The Homeplace: A Mystery (6 page)

Birdie had about decided that spotting Ray-Ray in the Notch wasn’t going to be as easy as she had guessed. Her best chance would be catching him between here and his home. She stood up and dusted off the seat of her britches. She’d walk back to the truck, go check the hunter, maybe give him a ride to his vehicle, and then circle around to the other side of the Notch and see if she could find any sign of Ray-Ray.

Another shot sounded in the bottoms.

Not a crack like the first. No, this was more of a boom. Came from a cannon like Ray-Ray carried.

Birdie slipped her Glock from the holster on her hip. She pulled back the slide just enough to be sure there was a live cartridge in the chamber. Then Birdie started down the hill. If she found Ray-Ray, she wasn’t sure what she should do. The sheriff just wanted to talk to him, that was all. Ray-Ray wouldn’t like that.

And if she did find him, Ray-Ray might shoot her. Or ask her to come to dinner. He was crazy that way.

Oh well, it would give her something to think about on her way down the hill toward the boom of the big rifle. One thing was for sure. Birdie hated walking.

CHAPTER SIX

Chase, Mercy, Marty, and Paco stood in a shady spot on the steps outside the café. Mercy rubbed her hands over her bare forearms. They’d said goodbye to each other, but no one was ready to leave. A burst of wind from a passing semi brushed Chase’s face and rattled the front windows of the café. Without saying a word, Marty dove behind the wheel of the Sheriff Department’s car. Paco Martinez jumped for the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. Tires spun and gravel flew as Marty backed away from the restaurant onto the highway and hit the gas. Red and blue lights flashed, and the deputies chased the speeding truck out of Brandon.

“Happens almost every day,” Mercy told Chase. “Truckers don’t slow down for this one-horse town.” She fanned the dust from Marty’s car away from her face and looked up at Chase. “Come back in for another cup of coffee?”

“Naw, I’ve got an appointment at the bank to go over some things about the ranch. Maybe I’ll stop by again later on.” He tried to think of a reason he wouldn’t want to see her again, but couldn’t.

Mercy pushed the hair away from her eyes. “There’s a pancake supper over at First Methodist tonight. They make it a big deal. Feed the visitin’ hunters. Money goes to the town. We’re closin’ early. How about you take me? Whole town will be there.”

“I don’t know, Mercy.” Chase wasn’t sure what the folks in Brandon thought of him now. He knew now he’d made a mistake going to the ball game on Friday. Finding Mercy back in town complicated a part of his life he wanted to stay simple.

“Come on, people will want to see you. By then everyone in the county will know about the Riley kid.” Her green eyes pleaded. “It might take their minds off of some of the bad if you’re there.”

Chase shook his head. “Ah, okay.” Chase gave in too easy. He always did with Mercy.

“Pick me up at my folks’ house at six. Like you used to.”

*   *   *

The bank manager pointed to a chair, and Chase settled in across the desk from the woman. Chase knew his father never would have done this kind of business with a woman.

The banker pointed to a stack of file folders on her desk and said, “It’s nice to do this in person instead of just email. Where would you like to start? Regular ranch accounts, rentals, or your”—she paused—“more altruistic endeavors.” She smiled at him.

“Anythin’ I should know about the ranch that I don’t?”

“I‘m sure you’re up to date.”

“How much is in the rental account?”

She opened a folder, put on her reading glasses, and then turned the papers so Chase could see the numbers. “Bobby Jackson hasn’t missed a payment.”

Chase took a check from his shirt pocket and laid it on the desk. “I want you to deposit this into that account.”

The banker’s eyes widened.

“As soon as that clears,” Chase said, “I want you to change the account to a trust for the education of Dolly Benavidez. I want her to be able to draw on that to pay for college.”

“Does she know about this?”

Chase shook his head. “I’ll take care of that. You just draw up whatever papers we need, and I’ll sign them before I leave on Monday.” He looked over the banker’s shoulder at the few stores still open on Main Street. Plainsman Liquors was the only one with cars in front. Chase bit back an old urge. “Anythin’ else?”

“Pop Weber and two other old timers are going to have trouble paying property taxes this year.”

“I’ll pay again. Like before, no one is to know.”

