Shepherd's Crook

by Sheila Webster Boneham

  “How could he do that?”

  I tried not to stare, or to draw her attention, but I couldn’t resist a quick glance as I turned away from her toward the arena, aiming to rejoin Tom. She was talking into her phone, her whole body radiating emotion, but for a few seconds I could no longer hear what she was saying. Then her voice rose again and she made another threat. It hit me in the gut like the stampeding ewes.

  “He’ll pay for this.”

  ten

  Those huge paw prints Tom and I had found came back to me six hours later as I stood in a hot shower and studied a hoof-shaped bruise above my knee. The paw prints were at least four and a half inches from heel to toenail. They were made by a humongous dog. Not only that, but they were oddly placed. Why would a dog be that close to the fence? Something must have forced him, or her, off the roadway. The print I saw later was just as big, and its placement also suggested that the dog had been nudged off the grassy edge of the lane, but only for a few steps. Maybe the dog was dodging a vehicle? Or a stampede? Could someone have used one of the bigger herding breeds to drive the sheep? Then again, maybe whoever owned the property had a big dog. Who did own the property? I had no sooner thought I’ll have to find out when my inner Voice of Caution screamed No you don’t! No more snooping around!

  Despite the questions whirling around my brain, I was enjoying my little bit of time alone in the house. Not really alone, but the cats were napping. Tom had left the event after Jay’s instinct test, and he’d taken Jay and Drake to free me up to take photos. The upshot was several hundred images of dogs and sheep. I had also photographed those tracks we’d found, all the while reminding myself that I was not getting involved in any sort of investigation. I knew where that could lead. I also knew it was already too late.

  When the clinic had wrapped up, I helped Evan secure the sheep in the larger holding pen. Evan said Summer was busy elsewhere, and Ray and Bonnie were nowhere to be seen. I wondered whether it was Ray who had prompted Summer’s hissy fit on the phone earlier in the day. If so, had she fired him? Was that why he wasn’t around to help wrap things up? Evan had been uncharacteristically silent, so I hadn’t asked. I’d just pitched in and moved sheep. I had minimal contact with them, but sheep are a smelly lot, and by the time we finished, my hair and skin and clothes reeked of lanolin. I went straight for the shower when I got home and let water, steam, and speculation swirl around me for a good long time.

  The paw prints had looked fresh, and they were much too big for any of the dogs at the instinct test or clinic. We often see Bouviers and Briards and other large breeds at herding events, but not today. I was stumped. I was also worried about the missing sheep. The thought of rustlers taking those sheep to slaughter made me ill, but who steals sheep for their wool? Then again, Summer had bought a half dozen new animals a few months earlier, and I thought I remembered that she paid four hundred a head, so they did have some monetary value.

  Tom and the dogs rolled in around six, but I had my hair dryer on and didn’t know they were back until I emerged from the bathroom with my arms full of towels and dirty clothes. Jay and Drake escorted me to the bedroom, where I piled my load into the clothes basket before lugging it through the kitchen to the laundry room.

  “Pizza on the way,” said Tom, saluting me with a bottle of local brew. “Lie down, boys.”

  I smiled, poured a hard lemonade, added a slosh of vodka, stepped over the dogs, and gave Tom a big smacker on the cheek. “No wonder I love you.”

  “Are you sore?”

  “A bit,” I said. “I think it will be worse tomorrow, but at least sheep are fairly light on their pointy little feet.” As an animal photographer, I’d been bitten and trampled, though never seriously injured. As a herding student, I’d been jostled and knocked flat more than a few times, but again, the bumps and bruises were all superficial.

  The alcohol was just beginning to ooze through me when the pain center in my calf lit up. I jolted straight up and screeched as I reached for my leg. My hands found soft fur over adolescent lankiness, and once I made sure all needleclaws were out of my flesh, I lifted Pixel onto my lap. “You little demon.” I snuggled the kitten under my arm and gently pressed a paw until her stilettos poked out of their sheaths. I looked into her big green eyes. “Time for a trim.” She made an O of her mouth and wiggled as I opened my grooming drawer, snagged the nail clippers and my ratty old rooster towel, and sat back down. My handsome orange tabby Leo lets me trim his claws without fuss, but at five months old, Pixel is not so complacent. I swaddled her in the towel and got to work, one paw at a time.

