by Kym Roberts
I called Scarlet and got her voicemail. I tried calling the beauty salon. Joellen told me Scarlet had taken the day off, but that she was okay.
What that meant, I had no idea.
We had a steady flow of customers and sold out of the latest releases by Fern Michaels and Joanne Fluke, along with Nancy Bush’s latest romantic suspense that I’d been wanting to read. I made a note to order more and the front door swished opened with the buzzer going off as our new customer crossed the threshold. He didn’t look as bad as I would have expected, but he was walking bowlegged and his left arm was in a sling. He grinned as he approached the counter.
“I guess you’re not competing today?”
Sly Alexander shook his head, a wistful look in his eyes. “I’m afraid I’ve been sidelined for quite some time.”
“Are you okay?”
“My rotator cuff is torn. I’ll be heading home to my orthopedic surgeon at the end of the week.”
“I’m sorry.” It seemed like such a lame thing to say to a man who lived for the rodeo, yet at the same time I couldn’t help but think his mom would be happy as all get out that Sly was okay and wouldn’t be riding any more this week.
“It’s all right. It’s not the first time I’ve been sidelined, although it might be my last.”
“It’s that bad?”
Sly laughed. “No, I’m that old.”
He didn’t look that old, maybe a few years older than Cade, but I imagined the most dangerous sport in the world had to be made for a young body.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ve already been involved in developing a team, so I plan to take a bigger role in that sooner than I’d originally planned.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“It’s the best thing. My wife is expecting.”
“You’re married?” Not that he acted single, he just didn’t act married. Or maybe I didn’t know what married acted like.
“For the last eighteen months to the most beautiful woman in the world.” His happiness was infectious and almost made me believe love was real.
“Does she know about your arm?”
“Are you kidding? She was watching on TV and was calling the guys before I even left the arena. She wouldn’t get off the phone until the doctor told her I had to hang up while I went to X-ray. She was not happy, but Taylor calmed her down.”
I couldn’t help my reaction to Taylor’s name. I’m not sure how I reacted but Sly saw it and grinned again. “Not you too? I would think the Princess of Hazel Rock had enough dates to never worry about another woman coming to town.”
Dates? Was he serious? I couldn’t tell, and didn’t want to think about it when I had more pressing questions to talk about, like how much money the rodeo had made in the past.
“Did you hear there was a record donation by the CBR last night?”
“No kidding. Well, that’s something to be proud of.”
“Yeah, it was ten times the normal take for the opening day.”
His eyes rounded. “Is that what Taylor said?”
“No, that’s what the mayor said when she gave him the proceeds.”
“Wow, maybe there was some truth to what Wyatt used to say.”
“What did he say?”
Sly looked around at the empty store, making sure our conversation wasn’t heard. “Erik’s dead, God rest his soul, but he was a hard man to like. He liked to stir up trouble and stir it up good. When Wyatt and I first started out, we used to room together. We were rivals in everything we did and everything we said. We played hard, and fought harder. We were the stereotypical young and dumb cowboys traveling on the circuit stirring things up. But there was no bad blood between us the way Erik tells it, and it used to really bother Wyatt. The two of them would butt heads more than two bulls in a pasture of cows. And Wyatt always got angry when we came to Hazel Rock, said we were riding for the worthiest cause out there and he thought Erik was stealing the proceeds. When Wyatt disappeared, Erik was the first to speak ill of him.”
I wasn’t sure if that bode well for Dalton or not, but the fact that Wyatt thought Erik was stealing from the CBR’s donations to The Cowboy Ranch went along with the news of the extra-large donation last night. “I guess Erik not being here on opening day, and the rodeo making more money than anyone thought imaginable, might not be a coincidence.”
He scratched his jaw. “It is pushing the odds of possibility a little too much for my book.”
“Yes, it really is, isn’t it?”
My father walked out of the back room and greeted Sly. “I heard you were banged up pretty good. Are you doing okay?”
“I’m good, Mr. Warren. Are you glad to finally have your Princess back? You’ve been telling me about her for years, and I didn’t think I’d ever get to meet her.”
My dad’s gaze wandered around the store and looked at every nook and cranny, but never met mine. If he had, my emotions may have spilled over. He’d talked about me to the riders; it was a very telling story of how much he loved me and missed me while I was gone.
Dad cleared his throat and wiped his index finger along his bottom lip. “Have you come to pick up the book angels, for your mom?”
“I have, Mr. Warren.”
Dad was doing everything he could to keep busy. He grabbed the angels from the shelf behind the register and carefully began wrapping the angels Scarlet had created out of an old hymnal. It wasn’t the standard cone-shaped angel with fanned paper wings and a golden ball glued on top for its head. Scarlet had gone all out with two swooping angels descending from the pages of music. Each with long flowing gowns, dainty arms extended as they held their own musical score, and feathered wings created out of some of the interior pages. Their heads were bowed irreverently, while their bodies gracefully curved the open pages. Once again, she had out-done herself and dad was making sure it didn’t get damaged with more than enough tissue paper. When he had it in an unrecognizable blob, he placed it in a box and dropped popcorn packing around it. He closed the box before putting it in a bag and handing it to Sly. “Does this mean you’re leaving early?”
