The Homeplace: A Mystery (11 page)

Sniffin’ after that Mexican girl.

Would he kill his son over that?

Marty shifted in the bed and balled up his fists.

Dead buffalo. Dead boy. Coach on the floor. Blood. And his best friend, Chase Ford, back in town.

No way Chase had anything to do with any of it. But Kendall hated Chase. What might the sheriff try?

Don’t even think it.

Marty’s eyes flew open again. A scream caught in his throat.
Keep it in. Don’t let it out.
Paco had said,
Don’t let it get to you.
But it had. Every image had climbed into his brain and threatened never to leave.

*   *   *

Kendall tugged the bed sheet over his chest. He shook his head.

A dead boy in the morning. Then Coach.

He hated having to call the state for help. Come election time, some might think he couldn’t do his job.

And what about Mercy? She gave off all the right signals. Called him and purred like a kitten when she asked if she would see him at the church supper. But she showed up on Chase Ford’s arm. Strutted her tight little self in those tight jeans and looked over her shoulder to be sure he noticed.

He noticed. Even licked his lips.

At Coach’s house, when he’d sent Ford on his way, Mercy jumped up into his truck and even snuggled up to him once they were down the road and out of sight. When he’d pulled the truck around to the back of her house and killed the headlights, she jumped right out of the truck, ran for the door, and said over her shoulder, “See you next time.”

Next time? Hell. She was still the same pricktease she’d been in high school.

On top of it all, Chase Ford shows up in my county for the first time in fifteen, sixteen years. Wouldn’t it be something if Chase had something to do with this? Catching him would make re-election a sure bet.

He slugged his fist into the pillow and settled his head into the mark it made.

In the morning he’d float the idea by the state cops that they should take a hard look at Ford. For now he let the images of what might have happened with Mercy warm his thoughts. In a few moments sleep closed around him.

*   *   *

A tendril of smoke from the burning toast teased Chase’s nose. He reached across his trailer’s stovetop to flick the bread off the rack, and tiny drops of sizzling bacon grease splattered his wrist. He cursed to himself, but the pinpricks of pain reminded him that in spite of everything that had happened the day before, he still could feel.

Coach was dead. Murdered. Like the kid they found with the buffalo.

It would be light in another forty minutes. Not that it mattered. He hadn’t slept. After breaking his promise never to go inside the ranch house, he’d lain awake in the trailer and counted the sounds of trucks on the highway, listened to the swoop of the wind around the old building and the coyotes’ howls. Anything to keep his mind off Coach.

Chase cracked two eggs into the skillet. In the years since Billee had left, he still had not learned to fry his own eggs. He could do his own laundry and make his bed, but mastering breakfast never came to him. He picked at the pieces of shell that mixed with the egg in the pan.

Why Coach?

The man never had an enemy Chase knew of. Players and their parents would do anything for him. Coach Porter just wanted to help the kids and coach basketball.

Why was he dead on his bathroom floor with a knife in his chest?

Greasy, gray smoke from the burning eggs filled the trailer. He scooped them from the pan onto a paper plate with the bacon and burned toast, sat down at the table, and stared at the plate.

Outside, dawn blushed new and pink on the ragged eastern horizon. Chase stepped out of the trailer into the cold of the morning and slipped into his jacket and orange vest. He thumbed three cartridges into the old Weatherby and closed the bolt on an empty chamber. He put on his gloves and orange cap. He’d hunt close to the ranch this morning. Until he could talk with Marty and find out more about what had happened to Coach, maybe searching for the old buck would keep the bad thoughts away.

Later he’d drive to town and try to find Dolly Benavidez. He’d heard she’d be working a breakfast shift at Saylor’s. The same blood that flowed in his veins ran through hers. Coach had sent him pictures. He knew she was a pretty girl, but he’d never seen his half-sister in person.

He slipped the rifle’s sling over his shoulder and walked out through the fading night, past the corrals and onto the prairie.

*   *   *

Cecil pulled the full trash bags from the cans near the gas pumps. He tied the bags shut and put new plastic liners in each of the barrels. A mud-splattered SUV pulled in to the pump closest to where he was standing. The driver, wearing a blaze-orange hat and vest, climbed out, fed his credit card into the reader, and began to fill his vehicle.