*   *   *

Stalks of knee-high brown grass tangled around the broken, silver-gray tree branches in the dry creek bed. Fresh tracks from two deer led Birdie down the wash. In the shade made by the trees, Birdie found what she expected.

Birdie poked at a slick, sticky gut pile with the toe of her boot. Whoever had dropped the paunch from the deer had taken his time and knew what he was doing. Only a few silver dollar–sized drops of blood dotted the sand. The stomach hadn’t been punctured, and there were no knife nicks on the coils of intestines. The liver and heart had been taken from the pile of entrails. Birdie found the place an arm’s length away where a knife had been wiped clean on a clump of dried grass.

She studied the deer tracks again. The heart-shaped tracks meant that these two were does. Most likely a mother with a yearling fawn. The two deer had slipped into the creek bottom single file. The hunter had taken the second deer. Good choice. The younger animal would be tender and better eating. She scanned the trees and shadows, guessing where the hunter had hidden.

Birdie poked around at the brush at the edge of the far creek bank. A sunbeam filtered through the bare autumn tree branches and flashed almost golden from a speck of dirt behind a fallen cottonwood. She sucked in a breath and told herself she should have worn her other pants. The pair that made it easier to bend over.

With more effort than it should have taken, she stooped down. Her belt buckle pinched the soft rolls along her belly, but she speared the empty rifle cartridge with her Bic pen like an actor on a TV detective show. It had been fired by a big gun. Birdie didn’t need to look at the stamp on the cartridge to know it was a forty-five-seventy.

Like Ray-Ray carried.

Not six more steps away she found another sun-glazed gut pile. No liver or heart there either.

Damn it, Ray-Ray.

She used her phone to take pictures of what she had found and tucked the cartridge in her shirt pocket. The phone had no reception behind the big hills in the Butt Notch. She put it in the pocket with the cartridge and stared up at the hill she’d hiked down.

Crap. She should have worn the other pants.

*   *   *

One trucker sat at the counter in Saylor’s Café. The kitchen was clean from breakfast and the clock over the cash register said one o’clock.

Mercy untied her apron. “Diana, I got some errands to run,” she told the waitress reading the new
People
magazine at the table by the front window. “I probably won’t be back. Close up at four and put the sign on the door tellin’ ’em they can eat at the Flapjack Feed over at First Methodist.”

Mercy took her coat from its hook by the back door and stepped out into the parking lot. She tossed the coat and her purse on the backseat of her mother’s old Lincoln. There was a dark smudge on the bumper. Mercy wiped away the spot with a Kleenex.

She climbed into the car. The warmth from the afternoon sun wrapped around her, and the steering wheel was almost too hot to touch. It reminded her of the bubble bath she had planned before Chase came to pick her up.

*   *   *

Sunlight touched the silvery threads of a spiderweb that stretched from the dried branches of a wild rose to the letters carved in Chase’s mother’s headstone. He stopped before he brushed them away.

His mother wouldn’t have touched them. Not from fear. The small things of nature were what she loved most. She marveled at the swallows’ nests along the eaves of the house and how the birds came back year after year. She could name each wildflower that grew in the pastures around the house and knew to the day when each would bloom in the spring.

When a spider spun its web outside her kitchen window, she refused to let his father knock it away. She marveled at it each day that whole summer. Especially on the prairie mornings when drops of dew clung to the silky fibers.

He stood by her grave a long time and thought of the good times and was glad that she hadn’t seen the man he’d become. But it hurt him that she’d never seen him play for the university, never seen him on TV, and never met the woman he loved.

He left her there with the wild rose he’d planted the morning he left Brandon, and never looked at the place beside her where his father lay.

Chase paused at one other grave before he left the hill and said a prayer for Dolly’s mother, and asked her to forgive him for the terrible things his father had done.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chase pounded harder on the front door of the small house that Coach Porter called home. No one had come when Chase rang the doorbell or rapped on the doorframe.

From inside the house, ESPN’s
SportsCenter
played on a widescreen TV, and lights were on in one bedroom and the kitchen.

But lights seemed always to be on at Coach’s house, and his constant companion was TV sports.

