Three-Inch Teeth, page 21
Cotton shook her head almost imperceptibly.
“So we haven’t met?”
Again the headshake.
“Then what is it? I’m really curious to find out.”
“It’s nothing. Kindly eat and leave.”
“Wow,” Sheridan said, pouring syrup on her pancakes. “Right to the point.”
As Sheridan ate her first mouthful, she said, “I can see why Mr. Bottom likes his breakfast. These pancakes are delicious.” And they were: fluffy, slightly sweet, with a sour buttermilk tang.
“Leon likes his breakfast, even though he eats it like a pig,” Cotton said. Her tone was bitter and dismissive, but for the first time she’d actually said something to Sheridan that wasn’t passive-aggressive or downright hostile toward her.
Sheridan wasn’t sure how to respond, so she didn’t. She watched as Cotton broke the yolk of the first fried egg and let it run off the crisp white edges until it painted the surface of the top pancake. Then she lifted it and pierced the yolk of the middle egg.
Sheridan was startled, and at first she couldn’t put her finger on why. Then it hit her.
“My dad eats pancakes like that,” she said. “You’re the only person besides him I’ve ever seen who uses that … method. No syrup at all, just egg yolks soaked into the pancake.”
Cotton seemed to freeze. Again, she refused to make eye contact.
“He also makes the best pancakes I’ve ever had until these,” Sheridan said. “What’s your secret?”
“No secret,” Cotton said, deadpan. “It’s just Bisquick, but I add sugar, baking powder, buttermilk, oil, eggs, and a teaspoon of vanilla.”
Sheridan sat back. “That’s exactly what my dad does. He used to make them for us every Sunday morning. I grew up eating these exact pancakes. Isn’t that a strange coincidence?”
“It is,” Cotton said with no enthusiasm.
“What are the odds? The same pancake recipe.”
“I don’t find it all that interesting,” Cotton said. “It’s a recipe right off the side of the box. Nothing special.”
“Still …”
Cotton ignored her. She was eating more quickly, as if in a hurry to get it all over with as soon as possible. Sheridan used the moment to slip her phone out of her back pocket, activate the camera app, and raise it from her lap until the lenses barely cleared the table.
“Did you make your kids pancakes when they were little?” Sheridan asked. While she said it, she snapped several photos of Cotton, then lowered the phone back out of view.
Cotton flinched at the question. “Why do you ask?”
“I guess I’m just making conversation.”
“Yes, I made my boys pancakes. No big deal. Why do we need conversation?”
“I guess we don’t,” Sheridan said. “Boys, huh? How many?”
“Two,” Cotton sighed.
“Do they live around here? Do you get to see them?”
For the first time, Cotton looked up. Her eyes flared. “The younger one is dead. The older one I never see.”
“That’s sad for you, I’m sure,” Sheridan said.
“It’s the way it is. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Okay. I didn’t mean to pry.”
Sheridan returned to her breakfast, but something was still nagging at her. The feeling was getting stronger.
“I’ve had only three men in my life,” Cotton said, surprising her. “The first one was very bad. The second was very good. The third is Leon. I’m not sure what he is.”
Sheridan didn’t interrupt Cotton. The woman seemed to have something to say finally. And Sheridan didn’t want to steer the conversation to her own recent loss. There were still too many conflicting emotions over that and she didn’t feel prompted to share them with an odd old woman.
Cotton said, “I regret things that I did in my life before I met the very good man, Mr. Cotton. When I cut that bad man out of my life, I cut out everything about him. Everything. It was like I had a tumor removed that also took some healthy tissue. It is what it is.”
“Do you mean your sons?” Sheridan asked.
“I said I don’t want to talk about it and I won’t.”
“What was your married name before you met Mr. Cotton?” Sheridan asked. “I might be crazy, but I can’t get over the feeling that we’ve run across each other before, somehow.”
“We haven’t,” Cotton snapped. “Now, go.”
With that, she pushed her chair back and rose from the table. Sheridan watched her carefully as she hurried to the kitchen door.
Before she slammed it shut, Cotton looked back at Sheridan with angry eyes. From behind the door, she shouted, “Go away and never come back.”
*
SHERIDAN SHOULDERED BY Bottom on the front porch. He seemed to be arguing with his bankers and his face was bright red.
She was in a fog and her stomach hurt. Her vision seemed clouded by her sudden thoughts and feelings.
The very bad man. Two sons, the younger one dead and the older a stranger to her. Healthy tissue removed along with the tumor. Katy Cotton was in her mid- to late seventies and Leon had alluded to the fact that she had some kind of ties to Wyoming in her past.
But most of all, it was the pancakes and the way she cooked and ate them.
Sheridan drew her phone out of her back Wranglers pocket and speed-dialed her mother. Marybeth answered on the first ring by saying, “Hi, honey. How are things going in Colorado?”
“Great, actually. I’m ready to head back.”
“This place is a nightmare right now,” Marybeth said. “Wait until I catch you up.”
“I look forward to that, but there’s something I really need to run by you.”
“What’s that?”
“Are you sitting down?”
