Going, Gone

by Laura Crum

  Going, Gone

  A GAIL MCCARTHY MYSTERY

  Laura Crum

  2010 · Palo Alto/McKinleyville

  Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Company

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.

  The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

  Copyright © 2010 by Laura Crum

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  A Perseverance Press Book

  Published by John Daniel & Company

  A division of Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

  Post Office Box 2790

  McKinleyville, California 95519

  www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance

  Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423

  Cover design and illustration by Peter Thorpe, www.peterthorpe.net

  ISBN 9781564747143

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Crum, Laura.

  Going, gone : a Gail McCarthy mystery / by Laura Crum.

  p. cm.

  ISBN [first print edition] 978-1-880284-98-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. McCarthy, Gail (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women veterinarians—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.R76G65 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2009033493

  For Burt, my bay gelding, who won many hearts in his long life, including mine.

  And Fergie, my little red dog, with me through good times and hard times, always a trooper.

  And for Baxter the cat, who was Zak’s friend.

  And Toby, Zak’s pony, much loved by us all, the magical little white horse who taught my son to ride.

  Though death has come between us, love remains.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to all who have helped with this project:

  Jim Warren of the 101, not that anything nefarious ever occurred on his turf.

  Deputy Chief Patty Sapone of the Santa Cruz Police Department, for advice on cops and their ways.

  Wally Evans and Brian Peters, for assistance with the real horses that provided the models for this story.

  Meredith Phillips, my always helpful editor.

  Peter Thorpe, for another great cover.

  And Janet Huntington, of the Mugwump Chronicles blog, who illustrated this book.

  Most of all, thanks to Andy and Zak, my husband and son. You were the inspiration for this book, and are the inspiration in my life.

  I love you.

  Author’s Note

  This book is about two real and much-loved places, our pasture in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and the land near our home by California’s Monterey Bay. The animals, too, are based on my own critters and are as true to life as my writing skills will permit. This leaves the people and the story, both of which are purely fiction, though my husband and son may have lent a bit of themselves to Blue and Mac. But there is no Carson Valley, no saleyard, no mysterious house in the hills. The character of the “horse blogger” is not based on any real person, but the concept was inspired by the many horse blogs I have read in the past year.

  I began this mystery series in 1994 with Cutter. The first five books of the series featured the characters of Lonny Peterson and Bret Boncantini, who both subsequently moved away to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and did not appear in the most recent five books. Many readers have asked about these two characters, so I have brought them back in this story.

  Thank you to all the readers who have written to me over the years. I appreciate your comments and feedback. For those who would like to learn more about this mystery series, go to www.lauracrum.com.

  Happy trails to all.

  Laura Crum

  Prologue

  The auctioneer’s rhythm rattled in my brain. Repetitive, almost mechanistic, rapid-fire. “Give me twenty, twenty, twenty, who’s got twenty, twenty, twenty, do I have twenty, now twenty-five...”

  I sat in the bleachers, high in the shadowy barn above the brightly lit ring where a group of cattle milled. I could see the auctioneer; a slim, dark man in front of a microphone, his mouth constantly moving. The ring men watched the crowd, marking the bids.

  What was I doing here?

  No answer but the rattle of dirt clods on boards as the ring men moved cattle out the gate to the auctioneer’s “Going, gone, sold at twenty cents.”

  I knew enough to know that the cattle had sold for twenty cents a pound. I still didn’t know what I was doing here.

  Sudden shrilling noise blasted through my mind; in another minute I was aware of sheets and blankets, my head on a pillow. A dream, just a dream, I told myself groggily. But what could it possibly mean? Why would I dream about a saleyard? Especially an unfamiliar auction. The place in my dream was no place I’d ever been.... I was sure of it.

  I closed my eyes as the alarm clock went into its snooze mode, and slowly managed to drift back to sleep. Only to wake moments later, or so it seemed, with my heart pounding.

  It’s a dream, I told myself, another dream. But somehow I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread; it clung to me, as persistent as a toothache. Something was wrong. I could feel it.

  The dream didn’t seem so terrible when I reviewed it. Just a dark horse, running across a field, under a stormy sky. Not even a horse I recognized. A dark-colored horse, unknown to me. I had the sense that something, either me or the horse, was lost and terrified, and also the feeling of some sort of impending doom. I could not remember what led up to this. If the dream sequence had revealed more than this one scene, it was lost to me now.

  Rolling over onto my side, I glanced at the sleeping forms of my husband and son, hearing their gentle, murmured breathing. Nothing wrong there. But something was wrong, somewhere. In this moment, I was sure of it.

  I cast about in my mind for the meaning of the fleeing horse, for a clue as to the identity of that horse, an idea about what it might symbolize. Nothing arose. Just the feeling of dread, washing over me in waves, not diminishing.

  Was it our trip? We were leaving today on vacation; was this some sort of premonition of disaster? A dark horse as a sign of warning?

