Chapter 8

IVY’S OFFICE DOOR WAS SHUT, SO I didn’t get to see the picture on her wall of Charley’s magnificent brother, Fire, when I left Milt’s office.

“I take that.” Eliana was suddenly with me in the hallway, reaching for my cleaned-up stew bowl and empty tea glass.

I felt a blush creep across my face. Guy often serves me food at home, but I don’t expect him to adios my dirty dishes. I pull my own weight.

Eliana saw my hesitation, my lingering glance at the empty bowl. I’d hardly tasted the stew, truth be told.

“You like more?”

I was no doubt crimson in the cheeks now. “I sure wouldn’t mind another bowlful,” I admitted.

“I bring for you. Go sit.” She waved to one of the tall dining tables and I took a seat. My dog was my shadow, curled up by my left boot.

“Do you remember Charley?” I asked Eliana when she came to me with another tall glass of tea and a full bowl—this time I smelled and tasted the softened, strong peppers, the perfectly braised game meat and spice. “Maybe you remember him being called Flame?”

“Pretty dog.” She flashed her perfect smile.

Bells sounded. It took me a few seconds to realize it was the doorbell, though Eliana turned away in an instant, making her flower-printed skirt swirl around her knees.

“I had to close the store to come up here.” The gal who said this headed right for my table.

She wore inch-long dark eyelashes and skin-tight, neon-colored yoga clothes, looked to be my age, and weighed about ninety cents. She drummed her fingernails—each with a different tiny decal of some sort: peace sign, yin-yang symbol, lightning bolt, whatnot—on the table and tossed her long, straight blonde hair while I wolfed my second bowl of stew.

“You’re new,” she told me. She brought one tiny ankle up to her palm and stretched, extending the whole leg straight up, perpendicular to the ground until she was standing there with arm and leg pointing to the ceiling, like that was normal or something.

“I’m Rainy.”

“And you’re new.”

She hadn’t even acknowledged Charley, who gave her a polite glance. We were not going to be best friends. When she ignored my dog, he set his head on my boot toe and got to work cleaning under his dewclaw. I smiled and leaned down to inspect Charley’s work. He grew the world’s longest dewclaw. A few months back, I’d cut off one front thumb hook after it reached a full curl. It makes a different-looking necklace. Guy said he wanted a matching charm to put on his keychain, so Charley’s growing one for him.

“Oh, Solar,” Ivy’s office opened up down the hall and she burst forward with a green tote bag and a handful of samples. “Good. You made it. So, this to the private delivery and here are some freebies for giveaway.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Ivy said, then gestured a mannerly palm toward me and added, “Did you meet Rainy Dale? She’s a horseshoer.”

“A what?”

Ivy laughed and waved Solar away. The girl gathered up the tote bag and dog supplement samples, then headed for the foyer.

I picked up my empty bowl and drained my glass.

“Oh, leave that,” Ivy told me, following Solar to the door.

Eliana came for my empties again. I followed Ivy. Charley followed me.

On the flagstone outside, Gabe was striding up from the right, and he tipped his hat to Solar. Charley swung around, plastered to my left leg in a heel.

Ivy asked, “Did you find Stuckey?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Gabe said. “He’s checking the flock. Thinks they’re all down in the lower part now, but a few might have wandered the hill. I told him to get a count. It’s not looking like all the geldings are going to get ridden. Oscar’s butchering.”

Ivy cast a glance to Solar as though Miss Yoga should grab on to the idea that there was more than horseshoeing that the girl didn’t get about life on this ranch.

Solar shook her head and got into one of those super-quiet electric cars and turned around using more space than I’d need to one-eighty Ol’ Blue. Gifted as a driver, Solar wasn’t.

“We wanted to get some exercise in all of them,” Ivy said.

“Yes, ma’am.” Gabe sounded like it had been his idea, but now she was making it hers.

