Chapter 20

RIDING BAREBACK PRETTY WELL RUINED MY shower. The bunkhouse, barn, and big house looked to be abandoned in the low light of dusk. I put Decker away without brushing him down. The other horses were munching hay, and someone had thrown a few flakes in Decker’s stall as well. He got busy without minding the wet mark the bridle left on his poll when I pulled it from his head.

The Bronco was gone. I called out toward the forge room, “Anyone here?”

No one answered.

I dug out my key, unlocked Ol’ Blue, and tried to start it again. No deal. My gaze fell on the big paper bag wadded around my recovered shoeing tools, all resting on the center floor hump. I pulled the hood release, hupped Charley into the cab, and brought the track nippers with me as I raised the hood.

The feeling of wanting a weapon was an odd one, and track nippers weren’t the world’s best choice, but they had some heft and added reach. I pushed the head into my hip pocket. The nippers’ long, hard reins rubbed high along my ribs as I poked at Ol’ Blue’s dual batteries.

All the battery connections were secure.

The sight of a car pulling up beside me was a shock. The approach had been soundless.

The ninety-pound waif who worked in Ivy’s dog specialty store and looked like a younger version of Ivy got out of the electric car, in electric clothes. Striped orange and green leggings and some kind of stretchy yoga top that turned into butterfly wings when she waved her arms. I dropped Ol’ Blue’s hood and we locked eyes. Her expression of distaste was not lost on me.

She started first, her little nose wrinkled. “Is Ivy here? I’ve got to talk to her. You, you’re, like, a mechanic or something?”

“Or something.” I tried to remember her name. She cheated, reading mine off Ol’ Blue’s door.

“Dale’s Horseshoeing.”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re Dale?”

“Yep.”

The Lexus pulled up between the electric car and the big house. Ivy got out of the passenger’s seat. The driver’s window was rolled down, allowing Baldy to hold his e-cigarette by the side mirror. Their parting words poured out for Waif and Charley and me.

“I thought you’d still feel that way,” Baldy said from the driver’s seat. “We just needed to respond to the request.”

“No,” Ivy said. “N-O. Just, no.”

He gave a raspy chuckle and stroked his chins. “What about keep your friends close and your enemies closer?”

Ivy slammed the car door and waved him off. The attorney pulled away in his fancy car, leaving in the direction he came from, the front gate. The waif stood on one leg and stretched a foot behind herself while holding the toes with her fingertips. She told Ivy that they should stop shipping special supplements but keep the shop open and they needed to talk about the last delivery. I made my announcement loud enough to be heard by anyone within shouting distance.

“They cut my dog. They hurt him.”

“Flame? Who hurt him?” Ivy’s nostrils flared, and she swiveled on her feet, checking all directions. It was still just us girls. “What are you talking about? Where is everybody?”

“I rode off, and no one was here when I got back. But while I was out, I figured out some stuff, and I want to know who hurt him.”

“Who hurt Flame?”

“Charley,” I insisted. “He’s Charley. And someone cut his ears. Before he became my dog. Back when he was Flame.”

“Cut his ears?” Ivy eyed Charley, her Botox brow barely wrinkled.

“Took the flap ends off to remove his tattoos.”

Ivy’s eyes widened. She reached for my dog. He wiggled at her in acknowledgment and took the petting he understood in her fondling his ears. “Oh, my God.”

For fashion, some people cut some dog breeds’ ears. Charley is a bobtail, too. Tail docking, illegal in England since the 1940s, may have happened to Charley’s little litter when he was still a milk sucker, or he might have been born a natural bobtail. This ear-cutting was different, and worse.

“It’s a safe bet,” I said, “that Vicente wouldn’t have been any happier about someone hurting Charley than I am.”

***

Inside the big house, Eliana had pushed the tall square dining tables together, and set many places with chargers, cloth napkins, and all the extra glasses and silverware for fancy eating. The house smelled like dinner would soon be served. Solar—I’d heard Ivy say her name—danced around wanting to talk to Ivy about the last delivery but turned down Ivy’s offer to stay, then drove away in her silent little car.

Ivy paced the great room and shook a manicured fist. “Oscar lied.”

I stood like a stone. Wondering which one of her yahoos had clipped Charley’s ears hadn’t gotten me anywhere close to knowing which employee it was. I was ready for answers and liked the realization that Ivy had been searching too.

