by Lisa Preston
Her final shout made Charley duck his head. He hates shouting. I do, too.
“So, Oscar was hired and Vicente disappeared all around the time of …” I folded my arms across my belly, but didn’t state the likely truth, “um, Fire’s last breeding?”
Artificial insemination is common enough in horses, but not in dogs. Someone had pulled a fast one on this ranch and gotten away with it, even though one of the victims—Reese Trenton, the neighbor who’d lost part of his family’s ranch to the Hollywood hobby-ranching woman—had a pretty good inkling. And now I’d figured it out, too.
Ivy shook her head and gestured for understanding. “What are you talking about?”
“All around the same time,” I said. “And you weren’t around much? Oscar hired on? Vicente disappeared. And your stud dog Fire had his last breeding. Was supposed to anyways.”
“What does one have to do with anoth—”
I cut Ivy off with a sharp wave. “Reese Trenton has a small dog.”
Ivy’s eyes widened in exasperation and her voice pitched. “What does that have to do with—”
I stopped her with both hands raised, shifting eye contact from her to my loyal, fluffy gold wonder of a little old dog. Should have checked with Reese Trenton about who sired his dog, should have made him say it, but I ventured the truth aloud now. “Fire didn’t sire that last litter. Charley did.”
Ivy closed her eyes and got it a split second after me but voiced the long-hidden truth. “Because something happened to Fire. That’s why Flame was used to sire that last litter.”
I nodded. “And someone removed Charley’s ear flaps in case someone else was going to check the tattoos to verify who the dog was.”
Ivy strode across the great room, covered her eyes with both hands and doubled over on the couch. “That’s so sick.”
“So who managed that deception? I want to know who hurt my Charley.” Top guesses would include someone who worked for Ivy. I took a breath and walked her through Gabe’s smacking Stuckey this morning, his assertion that it had been Stuckey who hit me.
“Oh, this is awful.” Ivy thrust her hands on her hips. “Gabe and Stuckey ran the show when I wasn’t around here much. Well, mostly Gabe. Oscar does whatever they tell him to, feeding, cleaning. Everything with the flock. The hunts. Taking care of the horses and the machinery. There’s a lot to a ranch.”
Even a hobby ranch, I thought. I told her about finding my tools in the bunkhouse, and I pulled the track nippers from my hip pocket as I explained.
She planted her elbows on her knees and took it all in, gaze darting about. No slouch, Ivy. She made her mind move to the new information and came up with a new notion.
“Whoever hurt you and Flame is the one who hurt Vicente.”
My mouth gaped like a door blown open by a sudden stiff wind. No words came out as I took half a lap around the room. I considered the folder on her table, saw a calendar she’d marked with: LA, ranch, breeding, hay purchases, and all sorts of dates that she’d been piecing together since this morning when I’d exploded her world and she’d had to call in her attorney.
“I can come pretty close to figuring out the exact night I found Charley.” I pointed at her calendar. “I know the date I found my horse, up near Cowdry. I found Charley just before I drove into Oregon.”
That had been a dark night. I was on the interstate, pulled over, alone. And then I wasn’t, thanks to Charley befriending me.
The cuts to his ears had to have been a good month old by then, and I bet Vicente hadn’t been much more than a week or two dead when Charley had to come down the hill for food, where I found him.
Because Charley would not go to the ranch houses or barn for help by then. He understood the people at those places as dangerous.
Ivy was struggling with this as much as me. I thought about what she and her attorney had been struggling with half an hour before.
I asked, “Where’d you go? I saw you drive away with your attorney and saw you come back when I came back from … riding.” I thought about Ol’ Blue being dead. Needing to get my truck running should have been at the top of my list.
“The police made another request,” Ivy said, “and my attorney said we should go out to the gate and talk to them. Actually, it was a request from a civilian that the police were passing on to us. They’ve made a preliminary identification of the body. They do think it’s Vicente. And they’ve talked to the next of kin, his nephew, who was requesting to come to the site where the body was found. But we don’t want him on the ranch.”
