The Love of a Lawman, The Callister Trilogy, Book 3 (2 page)

Tears welled again. To compound her anguish, the cold fog turned into a heavy mist and stabbed her face with prickles of chill. Her body began to quake from the cold.

With one last glance at the black-and-white spot on the hillside, she put her arm around Ava and walked her toward the old house where they had taken up residence, the house of her own miserable childhood.

Ava tried to look back, but Isabelle held her shoulders firmly and steered her straight ahead. "But—but, Mama—"

"Shh. Let's go inside."

She guided Ava through the gate in the hogwire fence that enclosed their large backyard, through the screened-in porch with its painted plywood floor, to the long mudroom where heavy coats hung on iron hooks made of used horseshoes. A row of assorted boots lined up beneath them. Still shaking, Isabelle stopped and stripped off her daughter's rubber boots. "Honey, your socks are soaking."

"Is Jack gonna be okay, Mama?"

Isabelle peeled off Ava's wet socks and hung them on the side of the deep fiberglass laundry sink. "Go stand in front of the fire. I'll be there soon as I take off my boots."

Ava continued to weep as she left for the living room. Isabelle tugged off her own boots and followed.

A low fire burned in the brick fireplace. The gloom of a cold foggy day forced itself through a pair of curtainless two-over-two windows, but the fire and rustic furnishings made the room feel cozy. Isabelle knelt in front of Ava as she worked the wet coat off her daughter's spindly arms. Ava sobbed and shivered.

"We have to get you warm," Isabelle said.

She grabbed a thick knitted afghan from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her daughter, then urged her to a seat in front of the fireplace. She sat back on her heels and rubbed the slender bare feet between her hands. "Your feet are ice-cold." Her own shearling-lined slippers sat on the hearth and she reached for them up and slid them onto Ava's feet.

"He isn't going to be okay, is he?" Ava's voice began to hitch again.

The ten-year-old was too wise to be fooled by an unrealistic white lie and the dog meant too much to raise false hope. Isabelle hugged her close. "I don't think so, but I'll have to go see."

"Go now, Mama. Go now."

Isabelle's heart kept up a rapid tattoo. Anger seethed within her, but she held it in check and pushed back a tendril straying from the braid that hung down Ava's back. "First, we need to put a log on the fire. Want to help me?"

Ava's sobs abated to weeping and sniffling. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "No."

"Okay. You get warm. It'll only take me a minute."

By the time Isabelle stoked the embers to a roaring blaze, Ava had ceased crying and was staring into the orange flames. "I hate it here," she said. "I don't know why we had to come."

Oh, Ava, please don't hate it.

They had been in Callister three weeks and Isabelle was uneasy enough about the move without Ava hating it. "This is where our family is, sweetie, and family's important." She removed Ava's wire-rimmed glasses and wiped them clean on the tail of her flannel shirt. "While you get warm, I'll go next door and see what happened."

"I want to go, too."

"No, sweetheart. You need to stay where it's dry and warm." She set the glasses back on Ava's nose. The lenses magnified her dark brown eyes to where they looked huge and owllike. "You watch the fire."

Her daughter didn't agree or disagree. She only stared with accusing eyes. But she was calmer now. Being given a task, a responsibility, had always settled her.
Too old for her ten years.
The thought sent a stab of guilt all the way through Isabelle's heart. "Please, Ava. I need you to stay right here until I get back."

Ava stared at her, her eyes red, her rosebud mouth turned down at the corners.

Isabelle rose and walked to the mudroom, keeping her steps light, careful not to bring more tension to the brittle moment. She picked a clean, dry shirt from the laundry line that stretched wall to wall above the antiquated washing machine, pushed her feet into rubber Sorels and yanked her heavy coat off its hook. Tears still hovered near the surface. She stamped toward her pickup, shoving her arms into the coat sleeves and zipping up as she went.