“Mornin’.” Cecil nodded to the man. “Do any good?”

“Could have had a doe, but I’m holdin’ out for a decent buck,” the hunter answered.

“Where you huntin’ at?”

The man motioned with his head. “Irv Brown’s place.”

Cecil nodded. “Got mine yesterday just at first light,” Cecil told him. “Big four pointer. Damn nice deer.” Cecil didn’t know why he lied to people.

“Where?” the hunter asked.

“My place.” Cecil thought for a minute. Irv Brown’s place was south of town. “North. I own four sections up there.”

“Must keep you busy.”

“I farm ’cause it’s somethin’ I’ve always done.” Cecil jerked a thumb toward the gas station office. “Own this place to make a little money.”

None of it was true. Cecil lived in a rented trailer parked in the lot down by the railroad tracks. He could no more run a farm than the man in the moon, and he was low man on the totem pole at Town Pump. That’s why he was emptying trash and working the Sunday morning early shift. But Cecil would never see the hunter again, so why not let the man think he was more important than he really was?

The hunter waved as he drove away. Cecil carried the trash to a Dumpster around back. Inside Town Pump, he poured a cup of coffee, slipped onto the stool behind the counter, and adjusted the volume on the TV set. He wished the boss would put in a satellite dish. The only thing the rabbit ears picked up was the Fox station from Colorado Springs, and all that was on was news.

Outside, Brandon was waking up. Lights came on in the homes. Cecil guessed this Sunday morning would be like all the others, except for some extra business from the deer hunters coming in for gas and beer. Townsfolk would drift to church. A few might stop in for a cup of coffee on the way. After church, Saylor’s would fill up, and those who hadn’t made their Saturday trip to the Walmart in Lamar would head that way in the afternoon.

Mercy’s Lincoln sped down the highway and turned into the gravel lot at Saylor’s Café. He watched her pull around back. In a minute, lights in the little restaurant came on. Mercy was a woman he’d told himself stories about. Imagination was a good thing. It helped him pass the time.

Cecil sipped his coffee and settled in for a boring morning. He fished the
Hustler
magazine he’d squirreled away out from under the counter. He checked to make sure no one was watching before he thumbed open the slick pages.

He’d almost gotten caught a couple weeks ago. Late one night, he hadn’t heard the basketball coach and the kid, Jimmy, come into the store to buy chips and pop. Cecil had needed to move real fast to tug up his zipper and hide the magazine under a newspaper. The kid had a smirk on his face when he paid for his Coke. Both of them were laughing when they climbed into the kid’s truck with that cute little Mexican girl he was always hanging around with.

But folks like that got what they had coming to them. He was sure of that.

*   *   *

At the edge of the corrals, Chase propped his binoculars on the top rail and scanned the prairie. The field glasses gathered in the new daylight and sharpened the wrinkles and creases in the pasture ground. Three pronghorn antelope stood atop a hillock about a mile out. Two of them had already spotted Chase. The third’s attention was fixed on something down along the creek.

Could be anything. Antelope were naturally skittish. An old coyote could be hunting jackrabbits for breakfast, or a prairie dog might be peeking out of his burrow.

Chase ducked down and eased out farther along the fence line. Where the rail fence met the barbed wire, he squatted down behind a clump of tumbleweeds caught in the fence and studied the place where the antelope was looking. Out about six hundred yards a puff of steamy breath floated in the calm, cold air. He looked closer and found a deer at the edge of the faded red tamaracks. It was a buck. And when it turned its head, through the binoculars Chase could see the broken antler tine. It was the big buck he’d seen the day before.

He huddled back, closed his eyes, and tried to remember all he could about that pasture. He’d played out there as kid, rode horseback across it more times than he could count, and bounced a four-wheeler across it chasing cows and calves. If he was going to get close enough for a shot, he’d have to remember each hill and gully that would hide him from the deer.

*   *   *

Birdie turned onto the lane that led from the county road to the Ford ranch house. Marty had called and told her to find Chase and not let him come to town until he could figure out what to do next. The murders had Sheriff Kendall fit to be tied, and Chase would only stir things up.

