by Terri Farley
For Jake, it was a long string of words. And then he added, “Why?”
Sam drew a deep breath and announced, “Happy birthday!”
“I’m—”
She held up a hand against Jake’s protest.
He said, “I was just gonna—”
“Hush,” Sam interrupted. “It’s fair, since I got Cougar from you.”
“Sam, I—”
Sam put her hands on her hips. She didn’t yell, because the little black spots of the coydog’s eyebrows were raised and worried looking, but she leaned forward until she was practically nose to nose with Jake.
Couldn’t Jake see that the half wild dog would get more understanding from him, a guy who’d lived his whole life on the range, than from anyone else?
“It’s a match made in heaven,” she whispered. Jake managed to get in a single word.
“Singer,” he said.
“What?”
Jake settled back, holding the coydog securely. “I’m gonna call him Singer.”
If the day had stopped there, Sam thought later, it would have been perfect.
She’d ridden the Phantom, saved Singer, and driven—pretty well—for the first time in her life. Nevada Day would have been a great celebration.
But the day didn’t stop there.
She and Jake crossed the bridge with Singer squirming in Jake’s arms, trying to see and sniff everything, and jump down to join Blaze as he paced beside them. Then the Border collie streaked away, barking, at the sight of Dad, Pepper, Ross, and Dallas mounted up and riding out, looking like an Old West posse.
Brynna stood on the front porch, but she walked to meet Sam and Jake.
“What’s up with them?” Sam asked, looking after the mounted men. But then she noticed Brynna wore her BLM uniform even though today was a holiday. “And why are you dressed for work?”
“I’ve got some official business to tend to,” Brynna answered. “Sam, I’m afraid we misjudged Nicolas. He’s gone and he took the colt.”
Sam felt the smile melt from her lips. Her head jerked aside to stare at the barn. The brightly painted vardo was still parked beside it.
“His vardo’s still here,” she pointed out. “He wouldn’t have left that behind.”
“He did, though,” Brynna said.
“No,” Sam shook her head. “Uh-uh. He was here when I got up this morning.”
“Are you sure?” Brynna asked. “Did you see him?”
“Not exactly,” Sam admitted, “but I saw Lace looking in the back of the wagon.”
“Lace is gone, too,” Brynna said. “Wyatt thinks Nicolas left during the hailstorm, using it as a diversion.”
It was possible, Sam thought. The hailstorm had started after she’d ridden away on the Phantom. But the accusation just felt wrong.
“His grandfather gave him that vardo. They worked on it together.”
“Maybe he thinks a Spanish Mustang is more valuable,” Brynna suggested, but her tone was uncertain.
Sam shook her head. “I just can’t believe it.”
“I’m pretty surprised myself.” Brynna’s short, bitter laugh reminded Sam of her stepmother’s conversation with Norman White yesterday.
He’d implied she had some stake in the colt’s disappearance. He’d wanted to take the foal back to Willow Springs immediately, but he’d let Brynna talk him out of it and asked if she’d stake her reputation and the reputation of the ranch on Nicolas’s honesty.
She had.
Now, Nicolas had vanished.
“I’ve already notified Sheriff Ballard,” Brynna told Sam.
“I guess you had to,” Sam said. “And Norman?”
Brynna opened her lips and shook her head. “Not yet. I’m still hoping we’re wrong.”
A sigh built up in Sam’s chest. How often had Brynna told her to think with her head instead of her heart? To trust experience, not hope? Her level-headed stepmother must be terribly worried if she was ignoring her own advice.
While Sam pondered what had made Nicolas leave without a word to anyone, Brynna and Jake talked about Singer and tracking Nicolas. Sam refocused on their conversation as they decided there was no sense in Jake joining the search.
“It’s going to be an easy tracking job. A draft horse and foal in the mud.” Brynna raised her hands in disbelief. “I don’t know what he was thinking.”
“Not that he could sneak off.” Jake shouted the words as Blaze barked, demanding that Jake put his son down even though the pup was dozing in Jake’s arm. “I could still go.”
