“Depressed over your daughter’s death?”
“I don’t know. I can’t think.” She sat down at a wood table, the hairbrush still in her hand. There was a vase of cut flowers on the table and another one on the kitchen windowsill. Her face looked freshly made up, her mouth glossy with lipstick that was too bright for her complexion, the streaks of brown in her hair full of tiny lights. “Nothing makes sense to me. Did this man Surrette kill our daughter?”
“Evidently, nobody saw her leave the Wigwam. Would she leave with somebody she didn’t know?”
“She was seventeen. A girl that age has no judgment.”
He sat down across from her. “Had she ever gone off with guys she didn’t know?”
“I tried to talk her into going to Alateen. She wouldn’t do it. Sometimes she’d come home at ten P.M. Sometimes she’d get dropped off at ten the next morning.”
“Would she go off with strangers, Felicity?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Who were her friends?”
“Druggies, boys on the make, kids who wanted access to her money.”
“Was she promiscuous?”
“Today they all are,” Felicity replied.
Clete looked around the cabin. The walls were pine, the floors constructed from railroad ties, the stone fireplace outfitted with steel hooks for cook pots. “What do y’all use this place for?”
“Hunting during big-game season. When Angel was younger, she had her friends out. We had ice cream parties on the bank of the stream.”
“Were Caspian and your daughter close?”
“I don’t know who Caspian is anymore.”
“Pardon?”
“When I met him, he was a different person. He had a brilliant mind for figures. He wanted to create a high-tech company and compete in the defense industry. He borrowed a half million dollars in start-up money from Love. Then he started gambling in Vegas and Atlantic City and Puerto Rico. Here’s the funny part. At the blackjack tables, he could count cards coming out of a six-deck shoe. He got banned from several casinos. Then they caught on to what he was doing.”
“I don’t understand. You said they caught on to him
after he was banned.”
“They realized if they let him stay at the table, he would lose everything he had won and drop ten to thirty thousand on top of it. How sick is that?”
“That’s why they do it,” Clete said.
“Do what?”
“That’s why they gamble. They want to lose. They like to punish themselves. They want to feel there’s a cosmic plot working against them. Go into the bar at the track after the seventh race. It’s full of losers. They’re happy as hogs rolling in slop.”
She stared at him blankly. “I feel like an idiot.”
“Because you never figured out your husband?”
“Because I married him.”
“My ex gave our savings to an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Boulder,” Clete said. “This guru made people take off their clothes at poetry readings. My ex thought he was a holy man and I was a drunk cooze hound. Unfortunately, in my case, she was right.”
Felicity propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. For the first time since he had come into the room, she smiled. “You always talk like that to women?”
“Only the ones I trust.”