Chapter 22
Wooden paddocks like patches in a quilt crisscrossed the rolling fields that pushed to the edges of Virgo Bay.
Inside, livestock grazed and frolicked and occasionally pooped as Patty and the twins approached.
A ramshackle barn and a compact farmhouse sat just back from the path, lined on either side by fences enclosing goats to the left and cows to the right. Nora kept herself firmly in the center.
Vic appeared from the barn at the sound of Patty’s call, trailed by Phil and his father, the inexplicably nicknamed Pickles.
Unlike his rugged son, Pickles was a primly dressed man with jowls and a permanent Eeyore-like expression.
He had dirt in exactly one place on his slacks and kept moving his hand to cover it.
“You’ve brought the city slickers,” Vic said in greeting, then fully took in the scene before him. “And a rifle.”
Patty’s eyes flicked to Phil, who brushed his nose with the back of his hand and looked away.
Was he disappointed to see the twins standing there?
Was Charlie the Snow White to Patty’s Huntsman?
Which would make Phil the evil queen, which Nora wasn’t quite sure about.
But regardless of what the look between them actually meant, she knew it wasn’t anything good.
“It’s hunting season,” Patty replied to Vic, then quickly changed the subject. “We’re here to help out. What do you need done?”
“Stalls need mucking, the rest of the horses still need turning out, and the pigs need feeding. Phil’s working on repairing the riding lawn mower, and I’ve got Pickles pruning the hedges out back. Aside from those chores, you lot can take your pick.”
There wasn’t much picking to be taken, it turned out.
Due to their inexperience with farm work, Patty suggested the twins take the stalls to start with.
And, despite the smell, Nora was grateful for this.
Pigs could break your toe just by stepping on it, and horses, well, they could break much more than that.
At least a pile of feces mostly kept to itself.
Nora soon found herself cleaning the stall of a horse called Wonderboy, Charlie half helping beside her.
“You still thinking it’s Patty?” Charlie asked. He was making concentric poop circles with his shovel, which Nora decided was as productive as she could expect Charlie to be.
“I think it’s a good possibility,” said Nora. “You saw her out there with that gun. There’s no reason she couldn’t have been the one shooting it at us. And she gave Phil that weird look when we got here. And she wanted to have you at her house alone. I don’t like any of it.”
“It’s not great,” Charlie agreed. “But then why hasn’t she killed me yet?”
Nora took a deep breath, then immediately regretted it as the odors of the stall flooded her nostrils. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. But we still don’t know why she’d want you dead in the first place. Maybe she wants to make you suffer first.”
“Damn, what the hell did I do to her?”
“If we knew that, we’d be halfway to getting this whole mess sorted,” said Nora, heaving a particularly heavy plop into her neat pile.
“You know, Nor,” said Charlie, swirling his shovel absently, “this has been kind of nice, huh?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We just haven’t hung out in a really long time. It’s been nice.”
“Charlie, you’ve nearly been killed like seven times now.”
“Yeah, but aside from that. It’s hard to find time to catch up, you know? Especially now that I have Jessica. I mean, being a dad is a lot of responsibility, but I’ve missed my baby sis.”
“You’re three minutes older than me,” Nora corrected. “And I still don’t understand where Jessica even came from.”
“I know, it’s wild, right? One second I’m living the carefree bachelor life, the next she’s on my doorstep with nothing but a cage and a note.”
“A note? You never mentioned a note.”
“It didn’t seem like something worth mentioning,” said Charlie. “I mean, Jessica’s kind of the star of the show here, right?”
Nora propped her shovel against the wall of the stall and crossed her arms. Spontaneous parrot deliveries struck her as at least a little out of the ordinary, though with the way Charlie lived his life, she supposed it may have seemed a standard part of his day.
Still, something bothered her, something she couldn’t quite put a name to.
“What did the note say?”
Charlie shrugged. “Something about Jessica having a lot to say. Or, no, ‘she’ll tell you what you need to know,’ I think it was.
Or ‘what you deserve to know,’ something like that.
Which was true; she told me where my favorite pair of boxer briefs was hiding like half an hour after I brought her inside.
I thought I’d lost those things for good, but they were in an empty Cheetos bag under my bed. Go figure.”