Brynna waved Jake away and finally he and the dogs headed for the warm tack room in the barn. Sam gazed after them, satisfied, but when she turned back to Brynna, her stepmother’s whole face drooped in despair.
“There’s something else going on here,” Sam insisted.
“I’m afraid this is one crime we can’t blame on Linc Slocum,” Brynna told her.
Sam looked down at her boots. She was that predictable.
“Oh—we found your notes,” Brynna added with a weak smile.
To Sam, it seemed days, not hours ago, that she’d written notes reminding Dad and Brynna to file a complaint against Linc Slocum for shooting Blaze, then placed them all over the house.
As Sam watched, her stepmother’s fingers kneaded the space between her eyebrows. She must be getting a headache. Compared to the federal charges Norman White might file against Brynna and Nicolas, the urgency of taking Linc to court over injuring Blaze probably didn’t seem that important.
“It could wait, I guess,” Sam said.
“No. The man deserves to be punished. This is something we can prove. As soon as the courthouse opens tomorrow, we plan to follow up,” Brynna said. “Believe me, he won’t get away with this. At least not easily.”
Pulling her car keys from her pocket, Brynna stared at the white BLM truck as if she couldn’t stand the thought of pursuing Nicolas.
Sam toyed with the idea of announcing that Jake had taught her to drive, but she kept quiet. This might not be the best time for another surprise.
“Come with me,” Brynna invited. “It’s not going to be fun, but I might need help with the horses if we come upon Nicolas before your dad and the hands do.”
Sam didn’t want to go, but she considered the awkwardness brought on by Brynna’s pregnancy and agreed. “Okay. Can I just change into something dry, first? It’ll only take a minute.”
Brynna nodded, and Sam hurried toward the house. As she did, a dark thought invaded her mind. Yesterday, Nicolas had told her she trusted too easily. Maybe he’d been warning her about himself.
Chapter Nineteen
Sam had dressed in dry, warm clothes and she was hanging her silver poncho back on its front porch hook when the phone rang. She grabbed her leather coat with fleece lining and called up the stairs, “I’ll get it, Gram.”
The minute she heard the voice calling, though, she was sorry she hadn’t just walked on out the door.
“That kid cut ’n run, didn’t he?” Linc crowed.
“Where’d you hear that?” Sam asked. She’d never get used to the speed with which news spread in a small town, and though stalling would do no good, keeping things from Linc Slocum came naturally to her.
“Sheriff Ballard stopped in at Clara’s for coffee to go, right after he talked with Brynna—boy, I bet her face is red.” Linc chuckled. “He gave Clara a ‘be on the lookout’ warning for that kid and the horses.”
“There’s more to this,” Sam began.
“I just bet there is! I bet he’s to blame for all this horse trouble.” Linc’s voice took on a wheedling tone as he went on. “Don’t he look kinda familiar to you, Samantha? Don’t he look like a guy you saw hanging around with Karl Mannix?”
He must be joking, Sam thought. Nicolas was exotic-looking and a complete stranger. Hadn’t Linc been the one to brand him a drifter?
“Yeah, I’m thinking I saw him in these parts in about May or June, right around the time my A
ppy colt disappeared.”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said.
“That’s because you don’t want to believe the truth—” Linc began.
Sam sucked in a breath, tried to put together something polite to say about Linc Slocum lecturing her about the truth, but she was still trying to talk while he went on.
“His kind of people, gypsies, move around for a reason,” Linc said. “They’re always working on a scam. You heard the expression being ‘gypped,’ right? Well now you know where it came from.”
“That’s just ridic—”
“The evidence speaks for itself,” Linc said smugly.
Sam sighed, once more hearing Nicolas telling her she was too trusting. She hated the possibility that Linc could be right.
Then, Linc jarred her gloom.
“Tell me, can you, Samantha?”
“Tell you what?”
“Nicolas’s last name.”
Sam felt the same way she had when she’d killed the truck’s engine and her head had hit the back of the seat. The suddenness of Linc’s question was all wrong.
Why did he want to know? And why had his tone changed from giddy to serious?
