“Snakes. In the tall grass. Boots.”
It took me a minute, then I said, “Right.”
We drove three miles in the green pickup, through a morning as bright and shiny as a copper cowbell, until we reached a tiny town that was one commercial street surrounded by a few blocks of small frame houses. I saw a one-story brick building set off by itself at the end of the main drag: the sheriff’s office.
“Slight, did you call the sheriff last night?”
“Sure, and the game warden. Why are you smiling?”
“Game warden.”
“Don’t have much call for them back home?”
“Not much.”
“There won’t be a whole lot they can do, but it won’t happen again anyway. The idiots who did it probably scared themselves more than they scared us.”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
He smiled. “We’ll keep our own watch, maybe padlock a few gates.” His wide shoulders rose and fell in a heavy sigh. “I hate to do that, because it makes it damned inconvenient for us to get in and out of the pastures, too.”
If he wanted me to absolve him of that responsibility, he was going to have to wait a long time. When I didn’t say anything, he jerked the truck roughly from third into second gear.
He parked the truck in front of a two-story building with a sign that said BOBBY LEE’S DRY GOODS. Its front windows displayed male and female mannequins wearing matching blue jeans, western belts, checked shirts, bandannas, cowboy hats, and boots. Just the outfit for your basic Saturday-night square dance back home in Port Frederick, I thought. If he thought he was going to dress me up like some country & western Barbie Doll, like Barbie and Ken Go to a Dude Ranch, well, he was going to have to think again. I would tolerate the boots for practical reasons, but I would, by God, draw the line at a leather belt with the letters JENNY burned into it.
In Bobby Lee’s Dry Goods store, I refused even to try on the elephant-skin boots that Slight pressed on me, and I rejected the ostrich-skin pair, as well.
“Ostriches are not endangered, Jenny.”
“This one clearly was.”
I insisted on buying their cheapest pair of plain, brown, cow-leather work boots, as these were not items of apparel I was likely to wear past tomorrow. Their prices on shirts and denims were so good, however, that I ended up carrying several sets into a dressing room to try on. The store had an old wood-plank floor that creaked when you walked on it, and a pleasantly musty aroma that mixed the smells of new leather, new clothes, and old dust.
When I emerged—feeling like Dale Evans—I saw Slight in what appeared to be casual conversation with the store’s only other customer. It was Lilly Ann Lawrence, who also wore the same clothes she’d had on the day before.
Uh-oh, I thought, and hurried toward them.
He was leaning against a counterful of men’s underwear while Lilly thumbed through a rack of women’s shirts. Slight was talking—no surprise there—and Lilly appeared to be smiling as she listened. I’d never seen a full smile on the girl’s face before, and I didn’t get to see it for long, because it vanished the moment she spotted me.
Slight gave me an appraising look, top to bottom. In fact, he focused rather overlong on my bottom.
“The shirt’s fine,” he said, “but you got enough room in those jeans for you and me, both.”
I plucked at them. “They’re comfortable.”
“They look it.”
Lilly laughed. Her jeans, I noticed, were skintight. So far, neither of us had given any indication that we were acquainted with one another. I didn’t want to play that game of collusion, however, so I said, “Slight, by odd coincidence, this is Lilly Ann Lawrence, one of Cat’s grandchildren. Lilly, this is Mr. Quentin Harlan, who works at the Crossbones Ranch.” That last bit wasn’t meant to put Slight in his place, but rather to warn her.
They both looked thunderstruck, although Lilly’s expression seemed to combine fury at me (for giving her identity away) with the shock of meeting him. Or was it such a shock? She could have followed us from the motel, with the idea that we might lead her to the ranch. If so, she was awfully brassy about walking right up next to him. I decided it had to be a coincidence. It was natural, after all, for a girl with horsey interests to come looking for a store like this.
Slight was the first to recover his equilibrium. He put out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she took it.
“Alice’s daughter?”
She nodded, looking defiant and scared.
