53
Sheriff Kinney considered the papers before him sorted in their various stacks. He picked one up and read a few lines. It was a letter from his father’s sister, his aunt, from a time when people wrote letters. It seemed all about the weather and he set it down again. He swiveled in the chair and looked out the window at the shallow field of snowfall and the white world beyond.
“Out in this in that goddam car of yours,” he said.
“You ask me something, Sheriff?” his deputy said from the outer office.
“What? No. Talking to myself.”
The deputy appeared in the doorway holding the coffeepot. “You want any more of this or should I toss it?”
“Go ahead and toss it and go on home before this gets worse.”
The deputy looked out the window. “What do I care about a little snow, Sheriff?”
“Well, why don’t you go on out and make a snowman then?”
The deputy stood with the coffeepot.
Kinney looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Donny.” He gestured vaguely at the papers before him.
“That’s all right, Sheriff. Your dad sure kept track of things, didn’t he.”
“He sure did.”
“You look like a bookkeeper there, or a lawyer.”
“I feel like both.” He randomly lifted a paper and it was the deed to a cemetery plot for himself. “A man never knows how many pieces of paper he collects in his life because there’s never any cause to look at them all together until he’s dead. And then it’s somebody else and not him who gets the job of looking at them, and it is a hopeless task, Deputy. Hopeless and thankless. Every man knows this and yet every man still saves up all his goddam papers. Now why is that?”
“I guess a man can’t help himself, Sheriff. I guess it’s his nature.”
He stared at the deputy. “I reckon,” he said. “Now go on home, Donny.”
“Want me to wash that mug?”
“Thanks, Donny.”
He leaned back in the swivel chair and set his bootheels on the edge of the desk and he looked at the picture of his daughter there on the desk. Josephine on that good roan pony, Laddy, the reins so easy in her hands. Sixteen on that day and she’d taken the blue ribbon by five entire seconds.
A junior now at the university in Boulder studying journalism. A good way to see the world, she said. As if the world were something her father and mother couldn’t imagine. She had not known the girl they found up there on the mountain trail, Kelly Ann Baird. But people at the school remembered when she’d gone missing. A pretty white college girl just vanishing. It was always news.
He wanted to call Josephine every day but he didn’t. She wouldn’t have it. The closer he wanted to keep her, the farther away she wanted to go. That’s what being a father was.
He stared at the papers and thought of the ranch and his life there as a boy, the only child for many years until Billy came along. Now he’d done the math and there was no way to keep the ranch without selling his house up here and moving back down there and nobody wanted to move back down there, least of all his wife. He’d sell the ranch, and Billy would get some money and move on, maybe for good. Grant and his son would move on too, you couldn’t worry about that. Grant was a smart man who’d once run his own construction company, a good man, now a man who’d suffered the most unthinkable thing. You could help but you couldn’t help him, not really.
His phone sounded the tone that told him he had a text message. He picked it up and it was Billy again. That made three. He read the message and set the phone down again and stared at it, and while he was staring at it the phone sounded its note once again, and he picked it up and read the message. But whereas the others had been the names of highways and passes and county roads, here was a single word that by itself made no sense to him: blanket. He scrolled to see if he’d missed something. He waited for the rest of the message, but it never came. He looked again out the window at the snow. He looked at his daughter on the horse.
When his boots hit the floor his deputy called out to see if he was all right.
Kinney gathered the two-way from the desk, his sheriff’s hat and jacket from the coat tree, and stepped into the outer office. Donny stood in his jacket and gloves near the front door.
“What’s going on, Sheriff?”
“I see you got your snow boots on.”
“I saw it was snowing.”
“Did you already tell Linda you were coming home?”
“Just sent her a text.”
“All right. You can call her from the road.”
“Where we going, Sheriff?”
“Loveland Pass.”
“Loveland Pass?” The deputy glanced through the panes of glass at the tumbling storm.
“I thought you didn’t care about no snow, Deputy.”
“I don’t, Sheriff. But that’s Summit County.”
“Is that a fact?”
The deputy tugged at his gloves. He adjusted his hat.
Kinney looked at him. “I just gotta check something out, Donny, and I need your help.”
“Hell, Sheriff. You don’t have to ask for it.”