Sam could have told Linc the information was none of his business, but something else Nicolas had said made Sam answer.
“Raykov,” Sam said, but she was hearing Nicolas’s voice as he quoted Napoleon.
Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.
The minute she hung up the telephone, Sam’s brain chattered another message.
Last night when she’d woken from a dream about Nicolas acting like a Pied Piper for horses, she’d wanted to run to the vardo, wake him, and make him promise not to play his violin until he’d left the Phantom’s territory.
Silly? Yes, but now the dream offered her another clue. If Nicolas was gone for good, he would have taken his violin with him.
Sam sprinted out the door and headed straight for the vardo. Brynna shouted something after her, but she didn’t slow down.
Feeling a little like a burglar, she drew back the curtain covering the back of the vardo. Curved wood polished by skilled hands glimmered back at her. She wanted to grab the violin, hold it aloft for Brynna to see, and dance around playing it, but of course she couldn’t.
Instead, Sam ran to the BLM truck, slipped into the passenger’s seat next to her stepmother, and slammed the door like an exclamation mark before turning to Brynna.
“He left his violin behind,” Sam said, then laughed as Brynna held up her right hand, crossed her fingers, then kissed them for luck.
Brynna drove carefully, but she didn’t waste any time.
“Now, maybe I can quit kicking myself for calling the people who adopted the other member of the colt’s herd,” she said without taking her eyes from the road. “First thing I did this morning was let them know I might have a Spanish Mustang stud colt available for adoption.”
“That would be so great,” Sam said. “If he could be reunited with part of his herd…”
“It gets better,” Brynna said with a smile. “I don’t know if anything will come of it, but some fanciers of the bloodlines are trying to get the horses ‘repatriated’ to Good Thunder Meadows.”
It took Sam a second to puzzle out what Brynna meant.
“Do you mean, they might get taken back home?” Sam asked.
“Stranger things have happened,” Brynna said.
Just then they passed the turn-off to Blind Faith Mustang Sanctuary. About a mile ahead, they saw Dallas, Dad, Ross, and Pepper headed toward Cowkiller Caldera.
“Now I know he’s not on the run,” Sam said as she and Brynna drove past the men and waved. “Nicolas wouldn’t head back into the mountains. If he was trying to escape, he’d go toward town.”
Brynna nodded, but she was looking through her window, following Lace’s tracks in the mud.
“They look like they were made with the bottom of a teakettle,” Brynna muttered, and it was a good thing she was driving so slow, following the tracks, because they both spotted the riders at the same time.
“Hey!” Sam said, and Brynna swerved left as Sheriff Ballard, riding his grulla mustang Jinx, rode up out of a ravine on their right.
“Look who’s with him,” Brynna said as Nicolas, riding Lace bareback, came into sight with the dun colt dancing alongside.
Brynna lowered the truck’s window and called out, “I guess everything’s all right.”
Sheriff Ballard and Nicolas laughed.
“Could hardly be better,” the sheriff said.
Sam didn’t bother rolling down her window. Despite the cold wind blowing against the car door, she shoved it open and greeted Jinx with an affectionate neck pat, then turned in time to let Lace whuffle her lips over her coat.
“Let me explain,” Nicolas said before anyone could ask questions. Shifting on the mare’s broad black-and-white back to look at Sam, he said, “Your friend Jennifer is partly to blame.”
“Jen?” Sam gasped.
“And her turkey vultures.” Nicolas gave a nod. “Lace woke me when the colt wandered off this morning, and I saw circling turkey vultures.”
Sam shuddered. She knew the birds were misunderstood, but they did eat dead things. And the colt had been missing. Sam knew why Nicolas had flung himself on Lace’s back and galloped away from River Bend Ranch without leaving a note or telling anyone where he’d gone. She would have done exactly the same thing.
“But he was all right,” Brynna said. For a second, she and the others glanced at Sheriff Ballard as he took a two-way radio from his saddle and reined Jinx aside to talk, but then Brynna studied every inch of the little dun mustang.
