In Plain Sight

Joe had to proceed cautiously here. In fact, it had been about Sheridan’s sleepover. He kept thinking his daughter was in over her head with the Scarletts, but that she would never admit it. Something was brewing besides coffee, he thought.

“Just a lot of things,” Joe said.

He clamped on his cowboy hat and cinched the belt on his bathrobe against the morning chill and was three strides down the cracked concrete pathway in his front yard when he realized he was being watched. He froze, and felt the hair on his neck stand on end.

He looked quickly at the road. There were no vehicles on it, and no one was parked. Wolf Mountain, still in shadow, loomed to the north, dominating the view. Then he felt more than saw something in his peripheral vision. Something big and black, hanging above the ground. Joe snapped his head to the side.

Then to the other side.

For a moment, he thought he was surrounded and he wished he’d brought his weapon.

He realized what it was, and his stomach surged and he felt sick.

Four elk heads—the Town Elk—had been mounted on the posts of his picket fence, facing inward toward his lawn. Toward him. The tongue of the big bull elk stuck out the side of its mouth, pink and dry. All eight cold black eyes were open.

Joe tried to swallow, but couldn’t.

Whoever had done this had hit him where he lived in more ways than one. Not only had he killed and beheaded four popular animals in Saddlestring that he was responsible for, but he’d brought the heads out to his own home and stuck them on posts to taunt him. To humiliate him. To frighten him and his family. He was telling Joe nothing was off-limits, and that he didn’t fear or respect him. He was bringing it right to him, and shoving it in his face in front of his family.

He was disgusted as well as angry. Who in the hell was he up against who would do something like this?

“Joe?” Marybeth was at the door.

His first impulse was to run back and physically turn her around before she could see the heads.

“Oh My God,” she whispered. “Joe . . .”

He was too late.

In the distance, above the thumping of his own heart and Marybeth’s gasps, he could hear an engine start up. They were being watched by someone, all right.

Unfortunately, Wolf Mountain was covered by a spider’s web of old logging roads. Unless he knew specifically where the vehicle had been parked, he would never be able to track the driver or drivers down.

“Who is doing this to us?” Marybeth asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Joe, what can we do about it?”

“I don’t know that either,” he said.

“I hope you get rid of those things before Lucy gets up and sees them.”

Joe nodded.

“This is awful,” she said. “It’s getting worse.”

“Yup.”

“What if he doesn’t stop?”

Joe went to Marybeth and took her in his arms.

“Joe, what if he doesn’t?” she said into his shoulder.

“He’ll stop,” Joe said, with no confidence in his words.

A FEW MINUTES later, Marybeth came out the front door again to find her husband walking across the lawn in his robe, cowboy hat, and boots, holding a severed elk head aloft by the antlers.

“Come in and get dressed, Joe,” she said, distressed. “Look at yourself. What if someone drives by and sees you?”

Instead of answering, Joe held the head up. “This really pisses me off, Marybeth.”

“Come in, Joe . . .”

JOE WAITED FOR the dispatcher to patch him through to the sheriff, who was having morning coffee with the rest of the “morning men” at the Saddlestring Burg-O-Pardner.

He drawled, “Sheriff McLanahan. What can I do you for, Joe?”

“Somebody cut the heads off of four elk and stuck them on my fence,” Joe said. “They were the Town Elk. All four of them.”

“Jeez,” McLanahan said. “I was beginning to really like those critters.”

“They’re all dead now. You want to come look at them?”

“Naw,” McLanahan said. “That ain’t necessary. I seen plenty of elk heads before. Shoot, they’re on just about every wall in town!”

“Now they’re in my yard.”

“That’s not very neighborly.”

“No, it’s not very neighborly,” Joe said, loud enough for Marybeth to hear. She looked up and grimaced. “Sheriff, it wasn’t neighbors. It was the same guy who pinned that Miller’s weasel on my door. He’s upping the ante.”

“Are you sure it was the same guy? How do you know that?”

“It has to be.”

“So you’re speculating,” McLanahan said, pronouncing it “speck-u-late-un.”

“Who else could it be?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

“You ‘don’t rightly know,’” Joe repeated, feeling his neck flush hot.

Marybeth stood in the doorway, listening to Joe, shaking her head as if to say, This valley is getting too small for us.