Trouble in Big Timber

by B. J Daniels

  He made a sound deep in his throat as he looked out at the endless sky. He couldn’t see how far it was to the bottom, which was just as well, he thought.

  “The thing is, I can’t trust you, Ford. If I thought you’d come back for the trial and tell them how much I loved Humphrey and how much he loved me and just keep it to the phone call... But you couldn’t do that, could you? You kept digging. Just like that medical examiner. Once Humphrey found my birth control pills, he wouldn’t listen to reason. Maybe I wanted him to find them. Maybe I just wanted it all to be over.” She sighed.

  “You brought this on yourself,” Rachel said, as if working herself up to what she had to do. “You should have just told the sheriff what you’d heard and gone back to Big Sky until the trial. Instead, you got involved with that...woman.” Her voice was rising. “You slept with her, didn’t you. I saw the way you looked at me after that.” He heard the jealousy, saw it in her blue eyes. “You betrayed me. You were the one person I thought I could trust. I trusted you with my life, Ford!” She looked at him as if she hated him. Her laugh was brittle. “She was just using you, and look where it’s gotten you.”

  Rachel took a breath and seemed resolved. “Shyla will be driving up here soon to pick me up. Don’t worry. She’s coming from another road, so she won’t see her husband. That marriage would have never lasted anyway. It’s time to say goodbye, Ford.”

  He said nothing. Even if he could have spoken, he wouldn’t have known what to say to someone so cold and calculating, so inherently evil.

  Ford watched her as she picked up the winter scraper he kept in his truck to clean ice off the windshield in the winter. She leaned down and jammed it against the gas pedal. The pickup’s engine roared. She pried the other end of the scraper against the back of the brake pedal.

  This was it, Ford thought, wishing the drug she’d injected him with had knocked him out—not left him in this state where he could see and hear what was happening to him. But he figured Rachel had known what dosage to give him so he would at least mentally suffer until the end. Probably just as she had Humphrey.

  As he looked at the drop-off in front of the pickup, he knew he would never have taken this way out. He would have stopped before the end of the road even if Rachel hadn’t called.

  What had saved his life, though, wasn’t Rachel but Hitch. He was falling in love with her, which made dying now so much more painful. He desperately wanted to live to see where this relationship took the two of them. He knew she would be his last thought before the end.

  Rachel looked over at him, the engine a roar, so she had to yell to be heard. “I’m sorry it had to end like this.” He wondered if she’d said the same thing before she killed his best friend. She reached over and unsnapped his seat belt. Then she shoved the pickup into gear and reached for the door handle as the truck leaped forward.

  * * *

  KEEPING LOW, Hitch crept up the passenger side of the pickup. There had to be a reason Ford hadn’t moved, hadn’t tried to stop this. She thought about Humphrey. Ketamine. Rachel knew how quickly it worked—and how just as fast it left the body, leaving no trace. If she’d used it on her husband, then why not Ford?

  All she knew for sure was that she would get only one chance to pull Ford from the pickup as she heard the engine rev and Rachel struggling to get the sprung driver’s-side door open.

  Hitch moved fast the moment she heard the engine rev up. She knew she’d have only one chance. She grabbed the passenger-side door handle and yanked it open. As she did, she saw Rachel turn in her direction as she struggled to get out of the driver’s-side door.

  It all happened in an instant and yet time seemed to stop in that moment, suspended as if frozen. Rachel’s expression was one of surprise, then realization as Hitch reached over to unsnap Ford’s seat belt and practically throw him from the moving vehicle. Rachel was still struggling to get out, her mouth a perfect O, mimicking the saucer shape of her blue eyes.

  Hitch fell from the pickup with her arms wrapped around Ford. She hit the ground hard, knocking the air from her lungs but not breaking her hold on him. She felt the back tire skim past them, felt the edge of the earth so close that one of her feet dangled over the precipice. For a moment, she wasn’t even sure that they wouldn’t still go over the edge of the cliff after the pickup.

  Over the sound of the howling wind, the roar of the pickup’s engine, came Rachel’s screams. They seemed to go on forever, diminishing as she fell, until the cries finally stopped just moments before the boom of an explosion. The sky below the cliff turned orange and then black with smoke as Hitch dragged herself back from the precipice to stand.

  Ford lay on his back staring up at the sky overhead. For a moment, she thought he was dead. But then he blinked. She saw his fingers move. She smiled down at him, then bent and kissed his lips. She felt them move under her own. Pulling back, she brushed his hair from his face as she picked up another sound. Sirens.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Ford drove through the gateway opening between the mountain and into the Gallatin Canyon. He felt something release inside him as if he was finally coming home. He reached over to squeeze Hitch’s hand. Her fresh scent mixed with the smell of new leather. He’d thought he would miss his old pickup when he’d had to replace it. But he’d been wrong about that. He seldom gave that truck a thought.

  Anyway, the new-leather smell wouldn’t last long, once he went to work on the ranch hauling hay and critters. He couldn’t wait.

  It was one of those cloudless Montana late-summer days, the sky overhead a bottomless blue. The afternoon sun shone on the pines and the rock rims over the sparkling clear green of the Gallatin River as it wound through the narrow canyon, the mountains rising high on each side. After everything he’d been through, he felt as if he was seeing it for the first time. It was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.

