The Clincher

by Lisa Preston

  Biddable, keen Swiftsure was a machine. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have that much concentration and work ethic. The dog was dying to move cattle for Weatherby. Some of the guys behind me, naturally, fell to admiring the dog while some of them started bellyaching about sheep ranchers. I don’t care if ranchers raise woolies or things that go moo, but for some folks, cows versus sheep is their politics.

  “Smelly bastards,” one fellow commented. No one else said anything to that bit of wisdom but someone started the old joke, “You know what sheepmen say?”

  I knew. We all knew, those of us who cut our teeth with cattlemen.

  “Sheep are liars.” I turned my ponytail to their hooting.

  Done with working his dog, Weatherby waved me over and I braced myself for a trip to the woodshed, so to speak.

  “Schram told me that he was maybe out of line when you were at his outfit. I sent you over there thinking he’d behave. He will now.”

  I opened my mouth and shut it when nothing came out, on account of not wanting flies to land in there.

  Weatherby cast a hard look over at Schram, who was a-horseback. Schram gave me a howdy with a face that meant he’d gotten himself a little old trip to the woodshed with Weatherby. I was feeling better and better.

  Schram wasn’t using the reining horse I’d shod for him, of course, as the sliding plates I’d put on his reiner wouldn’t let a horse stop a steer. A jug-headed, raw-boned nag was under him now. Schram shook out a loop readying to head his steer while he studied me from across the fence panel.

  “You’re all dirty,” he called, being as he was Mr. Good Grasp of the Obvious.

  Well, his horse was ugly and would still be so in the morning. I, on the other foot, could take a shower and wash my clothes. Besides, there was something a little dirty in his tone. Made me think about him asking if I was another woman who liked it rough.

  Right then, I wished for a crystal ball.

  I wanted to know what secrets Patsy-Lynn had taken with her to her grave. Had she been keeping company with a man other than her husband? With Felix Schram? A wild thought about Abby’s daddy and Patsy-Lynn bubbled up. Surely Keith Langston got company somewhere, sometime. I didn’t want to consider such nonsense, but random rudeness just popped into my brain as I stood too near Felix Schram. His coarseness gave me more than pause.

  Turns out, not all of these country people truly are my cup of coffee. Being a hick might not be the qualification I should be looking for in a person. Guy’s never made me feel second-rate, never, but he sure had some explaining to do. There was no explaining a guy like Schram. An unaccustomed feeling settled over me, which I dared identify as me trying to figure things out before they got ugly, instead of after. That was new. And good. High time for me to squint at some things that deserved studying. If Guy had a secret—and he’d pretty much admitted to it—I needed to know what it was.

  If the sheriff’s people thought I or Guy had something to do with Patsy-Lynn’s passing, I should figure out who did have a hand in her death. There were plenty of potential suspects. Some right here at the party.

  Harper Junior cornered me and said good and loud, meant for all nearby ropers to catch, “You still going with Martha Stewart?”

  I heard the snorts, felt the looks, heard the whispers Andy made to some of the other guys. Someone repeated the fiction that Guy was a poof. Early would have been a good time to leave, but I got distracted with joy when Weatherby asked if I wanted to run Charley sometime. Right away, I’d forgot what I’d told myself about paying better attention to everything.

  Most folks were gone by the time I got Martha’s empty chili crock off the food tables, but heading home, I remembered to wonder why Mr. Harper’s son might have a case of the apples against Guy.

  Chapter 17

  CHARLEY’S DAY IS NOT COMPLETE WITHOUT giving a good barking to someone. On the job, he bayed into the darkness, little growls shaking his chest. He kept it up as I opened the garage’s side door to the night and one of the sheriff’s men.

  Deputy Paulden held up a rounding hammer—the kind us shoers use to shape horseshoes. But this one in the deputy’s hand was in a clear plastic bag sealed with blue tape, labeled EVIDENCE.

  Made me think of a bloodied rasp in a similar bag.

  “Miss Dale. This was used to break into a veterinary office in town tonight. Thousands of dollars in damage.”

