by Lisa Preston
“What’s this all about?” Biff asked. “I thought we were celebrating.”
“We are celebrating,” Guy said. “And that was mysterious women stuff. I don’t ask, and recommend you don’t either. Inside, everyone. Please.”
Melinda lit up like she’d been invited to a swell party. A part of me flinched with the feeling of having missed something, not getting what Melinda’s deal with Biff was, ’cause she wasn’t wary of him, just pleased that Guy couldn’t lift the weight. I’d wait to ask her why she knew Biff could and what it meant, but a niggling thought—
Guy said, “I’m going to feed my fiancée, maid-of-honor-to-be and best-man-to-be.” He smooched me, his gaze full of meaning, and I felt a blush seep across my face. Guy’s known I needed a friend here in Cowdry. Making a life, a family of friends in a new place can be tough. We all crowded the kitchen, my nice guy offering beers, pouring me iced tea. I wanted to think and I could see Melinda wasn’t done thinking and glowing with whatever she’d figured out.
The caramel cream sauce wasn’t curdled, as far as I could tell anyways, it was poured over thin sliced pork roast and just as good mopped up with the crusty bread Guy kept coming.
After dinner, Guy turned to ask Melinda, “Do you ride?”
“I’d like to.”
“She wants to be a cop,” I said.
Melinda pointed to an open catalog on the coffee table. “Why are those horses wearing thongs?”
The ad showed photos of horses outfitted for backcountry hill climbing.
“That’s a crupper,” I said. “And you’re embarrassing me.”
“Is that a Western or English saddle?”
Oh, so she knew a tiny bit. “In between,” I said. “It’s for trail riding.”
“What kind do you have?” Melinda addressed Guy, acting like she was a little suspicious of any answer I’d give. So I gave it.
“He doesn’t have one. Rides bareback. So do I, just ’cause I can’t afford a saddle yet.”
“Well, technically,” Guy explained, “those slick leather saddles don’t offer much purchase. Nothing to pucker up on, if you get my meaning.”
Laughing, Melinda and I kicked back in the kitchen chairs. Rocking on the back legs, I balanced with my core, like riding a horse. I could all around have a fine time, enjoying my friend’s company. If I were a drinker, me and Melinda, we’d be drinking buddies. Sure I could do it, have a friend, a real girlfriend. Guy had been in Cowdry just a couple years ahead of me, already friended up with poker and rugby and running buddies like Biff and some others with similar names. A Chip? An Eddie or Teddy or something like that. Biff leaned against the kitchen counter, watching us, beer in hand as I talked about my post-shoeing plans for the next afternoon, hauling the repaired tractor tire to the back of the Buckeye.
Melinda was one who couldn’t leave a thing alone. “I want to take a look at that area where the tractor is. I’m supposed to work, but maybe I could get off a little early. I’d really like to go.”
Okey doke, if she wants to go, no harm in her tagging along. I’d bet Donna’d give me the loan of another horse.
* * *
And later that night, Guy grinned across the bed at me, the same smirking smile Spooky does when he’s kneading your thigh and knows you hate it. The same grin Melinda did when she’d known that Guy would be off balance and unable to lift my toolbox, but Biff could do it. I should have badgered her to speak up on it. All sorts of words and weird pictures danced around the ceiling of my skull.
“Arielle Blake had a note in her things that Stan Yates found. It said ‘Biff C.’ and he didn’t know who it referred to.”
“Biff’s last name is Pullara.”
“What’s his middle name?”
Guy said, “Guys don’t ask each other that.”
“What’s Biff’s real first name?”
“I don’t know that either.”
I thought about Stan Yates and the note Arielle wrote about ‘Biff C’ and I couldn’t peg the right questions and links. “I asked Biff if he knew Arielle and he told me no.”
“He didn’t. I remember talking when we were on the search party for the sheriff’s department. Neither of us had ever heard of her.”
“I should have told Melinda about the Biff C thing Arielle wrote.”
“Biff had nothing to do with it. And maybe it was Stan Yates who wrote whatever he says he found amongst Arielle’s things.”
