Ellie’s cell phone rang Thursday morning. “Ellie, I know Nash said we were meeting at eleven, but can you come over now?” asked Pastor Theo. “Things have taken a bit of a bad turn here, and I think you could help.”
Ellie had on farm work clothes and hadn’t yet dressed for going into town. “Sure. What’s going on?”
“I’d rather not go into it on the phone. Just get here as quickly as you can. Actually, no—don’t come here first. Go to Nash’s house. I expect he’s home. I checked with Don and he’s not at the sheriff’s office. Bring him here when he’s ready—but I’m warning you, that may take a while.”
“Why? What on earth happened?”
“I really can’t go into it here, but the ballistics test from your bison evidently came back with disturbing results. I want the three of us to talk about what to do from here, but from his phone call to me, Nash isn’t in a mood to have a rational discussion. I know I probably should send Don over, but God brought you to mind, so I’m trusting that.”
Ellie pulled a nicer shirt out of her closet and began looking for her sandals. “Sure. I’ll go to his house. And if he’s not there, I’ll call you and we’ll find him.”
Who could those tests have implicated that would make Nash so upset? There was only one way to find out.
“Gran,” Ellie called as she came downstairs brushing her hair. “I’ve got to go out. Tell Gunner to call my cell if he needs me.” She wasn’t ready to tell Gunner and Gran that Nash likely knew who the shooter was. She couldn’t be certain yet, and that was probably best done by official police procedures anyway. She knew Gunner—he’d press charges as hard as he could, whoever it was.
She didn’t have to ring the doorbell to know Nash wasn’t in the house—the sound coming from the garage let her know where to find him. The loud clang of hammer on steel rang through the air as she walked up the drive to his open garage door. Nash had his back to her, stripped to a sweat-soaked white T-shirt that clung to his skin. He was hurling a sledgehammer at a mangled piece of steel. She stayed back, warned to keep her distance by the sheer ferocity of his swings.
After half a minute, he exhaled loudly, chest heaving from the exertion, and rested the sledgehammer on the ground. She took one step into the garage.
“Nash?”
He turned, and the look on his face practically made her take a step back. Sharp features framed hard, cold eyes. His whole body looked as if it was at war—strung tight and ready for battle. At the same time, a bone-weary exhaustion lurked under all the tension. He looked like a man who had fought for a long time and was ready to give up. “Theo?”
He let the sledgehammer fall against the nearby workbench, which made Ellie feel safe enough to come closer. “He called me, yes. He didn’t tell me what happened, but I’m pretty sure I know.” She held his gaze, sensing the frustration that radiated off him like heat off a stove. “Who?”
“Mick.”
Mick? Her wildest guess would have never been Mick. He was the closest to Nash, looked up to him as the mentor figure Mick’s own father clearly wasn’t. If she’d had to choose which boy was getting the most out of the program, it would have been Mick, without a doubt. The punch in her gut must have been pale in comparison to what Nash was feeling. “It couldn’t be Mick.” That felt foolish to say, but it seemed so impossible that Mick would be shooting Blue Thorn bison. “It can’t be Mick.”
Nash took off his safety glasses, which just made the ice in his eyes that much sharper. “Well, there’s a small chance it could be Mick’s father—the rifle’s registered to him—but I don’t think there’s any point in fooling ourselves.”
“I’m sorry.” Really, what was there to say to this?
Her apology tightened his already tense features. “You’re sorry? This kid takes my time, your time, helps out on your ranch, gets to know the both of us and then shoots your animals. And you’re sorry? I’m not sorry. I’m furious. I’ve been taking it out on this hunk of metal because, believe me, if I even see that punk right now I don’t know what I’d do to him.” He flung the work gloves off his hands. “To put you and your family in danger like that. To kill one of your animals. The stupidity. The sheer cruelty of it.” He looked at her. “And don’t forget this started before the program. The casing I found earlier, from my first visits here? It matches. He came in and took what we had to offer even after trying to hurt your family. What kind of human being does that?”
“I don’t know. I can’t make sense of this.” It was bad enough when some unnamed person was taking shots at the ranch, but to learn it was someone she knew, someone she’d helped... The betrayal of this piled up on the betrayal of Derek and Katie, and suddenly it felt as if the whole world was ganging up to do her in. “What do we do?” Tears threatened all too quickly—she couldn’t go to pieces now, not with Nash looking like a bomb ready to go off.
“I don’t know,” Nash growled, kicking an empty soda can by his feet. “I know what I ought to do, but I’m far too angry to do it.”
“Maybe you should let Don handle it.”
That jolted his head upright. “I will not let Don handle this. I want this kid to stare me in the face when I charge him with killing your animal. Endangering your family. And you. I want Mick to feel the full weight of what he’s done.”
