Torey Hayden

Innocent Foxes

A novel

Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

About the Author

Also by Torey Hayden

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Three days after Jamie Lee died, Dixie almost got run down by a movie star. It was a deep, warm-as-breath August evening and Dixie was walking down Seventh Street on her way back from getting a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise at the Kwik-Way. She’d just crossed over at the corner by the United Methodist Church when the pick-up truck appeared, careering wildly down the middle of the road. Abruptly it swerved, mounted the kerb and came straight at her. Dixie screamed and ran for safety up the steps of the church. Brakes squealed and then there was a slithery hiss of rubber on grass before the final jarring crunch as the truck came to rest against a brick pillar at the base of the steps.

Three men were crammed into the cab of the pick-up and they all roared with laughter. In fact, they seemed to be laughing so hard that at first they found it hard to get the doors open. When the driver finally emerged, Dixie recognized him immediately. Spencer Scott.

‘You almost killed me!’ she shrieked, and burst into tears.

The door opened on the passenger side and the others spilled out. They were all canyon folk. They were all drunk too and seemed to find the idea of running her over hilarious.

Dixie couldn’t stop crying long enough to speak. It was their laughter that did it. That, and Jamie Lee and everything. She’d been coping pretty well over this last week, but this was just the last straw.

‘You aren’t hurt, are you?’ Spencer Scott managed to ask, when he’d finally caught his breath from laughing.

‘You near enough scared the life out of me, that’s what,’ Dixie sobbed.

He rooted in the pocket of his jeans and produced a red bandana handkerchief, the kind that tourists buy because they think it looks Western. He offered it to her.

What was she supposed to do with that? She was hardly going to get snot on a movie star’s handkerchief.

‘It’s clean,’ he said with an edge of annoyance.

Well, of course it was clean. Did he think she’d assume he would carry a dirty handkerchief? Oh dear Jesus, why did she have to be bawling in front of Spencer Scott, of all people?

Beyond him, the other two men were checking for damage to the pick-up. One climbed into the driver’s seat, backed it up a little, got out again and examined the dented grille.

Spencer Scott smiled. ‘I’m sorry we frightened you. No hard feelings?’

For the first time Dixie dared to lift her head enough to look at him properly. He was only an arm’s length away and she could see everything about him. He looked better in person than on the screen, if that was possible. Older and wrinklier, but Dixie liked that. His California-perfect features looked more manly when a bit of living showed. The only surprise was that he was so short. She’d heard that about him from other folks who’d been up close to him, but she still hadn’t expected she’d be taller.

‘Come on, Spence,’ one of the men called. ‘It’s OK. Nothing’s happened.’

He turned to go.

‘Hey!’ Dixie cried. ‘Something did too happen! You nearly hit me! And look at what you done to that pillar. You’re drunk. You shouldn’t be in a car. You can’t just drive off. We need to call the police.’

Spencer Scott smiled disarmingly, his handsome face focusing only on her. ‘We don’t need the police,’ he said chummily. ‘This isn’t anything really.’

‘It is to me! And it will be to the United Methodist Church too. They don’t got money to spend fixing what some drunk driver does,’ Dixie replied.

His eyes were just as blue as in the pictures and they twinkled when he smiled. ‘The police have more important matters to worry about. We don’t want to keep them from solving real crimes, do we?’

‘But you almost killed me! You could’ve, you know. If you’d been coming any faster …’

Still the smile, still the twinkly blue eyes that had looked at all those beautiful Hollywood actresses and were now looking only at her. ‘But you’re all right, aren’t you?’ he said. His voice had the warm certainty of a Jedi knight using the Force. ‘You aren’t hurt.’ Then without warning, he clasped Dixie’s hand and kissed it. ‘And you will forgive me for frightening you, yes?’

Without even intending to, Dixie nodded.

‘And I’ll let you keep the handkerchief.’

When Dixie got home with the groceries, she didn’t say anything about Spencer Scott to Billy. He was watching TV and the last thing he’d want was to be interrupted by talk about the canyon folk. Instead, Dixie put the groceries in the kitchen and then went upstairs to finish packing away Jamie Lee’s stuff.

It was amazing the number of things a baby could acquire in just nine months. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Dixie folded up each T-shirt and little pair of overalls before laying them carefully into the cardboard box. She paused over the tiny grey jogging shoes. It had been silly to buy them for a baby too young to walk and they’d cost way too much for something just for show, but Dixie had loved to see Jamie Lee wearing them. She brought them up to her face, cupping them in her hands, hoping to find Jamie’s scent lingering, but she smelled only rubber, glue and canvas. Kissing them tenderly, she laid them in the box with the other things.

Mama had told her to get rid of it all. She’d said to pick one or two things to remember Jamie Lee by and then send the rest of it to the Rescue Mission. Dixie didn’t want to do that. Giving Jamie Lee’s stuff away so soon would make her feel like she was trying to get rid of Jamie Lee’s memory as well. Besides, what other mother would want to dress her little boy in a dead baby’s clothes?