Guy was right, I decided. We couldn’t know something was so just because Yates or anyone else said it was. “I thought Vince was the likely person to have fired the shot that rolled Cameron Chevigny’s tractor.” Guy snuggled, kissed my neck. “Well, Vince had a reason to have a grudge against Cameron Chevigny.”
“But Melinda says it couldn’t have been Vince that Joby Thurman saw at the water trough by the Chevigny shed. Vince’s a big dude. If you can’t do that bend over a water trough and lift a concrete block move, then Vince sure couldn’t.” The lift was about build, I decided. Balance. That’s what Melinda was showing.
I realized Hollis Nunn wouldn’t be able to do the lift either.
Guy’s fingertips worked goosebumps into my spine. He laughed and added, breath in my hair, “We’re never going to be tangled up in those triangles like Cameron and Vince were.”
“Nope. Not us.” I needed to get my mind clear of all this small-town trash, but I thought again of Melinda and Vince’s attitudes to each other. “Melinda thinks Pritchard’s a scaredy-cat.”
“He’s picked an odd profession to be in then. I’d think a person would have to be brave,” Guy said it like he was ready for us to stop talking.
I shrugged. “I don’t know much about being brave.”
He smiled then. “You’re the bravest person I ever met.”
“Meet a lot of weenies, do you?”
Guy snorted. If he was a pony, he’d be saying he was scared or amazed.
Guy made me coffee in the morning, which was not amazing, just regular nice. “Wait for me and I’ll go with you to the Buckeye late this afternoon.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t get back before dark if I waited ’til you got off work. I’ll be fine. Melinda’s probably coming with me. Anyways, I’m just hauling that tire out and putting it back on the tractor.”
* * *
Darby had the tractor tire ready and used his loader to get it aboard Ol’ Blue’s Brahma topper.
“Watch out for cougars out near that federal land. One of the folks in the Outfitters group rides there, reported sign one time.”
“Cougar sign?”
“You packing?”
To Darby, packing probably didn’t mean getting a suitcase filled up to go on a nice vacation.
Bang! His loader dumped the tractor tire onto Ol’ Blue’s Brahma topper with a thud that made Charley cower. It’s already full of scratches up there but it still made me wince. We set to task with a bunch of spare cord Darby produced, got that tire tied down.
“You got a knife, just in case?” Darby had a wicked way with knots and knew it.
“’Course I’ve got a knife.” I turned my hip and lifted the flannel shirt open over my tank top to remind him who he was talking to. A shoer has tools.
Darby’s double take was bell clear. He stared and finally rubbed his jaw, muttering. “It didn’t have the engraving when I sold the knife and hammer.”
I looked at the Heart R knife in the scabbard on my hip.
Darby wiped his mouth, sealing his lips.
Something like a molasses and manure combo of ideas turned in my brain. I nodded encouragement at Darby, wondering all kinds of things about so many people in Butte County. “You ordered something for Stan Yates? For Biff Pullara? For Hollis Nunn? You ordered something else? A gun?”
He shook his head. “Don’t want to add to the gossip.”
Chapter 28
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF CHARLEY in Ol’ Blue’s bench seat, Melinda Kellan eyed Stan Yates’s mailbox. I told her ab
out Yates buying the north part of the Buckeye ranch.
“Interesting.”
“So we might be fixing Stan Yates’s tractor.”
“Sweet deal for him.”
Yates wasn’t outside, weed whacking or otherwise engaged, as I rumbled Ol’ Blue on to the ranch. I still thought it would have been great if Yates could have not had it in for a widow who’d done him no harm, but it was still none of my business and I couldn’t exactly pull up to his house to give him a piece of my mind. Besides, I needed all my pieces.
Bugs chirred in a golden fall afternoon at the Buckeye ranch. Guy’s warning that I not come a cropper in the far fields wasn’t much on my mind. Melinda didn’t say what was on hers when we dismounted Ol’ Blue. The prospect of a ranch ride with a friend—two friends, since Charley was there—finishing my good deed, that’s where my mind was.