Horses were needing riding? I perked up. Ivy had brought me into her home, let me use her phone. They’d fed me and rinsed me out with plenty of tea. I’d had the thought, of course, to offer to shoe for them—the Appy mare was close enough to due—and I’d been on and off their ranch for some bit of the day. I owed these people.

“I can ride for you.”

“Hmm,” Ivy said, starting to shake her head, then hesitating. “Okay, I’m going to ask you something, and please don’t feel insulted. You have no idea how many guests we get who say they can ride and what they mean is they have sat on a walking horse that needed no guidance in an arena. Riding out loose on the ranch is totally different. Things can spook a horse, and it’s hilly, and the horses can slip anytime. And you have to be careful of wire fences. And you have to duck when the horse goes under a low branch. If you can’t really ride—”

“I can really ride.”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think you should have been driving. I’d feel terrible if you got woozy again and fell off a horse.”

“I’m not going to fall off. I’m feeling so much better.” It was true. “Really, I’d like to repay your hospitality, and if you have horses needing wet saddle blankets, that’d suit me fine as a way to help you out.”

Ivy looked at me in silence then smiled. “Okay then.”

***

Oh, stepping into a stirrup after checking the cinch, swinging aboard a fine horse, feeling all the power and goodness at the ready, it’s the best. With Ivy’s okay, Gabe directed me to a blood bay in the second stall, a gelding called Decker who told me he was more than ready to get out for a ride. The bay had good shoes, but I couldn’t help noticing a flashy chestnut gelding across the wide barn aisle was bare, overgrown, and needing a full set. Gabe took a burly buckskin—its shoes clipped all the way around—from down the aisle and we headed out with Charley holding point like the header of a herding dog he was born to be. It was a fine thing to ride out on the Beaumonts’ ranch. Halfway up the big hill, the sound of a sheep’s bell rang below us. I figured they had it hung on a ewe or a wether. Leaving a bellwether, a castrated ram, as a good-sized and noisy bachelor to help mind the ewes and lambs is one more piece of protection to afford a flock.

Sure enough, with more height, we spied Stuckey in the bottomland far to the east, counting sheep amid the oaks. Gabe checked cross fencing and I noted the coyote scat on a scrubby knoll overlooking the field where the ewes had apparently bedded down the previous evening.

Gabe reined up and studied the coyote tracks with Charley and me.

“Varmints need bullets in their heads,” Gabe said.

“Is it legal here to kill them outright when they’re not bothering you or any stock?”

“Ever heard of the three Ss?”

Actually, I had. “Shoot, shovel, and shut up.”

He grinned. “That’s right.”

“Should we go up the hill all the way?” I remembered now what he’d said about the summit having cell reception and wished I’d thought to grab mine out of Ol’ Blue. I could have called Guy’s cell.

“No reason to go up there.”

“Wouldn’t it be the best view of the whole place, if we want to see stray sheep?”

“If there’s any stragglers, they’re probably over the low hill to the east. Some of them would have moved that way during the hunt.”

“We could split up,” I suggested. “If I find some, Charley can bring them in, push them down to the others.”

Gabe shrugged. “Reckon you can go wherever you want.”

I broke away from him, cut the bay gelding he’d assigned me straight up the slope, urging him to work.

Climbing that hill—the second time that afternoon—was a sight easier ahorseback than afoot. Decker wasn’t in great shape, but the thrust of his hindquarters lurching us up the slope felt wonderful. Even though Gabe was pretty sure he’d be the one finding sheep, I hoped to score, to be doubly useful to Ivy. In one glance over my shoulder, I glimpsed a lone old cowboy on a small, sturdy horse, descending a ridge way off, across the Beaumont fences, at a neighboring ranch. The horse was tailed by a small, fluffy dog, but when I looked back again, the brush had swallowed up the threesome.

