Hayburner (A Gail McCarthy Mystery)

by Laura Crum

  "Gail." Clay gave me a somber look. "They're saying it's arson."

  "I know," I said quietly.

  Angie watched us curiously. Keeping his hand on my arm, Clay led me a few steps away. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Angie half shrug and lead Sugar off.

  "I think they think Bart did it." Clay's voice, very uncharacteristically, sounded shaky with strain.

  My eyes shot to his face. "What do you think?" I asked.

  "What do you mean, what do I think?" For a brief second I saw a flash of some very intense anger deep in the blue-green eyes. "Do I think my brother lit the barn on fire, killing two horses in the process, to get the insurance money?"

  Recoiling a little, I tried to keep my voice calm. "I take it you don't think so."

  "You suppose right." Clay turned away from me abruptly. "I just came by to say hi. I'm taking Freddy for a ride." This last was said almost over his shoulder as he walked away.

  "Clay, wait." I started after him. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you."

  Clay kept moving. "No problem," he said, his usual easy tone back in place, at least superficially.

  More or less trotting after him, I said, "I know this must be stressful; I really didn't mean to make it worse."

  "No problem," he said again.

  By this time we'd reached the hitching rail, and Clay was untying his bay gelding, who was already saddled and bridled.

  Despite the fact that he looked outwardly calm, I had the sense that Clay's insides were churning, and that my thoughtless question had really upset him. Feeling bad, I tried again. "Where are you off to?”

  "Just going for a ride." Clay's tone was cool.

  I didn't think about it; the words popped out. "Take me with you."

  "Do you really want to go?" Clay looked surprised.

  "Yeah. It's supposed to be my day off, after all."

  Clay paused in the act of mounting Freddy, then lowered his leg back out of the stirrup and handed the horse's reins to me. "All right," he said. "You ride him."

  In a second he was untying the lead rope of a black gelding who also stood saddled and tied to the rail. "I'll take Bart's horse."

  "Will he mind?"

  "Nope. We have an understanding. Either of us can use the other's horse any time. It comes in handy."

  "All right." I adjusted the stirrups on Freddy's saddle to fit me.

  Clay mounted the black gelding and looked down at me. "Just be careful getting on and off him," he said. "Don't mess around and hang off him or anything."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "He's funny about some things-like people or objects sort of chasing him, if you know what I mean. He'll run off. He'll even kick at you."

  "Maybe I'd better ride that one." I indicated the black gelding with my hand.

  Clay shrugged. "If you want. But Blackjack, here, is a jigger. He won't walk. He drives most people crazy."

  "Oh." I nodded. I hated horses that jigged.

  "Freddy walks out real well; he won't buck or anything and he's real good outside. Nothing bothers him in that way. He's great on the trail. It's just confinement-type stuff that gets to him-ropes dragging from him, stuff like that."

  Clay pointed out a big scar on the horse's right rear pastern. "That was there when I bought him; I think he must have got tangled up in something, probably a barbed wire fence. It must have scared him pretty bad. I don't think he ever got over it."

  I looked at Freddy. The bay gelding regarded me in return, head slightly raised, a quiet but mildly wary expression in his eyes. I'd worked on this horse once or twice before for Clay-tubed him with mineral oil one time for a minor colic-and the horse had always seemed sensible enough to me.

  As if reading my mind, Clay said, "He's all right in most ways. He's a smart horse and he's got a lot of heart. If you were going to pick a horse to ride from here to Texas, he'd be the one. It's just that certain kinds of things really scare him. He almost kicked my head off once when I got off him in a hurry."

  "He did?" I said doubtfully.

  Clay laughed. "Don't worry. I'm not trying to scare you. He's really an easy horse to ride down the trail."

  "Well, okay," I said. "Just how did he happen to try to kick your head off?"

  Clay laughed again. "Oh, some girls were working on goat tying in the arena and they wanted me to give it a try. You know what that is?"

  "You stake the goat out and then you run down there on horseback, jump off, and tie the goat up. Sort of a lazy man's version of calf roping, right?"

