“Mamaaa!”

Isabelle Rondeau’s heart streaked up her throat. A plastic bottle of dishwashing soap slipped from her hand and hit the kitchen floor with a thud.

She tore from the kitchen, out the back door. Stumbling off the stoop, she sprinted across the yard and through the wooden gate that led to the driveway.

Her ten-year-old daughter Ava ran toward her from the pasture left wet by last night’s storm. “Mama! Mama! Something happened to Jack!”

Jack, their four-year-old border collie. Isabelle thought he was penned in the backyard. She caught her daughter in her arms. Heart pounding, she dropped to her knees on the wet grass and grabbed the girl’s narrow shoulders. She looked her up and down, yanked open her puffy nylon coat and searched for injury, but saw nothing wrong.

“He ran off...next door and--” The child began to wail.

“Ava, Ava, don’t cry. You’re all right.” Isabelle rushed her hands over her daughter’s long russet braid. “Show me,” she said in as calm a voice as she could manage.

“Over there.” The small voice hitched as she pointed toward the hillside some three hundred feet away, on the other side of two barbed wire fences.

Isabelle strained to see through the gray veil of morning fog. A tiny dim image of black and white stood out against winter’s beige grass. A sick feeling grew in her stomach. Burning tears rushed to her eyes. She pulled Ava’s thin body close and enclosed her in an embrace. “Shh-shh. Mama’s here.”

Instinct urged her to race to their fallen pet’s side, but the same instinct told her it was too late and Ava needed her presence more than the dog did.

Swallowing hard, she shot a look past her daughter’s shoulder, her eyes panning the fenced fifty-acre pasture that lay between her house and the county road. Two of her three most valuable possessions grazed down by the road. Cutting horses. A six-year-old sorrel mare .named Trixie and a ten-year-old blood bay named Polly. Her gaze zoomed over to the smaller side pasture that held her stallion. All the horses appeared to be fine. One sliver of anxiety quelled.

She swung her focus back to the black and white spot, then on up the hill to a massive log house that looked as if it had been hewn from the vast mountainside against which it stood. A lazy trail of smoke drifted from a wide rock chimney.

Tears welled again. To compound her anguish, the cold fog turned into a heavy mist and stabbed her face with prickles of chill. Her body began to quake from the cold.

With one last glance at the black and white spot, she put her arm around Ava and walked her toward the old house where they had taken up residence, the house of her own miserable childhood.

Ava tried to look back, but Isabelle held her shoulders firmly and steered her straight ahead. “But--but, Mama--”

“Shhh. Let’s go inside.”

She guided Ava through the gate in the hogwire fence that enclosed their large backyard, through the screened-in porch with its painted plywood floor, to the long mudroom where heavy coats hung on iron hooks made of used horseshoes. A row of assorted boots lined up beneath them. Still shaking, Isabelle stopped and stripped off her daughter’s rubber boots. “Honey, your socks are soaking.”

“Is Jack gonna be okay, Mama?”

Isabelle peeled off Ava’s wet socks and hung them on the side of the deep fiberglass laundry sink. “Go stand in front of the fire. I’ll be there soon as I take off my boots.”

Ava continued to weep as she left for the living room. Isabelle tugged off her own boots and followed.

A low fire burned in the brick fireplace. The gloom of a cold, foggy day forced itself through a pair of curtainless two-over-two windows, but the fire and rustic furnishings made the room feel cozy. She knelt in front of Ava as she worked the wet coat off her daughter’s spindly arms. Ava sobbed and shivered.

“We have to get you warm,” Isabelle said.

She grabbed a thick knitted afghan from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her, then urged her to a seat in front of the fireplace. Isabelle sat back on her heels and rubbed the slender bare feet between her hands. “Your feet are ice-cold.” Her own shearling-lined slippers sat on the hearth and she grabbed them up and slid them onto Ava’s feet.

“He isn’t going to be okay, is he?” Ava’s voice began to hitch again.

The ten-year-old was too wise to be fooled by an unrealistic white lie and the dog meant too much to raise false hope. Isabelle hugged her close. “I don’t think so, but I’ll have to go see.”

