Page 25 of The River We Remember

“You talked him down?” Brody asked.

J.P. shook his head. “When he saw me, he, I don’t know, changed his mind. He smashed the bottle against the wall, took off the rope, and got down from the chair. He told me that if I ever said anything to anybody, he’d beat me until I was bloody. So I never did.”

“Except your mother,” Brody said.

“That’s right. But not until yesterday, when you found him in the river. I figured maybe he’d drowned himself.”

Brody looked toward Marta. The window was behind her and the breeze that came through and blew over her carried to Brody the pleasant fragrance of lilac soap and bath powder. “Do you have any idea why your husband might have tried to kill himself?”

She shook her head. “He kept things to himself.”

Brody felt as if he was torturing them with his questions, but he had one more that needed asking. From his pocket, he drew the sapphire ring he’d found in Quinn’s clothing on the riverbank. He held it out to Marta.

“Have you ever seen this ring before?”

She stared at it blankly. “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. It’s lovely.”

“It was in the pocket of your husband’s pants,” Brody told her.

“I don’t know what it was doing there. As I said, I’ve never seen it before.”

“J.P.?” Brody said.

The kid shook his head. “Nope.”

Brody returned the ring to his pocket and decided that was enough for one day.

“Thank you for your time and your patience. You’ve been helpful.” He stood. “I’ll send Fred in, so that you can discuss the burial.”

Marta Quinn’s blue eyes were soft, wet, confused. “When…?”

“I’ll release your husband’s body as soon as the autopsy is finished. That will probably be later today. You can schedule the funeral whenever you think is best.” He looked to J.P. “Your dad’s pickup is still out at Inkpaduta Bend.”

“Okay if we drive it back home?”

Brody told him it was.

“I’ll get one of our hired men to help me,” J.P. said with no enthusiasm. “Sometime this afternoon or this evening.”

Brody left them and found Doc Porter waiting for him in the hallway outside.

“Ready for me to begin?” the coroner asked.

“He’s all yours,” Brody said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

YOUNG SCOTT MADISON stood back and admired his work. He’d lashed together the frame of a lean-to using twine and several long cottonwood branches he’d scrounged from the banks of the Alabaster. He tested the joints, shook them as if a fierce wind were attacking, and he was pleased with the way they held. He stepped into the middle of the structure and sat down. Although he was on the grass of the yard behind the Wagon Wheel, his family’s café, seated under the shade of an enormous oak, in his mind’s eye, the lean-to was on a mountainside, with a clear stream running nearby and tall pines rising all around him except right in front of his shelter, where the vista was clear and he could see a hundred miles. He’d seen a postcard once, a photo taken from the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado. He imagined himself on that mountaintop, looking down at the plains stretching away before him, a place where he could just about see the whole world.

His dreaming was interrupted by the grrrrr of a small engine approaching, and he knew what that meant. A moment later, Del Wolfe appeared on his homemade motorbike and shot up the gravel drive to the yard, where Scott sat inside the lean-to. Del was tall and thin, almost a year older than Scott, but in the same grade, which, come September, would be their freshman year in high school. He had jet-black hair, always in need of cutting. It hung down over his forehead so that Del’s dark eyes seemed to peer from under the shadow of an awning.

“Hey, Madman,” Del cried, killing the little engine he’d scavenged from an old lawn mower. He hopped off and laid the motorbike in the grass of the yard. “Did you hear?”

“Hear what, Wolfman?”