'You been good to Pete and all but…' She didn't finish. Her eyes looked receded, empty. 'I'm gonna move away. This town ain't ever been any good for us.'
'I don't think that's the answer.'
Then I saw the anger bloom in her face, past the fearful restraint that normally governed her life.
'Yeah? Well, why don't you just raise your own son and leave mine alone for a while?' she said.
At six that evening Mary Beth called from Denver.
'Am I going to see you again?' I asked. My throat was dry, my tone vainly ironic and preemptive, the receiver held too tightly against my ear.
'I can't come back there for a while.'
'I can get a flight to Denver… Mary Beth? Are you there?'
'Yes… I mean, yes, I'm here.'
'Did you hear what I said?' But I already knew the answer, and I could feel a weakness, a failing in my heart as though weevil worms had passed through it.
'Some people here are still upset about the way things went in Deaf Smith,' she said.
'With you and me?'
'That's part of it.'
'I think the problem is Brian Wilcox. Not you, not me, not the shooting of Sammy Mace and his bodyguard. I think Wilcox is poisoning the well everywhere he goes and your people are overlooking it to save the investigation.'
'Maybe that's true. But I can't do anything about it.'
I could hear her breathing in the silence.
'Can you give me a telephone number?' I said.
'We're leaving tonight for a meeting in Virginia.'
'Well, I hope it works out for you,' I said.
'What? What did you say?'
'Nothing. I never did well inside organizations. I hope you do. That's all I meant.'
In the silence I could hear her breath against the receiver.
'Mary Beth?'
'Yes?'
'I'll need you to testify at Lucas's trial. About the cans and bottles those other deputies lost or destroyed.'
'It's a bad time to bring that up.'
'Bad time? That's what's on your mind? It's a bad time?'
'Good-bye, Billy Bob.'
After I hung up the receiver, I stared at the telephone in the fading light through the window, as though I could will it to ring again. Then I walked outside, under an empty dome of yellow sky, into a sand-bitten wind that shredded leaves from the chinaberry tree. I got into my Avalon, the wind buffering the windows, and drove to Pete's house.
'You're by yourself?' I asked.