“Go now, Mama. Go now.”

Isabelle’s heart kept up a rapid tattoo. Anger seethed within her, but

she held it in check and pushed back a tendril straying from the braid that hung down Ava’s back. “First, we need to put a log on the fire. Want to help me?”

Ava’s sobs abated to weeping and sniffling. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “No.”

“Okay. You get warm. It’ll only take me a minute.”

By the time Isabelle stoked the embers to a roaring blaze, Ava had ceased crying and was staring into the orange flames. “I hate it here,” she said. “I don’t know why we had to come.”

Oh, Ava, please don’t hate it.

They had been in Callister three weeks and Isabelle was uneasy enough about the move without Ava hating it. “This is where our family is, sweetie, and family’s important.” She removed Ava’s wire-rimmed glasses and wiped them clean on the tail of her flannel shirt. “While you get warm, I’ll go next door and see what happened.”

“I want to go, too.”

“No, sweetheart. You need to stay where it’s dry and warm.”

She set the glasses back on Ava’s nose. The lenses magnified her dark brown eyes to where they looked huge and owl-like. “You watch the fire.”

Her daughter didn’t agree or disagree. She only stared with accusing eyes. But she was calmer now. Being given a task, a responsibility, had always settled her. Too old for her ten years. The thought sent a stab of guilt all the way through Isabelle’s heart. “Please, Ava. I need you to stay right here until I get back.”

Ava stared at her, her eyes red, her rosebud mouth turned down at the corners.

Isabelle rose and walked to the mudroom, keeping her steps light, careful not to bring more tension to the brittle moment. She picked a clean dry shirt from the laundry line that stretched wall-to-wall above the antiquated washing machine, pushed her feet into rubber Sorels and yanked her heavy coat off its hook. Tears still hovered near the surface. She stamped toward her pickup, shoving her arms into the coat sleeves and zipping up as she went.

The Sierra fired on demand and she drove down the long driveway, through potholes and puddles, sending muddy water flying. At the county road, she made a sharp right turn, drove a few hundred feet and made another, then sped up the smooth gravel road that went to the log house of the neighbor who had never been a friend, Art Karadimos.

On the left, just below Art’s house, Jack lay uphill from a huddled band of grimy sheep, their fleece turned gray by the wet conditions. She halted the Sierra and sprang out, climbed through the strands of a barbed wire fence and dashed to the border collie that had been with her and Ava since puppyhood.

She dropped to her knees and ran her hand over his hair, now wet and dark stained. She had no trouble spotting where a bullet had pierced his small chest. Art had always been a crack shot. A sob burst from her throat. “Dammit, Jack. Why didn’t you stay home?”

Wiping her tears with her sleeve, she tried to think. Jack couldn’t be left here in the sodden pasture, but how could she take him home, knowing Ava would see him shot and bloody? Even now, her grief-stricken daughter would be watching out the window.

On a hard swallow, Isabelle lifted the dog’s limp body and carried it to the Sierra’s bed. “Friggin’ sheep,” she mumbled, slamming the tailgate shut. She climbed behind the wheel and plowed up the road toward the log house.

Nearing the front deck, she spotted the owner standing there, his shoulder leaned against a thick log porch support, his face a scowl behind a drooping mustache. Eighteen years ago she thought he looked grizzled and withered. He still did. Apparently age hadn’t changed his personality. Her dead dog was testimony to that much.

She lurched to a stop, leaped out and stomped to the edge of the deck that struck her at chin-level. “That’s my daughter’s dog you shot!”

He glared down at her and threw a fist in the air. “I warned you yesterday. I won’t have him running my sheep.”

“You didn’t have to shoot him. You could have called me.”

He huffed, turned his back, walked into the house and slammed the door.

“You’re a mean bastard, Art Karadimos,” she shouted at his front door. “You always have been. You were mean to my mom and dad. You were mean to me and my brother.”

Silence.

