Stripped Bare (2 page)

I sped to the edge of town and jerked the wheel a hard right, catching the highway running north. Elvis's back tires slid on the pavement before I floored it, flattening my spine in the seat and racing down the deserted stretch of road.

In the midst of Roxy's hysterics I'd learned that Eldon was dead. The thought bounced in my brain, not settling into reality. Someone must have called Ted out to the Bar J when trouble broke out. Sheriffing was supposed to be an easy job in Grand County, not one where you got shot.

The more worried and wrapped up I got, the slower the drive to the Bar J felt. It was like Elvis's wheels spun in molasses.

Dizzying ground blizzards swirled along the black highway. The twenty miles north only took seven years before I swung a quick right onto the dirt Bar J ranch road. The wheels rattled across the AutoGate, the steel bars embedded in the road at the fence line, designed to keep cows on one side or the other. The back tires slid and the momentum smacked the Ranchero's bed into an anchor fence post. The post didn't break, but it tilted out, drawing barbed wire with it and snapping the line post six feet away. “Sorry, Elvis.”

The Ranchero rode low, like an El Camino. Too bad I hadn't jumped into a four-wheel-drive pickup, instead.

I fought to stay on the slightly raised dirt road but bounced into frozen pasture. Elvis didn't hesitate, especially since I kept pressing on the gas. I raced alongside the road, swerving to avoid the biggest soap weeds. The rough ground and clump grass ricocheted me from the seat to bump my head on the ceiling and back down. Each time, it forced my foot lighter on the gas and then pressed it back down. The engine roared and faded. I finally found a shallow entry spot and climbed back to the relative smoothness of the road.

Three miles from the highway I reached another AutoGate and a sharp turn to the left that led around a shallow lake the size of the Broncos' stadium in Denver. The ranch headquarters snugged under a hill on the other side. Red and blue flashed against the barn and houses with frantic urgency. Eldon's boxy two-story, built in the early twenties, looked like a shack compared to Roxy's McMansion, which dominated everything at the other end of the compound. I gunned across the frozen yard to Milo Ferguson's police cruiser. He hadn't wasted any time getting to the crime scene.

Crime scene. In Grand County? Here, “crime” meant an angry kid egging Principal Barkley's car. Or Leonard Bingham getting another DUI. A
bad
crime was a fistfight at the annual street dance.

Not murder. Not a cop shot.

I sailed over the final AutoGate, into the ranch yard, and skirted the barn with the calving lot behind. Two dozen cows bedded down in fresh hay. Tire tracks showed in the damp sand. Someone had been out checking the heavies recently. Why would I even notice that, when every thought should be on Ted?

Harold Graham and Eunice Fleenor, two of the best EMTs on the squad, wheeled a gurney out the front door and hauled it down the steps. The floor of the Ranchero probably buckled, I stomped the brakes so hard.

Roxy followed them out of the open door She sobbed with abandon and clutched a wool blanket to her chest. One of the EMTs had probably handed it to her, and for once her pride-and-joy of a cleavage disappeared.

I rammed the gearshift into Park and pulled the door latch. It didn't catch. I pulled harder and slammed my whole one hundred and twenty pounds into the door. Still, it didn't budge. The temperamental SOB sometimes balked for no good reason. “Not now, Elvis!”

I struggled out of the driver's bucket seat, across the console, and into the passenger seat. I threw myself against the door and it creaked open.

By the time I ran around the Ranchero, Eunice Fleenor slammed the back doors and sprinted for the cab.

Ted was inside. I wasn't. “Wait!”

Eunice jumped in the ambulance and turned the key. “Meet us at the hospital.”

I gripped the ambulance door with both hands. “Let me go with you.”

Eunice wrenched the door from my hands like she was swiping a cigarette from the mouth of one of her teenagers. “Can't. Got Roxy riding along already.”

She gunned the motor and jerked away, closing the door on the run.

I darted back to Elvis. Before I could pry the door open to follow the ambulance the ninety miles to Broken Butte, Milo Ferguson stopped me.

“Kate,” he hollered above the frosty wind, from the front porch of the old house.

Like a worn guitar string, I vibrated, ready to snap. I needed to get to Ted, but I had no information. All Roxy's
Oh my God
s didn't tell me much. How badly was he hurt? Who shot him? Why was he out here? Was Eldon really dead?

