The Clincher

by Lisa Preston

  It was before Guy started trying to dig into my past, which I can’t be having.

  When Red’s heels came shooting back at us, Guy whistled. “Check that out!”

  It’s true the horse’s feet were way too long, a couple months overdue, hoof wall beyond the shoes with just bits of clinches holding on the keg shoes some yokel had nailed on when Red was under his last so-called owners. I waited to hear the joke about the cobbler’s kid having bad shoes then remembered I had a clean slate with this guy. Guy didn’t know anything about me except that I had a truck, a dog, and a horse. He didn’t know I was a new shoer needing to create a client base so I could buy some hay and groceries. He didn’t know I’d ached for my childhood horse for years and only had him back an hour. And Guy probably thought I had enough means to own a stock trailer, but that was his mistake for jumping to conclusions.

  After spending the night on a cot in Guy’s garage, first thing the next morning, I reshod my horse—a pure pleasure.

  After graduating from horseshoeing school, I’d spent the next few years apprenticing. My first mentor was a Texas panhandle ranch shoer for the most part, so I got fast and strong at the sheer basics. We kept working horses working. Then I interned with a shoer in southern California who had a real wide range, pleasure horses and show horses of most kinds, even a little track work. When I found Red last year, I was plenty past interning, certified and ready to start my own business, but that first morning at Guy’s place last year was my first time shoeing my own daggummed horse. I loved it.

  As I was finishing Red’s last clinches, Guy stepped out with two mugs of coffee and said he didn’t know a thing about horses, but he knew his neighbor needed a farrier.

  I’d started cheap—fifteen dollars a head less than average for the area. I kept sleeping in Guy’s garage and he kept taking the rent money I paid in cash each month.

  Since then I’ve been in Guy’s bedroom and he’s been on my cot. And as long as I’m making a list, we’ve done it in the pasture, the hay shed, the truck, the kitchen, the living room, and the laundry room with the washer on spin. Proximity and happenstance are what put Guy and me together, but that sure doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to be with a fellow. Sometimes I figure we’re not together anyways, not really. The plusses are hard to argue with some days. His hands, his mouth. Double on that last, because it’s also the stuff he says and how he says it.

  Guy asks. From the beginning, he asked.

  Can I hold your hand? May I kiss you? Could I touch you there?

  Chapter 4

  AT THE CO-OP, I CHECKED THEIR bulletin board for my business cards. There weren’t any left, so I put more under thumb tacks and then bought Red’s oats, hoping some of those cards would mean new customers.

  I’m a pretty shoer, and that’s not referring to how I start every morning with my hair clean. Sure, my jeans are loose—three sizes smaller now than when I was a fat high school kid and they were tight-fitting—plus, about once a season, I use a little mascara and lip gloss. But I mean that I shoe pretty, driving every nail with the right power so they come out spaced perfectly, and I’m careful to make my clinches uniform. My clients who show—especially the halter class competitors and others graded for looks instead of performance—are way into having their horses’ feet look pretty.

  Pretty shoeing is part of what built up my clientele in the last year to the point where I can buy food and diesel and hay regular enough. I paid for Red’s oats with the cash money left over from topping off Ol’ Blue. The co-op is more than a feed store. There’s racks of tools and automotive stuff and even housewares and some clothes.

  Guy eyeballed every selection in the tool aisle, and got pretty taken with the range and wisdom of tape measures and those little do-alls—multi-tools—that used to be just jackknives, but now have pliers and every such thing in them after they’re twisted and folded around the right way. I have a dandy do-all on my belt, found it on the highway. I love road shopping.

  Guy pawed every clever little tool and device like he’d really discovered something. That boy loves his gadgets. The kitchen has corers and curlicue slicers and a thing called a spiralizer. He even has a little butane torch to caramelize sugar.

  I am not allowed to try using his kitchen torch for any kind of welding or soldering, though I have been tempted. I do love welding.

  “Look at this,” he said, after he hunted me down in the automotive section. He was holding a fat tape measure, a tape measure on steroids. “It’s a recording tape measure. You push a button and say what measurement you took. There’s a built-in microchip, no tape, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, giving him a look that didn’t need defining.

