BIG HORN: A Jenn Herrington Wyoming Mystery (The Jenn Herrington Wyoming Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  So that was why she was so late. Now he was sure the weaving wasn’t his imagination. “You didn’t text me.”

  “Time got away from me.” She made a cute frowny face. “We can have it tomorrow, though, right?”

  “We’re leaving for Wyoming in the morning. For Hank’s induction into the Hall of Fame. Remember?” He certainly did since he’d had to rebook their flights twice while they waited on her jury to come back. It was worth it, though. She’d always been close to her bull rider cousin, and the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo Hall of Fame was a really big deal.

  Her frown morphed into confusion and then recognition. “Crap. Right. Well, I’ll wrap it up good, and we’ll freeze it.” She walked barefoot into the kitchen and retrieved a storage container from a large drawer. “I do love your veggie lasagna. Was it low carb and gluten free, too?”

  He swallowed back the anger building inside him. Now wasn’t the time. He wanted to start their vacation without the lingering sour taste of a fight in their mouths. “Yes. But I’ll put it up. I have to eat first.”

  “Oh. Of course.” She floated past him toward their bedroom. “I need to shower and pack. Did you check us in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Arrange for the doorman to come for our luggage in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the concierge service to water our plants and bring in our mail and packages while we’re gone?”

  He ground his teeth. “Yes.”

  “Great.” From the other room, she raised her voice. “How was your day?”

  Before he could answer her, the shower came on. She wouldn’t hear him unless he raised his voice, and he didn’t feel like yelling. He felt like throwing the glass of wine across the room. Like stuffing the daisies in the trash compactor. Like putting his fist through the pantry door. But not like shouting for her attention.

  Instead, he drank his wine like a shot and refilled it. Drank it. Refilled it again. Drank it, then drained the rest of the bottle into his glass. Swallowing the last of the pricey vino, he looked around their perfect condo, where everything was expensively in its place, except for the two of them, most of the time.

  He couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  TWO

  Big Horn, Wyoming

  Jennifer snaked her hand under her husband’s arm and jammed the horn on the rental car. The blast was long, loud, and discordant, but it didn’t break up the traffic jam ahead of them—the traffic jam of massive bovines. She’d thought since they were booked in a lodge instead of crashing at her cousin’s remote ranch, they’d be staying in civilization. Had been sure of it when they’d passed a golf course community, but now . . . this.

  “Come on.” She mashed the horn again.

  There was zero reaction from the herd of beasts streaming down the mountain and blocking the dirt road. Tails swished at flies. Calves bawled. A cowboy whistled, then yelled “Yaw” and waved a coiled lasso at a cow that had taken a detour. Another animal slung its head and licked the inside of its nostrils with a long pink tongue.

  Jennifer kept going. “It smells like a flippin’ feed lot here. Are cattle drives still a thing? I feel like we’ve stumbled onto the pages of Lonesome Dove or something.” It might have been her favorite book of all time, but that didn’t mean Jennifer wanted it to come to life around her. She started to go for the horn a third time.

  Her husband blocked her, but gently. Aaron had learned to be extra careful with people because of his size. At six foot five, he doubled her body weight and then some. His size came in handy with his two passions: veterinary medicine and football, although his playing days had ended long ago. Back then, she would have added herself to his list of passions, too.

  “Honking won’t do any good,” he said.

  “We’re going to be late for Hank’s dinner.”

  They’d already missed the hall of fame ceremony in Cheyenne. She hoped there’d been a good turnout of supporters, since her aunt and uncle—his parents—hadn’t lived to see it. Her mother and Hank’s father were siblings, and their two families had always been close, visiting each other when she was small. Her family had quit coming to Wyoming around when she entered elementary school, though, and everyone had started meeting up for destination vacations or family reunions in Tennessee instead. She wasn’t sure why.

  Anyway, Jennifer had really wanted to be there for Hank and to represent her side of the family.

  Aaron lifted an eyebrow. Just one. She envied his ability to do that. It made him seem easy going. Seem, schmeem. He was easy going. A part of her believed that if she had his one-eyebrow trick in her repertoire, she would have seemed easy going, too. Which, truth be told, she wasn’t.

  “If we’re late, it won’t be because of these cows,” he said.

