The Clincher

by Lisa Preston

  The place where the backcountry riders had been training, it called for inspection.

  West of the highway, the main access road through the Forest Service land has few private owners, the main one being Donna Chevigny, way back at the big old Buckeye ranch. She was widowed some time back and has been trying to keep her spread going by herself. Her husband had done his own shoeing. Word was, she was trying to stay on top of it herself now. In the worst way, I wanted to be Donna Chevigny’s shoer, have that ranch account, but, as Dixon Talbot pointed out, it didn’t seem right to go and ask.

  A shoer, like a girl wanting to go to the prom, needs to be asked.

  Not taking the forest road as far back as the Buckeye, I turned Ol’ Blue onto the second spur road and parked at the trailhead where people usually trailered their horses. This is where the endurance people started their conditioning rides. All the better trails are in the standing forest to the west of Stakes Ridge, above the first valley. That first spur road, going up Dry Valley, is logged out and rockier country to boot.

  Talk was, a horse had been heard screaming out here somewhere.

  Horses scream when they’re unhappy or excited.

  And they get unhappy and excited when they’re moved.

  This screamer was new here.

  At the prep school, they showed us a movie about Ethel Kennedy. She got arrested for horse thieving when it was still a capital crime. But Mrs. Kennedy, she was rescuing a miserable horse, just like I wanted to do. I got my mecate off the floor of the passenger side of Ol’ Blue, coiled its length in big loops, and started my hike up the ridge.

  Either way, I was set. If the horse was there, I’d have a way to ride her home. If the horse thief was there, I’d have a way to hang him.

  Chapter 24

  FROM THE TOP OF STAKES RIDGE to the bottom of Dry Valley stands a long lonesome stretch of scrubby pine that could hide a little horse if it wanted to. Thought I heard a glimmer of a distant whinny. Sound shoots around the land and there seemed no better option than to get high. On the climb up the ridge, I definitely heard a horse holler, indignant and stressed, but I couldn’t make out exactly where the call came from.

  The afternoon was turning unaccountably hot. Upon reaching the ridgetop I was a sweaty girl. Good thing that I, like plenty of shoers, carry extra shirts in the truck. Sometimes I go through three shirts a day. I pulled my shirttail up and bent to swab off my forehead.

  The right position makes the difference. A glint caught my full attention. Sunlight sparkled on something down at the far end of the other valley, up over a little rise.

  I squatted and squinted, making sure it wasn’t some pond kissing the sunshine back. Nope, the glimmer was man-made, a metal-

  roofed little barn. Tracing a finger in the dirt, I made a map, then felt steeped in stupid as I recognized the lay of the land.

  My dirt drawing was almost full circle and made sense now. I glowered at my dusty index finger, wishing it’d made things clear to me much earlier.

  That property with the metal building was the way-back of Harper’s land. It had to be, just up and over that low rise. I remembered the map in the sheriff’s office, the forest road, curving, curving, as it skirted private land to reach all the trees it could. Everyone rode land west of the Stakes Ridge, because the first service road—to Dry Valley—had such rough ground in parts, it wasn’t much fun, and it had been recently logged, so was less pretty. If I’d walked toward the Flying Cross from that first road, I might have reached a screaming horse who’d probably been led in from the ranch, then abandoned a few miles south of the Harper property. Now, I didn’t have time to hike on before my shoeing appointment.

  * * *

  Harper, Harper, Harper, my mind harped as I hiked back down the slope to Ol’ Blue. Mercy, now one question sparked, an inquiry so obvious even I could think it up.

  But I couldn’t exactly go ask Harper Junior the same thing the police had asked me right after Patsy-Lynn’s funeral.

  Right after they found the rasp.

  The thing of it is, is a gal who knew Junior, that is, knew him in the biblical sense of the term, would also know if the man belonged on the scratch and dent table.

  All the sudden, I wanted to talk to Cherry Edelman. And that was a first for me.

  How to start the conversation was a pickle.

  Then I realized the same questions the sheriff’s department wanted to apply to me or Guy or any of Patsy-Lynn’s help—the questions I was trying to apply to Junior—ought to be applied to Cherry.

