Cold Case at Cardwell Ranch & Boots and Bullets

by B. J Daniels

  He could well imagine the condition many of the old items had been in before she’d worked her magic. It surprised him what wonders she’d achieved with a collection of what most people would have discarded as worthless. He could feel Kate’s energy in every room. It was like walking into the woman’s home rather than a shop.

  At a rustling sound, he turned to see Kate Landon come down the wide flight of stairs. She’d showered and changed since he’d seen her at the old hospital and now wore a colorful skirt and top with black ballet slippers.

  Her hair was still damp and hung around her shoulders, a coppery wave that framed her face and set off her wide green eyes. She was so stunning he stared, completely enchanted with this woman who could turn trash into treasure. As he stared at her, he realized that before, all he’d seen was her resemblance to the dead woman, now...

  “Hello,” she said in a lyrical tone. She seemed amused to see him again.

  “After meeting you, I decided I’d better see your shop,” he admitted honestly.

  She smiled, opening her arms to take in the expansive rooms. “It’s still a work in progress. I haven’t been open all that long. I bought the building at an auction four months ago.”

  So she had been in town before his coma. Which meant he could have seen her, just as his brother would have suggested, and that was how she became part of his nightmare.

  “Your shop is amazing. You’ve done wonders with it,” he said glancing around although all he really wanted to do was look at her.

  “Halloween night the basement is being turned into a haunted house,” she said. “You should come. If you’re still in town.”

  “I just might do that.” His gaze locked with hers. “Do you have plans for dinner tonight?” The invitation came out of nowhere, surprising them both.

  Her eyebrows shot up.

  “I realize we just met and you know nothing about me.”

  She smiled. “In a town this size? Are you kidding? Everyone in town knows your life history by now.”

  He returned her smile. “I hope what you heard wasn’t all bad.”

  “Not all of it,” she teased. “I’d love to have dinner with you, but I’m afraid I have other plans tonight.”

  Of course she would have a date, a woman like this.

  “I have to help my friend Jasmine sew some props for the haunted house. She sews, I help by providing the food and moral support. But I am planning on stopping by the Fall Festival later this evening. Maybe I’ll see you there if you’re going. There’s going to be frybread. I never pass up frybread.”

  “Great.” Cyrus wondered if this woman was why he was supposed to come back to Whitehorse. Maybe it hadn’t been about a murder at all. Maybe he’d been destined to return to meet this woman. He liked the idea much better than the alternative.

  It made more sense than any other explanation he could come up with. Which would mean there was no murdered woman in the nursery. No switching of babies. No wandering down an empty hospital hallway. None of that had happened.

  Instead Kate Landon had happened. He smiled to himself, desperately wanting to believe she was the reason he was in Whitehorse as he shoved off the doubts that had plagued him, the things that made no sense.

  He told that nagging little voice demanding a logical explanation for everything to shut up. It didn’t matter why he’d walked right to the old hospital nursery earlier today, why he’d been able to find his room, why he knew how the tile felt on his bare feet, or the big one, why Kate Landon looked so much like the murdered woman that he’d thought she was the victim’s younger sister.

  Couldn’t it be possible that he’d had the dream just to get him back here to meet Kate?

  Cyrus felt as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He was freer than he’d felt since he’d awakened from his coma. He told himself that he could let it go.

  Those months would always be lost, but he had come out of the coma with apparently no long-lasting side effects. He’d been lucky. He was alive. It was time he started enjoying that fact. Just as Roberta Warren, the hospital administrator, had told him.

  But as he turned to leave, Cyrus saw something in a glass cabinet that changed everything.

  Chapter 5

  “Do you like the bracelet?” Kate asked as she joined him at the glass case.

  For a moment, Cyrus couldn’t find his voice. He told himself there had to be hundreds, thousands of bracelets just like this one. But even as he thought it, he could see that this wasn’t costume jewelry.

  “It looks old,” he said as he stared down at the delicate string of tiny silver sleigh bells and tried to still his thundering heart. He saw that it had been made by a jeweler with an eye for detail. “It’s incredible workmanship.”

  Kate beamed. “My grandfather was a silversmith. He made the bracelet for my mother’s sixteenth birthday.”

  “Your mother?” he asked, his voice sounding strained to his ears.

  When she didn’t say anything, he said carefully, “There’s no price on it.”

  She laughed softly. “Because it’s priceless,” she said as she unlocked the case and gingerly lifted out the bracelet. The bells tinkled softly, sending a chill through him. He’d heard that sound before. A memory, unfocused and distant, tried to surface.

  “The items in this case aren’t for sale. I just like them where I can see them,” Kate said, pulling him out of the memory. “It makes me feel closer to my mother. I can’t bring myself to wear the bracelet. I like that she was the last person to wear it. Silly, I know.”

  “No,” he said, looking over at her and thinking he couldn’t be more enchanted by this woman.

  “It’s really quite heavy,” she said, surprising him as she laid the bracelet in his palm.

