Chapter 3
The problem with solving a small town's agricultural mystery, Gray discovered, was that word traveled at the speed of Ruth Sanger. And that woman's mouth was supersonic.
He'd barely settled into his usual booth at the diner when Ruth materialized at his elbow with the inexorable momentum of a weather front.
“I understand,” she said, without preamble or apology, “you're something of an expert on genetics.”
Gray looked up. “I have a master's degree in animal genetics. I have no idea if that makes me an expert.”
“You are compared to folks around here,” she replied tartly. “I have a question about dogs.”
He glanced at the pinochle table. Walter was glaring at Ruth’s back as if he was trying to drill a hole in it with his laser glare.
“Dogs aren’t my specialty, but I might be able to answer a general question about them,” Gray said cautiously.
“My Mabel had a litter last spring. Six puppies. Five look just like her. Brown and white, classic Springer spaniel. But the sixth one is black. Not a speck of white on him.”
“Did Mabel have access to any other male dogs during her heat cycle?”
Ruth drew herself up to her full height and declared indignantly. “Mabel is a lady.”
The black puppy suggested otherwise but far be it from him to slut-shame Mabel. He said instead, “It's possible for a litter to have multiple sires if the female mated more than once. It's called heteropaternal superfecundation.”
Ruth stared at him. “Mabel,” she repeated distinctly, “is a dog of impeccable character.”
“I don't doubt her character,” Gray said. “But biologically speaking . . .”
“Can it skip a generation?” Walter interrupted. “The black color. Can it skip a generation and pop up in a puppy even if neither parent is black?”
“Yes,” Gray said. “Recessive genes can remain unexpressed for multiple generations and then pop up . . .”
“HA!” Ruth pointed at Walter. “I told you it wasn't the Andersons' black Lab.”
“Leave the Andersons out of this,” Walter snapped.
Gray prudently refrained from pointing out that almost without exception, black was a dominant color gene, Angus cattle being a notable exception.
Walter threw up his big, callused hands. “I'm just saying that black puppy was big for a Springer spaniel. Chunky like a Lab.”
“Walter Meeks, if you say one more word about that dog having despoiled my sweet Mabel . . .”
“Well, somebody despoiled your precious dog,” Walter snapped. “She didn't have six puppies all by herself.”
Gray choked on his coffee, did his best to conceal his coughing, and went back to his textbook.
He made it through approximately four sentences before Irma Brown appeared at his elbow with a coffee pot and an obvious agenda.
“My grandchildren,” she announced, topping off his cup without asking. “My daughter has brown eyes, my son-in-law has brown eyes, but my granddaughter came out with blue eyes as clear as a summer sky. My son-in-law's mother is implying things.”
Gray set down his highlighter. “Brown-eyed parents can absolutely have a blue-eyed child. Brown is a dominant gene, but both parents can carry the recessive allele for blue eyes without expressing it themselves. If each parent passes on the recessive allele, the child gets blue eyes.”
Irma looked extremely relieved. “So it's science.”
“Pure Mendelian genetics.”
“Could you write that down? In case I need to show it to someone? And be sure to include what you just said—the Mendelson genetics part.”
Mendelian, he corrected her silently. And by “someone” Irma obviously meant the son-in-law's mother. Gray accepted the notepad she held out and wrote a brief, scientifically accurate explanation of dominant and recessive inheritance, along with a simple four-square genetic chart with big B’s standing for brown eyes and little b’s standing for blue eyes.
At the end of his explanation, he signed his name, He handed the notepad back.
“Thank you.” Irma tucked it into her apron pocket with a satisfied pat. “More coffee?”
“Please.”
He lasted until ten forty-five before the next question arrived. This one came from a gray-haired man he didn't recognize. “Heard you're the one to ask about breeding,” the man said, sliding into the seat across from Gray without invitation.
Word really does travel fast in this town.
Gray didn’t even get a chance to reply for the man blurted, “I've got a question about my squash.”
“My degree is in animal genetics, not plant genetics.”
The diner's door opened and Bonnie came in, unwinding her scarf as she said something cheerful to Rose about the weather. Gray watched her over squash man's shoulder. She glanced his way. Caught his look beseeching her to rescue him.
Smirking a little, she headed for his booth.
Squash man took one look at her, Bonnie jerked her head, and to Gray’s great surprise the man excused himself with a promise to bring Gray a sample squash next week.
Oh, goody.
“You look as if you just underwent the Grand Inquisition,” Bonnie said, sliding into the vacated seat.
