thirty-nine

Evan and I seemed to have exhausted conversational topics and ourselves, so I told him I needed to get going. I was surprised when he offered to walk me out, but he seemed to have shed his earlier terror, at least for the moment. “Summer has a dog here for training. His owner’s picking him up this weekend, but I need to take him out for a run.”

Evan stopped by the front door and picked up the shotgun. He started to reach for the doorknob, but stopped and thrust the gun toward me. “Could you hold this? I need to change shoes.”

Without thinking, I wrapped my fingers around the gun’s barrels. Surprised by its weight, I took the stock in my other hand and ran my gaze along the length of the weapon. A long ragged scratch marred the otherwise sleek finish of the wooden stock. “You’re taking this with you?”

He laughed. “No, the coyotes don’t come around until dusk.” He took the gun from me and set it out of sight in the living room. “I just don’t think that’s the best place for it.”

We said our goodbyes in the yard between the house and the barn, and I went to my van. Jay shook his travel crate with his wiggling, but I signaled him to lie down and said, “Sorry, Bubby, no sheepies today. We’ll go for a walk on the way home.” He grinned back at me, ready as always to accept whatever I suggested.

Movement near the barn caught my eye as I fastened my seatbelt. Luciano was trotting down the hill toward Evan, who held a stainless steel dog bowl. The two of them disappeared into the barn, and I assumed Evan was locking the big dog up to avoid any problems when he let the client dog out. I started the van, and as I reached for the shift, a big charcoal-gray dog bounded into view, leaping and spinning and bouncing. A Bouvier des Flandres, a big one and obviously young. Evan followed.

I was about to drive away when the Bouvier ran toward Evan, who swung his arm up and forward as if to direct the big galoot toward a gate at the end of the path they were on. The gate opened into an empty pasture, and I assumed Evan meant to use it to exercise the dog without disturbing the sheep in the other field. The purposefulness with which the dog trotted toward the gate held my attention. I waited and watched. The Bouvier stood on his hind legs and reached for the gate latch. It took him a couple of tries, but he finally did it.

He opened the gate.

Evan had pulled a clump of hairs from the gate latch on Saturday morning. They were dark, and six or so inches long. About right for a Bouvier’s beard. In the distance, Evan caught up with the dog, pulled the gate shut behind them, and disappeared over a small rise in the field. I sat for a moment, then shifted into gear and turned toward home.

Had someone sent a dog to open the gate and fetch the sheep from the pen? Could that be why the security cameras hadn’t caught anyone around the pens during the night the sheep went missing? They were undoubtedly set to human height to avoid accidental triggering by wild animals. Had Summer trained that Bouvier to do that neat little trick? It made sense that Summer would prefer to use a dog she didn’t own if she had larceny on her mind. It wasn’t as if he’d tattle on her. But I hadn’t seen a Bouvier around the event grounds, and a dog that size would be hard to miss. And why steal her own sheep? And if Summer was the rustler, then Evan had to be in on it. He would have known she was gone from their camper.

Then another question popped into my head. Did we know for sure that both Summer and Evan had spent Friday night in their camper? What if one of them had gone home? Someone had to care for the animals on the farm. I hadn’t given it any thought before, but as I drove away with the Bouvier’s gate-opening trick fresh in my mind, I started to wonder.

And what about Ray? How was he involved? I had the impression that Ray had stayed on the event grounds, although I wasn’t sure why I thought that. Maybe because I had arrived early and he and Bonnie were already moving the remaining sheep. If the Bouvier had been on the farm for more than a few days, Ray must have known the dog. Maybe he was the one who trained him to open the gate and round up the sheep. But again, why? And if the dog did take the sheep from the pen, what did he do with them?

I thought back to the huge paw prints Tom and I had found, and considered the size of the Bouvier. I had a hunch his feet would fit into those marks. Could someone have parked a stock truck somewhere on the property and used the dog to commit the crime? I remembered an old movie, The Doberman Gang, about a crook who trained Doberman Pinschers to rob banks. But that was Hollywood, and this was Indiana, and real, live sheep with no retakes. Still, I’d seen the dog open the gate with my own eyes, and a good sheepdog—Nell or Bonnie, for instance—could have moved the flock to a waiting truck. The more I tried to untangle the possibilities, the woollier my thoughts became.