by Lisa Preston
“No, right now they’re all in the hill country behind the machine shed. The lease land. The bull’s in my east field.” She swiveled her skull around, looking for a problem that wasn’t there. “It’d sure save me some work if you’ve got a dog that can move cattle.”
“Have they been dog-herded before? Charley’s older and I wouldn’t want to send him on real rough stock.”
She still hadn’t mounted up, just stood there holding the reins. “They’ll be all right. It’s Cameron’s bull we have to be careful of. The stock tank up at the shed is shared between the east and west pastures. If the bull’s up there, steer clear.”
I thought I got then her reason for avoiding the hogback hill. “I can see why you wouldn’t want to ride near a rank bull even with a fence between you.” My riding horse stamped a foot, letting me know he’d thought I should be aboard since I’d tightened the girth, but he’d be good and wait for my say-so.
The wryest sad smile ever came across Donna’s face and melted right off again. “Well, it’s not for the bull that I don’t like being near that shed.”
“No?”
“No.” Donna looked down with one guilty shake of her head. “I’d have to go up the hogback to get there. That hill was the death of my husband.”
Some people seemed taken up with the idea that Cameron Chevigny’s tractor-rolling accident was suspicious. Sitting on the Widow Chevigny’s horse at the back end of her ranch made for a hard time knowing what best to say or do. Donna was square with sending her horseshoer off on an errand to a place where she wouldn’t go. But she also seemed to be coming apart at the seams, her eyes squinty and her hands in fists that she pushed into her underarms.
* * *
I pointed the loaner horse toward the machine shed.
Donna turned her back to me and said, hoarse-voiced, “Bosals and braided reins. Should be hanging right inside the machine shed. There’s a gate where the cross-fencing between the west and east fields attaches to the shed. It runs right over the shared water trough. That gate should be shut. You’re not safe from the bull if it’s open.”
Because of the hill, we couldn’t see into the east pasture from where we stood. The bull could be close, right over the rise.
But the view improved once I was astride. Didn’t take but a couple minutes to ride to the hogback. Slowpoke tagged along, a ready fool.
A stout horse like the one under me could scramble up the steep rock, but with the tractor, the thing to do would have been to drive from the lowest part of the hogback, where it extended right between the two fields, and keep the rig pointed right up in a long, careful climb up the narrow center of the hogback. A little tricky, but surely a thing the Chevignys had done plenty. To drive the tractor up to the shed from where it sat at the foot of the hogback’s steep west side would be too dangerous. I shook my head and leaned forward, freeing my horse’s hind end to push us up the steep stuff, but pulled him up when something shiny caught my eye on the hogback.
Picking up horseshoes is a habit of mine. Many’s the time, it’s me who finds the missing shoe in a client’s field. I see the lay of the land and I know where those tires get thrown. I look into deep hoof prints out of habit and that’s why I saw this shoe, forty yards up the hogback.
Horseshoes, lying loose with their old nails curving around, look wicked, but it’s not too often that a horse steps on the wicked-looking thing and gets a problem. Still, a pulled shoe full of nails isn’t something a body likes to see on the ground where livestock are kept, so I swung down from the saddle and picked it up. Bad rusted nails, no rust on the shoe, but it was oxidized real good. Aluminum. Hard to imagine the Chevignys ever put such a shoe on their ranch stock. Aluminum shoes conduct heat faster, so they’re colder in winter and hotter in summer, but the main thing with them on hardworking horses covering a lot of rock is that aluminum wears out faster than steel.
This shoe had been out there a long time, for the nails to be rusted that bad. It was a double aught but I didn’t study on it more, just hooked one branch into my right hip pocket and swung back up where I belonged.
Once up top the hogback, I could see the two-sided shed plain, one wall to the prevailing west winds. Its open back had a full-length gate that would be easy to open from horseback. Baggy barbed wire that looked to be mostly made of rust ran off both back corners of the building, separating the federal lease land from the Buckeye proper. Perpendicular to the shed and barbed wire, electric wire ran up the east slope of the hogback splitting the west and east fields that the hogback helped divide. The cross-fence gate was strung right over a big water trough. The gate was closed, so even if the bull came up for a drink, I should be safe. Having the trough straddle the area under the fence gave stock in either Buckeye pasture access to water. Some of the horses I’d been all day shoeing had come on up to the shed to drink. There must have been water for the cattle out on the federal land somewhere.
