Alberta Alibi (6 page)

She didn't think so, but how could she be certain? Sheila knew the ranch wasn't doing as well as it used to. Her dad was worried because the price of cattle was way low. Not only that, but the weather seemed to be against ranchers these days. One year it was so hot and dry the grasses on the range and hay in the fields withered and died. The next year it rained so hard everything rotted where it stood. How was he supposed to feed his cattle? How could he keep the horses healthy?

If Dad was afraid of losing the ranch, would that make him do something drastic?

Suddenly Sheila sat up in bed. She could not lie here any longer, worrying until she felt sick to her stomach. Careful not to disturb Katie, she dressed quietly in a purple T-shirt and blue jeans, picked up her shoes and tiptoed from the room.

She padded softly downstairs and left her shoes by the front door. She wanted to go out to the barn and see Silver, maybe even take a ride before anyone else got up, but first she would grab an apple for Silver and one of those fresh, juicy Okanagan peaches for herself.

Her hand was on the fridge door when she heard a noise. She froze, listening. It sounded like a creaky floorboard in the front hall. Good, Dad must be up, maybe they could ride out together. She waited, but no one walked down the hall to the kitchen. Was she imagining things, or did her dad come downstairs and head straight outside?

She grabbed an apple and a peach and closed the fridge door. Retrieving her shoes from the front hall, she pulled the front door open, surprised to see it was not quite latched.

Sheila shivered in the early morning air. The sky shimmered gold over the grasslands to the east, but the sun had not yet risen above the horizon. She shivered again and tried to remember where she left her blue sweatshirt. Was it in the trailer or up in her bedroom?

She hadn't needed it yesterday because the afternoon and evening were so hot. She didn't remember stuffing it into her bag, so it must be in the trailer. Instead of entering the barn, Sheila walked to the trailer and tried the door. It wasn't locked and she stepped inside. At the back were two bunks, one above the other. Sheila's was the top one. She climbed up to look for her sweatshirt.

She found a couple of crumpled T-shirts and a pair of shorts stuffed inside her sleeping bag. Under her pillow was her bathing suit. No sweatshirt. She was about to climb down when she heard a door close. Peeking out through the narrow window beside the bunk, she saw her dad walking down the steps from the house. As she slid from the bunk she noticed Katie's red sweatshirt on the bottom bunk. Something blue stuck out from beneath it. She grabbed her shirt, yanked it over her head and ran outside.

By then Dad was halfway across the yard, heading for the barn. He almost jumped out of his cowboy boots when he saw her. “Sheila! I thought you were asleep upstairs.”

“I couldn't sleep. Did you go back inside the house?”

He frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“I heard you go out a few minutes ago. Then I looked out from the trailer and saw you on the steps.”

“You're imagining things, girl. A few minutes ago I was in the shower.”

His hair was wet and plastered to his head. He smelled lemony, like the shaving cream he always used. Sheila decided the sound she heard must have come from upstairs, not from the front hall as she had thought. “Are you going riding?” she asked.

“Not now. I was coming down to mix up a batch of hotcakes for you kids. But from the bottom step I thought I saw something move out here near the barn, just a glimpse of blue. Anyway, I came out to investigate.” He looked at her blue shirt. “Obviously it was you.”

“But…”

Her dad slipped an arm around her shoulders. “C'mon, Sheila, let's go make some hotcakes before the hordes descend upon us.”

They walked together back toward the house. “Ben and Ryan will be over for breakfast in half an hour. We've got loads of work to do today.”

“Ryan's here?”

Dad nodded. “He's in university now, but he's back to help us out for the summer, just like he used to in the old days.”

Sheila remembered Ryan well. From the time he was ten, he used to spend his summers on the ranch. He stayed with his father, Ben, in the cottage by a little copse of pines beyond the main house. She never liked the way Ryan teased her, but he often went riding or swimming with her too, kind of like a much older brother.

There was a stack of hotcakes keeping warm in the oven, coffee waiting to be poured and bacon sizzling on the griddle when Ben walked into the kitchen.

“Hey, Sheila!” he greeted her warmly and wrapped her in a big hug. “Sorry I missed you yesterday. I had a load of horseshoeing jobs on some of the ranches down south and didn't get home until late.” He stood back. “Let me look at you! You've grown so much, I hardly recognize you, Cowgirl!”

Sheila grinned. For as long as she could remember, Ben had called her Cowgirl and she was glad he hadn't forgotten. Ben had been the Walton's foreman since long before she was born and was almost like an uncle to her. He had a bushy brown-and-gray beard, thin brown hair and, just as she remembered, wore a blue shirt. She wondered if he always wore the very same shirt, or did he have a dozen identical ones?

“You don't look any different,” she said.

Then Ryan walked in. “Hi, kiddo!” he winked, grinning. He didn't look like a boy anymore. He was kind of old now, at least twenty, and he was as tall and broad-shouldered as the two older men. Ryan had soft brown hair that lay flat, and his eyes were gray, like his dad's.

“Hi, kiddo, yourself,” she said and poured coffee into three mugs.

The men had been gone for hours by the time Katie and the others finally wandered, bleary-eyed, down the stairs. As usual, Katie carried her notebook tucked under her arm, but for once Rusty didn't have his sketchbook.

“It's about time you got up,” Sheila said. “I've already had a ride on Silver, and I saddled two quarter horses for you.”

“Why?” Rusty's voice held an edge of panic. As if to cover his fear, he babbled on. “What's a quarter horse anyway? If I was going to ride anything—and I'm not saying I will—I'd want the whole horse.”

Sheila laughed. So did Huntley, which made her angry, so she stopped abruptly. Katie paid no attention to any of them. She settled at the table, opened her notebook and began to read, one finger following along her lines of notes.

