Vetted Again

by K'Anne Meinel

  “Yes,” one confirmed.

  “How about Rex? Allyssa said he received a violent kick.”

  “Yeah, he’s been knocked around good and is sleeping off whatever they gave him. He let us examine him, but he wasn’t happy about it. He is obviously sore. How is your wife?”

  Fey told them what she knew, and they continued to update her on what they had done to clean up the clinic and return it to its pristine condition after the sheriff’s deputies had taken their pictures and left.

  “Let’s make sure to write a report of your findings and fax it to the sheriff’s department,” Fey told the interns before letting them get back to their work.

  Fey was a little late picking up her siblings at the fair, but they weren’t worried. Their friends and their friends’ parents kept them company until she showed up.

  “Where’s Allyssa?” Sean asked, getting in the far back seat before he realized that his sister-in-law wasn’t there. Traci got into the front seat, seeing it was unoccupied.

  “There’s been an–” she almost said accident and changed it, “incident,” she began and then told her two siblings what had happened that day, leaving nothing out and telling them who was involved.

  “Christ!” Sean said, realizing the implications much quicker than his sister.

  “Watch your language,” Fey said almost automatically and the kid grinned. It was exactly what Allyssa would have said.

  “Is Allyssa going to be okay?” Traci fretted. She was worried. She looked up to Allyssa, who was only a few years older than they were, at least in her mind. She had had a serious case of hero worship for years now.

  “She’s going to be fine. She needs to rest, and she’s got some wicked bruises on her neck.”

  “So, Peter’s dead but Trever is still out there somewhere?” Sean asked, leaning forward.

  “Do you have your seat belt on?” Fey asked, glancing at her brother in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah,” he said and then scrambled to put it on.

  He didn’t fool Fey. She knew he couldn’t have leaned so far forward while wearing the shoulder strap, much less the lap belt.

  During the night, Fey woke up next to Allyssa and heard the distant sound of crying. It wasn’t the babies because that sound would have come through the baby monitor. Instead, after listening to the muffled cries for a moment, she realized they were coming from her sister’s room. Gently, she got out of bed, trying not to disturb her wife as she made her way through the darkened house. She nearly tripped over Lexy, who was laying in the hallway and was back to her normal self, much to everyone’s relief. Fey hadn’t seen the terrier’s dark coat. The dog smacked its tail on the carpet as if apologizing for getting in Fey’s way. Fey stopped a second to run her hand down Lexy’s smooth body, relieved she was okay and apologizing for stepping on her.

  “Shhh,” she said to the dog, putting her finger to her lips as though the dog could see her and would understand the gesture. She shook her head as she went into the room beyond the bathroom and opened the door. “Traci?” she called softly into the darkness. “Are you okay?”

  “Fey?” the young girl asked, sniffing audibly.

  Fey made her way to her sister’s bed side, sitting on it as she peered through the dark. “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked her.

  “Oh, Fey,” the girl sobbed, reaching for her sister in the darkness, finding her, and wrapping her arms around her. “What if Trever comes back? What if he hurts us?”

  “We aren’t going to let that happen,” she assured her, praying she could keep that promise. They had never expected a physical attack from those two bullies. She held Traci while she had a crying jag. Lexy joined them, trying to comfort the little girl by sticking her nose under her hand in a ‘pet me’ gesture. It always made humans feel better to pet her, or so Lexy thought. The methodical petting of the dog’s coat did seem to comfort the young girl more than her sister’s presence.

  “Fey, is Allyssa going to be okay?” she asked for perhaps the third time that evening.

  “Yes. The doctor said there will be bruising and we just must watch out for that. She’s probably going to sound funny for a little while too, but she will be fine,” she explained, not wanting her sister to worry.

  “What happens if Trever comes back?” She sounded about six years old instead of the eleven-year-old young woman she was.

  “Then we deal with it, but I don’t think Lexy is going to allow anyone into the house.”

