Chapter Twenty-Three
Four days of nothing.
No tracks. No broken wire. No boot prints near the culvert.
No sign that any living soul had come within a mile of the property since the break-in, and that—more than anything—put Logan’s teeth on edge.
Because trouble that announced itself you could fight.
Trouble that vanished meant it picked a better hiding spot.
The new deadbolt held solid on the back door.
The iron grate Jonah and Mason had sunk into the creek bed blocked the culvert tight enough to stop anything bigger than a muskrat.
Every window on the ground floor carried fresh latches, the kind that needed a key from the outside and a thumb-turn from the inside.
So the house sat locked up like a strongbox. Good. Fine. Still didn’t explain who’d gotten in or why the only thing they’d taken weighed about two ounces and came out of the dirt.
Logan turned the coffee cup between his hands at the lunch table.
“—probably just some drifter.” Mason stabbed a chunk of potato with his fork. “Think about it. A man passin’ through sees a ranch, figures nobody’s watchin’, tries his luck. Finds the silver, grabs it, moves on.”
“That’s what I’ve been sayin’.” Thomas leaned back in his chair. “A drifter, a vagrant, somebody passin’ through the territory. They’re long gone by now.”
“That don’t track.” Logan set the cup down. “A drifter picks a lock? A drifter goes through every drawer in my desk, takes one piece of silver, and leaves forty-two dollars in cash sittin’ right there?”
“Maybe he didn’t see the cash.”
“It sat right under the silver, Thomas.”
“So he’s a dumb drifter.”
“Nobody dumb picks a lock that clean.”
Grace carried a pot of stew from the stove and set it on the table between them. Miriam rode her hip, chewing on a wooden spoon in her everyday dress, the yellow one Grace had sewn from an old flour sack and somehow made look better than half the store-bought clothes in Gunnison.
“Logan.” Grace ladled stew into Pa’s bowl first, then Mason’s. “It’s been four days. Whoever it was, they got what they came for. Three dollars worth of silver.”
“You don’t break into a man’s house for three dollars.”
“You do if three dollars is a lot to you.” She ladled his bowl. “I’ve known people who’d cross a river for three dollars. I’ve been people who’d cross a river for three dollars.”
That landed. It always did when she pulled from that place, the New York years, the pennies on the kitchen table. He didn’t have an answer for it because she’d lived a kind of hard he could only circle around from the outside.
But this still stank. The whole thing had a shape to it that drifters and vagrants didn’t carry.
“Look, I ain’t sayin’ let’s live in fear.” Logan pushed the stew around with his spoon. “I’m sayin’ we keep the protocols. Check the fences mornin’ and evening. Lock up at dark. Nobody goes past the south tree line alone.”
“Logan, we’ve been doin’ all that.” Mason set his fork down. “And it’s fine, it is, but we’re goin’ a little stir-crazy. Thomas hasn’t been to town in two weeks. I haven’t played cards at Hannigan’s since—”
“Hannigan’s is a dump.”
“Hannigan’s has whiskey and music and women. No offense, Grace.”
“None taken.”
“Point is—” Thomas let his chair drop forward onto all four legs with a crack that made Logan’s jaw tighten, “—we been cooped up. All of us. And I think a night in town would do this family some good.”
“A night in town?”
“Yeah. Supper at the hotel. Maybe a drink. Let Grace see somethin’ other than this kitchen and that garden.”
Grace hummed. “I do like that garden.”
Thomas snorted. “And I like my bed, but I still leave it sometimes.”
“Thomas.” Logan rubbed the back of his neck. “We got an unsecured property and an unknown threat, and you wanna go drink whiskey at Hannigan’s.”
“I wanna go do anythin’ that ain’t starin’ at a fence post.” Thomas spread both hands. “Logan, you locked this place down tighter than Fort Knox. The grate’s in. The locks are new. Pa can hold down the house for a few hours with his rifle and his bad attitude.”
Pa crossed his arms. “Don’t you badmouth my attitude, boy.”
Grace patted his shoulder. “Pick your fights, Pa.”
Pa sighed. “In any case, the boy’s right, Logan. Take ’em to town. Take your wife. I’ll watch Miriam.”
“Oh, we’re bringin’ Miriam.” Grace sat down. “She’s been fussin’ all week. She needs fresh air and new faces.”
“She’s three months old.” Logan pressed his lips together. “She don’t need no new faces.”
“She needs stimulation.”
“She’s got stimulation. Mason makes faces at her every mornin’ that’d stimulate a corpse.”
“Thank you…?” Mason squinted. “I think?”