  The silver felt cold against his flesh and sent a memory of another palm clutching this bracelet ripping through his mind. He quickly handed it back to her and started to ask more about her mother when the front door jangled open and three women came in with a gust of cold air. Wind whirled golden leaves around the steps before the door closed again.

  “Good afternoon,” Kate said with a smile as she greeted the shoppers. Cyrus watched her quickly put the bracelet back in the case and lock it. “Maybe I’ll see you later at the Fall Festival,” she whispered as she passed him to go offer the women a cup of hot spiced cider.

  He stood for a moment, staring at the bracelet, before he noticed the women glancing back at him with obvious curiosity.

  As he left his mind was awhirl.

  The bracelet he’d seen in his dream was real. That had to mean that the woman wearing it had also been real—and murdered in the hospital nursery just like he’d known from the moment he’d awakened from his coma.

  If the bracelet had belonged to Kate’s mother, then she had to be the woman he’d seen in the nursery. The same woman who’d switched the babies.

  * * *

  When they’d been interrupted by the three local women entering the shop, Kate had felt as if Cyrus had wanted to ask her something more.

  As she gave the women a tour, she was again struck with that uneasy feeling she’d had when she’d met Cyrus at the old hospital. He hadn’t just stopped by her shop out of curiosity. He wanted something from her and she suspected it was more than a date.

  As more women entered the shop, Kate replayed the moment when Cyrus had seen her mother’s bracelet in the glass case by the door. At first she’d thought he was taken with it. But now that she thought about it, he’d seemed shocked to see it, almost as if he’d recognized it.

  Her heart began to beat a little faster. Was it possible he knew something about her mother?

  Now she wished she didn’t have to work on the haunted house tonight. She would make sure she saw Cyrus Winchester again. Unfortunately, she had no idea where he was staying or how to reach him. She would h
ave to make a point of catching up with him at the festival tonight—if he went.

  Kate thought he would go and be watching for her. Apparently he was as anxious to see her as she was him.

  Another group came through the door, then a handful of singles. Kate was busy showing them around her shop when she heard the bell over the front door ring again. She turned, half expecting to see Cyrus coming back through the door because she’d been thinking about him.

  But it was her friend Andi Blake Jackson.

  “What is going on?” Andi asked as she stepped in out of the cold. Andi was the local reporter for the Milk River Examiner, the only newspaper for miles. She used to be a famous television newscaster in Texas, but she’d moved to Montana and fallen in love and as they say, the rest was history. Andi had become a permanent Whitehorse resident when she’d gotten hitched to Cade Jackson, who ran the local bait shop and raised horses on a place out by Nelson Reservoir. His family went way back in Whitehorse.

  Kate and Andi had met when Andi did a story on Kate’s purchase of the old library building and her plans to open Second Hand Kate’s. They’d become fast friends.

  “I was down the street and I couldn’t help but notice people coming and going in the shop. I thought ‘what is she selling?’ And then I found out. You know why business has been so brisk, don’t you?” She didn’t give Kate a chance to guess. “Cyrus Winchester. The talk around town is that he stopped by your shop. Everyone is dying to know what he bought.”

  Kate had to smile. Andi had been born to be a reporter, with her natural curiosity and ability to ferret out news.

  “Is that the man’s name?” Kate asked, pretending to play dumb.

  Andi cocked a brow at her suspiciously. “Give it up. Jasmine already told me that you met him at the old hospital earlier. What was he doing here?”

  She shrugged. “I think he was just looking.” Looking for what, though? Cyrus’s interest had been less in Second Hand Kate’s and more in Kate herself. Had it not been for his interest in the bracelet, she would have been flattered at the attention. It had been a while since she’d taken an interest in anything but getting her business going. Cyrus Winchester interested her. Now more than ever.

  “He didn’t buy anything?”

  “Nope.” Kate stepped behind the counter to sort through some new stock she’d purchased at one of the last of the season’s garage sales.

  “Then why...”

  Kate had shared only the basics of her past with her new friends in Whitehorse. There were some things she’d never told anyone. But she knew Andi and knew she would keep digging if she thought there was something going on. “Cyrus asked me out to dinner.”

  Andi narrowed her gaze. “Get out of here. You do know what he’s doing in town, don’t you? He’s been asking a lot of questions about a murder.”

  Kate checked her expression before she looked up from her garage-sale finds. “Murder?”

  “This is where it gets really weird,” Andi said, looking around to make sure no one was within earshot. “There wasn’t a murder. The night he spent in the old hospital he thinks he walked down to the nursery and found a nurse murdered there, but he couldn’t have because he was in a coma the entire time and never left his bed.”

  “So he dreamed it?”

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  “How do you know this for a fact?” Kate demanded, not liking that this was what everyone in town was talking about.

  “I have a source at the hospital,” Andi whispered. “Her office is just outside the administrator’s and she hears everything.”

  “So who did he think he saw murdered?” Kate asked, hating being part of the gossip and yet wanting to know more about Cyrus. Feeling as if she needed to know more about him and why he might be interested in her—and her mother’s bracelet.

  Andi shrugged. “All he said was that it was a nurse who worked at the hospital. And get this, he thinks there were two babies in the nursery that night.”

