CHRISTMAS AT THE CARDWELL RANCH

by B. J Daniels

  Several cars went by, disappearing quickly into the falling snow. Still no sign of Ethan. Reaching into her pocket, she told herself he had probably fallen asleep and forgotten to set the alarm. Her pocket was empty. She tried the other one. Empty. With a groan, she remembered leaving her cell phone on the breakfast bar earlier. She’d been in such a rush to get out of the apartment and away from Ethan, she’d forgotten it.

  Ethan wasn’t coming. Had she really expected him to come after the fight they’d had? She considered going back inside the bar to wait, but she didn’t want Ace to know Ethan had stood her up. As soon as Reggie’s taillights disappeared in the snowstorm, Teresa started the walk home.

  The fight earlier had been another of those stupid ones.

  “I need to know you want to marry me and have this baby,” he’d said while she was getting ready for work.

  “Stop pressuring me.” Ever since she’d told him she was pregnant, he’d been so protective that sometimes she couldn’t breathe. He was determined they had to get married and settle down. His idea of settling down was moving closer to his parents, who lived down in Billings.

  “I don’t think your new friend Mia is good for you. I saw her talking to some guy the other day. I’ve seen him before. He’s bad news.”

  Teresa stifled a groan.

  “I don’t want you getting involved in some drug deal, or worse.”

  She had turned to face him, unable to hide her growing impatience. Ethan had been like this ever since he’d gone to the law enforcement academy and was now working for the Montana Highway Patrol.

  “I’m sure Mia isn’t involved in any kind of drug deal.”

  “Your friend might not realize what she’s getting herself into with a man like that.”

  It made her angry to hear him talk this way. “Mia’s a big girl,” she’d snapped. “She can take care of herself.” When Ethan looked skeptical, she’d added, “Mia carries a gun.” Instantly, she’d wished she hadn’t added that part.

  “She what?” he’d demanded.

  “It’s just a small one. She wears it strapped on her ankle.”

  Ethan had sworn and begun to pace. “You’re hanging out with a woman who carries a concealed weapon? Does she even have a permit to carry it?”

  “Damn it, Ethan. Stop acting like a narc.”

  He had stopped dead in his tracks. “What?”

  “It’s just that you used to be fun. Now you’re such a...”

  He had waited for her to finish.

  “Cop.”

  Without another word, he’d grabbed his coat and left.

  Still, she couldn’t imagine him not picking her up. He was too concerned about her and the baby. Something must have come up with his job, she thought now as she walked through the deep snow toward the apartment they shared.

  Ethan had been her high school sweetheart. She smiled to herself now as she thought of how they’d been back then. He had been adventurous, up for anything. His friends said he was crazy fun.

  But a couple of years ago, he’d almost gotten into some serious trouble with some ex-friends of his. The incident had apparently scared him straight. He was no longer crazy fun. Far from it.

  Teresa wasn’t sure she wanted to be married to a cop. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be married to Ethan. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be pregnant.

  Shoving those thoughts away, she found herself worrying about Mia as she ducked her head against the thick falling snow. Tonight she’d seen Mia get into some kind of argument with a man who’d come into the bar alone. The conversation had looked personal—and definitely heated. At one point the man had grabbed Mia’s arm. In the skirmish, the man ended up spilling his drink on her.

  Teresa had quickly stepped in.

  “Back off. I have it under control,” Mia had snapped, wiping at her alcohol-soaked jeans.

  Teresa might have argued differently, but the man had raised his head and looked right at her before getting up and leaving.

  Mia had apologized a while later when they’d both gone up to the bar to get their drink orders. “I just didn’t want you getting involved.” Mia’s gaze had met hers, worry in her eyes. “I might have already involved you too much. I’m sorry.”

  She’d been startled by her words. Even more startled when Mia had gone to the room where they kept their coats. Teresa saw Mia take something out of Teresa’s ski jacket pocket and stuff it into her jeans pocket.

  Teresa had confronted her, only to have Mia pull away. She’d stood helplessly as Mia grabbed her tray of drinks and headed off through the crowd toward one of the large tables at the back of the bar.

  Not long after that Mia had seemed unsteady on her feet.

  As Teresa had gone back over to the empty table where the man had been sitting, to clear his table, she spotted the hypodermic needle lying under his chair. Her heart had begun to pound. Was Ethan right? Was the argument over drugs?

  It still gave her chills to remember the look on the man’s face when he’d glanced up at her. Not long after that, she’d seen Mia stagger into some man before leaving through the back door. Mia had definitely appeared drugged. Had she left with the man?

  She felt a chill now as she slogged through the deep snow, glad she wasn’t that far from home. She’d left behind the cluster of buildings that made up the center of Meadow Village. Now there was nothing but snowy darkness. Pines, their branches heavy with snow, stood like sentinels at the edge of the mountain to her right. To her left, the golf course was an empty field of deep snow.

  The storm hadn’t let up for hours. She kept her head down against the falling snow, but it still clung to her face and eyelashes. With each step, she regretted not going back into the bar and calling Ethan. Sometimes she was her own worst enemy.

