Montana Cowgirl

by Debra Salonen

  The only gift his father ever gave him was the ability to read rivers and streams. OC could see where the water cut a little deeper and the big fish liked to hide until he coaxed them to the surface with a specially tied fly.

  Not that he’d ever tell her that. Obnoxious cow.

  “Well, hell, Marla, if you’re in such a goddamn hurry to leave, why don’t you get the fuck out of there today? I’ll tell Bailey she can have the whole damn house to set up her business. She can sell jewelry in the front part and make the shit in the back. Sounds like a damn fine idea to me.”

  Marla sputtered. “What? You can’t...” She stopped.

  Something clattered to the floor. He hoped it wasn’t the overpriced computer she talked him into buying.

  A second later, she was back on the line. “Okay, OC, if that’s how you want it, fine. I’ll leave the key on the counter. I don’t know what you’ll tell the people who are booked through August, but I guess that’s not my problem anymore.”

  She hung up before he could tell her to take a flying leap. The irritating sound of an open line made him swing at the phone. It shot across the nightstand, along with all stupid doctoring crap people thought he might need: tissues, water bottle, pill bottles, a mystery novel he couldn’t stay focused on long enough to read.

  “God damn it all to hell.”

  A movement in the doorway made him bite off the more colorful cuss words that were forming in his head. Louise didn’t abide swearing in the library or her house.

  “That went well.”

  She took her sweet time walking across the room, her gaze never leaving him.

  “I always said that woman had a screw loose. Now, it’s popped clean off.”

  Louise laughed, but her expression turned serious a moment later. “Marla has been acting a bit strange lately. I attributed it to being overworked.”

  Half the time when he’d show up at the shop she was playing some kind of candy game on the computer.

  Louise set the phone in place and slowly re-organized the other crap.

  When it came to the small amber plastic pill container, she hesitated. “I tried to re-fill this prescription this morning and the clerk said our insurance wouldn’t cover it.”

  “God damn stupid bureaucrats.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe Marla didn’t pay the company’s health insurance premiums.”

  OC didn’t like the ominous tone in her voice. The need for a drink got stronger. “Why wouldn’t she? She and Jack are on the same policy.”

  “Are they?”

  He didn’t know.

  He’d been in a bad way for a couple of months before his first surgery. Fact was he’d gone off the deep end after Bailey’s accident. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about his dead son-in-law. Ross seemed like a cock of the walk—a big talker who expected Bailey to do all the heavy lifting.

  Like me and Louise?

  “I need a cigarette. Hand me that fake electric thing, will you?”

  The device Bailey had given him had fallen off the table, too. Louise had to bend over again. This time when she straightened, she grabbed the edge of the open drawer for balance.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t meet his gaze, either.

  “I need to call the bank. You haven’t been getting a pay check from the Fish and Game, but Marla’s supposed to be paying the mortgage on the building.”

  “And all the utilities, insurance and taxes.”

  She pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of her loose sweater. As she scrolled around looking for something, she told him, “The other day I saw a special on printer paper. I tried to use the company debit card and it was declined. Forty-six dollars.”

  She looked at him, her expression serious. “I meant to call Marla and see if our pin got changed but I forgot.”

  He turned on the fake cigarette and put it to his lips. Bailey said it vaporized liquid nicotine so he got his fix. Placebo or not, he didn’t care. Just the act of holding it and taking a drag calmed his nerves and helped him think straight.

  Louise punched in the number then held the phone to her ear to wait.

  “We have money in savings,” he said. “We’ll be okay.”

  Louise shook her head. “Mostly gone. Co-pays, out-of-pocket, food, lights, gas—”

  Her list stopped as she listened. “Yes. Hello. This is Louise Jenkins. Can you tell me the balance on our loan? Yes, the Fish and Game. Oh, he’s doing well, thanks. I’ll tell him you asked.”

  She smiled at OC, but her expression seemed oddly muted. Something wasn’t right, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with their banking issues.

