Whirlwind (The Champions 1)

Tess beckoned to Lexie. “Come on. We can talk over breakfast. You, too, Ruben, as soon as the bulls are unloaded. We’ve got a problem on our hands.”

Lexie fell into step beside her sister. “What’s wrong? Did you get some bad news?”

“Not news. Just bad. A few of those two-year-old bulls in the upper pasture got out through an open gate in the night. We rounded up four of them up by moonlight. But we lost one.”

At least no more family members were dead, as Lexie had feared. But the loss of an animal was disaster enough. “Which one?” Lexie asked.

“The red one,” Tess said. “The best one.”

Lexie groaned, remembering the young bull that had shown so much spunk and promise the first time he was bucked in the corral with a weighted dummy on his back.

“He stumbled over the edge of that big dry arroyo.” Tess’s voice was emotionless, as if she’d chosen not to feel. “It looked like he broke at least one front leg and went down. Then the coyotes moved in.”

“Oh, no . . .” Lexie shuddered, helpless to blot out the images that flooded her mind.

“At least the coyotes made enough noise to scare the other bulls. They stuck together and stayed away from the edge. Aaron heard the racket from his place and called me. I put the red bull out of its misery. Aaron and the boys helped me round up the rest.”

Glancing into the blinding blue sky, Lexie saw vultures flocking above the arroyo. Without heavy equipment, there’d be no way to remove the bull’s carcass or even to bury it in the arroyo’s rocky bottom, and the meat would be too far gone to butcher. There was nothing to do but leave it for the scavengers. What an awful waste of a promising animal.

“The bull’s gone. There’s nothing to be done about that,” Tess said. “But there’s got to be an accounting for how that gate was left open.”

“Could the bulls have pushed the gate and broken it?”

“It wasn’t broken. It was unlocked, and that gate opens inward. It had to be open far enough for the bulls to get out. Either it was left that way, or somebody opened it.”

“The boys?” Lexie spoke the first possibility that came to mind. The two teens were young, and boys would be boys. They could have been distracted enough to leave a gate open.

Tess shook her head. “It wasn’t them. They haven’t been near that pasture in the last couple of days. I’ve been here and had my eye on them the whole time.”

“Even at night?” The boys slept in the bunkhouse. Sneaking out would be easy enough. What if they’d wanted to practice riding the two-year-old bulls? Teenage boys were crazy enough to try anything.

Tess shook her head. “They were dead to the world when I woke them to help round up the bulls. And they were in tears when they saw what had happened to the red one. I can’t believe they had anything to do with opening that gate.”

So who would do such a thing? Lexie couldn’t answer that question. But she’d made a serious mistake, dismissing the note on the truck as a harmless prank. Maybe if she’d shared the warning and put the ranch on alert, last night’s tragedy wouldn’t have happened.

Right now, there was just one thing Lexie knew for certain. She needed to tell her ranch family everything she knew.

* * *

The ranch house had been designed and built after World War II by Lexie’s great-grandfather, Winthrop Ashford. Times had been prosperous then, with the post-war economy booming and cattle by the thousands grazing the desert landscape—eating grass and shitting money as Winthrop had been fond of saying. Winthrop, who’d married late in life, had spared no expense in designing a home for his pretty young bride. The house was built in the Spanish style, pale stucco with a tile roof and an inner patio with an adjoining wing of bedrooms. Massive beams crossed the ceiling, with Mexican tiles on the floors and counters and stained glass in the windows. A cavernous fireplace took up one wall of the living room—a fireplace that was little used due to the hot climate and shortage of firewood.

Sadly, an elegant house couldn’t make up for a life of isolation. After less than three years of marriage, Winthrop’s wife had fled with her cowboy lover, leaving the old man with their son, a boy named Andrew. Andrew had married and fathered one child—a beautiful daughter named Isabel, who’d become Bert Champion’s first wife and the mother of his children.

The bones of the old house were still beautiful, but the surfaces showed the ravages of time and benign neglect. The heavy dining room table where the family shared their meals was marred with a patina of nicks, burns, scratches, and stains. No one had bothered to replace the tablecloths that had worn out more than a generation ago. The dishes were chipped and mismatched. But the food was abundant, the company honest and caring. Wasn’t that what counted?

Lexie washed her hands at the sink before pulling out her chair and sitting down in her usual spot. Bert’s chair, at the head of the table, was empty. His absence was too keenly felt for anyone to sit in his place.

Tess sat across from Lexie. Next to her, their neighbor, Aaron Frye, who’d stuck around for breakfast, was already filling his plate with bacon, eggs, and potatoes.

“Now this is what I call a breakfast! An old loner like me doesn’t get this kind of treat very often.” He squirted ketchup onto his hash browns. A stocky man in late middle age, with thinning hair and a craggy face, sun-seared below the hat line, he’d lived a bachelor’s existence for as long as Lexie could remember. If he’d ever had a wife, she’d died or left. The lonely mountain valley was hard on women, with the possible exception of the Champion sisters who’d grown up here.

And Callie.

Bert’s second wife, now his widow, set a plate of fresh, hot biscuits on the table before slipping into the place closest to the kitchen. At fifty, she was still attractive. Her short, graying curls framed a face that was, like her ample figure, all womanly softness. This morning she was dressed in a fresh white blouse and denim skirt. Her earrings, turquoise studs framed in Navajo

silver, heightened the blue in her eyes.

Lexie had been a toddler when her mother died in a riding accident. Coming into the family six months later, Callie had embraced Bert’s four motherless children as her own. Lexie could barely remember her real mother, but Callie had been there, warm and wise and supportive through all her growing-up years. She’d never taken to ranch work, but she was a fine cook, and her cheerful, easygoing outlook had transformed the house into a welcoming home.