Gun-Shy Bride

She took a photograph of where the body had been buried, then found herself looking again toward the Winchester Ranch. The sun caught on one of the large windows on the second floor of the massive lodge-style structure.

“The old gal?” Rocky said, following her gaze. “She’s your grandmother, right?”

McCall thought about denying it. After all, Pepper Winchester denied her very existence. McCall had never even laid eyes on her grandmother. But then few people had in the past twenty-seven years.

“I reckon we’re related,” McCall said. “According to my mother, Trace Winchester was my father.” He’d run off before McCall was born.

Rocky had the good sense to look embarrassed. “Didn’t mean to bring up nothin’ about your father.”

Speaking of outlaws, McCall thought. She’d spent her life living down her family history. She was used to it.

“Interesting view of the ranch,” Rocky said, and reached into his pack to offer a pair of small binoculars.

Reluctantly, she took them and focused on the main house. It was much larger than she’d thought, three stories with at least two wings. The logs had darkened from the years, most of the windows on at least one of the wings boarded up.

The place looked abandoned. Or worse, deteriorating from the inside out. It gave her the creeps just thinking about her grandmother shutting herself up in there.

McCall started as she saw a dark figure appear at one of the second floor windows that hadn’t been boarded over. Her grandmother?

The image was gone in a blink.

McCall felt the chill of the April wind that swept across the rolling prairie as she quickly lowered the binoculars and handed them back to Rocky.

The day was clear, the sky blue and cloudless, but the air had a bite to it. April in this part of Montana was unpredictable. One day it could be in the seventies, the next in the thirties and snowing.

“I best get busy and box up these bones,” she said, suddenly anxious to get moving. She’d been about to go off shift when she’d gotten Rocky’s call. Unable to locate the sheriff and the deputy who worked the shift after hers, she’d had little choice but to take the call.

“If you don’t need my help …” Rocky shifted his backpack, the small shovel strapped to it clinking on the canteen he carried at his hip as he headed toward his pickup.

Overhead a hawk circled on a column of air and for moment, McCall stopped to watch it. Turning her back to the ranch in the distance, she looked south. Just the hint of spring could be seen in the open land stretching to the rugged horizon broken only by the outline of the Little Rockies.

Piles of snow still melted in the shade of the deep ravines gouged out as the land dropped to the river in what was known as the Missouri River Breaks. This part of Montana was wild, remote country that a person either loved or left.

McCall had lived her whole life here in the shadow of the Little Rockies and the darker shadow of the Winchester family.

As she started to step around the grave washed out by last night’s rainstorm, the sun caught on something stuck in the mud.

She knelt down to get a better look and saw the corner of a piece of orange plastic sticking out of the earth where the bones had been buried.

McCall started to reach for it, but stopped herself long enough to swing up the camera and take two photographs, one a close-up, one of the grave with the corner of the plastic visible.

Using a small stick, she dug the plastic packet from the mud and, with a start, saw that it was a cover given out by stores to protect hunting and fishing licenses.

McCall glanced at Rocky’s retreating back, then carefully worked the hunting license out enough to see a name.

Trace Winchester.

Her breath caught in her throat but still she must have made a sound.

“You say somethin'?” Rocky called back. McCall shook her head, pocketing the license with her father’s name on it. “No, just finishing up here.”

Chapter Two

Inside her patrol pickup, McCall radioed the sheriff’s department. “Looks like Rocky was right about the bones being human,” she told the sheriff when he came on the line.

“Bring them in and we’ll send them over to Missoula to the crime lab. Since you’re supposed to be off shift, it can wait till tomorrow if you want. Don’t worry about it.”

Sheriff Grant Sheridan sounded distracted, but then he had been that way for some time now.

McCall wondered idly what was going on with him. Grant, who was a contemporary of her mother’s, had taken over the job as sheriff in Whitehorse County after the former sheriff, Carter Jackson, resigned to ranch with his wife Eve Bailey Jackson.

McCall felt the muddy plastic in her jacket pocket. “Sheriff, I—” But she realized he’d already disconnected. She cursed herself for not just telling him up front about the hunting license.

What was she doing?

Withholding evidence.

She waited until Rocky left before she got the small and her other supplies from behind her seat and walked back over to the grave. The wind howled around her like a live animal as she dug in the mud that had once been what she now believed was her father’s grave, taking photographs of each discovery and bagging the evidence.

She found a scrap of denim fabric attached to metal buttons, a few snaps like those from a Western shirt and a piece of leather that had once been a belt.

Her heart leaped as she overturned something in the mud that caught in the sunlight. Reaching down, she picked it up and cleaned off the mud. A belt buckle.

Not just any belt buckle she saw as she rubbed her fingers over the cold surface to expose the letters. WIN CHESTER.

The commemorative belt buckle was like a million others. It proved nothing.

Except that when McCall closed her eyes, she saw her father in the only photograph she had of him. He stood next to his 1983 brand-new black Chevy pickup, his Stetson shoved back to expose his handsome face, one thumb hooked in a pocket of his jeans, the other holding his rifle, the one her mother said had belonged to his grandfather. In the photo, the sun glinted off his commemorative Winchester rifle belt buckle.

She opened her eyes and, picking up the shovel, began to dig again, but found nothing more. No wallet. No keys. No boots.

The larger missing item was his pickup, the one in the photograph. The one he allegedly left town in. Had he been up here hunting? She could only assume so, since according to her mother, the last time she saw was the morning of opening day of antelope season—and his twentieth birthday.

Along with the hunting license, she’d found an unused antelope tag.

But if he’d been hunting, then where was his rifle, the one her mother said he had taken the last time she saw him?

McCall knew none of this proved absolutely that the bones were her father’s. No, that would require DNA results from the state crime lab, which would take weeks if not months.

She stared at the grave. If she was right, her father hadn’t left town. He’d been buried on the edge of this ridge for the past twenty-seven years.

The question was who had buried him here?

Someone who’d covered up Trace Winchester’s death and let them all believe he’d left town.

Her hands were shaking as she boxed up the bones and other evidence—all except the license still in her coat pocket—and hiked back to her rig. Once behind the wheel, she pulled out the plastic case and eased out the license and antelope tag.

The words were surprisingly clear after almost thirty years of being buried in the mud since the plastic had protected the practically indestructible paper.