Forging Fire

by Lisa Preston

  I remembered his words You and yours ought to stay clear of there. Seemed a busybody bossy thing to say and I’d paid it no more mind, hadn’t put it together with the startled look he wore when his hands went over Charley.

  ***

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

  I still wasn’t sure about Melinda’s advice that I call the emergency number, since this didn’t really seem to be a life-and-death situa—okay, it was a death situation, but an emergency? No. Still, I followed my best friend’s directions, only to end up stumped too long by the first question.

  “This is the nine-one-one center. What is your emergency?”

  “I’m calling because I found a body.”

  We worked on getting through the part about how the dead person didn’t need CPR. I’ve never taken a CPR class, but this turned out to be a training opportunity, because the dispatcher was willing to teach me the technique right then, over the phone.

  “No, he’s real dead. I dug him up.”

  Why she asked if I had any weapons on me, I don’t know. It’s not like I killed anybody. And when she heard I had a little shovel, she told me to put it down, like I was some kind of crazed maniac.

  “Yeah, I’m not holding the shovel right this minute.”

  “That’s fine, ma’am. Don’t pick it up again. Keep your hands where the deputies can see them. Do you understand, ma’am?”

  Ma’am again. Well, the dispatcher was raised right, I can say that for her.

  We chitchatted until I could see a spread-out batch of official-looking white SUVs with door decals speeding toward the ranch, though I never heard sirens. I lost sight of them as the low hills, curves, and oak trees swallowed up the view of their approach.

  “I don’t know that the ranch folks are going to be pleased about all this. Maybe I didn’t think this through.” With no direct trail, bushwhacking and switchbacking up to this highest hill’s summit could take the police maybe an hour unless they took horses or four-wheelers or were amazing runners like Guy. “I’m going to ride down to the barn. Just make sure you tell them the dead guy is at the top of the hill. There’s a pile of rocks near the gravesite. They can’t miss him.”

  I didn’t want to be here anymore. While I talked to the police dispatcher, I untied Decker, sorted out the reins, and hauled myself into the saddle one-handed, and set the horse to trotting.

  The dispatcher didn’t want me to hang up. “Ma’am, you need to stay on the phone with me until the first deputy makes contact with you.”

  I explained how we’d lose the connection as I rode toward the responding police. Ending the call gave me a free hand to slap my thigh, urging Charley to come with me as Decker carried me down the hill. After a hundred feet, Charley tagged along in his panting way.

  ***

  As I rode Decker down the hill. I could see the line of silent police cars clearing the ranch’s front gate. I would have liked to lengthen my ride, enjoy the saddle’s leather creaking, maybe find a way onto the neighboring ranch and see just how far I could go, but I took a switchback toward the barn, ready to find out how it goes after you dig up a dead body on your host’s ranch.

  Chapter 12

  DECKER AMBLED ON A LOOSE-REINED WALK. In the distance, the first brown-uniformed, potbellied cop went toe-to-toe with Ivy, who seemed to be the only person on the ranch up at a semi-decent hour on a Sunday morning.

  The temperature wasn’t the only thing heating up. A second white police SUV rolled to a stop behind the first, the driver’s door opened, and another uniform spilled out, this one with a sandy ponytail.

  Ivy whirled right there on the flagstone entryway and bolted into her house, brushing off the pudgy cop. He hollered something at the woman with a ponytail. Ponytail’s back was to me, but as Pudgy pointed behind her, she turned and faced me.

  She pressed a button on her shoulder mic—the patch there read Tehama County Deputy Sheriff—and pointed up the hill I’d just descended. A third cop car spat out a uniformed fellow built like a whippet. Whippet started springing the route Decker and I’d descended. I looked left and right in this wake, girding myself for talking to the cops in about forty seconds. From the ranch’s main entry gate, another police vehicle approached in a cloud of dust.

  “Are you the caller?” Ponytail hollered toward me.

  “Yes, ma’am, I—”

  “We need to talk to you.”