“Yes, sir. My wife is expecting and she insists our babies are restless without me singing lullabies to them at night.”
“You’re having twins?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. A boy and a girl. Our boy will be named after Wyatt and you inspired our girl’s name.”
“Me?”
“Well, it was more like your dad’s love for you that touched my wife. She was here with me last year and was so taken by the way your father spoke about you. It was obvious how much he loved you and she wanted the same relationship between me and our daughter. We chose a derivative of Princess. Essie and Wyatt are due in two months.”
It was just one more telling moment of how wrong I’d been to leave Hazel Rock when I was younger. Just another example to drive home how much I’d hurt my father. While I’d been angry and holding a grudge in Denver, my dad had talked lovingly about me to strangers. And it was another example of how everything was never how it seemed. Otherwise, Sly and his wife would have known exactly how bad a daughter I’d been.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dad went home around noon to gather up some of the book art he and Scarlet had made while she’d been hiding out at his house. Princess kept me company, sleeping under the register while I sat on my cushion most of the afternoon. I called Scarlet for the fifth time and continued to get her voicemail. Frustrated, I turned to my email and began writing a request for one of my favorite authors to join us for a fall book signing. It was an idea I’d had to celebrate the release of her book, Waxing Moon, A Midnight Poet Society Mystery. If I could get Lucy Barton in The Barn, it would be the coup of the decade for me. I wasn’t expecting her to accept, but I really hoped she would.
Once the request was sent, I began to fill out order forms on-line for the various books we needed. I was in the middle of a debate with
myself over whether we needed more mysteries, romances, or young adult novels when the door swished open and the bell sang.
“Welcome to The Book Barn Princess, how—” I shouldn’t have wasted my breath. When I turned toward my new customer, I found out it wasn’t a customer at all. It was Aubrey with her camera in tow. The girl was pushing her welcome.
I forced a smile. “What can I do for you, Aubrey?”
“I’m looking for a particular book.”
“Really?” The snark escaped my mouth in that one word, but I couldn’t help it; she’d earned it lately.
Luckily she was oblivious. “The Dangerous Eight. I don’t remember if we carried it when I worked here or not.”
It’s kind of ironic that she quit working at The Barn when I found a dead body in the storeroom, yet now she was being a major pain in the butt and sticking her nose in the middle of a murder investigation.
“Is it about bull riding?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s a reference book about the most dangerous positions, mistakes, and misjudgments a rider can make, along with how to avoid injuries.”
The name sounded familiar, but I tended to get all the books going through our store mixed up. I looked it up in the computer to see if it was listed in our new stock program I’d installed a month ago. As it turned out, we’d had three copies until yesterday and in the last of five days we’d sold all seven copies we’d carried. Yet I didn’t think I’d seen the book in stock. My father must have been the one to sell them. I made a mental note to order more, and then I looked up the book to see if it was for sale on Amazon. I found it under Erik Piper as the author; it was the bestselling book on bull riding they had to offer. Number one. Not 100,000 or 10,000. Number one. I knew I was missing why this book was important, and by the casual way Aubrey perused through the junk for sale on the counter, I was guessing it had something to do with Dalton.
“What are you up to, Aubrey?”
Teenagers are the worst liars, Aubrey included. They’re very expressive with their faces. They practice in the mirror, and with selfies. When their face is a blank slate—no pout, no eyebrow lift, no quirk of their cheeks—then you know something’s up. And something was definitely up with the soon to be college student standing in front of me.
“I’m just trying to learn more about the injuries the riders suffer and how they can be avoided. Like Sly yesterday…and you.” She tried to hold my gaze but couldn’t. Then she made a big mistake. “Scarlet recommended it.”
Scarlet. The woman who was in love with a murder suspect. The woman who wouldn’t answer her phone. The woman who had her trailer broken into and a backpack with Dalton’s stuff, which included a well-worn copy of The Dangerous Eight, stolen.
That’s where I’d seen the book. In Dalton’s backpack when Scarlet had been worried that something had happened to him.
“Scarlet didn’t recommend this book. A copy of it was stolen from her trailer,” I said.
“Scarlet had a copy of The Dangerous Eight?”
“No, Dalton had a copy of The Dangerous Eight in Scarlet’s trailer.”
Everything I was saying seemed to be the wrong thing. That is, it was the right thing from Aubrey’s perspective, since she had her phone out texting every last word to someone in her contact list. Undoubtedly, it was Liza Twaine. But I suspected I was giving information that would hurt Dalton—which meant it was the wrong thing for me to be saying about Scarlet as well.
“Why is the book so important, Aubrey?”
She couldn’t be bothered to look up from her phone. She was too busy reading an incoming text.
“Did you actually see that book in Scarlet’s trailer?” she finally asked.
I crossed my arms. I’d already held one tightly against my ribs, so it wasn’t a huge undertaking. “I’m not answering another question until you tell me why that book is so important.”
