Making the environs more decorative, however, was Victoria Moretti, my undersheriff, who had decided to join us. We’d just rounded a corner when Rezdawg’s wrinkled right fender collided with one of the aspens, which scraped along the door and knocked into my elbow. It might’ve collided with the passenger-side mirror if there had been one, but we’d knocked that off a mile back.
The trunk was a little bit bigger in circumference than a Major League Baseball bat. “Ouch.”
Vic was seated between us, and I glanced at her; dressed in provocative jeans, hiking boots, and a hooded Philadelphia Flyers sweatshirt, the buds of her iPod were in her ears, her eyes were closed, and she was ignoring everything, including me.
Diving between two more trees before heaving the vintage 4x4 over a rock outcropping on top of a small ridge and sliding down the other side, the Bear sawed at the wheel and looked at me, rubbing my elbow. “Are you okay?”
I folded the boredom-fighting map and stuffed it into the glove compartment with a box of fuses, an old radiator cap, a seventeen-year-old vehicle registration, and a large mouse nest. “Scarred for life.” I glanced back at him, unsure of what to make of the attention and instead focused on Vic’s head, bobbing along with the music playing so loudly we could hear it by just sitting next to her. “I don’t think she’s concerned for my welfare.”
“Do you think she is upset about not catching any fish?”
“If she was, she should’ve tied a fly on the end of her line and put it in the water; that’s where I usually catch fish.” I reset the handheld radio that kept trying to ride up under my rump and placed it back between Vic and me. “Are you sure this is the way we came in?”
He gestured toward the surrounding forest. “The trees are bigger than last year.”
I braced a hand against the dash. “Uh-huh.”
He shot a response at my disbelief, the corners of his mouth pulled down like guidelines on an outfitter’s wall tent. “Shortcut.”
“Uh-huh.”
The handheld radio chattered briefly, but it had been doing that all day; set on scan, it was picking up the signals from the sheriff’s department, the highway patrol, the forest service, and the wardens from game and fish. I picked the thing up and toyed with the squelch in an attempt to get better reception, but it didn’t seem to do any good. “Wardens must be busy . . .”
The Cheyenne Nation nodded and looked at me again. “Hunting season and the last of the tourists.”
I pointed toward the road, or the lack thereof. “If you’d pay more attention to where we’re going, you might save some of these trees.” He ignored me, and I continued to fiddle with the knobs on the police radio, the only concession I made to my full-time job when fishing—in my line of work it’s sometimes important for people to get in touch with me; not too often, but sometimes.
I could feel his eyes on me as he looked past Vic, grooving in her own world. “What?”
He did his best to sound innocent, something at which he wasn’t particularly good. “What?”
“Why are you behaving strangely?”
He turned back to the road. “Define strangely.”
“You keep watching me and asking me if I’m all right.”
He didn’t turn to look at me this time. “Are you?”
“Yep.” I sighed. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“As a good friend . . ” He sounded annoyed now. “Can I not simply be interested in your general well-being?”
“No, not really.” I picked up and played with the radio again and thought about what this kind of inordinate attention usually meant. “Have you been talking to Cady?” My daughter, The Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time, was a lawyer in Philadelphia. Newly married to Michael, my undersheriff Vic’s brother, she was pregnant with her first child but sometimes treated me as if I were one. “What’ve the two of you been cahooting about now?”
He shook his head. “I know you are in the suspicion business, but your paranoia may be getting the best of you.”
“Are you saying you haven’t been talking with her?”
“No.”
“No what?”
He shook his head solemnly. “No, I did not say that.”
“No, you haven’t been talking to Cady or no you didn’t say that?”
“Exactly.”
I shook my head and watched the passing scenery as we bumped along.
After a few moments, he spoke again, just as I knew he would. “I am supposed to broach a subject with you.”
“Ahh . . .” This is the way it usually worked; Cady, unwilling to ask me questions on more sensitive issues, would sometimes ask the Bear to intercede and bring the subject up, floating a topic for response before the real familial debate began. “What’s this about?”
“Your granddaughter.”
I took a breath, realizing the subject matter was of true import. “Okay.”
“She is going to need a name.”
I nodded. “Tell my daughter I agree, the child should have a name.”
He quickly added, ignoring the humor. “It is a question of what name.”
I smiled; Henry had been friends with both my deceased wife and me long before we’d gotten married. “We discussed that when she was here for rodeo—she’s going to name her Martha.”
There was a long pause as the Cheyenne Nation fought the wheel, the road, and possibly me.
I turned and looked at him. “She’s not going to name her daughter after her mother?” He shrugged. “We talked about this; we sat there in the bleachers at rodeo and she brought up her mother’s name and I seconded it.”
“She says you are the one who brought up Martha’s name.”
“I wasn’t.”
“She said she mentioned something about the baby’s name and that you brought up Martha.”
“I just brought her mother’s name up casually in conversation, and then she said she was going to name the baby after her.”
He shook his head some more. “When you bring Martha’s name up in conversation, it is never casual.”
We drove in silence, hearing only the music in Vic’s ears.
“I might’ve brought it up uncasually.” He continued to say nothing, which spoke volumes. “So, she doesn’t want to name the baby after her mother?”
“She is not sure.”
“Fine.”
“Obviously, it is not.”
“I just . . .” My voice sounded a little confrontational even to me, so I changed my tone. “It’s just that I’d gotten used to the idea.”
“Your idea.”
“Evidently.” We glanced off another tree, but they were fewer and farther between. “What does she want to name the baby?”
“Lola.”
We drove along in silence as I contemplated the thought that my daughter was considering naming my granddaughter after a 1959 Baltic Blue Thunderbird convertible. “She wants to name my granddaughter after your car?”
He gestured toward the vehicle in which we rode. “At least she is not going to name her Rezdawg.”
“Lola, really?”
“Yes.”
I thought about it. “Where did the name of your car come from?”
“There was a lovely young woman from South Dakota . . .”
“The stripper?”
He smiled a knowing smile. “She was a dancer, yes.”
“A stripper; she was a stripper from over in Sturgis you dated in the seventies.”
“She was a very talented performer.”
“And you named the car after her.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not having my granddaughter named after a car named after a stripper.” I shook my head. “Lola Moretti. Lola Moretti?”
Vic chimed in for the first time, and I noticed she’d taken the buds from her ears and was cupping them in her hand. “Sounds like a pole dancer to me.”