  “Understandably.” I closed the distance with Decker at a trot. Remembering the cop traffic-stopping Ol’ Blue the day before, I realized the little card he’d given me was still in my right rear pocket. I fished it out and handed it to her. “I talked to a fellow yesterday who gave me this.”

  She glanced at the card, then said something into her shoulder mic in fast numbers and code that I didn’t understand. She waved at the pudgy male cop. In seconds, she confirmed who I was and what I’d told the dispatcher. The fourth car pulled up hard while she squawked something into her radio.

  Ponytail nodded at the next batch of cops, a twofer, rolling out of their vehicle some distance away from us. “We need to talk now, Ms. Dale. Get off the horse.”

  “Let me just put him in his stall.”

  As I rode Decker toward the barn, Ivy threw her front door open and saw the uniformed cops trying to stop me for a chat. She had other ideas.

  “Rainy! Don’t!”

  I nudged Decker to a trot, past the pudgy male cop, who told me to wait.

  “I already told the other cop I’m just going to put the horse away.”

  Decker stopped at the barn without any aid from me. I hate barn sourness, but in the horse’s defense, I had just trotted him the last hundred or so yards home. And this wasn’t a great free moment for me to school the horse on not stopping when he hadn’t been asked to stop. I hopped off and led him in with one rein. Charley was my ever-present shadow as the dark barn aisle swallowed us up.

  The male cop asked someone outside the barn, “Did you locate your identification, ma’am?”

  Belligerence boiled out of Ivy’s voice. “No, I refuse.”

  His reply was too calm for me to overhear. Footsteps crunched on the pea gravel beyond the barn. Ponytail joined Pudgy. I caught glimpses of them as I undid Decker’s cinches, swapped the bridle for a halter, and grabbed the nearest dandy brush.

  “You can’t be here,” Ivy screamed at the cops as she came into the barn aisle with them on her heels. “I have not given you my permission. I do not give you permission to be here.”

  To say that the woman cop was not impressed by Ivy’s tirade would not adequately describe the response.

  Ponytail yawned, with a big open mouth, full dental display, and lazy palm wave over her gaping choppers.

  As I unsaddled Decker in the aisle and thanked him for carrying me up the hill, I realized I’d left the ranch’s coke shovel on the summit. Ivy flounced down the barn aisle just in time for me to explain everything.

  I took a breath. “Ivy, remember how you said yesterday there was something you wanted to talk to me about? There was something I needed to talk to you about, too. This morning I—”

  “Something’s going on,” Ivy whispered, cutting me off with a finger held up near her lips. “The police say they got a tip. They’re here with no warrant. Something about exigent circumstances—”

  Footsteps crunched near the barn’s open entry.

  Ivy clapped her mouth shut and rolled her gaze hard to the side, but carefully didn’t look over her shoulder at the cop behind her.

  Ponytail stood just outside the barn, visible from the center aisle, hair swinging as she scanned every direction. Ivy’s posture changed, one hip leaning against the stall door, a sweet smile fixed across her expression behind a palm that covered a dainty little cough. She tickled Decker’s nose.

  “Gosh,” Ivy said, her voice loud and cheery, “you really meant it when you said you wanted to take an early morning ride.”

  I hadn’t worked Decker into too bad a s
weat, but a horse warm from exercise does add a nice aroma to the surroundings. But Ivy’s weird pretense, for whatever reason she had going, was unsettling. I don’t do fake, and it’s a thing I’d likely mess up anyways. Start with the smallest mistake, I decided.

  “I left your coke sho—”

  “Did Decker get enough exercise? Did you lope him?” Ivy’s frozen stare iced me good.

  Ponytail strolled into the barn, would be on us in a second. Ivy whirled.

  “I have not given you permission to be in here. Please leave immediately. I’ve called my attorney. That other officer said that you guys were going up the hill. So your emergency business is out there. Not in here. You can’t come in my barn or either house.”

  “I’ll step out, ma’am. Will you please join me and just give us some very basic information? We just need normal cooperation.”

  “Of course,” Ivy said. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Great. Perfect.” The cop walked back out to the daylight, ending in a sideways stance, forty feet away, barely outside the barn. Her pose might have been meant to look casual, but passed for ready to brawl, too.