Aubrey’s eyes would have rolled out of her head if she’d been leaning a little to the left or the right when she finally gave in. She scrolled through something on her phone and then handed it to me.
“That’s a copy of the search warrant for the cabin Dalton rented at Enchanted Rock. The next image is a copy of the return that the sheriff filed this morning. It lists all the items the police took out of Dalton’s cabin.”
“Aren’t search warrants like a sealed record or something?”
“That’s what I thought too. But the judge must order it sealed, otherwise, it’s public record, just like a probable cause statement. If you scroll to the next page, that’s a copy of the probable cause statement. It lists all the facts of why the police believe Dalton should be charged with murder. I learned all of that this morning. Isn’t that cool? This is turning out to be best internship I could have possibly asked for.”
I had no doubt she thought it was cool. Scarlet, however, wouldn’t. As I scanned through the list of items recovered, I recognized several. A black, military style, single strap cross-body canvas backpack. A black Maglite ST3D016 3 Cell LED flashlight. A well-worn 2010 paper edition of The Dangerous Eight by Erik Piper. After that, clothing was listed by style, brand, size, and color. His toiletries were also listed by size and brand. The next item, however, sent chills up my spine. A P320 subcompact 9MM semi-automatic handgun loaded with thirteen 9mm hollow-point live rounds. Again, the serial number was listed.
It was disturbing to see the personal items of someone I knew listed on a public document. Yet it was even more disturbing to learn that he owned a gun and carried it while he traveled—and had it while he was with Scarlet.
The last item made me sick to my stomach. It was added on at the end of the document as if it was an afterthought: a personalized cattle branding iron with a cowboy riding a bull and the number 611.
Fuzz buckets. Dalton Hibbs had been the one to attack me. But why? What had I done to deserve that? What had Erik Piper done to deserve what had happened to him? Or the other person buried next to him?
“They got all of this out of Dalton’s cabin?”
“Yup. It shows the address to Crabapple Cabins right up top.”
I looked at the document again, and sure enough, Crabapple Cabins # 3 was listed with the street address.
“Am I missing something about the gun?” I asked. A lot of Texans carried guns. We liked our second amendment rights probably more than the folks in Alaska. I think it had something to do with our history of being outnumbered and outgunned at the Alamo.
Aubrey’s smile grew again, and I had to admit she was freaking me out a bit with her youthful bright pink braces and her enthusiasm about a murder investigation. She was beginning to remind me of little Darla shaking Nemo.
“Erik Piper was shot in the back of the head—twice. That gun”—she tapped the search warrant on her phone—“holds fifteen rounds.”
I looked down at the “thirteen live rounds recovered.” “Does Scarlet know?”
“No, and you can’t tell her either. This is exclusive information for the five o’clock news.”
“Aubrey…”
The young woman in front of me became all business. “No way, Charli. This will cost me my job!”
I pleaded my case. “We’re talking about Scarlet. Your mom’s boss. Our friend.”
“And we’re also talking about my entire career that hasn’t even begun yet. If I get tagged as a sieve on my very first internship, I’ll never get a good job. This is my chance; I can’t blow it.”
I started to rub my face and forgot about my ribs. The pain reminded me of being thrown over the stall. Of Dalton arriving at the Rodeo shortly afterward. And of Scarlet’s reaction to his appearance. Could this day get any worse?
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?” I’d hoped she’d forgotten.
“Did you see that book in Scarlet’s trailer?” She pointed to the book listed on the search warrant return she had on her phone.
“I saw a
book entitled The Dangerous Eight in Scarlet’s cabin. But it could have been a different copy.”
Aubrey looked at me skeptically, so I added what I’d just learned on my computer search of the book. “It’s ranked as number three in rodeo books, and number one for bull riding. We sold seven copies in the last five days. It’s a pretty popular book.”
I conveniently failed to mention that all the copies we’d sold at The Barn had been brand new. Not well-worn, like the copy that’d been stolen out of Scarlet’s trailer, or the one the police recovered from Dalton’s cabin.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I closed the bookstore and went to dinner at the diner, with my daddy carrying my donut that had the blue wave cover on it to match my denim skirt and red tank top. I figured the pink had been unlucky, so I needed to change things up. The two of us, and a crowded restaurant, were the best kind of date I could ask for at the moment. The waitress brought our dinner and I was more than happy to sit in the back of the diner in a small booth, capturing absolutely no one’s attention. We ate in companionable silence, too hungry to have a conversation.
Scarlet had texted me and told me she was fine, but that she needed some time alone. I could respect that but still didn’t care for it one bit. I wasn’t sure where she was hiding out from the increasing number of reporters in town. Unfortunately, they weren’t here to advertise or cover the rodeo, or the cause behind the event. They were here to air the town’s dirty laundry about an up and coming rodeo star being booked on not one, but two counts of murder. The evening news reported Wyatt Hibbs’s body had been positively identified through dental records as the first victim in the two burial plots. I wasn’t sure what the motive was or evidence found in the case, but it was obvious Dalton had his hands full with the legal system.