Rough Country

was kind of hoping that nobody knew about us, that she hadn’t mentioned it to anybody. I mean, you know, me going with her had nothing to do with her getting killed, but it looks bad.”
     
     
     
    THE DOOR CREAKED OPEN, and Berni peeked in. She squeaked, “Wendy?”
    Wendy stared at her for a minute, then grinned and said, “How’re you doing?” and she strode over and they wrapped each other up, and they both started crying, and Wendy was stroking Berni’s hair, saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right . . .”
     
     
     
    OUTSIDE, Virgil looked up at the stars; bright and cool, full night now.
    Zoe said, “Well, that worked out really well. I thought they were gonna go for it, right there on the floor.”
    “Got me a little hot when they started kissing each other,” Virgil said. Zoe put her fists on her hips and he held up his hands and said, “Joke, joke. Jesus.”
    “I’m gonna go home and cry,” Zoe said.
    “I’m heading south,” Virgil said.
    “Good night for driving.”
    Virgil put his arm across her shoulders. “Get a few beers or a little weed, listen to some LeAnn Rimes. You’ll be okay.”
    “That a promise?”
    “Well ...” He thought about his three ex-wives. “No. But LeAnn’s always good.”

6
    ZOE PUTTERED around the house, waiting—did the few dishes that she’d left in the sink that morning, vacuumed in the living room, cleaned up the guest bathroom, put out a hand towel. She was neat, tidy—an accountant even in her household chores. The only place she wasn’t an accountant, she thought ruefully, was in her sex life. If she could write off Wendy, life would be easier. Take her as a loss, depreciate her, call her a toxic asset, and unload her at twenty cents on the dollar . . .
    And she thought about Virgil. Virgil was good-looking, in the way she liked men to be—shoulders and arms, big hands, small butt, long hair, cheerful. But that, she thought, was misleading. His attitude and appearance were natural enough. It’s what you got with a good-looking small-town jock who’d grown up with an intact family and enough, but not too much, money. There was nothing faked about his attitude—but beneath the attitude, she thought, there was something cool, watchful, calculating. Hard, maybe.
    An emotional accountant, with brass knuckles.
    She smiled at the thought; and the doorbell rang. She glanced at the mantel clock: eleven o’clock, right on the dot. She popped the door and said, “Hi. Come on in.”
    Margery Stanhope stepped in, let her shoulders slump, and said, “This day . . .”
    “Something, huh? You want a margarita?”
    “Yes, I do. Make it a large one,” Stanhope said.
    “Did you hear about the fight?” Zoe asked, as she led the way to the kitchen.
    “The fight?” Stanhope tossed her purse on the kitchen table.
    “At the Goose . . . Wendy and Berni got into it.”
    Zoe put the margaritas together—a couple ounces of Hacienda del Cristero Blanco, a bit of Cointreau, lime juice; she wetted the rims of the glasses with the lime juice, spilled some salt on the countertop, rolled the rims in it, shook everything with ice, doing it proper—and got Stanhope laughing about the fight.
    “. . . we left them standing there, and she had her tongue so far down Berni’s throat, Berni’s lucky to be alive . . .”
    “Oh, dear; I know how you feel about her,” Stanhope said.
    “Yeah.” Zoe handed Stanhope her glass: “Luck.”
    Stanhope said, “Luck,” and took a sip and said, “Make a damn good margarita . . .”
    They went and sat in the living room and Stanhope said, “So. Virgil.”
    “He’s going to catch whoever did it,” Zoe said.
    “You think it’ll be a guest?” Stanhope asked.
    “We’ve got to hope not—if it is, it’ll all come out, about the gays and so on. You know what the TV stations will do with it.”
    “I keep thinking about Constance. Should I have told Virgil?”
    “If there’s any other indication that the killer’s a guest, we probably have to. If we don’t . . .” Zoe shrugged. “. . . I don’t know. We might be in trouble.”
    “I’m not sure how many people know, other than us,” Stanhope said.
    “Some people do. I’m pretty amazed that Virgil hasn’t heard yet—some of Wendy’s band members must know. Wendy does, for sure,” Zoe said.
    “But that makes it look like the band is involved,” Stanhope said. “They wouldn’t want that.”
    “And we think it makes it look like the lodge is