Slowpoke ran up to greet us, making dust fly, protesting in whimpers when Donna tied him with a lead rope so he didn’t follow us out to the back of the ranch.
Then Donna threw me with, “What I said before, the guilt thing . . .”
“Yes, ma’am?” I was surprised she wanted to talk to me in front of Melinda, but I guess she was ready to purge her conscience, and no one was going to get in her way.
“It’s not just guilt over not checking on him. It’s how I felt. How I still feel,” Donna wound up with a resigned breath, like she was some kind of horrible person. “There were days I was ready to be rid of him, I tell you. Days when I could have stood Cameron getting himself killed, bad as that sounds. I was so sick of the shame of him wanting more than me, I . . .”
There in her barn, she wasn’t going to cry, she just bit it all back and I was left to say something.
Anything.
But before I could, Donna went on. “I heard a woman say something about the gutter. I thought he was breaking it off with her. He’d had so many.”
“You overheard this?”
“On the phone. Cameron had a cellphone—I don’t—but it didn’t always work out here. He got a call at the house. He didn’t know I listened in. It was a woman.”
Melinda nodded and echoed, “It was a woman.”
I gave Melinda the strange look she deserved, then asked Donna, “Did she sound mad at him?”
“No, she didn’t but, oh, I don’t know.”
It wasn’t ’til I’d saddled Skip—one of Donna’s best Quarter Horses—and gotten Buster’s harness situated that a thought made itself into whole form in one of my spare brain cells. I went to Donna and asked, “Could you have heard talk about something being right under the gutter?”
After a pause, she said, “I could have. I’d heard the word, set the phone back down. I’d guessed maybe it was talk of someone’s mind being in the gutter. But maybe that’s where my mind was.”
More of Donna beating herself, I couldn’t stand.
“Perfectly understandable for you to hate him stepping out. He oughtn’t to have treated you that way.”
Melinda nodded. “I hate that he did that.”
Donna’s cheeks pinked up. “That’s what Hollis Nunn says.”
“Guy hates it, too,” I added.
“Does he?” Donna asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You might have a winner there.”
That agreed, I was set to go. Melinda, left out of the loop on account of her not having herself a man worth having or worth getting rid of, felt called upon to mention to Donna how she wasn’t a police officer but she wanted it clear that she did happen to work directly for Sheriff Magoutsen, she’d let him know over the radio that she was out here helping me with the tire, and she wanted to make sure Donna was okay with her taking a look at the area where the tractor was.
Donna’s sad little smile was wry, looked tried even though she clearly wasn’t afraid of anything Melinda wanted to know about.
“I don’t know what’s what, but I’d like to understand it all better.” Donna sounded beat from her stack of chores, the way this winter of her life had turned out.
Not wanting her to mope, I grinned a winner. “Well, how about it, this idea of mine, getting your tractor back up and running, sticking it in the shed?”
Donna looked away, misty-eyed, and I knew not to press another minute. Then she managed a little nod that was my go-ahead, and said, “Well, we can try and see.”
Charley followed when I mounted Skip. Melinda straddled Buster like she knew what she was doing, her face firm even after we’d ridden deep enough into the ranch. I knew her legs had to be dying, and I could be the kind of giver who finds a way to distract a friend from pain.
“You think Biff could be a nickname for Bickford?”
“I suppose. Why?”
After I told her about Arielle writing Biff C, she asked how I knew that Arielle was the one to write the note.
“Guess you’re right,” I admitted. The world of police investigations was not one for me. I like horses. Hooves don’t lie.
“You really thought Guy’s buddy Biff had something to do with Arielle’s disappearance and murder? What’s Biff’s full name?”
“Guy doesn’t know.” But I explained about Guy mapping runs on TrailTime. “So I guess the website shows when other trail users map runs on the same trails. Guy was running the app off his cell phone when he looked for Arielle and he remembers there being another map around Keeper Lake but it’s not there anymore.”
“So, why would someone delete a map there?”
“That’s the question,” I agreed. “Biff says he didn’t map, didn’t delete. Why’d the sheriff’s department have Guy and Biff look around Keeper Lake?”
