by Cassie Cole
15
Chase
I wasn’t book smart. Never was, never would be. And that didn’t bother me, neither. We all had our roles in life. I liked mine just fine.
But I was observant. And I had a good intuition. Daniel said intuition was superstitious nonsense, but that’s only on account of he couldn’t find any evidence that made sense to him. But I knew it was real. And right now, all the hairs on the back of my neck were stiff.
“This was definitely cut,” I said.
We’d found another section of the fence like the first. One entire post was gone, and the three strands of barbed wire had been snipped with wire cutters. Like the first, there was no possible way this was normal wear and tear from clumsy cows.
“I don’t disagree,” Landon said, “but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“How do you figure?”
“We’re too far from the road. If it were cattle thieves, they’d cut the fence as close to the road as possible to load the stolen cattle onto trailers. But here?” He pointed to the north. “That’s another rancher’s land. All this accomplishes is a few stray cows wandering from one side of the fence to the other.”
“Maybe the other rancher is the one doing the stealing.”
Landon snorted to show what he thought of that. “Never heard of ranchers stealing their neighbor’s cattle. Terrible crime. Too easy to get caught, thanks to branding. And the paper trail is a bit obvious. Plus, why cut the fence here, and where we repaired yesterday? There’s a swing gate connecting the two properties half a mile to the west.”
“So what’s your theory?” I asked.
Landon paused to remove his hat and wipe the sweat from his forehead with a sleeve. “I don’t know. Maybe we have some tricky cattle thieves. Avoid the roads. Drive their trailers out here, to the ass end of the ranch, and steal the cattle here.”
I swept my hand around the area. “Do you see any tire tracks?” I didn’t want for him to answer. “It’s gotta be the other ranchers. Maybe they’re sending a message. Or they think they can swipe some easy cattle right after their neighbor is dead, and then try to blame it on thieves.”
“I don’t know,” Landon repeated. “Like I said, it doesn’t make any sense.”
A car in the distance made us both look up. To the north on the neighbor’s property, driving east. We watched it slow down, turn onto the main road, and then immediately exit onto the driveway of our ranch.
“What say we go find out for ourselves?” I asked.
There was no freer feeling than riding a horse. Two animals in perfect synchronization, racing across the landscape at a dangerous pace. I stood in the stirrups and bent low over her mane to urge her faster, feeling the wind on my face. Landon was two steps behind me. I could always coax a little extra speed out of a horse than my brothers.
My horse was lathered and snorting heavily by the time we reached the house, but we were too late: the car was rolling back up the driveway, sending a miniature dust storm into the air behind. Daniel and Cindy stood awkwardly in the driveway, alternating glances between each other and us.
“What’s wrong?” I said, flying off my horse.
“Nothing.” The flush on her face told a different story. Daniel looked even more uncomfortable.
“Was that a BMW?” Landon asked.
Cindy and Daniel filled us in on what we missed. “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “They’re just two pricks to the north trying to make my life a little more annoying.”
No matter what she said, they were clearly shaken by the whole thing. I felt myself losing control of my anger, squeezing my nails into my palm, imagining these faceless Honeycombs folding under my fists as I struck them, knocking them to the ground…
I took a deep breath and counted to 10, the way I’d been taught. It worked. Afterward, I wasn’t sure which upset me more: how they’d hurt Daniel… or how they’d hurt Cindy.
“They’re holding some cattle that wandered onto their property,” Daniel said. He turned to Cindy. “I still think we should call the sheriff.”
“Trust me: you do not want to do that,” she said. She let out the most unconvincing nervous laugh I’d ever heard. “It’s not worth the hassle.”
I gave Landon a victorious look. “Told you it was them.”
“What was?” Cindy asked.
“That damaged section we showed you yesterday,” Landon said reluctantly. “We’re certain it was cut. Intentionally.”
“By your neighbors,” I added. “They admitted to it!”
Cindy closed her eyes and snorted. “Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me. The Honeycombs have always been a pain in our ass. And unlike the other problems on our ranch, this one’s my fault.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“I refused to date Francis, their son.”
Landon stared. “That’s what this is about?”
“It goes way back,” Cindy explained. “Ever since I was born Mrs. Honeycomb decided she was going to match Francis up with me. Play dates and dinner invitations all through middle school. Valentines in our mailbox every year—which I swear she wrote for him. It was all annoying, but easy to ignore for most of my life. Until high school. That’s when he started coming by every night, asking to go on walks with me, or take me to the movies, or anything else. I tried to be nice about it, but he was so damn persistent…”
“And eventually you told him to jump off a bridge?”
“In less nice words, but yes. Their family took it more personally than Francis himself, I swear.”
Daniel shuddered. “And I thought the two of them were bad. I’d hate to meet the mom.”
Cindy grinned widely. “She divorced his ass when I was a senior in high school. Took half his money and moved to Kansas City.”
“Maybe karma does exist,” Landon said.