  The jibe hit its mark. They’d departed Houston a full thirty-six hours after their original flight. She flopped back into her seat. “The jury was still out. I couldn’t just leave.”

  “The jury is always out. Or the judge has called an emergency hearing. Or you have to prepare for a closing argument.” His voice was without rancor, until he added, “Like my patients don’t have emergencies. The difference is I turn call over to my partners, but there’s only one Jennifer Herrington, superstar Harris County assistant district attorney.”

  “It makes a difference, Aaron. If the jury had convened for questions with the judge, and I wasn’t there, it could have signaled my lack of faith in the case. It was touch and go after he excluded my Eurofins test results. A child murderer could have walked.” She’d gone way out on a fragile limb on the expensive Eurofins DNA test, which was the only test around that differentiated between identical twins’ DNA. It had proved her defendant was the murderer. But the test hadn’t yet been replicated by other labs or laid out in detail in any peer-reviewed journals, so the judge had ruled that she couldn’t present the test and results to the jury. It had been a blow and left the entire case resting on the testimony of a witness little better than a jailhouse snitch. Given the nature of the crime and after all the money she’d spent on the excluded Eurofins test, there was no way she would have walked out on that trial before the jury was back. No stinking way. Not to mention how emotionally wrapped up in it she’d been. Sleepless nights and ten pounds she hadn’t meant to lose told the tale. It had been her first school shooting. All of her homicide cases were heart wrenching, but this one had taken its toll.

  Aaron didn’t respond. She hadn’t expected him to. The stalemate over her work wasn’t a new one, and she knew he was mad she’d missed the dinner he’d made for her the night before, even though he was pretending he wasn’t. The truth was, she hadn’t expected him to go to all that trouble, or she wouldn’t have gone for drinks with Alayah. And after she’d Ubered home, she’d been so buzzed that the magnitude of his efforts hadn’t registered. She’d apologized that morning and still felt bad about it.

  A cowboy galloped his horse down the hill beside the herd, breaking her reverie. Jennifer threw open the car door and jumped out, stepping in the hem of her red pantsuit. She recovered, but then wobbled in her Louboutin heels on the uneven ground. Rocks. Hummocks of grass. Divots and cracks. And, ew, cow patties. She hopped to the side, narrowly avoiding a steaming pile.

  “Hey, there,” she shouted to the cowboy. “Excuse me. Sir?”

  The cowboy looked her way, then back at the cows. He shouted over their moos, which to her sounded a lot like moaning. My God, these animals sound like a phone sex call center. “Can I help you?”

  She picked her way over the rough ground to get closer to him, struggling to maintain her dignity.

  He threw a hand up. “Stay back, ma’am. These aren’t pasture pets. If one of the bulls makes a run for it, I won’t promise I can stop him before he gets to you, with you dressed like a matador and all.”

  Matador? What’s he talking about? This is brand-new Michael Kors. Which she’d purchased after the jury came back the afternoon before. But she hadn’
t thought about the bulls. She stopped and smoothed her jacket. “We need to get up to our lodge. Do you mind letting us through?”

  He tilted his head, then adjusted his hat. Down, up. “I wouldn’t mind, but the herd might.”

  “How long will this take then?”

  He scratched one shoulder. “Shouldn’t be much longer now. Once we get a fair number in, the rest follow pretty nice.”

  She made a strangled sound deep in her throat and lifted her hair off her neck. “I don’t understand why this is happening.”

  He frowned. “They have to come down some time now that summer’s over or they’ll starve up there, if they don’t freeze to death first.”

  Another cowboy hollered, “Craig, coming your way.”

  Craig touched the brim of his hat, and, without seeming to give the horse any signal Jennifer could discern, he and the animal wheeled away from her as one to intercept three cows who’d broken ranks.

  Aaron pulled the car up beside her. The slightly neon cobalt blue Ford Fusion that had seemed fine at the airport was looking out of place now. She settled back in it with a withering sigh. Suddenly, the sea of cows turned and flowed into the pasture. She watched through the window, her foot tapping on the floorboard. Craig the cowboy had been right. With the logjam cleared, the cows moved quickly, but it turned out there were a lot more of them than she’d counted on.

