Carnosaur Crimes Page 12
“Can’t convince me of good news with neither shut eye nor blather,” Chase pronounced. “I’ve got the willies tonight, ladies. And we all know what that means.”
“Lordy, here comes that old tale about your mother being a Blue Child,” Pearl groused. “You’re just a superstitious old cowpoke, Chase.” She rose and started clearing dishes.
Ansel said nothing. There was no doubt that her grandmother, Renee Phoenix, had been born with uncanny intuitive gifts. Some family members said she had been a Blue Child, not a baby tangled up in her own umbilical cord as the name suggested, but one with a special connection to unseen forces from the misty beyond. A lot of people had called Renee a psychic. Others had labeled her a specialist in synchronicity, always guessing right with the odds in her favor. Personally, she had no recollection of grandma Renee, who died a year before her mother and father met.
“My mother knew things before they happened,” Chase insisted. “and I’ve got a little of her juice in me, Pearl. I don’t get the willies that often but when I do, somebody’s going to get hurt. Can’t say who or how or when, but it happens every time. Sarcee knows, don’t you, darlin’?”
Ansel nodded. “I’ve seen him get the willies three times. Once before one of our cowhands got drunk and died when he drove off the road straight into a John Deere Harvester sitting in a wheat field. And another time he knew somebody was in trouble before Howdy Adams’s wife committed suicide. She threw herself in front of a locomotive on a Great Northern spur line. Daddy also felt the willies when something was wrong with my mother. He was at a stockman’s conference in Jordan and left right away. Wasn’t until he got to the ranch that he knew for sure what had happened.”
Ansel stopped there. A stiff silence invaded the room. Nobody really wanted to go into Mary’s sudden and protracted diabetic coma and eventual death. It had devastated her father and changed her life as a little girl forever.
“Let the sheriff’s department do their job,” Pearl urged Chase. “Don’t borrow trouble you’ll loan to your stomach. You’ll get an ulcer.” She hustled toward the kitchen, her hands stacked with plates and serving dishes.
“I know something bad has happened just as sure as I’m sitting here trying to deny it to myself,” Chase mumbled.
“I wish you’d foretold me that you weren’t going to eat a lick of supper,” Pearl scolded over her shoulder. “I wouldn’t have cooked all this food. It’s a good thing Ansel came over.”
When she was gone, Chase swallowed down his drink and watched as Ansel stood and collected the remaining odds and ends left on the table.
After several moments of silence, he said,”How are you doing? You look tired.”
“I am. Long day.”
“Are you still working on that Argentina book?”
Ansel shrugged. “Should be. Seems like everything else keeps getting in the way.” She had no intentions of telling him about her experiences with the FBI, the BLM, and Dorbandt. His blood pressure would spike for sure. “For example, tomorrow morning I’m going to Permelia’s to discuss her book cover.”
A slight smile crinkled the corner’s of Chase’s mouth. “Good luck with Starr. That dog makes more noise than a jackass in a tin shed. With all the barking, you’ll probably only hear a hundred words for every thousand-count Permelia throws at you. Maybe that’s a blessing. She wheedled down my sale price on two stud bulls using tongue oil alone. She’s a regular word bandit.”
Ansel laughed as she walked to the kitchen. “I have my own selfish reasons for helping her. I want to see her Barnum Brown memorabilia and her dinosaur fossils.”
As she set the plates on a tiled island counter inside the spacious kitchen, Pearl peered at her. She stood at the double porcelain sink rinsing dishes beneath the tap. “Ansel, I’m worried about your father,” she whispered. “He’s not acting like himself.”
Pearl’s expression was pensive. Deep furrows raked across her brow, and her blue eyes were intense with unspoken emotion. She’d stopped in mid-swipe and water from a soapy plate dribbled down to her elbow. She didn’t even notice.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s been moping around hardly speaking and he’s distracted. I talk but he’s not listening. He’s also having trouble sleeping. Been using over-the-counter sleeping pills for two weeks now, and they don’t help at all. He’s bushed, that’s true. The ranch work is busting him good, but that’s not all it is.”
