The Clincher

by Lisa Preston

Knowing better than to leave before I’d said something to Harper I found the widower in one of his big living rooms, no one else too close by, so it was time. What do you say to a man the day he buries his wife? And mercy, did he know the sheriff’s investigator had quizzed me on the events of her death? Did he know they’d asked me for a blood sample? Did he know her death was being looked at with suspicion?

  Did Harper suspect me?

  Maybe I should suspect him. Patsy-Lynn had been about to order fancy wood paneling for her tack and feed room. Was Mr. Harper unhappy with the way his wife went through spending money? New paint, new fridge, rubber cushions in the barn aisle, fancy tack room paneling on the way. Were all the nice touches in the house on account of Patsy-Lynn, too? In front of us were more framed pictures of him and Patsy-Lynn, plus old ones of Harper Junior, which the widower stared at the most. I saw Patsy-Lynn was nicer looking without all that make-up. Winston Finch Harper was a much older man than I’d remembered. Maybe losing his wife had aged him some years this last week. His thin gray hair was combed back with some of that guy grease they use, but he’d bothered it since then. Long strands were messed about. Did his eyes always have that watery cast? I couldn’t decide. I’d never been around him much. He’d had horses before he married Patsy-Lynn but was more a businessman who played at gentleman farmer.

  “Um, sorry about Patsy-Lynn,” I said.

  “Thank you.” He nodded, but with such a vacant expression, I wasn’t sure if he knew who I was.

  “I’m Rainy Dale, your horseshoer, um, I mean her horseshoer, I mean . . .” I studied my shoes. They’re sandals, because I don’t have high heels and I couldn’t wear my work boots with my skirt, although maybe dressing worse wouldn’t be as big a disaster as me opening my yap.

  Mr. Harper smiled, just a little, but kindly. “You are still the shoer here, Miss Dale. You’ll help us take care of her horses?”

  Her horses.

  She’d always called them her babies. I nodded and felt like bawling.

  “Sure I’ll help. We’ll take good care of . . . her babies.”

  He blinked and looked away. “You know, she wanted children.”

  Of course, I hadn’t known that. I really hadn’t known poor, dead Patsy-Lynn at all. And it hit me, one reason why I felt so daggummed guilty. I itched with the feeling that she’d wanted to be my friend, especially that day I shod Spartacus. She was clingy and I’d blown her off. Hey, I had another job to do and I can’t stay and jaw any old time one of my clients wants to. But still.

  I looked up at Mr. Harper, hoping he wouldn’t see I was half scared he might think that I’d had something to do with his wife dying and half scared that I might have. My voice cut in and out like it was wired wrong. “You have beautiful horses, a beautiful home.”

  What a stupid thing to say to a guy who’s just lost his wife. You have beautiful horses. What was I thinking? If I was a blame-fixer, I’d say my inability to comfort was earned from my folks, but maybe I ought to own up to the fact that I’m a turd. Hate it, but there it is.

  Guy set out a tray of broiled steak bits on skewers that smelled fantastic, got picked up right away by others while I denied myself. And Guy vanished back to the kitchen. Harper Senior turned to shake hands with some folks who came up to say how awful sorry they were for his loss. “Thank you.”

  Sorry for his loss. Those would have been a nice few words for me to choose. I turned away, almost bumping into more men in suits, including Abby Langston’s bald, sweet-faced, potbellied daddy, Keith, who shook Mr. Harper’s hand. I slipped away and ended up facing Felix Schram and some other cattlemen standing in a little group.

  “Miss Rainy,” Schram said by way of greeting, with a friendly nod, elbowing the cowpoke next to him. “Watch out for this one when she’s got her hoof knife in hand. She don’t want no help with lifting her anvil.”

  You another one of those women who likes it rough? Schram’s coarse words when I was shoeing his horse came back to me like a bad dream. Could he and Patsy-Lynn have . . .

  I swallowed and kept moving, just to give Schram the ignoring he deserved. I wondered about the shoer Schram and Weatherby usually used. Dixon Talbot. I hadn’t seen him here at the reception. And I puzzled on the name the detective had dropped.

  Chapter 14

  MANUEL SMITH.” I SAID THE NAME out loud as I reached Ol’ Blue, way down the Harper driveway.

