Crunch Time (25 page)

Before Furman County bought the enormous ranch that made up the preserve, people had built everything from gigantic houses to log cabins on the property surrounding the ranch. Either the rich had wanted the mountain view or folks wanted to farm or ranch. Taking into account Charlene’s fur, car, grandson in parochial school, and altogether new lifestyle, I would have guessed her boyfriend was in that big-house-with-a-view category.

When I crested the hill, the BMW had disappeared. I motored along past five dirt roads going right, left, and sideways, with no clue as to where the silver car had turned. Unlike Sabine, I was no expert at tracking, and numerous vehicles had left their tire prints in the snow. I cursed silently and encouraged the van along to the turnoff for Sabine’s.

She met me at the bottom of her driveway. Tall, with a commanding presence, she wore a cap that I was sure she had knitted herself, from wool she’d spun from her own sheep and dyed using vegetables she and Greg had grown. She wore thick, unfashionable specs with shades she flipped down when she needed sunglasses, like now. Her frizzy hair radiated like a gray halo from a ponytail at the nape of her neck, and her ankle-length olive-green overcoat looked as if she’d bought it from an army veteran who’d survived the Nazi assault on the Ardennes forest. She’d apparently taken seriously my quip about using sharply pointed garden equipment as weapons. At arm’s length, she held two long-handled garden spades. Sabine Rushmore, pacifist, prepared for battle.

“There you are!” she said brightly when I hopped out of the van. She eyed me up and down. The skin at the sides of her eyes crinkled with worry. “You need boots and gloves? I’ve got some up in the house.”

Knowing her home lay half a mile up the murderous incline behind her, I demurred. “But thank you for setting out on this expedition with me. Do you want me to get the address, or do you know exactly where this place is?”

“I know it.”

I set off behind her. She insisted on carrying both “weapons,” as she called them. Even though I was wearing sneakers and lighter clothing, was bearing no arms, and was more than thirty years younger than my compatriot, she left my butt in the dust. Or in this case, in the snow. I huffed along and finally called to her to stop.

“Is it much farther?” I panted, bending over to deal with the stitch in my side.

“Just around the next bend. Are you all right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s all that high-fat-content food you make, Goldy. It’s slowing you down.”

Since the last thing I needed at this point was a nutrition lecture, I said merely, “Lead on.” She smiled before trotting away.

After a few more minutes of muscle-squealing agony, I followed her up a driveway that had not been plowed but that had a set of tire prints in it—going in and coming out. I wondered if the lab at the sheriff’s department could or would trace them. I doubted it. Tom had more serious crimes to investigate at the moment. And anyway, if the break-and-enterers were also adulterers, Father Pete would have pointed out that adultery wasn’t a crime. It was a sin.

Ahead of us, tucked into a stand of lodgepole pines, stood a tiny red one-story A-frame. The deck out front needed paint. On either side of the small front door, white crisscrossing on the windows plus black shutters with cut-out heart shapes indicated the house had been built in the seventies, when trying-to-be-Swiss style was all the rage in Aspen Meadow.

No one had shoveled the walkway to the deck. The place looked forlorn.

“Following the tire tracks,” Sabine called, “it looks as if your lovebirds broke in around this corner.” She disappeared, and I was suddenly worried. What if something happened to Sabine? Tom would have my neck.

The sound of breaking glass brought me quickly around to the side of the house. Why hadn’t I had the presence of mind to ask Donna Lamar for a
key
to this place? Sabine had used her garden implement to shatter what remained of the second window in the back door. The original breakers-in had smashed the first pane in the door. Sabine reached in and opened it.

“I didn’t know if your husband would want fingerprints from that other windowpane,” she said by way of explanation.

“Wait,” I said, pointing down. “They parked, then walked through the snow to this door, instead of the front door. They broke one pane of glass, and you broke the other. Why come back here?”

“They must have thought their vehicle would be out of sight,” said Sabine. “Hello?” she cried into the interior, which echoed.

“Sabine, wait,” I said. Again thinking of Tom and my fragile neck, I hustled ahead of her to make sure the place was empty.

