of town. On the drive they talked about her ranch operation and the proposed second phase of wind turbines. Rainwater said all the right things, but she listened for subtext that might signal problems. She didn’t fault him for the wall of privacy around his family; she wouldn’t discuss her personal life with a stranger, either. The main things that concerned her were the estranged wife and his over-qualification. She didn’t want to train a ranch manager for six months only to have him quit and move on to a better-paying job.
Wind whipped through the passenger window and the truck bounced along the two-lane road. “Okay, direct question,” she said. “And remember that I can check on this. Have you ever been arrested or jailed for anything?” She glanced at him sideways.
“No.” He smiled. “Check all you want to.”
“Then why are you willing to work for the pay I’m offering?”
He took a breath before answering. “I don’t like cities, even if that’s where the money is. And I would expect that after six months or so, if you were happy with my work, you’d be willing to raise the salary.”
She nodded but said nothing. Her finances were too iffy to make promises.
It was eleven o’clock when they approached Silk. “How about a Sonic burger and a cherry limeade?” she said. “I’m starving.”
She pulled into a drive-in stall and killed the engine. The day had warmed, and with their jackets on, the cab was comfortable even with the half-open window. She let him look over the menu a minute before she punched the call button. A teenage voice with a West Texas accent emerged with a hail of static from the speaker box. Marik wondered why the girl wasn’t in school.
“I’ll have a bacon burger and onion rings,” Marik said and looked at Rainwater.
“Broiled-chicken sandwich and a side salad with Italian.”
She gave him a shocked look, but repeated his order into the speaker and added two cherry limeades.
“High cholesterol runs in my family,” he said.
“Ah. You had parents.”
He smiled. “Grandparents, too, so I’m told.”
Marik’s cell phone vibrated in her jacket pocket. She glanced at its tiny window and smiled. Daisy Gardner had seen her truck in town.
“Excuse me,” she said to Rainwater as she flipped the phone open. Then to Daisy, “You’ll never get your paperwork done if you keep watching out the window.”
“In my job it pays to be nosey,” Daisy said. “Can you stop by the office?”
“I’ve just ordered lunch, actually. And I’m not by myself.”
“I know, and it looked like a man in there.”
“What, you’re using binoculars now?”
“Why are you riding him around in that old wreck of a truck instead of your perfectly nice SUV?”
“Long story. How about lunch tomorrow? I want to come in and get horse feed anyway.”
“Okay, but call me this afternoon when you’re alone. We need to talk. Today.” She sounded pissed off.
“What’s up?”
“I’ll tell you later. And you can tell me who that is in your truck.”
“Right. See you.”
Marik closed and pocketed the phone. “My friend Daisy,” she said to Rainwater. “Just another reason there are no secrets in this town.”
Which wasn’t quite true. Daisy had kept at least one secret for eight years.
The carhop brought their food, and after the obligatory rustling of sacks and paper-clad straws, they settled down to eating. Static crackled sporadically from neighboring speaker boxes, and from the top of a power pole, a mockingbird sang a forecast of spring. Marik kept thinking about Daisy’s warning: We need to talk.
Had Daisy somehow learned about the private investigator she’d hired?
“You’re right about the cherry limeade,” Jace Rainwater said, his mouth half-full. “Good sandwich, too.”
That afternoon she drove Rainwater over the parts of the ranch he hadn’t seen earlier—the north quarter, hilly and forested, where elk sometimes passed through; and next to it the upper pastures, still dormant in February. Killdeer Ridge bisected the ranch at a slight angle from east to west. South of the ridge, two herds of cattle were grazing on winter wheat in the flat fields close to the river. A large pasture also bordered the river, part of it fenced off around a sheet-metal hangar and a grass landing strip for lightplanes. Today the airstrip was unmowed and looked abandoned.
“The foreman will be the only full-time hand, at least for now,” she told him. “I’ll hire extra help for jobs like cutting and branding.”
Rainwater’s hands clenched and unclenched on the knees of his jeans, as if they were anxious to get to work. He asked smart questions, and she saw the thirsty expression in his eyes when he looked at the landscape. “It sure would be good to work cattle again,” he said.
She knew the feeling. Marik loved cattle and she loved the land, even though she had once abandoned it. Monte used to say, You can’t beat out of the hide what’s bred in the bone.
Jace Rainwater was her best prospect for the manager position, and she could use an ally who had an appropriate education to back up the things she knew instinctively about ranching. Marik had majored in art and education—not the sort of credentials that carried much weight with a bank or her ranching neighbors. But she couldn’t afford to make a quick decision about someone she’d be working with daily, who would live a few steps from her house. She sent Rainwater back to Amarillo with a promise that she’d make a decision within two weeks. Meanwhile, she could phone a couple of his references and have the P.I. do a background check. Might as well get something for her money.
She stood on the gravel driveway and watched Rainwater’s white truck drive away, wishing Monte were here to help assess his possible replacement. Monte was a better judge of character than anyone she knew.
Wind swept across the yard and solitude surged around her. She was the only living person for farther than her voice could carry. If she dropped dead like that poor eagle, no one would know and few would care.
Okay, that’s pathological. Cut it out.
The place was too damn quiet. She ought to get a dog. The last dog on the ranch was Monte’s old basset hound, a low-slung submarine named Rush Hour. The dog was lovable and useless, and when he died Monte was so broken up neither he nor J.B. got around to replacing him. What Marik wanted now was a big, furry ranch dog that would set up a ruckus if a stranger came onto the place.
She carried a bucket of horse feed and dumped it into the feeder in the corral. A ranch without horses was just wrong, so she had kept Lady and Gent. The blaze-faced mare and chestnut gelding coexisted in the small pasture behind the barn. When she was a kid and the ranch was prosperous, they’d had a string of twenty.
Her melancholy persisted, and instead of calling Daisy back right then, she walked toward the small barn next to the corral. It used to be a hay barn, but now it held something altogether different.
Her boots crunched in the silence. The barn door’s curved handle felt cold in her palm when she rolled it open. In the barn’s shady interior, the remnants of her father’s green and white Cessna airplane lay mangled on the dirt floor.
Chapter Five
Marik stepped into the triangle of light on the barn floor and paused to let her eyes adjust to the surrounding shadows. No matter how many times she confronted the wreckage, her breath caught hard in her chest. J.B. had worshipped that plane, a sweet little Cessna 210 that he treated like royalty. Marik had loved it, too, once. But something faulty with its engine or wiring