Breaking Point

the house. He thought she looked lovely: blond, slim, compact, with green eyes and nice cheekbones.
    “Hey,” he said, cranking the trailer hitch up and over the ball of his truck.
    “You saw Butch Roberson?” she asked.
    He stood and wiped away a drip of sweat that coursed down the side of his face from his hatband. “How’d you know that already?”
    “Dulcie told me. She said you called it in.”
    “Yup.”
    “Joe, did you hear what happened?”
    “Some of it,” he said, repeating the reports he’d heard over the radio.
    “Do they think Butch had something to do with it?”
    “That’s my impression,” Joe said. “It’s still too early to say. I’m not sure anyone knows anything yet.”
    “How did he seem to you?” she asked, concerned.
    Joe shrugged. “Strange. Different. Spooked, I guess.”
    “But he didn’t tell you anything? He didn’t confess?”
    “Nope. And he didn’t shoot me, either.”
    “I don’t think that’s funny, Joe.”
    He grinned.
    “Hannah is inside,” Marybeth said, gesturing toward the house. “I haven’t talked with her yet. She doesn’t want to talk. I don’t know what’s going on at their house, but apparently law enforcement is there questioning Pam.”
    “Man,” Joe said, shaking his head. It was strange to be so close to people who were apparently under suspicion.
    “I feel so bad for Hannah,” Marybeth said, as if reading his mind. “I don’t think she really knows what’s going on.”
    “Maybe I’ll know more in a while,” Joe said, telling her his intention to go back up into the mountains to Aspen Highlands. “I guess I didn’t realize they’d bought a lot up there.”
    “Pam mentioned it to me,” Marybeth said. “She said they’d scraped together enough to buy some land to build their retirement home. I don’t think they’ve started building anything yet, though. I don’t think they can afford to. The construction business hasn’t exactly been booming around here, as you know.”
    “Could be worse,” Joe said. “They could be trying to restore a historic hotel.”
    Marybeth’s glare caught him off guard, and he realized he’d hit a nerve.
    “I was just joking,” he said, feeling his ears flush hot.
    “I’m not amused,” she said.
    “I’ll call when I know something,” he said, giving her a good-bye kiss that she returned without much enthusiasm.
    “Hannah’s staying for dinner and maybe for the night,” Marybeth said. “When my shift is over, I’ll come back and feed everyone.”
    “Sheridan and April are home?”
    “They will be soon. Sheridan gets off at six, and April’s off at six-thirty. Sheridan’s supposed to pick April up.”
    “Let me know if you need anything,” he said. “And go ahead and start dinner without me.”
    “Ah,” she said. “I hoped you’d be home.”
    “That’s the way it goes,” he said, climbing into the cab of his pickup. Daisy was already there.
    —
    J OE TOOK H AZELTON R OAD up into the Bighorns to Dull Knife Reservoir. Dust hung in the air on the gravel road—there had been plenty of traffic before he got there—and the waning sun fused through it to give the scene a burnished orange cast. Trees closed in and opened into mountain meadows and closed back in again, and he regretted his ill-timed joke with Marybeth about the hotel. It wasn’t necessary, and he didn’t harbor any resentment toward her or the prospect of the project. In fact, he trusted her business acumen and admired her tenacity, and sometimes wished he didn’t love his job and these mountains so much, so he could focus his ambition on enterprises that would better benefit his family.
    “Remind me to apologize,” he asked Daisy. Daisy looked back as if she understood.
    —
    H E TURNED OFF the gravel road to a graded two-track at a sign in the trees announcing the Aspen Highlands development. The road plunged down into a wooded swale, then leveled out at the bottom as it got closer to the reservoir. Dull Knife had been created years before by damming the Middle Fork of the Powder River and flooding the creek basin. A smattering of cabins had been built on the east and west sides, but Aspen Highlands was obviously more preplanned. The roads through it were wide and straight and graded, and there were already a dozen or so homes built on two-acre lots in the trees.
    The Roberson property was easy to find because of the collection of law enforcement vehicles he could see parked in the grass just