A Taste of Blood and Ashes

by Jaden Terrell

  “That’s two drownings so far. What makes you think this one was foul play?”

  “For one thing, there was no reason for him to be out there. When he left home, he told his wife he was going out to meet a source. She always thought he’d gone out to meet Sam Trehorne and his pals—Doc Willoughby and Dalt Underwood. Maybe some others, but those three for sure would have been there. They were thick as thieves back then.”

  They’d have been young in those days. Late teens, early twenties. I said, “The police investigated?”

  “Yes, and this was Davidson County, almost to Nashville. Well out of the Trehornes’ turf. The cops should have been able to make a case, but Trehorne and his cronies all alibied each other, and Doc’s wife swore they were all in her living room, drinking wine and playing poker. Jim Lister and his wife were there too. Wife number one. This was just before he went to Texas and traded her in for a younger model.”

  “One of these things is not like the others. Lister was quite a bit older, wasn’t he?”

  “In his late thirties. But he was kind of a mentor to them, I guess. Old family ties and all that. Then a woman came forward and said Tommy’d been with her and that he’d had a lot to drink, and well, that was that. Accidental drowning.”

  “You got some reason to believe she was lying?”

  His cola-colored eyes flashed, the effect somewhat diminished by the redness in them. “He wasn’t that kind of guy. Nobody who knew him thought so. Sure he’d drink a few beers, maybe a couple of shots. But so drunk he couldn’t stand up to take a piss? No way.”

  “You seem pretty sure of that.”

  He gave me a cool look and said, “You get a feel for these things. He wasn’t a cheater, and he wasn’t a drunk. Believe me, he wasn’t the type.”

  He was young and idealistic, and he had plenty of time to learn that you could never tell who was and wasn’t the type. Sometimes you didn’t even know those things about yourself. I could have told him, but I didn’t have the heart to disillusion him. He’d find out soon enough.

  15.

  Eli gave me ten more names, with case numbers and dates spanning the past forty years. I tapped them into the notepad function of my cell phone, and when I’d finished, he tipped his empty beer bottle in my direction and sauntered back to his own camper. Khanh came out and handed me a frozen gel pack.

  “You sit down,” she said. “I make the fire.”

  It was too hot for a fire, but it would be hard to grill the ribs without one.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I can build the fire.”

  Her forehead furrowed. “You think I not knowing how make fire?”

  Of course she knew how to build a fire. She’d been cooking over an open flame since she was a girl. I took another sip of beer and said, “Fine. You make the fire. I’ll just sit here and be useless.”

  “You cook later,” she said. “Then I sit here, be useless.”

  I was sitting in my director’s chair, a beer in one hand and the gel pack on my side, when Hap strolled into camp, his sheriff’s badge gleaming in the firelight. He hooked his thumbs into his gun belt and looked at me, then at Khanh, who knelt beside the fire pit, feeding twigs to the flames. She studiously avoided his gaze, and after a while, he turned his attention back to me, hitched up his pants, and said, “Mace Ewing says you assaulted him.”

  “Mace Ewing is mistaken.”

  “He has half a dozen witnesses, and three of them say you assaulted them too. They all mistaken?”

  “Mistaken, or liars.”

  “Bold talk.”

  “Bold but true.”

  His small eyes glittered. “You know what I think, son? I think you have a chip on your shoulder, and when Mace figured to knock it off, you went ballistic.”

  “I didn’t go ballistic. I was in complete control.”

  “If that’s what you call control,” he said, “I don’t want to see what happens when you lose it.”

  “Ewing threw the first punch,” I said. “I was just defending myself.” I didn’t mention that raw energy I’d felt pulsing beneath my skin as I’d stepped out of the stall. Mace had thrown the first punch, but I was just as culpable. I’d wanted him to hit me. “If you want a more objective witness, Rhonda Lister was there. Why don’t you ask her what happened?”

  “She going to tell me anything other than Mace caught you messing with his mare?”

  “Depends on how you define messing with her.”

  “He found you in the stall with her.”

  “I grant you that.”