  “What about him?”

  I turned. It was Patsy-Lynn’s barn-help fellow, whose name had loped out of my brain, fixing to leave the funeral reception. I should have said his name aloud to help me remember.

  He chewed a fingernail, then shoved his hands in his pockets and snuck a peek over his shoulder. We were alone.

  “One of the sheriff’s men asked me about him,” I said as I climbed into Ol’ Blue.

  “Perfect. That’s just perfect.” He turned away, huffed, then leaned toward my open truck door. “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know him.” Closing my driver’s door felt better. Barn-help—

  Ned? No, Ted—kicked the ground, then stared at me as I jacked Ol’ Blue around.

  Ted was at the Flying Cross after I shod Spartacus and drove to the Langstons’ that day. Maybe he was the last one to see Patsy-Lynn.

  That evening, I couldn’t wait to tell Guy about the weird encounters. I started at the top.

  Guy heard me out, nodding and shaking his head at intervals as I added in what the sheriff’s detective said in the garage. “Manuel Smith.”

  “Yeah, like I told the detective and Ted, I don’t know the fellow.”

  “He lied about being at the Cascade, too.”

  “Manuel Smith lied about being at the Cascade Kitchen?”

  “No, the other guy, Ted Alvorson. Deputies came to the restaurant asking if he’d been there late Monday afternoon.”

  “The barn-help? Patsy-Lynn’s barn-help said he was at the Cascade?”

  Guy nodded, holding his chin.

  My mind spun as I thought about the sheriff’s men checking everybody’s stories. “He was acting weird as I was leaving the reception. He said he was at the Cascade when she died? But you never saw him there?”

  Guy made a face. “Ted came in for pie Tuesday late afternoon. Not Monday, as far as the server working remembered.”

  * * *

  Later that night Guy took a knee, pinked up, straightened his expression like he was trying for something serious, then applied his Earnest and Hopeful face.

  “Well, here it is,” he said. “Will you be my wife?”

  When my jaw hitched itself back up and I could manage a few words, I told the truth. “You’re out of your gourd. Guy, we just can’t.”

  “Can’t?” He didn’t seem to like the word’s flavor. “We can’t?”

  My ponytail beat my face as I shook my head.

  I had no words here, but I was percolating a response.

  He folded his arms across his chest. “At least tell me why not.”

  Sometimes I really, really wish my brain would spend a moment considering words before they went falling out my mouth. Anything’s better than blurting what I’d never considered admitting. “Because I’ve been married.”

  Naturally, Guy’s jaw dropped a couple yards, more or less. He did a fish out of water impression for a half minute.

  I gave him the tail end of the story. “And I said to myself afterwards, I said, ‘Rainy, let’s not be doing that again.’ That’s what I agreed on with myself.”

  Guy looked shocked.

  I was careful in explaining, sparse on details, how it had been a bad idea.

  He leaned forward, holding my hands, resting his chin on our knuckles. Guy was a prince as I told him I’d been a know-it-all emancipated sixteen-year-old, took up with a guy I had a quick crush on, got married, and realized by seventeen it was a dumb idea to hitch my wagon to a drunk. I spent a year being loyal, like a beat dog that stays by its rough master’s side. Getting myself unmarr
ied was the best idea ever.

  I’d never felt comfortable enough with that bit of my life to chat about it and I’m maybe not exactly the Cry About It kind of girl to boot, so I left out the part about what happened in the years before I married that basically left me in the boots I was wearing and nothing else.

  Oh, I couldn’t have done much worse in picking a guy to marry. Eddie was the sort of trailer trash that embarrasses poor, uneducated folks who live in trailers. I should have seen it coming, that life, when we registered for gifts at Walmart.

  The details didn’t need to be shared, but I remembered.

  We’d been married less than six months when he belted me across the room the first time, but there’d been plenty of signs—mean moods, boozing, and throwing our unbreakable plastic plates, which, by the way, broke.

  The last time he clocked me, I figured out that my so-called husband was an idiot second only to any boneheaded woman who’d stay with him. I got up off the floor but he was coming at me with the lamp.

