John Saul (14 page)

“How come?” Alison blurted.

Joey’s face reddened. “They just don’t,” he said. “How do I know why? Come on, let’s go see what kind of clothes they have.” He pushed the glass door of the Mercantile open and went inside, with Logan right behind him, but Alison hesitated, gazing across the street to where the group of kids was standing, now whispering among themselves and sneaking glances in her direction.

What is it? she wondered.

What was going on?

Why wouldn’t they like Joey Wilkenson? What could he possibly have done to them?

For a brief instant she was tempted to cross the street, to
walk right up to them and ask. But even as the thought came into her mind, she knew she wouldn’t act on it.

For she knew exactly what would happen if she did.

None of them would say anything. They would just look at her, and then turn around and walk away.

“Alison?” she heard Logan calling from inside the store. “Come on!”

Turning away from the group across the street, Alison hurried into the store, where she found Logan and Joey examining a stack of brightly colored western shirts.

“We can buy anything we want!” Logan told her, his eyes sparkling with anticipation. “All we do is charge them!” Seeing the uncertainty cross his sister’s face, he turned to Joey. “Isn’t that what you said?”

Joey grinned at Alison. “It’s true. We have accounts at every store in town. All we have to do is pick out what we want, and they send the bill to the ranch!”

“But Mom said—” Alison began. Joey didn’t let her finish.

“Aunt MaryAnne doesn’t know about the accounts. And if she says we shouldn’t have bought something, we can bring it back. What’s the big deal? We need school clothes, don’t we?”

Alison hesitated, but then her eyes took in the massive display of merchandise spread out before her, and her resistance melted. As her fingers fell wistfully on a plaid cashmere scarf, she heard Joey speaking to her: “Buy it—it’ll look terrific on you.”

For the first time in her life Alison Carpenter abandoned herself to the joy of shopping.

The scarf instantly became hers and she decided she would always think of it as a gift.

A gift from Joey.

In the middle of the afternoon, MaryAnne closed the last of the ledgers on the desk, leaned back and shut her eyes.

She had done it!

She had gone over all the accounts. In the beginning the ledgers looked like nothing more than row upon row of meaningless numbers, but she had kept at it, and slowly
come to understand just how much it cost to run the ranch. She understood the cost of keeping the horses, and the amount of money the Wilkensons had saved by raising most of their hay, rather than buying it.

More important, she understood just how much the ranch had cost Ted and Audrey, and the fact that it had never been intended to make money. Indeed, it had cost far more than it needed to, for the Wilkensons had spent considerable sums in rejuvenation projects, restoring once-cleared fields to their natural state and removing a culvert that had detoured the stream from its original course. That project had been particularly expensive, since it involved replacing a small forest of fully grown trees that had died when the stream had been diverted decades earlier, cutting off their water supply.

Yet no matter how much money the ranch absorbed, the books showed clearly that Ted Wilkenson’s income was large enough to support it all, with sums, which heretofore had been beyond MaryAnne’s wildest dreams, left over to support various conservation and environmental causes in the Sawtooth Valley area.

Though she covered several pages of the yellow legal pad she had found in the desk with questions, she had already struck several of them out as her understanding of the Wilkensons’ financial structure had become clearer.

I can do it, she decided. At least this part of it.

She got up from the desk, stretched, then moved through the house, automatically straightening things as she wandered through the rooms. Going out the back door, she paused to bask in the sun for a moment, enjoying the feel of the heat on her aching muscles.

Exercise.

That’s what she needed.

Maybe she should just take an hour or so and go for a long walk. She tipped her head back, surveying the soaring mountains that almost surrounded her. To the west, the stone face of Sugarloaf was just barely falling into the shadows of the afternoon, and as her eyes lingered on the ledge from which Audrey had fallen, she felt a chill go through her and quickly looked away. But there were huge granite outcrop pings
everywhere, and any one of them would provide a panorama of the whole valley. Surely the network of trails that led up the mountains would take her to one or another of them.

She was about to start off across the field when a loud whinnying came from the barn. Frowning, she headed across the yard, but stopped short, remembering the night of the funeral.

Another of the horses joined in the whinnying, and then from the house she heard another sound.

A dog barking.