“A quarter horse is a breed of small but really strong and fast horses that know how to outsmart cattle. They're perfect working horses for a ranch.”

Rusty looked even more nervous. “They chase your cows?”

“Only when we tell them to,” Sheila said. “They're very gentle.”

Rusty's eyes appealed to Katie for help, but she was lost in her notes.

“You rode one last night,” Huntley said. “You did great.”

“I'll take you out on the range today,” Sheila suggested. “You'll like it, things haven't changed much in over a hundred years.”

A gleam of interest sparked in Rusty's eyes but quickly died. “You mean we'll
walk
out on the range?”

Sheila nodded. “Walk, trot, canter, whatever works.”

Rusty turned to his cousin. “Katie? Are you listening to this? They're trying to get us killed! They're putting us on fast, cow-chasing horses and riding out to the range where there's—surprise—cows!”

Sheila noticed that Rusty said
they
instead of
she,
as if he automatically assumed Huntley would come too. She glared at Huntley.

Katie placed her finger under a line in her notebook and looked up slowly. “We need to visit the scene of the crime,” she said.

Rusty groaned.

9

A
s much as she longed to tap Silver with her heels and take off at a gallop across the rolling, grass-covered hills, Sheila knew she couldn't. Silver tossed his head and snorted impatiently, so bursting with energy Sheila could scarcely hold him back. But she remembered what her father said about her friends getting hurt and reminded herself how accident-prone Rusty really was, and she tightened the reins.

Sheila had not spoken one word to Huntley today, but he didn't appear to mind, or even notice for that matter, which was a bit depressing. However, he did seem to understand the need to hold the horses back—maybe he had seen Rusty in action already.

She studied Huntley. He seemed comfortable in the saddle, riding his black-as-midnight horse, but she didn't know why he had to wear a black cowboy hat, same as her dad's. At least it didn't have a white, braided-leather band and white feather. Sheila remembered braiding those three long leather strips and placing the band on Dad's black hat for a Father's Day surprise.

She had found the white wing feather later that summer, during the molting season of the trumpeter swans. Sheila used to sit by Swan Pond and watch them for hours, a beautiful pair that raised their little brood here on the ranch every year. Again she wondered if they had returned this spring. Without Swan Pond, where would they go? Maybe Huntley knew. Too bad she wasn't speaking to him.

It took forever to reach the hill above the development, but at last they reined in the horses. “This is where my dad figures a sniper would have stood,” Sheila said.

“How do I get down?” Katie asked. She stared at the ground near her horse's feet as if she were perched high on a rooftop.

Sheila made an effort not to roll her eyes. She glanced at Huntley; he better not be smirking!

He wasn't. “Wait there, I'll help you,” he said and slid down from his horse before Sheila could say a word. That boy was so pushy she felt like screaming. Katie was
her
friend, not his. Wasn't he content to take her dad away? Did he want her friends too? She swung down from Silver and marched over to help Rusty before he fell. Or before Huntley got there to help him first.

She held Rusty's horse. “Keep your left leg in the stirrup,” she told him. “Hang onto the saddle horn and swing your right leg over the horse. Good, now slip your left foot out of the stirrup before you…”

Rusty crashed to the ground and the horse twitched uneasily, but Sheila held on fast. Rusty gazed up at her, his head and shoulders lying in the long grass, his left leg in the air, foot stuck in the stirrup. Sheila was about to ask if he was hurt when he grinned.

“That's why you take your foot out first,” she said, “before you slide to the ground.”

“Now you tell me!” Rusty said.

To Sheila's annoyance, Huntley rushed over and freed Rusty's foot. “Thanks,” Rusty said. He picked up his baseball cap and scrambled to his feet, brushing dry dirt and bits of brown grass from his shirt.

Sheila grinned to herself, watching Rusty and Huntley walk to the edge of the rise. Rusty walked weird, his legs stiff and his knees stuck out sideways as if he still sat astride his horse. Horseback riding used muscles Rusty probably didn't even know that he had.

Already Katie was busy scouting around. Nose hovering close over the ground, she searched the grass for clues. For once she had left her notebook behind, along with her backpack. Sheila had told her she would have enough to worry about on this first ride without any extra weight or straps on her back. Katie stopped, studied something that lay in the brown grass, then straightened up and reached into the back pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a tiny notepad with a small pencil stuck through its coil binding. Flipping it open, she started to write.

Sheila marched over to Katie. “What are you writing?”

“I found a cigarette butt.” She whipped a small plastic bag from her other back pocket and scooped up the butt. “C'mon, let's see what else we can find.”

Sheila felt a sudden surge of interest. Maybe Katie was onto something. Her dad didn't smoke anymore. He used to when she was little, but he quit because Mom told him cigarette smoke was bad for children's lungs.

Working together, the girls searched the full length of the ridge. In one spot the grass was trampled down as if someone had sat there. On the flattened grass they found several more cigarette butts and a matchbook with the name of a Calgary restaurant printed on it. They picked each item up with a plastic bag, careful not to touch it. Sheila felt like a crime-scene investigator, like the ones she sometimes saw on TV.

They walked down a gentle slope toward the stream and across the muddy ground near the water's edge.

A row of aspen trees, their wafer-thin green leaves trembling in a slight breeze, lined the bank. “Look!”

Katie said.

A set of wide tire tracks led up to the aspens and sank deeper into the soft mud to form a V shape.

The tracks swung in a semicircle to the right, formed a second V, then headed straight for the grassy slope.

Two swaths of flattened grass led up and over the low ridge.

Sheila watched in dismay as Katie collected a sample of the mud and a twig from an aspen tree.