by Lisa Preston
Melinda Kellan gave one more bare nod, like she was admitting something secret.
Double wow, I thought, my little brain spinning back in time, picturing how things had gone in old Suit Fellow’s office: missing woman, realize missing woman was having an affair with the neighbor, neighbor dies in ranch accident before you get to confront him with what he knows about missing woman. Game over.
Melinda frowned and nodded. “He had a motive to shut her up, so she wouldn’t tell Donna Chevigny about the affair. But the most likely person to kill a woman—”
“Is her own man.”
We leveled looks at each other, and both of us got to wonder whether the woman in front of us had had the bad sense at some point in the past to choose to be with a man who hurt her. I had, and I hoped Melinda Kellan hadn’t.
She sniffed. “You think I want to be a records clerk and an evidence tech forever?”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” How am I supposed to know what she wants to be if and when she ever grows up? I turned on my boot heel and gave her my back to study as I went into the store.
Left in the pickle of following me—and now I intended to make an occasion of things, do some shopping in the convenience store—Melinda got to go away and leave me alone.
* * *
Spooky was taking a constitutional, running a few laps inside our little house at the end of Vine Maple road. I wished the cat would spare the sprinting. Or he could go with Guy to the high school track, which is where the boy tends to run a few times a week, plus extra when we argue. And I was half ready to schedule an argument.
I had a fresh box of Milk Duds warming inside my shirt. They’re good anyways but better gooey. One of the best uses for a mouthful of coffee is to finish melting a Milk Dud in the mouth, that’s my view.
Getting hugged melts them, too. Guy came in the door minutes after me and wrapped his arms around me. “Would you quit eating that crap?” He said when he realized what I had in my pocket, sighing like he’s the most put upon man in captivity. Somehow, he was melting my mood off. I couldn’t help smiling and feeling better.
“Okey-doke, as long as there’s some of those chocolate ravioli around.”
My comment put Guy’s bashful face on, the aw-golly look that means he knows he done good. So to speak. When he comes home, I get all distracted and happy without knowing why.
“In the fridge,” Guy said. He followed me into the kitchen and was soon frowning at his computer. I saw that he’d opened the website he uses to map his runs. The monitor showed a big green map and a yellow, wiggly track of one of his trails.
The chocolate ravioli were in a little Tupperware-type thingy inside the door by a brick of butter, and I popped a few in my mouth. The cheese inside was stiff, not melty.
Chocolate ravioli are a lot better warm.
“I’m almost sure something got deleted,” Guy said. “I seem to remember another user map here. If it wasn’t Biff, then maybe he remembers the other map.”
Guy’s running maps didn’t interest me near as much as hunting up more dessert.
He answered the ringing phone like it was tough patooty for me that his ravioli were chilly. What a bad man. He made me take the phone, too.
Hollis Nunn’s grizzly bear voice came through the phone. “You hate to butt in and you hate to stand by.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re going to bring in that tractor tire from the back of the Buckeye?”
I gave him my I-was-raised-right answer again.
Hollis praised my fortitude and my plan for how to haul the giant tire through the ravine. “You’ll have trouble getting that big old tire anywheres once you get it back to the barn.”
Too true. It’d never fit in Ol’ Blue’s bed on top of all my tools. If I could winch it high enough using the barn, I could maybe tie it on top of the truck topper but that’d take some doing and I hadn’t yet studied on the idea. I was handling one thing at a time. First the tire and rim had to be brought in from the back range.
Hollis cleared his throat. “You’re doing a good thing here, lending Mrs. Chevigny a hand with squaring her tractor away. I think well on you for it.”
That needed a waiting spell, not a comment from me. Once I’d waited on the quiet line another half a minute, he went on. “I’ll leave my flat bed at the Buckeye barn. Got room enough for one little old tire at the end, I reckon. I can take it to Darby’s for her.”
Darby had the tool and tire shop in town. This was going to work. I relaxed a bit. “Okey doke.”