  Guy came out of the house, a robe around his boxers. My mouth wasn’t working, what and all with my brain not coming up with a whole notion. When I did manage a thought, the deputy asked it as his next question.

  “You missing any tools, Miss Dale?”

  A vision of my truck broken into and my tools stolen made me sweat. I whipped my head around, craning to look at Ol’ Blue. I hadn’t been home long. Ol’ Blue should be fine. I made for my boots.

  The deputy nodded, like he’d maybe already had a look-see at the other side of the carport before knocking.

  “Let’s go take a gander, shall we?” Deputy Paulden grinned grim.

  We went out into the night, to Ol’ Blue resting and rusting beyond the carport.

  “Which vet’s office was broken into?” I asked. Cowdry has two, one with several vets in it, a place for dogs and cats and lizards and ferrets and hedgehogs and birds and whatever else people decided to have for keeping company. And then there’s old Doc Vass’s place that Nichol took over. My breath frosted in the cooling night air.

  “Doctor Nichol’s practice,” Paulden said. “Back window smashed out, lots of cabinets vandalized. And this hammer, a horseshoeing tool I’m told, was at the scene.”

  He drew out the story while watching me. I knew my face was screwed up and my lips about turned inside out. Then he asked, “What do you make of that? Looks like some horseshoer has it in for the vet.”

  “Huh.” There aren’t all that many full-time shoers around Cowdry, but there are four times as many part-timers who do a few backyard horses. I looked up at the deputy.

  It was like he was playing with me, taunting. “Could be you or could be someone else.”

  “It’s someone else,” I said, hoping he’d believe me, hoping Nichol would, too. Had the deputy and Nichol already discussed which shoers were likely suspects?

  Paulden nodded. “Could be someone making it look like you. How do you feel about that?”

  How’d he think I felt? I wondered hard on the hammer and someone beating up Nichol’s office with it. Just about any iron-hanger with a few one-horse accounts has a rounding hammer. I got ready for some growling as Paulden kept up his questions.

  “Can you prove this isn’t your hammer?”

  I couldn’t. It was just a stupid rounding hammer, a Diamond. My first was a no-brand from foreign parts and my new one’s a pricey Jim Poor. Besides, I only have the two and both were in my truck, right where I left them. Furious, I used both hands to twist my ponytail.

  Finally, my jaw unclenched enough to speak. “No, I can’t.”

  The deputy said, “Of course not. Can’t prove a negative, can you?”

  “I can’t prove much of anything,” I snapped. Then I saw only one of us was fit to spit.

  Deputy Paulden smiled and gave me a nod that said I should talk a bit.

  “I’ve never even been in that office,” I said. “Even back before it was Nichol’s, Doc Vass came to me, farm called, when I had him out to do my horse’s teeth.”

  The deputy smiled again. “Then this’ll be easy as pie. Your fingerprints won’t be in there. Let’s get a complete set printed at the office.”

  I tried to tell Paulden that they’d already swiped prints from me, but no, he wanted proper prints, whatever that was. And I thought about protesting that anyone vandalizing Nichol’s office should have been smart enough to wear gloves, so my prints not being in there wouldn’t really clear me, but suggesting how to be a skilled criminal didn’t seem like a good kind of argument to make.

  “Come to the office tom
orrow. We’ve got part-time office hours Saturdays now.” He handed me a business card with a case number written on it. I was to give the number to the person at the counter when I went in to get fingerprinted.

  Remembering how Guy had told the police we were cooperative, back when they wanted my blood, I thought about the suggestion at hand. Guy would say that I had spare fingerprints, so giving up a set wouldn’t hurt.

  The deputy seemed of the same mind, but looked at me sideways. “Have you given up your full fingerprints before?”

  “Nope.” And it seems like a gal can’t get ’em back once she gives them away. A bit like virginity, fingerprints.