Ellie had little doubt about that. Nash looked as if he was ready to come down on Mick like his worst nightmare. Was that good or bad? Mick had done something stupid and dangerous, but he was still only seventeen—he couldn’t even be charged as an adult, from what she guessed.
Theo walked into the garage behind her. “So, we have a problem on our hands.”
“I’ll say,” said Ellie. She was hurt and angry, but Nash looked downright explosive.
“I decided just to come over here and not wait. It’s probably better to have this conversation out of my office anyway. So, how are we going to handle this?” Theo asked as he leaned against a sawhorse, motioning for Ellie and Nash to take the stools in front of the workbench.
“It’s pretty clear what has to happen,” Nash said as he sat down. “We take Mick in, get his fingerprints, match them to the rifle and charge him—and maybe also his father—with the crime.”
Theo folded his hands. “I think there’s more to it than that. Mick is a member of our church, a young man we’ve been helping. We need some wisdom and grace as well as the justice you seek.”
“I have no grace for that kid,” Nash ground out.
“Look, I’m hurt by what he’s done,” Ellie began. “And I’m confused as to why on earth he’d do it, but I can see Theo’s point. We’ve got to think about this. The other kids—the whole church, probably the whole town—will be watching how we handle this.”
Theo turned to her. “Will Gunner want to press charges?”
“Absolutely. He’s angry, and he has a right to be. This has messed everyone up at the worst possible time. The family is frightened, the bison are stressed, which makes them volatile—and they’re already tough to handle in calving season. And that’s before factoring in the monetary loss of the animal he shot. It’s hit Gunner hard. The man has a baby of his own on the way.”
“All things Mick knows and chose to ignore,” Nash said. “We ought to make an example of him.”
“Are you sure that’s the way to go here, Nash?” Theo looked concerned. Even Ellie had been startled by the severity of Nash’s words. This was a side of Nash she’d always known must be there—the warrior, the enforcer—but hadn’t really seen before. “Even you have to realize you’re not entirely objective on this.”
“We’ve invested so much into Mick and the other kids,” Ellie said. “I can’t understand why he’d do this. It so...senseless.”
Nash put back on his shirt. “I’m bringing him in. The only question is do I pull him out of school in front of everyone or wait until after?”
Ellie had a vision of Nash walking Mick out of school in handcuffs. Was that really necessary? Would that straighten out a kid like Mick or just send him farther down the wrong path? She knew which Gunner would choose—and a part of her was as angry as her brother. A smaller part of her was shouting, Wait, stop! There’s another way!
“Don’t you have to talk to Gunner first? Official procedure or something?”
“I have enough evidence to bring him in for questioning now. All I need is his father’s consent, and believe me, I’ll get it.” Nash looked at Ellie. “I’ve gotten enough out of my system that I’ll be calm about it, but I want to be the one to do it. I’ll go pick up his dad and be waiting for him at lunch hour. After I’ve questioned him, I’ll talk to Gunner and we will arrest him.”
Theo turned to Ellie. “Let’s see if we can get the rest of the kids gathered at church after school. I can talk to them, help them understand what’s happened and why.”
That seemed like a good plan. Still, it all swirled around her head. “Mick, shooting at the Blue Thorn? I just can’t believe it. Why?”
“We’ll know in a few hours.”
* * *
Mick sat fidgeting in the guest chair of Nash’s desk in the sheriff’s office, rocking it back and forth on its casters and jiggling one knee up and down. The boy was alone. When Nash talked to Mick’s father, the man openly admitted giving Mick access to the now-missing rifle. He seemed more worried about the weapon than his son, surprising Nash by waiving his right to be present for Mick’s questioning. What kind of father treated his own son that way?
Don stood in the corner behind Mick and looked on. He had only barely consented to let Nash take the lead in interrogating Mick. No one was operating under the delusion Nash could be objective about this, but Nash had convinced Don that letting Mick see the full force of Nash’s anger might be useful. These kids were sorely lacking in a sense of consequences, so better an angry deputy than another dead animal.
Nash started with simple facts. “A bison was found killed on the Blue Thorn Ranch Sunday morning. We know it was shot by your father’s rifle.”
“So?” Mick barked back, defensive and afraid.
“Your dad says you have use of that rifle. He also says he doesn’t know where it is right now. He told us you do.”
Mick shrugged. “Father of the year, my dad, huh?”
Nash took a breath. In fact, they’d found the rifle stashed in a garbage can behind Mick’s home. Kids were never very creative in hiding weapons; they were always sure they’d never get caught. Nash sat right across from Mick, letting the frayed edges of his temper show. “I’m going to make this very simple. One question. Did you shoot the bison?
