Sully looked around. A good many of the guests had already left—and, he realized, he had talked to most of them.
“I guess I sort of did,” he agreed. “All these people gathering together to celebrate Miss Joan’s grandson and daughter-in-law’s coming baby just reminded me of my own family. There was always some celebration or other being thrown.” He smiled fondly as he recalled the last few. “I got so caught up in all the bad things I saw going on recently, I forgot to focus on all the good there was right there in front of me.”
Rae saw the expression in his eyes as he mentioned his family and drew her own conclusion. “So that means you’ll be leaving soon?”
She had no idea why that would hit her so hard. After all, she was used to wranglers coming and going on the ranch on a regular basis. It was practically a way of life, and it just reinforced her feelings that she couldn’t really count on anyone but herself. Why Sully leaving should bother her so much made no sense to her.
And yet there was a knot in her stomach.
“Oh no,” he said as they walked out together and went behind Murphy’s. When he’d pulled his truck in earlier, the lot had been fairly crowded. Now it was all but cleared out, he noted. “I signed on to work on the ranch for at least a month. Longer if the job’s not finished. I have no intentions of leaving before then.”
She felt the knot loosening, at least for now.
Can’t get used to this, she warned herself. He’s gonna be leaving soon enough. The man has a life back in California.
“That’s good. I mean, I won’t have to tell Miss Joan she needs to be on the lookout for someone else to send in. But I think you should realize that around here, the work is never finished. If you’re lucky, you don’t find yourself overwhelmed.” She allowed herself a small, tight smile. “You’ve done more work than those two drifters have done in all the time they’ve been here. Though he does try, Warren’s kind of inept, and as for Rawlings, well, there’s no good way to put this.” She’d given him more than a dozen chances, and the man still wound up disappointing her each and every time. “He’s just plain lazy.”
Sully made no comment about Rawlings, but the mention of Warren had him looking around the parking lot.
“Speaking of Warren, have you seen him?” Sully asked. “I didn’t see him among the few people who were left inside. I felt positive that he’d be waiting out here by my truck.”
“You’re his ride?” she asked, trying to remember if she had seen the two entering together. All she could recall was seeing Sully and no one else.
“Yeah, I brought him to the dance,” Sully confirmed with a grin.
“Maybe he caught a ride back with someone else,” Rae suggested. She thought for a moment. “Come to think about it, I don’t remember seeing him around in the last couple of hours. Maybe he decided not to stay and left early.”
“You’re probably right, but I’m going to go inside and check again just in case,” he told her. “I’d hate to leave him stranded after I brought him out here.” Starting to leave, Sully stopped long enough to tell her, “You don’t have to wait here until I get back. You should get going. Just be careful driving home.”
“Just like I’ve been doing for the last thirteen years,” she pointed out.
Ordinarily, if someone said that to her, she would have felt insulted that the person thought of her as too inept to make it back to the ranch. But the odd thing was that she didn’t feel insulted. Instead, she found it rather sweet that Sully was concerned about her welfare.
She wasn’t sure what to make of it.
The man was definitely confusing her, she thought as she watched him walk back inside Murphy’s.
Instead of leaving, she stayed where she was. Rae decided to linger to see if he had any luck locating Warren. After all, Warren did work for her.
“Brett said he saw Warren leaving more than two hours ago,” Sully told her when he came out of Murphy’s a few minutes later.
He thought it rather strange that the man hadn’t said anything to him when he was leaving, seeing as how he’d been Warren’s ride.
“Problem solved,” Rae declared. Taking one look at the pensive expression on Sully’s face, she surmised, “Problem not solved?”
Sully shrugged. He was probably making too much of this, seeing problems when none really existed. Still, something was bothering him about this. “It’s just kind of strange, that’s all.”
“I won’t argue with that. Now you can be my escort home,” she told him, getting into her truck. “So to speak. I’ll see you at the ranch house.”
She took off before Sully could answer her.
Reminding himself that he wasn’t the other wrangler’s keeper, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.
That would be the famous Cavanaugh gut, he silently thought, laughing at himself. There was no law that said everything had to make sense.
He just preferred it that way.
Sully kept an eye out for any sign of another vehicle on the road despite the fact that the saloon owner had told him that Warren had left Murphy’s over two hours ago. If he saw another vehicle on the side of the road now, that would have meant that Warren and whoever was giving him a ride back had broken down.
But there was no sign of another vehicle anywhere around on the way back to the ranch, and no sign of Warren, either.
* * *
The house was quiet when Sully finally walked in. He took that to mean that Rae had turned in for the night. He would have liked to talk to her for a while longer just to wind down, but on second thought, maybe it was better this way. If Rae was still up, they’d be alone together, and he just might be tempted to see if perhaps they could pick up where they had left off the other night.
And that might really complicate things, he thought.
Definitely better this way, he silently insisted, perhaps a little more emphatically than was necessary.
