“Seriously, I’m going to kill him and hide the body.”

“How long?” she demanded, though she smiled.

“He says a few days. But he doesn’t know about his impending murder.”

“How about tomorrow morning? After it warms up a little bit. Come to my house and we’ll ride along the river.”

“Is that what you really want?”

“I think it would be very neighborly of me.”

He sighed. “All right. But don’t laugh at his jokes. It makes me crazy.”

Seven

Walt gave Shelby and Luke a little time alone on the bar’s porch. Not too much time, though. He walked outside noisily. He briefly glared at Luke, just to see if he could make him tremble in guilt and fear. To Luke’s credit, he didn’t. But he did pull his arm from around Shelby’s shoulders slowly, reluctantly. So, there it was. Walt had suspected.

“I’m headed out,” Walt said. “Coming now or later, Shelby?”

“I’ll go with you, Uncle Walt.”

On the way home Walt said to Shelby, “I bet those Riordan boys were a handful to raise.” Shelby only sighed. Dreamily, Walt thought.

Once Shelby was dropped off at home, Walt said he’d be going over to Muriel’s place for a nightcap. He had a couple of things in the Tahoe already—a surprise for Muriel.

He loved that Muriel knew the sound of his Tahoe engine, his boots on the wooden planks of her porch, his knock. “Come on in, Walt.” It gave him a crazy lift, that there couldn’t possibly be any other caller. He walked in, shifted his stuff to under one arm so he could greet the pups, who would not leave him alone until they had a piece of him. She was wearing a comfy sweat suit, sitting on her bed, what looked suspiciously like a script in her lap and her reading glasses balanced on her nose. “What have you got there?” she asked.

“A little entertainment I didn’t want to get into alone.” He put a portable DVD player beside her on the bed along with four DVDs he’d gone to a great deal of trouble to find. Not so many of her films were available on DVD.

She fanned through them. “Oh, Walt!” she exclaimed. “What did you do?” Then she flipped one aside. “Not this one. I’m naked in this one.”

“Muriel, I’ve seen you naked. It’s a brilliant sight.”

“I know, but you’ve only seen me naked in the dark while we’re trying to keep the dogs off the bed. In this I’m naked with an actor, a director, an entire film crew and I think everyone from janitorial to the roach coach that brings lunch.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Is that hard to do? Get naked like that?”

She made a face. “You won’t get this, but it’s easier for me to do that than it was to get naked in front of you. I couldn’t care less what those people think of me—it was just work. It was right for the script or I would have declined.” She shrugged and added, “Plus, my parents were dead.”

He put a little kiss on her lips. “It was hard to take your clothes off for me?”

“It was,” she admitted. “I wanted to live up to your expectations. I’m getting better at it since you decided to be insatiable. Are you sure you’re sixty-two? You certainly haven’t slowed down much.”

“I feel twenty years younger with you. And you not only lived up to my expectations, you pretty much blew my mind.” He picked up the rejected DVD. “Let’s watch this one first.”

It made her laugh.

“Is that a script?” he asked, glancing at the sheaf of pages she held.

“Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s crap.”

“Good. Muriel, you have to start coming to Jack’s for dinner with us. It’s getting more interesting by the day. You wouldn’t want to miss it.”

“Really?” she asked, sitting up and crossing her legs in front of her.

“My innocent little Shelby has picked out a man. I’m sure she’s made a rash choice, he’s too much for her—a thirty-eight-year-old roughneck who flew Black Hawks for almost twenty years. He looks like he could take apart a big gang of Huns with his bare hands. But when he looks at her, sins of many varieties glitter in his eyes. And I scare the hell out of him—a thing of beauty. Well, tonight he showed up with his younger brother, who was a surprise visitor—better-looking, funnier, a lot more socially acute, more sure of himself around Shelby…” He laughed. “Almost caused the roughneck to take his own life. You don’t want to miss too much more of this stuff.”

“Shelby picked out this guy?” she asked. “This older guy?”

“Oh, there was no question about it. I suspect it was almost the second she saw him.”

“But he’s a roughneck. How do you feel about that?”

Walt leaned over and took off his boots. He straightened and looked at her with those scary general’s eyes. “If he does anything to hurt her, I’m going to kill him.”

Muriel shook her head and pulled the DVD out of the sleeve and loaded it in the portable player. “Shelby must be very grateful,” she said facetiously.

He climbed up next to her, leaning back against the wall, stretching out his long legs, shooing first Buff and then Luce off the bed. “I think she’s secretly enjoying his fear. I can’t wait for this movie.”

“It’s a chick flick,” she said.

“Clint Eastwood’s in it,” he said, settling back. “I like Clint Eastwood.”

“You won’t like him in this. He’s romantic. He doesn’t blow anyone’s brains out or say ‘Make my day’ even once.”

“But you took your clothes off in front of him. I want to see the look on his face.”

“Well,” Muriel said, “if you look very closely you might see an expression that approaches oblivion. He’s seen a huge number of actresses in the nude, and remains very much in control of his emotions. He wasn’t tempted in the least.”

