The McHenry Inheritance (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 1)

by Michael Wallace

  “Haven’t you been able to testify? Your story should carry some weight.”

  She laughed derisively. “They’ll be calling me on Monday. So I’ll take the stand and tell the truth, and my brother’s attorney will find a way to make that look like something awful. I’d give anything not to have to face that attorney on the witness stand. I’d kill to have this whole thing go away. This place means everything to me, and I can’t stand to think of losing it.”

  From the open front door a dozen feet away, there was the sound of a match being lit. Ellen turned, and Gordon, who was already looking in that direction, saw Mike Baca lighting a cigarette.

  “Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” said the sheriff.

  Gordon and Ellen agreed that it was.

  “Ellen,” said Baca, “you’ve outdone yourself. It was a great barbecue, and I’ve had a fine time. But troublemakers never sleep, and I have to be up early, so I think I’ll be on my way. Thank you for everything.”

  “Thanks for being here, Mike,” Ellen said. “You made it feel like old times again for a few hours.”

  “Oh, and Gordon: I don’t know if your friend Sam always plays poker like this …”

  “He does.”

  “You might want to get him away from the table before he loses any more than he has. Good night, kids.” Gordon watched Baca walk away toward the barn, where his car was parked. The sheriff had put on some weight over the years, but he still walked with a graceful economy that bespoke authority. Gordon thought, looking after him, that the man could be elected sheriff anywhere on the basis of that walk alone.

  “I don’t want to go now,” Gordon said, standing up, “but it sounds as if Sam needs my calming presence.”

  “Not at all,” said Ellen, getting up herself. “I have to make the rounds, too.” She paused and looked up into his eyes.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said. “I was very rude to you on the way out of court the day before yesterday, and I apologize for that. But I really appreciated the way you handled it. Some men would have snapped back at me and some would have just taken the abuse. You stood up for yourself, but you did it like a gentleman. Thanks.

  “Gentleman?” said Gordon. “That’s another one of those words, like ‘honor,’ that you don’t hear too much these days.

  She smiled. “I was talking too much, but it was nice to have someone here to listen. I’ll see you and your friend tomorrow morning, and may you have a day of fishing you’ll never forget.”

  • • •

  “Living with him would drive you nuts,” said Gordon sarcastically. “That’s probably why he isn’t married. Thanks a lot, Sam. If this is what your friends do to you …”

  Sam had taken a bottle of brandy out of his suitcase and was pouring two fingers into a tumbler. He handed it to Gordon.

  “Here. This’ll make you feel better.” He poured one for himself. “Besides, she might as well know the truth up front.” He raised his glass. “To honest and open relationships.” They each took a swallow. “How much did I lose in the poker game?”

  “Seventy five dollars,” said Gordon, “and the way you were playing you got off easy. Judy’s going to kill you.”

  “No she won’t,” said Sam. “Seventy five dollars isn’t capital punishment — it’s life in purgatory. What was I doing wrong, anyway?”

  Gordon put his hand over his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Listen up, Sam. The hand I stood behind you, you had the five of diamonds, the six of hearts, the seven of spades, the nine of diamonds and the king of spades. So what did you do?”

  “What else could I do? I tossed the king and drew a card.”

  “That’s right. You drew on an inside straight. Since you only had a dollar in the pot, it might have been worth a flyer. But what card did you draw?”

  “Three of clubs.”

  “Which left you holding a hand with no pair, no flush, no straight, and your high card is a nine. Does that seem like a winner to you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So when the next round of betting started, why did you see the first five and raise it five?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Gordon. Haven’t you ever heard of a bluff? I took out three of the other four players right there.”

  “Precisely. And why do you think the fourth one was still in the game?”

  “He wanted to play.”

  “Sam! The fourth man was in the game because he had something better than a nine-high in his hand. You were toast.”

  “He might not have called my bluff.”

