by Lisa Preston
Nodding as we headed inside, I took the knife back from him, palming that bone handle that would have been so smooth, was so smooth, except for the heart and the R carved into the upper reach.
Guy had some bug up his backside, it seemed. He turned this way and that, then made some more faces before gesturing with both hands. “You said she seemed pretty much, kind of . . . oh, what did you say?”
“Worn out.”
“Right. Sad. Like she was depressed.”
“Well, sure, who wouldn’t be? She’s struggling to make ends meet, she’s got more work than she can say grace over, she’s alone and widowed and—”
“And she’s giving away property,” Guy said. “This knife.”
Now Guy, hands on my shoulders, gave me a little shake, then slid his hands down my arms, squeezing me just above my elbows. He cocked his head and leaned in, then back as he muttered. “She was crying, I thought, the other day when she called.”
Swallowing, I waited for him to come clear.
He didn’t, he stood in our little dining area and festered.
“Guy.” It means so much when I say his name as a one-word sentence, with my eyebrows just so. It means: Make Yourself Clear If You’re Able. Plenty of days, it works like a dream on Guy, but today he just fidgeted, looking concerned and uncomfortable.
“Can’t you tell me what it is that’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Well, fine. What I’m wondering about is if Donna Chevigny is thinking of, er, well, of hurting herself.”
“Hurting herself.” I thought about those two words. People hurt themselves, I reckon. I’ve done it, for sure and for certain. But there was a rank darkness in Guy’s voice, a strain that meant more than plain bad choices that we all make now and again and again. “Now, when you say, hurting herself . . .”
He winced and turned his head away and studied his sneakers. I watched them with him and only learned that my Intended was getting himself mighty worked up. And that his shoes are worn nice and even. A level stride, Guy has. No wonder he’s fast.
“It’s supposed to be a classic sign,” Guy said. “Suicidal people give away possessions before they do themselves in.”
Guy’s mama is a psychologist, and he’s taken way too many college classes about why people do the things they do.
“Suicidal!” I said it like a dirty word, scared Spooky as I spat it out.
“Well, yes. And now as I think back on how she sounded when she called here the other day, she seemed bleak.”
Bleak was the word. Donna had been lonely and overwhelmed and I’ve been there myself and what if she saw her situation the way I did?
Worse, suppose she saw it the way Guy did? What if he was right?
I hated the thought in so many ways, I turned on him. “Suicidal?”
“Well, yes.”
“I can’t believe you said that. You shouldn’t have said that. What a thing to say.”
“It’s just a word, Rainy.”
“Yes and no are just words but it does matter all day long which you say, doesn’t it?”
The notion was still stuck like a turd on a hot day. “Suicidal?”
Guy nodded looking more than a little bleak himself. I was not liking the flavor of this conversation. It was about too much to wrap my mind around, but suddenly it slid and felt like it fit. It fit way too well and I was sick cold with the fear that he was absolutely, completely a hundred and seven percent dead right. I went for the house phone, Guy on my heels.
“It just rings. What do I do? Go to her house and ask her if she’s killing herself?”
“Isn’t there someone who can check on her?”
“Stan Yates is her only neighbor, and he’s a long ways from the ranch house.”
I didn’t know what to do. Most of my brain figured I was over-reacting, running with this awful maybe of an idea Guy’d come up with—maybe Donna was thinking of ending her life. But another part of me knew that if Guy was right—and it sure felt like he could be right—then I had to find Donna, stop her before it was too late.
Chapter 16
HERE’S THE THING WITH LETTING THE mind run with the worst possibility, imagining Donna had gone and done herself in, what-if-ing myself stupid: it’s hard to stop.
Storm clouds forming on the horizon didn’t help my mood at all. The air smelled like lightning was coming. The static made my ponytail fly and arm hairs stand up. An anvil-shaped thunderhead lifted off the far mountains to the south. Gray skies can make for a murky mind. If Guy was right about my client being depressed, I hoped it wasn’t catching.
