I was afraid to open the stall where the calf was, for fear he’d push past me and escape, so I awkwardly climbed over and dropped down beside him. That startled him enough to jerk him to his feet. He backed away from me, into a far corner of the stall.
“Here … here,” I whispered.
What do you say to call a bull? There’s no equivalent for “Here, kitty, kitty.”
“Food,” I said, and held out the bottle.
He bunched himself farther into the corner.
It occurred to me that I was bigger than he was, and that thought injected me with enough false courage that I headed toward him.
He bolted from that corner to another.
“Milk!” I said. “Um, good!”
I moved toward him again. He started to bolt away again. I lunged, grabbed him around his smelly, furry neck, and stuck the goddamned bottle into his mouth. My, isn’t this fun, I thought. And just then, he got the idea. His muscles relaxed, his hindquarters dropped to the straw, then his forelegs buckled under, and he began to suck contentedly on the monster nipple.
I stroked the curly white hair on the top of his hard skull, between his ears.
Well, maybe it was fun, after all.
“Nice little bull,” I crooned. “Don’t let those nasty men get anywhere near you with a knife, baby.”
We stayed there happily, he and I, as he slurped and birds twittered in the rafters, until he’d emptied the bottle down to a layer of foam. When I pulled the bottle away, he tried to grab it back, but I stood up quickly. He gazed up at me with his lovely, sweet, brown eyes and licked his white lips with his big, pink, moist tongue.
I moved my left boot forward in the straw and felt a sudden, quick, heavy weight pass over it.
By the time I reacted and looked down, the snake that had slithered across the instep of my boot was gliding off into a hole at the back side of the stall. But what I could see of it was very dark, very long, and very thick.
The shriek that rose instinctively in my throat didn’t make it out of my mouth, but I felt its vibration through my body anyway. Don’t move. My imagination bit with snake’s fangs through the thick hide of my boots. I felt the imaginary venom streak up my veins to my heart. Don’t move. Wait. Wait. Wait. Only when I felt sure it was gone did I scramble over the walls of that stall, run out of the barn as if a stampede of snakes was slithering after me, and stumble over the gravel down to the corrals. The sheriff was gone, probably to investigate the pasture, but Carl was still there, closing a calf into a small pen. I forced myself to slow down to a walk.
“Carl?”
He turned my way, nodded his recognition.
“Carl, there’s a snake in the barn. It ran over my boot.”
He nodded again calmly. “What kind of snake?”
“Kind? Kind? A big kind!”
Slight would have mocked me for that, but Carl merely nodded again and finished locking the calf in the pen.
“I’ll take a look,” he said.
But he walked off toward the house first. When he emerged, he held a gun. He disappeared into the barn. It wasn’t long before I heard a shot, then a second one. The horses went crazy, whinnying and kicking at the boards of their stalls. I heard Carl yell at them, and they quieted down. Soon, he appeared in the doorway, with the gun in his right hand and trailing something long and dark from his left. Feeling relieved but queasy, I walked over to take a look.
He threw the thing at my feet.
I jumped back as if it had, indeed, bitten me.
“Timber rattler,” he said.
It took me an unbelieving moment to comprehend that the meaning of that phrase was “rattlesnake.” The creature at my feet had no head left, but I could certainly make out the “rattle,” which looked like horny rings tapering to a button on the end. The snake looked huge to me, maybe four feet long even without its head, and as thick as the calf of my leg.
He kicked at it, and it rolled closer to me.
“Awful smell,” I managed to say.
“Yeah, they do stink.”
“Thank you, Carl.”
He gave me a quizzical look, as if my gratitude puzzled him. Sure, I thought hysterically, no big deal, kill a rattlesnake every day. Why we did it all the time in Port Frederick, when we weren’t shooting coyotes and prairie dogs. My knees and ankles were so weak that the stiffness of my boots was the only thing standing between me and a dead faint. I had seen dead bodies before. I had seen blood, just that morning, in fact. I had watched herpetologists on public television extoll the “beauty” and “mythological significance” and the “environmental value” of snakes. But this dead rattler with its head shot off and its horrible tumors at the end of its tail was more than this town girl could take.
I bolted, like a spooked calf, for the house.
In the second-floor bathroom, I made a wet compress out of a washcloth and took it with me to the spare bedroom, and then I lay down on the bed and put the compress on my forehead and folded my hands over my stomach and closed my eyes.
You’re a pansy.
Right.
Somebody knocked on the closed bedroom door. I sat up so fast I made myself even dizzier. “Yes? Come in.”
Carl opened the door, poked his grizzled head in, and nodded at me. One of his big hands appeared and he laid an object on top of the dresser beside the door.
“Thought you might like to take home a souvenir.”
He retreated, closing the door behind him.
I didn’t have to get out of bed to guess what it was that lay there—the rattle from the dead snake. I leaned over the side of the bed and vomited into a metal wastebasket.
22
I woke up an hour later, surprised I had slept.
