Dallas lifted his feet, one after the other, as if he were nervous.
She had to nudge him hard to get him to move toward the lump.
It was a cow, but it had a “wrong” look to it. Cows spent a lot of their lives lying down, but not stretched out on their sides as this one was, with her legs straight out and her head pressed sideways against the ground.
It lay as no living cow ever would.
She must have simply keeled over and died there on the spot, Annabelle thought at first. Death had to happen to all of God’s creatures eventually, and not every one of High Rock Ranch’s livestock made it to the slaughterhouse. A few went out the old-fashioned way, as this big old girl appeared, at first, to have done.
A shudder went through the big horse.
Annabelle slid off him again and walked toward the prone cow.
Dallas stepped backward. Annabelle turned to him and said, “Stay there.”
Not that she blamed him for wanting to move. The smell was terrible in the heat, because the cow had emptied its bowels and bladder, and there was drying blood …
“Blood?” Annabelle felt a touch of dread for the cow’s sake.
This was a pasture of pregnant cows that had just been weaned from their latest calves. Had this one miscarried and bled to death?
Why else would there be—
A gush of blood was pooled all around the fallen cow, as if every drop in her had poured out. The ground beneath her was so dry and hard that very little of the blood had soaked in; it remained a viscous, jellylike mass rapidly turning crusty and attracting flies, which also buzzed around the cow’s orifices.
“Oh, no,” Annabelle murmured when she got close enough to see more.
The blood had not come from the rear of the animal, as it would in a miscarriage, but from the front. It had all poured out of the head, and from a smiling gash across her throat. Coyotes were the only predators, and she knew they didn’t normally go after cattle this size. Even the calves were big for coyote prey. Maybe the drought was altering the natural order of things.
Or maybe the cow died first and then the coyote—
But why wasn’t any of the carcass torn away or consumed?
There weren’t any bulls here; what would scare away a coyote?
None of it was making sense to Annabelle as she struggled to fit what she was seeing with what she knew of life and death on the ranch. Like all the cows in this pasture, this one had been pregnant, which meant an unborn calf was now dead inside of her, so this was a loss to the ranch of two, not just one valuable life, as these things were measured in money.
And then she realized with a shock which cow this was.
It was the cow that had caused all the ruckus yesterday, the old breeder that Billy Crosby had kicked in his rage.
Annabelle had directed Dallas to this pasture expressly to check up on this particular animal, to make sure that Billy hadn’t done any terrible damage to her eye, and that they didn’t need to call out the vet to treat her. She didn’t know all the cattle by sight, not by any means—the ranch was much too big for that—but she knew some of the ones who’d been around a long time, especially the ones she affectionately thought of as “good old girls” and “good mamas.” Just like humans, or dogs, or cats, some cattle were “pretty” or “cute” or “handsome,” and some were homely ol’ critters. This one had been one of those, with a long bony face, a sway back, and knobby knees that only its own offspring could love.
“I’m sorry, old dear,” she murmured to it even as she held her breath to keep from breathing in the foul odors of its passing.
Speaking of its offspring, where was its “weaned” calf?
Annabelle looked around, but it was impossible to tell which of all the calves might be motherless at the moment, and they were too spread out for her to count. It had probably been frightened, then spent some time trying to nudge its mother to her feet, or to nurse from her, and then wandered off to graze. This was a hard way to get weaned, Annabelle thought sympathetically, but maybe—for the cow, herself—this was better, more merciful in its way, than going to the slaughterhouse, which was the fate that awaited all the cows past their breeding days.
Annabelle would have liked to place a hand on the cow, to pat its curly rough red hair and feel if its body was cool or if the death had happened recently enough for the carcass still to be warm. But she didn’t want to step into the blood, and so she didn’t get any closer.
Instead, she pulled herself back onto Dallas without the aid of any bucket or stump and rode home to give her husband the bad news.
UNLIKE HIS WIFE, Hugh Senior didn’t hesitate to walk into the blood, or to touch the brutal wound, which was how he came to the conclusion that no coyote had killed her.