  * * *

  Just on principle, I took my time in the morning before making my second trip of the week to the sheriff’s office. Being innocent doesn’t keep a person from feeling kind of guilty. I knew I hadn’t broken into Nichol’s place, but I fretted that other people might not. Much as I wondered who might have busted up the vet’s office and left a shoer’s hammer at the scene, it wasn’t something I could solve any more than I could figure out what happened to poor Patsy-Lynn.

  There was another mystery I was better suited to work on—Abby’s neighbor’s missing horse. This puzzle swirled in my mind, ignored by everybody but the Solquists, who owned the horse, and Abby, who seemed to have enough to fret over without spiraling herself over the neighbor’s horse.

  Puzzling on the missing mare more and more, I considered the surrounding land. There was an awful lot of backcountry in the northwest corner of the county. I needed a map. The Solquists’ mare could have made miles, but usually horses stick close to home. They don’t just walk to the next county if they’re settled in a place with good care. The Solquists were solid horse people, from what I heard. Their mare had a decent home.

  Stealing a horse should still be a hanging offense.

  This time in the sheriff’s little lobby, I paid more attention. It was time to turn my brain faucet all the way open anyways. My mind’s done more than enough trickling.

  A giant map of the whole county decorated the sheriff’s front office wall. When the old gal at the front counter said the fingerprint-taker wasn’t ready for me, I spent time studying the map’s perspective on this corner of the world where I’d tried to make a bit of a life for the past year. I wondered how long I’d last.

  Hiding places can become living places, can’t they? It’s all about the body in question and the lay of the land.

  Butte County’s a rectangle, simple and true in shape, possessing plenty of valleys and peaks to give the eye something to catch on. It seemed like Red and I rode a good deal of this ground, but now I realized just how big the place was. We hadn’t covered a tenth of the backcountry even though I know every trail for about twenty miles to the north, south, and west of Vine Maple and even east of the highway. A few of the back roads I know because of traveling to clients. Just a couple of my accounts—Harper and Delmonts on opposite sides of the highway being the bigger ones, but Langston and a few other one-horse accounts, too—are further off where the highway curves west. The huge chunk of state and federal forestry lands south of that curve goes from Old Man Harper’s place to forever, it looks like. Little-traveled valleys lay tucked between Black Ridge and Stakes Ridge, then acreage stretched for miles of ranchland and backcountry.

  I reckoned the Solquists must have checked the open country both sides of the highway for their missing horse. Unlikely as it was for the mare to wander south of the highway on her own, if one thing leads to another, a horse can get in too deep to get herself home.

  “I do not steal and I am sorry for the lady.”

  The man’s voice startled me from the map and my mind. His pronunciation was precise, his hair black. The hatband on his leather cowboy hat dangled feathers down the back of his neck. The girl walking him out looked at me. “You want to come this way?”

  I pulled my fingernail from my mouth and blinked at her. The clerk toed the heavy side door open, one hand on her cocked hip. She had a tan uniform that showed she was with the sheriff’s department, but a gunless grunt, not a deputy. She was about my size, my age—might have been a shade younger—and also used a ponytail instead of a hairstyle.

  “That’s the dude,” I muttered as we went down an inner hallway in the sheriff’s station. “He was coming to the Flying Cross last time I shod there and then I saw him at Weatherby’s place, like, maybe riding with the barn-help fellow, Ted.”

  “Brilliant.” She motioned me to follow her to a crowded little room. All cupboards and a big sink, it was like a laundry room without the washer and dryer. Clean pieces of paperboard, all pre-printed with blank squares for each print, sat on the countertop.

  I snapped my fingers without meaning to. “He’s the dude who was walking to the Flying Cross the day Patsy-Lynn died.”

  “The day she was killed,” the clerk corrected me. “And yeah, he was. Would have been sweet if you’d said that to Deputy Paulden and Detective Gerber on day one.”

  Jeepers, I didn’t think of it then. I tried to put my fingertips on the black ink pad she opened.

  “Let me do it,” she said. “You just relax. Don’t push down.”

  Having someone else move your hand around is skeezy, that’s all there is to it.

  Definitely involved more than a simple set of my fingerprints. After she used my fingertips to fill in all ten squares on the paper, then added prints of all four of my fingers held together in some bigger squares, she said she’d take my palms.