  Finally, ten minutes later, Aaron accelerated up the steep hill. Not a hill, really. More like the side of the Bighorn Mountains, just outside the tiny town of Big Horn, Wyoming. The encounter with Craig and the cows seemed a bit more charming in retrospect. She sent herself an email with a few snippets of description and dialog. The subject line was “Someday novel.”

  They approached a crooked wooden sign on their right that read THE BIG HORN LODGE in faded green paint. Was everything around there named big horn-something? A trend in naming conventions. Or maybe a rut? She wasn’t going to complain, though, since Aaron had made all the arrangements for their trip, letting her focus on her trial.

  “This is it.” Aaron bumped the car over the metal slats of a cattle guard.

  “It’s way out in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?”

  The road crested a rise, then wound down to a cabin and outbuildings nestled at the edge of a forest. Above them, a row of flatirons in black and gray towered up, up, up toward a cloudless blue sky. Jennifer could almost imagine the faces of long dead presidents etched into the stone.

  “Wow,” Aaron said. “Just, wow.” His square jaw hung open as he braked and leaned toward the windshield, admiring the mountains. She admired her husband. The man got better looking every year of his life, and he hadn’t started from a deficit. His blond curls pushed against the back of his collar. He needed a haircut. He always needed a haircut. He turned to face her. “Isn’t it amazing?”

  She agreed. “Like something out of a movie.” Dances with Wolves. Or True Grit.

  He eased off the brake. The car coasted down the road—driveway?—toward a majestic lodge. They parked in front. The area could have doubled as a used car lot. There was an old Suburban up on blocks, an incongruous Porsche Cayenne, and a worn-in Dodge Ram two-ton, all lined-up in a row beside them. A stand of aspens shaded the front yard with shimmering golden leaves. Up close, though, the structure looked a little tired. Made of rough-hewn logs, it stood three stories tall, with a deep porch and tall, rectangular windows. The varnish on the logs had dulled, and graying wood was showing through it. The aged skull of a ram hung over the entrance, the curve of its horns forming a three-quarter circle on each side. Green paint peeled from the door.

  Jennifer’s phone buzzed and then chimed. She hadn’t had a signal since their little regional jet had landed at the airport in Sheridan an hour before. Voice mail messages, texts, and emails all downloaded and announced themselves at once.

  Aaron turned off the engine. “Ready?” He popped the trunk and got out.

  The lure of technology tugged at her, but, after making sure none of the messages were from her twin brother Justin, her best friend Alayah, or her parents, she broke free of it. Her office knew to consider her unreachable through the weekend. She deserved a few hours away from the grind and could check her messages later. She slung her tiny purse and larger laptop bag over her shoulder. By the time she caught up with Aaron outside, he had hefted both of their suitcases onto the porch. She trotted up the creaky wooden steps, windmilling her arms to stay upright when she caught a heel between two boards. She jerked it out without breaking it. Aaron didn’t seem to notice. A piece of lined notebook paper taped to the glass of the storm door wafted up and down in the wind. BE WITH YOU IN A MOMENT.

  Jennifer rang the doorbell. After a minute with no answer, she heard voices outside. “Someone’s over there.” She pointed toward the side of the lodge.

  She and Aaron left their bags and followed their ears. On the side of the house, they found two men in a heated conversation. They looked like the before-and-after photos for an anti-drugs and alcohol public service announcement. One wore pressed khakis, wing tips, and a button-down shirt. The other, soiled jeans, suspenders, and a buttoned blue chambray shirt that, as Jennifer got closer, she saw read THE BIG HORN LODGE over the breast pocket. Both men looked to be in their early sixties and had white blond hair, but the conservative cut on the business-type was nothing like the Rod-Stewart-on-a-bender look of the one associated with the lodge. Their ice blue eyes differed, too. Piercing versus dulled.

  Rod Stewart crossed his arms. “Don’t make me call the sheriff, Hadley.”

  Hadley, the Gordon Gekko wannabe, sneered at him. “I haven’t done a thing.”

  “Right.”

  Gordon Gekko—Hadley?—pushed back his cuff, examining a shiny gold Rolex. “This isn’t over, George. Not by a long shot.”

