Rough Country

involved, and we don’t want that .”
    They sipped at their drinks for a minute, thinking, and then Zoe sighed and said, “If nothing comes up, I’ll probably tell him when he gets back. I’ll just tell him that we don’t know anything about it, but it was another murder, and she did stay up here. . . .”
    “Mention the band,” Stanhope said. “The more he looks at the band, as the cause, then the less it looks like the lodge.”
    “Mmmm.”
    “So what I want to know,” Stanhope said, “is your position, if it does involve the lodge.”
    “I’m ninety-five percent go-ahead,” Zoe said. “It’d have to be really awful before I’d back out. I’m already moving money, I’m talking to Wells Fargo about a loan, and they’re telling me it’s no problem. I’ll continue the accounting business—I’ll move Mary up to partner, and let her run the office—while I set up the lodge.”
    “Gonna have a lot of balls in the air,” Stanhope said.
    “What else have I got to do? I’ve got no life,” Zoe said.
    “Somebody’ll come along,” Stanhope said.
    “Maybe I ought to jump in bed with Virgil,” Zoe said. “It’d never work out, but maybe I could have a baby before it blew up.”
    “There’s an idea,” Stanhope said, her tone dry as sandpaper. “A lodge and an accounting business and a baby and no husband to help out . . .”
    “Ah, I’m not going to jump in bed with Virgil,” Zoe said.
     
     
     
    THEY SAT for another minute, then Stanhope said, “Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t have anything to do with McDill getting shot.”
    “Margery!”
    “Well . . . I wouldn’t tell. But you’ve got this thing about Wendy, and I guess some people at the lodge knew Wendy stayed over with Erica the night before she was shot,” Stanhope said. “You could’ve heard, and I know you can shoot, because I’ve seen you do it.”
    “I didn’t shoot Erica McDill,” Zoe said.
    “And you didn’t have anything to do with Constance . . .”
    “No! God! Margery!”
    “I’m sorry. I believe you. Even if I didn’t . . . I’d let it go. You’re a good person, Zoe.”
    “I was down at the U that weekend, with some friends. I didn’t even know Constance was dead until I got back up here.”
    “I’m sorry,” Stanhope said again. “I just . . .” She rubbed her forehead. “This whole thing . . .”
    She held up her glass, looking through the cut glass at the ceiling light, and asked, “You got another one of these?”

    WENDY ASHBACH had a new forty-two-inch LCD television and Blu-ray DVD player and she and Berni were halfway through Pretty Woman when her father banged on the trailer door and pulled it open and asked, “Whatcha doing?”
    “Movie,” Wendy said, through a mouthful of microwave popcorn. Wendy was lying on the couch, with Berni sitting on the floor, her back to the couch. Her father came in, uninvited, waved at his daughter’s legs. Wendy pulled her knees up to make a space at the other end of the couch, and Slibe Ashbach dropped into the opening.
    “What’s this shit?” he asked, looking at the TV.
    “Richard Gere and Julia Roberts,” Wendy said.
    “Oh, yeah.” He stared at it for a minute, then asked, “Doesn’t she blow him or something?”
    “You don’t see anything,” Wendy said. She reached out with the remote and paused the movie. “So what’s up with you?”
    “Tell me about the cop,” Ashbach said.
    “I only talked to him for five minutes,” Wendy said. “He’s a cop.”
    “What’s he think?”
    “He doesn’t know what he thinks. Some people think the murder was because McDill was taking over her advertising agency and might fire people; some think it was because of a gay thing at the Eagle Nest, a sex thing. And he wanted to know if it was because of me. I told him it wasn’t, and gave him my alibi, and he said he’d check it; which is okay with me.”
    Ashbach looked closely at them, at the scratches on Berni’s forehead, and Wendy’s bruised eye socket, and asked, “What happened to you guys?”
    “Me and Berni got in a fistfight down at the Goose,” Wendy said.
    “She slept with McDill, night before last. Night before she got killed,” Berni said.
    “What? Does the cop know?”
    “Yeah, he asked me about it, with Berni standing there. That’s what set her off,” Wendy said. “She hit me right in the eye, before I had a chance to say a thing.”
    “Witch. I’m gonna have nightmares, about you and McDill,”