Billy wandered up the stairs and into the bedroom. Pulling off his boots, he stretched out on his side of the bed. ‘You shouldn’t be up here, Dix, if all it’s going to do is make you cry.’

‘I got to cry sometime, Billy. He was my little baby.’

‘Yeah, but he was going to die anyway, wasn’t he? You always knew that.’

‘We’re all going to die anyway, Billy, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less when it happens.’ Pulling the tissue box off the bedside table, Dixie took one out to wipe her eyes.

‘Come here,’ Billy said and reached out his arms. ‘You need cuddling.’

Dixie lay down beside him. ‘Know what really breaks my heart?’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘That we can’t afford to get him a proper coffin.’

‘The one he’s got looks good, Dix.’

‘I remember seeing this picture once in National Geographic. There was a baby girl laid out in this white wooden coffin. It was so pretty. She looked like a sweet little angel lying there. Not dead at all. She had her head on this satin pillow and ribbons in her hair. That’s what I wish we had for Jamie Lee.’

‘Jamie Lee wouldn’t want no ribbons in his hair, Dix.’

Dixie sighed. ‘I didn’t mean that part. I meant the white wood coffin. I want Jamie Lee to look nice. Like a little angel. Pure-like, you know?’

Billy let go of her and turned over on his back. Putting his hands behind his head, he fixed his gaze on the sloping ceiling over the bed and didn’t say anything more.

Dixie glanced over. ‘You heard anything on that railroad job yet?’

Billy just kept staring at the ceiling. ‘Actually I’m thinking I won’t go down there,’ he said at last. ‘They’re taking on men at the sawmill and I was thinking tomorrow I’ll go check that out instead.’

‘I don’t like thinking of you working around all them dangerous saws. And railroad work’s more steady-like. It’ll pay more over the long run.’

Billy didn’t answer.

Dixie sat back up. There was a little knitted duck that Leola had made for Jamie Lee over on the bedside table. Reaching out, Dixie picked it up. She’d intended to put it in the box with Jamie Lee’s clothes, but putting it away had made her feel too sad. Holding it in her lap, she stared at it.

‘The thing is,’ Billy said, ‘I only need work till I get enough money for horses, Dix. Once I got those horses, I can start up my guide business. So, the way I reckon it, if I can get on at the sawmill and work a couple of months, I’ll have enough for a small string of horses by Fall. That’s when all the hunters come, so it’ll be a great time to start up.’

‘Where you intending to keep horses, Billy?’

‘Well, at the start I’ll be on the trail with them mostly, won’t I? Won’t need to keep them anywhere too permanent. They’re going to be able to feed themselves wherever I stake out camp. I’m reckoning on running week-long trips when the hunters come in. Maybe even two-week trips, like Bob Mackie does, only I’m planning on taking the hunters way into the Crowheart Wilderness. I know that area so good. Like the back of my hand. And no one else around here takes hunters there.’

‘That’s because it is a wilderness area, Billy. The government put lots of restrictions on what hunting you can do, once it got declared a proper wilderness.’

‘That’s a big piece of land, Dixie. Nobody’s ever going to be watching all of it.’

‘Billy?’ she said incredulously. ‘Don’t get silly ideas. You can’t go advertising to take people hunting somewhere it’s illegal to hunt and you won’t get no business if you don’t advertise for what you’re doing.’

‘Don’t you think I know that? Besides,’ he said and tapped the side of his nose, ‘Billy knows his ways.’ Then he grinned. ‘And know what else I plan to do? Come summer and all those fucking tourists? I’m going to take me and my horses down by Simpson’s Bridge and just ride along where they can see me from the highway. Then when they’re driving through, the tourists’ll be saying, “Look, Mom! A real cowboy!” and they’ll stop and want to take pictures and I’ll charge ’em. And I’ll offer to give ’em day trips – you know, taking Mom, Dad and kids out, so they think they’re getting to be cowboys too. They’ll do it on impulse. People always spend money better on impulse. I can take them up to the old mines. Or over to Beulerville, so they can see a real by-golly ghost town. Easy bucks, man. The tourists are always willing to pay so much just to do ordinary stuff. So, the only time I’m going to need to pasture the horses is in winter and we’ll be rolling in money by then.’

‘We ain’t never going to be rolling in money, Billy, so don’t kid yourself.’

‘Yeah, but this time it’s going to work out. This guide business will be it for us, Dix. You know how good I am with horses. And you just tell me who knows the Crowheart better than me?’

‘I just wish we had enough for Jamie Lee to have a white coffin.’

‘There’s thousands of bucks waiting to be cut loose from all them city cowboys. No kidding. You can’t believe the things some people pay serious money to do.’

‘But we need the coffin right now, not in the Fall. Not next year. Not after the guide business takes off.’

‘He’s got a coffin, Dixie.’

‘He’s got a blue plastic box.’

‘It’s not plastic. It’s fibreglass.’

‘They’re burying my baby in a blue plastic box.’ The tears started again. ‘You should have taken that railroad job, Billy. Leastways long enough to get Jamie Lee decently buried. I mean, he was near enough your own son. You’re the only daddy he knew.’