  “If you’re holding four kings, you’re not going to be bluffed. Look, Sam, you have to learn to cut your losses. When you drew the three, you should have bailed out and kissed off the dollar you already had in. Cutting your losses intelligently is the key to success. Do you know the first thing I do when I buy a stock?”

  “What?”

  “I put an automatic sell order on it. If it falls fifteen percent below what I paid for it, it’s gone. That way I still have eighty five percent of the money to invest again.”

  Sam eyed his friend warily. “Don’t you ever do something just on impulse, Gordon?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  They sipped their brandy in intimate silence for a few minutes, then Gordon got up and walked the few steps to the door and opened it. He stepped outside, looked up at the moon through the branches of the pine trees, and took a deep breath of the bracing mountain air. Sam came out and joined him. The temperature had dropped into the high forties and the only noise that could be heard was the sound of the creek. A dim light burned in one room of the main ranch house.

  “I’ve only been here a couple of days,” Gordon said at last, “but I really like this place. It has the magic.”

  Sam wisely said nothing.

  Sunday September 12

  The day dawned clear and cold, and when Gordon and Sam arose shortly before seven o’clock there was a thin layer of frost on their car windows, the picnic tables and the meadow beyond the ranch house. They drove to Mom’s cafe and found it nearly empty, but warm and inviting nonetheless. After Kitty’s dissection of him two days earlier, Gordon was planning on ordering something completely different, but when he learned she wasn’t in, he backed off and called for bacon, scrambled eggs and hash browns. He and Sam were in a hearty mood when they returned to Twin Creek Ranch at eight thirty. There was still frost on the grass of the meadow, but the sun had just come over the mountain and would soon melt it away. As they arrived, Gordon noticed that there was a lone man in a chamois shirt fishing the creek about three quarters of the way up the meadow.

  Ellen McHenry greeted them with an offer of coffee, which they declined. She was dressed as the day before, only this time the color of her T-shirt was teal and only the tip of the crew neck showed above the top of the gray wool sweater she wore over it. She had a large coffee mug, obviously made at a pottery studio, in her hand, and she used it to gesture toward a red pickup with gray trim parked a short distance from the house.

  “Dan got here first,” she said. “You probably saw him fishing up the meadow a ways.” She paused. “You’re welcome to do the same if you like, but if you’re not feeling sociable, downstream might be the way to go.”

  Gordon nodded.

  “I’ll be leaving for town in half an hour, but before I go, here’s a suggestion,” she said. “About a quarter mile downstream from the last cottage, you’ll come to a slight bend in the creek where an undercut bank’s been carved out right under the roots of an old pine tree. There’s a big brown trout — maybe eighteen inches long — that lives there. He’s nobody’s fool, but about once a year one of the boys hooks him. Give him a try if you like.”

  “How deep’s the water?” Gordon asked.

  “Hard to say. There’s a nice little pocket there. At this time of year I’d guess maybe three feet but I could be off by a foot in either direction. Why?”

  “I like to be prepared,” Gordon
said.

  After taking their leave, Gordon and Sam fished their way downstream, each man stopping at a likely spot and working it for several casts, while the other leap-frogged ahead to the next likely spot. At the third spot he tried, Gordon worked his way around to the foot of a pool about 20 feet long, crouched low in the water and zinged a perfect cast to the base of a rock, where the water tumbled down from a foot above. It was instantly smacked by a ten-inch rainbow trout, who put up a vigorous fight before being brought to hand and released. It was a native, beautifully colored, and Gordon held it in the water for a moment, admiring its beauty before releasing it.

  Five minutes later, in a piece of slightly faster water downstream, Sam cast a fly perfectly under an overhanging tree branch and was rewarded with a trout of similar size and coloring. In an effort to repeat his good fortune, he made two casts in the same direction and lost a fly in the tree each time. A short time afterward, Gordon made a deft cast to the top of a chute of water coming through a pool and watched a fish take the fly as it swirled down the current. When he got that fish in, Gordon noted from the dark speckles on its top that it was a brook trout. It was only a nine-inch fish, but it was a rarity in the area and he was pleased at having caught and released it.