At the summit, my horse Decker got a good rest while I looked in every direction. Amazing how much better the view is from the saddle. A few feet higher makes a difference. I saw more ranch land to the east. Haze to the west and bits of town. Maybe even made out the Black Bluff bull sale grounds. Somewhere in that little town was Ivy’s specialty shop where she sold her supplements for dogs. I heard distant traffic noise and realized good old Interstate 5 was down there at the bottom of the hill’s super steep west side. The north seemed to be a kinder slope but was fenced off.

The bay blew the wonderful noise of contentment that horses make. The honest scent of horse sweat drifted up. I smiled down at Decker’s russet face, then frowned. Below the horse’s black-tipped nose lay Charley, pressing his head to the ground in the same spot he’d been when I found him earlier in the day.

I backed Decker up a stride, then another.

So odd, the way my dog lay, his front legs a little spread, hugging the earth.

“Charley, get up. Come.”

Decker pawed and stamped a front foot while I made him turn on his haunches to let me see Charley from all angles.

Weird.

I had to ride away and bark the command to get Charley’s cooperation. And we didn’t find any sheep as we forced our way down through the rocks, brush and oaks, bushwhacking blind until we could see the houses and arena.

Back at the barn, Gabe loped up on the buckskin and said all was cool, the sheep were all accounted for in the low part where he’d expected. I was still glad to have had the ride and been a little use to Ivy. I set to work untacking, got my bay taken care of faster and better than Gabe did the horse he rode.

Gabe kept walking out the barn aisle and peering away from the houses, deep into the ranch or down the back road, the way he’d brought me in when he escorted me across the property in the morning. He went for a look-see after he carried his saddle to the rack, when he fetched a bucket of water to sponge our horses down, and once in the middle of brushing his out, banging the bristles absentmindedly on the heel of one hand as he strode the aisle.

Every stall had a nice run-out paddock and there were at least eight stalls on each side of the barn, plus open bays of hay storage before the stalls even started, but there were only four horses at this outfit.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked when Gabe came back and put the buckskin in a stall. “Long enough to remember Charley back when he was called Flame?”

Gabe nodded. And I realized why I’d wanted to ingratiate myself to Ivy.

I wanted to win favor here because I didn’t want this ranch to try taking my dog away from me. How was I going to deal with it if they tried to keep Charley, call him Flame again? I could have cried at the thought. Charley circled me in that way herders can’t help but do. When I stroked his fringed ears, he pressed his throat to my thigh. I wanted to fall on my butt and haul him into my lap. Maybe Ivy was right, I was concussed.

“He sure is loyal to you,” Gabe said.

Shepherds are special. They see you to the end and beyond. I couldn’t keep the hoarseness out of my voice when I asked Gabe, “And what happened to his brother, Fire?”

“Well, honestly, she thinks he was stolen by her old herdsman. Figured he got both dogs.”

“Was that the guy I saw on a flyer on the bulletin board at the bull sale? Vicente Arriaga? He disappeared?” I faced Gabe and almost told him that I’d met the man’s nephew but paused and thought better of it. Things were fuzzy, but the contradictions were waving at the back of my brain. “Just up and moved off one day?”

Gabe looked up, above me. Another man’s voice whispered something behind me, from the back of the barn where I remembered the cinder-block building snugged up. I turned but saw no one there and had caught nary a word. Gabe strode past me and disappeared through a narrow doorway at the back end of the barn.

Curious, I put my horse away and started to follow him but then Ivy appeared at the open end of the barn aisle, her Barbie-doll silhouette reminding me what an eyesore I am in the state of California, where so many women weigh a buck ten or less.

I stood there trying to make sense of things and musing on the good fact of life Gabe had observed when he noted Charley’s loyalty. Then the truth struck me so deep inside I almost choked.

Why hadn’t I seen it before? And what should I do about it? I knelt to stroke the reassuring warmth and softness of my good old Charley.

“I get it now,” I whispered to him.

Nothing had been broken inside Charley’s head when I’d found him at the summit either time today.

It was his heart.

My good dog knew something, I realized. And he’d known for nigh two years.

Charley knew where the body was buried.

And now, so did I.