  "Yeah. Anyway, I figured since Freddy came from a ranch in Nevada, he'd probably had a few calves roped off him and could handle this. So I said sure and ran him down there and slid him to a stop in front of the goat. It was when I went to get off of him that I got into trouble.

  "Somehow or other, seeing my body go by him in this flying dismount I made pushed his fear button. He jumped sideways like a snake bit him and kicked out so hard he'd have knocked my head off if he'd connected. He just missed me by inches."

  "Wow." I looked at Freddy dubiously.

  "Don't worry," Clay said again. "He's not difficult to mount or dismount in general. I promise."

  "Okay." I gathered the reins, put my left foot in the stirrup, and climbed aboard. Freddy stood like a gentleman. I patted his shiny red neck, settled my right foot in the off stirrup, and looked at Clay. "Let's go," I said.

  SIX

  We rode up the hill behind the boarding stable, following a dirt road I'd seen before, but never been on. Freddy walked out briskly as we passed some big corrals with mares and foals in them. In another minute we were approaching the main ranch house. Painted barn red with white trim, like the rest of the buildings on the place, it sat at the back of the sloping property, looking down on the whole operation.

  I glanced at the house curiously as we went by. This was where Bart lived with his mother. Clay's residence was a much smaller house on the other side of the property, one which had been the foreman's house in the ranch's early days.

  I knew, because Clay had told me, that Bart and he were half brothers, and that Bart would inherit the ranch when their mother died, it having belonged to Bart's father. "I'm just a tenant here," Clay had said with a smile. "I pay my rent by doing handyman work for Bart."

  Clay hadn't seemed to resent his role; since he was a contractor who built houses for a living (he'd built my house), repairing the barns and sheds came easily to him, and as he had said, "It's a good deal for me. I can save all the money I make."

  Now we were past the ranch house, still going uphill, moving through a little grove of oaks. I saw a flat alongside the road with a small barn and corral set up-two or three horses in the corrals. Freddy looked toward the horses and nickered; I clucked to him and bumped his sides gently with my legs. He moved out smoothly, just as Clay had said he would.

  Clay gestured at the little barn. "That's where Freddy and Blackjack live; Freddy was just talking to his favorite mare. So, how do you like him?"

  "Well, he's sure a nice walker."

  Clay grinned. "He is that."

  I could see Freddy's black-tipped red ears working gently-forward and back, forward and back, as he checked out his surroundings and acknowledged his rider. His walk was quick and rhythmic; I noticed he was already leaving Blackjack behind.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at Clay, whose mount was jigging, trying to keep up. "It must be frustrating riding that horse with this one."

  "It is," he said. "I think Bart just keeps this horse 'cause he's flashy-looking-impresses the ladies."

  Clay trotted Blackjack back up alongside Freddy. The black gelding was certainly flashy enough, I'd give him that. True black is an unusual color in a horse, and Blackjack was jet black with four white socks and a white blaze. Medium-sized, he had a little, Arab-y head and a way of arching his neck while he pranced. Though I disliked horses with the habit of chronic jigging, novice horsemen tend to think it makes a horse look "spirited." I
could picture Bart wooing the girls with his fancy, prancing black steed.

  "Bart's a real ladies' man, isn't he?" I said idly to Clay.

  Clay shrugged. "He always seems to have a girlfriend. Not like me."

  He looked at me as he said it. Hastily, I asked, "So who's his latest squeeze?"

  "Angie Madison, I think."

  "Angie. Geez." I was quite honestly surprised. "She can't be much more than twenty-five. And Bart's what? Forty?"

  "Forty-five," Clay said briefly.

  "He looks younger," I said. Brother Bart was, in fact, as flashy-looking as his horse. "But still, Angie's just a baby compared to him."

  "He likes 'em young," Clay said. "And I wouldn't worry about Angie. I think she can take care of herself."

  "Uh-huh." I nodded.

  Our two mounts plodded steadily up the hill. It was warm; Freddy's red neck already had a sheen of sweat on it. I could feel droplets breaking out beneath my bangs.

