Now that she knew there had been a murder, she was anxious to go through the Milk River Examiner newspapers from twenty-four years ago to find out everything she could about it.
Back in the schoolhouse, she went to her desk and opened the drawer where she’d put the stories. All six were there. She had yet to read the other five, so she stuffed them all into her backpack.
Turning to leave, she was startled to find a dark shape filling the schoolhouse doorway.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” Ben Carpenter said as he stepped inside. He was a big man who took up a lot of space and always made Jolene feel a little uncomfortable. She suspected it was because he seldom smiled. Ben was at the far end of his forties and the father of her moody eighth-grader, Mace.
“I was just finishing up for the day. Is there something Mace needed?” The boy resembled his father, large and beefy. Jolene had only once seen his mother, Ronda, but recalled she was tiny and reserved.
“I stopped in to see how Mace is doing,” Ben said. “I ask him, but he doesn’t say much. You aren’t having any trouble with him, are you? If you are, you just let me know and I’ll see to the boy.”
Jolene didn’t like the threat she heard in Ben’s tone. “He’s doing quite well and, no, I have no trouble at all with him.”
“Good,” Ben said, looking uncomfortable in the small setting. “Glad to hear it. His mother has been after me to find out.”
Jolene doubted that. Ronda Carpenter seemed like a woman who asked little of her husband and got even less. “Well, you can certainly reassure her. Mace is doing fine.”
Ben nodded, looking as if there was more he wanted to say, but he changed his mind as he stepped toward the door. “Okay then.”
Jolene was relieved when she heard his truck pull away from the front of the school. She felt a little shaken by his visit. Ben always seemed right on the edge of losing his temper. His visit had felt contrived. Was there something else he’d come by for and changed his mind?
Was it possible he was the author of the murder story? It didn’t seem likely, but then some people wrote better than they spoke.
Locking up behind her, she biked to her little house. Then, with the installments of the murder story in her backpack, she got in her car and headed toward Whitehorse.
She took the dirt road out of town. Old Town White-horse had been the first settlement called Whitehorse. It had been nearer the Missouri River and the Breaks. That was back when supplies came by riverboat.
Once the railroad came through, five miles to the north, the town migrated to the tracks, taking the name Whitehorse with it.
As Jolene drove, she mentally replayed the conversation with the women of the sewing circle and was even more curious why they had been so reticent to talk about the murder.
RUSSELL FOUND HIS FATHER waiting for him when he returned to the ranch. Grayson Corbett was a large man with graying hair and an easygoing smile as well as attitude. Grayson had raised his five sons single-handedly from the time Russell was small and had done a damned good job.
Actually there was little his father couldn’t do. That’s why seeing him like this was so hard on Russell.
Worry lines etched Grayson’s still-handsome face and seemed to make his blue eyes even paler. Russell knew what he wanted to talk about the moment he saw his father and felt his stomach turn at the thought.
“We have to make a decision,” Grayson said without preamble. “We can’t put it off any longer.” Clearly his father had been thinking about the problem and probably little else since they’d last talked.
“You already know how I feel,” Russell said. “It’s a damned-fool thing and a waste of money as far as I’m concerned. What did the other ranchers and farmers have to say at the meeting?”
“Some agree with you. But there are more who are ready to try anything if there’s a chance of saving their crops.”
Russell shook his head, seeing that his father had already made his decision.
“If some of these farmers and ranchers don’t get some moisture and soon, they’re going to lose everything,” Grayson said. “I don’t think we have a choice.”
“So what did you tell them?”
“I told them I had to talk to my son,” his father said. “This is your ranch as much as mine, more actually. You get the final word.”
Russell could see that his father was worried about the others, who had the most to lose. “What choice do we have?”
If he and his father didn’t go along with the rest, he doubted the fifteen thousand dollars needed to hire the rainmaker could be raised. “I’ll go along with whatever decision you make.”
Grayson looked relieved, not that the worry lines softened. They were throwing good money away, Russell believed. But if the ranchers and farmers wanted to believe some man could make rain, then he wasn’t going to try to stop them.
“Thank you,” Grayson said as he laid a heavy hand on his son’s shoulders. “At least by hiring a rainmaker, they feel they’re doing something to avert disaster.”
THE MILK RIVER EXAMINER was the only newspaper for miles around. It was housed in a small building along the main street facing the tracks.
Andi Blake, the paper’s only reporter, a friendly, attractive woman with a southern accent, helped Jolene.
“What date are you looking for?” Andi asked.
Jolene told her it would have been this month twenty-four years ago. “I’m not sure of the exact date.”
“I wasn’t here then, but you’re welcome to look. Everything is on microfiche. You know how to use it?”
Jolene did from her college days. She thanked Andi, then sat down in the back of the office and, as the articles from May twenty-four years ago began to come up on screen, she began to roll her way through.
She slowed at the stories about the drought conditions, the fears of the ranchers and farmers, talk of hiring a rainmaker to come to town. A few papers later, there was a small article about a rainmaker coming to town and how the ranchers were raising money to pay him to make rain.
With a shudder, Jolene thought of the murder story and her feeling that the weather conditions were too much like this year.
The headline in the very next newspaper stopped her cold.
Woman Murdered in Brutal Attack
An Old Town Whitehorse resident was found murdered in her home last evening.
Heart in her throat, Jolene read further, then backtracked, realizing that the article didn’t say who found the body.
The sheriff was asking anyone with information in connection to the murder of Laura Beaumont to come forward.
If this Laura Beaumont was the same woman that the author of the murder story was writing about, she had at least one lover.
Their DNA would have been in the house. But had law enforcement even heard of DNA testing twenty-four years ago? It wouldn’t have been widely used even if they had. Certainly not in Whitehorse.
Jolene continued to read, halting on the next paragraph.
The woman was found upstairs in her bed. She had been stabbed numerous times.
Had her lover found her? Or—
Sheriff’s deputies are searching for the woman’s missing young daughter.
Missing?