  Cherry Edelman wanted to be a rich guy’s wife. Did she create a job opening for that particular position? It made sense, good sense. Cherry had been all about the new vet. She could easily be all about turning into the next Mrs. Harper, choosing Junior instead of the Old Man as a passport to Patsy-Lynn’s easy life.

  And I was probably the only one in Cowdry who could see Cherry as a suspect.

  Hunting Cherry up in town would have to wait until my work was done for the day, but driving to my last appointment, I put in some pondering on how best to put the question to her.

  * * *

  Jean Thurman was giving her young ’uns a good bawling-out when I got to our shoeing appointment. Every seven weeks, it’s a long afternoon for me at the Thurman place, three or four to shoe and some trims besides. He works all day and she works in the mornings, so I can’t get started earlier. I fix feet fast as I can while Jean holds the horses and hollers at her kids. Blessedly, they had a new gelding pony and he was all I had to shoe today.

  After I had the pony half done, the Thurmans’ youngest got ahold of his sister’s braids and tried to use ’em for reins. When she wouldn’t giddy-up, he gave her hair an almighty yank and hollered, “Ho!”

  By the time Jean got the boy’s hands off his sister’s hair and the girl’s hands off her brother’s throat, the little horse I was working on got good and spooked.

  He started behaving like the Anti-Horse. I considered blessing the water in my cooling bucket and heaving it over his head for a quick exorcism. A screaming kid wasn’t helping matters. I gave his mama a look to say so. The little nipper was packed off to the house to think about mending his ways and we had no more of that hair-pulling business.

  “It just makes you think about retroactive birth control,” Jean sighed. “You think that stock tank’s deep enough to drown ’em?”

  I looked up. A ten-foot metal circle, two feet tall, it was deep enough, all right. I winced and told myself the heat was getting to me. Cowdry could now and again act like it was a hot place to live and the temperature would spike twenty or thirty degrees compared to the day before.

  Whether it was Jean’s poor choice of words or horse flesh or little punkins, I wasn’t very happy when I left the Thurmans. It was hard to get in the right frame of mind to see Cherry Edelman, but I was ready to tangle, if need be. She might have taken Patsy-Lynn down, but I could flatten Cherry. Still, I had to go in sly. If I could nudge her to talk to me a little, I could get evidence, an admission, if I could be sure she was being truthful, if, if, if.

  If Cherry was the devil, had gotten into a spat with Patsy-Lynn, I could handle her. But how could I prove that Cherry had been on the receiving end of a swung rasp?

  Thinking about where I was headed, I cleaned up a bit, I’m not proud to say. I don’t know why I felt compelled to wipe the horse off myself. Anyways, I keep a big bottle of cheap lotion in the truck. The trick is, all kinds of crud can be cleaned off without soap or water if slathered with enough lotion and then wiped off with the cleaner parts of my most recently shed shirt. I polished up my mitts, picking under my nails and pushing at the cuticles ’til the dirty parts pretty well fell away. I looked and smelled a lot better from the elbows down, and I slid on a fresh T-shirt to boot.

  Never before had I been to Cherry’s home, but I found my way there. It was an old house, with a semi-kept look, resembling its owner’s. The closed single car garage hid whatever vehicle she drov
e and I wondered if it was a truck. There was no answer to my knocking, but scratchy hip hop was playing out back, so I chanced to walk around.

  She had cold frames back there protecting tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli, and cauliflower. Nice rows of veggies basking out behind the house and the vegetables weren’t sunning alone. There was Cherry, lying face down on a chaise lounge. Late in the afternoon, yet the moon was out, Cherry’s moon, that is.

  She peeked over one shoulder, rolled herself on over—treating me to a flash—then slid a towel over the girl-goods.

  “Hey, Rainy.” But there was a question in her voice, as I’d never before come calling.

  Cherry paid attention to things I didn’t. She calculated.

  One thing could have led to another. She and Patsy-Lynn had a tiff. One shoves the other. Patsy-Lynn loses the catfight with the much younger woman, ends up with her head conked. The car’s running. Cherry leaves.

  Patsy-Lynn dies.

  I still wanted it to be an accident. Not evil. Not murder. I wanted to make excuses. And part of me didn’t want it to be Cherry who was responsible for Patsy-Lynn’s death.