The house was quiet as only houses in the country can be. I judged the time to be near two o’clock, because the sun was peeking in the windows on the west side. By now Carl might be drunkenly dozing in the bunkhouse. Slight, well, who could know where Slight was at any moment; he could be downstairs reading one of those cattle magazines that littered the floor of the living room, or outside riding, in town, out of town, on the road …
I rolled over lazily onto my side.
The sour odor that greeted my nostrils forced me out of bed. I carried the metal wastebasket past the mutilation on the dresser and into the bathroom. I emptied the basket into the toilet, then washed it out under the spigot of the big white claw-footed bathtub. After that, I scrubbed the tub. Then I washed my face and my hair under the silver spigot in the deep porcelain sink, scrubbing until the fragrance of shampoo washed out the odor of rattlesnake and fear.
When I finished, my hair lay in a wet, tangled mass on my shoulders. I combed it out, braided it, then went looking for an office. Where there are headquarters there should be an office, I reasoned, and where there is an office there should be rubber bands for my wet hair.
I walked down the hall, past a bedroom: Slight’s. That was evident from yesterday’s shirt hung on a bedpost. I glanced into the bedroom across the hall. The beer can on the bedside table made it easy for me to identify this room as Carl’s. There was a photograph in a gold frame behind the beer can, and I stepped in far enough to get a look at it: It was the little cowboy again. Cat Benet’s nephew, I thought Slight had said, “Chad” or “Laddy,” something like that. I was touched by this unexpected sign of sentiment in Carl, although on second thought, I guessed it wasn’t so unexpected in a man who got drunk to the strains of “Rhapsody in Blue.”
I found the office at the end of the hall.
It, unlike the rest of the house, was furnished with contemporary pieces—the sort of expensive, nondescript desk, credenza, chair, and cabinet suite that can be purchased at any office-furnishings store. Still, modest as it was, it was the only place I’d seen thus far where Cat Benet had spent money on anything other than land, livestock, and machinery. He certainly hadn’t lavished it anywhere else in his home.
For a moment I felt like an intru
der, until it struck me that the business that was conducted in this office was my business now. Slight would have to send the books to our accountant, but why not get started now on my own? Invoices are invoices and ledgers are ledgers, I reasoned, no matter if the product in question is animate or inanimate. If I could read profit and loss statements for banks and museums, I could probably read one for a ranch.
In the long, top desk drawer, I located my rubber bands and used them to make pigtails.
Now with both hands free, I toured the contents of the office.
The bottom file drawer was stacked front to back with annual reports from American foundations, Port Frederick’s among them. Suddenly I realized that maybe here in this office I would finally come across the reason that Cat Benet had picked us, out of all the possible foundations in the world, to leave his ranch to.
Our own annual report for the previous year—which I had written—gave me no clues, so I started reading the others. I examined their comparative net worths, I studied the names on their boards of directors, I noted their geographic locations, I perused their statements of purpose, I noted how their funds were accrued, invested, and dispersed.
What I discovered was that most of them had larger net worths and more prominent boards of directors than ours. Several of them listed farm or ranch land among their assets, indicating they had some expertise in managing same. At least half of them dispensed their funds nationally, rather than being limited, as we were, to local disbursement. And of all of them, we were the one located farthest away from Hood County, Kansas. Given these choices, I would have picked any foundation but ours. But Cat Benet hadn’t done that. He had selected—after considerable research, if this pile of annual reports was any indication—the foundation that would know the least about his business and the one that was the farthest away from it.
Now why would an astute businessman do that?
Because he wasn’t so astute?
Or could it have been because he wanted ignorance? And he didn’t want interference? Now there were thoughts to give one pause, and I did pause, feeling stunned, as if somebody had figuratively whacked me on the head with the ol’ two-by-four. Because those ideas would imply he had something to hide, maybe something relating to the land or cattle, since those were the areas of our greatest ignorance. And from 1,500 miles away, we probably would never interfere much with the operation, relying instead on Slight and Carl.
It was a chilling thought: Was the Port Frederick Civic Foundation being made an unwitting accomplice to some sort of fraud?
I don’t like being used, or being made a fool.
I used the phone on the desk to call Roy Leland.
“If there is fraud,” Roy said, “the members of Benet’s families may hold the key, because they’re the ones he barred from the place.”
“That’s right. Maybe there’s something here that he didn’t want them to see, something that would arouse their suspicions.”
“You think it could be connected to his murder?”
“I think that’s quite possible, but what?”
“Ask ’em.”
“Who?”
“Whoever’s on that list, Jenny.”
“You want me to call them?”
“Go see ’em.”
“Roy, they’re spread all across the country.”
“They have airplanes out there, don’t they? I won’t allow the foundation to be made party to a fraud by that screwball Benet. The sooner you see these people the better, Jennifer.”
That’s what I was afraid he’d say.
“There may not be any fraud, Roy.”
“Well, there sure as hell is something screwy going on.”
I sighed to myself: Bon voyage, Geoffrey, my love.