“I didn’t shoot that big buffalo. It wasn’t me.”
Nash sat back. “Who said the bison was big? How do you know it wasn’t a calf that got shot?”
“Well.” Mick backpedaled. “I just figured no one would be mean enough to shoot a baby one.” He looked everywhere but at Nash, clearly aware of the hole he was digging for himself.
Nash leaned toward Mick again, anger and sympathy warring in his chest. Mick was a clever, determined kid, but his dad had pretty much hung him out to dry. Mick could do so much more with his life than throw it away down this current path. Here was a kid looking for the deepest hurt possible—one that was also a cry for help. Nash made the effort to keep his voice even. “This will go much better for everyone, Mick, if you just level with me. You’re still seventeen, which means we have some leeway here, but not if you don’t cooperate.” He stared at Mick until the boy finally met his eyes. “The person who shot the bison will go to jail.”
“You mean like murder?” Mick’s fingers began drumming against the chair arms. The consequences of his actions were finally sinking in.
“Technically, it’s criminal mischief, but believe me, that’s serious enough to get you into a heap of trouble. The Bucktons will likely press full charges. And they should. No one here believes this was an accidental shooting. No one.”
Mick shook his head. Nash’s instincts told him the boy was about to break. He swallowed the urge to take the kid by his shoulders and shake some sense into him, but that wouldn’t help anyone. Everything would go easier—not easy, but easier—if Mick would just own up to what he’d done.
When no reply came, Nash unclenched his own fists, coming around to lean against the desk and deliberately using his height to tower over Mick. “I’ll ask you again. Did you shoot the bison at Blue Thorn Ranch?”
Mick squirmed in his chair. “No. I tell you, it wasn’t me.”
Nash’s frustration got the better of him, and he pushed off the table to pace the office. Don was right—he had totally lost the ability to keep calm about this.
“I didn’t do it,” Mick repeated, his voice pitching higher.
The fax machine in the corner of the office began to buzz and churn out paper. They were expecting the lab’s report on fingerprints found on the rifle. In a matter of seconds, Mick’s guilt would be sealed.
Nash nodded toward the machine. “We already have the rifle, Mick. That’s probably the lab report right now. If that paper says those are your prints on that rifle, you’d best start talking.” Nash nodded to Don, who walked to the machine and stood over it.
“It’s from my house—of course my prints are gonna be on it.” Mick was grasping at straws, his nerves beyond tight.
“Tell me now, Mick. I won’t be able to help you otherwise.”
“I didn’t shoot the gun!” Mick yelped.
Nash lost his temper. “You’re lying!” he shouted at Mick.
“Maybe not” came Don’s voice from over the fax machine.
Both Nash and Mick turned to look at Don, who was holding up the sheet of paper.
“Oh, man,” Mick moaned, his hand wiping the back of his neck.
“There’s a third set of prints on the gun. And the ones on the trigger aren’t Mick’s.”
“Oh, man. Oh, man,” Mick kept saying, rocking a little.
Nash felt eleven things at once. Regret at his certainty that Mick had betrayed him, uncertainty as to what it meant that Mick hadn’t done the shooting, worry over who had and several other emotions. He kept his mouth shut, unsure what to say.
“Which means, son—” Don kept his voice very low as he walked over and stood in front of Mick “—that while you may not have shot that animal, you know who did. Accessory to a crime is still a crime. Don’t you think for one moment that you are not still in a heap of trouble. The best thing you can do now is tell us the truth.”
“Who did it, Mick?” Nash practically ground the words out through clenched teeth. This surely meant that more than one of his students had betrayed his trust—just when he thought the burn couldn’t go any deeper. “I know you know, and believe me, I am losing patience here.”
Mick bit his lip and clutched the chair arms.
“Who shot the bison, Mick?” Nash asked more loudly.
“Don’t be stupid, son,” Don said over Mick’s shoulder. “Tell us what you know.”
“Who shot the bison?” Nash yelled louder than he ought to have.
“Marny!” Mick blurted out, his face going nearly red with the stress of the admission. “It was Marny, okay? She did it.”
Mick curled in on himself as Nash felt a wave of shock shoot through his limbs. Marny? How? Why?
“Marny Fuller shot that animal?” Don asked. “With your father’s rifle?”
“Marny?” Nash repeated, still stunned. Of all the admissions he’d expected, this was not one of them.
“Yeah, Marny. Now you know why I didn’t want to say, okay?”
“Son, this is a long way from okay. You’ve got some explaining to do.”