  “A reasonable man might have thought you were trying to steal his horse.”

  “A reasonable man would have thanked me.”

  “How’d you figure that?”

  “She got her bridle caught on her girth. Funny how she managed it, what with having no opposable thumbs, but somehow she got herself all tied up. I was just trying to give him a hand. Figured he wouldn’t want her hurting herself.”

  “Mace has been training horses since he was in high school. I reckon he knows what he’s doing.”

  I shrugged, thought of the articles on Mace’s website. He knew a little about horse training, maybe a lot. But as the pundit said, it’s not what you don’t know that gets you. It’s what you don’t know you don’t know. There was a lot Mace didn’t know. I said, “I guess we’ll just have to disagree on that.”

  The sheriff narrowed his eyes and nodded toward the corral, where Crockett and Tex were munching on orchard grass. Okay, so Crockett was munching and Tex was mostly gumming, but they were both attacking the hay with relish. “Those your horses?”

  I said they were.

  “Imagine you came home and found a stranger in your barn, undoing all your training, how’d you feel?”

  “Depends. Did I go off and forget I tied my horse’s nose to his tail?”

  “You got a smart mouth, son. Could be somebody’s gonna shut it for you one of these days.”

  “Somebody’s welcome to try.”

  He barked a laugh. “You talk big. So you took down a bunch of shit kickers. That don’t make you Chuck Norris.”

  “Doesn’t make me Mary Poppins either.”

  He hitched up his pants again. As threatening gestures went, I’d seen better. “Seems you got a habit of putting your nose in where it doesn’t belong,” he said.

  “Doc told me that would get me into trouble.”

  “Doc’s a wise man. You should listen to him.” He gave me a grim smile. “But somehow I don’t think you will.”

  “I’d be out of a job if I did.” I wanted to ask him why the fire trucks had taken so long to get to Carlin’s barn, how his investigators had missed the bones among the ashes, why they’d done such a cursory investigation. But attacking him wasn’t likely to get me any answers, so instead I said, “Look, I’m sorry about Mace and those other guys. But like I said, I didn’t throw the first punch.”

  “You instigated it when you went into his horse’s stall. And, no offense, son, but I saw those guys when you got through with them. They looked like they’d been run through a wood chipper.”

  “Maybe that makes me Chuck Norris after all.”

  “What that makes you is a dangerous man. Which means I’m going to have to ask you to leave the showground.”

  I gave him a long look.

  He held my gaze for a count of three, then looked away. “Here’s the truth of the matter. I don’t care who started that fight. You’re the stranger here, and you’re the one who went through four guys—guys I’ve known since they were knee-high to grasshoppers—like they were butter. Even if they were a bunch of shit kickers, I’d just as soon you were out of my jurisdiction, and I’d rather you didn’t wait for morning. Got it?”

  I sighed and shifted the gel pack, which was beginning to turn to slush. Thirty minutes on, thirty minutes off. Time to put it back in the freezer. “Got it.”

  16.

  The sheriff was a big man, and he left a big silence when he lef
t.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s that.”

  Khanh poked another twig into the flames. “You case just get more harder?”

  “Maybe. It was convenient, having all our suspects in one place. But that’s okay. We have some options.” Not the least of which involved a theatrical mustache, a pair of reading glasses, and a bottle of temporary hair coloring.

  She rocked back on her heels and wiped her hand on her thigh. “We going home now?”

  “No. You made that nice fire. We might as well put it to use.”

  Her lips quirked, a hint of a smile. “I go get you ribs.”

  The ribs came out tender and juicy, with a secret sauce that was just enough spicy and just enough smoky and just enough sweet. We roasted corn in the shucks and Khanh’s vegetables—sprinkled with sea salt and drizzled with olive oil—in aluminum foil packets and followed it all with wedges of ice-cold watermelon. If it wasn’t the best meal of my life, it was pretty damn close.

  It was well after dark by the time I’d iced my side again and loaded Tex and Crockett into the trailer. The air had cooled, and an occasional light breeze ruffled my hair and dried the sweat on my face. It smelled of pine and wood smoke and horses.