  My phone rang as I nipped off the last nail point, so I handed the kitten to Tom and checked caller ID. My brother Bill. It was his day to visit my mother at Shadetree Retirement Home, so a panicky little bird fluttered around my head, chirping questions. Has something happened? Is she sick? Has she blown the place up?

  Mom’s health, physical and mental, had been relatively good for several months, but that could change in the time it took to throw a trowel at another resident, which she had done a few weeks earlier. Granted, she had cause. He had uprooted a row of coleus she had just planted in the nursing home’s therapy garden. Luckily her aim was off, but the whole thing had upset her, and for two weeks she couldn’t remember anyone except her new love, Anthony “Tony” Marconi. Then again, with Bill, a hangnail can be a medical emergency.

  As I finished my phone call with Bill, Leo strolled into the kitchen and Pixel froze, then squirmed out of Tom’s arms and leaped to the floor. She arched her skinny back, pointed her tail at the ceiling, and bounced sideways across Leo’s path. He glared for two seconds, and the two of them raced down the hall toward the bedrooms. Jay cocked his head as he watched. He liked playing with kittens and puppies. Drake just wrinkled his brow as if he wasn’t sure he wanted such an uncivilized creature disrupting his life. Just wait, old man, I thought, just wait.

  “Everything okay with your mom?” Tom asked.

  “She asked Bill to buy her a pair of size thirteen slippers.” I sighed. “My dad’s size.”

  Daddy’s been gone for years.

  eleven

  Sunday morning found me wishing I had drunk one fewer vodka lemonades the night before. If I hadn’t needed to get to the trial grounds by eight o’clock, I would have wrapped my throbbing head in an ice pack for an hour or two. As it was, Tom had snuck out early for a field training session with Drake, and I had slept through the alarm clock. I barely had time to get dressed, grab my dog and my camera, and hit the road. Thank the caffeine gods that my favorite java drive-through was on the way.

  I parked my van just about where I had the day before, but there was no way Jay was staying there unattended. He trotted beside me as I crossed the part of the field roped off for parking, which was filling up with vans and trucks and other dogmobiles. In the distance, several people tossed discs for leaping dogs, including Kathy, the woman I had met the day before with Edith Ann. I made a mental note to try to get some good shots to send her as a thank you.

  The arena and adjacent pens were still empty, so Jay and I headed up the well-traveled roadway toward the big corral. Evan was loading the hayrack with breakfast for the woollies, and the sweet scent of fresh hay wound around me as I approached. Jay stopped to sniff at a door in the side of the building, whining softly, but he came to me when I called.

  “Good morning.”

  Evan turned, brushing the front of his sweatshirt with his fingers. “Hi, Janet.”

  “Any news?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded, sniffed, and rubbed his cheek against his sleeve. “Damn hay dust gets me.”

  Right. The mental version of a photo I had taken of Evan holding a newborn lamb, still steaming, came to me. In the picture, he sat on the ground, his thigh pressed into the ewe’s hip, the lamb cradled in his arms. The expression on hi
s face would have done St. Francis proud.

  “Ray usually does this.” He glanced around and added, “Usually beats me by an hour.”

  Evan had no sooner stopped speaking than Summer’s voice crackled behind me. “He’s nowhere to be found. We’ll have to make do.” Okay, so she didn’t fire him. She stopped beside me, her mouth smiling with no collaboration from her eyes, and said, “Maybe Janet can help for a bit.”

  My hand massaged the big killer-sheep bruise on my hip, but my mouth said, “Sure, happy to.”

  Summer turned back the way she had come, and Evan picked up a galvanized bucket and said, “Be right back. I’ll switch this out for a wheelbarrow.”