The Sierra fired on demand and she sped down the long driveway, through potholes and puddles, sending muddy water flying. At the county road, she made a sharp right turn, drove a few hundred feet and made another, then plowed up the smooth gravel road that went to the log house of the neighbor who had never been a friend, Art Karadimos.

On the left, just below Art's house, Jack lay uphill from a huddled band of grimy sheep, their fleece turned gray by the wet conditions. She halted the Sierra and sprang out, climbed through the strands of a barbed wire fence and dashed to the border collie that had been with her and Ava since puppyhood.

She dropped to her knees and ran her hand over his hair, now wet and stained dark. She had no trouble spotting where a bullet had pierced his small chest. Art had always been a crack shot. A sob burst from her throat. "Dammit, Jack. Why didn't you stay home?"

Wiping her tears with her sleeve, she tried to think. Jack couldn't be left here in the sodden pasture, but how could she take him home, knowing Ava would see him shot and bloody? Even now, her grief-stricken daughter would be watching out the window.

On a hard swallow, Isabelle lifted the dog's limp body and carried it to the Sierra's bed. "Friggin' sheep," she mumbled, slamming the tailgate shut. She climbed behind the wheel and charged up the road toward the log house.

Nearing the front deck, she spotted the owner standing there, his shoulder leaned against a thick log porch support, his face a scowl behind a drooping mustache. Eighteen years ago she had thought he looked grizzled and withered. He still did. Apparently age hadn't changed his personality. Her dead dog was testimony to that much.

She lurched to a stop, leaped out and stomped to the edge of the deck that struck her at chin level. "That's my daughter's dog you shot!"

He glared down at her and threw a fist in the air. "I warned you yesterday. I told you I wouldn't have him running my sheep."

"You didn't have to shoot him. You could have called me."

He huffed, turned his back, walked into the house and slammed the door.

"You're a mean bastard, Art Karadimos," she shouted at his front door. "You always have been. You were mean to my mom and dad. You were mean to me and my brother."

Silence.

She picked up a baseball-sized rock and hurled it with all her strength against the side of the house. It clunked against the thick log wall and bounced off. "I'm back, damn you! I'm gonna live here and there's nothing you can do about it! I'm gonna call the sheriff! You can't just shoot somebody's dog!"

Stamping back to the Sierra, she dug in her coat pocket for her cell phone and came up empty-handed. She had left the phone on the kitchen counter back at the house. "Shit!"

She roared back down the long driveway to the sagging lodgepole entrance to her own place and stopped to collect herself. She had to get a grip. She was all Ava had. A daughter shouldn't see her mother fall apart.

"Calm down, Isabelle," she muttered and eased up the driveway.

* * *

Sheriff John Thomas Bradshaw, Jr., listened to a breathless female voice on the phone, pretty sure the woman was crying.

"...shot... my little girl's dog... He..."

"Where are you, ma'am, and who shot him?"

"I'm at... home... in my barn. My neighbor..."

John groaned mentally. In the three months he had been sheriff of Callister County, Idaho, he hadn't been called on to investigate much and he couldn't recall from the Idaho State Police's two weeks of sheriff's school he had attended in Boise if dog-shooting incidents had been addressed. "Tell me who you are and where you live, ma'am."

When he heard her name, his mental groan grew louder. Izzy Rondeau. He remembered her from high school. Pretty, sweet-natured, sort of quiet. Had a long mop of curly red hair that flew wild and free as a windstorm. In school, she had been labeled Frizzy Izzy, among other teenage sobriquets. Hearing her name surprised him. She had left town before he graduated and he hadn't heard of her since.

She was calling from her folks' house, so the neighbor would be Art Karadimos, a gnarly geezer who raised sheep and damn sure had it in him to shoot her dog. Or even her, with the right provocation. He was one of John's dad's good friends.

"Just stay where you are. I'll be out there." John hung up and got to his feet. He grabbed his battered Stetson off the top of the nearest filing cabinet behind his desk and his down coat off the oak coat tree in the corner.