  I felt like I was unraveling a knot I hadn’t been the only one to tangle, and I spoke slow, low, with something like apology in my tone. “Ivy, I—”

  She cut a hand between us and whispered. “I told Eliana to stay inside. I need to tell Oscar. I’ve called my attorney, but he hasn’t answered me yet. He’s on retainer. He should get back to me right away even though it’s Sunday.”

  If Ivy were a horse, she’d be one of those super flighty, show-bred Arabians with the overexaggerated, carved-face beauty, big eyes, and skittering panic-mode of the too beautiful. All reaction, no responsiveness.

  I took a mighty breath. “I’ve got to talk to you about—”

  “Go tell Oscar for me, will you? Tell him to stay inside. He’s not to come out at all. Tell him to stay in his bedroom and not answer the door. Tell them to lock the bunkhouse. And tell Gabe and Stuckey to come up. No, tell Gabe to stay inside with Oscar, and tell Stuckey to come up to the house.”

  “I’ll do that,” I agreed, “and then—”

  “And then come up to the house.”

  “Yep.”

  Ivy speed-walked toward her house, hollering something at the female cop, who asked her to wait for one minute.

  I closed my eyes, counted to five, kissed Decker’s nose, and popped him back into his stall.

  Horses are so much more reliable than people.

  ***

  On that stroll from the barn to the bunkhouse, I wondered if Ivy was watching me from the big house and why in the world she was acting the way she was. I missed the healthy scent of horse I’d been enjoying in the barn. I counted four police cars lined up on the driveway that separated the arena from the barn and houses, and I remembered the skinny cop speed-hiking for the summit. Two uniforms—the woman with the ponytail and the heavy fellow who’d started at Ivy’s front door—were talking by the police cars. Both watched me as I knocked on the bunkhouse door and waited until Gabe cracked it open.

  Bare-chested, barefoot, and stubble-jawed, jeans zipped but the button undone, Gabe rubbed his tousled hair while I passed on the message about Ivy wanting to see Stuckey and wanting him and Oscar to stay inside.

  Gabe ran a hand through his dark hair like his head was lonely for the cowboy hat. He spoke under his breath. “They have these semi-absentee ranch owners where you live? Blow in for the weekend to enjoy the big house and an arena ride and think they—”

  He shut up good and fast as Ivy waved from the flagstone entry of her house and hollered past the cop.

  “Rainy? Stuckey? Come on up to the house now. We have a lot of stuff to do today.”

  Gabe blinked, stepped out onto the porch, bare feet slapping the boards, and noticed the police cars.

  Another car—one of those fake undercover things that’s obviously a police car but a plain sedan with antennas—pulled up behind the nearest marked car.

  I said again, “Ivy wants you and Oscar to stay inside, and she wants Stuckey to come up to her house.” I was getting my first look inside. This was no bunkhouse, it was a real house, with closing bedroom doors—probably the original farmhouse. The front door opened into the living room, which had a big-screen TV and a full works entertainment center. Above the stone fireplace, a small rifle rested in an open single gun rack. Across the living room was a dinette in an open kitchen bigger than the one at home in Guy’s little house. Gabe and Stuckey and Oscar had a pretty sweet setup on the Beaumont ranch.

  “Wow,” I couldn’t help saying.

  “Yeah, wow,” Gabe said, frowning at the cops and cars behind me. “What’s going on?”

  The pudgy policeman got back out of the first marked car and pointed at me while saying something to a man in a plaid shirt, straight hair down to his collar, who’d just pulled up in the unmarked sedan. Then Pudgy raised his voice enough to call out to me. “You’re the caller, is that right, miss?”

  “Yessir, I was up on the hill and I used my cell phone.”

  He closed the distance between us. “And you talked to Officer Steinhammer?”

  Gabe stepped backward into the bunkhouse, pulling the door-knob as he went.

  I faced the cop. “Um, I talked to a police fellow yesterday, and he gave me that card I gave the other officer.”