“I’m at my desk. What is it?”
“What was Dad’s mother’s first name?”
Marybeth hesitated for a beat. “Her name was Katherine. I never met her, and your dad never talks about her, because she walked out on the family when he was ten years old and his younger brother, Victor, was eight. Why do you ask?”
“Was she known as Katy?”
“Yes, she was,” Marybeth said. “Katy Pickett.”
Sheridan turned around and stared at the house on the Never Summer Ranch. Leon Bottom paced and gesticulated on the front porch, arguing with his banker. Behind a lace curtain on the second floor, a figure looked back at her.
“I think I just met my grandmother,” Sheridan said. “And she’s a nasty piece of work.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Twelve Sleep County Library
“MY MOTHER?” JOE said incredulously to Marybeth. “In Walden, Colorado? Can that even be possible?”
They were in Marybeth’s office in the Twelve Sleep County Library. Marybeth was seated behind the desk and Joe had taken the hardback chair across from her. His hat was crown-down on a side table and he’d come to fill her in on everything that had happened that morning and to find out what she’d heard as well. The door was closed and Marybeth had disconnected with Sheridan just a few minutes before.
For Joe, it was the last bit of information he would have dreamed of receiving at the moment, and he felt like he’d been gut-punched.
“She goes by Katy Cotton now,” Marybeth said. “Apparently she married a man named Cotton and they moved to Michigan years ago, but now it appears that she’s turned up on this ranch in Walden where Sheridan had a job.”
Joe looked at the ceiling tiles. He was speechless.
“When is the last time you saw her?” Marybeth asked.
He grunted instead of responding. He didn’t want to think about it.
“Joe?”
“I don’t know. Over forty years ago, I guess. Victor woke me up and told me Mom was gone. George was in the kitchen drinking coffee and trying to get over his usual morning hangover. It’s not like she said goodbye or left a note or anything.”
Marybeth raised her hands and placed them on the sides of her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Joe,” she said. “You never talk about her.”
“There’s nothing to say. She was just gone from our lives, just like that. I barely remember her.”
“She was there for your first ten years. You have to remember something.”
Joe shook his head. “She and my dad were bad news together, I’ve told you that. It was like they had their own thing going and they didn’t let anyone else in, including Victor and me. They loved each other like teenagers one minute and hated each other’s guts the next. They were very loud about both. My brother and I sort of raised ourselves, anyway, so when she left I guess it wasn’t all that different.”
“Do you miss her?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
“You might want to think about that now.”
“Why?”
“I’m not really sure,” Marybeth said. “I guess because now we know she’s out there. At least, Sheridan thinks she met her.”
“Sheridan might be wrong, though,” Joe said.
“It’s possible. Here, she took a couple of photos.”
Marybeth slid her phone across her desk. Pained, Joe picked it up and scrolled through all four shots. They were hurried and not in sharp focus.
“She looks like a mean old lady,” Joe said. “I can’t be sure of it.” But it was jarring to see her face, her white hair, the pinched mouth. She looked familiar, he thought. Like she could still easily lurch across the table and smack his ear with a cupped hand like she used to do when she was drinking or angry with George, which was most of the time.
“Sheridan said she was mean,” Marybeth said.
“That tracks with what I remember,” Joe responded. “Still, I hope it isn’t her. Sheridan doesn’t deserve to get sucked into this stupid thing. She’s got enough on her plate.”
“Your daughters are naturally curious about their relatives on your side,” Marybeth said. “They’ve always kind of wondered how their parents came to be.”
“They should know we aren’t the product of our parents,” Joe said, without mentioning his mother-in-law, Missy, by name. “Of all people, you should know that. When I think about what you went through growing up … I still can’t believe you made it through.”
He sat back in the chair and sighed. He said, “I’m not sure I even care about this right now. I don’t want to focus on it. There’s too much going on.”
“I understand,” Marybeth said. “But I’m going to fire up my database programs and start doing some research. I want to see if I can confirm Katy’s trail from Wyoming to Michigan to Colorado. Aren’t you just a little bit curious?”
“Nope.”
“What if you have half brothers or sisters out there that you’ve never met? Wouldn’t it be interesting to know about that?”
“Nope.”
He said, “All these years we’ve done real well on our own, haven’t we? We’ve got your crazy mother, and now mine might have crawled out from under some rock in Colorado. But we’ve got three great girls and we’ve got each other. That’s pretty good, right?”
Tears filled her eyes. “Yes.”
“We’ve done all right,” he said.
“We have,” she responded.
“Why muck it up now if we can help it?”
“I understand.”
Joe reached up with an imaginary eraser in his right hand and moved it in a circular motion, as if to remove the previous exchange from the fronts of their minds.
“So tell me about your morning,” she asked. “What have you found out about that bear?”
He said, “I’m working through a problem and I’d love your thoughts on it. Either we’ve got a bear with magical powers, a bunch of bears acting in unison, or we’ve got something else entirely.”
*
WHEN JOE WAS done recapping the events of that day, Marybeth squinted across the desk at him. “Does Jennie Gordon have a theory on how this is all possible?”