Ansel looked at the open kitchen door and moved closer to Pearl. “He’s real worried about the Arrowhead. He told me the ranch is working in the red. That’s never happened before.”
Pearl turned back to rinsing the soapy dish. “The ranch is a major problem,” she agreed. “But there’s something else going on.”
“What?”
“I don’t think he’s feeling well.” To her right, the dishwasher door beneath the counter was open. She dropped the plate into a rack slot. “It’s more than just aches and pains for his age. I catch him wincing like he’s in serious discomfort when he thinks I’m not looking.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
Pearl nodded. “Several times. He just smiles and makes light of it in his customary way. Says he’s fine, and I’m a mama cow trying to give milk to a bull. You know him. His damn pride won’t let him complain.”
Ansel pursed her lips at this disturbing news, then crossed her arms. “I’ll talk to Daddy. Maybe I can pry some information out of him.”
“Good. I feel better now. I just had to tell you. The ranch will survive. I can’t let something happen to Chase,” Pearl confided. “I don’t know what I’d do. Somebody’s got to talk some sense into him and find out what’s wrong.”
Footsteps resounded on the oak-slat flooring outside the kitchen and Chase popped through the door, hands ladled into his jean pockets. “Sarcee, I forgot to talk to you about that attorney referral you wanted. Got a minute?”
Just what she wanted. The perfect chance to corral her father and pounce on him about his health. “Sure.”
Pearl wiped her hands on a dishtowel and turned around. “Maybe you two will re-consider having some pie afterwards,” she suggested with a grin. “I’ll leave it out just in case.”
Ansel and her father walked through an opposite kitchen door and directly into a hallway in the east wing of the four-thousand square foot, spruce log home. A quick jaunt to the right and they reached a heavy cedar door. Ansel walked first into the study with its floor-to-ceiling bookcases, an antique redwood desk, plenty of cushioned chairs, and a fireplace. Chase gestured her toward another archway on their left which led into a smaller room containing a luncheon nook and a solid wall of casement windows. A single folder lay on the wooden table.
Ansel took a seat in one of four leather chairs, glad that it was night and she could see no further outside than the white light cast by decorative patio lamps. The wall before her faced the south pasture where horses grazed. The stock pond where she had almost died was out there, too. Today of all days, she certainly didn’t need to view it.
Chase sat across from her, back to the windows, and grabbed the file. “You know that the Arrowhead covers fifteen-thousand deeded acres, plus another twelve thousand BLM lease parcels that I use for grazing land,” he began, opening the folder. “The lawyer I’ve used to handle my Bureau affairs for the last five years is Noah Zollie. He’s in Billings.”
She took the sheet of paper he passed to her. It was an advertisement for law services with Zollie’s letterhead on top. “I was hoping for someone local.”
“He’s one of the best in the state. I don’t like messing around with fly-by-night lawyers when I’m courting the Bureau of Land Management,” Chase explained. “Too many things can go wrong. You going to tell me why you need a land trust attorney?”
“I’m looking for basic information about the way BLM land leases operate on paper.”
Chase eyed her carefully. “I can tell you that.”
Ansel folded t
he letter. “There are all sorts of land agreements between private, state, and federal groups. I need a complete overview. It’s just research work. I’m not getting personally involved in anything.”
Chase closed the folder and leaned back in his chair. “I’m going to guess it has something to do with the Big Toe fossil robbery. Am I right?”
She tried to keep her game face on, smile plastered across her lower jaw like a stiff rubber mask. Maybe he was a bit psychic. “Lucky guess. Okay, I’m trying find out how to prevent the BLM from revoking the museum land lease and removing the fossil tracks to a federal repository. They’ve threatened to do that. I’m just fishing. What can that hurt?”
“Nothing,” Chase conceded. “To tell the truth, I never liked the way the BLM moved in on Chester’s land after he died. His kin never had enough time to arrange for personal loans that would pay off the back revenues he owed under the terms of his Conservation Reserve Program contract with the government. The whole deal stank. I’d like to see things set right.”
“I think the Bureau was always more interested in the fossil tracks that flash flood exposed before Chester’s death than getting their money back,” Ansel declared. “The fact that the town council approached them with the idea of leasing the farmhouse and some of the property to start the museum was just icing on the cake.”