Inside Donna’s shed, braided reins hung alongside four rawhide bosals on hangers made out of tin cans nailed to the middle purlin. All the leather looked mighty dry. I tied the tack onto my saddle, eyeing the rougher country behind the shed while enjoying the cool shade and draft the open building offered.
Slowpoke romped in from the lease land carrying something disgusting, like a dead bird or a piece of garbage, thrilled with himself.
Donna was mounted up when I got back. She turned her horse just before I reached her, but I heard her sniffle. I reined my horse back to give the lady privacy. Her slumped shoulders shuddered before we dipped down into the ravine and that was the end of Donna’s crying spell.
Kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies, knowing I’d just ridden across the hill that Cameron Chevigny died on. I felt bad for Donna and wanted to suggest maybe laying down flowers or saying a few words would be a help, but Donna seemed to just want to stay away. And anyway, there’s no way I’m someone who should make suggestions to anyone else about how to lead her life.
“Drop that,” Donna said to Slowpoke, who was still carrying his whatever prize, something dark, not much bigger than a wallet.
Wasn’t a surprise when the mutt refused to obey. Instead Slowpoke carried his prize through the ravine.
When we climbed out of the ravine, I said, “I can sure see why you like riding out here. So many ranches use four-wheelers to buzz around nowadays.”
“Cameron used one, long time ago. An old three-wheeler. Then it killed our daughter when she flipped it, so we got rid of that miserable machine.”
“Oh, no, Donna.”
She gave one nod to my sense of it and said, “A truck can’t make it through the ravine, of course, so we stuck to riding the back part of the ranch.”
When I mumbled sympathy for her, Donna looked away. Said it was nearly twenty years ago her daughter’d died, and closed that subject. I’d never heard talk around town of a Chevigny daughter. I guess it was the decades that kept it quiet.
We rode easy. Soon we were catching glimpses of Donna’s barn in the distance. I can keep a silence all right, I guess, but it seems a natural thing to pass a few polite words in an hour beside another body, be that body a dog or horse or person.
“Found a horseshoe out there,” I said, half pulling it out of my hip pocket.
Donna snorted without giving it a glance. “There are things to be found out there.”
I shoved the funky horseshoe back home in the denim.
Slowpoke, the silly dog, was dying for a drink, having been unable to pant the whole way back to the barn because of carrying that thing in his mouth. He dropped it—a glove—at the water trough and jumped in, mucking it up, spilling water, tickled to death.
After I unsaddled the horse I rode in on, I studied a high shelf in the barn aisle. Broken tools, a glass insulator, a single spur with rusty rowels and a dried leather strap, a cracked mug, a real stiff leather braid piece and a little thing about an inch high, at the end of the row of useless things, a short shell casing. Stacked under
the shelf was the stuff of my interest—an anvil on a stump, nippers, rasps, and clinchers.
I realized I was looking at Cameron Chevigny’s shoeing tools.
What shoer can resist looking at another’s tools? It’s not that we covet, exactly, but we want to see what brands the other farrier favors. Cameron had had better than cheapy tools, but far below the best quality nippers. A welcome breeze gusted through the aisle, with the scents of dust, hay, sweat and horses. I stepped outside and almost planted a foot on what Slowpoke had dropped. His prize was indeed a glove. It wasn’t flat though. The outside was coated in dog spit. The inside had bits of dried dark stuff on white bone.
The glove held a hand.
Chapter 3
“AHUMAN HAND?” GUY ASKED.
“Yep.” I was bone tired and so glad he wasn’t closing up the Cascade tonight. Way, way better for him to be home twirling handmade pasta in cheesy sauce with smoked tomatoes and peppers, plopping a plump roasted chicken breast on top. Garlic wafted.