  “But there weren’t any babies in the nursery.”

  Andi’s eyes widened. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I was there that night. Martha Ingram’s father, Wally, was in the hospital and at her suggestion I stopped by to discuss buying some of the furnishings. You know she’s on the hospital board. I think she thought talking about that would keep her mind off the fact that her father was dying.”

  “So did you see or hear anything?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “You didn’t see Cyrus Winchester?”

  “No. Martha and I talked out in the hallway. I saw the nurses behind the desk down the hall. Now that I think about it, I saw one of them go into the room next to the nurses’ station to check on the only other patient.” With a start she realized that had to have been Cyrus Winchester. “I just remember it was kind of weird with the hospital being so empty that night.”

  “Creepy,” Andi said. “What if there really was a murder there that night?”

  “I thought you said there wasn’t?”

  Andi shrugged. “Still, you have to admit, it’s interesting that he is so determined there was a murder that he came all this way to check it out for himself. Clearly he’s mistaken, since there was no murder victim found and no babies in the nursery that night.”

  Kate nodded, remembering the empty nursery she’d passed as she’d left that night three months before. Interesting? Or very odd? “I wonder why he’s so convinced?”

  “Maybe he’s got a screw loose after being hit in the head or he just imagined it. You know he spent three months in a coma and only recently came out of it.”

  He was in a coma that long? Kate thought about how pale he’d looked when she’d seen him in the old hospital hallway earlier. He hadn’t looked well. She was reminded that she’d thought then that he’d looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

  “Well, I would imagine he will give up and go back to wherever he’s from soon,” she said.

  “Denver. He’s a private investigator in Denver with his twin brother, Cordell. They’re the grandsons of Pepper Winchester, a recluse who lives on a ranch forty miles south of here. He’s never been married.”

  Kate laughed, thinking now she really did have his life history. “You left out his shoe size and that he’s quite handsome.”

  “You noticed? I thought you didn’t have time for men?”

  Andi had tried to set her up with several eligible bachelors when she’d first come to town, but Kate hadn’t been interested. “So are you going out to dinner with him?”

  “I’m busy tonight, but I might if he asks again.” Kate realized that something had drawn her to Cyrus Winchester, something more than his good looks, as if they had some...connection—even before she’d seen his strange reaction to her mother’s bracelet. As Andi had put it, creepy.

  “I’m not sure you should go out with him,” Andi said. “What if he is crazy? Jasmine said when you met him earlier at the old hospital he was looking for his room?”

  “I was loading up the last of the furniture I bought at the auction. He said he wanted to see the room where he’d stayed that one night.” But he hadn’t been searching for his room. She got the feeling he’d gone straight to it.

  “He came back to the scene of the crime?”

  Kate realized that was probably exactly what he’d been doing. In fact, he’d said something to that effect. She shivered now at the memory.

  Another group of women entered the shop on a fresh blast of cold air and autumn leaves. “I wonder if there ever have been any murders at the old hospital?” Kate whispered as the women disappeared into the back of the shop.

  “None that I know of,” Andi said, thoughtfully.

  Kate knew her friend. If anyone could track it down, it was Andi. “Let me know what you find out.”

  * * *

  A c
ountry-western band played on a flatbed trailer parked along the main drag. Fall Festival was in full swing by the time Cyrus got there. He hadn’t seen Kate Landon, wasn’t even sure she’d show up.

  Seeing that silver bracelet in her shop had thrown him for a loop. Then when she’d told him it had belonged to her mother...

  He’d gone back to his hotel room and spent most of the afternoon trying to make sense of it, as if any of this made any sense. Maybe seeing Kate and the bracelet was just a coincidence. Just like the murder had been nothing more than his overactive imagination at work.

  His head hurt and he tried to put all of it out of his mind as he walked along the crowded streets clustered with booths offering everything from crafts and home-grown pumpkins to Christmas-tree ornaments and baked goods.

  A mixture of alluring scents floated along the street: burgers, chocolate, coffee, hot apple cider, barbecue, cotton candy. But one scent in particular drew him until he found the booth where women were making frybread.

  He breathed in the delicious aroma, remembering another fall when he was five and his father brought him and Cordell into town for the Fall Festival.

  “Two?” the woman behind the counter asked.

  Cyrus started. Did he look as if he needed two frybreads? That’s when he noticed Kate had come up beside him and was doing the same thing he’d done, breathing in the wonderful aroma.

  Her eyes were closed as she breathed in the scent of the frying bread, her expression one of unmitigated pleasure. He smiled to himself, guessing he’d had the same look on his face just moments before.

  “Two,” he confirmed as Kate Landon opened her beautiful green eyes. He couldn’t believe how happy he was to see her and that happiness had nothing to do with his reason for coming to Whitehorse. “I take it you like frybread,” he said with a grin.

  “I love frybread. This is why I wasn’t about to miss the Fall Festival or miss seeing you again.” She seemed to blush as her last words came out. As he handed her one of the confections covered with sugar and cinnamon, she said, “Thank you, but you didn’t have to buy mine.”