Unsure if she were serious or merely melodramatic, Madison eyed her with skepticism. “Has that ever happened before?”
“Your Uncle Joe Bert was gorged in the thigh once by a long-horned cow. Hit a major vessel. Blood squirted all the way up to the auctioneer’s box!” She used her hands to mimic the spray. “Good thing Cutter Montgomery was there selling cattle that day. He applied pressure until the ambulance could get there. You should have seen the hole. I swear, it was this big.”
As she used her hands to demonstrate and went into some of the more gory details of the event, Madison found herself questioning her earlier assumption that George Gail was harmless. Anyone who found that much pleasure in describing a bloody wound was not right in the head.
“By the way, here’s your money.” George Gail dipped a hand into the edge of her bra and pulled out a wad of bills.
Struggling not to wrinkle her nose, Madison made no move to take the money from her hand. “You can put that in the cup holder,” she suggested.
“I don’t see his truck out front. Pull around to the back.”
“Back there? It’s pitch black. Surely he’s not back there.”
“Turn here beside this building. It will wind you back around.”
A more nervous-type person would question the directions. A doubter would wonder why George Gail told her to drive down a dark path to the very back of the complex. A worrier would fret over the stillness of the night, the stark darkness around them.
Madison discovered she was all three of these things.
“Are you sure about this, George Gail?” she asked. Her eyes darted to the trench coat again.
“See, there’s his truck!”
George Gail jumped from the car as soon as it stopped, calling her husband’s name. The only answer was from the lowing cattle in a nearby pen.
“Where could he be?” she worried.
“Are there any lights you can turn on?” Madison suggested.
“Good idea! I’ll go turn them on. You stay here and look for him.”
Before Madison could protest, George Gail’s phone buzzed with a text message. She looked down at the screen and read it aloud. “‘Put back. Hemp.’ I think he means he’s out back and needs help.”
“How did you…?”
George Gail shrugged. “I’ve been deciphering love letters and messages for forty years. His handwriting is even worse. Here, come this way.”
The stockyards of the sale barn were an organized maze of pens and alleys, all tucked beneath a sprawling metal roof. For a woman of size, George Gail moved with confidence as she unlatched a gate and squeezed through its narrow frame, motioning for Madison to follow.
“Where are we going?”
“Up those stairs to the catwalk. From there we can see out over the pens.”
The beam from her car lights shone onto the rickety steps as she reluctantly followed her leader.
“Watch your step up here,” George Gail advised. “This is an older section of the pens. We usually only use them when we have more than two or three thousand head of cattle, but the fire damaged the pens closer to the front. We had to go back to using these, even though they’re a little woppy-jawed.” She gingerly stepped over a gaping hole left by a missing plank.
The higher they went, the less light cast upon their way. As they stepped onto the catwalk that spidered off into different directions, George Gail called her husband’s name. After going just a few feet, darkness surrounded them.
Perhaps it was the black all around them, perhaps it was the chill of the February breeze chasing itself through the open-sided barn. Perhaps it was the unknown, or the ambiguous text from Curtis. Perhaps it was the fact George Gail was wearing a trench coat and, try as she might, Madison could not get the stocky image of Caress’s killer out of her mind. Perhaps it was a combination of it all, but something lent an air of danger to the night, a sense of foreboding.
“Do you hear anything?” Madison felt compelled to whisper, even though George Gail had been calling her husband’s name at the top of her lungs.
“Just the cattle moving below.”
“I can’t see a thing, can you?”
“I’m not sure… Look over there. To the right, past that big beam. Could that be a person?”
The moon kept slipping behind the clouds, but if she stared hard enough, Madison thought she saw the vague outline of a large support beam against the black horizon. “I don’t know,” she whispered back. “I’m getting cross-eyed, staring into the darkness.”
George Gail’s phone buzzed again. “It’s him!” she whispered excitedly, consulting the screen. “He says ‘Down. Eight.’”
She started forward, but Madison took hold of her arm. “Wait. Why did he text you instead of calling out?”
George Gail sounded frightened. “Maybe he’s hurt!”
“Or maybe someone else is down there.”
She could barely make out George Gail’s face in front of her. She couldn’t see the smear of blue eye shadow streaked across her face. She could, however, see the white of her eyes as they widened in fright.
“I’m scared, Madison,” she squeaked.
Madison squeezed the other woman’s hand. “Be as quiet as possible,” she advised.
Somehow, Madison ended up in the lead. While George Gail brought up the rear, holding in tiny whimpers with both hands placed over her mouth, Madison led their slow procession down the long walkway. She tried to count eight pens as they passed over them, but peering down into the pitch made her dizzy. Occasionally a silvery horn would reflect a bit of light, reminding her of the dangers of falling. Not only was it a long way down, some of the pens held cattle.
“Was that eight?” she whispered, turning her head toward her companion. The walkway dipped unexpectedly and she lunged forward, falling into a handrail that felt dangerously unsteady. Feeling George Gail’s hand on her back, she hissed in belief, “Did you just push me?”
“No, I stumbled! And he didn’t mean eight, he meant right. We still have a way to go. Hurry up.” Suddenly impatient, she shoved Madison to urge her forward.