I blazed the many miles back up the long forest road toward the Buckeye ranch. If I dawdled there at all, I’d be late for my noon shoeing appointment, first time ever late for a job.
Stan Yates—I assume it was him, it was some dude with a short gray beard—was out front of his house, weed-whacking around the edge of the driveway. As I drove by, he raised a hand in what could have been either a hail or a howdy. But the thing with thinking that a sweet old lady might be considering doing herself in is that once you start such rumination and you get busy with going to check on her, every second feels like a life might be draining away. I powered Ol’ Blue right past Yates’s wave. Soon Charley and me pulled up between the Buckeye barn and the house. Time for action.
Her house is a sprawling rambler with a gaping, wooden porch, but no answer at the door. No problem, I headed for the barn. In the round pen just beyond, Buster rested, bulky and full of power, content with hay and water.
“Donna? It’s Rainy. Rainy Dale.” I stood at the hitching rail and water trough at the edge of the barn’s dark aisle and listened. Charley placed one front paw on the trough’s lip to pull himself up for a quick sip. I tried not to think about Slowpoke packing the gloved hand of a dead woman in from the back of the ranch and dropping it at my feet in this very spot. Creeped out, I stepped into the barn’s darkness.
Horses blew that wonderful breathy, understated greeting.
“It’s just me,” I told them, making myself walk the length, in total darkness to the end where I found myself wondering about the sheriff’s Suit Fellow theorizing that Cameron Chevigny might have killed Arielle Blake, then accidentally killed himself. But if Donna was unhappy with her husband, why not get shed of him?
What if Suit Fellow was wrong twice?
Charley followed me into the darkness with the merely half-interested way he has when there’s not enough else going on and that’s when I realized for sure that Donna wasn’t around the barn. The Buckeye barn held good Quarter Horses, but no overworked old woman, no silly young dog. I went back to the house and knocked again, harder. The front door gave enough to show it wasn’t locked and I stood debating whether to turn the knob. A long gun hung over the fireplace mantle. I shaded my eyes to the door’s glass pane and peered. Large bore, a shotgun. I thought about the other weapon or tool, the knife.
If Guy was right about suicidal people giving possessions away—well he would know, he’d half-followed his mom’s head-doctor footsteps in college where he’d learned stuff about how people make their choices. Donna had given me that fancy knife. She was widowed and sad and worked near to death. Lost her daughter too, and how bad an ache would that be?
So, if she was a danger to herself, I should walk right into her house to make sure she wasn’t in there, half-dead, having swallowed a bottle of pills or something, shouldn’t I?
I turned back for the barn. Charley chuffed.
“I know you said she’s not there,” I told my good dog, “but what if?”
This whole check-on-Donna thing was what if. I stopped at Ol’ Blue and checked my cheapie little cell phone.
No service. No surprise.
The heebie-jeebies I’d arrived with turned into a case of the screaming meemies. I walked around the house. Good as abandoned. I made to do the same at the barn, ending at that rough wooden shelf that packed a few dusty relics. The shell casing was still there, next to a rusty
spur. The shell was silvery, smooth in my fingertips.
The shotgun’s the only artillery we ever had. That’s what Donna told me. Donna didn’t have any reason to lie to me, did she? Or if she did, what was it?
This was too much dawdling. I barely had enough time left to make it to my noon shoeing appointment.
The crunch of gravel, the rumble of a rugged diesel drawing closer, called me back to the front of the barn, by the water trough.
Donna. It was Donna Chevigny driving that approaching truck and I was so glad to see her breathing, I could hardly move my boots.
“Rainy,” she said by way of greeting. She peered at the hand I waved. “What have you got there?”
The shell casing was between my thumb and index finger.
“An empty,” I said.
“Oh, that.” Donna shrugged while turning for her pickup. She dropped the tailgate and tugged on one of many sacks of feed in the truck bed. “I found that on the lease land, back when I turned the cattle out there. Summer before last. Thought it was a shoe at first. You know, one that a horse had pulled off, just the end of one heel showing in the sun? I remember dismounting to pick it up.” Her last words came in a breathy grunt as she lifted the first sack of feed.
