Gun-Shy Bride

Restless, he picked up his cell phone again when he heard a vehicle coming up the road.

Luke shaded his eyes as he watched the cloud of dust draw closer. Definitely a pickup.

Squinting into the sun, he saw the sheriff’s department logo on the side and couldn’t believe his eyes.

McCall?

He watched her drive into his yard, hoping this was a social visit, knowing it probably wasn’t. Had something happened and she was here to give him the bad news?

He stood in the shade as she climbed out of her pickup. Her dark hair shined in the fading sunlight. She moved with long-legged grace toward him. And as always, he was hit with such a need for this woman that it almost dropped him to his knees.

Turning back to his work, he drove a nail into another two-by-four, warning himself not to get his hopes up, that her being here had nothing to do with him. Or that kiss last night.

Luke Crawford
—The game warden was after a poaching ring—and the woman he’d lost ten years before.

McCall Winchester
—The deputy sheriff had been running from the past until she discovered the grave and her life changed.

Ruby Bates Winchester
—The waitress and mother had a secret she’d kept from her daughter all these years.

Trace Winchester
—He’d disappeared twenty-seven years ago, leaving behind a pregnant wife and a lot of speculation about where he’d gone.

Pepper Winchester
—The matriarch of the family had been a recluse for the past twenty-seven years.

Enid Hoagland
—The disagreeable gatekeeper at Winchester Ranch. It was her job to keep everyone away from the lady of the house.

Buzz Crawford
—The former game warden didn’t seem to be enjoying his retirement. Or was guilt bothering him?

Eugene Crawford
—He’d been like a brother to his cousin Luke—just like Cain was one to Abel.

Sheriff Grant Sheridan and his wife, Sandy
—The two seemed to have no secrets from each other. Or did they?

Red Harper
—The secret that had been eating away at him for the past twenty-seven years was finally about to come out.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

The wind howled down the ravine as Deputy Sheriff McCall Winchester poked what appeared to be a mud clod with the toe of her cowboy boot.

The thunderstorm last night had been a gully-washer. As her boot toe dislodged some of the mud, she saw that the pile of objects in the bottom of the gully was neither mud nor rock.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

McCall looked up at the man standing a few feet away. Rocky Harrison was a local who collected, what else? Rocks.

“It’s always better after a rainstorm,” he’d told her when he’d called the sheriff’s department and caught her just about to go off duty after working the night shift.

“Washes away the dirt, leaves the larger stones on top,” Rocky had said. “I’ve found arrowheads sitting on little columns of dirt, just as pretty as you please and agates large as your fist where they’ve been unearthed by a good rainstorm.”

Only on this bright, clear, cold spring morning, Rocky had found more than he’d bargained for.

“Human, ain’t they,” Rocky said, nodding to what he’d dug out of the mud and left lying on a flat rock.

“You’ve got a good eye,” McCall said as she pulled out her camera, took a couple of shots of the bones he’d found. They lay in the mud at the bottom of the ravine where the downpour had left them.

With her camera, McCall shot the path the mud slide had taken down from the top of the high ridge. Then she started making the steep muddy climb up the ravine.

As she topped the ridge, she stopped to catch her breath. The wind was stronger up here. She pushed her cowboy hat down hard, but the wind still whipped her long dark hair as she stared at the spot where the rain had dislodged the earth at the edge. In this shallow grave was where the bones had once been buried.

Squinting at the sun, she looked to the east. A deep, rugged ravine separated this high ridge from the next. Across that ravine, she could make out a cluster of log buildings that almost resembled an old fort. The Winchester Ranch. The sprawling place sat nestled against the foothills, flanked by tall cottonwood trees and appearing like an oasis in the middle of the desert. She’d only seen the place from a distance from the time she was a child. She’d never seen it from this angle before.

“You thinking what I am?” Rocky asked, joining her on the ridge.

She doubted that.

