“Oh shit, Junior.” Literally. “I’m sorry. I had no idea. Give me a hand, and we’ll tie them in the back of my truck.”
Louise high-steps beside them to the Tahoe. Junior puts his hand on the rear hatch.
“They’re fast. How about we each catch one as they make a break for it?” Maggie moves to the right.
Junior nods. “One, two, three.” He opens the door.
Two goats leap into the void. Maggie catches seventy-five pounds of black flying fur. “Oomph. Gotcha, Omaha.”
Nebraska and Junior hit the ground. Nebraska scrambles with three legs, but Junior doesn’t release his grip on the fourth. After he hauls the reddish-brown goat in, he squats, then hefts. Louise helps by barking her fool head off and nipping at the heels of the goats.
Maggie holds Omaha tight. The goat struggles, freezes, then struggles again. “Stop it, Louise.” The dog continues barking. “I have halters and leads permanently tied into the front corners of the truck bed.”
“I didn’t go to police academy for this.”
“You’re county law enforcement. Livestock are in your jurisdiction.”
Junior grumbles and uses one hand to drop the small gate on the truck bed. Maggie backs her butt onto the lowered gate, then swings her legs around until she can rise up on her knees, then her feet. She clamps Omaha between her legs while she wrestles him into a halter.
“So close, and yet so far, you little monster.” She ties the halter and releases her leg grip.
He shakes his body from his shoulders through to a tail wiggle, then he butts her knee.
“If you can’t have freedom, you’ll take loving, huh?” She scratches behind his horns where he likes it best. “I missed your stinky butt. And your brother’s.” Over her shoulder, she watches Junior. He’s clumsier than she is, but successful. “Thanks, Deputy.” She uses her other hand to give Nebraska some scratches and loving, too.
Louise jumps into the truck bed with them, bringing the body count in the small space up to five. She snuffles along the floor, until Maggie realizes she’s hoovering up goat poop.
“Stop it, Fucker.”
Junior hops off the gate. “What did I do?”
Maggie considers laying into him about their last conversation at the sheriff’s department. “Not you. The dog.”
“Her name is Fucker?”
Louise wags her tail at him.
Maggie shrugs. “It seems to fit.”
“No comment.” Junior gives Maggie a hand down. He slams the gate. “Next time, I ticket you.”
She salutes him. “I’ll find a way to pen them up at Michele’s, unless you want to evict my tenant.”
“Bring me the right paperwork, and I will. Until then, you’re on your own.”
On her own. Alone. Yep, more than he can possibly know. “Until then, I guess I can count on you for illogical insinuations and animal cruelty charges.”
“There’s nothing illogical about following where the evidence leads.”
“I hope you remember that when you actually get some.”
Fifteen
Maggie sticks her head through the door of the Coop. She wants to make sure it’s okay, but that’s ludicrous. Clearly it’s not okay. It’s a wreck. Exactly the same as yesterday.
Why would someone do this to her things, to her? It feels so personal. For a brief, guilty second her mind goes to Gary. Personal. He’s the only one that has—had—a personal stake in her around here. She’s a junker, for God’s sake. Unless someone is pissed off for paying too much for repurposed vintage farm and industrial junk, whose feathers does she ruffle? Well, not counting her liaisons. But that brings it full circle back to Gary, since she hasn’t romped with anyone but him since before Hank’s reentry into her life. Except in Wyoming, and the romper in question was already dead by the time the damage was done to the store.
But if Fayette and Lee County law enforcement personnel are right, it may be someone who also had a beef with Gary. And while she can’t think of someone out to get her, she wonders if it’s time for her to share her growing fire suspect list with law enforcement, to get them off her tail.
But that can’t take precedence over getting her business in order. She shuts and locks the door. She has to jump-start her cleanup and repair. That and fulfilling web orders, of which there’s a few days’ backlog, since her part-time employee quit coming in after the vandalism and store closure. She’s eager to get started. Good hard work is cleansing and a great distraction. She’ll tackle the store as soon as she deals with Omaha and Nebraska.