She snatched a folder of papers from the coffee table by her fireplace. “I track and deduct everything I can for the ranch. I went back through the travel records, different receipts. I checked my notes about the last breeding. But yesterday, I asked Oscar if he remembered Flame, and he said that was before his time. But my records show I hired Oscar to work here a couple of months before that. It was before Vicente left. And of course, Vicente didn’t leave. Someone killed him!”

Her final shout made Charley duck his head. He hates shouting. I do, too.

“So, Oscar was hired and Vicente disappeared all around the time of …” I folded my arms across my belly, but didn’t state the likely truth, “um, Fire’s last breeding?”

Artificial insemination is common enough in horses, but not in dogs. Someone had pulled a fast one on this ranch and gotten away with it, even though one of the victims—Reese Trenton, the neighbor who’d lost part of his family’s ranch to the Hollywood hobby-ranching woman—had a pretty good inkling. And now I’d figured it out, too.

Ivy shook her head and gestured for understanding. “What are you talking about?”

“All around the same time,” I said. “And you weren’t around much? Oscar hired on? Vicente disappeared. And your stud dog Fire had his last breeding. Was supposed to anyways.”

“What does one have to do with anoth—”

I cut Ivy off with a sharp wave. “Reese Trenton has a small dog.”

Ivy’s eyes widened in exasperation and her voice pitched. “What does that have to do with—”

I stopped her with both hands raised, shifting eye contact from her to my loyal, fluffy gold wonder of a little old dog. Should have checked with Reese Trenton about who sired his dog, should have made him say it, but I ventured the truth aloud now. “Fire didn’t sire that last litter. Charley did.”

Ivy closed her eyes and got it a split second after me but voiced the long-hidden truth. “Because something happened to Fire. That’s why Flame was used to sire that last litter.”

I nodded. “And someone removed Charley’s ear flaps in case someone else was going to check the tattoos to verify who the dog was.”

Ivy strode across the great room, covered her eyes with both hands and doubled over on the couch. “That’s so sick.”

“So who managed that deception? I want to know who hurt my Charley.” Top guesses would include someone who worked for Ivy. I took a breath and walked her through Gabe’s smacking Stuckey this morning, his assertion that it had been Stuckey who hit me.

“Oh, this is awful.” Ivy thrust her hands on her hips. “Gabe and Stuckey ran the show when I wasn’t around here much. Well, mostly Gabe. Oscar does whatever they tell him to, feeding, cleaning. Everything with the flock. The hunts. Taking care of the horses and the machinery. There’s a lot to a ranch.”

Even a hobby ranch, I thought. I told her about finding my tools in the bunkhouse, and I pulled the track nippers from my hip pocket as I explained.

She planted her elbows on her knees and took it all in, gaze darting about. No slouch, Ivy. She made her mind move to the new information and came up with a new notion.

“Whoever hurt you and Flame is the one who hurt Vicente.”

My mouth gaped like a door blown open by a sudden stiff wind. No words came out as I took half a lap around the room. I considered the folder on her table, saw a calendar she’d marked with: LA, ranch, breeding, hay purchases, and all sorts of dates that she’d been piecing together since this morning when I’d exploded her world and she’d had to call in her attorney.

“I can come pretty close to figuring out the exact night I found Charley.” I pointed at her calendar. “I know the date I found my horse, up near Cowdry. I found Charley just before I drove into Oregon.”

That had been a dark night. I was on the interstate, pulled over, alone. And then I wasn’t, thanks to Charley befriending me.

The cuts to his ears had to have been a good month old by then, and I bet Vicente hadn’t been much more than a week or two dead when Charley had to come down the hill for food, where I found him.

Because Charley would not go to the ranch houses or barn for help by then. He understood the people at those places as dangerous.

Ivy was struggling with this as much as me. I thought about what she and her attorney had been struggling with half an hour before.

I asked, “Where’d you go? I saw you drive away with your attorney and saw you come back when I came back from … riding.” I thought about Ol’ Blue being dead. Needing to get my truck running should have been at the top of my list.

“The police made another request,” Ivy said, “and my attorney said we should go out to the gate and talk to them. Actually, it was a request from a civilian that the police were passing on to us. They’ve made a preliminary identification of the body. They do think it’s Vicente. And they’ve talked to the next of kin, his nephew, who was requesting to come to the site where the body was found. But we don’t want him on the ranch.”