  He needed a weapon? Well, I didn’t. I kicked him right and proper and didn’t waste any more time in that room. Later, he’d tried to tell me that there were reasons, that he wasn’t himself, that he wanted to explain. Like he was going to pull some brilliant reason out of his skull.

  That was the last Eddie got to see of me.

  A few words from Suit Fellow echoed in my skull.

  The last person who saw her was the one who watched her die or left her dying.

  When a change of subject is needed, chewing the fat on a possible murder investigation makes a ripe distraction, I believe. And so I said, “Guy, someone killed Patsy-Lynn, had a hand in her death anyways. It was probably someone close to her. And that someone could well have been at the funeral and reception.”

  Or not there, because how stressful would it be to attend the funeral of someone you killed? Maybe the killer was the one who didn’t come pay respects.

  My frown got company as Guy furrowed up his face, too.

  “Her husband is closest to her, I would think,” he said. “But he didn’t hurt her.”

  “What makes you say so?” According to the police, his only alibi was that he’d been with a so-called “reputable person” when Patsy-Lynn died.

  “For one thing, he just doesn’t seem like a killer.”

  I stifled a snort. “Professional killer-spotter, are you?”

  “I do okay.” He shrugged with all the humility he could muster, letting my mood go. Got to hand it to the man, Guy’s kinder to my dark parts than I merit. Lightening things up by joking about marriage a minute ago, for instance.

  “Someone hurt her. Maybe she hit that someone back with my old rasp. A Texas Ranger told me that most women who get murdered get killed by their own men. That’s the way it is. Ex-wives get killed by ex-husbands, too. They get OJ’d. Once a man starts smacking a woman . . .” I swallowed and shrugged. “I wonder if Patsy-Lynn had an ex and if he was the one driving in as I was leaving when I finished shoeing Spartacus.”

  Guy had on his earnest face.

  My jaw set. “I’m just saying that when a guy hits a girl, he can take it all the way one day.”

  Guy was staring at me way hard now. “Have you been hit, Rainy?”

  I shook my head to indicate I didn’t want to talk. What I haven’t told Guy bulks up the space between us. There’s so much more unspoken than said. And it has to stay that way.

  I didn’t want to believe Winston Harper hurt his wife. He seemed real bereaved. I’d thought he was a decent hubby to Patsy-Lynn. I have a warm spot for anyone who treats his wife kindly. I’d have felt that way even if he hadn’t said I’d still be his shoer. To my way of thinking, any no-account who treats women the way that so-called husband of mine treated me doesn’t deserve even a below average sample such as myself. I did Eddie a favor when I rid him of me. But when I quit being Mrs. Eddie Odendorfer, my eating money came from what I got out of selling my beater car. The thing was, without the car, I didn’t have a place to live.

  Those shelter days were some skanky living. Temporary but double tough.

  I never did see that ex of mine again. And I never saw that boy—the one before Eddie—again either.

  The happiest day I’ve known was my tenth birthday—back to living with my daddy, Los Angeles behind me for a while—when I watched Red get born. I always did best with horses and I knew, in my teens, I’d become untethered and needed to fix my life to them. A body needs a stake to start as a trainer, besides which, I didn’t want to be buying or selling horses for a living. I’m no horse trader. I wanted to be a horse keeper, but Red was long gone by my mid-teens. Working as barn-help and an exercise girl at the track came easy, but it was a life below minimum wage. Worse, plenty of fellows in parts of the horse industry are equal to long-lost kin of my ex. So, while I liked working and living around horses, I didn’t always like the company I kept.

  And of course, I didn’t like my own company, hadn’t since my very early teens, but that’s another story and one I don’t tell.

  There was one trade I could go to school for, something horse people always need. I could work my tail off and earn my own way. I could find Red and get him back. Realizing it would be the best salve for my second-worst sore, I got back in touch with my folks and borrowed bus fare to New York and tuition for the months of horseshoeing school. Now I know in my bones that shoeing is how I’ll live my life as long as I’m healthy. And even now—with a dead client and a sort-of boyfriend who’d kneeled like a fool in front of me—it still seemed like a sound plan. Guy said, “With such a bad experience, I think I can understand why you never told me about your marriage.”