‘I would have, Dix. You know how much I always wanted to do right by Jamie Lee. But I’m no good at that kind of work. I need to be my own boss. Got too much cowboy in me. Can’t you understand how great this guide business is going to be? Won’t be nobody to worry about except me and the horses, and I love horses, man. Me and the horses and all those city dudes, waiting to get their pockets picked. I’ll make you enough money to roll in. I promise.’

‘That’s what you said the other times too, Billy. Fact is, we need money now, not some far-off time that might never come. You should have took the railroad job.’

An injured silence followed. At last Billy sat up and reached for his boots. He pulled them on. Then he hunched forward enough to peer out of the small, gable-end window.

Dixie sighed. The knitted duck was still sitting in her lap, so she lifted it up and pressed it to her cheek. ‘Know what? I almost got killed tonight,’ she said softly.

Billy didn’t reply.

‘Did you hear me?’ she asked, turning. ‘And you know who almost done it? Spencer Scott. Him and two other guys from up the canyon. They were drunk as skunks. Weaving all over the place in their pick-up. I got up on the steps of the United Methodist Church just in the nick of time. Came this close to hitting me.’ Dixie measured out the distance with her hands.

‘I wish the canyon folk would all just go the fuck back to California,’ Billy replied. ‘I get so fed up with them around here. They think owning the land is the same as belonging here.’

‘Spencer Scott’s really handsome, Billy. Handsomer even than in the movies. He gave me his handkerchief.’

‘I hope you told him you got hurt.’

‘I didn’t get hurt. I mean, thank the good Lord Jesus for those steps in front of the United Methodist Church, because that’s what saved me. All that happened was that the truck knocked that brick pillar skew-hawed that’s at the bottom of the steps.’

‘Why didn’t you tell Spencer Scott how hurt you were?’

‘Because, like I just said, Billy, the pick-up didn’t touch me. I was scared so bad, I practically wet myself, but that’s all.’

‘Should have said you were hurt anyway. Then we could have sued him. Maybe we can still do it. For, like, “mental distress”. Folks get millions for that.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Billy.’

‘Didn’t you say they were drunk? So they were in the wrong, not you. And being drunk, they won’t remember straight. Think of it. That’s a really good idea. We could nail them. Dix.’

‘But it wouldn’t be right, Billy. I’m just fine.’

He shook his head wearily. ‘Yeah, well, what ain’t right, Dix, is that he’s got more money than he can count and for what? For being a grown-up man playing make believe. Here’s all us hard-working folk, just scraping by, and he gets millions for pretending to be what we got no choice about being and don’t get paid for. There’s no fairness in that at all. So it was you being stupid, Dixie, not me. You should have told him you was hurt. Then you could have got your white coffin and I could have got my horses. In fact, the way I see it, we’d be doing the right thing. Because he could easily kill somebody, driving drunk like that. Slap a big old lawsuit on him and even Spencer Scott would think twice the next time he wants to get behind the wheel.’

‘He kissed me,’ Dixie said softly as she set the knitted duck into the box with the rest of Jamie Lee’s things. ‘Spencer Scott kissed my hand.’

‘Yeah, well, it would have been far better if he’d kissed your bank account.’

Chapter Two

The town of Abundance had had its heyday just as Montana approached statehood. The rich silver lode, first struck in 1876, was showing its worth by the 1880s. All three of the big mines – the Eldorado, the Inverurie and the Kipper Twee – were producing steadily and the Lion Mountain mine was just getting underway. Nearly 25,000 people lived in Abundance in those days. There were six banks, five hotels and 22 saloons. The Majestic Theatre on Main Street attracted shows all the way from Chicago, and the Masonic Hall was an architectural showpiece, its high false front and dramatic second-storey balcony characterizing the extravagance of the times.

Then in 1892 the world silver market collapsed. The Inverurie, the oldest mine, the one upon which Abundance had been founded, faltered first. The Panic of 1893 followed, and legend had it that within twenty-four hours of the Kipper Twee’s closure, 1,500 people had packed up and walked out of their houses, right out of their lives in Abundance and left forever. By 1898, only the Lion Mountain mine was still in operation and that was more for the gold and lead mingled in its lode than for silver. The population of Abundance dropped below 10,000. By 1905, even the Lion Mountain gave way and Abundance came to the brink of death.

Unlike the nearby towns of Cache Creek and Beulerville, Abundance survived. A branch line of the railroad, originally built to carry ore, proved a life-saving link with the outer world. Sawmills sprang up to process timber from the vast mountain forests, and there was enough low-lying land in the river valley to make ranching viable. Abundance clung to life by filling the boxcars with lumber and cattle once the ore was gone.

By the time Dixie was born, the population in Abundance had fallen below the 3,000 mark. Remnants of the glory days were still everywhere. The derelict Masonic Hall dominated Main Street. Empty false-fronted buildings with elegantly carved façades stood cheek-by-jowl with the plate-glass windows of the 1960s drugstore and the unassuming modernity of the Texaco station. Whole back streets were nothing more than rows of vacant, crumbling houses, their ornate gingerbread tracing broken, their doors and windows gone. ‘Ghost houses’, Dixie and her friends had called them, and used them as a quirky, otherworldly playground.

