Roped (Gail McCarthy Mysteries) (4 page)

That was the thing, I thought suddenly, that you couldn't explain to people like Susan Slater. That you could learn to understand horses, that you could know, much of the time, what they were thinking, what they wanted, what they needed. That until you could do this, you weren't in a position to say what was good for a horse. You had to know horses to love them.

FOUR

Glen canceled the roping. I don't know what Lisa or, for that matter, Susan said to convince him, but he ordered Al to give all the teams their money back and told everybody to go home. It was unprecedented. There would, I knew, be a lot of talk.

Lisa came to collect me as Lonny was loading our horses up. After inquiring about Pistol and finding he was all right for the moment, she herded me into her pickup, apparently anxious to get me alone.

"We have to stop by the big house first and talk to Dad," she said as soon as we were in the cab. "He's pretty upset."

I could imagine.

Lisa drove her truck, a plain white Ford just like Glen's-the Bennetts had never gone in for fancy trucks-up the ranch driveway. I stared out the window at the familiar view.

Hilly pastures rolled away on each side of the board-fenced drive, which was lined with the vivid orange spikes of red-hot poker plants. The hills dropped away from us to the distant farmland of the Pajaro Valley, and beyond that, almost hidden in the heat haze of midday, lay the bay.

We topped a little rise and bumped over a cattle guard. Then it was all green lawns, trees, and flower beds, with the big red brick house set right in the middle.

Lisa parked the truck and we walked into the house through the back door. The front door at Glen's was a massive wooden thing reached by way of a block-long brick walkway, lined with formal flower beds. Very imposing. Maybe that was why it was avoided by just about everybody. Visitors all seemed to walk through the garage and in the back door.

Joyce had always disapproved of this. Joyce was Glen's wife. His second wife, actually. Tom and Lisa's mother had died when Tim was born, and Glen had married Joyce a couple of years later. Tim and Lisa had always called her Joyce, never Mom. Neither of them liked her; Lisa and I had referred to her in our high school years as Lisa's wicked stepmother.

Joyce was watching TV when we walked in. Seeing her there across the room, I thought she looked exactly as she had when I'd last seen her, well over ten years ago. A fit-looking woman wearing tight black jeans and a vivid blouse with a Western print, Joyce had ash blond hair with silvery streaks that had stayed the same color ever since I'd known her. It was a color that suited Joyce.

She gave us a casual glance as we walked into the room, and her eyes met mine. I couldn't tell whether she recognized me or not. Since I had run in and out of her house on a regular basis during my high school years, I would have supposed I might look familiar to her, but if I did she gave no sign.

Glen and Tim were in the kitchen, and Lisa marched firmly in that direction. But curiosity prodded me. I walked slowly across the living room toward Joyce.

It was a long walk. The living room, like the whole house, was huge. Joyce had designed the place, Lisa had once told me. If so, the house sure said some interesting things about Joyce.

The building was laid out on massive, dramatic lines; I doubted whether a hundred people could make the living room seem crowded. There was a brick fireplace that looked big enough to roast an ox, and one whole wall was made up of giant windows that looked out on a wide brick patio backed by a football field of a lawn. The main room contained several couches, a dozen or more chairs, a couple of tables, and a grand piano, but it still looked empty. Maybe it was the height of the cathedral ceiling; I always felt if I yelled it would echo.

I walked across all this space to where Joyce lounged on a flowered couch that clashed quite badly with the loud print of her blouse. She looked up at me with the expression of a sleepy cat. "Hello, Gail," she said.

I stared at her in mild amazement. Even for Joyce, this seemed a bit much. Joyce didn't rope, but at one time, anyway, she'd had a couple of horses she showed in Western pleasure classes. She knew enough about horses and ropings to know that this sort of thing was not par for the course.