  “But you said they drugged the dogs.”

  Fey mentally cursed herself for that, especially if her sister was having nightmares about it. “Well, then, we have to make sure Allyssa is around to take care of it for us,” she teased, trying to sound flip.

  “What if she doesn’t have a gun nearby. She stopped wearing one, didn’t she?”

  “That was because of the babies,” Fey told her, wondering if her wife would start carrying a gun again. She kept hers locked in the RV. “Look, Traci, we can worry ourselves to death over these things, but we just have to deal with them as they come. There is no way we can predict when or if someone else is going to do things like this. They are responsible for their own actions. We are only responsible for how we respond to those actions. Peter paid with his life for what he tried to do.”

  “He was my brother. What if I’m like that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the same blood that flowed through him, flows through me and Sean,” she pointed out logically.

  “True, and the same blood that flows through you from Dad flows through me,” she tried to distract the young girl. She really shouldn’t call her little anymore; both she and Sean were growing like weeds. She figured that was from the healthy air out at the ranch.

  “Yeah, but we had different moms,” the youngster pointed out, determined to keep her train of thought on track.

  Fey thought about that briefly. At least Traci had stopped crying. “Well, that’s true.”

  “And my mom wasn’t very...nice,” she understated.

  “Your mom loved you very much.”

  “Yeah, she never said it, but I could tell. She wasn’t very nice to Dad though.”

  Fey thought about how astute children were. They might have not said anything in the years they had been coming to the ranch, loyal to a fault, but they had been fully aware of Rosemary’s faults. “Our dad loved you to bits.”

  “Yeah, he really didn’t like how Mom talked about you and Allyssa. I asked him once why we didn’t see you that much.”

  “Yeah? What’d he say?”

  “He said it was better that way because Mom didn’t like the competition. He once told me he regretted not seeing you grow up, but he knew his parents had loved you enough for him. Isn’t that weird?”

  Now it was Fey who felt like crying. She’d known her father regretted the estrangement, but it was true, Grandma and Grandpa had loved her enough for them all. “Yeah, but then, when we are kids, adults seem weird and as an adult, kids sometimes seem weird.”

  Traci chuckled. It wasn’t often Fey sounded like a kid herself. She always seemed so much older than her and Sean, always acting like an adult as they came to know her, never really feeling like a big sister. It was Allyssa that bridged that gap since she was between them in age. Now, when kids asked about her parents, she explained they were dead, but her sister and her sister’s wife were more fun than parents. She knew her mother hadn’t liked the fact that her sister liked women and had married one, but Allyssa was the best sister, even if it was only by marriage. “You know, Fey, I think I like living on the ranch more than I liked living in Portland.”

  Fey’s heart warmed. She had always hoped to give that to her siblings. It was their heritage too. She left her sister in her bed, her hand on the dog’s head where it lay on the bed, both comfortable and safe and falling asleep.

  “Everything okay?” Allyssa rasped when Fey returned after checking the babies and her brother.

&
nbsp; “Everything is fine,” she responded, wrapping herself around her wife’s warmth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The weather forecaster looked a little bug-eyed. He’d forecasted rain a few times but either he was wrong, or the winds had blown the clouds away before the rain could fall. This section of Oregon was a fire trap and several fires had sprung up. Some were caused by human carelessness and some were caused by Mother Nature, who sent lightning storms that started the grasses on fire. They had already begun bringing in firefighters from California to fight one blaze that was getting out of control. Surely the weather would change and the fall rains would come soon?

  “Anything?” Fey asked softly as they shared their breakfast and she saw Allyssa had been watching the local news.

  “No, nothing,” Allyssa said, looking at her wife in her muscle shirt, looking fine and fit. She could no longer tell she’d had a baby last year. The paunch was gone, and Allyssa considered herself lucky to have such a fine woman in her life. “Henry called and left a message,” she told her wife.