“Ew,” said Nora as a first of all. “But also, that’s kind of a weird note, don’t you think?”
Charlie shrugged again. “I’ve had weirder. What, you aren’t thinking she’s connected to all this somehow, are you?”
“I don’t know, Charlie, maybe. Isn’t it just a little too odd to be a coincidence?”
“You and I have very different thresholds for odd.”
“At least I have a threshold for odd,” said Nora.
“Oh wait, the note said something else…” But before Charlie could finish his thought, chaos erupted outside the barn.
Someone was shouting, which was promptly joined by the sound of thundering footsteps and more shouting voices.
Nora froze. Those were never particularly positive noises.
No less than eight possible horrors ran through her mind at once, each less welcome than the last and at least one involving an unexpected tornado.
Phil burst into the barn, his boots heavy on the hay-strewn stone floor. He looked from one twin to the other, face severe, and Nora braced for whatever was about to come.
“Leopold’s escaped,” he said.
Nora had not braced for that.
“Huh?”
“Uncle Vic’s favorite goat. Sired three-quarters of the kids on this farm. Dad didn’t secure his paddock properly and the bastard’s practically uncatchable, apparently. Running all over the fields like a convict on the loose. We need more bodies to corner him. You coming?”
Nora pretended to consider this. “Oh, no, sorry, we have to finish in here,” she said after what seemed like a reasonable length of time.
There was no way in hell she was going to go chasing after a rogue goat.
That sounded like a surefire way to end up with a horn in places horns had no business being.
“I’m in,” said Charlie, dropping his shovel onto the soiled floor.
Nora tried to toss him a look that said, “Like hell you are,” but he was already halfway out the barn. She threw her head back in exasperation and scampered out after him.
Despite her misgivings that this might have been some weird murder ploy by Phil, there was indeed a large black-and-white goat playing an aggressive game of red rover against a growing crowd of people.
Which, in some ways, was worse than a murder ploy.
Vic and Patty seemed to be approaching the animal from behind while it geared up to charge at Pickles and Charles, who must have shown up at some point during Nora’s mucking and Charlie’s dabbling in fecal art.
“You two go around that side,” Phil directed as he went to fill in the other side of the circle.
Charlie and Nora did as instructed, heading off the goat from the side closest to them, which only served to take the creature’s attention away from its initial target.
Its great head swung in the twins’ direction, horns locking on Nora, and before anyone could advise her otherwise, she was bolting away from Leopold at a full sprint.
The goat was instantly on her heels, followed by a parade of frantic relatives rushing after them.
She raced across the field and past the riding lawn mower Phil had been working on, engine on and tools strewn in front of it as though he’d been plucked from his duties by the renegade goat.
“Good, good,” Patty called at Nora. “His paddock’s a bit to your right, see if you can guide him there.”
“I’m not doing this for his benefit,” Nora shouted back.
If they were planning on killing her as well as Charlie, she’d hoped for something more dignified than being used as goat bait.
Still, she could see the upside of getting Leopold back into his enclosure.
She veered left. Hoof steps followed, clopping with a small but mighty rage.
“You’ll have to run him into the paddock and do a little U-turn back out, kiddo,” Patty called.
Nora didn’t even like doing a U-turn in a car, when the only horns she had to face were the kind that honked.
She rushed in through the open gate, braving a look back to ensure Leopold was still on her tail, then looped through and back out of the paddock, slamming the gate with enough force to rattle the fence around her.
The crowd trailing her stopped where they were, Patty offering a polite round of applause for her effort, which felt somewhat inadequate considering how very close Nora had come to having two extra holes in her bottom.
She scanned the field for Charlie, who was catching his breath at the base of the small hill the riding lawn mower sat on.
He gave her a thumbs-up, doubled over from what was likely the first run he’d completed since high school gym class.
The others had started to disappear from view as Nora struggled to regain whatever passed for her composure at this point.
She sagged against the fence, trying to steady herself, before promptly springing upright again at the sound of Leopold’s hooves trotting in her direction.
When she turned her gaze back over to Charlie to give him a look that said, “This fucking guy,” what she saw instead locked up her already-tense muscles.