Forging Fire

by Lisa Preston

  “That’s fine, sir,” Ponytail called then shot the potbellied cop a look.

  “Yeah, I’ll go,” Pudgy mumbled to her, and followed Gabe to the barn.

  That hadn’t been Stuckey ducking for Ivy’s house, I decided. It was Oscar, wearing Gabe’s hat. I didn’t like the feeling of deception, of taking sides, of conflict, but I didn’t know where I stood in all this mess.

  ***

  “So, Rainy Dale.” Ponytail held a palm-sized recorder between us. “Can we sit down and talk? Maybe in here? Because your nine-one-one call this morning is a little unbelievable.”

  She stepped back into the bunkhouse. I hesitated only a second before following. Ivy had as good as invited me to stay there tonight, after all. I could be in the bunkhouse with the cop.

  Ponytail plugged an ear bud into her left ear and her radio. The irregular squawks of police radio communications stopped.

  She started her recorder and said some official-sounding stuff about how I was free to leave and that I was there of my own accord, then said, “I’d like to understand exactly what happened this morning that led to you calling nine-one-one.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, like I mentioned I figured out from the way my dog was behaving …” Again, we fleshed out what I’d quickly told the nine-one-one operator and the cops as they arrived on the scene when I’d been riding down from the hill, what, a half hour ago? I told again how it came to pass that I’d dug where I had and unearthed the body, just like I’d explained it to Ivy a few minutes ago, a hundred feet away.

  My cop rolled her eyes, pointedly looking at Charley curled up beside my leg. “Should we dig up the floor where he’s laying now?”

  “Um, no I don’t reckon so.”

  “I have a pit bull,” Ponytail said. “Sometimes he lays down in the same spot in my backyard. I’ve never thought that maybe I should dig up the ground underneath him just in case there’s a corpse where he lies down.”

  “Well, a pittie isn’t a shepherd, is all I can say. If you’re not into sheepherding, then you’ve never seen that painting of The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner.”

  She exhaled, inhaled, then blew out a long time again. “You’re serious? You figured out that this dog of yours, that you found two years ago off the interstate, used to belong to a Vicente Arriaga who worked on this ranch, and the dog lay down yesterday a couple of times on one spot at the top of that big hill, so you decided that his previous owner was buried there and today you dug him up?”

  I nodded, whole and honest. “That’s how it seemed to me.”

  Her gaze attained a canny glint. “Suicide, you think?”

  “I guess I don’t … well, I mean, someone must have buried him for him to be buried.”

  Her expression dulled as I finally articulated the point, apparently trying her patience. “How do you think he came to be buried up there?”

  “I have no information or knowledge about that,” I said. “None.”

  “Are you willing to sit down with our detective and also take a polygraph on your story?”

  “Sure,” I told her. “I’m not lying.”

  “What can you tell me about drugs here?”

  Whoa, I thought. “Drugs?”

  “As in illegal, recreational drugs.”

  I’m not brilliant or experienced on such matters, and I said as much with, “I don’t know anything.” But something pestered at the back of my brain. What had I missed?

  “It’s okay to tell us what you suspect,” Ponytail said. “This is between you and me right now.”

  “I don’t know anything about drugs. Why are you asking me that?”

  “Oh, you know,” my ponytailed chatty new friend continued, “you had a traffic stop yesterday, talked to a CHiP. We share information. He was aware of a couple other interesting issues.”

  “Like, drugs?” I asked, because I am so very quick on the uptake if it has nada to do with horses.

  Ponytail gave me a bland expression. “You told the CHiP that you’d been assaulted and kidnapped, and he asked you about your work here. He was aware of a missing persons case, too.” She held out her notepad with a case number written on it. When she cocked her head, I realized she was listening to something on her earpiece. The radio on her hip no longer blurted intermittent messages.

  I asked, “Missing person?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?” I cleared my throat.

  “Missing person ’til the body’s found. The fact is, there’s a man named Sabino Arriaga who comes around asking about a missing person case and where it’s leading. You’re the first new witness or info in over a year, and you dug up a dead man!”