  He caught, good for him. “There’s your Wood Plank face.”

  I kept wearing Wood Plank and didn’t need to say a thing.

  “I meant there’s no recording tape, like a tape recording machine. The audio recording is done digitally. There is a tape to be a tape measure.”

  Guy pulled out the retractable metal tape and told me that we were two feet six and one-quarter inches apart.

  Sometimes, we’re a lot farther. Even standing shoulder to shoulder, we can be miles apart. When it comes down to it, we don’t know all that much about each other. We don’t know near enough.

  “I,” he said into the gadget, “am five foot eleven and three-quarters of an inch tall.” He spoke with a baritone fitting the seriousness of his proclamation. Then he pushed another button and darned if the tape measure didn’t play back his voice, his words.

  He bought the silly thing while I studied on the car washing products that all but promised a brand new vehicle. Never mind, I can use soap and water from home to clean Ol’ Blue.

  Guy beat me to hefting out the fifty-pound sack of feed.

  My truck was on Depot Road, right next to the railroad tracks at the side of the Co-op Feed & Seed. I guess way back when, townfolk thought Cowdry was going to be a lot more important in the beef market than it ever was. The train doesn’t even stop here now, but they’d clearly once meant for a lot more feed and feed-eaters to be in the empty dirt lot between the tracks and the co-op.

  We stepped onto the red cinders and sand that train people seem to like putting next to tracks. The ties and rails are bedded down on heavy black rock. Vibration told us about the coming freighter before the train’s whistle sounded. I crunched across the cinders, ready to leave, but Guy set down the bag of feed and walked the other way, up the slope, near the edge of the railroad ties. He faced the beginnings of sunset as he watched the train. When he squints—and he does a lot ’cause he rarely wears sunglasses even though he always packs them—he gets little crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes. The good-looking kind of crow’s feet.

  As the train rushed in, Guy quit squinting at it and stood there, too close. His shirt plastered hard to his chest, and his hair flew back. The steel wheels banged, the couplings knocked, and the railroad cars swayed into the curve.

  Several feet below him, on safer ground, the train’s power made me wince. So did whatever’s in Guy that makes him tease trains. There’s got to be something wrong with a man who won’t step aside for a hundred steel freight cars.

  Not ’til the last car passed did Guy come down the slope, grab the grain with one arm, and reach for my hand with the other. He didn’t say a word, just looked happy. Driving home, I was picturing the lettering on the truck doors and wanted to get at the project before we lost the light.

  We’d have made it home before dark if the deputy hadn’t come after us.

  Chapter 5

  ANGRY PEOPLE MUST HAVE DESIGNED POLICE uniforms. It’s all black boots, tan clothes, and sunglasses spat out of a white car with a shield on the door. My daddy, who covers more miles in a year than plenty of people drive in decades, told me to be polite, but quiet when it comes to getting pulled over by the police. There’s a reason why “You Shoulda Shut Up” is my favorite song. Aside from being a catchy t
une, it’s good advice.

  The deputy seemed solid at the same time he looked average. Wearing a bulletproof vest will do that for a person, and maybe the look is helped by the buzz cut and mustache. His left arm had the man-tan of a person who wears a short sleeve shirt and drives with the window open, even though a central Oregon spring doesn’t exactly mean we’ve got sunning weather.

  I figured he’d ask if I know how fast I was going. That’s what they always start with, then they’ve got a person digging for registration and insurance cards out of the glove box.

  Even if Ol’ Blue had a working speedometer, which it doesn’t, it’s fair to say I wouldn’t have been looking at it anyways. And if I had been, any relationship between my speed and what some road sign recommended would have been purely coincidental.

  The deputy strolled up in his own sweet time and opened with, “Do you know why I stopped you?”

  “No. Do you?” I encouraged him with part of a smile.

  “Were you at the Harper residence this afternoon?”