  Her eyes opened wide. “Excuse me? When was the last payment? March? And you’ve had nothing since?”

  Holy shit. Marla stopped making the mortgage payment on the Fish and Game? What the hell was she thinking?

  As soon as Louise re-pocketed her phone, OC reached for the landline. “Is that dumb bitch trying to screw us out of everything we worked our asses off for all these years? I’m not calling her. I’m calling the police.”

  Louise covered his hand with hers. “Marla’s not smart enough to plan our downfall. But she is an opportunist. March is probably the last month you were still going into the office. Before that, you signed off on the books, didn’t you?”

  He couldn’t remember for sure. Between the pain pills he’d borrowed from Jack and the booze, most of this past spring was a fog.

  “If she didn’t pay our bills, what’d she do with the money?”

  “Bought a home in New Mexico, I’m guessing.”

  The pit in the bottom of his stomach instantly filled with piranhas and his left foot began to throb—even though it wasn’t attached to his leg any more.

  Paul put Skipper in the pasture with the other horses and returned the tack to the storage room. He was on his way to the SUV where Bailey was waiting, when a late model extended cab four-wheel drive pulled in.

  He’d have recognized the truck right away even without the colorful Jenkins’s Fish and Game logo on the door.

  Normally, Jack Sawyer was behind the wheel, but not today. Marla eased off the gas pedal as soon as she spotted him.

  Crap. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation with his renter. He picked up his pace and trotted to the SUV.

  “Paul,” Marla bellowed stomping on the brakes so the truck’s rear end broke loose and skidded sideways, raising a ridge of blacktop at the same time. “I was just going to call you.”

  “Lucky me,” he muttered under his breath.

  Bailey apparently had lowered the windows to avoid overheating. Her low chuckle told him she’d overheard his snide remark.

  “What do you need, Marla?”

  “I need you to let me out of my lease a couple of months early.”

  He glanced at Bailey. “But you just gave notice.”

  Marla lifted her arm and pointed at Bailey. “Tell that to her asshole daddy. OC fired me, and I know Jack won’t tolerate that, so we’ll be leaving sooner rather than later. To hell with the fair. They probably have fairs in New Mexico.”

  Paul had no words. Jack Sawyer had been OC’s right-hand man for as long as Paul could remember. “When do you plan to be out?”

  “Soon as we can get packed. A week, maybe?”

  Paul looked at the house. He’d only been inside a couple of times to make small repairs, but he’d had to turn sideways in places to get past all the clutter.

  “Good luck with that,” he muttered softly.

  Bailey let out a soft chuckle. Not low enough to escape detection by Marla, apparently.

  The woman, who was a foot shorter than Paul, hopped to the running board of the SUV so she could face Bailey at the same level. “You think that’s funny, Miss Queen Bee? Well, you won’t be laughing when your dad’s company goes into receivership.”

  “What are you talking about, Marla?”

  “Jenkins’s Fish and Game is fal
ling apart. Jack and I have done everything we can, but people believe all that crap I put in the travel magazines about OC being the Fish Whisperer. They call to book a guide and they want OC, even though Jack’s every bit as a good.”

  Bailey’s expression said she didn’t believe that for a minute.

  “OC’s a surly drunk who brought all his current problems down on himself.” Marla zeroed her laser squint on him. “Isn’t that what you told your brother a few weeks ago? You were in Grey’s. I was at the table right behind you.”

  Paul felt Bailey’s gaze on him. “Might be true, but that doesn’t mean you should kick a man when he’s down.”

  Marla turned her back on him to address Bailey. She half leaned in as if ready to climb through the window. “Is that what you think, Queen Bee? That we’re picking on your poor old daddy? Jack’s been working double time all these months and the great OC Jenkins couldn’t even be bothered to say thank you.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Marla,” Bailey snapped. “We all know OC’s no saint. But the man’s been in and out of the hospital for months, doped up on pain meds and fighting a major infection. Now, he’s dealing with an amputation. Is it too much to expect a little compassion? Or, at the very least, could you cut him some slack until he’s back on his feet?”