“Yeah, Earl Delmont gave me a call. I’ll do the hauling. We’ll see how quick the tire gets fixed. Earl might just leave the draft horse at her place so it can haul the tire back out there again.”
When I got off the phone, I made a wonderful discovery in the freezer. Some very dark brown stuff in a plastic container.
“Hey, ice cream!”
Guy shook his head while I grabbed a spoon. “That’s gelato.”
No, according to my spoon-and-mouth test, I was correct. “Ice cream,” I told him. “Where’d it come from?” It was really Serve a Term in Hades-type dark chocolate and that’s all that needs to be said about how good it was. I finished my spoonful and returned to the freezer. This stuff was dangerous. Size five jeans are going to my personal history book if I don’t watch it.
I scolded my fiancé and fixed a couple stink eyes on his face. “Hope you don’t leave that kind of stuff in the freezer too often.”
Eventually, he came around to the path of peace. “Sorry.”
Even if he didn’t mean it, well, at least he said it.
And even if I didn’t remember why he had all these fancy desserts going on—there was a contest he was entering and he claimed to have already told me about it twice—at least I was there to help try them out.
Oh, the man could go awhile on the subject. “I was going to do a brandy bombe with the gelato, you know, a non-dairy alternative.”
You know? No, I don’t know. A bowl of snoose noodles with floor scrapings would suit me most days of the week, but I cowgirled up and asked, “What did you settle on?”
“Chocolate waffles. Rainy, have you ever looked at a map of the land between the Buckeye and Keeper Lake?”
“Mmm,” I said, at a loss for smarter words. I mean, hey, chocolate waffles. Who wouldn’t get her ears pricked up over such a sound? “Maybe I should try those.”
Giving me a look that could wither a Texas live oak, Guy must have been thinking about sharing our lives with each other. Wanting to know more about what I was hatching, he said, “This sounds like quite a production with this horse thing and tractor. I didn’t get that entirely before.”
So I had to explain about the Buckeye not using four-wheelers. It wasn’t just that the ranching techniques were old stuff, though it’s a safe bet Chevigny doesn’t mark cattle with a paint ball gun, nor cotton to the new pesticide use reporting rules. Their daughter had been killed on an ATV. I told him how worn out and sorrowful Donna looked and lived, more on her plate than she could handle.
“That’s sad.” Guy frowned. “How’d the Chevignys get their tractor on the far side of their ravine in the first place?”
“They used to go in through their neighbor’s property.” And then I explained about the old problem between Stan Yates and Cameron Chevigny.
Not having a four-wheeler might be seen as another problem but then again, it was a do-able thing to ride from the Chevigny barn all the way to the ranch’s back pastures while dragging a heavy tractor tire on a horse-pulled sled.
Finally, Guy had something to say about this whole big mess I was fixing to jump into. “I’m setting coffee out for you in the morning.”
Coffee? No, I’d need something stronger, like Guy. The last time I nearly ended up in a coffin, Guy showed up and lent a big hand so I got to not die. But something strong was going to be under me in the morning, stronger than anything I’d ever had under my rumpus.
Chapter 14
RIDING A DRAFT HORSE IS AN experience.
At first, he’s brawny and beautiful and a body thinks, well, he’s just a big horse, right? So put a ladder against his ribs, shinny up, and then kick the ladder away once up there. Or just hop on, bionic woman style, like me.
Or not.
Buster’s not eighteen hands high, but plenty high enough to give a Quarter Horse-and-Arab rider an altitude nosebleed. I clipped one end of Guy’s strap around his right front leg and threw the length across his back. On his left side, reaching the reins and his withers by standing on my tippy toes, I put my left foot into the other end of the loop. Once I’d used the loop for a stirrup, gotten astride, I freed my left foot and then leaned down to my right to unclip the end that was around Buster’s right elbow.
And he stood like a prince while I gathered the reins, wiggled around on him for a sec and took a gander of the world from Belgian height.
Donna looked a little confused about why Hollis Nunn had hauled the big horse to her place for me to use. “You’re doing a favor for Earl Delmont?”
