Corralled

by B. J Daniels

  But as he heard her moving around upstairs, he found himself smiling. He could always get another truck.

  Chapter Five

  The motorcycle that the guard at the Grizzly Club said had gone after the woman in the silver sports car was registered to Logan Chisholm, the address Chisholm Cattle Company, Whitehorse, Montana.

  Sheriff Buford Olson let out a low whistle. Hoyt Chisholm was one of the wealthiest ranchers in the state, so it was no surprise his son might be visiting the Grizzly Club. Or even that he might know the woman who’d been visiting Martin Sanderson, as the guard had suggested.

  So what had he been doing on this side of the Rockies? Visiting his friend JJ? Did that mean that Logan Chisholm also knew Martin Sanderson?

  Buford picked up the phone. His stomach growled again and he noticed how late it was. He’d call him tomorrow. Probably a waste of time anyway, since Logan Chisholm hadn’t actually gone into the Grizzly Club.

  But Chisholm had seen Jennifer James leaving and possibly followed her. He might know where she’d gone between the time she was seen leaving the club and going out in a blaze that evening beside Flathead Lake.

  Sighing, Buford put the phone back. He was starved and it was late. Also, he didn’t relish telling Logan Chisholm about the dead woman—that was if Logan even knew this JJ. Chisholm was probably still in the Bigfork area, which meant he would read about it in the papers.

  There was always the chance that if Chisholm knew something about either death, he would come forward with any information he had. Buford had never heard much about Hoyt Chisholm’s sons except that they were adopted and there were a bunch of them. Which meant they hadn’t been in too much trouble. With a father as well known as Hoyt Chisholm, it would be hard to stay out of the headlines if the sons had run-ins with the law. Even Chisholm’s money could only do so much when it came to the press.

  It certainly hadn’t been able to keep Hoyt’s name out of the headlines when he’d lost first one wife, then another. The first wife had drowned, the second had been killed in a horseback riding accident, the third had disappeared, recently turning up dead, murdered.

  Buford had followed the case with interest. Hoyt had been arrested, but later cleared. An insurance investigator by the name of Agatha Wells had been arrested for the third wife’s murder. Last Buford had heard, Agatha Wells had been sent to the state mental hospital for evaluation and had escaped.

  It had been nasty business, since Hoyt Chisholm had recently taken a fourth wife, Emma. The insurance investigator had come after her as well, abducting her at one point. Later Agatha Wells was believed to have drowned in the Milk River after being shot by a sheriff’s deputy on the Chisholm ranch. Her body, though, had never been found.

  He hoped Logan Chisholm didn’t have any connection to Martin Sanderson’s death. The Chisholm family had been through enough.

  Picking up his hat, Buford pushed himself up out of his chair. He’d spent too much time on his feet today and he ached all over. As he turned out his office light, all he could think about was his big leather recliner waiting for him in front of the television. He had a lot on his mind. And he couldn’t quit thinking about that note that had been pinned to Martin Sanderson’s body. He’d give anything to know what it said. He had a feeling it would solve this case.

  So much about the case nagged at him. Why had Martin Sanderson invited all of the members of the former Tough as Nails band to Montana and left keys for them when he had to know that the one called Luca was dead?

  And what, if anything, did this Jennifer James, JJ, have to do with it?

  It wasn’t until he got home to discover his granddaughter visiting that he found out just who JJ had been.

  BETSY HARPER GLANCED AROUND the table in the motel restaurant dining room, marveling at how little they had all changed. Loretta was still brassy, loud and demanding. Karen had always been quiet, never letting anyone know what she was thinking.

  And Jett was Jett, she thought with no small amount of bitterness. He had barely acknowledged her, but what did she expect? He’d dumped her for JJ ten years ago and done her a favor in retrospect.

  He would have made a lousy husband, an even worse father. Still, he’d been her first, and she somehow thought that might have made a difference to him. Apparently, it didn’t.

  “So what do you think of this whole mess?” Jett asked after he’d joined them in the motel restaurant dining room.

  They’d decided to all stay at the same motel. Jett had joked about keeping enemies close. Betsy supposed that was how he felt. Just like JJ, he’d definitely betrayed them all, some of them more than others.

  Conversation had been stilted. Loretta had gone on for a while complaining about how bad her life was. As if they couldn’t just look at her and see that she was hard up for money. Loretta blamed Martin and was convinced Tough as Nails could have been great if he hadn’t broken up the band.

  “I’m not sorry Martin’s dead,” Loretta said now. “I just wish I’d shot him.”

  “Who says you didn’t?” Jett said. “We all think it was JJ, but maybe she didn’t do it.”