“Annabelle,” he said, looking up at her, “somebody’s cut her throat.”
“Oh, Hugh! Oh, no! Are you sure?”
He didn’t even bother to answer, and so she knew it must be obvious. What he did say was, “And we know just who would have done that to this particular cow, don’t we?”
Tears came to Annabelle’s eyes and she felt pity.
Her pity wasn’t only for the poor cow, but also for Billy Crosby, and she thought, Oh, Billy, what have you done?
She thought of the times she’d sat down with the boy and tried to talk to him about high school diplomas and jobs and being a husband and a father. She felt sickened by the blood, and the smell, and sickened for him. Her stomach heaved and she bent over the dirt and grass, though nothing came up. It was then that she noticed the cause of the burnt vegetation smell she had noticed earlier.
“Hugh!” she called, holding her hand over her mouth. She took her hand down and pointed. “He started a fire here.”
Hugh stalked over and then walked around, examining the ground and coming to an analysis: “He tried to set a fire to burn her body … which means he didn’t care if he burned the whole ranch down, and all the animals and us with it.” He stood up straight, and was framed in front of the distant, dramatic clouds like a photograph of a rancher in his element. “I wonder why his fire didn’t catch.”
“Because her blood put it out before it could, that’s why.”
Annabelle’s pity turned to rage with these new facts.
“This is a horrible thing to do, horrible! How dare he, Hugh, how dare he?”
“Because that’s the kind of person Billy is, Annabelle. I’m sorry I didn’t figure that out sooner.”
A FEW MINUTES LATER, on their ride home, her anger weakened.
“Hugh, maybe it wasn’t Billy.” She offered up her one last benefit of the doubt to him. “It could have been anybody. Some crazy person driving by. A trespasser, an illegal hunter.”
Her husband threw her a disbelieving look.
“And this stranger just happens to find that pasture and kill that particular cow out of all of our cattle. You can’t be serious, Annabelle. You know as well as I do it was Billy. This has Billy’s fingerprints all over it, and I mean that literally. I’ll bet you that boy’s so stupid he’s left a trail of evidence.”
“What will happen to him? What about his family?”
“His family is better off without a man like him.”
She nodded, feeling on the verge of tears for their sakes.
“We’d all be better off without Billy Crosby,” Hugh said, and Annabelle recognized his tone. It was the one he used when he came to a hard and irrevocable decision.
“People will say we never should have tried to help him.”
“Let them say it,” Hugh snapped. “Maybe we stopped worse from happening.”
“Maybe we did.” Annabelle felt a little comforted by that possibility, because who knew what Billy might have become, even before now, if they hadn’t stepped in to try to push him along a better path. Yes, they had failed this time with this one boy. But there had been success stories, like Hugh-Jay’s best friend Meryl Tapper, who had found love and inspiration among the Linder
s. Meryl was going to be a lawyer, and maybe marry their daughter, which could never have happened without their intervention in his troubled life. He wasn’t out setting fire to pastures, and none of the other boys they’d helped had done anything like this, either.
“This could have been worse,” she murmured, thinking of the burnt patch.
They were a few hours away from finding out what “worse” could mean.
SHORTLY BEFORE NOON, and unaware of what was going on at the ranch, Hugh-Jay drove his silver truck up his driveway in town and parked in the gravel behind his own home.
His and Laurie’s house could hardly have been more different from his parents’.
Out on the ranch, his mother and father had an attractive, practical, two-story frame home, unpretentious and perfect for its hardworking functions. Here in Rose, Hugh-Jay and Laurie lived in an inherited mansion that was almost 120 years old and rose out of the ground as if nature had shoved it up from below. Over years spanning two centuries, the elements had barely softened the edges of the enormous limestone rectangles that formed it, or the hand-laid stone fence around it. It was a showplace, a nineteenth-century vault, impenetrable unless he and Laurie left the doors unlocked, which they always did, just like almost everybody else in Rose left their cars, trucks, and houses unlocked. There just wasn’t any such thing as a home invasion, or a murder, or car theft in Rose, although tools had been known to disappear from open garages now and then, which people put down to neighbors forgetting to return them.
