The Homeplace: A Mystery by Kevin Wolf Page B

sheriff’s line. Then, “I still want to talk to him. Go by his farm again.”
    Rage flared inside Birdie. “It’s not my”—the phone went dead—“job.…”
    Shit fire. She hated that man.
    *   *   *
    Through the scope on his father’s three-hundred Magnum, Chase spotted the tips of the big buck’s antlers. The deer had bedded down behind a clump of yucca plants on a knoll just above the winter wheat field where Chase had first seen him that morning. No doubt the old buck had found a sunny spot to chew its cud. The wind was to its back. It could see danger coming from a mile away in three directions, and the breeze would bring the scent of trouble from the other.
    Chase leaned the old Weatherby against a fence post and raised his binoculars. He fiddled with the adjustment wheel until the deer came into focus. Through the spear points of the soapweed, the old buck stared right back at him.
    No chance to get any closer today. The deer knew right where Chase was.
    Hints of a breeze stole away the day’s warmth. The sun would be down in less than an hour. Cinnamon-dusted clouds stacked up on the western horizon, and spikes as bloodred as the smears around Jimmy Riley flared away from the setting sun.
    Chase needed to get back to his trailer in the ranch yard and wash up. Mercy was expecting him at six.
    *   *   *
    All through school, every girl Mercy knew had told her she lived in the nicest house in Brandon. Her house sat at the edge of town, north of the highway, the railroad, and the feedlots. The prevailing wind in Brandon always came from the north. It made sense that folks who had a choice would want to live upwind of the noise, smells, and commotion that happened on the south side of town.
    Mercy’s father was vice president of the bank, and Mama owned the café. Mercy knew she had more than most of her friends and she was grateful, but the house she lived in was really no different from the other houses in the county. The only time the front door was opened was when Mama decorated it for Christmas. When folks came to visit they entered at the back of the house, through the mud room off the kitchen. Mama kept a dozen chickens in the backyard, and her father ran cattle on two sections of ground north of town.
    Mama had tried to keep the house clean, but there was always a gritty layer of prairie dust on the vinyl floor in the kitchen and during the summers flies had buzzed in the corners of the windows just like the farmhouses her friends lived in.
    Just after four, Mercy opened the back door and ran up the stairs to her parents’ room. She started water running into the claw-footed tub in their bathroom, and when the steam fogged the windows she poured in twice as much bubble bath as she should have. Mercy gathered towels and a robe from the back of the door, stripped off the clothes that smelled of Saylor’s Cafe, and settled in the hot water to soak away the day.
    Chase Ford wouldn’t come at six. Chase would knock on the back door at five forty-five. He was always early, and Mercy intended to make him wait.
    She scrubbed the stains and grime from her fingernails with a stiff brush and washed her hair. She rubbed handfuls of conditioner into her dark hair, leaned back to enjoy the warmth around her, and stared out of the open bathroom door.
    Mercy hadn’t touched a thing in her parents’ bedroom since Mama had moved to the rest home in Comanche Springs and Daddy had died. His deer rifle still leaned in the corner behind the door, and Mama’s full-length oval mirror sat at the end of their bed.
    Whenever Mercy looked at herself in that mirror she could still see the reflection of Mama’s face behind her. Mama was there when Mercy tried on her costume for the school play, when she dressed up for homecoming, and all those other special times. Mama told her she looked like a lady.
    But Mercy wasn’t a lady. She was just a girl from a small farm town on Colorado’s windswept prairies. She