“Beth,” Duke started in what he hoped was a calm voice though inside he was ecstatic. Until right now he hadn’t had confirmation that the woman who had experienced the strange interaction with Riley was the same woman who had a wallet that had gone missing. Now that he knew, there was no way he wasn’t going to put himself back on this case. “I saw what happened. I saw Riley Saunders touch your purse and I believe I saw him put his hand inside, too.”
She sucked in a gasp. “And you didn’t do anything? When I reported my wallet missing to the girl in the gift shop, she told me that the stage manager had hired a private security firm. She told me I should go and talk to Rock Wolf Investigations. But she didn’t tell me you were there and did nothing!”
“Hang on,” Titus growled. “Duke saw Riley touch your purse. He saw what looked like Riley’s hand slipping into your purse. But he did not see Riley remove anything from your purse and that is why he didn’t intervene.”
Beth was wringing her hands. She looked very upset. “We’re traveling and I know it’s not wise to keep valuable things in your purse when you’re traveling, or at all really, but I sometimes wear my grandmother’s wedding rings and my hands were swelling yesterday because of this crazy heat and so I just put them in a pocket of my purse for safekeeping. That’s why I’m here. This morning I realized that the rings are gone. My wallet is replaceable. It’s a pain in the rear end, but it’s doable. But the rings can’t be replaced!”
Duke felt a shot of pure sympathy for this woman. “Ma’am, I am so sorry. We have a—well let’s just say that this is a very complex case. But I’m going to go have a talk with the stage manager this morning. I’ll confront Riley and see what we can do about getting your rings back.”
“Thank you.” Beth Alred wiped a tear from her eye and offered him a wobbly smile. “I’ll pay whatever fee you want to help me.”
“We’ve already been hired by the theater manager,” Duke told her gently. “I think that’s plenty. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to deliver, but I’m going to try.”
Duke felt a grim satisfaction at the thought of the upcoming conversation with Olivia Houghton. It was time to stop being nice and just be honest.
Chapter Twenty-One
“He told you he would pay you what for the donkey?” Olivia stared at the owner of the furry, long-eared creature standing in the parking lot of the Moonrise Theater’s back lot. “I’m sorry, but that’s a preposterous price. I can’t believe that my—that Riley would agree to that price.”
“Believe it, girlie,” came the reply.
One of the things that made the Moonrise such a great place for the Riley Saunders Show was that it had a grassy area between the bluffs overlooking Tablerock Lake and the theater building itself. What had once been just a lawn was now a carefully manicured set of four paddocks where the various livestock animals used by Riley Saunders in his show could be turned out between performances. It helped the show maintain a good relationship with the local animal control office tasked with checking up on the welfare of any animals used in Branson area shows. There were shade shelters set up in each paddock along with water tanks and feed bins. At the moment, the potential addition to their cast was ripping up grass as though he’d never seen the stuff before. His long fuzzy ears were wagging back and forth as he shook and stomped the flies away.
“This animal is underweight and you’re telling me that you have no records of veterinary care for him?” Olivia could hear Mona’s refusal to take the animal home to her stabling facility. “We can’t have the animal…”
“Patches.”
“Whatever. Patches cannot be acquired by our company until his veterinary, farrier, and dental records are in order. When was the last time you had his teeth done? He is literally skin and bones, sir.”
The overall-wearing stereotypical hillbilly, with the red checkered shirt with ripped out sleeves, a straw hat, and mud-crusted boots, gave Olivia the stink eye. “You’d better fork over the cash, girlie. I didn’t lug this beast down here for nothing. And I can’t say I can get him back inside the trailer again neither.”
Olivia glanced at the sorry excuse for a stock trailer hitched behind a groaning pickup truck that had once been a bright shade of red. The trailer was so rusty that it was impossible to tell if it had ever been anything other than brown. She could not actually blame the little donkey for not wanting to get into that rattle trap combination. The poor creature had probably thought it was going to die en route.
“There’s no way,” Olivia muttered. But how could she let the poor little critter go back to wherever this man had come from? Who knew what sort of conditions the dirty little donkey had been used to. A sudden thought occurred. “Do you have other animals?”
“Nah. Well, my cows. But cows are worth something,” the man announced. “That’s why you give them the first pick of feed and hay.”
“Oh really. And you’re feeding this donkey cow-quality hay?” That explained a few things in Olivia’s opinion. It also decided her. “You want me to take the donkey off your hands?”
“What? That fella who called about my ad says he needed a donkey for a Branson show!” The man looked offended. “This here is a show donkey.”
“Yeah, well right now he’s not in show condition and I’m going to have to spend a lot of cash to get him there. So, if you want to sell him the price is two hundred and fifty dollars.” Olivia let that sink in a minute. “But if you want to take him home, you go right ahead.”
Olivia crossed her arms and waited. The donkey raised its muzzle from the grass and stared at Olivia as though he were begging her not to present his current owner with that sort of choice. Olivia was bluffing. At this point she probably would have paid the two thousand five hundred dollar price tag just to get the poor critter out of its current situation. But she didn’t want the man in the overalls to realize that.