  "I'm sorry I overreacted when we were talking about Bart being suspected of arson," Clay said at last. "I guess I feel a little protective of him. He's had a hard life. He went to Vietnam when he was eighteen, got shot in the leg, came home and married his high school sweetheart. They were both nineteen. It didn't last.

  "They had two kids and she got full custody. It about killed Bart. For a few years he was more or less a bum. Then he came back here to help Mom run the boarding stable. Ever since she came down with cancer, it's been way too much for her. Bart takes care of her, runs the business, just does everything. I feel like it's pretty rich, that detective accusing him of burning his own barn down."

  "I don't think it's personal," I offered. "If it's arson, the owner is always the first suspect."

  "Well, it wasn't Bart," Clay said flatly. "I know him, if anybody does, and he wouldn't do that. Bart acts tough, but it's a lot because of the life he's lived. Going to Vietnam was really hard on him. They put him out there on the front lines, hunting the Viet Cong. I think the hardest part of all is that nothing's ever seemed real to him since. He told me that one time. His life now is like," Clay paused, "a faded, monochromatic print in comparison."

  "I've heard that about vets," I said. "it’s hard to adjust to civilian life, once you've been at war."

  "I can understand it," Clay said. "Intellectually, anyway. Though, of course, I've never experienced anything like that. But once you've lived life on the edge, with every moment a matter of life and death, I can see where you'd find ordinary civilized life a little weird. Like a sort of ho-hum fantasy that doesn't bear much resemblance to reality."

  "Uh-huh." I nodded again, wondering where this conversation was going. Though I sympathized with Bart's situation, he was sounding more and more unstable by the moment. "Bart said he was underinsured," I ventured.

  "He is. He won't get enough money out of that barn to build another, and he's bound to lose all those boarders. That damn German vet was trying to talk a couple of them into moving their horses out to his daughter's ranch. I heard him-yesterday morning."

  Clay sounded angry again; I tried a mollifying change of subject. "I've never ridden up this hill before. Where does the road go?"

  "More or less to the top of the hill." He indicated a trail I could see branching off to our right. "That goes to the same place, so it's easy to ride a little loop. It takes about half an hour. Are you game?"

  "Sure." Now that I was horseback, I was enjoying myself. The hill we were riding up was a north slope, and mostly forested; despite the fact that the temperature was roughly eighty and puffs of dust rose under the horse's every footfall, the shade and a slight breeze made it pleasant.

  And then, I thought, looking over at my companion, there was Clay.

  Clay was looking away from me; for a second I studied him. His face was calm now, the unusual expression of stress gone; once again I saw the personable man who'd been courting me for several months.

  From his blondish brown hair lightly sprinkled with gray, to his blue-green eyes, to his tall, lean body, there was nothing one could fault about Clay Bishop's looks. And I liked him, too. I liked his calm, quiet air, his intelligence, his competence. I just didn't know if I liked him as much as I liked Blue Winter.

  You're going to have to decide, Gail, the little niggling voice in my mind said. And pretty soon. I was constitutionally incapable of sleeping with two men at the same time. It might not be against anybody's law, but it just wasn't me, and I knew it.

  On we went, and up. Freddy walked smoothly; Blackjack jigged alongside him. Both horses were sweaty. Clay sat Blackjack's jig easily, not saying much, just looking at me from time to time. I felt, as I often did with this man, a sense of quiet companionship.

  My mind went back to Blue. I felt companionable with him, too, but perhaps there was a little more edge. I was always so aware of Blue physically that I could never quite relax around him.

  So, was that good or bad? Sunlight shafted through a little grove of willows by the trail; I stared at their flickering yellow leaves and then back at Clay. Our eyes met; he smiled quietly.

  Damn. I really did like Clay. So just what the heck was I going to do?

  The road was growing steeper now; even Freddy's long walk seemed more labored as he plodded. Eucalyptus trees closed ranks on both sides, their tall, pinkish, peeling trunks and long blue-green leaves rustling in every breeze. I could smell the sharp, aromatic, camphorlike scent, feel the air that always seems to move in eucalyptus groves brushing my face.

