other family members can be convinced to contribute. Had David McMillan even tried that route before going straight to a threatened seizure?
I only realized how angry I was when I jabbed my finger at my phone so hard I dropped it. When I picked it back up I looked at the time and sighed. Just past three in the morning. Oh my God, what was I doing? I forced myself to turn it off at that point, because I could feel that if I didn't, it was going to be dawn soon and I wouldn't have had a wink of sleep.
The next day, there was an e-mail from David McMillan in my inbox. I was in the middle of reading it when there was a knock at my office door. I told whoever it was to come in.
It was Pender. "Hey," he said, sipping a cup of the disgusting coffee from the vending machine. "What's up?"
"Uh, not much," I responded, looking up. Pender and I don't stop by each other's offices to chit-chat – not during work hours, anyway, so I knew he must have something to say. "How about you?"
"Oh," Pender shrugged. "Not too much here, either. Melissa's got me working on that Netwide case – you know, those two tech bros who tried to hide all their assets offshore and then picked the wrong Caribbean island to do it? What a couple of chucklefucks."
I smiled politely, eager to get back to David McMillan's e-mail. What did Pender want? I waited for him to say something else.
"So I got your e-mail last night," he said, finally. "About David McMillan. Did you send that from home?"
"No," I lied. "I worked late last night. So – do you know him?"
Pender shook his head. "No, not really. I mean, I know his face, I've said hi to him, but I don't know the guy. Why are you asking?"
"Oh," I said, waving my hand as if it was all extremely inconsequential. "Just wondering about that McMurtry case – you know, the one in Montana?"
Pender gave me a strange look. "Yeah, Blaze, the one in Montana. I definitely remember that one – the whole office does after what happened to you."
"Well, OK," I said. "Yeah, that one. Anyway I was just, uh – David McMillan took over that case and I was just curious about how it's going."
Pender was still looking at me strangely. I didn't like it. "Why are you so worried about the McMurtry case?" He asked, finishing his coffee and throwing the crumpled cup in the trashcan by the door, where it would then go on to stink up my whole office.
"I'm not worried," I lied. "Just, uh, interested."
"Is that all it is?"
"What else would it be?" I asked, a little snappishly. "I'm just curious about a freakin' case, Pender, I don't know why you're looking at me like that."
He made a face. "I dunno, Blaze. I remember you sounded kinda funny when you called me from Montana that first night, after your first meeting with Jack McMurtry. Are you sure nothing happened?"
I immediately straightened up in my chair, causing Pender to hold his hands up in a 'slow down' gesture. "I don't mean anything like that! I just – Blaze, I just wondered if, uh, if everything's OK there. You're not the type to go back and rehash a case you're not even on anymore. I'm just concerned about you, is all. I –"
"Well thank you for your concern, Pender. I appreciate it. I am fine, though. No need to worry. It was just curiosity – wondering how it gets handled when so much of the paperwork just can't be found, you know?"
I don't think Pender believed me. Smart man. But he could see I definitely wasn't going to tell him what the real problem was – if there was one – so he left soon after that. I turned right back to my computer screen. David McMillan's e-mail was polite and brief. No, they hadn't checked out any of the other family members because Jack McMurtry himself had assured them they wouldn't be interested in helping to pay the debt. And although more information would have been useful, it wasn't necessary – Jack McMurtry owed the money, he was the owner of Sweetgrass Ranch, and it would have been a waste of our own resources to pursue any other avenues without a good reason.
