Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

I fitted on my Stetson and glanced around at the sunlight on her pasture and her horses drinking in a creek that was lined with aspens and cottonwoods.

"Can I take you for breakfast in town?" I asked.

"Doc says you were a Texas Ranger."

"Yeah, before I got hurt. I started off as a city cop in Houston."

She seemed to look past me, into the distance. "I have some coffee on the stove," she said.

Her house was built of lacquered pine, with big windows that looked out on the hills and cathedral ceilings and heavy plank furniture inside and stone fireplaces and pegs in the walls for hats and coats. In the kitchen she poured a cup of coffee for me in a white mug. Out back two llamas were grazing in a lot that was nubbed down to the dirt, and, farther on, up a hill that was still golden with winter grass, a whitetail doe with two fawns stood on the edge of a deep green stand of Douglas fir.

"Are you and Doc pretty tight?" I said, my face deliberately blank.

"Sometimes. In his own mind Doc's still married."

"I don't see Doc in your support group," I said.

"Why?"

"His wife died in an accident. I suspect most people in your group have lost relatives to criminal acts."

"Doc's wife worked for the utility company. They made her fly to Colorado in bad weather. He blames them for her death."

"I never heard him say that," I said.

"Sometimes if you confess your real thoughts, people will be afraid of you," she replied.

But I knew she was talking about herself now and not Doc. He had told me about her husband, a stockbroker from San Francisco who had taken early retirement and bought a ranch in the Jocko Valley six years ago. He and Cleo'd had a six-year-old son. Their lives should have been idyllic. Instead, there were rumors about infidelity and money-laundering back in San Francisco. The husband filed for divorce, accusing his wife of adultery, and won summer visitation rights with his son. He moved to Coeur d'Alene and each June came back to Montana and picked up his boy.

On a July Fourth weekend two years ago, the father's and the son's bodies had been found in the trunk of the father's automobile on the Clearwater National Forest. The automobile had been burned.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she said.

"No reason."

"Doc told you everything that happened?"

"Yes."

"The people who did it were never caught. That's what's hardest to live with. The only consolation I have is that Isaac, that's my son, was shot before the car was burned. At least that's what the coroner said. But sometimes coroners lie to protect the family."

I picked up my hat off the back of a chair and turned it in my hands. I didn't want to look at her eyes.

"There's a rodeo this evening in Stevensville. I'd sure like to take you," I said.

The sun was setting beyond the Bitterroot Mountains when we walked up into the wood stands that overlooked the arena. The air was cool and smelled like hot dogs and desiccated manure and pitch-forked hay. The summer light had climbed high into the sky, and in the distance I could see the humped, purple shapes of the Sapphire Mountains and the shine of the Bitterroot River meandering through cotton-woods whose leaves were fluttering like thousands of green butterflies in the breeze.

"People say you come to Montana once and you never leave. Not unless something is wrong with you," Cleo said.

"It's special, all right," I said. But my attention had shifted away from the softness of the evening to a young woman down by the bucking chutes. She wore suede boots and bleached jeans with a concho belt outside the loops and a T-shirt and a straw cowboy hat that was coned up on the sides; she propped one boot on a white slat fence and watched three wranglers run a bull into the back of a chute.

"You recognize that gal down there?" I said.

"No," Cleo said.

"The biker girl from the bar in Lincoln. She tried to warn us about Doc. She thought he was going to get hurt."

"The one who got in the cashier's face?" Cleo said.