Grace turned to Logan. Full turn. Hip cocked, one hand still holding Miriam steady, the other planted on the table edge. Those honey-brown eyes locked onto his.
“Logan. One evenin’. Three hours. We eat supper someplace I don’t have to cook it, we walk around, we come home. That’s it.”
“Grace—”
“When’s the last time you did somethin’ just for the sake of doin’ it?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried to think of a single occasion in the past two years that qualified as recreation and came up blank, unless you counted the time he’d re-organized the tool shed by function and then by size, which he’d found enormously satisfying but which Mason had called “the saddest Saturday in the history of Colorado.”
“See?” Grace tilted her head. “You can’t even remember.”
“I remember plenty.”
“Name one.”
“I took you to the pond.”
“That’s the only one, and it happened last week.”
“We carved the garden—”
“That’s work, Logan. That’s you doin’ work in a slightly different location.”
Mason snorted into his stew.
“Fine.” Logan exhaled through his nose. “Fine. Three hours. We eat, we walk, we come back.”
“And a drink at Hannigan’s,” Thomas said.
“One drink.”
“Two.”
“Thomas.”
“One and a half. I’ll nurse it.”
“You ain’t never nursed a drink in your life.”
“I’m turnin’ over a new leaf.”
Logan looked at Grace. She smiled at him.
“Alright.” Logan exhaled. “Two drinks. But we leave by eight.”
“Nine.”
“Thomas Edwin Foster—”
“Eight-thirty.” Grace smoothed the tablecloth. “We leave at eight-thirty.”
“Eight-thirty.” Logan pointed at Thomas. “And you’re drivin’ the wagon home.”
“Deal.”
***
Grace dressed Miriam in the new clothes.
Logan had bought them in Gunnison three days ago, a little cotton dress with lace trim and a matching bonnet that tied under the chin.
He’d picked them out himself, which had meant standing in the dry goods section of Henley’s General Store for twenty minutes, holding baby dresses up to the light and comparing stitching quality while Mrs. Henley watched him from behind the counter with an expression that suggested she’d never seen a grown man inspect infant lace work with that level of intensity.
He hadn’t told Grace he’d bought them. Just left the package on her bed with a note that said For Miriam. The blue one had a crooked seam. —L
Now Miriam sat in Grace’s arms on the front porch, looking like a chubby angel, and Logan stood by the wagon checking the hitch for the third time, pulling each buckle, testing each strap, because Logan Foster did not put his family in a wagon with an untested hitch the same way he did not put his baby in a crib with a knot that looked like Mr. Henley.
Standards. A man had standards, or he had nothing.
“You look nice,” Grace said from the porch step.
He glanced down at himself. Clean shirt. Good trousers. The leather vest he’d conditioned last week. Boots polished, hat brushed. He’d even shaved, which took extra time because he shaved close and careful. None of this two-day-stubble nonsense Thomas cultivated.
Poor sap thought it made him look rugged, when in reality it made him look like a man who’d lost his razor and his motivation in the same afternoon.
“I look the same as always.”
“Exactly.” She grinned. “You always look nice. You just never accept compliments.”
His neck got warm. He busied himself with the hitch.
Mason and Thomas piled onto the back of the wagon, shoving each other for the better seat, which turned out to be the same seat because the wagon bed held two hay bales and a blanket, and neither one qualified as comfortable. Jonah jogged up from the bunkhouse, tucking his shirt in.
“Room for one more?”
“Hop on.” Mason scooted over. “Long as you don’t start another knot debate.”
“It’s a bowline, Mason. Die on whatever hill you want, but die knowin’ you’re wrong.”
Logan helped Grace up onto the bench seat. Miriam squirmed between them, batting at the air with both fists.
He picked up the reins.
“Logan!” Pa stood on the porch with his rifle propped against the rail. “You buy that girl back somethin’ sweet from the bakery, you hear me? She deserves a treat.”
“I’ll bring you somethin’ too, Pa.”
“I don’t want nothin’. I want her to have somethin’. You listenin’?”
“I’m listenin’.”
“And don’t let Thomas drink more’n two!”
“Already covered.”
“And check that left rear—”
“I checked it, Pa.”
“—wheel, because the spoke’s been—”
“I checked it!”
“Alright, alright.” Pa waved them off. “Go on. Get.”
Logan clicked his tongue. The horses leaned into the harness.
The wagon lurched forward, and Grace leaned into his shoulder for a second—just long enough for the warmth of her to press through his sleeve and settle somewhere in his chest. Then, she straightened and started pointing things out to Miriam, who could not possibly have cared less about the landscape but seemed to enjoy the sound of Grace’s voice describing it.