“I can’t see what I’m doing,” Madison reminded her. “What about those lights?”
“I forgot. I’ll have to go back to turn them on. You wait here.”
“All by myself?” If Madison sounded afraid, it was because she was. There was something decidedly sinister about the night. The deeper they walked into the shadows, the worse the feeling grew. And they seemed to be no closer to the end now than they were when they began. Had she missed a crosswalk somewhere? Had she taken a wrong path and turned them in circles?
“What if he’s hurt?” George Gail whined. “We need to get to him as soon as possible. You stay here, and when I turn on the lights, you locate him. You can get down to the pens faster than I can.”
“Just how am I supposed to get down there?”
“Crawl down. There are ladders every so often.”
“I don’t know, George Gail. Maybe we should call for help.”
“The wreck, remember? I’ll try to get through while I go turn on the lights. You stay here and try to find Curtis. Please, just find him!”
For lack of a better plan, Madison agreed. The walkway swayed a bit as George Gail waddled back the way in which they came. In a matter of steps, the blackness swallowed her whole. Not even her trench coat glowed in the darkness.
Madison stood in the black night, trying to get her bearings. Earlier, she had seen the faintest hint of the sky to their right. She thought she had headed in that direction, toward the largest support beam, but she was no longer certain. With the moon moving behind a cloud again, there was no light to guide her steps. Perhaps if she moved on, she might get a glimpse of starlight if nothing else.
After a few steps, she heard a noise below and stopped to listen. She could hear cattle moving beneath her, a slow stir of beastly bodies in the stillness of night. Deciding it was nothing more than the cows, she took anothe
r step.
The noise came again. It sounded like ‘psst’.
She waited, hearing the sound again. “Curtis?” she called in a whisper.
“Down here.” The words were low, no more than the murmur of the cows.
“I can’t see you. Are you all right?”
“Hurt.”
Swallowing hard, Madison peered into the dark pens below. She could barely make out the backs of about two dozen head of cattle crowded inside one of the pens, but there was no indication of Curtis Burton. She crawled to her knees, trying to get a closer look.
“Crazy.”
She heard his faint word as she tried to see under the catwalk. Afraid of losing her balance and falling headlong into the pen, she lay down on the wooden walk and hung her head over the edge to see beneath her. “What did you say?” she whispered.
“She’s crazy,” he answered, but his voice sounded weak.
“Who? Who’s crazy?”
There was no answer. Madison’s eyes watered with the strain of staring into black nothingness. Blinking the sting away, she slowly walked her eyes along the railings of the fence. That dark blob was a cow… so was that one… and the one in the corner was a really big cow, curled horns and all. And that… was that…
“Curtis?” she whispered frantically. There was a dark shape draped against the fence, squashed between the railings and a large white-faced cow.
He answered, but with a discombobulated, “George Gail.”
Madison sucked in a sharp breath. Was he confused, mistaking her for his beloved wife? Was he asking about her, wandering where she was? Or, Madison wondered in dread, could he be answering her question? Was he saying George Gail was the crazy one?
No, no, no, that was impossible!
… Wasn’t it?
Think, Madison! In a strange, convoluted way, it made sense. George Gail believed her husband was having an affair with Caress Ellingsworth. From the very beginning, she claimed she wanted to kill someone. She could not remember what happened the night Caress was murdered, only that she woke up with car keys and blood. She, herself, was worried she might have actually done it.
Or had it all been a brilliant act in an effort to pump information from Madison, to find out if she could identify her? She was wearing a trench coat, after all, just like the killer. She had directed Madison to the dark outer pens without hesitation. And she had translated her husband’s mistyped text messages easily enough; too easily, perhaps? Had she known all along where he was, because she had left him there, injured and in pain?
No, that’s too crazy, Madison convinced herself, even for George Gail.
Curtis said something else. She strained to hear his words. “Need to open the gate.”
“How?”
“Have to crawl down here and swing it open. Stay on the fence.” He struggled to get a deep breath before adding, “There’s one cow in here that’s plumb loco.”
Madison did her best to hide the fact that she was horrified, even from herself. A man was trapped and possibly injured; this was no time to be worried about her own fears. She had to help him.
With the help of a few mumbled directions from Curtis, Madison found the ‘ladder’ George Gail mentioned. In truth, it was nothing more than a few strategically placed boards, nailed horizontally down the side of a support post. Madison felt like one of those people who climbed telephone poles, but without the safety belt.
The climb down was frightening enough, but touching the dirt floor below was no better. She was standing in almost total darkness. She prayed she was on the alley side of the fence, and not standing in a pen filled with cattle.
“Curtis?” she whispered into the darkness.
“Over here.”
Even while pinned between a fence and a twelve-hundred pound animal, the cowman had more wits about him than Madison did. He managed to press a button on his cell phone and illuminate the screen, casting a circle of light into the blackness. Madison spotted him easily enough, several feet to the right.
“Come on down the alley. The gate is about six feet this way,” Curtis told her. “Work the latch, then pull it open. Get out of the way fast. Get on the fence.”