  “They didn’t make me do all this when I was here before,” I said.

  “There’s such a thing as probable cause and consent.” She snapped rubber bands over heavy paper rolled onto a fat cardboard tube. Again, she told me to relax and let her do it. I tried to disconnect from my hands while she rolled my palms across the paper.

  “Great,” she said, “these are good clean prints. Sometimes people have trouble cooperating and smudge them. You did fine.” And she went on about the specific points on my prints and how bigger departments all had scanners, but here in Butte County they still hand-rolled palms.

  Dandy, I thought, one of those show-offy know-it-alls and a blabbermouth to boot, just dying to say every piece of police lingo she could. I had to hear about ridge endings and dots and bifurcations. A person would have thought she was talking about the forest lands on the lobby map. She made it real clear that she knew a lot of things about partial prints and whorls and loops.

  To me, loops are for roping and whorls are the cowlicks in a horse’s coat where the hair grows every which way. I’d helped vets mark whorls on passports for horses to be shipped internationally, but my know-how of fingerprints and other police stuff was nowhere. I wished someone would ask a horse question, better still a hoof query.

  “There’s a horse missing,” I said, “and—”

  The clerk snorted, like Red when I refuse him extra hay. “The sheriff’s department can’t throw everything into it every time someone has a missing animal.”

  Getting into it with this gal would be a waste of time. I was made of questions, with no good answers. My hands were dirty and I wanted to know more about the break-in at Nichol’s place. This fingerprint tech, or whatever she was, didn’t actually seem to be investigating me or anyone else. She was a flunky, like the barn-help who fetched horses, especially at the racetracks and big training barns when I’d done my shoeing internships. Flunkies and gofers fetch like Labradors, but they don’t run the dog show.

  The flunky thanked me for being cooperative, noting I was one of the ones, like the Kittredge dude, who had given blood, too. She set out gritty borax soap for me to wash my hands of the blackness.

  “Guy Kittredge was asked to give a blood sample?” I rubbed my chin, thinking.

  “And maybe wash your face, too.”

  I rubbed borax on my face like some kind of beauty queen. “The detective only asked me for blood when he came to the house. He didn’t ask Guy.”

 
“Right,” she said, dismissing me.

  A loop spun in my mind, wanting to prove negatives, like: I didn’t bother the vet’s office, I didn’t hurt Patsy-Lynn. And for that matter, Guy didn’t hurt her either. But all of us newcomers seemed to be painted with the same broad brush of suspicion by the townfolk in this place that was founded on farming and ranching over a hundred years ago.

  As Deputy Paulden said, a negative can’t be proved.

  Something clear, like a missing horse, that’s an easier problem for me to tackle, but not as important as a woman dying. My fingerprints not being at the vet’s office wouldn’t prove I hadn’t bothered Nichol’s business, but a lot of people could say I was at Weatherby’s that evening, having chili same as everyone else.

  I hauled myself to the other end of town, to the vet’s office, where there were things to say.

  * * *

  Nichol glanced over his receptionist’s frizzy head and waved me back right away to a treatment room. It was one of those little rooms with a door on each end, the other door going to the office’s surgery and main work area.

  Beyond the door, Nichol muttered to someone about a just-spayed dog. He let the door to the surgery area stay open when he came back in, affording me a view of shattered cabinets, a pile of broken stuff swept into a corner, a clipboard and prescription bottles lined up on the counter. Disinfectant wafted. They were still doing clean up and inventory from the break-in. Nichol stood, looking fixed to wait for my words.

  “I’m sorry someone broke into your office and all. And by the way, it wasn’t me. That’s what I came here to say.”

  He raised his eyebrows and then mine with “Yeah, I know it wasn’t you.”

  “I thought you might have figured it was, on account of the rounding hammer.” Horse vets tend to know shoer’s tools. It wasn’t like talking to Guy, who couldn’t tell a rounding hammer from a driving hammer, didn’t know the difference between my clinchers and my crease nail pullers.