  “No. I can’t. He just called and instead of asking how’s everything going, he demanded that I clean out the back room so you can set up shop. Just like that. No warning. Just ‘Move your shit, Marla,’ the Queen Bee is back in town and she needs your space.”

  Marla’s foot slipped and she had to grab the window to keep from falling. “Well, guess what? You want that space so bad, you can have it all because I quit.”

  The stricken look on Bailey’s face hit Paul mid-gut. He nudged Marla just enough to make her jump down from the runner.

  “I didn’t ask him to boot you out, Marla.” She looked at Paul, her frustration clear. “OC’s worse than a bull in a china shop. He’s a matador with a red cape waving the whole herd inside.”

  Paul walked around the car and got in. Through Bailey’s open window, he told Marla, “I’ll take a look at your lease tomorrow. But, for the record, I think renting the back half of the Fish and Game to Bailey is a great idea. Good luck when Jack hears what you’ve done.”

  She turned in a huff and marched back to her truck, which was still idling. When she stepped on the gas and let out the clutch, the husky back tires churned up a plate-size divot of blacktop.

  Paul got out, grabbed his phone and took a photo of the damage.

  When he got back in, he told Bailey, “That woman has been a pain in my ass since the day she moved in. This—” He held up his phone. “—is coming out of her deposit.”

  They drove back to Marietta in silence, for the most part. He turned on the radio but his mind couldn’t focus on the lyrics.

  “It sucks when people attack people you love, doesn’t it?” he asking, recalling how frustrated and upset his family had been when Austen’s scandal broke.

  “I quit making excuses for OC when I was ten.”

  “Still...he’s your dad.”

  She turned her face toward the window.

  “Yeah, and some things never change. I married my father—a self-destructive egoist—and became my mother—the co-dependent little woman. When I dared to leave him, he killed himself and the horse I loved like a child.”

  The bleak despair in her tone nearly made him pull over. He recognized that spiritless despondency in her voice—he’d heard it fifteen years ago when she told him she had no choice but to go through with the abortion.

  Her phone beeped and vibrated on the seat between them.

  She picked it up. “Mom.” She closed her eyes and let her head fall against the seat’s built-in headrest. “I guess it’s time to circle the wagons.”

  Paul stepped on the gas. “It sounds to me like you need a forensic accountant, and I happen to know the best.”

  Chapter 8

  “Where do we even begin?” Bailey asked her mother the following morning.

  They stood shoulder-to-shoulder looking across the floor-to-ceiling stacks of boxes, plastic bins and general clutter that filled the back half of Jenkins’s Fish and Game.

  The former kitchen looked pristine by comparison, but Bailey had peeked into a few of the oak cabinets and found everything from empty Jack Daniels bottles to ten-year-old cancelled checks.

  Marla Sawyer was a pack rat with hoarder tendencies.

  “Toss all her crap on the lawn,” OC bellowed from the doorway between the office and the back rooms.

  To Bailey’s profound relief, his wheelchair fit through the main entrance. She hadn’t realized the city had required him to install a handicap ramp and bathroom when he converted the home to a business. The first lucky break of the day.

  “Some of this stuff might be ours,” Louise said, picking up a stack of mail that looked fairly new. It had been sitting under a coffee cup skimmed with green mold.

  After Marla’s bombshell the day before, her father seemed more like the OC she remembered from her childhood—the strong, brusque, determined businessman, not the angry drunk of her teen-age years.

  She’d returned home from her trip to the ranch with Paul to learn her parents had decided on a plan that started with Bailey and Louise going to the office to retrieve the computer, checkbook and any easily transportable files.

  Their evening at the kitchen table had been an eye-opener. She’d known within minutes of opening the company’s accounting program just how serious a matter this was.

  She’d texted Paul, “Need big guns.” He could take the innuendo any way he wanted.

  Paul had texted her back with a time to meet: 9:45.