  I said, “Huh?” which didn’t make me sound too bright, but here I’d been trying to decide whether to fake a guess at my speed or just come right out with I-dunno-you-tell-me.

  “The Harper residence. You there?”

  People leave out whole words and it’s left for the rest of us to guess. This is not exactly fair and it makes my mind ping. Anyways, residence is a hoity-toity word for home and I don’t cotton to hoity-toity. So I was still thinking what to say when he barged on like a bull getting at his evening feed.

  The deputy glared past me and fixed Guy with a look that made it plain Guy should have been clear that the police wanted a word with me.

  “Well, Miss Rainy Dale,” the deputy said, “we’d like to talk to you. At the very least, you seem to have been the last person to see Patsy-Lynn Harper alive.”

  There was more than a little wrong with his words and I paused while my brain tried to fire up and identify the problem.

  Pausing wasn’t the deputy’s thing at all. “Have you got any injuries, Miss Dale?”

  “Everyone’s got injuries.” I don’t know why I said that. Sure I’ve been injured, but I wanted no pity. Also, I don’t want anyone knowing about my injuries.

  The deputy wasn’t looking at me as I spoke. He was looking at my arms, hung by my hands from Ol’ Blue’s steering wheel. He studied the long red scrape Spartacus had given me on the inside of my right arm.

  Before I opened my mouth, the deputy said, “Miss Dale, do you have any fresh, recent injuries?”

  “None to speak of.” I wasn’t giving the sheriff’s man eye contact.

  “Did you leave anything there?”

  “There?”

  He looked as annoyed as someone in sunglasses can. One thumb hooked in his gun belt. So, pretty annoyed.

  “Yeah,” he said again. “Did you. Leave anything. There?”

  I thought of hoof trimmings I’d pared off Spartacus. Did that count? Probably not. “Nope.”

  “You sure ’bout that?”

  “Yep.”

  “No tools? Nothing at all?”

  I studied the deputy, ’cause he was going about it so, so careful. Bile rose in my craw. Picking through my brain before I answered again, I spoke slowly. “I left her my card. An appointment card for the next shoeing.”

  “You left her your card,” he said right back.

  “Yessir.”

  “How about you head on over to the station for a quick statement? Follow me, okay? That suit you?”

  Yowie. Seemed like whether it suited me or not, it suited him. I looked at Guy and for once he seemed to be without words. I pointed Ol’ Blue at the deputy’s bumper and followed him on over to the sheriff’s office to get it done.

  Cowdry’s not the county seat, so the sheriff’s satellite station is just a few rooms in the beater strip of stores at the bottom of town. Even though it’s not my stomping grounds—Guy’s house is off Cowdry’s north end—I do have clients to the south. I’ve driven by the sheriff shop at the strip mall, but I’ve never been inside. When I shoe for Sheriff Magoutsen, I keep my head down and try not to call him Magoo. He’s a little guy with a big, round baldness up top, always squinting through his glasses so bad I expect him to bump into things. He keeps his ropers at a boarding barn, not at his home and certainly not near this west county office.

  Guy was mighty quiet on the ride, but he walked inside with me. Then they wanted me alone for the statement, so he waited in the lobby and I ended up in a small room with an older fellow in a suit. He introduced himself as detective so-and-so, but his name left my brain as soon as it entered my ears. Stained-suit-fellow had some paperwork and an old-fashioned tape recorder. No mustache on this fellow and really short hair, grayed-up red. The short cut helped hide his impending baldness. The open sport coat and loosened tie helped hide the button-straining paunch.

  Suit Fellow asked me a bunch of stuff I’m sure they knew, like who I was and where I lived and all, then he asked, “Are you here of your own free will?”

  “Sure,” I said. What I meant was: I guess so. But I hadn’t really considered the question.

  “I understand you told Deputy Paulden that you hadn’t left anything at the Harper residence on your visit there this afternoon.”

  I felt a little choked about things. Couldn’t say why. Nobody likes being asked questions by someone who doesn’t really ask but instead makes statements that get a girl sweaty. And Suit Fellow was worse than Paulden about too few words.