  “And?” Fey asked, sipping at the coffee she had poured.

  “Nothing,” she said in response to the unanswered question of whether they had found Trever yet. No sign of the man had been found.

  “Maybe he drove off a cliff and they just haven’t found him yet?” Fey asked, hopefully.

  “Yeah, we can wish.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “That he’ll come here again?”

  Fey nodded, watching her wife carefully. It had been two weeks since the attack, and the bruises were fading. Occasionally, Allyssa sounded raspy, but overall, she’d been very lucky. She had taken to carrying her sidearm again, putting it away whenever she was around the babies. She wished they had a lock box and Fey intended to buy one for the hall closet. She’d make the effort today. They needed one, and if that made Allyssa feel more confident about wearing a gun again, she’d do it.

  “He’d have to have a death wish to come here again, don’t you think?” commented Allyssa.

  Fey laughed with her wife. She’d called Henry to inform him of the incident at the ranch and he’d followed up with the sheriff’s office to make sure Allyssa wasn’t going to be charged. With Sheriff Bradley’s endorsement and Juanita backing up Allyssa’s story, there would be no charges. The local paper had run with the story, playing up the drama again and referencing the previous shoot-out at the ranch, but Allyssa had laid low, hiding at the ranch and not going anywhere as her neck healed.

  “School starts in a week,” Allyssa reminded her wife.

  “Should we plan on driving them back and forth?” She wondered if the bastard would be stupid enough to grab one of them.

  “I guess. I was thinking more about the clothes and supplies they need. Can you get off this weekend, so we can all shop?”

  Fey knew it would take them all day to get clothes for both her siblings while she and Allyssa coped with the active babies. They were all determined to walk, but Tom, who had been the smallest, was determined to run. They were quite the handful as they grew so quickly. Again, she blamed it on the healthy air at the ranch, although, with all the fires burning, the air frequently smelled of smoke. Fey knew Allyssa was watering the grasses around the ranch because they were a healthy green and she had to cut them back with the lawnmower. No one else she knew was cutting lawns these days with the drought that had hit the state. If it didn’t rain soon, she’d be euthanizing even more stock than she was already. Some ranchers were sending stock to the yards in record numbers, culling their herds to save those that remained. She’d treated a lot of animals for heat exhaustion and lack of water.

  Fey knew Allyssa was worried about losing the ranch to a raging fire, and she was watering down the house and other buildings in the cool of the evening when no one would see; the green lawns gave her away. The geese and ducks were eating the bugs that flourished in this heat, and the chickens were helping them when they could escape from their coop. The horses were reaching through the corrals to nibble at the luxuriant vegetation. Allyssa had even watered down some of the corrals, cutting down on the dust. She was going to have to stop soon though, the water level in the spring house was dangerously low and they needed it for their own consumption.

  “Yeah, my weekend is free as far as I know,” Fey told her wife, hoping that would remain true. Her interns were leaving this weekend and replacements were due in two weeks. She wanted some quiet time without the students for a while. “Heard from Brock?”

  “Yeah, his entire crops are a complete loss,” Allyssa said sadly, knowing they had gotten their rents, but the farmer had taken a huge hit with the expansion of his fields on their ranch. It wasn’t the only place he had fields, but it had been the largest this year, and he’d had high hopes.

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “He said he is going to try for a loan at the bank next year, but I told him he should see what the spring rains look like.”

  “That’s sound advice. Sometimes, these droughts come in cycles.”

  “What do the old farmers and ranchers say?”

  “That these droughts come in cycles,” Fey repeated with a grin.

  They enjoyed their morning chitchat. Juanita would usually show up as Fey was leaving. Frequently, they were interrupted by the babies, and occasionally, Sean or Traci joined them. The children liked being able to sleep in during the summer. Fey had asked them not to ride anymore since the animals were miserable in the heat too, and Allyssa didn’t let them ride the ATVs for fear the machines might start a fire. There was dust on everything as no rain had fallen to keep it down and mud it up. She didn’t need them using up gas and causing more dust in the air.