  She glanced at the yellow enamel clock above the sink. “Hey, that used to be in our kitchen.” She reached for the lined tablet she’d brought from home to keep track of inventory. “Old clocks are highly collectible. Maybe there are other antiques of value around here.”

  “Oscar always loved old stuff,” Louise said. “The garage should be full of things he bought at auctions or stumbled across up in the mountains.”

  “Yeah, and you’re not gonna touch that. I’m gonna get into restoring stuff one of these days.”

  Bailey clamped her hands on her hips and pivoted to face him. “Guess what, Dad? One of these days is here. Now.”

  She pointed at his leg. “Even with a prosthesis, you aren’t going to be hiking nine miles a day anymore. Your new job is going to be figuring out how to sell all this crap on eBay.”

  She’d called Maureen earlier—too early for California—to ask for advice on how to handle her dad’s rehabilitation now that they were facing a financial crisis. “OC’s only been out of rehab for a week. Is that too early to get tough with him?”

  “There’s a time for sympathy and TLC,” Maureen told her. “But at some point, the patient has to push through the pain and make life happen again. Your dad isn’t going to get back in the game by sitting around feeling sorry for himself.”

  “I’ll do it. How hard can it be? Where’s my e-cig? Louise, where’d you put it?”

  Bailey bit down on a smile. A small victory but still a win.

  She’d gotten him out of the house and focused on the future—a more realistic future. He might be able to lead short fishing excursions again some day, but until then, he had to find a way to be productive and regain some control of his life.

  Mom stepped out of the public bathroom. “At least, Marla kept the public areas neat and tidy. We can be thankful for that.”

  She’d just helped OC turn on his cigarette when someone knocked on the closed screen. “Anyone here?”

  A spunky little thrill she had no business feeling moved up and down Bailey’s spine the moment she heard Paul’s voice.

  No. Don’t go there. It’s too soon. We have too much history between us. But the truth was she hadn’t stopped thinking about him since she got home.

  “Hey,
everyone. I brought you a present. Sheri Fast, the best forensic accountant in Montana.” He opened the door for a tall, lanky blond with a French twist, a gray pencil skirt, four-inch pumps and a tailored white shirt.

  Holy mother. That’s an accountant?

  Bailey blushed, realizing how sexist her observation sounded. To make up for the gaff, she purposefully marched across the room—ankle be damned—to greet the woman. “Hello. I’m Bailey. These are my parents, OC and Louise Jenkins. Thank you for coming so quickly.”

  “My name says it all.” Her manicured hand felt cool, her shake firm and businesslike. “When it comes to embezzlement, time is of the essence.”

  Louise led the woman to Marla’s desk with the computer and high-end monitor they’d brought back this morning. “We don’t know for a fact Marla’s been stealing, but—”

  “Of course, she has,” OC said, interrupting. “The company’s broke. Our business savings has been cleaned out. And every room in this place is stuffed full of shit. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know somebody had her hands in the cookie jar.”

  The accountant set her Louis Vuitton briefcase beside the desk. “Opportunistic thieves are the easiest to catch,” she said, sitting with the sort of big city grace Bailey envied. “Unfortunately, they also provide the biggest challenge when it comes to obtaining restitution.”

  “Why is that?” Bailey asked.

  The woman slipped on a pair of tortoise shell readers that transformed her face into some Hollywood porn producer’s ideal image of an accountant.

  Bailey looked at Paul to see if he was drooling. Strangely, he was looking at Bailey.

  “Because by the time they get caught they’ve already spent the money. It’s all about immediate gratification.”

  Bailey pictured the big truck Marla had been driving the day before and her stomach soured.

  Paul cleared his throat to get their attention. “Um...speaking from experience here, I suggest we all step away and let Sheri do her thing.”

  He started toward the back rooms but stopped abruptly. “Holy smokes. We’re gonna need a bigger dumpster.”

  Even OC chuckled, which made Bailey so grateful she almost kissed Paul. Luckily, he’d started poking into boxes. “What is all this stuff? This looks like an OCD version of Hoarders.”