Mick’s face went from flushed to pale, looking as though he might be sick. Nash, still struggling to put the pieces together, grabbed another chair and pulled it up next to the boy. “Tell me what happened.” Half of him was relieved that his faith in the boy hadn’t been misplaced entirely, while the other half was shocked at Marny’s nearly equal betrayal.
“Our dads hate Miss Ellie’s family.”
Nash couldn’t quite see how that fit in, but he urged Mick to continue. “Go on.”
“Mostly Marny’s dad, but he and my dad talk a lot since they’re both out of work. They spend a lot of time down at Lonesome’s, you know?”
Lonesome’s was the bar just down the block from Shorty’s Pizza. Nash or Don got at least one call a week to break up a fight or some such nonsense at the roadhouse. Not exactly an uplifting place to spend a lot of time.
“What do your dads have against the Bucktons?” Nash couldn’t see how any grievance warranted what was going on.
“Marny’s dad worked a day or two at the Blue Thorn a while back, and he thought it’d be permanent, I guess. Only it wasn’t. Marny’s dad drinks a lot.” In a heartbreaking show of misplaced loyalty, Mick looked up at Don. “I mean, he’s never hit her or anything like that, but Dad says he’s a mean drunk, and I’ve seen it. He yells, mostly. Sometimes at her, but mostly at anybody he thinks ought to have hired him.”
Nash still wasn’t seeing a strong enough connection. If Marny’s dad had only worked a day or two on the ranch, that might explain why he hadn’t shown up on the employees list. “So Jerry Fuller thinks he should be working at the Blue Thorn?”
“No, nothing like that. He holds a grudge, and I don’t think he’d work there now even if they asked him. But he—well, he and my dad, actually—were both ready to get jobs building those fancy houses that were gonna go up last year. Those were supposed to be good-paying jobs, Dad said. Marny’s dad said things were gonna be looking up for him and her. She wouldn’t have to go to Waco to live with her mama or anything like that.”
Don came around and sat on Nash’s desk. “You mean Ramble Acres? The DelTex condo development that got nixed last spring?”
“That’s the one. My dad said even I could probably get a better job working on that site than working at Shorty’s all summer. I could probably even buy a new car.”
Now it was starting to make sense. Nash had been told that the Buckton family had been the target of some nasty dealing by DelTex in order to gain the water access needed to build Ramble Acres. To keep from having the land rights forced away from them, the Bucktons had exposed the company’s underhanded practices. As a result, the Ramble Acres project had died and taken a lot of potential jobs with it. It wasn’t hard to see how these two kids had decided the Bucktons had hurt them. “So your dads think the Bucktons took their jobs away. And your lives are worse on account of it.”
Mick picked at a rip in his jeans. “If Marny’s dad sends her to Waco, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll never see her again.” He looked up at Nash. “Marny’s dad ain’t no picnic, but her mama’s worse, if you ask me. Marny’d say the same.”
“So you decided to get back at the Bucktons for what they’d done to you.” It still made no sense given how much time Marny had spent with Ellie, but who could say how a teenage brain put facts together? Oh, Ellie. She was going to be stung by this. Badly. At a time when she was already hurting. She’d poured as much time and attention into Marny as Nash had into Mick. Now Marny’s outburst at the church program made a sick sort of sense. What a mess of pain this is, Lord. How on earth do we find our way out of it?
Nash’s gut sank lower when he remembered something. “The first shooting took place even before we met. Did you and Marny do that one?”
“We were just messing around then. Marny is a really good shot. I thought at first she was just letting off steam or something—she thought it was fun to scare the herd. I didn’t think we’d actually hurt anyone.”
If Nash had a dime for every time he’d heard that phrase... “But you did. Do you get how serious this is, Mick? I know you were trying to protect Marny, but do you hear what I’m saying?”
Mick looked at Nash. “I get it. I get it.”
“Do you?” Don stood up from the desk.
“What happens now?” Mick practically whined. Nash fought the twin urges to hug and shake the boy. Things could go any number of directions now—most of them bad.
“Now we bring in your dad, Marny and her dad. Things are going to get very messy from here.”
Mick’s face sank as he realized just how far this tangle spread. The boy put his head in his hands and cursed, and Nash couldn’t blame him.
“Take his statement,” Don said. “And I’ll find Miss Fuller. Then we’ll ride out to the Bucktons’ and let them know what’s up.”
“Let me talk to Ellie before you talk to Gunner, okay? This is going to hit her hard, and she deserves a heads-up before we hit the whole family with this.”
Don paused a bit before nodding. “Well, I suppose another hour won’t pretty this up none. Mick, give me Marny’s cell number, ’cause I know you’ve got it.”
While Mick replied, Nash pulled out the statement form, and the whole world started its downward spiral from there.