by Lisa Preston
Not a real horse guy, just someone with a costume in his wardrobe.
“Doll, let’s go now.” He slid a hand across her patooty and gave the left half a squeeze.
She ignored his command and grope, so at least she had that going for herself. When he dropped money on the table and headed out, she turned her tall self around and strolled the other direction, toward the powder room. I just knew she’d be in there a good long spell while he cooled his boot heels, but I guessed her payback would be wasted on him.
Like a horse or a dog, a fellow ought to know when he’s being punished for turdiness.
Doll, he called her. Jeez Louise.
She didn’t much look like a doll to me, but what do I know about dolls? Dolls and me broke up as soon as I discovered horses. I don’t know how old I was exactly but it was before figuring out how to read. Way, way before boys.
The Tall Doll brushed aside long brown bangs hanging shaggy over her eyes and winked at me as she passed by on her way to the ladies’. Older than me by half a decade, she wore those packer-style, lace-up riding boots that gave her extra height and let me figure her for someone who spent time in a saddle, since the boots were scuffed in all the right places to show stirrup wear. This gal was horse people. Obviously, she used someone other than me for a shoer, but maybe she was from elsewhere in the county since I didn’t think I’d seen her around town. And I’d been thinking lately, what with growing new roots here in Butte County in general and Cowdry in particular, that a friend would be a nice addition. Guy and I need people to invite to our wedding, which we’re not planning yet, since I’m not there yet, but it’s coming, sure enough.
A real friend, a girlfriend, that’s something that might be a good thing to have.
She’d have to be a rider, of course, to be my new best friend.
In the mirror, I saw Fred Flintstone out in the parking lot. He opened up the big Ford truck, letting me view the Paso Pastures sign on the door as he opened it. And I realized Wolf Eyes took it in, too. Something in her shoulders relaxed. She slid onto the empty stool next to me and hitched her chin in greeting.
“Melinda. Melinda Kellan.”
I’m five-foot-six on a tall day and I’d say we measured the same. This Melinda’s muscles probably resulted from lifting lead, not honest-earned by hefting an anvil and shaping steel.
Guy set a meal in front of me and headed off with a couple of vegetable sides for another table. I wanted to get after my new job—chowing down—with a good businesslike attitude, but then I recollected where I’d seen this Melinda Kellan before. And I bet now that I remembered, I was blanching like Guy’s vegetables. I sure felt smart as a carrot.
Melinda Kellan was the police clerk who took something from me during that unfortunate misunderstanding a while back.
My fingerprints.
“You work at the sheriff’s office. The little one out here in Cowdry. You’re the one who fingerprinted me.” Butte’s a small county but Cowdry’s a pretty good ways from the county seat, so there’s just a small deputy force out here, with office space in the strip mall near the grocery store. I’ve been needing to check in with them, to see if I’ll have to testify. I can never remember the investigator’s name. I always thought of him as Suit Fellow.
Melinda Kellan squinted at me all this time I jabbered and recollected. I figured she ought to be able to help me out.
“What’s that guy’s name, you know, the one who . . . investigates stuff?” I waved my hands to help her guess the rest.
She smirked, said a name that went in my left ear, sprinted across the open prairie of my mind, and fell out my right ear. Then she nodded. “He’s retiring soon.”
Huh? I hate it when people answer a question that didn’t get asked, not lingering on the one that wanted good answering. Do I really have to see Detective what’s-his-name and will he make me go to court? But instead of hollering all this at her, I kept my mouth very shut.
“Will you do something for me?” Melinda Kellan spoke like she wasn’t asking, more telling. “Will you let me know if anything, anything at all, strikes you as not fitting while you’re at the Chevigny place?”
Just made me itch to say something like, “Sure, I’d be happy to spy on my new client—a widow at that—for you, you bored little clerk.” Instead, I gave her more of a studying, trying to get my eyeballs and brain moving since my mouth wasn’t working much. Melinda Kellan wore running shoes. She’s not horse people. I turned away from the little inquisitor, bit my burger, and made eye contact with her through the mirror. “You ride?”
Kellan shook her head.
“Ever make hay?”
She grinned. “Not in the way you mean.”
Bristling like a porky-pine, I nodded, turning a little red and not liking her little sin-uendo at all. It figured. Figured she didn’t ride and didn’t get, just didn’t get, how tough and dangerous the work of making food is. I don’t mean making food like Guy, in a kitchen. I mean making it like Donna Chevigny does, like her departed husband had. Making feed for cattle and tending those cattle ’til they’re ready for slaughter and—
“So, I don’t ride. What about it?”
Like she was looking to start something.
Then Melinda Kellan went quiet as the tall rider sauntered back from her powder, taking the long walk across the restaurant in her sweet time.
There’s horse folk and then there’s everybody else. With plenty of people, I can peg ’em for what kind of horse they’d be if they’d been blessed born. Guy, for example, would be a Thoroughbred, though a palomino. Sometimes I can tell more than the breed, I’d know how good the legs and feet would be and what kind of an attitude is in the eye. It’s not always a good thing, this gift of mine. There’s some people I don’t take to, but everybody I cotton to shows up in my mind as a horse. Not Melinda Kellan though. She wasn’t one of us, not tough enough.
Tall Doll and I made eye contact in the mirror as she passed behind me this time. I winked. We had an instant connection. She would be an Appendix Quarter Horse, with good feet, if she were a horse. My new near friend paused and said, “Watch that you don’t turn your back on that Chevigny woman.”
I stared in the mirror at the Tall Doll, taken aback. Saying bad things about people in Donna Chevigny’s position is like drowning kittens, kicking puppies, and slapping orphans. Bad form. It’s just not done, talking trash on widows behind their backs. I really should mind what I say and how loud and who’s around when I blab to Guy about my new shoeing accounts.
Turning my stool all the way around, I faced Tall Doll. “Missus Chevigny’s a widow.”
She made a wry, friendly face, then dropped her tone low enough to keep it between us. “She caused Cam’s funeral. And you could end up in the ground just like he did.”
Acknowledgments
SO MANY PEOPLE GAVE SO MUCH wondrous support and feedback as I wrote The Clincher. I’d like to thank Mark Gottlieb (my agent and the best advocate a writer could have), Barry, Rob, Sandy, Corinne, Molly, PJ, Monty, Edwin, Jessica, Judy, Margaret, Katherine, and, of course, my editor Lilly Golden for so many contributions to the Rainy Dale Horseshoer Mystery Series.