I took off for the house. A slash of light from the open front door silhouetted Milo as he stood at the top of the wide wooden porch steps. His stomach billowed over the top of his pants, belted so far down on his hips it was a wonder they stayed on. Like other old cowboys I knew, when Milo's belly got bigger and his butt disappeared, he simply hitched his Levi's lower and kept the same pants size.

Squinting into the driving snow pellets, I stopped at the base of the stairs to hear the story and dash. “Roxy said someone shot Ted. Is that true?”

He descended the steps. “Come on inside.”

No. I had to get on the road. I inched backward.

“Let's get out of the storm.” He clamped a beefy hand on my arm and pulled me up the stairs.

I resisted, but short of throwing a punch, I couldn't escape. To the right of the front door, yellow crime scene tape blocked the steps leading to the second story. I didn't see any blood or bodies or signs of struggle.

Rope Hayward and his wife, Nat, sat on two vinyl kitchen chairs across the room. Nat was Dad's mother's sister's cousin by marriage, twice removed. She'd gone to grade school with Dad and married Rope when he got her pregnant, around the time Buddy Holly fell from the sky. They moved out to the Bar J, where Rope took up the job of ranch hand for Eldon. Nat cooked for the hay crew in the summer, for the extra calving help in the spring, and for Eldon, after his wife died.

Looking like a faded scarecrow, Rope rested his hand on the back of Nat's bent head. Her weeping sounded like a hungry kitten. I dipped my head in their direction. Rope nodded back in a disjointed way. Nat blew her nose.

The ranch house appeared even older and less modernized than ours. Cracked, dry leather covered the couch and recliner. They might be pieces purchased by Eldon Edwards's parents, the original homesteaders. Dark, glossy, varnished wood outlined the window sashes and served as floorboards. Whatever color the wall-to-wall carpet started out, it was now a dirty gray, worn nearly to the backing in some places. The living room opened into a kitchen, with a two-burner gas stove visible, sitting on cracked linoleum.

Mom would say the house had good bones. It certainly had plenty of space. Bedrooms and Eldon's office filled a second story, with only Eldon to occupy them.

This was the house Eldon grew up in, and from what everyone around town said, he hadn't changed a thing since. They said—and I didn't hold much with what “they” said—he hadn't let his bride spend a dime on upgrades. But that saintly woman—again, a “they said” sentiment—had passed away so many years ago I had only a vague recollection of her. The house had the musty basement smell old houses are prone to. Tonight, a faint odor of burned meat and gunpowder lingered in the air.

I shivered and stayed close to the front door. I wrenched my arm free from Milo's grasp and decided I'd give him three seconds. “What about Ted?”

Milo clicked the front door against the rising wind. “Not sure.”

My heart bounced to my stomach floor. Two seconds down. “How bad is it?”

Milo sucked on his teeth. “He was shot from the front. Bullet went into his midsection but there wasn't an exit wound. He was unconscious.”

Two seconds more than I was willing to give. “I've got to go!” I lunged for the door.

Milo leaned against the front door so I couldn't leave. “He was breathing, and the EMTs'll git him stable. Nothing you can do, for right now.”

I fidgeted like a horse in the starting gate. Even if I shoved him, I'd probably not be able to do more than jiggle his belly.

“Just listen to me a sec. You're gonna have to tell Carly that her granddad is gone. Sooner the better, before somebody spills the news first.”

His words smacked me upside the head. Of course. Carly. She'd already lost her mother, my oldest sister, Glenda. When her father died, Eldon's son, a couple of years after that, it had nearly broken her. Would she hold up after she learned her granddad was murdered? With her mother and father dead and a stepmother like Roxy, I was the closest thing to a parent she had. Poor girl.

“I don't know where Carly is.” I blurted it out before thinking.

He narrowed his eyes. “Aren't you her guardian?”

My fingers closed on the doorknob.

He frowned. “Seems a girl like that might bear a little closer watching.”

I'd been accused of negligence in the matter of my niece twice in the course of an hour. I focused on the door, thoughtless words dribbling from my mouth. “She's much better these days.”

Milo let out a
harrumph
. “She's gotta know about her granddad.”

