"Not until the pasture comes on better. May or June. Why?"
He leaned his bottom against the front fender of his truck and crossed his ankles and his arms, looking like he wanted to talk. "I think the horses are ready. They need more to do."
She leaned against the fender, too, and crossed her arms. "I've been thinking about getting a few head of buffalo instead of calves." She didn't know where that came from. She had thought about it, sure. But not since she had returned to Callister.
He tucked back his chin and blinked at her.
Uh-oh. He thought it was a dumb idea. Maybe it was, but she charged on, putting her private musing into words. "If I get calves, I'll have to buy seventy or eighty head, but I could get along with only about a dozen or so buffalo calves."
He looked down, like he was studying his boot toes. "You want the horses to work buffalo instead of cows?"
"The buffalo calves don't get trained to the routine as fast as cows do. You have to replace the cows every couple of months, but you can work the buffalo for a year maybe."
A laugh burst from John and he shook his head. "I've never seen a horse try to control a buffalo. They're tough animals. Aren't you afraid one of them will challenge the horse?"
"Some of the trainers down in Texas use them. As long as they're no older than yearlings, it doesn't seem to be a problem."
"Aren't they expensive?"
"These days, no more so than cows. I'm just thinking of my pasture. A dozen buffalo will eat a lot less than seven times that many calves."
"Good point."
She nodded. "I'm thinking it's what I should do. I don't need to spend any more money than I have to."
"You'd have to shore up your fences. Four barbed wires doesn't present much of a barrier to a determined buffalo."
"I know, but Paul can do that." She grinned. "He works for free."
John laughed his easy laugh and looked right at her. "Well, it'd be a new experience for me, cutting buffalo calves from a herd. New for these horses, too, I'll bet."
"They can handle it. They'll like the challenge."
He pushed back his hat with his thumb and showered her with a huge smile. "You're something else, Isabelle."
She smiled, too, unable to remember when she had enjoyed a man's company so much. "You are, too."
He glanced at his watch again.
"Gotta go, huh?"
"Not yet. You trying to run me off?"
"No. No, of course not."
"No hurry. I just need to get back soon enough to clean up before I go to the office. Gotta look like the sheriff, you know." He grinned. "I'm pretty low maintenance, so it doesn't take me long."
Low maintenance. She didn't know what he meant by that. "Right," she said, nodding and remembering what Paul had told her about him, which amounted to gossip more than fact.
A pregnant pause, with neither of them talking. "Speaking of being sheriff," she said at last, "I'm curious about something. Did Luke McRae really just up and hire you?"
John laughed. "That's what people think. It wasn't quite that simple. The commissioners were looking for a warm body to fill the seat 'til the election this fall. I was the only one they could find."
"I can't believe you quit ProRodeo to be the temporary sheriff in Callister."
"I'd already quit the rodeo before the sheriff's job came up. I was working at a feedlot in Nampa while I looked for one of those career jobs. I ran into Luke and his wife at a music concert in Boise and the rest, as they say, is history."
"But you said it was the commissioners who hired you."
"After the show, Luke, his wife and I went to dinner. We started talking about college. My degree's in business administration and Luke's wife's got an M.B.A. from one of those rich schools in Texas."
Isabelle had suspected he had gone to college, probably on a rodeo scholarship. What would he think if he knew how dumb she really was? The gap between them grew wider. Damn. She looked off and up at the mountain rising behind her house.
"Somewhere in the middle of that evening," he was saying, "from out of the blue, Luke asked me if I'd like to ramrod the sheriff's office for a few months." He looked down and brushed a stone with his boot. "We all had a hell of a laugh."
She giggled, more nervous now than ever. "I can imagine."
"Luke was serious. The commissioners really were looking to hire an interim sheriff. Callister had been without a lawman for over a month. It was a big problem, Luke said, because the sheriff's department has the biggest, most unwieldy budget in the county. The commissioners believed an administrator was more important than a lawman, since there's virtually no crime in Callister. Of course they're wrong about there being no crime, but I didn't know that at the time."