“
You
are not going anywhere,” Sabine said, holding out an arm like a crossing guard. “I am strong, fearless, and sixty-five years old.” She reached back through the door and picked up her garden spades, which she had leaned against the house. “
Nobody
messes with me.”

Sabine ordered me to stay put while she traipsed through the two bedrooms, her gardening spades at the ready. She checked the two bathrooms and the closets while I pretty much stayed in the living/dining/kitchen area. At one point, I sneaked over to the kitchen and checked the cabinets and refrigerator. They were empty, except for an opened box of baking soda in the fridge.

Back in the living/dining/kitchen area, we looked around for clues as to who could have broken in before we broke in. The place was cold and dark, as A-frames tend to be. There was a solitary skylight, which let in some sunshine as well as water. Either Donna or the owners had put a bucket on the shag-carpeted floor to catch the trickle from the leak, and the melting snow made irregular plops.

“Looks like they had a fire,” I said, eyeing the tiny, bleak fireplace.

“You know Sherlock Holmes would go through those ashes,” Sabine announced. She put down her spades, picked up one of her bags, and hustled over to the hearth, where she got down on her knees. She began methodically sifting the gray dust, bit by small bit, over to one side of the hearth.

I looked around. What was missing? Something, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Wait: the fire.

“Where do you suppose they got their wood?” I asked Sabine, who was still intent on the cold ashes. “Could they have brought in an armful from their vehicle? Or several armfuls? I didn’t see any pieces of dropped bark between the driveway and the back door.” I remembered the sleeping bags and cheese wrappers. Was it possible these folks backed a truck full of supplies into each of their love nests whenever they went for a roll in the hay?

“The home owners used to chop their own wood from their land,” Sabine said. “We do, too. All of us out here cut down some trees, to keep the fire danger down. That big wildfire out in the preserve? It started less than a mile from here.”

“But . . . when we came in, I didn’t see a pile of firewood beside the house.”

“Check out back,” she said without lifting her eyes from her ash sifting. “The owners’ store of wood should be covered with plastic. Up here, we tend to get more snow than in town. You have to keep the logs dry, in case you lose power and are completely dependent on your fire to keep you warm.”

Off I went. Sure enough, once I rounded the back wall of the house, I saw a block the size of two cars—the woodpile. It was covered with green plastic. Huh . . . what would Sherlock Holmes do? He’d look down.

The fresh snow had filled in old, deep boot prints, so I carefully followed them. The prints went to the woodpile, then back to the
front
side of the house, to the deck, where there was another door. Bark and kindling littered the path. So they had parked, smashed a window to get inside the back door, and then gone in and out of the front door with firewood.

At the woodpile, I followed their trail to a spot where there was a showering of chips. The snow was tamped down with boot marks. I pulled back the plastic and saw where an entire section of logs had been depleted. Unfortunately, the thief had not left a sweatshirt with his name on it.

And then, from deep in the woods, there was an eruption of gunfire.

Damn it.

I dropped to my belly, with the woodpile between whoever was shooting and yours truly. “Sabine!” I screamed. “Did you hear that?”

She had come out the back door with its two broken windows and was looking for me. “Don’t worry,” she called. “We hear shots fired all the time. It’s not even hunting season. The bastards!”

“You hear shots fired all the time,” I muttered, as I got to my knees and brushed snow off my clothes. “Great.”

“Still,” she yelled, “we should probably leave. We
are
technically trespassing.” As if to punctuate her words, another round of gunfire, closer this time, went off.

“Crap!” I hollered as I fell on my stomach again. Was my yelling more or less likely to rain bullets on us? Wait a minute. I’d seen something. Where? Not on top of the woodpile, not beyond it, but . . . below it. I inched sideways.

From this angle, between the snow and the bottom of the woodpile, I saw that something silvery had become wedged. It wasn’t a coin. It was too flat. As my frozen fingers tugged on the tiny gray corner of whatever it was, a third round of gunfire went off.

“Goldy?” Sabine cried. “You’re not in the best of shape, and I don’t want us to try to outrun those shooters, whoever they are.”

“Okay, okay.” I pushed hard on the lowest log close to the silvery gray thing. The wood moved a tiny fraction. I slammed my shoulder into the woodpile. Nothing. “Sabine!” I hollered. “Duck down and come help me!”