Some of Milo's concern seeped deeper into me. “He's really dead? Who shot him? Why?”

Milo's frown deepened. “Don't know. Gonna find out.” Milo wheezed as if he couldn't get enough air past his big belly. “I couldn't make heads nor tails out of all Roxy's wailing.”

“When Ted wakes up…” He would wake up. He'd be okay. I gulped down the doubts. No sense getting worked up until I knew his condition. “When he comes to, he can tell you what happened. Whoever shot Eldon must have shot Ted.”

Milo's graying eyebrows drew together. “Maybe.”

“I've got to go.” I put a hand on his tree trunk of an arm to urge him away from the door.

He hesitated, and the look in his hazel eyes softened. “I've known you since you was no bigger'n a bug. You're a good and honest one, that's for sure.”

What was that about? Did he think Ted was going to die?

“I'd haul you to Broken Butte, but I got to secure the scene. You gonna be all right?”

I swallowed hard. An hour-plus drive to Broken Butte to worry that I might be greeted with the grim news that I was a widow? I nodded and he stepped out of the way.

I jumped down the rickety porch steps and raced for the Ranchero.

Milo pushed outside and raised his voice against the wind. “Get hold of Carly.”

 

3

I managed to stay on the dirt road out from the Bar J, but the highway felt like a belt of frozen black snot. I needed to tell Carly about Eldon. I needed to be with Ted. No way to split me in two.

With one hand gripping the wheel, and praying I didn't end up ass over teacup in the barrow ditch, I felt for my phone in the console, then the passenger seat. Despite the freezing temperatures and the iffy quality of Elvis's heat, sweat trickled down from my armpits and dampened my flannel shirt. A smell of wet manure from my boots mingled with the musty fragrance of Elvis's heater.

Clouds blocked out the scant moon, and the dash lights didn't do much to help me locate the phone. I leaned way to the right to snatch it off the passenger side floor, which made me steer across the centerline. After all that, I held it up and pushed speed dial with my thumb.

Robert answered on the second ring. Only fifteen months older than me, we'd grown up as close as twins. We might be the only sane ones in the Fox clan, but that was giving me a lot of credit.

“Kate.” Robert's voice hung heavy with sleep.

“Sorry to wake you up, but I need your help.” The back wheels slid to the left and I tossed the phone aside to use both hands to steady Elvis. He was never any good on snow and ice. When I fished the phone from the seat, Robert sounded fully awake.

“What's going on? Where are you?”

Trying to ignore my overactive heartbeat, I explained the situation as I knew it.

“Do you want us to come down to the hospital?” The squeak of a closet door told me he was already reaching for a shirt. Sarah, his wife and my best friend, mumbled something in the background.

Yes.
“No. I don't know how Ted is or what's going on. I've got about fifty head in the calving lot. If I don't get home by morning, can you check on them and throw them some hay?”

“I'll go out there first thing. Who's with Carly?”

My wipers swiped at flakes, smearing moisture along the windshield. “Well. Um.”

He paused. “You don't know where she is?”

I didn't need more judgment on that score. “I tried calling but she's not answering her phone.”

“Does she know about Eldon?”

“I don't know. If she's home when you get there, tell her Ted was shot, but don't tell her anything else. And don't let her answer her phone or the house phone. I'll tell her about Eldon.”

“Okay. You sure you don't want us to come to the hospital? Dahlia is bound to be a handful.”

Ah, Dahlia. Ted's mother. Much as I'd like a posse with me, I'd wait to rally reinforcements until I needed them. “I'll call Ted's folks when I know more.”

We signed off and I put all my energy into arriving in Broken Butte without killing myself in the storm. I blinked away tears at the thought of Ted in all his tall, broad-shouldered good looks, bending down to give me a teasing kiss.

From the moment Ted had noticed me, I'd never believed my good fortune. He was a Hodgekiss legend, my older sister's age, and the hero of every little girl's fantasy. Okay, maybe not every girl, but certainly mine.

He was my first crush, as true and impossible as my younger sister's love for Justin Bieber. Of course, I'd grown out of it, but when I'd returned home with my shiny BA and no clue what to do with my life, he'd appeared as if by magic and literally became my dream come true.