“What are you doing down here, Ms. Lawrence?”
He said it casually, politely, but there it was, the most loaded question of all, hanging right out there in the air between us. And he hadn’t wasted a minute in asking it. What would she say? She’d be crazy to lie, because this man was no fool. What finally came out of her trembling mouth took me by complete surprise.
“I want to get to know my grandpa.”
Slight looked startled. “Your grandpa’s dead, child.”
She stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket and sniffed. “He never gave me a chance to know him while he was alive. I would have liked him, I know I would, and he would have liked me. I know it! My mother’s always saying I’m a throwback to Grandpa. I could have come to the ranch a lot, I would have loved it, he could have taught me all about it.”
Slight folded his arms over his chest. “So where have you been all these years?”
“I was a kid!”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she said mulishly.
“You get your driver’s license at sixteen?”
“Yes, but—”
He shrugged. “You could have come down on your own.”
“But that lawyer told me Grandpa didn’t buy this ranch until last year! You were still way down in Texas somewhere, and …” She trailed off in the face of his skeptical expression. But then she blurted, “It isn’t fair.” Lilly glared at me, then at him. “He never even asked me if I would like to run the ranch! I could have gone to ranch management school, I could have done it, I could! Instead, he gave it to strangers”—she threw me another hateful glance—“who don’t know anything about managing animals, or land—”
“And you do?” Slight drawled.
“That’s not the point! I could have learned! It isn’t fair!”
“But it is the way it is,” he said firmly.
“Can’t I just see it?”
“Come on the ranch, you mean?”
“Yes! Please!”
“The way I understand it is that Cat left you a nice trust fund. Set you up for life, all of you.” Slight looked resentful; there was an edge to his voice as he said, “But that’s not enough for you, I guess, you think you ought to have his last ranch, too.”
“You can’t love a trust fund,” she blurted.
“Oh, I don’t know.” His tone was wry. “I think I could learn to get pretty fond of one myself. And I think you’d be better off goin’ on back home, Ms. Lawrence, before you get yourself in a heap of trouble.”
Lilly clamped her jaw, but then her face crumpled, and she burst into tears. Blindly, she turned away from us and stumbled down the aisle to the counter, as if to pay for the blue jeans that were stacked there. But she couldn’t pull it off. She ran out of the store. The bell on the front door jingled as it closed behind her. The clerk behind the counter, who’d been tactfully trying to ignore us, gave it up and stared openly, first at the door, then back at us.
“Her grandpa was a pisser, too,” Slight said.
“A pisser?”
He nodded, still gazing at the door. “Impulsive, headstrong, emotional. Exasperating as hell. Except maybe for Carl, Cat Benet was the most goddamned emotional man you’d ever want to meet. He’d yell at you one minute and then get all teary-eyed and sentimental the next. I ’spect that sentimental streak, that’s how he came to get married so many times. Not to mention bein’ impulsive.” He laughed a little. Then he faced me. “Did you bring her?”
/>
“No, of course not.”
“I didn’t think so. She seem a little young for her age?”
“I don’t know, yes, maybe.”
“Lot of city people got romantic notions about livin’ in the country. They think it’s all sweet cream and fresh eggs and bluebirds. They don’t know anything about the reality of it day to day.” He glanced again at the front door. “Pretty little thing, though.”
“A child,” I said sternly.
His gaze, when he turned it on me, was offended. “I can tell the difference between you and her, Jenny.”
Did he think I was jealous? Good grief. I opened my mouth to defend myself, but thought better of it, and just wandered away, among the rows of denims and twills. But that didn’t detach me from Slight, who followed me all around the store, jabbering away the whole time. Did I think the girl would try to get on the ranch? What did she want down here, anyway, really? How could she get to know her dead grandpa by coming down here? Why wasn’t she in school someplace the way a rich kid ought to be? What did she mean, she would have loved the ranch? Was she a horsewoman? What did I know about her? Didn’t I want to do something about her, to make sure she really did go back home? Didn’t I want to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid that might hurt her or her family?