“Poor fool.” Walt pushed Play.

“Are you determined to watch this?” she asked.

“I can’t wait.”

“This is going to bore me to death,” she said tiredly, leaning back against her pillows and yawning.

“Want me to wake you up for the naked part?” Walt asked her.

“Wake me up when you’re naked,” she said, yawning again.

Mel received a very important phone call at the clinic. She hung up, took a deep breath, looked at her watch: 10:00 a.m. She picked up the phone and called Shelby, but there was no answer at the ranch—they could be out riding. She called Brie. “Hi. I need a sitter. I can try to find Jack if you’re—”

“I just saw him leave the bar in his truck,” Brie said. “I’ll come and get the kids, how’s that?”

“Thanks. I have an errand and could be a few hours.”

After hanging up, she went into Doc Mullins’s office. “I did it,” she said. “I got a county rehab placement for Cheryl Chreighton.”

“How’d you manage that?” he asked, impressed in spite of himself.

“It wasn’t easy. I had to make a hundred phone calls. It would have been infinitely easier if she had committed a crime and could blame it on booze. She could have gotten treatment in sentencing. This was way harder.”

“She have any idea you did this?”

“Nope,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t want to give her time to think about it. She’d just get drunk and change her mind. But if I blindside her, get her over there and they dry her out and get her in the program, she has a chance.”

“Exactly one,” he stressed.

“Yeah, I’ll never be able to pull that off again if she relapses. So—I’m going over there. I’ll take your truck and leave you the Hummer for patients.”

“Jack’s truck would be a better ride,” he said.

“Can’t do that,” she insisted. Jack and Cheryl had history. There was a time, long before Mel, that Cheryl had a fierce and embarrassing crush on Jack, and Jack had to put her down rather harshly. “I can’t get Jack or even his truck involved. It might send the wrong message. Besides, I keep reliving that nightmare of riding to the hospital in the back of your pickup with a patient, holding a bag of Ringer’s over my head. I’ll take your truck and leave you the Hummer,” she said, holding out her hand for the keys.

“Good luck,” he said, handing them over.

After Brie had taken the kids back to her RV, Mel drove a few short blocks to the house she now knew to be the Chreightons’. It was in disrepair, which several of the houses on this block seemed to be. People tended to get used to things like peeling paint, sagging roofs. Plus, this was not a family with money. No one worked but Dad, and he only worked when there was work, piecemeal, probably with no benefits.

She knocked on the door and it was a long time before a morbidly obese woman answered. She had never seen Cheryl Chreighton’s mother before, which in a town this size was incredibly strange, but it was apparent why—the woman had probably not been out of the house for many months, perhaps years. She had a cigarette in her yellowed fingers and a frown on her face. She answered the door with a barking hack. Mel gave her time to catch her wheezing breath.

“Is Cheryl at home?” she asked.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Mel Sheridan,” she said. “I’m the nurse-practitioner and midwife. I work with Doc Mullins.”

“You’re the one,” she said, looking Mel up and down. “Jack’s woman.”

“Yeah, that’s me. So. She here?”

“Sleeping it off,” the woman said, turning to waddle back into the house, leaving Mel to follow.

“Can you get her up for me?” Mel asked, letting herself in despite the lack of invitation.

“I can try,” she said. Mel followed the woman into the little kitchen, which was obviously where she had set up camp. There was a collection of newspapers and magazines, stained coffee cups and empty Coke cans, an overflowing ashtray, an opened box of doughnuts, a small TV sitting on the counter. Mrs. Chreighton went into a room off the kitchen, a crude add-on in the back of the house. The door didn’t close, didn’t seem to have a mechanism for closing—there was a hole where the doorknob should be.

Mel heard her in there, yelling, “Cheryl! Cheryl! Cheryl! There’s some woman here to see you! Cheryl!” After a bit of that, there was some muffled protest. Mrs. Chreighton came back into the kitchen, went back to her chair, which sagged under her weight.

It was a household of addiction, Mel thought. Mom is hooked on food and cigarettes, Cheryl’s hooked on alcohol, and Dad’s drug of choice was anyone’s guess. He was probably hooked on these two women and their problems.

Cheryl appeared in the doorway of her bedroom, wearing yesterday’s clothes, straggly hair hanging in her face, her eyes swollen and barely open. Mel took a breath. “Got a minute?” she asked.

“What for?” Cheryl asked.

“Let’s step outside and talk,” Mel said. She walked out the front door, leaving Cheryl to follow. Mel stood on the sidewalk in front of the house until Cheryl came out and stood on the front step. “How drunk are you right now?” Mel asked her.

“I’m okay,” she answered, rubbing her fingers across her scalp, threading fingers through her limp and greasy hair.

“You have any interest in getting sober? Staying sober?”

“I do sometimes. I don’t drink a lot of the time…”

“I can get you in treatment, Cheryl. Get you detoxed and cleaned up and in a program. You’d get twenty-eight days of sobriety therapy and a real good chance of going straight, off the booze. But you have to decide right now.”