“Thankfully, there were no thumb screws or hot irons involved in my interrogation,” he responded.
“Larry Cargill can be a lot.”
“Is that Squash Man's name?” he responded. “Larry?”
“It is.” Bonnie paused, looking thoughtful. “Although Squash Man fits him pretty well. Come August, he'll be hauling around grocery bags full of zucchini and giving them away to anyone who'll take a few off his hands.”
Gray leaned back, amused.
“How are you doing today?” she blurted in an abrupt change of subject.
He answered wryly, “I’m surviving. Turns out folks in this town have a lot of genetic questions.”
“Your mistake was being willing to answer them.” She wrapped both hands around her mug. “Ruth told Walter you should hang out a shingle—Genetics Doctor.”
He filed that in the category of things that were never going to happen.
His phone buzzed and he glanced at the caller ID. Sully Foster. He picked up the phone and murmured to Bonnie, “Saved by the rancher.”
“Chicken,” she muttered.
“Guilty as charged.” He answered his phone. “Hey. What's up?”
“You need to come out here,” Sully said.
“Is one of the cows in distress?”
“Not exactly. But you need to see this. Bring your spreadsheet.”
Sully was waiting for him at the pasture fence. He was a big, quiet man who ran his and Jenna's operation with steady competence. Sully pointed into the pasture without preamble.
Gray looked over the fence. And stared.
The cows were large.
Very large.
It had only been a couple of weeks since he’d seen them, but they’d abruptly ballooned out, their sides bulging and bellies huge.
Calves put on a big burst of weight and size at the end of gestation, so it was normal for cows to have a final spurt of weight gain near the end of the pregnancy. But this.
This was not normal.
“Wow,” Gray breathed.
“That's a word for it,” Sully grumbled. “Dillon still coming today?”
“Said he'd get to Cobbler Cove around two o'clock if his flight to Bozeman is on time.”
“You want to go up to the house and grab a cup of coffee while we wait for him?” Sully asked.
“I'd rather weigh your cows.”
“I figured. I'll call the cows up to the barn now.”
Dillon Steele arrived at the Foster Ranch at one fifty-eight PM.
He climbed out of his vet truck with its big equipment bins in the back.
He wore a beat-up canvas jacket and steel-toed boots that came with working on big animals that tended to step on nearby human feet when they were annoyed or in pain.
Dillon took one look at the cows, and said, “Huh.”
“Huh,” Gray agreed.
Sully just shook his head in disgust.
“Show me your data, Gray,” Dillon said.
Gray pulled up his spreadsheet on his tablet. Dillon scrolled through it with the focused attention of a professional. Eventually, Dillon handed the tablet back and said merely, “Let’s pull a sample of amniotic fluid so you can figure out what in tarnation's going on with these giant calves.”
The cow Gray had flagged as the largest one was a solid black Angus named—according to Jenna's records—Snowball. Which sounded suspiciously like a name Jenna's six-year-old son, Bobby, had come up with for the jet black cow.
Snowball turned out to have opinions about the amniocentesis procedure. Strong opinions. In fact, she expressed them at considerable volume, bawling her head off in the chute.
“Easy,” Dillon said, in a calm, silky voice that Gray had heard both veterinarians and bomb disposal technicians use in tense situations. “Easy, girl. Almost done.”
Snowball retorted with a toss of her head and a stomp of her front foot that declared she was not interested in being easy.
She shifted her bulk sideways with the determined energy of a large animal who had decided she was done cooperating.
Gray, who was on her left side providing a combination of reassurance and counterweight, slid backwards as she leaned her full weight against his hands.
“Hold her still,” Dillon murmured.
“I'm trying,” Gray grunted. But at the moment, Snowball outweighed him by approximately eleven hundred pounds, and she knew it.
“Almost there,” Dillon said, and then, “got it.”
Snowball expressed her feelings about the whole process with a final bawl of complaint as Sully released her from the cattle chute. The cow trotted back to the herd and went back to her hay with the regal air of a woman who had made her point.
Dillon looked at the herd and shook his head. “I see a whole lot of C-sections eating hay over there.”
“How many if you had to guess?” Sully asked.
“More than half of them.”
“That's what I was afraid of,” Gray said grimly, and made a note in his spreadsheet.
The next morning, Gray packed the now filled out forms Bonnie had brought to the station in a folder and drove into town.
Sure, he could just mail the forms to the mayor’s office. But Bonnie had gone out of her way to hand deliver them, which hadn’t been easy for her to do.