Red-Hot Ranchman

by Victoria Pade

  “And if she doesn’t take it well and word gets out—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Blessings turnin’ to curses.”

  “Somethin’ I know all about,” John agreed.

  And on that note, neither of them seemed to have anything else to say.

  “CAN YOU CALL HER NOW?” Robbie asked for what seemed like the hundredth time.

  “Yes! I will call her now,” Paige finally agreed, exasperated with her son.

  Besides her regular chores, she had had to spend most of the day putting the whole house back together, room by room, in the wake of her son’s going through each one like the demolition derby, trying to find Buddy. Since the doll had still not been located, Robbie had switched to thinking maybe he’d left it at Julie’s house at some point.

  While Paige dialed her friend’s number, Robbie sat on the floor and pulled his new puppy onto his lap not two feet away, eager to hear his mother’s conversation.

  Julie picked up on the third ring. “You must be psychic. Just when I need to talk to you, you call,” the other woman said when she realized Paige was on the opposite end of the line.

  “I’d like to take credit for having ESP but—”

  “Ask her,” Robbie urged.

  Paige gave him a stern look. “Robbie gets the points for this call. He’s lost Buddy and we need to know if you’ve come across him anywhere.”

  “His doll, Buddy? No, I haven’t see him.”

  Paige shook her head at her son to let him know they’d struck out again.

  It wasn’t enough for the little boy. “Is she sure? What about in her car or somethin’?”

  “Julie hasn’t seen Buddy,” Paige said away from the mouthpiece.

  “Then the only place else I coulda lef’ ’im is in the woods.”

  “The woods?” Paige repeated, alarmed that her son had gone back there when she’d specifically told him not to. Which was probably why he’d chosen not to tell her until every other possibility had been exhausted. And at a time when she had Julie on the telephone and couldn’t vent the anger Robbie had to know she’d be feeling.

  But she did have Julie on the telephone, sounding upset, and Paige knew dealing with her son’s disobedience had to wait.

  Robbie headed for the back door with the puppy in tow and she stopped him in his tracks. “Don’t you go out of this house. We’ll talk about this when I get off the phone, and in the meantime you’re not getting out of my sight to go into those woods to look.”

  “Can we go when you get off?”

  “For two cents I’d just let that doll be lost for good to teach you a lesson about going off where you’re not supposed to.”

  “But can we?” he persisted.

  “Just stay put,” she said, returning her attention to her call. “I’m sorry, Jule. We’ve been in an uproar looking for this doll. Now tell me what’s up with you.”

  Julie didn’t hesitate. “It’s Burt,” she blurted out in lament. “He broke a date with me last night because he said he had to work and then I happened to go by his place later on and there was his car and that reporter’s black Trans Am in front of the house. I think he’s fooling around with her.”

  “That’s a pretty big leap, don’t you think? You know that reporter is keeping tabs on the burglaries through Burt. Her being in town last night was probably just a coincidence. Or maybe meeting with her was the work he had to do. Maybe he’s hoping some publicity on the burglaries will make someone come forward with information.”

  “It’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back, Paige. He’s been acting very strange lately besides this. He breaks more dates than he keeps. He leaves early when he does show up and while he’s with me he’s preoccupied. He hardly even knows I’m on the same planet let alone in the same room. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that just when he’s withdrawing from me he also happens to be seeing more and more of the lady reporter, do you?”

  “Is he seeing more and more of her?”

  “This is the third time the black Trans Am has been around this week.”

  “What does Burt say about it?”

  “That she’s just getting information to write a story. Well, how much information does she need is what I’d like to know. And why can’t she get it over the telephone? Why does she have to meet him face-to-face every time? And why at night? At his place?”

  It did sound fishy and Paige couldn’t help being reminded of her own past, of her ex-husband’s deceptions and of how easy it was to be hurt by a man who wasn’t honest and aboveboard.

  An image of John suddenly popped into her head and Paige had to force her thoughts back on her friend’s problem. “Have you tried talking to Burt about how you feel?”

  “I’ve made a few comments. He knows I’m unhappy with the way things have been between us. We even had a fight after his party the other night because he was all set to run out of here with the last of the guests when we had already planned for him to stay over and finish out the night with a private celebration of our own.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It isn’t good. And I know it, even though he keeps saying that I’m blowing things out of proportion. That he’s extra busy trying to find who’s responsible for these burglaries. That the reporter from Tinsdale is nothing to him. That he forgot he was supposed to stay over on his birthday and he’d just been tired that night and needed to get home to his own bed.”

  All possibilities.

  Or all lies.

  Maybe Paige was too suspicious. Maybe Julie was, too, after knowing what Paige had gone through in her own marriage. But Paige had ignored her own suspicions and given her ex-husband the benefit of the doubt numerous times even though things he’d said just hadn’t added up. Then when the truth had come out, it was too late to protect herself.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Jule,” Paige said sympathetically, her heart going out to her friend. “Try not to jump to any conclusions—this is Burt after all. We’ve known him since we were kids. He’s a good guy. And the break-ins are a big deal. They could very well be driving him nuts and making him act so oddly. But keep your eyes and ears open, too.” Basically what she was doing with John…

  “Mo-om, can’t you talk later?” Robbie groaned at that point, loudly enough for Julie to hear him.