Surely Joey had taken Storm with him when they’d gone to town? Except if the kids were going to be shopping—She looked up to the second floor, and there was the big shepherd, his forepaws propped up on the sill of Joey’s open window. He started barking again as the commotion in the barn increased. MaryAnne ran to the back door, calling out to the dog. From the second floor Storm’s barking turned into a frantic howl, and MaryAnne suddenly understood what had happened. Hurrying upstairs, she opened the door to Joey’s room. The dog immediately bounded out, racing down the stairs. MaryAnne followed him, catching up to him in the kitchen, where the closed door had stopped him. As soon as she opened it, he streaked across to the barn, disappearing inside.

By the time MaryAnne made it to the barn, the horses had begun calming down, but still she stopped at the door. “Storm? Here, boy! Come on!” A second later the dog trotted up to her, his tail wagging. “What was it, boy?” MaryAnne asked, reaching down to scratch the big dog while she peered into the gloom of the cavernous barn.

The horses were quiet now, and when neither they nor Storm showed any further signs of nervousness, MaryAnne finally stepped inside, peering into the shadowed light “Bill?” she called out. “Are you here?”

Nothing.

With Storm at her heels, she moved farther into the barn. The three horses were in their stalls, each of them with its head over the door, watching her.

“What was it?” she asked them. “Was someone in here?”

Though neither Buck nor Fritz, the two geldings whose stalls were closest to the door, made any response, Sheika nickered softly, her ears flicking forward. MaryAnne moved farther into the barn, frowning uncertainly at the big mare and remembering how Sheika had finally come back to the barn the day after she had arrived.

That morning, when she’d first looked out the window and seen the big horse calmly grazing in the field, she hadn’t known where it had come from, and surely would have stopped Joey had she known it was the mare that killed Ted. But Joey had charged outside immediately, calling out to the horse. MaryAnne had watched in stunned surprise as the big mare stayed where she was as Joey ran toward her. Only as he’d come close had she finally walked over to him, then nuzzled his neck, licked his cheek, and followed him docilely back to the barn without his even laying a hand on her bridle.

She had had to call the sheriff’s office, of course. Within the hour Tony Moleno had arrived with Olivia Sherbourne, the bluff middle-aged woman who was the local veterinarian.

While the vet had examined the horse, Joey pleaded with the assistant deputy not to have her destroyed. “She didn’t hurt Dad on purpose,” he insisted. “She’s not like that! Something made her do it!”

Tony Moleno had said nothing until Olivia Sherbourne finished her inspection. “Well, what do you think?”

Olivia had shoved her hands deep in the hip pockets of her jeans, and met Moleno’s gaze with a determined look. “I think putting this horse down is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. You
know
me, Tony! I’ve put down plenty of horses in my time, some of them because they were sick, but most because they were dangerous. And I never had any question it was the right thing to do. But I’ve known Sheika for a lot of years, and I’ve never known her to hurt anything. You could poke that horse with a sharp stick, and all she’d do is look at you. I think Joey’s right—something gave her a hell of a scare, and all she did was react. It was an accident, pure and simple. If you want me to, I’ll go roll
around under her, and you watch what happens. All she’ll do is snuffle my pockets, looking for sugar!”

Tony Moleno had taken a deep breath, but Olivia Sherbourne wasn’t through.

“There’s no law saying a horse has to be put down just because of an accident, Tony, and if you don’t believe me, call Rick Martin or Charley Hawkins. It’s just a custom, and with Sheika, I won’t do it.” Anticipating him, she added: “And if you put her down yourself, I’ll see to it that every kid in town knows that you did it, and that I was against it!”

The assistant deputy had spread his hands in submission. “All right, Olivia. You’ve made your point, and you’re the expert. If I wasn’t going to listen to you, I wouldn’t have brought you up here, would I?”

Olivia Sherbourne had snorted in derision and walked back to her truck. But as she pulled out of the yard, she’d stopped and stuck her head out the window, calling out to MaryAnne. “You have any trouble with him, you call me! In fact, if you have any trouble with anybody, you call me! I live just down the road.” Then she’d driven away, leaving Tony Moleno chuckling in the cloud of dust she’d raised.