Thinking about the dead man’s nephew made me picture him standing over me as I’d awoken the morning before, outside the ranch gate after getting pasted in the head, probably by Stuckey. And thinking about the younger Arriaga made me feel bad, though I avoided pondering on it too much. Feeling bad made me want to talk to Guy. I paused and sent him a text about how I loved him and missed him, even if it might not go through until I had better cell service. I couldn’t believe how long it had been since I’d heard his voice in real time. And how long since we’d been face-to-face, or better, lip to lip. Two years ago, I hadn’t loved anyone, not even myself. Now I’m clean, clear, and crazy in love with Guy Kittredge.
Friday. Friday morning, he’d made me coffee before he headed for work at the Cascade Kitchen, before I went out to shoe. I’d known I’d be ending the day at the Buckeye ranch, figured I’d shoe a couple of Donna Chevigny’s geldings. Sure hadn’t figured on making for the Black Bluff bull sale and running my dog on the stock in their famous arena the next morning. I frowned.
“My truck’s dead. Maybe I just need a jump. Can I use your house phone?”
She rose and accompanied me to Milt’s office, where the phone rang.
***
“Wow, Leonard, say that again.” Ivy punched the speakerphone button as she spoke. The attorney’s voice crackled into the room.
“As I said, my source is not at your local sheriff’s department, but up at the medical examiner’s office. We were wondering what the deceased died of? Well, I’m hearing that the X-rays don’t show any foreign bodies.”
“Foreign bodies.” Ivy repeated the term without comprehension.
The attorney’s voice blared over the speakerphone. “Bullets.”
Ivy picked up the phone, killing the speakerphone, and told her lawyer, “Then he wasn’t shot.”
That was too much of a deduction, I reckoned. No bullets inside a man might just mean the lead had passed through. The sight of the pistol on Reese Trenton’s hip came back to me. So did his stern words.
Ivy listened, interspersing the pauses with, “Right … right … okay, tomorrow.”
When she hung up, Ivy pushed the phone across the desk and gave it a grand wave. “All yours.”
Every punch of a number on the phone felt closer to a bend in the road.
“It’s me,” I told Guy, flushing with relief and apprehension to not get his danged voice mail. Now I’d have to talk in front of Ivy, who stood there looking right at me.
“Are you okay?” His voice rose unnaturally as he talked fast and loud, like someone was turning up his urgency knob. “Why haven’t you called? Where are you?”
“I’m with Ivy Beaumont, on her ranch outside of Black Bluff—”
“Please explain this to me,” Guy screeched. “Why is your mother so flipped out about you being at Milt Beaumont’s place? Melinda remembered the names you said, and I’ve been telling people that’s where you are. Who is Milt Beaumont?”
Jeez Louise, Ivy was going to overhear him. I cradled the phone tight to my ear. “I love you, too, Guy. Yep, miss you bad. Oh, tonight, huh? How about that.” Then I slipped my finger on the disconnect before Ivy could hear him scream the Beaumont name again. I talked away to the dead line, flicking Ivy occasional smiles. “Sure, Guy. No problem. Yeah.”
Ivy stood sideways to me, looking at Milt’s bookshelf as I made a show of hanging up the phone.
I gave my best she
epish smile. “He wants me to call my mom.”
“Oh, sure. Go ahead. I’m looking for a book.”
While Ivy dealt with her sudden urge for literary entertainment, or not, I thought about what to say and how to say it when I called my mama. It’s a shocker that she was excited about my exact location.
Calling my mama is something I don’t do often enough to have memorized her number. I used the directory in my cell to find her number before dialing.
“This is Dara Dale.” My mother’s voice was reserved, full of a snootiness I know she can fake, though I’ve never understood why she does it.
“It’s me. Rainy.”
“And you’re calling from Milt Beaumont’s! Honey I don’t want you anywhere near that man! Everybody in the industry knows what Milt Beaumont’s all about, and—”
As I hung up on my mama, Ivy sat down on the leather chair, pulled a drawer open, and fished through the USB cables and recording equipment stored inside. Had Ivy heard my mama or heard Guy?