"There was a murder last year." She swung her gaze back to him, wanting to be a part of a conversation she felt was quickly rising over her head.
"A crime of passion. The first murder in this county since 1934. The commissioners think it was a fluke, not likely to happen again in another seventy years. I lived here all my life. I know almost everybody in the county, so I didn't disagree."
"So you said yes."
"I thought about it a while, but I couldn't find much reason to argue against it. I was living from payday to payday, working at a shitty job. My prospects for the future had me flummoxed. In the end, I said, 'why not?' I called Luke up and said I'd meet with the commissioners."
"Wow."
"After they told me what Jim Higgins did, it pissed me off. I guess it hit a soft spot in me. This is my hometown. All my family lives here. I want the public officials to be honest and responsible, whether I'm personally a resident or not."
"You're planning on leaving?"
"I have to when this is over. I have to work at something where I can make enough to support myself and my kids."
Isabelle didn't know why, but that reply left her unsettled.
He glanced at his watch again. "Guess I gotta go," he said and turned to his truck door.
"Thanks again for the flowers. I really like them."
He nodded again, opened the door and climbed inside. As he cranked the engine, he looked back at her, squinting in the sunlight. "I'll see you next Tuesday."
She nodded. He shifted into reverse and the truck inched backward.
"John?"
He stopped. She swallowed the lump that had grown in her throat. "I didn't go to college. I didn't finish high school."
His expression softened. "Isabelle, I don't care."
Chapter 11
Tuesday came with a change in the weather. Isabelle waved to John as he parked in what had become his spot. He slid out of his truck and ambled toward her, dressed in riding boots, a faded denim shirt and faded jeans. His silver belt buckle shone in the sun.
"Hurry," she called to him, pulling Polly's cinch tight. She had already saddled Trixie.
"What's up?"
"Blue skies. Warm day. Time for a change of pace."
She hadn't seen him or heard from him since Thursday. Five days. Isabelle, I don't care. The words had echoed in her head a hundred times since he said them last Thursday.
When he had phoned last night, saying he was taking the whole day off and would come out early, and with a forecast for temperatures in the low sixties, she had made a plan. As soon as she got Ava off to school, she snugged a bill cap on her head and went out to catch Trixie and Polly.
As John neared, she was struck by how much she had looked forward to his arrival this morning, how much she appreciated his laid-back dependability. The very thought delivered an unwelcome blow to her independence. She didn't want to want a man's company, didn't want to rely on a man for anything. She had relied on Billy and look what it had gotten her.
She handed him Trixie's reins, unable to ignore how his tan canvas jacket set off his eyes and fit in just the right place at his waist. He could be a model in a Western clothing ad.
He gave the deep chuckle she had grown to like too much
and rubbed a hand down Trixie's neck. "Sounds good. Where are we going?"
"I figured we'd ride up the mountain. The head of Stony Creek's up near the snow line. I don't know how far we'll get. With the thaw the creek's probably full, but I know a good place for a picnic." She patted a pouch behind Polly's saddle. "I brought us a lunch."
"Cool. I've got all day."
Astride Polly, she led the way, following an evident but seldom used trail that climbed from the back of Rondeau property onto national forest and on up Callister Mountain. They passed through a grove of small evergreens, then broke into a wild grass meadow clear of the trees. The morning sun warmed their faces and shoulders, at odds with the spring air's bite on her cheeks.
When the single-file trail played out, John came up and rode alongside her, softly encouraging Trixie. He was gentle with the horses and she appreciated that. Billy had been rough and impatient.
Mental sigh. She had to stop comparing John and Billy. The Bradshaws and the Bledsoes had never competed in the same arena. John might make flattering comments that made her feel special, but she knew an irrefutable fact. They came from two different worlds—-he from Callister's aristocracy, she from the riffraff.
