by C. J. Box
“I’m John Wayne Kleinsasser. I thought you were coming out this morning,” he said.
“Are you surprised to see me now?” she asked.
He lowered his wrist and looked at her from the top of her head to her boots. It wasn’t a kind assessment, she thought.
“Why would I be surprised, other than you’re seven hours late?” he asked.
But she’d noted the tell and filed it away.
“We’ve been moving cows all day,” he said. “Now we’re getting something to eat. It’s tradition for hauling day.”
“I’m not hungry,” she lied.
“I don’t believe I asked you if you were.”
She said, “I’m happy to sit in my car and wait. I don’t want to rush you. But if you’ll recall, I was hoping to walk through the building where your niece was assaulted, as I said. I’m sorry I’m so late but I was … detained. Is there still a chance I could do that?”
“Today?”
“Either that or I could come out tomorrow,” she said. “Or the day after that, or the day after that,” Cassie added. Her clear meaning, I’m not going away.
Again, he looked her over. She strained a smile.
He sighed, and said, “Come on in. I’ll finish up and drive you out there. When you’re through you can go back to Bozeman and leave us alone.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate it. I know what a busy time this must be.”
“Making a living,” he said. “How’d you get here, anyway?”
“The gate was open.”
It took him a moment, then he nodded. “We opened them for the cattle haulers and you slipped right through,” he said as much to himself as to her.
He stood aside as she mounted the steps to the porch, then took another step back when she shouldered past him to enter the house.
He hadn’t asked about the new car, she thought. Even though he’d made a point of getting her vehicle description the night before.
*
John Wayne closed the door behind them and Cassie paused near a tangle of cowboy boots on a rug to the side. He padded up behind her in his socks.
“Take your shoes off. It’s something we do,” he said.
“Okay.”
Cassie was grateful that he walked around her as she bent over to pull off her boots. She was able to slip the .22 from her boot shaft into her purse without him noticing.
Then she stood and beheld the great room. High ceilings, heavy beams, dark furniture, mounts of deer and elk heads on the walls. Shafts of light from narrow windows on two exterior walls and a single skylight high above crisscrossed in the gloom.
“An iron cross,” she said to John Wayne.
“My grandfather’s design,” he replied.
Warm odors from the dining room filled the house, and she could hear low chatter and the clinking of silverware and glasses from somewhere down a hallway.
“Please,” she said, stepping aside toward a dark floral ottoman, “go finish your meal. I’ll sit here and wait.”
There was an unworldly squawk from the direction of the dining room that sounded to Cassie like part falcon, part hog. The sound stopped and started again until it ended abruptly.
She looked to John Wayne for an explanation.
“My father would like to meet you,” he said. Then he shrugged, as if that wouldn’t have been his choice.
“Horst?” she asked, trying to recall the given names of the Kleinsasser clan.
“Horst the second,” John Wayne corrected.
She followed him across the polished dark wood floor of the great room and into the hallway. Over his shoulder, in a soft voice, he said, “He had a stroke recently. A pretty bad one. He’s slowly getting his speech back, but right now I’m the only one who can understand him. I’m kind of his translator.”
She nodded as if she understood. “Really, I don’t mind waiting.”
“If the old man wants to meet you he wants to meet you,” John Wayne said with a shrug.
They took a sharp turn to the right and entered a narrow dining room paneled with light pine. The walls featured old sporting paintings from nineteenth-century Europe.
The table was stocked with a huge platter of roast beef, a bowl of quartered potatoes, a tureen of brown gravy, and trays of green beans, carrots, and sauerkraut.
A square-faced woman in her fifties wearing a full apron hovered briefly at the back of the room. No doubt the cook, Cassie thought. The woman scuttled away through a door at the end of the dining room without looking back.
That left only the family and Cassie.
Seven pairs of eyes greeted her. It was absolutely silent. The absence of Cheyenne and Franny were glaring, and Cassie noted that no place settings had been set for them.
Horst II, John Wayne’s father, slumped in a wheelchair at the head of the table. His head rested on his left shoulder and his mouth gaped. His large hands rested on the arms of his wheelchair. He was unshaven and wearing sloppy sweat clothes that looked two sizes too big. Someone had tied a bib around his neck. Horst II looked nothing like the photos Cassie had seen of him in the internet. Only his eyes seemed alive, and they were fixed on her face.
Next to Horst II on the far side of the table was Margaret, Cassie guessed. She had metal-framed glasses and her head was covered with tight curls. Margaret had a fork in her hand with a square of roast beef on it poised to feed to her husband. She had a fleshy porcine face and she wore an out-of-fashion dark dress of thick material that looked like it would rustle when she walked. The expression she aimed at Cassie was equal parts dislike and suspicion.
Cassie didn’t blame her. What kind of person crashed a family get-together?
Rand, seated next to his mother, didn’t even try to disguise his contempt for her. He tossed his silverware to the tablecloth and sat back and glared at her in disgust. While casually refreshing an ice-filled cocktail glass with more bourbon from a decanter, he arched his eyebrows at her as if to say, Get the hell out.