  Fey had asked Allyssa to put all their animals out in the field to find nourishment and water on their own where they could. There was water in their troughs but only as a last resort. This winter, Fey wasn’t going to feed the animals until she was forced to; they could forage in the fields. “Open the gates to Brock’s fields,” she advised her wife. That way, at least the dead plants wouldn’t go to waste, and the horses and cattle still left could find food in the dead crops.

  Allyssa was opening gates with help from Sean, Traci, Woody, and Rhonda when she saw a sheriff’s SUV pull up to one of their ranch yard gates. Worried that it was something about Trever, she hurried to meet him before he could open the gate.

  “Can I help you, officer?” she asked, not recognizing him from the officers she had met over the years.

  “Yes, are you Allyssa or Fiona Herriot?” he asked, sounding respectful.

  “I’m Allyssa Herriot,” she assured him.

  “I’m visiting all the ranchers and farmers in the area and advising them to pack up their most valuable belongings and vacate the area. There is a strong chance the Sweetwater Creek Fire is going to jump the highway and head this way,” he informed her.

  “What?” she asked, aghast at the news. She hadn’t even known there was a Sweetwater Creek Fire.

  “Yes, ma’am. We need you to be prepared to evacuate.” He handed her a flier they had prepared, which was signed by Sheriff Bradley. It explained the procedures they were to follow, so they could be ready to evacuate. They were advised to take their pets and make all other preparations.

  “How long do we have?” she asked, glancing at the house where her babies were playing in the yard with Juanita. She looked around her beloved ranch, back at the children and her friends, then towards the hills that separated their ranch from the town.

  “We’re not sure, ma’am, but you need to take this seriously,” he told her, looking at her curiously. He knew who she was, but he saw she was wearing a Glock, not the revolver she had recently used to shoot and kill a man. He wondered where they kept the shotgun that had been used to kill that rustler he had read about.

  “Thank you,” she said weakly. She watched him walk away, get in in his SUV, and drive away. Once he got over the hill, she watched the dust blow across her
yard. She looked at the buildings in the way of the fire and wondered if any would be left standing when this was over. She looked up at the sky, praying for rain as she had done every day during this awfully hot and dry summer.

  “What’d the deputy want?” Rhonda asked.

  “We’re being asked to evacuate,” Allyssa told her, showing her the flier and looking at the others, who were coming up. “Can you chase the cattle and horses away, head them towards the lake?” she asked the therapist as Woody came up and heard her.

  “Yes, we’ll get them going, and then, we will head out,” Woody answered her.

  “What’s going on?” Sean asked as he came up with Traci.

  Allyssa explained. “You two go pack your clothes. You can pack a box with your things, but I want you to take just the minimum.”

  “Do you need help?” Rhonda asked.

  “You can help get the stock out. Should we let the chickens go?”

  “They’d do better if you caught them and put them in a horse trailer,” Woody stated. “I’ll saddle up and herd the horses out; they can fend for themselves. Big Red and her beau will be in that bunch,” he told her. “You start gathering the poultry and that damn llama,” he told Rhonda.

  “I’ll hitch the horse trailer to the Suburban,” Allyssa told them, and everyone nodded. She needed to back up the computer and grab a few things from the clinic. She’d have Juanita pack her things and then together they would pack up for the children. “I’m going to try to reach Fey,” Allyssa said as the children ran off. The therapists headed for their appointed tasks. Allyssa got hold of Fey, told her about the evacuation, and demanded that she come home immediately to help. Fey could hear the desperation in her wife’s voice and realized it wasn’t a joke; this was real. She left the rancher she was talking with, warning him of the impending fires as she got in her RV and headed home. Allyssa gassed up both the Suburban and the Jeep, hooking another trailer to the Jeep and strapping the ATVs to it with Rhonda’s help.