From the Coop, she drives to Lumpy’s little ranch. Well, actually, she drives past it and makes a U-turn in front of Gidget’s old place first, just to eyeball things. Thank the Lord for good renters, she thinks, watching a thirty-ish man in a dirty ball cap, jeans, and long-sleeved plaid shirt mow in even rows across the pasture with the tractor. Two kids and a rangy tan dog are playing in the front yard of the little white house. Cows are grazing in a separate pasture on the other side of the drive.
She creeps up the lane back to Lumpy’s and drives to his house, where she parks under a tree for the shade. If she’d known she would be coming, she could have brought him his pie. She stops, remembering the night before. Pie. They’d eaten all the Royers pies. And the Steak OMGs. Dammit. No pie left for Lumpy. She’ll have to think of a new thank-you gift for him later.
Leaving her bag in the truck and goats in the bed, she heads for Lumpy’s door. Louise makes a hasty reconnaissance while Maggie bangs on the door off and on for a full minute. No one answers. Lumpy lives alone. His truck is home, which is weird, since he’s not coming to the door. But from time to time, a former–Texas Ranger buddy will pick him up for a fishing trip.
She gives up and returns to Bess, whistling for Louise. The dog races back, her body nothing but a black streak, straight for the goat-pen fence. Maggie expects her to jump it, but instead, the dog doesn’t alter course. Maggie braces for a horrible collision.
None happens.
One moment Louise is on one side of the fence, the next she’s on the other. She barrels into Maggie’s knees for praise and a hug, but Maggie steps around her. She examines the spot the dog went through and finds the mesh cut cleanly at the corner of every square, from the bottom of the fence to the top two squares. The cuts create a triangular door into and out of the pasture.
Maggie steps back, arms crossed. “Some bastard cut the fence. At Lumpy’s.” Random vandals? To let Omaha and Nebraska out? Or targeted at Lumpy? It’s impossible to say.
After a minute to think about it, her skin crawls. She feels watched. She scans the property, but sees no one. She can’t fault Lumpy’s absence. He provided solid fencing in a pasture with a pump-fed water tank and float and lots of good forage. The goats should have been fine. Someone had done this on purpose. Lumpy had made lots of enemies during his years as a Ranger, and he still monitors the police scanner 24/7. As a result, he keeps his stick in too many pots, stirring up trouble. Maybe this is someone getting back at him.
She fetches her phone from the truck and types him a message. Where you at? Someone cut your fence. I took my goats. Before she hits send, she thinks about the logical next step. Lumpy has calves in the pasture, too, and even though they’re still a hundred yards away and not the sharpest animals on God’s green earth, they could wind up on the road. There’s a spare stack of goat panels leaning against the barn.
Before she gets to work, she can’t resist reading new texts in the string with her Amarillo friends.
Wallace: So, you and Ava, BFFs?
Emily: Not funny, Wallace.
Maggie replies: What she said. ;-)
She stuffs her phone in her back pocket and gets to it. The panels are unwieldy, but she pries one away from its pals and lifts it from the middle. She walks it over to the ruined panel, first with one end digging up the grass, then with the other end dragging through it. She props it against the fence and returns to the barn for baling wire,
cutters, and pliers. Once she has the right materials and tools, she makes fast work of removing the clipped panel and replacing it with the intact one. She secures the new panel on each end with twisted wire.
When she finishes, she gets her phone out and adds to her Lumpy message: I fixed your pasture fence. Then she hits send and wipes her brow with her forearm. The sweat leaves a muddy track on her arm. She suspects it has a match on her face, so she uses the inside of her tank top to clean her forehead. The dirty streak on her shirt confirms her hunch.
Her stomach growls. She decides it’s lunchtime, but she’s got a load of animals. It only takes her a minute to decide whether to go to Tractor Supply for goat panels or pay Lumpy back his materials later. She reverses the truck up to the panels. As she scoots each one into the truck bed, she coaxes Omaha and Nebraska to step into the open squares. She borrows the roll of wire and cutters, too.