  “I think she did it,” Betsy said. “Why else would she take off the way she did?” Jett had told them that JJ had been staying in a wing of the main house and that he’d seen her prints in Martin’s blood—and so had the sheriff.

  “Maybe she ran to avoid us,” Karen said without looking up from her meal. “If like you said Martin was threatening her with this reunion tour… She was probably afraid that we all hated her.”

  Jett laughed. “Like you don’t. I would have loved to have seen her face when she found out what Martin was up to. I’m surprised she didn’t kill him with her bare hands.”

  “I can’t believe she agreed to a reunion tour,” Betsy said.

  Karen gave her a you-can’t-be-that-naïve look. None of them knew just how naïve she’d always been about a lot of things.

  “Jett just said JJ knew nothing about it,” Karen said impatiently to her. “There was never going to be a tour. It was just Martin messing with us again.”

  “Well, he’s dead now.” Jett waved the waiter over. “Anyone else want to drink to that? I’m in the mood to celebrate. Champagne,” he told the waiter.

  “You’re the only one who thinks this is a celebration,” Karen said. “A man has been murdered and you’re all ready to string JJ up for it.”

  “Well, if one of us didn’t kill him, then who else was there?” Jett said. “We’re the only ones who had motive, opportunity and means, since there was a handgun on the floor beside him. I heard the sheriff check. It belonged to Martin.”

  “But JJ is the only one missing, isn’t she?” Loretta pointed out.

  The waiter brought the champagne and glasses. Jett poured himself a glass and lifted it for a toast. “Here’s to JJ, wherever she might be. If she was here I would thank her.”

  No one else reached for a glass, but that didn’t keep Jett from emptying his.

  As he set his down, his gaze settled on Betsy. She felt the heat of his look as he asked, “What do you girls have planned to amuse yourselves until we can get out of this godforsaken place?”

  KAREN FELT DISGUSTED BEING around Jett again. She hated that they were all acting as if nothing had happened ten years ago.

  Betsy was the worst. Jett had broken her heart. Karen remembered how despondent she’d been. She’d had to hold Betsy’s hand through that horrible time while keeping her own pain and anger to herself.

  Now as she watched Jett turning his charm on Betsy, she wanted to throw something at him. Throw something at Betsy, too. Hadn’t the woman learned what a no-count Jett was? He used people, then discarded them. One look at Jett and Betsy should have known the man hadn’t changed.

  “I, for one, am going to turn in early,” Karen said tossing down her napkin and rising. “I regret ever coming here.”

  “You came because you felt like you owed us,” Loretta said snidely.

  Kar
en turned on her. “It wasn’t your guilt trip that made me change my mind and come after you pleaded with me,” she snapped. “I did it because I got tired of listening to you whine.”

  “Now, ladies,” Jett said.

  “There are no ladies here,” Loretta said with a laugh. “I think I will have a drink, Jett. That is, if you’re buying.” She picked up one of the champagne glasses and held it out. He happily filled it.

  “I didn’t want to come, either,” Betsy said. “But I also didn’t want to be the one band member who ruined it for the others.”

  “How could we have had a reunion tour without Luca anyway?” Karen said.

  “Bands do tours all the time without the original members,” Jett said.

  “There wasn’t going to be a reunion tour,” Karen snapped as she started to step away from the table.

  “Then why get us here?” Betsy said, sounding surprised and disheartened.

  Karen was tired of Betsy’s apparent naïveté. No one could be that sweet and innocent, she thought as she walked away.

  Behind her, she heard Jett say, “I think he was hoping one of you would kill JJ.”

  Loretta’s laugh and words followed Karen out of the room. “What makes you think we didn’t?”

  EMMA CHISHOLM STOOD AT THE window looking out at the rolling prairie. Chisholm land as far as the eye could see. She’d fallen in love with this place, the same way she had with Hoyt Chisholm, only months ago.

  Of course, she hadn’t had any idea what was in store for her when she’d agreed down in Denver to run off with him to Vegas for a quickie marriage. They hadn’t known each other. They hadn’t cared. Love does that to you. He’d told her the ranch was large and isolated.

  “Sounds wonderful,” she’d said, and he’d laughed.

  “Some women can’t take that kind of emptiness.”

  “I’m not some women.” But she’d heard the pain in his voice and known there had been others before her who he’d taken back to the ranch. All she’d known then was that they hadn’t lasted. A man in his late fifties would have had at least a wife or maybe even two, she’d thought then.

  It wasn’t until she’d come to Whitehorse, Montana, and met Aggie Wells that she’d found out she’d underestimated Hoyt’s history with wives—and pain. He’d been married three other times, all three ending tragically, as it turned out.