  “It never is,” George-aka-Rod Stewart muttered. He looked up as if noticing Aaron and Jennifer for the first time. Louder, he said, “Sorry about that, folks.” Then, staring at Jennifer, he added, “Oh, my.”

  “What?” Jennifer said.

  “It’s just, well, your outfit is—”

  Hadley, “Loud,” at the same time that George said, “Terrifying.”

  Jennifer’s jaw dropped, and she gawked at them. Hadley nodded and walked away. Jennifer looked at her husband and mouthed what the . . . ?

  “May I help you?” George took a few careful steps in their direction.

  Aaron stuck out his big hand. “Aaron Herrington. My wife Jennifer and I,” he gestured to include her, “have a reservation for tonight.”

  “Ah, yes. You paid for three nights, and then couldn’t make the first two.”

  “That’s right.”

  The men shook. Jennifer offered her hand, but she dropped it when George didn’t turn her way.

  “I’m George Nichols. Come on.” He walked around them. Liquid sloshed in time with his steps. A glass pint protruded from the back pocket of his saggy, grease-stained jeans.

  Aaron did the eyebrow lift again. Longing coursed through Jennifer. She wanted to be in love again, to be loved again. By Aaron. They had been so good together once. Had been for a long time, and she wasn’t sure when they’d drifted apart, or why. The moment and the ache passed as quickly as they’d come, though, and she and Aaron traipsed behind George to the entrance. Aaron took one of their suitcases in each hand. She reclaimed her laptop bag, then glanced back into the parking area before going into the lodge. The Hadley fellow was watching them from beside the Cayenne. The scene between him and George had been off putting. Jennifer wondered who he was, why he was here, and when he was leaving. Soon, I hope.

  George flipped on lights and motioned them ahead. “Let me check your room. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared down a dark hall, like a bowling ball searching for a gutter.

  Jennifer paused to take measure of the place. The front room was spacious, with bulky furniture oriented around a cast iron stove. It had a throwback feel, circa 1970. Oranges, br
owns, golds. Stained wood finishes. Knubby fabrics. Gilt-framed pictures. A wide opening led into a kitchen with yellow Formica on every surface. Before Jennifer could get a closer look, though, the light overhead flickered and went out.

  She said, “It’s a little run down. I’m thinking The Shining.”

  Aaron cocked his head, a pleased expression on his face. “More Wyoming meets The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”

  “Maybe.”

  A shaggy, gray-muzzled St. Bernard struggled to its feet from a carpet with a jagged row of missing fringe around its edges. Jennifer thought the dog was coming to check them out. Instead, it lifted a shaky leg on the corner of the wall.

  “No,” she cried.

  Aaron groaned, then he laughed. “Poor old guy. Here, boy. Let me take you out.”

  The dog wagged its tail and tottered across the floor like it had been trading nips with George. Before he and Aaron could reach the door, there was a screech, and a calico cat leapt from its perch on a rolltop desk, attaching itself by its claws to Aaron’s chest. Aaron grunted—for him, a fairly dramatic expression of shock and pain—and grabbed the cat. In the brief and violent wrestling match that ensued, the cat scored a few major points, although ultimately Aaron wrenched it off and tossed it away from him. With a swish of its multi-colored tail, it jumped back onto the desk, where it licked its paws and studied the intruders as if imagining them stuck to a specimen board by long straight pins.

  Aaron let loose a string of curse words. If his mother were here, she would have come after her son’s mouth with a bar of soap.

  “That dog is an incontinent pony, and the cat is a gremlin.” Jennifer put a hand to her throat. “Your shirt. It’s shredded.”

  He pulled the gray University of Tennessee golf-style shirt away from himself and peeked down the front. “So is my chest.” He let go of the fabric and blood seeped through as the shirt settled against his skin.

  “I’ll find something to clean you up.” Jennifer hurried into the kitchen, looking for paper towels and soap. When George returned, she’d ask him for hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol, too. Aaron wasn’t a stranger to wounds inflicted by animals in his line of work, and she’d doctored him many times. Once, when he was in vet school, he’d even spent a few days in the hospital with cat scratch fever—which had earned him the nickname Ted Nugent from his classmates—so both of them knew personally how serious cat’s claws could be.