Hugh-Jay and Laurie could have built a house out on the ranch, near his folks—or at some distance from them, because the ranch was big enough for that—but Laurie was a town girl. She’d had covetous eyes for the huge house that Hugh-Jay’s grandfather had built for his grandmother. It had sat empty for a long while—because Annabelle never wanted to live in it, and there was nobody else in the family to take it—and the family would never consider selling it. With its exterior of foot-thick native limestone, and hand-hewn beams and massive antique walnut furniture within, it had been a fight for them to keep it off the National Register of Historic Places. They wanted to preserve it; they just didn’t want other people telling them how to do it. Hugh-Jay’s great-grandfather had designed it to warm, cool, protect, and impress, not necessarily in that order.
Hugh-Jay had resisted Laurie’s pleadings, at first.
He preferred a simple house on the ranch, like his folks’, only smaller.
“Give your bride what she wants,” Annabelle advised him before his marriage to Laurie. “That’s what your father did for me when I said I didn’t want to live there, and look how well that’s turned out!” His father, overhearing that, laughed. “Yes, all I had to do was build your mother a brand-new house,” he’d teased. But he also put his arm around Annabelle and gave her waist a squeeze, which she returned with affection. Hugh-Jay felt he would give anything to have a marriage as good, as alive, as his folks’ was, so he let himself be moved into a house that felt uncomfortable and pretentious to him. His wife scoffed, “Hugh-Jay, it was built for men your size!” But he felt it was built more for big egos than big bodies; it embarrassed him to live there when most people he knew were scrambling to make a living.
Hugh-Jay stepped out of his truck and squinted west, where clouds were building.
His pair of black Labrador retrievers came trotting up, their tails wagging and their tongues hanging out, to sniff him and to slobber their welcome onto his fingers, his jeans, and his boots.
“Looks like rain toward Colorado,” he told them. “We sure need it.”
The dogs trotted back to the shade of a tree and flopped down again.
A couple of days earlier he had witnessed an idiot toss a burning cigarette out of a car window. He chased the car down on the empty highway, squeezing it to the side of the road and forcing the driver to stop, scaring the four people inside half to death, so he could give them a piece of his mind about the danger of flipping live butts out of windows.
“You like barbecue?” he’d shouted as he approached their car.
Four hard-looking city faces stared back at him.
He knew he looked imposing. He meant to be.
He hoped the sight of a six-foot-two-inch cowboy rushing at them out of nowhere would scare the hell out of the ignorant fools.
“’Cause if you like your beef barbecued,” he said as he came closer, “you’re going to get it when that cigarette of yours catches that grass on fire and burns up all my cattle.”
Later, thinking about it, he realized he was lucky they hadn’t shot him. There could have been guns in that car. They looked like the types who’d carry firearms, and not for hunting deer or pheasant, either. There was no mounted gun rack; the guns these types would carry would be tucked into dark places under seats or in the glove compartment. One of them could have popped him out of sheer self-defense, because he looked and acted like a crazy man. But they were also lucky, he thought, that he hadn’t jerked open the door closest to him, hauled the driver out of there, marched him back up the highway to where his cigarette lay smoldering and made him stamp it out with his forehead.
Instead, Hugh-Jay had gotten back into his truck, thrown it into reverse, and performed the grinding out—with the leather sole of his boot—himself, while they sped away down the isolated highway as fast as they could escape from him.
He hadn’t told his wife Laurie about the incident.
He hadn’t told anybody. Well, almost no one. Soon afterward he telephoned the local veterinarian to discuss the lame horse, and was still so full of adrenaline that he’d spilled the story. The vet sounded surprised, not at the stupid behavior of human beings who would throw burning butts onto dry grass, but at Hugh-Jay’s high dudgeon about it. It wasn’t a reaction anyone expected from him. And now he’d had two such incidents in just the past forty-eight hours, first with those strangers and then with Billy Crosby and his stupid beer can.