  At the sound of a car approaching, she moved to the edge of the road. Probably Ethan, she thought. Was it possible he’d simply fallen asleep and on awakening, realized he hadn’t picked her up?

  She felt headlights wash over her. Chilled to the bone, she could feel the deep wet snow soaking into her jeans up to her knees. She was angry with him, but right now she didn’t feel like fighting. Worse, she didn’t want her own foolish stubbornness to make her end up walking the rest of the way home just to spite Ethan or try to make him feel guilty.

  Once they got back to the apartment, she would take a nice hot shower. Maybe have a beer with him. Or a soda, she thought, remembering that she was pregnant. She might even be up for making love. Anything to take the edge off and forget for just a while that her life was a mess and had been as far back as she could remember.

  Teresa shielded her eyes from the blizzard and the bright headlights as the vehicle caught up to her. A thought struck her in that instant. The engine sound was wrong. She knew it wasn’t Ethan in his old pickup even before she saw the large black SUV slow to a stop next to her.

  It was one of those expensive big rigs like ones she saw all over Big Sky. The windows were dark as well as the paint. She was trying to see inside, to see if she knew the driver, when the back door was suddenly flung open.

  The man who jumped out was large and bundled up in a bulky coat. Her heart was already racing by the time he grabbed her. She tried to scream, but he clamped a gloved hand over her mouth and dragged her toward the large SUV. She fought, but he was too strong for her. Still, she got in a few good kicks and punches before he forced a smelly cloth over her mouth and nose, and everything went black.

  Chapter Three

  Hud got the call just after daylight the next morning. He’d been up all night with the break-in. He needed sleep and food badly, and was on his way home, hoping for both when the call came in.

  “My fiancée didn’t come home last night.”

  “Who am I speaking with?” he asked. The man sounded more than a l
ittle upset.

  “Ethan Cross.”

  Hud knew Ethan, knew his record. A wild, good-looking kid who’d gotten into trouble a lot before going to the academy and becoming a highway patrol officer.

  “Your fiancée is Teresa Evans?” he asked to clarify. Ethan had been with Teresa since high school. That was the nice thing about a small community. Hud knew the players, at least the local ones.

  “She works at the Canyon. I was supposed to pick her up after closing, but I got called out on an accident down by Fir Ridge. With the roads like they were, I didn’t get back in time. When I realized she wasn’t home, I went looking for her. This isn’t like her.”

  Hud took a guess. “Did the two of you have a fight earlier yesterday?” It was an old story, one he’d heard many times.

  “Not really a fight exactly. Still, she wouldn’t not come home.”

  “She probably just stayed at a friend’s place to let things cool down. Have you checked with any of her friends?”

  “There’s only one she’s been tight with recently. I tried Mia’s number, but she doesn’t answer.”

  “Mia Duncan?” Hud asked, and felt his pulse quicken when Ethan said yes. “Have you tried Teresa’s cell phone?”

  “She forgot to take it when she left for work. I found it when I called her number looking for her.”

  “Let’s give her a few hours and see if she doesn’t turn up,” Hud said, hoping he didn’t have two missing women, since Mia Duncan hadn’t turned up yet, either.

  * * *

  TAG COULDN’T BELIEVE how much he’d missed this. As he trod through the knee-high snow on the mountain the next morning swinging the ax, he breathed in the frosty air and the sweet fresh smell of pine.

  “How about that one?” Dana called from below him on the mountainside. They had climbed up the mountain behind his cousin’s ranch house Christmas tree hunting. Now she motioned at one to his far right.

  He waded through the new-fallen snow to check the tree, shook off the branches, then called back, “Too flat on the back. I’m going up higher on the mountain.”

  “There’s an old logging road up there,” she called from down below. “I’ll meet you where it comes out. If you find a tree, give a holler. Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking down here.” She sounded as if she was enjoying this as much as he was, but then Dana had always loved the great outdoors.

  He felt a chill as he remembered what had happened to her and her family last spring. Some crazy woman had pretended to be a long-lost cousin, and having designs on Hud, had tried to kill Dana, her children and her best friend, Hilde. Fortunately Deputy Colt Dawson had found out the woman’s true identity and arrived in time to save them all.

  Tag couldn’t imagine something so horrifying, but if anything, his cousin Dana was resilient and Camilla Northland was in prison, where hopefully she would remain the rest of her life.

  The new snow higher up the mountain was as light as down feathers and floated around him as he climbed. He had to stop a couple of times to catch his breath because of the altitude. “You’re not in Texas anymore,” he said, laughing.

  The land flattened out some once he was near the top, and he knew he’d hit the old logging road. As he started down it, he kept looking for the perfect tree. Dana’s husband, Marshal Hud Savage, had warned him not to let Dana come back with one of her “orphan” trees. Hud hadn’t been able to come along with them. He was working on a burglary case involving a condo break-in and a possible missing person.

  “She’ll find a tree that she knows no one will ever cut because it’s so pitiful and she’ll want to give it a Christmas,” Hud warned him. “Don’t let her. You should see some of the trees that woman has brought home.”