“She means it,” the deputy had told her. “Olivia’s a terrific vet, and a terrific woman, but I wouldn’t want to cross her. The last guy that did wound up with a black eye and a dislocated shoulder. Deserved it, too. You couldn’t have a better friend than Olivia, and there’s not a soul around here who wouldn’t agree with me.”

“Including the man she gave the black eye to?” MaryAnne had asked.

Moleno’s chuckle had turned into a roar of laughter. “He’s not around here anymore. Stayed another month, then just left. No one’s heard from him since.”

Though that had been the end of any talk of putting Sheika down, MaryAnne had still felt leery of the big horse. Now, in the barn, she approached the mare carefully. “What was it, Sheika? Was there someone here?”

The horse nickered again, and stretched her head forward, and MaryAnne reached out to give it a tentative
scratch. The horse’s big tongue slid out, licking her arm, then she dropped her head lower, straining her nose toward MaryAnne’s jeans.

“You want some sugar?” MaryAnne reached into her pocket, pulling out one of the lumps she’d already started taking from the sugar bowl each morning to feed to Buck and Fritz. Now Sheika gently took the sugar from her hand, her lips barely touching MaryAnne’s skin. “I think Dr. Sherbourne was right,” MaryAnne said, patting the horse once more. “I really don’t think you’d hurt anyone.”

“Damn right I was,” a voice said from the barn door. “And my name’s Olivia. Nobody calls me Dr. Sherbourne, and I hope you’re not going to start.”

MaryAnne spun around to see the vet silhouetted against the bright sunlight outside. “My God! You startled me!”

“Down, Storm!” Olivia commanded as the big shepherd reared up to try to lick her face. Obediently, the dog dropped back to the ground, and the vet fished a dog biscuit out of her pocket, holding it down for Storm to snatch. “Greedy, aren’t you?” She strode into the barn, speaking a few words to each of the horses, then stopped in front of Sheika. “Thought I’d stop by and see how my girl’s getting along.” She held the big mare’s head in her hand, then peeled back her lips to check her teeth. Satisfied, the vet turned to face MaryAnne. “I assume you’re not having any problems, since you haven’t called me.”

“Actually, I’m barely getting used to the place,” MaryAnne replied. Then, remembering her conversation with Bill Sikes that morning, and Joey’s words after Sikes had left the house, she found herself telling Olivia Sherbourne about it. “I’m not sure what to do,” she said when she was done. “Was Ted really about to fire Bill?”

“Not that I know of,” Olivia replied. “But I can’t say he wasn’t, either. And if Sikes wants to go, let him! There’s plenty of people who could take his place, and probably do a better job. I liked Ted and Audrey a lot, but if this were my place, I’d do things differently.”

MaryAnne frowned. “What’s wrong with it?”

Olivia hesitated. “Well, now that you’ve put me on the spot, I guess I’m not sure,” she said. “Just more of a feeling,
you know? I’ve just had a feeling lately that something’s not quite right around here.”

MaryAnne felt a shiver go through her as she heard the veterinarian reiterating almost exactly what Sikes had said only this morning.

“Well, I don’t mean it like he did,” Olivia replied after MaryAnne repeated the handyman’s words. “I’m afraid I don’t buy into the idea of animals taking revenge. But there are all kinds of strange people around here. There are even a few mountain men still living up near the timberline.”

“Mountain men?” MaryAnne echoed.

“Nut cases,” Olivia replied. “Most of them have died off, but there are still a few left, scratching out a living God only knows how. For the most part, they’re pretty harmless, but some of them are absolutely psychopathic.”

Unbidden, the memory of the strange-looking man she’d seen at Ted and Audrey’s funeral came into MaryAnne’s mind, along with an echo of Joey’s insistence that he’d seen someone in the pasture the night before the funeral. “Do any of them live around here?” she asked.

“Who knows?” Olivia replied. “They seem to live pretty much anyplace they damned well please, and do whatever they want to do.” Seeing the look of worry that had come over MaryAnne’s face, the veterinarian regretted her words. “Hell, I’m just talking to hear the sound of my own voice. I’m sure everything’s just fine.” Her eyes scanned the countryside, looking for something to distract MaryAnne from what she’d just said. Then, as though she’d had a sudden inspiration: “You had a full tour of this place yet?”