  In another minute we'd reached the top-a wide circular clearing in the eucalyptus forest. Wheeling Freddy, I looked out between the slender, straight trunks back down the way we had come-the dirt road rolling through the hills, the roofs of the boarding stable buildings, the wide meadows of Harkins Valley-all falling away in the distance.

  In the foreground, at the edge of the clearing, was a huge, venerable blue gum, much like the one that crowned my ridge at home. Wide and branching, the old many-trussed giant was very different in character from the ranks of telephone-pole-trunked trees that made up the rank and file of the eucalyptus forest.

  As I stared at the tree and the view beyond it, Clay rode up next to me and held out his hand. I took it, and he pulled me closer, his mouth reaching for mine. For a second our lips met-I could feel the warmth-and then Freddy leaped sideways, almost dropping me to the ground.

  Only the fact that my right hand was resting on the saddle horn saved me. Instinctively I clutched and clung on, recovering my balance a second-and twenty feet-later. Freddy snorted, staring apprehensively at Clay and Blackjack.

  "Shit," I said.

  "I'm sorry," Clay said ruefully. "I should have known he wouldn't like that. I just wanted to kiss you so much."

  I had to smile.

  Clay smiled back. "I really didn't mean to get you dumped."

  "I survived," I said. "He sure can move quick. Fortunately I've got one of my own who's like this-my old horse, Gunner. I'm used to it."

  "That's good. So much for my idea of a romantic moment on horseback, though." Clay turned Blackjack away, indicating a narrow trail that departed between the eucalyptus trunks. "That's the way back."

  As I clucked to Freddy and followed Clay, I was conscious of a sense of disappointment. A little interlude of minor passion on horseback sounded like fun to me, too.

  Maybe, I told myself, you're just horny. You can't tell which one of these guys you like best because you're just too keen to get in bed with somebody.

  The thought made me smile. I'd never seen myself as the sort of woman who was so driven by lust that she couldn't make good choices, but you never know what you'll come to.

  Watching the back of Clay's head as he guided Blackjack down the steep trail, I reflected that Clay and Blue were in many ways very alike. Both were tall, quiet men who worked with their hands, both gave the impression of being somewhat solitary, both seemed comfortably confident, both were horsemen. Both, I added to myself, came from families of two brother
s-both were the younger brother. And in both cases the older brother had been to Vietnam.

  But Blue's brother had been killed, so there the similarities ended. And the two men were different in other ways, too. Physically, Blue was much bigger than Clay-taller, bigger-boned, wider-shouldered. And Clay was a much more conventionally handsome man than Blue; he was the type who would be universally considered "good-looking" by women. Blue's looks were more unusual; some would find him attractive with his red-gold hair, freckled, sun-lined skin, and long bones, but he did not, in general, fit the label "cute."

  Leaning back a little as Freddy picked his way sure-footedly down the hill, I felt suddenly that I'd come to a crossroads in my life. I'd put it off as long as I could, gone my own way and continued to be interested in both men, felt my attraction to both of them grow. But I was getting to the end of it. I was ready to be involved with a man again. One man. But which one?

  Fixing my eyes on the back of Clay's head, I tried to picture him as my boyfriend. It wasn't hard. Then I thought of Blue. I could picture being with him, too. Try as I might, my mind couldn't find a way to weigh them both up and make a nice, logical choice.

  Not to mention, I thought, with an inward eye roll, I had problems enough making that first step into commitment and intimacy. My instinct to protect myself by remaining autonomous and invulnerable went very deep. I had trouble just being comfortable in a relationship, let alone deciding which one to be in.

  Still, some part of my being was calling out that it was time to quit stalling around and take the step. I just didn't know which direction to go.

  As the horses emerged from the steep, shady eucalyptus forest into a wide meadow, I rode Freddy up alongside Blackjack.

  "Eucalyptus groves are interesting, aren't they?" I said conversationally.

  Clay nodded.

  "Ecological purists don't like them," I went on, "because they're not native and they're allopathic-they kill the native plants. But I grew up with eucalyptus trees, and I'm fond of them. They have such a wild feeling, and they're always talking. It's really something to be in a eucalyptus grove in a storm."