Chapter Six

After Grandma died, my father sold the old house on Second Street and built a huge monstrosity on the hill overlooking the shallow valley that held Prairie View. It sat up there like a toad surveying the pond, waiting to whip out its tongue and catch some unsuspecting insect.

My dad was like that toad of a house. Always lying in wait, ready to “bail out” any poor person whose farm, business, or family member was in trouble. Dean O’Hara, my daddy, would produce his magic checkbook and buy the troubled farm, business, or person. And they would be indebted to him. It made him powerful, somewhat of a despot, and grudgingly respected. That damn funeral was going to be huge.

I pulled into the circular driveway and parked outside the three-car garage. When I opened the back of the Murano, I found my black suit had fallen sometime during the drive and was lying in a heap. My suitcase had slid into it and bunched it up.

“Shit, what the hell else?” I hate ironing clothes.

Daddy hid the house key in the nose of the hideous wooden bear made by one of those chainsaw artists he was fond of. My father’s taste in art was both western and dubious. His house was full of bronze animal sculpture and, the height of bad taste, taxidermy. Grandma wouldn’t have dead animals in her house, so after she died, Dad went on a taxidermy spree.

When I opened the door of the house, I was greeted by a bared-teeth badger sitting by the boot jack. Its glass eyes were slightly off-kilter, giving it a simpleton look. I was going to cover every one of those monstrosities while I was there. They made me feel like I was flea infested. The house smelled of aftershave, pipe tobacco, coffee, and that certain spicy-sweet smell that comes with the testosterone-producing sex.

I threw my bag and crumpled suit on the foyer chair. The house was clean, meaning Connie, housekeeper and family friend, had been here. I checked the table where Dad’s mail was always placed and found a note from Connie. My Sweet Jilly, I’m so sorry about your dad.

I can’t believe it’s real.

I’ve informed Father Wallace in case you need him.

Please call me if you need anything.

There is a casserole in the fridge. 1 hour at 350°.

I’ll be in tomorrow to check on you.

I mean it, call me. Connie Food. I had forgotten all about it and realized I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, except airplane peanuts. Connie, as usual, knew what needed to be done. She had been with our family since she was in her twenties, raising two boys who went on to do great things in law and construction. I didn’t know for sure but, I suppose, my dad had something to do with setting them up. I wondered how they paid him back. People were always paying him back. I wondered, with such successful sons, why Connie continued to take care of Daddy.

I preheated the oven, opened a bottle of pricy Cabernet, popped the casserole in, and sat at the kitchen table. I sipped the wine and appreciated that Dad did have a sense of fine wine. I watched the sun droop toward the west and listened to the kitchen clock tick…tock…a cherrywood number with squirrels and pheasants carved in it. What was I going to do with all this overbaked décor? For that matter, what was I going to do with the entire house?

The phone jerked me out of my perplexing thoughts. The caller ID read B. Stover.

“Thank God, you’re around,” I said into the receiver. “I was worried you’d be away on one of your ‘excursions.’”

“No, baby girl, I’m right here. Do you need me?”

“Oh, Billy-boy, you don’t know the half of it. Have you eaten? Connie left a baked ziti casserole, and I’ve just opened a bottle of kick-ass cabernet.”

“I’m there. I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes. See you then, my Jilly-jill.”

Billy Stover, friend, battle comrade, and keeper of secrets. We’d known each other since I was eighteen. Dad continued to believe I should have a work ethic, so I started a job at the Hi-Line Club as a waitress. Billy was ten years older than me and the swamper for the restaurant and bar. After closing, he cleaned up. While I was working, he would come down from his apartment upstairs, sit at the help’s table, and order his on-the-house dinner. When not busy, I’d get into stimulating conversations with him about books, movies, and pot. We both loved to dip into the weed back then when our brains could afford the loss of synapses.

The following summer, when I returned from my first year of college, Billy and I started hanging out together outside of work. We’d get stoned and revel in our heady discussions. One night Billy made a confession that changed the way I viewed him and the culture of northern Montana.

“Billy, why, with your excellent brain, do you just swamp out the Club?”

“Okay, dearie, it’s truth-telling time…and I expect your discretion.” I nodded, thinking he was going to tell me he couldn’t read or something.

“Jill, you know that extra room upstairs, next to my apartment, the one that always stays locked?” Now I was getting uneasy. Locked rooms held hideous secrets in all the movies. “Well, three nights a week, I run some games in there.”

“Games?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“You noticed that sometimes I come down to the kitchen and put together a relish tray? Well, it’s for the games. Poker. Big, I mean big stakes. I serve the drinks, food, remove the rowdy, the drunk, the flat broke, and get a hefty percentage for all my work. Swamping the Club is my on-the-table front, while running the games is my under-the-table livelihood.”

“There’s gambling up there?” I’m sure my jaw was unhinged.