  Paige waved her son off as her friend said, “Speak of the devil—Burt just drove up. I’d better get off.”

  “I have to go anyway. I need to return some business phone calls and then I’m going to end up searching the woods for Buddy,” she said with a pointed glance at her son. “But if you want to talk some more after Burt leaves, give me a ring or just come out here. You can have dinner with us, spend the night.”

  “I’m lousy company right now. Besides, maybe I can get Burt to stick around and hash this out. I’d rather he admit he has the hots for this reporter and end things with me than go through any more of this misery.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. I think I need it,” her friend answered dejectedly before they said their goodbyes and hung up.

  “Fine-ly,” Robbie breathed peevishly.

  “Don’t take that tone with me. You’re in trouble here. Didn’t I specifically tell you to stay out of those woods behind the barn? What were you doing back there?”

  “Playin’,” he mumbled, his chin nearly on his chest. He looked up at her from beneath his brows with an expression that was part contrition, part malcontent.

  “Are you sure you took Buddy with you? I don’t want to go traipsing through there on a wild-goose chase.”

  “We’re not chasin’ gooses. We’re lookin’ for Buddy.”

  Paige tried to rein in her temper and repeated her question. “Are you sure you took Buddy into the woods?”

  “Yep. I’m jus’ not sure if I took him out with me again or not. But he’s nowhere else and I can’t think of nowhere else he could be.”

  “Do you know exactly where in
the woods you were?”

  Robbie shrugged.

  “You don’t. So we’re going to have to search all through them.”

  Another shrug. Then he said pleadingly, “We got to find Buddy. While you make your other calls, want me to go see if John’ll come with us and help?”

  Great. Her six-year-old was trying to bribe his way out of trouble with the man next door. “No, I don’t want you to ask John to help.”

  Especially not after the phone call to Julie and the memories of Paige’s own past that it had stirred up. Memories that seemed like a warning to her to be careful.

  Of men in general.

  But of John in particular.

  PAIGE SPENT ABOUT AN HOUR on the phone, most of it working out details with a man in Tinsdale who had three horses he wanted to board.

  Robbie had stayed in the kitchen the whole time, but not five minutes had gone by without him letting her know that he was waiting impatiently. He sighed, he flopped backward onto the seat of one of the kitchen chairs, then hung across it on his belly like a pelt slung over a trapper’s saddle. He played with the puppy, told it in an aside loud enough for Paige to hear that he wanted to go find Buddy, gave it fresh water, then sailed a scrap of paper in the bowl, splashing water all over the floor.

  By the time Paige was finished, she wanted to throttle him. Instead, she just sighed and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  The woods were her least favorite portion of the property. It was a densely overgrown section that hadn’t been used either by her family or the previous owners. They had left it instead to separate the working part of the farm from the city-owned road. As a result, fir trees, a few oaks and even some aspens grew wild there, as did underbrush and weeds.

  In the autumn, for as long as she could remember, one or more of the trees had been chopped down for firewood, so little by little the woodlot was being pushed back, but there was still plenty of it left and Paige didn’t like to go there unless she had to.

  From a distance, the trees looked majestic and beautiful. But in the thick of them they blocked even the bright summer sunshine and cast an ominous feel over the area. It was silly, she knew, but the woods gave her the creeps as much now as they had when she was a kid.

  Unfortunately, Robbie loved the place and she had trouble keeping him from playing there. Ordinarily that wasn’t such a big deal, but since it seemed that whoever had poisoned the water trough and set fire to the barn had come in through the woods, she really didn’t want him anywhere near there.

  “Show me where you were playing,” she told her son once they’d headed into the thicket.

  “I was all over the place. I saw a rabbit an’ tracked it cuz I thought maybe I could snatch ‘im an’ keep ‘im.”

  “And you had Buddy with you the whole time?”

  “I think I put ‘im down so I could grab the rabbit if I got close enough.”

  “How far into the trees did you go?”

  “Pretty far. It was a fast rabbit.”

  “Great,” she muttered to herself. Then to her son she said, “Try to follow about the same path.”

  Robbie led the way, keeping his eyes on the ground, and Paige followed him, scanning a wider area as she went along. She didn’t like how they were heading farther and farther into the densest part of the woods. She just kept hoping they’d spot the doll before too long and get this ordeal over with.

  That didn’t happen until they’d gone nearly to the road, covered almost the whole area and taken a good hour to search. But finally, Robbie spotted Buddy’s redand-white baseball shirt.

  “I found ‘im! I found ‘im!” the little boy shouted, charging the last few feet to snatch Buddy up from the spot where he was propped against a gnarled root that curled up from beneath the ground.

  “Thank goodness,” Paige said, waiting for her son to rejoin her so they could make their way home.

  They’d barely turned around and taken a dozen steps when she heard the sound for the first time. A rustling in the foliage not far behind them.

  Robbie heard it, too, because he said, “What’s that?”