  Tag told himself he would be happy with whatever tree they found as long as it was evergreen. But he knew he was looking for something special. He hadn’t had a real Christmas tree in years. Along with getting one for Dana’s living room, he planned to pick up a small one for his father’s cabin. He knew Harlan probably didn’t decorate for Christmas, but he’d have to put up with it this year since his son was determined to spend Christmas with him.

  Dana had said she would lend them some ornaments and the kids would make some, as well. Tag couldn’t wait, he thought, as he looked around for a large pretty tree for Dana and a smaller version for him and his father.

  He hadn’t gone far down the logging road when he picked up a snowmobile track coming in from what appeared to be another old logging road. Dana had told him that they often had trouble in the winter with snowmobilers on the property because of the catacomb of logging roads that ran for miles.

  He remembered hearing one late last night, now that he thought about it. A lot of people got around that way in the wintertime. For all he knew, his father had been out and about after the bar closed. To visit his girlfriend? The thought made him smile.

  “I found a tree!” Dana called from somewhere below him on the mountain. He couldn’t see her through the thick, snow-filled pines.

  “An orphan tree?” he called back, and heard her laugh. “Hud will have my head,” he mumbled to himself as he started to drop off the side of the mountain, heading in the direction he’d heard Dana laugh.

  He’d only taken a couple of steps when the sun caught on an object off to his right. Tag saw what looked like a branch sticking up out of the snow. Only there was something very odd about the branch. It was blue.

  As he stepped closer, his heart leapt to his throat. It wasn’t a branch.

  A hand, frosty in the morning sun, stuck up out of the deep snow.

  * * *

  MARSHAL HUD SAVAGE arrived by snowmobile thirty minutes after he’d gotten the call from his wife. He found Dana and Tag standing half a dozen yards away from the body. It was the second time in the past six years that remains had been found on the ranch. Hud could see that Dana was upset and worried.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he told her. “Go on down to the house and wait for the coroner. He’ll need directions up here.”

  As soon as she left, he stooped down and brushed the snow off the victim’s face. Behind him, Tag let out a startled sound, making him turn.

  “You know her?” he asked.

  Tag nodded, but he seemed to need a minute to find his voice. “She works at the Canyon,” he said finally. “I think her name is Mia. I ran into her at the bar last night. Or more correctly, she ran into me. Was she...murdered?”

  “Looks like she was strangled with the scarf around her neck,” Hud said. He could see where the scarf had cut into her throat. “But we’ll know more once the coroner and the lab does the autopsy.”

  “I thought it might have been an accident,” Tag said.

  Hud studied him. He seemed awfully shaken for a man who’d only just run into the woman the night before. “So, what exactly happened last night at the bar?”

  He listened while Tag recounted the woman stumbling into him, apparently quite drunk, and how he’d gone out the back door after her to make sure she was all right. “I saw her getting into a pickup with a man.”

  “And you think her name was Mia?” Hud asked. Could this be the missing Mia Duncan? He had a bad feeling it was.

  Tag told him that all he knew was what another server at the Canyon had told him. “She had apparently left in the middle of her shift.”

  “Do you know the name of the other server you talked to?”

  “Lily. At least that’s what the bartender called her.”

  Hud nodded. “Tell me about the man the victim left with behind the bar.”

  “Cowboy hat, pickup. It was snowing so hard I can’t even swear what color the truck was. Dark blue or brown, maybe even black. That’s about it. I only got a glimpse of the man through the snow,” Tag said.

  “But he got a good look at
you?”

  He saw that the question took Tag by surprise. “Yeah, I guess he did.”

  “I might need a statement from you later,” Hud said. “If you think of anything else...”

  “I’ll let you know,” Tag said as the coroner and another deputy arrived by snowmobile. The coroner’s had a sled behind his snowmobile.

  “Dana will have a pot of coffee on when you reach the house,” Hud told him. He’d seen Tag’s rented SUV parked in front of the ranch house.

  Tag nodded and turned to leave.

  Hud watched him go, worrying. Dana had just been disappointed by one “cousin.” He didn’t want her disappointed again if he could help it. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that Tanner “Tag” Cardwell knew a lot more about the victim than he’d admitted.

  He reminded himself that his instincts were off. He was probably just looking for guilt where there wasn’t any.

  * * *

  TAG WAS GLAD he didn’t have to talk to anyone on the walk down the mountain. His head was spinning.

  He’d been shocked when he’d recognized the dead woman—even more shocked when he’d seen what she was wearing. A leather jacket like the one he’d seen lying over the arm of his father’s couch just yesterday.

  Since discovering the body, he’d kept telling himself it couldn’t be the same woman. Just as his father couldn’t be involved in this.

  That was why he hadn’t mentioned the jacket to the marshal, he told himself. He couldn’t be sure it was the same one. But both his father and the woman had been at the bar last night. Tag knew how some women were about cowboy guitar players—even old ones.

  A chill had settled in his bones by the time he reached the ranch house. He liked the idea of a hot cup of coffee, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone—especially his cousin—about what he’d seen on the mountain.

  As he climbed into his rented SUV, he told himself that the woman’s death had nothing to do with his father. And yet Tag couldn’t wait to reach the cabin. Harlan Cardwell had some explaining to do.