“Well, we’re swapping favors,” I explained. “He’s got a horse with Sweeney. I’m going to take the youngster in, give The Kid a home to see if he can recover in time, so Earl’s letting me get an afternoon’s use out of Buster.”
Donna paused a minute. “I don’t understand.”
I re-explained my Grand Plan. “This is Buster. Earl Delmont’s loaning me Buster here, and he or Mr. Nunn will haul him back home to boot.”
Turning in her haze, Donna muttered something—“Nunn” or “none” I couldn’t say which—then we saw the man himself.
“Rainy,” Hollis said, “you want a rock sled to use for dragging that tire in?”
“The ravine’s pretty rough. I figured I’d make a travois out there.”
“Taking the fast route through the ravine then?”
“Yessir.”
Donna sighed and nodded and said something about getting at some fences that wanted fixing.
Then Buster and me struck out on what I thought would be well over an hour’s ride of his lumbering gait each way. He wore a collar with a light body harness that included breeching, so I expected he’d be able to handle dragging that tire into and back out of the ravine fine. If need be, I could always hop down and just lead him.
Anyways, straddle that broad back and in about a hundred yards the leg muscles mutiny. And it’s not just the harness rubbing through the jeans that worries the flesh. One or two gajillion thigh fibers scream that they’re being stretched and jostled and they don’t care for it and how much longer is this going on?
When “more than an hour” is the answer, it’s not an answer those twanging bits of my body want to hear.
There’s a place to take the mind when the muscles have had more than they can enjoy and I went there, looking at the earth that passed below me.
Even though this was my third ride out to the back of the Buckeye, it was my first north ride in this much daylight, the first on a horse with a lollygagging gait, and the first time I wasn’t fixing to do a day’s work shoeing once I got to the back of the ranch. My mind went to the hauling project in front of me and Buster. I had baling twine and a tiny folding saw and enough rope to tie together a travois. There was supposed to be a tire iron and jack in the shed and some scrap lumber I could use for cribbing the tractor, since there wasn’t a jack stand of any sort out there. The flat edge of Buster’s light freighter harness—the one that was rubbing at my knees—was going to give my hands the power of his chest.
His haunches would push if he needed to really haul, but I didn’t think the excursion was going to be too much of a challenge for this prime puller. His big feet crunched the dry dirt like he was a horse on a mission and he was perfectly happy to hack out across the multi-section ranchland. When we climbed out of the ravine, the loose range horses stared at us from afar. I watched the Federal lease land loom closer and closer and I wondered about the crime scene where Donna’s silly dog had found Arielle Blake’s hand. Buster and I drew in on to that unknown area like a camera close-up until we finally got to the shed.
There, I told my thighs to spread a little wider and I’d reward them by getting down off the sweet beast. The thighs said they were mighty happy time had come for me to drop myself to the ground and I made it easy as I could on them, transferring my weight to his collar as I swung down, using my arms to lower myself ’til my toes touched earth. Still, I held onto the harness as I straightened out my legs and got the feeling back. And holding that scarred leather, I wondered how many logs and wagons it had borne for the Delmont family and if they’d maybe bought it used.
There’s often a good story in old leather.
To hear my freshman history teacher tell it, the horse collar is the piece of technology that brought about civilization in cold country. Without the collar, we’d all still be hunting and gathering in cold lands or farming within throwing distance of the equator.
I don’t remember anything else from high school, not from the classes anyways.
I tied Buster inside the breezeway of the shed for shade, using the gate’s edge post. Finding the jack and tire iron for the lug bolts was easy enough and the cribbing was right where Donna said it’d be. How I’d not noticed it when I was there before, I don’t know. It was just one of those things that belonged in a shed, so I didn’t see it, I guess.
Down the steep little slope at the tractor, I got to work, shaking my head about tricycle gear design. It’s real clear the plans for these things were drawn up by none other than Lucifer.