Ivy snapped her fingers in my direction. “Now, everything’s out in the open.”
Chapter 21
IVY PLUGGED HER CAMERA INTO A laptop, then plugged the computer into Milt’s big wide-screen monitor. She powered up the camera, rousted the computer, and, with a few swipes and taps of her fingers on the computer, we were looking at her photographs of the hilltop crime scene. I hadn’t moved a muscle. Charley lay on my boot toes, making my feet, like him, fall asleep. The pins and needles started shooting up my legs. My breath hadn’t returned to normal.
“What, does your husband, uh,” I tried to make my voice sound super casual, like Ivy and I were just having a friendly, get-to-know-one-another conversation, and I hadn’t just hung up on Guy then my mama as they screamed about Milt Beaumont. “What does he do for a living?”
She flipped through her pictures on the giant computer monitor. “Milt? He’s an attorney.”
I chewed on that answer, imagining the bald man with the Lexus she’d been consulting all afternoon and who’d phoned with the inside scoop from the medical examiner’s officer minutes earlier. “If you’re married to an attorney, why’d you need that other fellow?”
“Leonard? Different kind of law practice. Milt handles financing and contracts in the industry.” Ivy waved at the red carpet photos on the office wall.
“The movies?”
“Right. Milt’s not a criminal attorney. Leonard is. It’s completely different work.”
Ivy had a criminal attorney on retainer. I chewed on that, wiggling my toes to stop the pins and needles. Charley rolled over and stretched, then tucked himself into a little fur ball for a snooze.
Ivy pinched her fingers together on the laptop and swiped them out, over and over, zooming in on one of her crime scene photos displayed hugely on Milt’s wide screen. “Oh, oh. Look at this.”
I didn’t want to see a picture of a corpse. I’d averted my eyes that morning when I’d dug him up, and again when she’d taken me up there on the four-wheeler.
But it was pictures of the evidence on the police tarp she’d enlarged. The coke shovel. A folding camp shovel. Was that second shovel what someone had used to bury Vicente? Next to the shovels was the dirty thermos the cops had found somewhere up there. I wondered when the coke shovel would be returned. It had nothing to do with the crime. Should I buy Ivy a new coke shovel for her forge if the police wouldn’t give back the one that I’d left up there?
I asked, “What do you think’s the deal with that thermos?”
Ivy cocked her head and swiped on with a shrug. “Sometimes, we sent hot meals up to Vicente. But look at this.”
The computer screen filled with a close-up of Vicente Arriaga’s state identification, library card, and a business card for a massage parlor called Pleasures in downtown Black Bluff. The card showed a silhouette caricature of a long-haired, high-heeled woman reaching out, which led me to believe it was not the kind of massage place where an athlete like Guy would go to get his leg muscles worked on.
“Pleasures massage parlor,” Ivy said, copying the phone number down on a piece of paper she grabbed from Milt’s desk. “Sounds sketchy. Let’s go.”
When Charley and I followed her out of Milt’s office, it was with the intention of getting my truck running, not playing junior detective in the poky little town of Black Bluff.
Eliana met us in the dining area. “Dinner ready.”
Ivy waved with a flourish. “Take some out to the men, if you don’t mind.”
“They not here.”
“Oh,” Ivy said, looking a tad miffed and jiggling her keys. “Well, it’s, um Oscar’s day off anyway. Gabe must have taken him to town. I need to talk to them, to everyone, when they get back.”
“You not eat now?” Eliana asked.
Ivy shook her head and said, “You go ahead and eat. Rainy and I are going to take a ride.”
It wasn’t my kind of ride. But I bet if I went to town with Ivy, got off this ranch where I was stranded, then I could get cell reception and perhaps the privacy to talk to Guy about everything.
***
Pleasures was a house. An old one, with dark blue siding, wrought iron security doors and windows, and a vague light inside.
“Come on, Rainy.” Ivy swung out of her Benz SUV, which she’d chosen over the Hummer and the sports car in her immaculate triple garage.
“Right behind you.” I turned to tell Charley, on the back seat, to wait.