She discarded that depressing thought and turned her attention to the surroundings she loved. A few hardy wildflowers and wild strawberries peeked out from the grass made wet by snowmelt. Small mounds of snow peppered with duff and pine needles still lay in shady spots and shrinking patches of the white stuff glistened like diamonds in the sun. They didn't talk, enjoying instead the call of a bird, the creak of saddle leather, the sounds of shod hoofs striking rock and the soft snorts as the horses cleared their nostrils. The smell of clean, rich earth and new season engulfed them.
They soon reached a rimrock where they stopped and looked down on the Rondeau and Karadimos spreads. "Art's sheep look like Ping-Pong balls against the hillside," Isabelle said, surprised she could enjoy the sight of something that had caused her so much angst.
"Pretty." John, too, gazed down on the valley greening up and opening itself to spring. The reins hung loose in his hand as he rested his forearm on the saddle horn. He looked right and proper sitting there astride Trixie.
"Paul and I used to hang out here," she told him. "We would pretend we were hiding from outlaws." She turned and looked up the mountain, toward a broad granite face, a place she hadn't been since childhood. "There used to be a miner's cabin up there. It was really old, maybe all the way back to the forty-niners. Paul would go up there and hole up for days when we were kids."
"Hunh," John said. "I didn't know there was a cabin up that high. Where is it?" He reached down and patted Trixie's neck.
"Just below the glacier at the foot of that big granite outcropping. Only accessible on foot or horseback. It's about a day's ride from here. The old thing was rickety, but it had a floor. I remember there was a wood cookstove in it. I used to wonder how they got it up there."
She turned John's way. His eyes were shaded by his hat brim, but she saw something in them that had been there several times now, an appraising look that penetrated her walls and sent a skittishness through her. She quickly switched her attention back to the mountainside. "I mean, it's uphill and steep. And the stove is made of cast iron."
"They did a lot back in those days that makes you wonder."
She didn't dare look him in the face again, didn't want to open a Pandora's box of emotions. Instead, she clucked at Polly and moved ahead, deliberately forcing her mind to a flat limestone ledge on the banks of Stony Creek, where they would lunch.
They rode through burgeoning potentilla and the shadows of lodgepole and bull pine, listening to the creek's susurrus amplify to a roar as they drew nearer its rushing water. After a while they reached the edge of the treeline and she spotted her destination. Bathed in sunshine, the rock ledge the size of a flatcar looked as she remembered it from years ago. She pulled up. "Ever been here before?"
"Nope. New territory to me."
"That big rock's where we're going."
After they dismounted, secured the horses and loosened the cinches, she grabbed the lunch. Along with food, she had brought one of those plaid wool blankets Texans took to football games when they thought the temperature might drop below seventy.
John helped her spread the blanket on the sun-warmed ledge, then she unpacked sandwiches made of tuna salad like her mother always made it, with walnuts and chunks of apple and celery. She had also brought potato chips, bottles of water and a few chocolate chip cookies.
Due to the spring runoff, Stony Creek was full bank to bank. A wall of white water crashed down the ancient glacier gouge that was a trickling brook in the summer. They sat down cross-legged, shoulder to shoulder so they could hear each other talk over the roar of the rushing water. John bit into a sandwich so hungrily she was sure he hadn't eaten breakfast.
"Mmm," he said as soon as he swallowed. "I don't know why you say you can't cook."
He had taken off his hat and the sun caught a few weather-bleached strands of his wavy brown hair. He didn't wear grease on his hair and she liked that.
"My mother was a wonderful cook. She tried to teach me, but I didn't learn. If you'll notice, there isn't much here that was actually cooked by me." She sent him a smile over her shoulder. "All I did was sort of throw it together. Ava baked the cookies from one of those frozen packages."
"Tastes good to me. I don't get much homemade food. If it's not fried potatoes, I'm lost when it comes to cooking."