“Let’s go get your cattle!” I exclaimed. Everyone was ignoring what really mattered. “They stole from you. Hell, they practically admitted it. Let’s ride over there, demand the cows, and drive them home.”
“And if they have a problem with that?” Daniel said.
Cindy put a hand on my shoulder before I could suggest something violent. Her touch calmed me immediately. “That’s sweet of you. Really, it is. But it’s not a big deal. We have too much other work to do to let ourselves get distracted fighting those assholes.”
“It would be easy,” I protested. “Just ride over there…”
“You do not want to mess with the Honeycombs. Francis is a doomsday prepper. Has an entire bunker filled with army surplus meals and bottled water—and weapons, too. We used to hear them testing grenades and assault rifles out on their property. It would be a whole big thing, and they’d call their sheriff buddy, and you’d spend tonight—and a bunch more nights—in the county jail.” She shook her head. “Let it go.”
We handed our lathered horses to Daniel and saddled new ones, then went back out on the ranch. We repaired the damaged section we’d been examining, then four more parts that required small maintenance. Then we went looking for the new calves that needed to be checked for defects and branded. But the work was unable to distract me from my anger. From the growing ball of injustice in my head.
They’d stolen from her. And then they’d taunted her about it.
Someone needed to make it right.
16
Cindy
I stood in the driveway as Landon and Chase rode back out to finish their work, waiting until they were far enough away to talk to Daniel.
To discuss what just happened.
God, the kiss was good. The kind of kiss you didn’t know you needed until it happened, and then you wondered why you hadn’t done it sooner. The kind of kiss that leaves you flushed and breathless and playing with your hair.
The kind of kiss that left me wanting more.
A car engine broke me out of my stupor. The truck pulled around in a tight circle, with Daniel behind the wheel.
“Hey!” I waved,
running up. “Where are you going?”
He rolled down the window halfway. “Gunna, umm, go get those quotes. For the repairs.”
“Hold on, I wanted to talk about…”
“I’ll be back soon!” he said, quickly driving away.
I stood there, alone and confused.
I poured myself a glass of water from the kitchen and drank it down. Any man who kisses that well has no right to be shy. Daniel should have waited until his brothers rode off, then swept me back in his arms to kiss away the afternoon.
Once I got over my annoyance, his embarrassment was almost kind of cute.
As much as I wanted to sit around reliving the kiss while twirling my hair, that was stupid teenage bullshit. I had adult things to do. Financial documents to sort and catalog. Numbers to crunch.
But God, did I want to sit around daydreaming about the kiss.
I sat cross-legged on my bed and dumped out the box of financial documents. The first thing I did was sort everything into manageable categories. About 75% of the documents were redundant: delinquency notices and monthly statements that showed the running totals. I didn’t need credit card statements for the last six months. I just needed the most recent one, with the most up-to-date balance.
Once everything was sorted, I pulled out my laptop and opened up Excel. Without internet I couldn’t connect to my cloud storage; I had to save the file locally, like a peasant. But it wouldn’t matter if my computer crashed and I lost all the data. All I was trying to do was get a ballpark number of how much my dad’s estate owed.
I tackled the credit cards first because even though they were in the tens of thousands of dollars, they were still the small stuff, relatively speaking. Dad had twelve different credit cards, I saw with surprise. Usually you started getting rejected after the sixth or seventh. I punched numbers into my spreadsheet, rounding up for simplicity: $12,000 on a Capital One Visa. $8,000 on an American Airlines Visa. $18,000 on a Discover Card.
Curiosity got the better of me and I started glancing at the purchases themselves. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but everything was ranch related. Feed, equipment, equipment maintenance from a mechanic, RFID tags for the cattle, monthly groceries…
It was almost disappointing how mundane it was. No gambling or pornography, no suspicious ATM withdrawals at two in the morning. He never even splurged on dinner at a restaurant in town. Every single purchase was for the ranch.
I supposed that was better than any other weird addiction.
Once the credit cards were done, I moved on to the business line of credit. That predated most of the credit cards, which made sense: only when the business line of credit maxed out did he turn to credit cards. For thoroughness I glanced at the purchases, which were the same type of stuff as on the credit cards. I got to the important number, the one at the bottom in bold letters. A six digit number, not counting decimal places. I shook my head and typed it into my laptop.
There were various other business invoices. Stuff where services had been rendered and billed later, which of course dad couldn’t pay. These actually left me feeling guilty because they were local businesses: the feed store; the mechanic with the shop next to Maggie’s old motel; a plumber who must have known dad because he attached a personal note to the invoice, insisting that it was alright, that my dad pay it whenever he was able, no rush, he understood what he was going through.
It was easy to not give a fuck about repaying Visa and American Express and even the local credit union. But seeing real people getting screwed over left me feeling surprisingly guilty. I was tempted to cut these guys checks from my own checking account.
Finally I came to the big one. The equity line of credit. Essentially a new mortgage on a property that had been in our family for generations. I flipped through the pages of legal jargon and got to the end, where my name was scrawled in black pen. A hasty signature from a desperate man.