Spooky, Guy’s stinking shorthair, tripped me as I carried my plate to the dinette. There was a time when my old sheepdog Charley would have made an effort, herded Spooky and any other feline, fowl, or hooved critter clear of me. Or at least to the top of the sofa. Tonight, Charley just winked at me from the old wool horse blanket in the corner.
In the rock-paper-scissors of this house, I can boss Charley around and Charley can boss Spooky around and—get this—Spooky thinks he can boss me around, maybe because he was living in Guy’s house before I was. All that cat does is shed. There’s no place in this house that chocolate-colored cat hair isn’t.
“Arielle Blake,” Guy said.
“Huh?” Hard to talk with a full mouth.
“We need a map.”
“Please pass the salt. Why do we need a map?” When I ride Red, I never carry gadgets. My horse and I are just out there to see the countryside. But my Intended has a thingy on his kitchen computer that lets him upload runs he’s tracked with a cell phone app or on his fancy runner’s watch. The program, TrailTime, maps his weekly trail run and tells him how wonderfully fast he is at sprinting track intervals.
“Please really taste food before you salt it.” Guy flicked the machine on now and tabbed over to his running maps, but he also pushed the salt and pepper toward me. “How far did that dog go?”
I swallowed. “Slowpoke?”
“What?”
“Huh?”
“Rainy, would you tell me what happened?”
Sometimes Guy gets frustrated with me for no reason, but I tolerate—
“Hello? Rainy? Donna Chevigny’s dog found a human hand.”
“I expect so. Not many kinds of hands and pretty unlikely to have been a baboon’s.”
“And then what happened?”
I waved all around the dining table. It’s just a little nook next to the kitchen in Guy’s little house at the end of Vine Maple road, but it’s homey. “This is what happened next. I came home starving and you started feeding me and we told each other about our days.”
Home with Guy, mornings or nights, the bits of weekend we don’t work, it’s become one of my favorite times. We putter. Charley tags along or not. Soon, Guy will be leading his colt Bean on baby trail hikes. Bean’s dam is Liberty, who belongs to my youngest client, Abby Langston. Since Guy hired Abby as an under-the-table afternoon dishwasher and I hired her as a sort of helper, we’d seen a lot of her over the summer and pretend we’re her aunty and uncle or something like that. Abby asks me stuff and tells me stuff and, well it’s got to be said, she looks up to me. No one else ever has. Come to find out, I like to aunty Abby. There’s no better way to aunty a pre-teen girl than ahorseback, which demands just a few road crossings from each of us as we make use of every bit of natural land between our homes. When I’m on Red and Abby’s aboard Liberty, we can say nothing and understand everything.
When Bean moves into Red’s pasture next month, my good horse will finally have a pasturemate. In a few years, Bean will be old enough to ride, then Guy and I will finally be riding our two horses out together on the trails.
This is a good life.
Three hard knocks on the door startled us. Yellow fur flew as my old Charley jumped up, barking and embarrassed. His commotion sent Spooky zinging for parts unknown. Charley never used to sleep so hard a car could drive up without his say-so.
“That would be a Sheriff’s deputy,” Guy said.
My jaw dropped enough to be bad manners. I snapped it shut, swallowed my mouthful of pasta, and asked, “Why are you expecting the po-lice?”
“I think it’s one of their assigned duties to keep tabs on body parts.”
Turned out, Guy can see the future, or near enough, because the gloved hand that Slowpoke had packed across the Buckeye ranch from the federal land is exactly what Deputy Paulden wanted to discourse on.
But my pasta was so tasty, and getting cold. “Donna said she’d call the sheriff.”
“Miss Dale, Donna Chevigny did call us. That’s why I’m here to talk to you.”
“Arielle Blake?” Guy asked the deputy.
The sheriff’s man pointed at my Intended. “You and one of your buddies went out on the search.”
Guy nodded. “Biff. But we were sent over by the lake behind the Country Store.”
On the road that runs out of town southeast and connects to the highway, there really is a convenience store called the Country Store. I scratched my head, way too far behind.