  Assuming that it was Vicente Arriaga I’d unburied, I didn’t envy the police going to talk to the nephew of the dead man. I shook my head. “I’m no witness to something that happened here a year ago.”

  “More than.”

  “Okay, more than a year ago. I got here Saturday morning.”

  “And what are you going to do now?” Ponytail asked. “Where will you be when we need to contact you?”

  “I’d like to go home as soon as …” The sound of a four-wheeler and at least one vehicle coming and going distracted me. “Soon as I do a couple-three shoeings.”

  “Shoeings?”

  “Horseshoeing. Ivy’s been more than kind to me. I offered to get her horses caught up on shoeing before I hit the road.”

  “Our detective will need to talk to you. He’ll have some preliminary autopsy results by tomorrow. And our polygrapher will be working then. This isn’t like the old days when cops would tell you not to leave town, but with you being from out of state, you can see how inconvenient it will be to reinterview you if you’re on the road or up in Oregon. And it’s a little incredible, this digging up a body where your dog lays down.”

  “He used to be Vicente Arriaga’s dog.”

  “So you said.” She made a friendly, accommodating face, like we were buddies and surely I’d understand the pickle the law was in.

  I did understand.

  She concluded our interview with nothing much settled, and we went to the front door of the bunkhouse together, the three of us, Charley panting in anticipation of what might come next as we stood on the porch and pulled the door shut after us.

  “Can we count on you?” Ponytail asked, handing me a card. “I’m Deputy Steinhammer. This is my cell number. And I wrote Detective Orvell’s number on it, too. He’s the homicide investigator. If it comes to it, can we count on you?”

  Her quiet question shook me. “What do you mean?”

  “I think you know.” Ponytail cocked her head and studied my dog, then looked me square in the eye. “And by the way, Ms. Dale, I understand about the mourning.”

  “About this morning?” I said.

  She eyed me, steady and solemn as a wolf. “There was a guy from Black Bluff who was killed in Afghanistan. And the last one at his funeral, the picture they carried in the paper, was his German Shepherd downed, alone, in front of that flag-draped coffin.”

  There were other kinds of shepherds, I reflected, than the little herders I love.

  And I realized one thing I’d missed before. Billowing in my brain was the memory of yesterday’s traffic cop and his pointy-eared, black-faced dog hesitating in Ol’ Blue’s cab. I remembered how the police dog paused right where a package from this ranch had been set in my cab.

  Chapter 15

  DRUGS ON THE RANCH WERE NOT my business, but getting cross-threaded with the police isn’t my thing, either. If I allowed myself to speculate, I’d wonder who really ran things on the Beaumont ranch and how the real money was made. When Ivy had wanted a package delivered, Gabe had said something about Eliana doing it, then Ivy had set the package in my truck. Ivy owned the place, but was she in charge?

  A couple of shoeings, I said to myself. And then I’m clearing out.

  Outside, the unmarked police car, now unoccupied, was still there, along with two marked police cars
—one with Pudgy sitting behind the wheel, writing away—the crime scene van, and the marked SUV that had towed the little trailer. Where was Ponytail? I went up to the big house. Stuckey let me in just as Gabe and Ivy were facing off, both flushed beetroot-red.

  She paced within a stride, energy seething out her pert body, cell phone in one hand, cordless house phone in the other. One phone rang. She lifted the cordless to her ear. “It’s about time.”

  Gabe looked away. With his face safely turned so Ivy couldn’t see, he rolled his eyes.

  “No!” Ivy snapped into the phone. “You’ve got to come. They have a warrant now. A search warrant. What?” She paused and listened for two or ten seconds. “No. They said up on the hill. Right. Not in any buildings. Not at this time, they said.”

  I kind of hate standing around while someone has a loud phone conversation. From Gabe and Stuckey’s foot shifting, I reckoned I wasn’t the only one who was not at their favorite pastime.

  “Okay. Okay,” Ivy said. “That’s what I’ll do. But you get up here right away.” She slammed the cordless phone down, pocketed the cell, and looked around her great room.