  Hearing real well is one of my gifts, though with enough pounding of steel, the daily ringing will make me deaf before my time. At this point though, I can hear a loose nail in lots of horses’ hooves. I hadn’t heard the bunkhouse door latch shut. It was a safe bet Gabe was listening on the other side, and I didn’t blame him a bit. Must be quite something to wake up on a Sunday morning and there’s police crawling all over the ranch.

  “And that,” Pudgy said to me, “was regarding an assault, theft, looks like a joyriding-slash-kidnapping that started at the stock-yard sale grounds? Odd complaint.”

  “I don’t know what the police officer called it. I just told him what happened, which was that someone hit me on the head when I was at the Black Bluff bull sale yesterday morning, and when I woke up, my truck had been moved and some of my tools and my dog were missing. I found my dog. Anyway, he gave me that case number on the card.”

  Pudgy glassed over a bit as I jabbered but said, “We need to take an official statement from you, Miss Dale. Can you come over to my car?”

  Just as he asked me this, the woman officer hollered at him, and he gave a shout and nod in return, then said something I couldn’t catch into the mic on his shoulder, followed by a “Ten-four.” And he beckoned for me to follow along as he strode to his patrol car.

  “Right now, Miss Dale.”

  “Yessir,” I called.

  But a stride before I cleared the bunkhouse porch, the smacking sound of a closed fist punching flesh made me freeze.

  There’d been a time in my life when I was on the receiving end of that kind of treatment, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I turned and looked back. The bunkhouse’s front door was slightly ajar. The door’s glass offered a reflection from the living room window, thus displaying a sneaky view of what was going on inside.

  Stuckey lay sprawled across the bunkhouse living room. Gabe stood over him. Stuckey’s straw cowboy hat had been knocked off. I realized Gabe had sucker punched him.

  I stayed frozen, breath held, waiting for one of them to make enough noise to cover my presence on their front porch.

  Stuckey rolled onto his side, then his knees, grabbed his hat, and stood. His reflection wavered in that uncertain way of glass windows serving as mirrors.

  I managed one good step with my right foot and two breaths. Two wooden steps remained between me and getting off this porch, then fifty yards from the cop who was looking at me from his front seat.

  “Gabe! Hey! What’d you do that for?” The reflection of Stuckey rubbing his jaw glimmered ghostly before me.

  “You fucking idiot, what di
d you do this time?”

  “But Gabe, I—”

  “Shut up!” Gabe’s voice was low but boiling with fury. “I know it was you, Stuckey.”

  Chapter 13

  A VAN PULLED UP BEHIND THE little police parking lot that had formed up on the Beaumont ranch. Jumpsuited men and women took their time getting out. Their van’s door was plastered with a police shield on the door and three words across the side.

  Crime Scene Team.

  Someone speedy from the police department must have made it to the summit and confirmed what I’d told the dispatcher lady. None of the police were looking my way that second, so I crossed the flagstone and knocked on Ivy’s front door. Charley stuck to me like glue but still had that brief hesitation before crossing the threshold when Ivy let us inside.

  “I’ve called Milt and I called my lawyer, told him to get here ASAP. Where’s Stuckey?” Ivy shoved the door shut behind me and turned the deadbolt.

  “I reckon he’s coming. I did tell them you wanted Stuckey to come up to the house. Talked to Gabe, anyways.”

  Three knocks sounded, placed high and in the corner on the door, two quickies, the briefest pause then a third rap. Ivy opened it immediately and let Gabe inside. He’d gotten properly dressed in a white western shirt tucked into his jeans. As he came in, he removed his cowboy hat, slipped his right hand into his hip pocket, and told Ivy there were cops outside.

  Ivy paced a tight circle in the foyer and gave a brief smile as Charley curled himself in front of the western fireplace far from us and our tizzy. “That big guy said they got a tip that there’s been a body found on the ranch. I’ve called my attorney.” She was breathing fast and hard. “I think what we all have to do is act normal. Like we have nothing to fear. Because we don’t. We haven’t done anything wrong. We should just go about the day like it’s a normal working day. That will make the cops realize that everything’s fine here.”