  He glanced over at Hitch. “You sure you’re ready for this?” he asked, grinning. He’d been waiting what seemed like a very long time to take her home to meet his family. The investigation had taken a while to complete even with his testimony about Rachel’s confession—and the evidence Hitch had accumulated.

  Shyla had been shocked to hear about her husband’s death—and maybe even more shocked to find out that he’d been Rachel’s accomplice. She had driven up the mountain road at her friend’s request with Rachel’s suitcases in her trunk. It had seemed a strange request. She’d thought she was taking Rachel to the airport. Little did she know that her best friend never planned for her to leave that mountain alive.

  The story all came out over the months that followed. It had been the little things that Rachel had overlooked. All together, though, they painted a picture of a woman desperate to keep her level of living and at the same time get rid of her husband.

  In the end, Hitch had put together enough evidence that the investigators almost didn’t need his testimony about Rachel’s confession. He tried not to think about her and the lives she’d wasted—her own included.

  “Meeting your family can’t be that scary,” Hitch said now with a laugh. “Sounds like there are a lot of them?”

  “Between the Cardwells and the Savages, uh-huh. My aunt Dana will insist on throwing a party to get everyone together. It’s what she does. She’s the matriarch of the family. Everyone pretty much does what she tells them to—even my uncle Hud. Then there is my father and stepmother and all my uncles involved in the Texas barbecue business and my aunts and my cousins...”

  “I get the picture,” she said with a shake of her head. “You’ve told them about me? About us? About what I do for a living?”

  He nodded. “There are a few cops in the family and private detectives, and of course Uncle Hud is still marshal, although he’s supposed to be retiring.”

  “Then I should feel right at home,” she said, smiling.

  “I hope so.” He knew they
would love her as much as he did. The woman had saved his life. If his aunt Dana had anything to do with it, they would welcome her with a brass band.

  * * *

  HITCH COULDN’T BELIEVE what they’d both been through together in such a short time as she looked out at the gorgeous summer day. It was hard to put it all behind her. She knew it must be even harder for Ford. She could tell coming home was the best medicine for him.

  Fortunately, the drug Rachel had injected him with hadn’t done any long-term damage. If the near-death experience had brought back his PTSD, it didn’t show. He seemed to have come through it stronger and with fewer scars. He credited her with that, but he was strong and he was finding his footing on Cardwell Ranch. Ranching suited him. She loved seeing him happy.

  But the fact that she’d almost lost him was never far from her mind. Rachel had proved to be more cold-blooded than even some of the worst male criminals Hitch had run across.

  “The sad part,” Ford had told her after it was all over, “is that I knew Humphrey. He wouldn’t have divorced Rachel and left her penniless, no matter what the prenuptial agreement said. Even with all the lies she’d told him, he still loved her. He would have given her more money than she deserved.”

  “Not enough for her, though,” Hitch had said. “She wanted it all.”

  “From what she told me, she knew that Humphrey loved her right up to the end. She seemed angry that he still did even when she shot him.”

  Hitch had wanted Rachel Collinwood to spend her life behind bars. She didn’t even deserve a not-very-quick death. But often people didn’t get what they deserved.

  That thought made her smile, because a part of her thought she probably didn’t deserve a man like Ford Cardwell, but she had Rachel to thank for bringing them together. Hitch had fallen in love with him, something that still surprised her, since she’d thought she’d never meet anyone like him.

  “Brace yourself,” he said now as he slowed the pickup after taking the turnoff to Big Sky. “I can’t wait for you to meet everyone. It’s just that they can be a bit overwhelming. Also, since I’ve never brought anyone home before, they’re going to know I’m serious about you. Especially my aunt Dana. She’ll spot how crazy I am about you right away. She’ll be delighted and unable not to show it and get that wedding gleam in her eye. Then there is Uncle Hud—”

  “The marshal.” Ford drove over the bridge spanning the river. Ahead, she could see the ranch. To her surprise, she actually felt butterflies.

  “Hud will be happy to have another person in law enforcement in the family. Not to mention my father. He’s been worrying about what I plan to do with my life. He’ll think this has happened too fast—”

  “It probably has,” she said.

  He shook his head and smiled at her. “You know when it’s right from the moment you feel it.”

  She nodded as he turned in front of a large two-story house. People instantly began to pour out onto the wide front porch and down the steps. Hitch laughed and couldn’t help smiling.

  “I wasn’t kidding,” Ford said. “Want to run now?”

  Hitch shook her head. “Nope. You know me. I’m in it for the long haul.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” he said, and the two of them opened their doors and their arms to his family.

  * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Spring at Saddle Run by Delores Fossen.

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  Spring at Saddle Run

  by Delores Fossen

  CHAPTER ONE

  MILLIE PARKMAN DAYTON muttered a single word of profanity when she looked at the name on the sliver of paper that she’d just drawn from the bowl.

  A really bad word.

  One that would have gotten her mouth washed out with soap had she still been a kid. Because it’d been a while since anyone had crammed a bar of Dial Antibacterial into her mouth, Millie steeled herself for a mouth washing of a whole different kind.