Then one year the Masonic Hall caught fire and burned down. Two years later what was left of the derelict Majestic Theatre was demolished to make way for a drive-in bank. One by one, the old buildings disappeared, leaving gaps along Main Street like lost teeth in an eight-year-old’s smile.

The town kept on fading. The hardware store closed. Then the dime store. Then Jack’s Redi-Mart. There were Walmarts to shop at now, and even though it took a ninety-minute drive to get to one, people liked them. They were so big and full of things that it felt wondrous going through the doors, and you could make a nice day of it, having your lunch at McDonald’s, which was another experience denied Abundance. Truth was, nothing was abundant in Abundance anymore. That’s what everyone liked to say. Nothing abundant about it, except for the view.

A view they did have. Cupped into an east-facing basin, Abundance was surrounded by startlingly enormous mountains which rose straight up out of the flat river valley with such abruptness that tourists often brought their cars to a dead stop right in the middle of Simpson’s Bridge when they got their first full view of them.

For the people living there, however, the mountains were much more than just something pretty to look at. In offering up the gold and silver from their rocky depths, they had created Abundance, and they had destroyed Abundance just as easily when the promising veins paled into worthless rock. Even now they dominated the remnants of Abundance, bringing snow in August, chinooks in February and evening shadows at a time of day when the rest of the world was still having afternoon. Their craggy profiles, the smell of their pine forests, the taste of their snow on the wind were all as much a part of the folk born and raised in Abundance as the blood running in their veins.

To Dixie the mountains were as familiar as family. They were like family in other ways too: always there, reliable and friendly some days, dangerous on other days, but always, always there for you.

When she was growing up, Daddy used to say, ‘Too bad you can’t eat the scenery.’ What he meant, of course, was that the jaw-dropping panorama was the only wealth anyone had around there. He was right. Even the folks considered rich in Abundance weren’t rich by the outside world’s standards. Everyone was just getting by. For Dixie, however, it had been enough. Unlike some of her friends at school, she’d never dreamed of escaping to bigger places like Billings or Missoula. Life in Abundance held all she’d ever wanted.

The mountains were what had attracted the canyon folk too. It started out innocently enough when this screenwriter guy bought a run-down summer cabin up on Rock Creek. Just the fact that he was a foreigner – or ‘furriner’ as Mama liked to call him, meaning that he came from outside Montana – was enough to make people’s ears prick up, but the fact he was from Hollywood … well, you might as well have said Captain Kirk had landed the Enterprise on Main Street. At the church picnic that summer, no one could talk of anything else.

Soon, though, folks got bored with it and went back to talking about hunting and fishing and cattle prices. While it was true that the screenwriter guy had bought the cabin, he was hardly ever there. When he was, he kept himself to himself. Not in an unfriendly way, but just in the way foreigners did, so that you got to know nothing about them. Spotting him was harder than spotting the mountain lion that occasionally wandered into folks’ yards and ate up the dog’s food and, if you weren’t careful, the dog as well.

A couple of summers later, however, it started all over again, when word got around that the screenwriter guy had brought some movie stars to stay with him and they were going fishing on the river every day. Someone said they saw Spencer Scott standing in waders right by Simpson’s Bridge, and that’s when everyone forgot about bluebirds and started using their binoculars for other things.

They liked Abundance, did the screenwriter guy and his friends. More of them came to visit and they started staying longer. They began coming into town, hanging out at the Stockman Bar or eating lunch at Ernie’s Diner. They never ever talked to folks, just to each other, but that was OK. Most folks weren’t so sure they wanted to talk to them anyway. The screenwriter’s new movie had come to the showhouse over the winter. Everyone had gone, just to see what he’d been up to there in his cabin on Rock Creek, and everyone was disappointed. It was full of sex and gore and not at all the sort of thing decent, church-going folks went to see. There were a few, of course, who got starstruck. They tried to cosy up whenever they saw them and be friends, but that never happened. The canyon folk always brought their own friends with them.

More and more started staying. For a couple of years, there was a mini land rush as they bought up the dilapidated cabins that peppered the narrow mountain canyons. When those ran out, they started buying ranches along the river. You couldn’t blame folk for selling up, because it was like they’d won the lottery. Never, ever in a million years could they have got that kind of money selling local. Everyone knew it was all bad land, even down by the river. Scrubby, dry and alkaline. It wasn’t fit for anything except running cattle, and you needed five thousand acres at the very least to make a living doing that. But then canyon folk would turn up out of the blue, knock on your door and right there on your doorstep they would offer you more for fifty acres than the whole ranch was worth. If you had a good view of the mountains, you could name the most unbelievable amount you could think of, and like as not you’d get it.