I’d gotten over most of my issues with my dad. The pain of not having his approval, his acceptance, his whatever. It took years, but I was at a point where I’d accepted that my dad was the person he was, and wouldn’t change. He was a better ranch owner than a husband, a better husband than a father. I’d essentially written him off the way one writes off a distant cousin: I ignored him except around the holidays, and then I sent a card and maybe made a phone call, and then went back to my real life without any guilt.
But that was all passive pain. A vacuum where his love and attention should have been. I could fill those holes, whether with work or a quick Tinder date or a few glasses of whiskey.
This piece of paper was different. This was proactive damage. He’d forged my signature to keep the ranch afloat, a selfish desire, intentionally throwing a lasso around my neck to drag me down with him.
The pain cut deeper than anything he’d ever done in my life. I took a few moments to collect myself, waiting to see if I would cry.
Nothing came.
As I went back over the details of the loan—which included an insane ballooning interest rate—I found myself wishing his issues had been drug or gambling related. That would have been much simpler.
The doorbell rang, scaring the shit out of me. “Coming!” I shouted, following Heidi’s barks to the front door. The man waiting on my porch wore a brown suit that was two sizes too large, and held a briefcase at his side. His head was like an egg with a little bit of black nest around the fringe.
I sighed when I saw him. “Let me guess: you’re from the bank.”
“I… Actually, no. I’m with the Black Hills Insurance Company. The man who lived here, Richard Jameson, had a life insurance policy with us.”
“Oh, yes!” I said. “You’re someone I actually want to see. Come on in. Don’t mind the mess.” I ushered him into the kitchen.
“I’m assuming you’re Richard’s daughter? Cynthia?”
“Unfortunately so.”
He paused and collected himself. “Let me just say, from everyone at the Black Hills Insurance Company, that we’re terribly sorry for your loss. Is now a good time to discuss his policy? I can come back…”
“Thank you, and yes, this is the perfect time.”
He put his briefcase on the table and sat down. “I was contacted by your estate lawyer, Robert Bonile. He filed the death claim, but we had some questions for you, if you don’t mind. Normal paperwork type stuff.”
“You’re the first person I’ve talked to who my father didn’t owe money. I’ll gladly answer any questions you have.”
He didn’t laugh. He opened his briefcase and removed a stack of forms, placing them precisely on the table. “The first question we always get is how the payout works. The policy will be paid out to your father’s estate, which will then be disbursed according to his will.”
“No chance of that,” I grumbled. “But I understand, yes.”
“Good. Sometimes beneficiaries, or inheritors, are upset when they do not receive the payout directly.” He made a note on one form and flipped it over. “Now I have some questions about your father. Just verifying what we already have on file.”
“Hit me.”
“You’ve already said you were his daughter… Your mother is deceased?”
I dredged up the reply I’d gotten used to saying when people asked about momma. “She died a few years ago. Cancer.”
“Ahh. I’m sorry. Your father was self-employed?”
I nodded. “Worked this ranch all his life.”
“It must be wonderful to be your own boss,” he said. “Choose your own hours. Spend more time with family.”
“Sure.”
“How was your father’s health?”
“Good, I guess,” I said. “He was fit. The ranch made him active.”
“Did he smoke?”
“Momma made him quit when I was born.”
“Our children bring out the best in us,” he said with a polite smile. “Did he drink?”
“Who doesn’t?”
A pen tick. “
How often?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a years, but he used to have a single glass of whiskey every night with dinner. Nothing excessive.”
“You didn’t know your father very well?”
“I live in Austin,” was all I said.
His tone was bored, formal. “So you wouldn’t know if he was on any psychiatric medication?”
“Psychiatric?”
“Bipolar disorder, or depression.”
“Why, does it say that?” I asked, leaning forward.
“There’s no history of that on our records. Like I said, I’m just verifying the data.”
I relaxed a little. “Nope, nothing like that. He was prone to moods though, let me tell you. If something was wrong with the ranch, like a sick calf or a horse he couldn’t tame, he’d go into a fugue for days. There was no talking to him when he was like that.”
“Sick calf… That sounds terribly sad,” he said. “The most stressful part of my job is meeting with grieving family.”
“I bet you hit the jackpot with me, then.”
“You’re certainly handling it better than most.” He returned his eyes to the paper. “No psychiatric drugs… What about other drugs?”
“Nope.”
“Prescription drugs, opioids…”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Are you certain?”
“The strongest thing in his medicine cabinet is extra strength ibuprofen,” I said.
He made the check mark next to that section of text, then put the papers away. “Excellent. Now… May I see where… Umm. There’s no delicate way to put this. Where he…”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
I’d deliberately avoided the place since coming home. I caught a glimpse of it on the first day while taking stock of everything, and since then I’d taken the long way around the house. It was almost a relief having this insurance guy here to force me to confront it. Even still, I could feel a lump in my throat growing.
A horse came riding up as we walked down the front steps. Landon, a worried look on his face.