  Seems like I’d noticed at some point Cherry worked retail, tending a cash register at some crappy store. I was sure Cherry wanted a life of leisure and nice things, like Patsy-Lynn had, but maybe Cherry didn’t outright kill to get it. Maybe she just didn’t help Patsy-Lynn when she should have.

  Like me.

  “Hey, Rainy,” Cherry said again, louder, like I was a deaf mute in her garden.

  “Yeah, hey.” I realized I hadn’t seen a mark on her body—and I’d gotten a good view of the whole of her. If she’d been smacked with a rasp hard enough to draw blood and snag flesh in the rasp teeth just last week then a wound should still be there.

  So then, Cherry was in the clear and there was a whole ’nother direction to consider. I could think of plenty of ways to phrase it badly.

  Say Cherry, that fellow you bonked during Patsy-Lynn’s funeral reception. Oh, which one, you ask?

  Hey there, Cherry. How are ya? Busy? Sure. Been to the clinic? Understandably. I was just wanting to know if you’d happened to notice an owie anywhere on a particular man . . . Oh, not how you pick ’em, is it?

  Um, Cherry. Here’s a question. When you and Harper Junior were in your birthday suits, did you happen to look above his waist at any point?

  “Hello?” Cherry spoke to the air, then gave a little snort, the kind usually coming out of thirteen-year-olds who are fed up. “Pass me that tea, m’kay?”

  A plastic mongo tumbler, ice clunking against the sides, sweated in her shadow. Looked like good tea. I handed it to her like that was my reason for being. Maybe I wasn’t there to pin a murder on her or her one-afternoon stand after all. Maybe I was wrong about everything.

  Finally, I got to it. “Um, you know Harper’s son?”

  “Win? He’s Winston Junior, you know.”

  I guess when you bonk a guy named Winston Harper Jr. at his stepmother’s funeral you get to call him Win.

  “Okey-dokey.” I faltered, but she was off to the races, needing no reason to blab.

  “He’s going to Mexico. I’m going with him this time.” She said it like it was a real prize.

  Mexico. Needing another trip to the farmacia, I’d guess. He’d run out. And if he’d stolen steroids from Nichol’s office and had them in his tack room, well, he didn’t have those anymore. But when his daddy said Junior was leaving, it sounded permanent.

  So, Cherry was going with him. With Junior. With Win.

  All the sudden, I was her protector, but she didn’t know it.

  What if Junior got crotchety? What if his mean mood had been any uglier when I was dealing with Spartacus’s laminitis and Nichol hadn’t been there? Cherry wouldn’t have a big veterinarian around if she went on a road trip with Junior. She wouldn’t have my muscles to make herself safe.

  “Don’t do it,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere with him.”

  Cherry adjusted her towel with a lazy hand in a silly gesture of pretend modesty. “Come again?”

  Heckfire, this just wasn’t working out at all. She probably thought I was jealous or an idiot or just bad-tempered, ’cause that’s what I sounded like, even to me. But Junior was a toady-bully and I reckoned it was up to me to tell her. “I think you should stay away from him. He’s a bad apple.”

  “You know, Rainy, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

  I never understood why people say that. Who wants to catch flies? Maybe someone like her who opens her mouth and legs more than she ought to.

  “I know you don’t think much of me,” I grumbled.

  “Aw, Rainy,” Cherry said, maraschino-sweet. “Except for you being so foul and bad-tempered, you’re quite nice.”

  She popped her gum, dismissing me with a bye-bye wave.

  * * *

  By now, Guy should be near to finishing his day at the diner, thinking ugly thoughts of his own about the Cascade Kitchen and wishing he was working in his own restaurant instead of suffering with the over-salted greasy grub that got handed out when he wasn’t able to stop it. Bad chow aside, the reason for me to be in that diner was to get me a sounding board.

  Guy smiled. “What have you been up to?”

  “Investigating. I talked to some folks.”

  His eyebrows climbed. “Investigating? Who did you talk to about what?”