  There was no sign of Oscar or Eliana, but I could see shut bedroom doors down that hallway. There was no scent of breakfast. I bet on a regular Sunday without police crawling around outside, bacon would have been sizzling. I could have eaten a plateful.

  “Stay,” Ivy said. “You’ve all got to stay with me.”

  Stuckey looked at Gabe, who looked at the ceiling.

  “And you could hang out and heal,” Ivy said to me. “You’re concussed, after all.”

  Stuckey shifted away, his head bowed. I figured he’d have been fine with sleeping in or leading a pig hunt or counting sheep while awake, but this day was too much for the likes of him. And me.

  “Look,” Gabe said, “it’s my day off. I already did the feeding. The delivery guys will stack the hay. Duffy’s coming out. There’s no hunt. It’s Sunday. Everything’s taken care of.”

  “I have to go up the hill,” Ivy said. “We’ll take one of the four-wheelers. I don’t want to go up there alone.”

  Gabe faced her, calm and stillness in his face, but determination, too. “Then make Stuckey go.”

  “Gabe,” Stuckey protested, his whine almost desperate.

  Before, I’d reckoned they wanted the cops gone so that Eliana and Oscar didn’t get deported, but now I wondered a lot of things. Still, it wasn’t my place to make their situations worse.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll stay,” I said, “but I did promise you a couple of shoeings—”

  “Yes!” Ivy seized on this. “Stuckey, you want to shoe. Stick around here today, okay?”

  He looked at Gabe, who pulled out car keys from a front jeans pocket.

  I told Ivy, “The police want me to stick around for a bit anyway—”

  “I want you to do something for me,” she said. “I want you to come up there with me. My attorney told me to take pictures of everything. I want to see what you saw up on top of the big hill.”

  Going back up to the body did not sound like fun to me. I didn’t want to be there.

  Ivy read my reluctance. “Come on. After all I’ve done for you, I thought you’d help me. Please? Come with me. I’m kind of scared. This is upsetting, and I don’t quite understand what’s going on. I don’t know who I can trust. I can trust you, can’t I?”

  She could. I’m as trustworthy as a shepherd. I wasn’t sure I had an iron in this fire, so to speak, but I felt a loyalty to Ivy that I couldn’t explain. When she grabbed a camera, I thought I understood a little bit. Anyone would feel intimidated standing up to a bunch of cops with a creepy crime scene on her own property. Taking pictures made sense. So did having some company, and I could give that much to Ivy.

  “I’ll go,” I agreed, hating it.

  ***

  Ivy drove a four-wheeler like she hated the ground she pointed the tires at. She sat bolt upright to prevent the huge long-lensed camera hanging from her neck from smacking the four-wheeler’s gas tank. My right arm was wrapped around Charley, who was hugging my lap, and I’d scooted back from the long seat onto the cargo rack so we wouldn’t be crowding Ivy. My left fist ached from clutching the rack so tight, but it was necessary to keep Charley and me aboard given Ivy’s speed and the way she hit bumps. The tires regularly went airborne.

  ***

  Oh, the police had done a lot more excavating than me. They’d been busy.

  Yellow crime scene tape was strung up in a giant square. The police four-wheeler was there, along with Ponytail, three jump-suited specialists and the man in the plaid shirt. There was a tarp on the ground with various objects laid out, numbered with little cards, but I couldn’t see those things well, because they were behind Ponytail and I was looking over Ivy’s speeding shoulder.

  Ponytail raised both hands at Ivy as we approached, blocking our way.

  Ivy didn’t slow down.

  Ponytail didn’t move.

  Behind that uniformed deputy, Plaid Shirt and one of the jump-suits looked up.

  At the last second, Ivy veered and braked hard, raising an instant dust storm. Charley squirmed in my arms, wanting off the blasted machine before it fully stopped. As the dust settled, I released him.

  “Keep the dog away,” one of the jumpsuited men ordered me.

  “No problem.” As I dismounted the four-wheeler, Charley glued himself to my leg.

  “Is that the dog?” one of the jumpsuits asked Plaid Shirt.

  Ponytail said, “Yeah, it is.”