  “It wasn’t a visit,” I said. “I was there to shoe her horse. One of her horses. And I told the deputy that I left an appointment card.”

  “No tools?”

  “Nope.” My tools are my living.

  “Didn’t leave a file?”

  “A file? Nope.” Picturing a big wad of papers that go in a filing cabinet, I gave the man a look of pure confussment. He was a lot better than Guy at grabbing onto the meaning of looks. Maybe his suit bestowed some smarts.

  “You didn’t leave a file.” He stood and went for the door. Leaning out of the little interview room, he hollered at someone he had hollering privileges on. “Bring me that evidence from the Harper garage.”

  Something else got said in the hall, but I couldn’t make it out.

  Suit Fellow fetched me a can of soda without asking. He carried it by the rim, set it down and stood over me. “Here’s a drink for you. Thought you might like it.”

  “Thanks.” I kept my hands to myself.

  “You a blood donor?” he asked.

  The door latched hard, like it meant business.

  “Huh?” I twisted my ponytail hard to one side.

  “I asked, do you know your blood type?”

  Several seconds is how long my jaw took to get working. “That’s not even close to what you asked me.”

  He raised his eyebrows and hurled out a monologue about the case developing and them requesting a number of samples from a number of people to rule out possibilities. A knock sounded on the door. Someone cracked it open and handed Suit Fellow something in a clear plastic bag with official-looking tape on the bag’s edges.

  Inside that evidence bag was something I’d know at a distance even if I didn’t know whether it was mine. It was long and flat, less than a quarter inch thick, about two inches wide by seventeen long. One side is for coarse work and the other’s for fine smoothing. And the last three inches of one end bears a wicked point.

  I twisted my ponytail the other direction. “That’s not a file. That’s a rasp.” My mama would have hollered at me to quit playing with my hair. She always got after me for it, like it was the worst thing I could do.

  She learned.

  “A rasp,” Suit Fellow said. “Okay, is it your rasp? Did you leave it at the Harper residence earlier today?”

  “Look,” I explained, “I use up a rasp in about thirty animals. I go through them pretty often and carry quite a few in my truck. When they get more worn than I�
��ll use, I often give them to clients so they have one for emergencies. I may have given one to Patsy-Lynn. I think I did, some time back.”

  He looked like he was trying to decide whether to believe me. And he set the bagged rasp down on the table. The unnatural feel of indoor offices, with thin carpet and fluorescent lighting, is not my world, but under the unnatural lights, I could see the rasp in the evidence bag a lot better. It was a used rasp, the brand I used.

  There was blood on the rasp. Lots of bright red blood, and maybe some skin snagged in the teeth.

  Chapter 6

  THAT RASP IN THE DETECTIVE’S EVIDENCE bag? Yeah, I was pretty sure it was one of my old rasps. And I felt cold as the north side of a cedar forest in December, where the frost stays in the shadows, the sun never warms the ground. My voice had trouble.

  “Guy said she killed herself in the garage.”

  “Mrs. Harper,” Suit Fellow said, making it real clear who’d be asking questions, “was found in her garage. And this tool, this rasp as you call it, was with her. And we’d like more information about that.” He looked set for me to spill some beans.

  I was fresh out of beans. “Did you ever think there might be another way to go about this?”

  Muscles in Suit Fellow’s jaw tightened as he gave the wall a good looking-at, then checked his notes. While I got the silent treatment, it did occur to me that I might not be quite as cool as I pretended.

  Even though my daddy ran afoul of the law more than he should have, I thought I was considered rehabilitated in the eyes of whoever did that kind of accounting. Sheriff Magoutsen being one of my clients didn’t seem to be helping me here though. I don’t know how many deputies there are in this county, but I’d think they’d all know the sheriff keeps a few good Quarter Horses with a buddy in Cowdry for weekend roping. Even though he himself lives at the other end of the county, Butte’s not too awful big and Magoutsen’s horses would have to get shoes somewhere. If this detective fellow thought about it, he might have been able to deduce that I could have been the sheriff’s shoer.