Tom O’Grady, the real-estate agent, was the person to know in those days. He was good at sizing the canyon folk up, at knowing which piece of property would suit them, and then charming them into feeling they got the best of the deal when he sold it to them. Truth was, though, never for a moment did Tom forget that he was an Abundance man. He fleeced every one of them.

Almost as good as the money he got for people was the gossip he gleaned. Because Tom spent so much time with the canyon folk, he always knew what was going on with them and it was often juicy as a mango.

The canyon folk brought with them a lifestyle that people in Abundance had only ever read about in stories. They bought ranches just because they liked the scenery and not because they had to make a living from it. They bought up, tore down, threw out and built back up again without ever once using a local man. The bathroom tiles came from Italy; the oak in the cupboards came from Vermont; the man who made it into a kitchen came from Mexico. The canyon folk did all that and then only lived in the houses a few weeks in the summer. This made no sense to anyone local but you still felt in awe of it.

Dane Goodman was the first big-name movie star to move into the canyon and stay there on a fairly regular basis. He bought Grampa Cummings’s ranch house up on Dry Creek and first thing he did was knock down the old porch on the west side and build a cedar deck. Then he installed a Jacuzzi hot tub and there was all sorts of gossip about naked starlets running through the woods. At the time, Dane Goodman was married to a well-known actress, but she only lasted four months before she went crazy and had to go back to California. So he took up with the screenwriter guy’s wife, which was all right because the screenwriter guy had already taken up with one of the naked starlets. Then Dane Goodman went off to do a movie and fell in love with someone else and brought her up from California. Meanwhile, the screenwriter guy’s wife moved in with Tim Mason. This shocked folk considerably, not only because Tim Mason was a local man but because everyone in town knew he was gay. There was no end of speculation about what Tim and the screenwriter guy’s wife were getting up to amidst the white wine, cedar decks and hot tubs.

Spencer Scott was the next big name to make the Abundance area his home, and after him came that director guy, who had done all those anguished movies about poor people, and finally the Writer From Back East. They thought they were being cowboys, but they behaved like mountain men, letting their hair and beards grow, clomping down Main Street in raggedy jeans and boots and getting very publicly drunk. Mostly, however, they liked owning things: Hummers, vintage pick-ups and cattle from breeds nobody local had ever heard of. Most of all, however, they liked to own land. It had gone beyond the land-rush days by this point. The canyon folk and their hangers-on now owned most of the river valley, the canyons and even the mountains themselves.

As a consequence, the look of the canyons changed. Roads were cut through the virgin forest. A landing strip was bulldozed down along the river. There was a helipad beside the highway just beyond Simpson’s Bridge. The novelty of having movie stars walking around had long since worn off for the residents of Abundance. Celebrity faces in the drugstore or the supermarket became an ordinary event. No one really noticed anymore. Not that the canyon folk were part of things now. They weren’t. They still kept themselves to themselves, while the Abundance folk went on as usual. Almost nobody mixed.

This wasn’t to say, however, that the canyon folk weren’t good to Abundance. One year they decided the town ought to have a Fourth of July picnic, like the kind you read about in books, with sack races and watermelon-seed spitting contests. They set up a committee, got money for it and organized it as well. It was good fun. There was a parade and a pig roast and a huge fireworks display at the end. Another time, the canyon folk decided there ought to be a pretty white wrought-iron gazebo in the park so that a band could come and play on Sunday afternoons in the summer and they got that done. And they brought live theatre back to Abundance for the first time in ninety years with what was probably the most star-studded local dramatics group in all of the West.

It wasn’t that the locals were ungrateful. These things were meant for everyone and the folk of Abundance really did enjoy themselves too. It was just that while a band playing in a gazebo on Sunday afternoon was nice, a new scanning machine for the hospital would have been nicer. This was the whole problem. The canyon folk only seemed interested in Abundance as a dreamy kind of place where they could do storybook stuff. When they got tired of the crappy internet connection or the bad coffee or having only two full-time doctors, they would fly away. For Abundance folk, however, Abundance was all there was.

On Tuesday evening when Dixie went to the funeral home to dress Jamie Lee, Main Street was alive with high-school kids ‘turning the point’, as they called the ritual of relentlessly driving around the two-block downtown area in their parents’ cars. Entering the mortuary was like stepping into another dimension. The heavy oak doors closed behind Dixie, and there was a sudden vacuum of silence before her ears adjusted enough to hear the softly piped organ music. Her eyes took longer to leave behind the summer evening’s brilliance for the mortuary’s shadowy interior of burgundy carpets and heavy velvet drapes.

The funeral director came out of his office to lead her down a dimly lit corridor to a small room adjacent to the chapel. Right in the middle of the room was what looked to Dixie like one of those little folding tables you put your dinner on when you eat in front of the TV. On top of it was the tiny blue coffin. Jamie Lee lay inside, swathed in a white baby blanket.

‘Is your husband coming?’ the funeral director asked.

‘He’s not my husband,’ Dixie replied softly as she bent to take the clothes out of the plastic carrier bag.

‘I just wondered if I should leave the door unlocked. It’s the kids, you know. They get up to mischief at this time of night.’