  I stared all around as the jumpsuit gave Charley a second look.

  There was a body bag, empty, but rolled out. I had to avert my eyes from looking at the exposed corpse. I’d never be able to un-see it if I caught a glimpse, and I didn’t want the memory.

  The cops’ metal detector and the portable X-ray unit had been worked, judging from the dust on the units.

  It seemed like forever since I’d ridden up here on Decker, but it was still the same morning.

  Ivy leaned into me and whispered, “Stay with me. Don’t talk to these people.”

  I didn’t respond loudly, but it wasn’t a whisper, either. “Ivy, I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  She was already stepping forward, raising her camera.

  Right away, the cops didn’t like it when Ivy marched to the edge of the yellow crime scene tape with her big fancy long lens. She held it in front of her impressive chest with both hands and started shooting, rapid-fire, twisting the zoom feature.

  One of the jumpsuits reached for a light blanket and covered the dead man’s body, saying as he did so, “No next of kin wants civilians to photograph their dead loved ones.”

  I was glad that Vicente—assuming that was Vicente Arriaga—was covered up. It was hard to keep my eyes averted.

  Ivy said, “It’s my ranch. I have every right in the world to take pictures. You can’t stop me. I checked with my attorney.” She clicked away while she spoke, working two-handed, her left twisting the zoom lens, the right trigger finger zapping countless volleys of shots with each click.

  The plainclothes cop in the plaid shirt waved to the jumpsuited men, and they began to ignore her photo-taking.

  This was so not my world. I wanted to be home, I wanted to talk to Guy about all this weirdness. He has a terrific mind and all kinds of college learning on why people do the things they do. I didn’t warm a chair four years at a university or senior year of high school. Guy is the jelly to my peanut butter.

  And on this summit, there should be cell reception. I could talk to Guy on my phone. I palmed the cell phone in my jeans pocket. Like anyone else with a decent set of manners, I paused. Yakking to my fella did not seem like a respectful way to stand around in front of a dead man. I shot a guilty look all around and pulled my hand out of that pocket, empty. As much as I wanted to talk to Guy, it would have to wait. I stepped back to the four-wheeler and stood beside Charley, who planted on his butt.


  The tarp between Ivy and Plaid Shirt held the coke shovel I’d tied to Decker’s saddle first thing this morning. I pointed at it. “That’s what I brought up here. It’s what I used to dig.”

  “So I gathered,” Plaid Shirt said. “You and I are going to have a follow-up conversation about what you said to Deputy Steinhammer.”

  “Who?” I’d remember names if they had anything to do with horses.

  He pointed to Ponytail. I nodded. Some kind of look passed between me and her, then her and him. She straightened her green clip-on tie.

  Ivy clicked away, photographing everything. I stared at the other items on the tarp. There was another shovel, this one an Army-green folding fire shovel. There was a small widemouthed thermos with a weathered red plaid exterior. And they’d opened the dead man’s wallet, carefully spreading out the contents.

  He’d had seventeen dollars—a ten, a five, and two singles—and a few wallet-sized cards that I couldn’t see well enough to know if they were credit cards or what.

  “How long,” Ivy asked, her voice subdued, “are you guys going to be here?”

  “We don’t rush things,” one of the jumpsuits said.

  Ivy covered her eyes with one hand and turned away, taking in one or two shuddering breaths. “I’m sorry about the way I reacted when you first got here. I was really shocked, that’s all.”

  “That’s understandable,” Plaid Shirt said, his voice so even, so modulated that I wondered what else he meant to convey.

  ***

  The post-photo-session four-wheeler ride down from the scene was a lot less aggressive than the drive up the hill had been. Seeing a real dead man on the ranch seemed to have changed something in Ivy. She turned and glanced at me now and again, her blonde hair blowing in my face. No, she didn’t risk getting helmet-head, went for the wind-tousled look instead. There’d been something gutsy in her when she rode up. Maybe now she understood that the cops weren’t the bad guys in this thing.

  Halfway down the big hill, she slowed enough on a switchback that we could hear each other over the engine without all-out shouting.