“Somebody was buried up here,” Rocky said. “Probably a homesteader. They buried their dead in the backyard, and since there is little wood around these parts, they didn’t even mark the graves with crosses, usually just a few rocks laid on top.”

McCall had heard stories of grave sites being disturbed all over the county when a road was cut through or even a basement was dug. The land they now stood on was owned by the Bureau of Land Management, but it could have been private years ago.

Just like the Winchester land beyond the ravine which was heavily posted with orange paint and signs warning that trespassers would be prosecuted.

“There’s a bunch of outlaws that got themselves buried in these parts. Could be one of them,” Rocky said, his imagination working overtime.

This less-civilized part of Montana had been a hideout for outlaws back in the late 1890s or even early 1900s. But these remains hadn’t been in the ground that long.

She took a photograph of where the body had been buried, then found herself looking again toward the Winchester Ranch. The sun caught on one of the large windows on the second floor of the massive lodge-style structure.

“The old gal?” Rocky said, following her gaze. “She’s your grandmother, right?”

McCall thought about denying it. After all, Pepper Winchester denied her very existence. McCall had never even laid eyes on her grandmother. But then few people had in the past twenty-seven years.

“I reckon we’re related,” McCall said. “According to my mother, Trace Winchester was my father.” He’d run off before McCall was born.

Rocky had the good sense to look embarrassed. “Didn’t mean to bring up nothin’ about your father.”

Speaking of outlaws,
McCall thought. She’d spent her life living down her family history. She was used to it.

“Interesting view of the ranch,” Rocky said, and reached into his pack to offer a pair of small binoculars.

Reluctantly, she took them and focused on the main house. It was much larger than she’d thought, three stories with at least two wings. The logs had darkened from the years, most of the windows on at least one of the wings boarded up.

The place looked abandoned. Or worse, deteriorating from the inside out. It gave her the creeps just thinking about her grandmother shutting herself up in there.

McCall started as she saw a dark figure appear at one of the second floor windows that hadn’t been boarded over. Her grandmother?

The image was gone in a blink.

McCall felt the chill of the April wind that swept across the rolling prairie as she quickly lowered the binoculars and handed them back to Rocky.

The day was clear, the sky blue and cloudless, but the air had a bite to it. April in this part of Montana was unpredictable. One day it could be in the seventies, the next in the thirties and snowing.

“I best get busy and box up these bones,” she said, suddenly anxious to get moving. She’d been about to go off shift when she’d gotten Rocky’s call. Unable to locate the sheriff and the deputy who worked the shift after hers, she’d had little choice but to take the call.

“If you don’t need my help…” Rocky shifted his backpack, the small shovel strapped to it clinking on the canteen he carried at his hip as he headed toward his pickup.

Overhead a hawk circled on a column of air and for
a moment, McCall stopped to watch it. Turning her back to the ranch in the distance, she looked south. Just the hint of spring could be seen in the open land stretching to the rugged horizon broken only by the outline of the Little Rockies.

Piles of snow still melted in the shade of the deep ravines gouged out as the land dropped to the river in what was known as the Missouri River Breaks. This part of Montana was wild, remote country that a person either loved or left.

McCall had lived her whole life here in the shadow of the Little Rockies and the darker shadow of the Winchester family.

As she started to step around the grave washed out by last night’s rainstorm, the sun caught on something stuck in the mud.

She knelt down to get a better look and saw the corner of a piece of orange plastic sticking out of the earth where the bones had been buried.

McCall started to reach for it, but stopped herself long enough to swing up the camera and take two photographs, one a close-up, one of the grave with the corner of the plastic visible.

Using a small stick, she dug the plastic packet from the mud and, with a start, saw that it was a cover given out by stores to protect hunting and fishing licenses.

McCall glanced at Rocky’s retreating back, then carefully worked the hunting license out enough to see a name.

Trace Winchester.

Her breath caught in her throat but still she must have made a sound.

“You say somethin’?” Rocky called back.

McCall shook her head, pocketing the license with her father’s name on it. “No, just finishing up here.”