Next to Rand was a young female who looked like she didn’t belong, Cassie thought. At least in this family. She was thin and wore too much makeup and a multicolored tattoo snaked up the side of her neck from her very tight top. Cassie knew Rand wasn’t married and she surmised the girl was either his live-in or somebody he’d picked up and invited to the hauling day meal. The girl nervously drank from an oversized goblet of red wine.
On the near side of the table were two boys aged probably eight and ten. John Wayne’s sons, she guessed. They were duded up in cowboy clothes and the roast beef and vegetables on their plates looked virtually untouched. They looked at her like they enjoyed the distraction she’d brought.
Rochelle, John Wayne’s wife and the boys’ mother, was a wispy and featureless woman with mousy brown hair and an inoffensive manner. She was the first in the room to look away when Cassie found her eyes.
“Everybody,” John Wayne announced, “this is Cassie Dewell. She’s working for Blake’s lawyer to get him off. She wants to walk through the old crew shack to see if the police missed anything.”
No one said hello. No one said anything.
“Not necessarily,” Cassie said softly.
Rochelle turned her attention to her boys and urged them to eat or they wouldn’t get apple pie for dessert. Reluctantly, both John Wayne Jr., and Tristan proceeded to push their vegetables around on their plates as if the activity alone would fool their mother.
Cassie watched as Horst II took in a big wet breath as if loading up, then squawked a staccato series of bursts. She couldn’t make out a single word. Then he did it again.
“Dad wants to know why you picked this moment to interrupt our hauling day feast,” John Wayne said to Cassie with a bit of a smirk. “He wonders if it’s because you don’t look like a woman who misses many meals.”
Margaret shot her husband a reproachful look. Apparently, Cassie thought, she couldn’t understand him, either.
Horst II squawked again.
>
“He said he was joking,” John Wayne said.
Cassie tried to summon up confidence. Her mouth was suddenly dry. She said, “I remember the hauling day feast. We used to have them when I was a girl. Everybody who helped out was invited….”
She trailed off when she realized that unlike her uncles and aunts, who invited in all of the neighbors and friends who assisted in the work no matter who they were, the Kleinsassers had sent all their employees elsewhere. This meal was only for the immediate family.
Rand said to Cassie, “It’s a little hard to enjoy my meal with you standing there staring at us like we’re fuckin’ zoo animals.”
“I’m sorry,” Cassie replied. She looked to John Wayne for some kind of guidance to stay or go.
Horst II said something that sounded to Cassie like, “Don’t shit.”
“Pardon me?” Cassie asked. She was rattled.
“He said, ‘Don’t sit,’” John Wayne said with a grin.
Before Cassie could reply, Horst II rattled out a long string of invective. While he did, Margaret fixed her eyes on the side of his face as if trying to silence him without succeeding. It was not a kind or sympathetic look, Cassie thought.
Finally, John Wayne said, “He says Blake means nothing more to him than any hopeless loser he passes on the highway or cow shit on the bottom of his boot. He says Blake is no more part of his family than you are and if you’re trying to get him off you’re just as evil as he is.”
Cassie didn’t respond. She couldn’t.
“He also said this might be his last hauling day feast on this earth with his loving family and he’d like you to leave.”
“Gladly.”
“Now, git,” Rand said, using his hands to shoo her away as if she were a dog.
“I’ll be outside,” Cassie said over her shoulder to John Wayne as she turned on her heel. He took a beat to move aside so she could go.
Red-faced and humiliated, she strode down the hallway in her stocking feet. There was a peal of laughter from Rand as the tinkling of silverware resumed.
She fought the urge to run.
*
Cassie felt the presence of someone approaching from the hallway while she pulled on her boots. Then she heard the rustle of clothing.
Margaret eyed her coolly. Her bearing was more serious than what Cassie had observed inside the dining room, as if Margaret had shed the costume she wore around her family. She carried the empty tureen as if she’d used it as an excuse to leave the table.
“You should really go home,” Margaret warned. Cassie was unclear if it was friendly advice or a threat.
“Everyone in this county seems to agree with you. And I will—just as soon as I can.”
Margaret fixed her gray eyes on Cassie. “You have no idea what you’ve stepped into.”
“Your son Blake said the same thing to me.”
Cassie watched carefully for Margaret’s reaction. But the woman didn’t even flinch.
“You don’t understand,” Margaret said. “Blake no longer exists on this ranch.”
“I get that. But he’s still your firstborn son. And you probably don’t know this but he was attacked in jail. From what I understand he may not make it.”
Again, not even a tic. Cassie couldn’t discern if Margaret had heard about Blake before she brought it up. Or if she simply didn’t care.
Margaret sighed and shook her head. “He’s just as bad as the others.”
Before Cassie could respond, Margaret turned and walked away, cradling the empty tureen in her slender hands.
eighteen
A long hour later, John Wayne emerged from the house at the same moment Cassie’s phone lit up with a call from Ben. John Wayne pulled on a barn coat, clamped on a black cowboy hat, and chinned toward his pickup to indicate she should follow him. He looked annoyed.