‘It’s not his little boy, you see.’

The funeral director looked at her.

‘I mean, he’s been good to Jamie Lee and all. Just like a proper daddy. He didn’t even mind about Jamie Lee being the way he was. But it got kind of hard. ’Specially right here at the end. Know what I mean? But Billy tried to be good to Jamie Lee. Better than Jamie’s real daddy. His real daddy never even seen him …’

‘It’s all right. I understand,’ the funeral director said gently.

‘I just didn’t want you to be thinking Billy isn’t here because he doesn’t care. It’s that he’s been working all day and he’s real tired. He’s just got a job out at the sawmill, running one of them strippers, and he comes home dog-tired from it.’

The funeral director nodded.

‘He’ll be coming tomorrow though,’ Dixie added. ‘He wouldn’t dream of missing the funeral. He was real attached to Jamie Lee.’

After the funeral director left, Dixie went over to the coffin. Jamie Lee lay on his back, his head turned slightly to one side, his eyes closed. The way he looked that moment, you really would have thought he was just asleep. He didn’t have that bluish colour of death about him. In fact, he looked better now than he had when he was alive. His poor little heart never could cope, so Jamie Lee had always looked a little blue. Now he was pink and rosy as any baby.

Dixie felt an almost overpowering urge to lift up his eyelids and see if his eyeballs were still there. She didn’t know why this insistent thought had come to her but she forced it away before it spoiled the moment.

Very gently she reached into the coffin. When she picked Jamie up he felt … odd, almost slippery; she hadn’t expected this so when his head lolled lifelessly to the side, she nearly lost hold of him. And he was so cold. Not that she hadn’t known in her head that he would be, but there’s a big difference between what your head knows and what your heart expects.

In the corner of the room was a white rocking chair. When the funeral director had shown her into the room the first time, he’d explained how sometimes mamas and daddies liked to hold their babies one last time and that was what the rocking chair was for. Taking Jamie Lee over, Dixie sat down. ‘I got you some nice new clothes.’ She laid him on her lap and reached into the carrier bag. ‘Look at what I bought you. Lookie here at these little jeans. See? Aren’t they cute? And this little shirt. It’s just like Billy’s rodeo shirt. And see these, Jamie Lee? These sweet little baby cowboy boots Auntie Leola got you? You’re going to look all snazzy when you meet Jesus.’

Tears came and she let them. It was safe here. No one to tell her not to get upset, to say how Jamie Lee had been going to die anyway, so it was better he didn’t have to suffer any more. No one to tell her she shouldn’t feel so bad, because with the kind of defects he had she should have been expecting it. No one here except the funeral man, and if he did this job every day, he had to be used to crying.

As she removed the babygrow, faintly stained with the funeral parlour make-up, Dixie thought how she had cried, too, when she’d found out she was pregnant. The last thing she’d wanted was Big Jim’s child. The relationship was already over; in fact, if it hadn’t been for Daddy making such a big deal out of saying ‘I told you so’, and how she only ever attracted trash, Dixie would have finished with Big Jim long before that. Then there she was, carrying his bastard baby. Sitting in the bathroom, with little splashes of pee still gleaming on the plastic pregnancy indicator, Dixie had stared at the thin blue line and cried so hard.

Mama, of course, had said there was no need to tell Daddy about it to begin with. You could fix things, she said, and men didn’t even have to know. But Dixie couldn’t do it. The baby was alive, and killing was killing. Maybe ordinary men wouldn’t know what she’d done, but Jesus would know and that’s what she told Mama.

Mama got angry when she’d said that. ‘You been born again or something?’ she said scornfully, ‘because this family’s not so churchified that we can give Jesus as an excuse for our own stupid behaviour. We accept ugly things need doing sometimes. That don’t make them right and that don’t mean we won’t have to pay on Judgment Day, but they still need doing. And it ain’t Jesus who’ll do them. You, of all people, should know that.’

Dixie cried then because she knew what Mama was referring to, but she still stayed firm. As ashamed as Mama and Daddy said they were of her for having a baby when she had no man, Dixie refused to get an abortion.

She’d cried again the day Jamie Lee was born, as the doctor stood over her explaining what Down’s syndrome was and how this meant Jamie Lee’s heart wasn’t made quite right and they might not be able to fix it. ‘You just done nothing but make me cry, little man,’ she whispered as she dressed his small, cold body.

Chapter Three

Spencer fiddled with the espresso maker, trying to get it to work. As always, it produced enough steam to power a locomotive, followed by a trickle of dark, murky liquid that looked like engine oil. He had been absolutely assured this was the best-quality machine around and yet it routinely turned out sludge that even Starbuck’s wouldn’t call espresso. ‘Sidonie!’ he shouted angrily and bashed the side of the machine in frustration.

When there was no answer, Spencer turned around. ‘Where the fuck is she?’

The boy, who was sitting at the kitchen island, shrugged. ‘How should I know?’ Cereal fell out of his mouth when he spoke.