From the car, I watched Ivy walk up the front yard’s stepping-stones to knock. I fished out my cell.
My dead cell.
I twisted my ponytail into a stick, muttered something unlady-like, and got my sweet self out of the Benz.
Ivy was already storming back. “I bet someone’s in there. I left a note, promised money for answers. I wonder if the police have already been here.”
This was all too much for me. What I needed was to be back at the ranch, jump-starting Ol’ Blue with this giant Benz. “If the guys are back when we get back, I’m going to confront them about Charley, ’cause it was probably one of them who hurt him a couple years ago.”
And then, I thought privately, I was out of there.
“I’m going to be all over them,” Ivy said. “And I’ve already caught Oscar lying.”
“About what?” I asked. “And Gabe says it was Stuckey who jumped me at the bull sale.”
Ivy exploded. “How could he do that? What was Stuckey thinking?” She was already driving, but we didn’t seem to be going straight home. We went deeper into Black Bluff, past gas stations and a grocery store that sat kitty-corner from a smaller, dumpier tienda that advertised a whole lot of peppers and money transfer services for its clientele. There was even an actual pay phone on the outside wall of La Tienda. I didn’t have enough punch in me to dial the thirty-seven digits that would be required to use the public phone for free, but I wanted to jump out of Ivy’s car, hit the zero, and tell an operator to get my almost-husband on the phone.
The library was down the main street, where cute stores like an ice cream parlor, a quilt shop and, oh yeah, Great Dogs specialty shop had frontage in between a couple of coffee shops.
“Good,” Ivy said, nodding with satisfaction. “Solar put a notice up.”
There was a handwritten sign on Great Dogs’ door that announced the store was temporarily closed. I took that to mean more than the fact that it was Sunday evening. The store was not going to open in the morning.
“Can I charge my phone?”
Ivy pulled out a mini-USB cable for me. So I had power, and a signal, but the same person sitting beside me who had made me uncomfortable earlier when Guy and my mama screamed the name Milt Beaumont.
I didn’t call. I texted my mama: Still in Black Bluff. On your way to OR, can you come get me if I can’t get my truck started?
Approaching the ranch gate though, it was a reunion. Gabe’s beater Bronco blared his horn at the white Jeep Compass. Sabino Arriaga moved to the middle of the
road, trying to flag us down after Gabe went around him. Ivy floored it, and we left Sabino behind as we roared through the ranch gate.
***
This was going to be my first time going toe-to-toe with Stuckey since I’d learned from Gabe that he was the one who knocked me out at the sale grounds. I’d sort of let that crime go when I realized that, long before he was my dog, someone had hurt Charley, but maybe that Saturday-morning crime mattered, too. Maybe Ivy was right—solving one thing solved everything. She figured the same person who hurt Charley had hurt Vicente. It kind of made sense. But as the Bronco pulled up between Ol’ Blue and the bunkhouse while Ivy cut sharper to the right to go into the giant garage attached to her giant house, I realized something else.
They’d deny it.
Whether all three of those men were in on it, or just one of them, all three would deny it. If only one of them did it and the other two didn’t even know, then all three would deny it and one would be lying. I explained it to Ivy as we pulled into her garage.
She shut the Benz off and looked at me as the garage door closed behind us.
“We have to be subtle,” she said. “And we have to stay on point.”
“I want to get my truck started.”
And I wanted to leave, but I chose not to say that part aloud.
“I’m sure the men will help you. Oscar’s staying in the bunkhouse tonight, like usual, now that the police thing has cooled off.”
She meant the immigration angle, not the, well, the murder problem.
Ivy added, “Please ask everybody to come up to the house after you do whatever with your truck. Don’t take too long.”
***
Standing out there in the dark with my truck was more than a little creepy, but I hupped Charley into the cab and popped Ol’ Blue’s hood like it was no big deal.
Then I screamed like a girl when someone touched my shoulder. Someone big.
“Stuckey, you scared me. My truck’s dead.”
His voice came out jokey. “Then you can’t leave.”
Gabe, behind him in the dark, spoke up. “I’ve got jumper cables.”