  “Probably a coyote,” Paige answered, even though she wasn’t so sure about that. Small animals were not as heavy-footed as this sounded and she’d never known anything large to lurk in these woods. But she didn’t want to let Robbie see just how uneasy she was.

  Instinct made her reach for his hand as she picked up the pace, glancing over her shoulder as she did. She couldn’t see anything except trees and underbrush, but she could still hear the sounds of something—or someone—else coming through them.

  And the faster she and Robbie moved, the faster the steps seemed to move, too.

  Then another sound joined the heavy, rustling steps. A snapping sound. But not just that of a twig breaking underfoot. A more defined noise, like a fair-size branch being broken by hand—snap…snap…snap—as if whoever was back there wanted her to know it.

  “I think somebody’s followin’ us,” Robbie whispered.

  The hair on the back of Paige’s neck stood up.

  “Is anybody there?” she called, hoping this whole thing wasn’t what it seemed, that someone would answer her and she’d feel silly for being afraid.

  But there was no response. Just that snapping sound and the heavy, rustling steps.

  Surely if they’d only happened across someone innocently in the woods that person wouldn’t have a reason not to show himself.

  So what did that mean? Paige asked herself as she kept on moving. Had someone been lying in wait in these woods? Or had she and Robbie accidentally met up with whoever was doing damage to her place when they were on their way to doing more?

  She was nearly jogging now, trying not to go too fast for Robbie’s short legs, pulling him along and praying to reach the open field before their stalker reached them.

  They’d almost made it when suddenly there was silence.

  Maybe whoever had been back there had given up, Paige thought. Or lost interest in whatever sick game they were playing.

  But no sooner had she let herself hope for the best when an arrow silently cut through the air close by her head and hit a tree not three feet in front of her.

  With a strength she didn’t know she had, Paige picked up Robbie and ran as fast as she could go, bursting into the field and making a beeline past her own barn, past John’s barn and straight to his back door where she beat on it, shouting for him.

  But the man who opened the door wasn’t John.

  It was someone who resembled him, who was every bit as tall and broad-shouldered, had hazel eyes instead of green, the same black-coffee-colored hair, but not the bushy mustache or the slight indentation in his chin.

  “Where’s John?” she demanded unceremoniously.

  The man nodded over her head, and Paige turned to see him coming out of the barn behind her, wiping his hands on a rag as he did.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Paige blurted out what had happened, and after John had made sure she and Robbie were unhurt and sent them into his house to lock themselves in, both men took off for the woods.

  “Was somebody really after us?” Robbie asked as Paige stood at John’s back door, her eyes trained on what she could see of the woods between her barn and John’s.

  “I don’t know,” she answered feebly, the full impact of their experience sinking in.

  “I think they were,” Robbie said. “I think we better call Burt an’ tell ‘im to bring his gun.”

  Paige hadn’t thought of the sheriff. She hadn’t thought of anything but getting to safe ground. But she was reluctant to take her son’s suggestion. She knew the sheriff was with Julie, hopefully hashing out the problems they were having, and she hated to interrupt that.

  While she was still debating what to do, she spotted John and the other man heading back, John carrying the arrow, and decided to hear what they’d found before doing anything.

  “Did you get who was after us?” Robbie asked the m
inute John and his companion came in.

  John shook his head. “We didn’t find a trace of anyone.”

  “Except for the arrow,” the other man added. “That’s something. Maybe it’ll help track down its owner.”

  “I think Mom should call Burt,” Robbie informed them.

  “Do you think it would help matters?” she asked, aiming the question at John. “Burt and Julie are in the middle of something important and I’d rather wait unless you think there might be something he can do.” She hated that her voice was weak and her hands were shaking.

  John seemed to notice it, as the two men agreed that calling Burt could wait. He pulled out a kitchen chair. “Sit down. I’ll get you a stiff shot of bourbon to calm your nerves.”

  “I’ll get it,” the other man offered.

  Paige took the chair, glancing at Robbie as she did. It was clear he was as shaken as she was. His arms had a viselike grip around Buddy, his eyes were wide with fear and his face was the color of ash.

  “Come here,” she invited, thinking to bolster him with a hug.

  If they’d been alone, she knew he wouldn’t have hesitated to climb into her lap. But they weren’t alone, and with a quick look at John, he stayed where he was and only muttered, “I’m not a baby.”

  The other man came back with the drink just then, and as he handed it to Paige, John said, “This is my brother, Dwight, by the way. Dwight, this is Paige Kenton and her boy, Robbie.”

  “I’m sorry to barge in when you have company. I just—”

  “Nothin’ to be sorry for,” John said, waving away that notion as he pulled out a chair for Dwight and one for himself.

  John sat and, ignoring the brave front Robbie was putting up, took the little boy onto his knee to comfort him anyway.

  “I shouldn’ta gone back there and lef’ Buddy,” Robbie said guiltily.

  “It’s over now,” Paige said gently, reassuring her son with a squeeze of his knee.

  “Did you see anything that would tell you who was following you?” John asked them.

  “Whoever it was kept out of sight. What I don’t understand is what someone was doing out there in the first place. Did you discover anything that could account for it?”