“No.”
“No hands on the ranch?”
“Not tonight.”
“What about that kid brother of yours?” the sheriff pressed, his graying bushy eyebrows lifting with each of her negative responses.
Tory felt herself stiffen. “Keith isn’t home. He’s in town, I think.”
“But you don’t know?”
“No. Not for sure.”
Barnett pressed his thin lips tightly together but didn’t comment. When the three men went into the den, Tory escaped to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. She tried to ignore the fact that her hands as well as her entire body were trembling.
Where was Keith? Everyone wanted to talk to her brother and she had no idea where he was. It was late, damned late and unlike her brother to be out on a weeknight.
The grandfather clock in the entry hall chimed one o’clock. The hollow notes added to Tory’s growing paranoia.
Drumming her fingers on the counter as the coffee perked, she considered using the phone and trying to track down her brother, but discarded the idea. He was twenty-one and able to mak
e his own decisions. Or so she silently prayed.
The murmur of voices from the den caught her attention and her heart began to pound with dread. Quickly grabbing the glass carafe, four mugs, the sugar bowl and creamer, she set everything onto a woven straw tray and carried it into the den. Trask looked up from his position in her father’s leather recliner and smiled reassuringly.
“Okay, now let me get this straight,” Barnett was saying, his graying mustache working as he spoke. “You two went up on Devil’s Ridge looking for some sort of clue that might lead you to the fourth man who was supposedly involved in the Quarter Horse swindle. Right?”
“Right,” Trask replied.
Tory caught Barnett’s inquisitive stare and nodded curtly to his unspoken question. “However, it could be a three-man conspiracy,” she said. “I still don’t believe that my father was involved.”
“Be that as it may, Ms Wilson, your father was tried and convicted, so we’ll have to assume that he was in on the swindle,” Barnett said slowly before turning to Trask. “So, you believe the fourth man theory because of this piece of paper.” He held up the anonymous letter, without waiting for a response. “And, you think that because you’ve been poking around looking for some proof to support the fourth man theory, one of the calves from the Lazy W was shot, and someone tried to shoot you as well, this afternoon—”
“I’m not sure they were shooting at us, maybe just trying to scare us,” Trask interjected.
“Nevertheless, a shot was fired in your general direction.”
“Yes.”
“And when that didn’t work, whoever it was that fired the rifle followed you to Neva McFadden’s place and beat the tar out of you.”
Trask frowned, nodded his head and rubbed his jaw pensively. “That’s why I think it was a warning. If they had wanted me dead, I would have been. I had to have been an easy target coming out of Neva’s house.”
“So that’s all of your story?”
“Except that someone’s been calling Neva and harassing her, making threats against her son,” Deputy Woodward added.
“What!” Tory’s face drained of color and she almost dropped her coffee. She turned her wide eyes on Trask. “No—”
Trask’s jaw hardened and his eyes turned as cold as blue ice. “That’s why Neva tried to talk both me and you out of the investigation. She was afraid for Nicholas’s life.”
“This has gotten completely out of hand,” Tory whispered, leaning against the pine-paneled wall.
“You should have called me,” Barnett said, leveling his gaze at Trask, “instead of trying to investigate something like this on your own. Could have saved yourself a lot of grief as well as a beating.”
“I was just trying to keep it quiet.”
Barnett frowned. “We could have done a better job. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s what my department gets paid to do. As it is, you’ve made one helluva mess of it.”