Hugh-Jay shook his head at his own volatile behavior.
He placed his gloved hands on the roof of his truck and sucked in a deep breath, trying to locate the calm, reasonable man that everybody thought he was, that he thought he was. Even through the gloves, the heat forced him to lift his hands back up. When he did, he saw that the palms of the yellow calf leather had turned gray-white, which told him that dust had traveled from the salt flats and rock monuments west of town. In the thick layer of dust on the metal, he saw his own clear glove prints, from his palms to the ends of his fingers.
“Bad weather for criminals,” he thought wryly.
He slapped the dust off his gloves, then turned to look toward the back door of his house. Suddenly, he felt heartburn and tasted bile. He wasn’t sure he could eat anything that Laurie fixed for him. While he was at his parents’ home, or doing ranch errands, he could distract himself from what he didn’t want to think about, but now he couldn’t avoid it any longer.
He was headed home for lunch, without calling ahead to let her know he was coming.
This also wasn’t behavior she expected from him, which was why he was doing it.
It was his third uncharacteristic act in forty-eight hours, he realized.
Hugh-Jay thought of what his mother had asked him—oddly, out of the blue—that morning: Are you all right?
No, was the honest answer to that, he wasn’t all right.
He was far from all right. He was worried as hell and sick about it.
And his father’s order—also out of the blue—for him to check up on the ranch in Colorado, hadn’t made him feel any better. When he heard it, he felt his bowels go loose and he got an awful feeling in his gut. Somehow he managed to cover up his reaction so his dad didn’t notice anything, but he hadn’t fooled his mother. He never had been able to put anything over on her, not like Chase could by charming her, or like Bobby and Belle could by just refusing to talk about stuff. Hugh-Jay wondered how long his mom would wait to ask him again.
A sudden gust of wind preceding
the rain jangled the wind chime on the porch.
Wishing it didn’t take courage to walk up to his own back door, Hugh-Jay forced himself to get going. He took off his boots before walking into the kitchen in his stocking feet, so quietly that he had a moment to take it all in before Laurie even knew he was there.
THE BIG OLD-FASHIONED KITCHEN was fragrant with baking pies.
Hugh-Jay saw his wife dressed in her favorite yellow sundress, with her dark pixie hair stuck sweatily to the back of her neck, and he saw her bare arms, shapely bare legs, bare feet. The bones at the backs of her ankles were so slim they looked as if he could break them with a pinch. Her painted toenails—red—made his heart hurt, they were so sexy and perfect. He could have held her feet and played with her toes all day long, if she would let him. Such longings used to make her laugh and tease him; now, they would probably make her run and put on shoes.
He stared at her in silence while she worked at the sink.
She was twenty-two to his twenty-four, and so lovely that when he married her he could hardly believe she was supposed to be his for the rest of their lives. She’d left college to marry him, which sounded like a sacrifice except to anybody who’d seen her grade average. Laurie Linder was far from stupid, but she’d never had any interest in learning about much of anything beyond makeup, clothes, and gossip. Hugh-Jay hadn’t cared; he’d loved her from afar for years, awed by her beauty, admiring her sexy walk and exuberant spirit, while he waited until she was old enough for him to ask her out on a date. He knew perfectly well that if he weren’t the son of the wealthiest people around Rose, and if he didn’t have things like this house to offer her, she’d never have looked at him.
He hadn’t cared, not really. He was happy just calling her “my wife.”
His parents didn’t like her, considered her shallow and self-centered; he knew they did. They tried to hide it for his sake, but when Hugh Senior or Annabelle Linder disapproved of someone, that fact was hard to miss despite their outward show of warmth. It made him feel protective of Laurie, who might not be “deep,” but whom he loved deeply.
The Scent of Rain and Lightning Page 5