‘What are you eating? You sound like a pig at the trough,’ Spencer said and came over to pick up the box of cereal.

‘Coco Pops.’

‘How the fuck did you get hold of them?’

‘The store,’ the boy replied derisively. ‘Sidonie bought them for me.’

‘Yes, well, that was a waste of money then.’ Spencer turned on the garbage disposal and emptied the contents of the cereal box into it.

‘Hey! What did you do that for?’

‘Because we don’t eat crap here. And I can’t imagine your mother lets you eat this junk either,’ he said, crumpling up the empty container. ‘She’s still in her vegan phase, isn’t she?’

‘As far as I know, they don’t kill anything to make Coco Pops,’ the boy replied.

‘Watch your mouth.’

The boy’s eyes went wide with fake innocence. ‘How am I going to do that?’ he asked and tipped his head as if trying to look down at his mouth. ‘Because my eyes are up here and my mouth is down here and I can’t see it.’

‘Cut it out.’

The kid leaped off his chair. ‘OK. So where are the scissors?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You said, “Cut it out,” so I’m just going to get the scissors.’

Angrily Spencer threw his espresso cup into the sink. There wasn’t the satisfaction of its breaking. It just clattered noisily against the metal. Coffee splashed everywhere. ‘Where the hell is Sidonie?’ he shouted at no one in particular. ‘Sidonie? Sidonie!’

The boy, his expression placid, watched Spencer storm across the kitchen.

‘I’m going out on the deck. When Sidonie finally turns up, tell her that’s where I am.’

The boy picked a bit of Coco Pops out of his teeth and flicked it off on the floor. He shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, whatever. Just don’t yell at me. It’s not my fault I’m here. I don’t want it any more than you do.’

Spencer had only two children: Thomas and Louisa. They had been part of his ‘Life Before’ – that period of struggling early in adulthood when he was still nobody. He and Kathryn had been high-school sweethearts. Two kids in two years and a basement apartment followed, while he did Shakespeare in the Park and worked the night shift at the warehouse. His big break had come from the ignominious fact that he had been willing to play second fiddle to a ten-foot python in an experimental Off-Off-Broadway production. What that snake was getting up to with the scantily clad girl in the lead part proved so outrageously controversial that the play actually garnered an audience, although perhaps not for the reasons the playwright had intended. Spencer, seeing his chance, managed to successfully upstage both the girl and the snake.

Despite being so supportive during those lean years when Spencer was on the theatre circuit, Kathryn didn’t enjoy success when it finally came. She had liked being married to an artist but she saw herself as intellectually above being a movie star’s wife. Hers was an old Connecticut family and they didn’t ‘do Hollywood’, as she put it, which was OK with Spencer, as by that point he was no longer doing Kathryn. He had, however, taken seriously his obligations to her and to the kids, so when the divorce came, he provided well for all three of them, even in the later years, long after he and the kids had drifted out of regular contact. He paid for their braces, their private schools, their summers at camp. He paid for Thomas’s business degree at Harvard and Louisa’s long-drawn-out doctorate in ancient Persian culture, which seemed mainly to involve spending years in remote Arabian deserts peering into archaeological trenches; and he had done it all simply because they were his kids.

This boy wasn’t. Spencer didn’t care whose DNA the kid had. Phoebe had been just another of the countless good-looking girls who made it their life to follow fame. A groupie, elevated to a fuck-buddy, but nothing more. That was how the game was played, sex, drugs and fame being traded like so many casino chips. Nothing was meant for real. There was no relationship, no commitment and most definitely no baby.

She was wily, was Phoebe, and so much more of a player than Spencer had ever imagined at the time. He still found himself running those events back over in his mind, trying to figure out exactly what had happened, because he was no one’s fool. He’d always been so very, very careful to avoid just this situation. Certainly there’d been a lot of times with too much to drink, too many drugs, but even so, he’d always been careful, always taken responsibility himself. But Phoebe was just so brilliant at fucking. That was her secret weapon. If you do it so much, so often and in so many different ways, sooner or later a condom will come along that can’t cope. Either that or Phoebe had saved the spent condoms and done something kinky with a turkey baster. Spencer wouldn’t put that past her either.

When he found out about the pregnancy, Spencer thought he’d handled it all very coolly. He hadn’t got upset. He hadn’t blamed her in any way. In fact, he’d smiled and caressed her solicitously while reassuring her that he’d pay for the abortion and all her care.

Phoebe wouldn’t even consider it. No fooling that old fox. By the time Spencer had sent his lawyer around the next morning to help her see reason, she had already vanished into the mist.

The birth announcement arrived unceremoniously by email right along with the rest of the spam in Spencer’s inbox. Phoebe had named the boy ‘Tennesee’, of all things. She wasn’t even classy enough to spell it right.

Her lawyers’ letters started arriving only a few days later. It made no difference that Spencer had never wanted the child, that he had done all he could to prevent the boy’s conception and, indeed, his birth. The paternity test established Spencer was the father and that was it. The kid was the perfect blackmail tool. Whenever Phoebe wanted money, it was always ‘for the boy’ and the court always listened.