“Well, Noah’s the man to call if you want to plumb your angles,” Chase insisted. He pushed back his chair and slowly stood up, a slight stoop to his stance.
As she rose, Ansel noticed his gritted teeth. “Are you all right, Daddy?”
He smiled, leathery, tanned face suddenly vibrant. “I’m a little off my feed, but it’s nothing a few good bucketfuls of rain won’t cure. Things will change for the better. They always do.”
When he came around the table, Ansel walked over to him. “Pearl says you’re in pain, but won’t admit it. I want to know the truth.”
The annoyance on Chase’s face shadowed his grin in an instant. “I know she means well, but she’s fretting over nothing. I’m fine. I wish everyone would leave it be.”
Ansel realized she’d get nothing out of him by direct questioning. Making him angry wouldn’t help. She stood on her booted tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m glad to hear it. There’s a beautiful moon out tonight. Do you want to walk me up the hill? I’d like to see momma’s grave.”
Her mother was buried in a small family cemetery which began in 1878 and contained many Phoenix ancestors, some of whom originally immigrated to America from Germain-en-Laye, France. At the top of a low ridge overlooking the Missouri River was a white marble tomb with a six foot tall Indian Angel carved in her mother’s likeness on top.
Chase’s face relaxed as he chuckled. “You’re about as subtle as an Arkansas toothpick,” he said, referring to another name for a Bowie knife. “Trying to scare a confession out of me?”
“Not at all. I’ve got to leave early in the morning. This will be my only chance to go.”
“All right, we’ll go see Mary. Then we’ll make Pearl happy by having some pie.”
“I love you, Daddy,” Ansel said.
“And I love you, Sarcee.”
Chapter 16
“When the wisdom keepers speak, all should listen.”
Seneca
Ansel sucked in a warm lung-full of air rushing through the open driver’s window. The sky was cloudless and azure blue, typical for Big Sky country, and she was determined to enjoy the comparably cool, high-seventies temperatures while she could. According to the news, the sun would be a wood-burner by noon.
She peeled the truck along a Diamond Tail dirt road and surveyed Permelia’s drought-ravaged grasslands. They looked like the Arrowhead’s except they were stippled by red and white Texas Longhorns rather than Black Angus. Permelia operated one of the few Montana ranches that bred the registered heifers, steers, and seedstock bulls.
She knew a little about the breed from her father. They were originally descended from cattle brought to Spain by African Moors, then imported into Mexico and America. Both sexes carried lengthy horns spanning up to eighty-four inches. Ansel watched as older genders trundled across the pastures, looking ready to topple onto the ground from sheer top heaviness.
She reached the late 1800’s vintage farmhouse constructed from ponderosa planking painted bright white and parked by a corral where Permelia stood beside a tall bay horse. Gone were her fancy, neon pink clothes and accessories. She wore denim ranch duds, navy boots, and a floppy blue hat. Despite her years and rail-thin stature, she released the cinch buckle around the horse’s belly, slid the heavy western saddle off, then tossed it onto the top rail as easily as a young cowhand.
Ansel dragged her large leather portfolio case out of the truck. Dust swirled with every step she took, while the smell of hay, horse lather, and dung assailed her nostrils. It made her long for the days when she had ridden War Bonnet, a birthday gift from her mother twenty-years before, over coulees and through cottonwood stands. That was impossible now. The old paint stallion had laminitis and spent his days paddocked or brushing grass with his tail.
Permelia patted the gelding affectionately and joined her near the porch. “Howdy, Ansel. Glad you could make it. Gonna be another neck-blister today. I hear there’s a passel of Canadian forest fires and dust storms up north. Hope Saskatoon dust and smoke doesn’t blow our way.”
“God forbid,” Ansel said, with abhorrence.
Between fires and dust storms, the black blizzards of the Dust Bowl days were most feared by everyone. Lands ravaged by fire renewed themselves. Not so with the dust tsunamis that churned across rangelands with winds up to eighty miles an hour and flattened everything from power poles to sixty-five foot grain bins. Worst of all, the winds stripped topsoil and rocks from local fields or dumped it in dunes behind windbreaks. The results left only sandy soils behind and removed all the nutrients needed to grow healthy crops.