Beside them, white water threw up a fine mist that showed a rainbow in the sunlight. She looked up at the cloudless blue sky, marred only by a white jet trail thousands of feet above them. The sense of peace she had always found in the mountains seeped into her. "You forget about things, you know? Until I got back here, I didn't realize how much this place was a part of me. Billy and I lived in four states, but the sky doesn't look like that in a one of them."
John looked up, too, squinting from the brightness. "It's God's country, all right. You never came back, not even to visit?"
"Just once. For Mom's funeral. We were in Scottsdale then. I flew into Boise on a red-eye, rented a car, drove up here for the funeral, then left town by dark."
"Why such a hurry?"
She shook her head. "Couldn't stand being here."
She felt the tiny pang that always came when she thought of her mother's death. "That was over ten years ago, before Ava was born. At that time I didn't think there was a chance in hell I'd ever come back. Art Karadimos wanted our land and I figured Pa would eventually lose it to him. I didn't give a thought to inheriting it." She looked at him again. "That's why Art hates us, you know. Because of the land."
"My mom told me. But Mom thinks he doesn't want it anymore."
Isabelle shrugged. "That could be true. The great equalizers caught up with him."
"Equalizers?"
"Age and circumstances beyond his control. He won't be able to bully me and Paul the way he did our parents."
"Scottsdale, huh? I've been there. Cool place. How'd you wind up in Texas?"
"Timing, I guess. We ran into one of those big-shot Texans at a horse show. He had multiple car dealerships and a pile of money. He also had a string of good horses, but they were poorly handled. He knew it. He made us an offer we couldn't refuse, so we trailed along behind him to Weatherford, which, I might add, is a heck of a long way from here."
Her mind struggled to find a comparison between her present surroundings and the flat Texas plains where she had lived for more than ten years. "There isn't a mountain in sight in Weatherford, Texas."
Though she had been home only a few weeks, Texas seemed like something she had imagined. She toyed with a potato chip. "We were too busy to think about Callister most of the time, anyway. We handled a lot of horses. Some of those Texas ranches own dozens of cutting horses." She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. "Weatherford's close to Fort Worth, the be-all, end-all of the cutting world. The NCHA head
quarters is there."
"NCHA. That stands for—"
"National Cutting Horse Association."
"I roped in that big rodeo in Fort Worth a few times. Won a little money."
"Did you? I always went to that rodeo. I really liked the animal exhibits. Some of the best-looking cattle I ever saw. I wish I'd run into you."
"I was married then."
His tone had a firmness to it. When she glanced up, he was looking directly at her. She smiled at what he must have assumed. "I only meant, John, that it would have been neat to see someone from home. I felt un-rooted in Texas. With my mountain country ways, I didn't fit into the horse society down there. Those cutting-horse people aren't like the rodeo folks, you know?"
"No, I guess I don't."
"The rodeo's an industry of cowboys. Salt-of-the-earth kind of people. The cutting-horse business is probably more like horse racing than rodeoing. It scares you how much money's involved. Most of the owners are bored and filthy rich. Some are real ranchers, but many don't know much about livestock in general. Some of the owners are celebrities who never got close to a horse until they owned one. Down there, owning a cutting horse is kind of the in thing."
John laughed. "You're right. You don't see too many of those types in rodeos."
"To many of them, the horses are nothing but objects to be used and discarded when they're no longer fun or when they no longer pay off. Assets, they call them, as if the horses aren't living, breathing things. I hated it, but leaving was a hard decision. When you work with animals that are so smart and have so much heart, you can't keep from falling in love with them. It sounds weird, but I kept thinking I was doing the horses a favor by staying around and standing between them and..."
Her voice trailed off as vignettes of her relationships with various horse owners flashed through her mind. The life she had left in Texas, among the rich and famous who indulged their every whim no matter how bizarre, was more than she could describe to someone who hadn't lived it.
"And what? You didn't finish."
"Oh, nothing. It was just another one of my silly ideas. Billy always said I had a head full of them."
The Love of a Lawman, The Callister Trilogy, Book 3 Page 12