“Well, this is not public knowledge, but that’s where her phone showed as its last point known on the Find My Phone app.”
“I don’t get that,” I said. “I mean, Yates said that, too. But what was she doing there?”
Melinda shifted atop Buster, rubbed her quad muscles. “Who’s Hollis?”
“Oh, he’s the hay man.” I explained about the failed rodeo stock business.
“Interesting,” Melinda stopped Buster at the edge of the ravine. “Holy cats, ride him down that?”
“After you. Trust me. And Buster. He’s done it before.”
Dragging the rock sled down into the ravine was tougher than the travois I’d used to haul it out with, but the rock sled was better for the just-fixed tire. Melinda mumbled encouragement to the big horse the whole way. I figured she was really calming herself. I scratched thank yous to Skip now and again, but the good horse under me had it all under control.
“Good boy, Buster, good boy. That’s it. Easy now. Steady. Good boy.”
I told Melinda, “You talk as much as your momma.”
“Oh, I had an earful from her after she showed the Pritchards and his parents Cowdry property. My mom said it was all her son this and her son that. Retta this and Retta that.”
“Who’s Retta?”
“Vince Pritchard’s wife. Loretta. She’s like you, into horses—”
“Give Buster his head. He won’t go too fast, you can trust him, but he might need to swing his neck for balance. Holding the reins short hampers him.” I’d given Skip all the rein he wanted as we inched down the switchbacks into the ravine.
“Since all the Pritchards are looking at horse property on the west side, they’re moving, and if they’re moving, he’s got the job. He’ll be the next deputy.”
“Maybe there will be another job opening for you sometime soon.”
We hit bottom in no time.
“Wow,” Melinda said, gawking at the switchback in front of us. “We’re climbing up that?”
“I’ll go first this time.”
“Why’d you make me go first when we came down here?”
“Same reason I should be ahead this time: In case Buster loses the load.”
She craned her head at the tire on the sled Buster was dragging. We’d long since tuned out the racket of the rock sled. “Is he g
oing to lose it?”
“Nope.” I nudged Skip up the ravine. In a few minutes, Buster leaned forward with one last heave that hurfed Melinda and the rock sled with the tractor tire cargo clean out of the ravine, up onto the back of the Buckeye ranch. I explained to Melinda all about Stan Yates’s land bordering the west end and him telling Donna he had a handshake deal with Cameron Chevigny to buy it in hopes of more wind farming.
“Interesting,” Melinda said.
Even with the day dying around us, under the direct sun it was baking, and my old dog panted like he’d raced the miles to the tractor instead of slow-trotted behind a walking horse.
Water and shade were up at the shed.
“Go on, Charley,” I said, pointing up the hogback to the shed. “That’ll do, wait for me there.”
I explained to Melinda how the shed was an open breezeway, not the solid square it looked to be from our angle. She nodded and I watched her squint at the far corner where the water trough was. Maybe we both thought about things that little Joby Thurman saw near the shed during Outfitters weekend a year and a half ago. And what happened that same night.
“Where was the horseshoe?” Melinda asked.
I pointed between the tractor and the hogback spine. “Where was Arielle Blake’s body?”
She waved up the rocky hillside on the federal land behind the Buckeye’s back fence. “Not too far up there, from what I saw of the crime scene photos.”
The notion of looking at creepy photos of a decomposed and murdered woman gave me a shiver.
Melinda’s gaze narrowed at the fence separating us from the lease land. “Our detective figured Chevigny killed Arielle Blake after she went Fatal Attraction on him.”
I frowned. “And her body was on the federal land. Chevigny would have told her to use the federal land to walk over to meet him, rather than cutting right through his west pasture above the ravine here, just in case the bull was in this west pasture.”
Melinda swiveled on Buster to face me. “It’s not though, is it?”
I shook my head, absorbing the motion with my back as Skip began to trot. He’d expected to find a dozen ranch horses out here, but I realized Donna had brought them home after all. “The bull should be secure in the east pasture. Only gate is up there at the shed.”