Paulden nodded. “Keeper Lake.”
“We were way off.” Guy folded his arms across his chest. “Why did we get asked to comb those trails by the lake?”
“The detective had information that Ms. Blake was last near the lake.”
Guy frowned toward his computer. “Someone must have seen her.”
Getting information out of Guy and the deputy was less fun than shoeing draft horses all day without a hoof stand, but eventually they cleared up that some gal named Arielle Blake had gone missing about a year and a half ago—plus or minus around the time I’d moved to Cowdry. They didn’t know if she’d simply walked off on her boyfriend—a wind farmer—or if she’d gotten lost on one of her all-day walks, met with accident, or come to a bad end some other way.
It was the last thing, turns out, because the deputy allowed that they were pretty sure it was her hand inside the glove.
“From a DNA test?” I asked.
Deputy Paulden shook his head. “We won’t have the results back for a while, but Arielle Blake had a distinctive piece of jewelry on her right hand, so we have a tentative identification. The detective asked me to have you draw a map showing where you and Mrs. Chevigny’s dog went.”
“Oh.” I fetched a blank paper out of Guy’s printer. A couple of inches down from the top, I drew a line across the page. “This line is the ravine that cuts the Buckeye hay fields from the rough pastures we were in today. Her hayfields are below the ravine. Like, past the bottom left corner is Donna’s house and barn. The top of the paper, in the middle, is her open shed where I got the bridles and reins for her.”
Deputy Paulden rubbed his jaw. “This left side, the pasture north of the ravine that borders the Yates land, that’s where you were working today?”
Now that I thought about it, there was one mailbox I passed on that long lonely road through forest land out to the Buckeye ranch. Next time, I’d pay attention and look for the Yates name. “I was shoeing in the west pasture. Her bull was supposed to be in the east pasture, but we didn’t see him. Her horses needing shoes were in the west pasture and she’s got cattle on the federal range which is north of the shed.”
Paulden frowned at my map and tapped the table above the paper, indicating north of the Chevigny shed. “How far onto the federal land did you go?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t. I was just in the shed, getting some tack for Donna.”
“So her dog went out there on his own?”
“Yeah, he followed me when I r
ode up to the shed. I wasn’t there long. Like, minutes. Slowpoke was carrying something when I headed back down the hogback. I didn’t think much about it, but he carried it all the way back to the barn.”
Guy put a finger next to Paulden’s. “Isn’t the Buckeye ranch pretty far from the lake behind the Country Store? Like ten miles or so?”
“More like fifteen,” Paulden said. He waved across the table. “Your pepper mill would be Keeper Lake.”
Guy shook his head. “We were really looking for Arielle Blake in the wrong place. If she just broke her leg, hit her head, whatever, and needed help out there, we were never going to find her.”
Paulden ran a hand over his buzz cut and looked at me. “While you were at the Buckeye ranch, did Donna Chevigny mention anything at all about Arielle Blake?”
“I’d never heard of Arielle Blake until the last couple minutes with you and Guy.”
The deputy squinted. “And Yates? He still not letting Chevigny cross his land?”
Some memory tried to niggle up, but it couldn’t get a purchase in my hungry, tuckered mind. “I don’t know anything about that. I’ve never heard of Yates.”
“Stan Yates. The wind farmer. Arielle Blake’s boyfriend. They lived together. His place backs up to the west part of the Buckeye ranch, north of the ravine.”
My shrug showed my lack of clues.
“Is that tractor still out there?” he asked.
I nodded. “Hey, Guy and me got subpoenas about the other thing. Is it really going to trial?” That “other thing” involved the murder of one of my clients back in the spring, but that’s another story.
Paulden said, “You’ll have to speak with the investigator about that.”
After the deputy left, Guy repeated the local news I’d paid no attention to back when I first moved to Cowdry. Arielle Blake, a young woman who was known to hike alone for hours, didn’t come back one day and no one ever knew what happened to her. When they asked for able-bodied people to hit the trails, Guy and his rugby buddies and other people had joined the search.
“And why were you looking near Keeper Lake?” I asked.