Marty had told her that Chase wasn’t answering his cell phone. He probably had it turned off or had left it in the trailer and gone hunting.

Golden sunbeams slanted through the farmyard and sparkled on the aluminum trailer that Chase had parked in the empty corral out by the big barn. A cottontail rabbit dashed in front of her truck and dove for cover in a tangle of weeds near some rusted farm equipment. Before Chase’s mother died, his father had kept the yard mowed and the buildings painted. Each tractor and piece of equipment had been parked in its own place.

Now overgrown weeds crowded sagging fences. What equipment hadn’t been sold at auction was covered with rust. Paint peeled from the outbuildings, and the ranch house was as gray as the dirt in the corrals.

When Birdie stepped out of her truck, specks of sunlight glittered from a glass bottle hidden in the weeds. She looked closer. It was a whiskey bottle. Jim Beam, she guessed. Big Paul’s best friend.

“Chase,” she called. When he didn’t answer, she pounded on the trailer’s door and called again. “Chase, it’s me, Birdie.”

She dialed his number. Inside the trailer she heard a phone cackle. Marty was right. Chase was out hunting.

Unless. Don’t think it, Birdie.

But the thought filled her mind.

Unless the same one who killed Jimmy Riley and Coach had murdered Chase, too.

She tried the trailer door. It was unlocked. She pressed her eyes shut and opened the door.

No. No. No.

When she opened her eyes the trailer was empty. A paper plate filled with cold eggs sat on the little table, and the trailer smelled of burned eggs and cold grease. The cell phone lay on the table beside the plate. She didn’t see his heavy coat anywhere, and his Lakers cap hung from a hook on the wall. She plucked it down and held it to her face.

It smelled like Chase. Big, strong Chase.

She stepped out and studied the ground around the trailer. Fresh boot prints in the dust led out toward the corrals. Marty was right.

Chase had gone hunting.

The cottontail peered out from its hiding place under the rusted junk. Lacy films of ice filled the petrified hoof prints in the corral’s dried mud. The new sun inched higher above the horizon, and the golden sunbeams melted away.

Birdie stepped back into the trailer and hung Chase’s Lakers cap back where she had found it.

Good boy. You’re wearing your orange hat. I won’t have to ticket you.

For once, Birdie didn’t mind walking. The back of her shirttail had worked its way out of her pants. She tucked it in and started off across the corral, following Chase’s tracks. She found where he’d knelt down behind a bunch of tumbleweeds tangled in the fence. Saw the place where he’d shimmied under the barbed wire and guessed he eased down into the crooked gully that led down to the creek. Chase must have had something spotted.

Three antelope, nearly a mile away, stood on a high point. All three’s ears were up, and their eyes were fixed on Birdie. In the next instant, the pronghorns sprinted off the hill and hauled ass for the next county.

Then Birdie spotted Chase.

The sun at his back painted a long shadow over the prairie and hid his face in the glare. But she knew his easy, graceful stride. She had memorized it so many years before.

She wriggled her short legs and wide backside through the barbed wire and started out to meet him. Her heart bounced inside her chest when he raised his hand to wave at her.

“You here to check my license, Warden?” he asked when they were close enough to see each other’s faces. “There’s a big buck hangin’ out down along the creek. Saw him yesterday mornin’ from the other side. Thought maybe I could get close enough for a shot, but he gave me the slip.” He smiled at her.

Birdie felt her face cloud over. “Chase—” She wanted to tell him she was sorry about Coach, and tell him she was glad he’d come back to Brandon, and tell him that thing she kept so secret. But she couldn’t tell him any of that.

“What’s wrong, Birdie?”

“Damn it, when you wouldn’t answer your phone this mornin’, Marty called me and made me promise to come out here and be sure you were okay. So that’s why I’m here, and now I’m gonna be late for the meetin’ in Comanche Springs, and I got better things to do.” She pushed the words out as fast as she could so he wouldn’t hear what she felt. “One more thing: you keep your ass out of Brandon until Marty tells you it’s okay. Don’t even think about tryin’ to find Dolly ’til things settle down. Kendall’s on the warpath, and you’re apt to cause a whole shitstorm of trouble, and the county got enough with the murders and all.”