  In this fashion they reached the cut under the pine tree in a little under an hour. Gordon surveyed the water from above, then moved to the side of it, keeping well back and out of sight of any fish. Finally, he met Sam again at the top of the run.

  “Well,” said Sam. “That sure looks like a place there’d be a nice fish. Who goes first?”

  Gordon took a quarter out of his pants pocket and flipped it end over end in the air. “Call it,” he said.

  “Tails.”

  The coin landed on its side on a small rock by the creek, bounced into the air, and fell into six inches of water before coming to rest on the bottom. The two men peered through the creek at it.

  “Heads,” said Sam. “Fair enough. I think I’ll take a break from fishing and watch you try your luck.”

  “Skill, you mean. If you’re not fishing, could you hold my rod while I change flies.”

  “What’s wrong with what you have on?”

  “Sam, this is a number 12 Royal Wulff.”

  “It’s caught two fish already.”

  “And those two fish would be a snack for what I’m going after now. Here.” He led Sam to a shallow, heavily pebbled section of the creek above the spot he was preparing to fish. “See this?” He pointed with his rod to a black spot on a light-colored rock, then scraped it off with his rod tip. “Stonefly nymph, I’m guessing about number 6. They’re everywhere in this creek. Mr. Brown Trout, if he’s in there, is probably sitting near the bottom sucking these in by the dozen as the current carries them through his water.” He took a fly box from his vest and removed a black fly half an inch long, and about the same shape and color as the nymphs on the rock. “This is the ticket.”

  Gordon snipped off the fly on his line, then cut two feet of 5X tippet from the end of his leader and retied it back where it was.

  “Why are you doing that?” Sam asked.

  “To get a knot up here. You’ll see.” Gordon then reached into his vest and took out some lighter 6X tippet material and attached that to the reattached 5X with a sound knot. He trimmed the 6X tippet six inches below the bottom knot. “Now we’re getting there,” he said. Reaching into his vest again he pulled out a bright-orange bobber about three-eighths of an inch in diameter and a toothpick. A narrow passage ran through the axis of the bobber, and Gordon threaded the end of the leader through it. When he had gotten it over the knot at the top of the 5X leader, he pushed the toothpick into the passage with the leader. Once the tip of the toothpick showed through the bottom end, he snapped off the top of it about a quarter-inch from the bobber. He tied on the black nymph and finally removed a package of BB-sized weights from his vest and clamped one on the leader just above the bottom knot and inches from the fly.

  Sam watched with fascination. “You’re certainly cleaning out the hardware store,” he said. “Would you care to tell me what it’s all about.”

  “Simple,” said Gordon. “I’m trying to bring that fly down to Mr. Fish along that current near the bottom. The weight gets the fly down fast, and the cork bobber serves both as an indicator — to tell you when something’s touching the fly — and fixes the depth based on where it’s located on the line. Nothing to it.”

  “Let’s see it work.”

  Gordon moved himself into position slowly and carefully. The pine tree was on the eastern shore of the creek so the sun was in front of him and his shadow wouldn’t hit the water. Even so, he proceeded quietly and kept a low profile until he had reached a spot on the bank directly across from where he believed the fish to be. There was a gravelly beach about five feet wide on his side, which earlier in the season had probably been under a couple of inches of water. He squatted at the back of it to stay as low and far away as possible and was relieved to notice that there was no brush directly behind him, so he could make a reasonably unimpeded cast.

  Aspen Creek, at this point, was twenty feet wide. After cascading through some boulders, the water leveled out into a riffle about twenty feet above the pine tree, with its main current running about a foot from the opposite bank. The system he had rigged up was cumbersome, but after a couple of tries, he found that by casting long and to the top of the riffle, he could drag his indicator and fly into the main current and let them drift cleanly over the hole under the pine tree. He did this six times without attracting the interest of a fish.