She sends Lumpy one more text: I owe you goat fence
Back at Michele’s, she pulls the truck into the shade on the side of the house. Since she doesn’t have T-posts or a post-hole digger, she leans the corners of the panels upright against slender-trunked cedar trees. Rashidi had cleared all the lower branches off the trees near the house, God bless him. She wires the panels into place on the tree trunks, creating a rough circle. Really rough. More like an octagon with whiskers, given that a few panel ends stick past the tree they’re joined to, but it works. She leaves the end of one panel unwired to make a gate. Finally, she gets the biggest tub she can find from Rashidi’s gardening shed and links hoses together to reach all the way to the near edge of the jury-rigged pen. She fills the tub with water, adds two goats to the pen, and voila, Michele has a goat ranch.
Louise jumps into the tub for an impromptu bath.
“Out.” Maggie remembers Louise outside Royers. Before the fire. The dog likes water.
Louise dunks her head, then jumps out and shakes the excess water off on Maggie’s legs.
“Fucker.”
Louise grins up at her. Maggie takes a picture of the new goat pen and its contents and texts it to Michele. Sorry? I hope this is OK. Lumpy’s fence got cut. He wasn’t home.
Maggie is feeding the goats their new treats when she hears crunching gravel from the front of the house. The sound of an engine, too.
A typing bubble appears immediately, and Michele’s answer follows seconds later. Why didn’t I think of that? Totally fine. I just talked to Papa and Charlotte. Don’t be surprised if they show up looking for you.
The vehicle engine noise stops. A car door slams. Then another.
“Yoo-hoo. Maggie?” The voice is high and sweet.
Louise cocks her head and whines, asking Maggie about the new voice.
“It’s Mom,” Maggie informs the dog. “She’s okay. Sort of.”
Louise takes off like a bullet toward the front of the house.
Maggie straightens her dirty top and skirt, wipes muck off her knees, and lifts her shoulders and chin. “Coming, Mom.”
She wobbles through the clumpy grass in Michele’s side yard. At the corner of the house, she adopts a determined strut, marshaling courage and the right attitude to face her mother. When she reaches the front yard, she sees a low-slung Shelby Cobra in the drive. Michele’s father, Edward Lopez, is squatting beside it, petting Louise. He’s a handsome man, with olive skin and dark hair going to gray, wearing chinos and a golf-type shirt. He waves at Maggie.
Walking toward Maggie, arms extended, is her mother. Charlotte is radiant in a white scoop-neck T-shirt, boots, and patchwork-quilt-patterned prairie skirt. Curling strands of hair have escaped Charlotte’s French twist to brush her face, ears, and neck. She’s a more demure version of Maggie, although with the help of L’Oréal, not a much older-looking one.
Maggie moves straight into her mom’s hug. “Hi, Mom. Edward.”
“Finally, you’ve returned!” Charlotte says, backing out of the hug but hanging on to Maggie’s arm like her daughter will run away if she lets go.
To Edward, Maggie says, “I was gone for seven years once. Now I can’t leave for seven days.”
He squeezes her shoulder. “Let’s get out of this heat.” He walks ahead of them and opens the door.
Courtly. Always. A very likeable man. Michele dotes on him.
“Wait,” Charlotte says. “Maggie, your arms. What’s with the bandages?”
“You heard about Gary?”
“Yes.”
“So you know I was the one who found the fire and called for help. It . . . got me. A little. My arms.” She takes off her sunglasses. “My eyebrows and eyelashes. I’ll be fine.”
“It’s all so horrible. I’m sorry, honey.”
“Thank you, Mom. It’s very sad.”
“I always worried your father would die in a fire. But he never got hurt in all those years as a volunteer. Not once.”
At the door, Gertrude greets Louise. Maggie steps aside to let the dogs play in the front yard. Once inside, the air is too cool on Maggie’s sweaty skin. She wraps her arms around herself and heads toward the kitchen, dropping her sunglasses on the counter.
“I’m making coffee. Anyone else?” She grabs a mug from the cabinet.
Her mother and Edward follow her. They shake their heads no, looking at each other like guilty teenagers.
Maggie closes the cabinet. What’s going on with them? She inserts a Rainforest Blend pod into the Keurig and starts it. “You’ve been dying to talk for days, Mom. Whatever it is, spill it.”