It was late and he needed to turn in. He had a feeling that tomorrow was going to be a very long day. There really was no such thing, he’d come to learn, as a day off on a horse ranch. If you weren’t there for part of the day, you just got to work that much harder the next.
* * *
Sully wasn’t sure how long he’d been at work when Rae walked into the stables. About to say hello to her, she cut him short by asking, “Have you seen Warren?”
“No, but then I didn’t swing by the bunkhouse,” Sully reminded her. “I came straight to the stables this morning to get a head start on the work. Why?” He noticed the odd expression on her face. “Something wrong?”
Rae frowned. “When you didn’t come to breakfast, I thought you were gone, too.”
“I just grabbed a couple of slices of toast to go. I had a feeling that Rawlings hadn’t held up his end and that there’d be a lot to do today.” Sully stopped abruptly as her words replayed themselves in his head. “What do you mean ‘gone, too’?” And then he made a guess as to whom she was talking about. “Rawlings’s gone?”
“No.” Her tone sounded that she wished he was. “I left him in the kitchen, gorging himself on waffles. He told me that Warren never came in last night.”
“Never came in?” Sully echoed as he stopped working. “But he left Murphy’s around seven—maybe eight. He left way before we did.”
“Well, he didn’t seem to make it home.” Rae shrugged, looking impatient. “There’s probably nothing to worry about. I mean, he’s taken off before. Except that maybe this time he just kept going.” She sighed, shaking her head. “If I had to lose someone, I would rather it had been Rawlings. At least Warren tried to do the work, even though the man was totally out of his element.”
She was marching around now, like a tiger seeking release, Sully thought. “What was his element?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea. He never talked about where
he came from or what he did for a living before he turned up here. But Miss Joan seemed to think that he needed a second chance and I wasn’t about to question that. I mean, after all, she took me in. Although I think she missed the boat with Rawlings.” She thought that over. “I suppose in his defense, he only started to slack off after Warren came here.”
Sully looked at her curiously. “They didn’t arrive here together?” He had just assumed that they did.
“No. Rawlings was here a whole month before Warren turned up,” she told him.
Since there was no sign of Rawlings coming to join him in the stables, Sully got back to work. The stalls weren’t going to clean themselves.
“Did you check his bunk?” he asked Rae. When she didn’t answer, he clarified, “To see if he took his things.”
They’d been through this once before, and she was annoyed with herself for not remembering to do that. She threw “No, I didn’t,” over her shoulder as she left the stables.
* * *
Sully was still working—and still doing it on his own—when Rae returned fifteen minutes later. One look at her face had him abandoning the last stall and crossing over to her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Did you kill him?” He was referring to Rawlings, trying to get a smile out of her. He didn’t succeed. Her scowl deepened.
“No, and Warren’s things are gone,” she said. “He packed up and left. This is not a good time to take off like this. The least he could have done was tell me. It doesn’t make any sense,” she complained. “The man didn’t seem unhappy, just out of his element.
“But he was grateful for the work,” she added. “If Rawlings had taken off like this, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But Warren...” Her voice trailed off, underscoring her confusion.
“Did you question Rawlings?” Sully asked. “Did he happen to see who gave Warren the ride back to the ranch?”
“What’s the point?” she retorted. “It doesn’t matter who gave him a ride from Murphy’s. It wasn’t to the ranch. Rawlings said he didn’t see Warren. He’s gone now.”
Didn’t she understand? “That’s exactly why it does matter. Maybe he intended to come back but whoever gave him that ride had other ideas.”
“We don’t know what happened,” she pointed out. “Maybe Warren did come back. He came back, packed up and took off in that old jeep he drove when he first came into Forever.”
Sully pieced together the spare information that they did have. “But Rawlings never came to Murphy’s yesterday. That means he was here the entire time. He told you that he didn’t see Warren, which means Warren never came back to the ranch.”
“But he had to have come back,” she realized. “I just said that his things were missing.”
“So either Rawlings lied about not seeing him or Warren came back when Rawlings wasn’t around and took his things,” Sully concluded. “Where did you say Rawlings was now?”
This needed further investigating, he thought, leaning the shovel he’d been using to clean out the stalls against one of the walls.
“He’s probably still in the kitchen, eating breakfast like he hadn’t had anything to eat for the last three days,” she told him, frowning.
Sully started to walk to the ranch house. Rae was right behind him, walking quickly in order to keep up with his longer stride.
* * *
“Do you remember what time it was when you last saw Warren?” Sully asked Rawlings.
“How should I know?” Rawlings demanded. “I don’t mark these things down.”
But Sully was not about to just back off. “Was it when he left with me for Miss Joan’s party at Murphy’s?” he asked more forcefully.
Looking a little unnerved by Sully’s tone, Rawlings shrugged as he shifted his chair back. “That sounds right, I guess.”
“Why didn’t you come to Murphy’s?” Sully asked. “The invitation was for everyone. Man like you would find free beer and free food pretty tempting.”