Thinking about the dead man’s nephew made me picture him standing over me as I’d awoken the morning before, outside the ranch gate after getting pasted in the head, probably by Stuckey. And thinking about the younger Arriaga made me feel bad, though I avoided pondering on it too much. Feeling bad made me want to talk to Guy. I paused and sent him a text about how I loved him and missed him, even if it might not go through until I had better cell service. I couldn’t believe how long it had been since I’d heard his voice in real time. And how long since we’d been face-to-face, or better, lip to lip. Two years ago, I hadn’t loved anyone, not even myself. Now I’m clean, clear, and crazy in love with Guy Kittredge.

Friday. Friday morning, he’d made me coffee before he headed for work at the Cascade Kitchen, before I went out to shoe. I’d known I’d be ending the day at the Buckeye ranch, figured I’d shoe a couple of Donna Chevigny’s geldings. Sure hadn’t figured on making for the Black Bluff bull sale and running my dog on the stock in their famous arena the next morning. I frowned.

“My truck’s dead. Maybe I just need a jump. Can I use your house phone?”

She rose and accompanied me to Milt’s office, where the phone rang.

***

“Wow, Leonard, say that again.” Ivy punched the speakerphone button as she spoke. The attorney’s voice crackled into the room.

“As I said, my source is not at your local sheriff’s department, but up at the medical examiner’s office. We were wondering what the deceased died of? Well, I’m hearing that the X-rays don’t show any foreign bodies.”

“Foreign bodies.” Ivy repeated the term without comprehension.

The attorney’s voice blared over the speakerphone. “Bullets.”

Ivy picked up the phone, killing the speakerphone, and told her lawyer, “Then he wasn’t shot.”

That was too much of a deduction, I reckoned. No bullets inside a man might just mean the lead had passed through. The sight of the pistol on Reese Trenton’s hip came back to me. So did his stern words.

Ivy listened, interspersing the pauses with, “Right … right … okay, tomorrow.”

When she hung up, Ivy pushed the phone across the desk and gave it a grand wave. “All yours.”

Every punch of a number on the phone felt closer to a bend in the road.

“It’s me,” I told Guy, flushing with relief and apprehension to not get his danged voice mail. Now I’d have to talk in front of Ivy, who stood there looking right at me.

“Are you okay?” His voice rose unnaturally as he talked fast and loud, like someone was turning up his urgency knob. “Why haven’t you called? Where are you?”

“I’m with Ivy Beaumont, on her ranch outside of Black Bluff—”

“Please explain this to me,” Guy screeched. “Why is your mother so flipped out about you being at Milt Beaumont’s place? Melinda remembered the names you said, and I’ve been telling people that’s where you are. Who is Milt Beaumont?”

Jeez Louise, Ivy was going to overhear him. I cradled the phone tight to my ear. “I love you, too, Guy. Yep, miss you bad. Oh, tonight, huh? How about that.” Then I slipped my finger on the disconnect before Ivy could hear him scream the Beaumont name again. I talked away to the dead line, flicking Ivy occasional smiles. “Sure, Guy. No problem. Yeah.”

Ivy stood sideways to me, looking at Milt’s bookshelf as I made a show of hanging up the phone.

I gave my best sheepish smile. “He wants me to call my mom.”

“Oh, sure. Go ahead. I’m looking for a book.”

While Ivy dealt with her sudden urge for literary entertainment, or not, I thought about what to say and how to say it when I called my mama. It’s a shocker that she was excited about my exact location.

Calling my mama is something I don’t do often enough to have memorized her number. I used the directory in my cell to find her number before dialing.

“This is Dara Dale.” My mother’s voice was reserved, full of a snootiness I know she can fake, though I’ve never understood why she does it.

“It’s me. Rainy.”

“And you’re calling from Milt Beaumont’s! Honey I don’t want you anywhere near that man! Everybody in the industry knows what Milt Beaumont’s all about, and—”

As I hung up on my mama, Ivy sat down on the leather chair, pulled a drawer open, and fished through the USB cables and recording equipment stored inside. Had Ivy heard my mama or heard Guy?

Ivy snapped her fingers in my direction. “Now, everything’s out in the open.”