Dangerous Refuge by Elizabeth Lowell Page A

having trouble swallowing. “Lorne’s home, but he’s in his town clothes. Shortly before Lorne died, Dingo ate poison. Dingo’s a hunter, not a scavenger, and Lorne didn’t put out poison. Lorne’s dogs—the ones that lasted more than a year, anyway—hunted in the national forest in the daytime, not out of garbage cans at night. Lorne was trying to change his will. If he had lived, the Conservancy would have been cut out.”
    “We’ve had a lot of people refuse us,” Shaye said. “They’re all alive and a lot of them had more land than Lorne.”
    Tanner nodded. “That’s what I figured. Which leaves the missing gold. Did he say anything about being close to bankruptcy?”
    “No. He complained about the price of feed and taxes and what a lousy amount of money he got from the cattle when he shipped to the feedlots, but so does every other rancher I know. He was looking at new trucks, and had just bought a new dress hat and the boots I found him in, so he couldn’t have been that broke.”
    Then, as if it had just registered. “Gold? What gold? He had a silver belt buckle or two, but I never saw him wearing gold.”
    Tanner watched the sky with the measuring eyes of someone who had grown up where weather mattered. The morning was sunny with puffy clouds, but almost cool. Autumn was settling in, leaching the heat from the ground. Once the sun went behind the mountains in the late afternoon, the furnace went off and things got chilly real fast.
    Clouds slid over the sun like gray fingers, threatening rain. But the clouds were being pushed by a hard wind that chased and scattered them before they could get together and cry.
    Shaye waited, seeing cloud-shadow and sunlight change Tanner’s face. He looked like a man chewing on something he couldn’t swallow and wouldn’t spit out.
    “Sorry, that was my mistake bringing it up,” he said. “So you found him out here?” he asked quickly. “On his back, wearing his new town boots?”
    She wanted to pursue the question of the gold, but doubted that he would tell her much more than he had.
    All he has is questions to ask, not answers to give.
    It irritated the hell out of her. Then she took a better grip on her roller-coaster emotions and said, “Yes.”
    “Wonder why,” he said to himself. “He and my dad were raised alike. Dad didn’t change. I’m having a hard time believing Lorne did.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “On the ranch you had your work boots, then you had the boots you wore into town, and for really special occasions you had a pair of fancy boots. Your work boots didn’t leave the ranch, and you weren’t on the ranch without being in them unless you were heading into town or coming back from town.”
    Shaye didn’t know what to say. Obviously the boot thing meant more to Tanner than it did to her.
    He sat on his heels and ran his fingers through the dirt, testing the dryness of the soil.
    “If you found Lorne here, he wasn’t coming back from his truck or heading toward it,” Tanner said, “yet he was wearing his town boots. With a town shirt. What about his pants?”
    She looked at the ground, seeing the past and not wanting to see it at all. “They weren’t work pants. Maybe he was just out admiring his land.”
    “He respected the land, but I never saw him stand around and admire it. Did you?”
    Wind gusted down the mountain, swirling her hair. Automatically she tucked it back behind her ears. “No. When he was outside, he was always doing something. Mending fences, cleaning the irrigation ditches, checking the cattle, cussing the deer and rabbits that kept raiding his garden, despite Dingo’s teeth. Even when we were talking, his hands were busy oiling a bridle or wielding a hoe or . . . something.”
    “Yes, that’s how I remember him.” Tanner stood and brushed his hands off. “No footprints around the body?”
    “I didn’t look for any.” Absently she pushed windblown hair back from her face again. “Even ten feet