Her round blue eyes were locked back on the TV, though, watching what appeared to be some sort of soap opera. Her face, so surprisingly young-looking from a distance, told a different story up close. I could see the thick layer of foundation, the heavy black line around the eyes. I noticed that the hair spray holding the silver ash hair in soft waves had been applied pretty heavily. Joyce, Lisa had once said disparagingly, spent a fortune on clothes, hairdressers, and the like. The money had certainly bought something, I thought; she looked pretty good from across the room.

Seeing that Joyce clearly didn't want to talk to me, I wandered back toward the kitchen, where Lisa appeared to be engaged in a stormy argument with Tim. Before I reached the long bar covered with shiny tile that separated the kitchen from the living room, Lisa burst out of the open archway as if catapulted and grabbed my arm. "Come on; we're out of here. If you want to talk to me come on up to my house," she hurled in Glen's general direction. Then we were out the door.

A blast of hot air enveloped us as we stepped into the garage; I squinted my eyes against the glare of the noon sun on the blacktop driveway. After Glen's cool, dim living room, it felt like walking into an oven.

The heat didn't seem to register on Lisa. She was bristling with fury and strain, and she moved toward her truck with quick, jerky strides, her eyes snapping familiar sparks at me as she said impatiently, "Come on."

I plowed after her, feeling as if I were wading against a tide of heavy, hot mud. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

I'm not used to this kind of weather. Santa Cruz County has a mild climate; what I was used to was cool, foggy summers and sunny, only slightly chilly winters, with the occasional rain to liven things up. This sort of heat was outside my range.

I climbed into Lisa's truck and looked for the air conditioner. No such luck. The truck was a plain Jane, the sort any dirt-poor rancher would drive. No air conditioner.

Lisa was driving up the road past Glen's house, the truck rattling and jouncing in the potholes as soon as we got off Glen's nicely paved driveway.

"Where are you living?" I asked. "Not in Vincente's house?"

"Yep." Lisa's voice was curt.

Vincente was an old man who had spent his life working for Glen. During the years Lisa and I had been friends, Vincente had lived in a little frame house that dated from the ranch's early days-in the late 1800s. Glen and Joyce had bulldozed the main ranch house to build their mansion on its site, but Vincente's house, which was the original foreman's house and sat in a small valley just over the hill, had survived untouched. Probably because Joyce never had to look at it.

In Vincente's case, untouched really meant untouched. The paint had been mostly a memory, the floor dipped in several places, the roof leaked, and the porch had been about to collapse. I couldn't imagine Lisa living there.

"Vincente died a year ago-a heart attack," she said. "When I moved back here I talked Dad into letting me fix the house up. Vincente would never let Dad do a thing while he was alive, wanted everything just as it was." Lisa flashed a sudden, mischievous, watch-me-get-my-way smile, her old smile. "It cost a little bit, but Dad sprung for it. I couldn't live in the big house," she went on grimly. "I've always hated that house."

The emotion in her voice seemed out of proportion to a house, though I didn't like Glen's house either. It was just too big, too opulent-looking. The wall-to-wall carpeting was too deep, and the furniture was too shiny and velvety. It wasn't the kind of house where you could kick off your dirty boots. But I didn't think that was what Lisa meant when she said she hated the house.

We crested the ridge and I saw Vincente's old house down in the valley below us. The house was in a pretty setting under some big cottonwood trees by a creek, but in Vincente's time its picturesque quality had been swallowed up by the crumbling sadness of disrepair. Now a dark brown picket fence adorned with yellow climbing roses framed a square of lawn, and the house itself looked crisp, with a new roof and a solid porch. It had been painted barn red with dark brown trim, and the overall effect was charming-sort of an English cottage with a California ranch twist.

Lisa pulled up to the gate, and we were met by a volley of barks. "Stupid dogs," she said affectionately. The dogs in question were jumping up and down just inside the fence. They looked like Queensland heelers, and my heart jolted painfully. My old dog, Blue, a Queensland heeler, had died this last winter at the age of fifteen, and I wasn't over it yet.

She opened the gate and they boiled out of it, racing past Lisa to swarm around me, sniffing my pants leg. "They won't bite you," Lisa said over her shoulder. "They like women."