Back then poker games were illegal; they still are. Billy, I learned, had a little gambling empire going on right under everybody’s nose. More shocking for me, it was a local open secret. If you had the money, you got to play in Billy’s room. The owner of the Hi-Line Club got his percentage, gave Billy the apartment and a daily meal, and high rollers from all over the area would show up to play. Billy limited it to three tables and would often have people waiting in the bar downstairs for an open seat at a poker table upstairs.

It was the summer when I learned how much I didn’t know. It was the end of my childhood. I found that I wasn’t the only one with a secret. The whole town was full of secrets, and Billy knew most of them. Drunks talked to Billy; down-and-outs talked to Billy; lonely, rich farmers talked to Billy; hell, I even talked to Billy.

“I think I like girls way better than I like boys.” I was nineteen, we’d just finished a joint, and I was going back to college in a few weeks. “Do you get my drift?”

“Oh, honey, haven’t you ever wondered why I haven’t hit on such a lovely specimen as you? You clearly aren’t into men, and…maybe I like boys way better than I like girls.”

I started rolling another joint.

That revelation realigned everything I had assumed about gay men always appearing nelly. Billy’s body was beefy, in the muscular sense. He was one of those guys who walked funny because his muscles were pushing his arms from his torso. The legs of all his pants were skin tight because of his abnormal quad development. He lifted weights for a few hours a day. He was a consummate butch, at least to those folks he wanted to fool.

“But you laid that married woman from Cutbank only last week!”

“Just because I like an occasional bounce with a woman doesn’t mean I don’t have a preference. I sleep with lots more men than women.”

He went on to explain how he’d always preferred men, but he also loved money. So he was using his “job” in Prairie View to set himself up to move to a gay-friendly place when he was in his fifties. Find a cute young boyfriend and settle down. I was impressed with his long-range planning.

“I’m doing very well in the investment world, thank you very much.” I heard how swishy he talked when one knew the rest of the story. “I don’t want a boyfriend until I’m older and desire companionship. As it is now, I trip off to Great Falls or Missoula once a month or so and find all the sex I need. And, yeah, I figured you for a lez a long time ago and was wondering when you’d tell me.”

“Damn, am I that obvious?”

“Only to those in the know, dearie. And your…friendship with Annie Robison when you were in high school was difficult to miss.” I cringed and sucked on the joint.

For the next few weeks, I learned more from Billy about my family and my town than I had learned in nineteen years. My understanding of the world sharpened from the secrets Billy revealed.

My family, I had assumed, made its initial fortune in real estate. Not true. My dad’s grandfather was a bootlegger during Prohibition and ran booze all over the Hi-Line, making more money than he could spend. After the Repeal Act passed, all that money went into mostly legitimate businesses, except for off-color investments in gambling. The most visible business was beer and soft drink distribution. More money was made and, by the time Dad was born, my family’s influence was statewide and even into southern Alberta. When my daddy took over, he was bankrolling every backroom gambling operation in the states of Montana and Idaho. Then casino gambling became legal, and Daddy had a cut in every casino, legally. His buying out a dying farm or bankrupt business was just a hobby for him. And Billy’s business? Of course, he was financed by my father, too.

My emotions upon learning all this ran from feeling stupid, to angry, to powerful. But the long-term effect was that I fell in love with secrets, with the rest of the story. And my interest in investigative journalism was born.

I joined the School of Journalism at the University of Montana, and trudged to a master’s in journalism. I moved to Seattle and wrote for a couple of the free rags popular in the city during the late 1980s. I was able to choose my stories and write long, indignant exposés about everything from police cover-ups to fraudulent university research labs.

In the 1990s, my work caught the attention of a national syndicate that contracted me to investigate early deaths of cancer patients using experimental protocols. My first Pulitzer. A few years and a dozen stories covering war and pestilence later, the same syndicate asked me to investigate some cozy dealings between sports franchises, software billionaires, and politicians, all at taxpayer expense. After receiving numerous threatening phone calls and letters, I completed that work and gleaned my second Pulitzer. The threats stopped.

And my father, what did he have to say about my success?

“You’re a wonderful writer, honey, but you’re making some important enemies in territories I don’t travel. I’m worried. Couldn’t you switch to fiction?”

“I don’t know how to write fiction. I’ve never even written a short story and, besides, I find fiction to be too…confining, rule-bound. I like to go into the streets and get dirty when I research. I like learning the back story, the one people should know. Fiction comes from the imagination, and that’s way less interesting for me than true stories.”

“But what about your love for Charles Dickens? Doesn’t he inspire you to write fiction?”

“Daddy, dearest, have you ever read Charles Dickens?”

“Well…not that I remember.”

“When I think I can write fiction like Charles Dickens, then I’ll write fiction. Until then, I’m just a nosy reporter.”