“Not really,” Joe said. “It’s all new ground. We’re both bumbling around in the dark, with no clue when the next attack will come or where it could happen.
“Think about it,” he said. “This grizzly—if it is one creature—has covered hundreds of miles in a huge loop around the state of Wyoming, picking off people along the way and not displaying any kind of normal bear behavior. It’s not protecting its territory, food supply, or cubs. It’s hunting lone humans and tearing them to shreds and not caching the bodies—except for Clay Junior—or even feeding on the remains. Judge Hewitt was the exception to the pattern this morning, of course, but the grizzly was apparently spooked away before it could finish the job. Other than that, the attack was similar.”
“Thank goodness it didn’t finish the job,” Marybeth said.
“Hewitt said something about seeing a red dot before they loaded him on the helicopter,” Joe said. “It doesn’t make any sense. I associate red dots with scopes on firearms, not with bears. I wish Hewitt could have explained what he was talking about, but it’s very possible he was hallucinating at that point. There were plenty of drugs in his system and that attack had to be traumatic.
“All sorts of scenarios go through my head when I consider the factors in the attack,” Joe said. “What if someone has trained a grizzly to kill on command? What if someone is driving around the country with a trailer and a grizzly in the back and unleashing it on people in random places?”
“But why?” she asked.
“I don’t have a clue. That’s where my speculation falls apart. Every theory I have falls apart if you look at it real closely.”
“So you’re injecting a human element into the attacks?” she asked.
“I guess I am. But I can’t get it to square with anything that seems remotely plausible. No one has attack bears at their disposal. And I sure never saw any evidence of that when I actually saw the grizzly in person on the Double D. No, that bear was acting entirely on its own when it went after Brodbeck in the river.”
“So we’re back to the lone bear theory,” she mused.
“I don’t know what we’re back to,” he groused.
“What if the bear is still here?” Marybeth asked.
Joe shrugged. “It could be. Or it could be twenty miles away on a dead run looking for its next target. We just don’t know, and that’s the frustrating thing.”
“Just like we don’t know anything about that drive-by shooting at the school,” Marybeth said with a shiver. “They still haven’t found the car or anything else, from what I understand.”
Joe said, “A white SUV with California plates? That almost sounds like projection instead of reality.”
“You need to stay out of that investigation, Joe,” Marybeth cautioned. “I’m serious. As awful as it may sound, you can’t get distracted right now.”
Joe grudgingly agreed with her.
“There is something that occurs to me,” Marybeth said after a full minute of silence between them. “It’s crazy, but it’s not crazier than the theories you’ve laid out.”
“Please tell me,” Joe said. “That’s why I’m here.”
She put on her readers, as if they would help her see more clearly, then said, “You’re looking at all of this from the perspective of the grizzly bear. You and Jennie as well. You’re trying to establish a behavior pattern based on what you know about bears and what motivates them to attack or run away. You’re looking at times and distances—logistics. And you’re trying to guess what the bear will do next based on what it’s already done.”
Joe encouraged her. “Go on.”
“What maybe you haven’t done is look at the pattern of attacks based on the victims instead of the bear.”
“I don’t follow.”
“And I’m not sure this even makes any sense once I really think about it,” she said. “But isn’t it just bizarre that we know three of the victims personally? Clay Junior, of course. Then Dulcie—and now Judge Hewitt? How do you square that, since I know you don’t believe in coincidences?”
“I don’t, usually,” he said. “But maybe this time I do. We don’t have much population in Wyoming, and the longer we live here the more people we know. It isn’t crazy to think that we’re acquainted with the victims in some way. Tell me: When is the last time someone in this county or the area died and we didn’t know them, or at least know of them?”
“I’ll grant you that,” she said. “But still …”
“We didn’t know that prison guard, whoever he was,” Joe said. “Right?”
She agreed.
“So how do we square that? It breaks the pattern, right?”
“It does,” she said. “But maybe we need to learn a little more about that prison guard. Who knows? We may find something that links him to the others in the same way.”
Joe thought about it.
“You’re not buying it, right?” she asked.
“I’m not rejecting it entirely. But like my theories, it may not hold up. Why would someone target people we know? Do you think a bear keeps a list of our friends and acquaintances? And where does that corrections officer from Rawlins fit in?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I can do some digging into him. I know who I can call who might be able to shed some insight into him.”
“Who?”
“Dick Weber,” Marybeth said. “He’s the deputy warden at the prison. He’s been there a bunch of years and he probably knows all of the COs.”
Joe rubbed his jaw. “How do you know him?” It always took him off guard when Marybeth brought up names in conversation he’d never heard before, because he doubted there was a single person on earth Joe knew that his wife wasn’t aware of.
“I met him through his wife, who runs the food bank in Carbon County,” she said. “I met him last year when we did an event down there.”
Marybeth was on the executive board of the Wyoming Hunger Initiative, which had been formed prior to the pandemic to feed children, but had grown in dollars and influence to become a primary source of nutrition for poor families throughout the state.
“Ah, gotcha,” Joe said.