I stepped up and took her load, hefted fifty pounds of oats to my shoulder.
“Thanks, Rainy.” She gave a nod toward the back of the barn as she began to tug on the next sack. “No, they asked about reloading, but we never did any.”
“Huh?” I’d already headed deep into the barn aisle with the oats, liking the scent but not the plastic feel of the feed bag. The scratchy burlap bags of my childhood are gone—grain is sold in slick synthetic bags nowadays. Slowpoke scampered after us in between trying to hassle Charley into playing. I hollered back, “Reloading?”
As my eyes adjusted to the dim, I noticed the empty, beater pallets by metal trash cans Donna used as feed bins in the far corner. Then I stood there like a special kind of idiot ’til she struggled up hugging a heavy sack to her chest. Her burden sunk as she neared, slipping to her belly, her hips, then slid off her thighs as she barely made it to the bins.
“Whew! Just put it down,” Donna said.
I did and went for another bag, then another and another, setting them wherever she pointed.
“The sheriff’s team found lead shot way out there, on the back pasture or nearby on the federal land,” Donna said. “Asked if we did reloading.”
“Shot?” The word has a bad sound. I sweated at the idea. “Shot, did you say?”
“Yeah, there was a bit of lead shot out there, spilled somewhere. It was strange, and they were looking at everything that was unusual. But I didn’t know why shot was out there, so . . .” She spread her hands and gave a slight shrug.
“Lead shot?” I set a forty-pound sack of beet pulp pellets down, trying to catch up. Failing.
Donna was nodding again, sounding like she was talking to herself. “The sheriff’s men found a little spill of loose lead shot, back when Cameron had his accident, and they were asking if we did any reloading, but no, we never did.”
Puzzling on spilled lead shot just left me puzzled. Anyways, she’d found the shell long afterward.
And I’d found the shoe even more recently.
And then Slowpoke found a hand, presumably Arielle Blake’s.
“I don’t understand,” I said, a little meek.
She shrugged again. “I don’t either, but some things are never going to be understood, I suppose.”
Twisting my ponytail did not help me understand, but it’s what I did until I could come up with a maybe. “Do people ride through your land? Maybe getting to the national forest land on long rides or pack trips? Maybe coming from the Yates place?”
She shook her head like a woman who doesn’t waste motion, two short swings, one each to the left and right. “No, you can’t get to anywhere but the Buckeye—”
“You could cut from Yates place to the federal land through the Buckeye.”
“Yates isn’t horse folk. He was never a backcountry kind of fellow.”
Her answer frowned me because it would have quieted down my itchy brain parts right away if I could have just chalked up the shoe to some unknown rider that passed through like others do.
But there were no others passing through, if Donna was to be believed.
And why shouldn’t I believe her? Say the shotgun was the only firearm she owned. I wondered if Yates had a pistol.
Donna got one more sack of feed, I did the other eight. Her breath came out in little puffs as though she was beat shy of a summit. Her thanks came with shaking her head, telling me how she used to be stronger.
“Rainy, what are you doing here?” She seemed in a strange state, staring glassy-eyed around the barn like she didn’t quite know how we’d walked ourselves in there.
“I came to check on you.”
She froze. Her eyes misted. She looked away, then strode off to the open barn doors where strong noon light split gray clouds. The sun’s strokes cast a light that made Donna look as aged as the relics on the shelf at her back. So as not to look too long at her, I set my eyeballs on the rusty old coffee can, the glass insulator, the spur, and all those other things.
Donna started crying. “I know guilt. Do you know the feeling? Really know it?”
Fact is, I have a real close acquaintance with that yuck but our private shames usually ought to stay private. I wasn’t about to tell her about my unmentionables and I wasn’t sure I wanted her telling me hers. I was fresh out of ideas on how to ask a woman if she was thinking about quitting life, but I was going to have to stick until I felt okay that she’d not be giving it all up today.