Tricycle tractors, with centered little wheels up front, are awful tippy. They’re a bad idea that was copied by those three-wheeler builders, back when they were popular, before four-wheelers got built. Before the Chevignys lost their daughter.
Laying a piece of scrap lumber well under the tractor and one parallel just inside the flat tire, I stacked two more pieces across the ends of the first and then added more cribbing. It took a bit of doing, but I built a place for the tractor to wait some more. When it was solid, I scooped the earth away from the lame tire and found it was jacked well enough.
Turns out that cribbing up the tractor’s frame wasn’t the hard part. I had to get temperamental with some of the bolts in order to free the tire, but I got the job done and went to scare up a couple saplings from the land behind the shed.
From that hilly ground, a couple long alder poles volunteered so I didn’t have to dawdle. Even though Dragoon was supposed to be in the east fields now, my mind stuck on the last time I’d seen him, charging parallel to the lease land. I made it snappy, wanting to get off the lease land back to the safe side of the electric fence, the west field, and its derelict demon of a tractor.
I was especially mindful of the bull, being as the least speedy and least agile horse I’d ever had cause to sit on was all I’d be able to get under my butt. I’d debated whether to leave Buster tied at the shed and just traipse around for my poles on foot or to ride him out onto the lease land where the bull might be if he’d gone through the barbed wire. Buster would make an awful big target if Dragoon happened across the hills and decided to run at the horse.
Back with my two poles on the safety of the west pasture, I laid ’em down side by side and fast tied them together near one end. Lashing the tire, heavy because of the farm-weight steel rim, to this end of the travois took quite a while and had me panting as I worked to get it secured and balanced. Then I eased the free ends of the poles, one at a time, up and fastened them to Buster’s harness. That good horse stood like a stone while I weighted him. Handy thing was, I could use his end of the pole as a stirrup now, and it would be a sight easier remounting. The satisfaction coursing through my veins was real, earned. Too bad no one else stepped up to help Donna with the tractor long ago. Too bad Stan Yates wouldn’t allow her access to the west pasture back here that abutted his land.
Then I remembered that the feds didn’t allow motoriz
ed vehicles in that land, just boots, hooves, and bicycles. Given that the tractor couldn’t cross the ravine and Yates wouldn’t allow Donna to bring it through his land, she had no legal way to get this tractor back to her barn. By buying this Buckeye land north of the ravine, Stan Yates could be getting himself a free tractor. The notion made me pause as I stepped my left foot onto the travois rail at Buster’s side and mounted. Was I fixing Stan Yates’s tractor?
Buster and I took our sweet time riding back. I wasn’t going to hand over a used-up horse to Earl Delmont and there was still the thing about needing to use Buster again to return the tire once it had been repaired.
Wasted worry though, ’cause I needn’t have sweated about how much horsepower was under me. Back at the barn, Buster wasn’t tired a whit. He really could pull all day, just like the Delmonts said. He hauled the tire all the way to Hollis Nunn’s flatbed and that’s where I left it. I untacked Buster in the round pen and left him with hay and water, the harness hung on the pen’s outside halter hooks. I was set to leave when Donna came out of her house, wiping her hands through her gray hair that was showing its end-of-the-day loose look. Surely my ponytail was looking a little used and messy, too.
“Thank you, Rainy. That was a huge chore. It’s good to get things taken care of.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She wandered toward the round pen, having another conversation about how swell people were, how helpful and kind some people were to her. Left me with the taste that some folk let her know their ugly thoughts and I was glad I wasn’t one of those. And I was glad Hollis Nunn was in her corner, too. This woman needed some kindness sprinkled on top of her life. When Donna got a little, her gratitude was plain. It still seemed like she felt bad about having suspected me of dallying with her husband and maybe it seemed like I was still trying to prove I hadn’t done it.
Then she pulled out the very thing that had had her hating me at the end of our second shoeing day. We both looked at it and the quiet was more than I could take.
“It’s a nice knife,” I said.
“That’s as may be,” Donna said. “But I don’t know whose it is.”
