The VACANCY sign was on at the Almost Home Motel. Of course it was, Kristen thought. Tristess wasn’t a place to visit. These guests weren’t tourists. This was where failed ranchers went to die and men named Bubba went to pass sexually transmitted diseases to teenagers named Brandissa or Starr. And there weren’t even enough of those to fill the building.
Behind the front desk, a young man greeted her with a monotone, “Welcome to the Almost Home. You’re almost home at the Almost Home.”
“God, I hope not,” Kristen said.
“Pardon?” the boy asked.
“I’d like a room for the night.”
Kristen couldn’t remember her license plate, and when the boy asked for her credit card, it took her a moment to understand the request. When she opened the door to her room, she was startled to see that it looked exactly like her earlier stay, although what she had expected she didn’t know.
She didn’t bother bringing in her suitcases. She set her laptop on the table and typed Marydale Rae Tristess Oregon murder. The headlines were almost eight years old, but the search engine brought them instantly back to life. LESBIAN LOVE TRIANGLE ENDS IN MURDER. RODEO KILLER TO BE TRIED AS ADULT. The articles all featured the same photograph. A younger Marydale, sitting on top of a pyramid of hay bales surrounded by five other girls. The five wore tiaras; Marydale wore a crown. They were all pretty and blond, but Marydale looked like the original after which the other girls had been imperfectly modeled.
The article said she had been seventeen at the time, a volunteer for the American Veterans Support Network, treasurer for the local chapter of Future Farmers of America, and the Tristess rodeo queen three years running. Most of the articles mentioned that she had been orphaned. A few mentioned that she had been researching colleges and wanted to study psychology and eventually get her master’s in counseling. I want to serve other people, the young Marydale was quoted. Whether it’s tutoring someone at school or helping one of our servicemen find community back home, helping others is the most rewarding thing you can do.
Nonetheless, on the night of the rodeo coronation, Marydale lured champion calf roper, honor student, and rancher Aaron Holten to her barn and killed him. She waited for him in the hayloft, and when he was halfway up the two-story ladder, she threw three hay bales at him in quick succession. The third bale knocked him off the ladder and to his death. They can weigh up to a hundred pounds, maybe more if they’re spoiled, a local rancher was quoted as saying. The DA told reporters that Marydale had lured Aaron over with offers of sex. Judge Kip Spencer had presided over the case.
After the murder, the story unfolded to the town’s horror and fascination. Everyone who had contact with Marydale had something to say, and the Tristess Tribune interviewed them all. Apparently, it was common knowledge that Aaron had courted Marydale for years and that she had rebuffed him. What the town hadn’t known was that Marydale had seduced her friend Aubrey Thomsich. She was wild, Aubrey told the local paper. I knew it was wrong what we did, but life was always exciting with Marydale. The local preacher suggested that the grief over her parents’ deaths had turned her from the right path. One of Marydale’s classmates said that Marydale had always looked at her with the eyes of lechery.
The accompanying picture showed Marydale putting her arms around a dog with a cast on its front leg. Kristen stopped at the photograph, touching the screen with her fingertip. It didn’t take a trial attorney to see that the town had turned on her. The accounts of her deviance were stacked up against her honors and accolades, as though somehow being a beautiful orphan and a junior soroptimist made the murder of Aaron Holten worse.
Kristen picked up her phone to call…someone. Her hands shook. Who could she call? The last thing Sierra needed was one more person in her life making bad decisions that would appear, to Sierra, as romantic adventures. Donna would love the whole thing. She might be stuck with the Lubbock, Texas, divorce, but Kristen had fucked a convicted murderer two months into her first job as DA.
No, not fucked. Kristen stared at Marydale’s picture on her screen. She had fucked the Mad-Dog-drinking philosophy major and a half dozen other men who had felt, momentarily, like answers to some question her body kept posing.
She lay down on the bed.
“Marydale,” she whispered, and tears came so suddenly to her eyes, they felt like they belonged to someone else. “How could you do this to me?” She pressed her face into the orange coverlet, not even thinking about how many times it had not been washed. “How could you not tell me?”