  Stop it, Gail, I urged myself. Forget it. It was just a dream. But even as I rolled over and tried to grab a few more minutes of sleep, I felt an uncomfortable certainty that the dream had meant something. What, I wasn’t sure.

  Chapter 1

  The diesel engine of the four-wheel-drive pickup chugged rhythmically as a heartbeat; my hands on the steering wheel registered its steady pulse as automatically as I was aware of my own. A glance in the rearview mirror showed me that the horse trailer was tracking along evenly behind the truck, its three passengers riding quietly. Above my head, in the cab-over camper, my husband, Blue, and my six-year-old son, Mac, were dozing, or perhaps wrestling, judging by the occasional thumps and bumps.

  Loosening my grip on the steering wheel, I stretched out each hand in turn, squinting a little at the view through the windshield. Flat green alfalfa fields, dusty gray-brown dairies, miles and miles of almond orchards and grapevines slipped by outside the truck. California’s Central Valley looked tranquil in the late afternoon sunlight, as simple and unadorned as a country girl before the era of TV. We were on our way, at last.

  After much planning and preparation, our small family, co
mplete with mounts, was embarked on a vacation in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we were off to visit my old boyfriend, Lonny Peterson, at his ranch near the small town of Carson Valley. Even more accurately, to visit my two horses, Danny and Twister, both of whom were currently turned out in the pasture there. Whichever way you cared to look at it, I thought with an inward smile, we were going to spend some time living in our camper, riding horseback through the April green grass of the foothills, swimming in the creek, and picnicking in the wildflowers. What could be finer?

  It wasn’t that I didn’t love my home in the hills near Monterey Bay, on California’s central coast. I did; I loved my garden and animals and my life as a homeschooling mom. But I loved the Sierra Nevada foothills, too, and I was ready for a change of pace.

  How in the world had this all come about? I let my mind drift back over the events of the last few years, even while my eyes stayed resolutely on the road. Six, no seven years ago, I had been Gail McCarthy the horse vet, wedded to my career, having taken only three vacations in my ten years as a practicing veterinarian. Then had come marriage to Blue and the birth of Mac, and hey presto, suddenly I was a stay-at-home mom, raising my baby.

  Vacations had remained rare; besides my child, I had horses, dogs, cats, chickens, and a large garden to care for. Such things are not easily left, even for a short time. And Blue was equally tied down, busy with his work as a manager and plant breeder at a rose-growing farm. In short, we stayed home on our own small farm and enjoyed it.

  A sudden metallic jingle startled me. The dog sitting on the passenger seat shook her head again, causing her tags to rattle musically.

  “Hi, Freckles,” I murmured, stretching out my hand to stroke her head.

  Freckles wagged her tail and flattened her ears; her light blue eyes gazed up at me in a mildly worried way. Last month she’d lost her longtime canine companion, my Queensland Heeler, Roey, and she was still moping.

  So was I, for that matter. Roey had been with me eleven years; I’d raised her from a pup, and losing her left a gap I could not get used to. I still expected her presence by my side, as the tongue expects a familiar tooth in its place and cannot accustom itself to the empty hole. Over and over again I found myself looking for Roey, only to be reminded, once more, that her body lay buried in our garden, next to the pond.

  I imagined that Freckles felt much the same. At any rate, her usually lively personality seemed flattened, and her somewhat comical appearance—a cross between a Jack Russell terrier and an Australian Shepherd, Freckles was anything but ordinary—was dimmed. Freckles looked sad and worried.

  “I miss her, too,” I said quietly, and the little rough-coated, liver-and-white spotted dog wagged the tip of her tail and pushed her whiskery muzzle up against my arm.

  I patted Freckles’ head and thought of Roey, who should have been lying in her accustomed place on the passenger-side floor. Ready tears rose to my eyes and I blinked. The pain of losing my dog wasn’t rendered any easier by the fact that eleven wasn’t particularly old for a Queensland, and Roey might have been with me much longer had she not been visited with degenerative myelopathy, a spinal disease that caused a gradually worsening paralysis. My bouncy little red dog had slowly been reduced to shuffling and then stumbling and was finally unable to walk at all. Fortunately the disease caused no pain, and Roey, always a trooper, had remained bright-eyed and reasonably cheerful through it all.

  Blue and I had done our best to stay the course with her; we’d bought her a canine “wheelchair” and pushed her about in her little cart for several years, until she grew too weak to bear it; we’d dealt with her worsening incontinence as patiently as we could, though neither of us had expected to have a dog in diapers after our child had finally outgrown them; we’d taken her on our occasional overnight camping trips, which she loved. For the last year I’d given her a daily dose of painkillers and antibiotics, to combat her worsening arthritis and constant bladder infections. But neither of us could bear the increasing look of stoic misery in her eyes, and when she started to develop large sores on her legs that would not heal, we knew it was time.

  Still, I’d put off the inevitable day with endless excuses—Roey still enjoyed treats and being petted; she licked Mac’s ankles affectionately whenever he came within reach; she played with her own front paws—nipping and mock “wrestling” with herself; she wasn’t ready to go. In the end, I wasn’t sure if I was prolonging her life for her sake or mine. She’d been with me so long, taken me through so much; she was part of our little family. I couldn’t picture my life without her.

