Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [44]
He looked up at me, his face intent. “Really? What about?”
“Same old thing. Private property rights and the common good. And I guess there’s some trouble between him and Roy. I think they’re both going to try and turn this festival into a political battleground, but they’ll have to go through me to do it. I’ll toss both their butts out without thinking twice.”
Gabe leaned back in his chair, his mustache twitching in amusement. “I have no doubt about that. Should I beef up security Friday night?”
“Nah, I can handle it. They won’t backtalk me too much. Everyone knows I have high connections in local law enforcement.”
“Not to mention a very protective husband.”
“Now, an update from the home front.” I spent the next twenty minutes telling him about my lunch with Rita. By the end of my story, I actually had him smiling.
Maggie knocked and opened the door. “All done, kids.”
I signed the statement, and Gabe walked me out to the parking lot. “We’ll talk more about your storytellers tonight,” he said. “Just don’t go asking them any questions, okay? That’s my job.”
I made a cross over my heart and held up three fingers.
“I know for a fact you were never a Girl Scout,” he said. He leaned against his dad’s truck and stroked the fender. “How’s it running?”
“Fine. And don’t worry.” I poked him in the chest. “I’m taking very good care of it. Are you going to make it home for dinner?”
His eyes lit up. “Are you cooking again?”
“No, but there will be a home-cooked meal waiting for you.”
“Your cousin Rita?” he asked dubiously.
I laughed out loud. “That was a joke, wasn’t it? Actually your son is cooking us dinner. I think he’s trying to say he’s sorry. Think you can make it home by six o’clock?”
He turned and inspected an imaginary spot on the truck’s fender. “Depends on what’s happening with the Cooper case.”
I didn’t press it, though I was itching to. “Well, don’t work too hard.” I stood on tiptoe and kissed him lightly. He pulled me close in a tight hug, then turned back toward the station. After a few steps, he stopped and turned around. The wind softly ruffled the top of his black hair. In his gray Brooks Brothers suit he appeared the consummate professional, but I saw through it to a lanky, pain-racked sixteen-year-old boy whose father died before he could teach his son all he needed to know about being a father.
“Be careful,” he said, his face still. “I mean it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said solemnly, giving him a small salute, then mouthed the words I love you.
“Yo tambien, querida.”
A short while later I felt a surge of anticipation when I turned right at the redwood Methodist church and drove down the gravel driveway to Grace’s stables. Less than fifteen minutes away from both my house and the museum on a back road that eventually led to Montana de Oro State Park and Morro Bay, it had, over the last five or six months, become my semisecret place of retreat. Though I tried to make it out to the Ramsey Ranch at least once a week, I missed the satisfying routine of caring for animals on a daily basis, working in a garden, and living far enough away from civilization that when you sat on your front porch at night, the screeching you heard came from an owl and not your teenage neighbor’s tires taking a fast corner.
The road forked at the end, one gravel road leading to her house and the other to the stables. The house was a square, neat two-story with white trim, gray shingles, and an old chimney. Across the front was a white picket fence laced with pink and yellow tea roses, and to the left grew a hundred-year-old oak tree under which sat a wrought-iron patio set. Pockets, her gray tabby cat, sat in the middle of the glass-topped table and licked one white paw.
I drove directly to the stables, knowing that was where Grace would likely be this time of day. Two large arenas flanked a wooden breezeway barn that housed approximately thirty horses. Grace’s boarding and training operation was small but exclusive, and as a rancher