“Fine!” The man threw up his arms and snarled at Olivia. “But I ain’t signing no bill of sale! You get him without papers.”
“You’ll sign this bill of sale or I’m not giving you a penny.” Olivia set her jaw and glared up at the man. Just let him try to think that she was going to be pushed around just because he was four times her size and more.
Olivia presented the bill of sale she’d typed up for the donkey earlier that morning, God awful early since it was currently twenty minutes after eight o’clock in the morning. She handed the man in the overalls a pen and he signed his name with a flourish.
“You’re not going to be getting a good review from me,” he grumbled. “Just you see. I’ll be on that website address. I’m not a dummy. I’ve even got Internet at home. And a smartphone too. I’ll be on that website telling everyone ‘bout what Riley Saunders is really like!”
“You go right ahead,” Olivia said, pulling out her own smartphone. She opened her camera app and started snapping off photos of the dirty little donkey creature.
The man looked suspicious. “What are you doing?”
“Documenting the horrible condition in which you brought this animal to us so that when you leave your bad review, I can show everyone exactly why I treated you poorly. People really don’t like it when someone treats an animal cruelly. It might even be good publicity for our show. So, go ahead mister. Do your worst!”
That was all it took for the man in overalls to change his mind. He took the two hundred and fifty dollars in cash right out of Olivia’s hand and scurried back to his rattletrap truck and trailer. A moment later, he disappeared in a huge puff of black smoke leaving a very relieved looking donkey behind.
Olivia huffed out a huge sigh and put her elbows on the top rail of the fence. “You poor little creature. What on earth am I going to do with you?”
The beast had what appeared to be a white coat with spots of some kind. It was hard to tell with the dirt, but its eyes were huge and brown and look gratefully at her. It wasn’t that big, either, which lead Olivia to think it was probably a miniature donkey,
which was at least better for their show purposes. Snooker was a Shetland pony for a reason. Even a medium-sized pony had difficulty trying to maneuver up and down the stage steps and in the aisles.
Then the donkey brayed. For a moment, Olivia cringed as her mind played through a dozen different conversations she’d had with Mona about donkeys and the sound they made. “Hush now, or Mona will never let you stay.”
The donkey shut up, but that was probably because it realized Olivia was heading for the hay shed. She was just trying to wrestle a bale out of the shed when she heard the rumble of a truck pull up into the parking lot behind her.
Olivia turned around, half fearing it was the overalls guy coming back to change his mind. And maybe it would be tempting to let him change his mind since now Olivia had the task of calling the veterinarian and trying to get the animal examined, vaccinated, and current with his negative Coggins test so he could get the boarding facility with Mona where he would still have to be quarantined until they could be reasonably sure he wasn’t lugging around some kind of virus that could spread to Mona’s other clients.
But it was only Henry. Or rather it was Duke Dunbar driving Henry the gray truck. The truck that pulled right up close to the paddocks and parked before the very good-looking driver got out of his truck.
Olivia felt her face flushing red hot. She was well aware of what had happened the last time they’d spoken. She’d fired him. Sort of. He’d been angry too. Now everything had changed again. Or at least that’s how it felt.
He took off his ball cap and ran his fingers through his dirty blond hair. He was in shorts and a tank top. The sight of his legs was enough to make her drool like some high school bimbo. They were tanned and muscular and covered in a light dusting of blond hair. Even his feet were tanned in his sandals. And his arms! Good Lord, his shoulders, biceps, and forearms were a bit like an anatomy model. Olivia had to close her hands tightly around the wire cutters she was holding in order to keep herself from reaching out to touch the man. His green eyes were busy taking in the Riley Saunders’s Show’s latest acquisition and Olivia realized that Duke might know a lot more about donkeys than she did.
“A donkey?” Duke’s brow furrowed a bit. Then he noticed she was covered in hay and doing her level best to lug a bale out of the shed. “Here. Let me do that.”
“There’s a hook around here somewhere. It’s a big bale…”
But Olivia needn’t have bothered her head about Duke and the bale of hay. He slipped one hand beneath both strands of baling wire and effortlessly lifted the bale off the ground. He slung it about ten feet in a perfect arc until it landed on the ground in front of the donkey’s pen.
The creature was now trotting back and forth in front of the fence beside the hay bale making snorting noises and trying to push its head through the rails in the fence to snatch a bite.
“The poor thing is hungry.” Duke plucked the wire cutters from her hand. Then he looked at the hay. “You might want to be careful feeding him too much of this. It’s got a bit of alfalfa in it. If he’s not used to it, he might get a belly ache.”
Olivia was aghast. “That’s what Snooker eats. What else would we feed him? That’s what Mona feeds Snooker at home. She’s our livestock gal. She keeps a boarding barn.”
“Then she’s got some plain grass in her barn somewhere that she would be best off giving him,” Duke said with authority. “But she’ll know what to do. Is she coming to pick him up soon?”
The donkey was getting a bit impatient with their chatting instead of feeding him. He put his ears back and brayed—loudly. Olivia put her hands over her ears and Duke started to laugh.
“Can we just feed him some?”
