In Plain Sight

His voice, Sheridan thought, chilled her to the bone—and the way he looked at her, with familiarity even though she was sure she had never seen him before. She was glad she had the knife hidden under the blanket in her fist.

Then it hit her. “How’d you know my name is Pickett?” she asked.

The question made the man blink, as if it startled him. Uncle Arlen looked over, intrigued.

“Why, everybody’s heard of Sheridan Pickett,” the man said, making a lame joke as if he were saying the first thing that popped into his mind while trying to think of something better. “Actually, I believe Arlen here might have said your name.”

Sheridan didn’t reply, and felt threatened the way Monroe looked at her, with a kind of leering familiarity.

“I don’t remember saying anything,” Arlen said. “But whatever . . .”

“Or maybe I heard it from Hank,” the man said with sudden confidence, as if he liked this version much better. “Yeah, I heard it from Hank. You’re a friend of Julie’s, right?”

“Right,” Sheridan said.

Bill Monroe nodded knowingly, then tilted his head to the side without once taking his eyes off her. “That’s what it is,” he said. There was an awkward silence. Sheridan wanted to leave, but the men crowded the door. Obviously, Arlen expected her to go back to bed. Bill Monroe—who knew what he wanted? Whatever it was, he wouldn’t stop staring at her, sizing her up. He scared her to death.

Then she thought: the man knows both Arlen and Hank, and knows them well enough that he could say Hank’s name in Arlen’s house without retribution. What did that mean?

Finally, Arlen said, “Well, Sheridan, did you get your drink? You can take a glass of water upstairs with you if you want. I was about to make a couple of sandwiches for Bill and me while we talked a little business. Can I make you one?”

“No, thank you,” Sheridan said.

“Good night,” Arlen said, stepping aside as she sidled around the counter and headed for the doorway.

“ ’Night,” she replied. She was close enough to Bill Monroe as she passed to smell him—tobacco smoke, dust, and bad sweet cologne.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Bill Monroe said to her back.

As she went up the stairs, she looked over her shoulder to see him watching her carefully, a hint of a smile on his lips, and for a second it felt as if a bolt of electricity had shot through her.

WHEN SHE AWOKE she could hear Julie still sleeping beside her, a burr of a snore in her breathing. Her dreams had been awful, once she finally got to sleep. In one, a vivid dream, Bill Monroe was outside their house, on the lawn, looking through the window at Lucy and her as they slept.

In another dream, Sheridan went back out into the hallway in the dark to where the window was and parted the curtain. A yellow square could be seen through the distant trees, the light from Wyatt’s chicken coop.

She raised the eyepieces of the binoculars to her eyes and adjusted the focus tight on the square. Then something or somebody passed by the window inside, blocking out the light like a finger waved in front of a candle flame. And when the person passed, she could see the slightly smiling face of a woman, her expression paused in mid-conversation.

It was Opal Scarlett.

15

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, IN THE CHILLED HIGH-ALTITUDE predawn, J. W. Keeley labored up a rocky hillside on the western slope of Wolf Mountain with a bucket full of creek water in each hand. He walked carefully, the soles of his Docs slick in the dew on the grass, trying not to slosh water on his pant legs.

When he reached his pickup he lowered the buckets to the ground, then rubbed his gloved hands together hard, trying to work the soreness out of them from the bucket handles. It would be a little while before the sun broke over the mountain and he could see well enough to finish up.

While he waited, he leaned over the hood of his pickup and raised the binoculars to his eyes. Over a mile away were the house, the garage, the little barn, the single blue pole light. As the sky lightened, the white picket fence around the front lawn began to emerge. He couldn’t see much behind the place yet. He knew there was a steep hill, and a red-rock arroyo back there.

Inside the house, the family slept. Except for the oldest girl, of course. She was still at the Thunderhead Ranch.

Keeley lowered the field glasses and used the back of his glove to soak up the snot running out of his nose. He would never get used to the cold, he thought. Even when it should be nearly summer, when the grass was coming up and the trees were budding, it still dipped below freezing most nights. Sure, it got warm fast once the sun came out. In fact, it heated up so quickly and with such thin-air intensity that he found himself short of breath at times. It felt as if there were nothing between him and that sun, nothing to mute the heat and light. Like air, for example.