  I stood close to the fence and breathed in the almost tangible fragrance of sheep and half-chewed hay. I like to watch animals eating. Unlike too many people, our nonhuman kin nearly always look deeply satisfied, no matter the fare. The sheep nearest the fence eyed Jay as she—or perhaps it was a wether—chewed, and I would be hard pressed to say whether the look was thoughtful or indifferent.

  Something clanked behind me and the whole flock jumped away from the fence, snorting and baaing. Jay spun around; I flinched and turned. Evan stood just outside the door Jay had sniffed, not the big sliding door, but what looked to be the way into a storage room. He folded at the waist and stumbled away from the building. The bucket rocked back and forth on the narrow concrete apron. I crossed the roadway, my heart racing even before I looked into the room and wished I had not.

  Ray Turnbull hung from a crossbeam, a length of rope knotted around his neck.

  twelve

  If I never see another hanged body, I will still have seen one too many. I had seen several murder victims in the past year, but this was the worst. The last thing I wanted to do was enter that room, and I doubted there was any chance Ray was alive, but someone had to be sure. Evan was busy upchucking on the far side of the roadway, so someone was me. I put Jay in a down-stay and, without looking again at Ray’s horrifying face, I stepped over a beat-up boot and started to reach for his wrist but hesitated. Three of his fingers were twisted in crazy directions, and swollen. I was sure they were broken. I forced my own fingers to grip his wrist.

  Cold. No pulse.

  I spun around and staggered out of the room, pulled my phone out, leaned against the side of the building, and slid to the ground. Deep breath, Janet, deep breath. Jay scooched up close beside me and placed a paw over the crook of my elbow as if to say, “It’s okay, I’m right here.” My hand seemed to be soldered to my phone at first, but I finally managed to punch in 9-1-1. It took a couple of tries before the dispatcher deciphered the message. She offered to stay on the line with me until the first responders arrived, but I declined, and dialed again. I wanted a cop I knew. I called Homer Hutchinson.

  Once he recovered from the initial shock, Evan was so fidgety I thought my head might explode, so I sent him for coffee for both of us, preferably with a big shot of something very strong, early morning be damned. He was ten yards down the roadway when I called after him. “Evan, wait!”

  He stopped and turned around.

  “What about Bonnie?”

  “What?”

  “Ray’s dog. Bonnie. Where is she?”

  “Oh, God.” He looked like he might lose it again.

  I knew I should stay put to deflect lookie-loos and wait for the police or sheriff or whoever would have jurisdiction. But if Bonnie was missing, the sooner we started looking for her, the better. Ray might have left her in his truck or wherever he was staying, but that seemed unlikely. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Ray without the little black-and-white dog. If she witnessed Ray’s death, she might have run off, terrified. Then I remembered how she had barked at the fat guy in defense of her master, and my insides contracted. Whoever killed Ray might have hurt her—or worse. Especially if she had tried to protect him.

  “I’ll look.” Evan’s voice brought me back to the moment. “I’ll get your coffee first.” I told him to forget the coffee, and he took off.

  I called after him, “I’ll help as soon as the police are done with me.”

  Although I couldn’t see him, knowing that Ray was hanging dead a few yards from where I stood gave me the shakes. There was no one nearby, so I scurried through the big sliding door, put Jay in his crate with a cheese-stuffed chewy toy, and grabbed my folding chair. When I re-emerged from the building, the sound of approaching sirens took me back to the first murder investigation I’d been near, almost a year earlier. What happened to my quiet, boring life?

  And what makes you think this is murder? The more I thought about that, the more the answer slipped from my grasp. Ray wasn’t a big man, but he had lived a life of physical labor and he appeared to be healthy and strong. It was hard to imagine anyone bettering him without a struggle, and other than his boot on the floor, nothing in the storage room suggested a struggle, at least not in the brief look I’d had. I remembered thinking that Ray seemed angry on Saturday, although he was always a bit sullen. Then again, several people had seemed angry on Saturday—Summer certainly, and Evan, and the fat guy I’d seen with Ray.