Finally, I held up one hand.
He raised his eyebrows.
I held up a pair of blue jeans in my other hand.
“I’m going to try these on,” I said.
He nodded grudgingly. He couldn’t very well follow me into the women’s dressing room, although he talked to me all the way to the door of it. And then he tried to talk to me through the door, but I told him to go away. When I came back out—wearing a smaller size this time—he was gone.
I paid for my purchases—which included in addition to my new boots, three pairs of jeans, a couple of long-sleeved cotton shirts, socks, and work gloves that Slight had recommended for riding, all of which I could also use back home for gardening—and then I carried what I wasn’t already wearing out to the truck.
Slight was nowhere to be seen.
I dumped my old and new clothes on the backseat and checked my watch. It was past eleven. My how time flies when you’re spending money. I was hungry, and there was a café across the street. But first, I had some fiduciary responsibility to exercise.
14
I strolled down the street toward the sheriff’s office. Cars and pickup trucks were angled into the curb the old-fashioned way. No parking meters. Along the way, I passed a hardware and kitchenwares store, a grocery store, and two closed and boarded businesses. Their empty display windows gave that side of the street the look of a set of uppers with its two front teeth missing. When I glanced at the other side of the street, I noticed other gaps denoting failed businesses. This little town in Kansas, founded in 1902 according to the sign at the city limits, was like an old man who’d lost his bite. There was a little bank, and a tiny liquor store. Rock Creek was down to the essentials, all right: cash, clothes, screwdrivers, frozen food, and booze.
The stiff morning breeze kicked up little tornadoes of dust that swirled around my boots, making me feel for a minute as if I had walked into Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl days of the thirties.
The sheriff’s office was a neat little square of red brick, with azalea bushes bordering the clean cement sidewalk that led to the front door. There was a sign on the door: HOURS: 12 P.M. TO MIDNIGHT. KINDLY DO NOT COMMIT ANY CRIMES BEFORE NOON. It listed a long-distance emergency number that was probably the highway patrol. I looked at my watch: eleven-thirty A.M. Well, shoot. As I started to walk away, a female voice called, “Can I help you, Miss?”
I turned to look just as a young woman in a brown uniform, complete with gun and belt, came around the corner of the building. She wore a badge on her chest and she had hedge clippers in her hands.
“I’m Sheriff Pat Taylor,” she said, and smiled.
“Jenny Cain.” I smiled back and stepped toward her. She let the clippers hang from her left hand while we shook right hands. “I represent the new owners of the Crossbones Ranch.”
“Oh, yes?” She grinned as she lifted the clippers in a kind of salute. “Well, I represent Hood County, where we got a whole lot of land but not a whole lot of taxpayers. Part-time sheriff, part-time gardener, mother, wife, Sunday school teacher, that’s me. What can I do you for?”
“I wondered if you were going to investigate that hunting accident we had on the place last night?”
“Don’t believe I’ve heard about that one.”
“Didn’t you get a call from one of our men?”
“Don’t believe we did, and I believe I’d know.” Sheriff Taylor had a solid, feet-apart stance, brown eyes that looked straight into mine, and shoulders that strained the fabric of her short-sleeved shirt. I was willing to bet her own kids behaved themselves, and that very few of her Sunday school charges ever ended up in her jail. “What is it happened? You want to come in, make an official report on it?”
“I don’t know.” I felt confused, embarrassed by Slight’s lie, and more than a little betrayed. “Quentin Harlan and I were out in a pasture last night, about eight-thirty, and somebody shot a couple of bullets in our direction. One of them hit a rock and shattered our truck window, but the other one hit and killed a heifer as she was giving birth.”
The sheriff made a tsking sound with her tongue. “D’ya lose the calf, too?”
“No, we saved it.”
“Well, thank God for that. I tell you what, let’s go write it up, you’ll want the report for the insurance company, I ’spect. And I’ll try to get out there to take a look. You never know, I might even get lucky and catch ’em.”
