this kind of trouble, McCall thought.
But she knew what her mother was getting at. Whitehorse was a small town and deals were made between local judges and some families. McCall also knew the legendary Buzz Crawford. He wouldn’t have taken well to blackmail.
“So if my father wasn’t worried about this poaching charge …” And apparently he hadn’t been, if he’d gone hunting the next morning on that ridge. “Then why did you think he ran off?”
Ruby waved a hand through the air. “I was pregnant and crazy with hormones, out of my mind half the time, and Trace …”
“You fought a lot,” McCall guessed after having seen how her mother’s other relationships had gone over the years. “Did you have a fight the morning before he … disappeared?”
Ruby looked away. “Why do you we have to talk about this? Trace and I were both young and hotheaded. We fought, we made up.” She shrugged. “There was no one like Trace.” She smiled as if lost for a moment in the past.
And for that moment, Ruby looked like the pregnant young woman in love that she’d been in the few photographs McCall had of her—usually in uniform, alone, at the café.
The moment passed. Ruby frowned. “No matter what you’ve heard, Trace didn’t leave because of you.”
“So did he take anything when he left—clothes, belongings?”
“Just his pickup and his rifle. He would have made a good father and husband if his mother had stayed out of it. Pepper Winchester has a fortune, but she wouldn’t give him a dime unless he got out of the marriage to me and made me say my baby was someone else’s. What kind of mother puts that kind of pressure on her son?”
McCall didn’t want her mother to take off on Pepper Winchester again. Nor was she ready to tell her mother what she’d found up on the ravine south of town without conclusive evidence.
She got to her feet. “I need to get going.”
“You sure you don’t want some tuna casserole? I could get Leo to dish you up some for later. You have to eat and it’s just going to get thrown out.”
“Naw, thanks anyway.” She hugged her mother, surprised how frail Ruby was and feeling guilty for upsetting her. “I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”
“All that was a long time ago. I survived it.”
“Still, I know it wasn’t easy.” McCall could imagine how hurt her mother must have been, how humiliated in front of the whole town, that her husband had left her pregnant, broke and alone. McCall knew how it was to have the whole town talking about you.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Ruby said with a smile. “Within a couple of weeks, I had you.”
McCall smiled, feeling tears burn her eyes as she left, her hand in her pocket holding tight to the hunting license—the only definite thing she had of her father’s—unless she counted his bad genes.
WORD ABOUT THE BONES FOUND south of town had traveled the speed of a wildfire through Whitehorse. McCall heard several versions of the story when she stopped for gas.
Apparently most everyone thought the bones were a good hundred years old and belonged to some outlaw or ancestor.
By the time McCall left Whitehorse, the sun and wind had dried the muddy unpaved roads to the southeast. The gumbo, as the locals called the mud, made the roads often impassible.
McCall headed south into no-man’s-land on one of the few roads into the Missouri Breaks. Yesterday she’d driven down Highway 191 south to meet Rocky. But there were no roads from the ridge where she’d stood looking across the deep gorge to the Winchester Ranch.
Getting to the isolated ranch meant taking back roads that seldom saw traffic and driving through miles and miles of empty rolling wild prairie.
Over the years McCall had thought about just showing up at her grandmother’s door. But she’d heard enough horror stories from her mother—and others in town—that she’d never gotten up the courage.
The truth was, she didn’t have the heart to drive all the way out there and have her grandmother slam the door in her face.
Today though, she told herself she was on official . Of course one call to the sheriff would blow that story and leave her in even more hot water with her boss.
But already in over her head, McCall felt she’d been left little choice. Once the report came back from the crime lab—and she gave up the hunting license—it would become a murder investigation and she would be not only pulled off the case, but also locked out of any information the department gathered because of her personal connection to the deceased.
Before that happened, she hoped to get the answers she so desperately needed about her father—and who had killed him.
She knew it would be no easy task, finding out the truth after all these years. Her mother was little help. As for the Winchesters, well, she’d never met any of them. Trace had been the youngest child of Call and Pepper Winchester.
His siblings and their children had all left the ranch after Trace disappeared and had never returned as far as McCall knew. Her grandmother had gone into seclusion.
The Winchester Ranch had always been off-limits for McCall—a place she wasn’t welcome and had no real connection with other than sharing the same last name.
The fact that her father had been buried within sight of the ranch gave her pause, though, as McCall slowed to turn under the carved wooden Winchester Ranch arch.
In the distance she could see where the land broke and began to fall as the Missouri River carved its way through the south end of the county. Nothing was more isolated or wild than the Breaks and the Winchester Ranch sat on the edge of this untamed country.
It gave her an eerie feeling just thinking of her grandmother out here on the ranch, alone except for the two elderly caretakers, Enid and Alfred Hoagland. Why had Pepper closed herself off from the rest of her family after Trace disappeared? Wouldn’t a mother be thankful she had other children?
McCall drove slowly down the ranch road, suddenly afraid. She was taking a huge chance coming out here. Even if she wasn’t shot for a trespasser, she knew she would probably be run off without ever seeing her grandmother.
Weeds had grown between the two tracks of the narrow, hardly used road. Enid and Alfred only came into Whitehorse for supplies once a month, but other than that were never seen around. Nor, McCall had heard, did Pepper have visitors.
As she drove toward the massive log structure, she was treated to a different view of the ranch from that on the ridge across the ravine.
The lodge had been built back in the 1940s, designed after the famous Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone Park. According to the stories McCall had heard, her grandfather Call Winchester had amassed a fortune, tripling the size of his parents’ place.
There had always been rumors around Whitehorse about Call Winchester—the man McCall has been named for. Some said he made his fortune in gold mining. Others in crime.
The truth had remained