  “It didn’t count anyways.” Nothing much counts when you don’t stick with it.

  He pressed for more about the ex in general and Eddie’s little hobby of belting his wifey in particular, but I said, “It’s just ugly stuff from way back.”

  “Funny how people can get themselves in bad situations and have trouble getting out,” Guy said, rubbing his jaw.

  I started to sweat of course, like I always do when my mind runs a replay on how things came to be, then I rolled my eyes at the notion that Guy thought I was going all misty over the wasted time with the ex. If he only knew how my life going in the crapper had begun, he’d know my ex was something I maybe had coming to me.

  Really, there’s no if about it, because Guy’ll never know.

  Why Guy wants to know what’s made me how I am, I don’t get, but his poking into the past gave me the creepy-crawlies something awful. And I already had a raging case of the creeps, what with Patsy-Lynn’s death hanging over me.

  “Rainy, please. Can’t you tell me what happened?”

  Guy’s no quitter, I’ll give him that. And I blurted, “I was fat.”

  He chuckled and snorted a couple breaths. “That’s hard to imagine.”

  “Then you don’t have a very good imagination.”

  “Look, lighten up, will you? And I’ll have you know that I led my class in spinning sugar during our pastry section and the instructors called me not only imaginative, but inventive.”

  I ask for mercy here. The man really does spin cooked sugar. I’ve seen him do it. These foodies get way too into desserts. And how is it that the fancy food people don’t pack on the pounds like normal people?

  My mind was a hundred and seventeen places, so I was thrown again when Guy said, “Hello? Rainy? There’s got to be more to the story. Just who in the world said you were fat?”

  Actually what my first boyfriend said was that I was built like a brick shithouse. Oops. Well, I mean, excuse me for excusing myself, ’cause he’s the one who said it after all.

  And for that, fuck him.

  Oops, really, really oops.

  Guy kept blabbing, shaking his head. “Maybe whoever said it saw you bent over under some horse and thought you were three feet tall and two feet wide ’cause you were doubled over.”

  I was stiff as bar stock.
Guy wiggled around in consternation, trying to catch my eye, but no one can catch what I won’t give.

  “Hey, Rain. I was, you know, joking.”

  I woke up. “Then you don’t know how to joke proper, ’cause neither one of us is laughing.”

  “We could build a life here, together,” he said.

  It was my turn for head shaking. “Guy, you make as much sense as iron shoes on a chicken.”

  His eyeballs took a lap around their sockets. “There’s a line not too many guys hear when they’re rejected.”

  “I didn’t reject you.” He was getting my hackles up. I might have wanted to tell him more, but just couldn’t.

  “See, lots of times, when a man proposes, the woman says yes. Men love that.”

  “Do they?” I snapped, all testy.

  Guy was mild. “They do.”

  The phone jangled, making me jump. Little Abby Langston was breathless on the line over Liberty losing a shoe.

  “I’ve looked everywhere. And our field’s not that muddy.”

  “Okay, okay, settle down. I’ll squeeze you in tomorrow afternoon, soon as you’re out of school.”

  Charley and I excused ourselves and marched off to the garage for the night.

  * * *

  My work week was supposed to end with a morning of trimming, lunch, then a full afternoon. The six trims were all at one outfit, way back the opposite side of the highway from the chunk of Forest Service land that crowns the area. These folks want barefoot horses but the gravel road riding they do is tough on hooves. Still, they’re careful and really pay attention to their ponies’ feet, I’ve got to give them that. It made a lighter morning’s work and would leave me tooling along the backcountry taking me by the Frichtler farm that could have been paying me big bucks for four horses if I could lower my standards enough to do the kind of shoeing they wanted, but I wouldn’t do it.

  Just the thought of those big lick horses—sore from the chains and wedges and chemical irritants so-called trainers use to force the horses’ stride into that huge unnatural lick—makes me wince. Those poor critters move at a running walk because they’re afraid of their own painful feet. I want no part of it, that’s all. Big lick horses didn’t ask to be made to move like freaks and they could do honest work if people wouldn’t interfere with them. I turned my head away as I drove past the Frichtlers’ herd of Tennessee Walkers and didn’t think about anything ’til I got home for lunch.