“With what?” Bent at the waist, she trotted toward me. She was covered with ashes from the fireplace.

“Help me push this woodpile over,” I said when she arrived.

“Are you mad?”

“Not mad, not angry, and certainly not insane. On three, push.” We set our arms out straight against the logs. I counted, and Sabine and I heaved and groaned. The woodpile crashed over.

“You really must have hated those logs,” said Sabine, brushing off her gloves. “And now we need to get going.”

I bent over and scooped up a credit card that was partially covered with snow. Once more, gunfire exploded, closer still. Even though I was consumed with curiosity, I couldn’t indulge it. My heart was pounding with the amount of effort it had taken to upend the logs, and I was worried about getting away from the shooter. I shoved the card in my pocket without reading the name.

Sabine motioned for me to follow her. Still bent at the waist, she jogged to the house, retrieved her gardening tools, and started trotting up the driveway. I raced after her, slipping and sliding wildly, as eager to get away from that A-frame as I’d wanted to get anywhere in my life. But I had, as they say in Tom’s business, a clue.

Sabine, bless her sweet heart, waited for me at the end of the A-frame’s driveway. Worry creased her face. “Are you going to make it?” This, from a woman three decades older than yours truly, propelled me the rest of the way to her house.

Once we were inside Sabine’s hand-built log cabin, I pulled out the credit card. Printed at the bottom was the name
Sean Breckenridge.
I showed it to Sabine, who raised her eyebrows.

She said, “This calls for some hot herb tea.”

I built a fire in her hearth and swathed myself in a homemade crocheted afghan. As I began to warm up, I wondered about Sean Breckenridge.

I didn’t know him, really. He and Rorry had been living in Aspen Meadow for only a few years, and when Rorry had parties, Marla told me, she hired a Denver caterer. Rorry and Marla had become friends at the country club pool, where Rorry took her son for swimming lessons.

I knew Rorry from church, but only a little. Sean and Rorry’s son, who I guessed was now in kindergarten, came to the altar for a blessing when his parents took communion. The little guy was dark haired and adorable, and possessed an amazing collection of checkered shirts and cowboy boots. He seemed to be wearing a new pair of boots every time I saw him, but always the same cowboy hat. As the mother of a son, I knew enough to tell him his outfit was “really cool” but to stop there. The little boy had looked at me with serious eyes and actually tipped his hat. He’d said, “Thank yeh, ma’am.” I’d managed not to laugh.

Sabine returned with a tray and two hand-thrown pottery mugs, from which a steam emerged that smelled like lawn clippings. She said, “Maybe it’s not as big a deal as we think it is.” She settled into a rocking chair and blew on her tea. “Maybe Sean and Rorry just have so much money, and such a big house, that they go out looking for, you know, adventure while their son is in school.”

“Adventure. Right.”

“Well, Goldy, you don’t
know
he was up to something else.
With
someone else.”

“You’re right, I don’t.” I took a deep breath. “What do you suppose that person or those people were shooting at? Do you think they saw or heard us?”

“I can’t imagine they did,” she said. Her nose and cheeks were smudged with soot. “I wish I’d found something. May I just see the card one more time?”

I placed the credit card on the coffee table Sabine and her husband had made, she’d told me when I did her retirement party, from a door salvaged from an abandoned church.

“It could have been stolen,” I said. “Or, if he’s the one who dropped it, he could have done it when he was lifting logs,” I said, remembering how he’d dropped his keys when he was trying to carry his camera. “Credit cards are weird that way. They can work their way out of your wallet. Any man who was exerting effort like that, back and forth to the house, if he had a wallet? The card could have just fallen out. Then the guy’s boot wedged it under the pile.”

Sabine shook her head again and handed me the card. “I notice the expiration is in two years. So it’s a current card.” That information settled over us for a few minutes. “Well, old friend,” she said, standing up, “I have to go take care of the horses. Hay, water, stuff like that. You’re free to stay as long as you want, but I need to get out to the barn.”

I scrambled to my feet and checked my watch. One-forty-five already! I had no idea our little escapade at the A-frame had taken so long. “I have to skedaddle, too. But, wait. Sabine, are you the one who called Donna about someone at the A-frame?”