“By the time I reached the place where I thought they’d been circling, they were gone,” Nicolas said.
“The storm,” Sam said as she remembered seeing turkey vultures, too. They’d vanished just before the sky cracked open and pelted her with hail.
“Right, and though Lace had no trouble finding him—without vulture navigation,” Nicolas joked, “you cannot imagine what it’s like to give a horse its head and expect it to carry you through such a violent storm to safety.”
Sam bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. She had a pretty good idea of how Nicolas had felt, and when he leaned down and hugged Lace’s neck, she felt a tug of longing for the Phantom.
“So, everything’s all right.” Brynna sighed.
“You keep saying that.” Sam laughed, but as she realized how much Brynna had agonized over this, she understood.
“Actually,” Sheriff Ballard said, rejoining them, “everything’s better than all right, and though I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch, I think I may have Sam to thank for something real big, real soon.”
“Me?” Sam said, but her incredulity shattered as she thought of her phone conversation with Linc. “Linc Slocum’s done something else stupid, something having to do with Nicolas, right?”
Excitement blazed through Sam and when the sheriff nodded, she imagined an explosion of triumphant fireworks.
“Tell me!” Sam begged.
“Well, I’ve been talking to Linc off and on since yesterday, kinda leavin’ the door open for him to come up with something,” he drawled.
“And he did,” Sam filled in.
“He just faxed a document in to my office, says it’s evidence that ‘speaks for itself,’ but it turns out that this ‘communication’ between Karl Mannix and Nicolas, here, is something we confiscated from the computer in Mannix’s cabin last spring.”
“He gave you the same thing?” Brynna asked.
“We held it as evidence against Mannix, but we’ve been trying to find out if it was ever sent. And to whom.”
“Now I guess you know!” Sam crowed. “And the note Linc gave you was exactly the same?”
“Well, it did have one minor change,” Sheriff Ballard said. “This note was directed to Nicolas Raykov.”
“I’m confused,” Nic
olas said. “I don’t remember telling him my name.”
“You didn’t. I did,” Sam said. She clapped her hands in delight, though she really felt like dancing.
“I’ll pick him up for falsifying evidence,” Sheriff Ballard went on, “and then, I think I’ll have enough for a search warrant. Not that I expect to find anything.”
“Why not?” Nicolas asked. “It sounds like he’s a fool.”
“He just panicked, and saw you as a target of opportunity,” the sheriff said. “Just like we hoped.”
“Glad to be of service,” Nicolas said, making as much of a bow as he could from Lace’s back.
The sarcasm drained from his face then, and his left eyebrow was no longer raised in skepticism as he slid down from Lace and walked over to Sam.
“I have to thank you for something.”
“Okay,” Sam said carefully, but she wasn’t prepared for Nicolas to pick up both of her hands as he faced her.
“Remember me saying you were too trusting?” he asked.
“Sure. I was thinking about it this morning,” Sam answered.
“I bet you were,” Nicolas said, glancing at the colt. “But as it turns out, I was wrong. You trusted me when others didn’t, and you stood up for me, and I thank you.”
Feeling the flush on her cheeks, Sam shrugged, but Nicolas still held on to her hands.
“Perhaps your friend Jennifer would say you were like her turkey vultures,” Nicolas teased. “You took something poisonous like Linc Slocum’s judgment of me, and not only did you make the poison go away, you turned it into something good.”
“I’ll say,” Sheriff Ballard told her.
Grateful, but more embarrassed than she remembered being in her life, Sam covered her blushing face with her hands.
In the brief darkness, she saw the Phantom again, leaning over Singer, grazing a growling pup with gentle lips.
Sam sighed. If it was true that she had a touch for turning bad things good, she wasn’t the only one.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Lynn Strauman of Gypsy Rose Ranch for my love-at-first-sight glimpse of Gypsy Vanner horses, and to Dennis Thompson and his late wife, Cindy, who spotted a magical Gypsy Vanner stallion grazing the green fields of Wales and brought him home. To see the real horses behind the fictional one in this book, visit GypsyGold.com and GVHwest.com.