In the reception area outside his office sat Callister County's one deputy, Rooster Gilley, and Dana Mason, the department's receptionist, clerk, secretary and dispatcher. Setting his hat on his head, John stopped at Rooster's desk. "When did Izzy Rondeau come back?"

Rooster glanced up from a Solitaire game on his computer screen, his face set in its usual dolorous expression. The deputy's face made John think of a basset hound. "Maybe three weeks now," Rooster said. "Why?"

After several months associating with Rooster, John had ceased questioning the deputy's knowledge of Callister County and its population. The older native knew all thirty-five hundred citizens and somehow knew the county's every happening, no matter how trivial. He had been the deputy sheriff for over ten years. He was a little puny in the thinking department and this was the best job he had ever had. He was loyal and steady.

John shrugged into his coat. "Art 'Dimos shot her dog."

"Ooohh, shit. You going out there?"

"Have to."

"Billy ain't with her," Dana put in, without looking away from her computer screen. Her hands flew over the keyboard keys. She wasn't playing Solitaire. Having done a hitch in the army where she was some kind of clerk, she maintained the record-keeping end of the sheriff's office with ruthless efficiency. "Izzy's cousin said he ran off with another woman."

No big surprise there. Billy Bledsoe had always been a prick, even as a kid. Izzy and he had left Callister together.

"The hell. I'll be in the Blazer if you need me."

John clumped up the steep wooden stairs leading out of the courthouse basement that housed the sheriff's office and jail. Outside, he drew into his lungs a big helping of chilled air, thick with moisture. Spring had to be just around the corner.

The sheriff's department's aged Blazer with its encircled gold star logo on the front door waited for him like a faithful, if broken-down, steed. He thought again about asking the county commissioners for a new rig. Travel on the mostly unpaved county roads wore out a vehicle in a hurry.

He scooted behind the wheel, looking around as he plugged the key into the ignition. Through the silver mist, he could see the entire town strung along two sides of the highway that passed through. Except for automobiles and the paved highway, John suspected the town didn't look much different from when it began in 1840, when a Bradshaw had been one of the founding fathers. John's roots ran deep.

Things looked quiet this morning. Still, he could almost feel the town's pulse elevating to a steady drum as the weekenders anticipated the evening. Typical for a Saturday.

The radio, which he kept tuned to a country-western station, came on when he switched on the ignition. John shifted gears and nosed east as George Strait crooned "Amarillo by Morning." The lyrics told a story of a rodeo cowboy, broke and down on his luck. John had heard the song many times, but it still had special meaning to him, for he himself was a broke, down-on-his-luck rodeo cowboy.

The Karadimos and Rondeau places were about fifteen miles out of town. Because they were the only two dwellings at the end of Stony Creek Road, Callister County's four-man maintenance crew kept the gravel passage in only fair shape. The Blazer furrowed through mud ruts and rattled over wet potholes, making poor time and giving John's mind an opportunity to dwell on Izzy.

In school they had been in 4-H together; both had raised steers. A couple of years older than he, she'd had a woman's body when a lot of the girls his age looked more like boys than girls. He spent his whole sophomore year at Callister High School sporting a hard-on, watching her heart-shaped butt twitch up and down the hallways in tight jeans. And dreading the day when she would graduate and take that vision away from him.

He invited her to a rodeo once to watch him rope, but his being the only Callister High School kid ever to be a steer-roping champion at the national level hadn't impressed her. She'd had eyes only for Billy, who wasn't a champion at anything.

John reached the weathered Rondeau gate, slowed just past the cattle guard and looked at two horses grazing on his right. Their images were blurry in the fog, but they looked like mares. Izzy had fooled with horses when they were teenagers, probably would have competed in rodeo if she'd had some support.

A white frame house of no particular style hunkered at the end of a half mile of driveway. John couldn't guess its age, but he was sure it was older than he. Its most obvious distinctive feature was wood siding badly in need of paint. A huge barn in need of more than paint and a couple of outbuildings with attached corrals lay to the left and slightly back from the house. John ground his way uphill toward the complex.