Charlotte claps a hand over her mouth. Behind it, her lips curve into a huge smile. The light catches something sparkly on her hand.
“Hold it right there.” Maggie comes around the counter and takes her mother’s wrist. She holds the left hand in front of her and examines the ring finger. The light catcher is a diamond. A big one on a slim gold band. “You got engaged?” She looks to Edward for confirmation.
He takes a deep breath, and his eyes shine like the diamond. “Tell her, Charlotte.”
Charlotte places both hands on Maggie’s cheeks. “We got married, honey.”
Maggie’s eyes widen. She’s so surprised, she doesn’t even smile. “You don’t let any grass grow, do you?” The two have only been dating a few months.
Edward dips his head slowly, then raises it. “Not when I’m lucky enough to have a woman like your mother.”
Maggie finally chuckles. “Congratulations.”
Charlotte draws Maggie into another hug. “You’re not mad we did it without you?”
“Of course not. It’s your life, not mine. I just want you to be happy. When did you do it?”
Edward says, “Last weekend. We’ve been on a little honeymoon in Austin.”
Charlotte pulls back, still hanging on to Maggie by the elbows. “I feel guilty we didn’t have a church wedding.”
“I think God will forgive you, Mom.”
“So we’re having a short ceremony and reception at St. Paul tonight. Just punch and cookies after, with our family and friends. Will you be there?”
Maggie contains the groan that threatens to escape. She wonders how many friends Catholic Edward really has in the Wend community and Lutheran congregation. But Michele’s mother was a Methodist. He’s probably used to being the odd man out. “Sure, Mom. Whatever you want.”
“I’m so glad. And your nice Wendish renter will still be here, so she’s coming, too.”
“Leslie?”
“Yes. Leslie. What a sweetheart. She loves our church. She’s been coming to the ladies home Bible study this week. Did you know the same reporter that’s been bothering me about you interviewed her? Anyway, she even sang with the choir Sunday. She has a beautiful voice. Not as pretty as yours, but the best we have in that group. She used to sing professionally, you know.”
Maggie’s jaw drops. “Wow.”
“She said you’ve accepted her offer on your house. She makes such a lovely addition to the community, and she’s been yearning for a Wendish home
for years.”
“What?”
“A Wendish home. She grew up outside the community. But—”
“No. The part about me accepting her offer.”
“Oh. She said she’s buying your house.”
“She most certainly is not.”
Charlotte sits on a barstool, her body slumping a little. “But I don’t understand. She said you’re moving into Gidget’s and—”
Maggie pushes her hair back with both hands. “I have long-term renters at Gidget’s. Good renters. Leslie is a short-term vacation renter. My house is not for sale. Did you not think I would tell you about something as important as I’m moving?”
Charlotte sniffs. “Well, you hadn’t told me you were traveling to Wyoming.”
“That was for one week. To go to an estate sale.” She omits the part about trying to reunite with Hank since it’s beside the point now anyway. “Which is way different than moving.”
“Maybe to you it is. But I’m your mother.”
Maggie sighs, but it comes out more like a growl. “You must have misunderstood her.”
“Maybe so.”
“She’s probably looking at buying someone else’s house.”
“I guess.”
Edward steps between them. He smiles. “Can I get one of those coffees after all?”
Something moves in the backyard and Maggie glances out the bay window. She can’t see the goat pen from inside the house so it’s not them. Normally the only things out there are oak and pine trees and an occasional deer. This time is different. A white-as-a-corpse woman is standing on the patio, nose almost to the glass, a fat French braid holding the hair off her face. Maggie is pretty sure she’s seen her before. Or maybe she just looks like the woman from her dream earlier?
She smiles at Edward. “After I find out what that woman in the backyard wants.”
Edward and Charlotte both look out the window.
“What woman, honey?” Charlotte asks.
Maggie’s eyes seek out the spot where the braided woman was a moment before. Now the backyard and woods beyond it are empty. “Huh. That’s weird. She’s gone now.”
Maggie Box Set Page 36