Cassie nodded that she understood his instructions. The man swung into the cab of his truck and it leaped forward, the rear tires raining gravel on her rental car as it turned in the yard and shot over a cattle guard. She gave pursuit and raised the phone to her mouth because she hadn’t synched it to the rental’s Bluetooth system yet.
“Hello, Ben.”
“Hey, Mom. I just got done with practice and I saw that you called.”
“Thank you. Yes, we got cut off last night after you started telling me that something crazy happened….”
“Did you really get arrested?” he asked.
“Not officially. But a cop pulled me over and took me into the station. I couldn’t call you because they took my cell phone.”
“Mom?”
“What, Ben?”
“You’re breaking up.”
Although she was following John Wayne’s vehicle on the gravel road at bone-rattling speed, she glanced at her phone to see there was only a single bar of reception. The farther she got from the ranch headquarters, the poorer it got.
The screen indicator changed to no service.
“Oh, crap,” she said aloud. She cursed and tossed the phone aside where it landed on the passenger seat.
*
John Wayne either didn’t care that she could barely keep up with him as he raced through his ranch or he wanted to humiliate her further when she lost him and had to find her own way out.
Cassie was fortunate, though, in that the few times he vanished over a hilltop or took a sharp turn he left a telltale cloud of dust hanging in the air to follow. And she did.
She hoped when they got to the crew shack that she’d have the opportunity to question him. The gloves were off as far as she was concerned. John Wayne was no more than a cheap bully, and she’d dealt over the years with plenty of those. He’d been minimally accommodating when they first met when it was just the two of them, but he’d shown his true colors when he tossed her to his family to be demeaned like that.
So many questions. And if he didn’t answer them or lied again, that very fact would be an answer in itself that he was hiding something. She created a mental list of topics:
• Did he or Rand order the sheriff’s department to pick her up and detain her?
• Did any of them at the table know that her car had been torched?
• Had the news of Blake’s assault reached them prior to her arrival? And if so, how?
• Did any of them order the jailhouse attack? Did they have a connection to the perpetrators?
• Was Horst II capable of communicating with anyone in the outside world, or did he require John Wayne’s “translating” ability to convey his wishes?
• Where were Cheyenne and Franny? Why didn’t they come to the vaunted family hauling day feast?
And most of all, why did the family and their proxies in the sheriff’s department do everything they could to make her investigation difficult if they were confident the allegations against Blake would land him in Deer Lodge for a very long time?
*
The two-track road paralleled a dry creek bed choked with rust-colored willows. It wound around an old copse of river cottonwood trees with dry leaves quivering on the branches like so many baby rattles. Suddenly the old crew shack appeared.
Cassie glanced down at her odometer to note that the journey was four-point-two miles from the ranch headquarters. That was a long walk for Franny that night, she thought.
John Wayne pulled off the road and motioned for Cassie to proceed. Instead, she stopped next to him. He quickly got out.
*
“This is the place my brother raped my niece,” he said. “Have
at it.”
“Are you going to show me around?”
“No. I’m going home to take a nap.”
“Will you be available to answer some questions?”
“I already did that. Ask the sheriff. Now please step back. I wouldn’t want to run over your cowboy boots with my tires.”
“I have a lot of questions. Some things just don’t add up to me.”
He looked at her for half a minute before r
olling his eyes and throwing the transmission into reverse.
“Be off the property by sundown, lady,” he said. She stepped back toward her car so the open pickup door wouldn’t knock her over as he backed up.
She watched as he did a three-point turn and accelerated so rapidly back down the old road that the velocity of the maneuver slammed shut the passenger door on its own.
*
Cassie turned slowly and observed the crew shack. It was grander than she thought it would be: two levels, peaked roof, old shutters on the windows on both floors. It had obviously been built by people with ambition who later, for whatever reason, abandoned it.
Montana was filled with such houses and they could be found in dying small towns and within vast landholdings. They’d been built when the world was larger, when transportation was poorer. And because Montana was settled late in comparison to other parts of the country, many of the old ghost houses were originals. They’d once been attractive, well-appointed homes but they’d been left to rot. The low humidity and lack of subsequent development were two contributors to why the old structures still existed. Trees and bushes the original inhabitants had planted were dead or wild and untrimmed.
Cassie was always curious about what happened that resulted in the families who lived there to find the need to just walk away. Housing ranch hands was not the original purpose for the faded old house. That had come later.
She wondered if this house had been on an adjoining ranch to the Kleinsassers’ original holdings, and when Horst I bought it he forced the former inhabitants to flee. She would likely never know.
Although Franny’s affidavit had been in the file that either vanished or was burned up in her car, Cassie could recall many of the passages with clarity.
He said he wanted to show me where he spent most of his time when he was growing up on the ranch. He said he wanted me to know that even though my uncles told me different, Uncle Blake had spent a lot of years there and he had a real connection to the ranch that I probably wasn’t aware of….
We arrived at a two-story old house on the side of a meadow. The house was kind of dumpy, I thought. Some of the windows were broken out and the cattle had been on the porch and collapsed it. There was old cow manure everywhere. It was outside the house and inside the front door. The place smelled like cows. I’m not fond of cows. I’m a vegan, you know….