“What if they stampede?” Madison worried aloud. Belatedly thinking to use her own phone, she saw that she was in a long, wide pathway that ran parallel beneath the catwalk, flanked on either side by cattle pens. Most of the pens were empty, except for the one where Curtis Burton was trapped.
“Don’t get caught behind the gate,” he cautioned.
As Madison neared the pen of shaggy bovine, fear collected in her belly. The odor, alone, was enough to curl her stomach. The locals all complained about the stench of the chicken houses scattered about, but when was the last time they took a good whiff of a cow pen? To her offended senses, there wasn’t a huge difference between cow dung and chicken litter. And ammonia this raw and concentrated stung her nose either way, no matter which animal it came from. Add the muck and the dander and the sweat of twenty head of thousand-something pound beasts, and the smell was every bit as rank and overwhelming as that in the chicken houses.
And cows were so much bigger than chickens! Madison was intimidated by their size, even with the security of a fence between her and them. They looked docile enough, but Curtis had mentioned a wild one. Her money was on the horned cow in the corner. While the other beasts stood quietly in the crowded pen, contentedly chewing their cuds and licking their sides with long, slobbery tongues, that one cow moved restlessly along the far fence. The other cattle left her a wide berth as she prowled the perimeter, searching for a way out.
Another cow bumped its large body into the railings near Madison. The boards bulged outward, prompting Madison to move to the center of the alley.
The latch to the gate was harder to open than she expected. Realistically, Madison knew it had to be secure enough not to give way beneath the pressure of milling cattle, but what about beneath the fumbling fingers of a frightened greenhorn? She finally lifted the gate itself, relieved when the latch gave at last.
Scrambling out of the way, she jumped onto the bottom rail of the fence. The gate was unlatched but still in its closed position. As Curtis reminded her again to stay free of the gate’s swing, Madison stretched her arm out as far as she could to tug the gate outward.
“It’s not budging,” she complained. She was too afraid to get down off the fence and open it properly, afraid she would be either trampled by the cows or squished behind the gate.
“Hit one of the cows,” Curtis advised. “Slap ‘em on the rump.”
She climbed to the top of the fence—why did they build the sides so high?—and leaned down into the pen. Afraid she might lose her balance and fall among the cows, her first attempt was a bit lackluster.
“Harder!”
This time she slapped the cow hard enough that it jumped. The movement started a chain reaction. Cows bumped into one another, slowly at first, just enough to shift positions in the pen. The cow pressing into Curtis turned with the herd, her backside now pressed into his chest. He popped her on the flank and was rewarded with a swift kick, but she moved forward. Curtis sagged to the ground and gulped in his first deep breath since being trapped.
“Watch out for the horned piebald,” he warned weakly.
Madison was not raised on a farm. She had no idea which one was a piebald. Too many of them had horns. And the shift in movement frightened the herd, making even the most docile creatures lumber to life. Two cows bellowed in protest, another reared up on the backside of its neighbor, riding her around the fence. Feet quickened, bodies thumped, horns slung. It took a while, but one cow finally bumped its rear into the gate and forced it to swing open. Eyes wild, the bovine backed her way from the crowd and into freedom.
The rest of the cows quickly followed suit. There was a mad scramble for the gate, making Madison grateful for Curtis’s advice. The eager herd crowded into the opening, pushing and shoving in their quest for freedom.
> Madison clung to the top rail of the fence. The railings swayed as the cows fell against it, but it stood strong. As the large bodies pushed down the alley, too close for comfort, Madison swung her feet to the other side of the fence, inside the pen.
Madison took a moment to worry about George Gail. What was taking so long? The barn was still pitch black, save for the faint glow of starlight peeping in beneath the eaves.
A rancorous clatter tore her from her wanderings. She heard a low, wild bawl, the sound ominous. A lone cow remained in the pen, the crazy one with the sharp, curled horns. Did piebald mean spotted? She was thrashing into the railings opposite Madison, hurling her large body repeatedly into the wooden fence.
Paralyzed with fear, Madison watched the cow plunder her way down the fence, closer to where Madison was perched. Crazed by the commotion of the other cows, the frenzied bovine did not realize the gate was standing wide open. She was intent on making her own way out.
To Madison’s utter amazement, she watched as the cow tried to jump the fence. When her hooves cleared the top railing, Madison understood why the boards reached so high. In her wildest imagination, she never would have believed a cow could reach such heights.
When the cow realized she was still trapped, she bellowed again in rage. She twisted and flung backwards against the fence.
That was when she spotted Madison.
Time played out in slow motion. Madison saw the angry cow paw the ground, flinging filth that splattered the fence behind her. She lowered her head. The whites of her eyes glowed like evil marbles as she trained her sights on Madison.
Then she plunged, and all hell broke loose.
Maddy squealed and dove over the side of the fence. Her foot hit the back of a cow still in the alley. Squealing again, she scrambled along the side of the fence, hanging by the top rail, frantically working her way toward the adjacent pen. As the angry cow threw her weight into the fence Madison clung to, the wall of boards trembled beneath her hands. The force of the second blow almost loosened Maddy’s tentative hold. With the third, she heard a board crack.
When the Stars Fall (The Sisters, Texas Mystery Series Book 2) Page 24
