Page 25 of Killer on the Homestead
He eyed her. “Been mapping out ways to come find me, Red?”
One side of her mouth curved up—amusement in spite of how badly he knew she didn’t want to be amused by him. It eased something inside of him, this very simple human interaction that didn’t have any weights to it. Even when his life had been baseball, every relationship had been full of weights—responsibility to his team, his manager, his agent. How he was representing the team, himself. Hisbrand, as his agent liked to say.
And he loved his parents, with everything he was. There wasn’t a weight there he didn’t take on gladly and with enough humility to know the weights went both ways. Because when you loved people, you worried about them. When people supported your dream, you wanted to do right by them in every way you could.
And he wanted to fix this stress for them, this hurt. Thisdesecration. So that was a weight.
But with Rosalie, she was just…a friend. Helping him with a problem. And there were no weights.
For a minute, that felt just as disorienting as it did freeing. Especially when she pulled her truck to a stop in front of his cabin, then got out with a little hop and started marching right for the cabin. Up his porch, like she was coming inside with him and that…felt a little more like panic than ease.
He hurried up to the door, which he’d locked, so it wasn’t like she could get inside. Still, he felt the need to bar the door with his body.
“I haven’t unpacked yet.”
She waved that away with the flick of a wrist. “I’m a slob. Won’t bother me any.” She gestured for the door. “Let me in or I’ll assume you’re hiding a murder weapon and a bunch of dead cows in there.”
She smirked at him and since he genuinely didn’t know what else to do, he let her inside. The curtains were drawn, so the room was dim. He could turn on the lights… He could do a lot of things, but exhaustion was poking at him. Pain—in his shoulder, his head. Since she wasn’t explaining what was up, he took a seat on his couch. For just a moment, he closed his eyes and let out a long, slow breath.
“You’re in pain.” She said it like an accusation.
“You’re not living if you’re not in pain.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say, and I deal with criminals on the regular.”
When he opened his eyes, she was standing in front of him, hands on her hips. She was wearing a simple little black dress. It wasn’t the right color for her at all, but he didn’t mind the view of her legs. Which he took his time enjoying before meeting her gaze.
“It’s the way of life for a professional pitcher. The older you get, the more it hurts.”
She stared down at him, those violet eyes flashing with a restrained annoyance that never failed to amuse him. Or maybearousehim was the more apt word, even if he was trying to ignore how much he liked being in her orbit. “Got any aspirin around here?” she demanded.
“For you or for me?”
She sighed at him as if he was a difficult toddler. “For you.”
“I’ve got a pain pill I can take, but I need to eat something with it.”
She marched right into his kitchen, poked around in the fridge and the little pantry. He almost told her to stop, that he’d handle it, but she just…moved around the space that he didn’t think she’d ever been in and made him a sandwich without asking any questions. She filled a glass with water, brought both over, and set them on the coffee table in front of him. Then she put a little orange bottle there too.
“Eat. Take the pill. And learn this lesson pretty dang quick—you can’t take care of the people in your life if you don’t take care of yourself.” She said this firmly, with enough conviction that he studied her.
“You do a lot of taking care?”
Her gaze skittered away from his. “I give it a shot every now and then. So here’s what we’re going to do.” She was pacing in front of him now, but if he stopped eating, she’d stop, and glare at him until he did.
So he ate, while she laid it out.
“We’re going to map it out, the missing cows. The cows Audra found on our land last year all the way to the last one. Map it out by location. Mark it down by calendar. We’re going to follow every last step from a ranching perspective and see if something jumps out and connects to a murder perspective.”
He liked that it sounded like something, but it didn’t sound like finding a murderer. “And if this has nothing to do with the murder?”
“We’ll have figured out one mystery at least.” She tapped her fingers on the table. “Listen, maybe this is the deadest of ends, but we’re already at one. And so are the cops. If they won’t follow this line, we have to. Because we’ve got ranch eyes, or at least I do.”
“I’ve got ranch eyes,” he muttered, feeling defensive because…yeah, he didn’t have a clue. For the past fifteen years, he’d only been on this ranch on holidays. But there’d been a time—before high school, because even then his parents had let him focus on baseball—in the early part of his childhood when his life had been about setting him up for taking over the ranch someday.
He’d never…wanted that, but he’d been raised in it. So he wasn’t ignorant. He wasn’t going to let himself feel like he didn’t belong right here. Like he didn’t know more than those detectives who’d never dealt with calving or branding season and everything after and in between.
“Okay, so we use our inherent understanding,” Rosalie said firmly, not arguing about hisranch eyes. “And maybe it’s the wrong direction, but sometimes when you scale a brick wall, you get to the other side and realize it didn’t lead you where you wanted to go at all. But other sometimes, that’s an answer all on its own, or it leads you to a place you’d never have thought of otherwise. We need a map of the ranch.”