  Sitting in the front row in the town hall of Last Ride, Texas, Millie’s mother, Laurie Jean Parkman, gasped and then lost nearly every drop of color in her face. No easy feat, considering she was wearing her usual full coverage makeup. After the color drained, her mom pulled out the mountain-size emotional guns.

  Tears filled her eyes.

  Narrowed eyes that had also gotten the full makeup treatment. Laurie Jean’s now hot baby blues warned Millie she’d better think fast and figure out a way to erase everyone’s memory of what she’d just said.

  Making waves brings shame—that was Laurie Jean’s motto. It wasn’t exactly needlepointed on pillows around the Parkman house, but it’d been served up verbally and often enough with morning oatmeal and the occasional mouthful of Dial Antibacterial.

  Shocked chatter rippled through the town hall. There’d be gossip. Then, pity and forgiveness. Millie knew the folks of her hometown of Last Ride would cut her enough slack to overlook the f-bomb. More slack than she would ever deserve.

  Because she was a twenty-nine-year-old widow.

  And because everyone in the room knew why she’d cursed. With the name she’d just drawn, life had just given Millie a big f-bomb poke in the eye.

  Twenty Minutes Earlier

  THE GLASS BOWLS filled with names sat like giant judging eyeballs on the table in front of the Last Ride town hall. Someone on the Last Ride Society Committee—obviously, someone with an inappropriate sense of humor—had put labels on them.

  “Bowl o’ Names” on the left.

  Not to be confused with bag o’ salad or Bowl o’ Tombstones on the judgy glass “eyeball” on the right.

  Millie’s stomach fluttered because she knew her name was in the left bowl, a place it’d been for eight and a half years since her twenty-first birthday. She was in good, and also bad, company since the name of every living adult Parkman relative in Last Ride was in that mix with her.

  At last count there were about three hundred and eighty, and names were added as her cousins, nieces, nephews, etc. came of age. Names were subtracted when cousins, nieces, nephews, Parkman spouses, etc. passed. Or fulfilled their assignments.

  The right bowl was jammed with folded slivers of paper with names, as well. No more coming of age for these folks though. These were names taken from the tombstones in all the local cemeteries. Millie didn’t find it comforting that the Bowl o’ Tombstones was stuffed to the brim.

  And that her husband’s name was in there.

  It had been for twenty-two months since Royce had been killed, and his name had been crammed in the mix shortly thereafter. Millie hoped it stayed there until she was part of the whole “ashes to ashes/dust to dust” deal. Then, some unlucky Parkman kin could have a go at doing their duty and do the research that would almost certainly stir up more gossip than it already had.

  The memories came. Of Royce’s fatal car wreck. Of the fact that Millie could no longer remember his taste. His scent. Or the last time Royce had told her he loved her. But there was something she could recall in perfect detail.

  That what she’d had with Royce had been a big fat lie.

  Millie felt the memories and the lies roll into a hot ball, one that would surely spiral her into a panic attack if she didn’t stop it. She needed fresh air, but bolting now would cause every eye in the room to turn and look at her.

  To pity her.

  To whisper about her behind her back.

  Millie didn’t want the pity any more than the gossip or the memories so she started silently repeating the mantra that she’d latched on to shortly after the panic attacks had started.

  Beyond thi
s place, there be dragons.

  It was something she’d seen written on an antique map, a way to warn travelers of dangers ahead. A beautiful map of golden land and teal green waters. The image of it soothed her and sometimes—sometimes—it reminded her not to go beyond the gold and teal. That if she crossed over into the dragon pit of grief, she might never come back.

  Beyond this place, there be dragons.

  The back door opened, bringing in yet more heat and a spear of the May sun that would warm things up even more before it set in a couple of hours. The trio of overhead fans whirled, scattering the heat, some dust motes and the clashing scents of perfumes that the majority of attendees had splashed on.

  “I volunteer as tribute,” the newcomer called out.

  The newcomer, Frankie McCann, was decked out in a full Hunger Games/Katniss Everdeen costume, the cool leather one from the scenes in the last movie. She’d even braided her hair, but unlike Katniss, Frankie’s locks were a blend of pink, peach and canary yellow.

  Frankie’s announcement caused a few giggles, including a hoot, holler and a knee slap from Alma Parkman, the president of the Last Ride Society. There were also some scowls as the “eyes” turned toward the back of the hall. Millie tried to poker up her face and show nothing. Because pretty much any kind of reaction from her would spur more of that pity and gossip. Millie also kept that blank face when Frankie sank down beside her.

  Even if Frankie hadn’t come decked out as Katniss, her presence would have stirred up talk, but Frankie had a right to be here. Seven years earlier, when Frankie had been barely twenty-one, she’d married Tanner Parkman, Millie’s brother, and even though they’d divorced only a year later, Frankie had given birth to Tanner Junior. Or Little T as people called him. Since there hadn’t been a provision in the Last Ride Society to remove divorcées or those who’d given birth to Parkmans, Frankie had remained in the Bowl o’ Names. Much to the disapproval of those, well, who disapproved of a lot of things.