  “Cherry Edelman, Mr. Harper, Abby,” I said, counting back on my finger, then working the other direction, from the day’s push-off. “Dixon Talbot came to the house after you left this morning. And I talked to Nichol.”

  Guy made a big frowny face and his jaw ratcheted forward. “I’m not wild about Neal.”

  Blank, I was. Why did Guy throw me curveballs? “I don’t know who that is.”

  He froze, then relaxed like he’d slipped into a warm spring. His shoulders smoothed and a beamer of a grin spread across his face. “You don’t even know his first name?”

  “Whose first name?”

  “The vet’s. Neal Nichol.”

  “Oh. No, guess not. Why?” There is a reason I get so almighty distracted. And I choke down this demon every single day. Down.

  Don’t think about it, even though I did it again last year, last month, last week, yesterday, today. I’ll do it again tomorrow. Gah!

  Guy said, “I’m not enchanted with his interest in you.”

  Enchanted? I didn’t want to think about Nichol right then.

  “There’s something going on, something not right. There’s these people, the Solquists, whose mare went missing and—”

  “I’m the one who told you about that horse being missing. Remember? That was me.” Guy shook his head, looking slightly miffed.

  “Okay, I think I know where the horse is, up Dry Valley, off the first spur road. I went up the Stakes Ridge and heard a horse, but I had a shoeing appointment and didn’t have time to go back to the first road and I want . . .” I stopped. Guy looked distracted.

  The diner owner, Dennis McDowell in the corner booth with some other good ol’ boys, eyed us over coffee.

  “Oh?” Guy said. Then he whirled to deal with a delivery truck that came to the Cascade Kitchen’s back door. I followed him through the swinging doors to the kitchen area, not letting this drop for Guy or his boss.

  Guy hefted a big box from the deliveryman and made for a high steel shelf to unload. He shoved the box onto the shelf with the side of his chest like this was his habit. Guess that’s why he changes aprons and chef shirts—he goes through shirts as much as I do—so often, ’cause that crate left quite a mark on the one he was wearing. He paid it no mind, all his attention back on me.

  I balked.

  “Rainy?”

  So, Guy’s a man who can take a shot in the ribs and not worry about it, I’ll give him that.

  “Rainy, what’s bugging you?”

  “We’ll never go riding,” I said, plaintive without meaning to be.

  �
��The fact is, I’d love to go horseback riding with you.”

  Would he quit calling it horseback riding? There’s no other kind of riding. I sighed at the futility of it all.

  It was past time to get to things that could be dealt with. Just enough light was left in the day to get to that horse out in the hills. Since I’d be bringing her home in the dark, I swung by the house to grab my good dog and maybe a flashlight and some trail grub.

  One of Guy’s water bottles was on the kitchen table. I turned to fill it and tripped over Spooky. We were both offended by the encounter.

  What else, I asked Charley, scratching my blockhead while I ran the tap. Maybe bandages, just in case? He wagged, saying he was ready, didn’t need to pack a thing.

  Tap, tap. Goslings pecked at the back door. I saw Guy’s goose pen was near done. He’d strung wire mesh from it to the house so they could run around by the backdoor.

  The little baby bird home looked real good. It would need a top enclosure before they got too old, but Guy’d done a bang-up job on the goose house, made it sturdy and respectable-looking.

  I’d sold him short on his skills.

  Charley’s got skills, too. He wanted to go out back and herd birds. But then he cocked his ears. Somebody was out there, at the back of the house.

  I love Charley, truly I do. Yet I wished right then he wasn’t Australian, but instead a German.

  Charley yipped, sure, let me know that someone was there, something was wrong.

  The door flung open and a huge silhouette of a man took up the whole doorway. Beyond cornering the goslings that wandered in the open door, my dog was fresh out of ideas. The baby geese were busy, getting away from Harper Junior, then obeying Charley.

  Junior looked ready to take someone apart.

  Right then, I had the wrong kind of shepherd.

  Chapter 25

  SPOOKY PEEKED OUT FROM THE EDGE of the couch, trying to pick the worst threat: me, Harper Junior, or the geese huddled in the corner behind Charley.

  “You shouldn’t let them wander around like that.” Junior sneered at my good dog holding the goslings. “A working dog ought to work or be in a kennel.”