“Really?”
“Sure, if they’re from this county, I could prob’ly tell who they were just by lookin’ at their tire tracks.” She smiled. “Well, maybe not quite.”
Sheriff Taylor unlocked the front door and turned the sign over to read OPEN. When we went in, she discovered to her “tsking” dismay that she had failed to switch her phone answering machine to “on” the night before, so there couldn’t have been any message from Slight. That made me feel better, though not entirely, because hadn’t he distinctly told me he’d talked to the sheriff? Or had he just said he’d “called” her? After I filled out the report, I headed back toward the center of town (which was only the center of the block) to find out. But Slight still wasn’t at his truck.
I crossed the street to the Rock Creek Café.
I pushed open the front door, only to find Slight and Lilly Ann seated at a table together. I sighed to myself in my best put-upon manner and walked over to sit down at their table with them.
The café was as plain as they get. Just past the door was a glass-front counter with a cash register on top and one flavor of Life Savers (wintergreen) for sale below. There were only about ten tables, each with silver metal legs and a gray and silver-flecked Formica top rimmed in metal, each with its own two-sided silver paper-napkin dispenser, salt and pepper shakers shaped like Hawaiian dancers, plastic catsup and mustard containers, and honey in a plastic bear wearing a yellow dunce cap with a hole in the top. The kitchen was in the back behind wooden swing doors.
I threaded my way between two tables of three men each, all of them wearing coveralls and dirty baseball-type hats, most of them staring curiously at me. A couple of the older ones nodded politely. Their conversations recommenced once I had passed by.
Slight’s squint was a richly amused one.
“Now those jeans fit,” he said.
The look Lilly Ann gave me was as sly as his.
“I think I know what you’re up to,” I said to her as I sat down. I glanced at Slight. “I never have any idea what you’re up to.” I opened a menu. “But neither of you knows what I’m going to do next, and if I were you, I’d start wondering.” I looked up as the waitress appeared. “I’ll have a grilled cheese sandwich on whole wheat, a dinner salad with Italian dress
ing, and coffee black, please.”
Their sly grins had faded.
That pleased me.
But nothing could still Slight for very long. Soon, he was regaling Lilly Ann with wild tales of her grandpa’s escapades when Cat had been as young as she was now. It was all highly amusing, especially to hear Slight tell it. But I kept my eyes on my sandwich, pondering this odd little luncheon group. Just what was going on here, I wondered, and just what was I going to do about it? The girl was obviously trying to ingratiate herself with Slight, probably in the hope that he’d relent and allow her onto the ranch, in spite of the will. By the time I’d polished off the potato chips and dill pickles, I had decided to be direct.
“Where are you going to go now, Lilly?”
She had grown relaxed listening to Slight, but now she visibly tensed again.
“I don’t know,” she mumbled. “Back to the motel.”
“Where are we going?” I asked Slight.
“Riding,” he told me, and I had the impression that he was just about to say where when he stopped to eye the girl. “Don’t know where, exactly, we could ride just about anyplace on the ranch today, I suppose.”
It was a warning to her: Do not trespass, for we may see you do it.
“Bye,” she said abruptly, and got up and left.
I turned toward Slight, to discover him staring after her with a strange expression on his face, one I couldn’t decipher.
“Goddamned old fool,” he muttered.
“Who? Cat?”
“Me. You payin’?”
I laughed. “You’re not so foolish.”
He squinted that grin of his at me.
I paid the bill for all three of us and even bought him some Life Savers for dessert.
15
We were almost the only traffic on the two-lane highway going west toward the Crossbones Ranch. But whenever we did pass somebody driving east, Slight and the other driver would raise their right index fingers off their steering wheels in a kind of salute. Sometimes, they nodded as well. Once a man driving a tractor-trailer rig waved with his whole arm—clearly a demonstrative type, probably cried at funerals.