  It was the shocked look on the face of a friend who was a small-animal vet when he saw her that convinced me we’d gone far enough. Roey’s poor, frail body was literally rotting away, and her eyes, though still bright, were perennially anxious. She was ready to go.

  I sighed and blinked again, feeling the tears run down my cheeks. Swiping them away with one hand, I put my focus back on the road. Roey was gone, though perhaps her spirit rode with me. I couldn’t know. The trip was ahead of me. I, too, would let go.

  Maybe it was the loss of my dog that had precipitated this trip; I didn’t really know that for sure, either. All I could speak to was the urge for a change that had come over me suddenly. I had asked, no, demanded, that Blue finally take a real vacation from work, and to my own surprise, I’d gone out and bought a self-contained camper for our pickup truck. And here we were, on the road.

  A long, straight stretch of road, at the moment. But up ahead were the rounded green slopes of the foothills, and beyond that the deep blue ridgeline of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, crowned with white. The Sierra Nevada, the range of light. John Muir had said that. I smiled. We’d be at Lonny’s ranch in an hour.

  A thump from the horse trailer made me glance in the mirrors. Nothing obviously wrong—no doubt one of the inmates had kicked at the sides. Plumber, probably. My little brown horse had a habit of doing that. Gunner, the big bay, and Henry, Mac’s horse, would inevitably be riding quietly and patiently, as was their way.

  The logistics of getting an expedition like this organized had seemed mind-boggling to me when I’d started. It had been a chance comment of Lonny’s that had shown me the way, opened a door to the possibility.

  “The hills are beautiful in the spring,” he’d said. “You should really come and see it. It’s horse heaven up here. And there’s a swimming hole in the creek that your kid would love. It’ll be perfect in late April.”

  That had been a month ago, right after we’d buried Roey. I’d called Lonny to check on my two turned-out horses and suddenly conceived of this idea. Lonny had convinced me that he had a perfect campsite for us—along the creek, completely private, corrals nearby—and that we—and our horses and dog—would be no trouble to him. And now, in the last week in April, after a month of preparation, we were on our way.

  Motion in the rearview mirror caught my eye. I looked back and saw Blue peering at me from the camper window.

  “Do you want me to stop?” I called back.

  “We’re ready to come up there with you,” he answered.

  “Okay. I’ll pull over as soon as I can.”

  Moving from the camper to the cab demanded a stop, at least for Blue and me. Mac and Freckles were the only ones who could squeeze through the small window connecting the truck and camper.

  A convenient off-ramp presented itself and I pulled off the highway. We were just east of the town of Merced, or so I reckoned. All around us the hills were rising up, their slopes brilliantly green and spangled with wildflowers. The “bald hills,” if I remembered right. That’s what Lonny had called them.

  I eased the truck and trailer to a stop, careful not to jostle any of the passengers. Once we were safely parked, I clipped a leash on Freckles and let her out for a brief walk on the shoulder of the road. Blue and Mac emerged from the back of the camper and we all stretched in the spring sunshine. A little wind ruffled th
rough my hair and Blue smiled at me.

  “Can you watch Mac?” he asked. “I’ll go back and check on the horses.”

  “Sure,” I said, and then to Mac, “Come here, baby.”

  This automatic endearment was met with a glare. “I’m not a baby,” my little boy said firmly.

  “No, I know you’re not,” I amended. “Sorry.”

  “And why do I have to come over there?”

  “You don’t, I guess. Just stay off the road.”

  “I will. Can I walk Freckles?”

  “Sure.” I smiled and handed over the leash.

  At six years old, my son was becoming increasingly independent; I was reminded over and over again that I no longer had a baby. That part of my life was gone, Blue and I having decided that one child was just right for us. And I was forty-five, after all. It wasn’t likely that I’d conceive another.

  I felt a sharp pang as I watched Mac tug at Freckles, who was never quite sure that Mac was the boss. Like me, she’d known him since he was a wiggling pink newborn in my arms; it was hard to come to grips with the strong-minded individual he seemed to have become so suddenly. Only yesterday he’d been a fluffy-headed toddler, surely. And yet it wasn’t sudden at all. A steady progression from my arms to his own two feet, on which he now stood firmly, a six-year-old boy determined that he was in charge of a little spotted dog.

  Freckles yielded to another tug and followed Mac along the shoulder of the road. Blue reappeared from the back of the horse trailer and reported, “Everybody looks fine.”

  “Good,” I said. “Shall we get going?”

  “Yep,” Blue agreed. “It would be nice to have a little time to set up camp before we barbecue.”

  “We ought to get there just before five o’clock, if everything keeps going smoothly.”

  Blue grinned. “God willing and the creeks don’t rise, right?”

  “Right,” I said and called, “Come on, Mac, bring Freckles back. Let’s get going.”