Worse was to follow, however, because motherhood didn’t suit Phoebe all that well. She frequently needed to ‘take a break’, disappearing for days, sometimes weeks at a time. To her mind it made perfect sense that she could just foist the kid on to Spencer any time she got fed up with him, because, as she pointed out, he was Spencer’s son too.

More lawyers followed and then more money, this time to hire a full-time, live-in nanny for the boy so that any time Phoebe felt the need to chant with the Indians in Colorado or beach comb in Baja, she could go. Even this, however, was not enough to free Spencer from the mess. In the latest turn of events, the new nanny had been found not to be Filipina after all but Mexican and illegal. Documents had been forged and God knows what else, and Phoebe hadn’t paid attention to any of it right up to the point where immigration officers turned up on the doorstep to take the nanny away.

A perfunctory email was all the notice Phoebe gave Spencer that she had plans to be in the Virgin Islands, so the boy was coming to him until all this nanny business was resolved. The way she worded it, you would have thought Spencer had hand-picked this crap nanny and then personally sent the immigration service in to get her. Before he could get her even to answer her fucking phone, the kid was in Montana.

Spencer was furious. The ranch had always been his private retreat. He only ever brought Sidonie. That was the whole point of Montana: to get away from the agents, the entourage, the hangers-on, the hustlers, the sycophants. The ranch was Spencer’s idyll. He hated Phoebe for tainting that, because he knew she’d done it on purpose. She lived to smear shit on anything he valued, and that’s all the boy was to him: shit.

Spencer considered those matters as he sat in the pinewood rocker on the deck. Slowly, the primeval motion calmed him. His gaze wandered to the mountains.

The ranch was tucked into the lower foothills of Lion Mountain. When sitting on the deck, his view of the massive range was oblique rather than full on, the mountains on the left of his field of vision, each rising one behind the other, their pine-covered foothills eroding down into the broad river valley below. It was a startlingly beautiful view that never lost its intensity for him. Whenever he took the time to really see it, he was always astonished by it all over again, and he liked that. It helped keep things in perspective.

‘Here.’ Sidonie appeared with a cup of espresso, properly made. She was wearing only her bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower. As she leaned down to hand him his coffee, the robe gapped to expose the moist roundness of her breasts. Spencer felt himself harden. He smiled and took the cup.

‘Do you want a croissant or anything?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m OK.’

She was barefoot. The perfume of her shower gel was still clinging to her, the robe short enough to show almost all of her long, long legs. He wanted to fuck her there and then. Spencer considered it, considered how they’d do it. He envisioned laying the robe open on the deck to make languid love there in the cool Montana morning sunshine.

Reality snapped back like a rubber band as the boy slid open the screen door and came out on to the deck. ‘Can I use your computer?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Spencer replied irritably.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I said so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I said no. I don’t want you messing up my stuff on it.’

The boy stood there. He was small for almost ten. Like his mother in that regard. Spencer had found Phoebe’s petite stature a turn-on when they’d first met. He liked his women young and nubile and Phoebe’s small size gave her a perkiness that had made her seem more youthful than she actually was. That small size wouldn’t do the boy any favours though. Women always preferred tall men.

‘Will you give me some money then?’ the kid asked.

‘What for?’

‘A game for my PlayStation.’

‘No,’ Spencer replied.

‘Why not?’

Spencer swung his arm out wide. ‘See this?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s called the out of doors.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘So go explore it.’

The kid quirked his lip up on one side in a disdainful expression. ‘And I want to do that because …?’

‘Because it’s there. Shit, Tennesee, what’s the matter with you? When I was your age, all I had was the street to play in. I would have killed to have somewhere wonderful as this.’

‘Good thing you didn’t get it then, huh? Or you’d be in prison now.’

Exasperated, Spencer rolled his eyes.

‘Can I go look around the stores in town then?’

‘When we drove through Abundance yesterday, did you see that big shopping mall?’ Spencer replied.

The boy’s expression lit up with interest. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Precisely.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘That Abundance has three thousand people living in it and it’s ninety miles from any place bigger, so you’re lucky to get milk and a newspaper. And that’s why we come here, Tennesee. That’s what we like about it. Otherwise we would stay in LA.’

‘There’s a DVD section at the back of the Pay’n Save. I could take him there,’ Sidonie offered. ‘Maybe they have games to rent.’

‘Yeah!’ the boy cried.

‘Sidonie, stay out of this. He can fucking well entertain himself.’ Spencer looked over at the boy. ‘Go down to the barn. Guff can show you the horses.’

‘I don’t like horses. They stink.’

‘I don’t care. Go down anyway. Hang out with Guff a while.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s a cowboy.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘A genuine cowboy, Tennesee.’

‘Yeah. So?’

‘So that’s cool. Cowboys are cool. He can teach you how to be a man.’

The look of contemptuous ennui on the boy’s face did away with any need for an answer.

‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ Spencer said. ‘Normal kids would be grateful for all this.’

‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ the boy replied. Then he turned and went back into the house.

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