  I was taking down the corral and trying to ignore the pain in my side when Samuel Trehorne sauntered out of the shadows, looking like a paunchier but less disgruntled version of his brother. Khanh, kicking sand over the embers, looked up, her lips thinning into a disapproving line.

  Trehorne said, “That was quite a stunt you pulled back there.”

  “What stunt was that?” I said.

  “Outmanned and on their turf? I don’t know if you’re brave, impulsive, or just plain stupid.”

  “I feel compelled to point out that I won.”

  He laughed. “So you did. Though not without cost.” He nodded toward my blackening eye.

  “Point taken.”

  “Nonetheless, you handled yourself well.” He gave me a greasy smile. “Word is, you’re pretty tight with Carlin Underwood.”

  I said, “I don’t know that I’d call it tight. I helped her move a couple of coolers and get her husband back to the trailer after his seizure.”

  “Where he regained his memory, or at least some small part of it. Very touching, yadda, yadda, yadda.” I wasn’t surprised he knew. Maggie had been so quick to tell me about it, it was probably all over the grounds by now. He gave a dismissive wave and said, “Anyway, my point is, you’re a stranger around here, and you helped her. I’d say right now you’re the closest thing to an ally that girl has.”

  “If that’s true, then that girl’s got a problem.” But it wasn’t true. She had Zane and Gerardo, Sue Blankenship, and Maggie James. Maybe in Trehorne’s world, they didn’t count.

  Trehorne tugged his belt up over his paunch, a gesture reminiscent of his brother’s. “I hope she’s got a problem, son. And I hope it’s going to be you.” I felt my eyes narrow, and he hurried to add, “Now don’t get all bent out of shape. I’m not asking you to hurt her.”

  “What are you asking?”

  “Carlin Underwood is a thorn in my side. She won’t stop until she’s brought down my whole family, and I need to know what she’s up to. What’s her strategy? Who is she talking to? I’m prepared to pay well for the information.”

  Again, no mention of Zane. Maybe, like Zane’s mother, he’d written Zane off as a man as good as dead.

  I said, “What exactly is it you’re looking to learn? Seems to me like they’ve been pretty open about what they mean to do.”

  “What they mean to do is bankrupt us all, and there’s no lie they won’t tell to get it done. Don’t be on the wrong side of that, son.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a check with the pay-to-the-order-of line blank. I couldn’t have bought Trehorne’s silver stallion with it, but I could have taken a couple of vacations to Italy.

  I said, “You know what I do?”

  “Private detective. I Googled you last night. Plus, Trudy was most anxious to share the news.”

  An incestuous little group, Eli had called them. If his suspicions were right, they had secrets on top of secrets. That could breed distrust, but it would also make them quick to tip each other off. I wondered if Trehorne knew about the bones we’d found, suspected he did.

  I said, “Then you know I already have a job.”

  “I know you have a colorful history. Not exactly a stickler for protocol, are you, Mr. McKean? What’s a little double dipping to a man who makes his own rules?”

  Khanh sent a fierce kick into the fire pit.

  I held his gaze. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

  “What about the name of your business? Maverick Investigations? Should I believe that?” He waved the check, as if drying the ink. “You a maverick, Mr. McKean?”

  I imagined him forty years younger, holding Tom Cole’s head beneath the water, and felt a sudden revulsion. Had he acted alone, then persuaded the others to cover for him, or had they all been present? Or was this forty-year-old conspiracy just a figment of Eli’s imagination—the hopeful fantasies of a young reporter hoping for the story of a lifetime?

  “Technically,” he said, “there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to do both jobs. Reporting Carlin’s actions to me should in no way interfere with finding out who set fire to her barn.”

  “Unless you set it, in which case that would be a serious conflict of interest.”

  He grinned. “Oh, I don’t think so. Of course you’d have to cash the check before you sent me to prison. But I didn’t set the fire, so you have nothing to worry about.”