  Former insurance investigator Aggie Wells had brought the news along with a warning that Emma was next. “He killed his other wives. I can’t prove it,” Aggie had said, “but I keep trying. Watch yourself.”

  Emma hadn’t believed it. She knew Hoyt soul deep, as they say. He wasn’t a killer. She’d just assumed like everyone else that Aggie was either obsessed with her husband—or just plain crazy.

  That was months ago, she thought now as she looked out across the land and realized she’d been living with ghosts—the ghosts of her husband’s exes and now Aggie’s ghost.

  So why did she still expect to see one of them coming across the prairie with only one goal in mind, killing her, the fourth and no doubt final wife of Hoyt Chisholm?

  No one knew about the ghosts she’d been living with. As much as she and her husband shared, she couldn’t share these thoughts with Hoyt.

  “Aggie Wells is dead,” Hoyt had said. “She was shot. You saw her fall into the river. She didn’t come up.”

  But when the sheriff had dragged the river, they hadn’t found her body.

  “She got hung up on something, a root, a limb, an old barbed-wire fence downriver,” Hoyt said. “When the river goes down this summer, we’ll find her body. But until then, she’s gone, okay?”

  But it hadn’t been okay, because Emma had come to know Aggie, had actually liked her, maybe worse had believed in her heart that the woman might not be crazy. Nor dead. If anyone could survive being shot and even drowned, it would be Aggie.

  The insurance investigator wasn’t the only ghost Emma now lived with, though. Hoyt’s first wife, Laura Chisholm, was the ghost that caused her sleepless night. Aggie had come to believe Laura hadn’t drowned that day on Fort Peck Reservoir but was still alive and vengefully killing Hoyt’s wives.

  Aggie had even provided photographs of a woman who looked so much like what Laura Chisholm would look like now after all these years that it had made Hoyt pale. Seeing the effect the photographs had on her husband had made a believer out of Emma. And if you believed Laura Chisholm was alive, then you also had to believe that she had murdered not one but possibly all of Hoyt’s other wives—and would eventually come for Emma herself, like the living ghost she was.

  Hoyt didn’t believe it. At least that’s what he said. But if that were true, then why would he continue to insist on someone hanging around near the ranch house so Emma was never left alone?

  She laughed softly at a thought. Didn’t Hoyt realize that she was never really alone? Either Aggie’s ghost or Laura’s was always with her—at least in her thoughts. She was merely waiting for one of the ghosts to appear. Either Aggie trying to save her again or Laura determined to kill her.

  “What are you baking?” Hoyt asked as he came into the kitchen and pulled her from her thoughts.

  “Gingersnaps,” she said, stepping away from the window and back to her baking. Baking was the one thing that took her mind off the waiting. She was always baking or cooking or cleaning. Hiring help had proved to be difficult after all the trouble here on the ranch. Suspicion hung over the place like thick smoke.

  “I hate seeing you work so much,” Hoyt said now. “I’ve called an agency in Billings. We have that guestroom at the far wing. What would you think about live-in help? No one wants to drive all the way out here from Whitehorse. I think this will work better.”

  She didn’t correct him. It wasn’t the drive and he knew it. Maybe people in Billings didn’t know about the Chisholm Curse, as it was called.

  “I don’t need any help. You know I like to keep busy,” Emma said, but she could tell he was determined to hire someone. Normally she would have put up a fight, but the truth was, having someone living in the house and helping sounded like a blessing. That way Hoyt and his sons could go back to running this ranch instead of babysitting her.

  Hoyt came up behind her, put his arms around her and pulled her close. She closed her eyes and leaned back into him. Never had she felt such love.

  “Dawson just left for home,” her husband said, nuzzling her neck. Her stepson Dawson had been assigned to Emma duty that day, which meant he’d spent the day pretending he had things to do around the ranch’s main house and yard. Did any of them really believe they were fooling her?

  Certainly not Hoyt, she thought as she turned off the mixer and let him lead her upstairs to their bedroom. The cookies could wait. Being in her husband’s strong arms could not.

  She knew as he closed the bedroom door that he believed their love was like a shield that would protect them. She prayed he was right, but alive or dead, his first wife and Aggie Wells were anything but gone for good.

  FORMER INSURANCE INVESTIGATOR Aggie Wells had come close to dying. She still wasn’t her old self. For months, she’d felt her strength seep out of her and now wondered if she would ever be the same again.

  She told herself she was lucky to be alive. If the bullet had been a quarter of an inch one way or the other it would have nicked a vital organ and she would have drowned in that creek.

  It surprised her that she’d survived against all odds. How easy it would have been to give in to death. She still had nightmares remembering how long she’d had to stay underwater to avoid the sheriff’s deputies catching her.