  I got to my feet and paced back and forth across the roadway a few times, trying to force other images to replace my vision of Ray’s dead face. It was going to take a long time to bury that one, I knew.

  The next part of the morning was a blur of police officers, EMTs, the coroner, and I don’t know who else. It seemed as if dozens of people were milling around, although I was in such a state of semi-detachment that I can’t really say. About twenty minutes in, Hutch arrived and disappeared into the storage room. If you had told me a year earlier that I’d ever be happy to see Detective Hutchinson, I’d have said you were delusional. He had been one of the detectives assigned to the first murder investigation I was party to, and we had not hit it off at first. Not even close. I had been reminded in the interval that first impressions may be way off. Evan hadn’t come back, and one of the police officers went to find him. He was, after all, the first person to find Ray.

  I was in something of a daze when Hutchinson re-emerged from the storage room, calling back to whoever was in there, “Go ahead and take him down.” He stood in front of me, shoved his notebook into his breast pocket, and said, “That was rough.” I nodded. “Stay here, okay? I’ll be back.” And he walked away.

  The coroner, a tall, gray man with gray hair and a rumpled gray suit, stepped out of the room, followed by two EMTs guiding a gurney. Ray’s body was covered with a white sheet, but I still turned away as they loaded him into the ambulance. A police officer followed, a large plastic bag with writing on it dangling from one hand. It held a single cowboy boot. I have no idea how much time passed before I looked around and realized that everyone had cleared out and I was alone again.

  I told myself at first that I had to stay there, had to wait for Hutchinson, but a voice whispered, he’s a detective—he’ll find you. I walked around the end of the long building in time to see the ambulance turn out of the gate and onto the county road. A city police car and a sheriff’s department car were parked near the arena, and I could see men and women in uniforms talking to people in the spectator area. Some of the spectators were, of course, also competitors, and many had dogs by their sides. The general public was well represented, too, and all sorts of people, young and old, were exploring the vendor and information booths and watching the action.

  I caught sight of Evan talking to two men in dark suits behind one of the booths. As I watched, I wished I had my camera so that I could zoom in on them. The taller guy was so thin he seemed to swim in his jacket as he edged back and around, positioning himself slightly behind Evan. The heavier man was speaking, and I wondered whether the strain across his suit coat would pop the button that held the fabric over his belly. It was the same fat man I’d seen with Ray on Saturday. He raised his hand and poked Evan in the chest, and Evan stumbled back and raised hi
s hands, palms out, toward the man. Don’t watch, Janet, whispered my prissier angel. Too bad you don’t have your camera, said my inner troublemaker. As the men walked toward the parking area, Evan pulled his baseball cap off and threw it on the ground. He bent over, hands on his knees, and stood that way for a few seconds before he picked up his cap and worked his way along the backs of the booths, away from the parking area.

  thirteen

  I got Jay from his crate and set out to look for Bonnie. I called Giselle Swann, thinking she would help put the word out on the Internet, but had to leave a message. For once I wished I had a smartphone so I could post to social media myself. Who else could I count on? Sylvia Eckhorn, mother of twins and most energetic woman in the world, answered her phone from the cereal aisle of Costco. She promised to put the news on Facebook, Twitter, and a few other places. Someone somewhere would eventually see a black-and-white Sheltie on the loose. At least I hoped so.

  The morning events were delayed by a couple of hours, but aside from the ones trying to cop a view of the murder scene, people mostly went with the flow. Other than taping off the area around the room where Ray died and questioning me and Evan and a few other people, even the police saw the value in letting the day’s events continue. By early afternoon things were almost back on schedule, and between laps around the property, I got to watch a bit. It gave me a good chance to ask everyone I saw to be on the lookout for Bonnie. The parade of herding breeds was lovely, and the dogs got plenty of applause. The group was well represented, too—Shetland Sheepdogs, Australian Shepherds, Pembroke and Cardigan Welsh Corgis, Australian Cattle Dogs, Summer’s English Shepherd, and more. Border Collies, of course, and a Pyrenean Shepherd.