  He was probably telling the truth, as far as that went. If he’d had a hand in setting the fire, he’d done it with a pen and a check. Or he’d called in a favor, or asked one. Either way, I doubted he’d been the one to throw the match.

  “Of course,” he said, “there’s a very good chance she set it herself, which would be the best outcome of all, from my perspective.”

  I said, “Even if I wanted to help you—” He started to interrupt, and I held up a hand. “Not saying I do, but even if I wanted to, it wouldn’t do you any good. Your brother just banned me from the showground.”

  He gave a dismissive snort. “My brother can sometimes be shortsighted. I can take care of that. Are you in?”

  I thought about it, but not for long. When the wind turns in your direction, you unfurl the sails.

  I hooked the corral back into place and, ignoring Khanh’s disapproving look, said, “I’m in.”

  Trehorne had been out of earshot for about three seconds when Khanh punched me in the shoulder, sending a shock of pain through my ribs. “We detective, not spy.”

  I made a show of rubbing my shoulder, then put the check in my wallet and said, “Don’t worry. We’re not cashing it.”

  She frowned, pursing her mouth in a confused moue. “I not understand. We work for Mr. Trehorne or no?”

  “No, it’s just a way in.” There was nothing illegal about what I was doing, but it was still dancing at the edge of a conflict of interest. Trehorne was going into it with his eyes open. I’d call Terry later and fill him in so everything would be aboveboard. In my line of work, a conflict of interest isn’t necessarily a deal breaker, but everyone involved has to know the score.

  “Good,” Khanh said. “Minute there, I think you lose you marbles.” She circled her index finger around her ear and gave me a proud grin at mastering another idiom.

  “Live and learn, Grasshopper,” I said.

  She frowned. “Yesterday, you call me Obi-Wan. Today I Grasshopper?”

  “You have to keep up,” I said. “It’s my turn to be Obi-Wan.”

  We sat by the fire and batted ideas around for a while. Then she went inside to wash dishes. “Going for a walk,” I said as the door closed behind her. “Maybe I’ll check on Zane.”

  I felt restless and out of sorts. I was no closer to knowing who had set the fire at the Underwoods�
�� barn or who the unnamed bones belonged to, and I was tired. Tired of Samuel Trehorne, tired of Gerardo’s suspicion, frustrated that I could do nothing about Zane’s loss or Carlin’s desperation. It was too early in the game to be feeling this way, but I felt it nonetheless.

  Back at the arena, the Big Lick classes were starting, but I didn’t want to watch. I’d had enough of them and of the Trehornes. I walked through the prep area where two vets I didn’t know were doing the inspections. Doc, I assumed, had gone on break. Jim Lister, holding the reins of a big black stallion, stood in line while the inspector manipulated the lower legs of a copper-colored mare with a flaxen mane. I passed them without speaking and went down to the stalls as daylight faded and the sky turned the color of blueberries. The lights came on with a hum, turning the shadows crisp and dark.

  There was no sign of Mace, so I stopped to give his mare a clandestine scratch, then made my way over to Trehorne’s block of stalls. Junior was saddling Rogue, while a groom brushed the tangles out of the stallion’s mane. The USDA judges must have left after all. Rogue looked off into the distance, still as a statue. The playful animal I’d seen at Trehorne’s stables was gone, and in his place was a horse with a single focus—the job at hand.

  There was no overt abuse, nothing beyond the usual stacks and chains, and while Junior showed no obvious affection for the horse, he also showed no cruelty. All the same, something about the scene unsettled me. Junior glanced in my direction once, then heaved his bulk into the saddle. It creaked beneath his weight. With a growing sense of unease, I watched him ride off. Then I moved on.

  At the Underwoods’ barn, a video ran in the empty lobby—Carlin on Tesora, some kind of New Age music in the background. A framed poster with the TASA tenets on it shared wall space with pictures of Carlin and Zane on a variety of high-stepping, flat-shod horses, each more beautiful than the last. Tesora was the crown.

  There were no pictures of Rogue.

  I started around the corner to the stalls and heard a man’s voice from behind the stable. “Señora, you are making a fool of yourself.”