“A little,” Duke agreed. He cut the bale and pulled off a couple of flakes. “Here you go, fella.” Duke seemed to be purposefully shaking out the flakes of hay to break them up. He glanced at her and grinned. “It’s to keep him from eating too fast.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“Does he have water?”
“No?” Olivia pointed to the big black container. “There’s a water tank though.”
“And a hose.” Duke was already looking inside the shed.
Without a word from Olivia, Duke got the hose out and hooked it up to the big spigot near the shed. He whistled as he bounded over the fence and dragged the hose out to the shelter where the tanks had been placed to keep them from getting too warmed by the sunlight. Duke seemed perfectly happy to stay there and take care of the animal and Olivia had to remind herself once again that the guy had grown up expecting to be a farmer.
“I bet you were a good farmer,” Olivia told Duke suddenly. “You just know this stuff.”
The little donkey lifted his head from the hay and spotted the water. His little hooves seemed to fly across the thick grass as he headed for the water tank. Duke moved the hose to let the beast drink, but every few moments he would swing the water at the donkey to make him stop drinking.
“What are you doing?” Olivia frowned. “That’s mean!”
“No, it’s not.” Duke shook his head. “If he gorges on the water he’s going to get a belly ache. Big time. He needs to take a break and go eat some more. Then come back. Where did you get this thing? He acts like he hasn’t had enough food or water. And in a place like Missouri where water collects in a hole in the pavement, that’s laziness and nothing else.”
“I don’t know. The guy who brought him was awful, but Riley is the one who made the deal.” Olivia felt a cold chill in spite of the temperature being in the upper nineties. “I don’t know what’s wrong with my uncle, Duke. He told the horrible man who brought this donkey that he’d pay him twenty five hundred dollars! I didn’t pay that of course, but it’s the idea of it! Where does Riley think he’s going to get that money? I know you told me yesterday that you think Riley is behind the thefts. I think you’re right.”
“I know I am,” Duke told her as he finished filling the tank and began to roll the hose back into the neatest little ring possible. He wound that thing around his elbow and forearm as though he were a human hose reel. “I know that I’m right because we had a woman come into our main office this morning claiming Riley stole her wallet out of her purse.”
Olivia felt the blood drain from her face. She had to reach out and grab the top rail of the fence in order to keep herself from falling right to her knees. “She told you that? Did she see it? Why didn’t she say anything?”
“Remember when I told you I saw your uncle stick his hand in some woman’s purse yesterday?” Duke’s gaze was steady. There was no ego, no I-told-you-so. He was just being honest. “I recognized the woman who came into our office as being that woman. She told me her wallet was taken and she filled out a lost and found report with your gift shop and the clerk told her we were investigating the thefts.”
Olivia was going to have to have a talk with Clara. She knew that’s who it was since she brought Olivia the report. But really, was Clara in the wrong or was Olivia for never believing what was right in front of her face?
“The woman went to the police,” Duke continued. “They wouldn’t talk to her because they said the wallet would get turned in because Branson is such a good city with no crime.”
“Seriously?” Olivia shook her head. “I wish I could say I was surprised. And yes, the people here are good, especially the locals. But most of the people in this city at any given moment aren’t locals!”
“Beyond the store clerks, no, they aren’t,” Duke agreed. He looked as though there was more to tell. “But the woman discovered this morning that the set of wedding rings she had taken off yesterday and put in a pocket of her purse were gone too.”
Olivia covered her mouth with her hands. She felt a cold shot of horror at hearing this. “Why is that so much more awful?” Olivia whispered to Duke. “Why does that make it worse? Like stealing a wallet or something isn’t bad enough, but someone’s wedding rings? That’s awful!”
“They belonged
to her grandmother, she wears them, but her hands were swollen because of the heat,” Duke explained.
Olivia felt a sudden determination to get to the bottom of this mess. It was nine o’clock in the morning. There was still time before Riley got to the theater. Still time to prove that her uncle was a liar.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Duke followed Olivia through the back doors of the Moonrise Theater. He’d never been in this part of the building before. The doors and floors had been modified for Snooker the pony, which meant the doors were double-wide and the floors were coated in some kind of rough high traction material that reminded Duke of the sand and paint chips you put down on a garage floor to keep the cement from being slick when wet.
“His office and dressing room are back here,” Olivia whispered. Then she turned to give him a wry smile over her narrow shoulder. “I don’t know why I’m whispering. There’s no chance that he would come in early.”
“Not even when he was getting a new animal?” Duke could not help but think this was odd behavior indeed. You’d think the guy would want to be around when a new donkey showed up, especially if he hadn’t actually seen the creature before.
But Olivia was already shaking her head no. “He told me last night… well, he told me a lot of things last night, but he told me he wasn’t going to be here. He expected me to do it.”
“That seems rude,” Duke muttered. But he didn’t want to start ragging on her uncle. In Duke’s experience with the man so far, he was rude and selfish. He treated Olivia like a slave, not like a member of his family.
“It is rude,” Olivia admitted.
She stopped before a door that had a big star on it that read RILEY. She turned the knob. When it didn’t open, Duke was prepared to pull his lock pickers from out of his cargo pocket, but Olivia was way ahead of him with a set of keys. She unlocked the dressing room door and pushed it open.
Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset Page 16