“I decided not to go, okay?” the wrangler answered defensively. “I thought after working all week I just wanted to kick back and relax. With Warren gone to this thing, I didn’t have to put up with mindless conversation.”
Sully seemed to draw in closer, all but in Rawlings’s face. “And you didn’t see him after that?”
“I already told you said I didn’t,” Rawlings retorted angrily. He turned to face the foreman. “Look, I don’t exactly get paid much. Do I have to put up with him firing questions at me like I’m guilty of something before he even tells me what the hell’s going on?”
“We think Warren’s missing,” Rae told the other man, begrudgingly doling out her words.
Rawlings looked unimpressed. “Maybe he just took off again, like last time.”
“He took his things with him, cleared out his locker,” Sully told the wrangler.
“Then maybe he took off for good. Can’t say I blame him,” Rawlings said. “If I had somewhere to go, maybe I’d take off for good, too.”
“A man just doesn’t take off without saying something. You said you have a decent relationship with him,” Sully said, looking at Rae.
“I do—or did,” she corrected. “Warren was really trying to do better.”
“Then something must have spooked him,” Sully speculated. “Was there anyone at the party you didn’t recognize?” he asked her. “Like a stranger? Someone who Warren might have known from his past? It was pretty crowded there at the high point.”
Rae shook her head. “No, I didn’t see anyone like that at Murphy’s. Everyone there was from Forever.”
“You’re not,” Rawlings pointed out, glaring at Sully.
Rae was quick to turn the accusation back at the wrangler. “Neither are you.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t there,” Rawlings reminded them. “I was right here, on the ranch, minding my own business, remember?”
For now, Sully ignored the irritating cowboy. “Maybe Warren’ll change his mind and come back. Maybe this is all just a big misunderstanding and he’s spending time with someone after the party. I’m going to go back to work—” he began.
“I could file a missing-persons report on Warren with the sheriff,” she said, thinking out loud.
“You can’t,” he told her matter-of-factly. “You have to wait at least twenty-four hours before filing a missing-persons report. By my count it’s only been about half that time.”
She looked at him impatiently. “That might be true in California and even in some of the bigger cities in Texas. But Forever’s got different rules,” she informed him. “Out here someone’s missing when they go missing.”
He could see there was no arguing with her about this. He also saw that despite the front she put up, Rae was worried that something had happened to Warren.
“All right then, why don’t you go and file that report with the sheriff,” he told her. Stripping off the gloves he’d been using, he stuck them in his back pocket. “I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t have to,” she retorted.
His eyes met hers. “I have to” was all he said.
Nodding, she turned toward the other wrangler. “All right. Rawlings, you get to spend another day by yourself—with the horses,” she added.
The wrangler looked less than thrilled. “You’re leaving me here to do all the work?”
“You catch on quick,” Rae said as she left with Sully.
In the background, Rawlings muttered something unintelligible under his breath. Because she was worried about Warren, she let it go.
Chapter 10
Sheriff Rick Santiago looked up from the report he was reading on his desk. He looked mildly surprised to see who had just walked into his inner office.
“Morning, Rae,” the sheriff said, half rising from his chair. His eyes shifted to the man who had walked in right be
hind her. “Sully, right?” he asked.
Sully had a feel that Forever’s sheriff was far sharper than the laid-back, easygoing image he liked projecting.
Putting his hand out to the dark-haired man, Sully shook hands with him. “Right. We met last night.”
Rick’s smile was benign as it took in both visitors. “So, what can I do for you, Rae?”
Rae took a breath, as if she needed to fortify herself before speaking. “This is an official visit.”
Rick gestured toward the two chairs in front of his desk. “Have a seat,” he told them, doing the same. Once his visitors had gotten comfortable, he said, “Okay, tell me what official thing brings you here?”
Rae sat up a little straighter. “One of the latest wranglers Miss Joan had me take on at the ranch has gone missing.”
Interest flickered across the sheriff’s suntanned face. This was different than the usual things that his office was asked to handle. For the most part, those involved missing livestock and occasional acts of vandalism brought on by one of the citizens having had too much to drink and then getting pulled into a meaningless argument with another Forever resident.
“Who is it?”
“John Warren,” Rae answered.
Pulling a pad closer, he made a note on it. “How long has Warren been missing?” Rick asked.
“Since sometime yesterday afternoon,” she answered. She saw minor surprise cross the sheriff’s face. “He came to Miss Joan’s party at Murphy’s along with everyone else, but then I lost track of him.”
Rick raised his brow, looking from Rae to her companion. “Were you supposed to be keeping track of him?” he asked, obviously thinking this was rather an odd choice of words.
This wasn’t the point, Rae thought, annoyed that the sheriff wasn’t focusing on what was important. “No, but, well, some of the people who Miss Joan decides need a second chance aren’t always exactly Boy Scout material—”
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