Coach had grown up in some farm town in Missouri. Got a scholarship to play basketball for a small college in Nebraska. Was set to be a starter his junior year when, coming home from Thanksgiving break, he’d been in a car wreck on an icy highway. A teammate had been killed, and Coach’s face had been cut up real bad. He lost his left eye and his chance to start. He played a minute here or there in games whose outcome had already been decided, but spent most of his time on the end of the bench.

But Coach made the team again his senior year, took the same seat on the bench, and graduated with honors. Fresh out of college and just a few years older than the players who would be on his teams, Coach took the job with Brandon Schools. Chase and Marty were seniors that year. For the first time Chase had to work at a game that had been so easy for him. Coach wrote letters and made phone calls, and when Brandon went to the state tournament, college coaches knew all about Chase Ford. Instead of the junior college in Lamar, Chase left Brandon with a full ride to the University of Colorado.

Seventeen years later, Coach Porter taught history, coached track and basketball, and had made a player out of Jimmy Riley. He was the only man in Brandon whom Chase had talked to in all those years.

Chase stepped back from the door, crossed the porch, and looked down the side of the house. Coach’s pickup was in the driveway. Chase took out his cell and dialed Coach’s number.

Straight to voice mail.

Like Dolly’s.

Down the street, Chase could see the school bus wasn’t back from the freshman game. Old Paco said the cell reception was bad in Limon. Chase guessed that Coach had gone along. Maybe he even drove the bus. Coach would do that. Basketball and kids were important to him. All these years later, Chase realized the kids were the most important thing to Coach Porter.

Especially a kid whose father never showed up for a single game.

Chase should have told Coach he was coming for the weekend. Now, Chase wanted to be there when Coach found out Jimmy Riley was dead.

But Mercy said the whole town would be at the pancake supper. He’d see Coach then.

Chase left Brandon for the ranch. It was four hours until he needed to be back at Mercy’s house. He’d take his father’s rifle and slip out on the sage flats to watch for the big buck he’d seen that morning.

*   *   *

By the time Birdie had reached the top of the Butt Notch’s south hill she had used up every cuss word she knew three times and was partway through the list for the fourth. Weighted down by her pistol, her too-tight pants chafed her hips. Sweat soaked the armpits of her shirt and plastered her hair to the sides of her head.

She scooped a bottle of water from the cooler in the back of her pickup, pressed it to her forehead, and used each of the cuss words still available on her list. Cell reception showed four bars and three messages. Two from Sheriff Dickweed and one from Marty’s wife.

The first message from the sheriff said, “Call me.” The second said, “Call me now.”

Birdie let the jerk wait and checked the message from Deb. “You’re comin’ to the Flapjack Feed, aren’t you? The boys want to see their Aunt Birdie. See you tonight.”

Seeing the little boys would be fun. Birdie had spent the whole day at the place where Jimmy Riley had been found, or hunting for Ray-Ray Jackson and not doing what the state paid her to do.

Besides, she could nose around at the pancake supper, talk with hunters who came in to eat, and get a feel for what was going on.

She sipped the water and used her binoculars to scan the creek bottom one more time. Still no sign of Ray-Ray. She pressed the callback button on her phone and waited for Sheriff Shithead to pick up.

First ring. “Where have you been, Hawkins?” Sheriff Kendall snapped.

What? No
Good afternoon, officer?
Birdie gritted her teeth so tight she’d need to call the dentist for an appointment on Monday. She fought the urge to tell the turd-breath that she had been risking life and limb to track a dangerous criminal and simply said, “I didn’t catch up with Ray-Ray. Found where he shot a deer. Least I’m ninety-nine percent sure it was him that shot it. But never saw him.”

“Listen, Hawkins, we got somethin’.”

“I hope it’s good,” she muttered.

“What’s that, Hawkins?”

“Nothin’. Go on.”

“When the processor in Cheyenne Wells started to butcher the first of Puckett’s buffalo, he found a rifle slug. He checked the other buffalo and found slugs in two more.” Birdie could hear the stubble on Kendall’s chin scrape over his phone. “The state is gonna do a full ballistics study and tell us what they can, but for now we can guess the buffalo were shot with a thirty caliber. The bullets were pretty tore up, but they’re guessin’ they were a hundred and fifty grains.”