They made it about four hundred yards past the barn.
“Logan! Logan, hold up!” Jonah’s voice cut from behind as he… ran up to the… wagon?
When did he even jump off?
Logan pulled the reins. “When did you—Why did you—Jonah… why?”
“The south pasture.” Jonah wheezed next to the wagon. “I… when we passed the ridge just now, I looked down and… one of the heifers. She’s in a hole. A big one. I can see her from the road.”
“A hole.”
“A hole, Logan. Not a gopher hole. Something dug. Deep. She’s in it up to her chest and she ain’t movin’ right.”
Logan’s hands tightened on the reins. The leather bit into his palms.
“Mason, Thomas. With me. Now.”
Both brothers vaulted off the wagon before he finished the sentence. Logan handed the reins to Grace, swung down, and followed Jonah at a run toward the ridge.
About two hundred yards from the fence line, a dark gouge tore through the grass. Too square and too even at the edges for a sinkhole. No, someone had cut into the earth with shovels, six feet long and maybe four feet deep, and left the pile of dirt mounded along one side like a scar.
The heifer—a two-year-old red angus, one of the best in the herd—lay at the bottom. Her front legs had gone in first. The left hind leg angled wrong below the knee, and the bone pressed against the skin without breaking through.
Logan’s stomach dropped.
“Damn it.” He scrambled down the slope and knelt at the edge as the heifer lowed. “Damn it, damn it—”
“How bad?” Mason slid down beside him.
“Left hind’s broken. Below the hock.” Logan leaned in. “Clean break, maybe. But she can’t stand. She can’t—”
“Can we splint it?”
“Mason, she’s eight hundred pounds.”
“So? We can—”
“You splint that, she puts weight on it the second she stands, and it snaps again. Or it heals crooked and she can’t walk. She just suffers for months before—”
He swallowed. The heifer looked at him. Her breath came in short, wet huffs, and her nostrils flared with each one.
“Mason. Get my rifle.”
“Logan—”
“Get my rifle.”
Mason went.
Soon enough, Mason brought the rifle, and Logan did the deed.
He’d had to. Some things a man did because the alternative meant cruelty, and cruelty toward an animal ranked low enough to shame the devil himself.
Logan did it quick. One shot, straight to the head.
The light left the poor thing’s eyes before the echo came back off the ridge.
Logan stood there. Rifle at his side. The smell of gunpowder mixing with grass and fresh-turned earth.
A two-year-old heifer. Seventy dollars at market. One of the best breeders he’d raised, gentle enough that Miriam could’ve sat on her back in a year or two, and now…
He looked at the hole. “This ain’t natural.”
“Logan—”
“Look at the edges, Mason. You ever see a sinkhole with straight sides? You ever see the ground open up in a perfect rectangle?”
Mason lowered his head.
“Somebody came onto my land. Dug a hole in my pasture. And my heifer walked into it and broke her leg, and I just—” He bit down on the rest of it. Breathed through his nose. “We ain’t goin’ to town.”
“Logan.” Grace slid down into the hole next to him. “Logan, I’m so sorry.”
When did she get here?
“Go back to the wagon.”
“Let me—”
“Grace, go back to the wagon.”
She flinched.
“We’re ridin’ the property. All of it. Tonight.” He looked at his brothers and Jonah. “Every acre, every fence line, every drainage ditch and tree line and low spot where somebody could dig without bein’ seen. If there’s another hole out there, I wanna find it before another animal does.”
“It’s gonna be dark in two hours,” Thomas said.
“Then we better ride fast.”
“Logan.” Grace put her hand on his shoulder. “It could’ve been—”
“Don’t tell me it’s a drifter. Don’t tell me it’s a coincidence.
First, somebody breaks into my house, and now somebody digs holes in my pasture?
” He pointed at the dead heifer. “That’s seventy dollars and a good animal.
Gone. Because somebody wants somethin’ on this property, and I don’t know what, and I don’t know who, and I am done sittin’ around waitin’ for the next hit. ”
Miriam grabbed a fistful of Grace’s hair and tugged. Grace looked at Logan’s face the way she’d looked at the strongbox the morning after the break-in.
“Okay.” She nodded. “Okay. Ride the property. But eat first. Please. You can’t spend all night in the saddle on an empty stomach.”
“I ain’t hungry.”
“I don’t care if you’re hungry. I care if you fall off your horse at midnight because you’re too stubborn to—”
“Fine. I’ll eat.”