I kept my eye on them, just in case. Queenslands like to nip. These two, one red, one blue, sniffed me carefully but left my ankles alone, otherwise. I eyed the red dog's bulging belly with interest.

Lisa called her dogs from the porch: "Joey, Rita, get over here!" The dogs reluctantly gave up sniffing me and trotted back to her. I walked after them.

"Is she bred?" I asked.

"Yeah, she is. Joey's the father. Do you want a pup?"

"Maybe." I looked at the dogs some more, considering them as prospective parents for my own next dog. They looked back at me, sharp, pricked ears pointed attentively in my direction. The blue dog had a black mask that covered half his face, giving him an asymmetrical look that was slightly comical. It reminded me of my horse, Gunner, with his one blue eye and one brown one.

The female was a pretty dog, rust red, with a wide forehead and big brown eyes that were rimmed in black, as though she were wearing eye makeup. She glanced at me in that sideways, wary way that Queenslands do, and I thought she looked just like a little fox.

Lisa opened her front door, and the dogs and I followed her into the house. It had changed a lot since I'd seen it last. The pine plank floor was oiled a smooth, golden brown, and there was a braided rug in tones of brown in the center. A woodstove sat in one comer, and a long burlap-colored couch and a couple of big overstuffed chairs filled the small space. Nothing fancy, but friendly and comfortable.

The dogs lay down on the rug like it was theirs. I walked around them and followed Lisa into the kitchen. It had wallpaper with a light yellow pattern and new oak cabinets. There was a round wooden table with a butcher-block surface. Lisa got two bottles of beer out of the refrigerator and poured them into glasses and set them on the table. "The sun's over the yardarm somewhere," she said.

I laughed. "I guess so. So what's the problem?" I asked as I sat down.

Thus confronted, Lisa looked uncertain. "I don't know how to begin," she said at last. "It sounds so ridiculous. Dad and Tim don't believe me. They think I'm nuts."

"Just tell me the story. Begin at the beginning."

Lisa was staring at the wall behind the table intently. Her blond curls were tumbled, and there were dusty streaks on her neck and shirt. I watched her watch the wall and saw the look of fear creep back into her eyes. She ran her fingers through her curls. "I don't know where the beginning is."

"What are you talking about, Lisa?" I asked her. Patiently, I thought.

"I'm trying," she snapped. "I don't know where to begin. That horse you had to put down, that's part of it."

"What's the rest of it?"

"Lots of things. Most of them little things. Dad's three-year-old colt was poisoned. Someone left the gopher grain where he could reach it through the fence, and it killed him. Then the pasture gate was left open and the cattle got out on the road. Some dummy hit one and is suing Dad." The words were coming out of Lisa in a torrent now. "The hitch came off the truck the other day when Dad was hauling Smoke and Chester to a roping. It was on flat ground, luckily, and the trailer just rolled to a stop. We could have lost them, too. And last week," her face seemed to tighten, remembering, "last week he was working on the tractor and Tim was helping him. They worked on it all Tuesday and started again Wednesday morning. Dad got down underneath it; he wanted to figure out why it wouldn't start. He told Tim to press the starter button; Tim did and the damn thing jumped forward. It's just pure luck that the way Dad was lying none of the wheels touched him." Lisa looked at me defensively. "I know you'll think this is stupid. But Dad and Tim both swore they left that tractor in neutral. There's just been too many things. Dad's worried; I know he is."

"All of those things could easily be accidents," I said slowly. "Things like that happen on ranches. You know they do. More ranchers are killed by their tractors than by almost anything else."

"Bulls and stallions do their fair share, too," Lisa agreed. "But I have a feeling about this. Something's wrong. Someone's trying to get at Dad."

"What would be the point?" I asked her. "If someone is really doing this, the question would be why."

"I know. That's what Tim and Dad said. Why would someone do things to make Dad's life miserable? It doesn't make sense. I just have this feeling. I don't like it, Gail." She was quiet a minute. "It scares me," she added at last.