“All right, Roy, but you’ll have to see that Geof gets the word when he docks in Provincetown tomorrow.”
“That’s no problem. Just tell me where he’ll be, and I’ll have somebody there.”
Trying not to sound martyred, I told him, “And Roy? Don’t ruin his trip entirely. Just tell him Benet died and I’m having to work on the bequest.”
Downstairs, a screen door slammed.
“Carl?” It was Slight, hollering in the front room. “Jenny? Children?” I smiled, in spite of myself. “Daddy’s home!”
I said, “Roy? I’ve got to go.”
“Any more dead cows?”
“Snakes.”
“What?”
“A rattlesnake slid over my boot, but Carl Everett shot it.”
“Your boot?”
“No, the snake.”
“Hell, save it, have some more boots made out of it.”
“What a good idea,” I said faintly. “Good-bye, Roy.”
As I hung up, I heard Slight clump into the kitchen, and soon he was making pan-rattling noises. I walked quietly back down the hall to my bedroom, retrieved Dwight Brady’s letter from my briefcase, then tiptoed back to the office and called him. While I waited for somebody to pick up the ringing phone in Kansas City, I twirled my chair around so that I could put my feet up on the windowsill behind the desk. When Dwight came to the phone, I told him I had a question about the will.
“I’m curious,” I said, “who are these people?”
“How were they related to Benet, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the ones in Illinois are Benet’s second wife and their children, who were adopted by her second husband. The ones in California are his third wife and her son by another husband. The two in Texas are Cat’s sister and nephew, and the one in New Mexico was his fourth wife. Of course, you know the Kansas City contingent.”
“He left something to all those people?”
“Yes, trusts, sizable ones.”
“Even to his ex-wives?”
“Yes.” Dwight’s dry tone suddenly took on the note of wonderment that we all seemed to get in our voices when discussing Benet’s marital history. “You might be interested to know, Jenny, that this is in addition to the settlements he made on his wives when they divorced him, as well as the child support payments he continued until all of his children were twenty-one, even including the two children who were adopted by their stepfather!” The dry tone returned. “Mr. Benet was a generous man.”
Or one with a guilty conscience?
As I thanked Dwight and hung up, I whirled the chair back around until it faced the door—where Slight Harlan stood, leaning casually against the frame, gazing in at me.
When I had caught my breath, I said, “I don’t get it, Slight.”
“What don’t you get, Jenny?”
“Who ever heard of leaving trust funds to your ex-wives? And yet Cat, who felt warmly enough about his ex-wives to leave them each a lot of money, barred them from this ranch.”
“Don’t you recognize a bribe when you hear one?”
I stared at him. “Bribe?”
“What are the terms for everybody getting their money?”
“That they won’t contest the will and they won’t come here.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Do you get it now?”
“He wanted us to have the ranch, and you guys to run it with absolutely no interference from anybody. Have I got it? Is that it?”
He nodded, smiled, and walked away.
I continued staring at the space he had vacated.
There it was again: no interference. And if he wanted ignorance, he was getting it from me, all right: I felt as dumb as a post.
23
Before going downstairs, I returned to my bedroom and steeled myself to pick up the snake’s rattle. It felt like it looked—horny and rough, and smelled bad enough to make me want to throw up again. When I gave it an experimental shake, I didn’t hear anything, but the movement released more of the awful odor. Holding the evil thing as far out from myself as possible, I carried it with me to the kitchen.
Slight looked at my pigtails this time and said, “Well, if it isn’t Little Mary Milkmaid.” He grinned.
“So how does your garden grow?”
“With silver bells and cockleshells.” I laid the “souvenir” on the kitchen counter, then wiped my hand off on my jeans. He raised his eyebrows at the ugly thing, then at me. “And rattles all in a row.”
“Heard about that,” he said.
“It was horrible. What’s this?” A glint of broken metal on the kitchen counter had caught my eye. When I got closer, I saw that it was the picture frame holding the photographs of Cat Benet’s nephew, only now the glass was broken—a couple of large wedges were missing—and the frame was split at two corners, so the whole thing was held together mostly by the backing. It looked to me as if Slight had been trying to slide the photographs out.
“Crotalus horridus horridus”
“What?” I jerked around, turning my back on the photographs.
“Latin name for it. A timber rattler’s one of the most aggressive creatures on the face of the earth. They’re as irritable as some women I’ve known, present company excluded, of course.” He picked up the rattle and gave it a shake. “Did you know you can’t make these things rattle? Can’t shake ’em fast enough.”
“I didn’t even hear it,” I said.
“They sound like somebody hissing through his teeth.”
“I’ll remember that.”
He frowned at the thing, then set it down.
“I’m leaving,” I told him. “Tonight, if we can get that pilot to come back for me. I’ve had enough of the hazards of the country, Slight. I’m going back to the city where it’s safe.”
I didn’t say which city.
“I’ll fly you,” he said.
“You’ll what?”
“I’m a pilot.” He squinted that amused smile at me. “Go get your things together, and I’ll fly you.”
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