Carla nodded her gratitude. “Been a long time coming. But she’s got a few more days left in her — weeks maybe. I swear she’s just holding on to make sure the Ranger-Review gets her obituary right. Even on her deathbed—”
“No, dear,” the Liquor Store Lady interrupted. “I’m sorry she’s still married to your stepfather. Word is, that bastard from North Dakota got your mom to change her will and now she’s leaving everything to him: your family’s ranch, the oil rights, the Lewis Mansion, everything — lock, stock, and barrel. That’s what I hear, anyway.”
Carla bit down on her cigarette, tasted the bitter tobacco.
The Liquor Store Lady sighed. “This bottle’s on me.”
The afternoon sky was beginning to purple as Carla left the unopened bottle in the passenger seat, stepped out of her truck, and stood in front of the three-story building that had been built by her great-grandfather and namesake, Charles Lewis, a train conductor turned sheep baron. The old brick manse was nothing like the sprawling estates back east, the kind she’d seen in magazines. In fact, the building might pass for a guesthouse in the Hamptons. But in Glendive, Montana, the place stood out like the Hope Diamond in a dusty coal bin, and had just as many stories told about it. Some were apocryphal, others merely the cud chewed by local gossips, but as Carla spotted a kettle of turkey vultures circling a nearby field, she knew that just as many were true.
Even though Carla had grown up here, she still called the place by its formal name. Especially after her father committed suicide years ago and her mother married their attorney from Watford City, a business partner who called himself Arnold H. Chivers, Esquire. Since then the Lewis Mansion had felt even less like a real home.
“About time you showed up,” her stepfather snapped as he opened the front door and met Carla on the porch, which was littered with cigar butts. He tried not to grimace when he saw her broken nose and bruised cheekbones but failed miserably. If masking emotions had been an Olympic event, Arnold Chivers would have scored a 3 out of 10, with perhaps a generous 4.5 from the Irish judge.
He shook his head and glanced at the time on his cell phone. “I don’t even want to know. Your mother’s been asking for you nonstop, so get in there and be the prodigal daughter you always thought you were. I’m heading to my office to get some papers notarized. I’ll be back in a little bit. I expect she’s—”
“She’s in there dying,” Carla said flatly. “And you’re screwing her one last time, with your fountain pen. This building and every acre is part of us, built by and for my family.” Carla felt herself rising on the tide of emotion left over from losing her last fight. She used that anger as a cudgel, digging her forefinger into her stepfather’s chest. “I’ll see this place burned to the ground before it belongs to you.”
This was the longest conversation she’d had with her stepfather since she was twelve, when she came back early from Lincoln Elementary, heard strange noises, and walked in on her stepfather having sex with their young German housekeeper. He’d sent Carla to the family cabin on the Yellowstone River. When she returned three days later, the housekeeper had been fired and given a one-way ticket on a Greyhound bus. Carla’s mother had been a riot of drunken apologies but refused to leave the man or kick him out. Since then, the house had felt like a mausoleum, smelled like dust instead of wood soap, mold and mildew instead of scented candles.
As Arnold collected himself, Carla remembered how he was the first person she’d ever hit. It was an awkward, ugly, overhand right, straight to his neck-beard, when she was sixteen and he was... where he wasn’t supposed to be.
She never talked about that night to anyone, just quit FFA and took up wrestling. Then boxing. Then left town after graduation, never to return.
Until now.
“Look,” Arnold said, “I know you don’t think highly of me.”
“I don’t think of you at all.”
There was a crack of gunfire and they both glanced at the field. Two boys were shooting gophers, sighting their rifles for Glendive’s annual coyote hunt.
“This situation with your family’s estate isn’t my doing,” said Arnold. “Believe it or not, your mother had her will changed of her own volition and without my knowledge. I just found out yesterday. I didn’t expect it, I didn’t ask for anything beyond my stake in the business, but I’ll gladly take everything — if that’s your mom’s dying wish.” He shoved his way past Carla. “And good luck trying to stop me.”
Alyce Lewis had withdrawn from the world from time to time even before she got sick. Carla suspected it was because her mother enjoyed the drama her absences created. There were small-town rumors: Alyce had gone to New York City, worked in off-Broadway musicals under a stage name, and flamed out before coming home to Glendive in shame. She’d suffered a bad bout of plastic surgery in Mexico and now went to bed wearing her makeup. She’d had an affair, which was why her husband blew his brains out during harvest. As Carla walked into the parlor, she smelled dead flowers in vases filled with fetid water. She saw the spent oxygen bottles and listened for the grandfather clock, which had stopped working. She was reminded that nothing is as simple as gossip.
The truth was that Carla’s father had killed himself after learning the pipeline he’d built on their land had leaked benzene into the groundwater. Nearby homes and ranches were contaminated. Three newborn babies died. Arnold settled with the families, buying their silence. But when Alyce got sick, her heartbroken father took matters into his own hands. Arnold cleaned up the mess, literally and figuratively.
The affairs came later. Many of them.
“Hello, dear,” her mother rasped, staring out the front window into the dark clouds that had put out the sun. “People kept calling all week, telling me you were back in town. If I had known dying would have brought you home so quickly, I would have got on with this business years ago.”
Carla thought her mother looked like an aging movie star in repose. She was wearing silk slippers and a long ivory negligee whose plunging back showed her jutting shoulder blades, revealing how much weight she’d lost during her eight-year battle with leukemia. Alyce took a long drag on her cigarette, heedless of the wheeled oxygen tank at her side. The hose curled up beneath the nape of her neck, disappeared into the long blond tresses of her wig, and then reappeared just below her nose. Curlicues of smoke drifted up and caressed a ceiling the color of coffee-stained teeth.
“I think you died when you married Arnold,” Carla said. “I’m looking at a ghost who’s made some very bad financial decisions.”
“So you’ve heard.” Her mother fought a cough, then smiled through cracked lips. “Yes, everything that rightfully belongs to you, my dear. Everything your grandparents fought for during the Dirty Thirties when the weaker fled, everything your father endured those long winters for, so he could make this place what it is — I’m leaving it all to your stepfather.”
“If you’re doing this to hurt me—”
“I’m doing this to save you. Oh, I knew what he did to you, darling.” She paused to let that sink in, flicking her cigarette into a cracked ashtray. “And I know how that must make you feel. But if I’d left him, if we divorced, he would have ended up with half of everything and I just couldn’t allow that. So I waited and put it all in his name. People will think he forced me to change my will — they already do. Then when he returns, everyone in town will say that’s why I did this.”
Alyce opened a drawer. Inside was an old Colt .32 with black tape on the handle. Carla knew the gun — it was her father’s.