“You throw a mean saddle, Mrs. Chance.”
“Call me, Permelia. I’ve known you since you were in my beginner’s riding classes. Only strangers and gentlemen call me by my married name, and I don’t trust any of them. Especially the men. You do what I do, Ansel. Always throw your own saddle. Taking responsibility for yourself makes you strong. It’s as true with life as it is with riding.”
Ansel smiled as she remembered taking a summer’s worth of classes from Permelia when she was ten years old. Permelia had instructed girls in the skills of western riding for over thirty years and she was still teaching them.
“I intend to.”
“Good girl.” Permelia scanned the heavens. “Curse this heat. L.C. Smith died this morning from it.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Ansel proclaimed. “That must be a terrible shock. Was he here long?”
“About seventeen years. He went down sudden-like. Saw him yesterday and he was Jim Dandy. Got to be crucible-hot to bring down a Butler bred stud that’ll go for days without water and live on weeds, cactus, and brush. Let’s wet our whiskers.”
Only then did Ansel realize she referred to a disceased Longhorn, not a respected top-hand. Chagrined, she followed across the porch, and through a squeaky, wood-scrolled screen door. As soon as they entered, the maniacal yelps of a dog locked inside a room echoed down a hallway.
The noise receded in Ansel’s mind as she marveled at the inside, which looked like a sitting room straight out of the early 1900s. Gazing at the well worn, four piece, hardwood parlor suite upholstered in three-tone floral velours with bottom fringes, fancy bindings, and rococo brass gimp ornamentation was like time traveling.
Her eyes also took in the graceful lines of a birch parlor cabinet with ornamental wood shelves, two center bevel-plate mirrors, and narrow legs. In the dining area sat an immensely heavy golden oak table with five inch hand-turned and fluted legs with matching chairs. A combination sideboard and glass closet was filled by flowered china with gold edging. Ansel was yanked back to the present by Starr’s vocabl
es, which had become keening howls.
“Just have to breed them heifers to somebody else,” Permelia continued at warp speed. “Maybe Six-Shooter or Pistolo. Got my foreman dressing down L.C. Smith right now. We’ll have meat aplenty and another hide and set of horns to sell to city folk. Take a seat, Ansel,” Permelia directed, tossing her hat on a spring-loaded parlor chair. “Any news about Chief Flynn?”
Ansel sank into the couch that looked as if a thousand rumps had kept it warm for her and adjusted her case so she could paw through it easily. She shook her head. “Nothing much except that the state police are involved now. It looks like foul play.”
“Seems like somebody might have ambushed him, all right. I’m praying for him and the family. I remember when you could ride anywhere alone for days in Lacrosse, stop at any ranch along the road day or night, and be guaranteed a friendly welcome whether they knew you or not. Got nothing worse than mean gossip and bad grub. The world’s turning sour.”
Permelia’s hawk-eyes shifted to Ansel. “Guess you know about Rusty Flynn?”
Ansel’s head snapped up from her fussing with the portfolio zipper. She hadn’t heard that name spoken around her in years. Everyone made a point of not repeating it to her. Rusty Flynn had been eight years old when he pushed her into the pond.
“Rusty? He’s in prison.”
“Not any more. He got out a year ago. He’s living in Swoln. Used to come by here every once in a while last fall. Sold me braided horsehair key chains he learned to make in the Wyoming hoosegow. I’d buy a few from him and give them out to the sick kids at the hospital. It’s uncharitable for me to say it, but Rusty’s an oily one. He’s always polite and charming, but he’s got the ‘dare me’ eyes of a sand scorpion. I don’t trust him and I quit encouraging him to come around. Now I’m wondering if he has anything to do with the Chief gone missing.”
Anger flushed through Ansel’s veins as she tried to wrap her mind around the fact that Rusty was in Lacrosse. Had been for quite a while, and her father or Pearl hadn’t even told her. No wonder her father had the willies if Rusty was hunkering in the background shadows of Cullen’s affairs.