She said, “I feel so guilty about Cameron.”
“Ma’am,” I began, straining with why she felt guilty, passing it by, and the difficulty of forming my question. I hoped she wouldn’t put me on the spot like I was about to put her. Oh, please, don’t ask why I’m asking. “Do you have some friends you could stay with or who could stay here with you? So you’re not alone?”
“I am alone. I’ve outlived all my family. Lost my best friend, my best girlfriend three years ago. She went and died.”
We met eyes and I was sure she was making it plain that she wasn’t putting her husband on that short list of best friends.
Hey, that ground was dry. Not at all like my eyeballs that studied that dirt.
“She had a stroke. And she was two years younger than me.”
Well, hey, these people eat steak and eggs two or three times a day. Even I know better than that.
“I’m sorry you’re alone,” I blurted. “I feel bad.”
“I feel bad, too.”
I nodded and said I was sorry again.
“It’s because I didn’t check on him,” Donna said suddenly, speaking with so much hot pain, I half expected her to hiss with steam as the sprinkling started. There’d been no watering down of Donna’s pain.
“You didn’t check on your husband the day he died?”
“End of winter,” she said, with a wry smile. “Didn’t know it was starting the winter of my life.”
She wiped her eyes and looked at me like comfort lost. “Every farming and ranching wife knows to check her man regular when he’s on a machine. Doctor said he had a lot of weight on his chest, but it wasn’t enough to do him in right away. No, it was the time he was there, just too long with all that dead weight on him. A slow and horrible death. Cameron deserved better.” She shook her head. “Hardly a mark on him, open casket, but it was a bad way to die.”
I’d fancied the tractor must have squished Cameron Chevigny or a whack on the head had done him in, but no, it was worse than a rancher’s quick death.
“Maybe . . .” I started, “I mean, do you want to come on out there with me? I’ll be there, be there with you. You and I can take care of the tractor together.”
Nothing. That’s how much response Donna gave. That’s what I know—nothing about noth
ing. Just who in Hades did I think I was to be making such suggestions anyways? When her widow’s eyes went wet, I felt several kinds of awful.
“Hey,” I said, “I’ll go. I don’t need help and I said I’d do it. I will. I just wondered if you might have wanted to and you don’t have to, of course.” What other words could I say? I hadn’t meant to be shirking what I’d promised to do, just thought it might help her to face the fear of the place where her husband died.
Donna shook her head with a grimace at last. “I wouldn’t want to exorcise my demons. I take ’em out for a spin now and again. That’s good for them and me. Pain and the past makes us breathe today. When I lay flowers for him, I do it at the tombstone where it says Cameron Bickford Chevigny, husband and father, and the days he was born and died.”
* * *
Mulling Donna Chevigny’s words as I drove off, I was startled, braked up a cloud of dust when, a piece down from the Buckeye main entrance, Stan Yates ran out of his driveway into the center of the road, flagging me down.
Chapter 17
OL’ BLUE SEEMED TO PULL OVER real natural and next thing, I was face to face with Stan Yates himself.
He eyed my truck doors. “You’re the one who found her.”
At first, I was thinking of Donna, since I’d come all the way out here to check on the Widow Chevigny.
Yates wiped the corner of one eye. “You found Arielle.”
Ol’ Blue is, after all, a rolling advertisement for Dale’s Horseshoeing, with the house phone number to boot. My breath taken away, I needed a few seconds. I didn’t want to say something like ‘no, it was Donna’s dog Slowpoke what found her’ or ‘no, really, only found her hand.’ I was not going to blow it. Not.
“We searched out there. Because she used to take these really long walks. We never found her.”
I told the truth. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know what to say.” But I thought things like: Are you trying to stiff a sad widow, making up a handshake land deal with her dead husband just so you can steal her land? Are you stealing her tractor that I’m fixing? Did you kill Arielle? And Cameron?