  “I hate to be the one to say this,” said Sam, “but it looks like you just went to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

  “That was just a dress rehearsal. I had the fly at two and a half feet, and it’s probably too high for the fish to see. I’m going to move that indicator up six inches and see what happens.”

  On his second cast, Gordon hit the spot he wanted at the top of the riffle and got the indicator and fly drifting cleanly down the current. As the orange bobber glided beneath the edge of the undercut bank, it suddenly went under water. Gordon raised his rod tip, and what he hooked was so solid that for an instant he thought the fly had become embedded in the bottom. Then he felt a violent twitch and realized he had a fish on.

  It streaked upstream, tearing a few feet of line from Gordon’s reel, but the cascade above blocked its passage, and Gordon helped a bit by pulling to his right to turn the fish’s head away from the one gap in the rocks through which it might conceivably have gone. As he did so, the trout came close to the surface, and he could see that it was as good a fish as Ellen McHenry had said. It went back downstream to its hiding place and thrashed backward and forward, attempting to shed the hook from its lip. But Gordon kept steady pressure on the line, and when the fish let up for a second, Gordon deftly used his rod to turn its head in the opposite direction to wear it down. The trout made a dash downstream, but encountered a stretch of shallow water that left it badly exposed, so Gordon was able to turn it back towards him again. After more head-shaking and zig-zagging in its little corner of the stream, the fish was showing signs of fatigue, and Gordon began slowly pulling it toward him. After a couple of shakes and runs, it rolled over on its side as he pulled it up to the bank. He handed his rod to Sam, who had come over for a better look, and knelt over the fish, which was now lying in three inches of water. It was a beautifully colored German Brown, golden in hue and dappled with red and black spots. The hook of Gordon’s fly was neatly piercing its right upper lip.

  “Wow!” said Sam. “Well done.”

  “I don’t suppose you brought your camera?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then I guess we’ll just have memories.” Gordon knelt over the large trout and reached for the fly. The fish flapped a couple of times, and he said, “Hold steady, here. You’ll be home again in no time.”

  A gunshot rang out in the distance, like a thunderclap reverberatin
g through the small mountain valley. Gordon and Sam both froze, then Gordon smiled. “Deer hunters, probably.” He reached down again and with a quick flick of his wrist removed the barbless hook from the fish’s lip. With his left hand, he moved the fish farther out into the current and held it gently upright, facing upstream. The trout’s gills opened and closed quickly as it pumped oxygen into its system, getting its breath back. After about two minutes it streaked out of Gordon’s hand, made a sharp left turn, and headed back under the overhanging pine tree.

  “That was a beautiful fish,” said Sam.

  “Best I’ve caught this trip.” Gordon bent down to pick up his rod, and as he did so he was conscious of a vehicle driving above them on the dirt road leading out of the ranch. The creek was about 40 feet below the road at this point, and the angle was such that they couldn’t see the road directly. He assumed it must have been Ellen McHenry heading into town, though as he looked at his watch he realized it was ten o’clock — an hour after she said she’d be going. He looked up again and could see only a puff of dust left by the passing vehicle. Then he shrugged and turned his attention back to fishing.

  After the capture and release of the brown trout, the rest of the morning was anticlimactic. Gordon and Sam each landed some small to medium fish; the morning ended with Gordon two fish ahead and winning the dinner bet. When they returned to the main ranch house at a quarter past noon, both men felt they had enjoyed a half-day that had restored their spirits and left them with the pleasurable feeling of physical lassitude and contentment that good exercise and fresh air can bring.

  They stopped to thank their hostess but found she hadn’t yet returned. In fact, there seemed to be no one present, either in the house itself or the surrounding cabins. Dan McHenry’s pickup was still parked near the house, but he wasn’t visible in the meadow. Noticing this, Gordon nudged Sam.

  “Are you in any hurry for lunch?”

  “I can wait a bit. Why?”

  “It looks like Dan McHenry’s gone upstream and left the meadow to us. Let’s check it out.”