She picked up a baseball-sized rock and hurled it with all her strength against the side of the house. It clunked against the thick log wall and bounced off. “I’m back, damn you! I’m gonna live here and there’s nothing you can do about it! I’m gonna call the sheriff! You can’t just shoot somebody’s dog!”

Stamping back to the Sierra, she dug in her coat pocket for her cell phone and came up empty-handed. She had left the phone on the kitchen counter back at the house. “Shit!”

She roared back down the long driveway to the sagging lodgepole entrance to her own place and stopped to collect herself. She had to get a grip. She was all Ava had. A daughter shouldn’t see her mother fall apart.

“Calm down, Isabelle,” she muttered and eased up the driveway.

Sheriff John Thomas Bradshaw, Jr. listened to a breathless female voice on the phone, pretty sure the woman was crying.

“... shot ... my little girl’s dog. ... He ... ”

“Where are you, ma’am, and who shot him?”

“I’m at ... home. ... in my barn. My neighbor ... ”

John groaned mentally. In the three months he had been sheriff of Callister County, Idaho, he hadn’t been called on to investigate much and he couldn’t recall from the Idaho State Police’s two weeks of sheriff’s school he had attended in Boise if dog shooting incidents had been addressed. “Tell me who you are and where you live, ma’am.”

When he heard her name, his mental groan grew louder. Izzy Rondeau. He remembered her from high school. Pretty, sweet-natured, sort of quiet. Had a long mop of curly red hair that flew wild and free as a windstorm. In school, she had been labeled Frizzy Izzy, among other teenage sobriquets. Hearing her name surprised him. She had left town before he graduated and he hadn’t heard of her since.

She was calling from her folks’ house, so the neighbor would be Art Karadimos, a gnarly geezer who raised sheep and damn sure had it in him to shoot her dog. Or even her, with the right provocation. He was one of John’s dad’s good friends.

“Just stay where you are. I’ll be out there.” John hung up and got to his feet. He grabbed his battered Stetson off the top of the nearest filing cabinet behind his desk and his down coat off the oak coat tree in the corner.

In the reception area outside his office sat Callister County’s one deputy, Rooster Gilly, and Dana Mason, the department’s receptionist, clerk, secretary and dispatcher. Setting on his hat, John stopped at Rooster’s desk. “When did Izzy Rondeau come back?”

Rooster glanced up from a Solitaire game on his computer screen, his face set in its usual dolorous expression. The deputy’s face made John think of a basset hound. “Maybe three weeks now,” Rooster said. “Why?”

After several months associating with Rooster, John had ceased questioning the deputy’s knowledge of Callister County and its population. The older native knew all thirty-five hundred citizens and somehow knew the county’s every happening, no matter how trivial. He had been the deputy sheriff for over ten years. Being a little puny in the thinking department, it was the best job he had ever had. He was loyal and steady.

John shrugged into his coat. “Art ‘Dimos shot her dog.”

“Ooohh, shit. You going out there?”

“Have to.”

“Billy ain’t with her,” Dana put in, without looking away from her computer screen. Her hands flew over the keyboard keys. She wasn’t playing Solitaire. Having done a hitch in the army where she was some kind of clerk, she maintained the record-keeping end of the sheriff’s office with ruthless efficiency. “Izzy’s cousin said he ran off with another woman.”

No big surprise there. Billy Bledsoe had always been a prick, even as a kid. Izzy and he had left Callister together. “The hell. I’ll be in the Blazer if you need me.”

John clumped up the steep wooden stairs leading out of the courthouse basement that housed the sheriff’s office and jail. Outside, he drew into his lungs a big helping of chilled air, thick with moisture. Spring had to be just around the corner.

The sheriff’s department’s aged Blazer with its encircled gold star logo on the front door waited for him like a faithful, if broken-down, steed. He thought again about asking the county commissioners for a new rig. Travel on the mostly unpaved county roads wore out a vehicle in a hurry.

He scooted behind the wheel, looking around as he plugged the key into the ignition. Through the silver mist, he could see the entire town strung along two sides of the highway that passed through. Except for automobiles and the paved highway, John suspected the town didn’t look much different from when it began in 1840, when a Bradshaw had been one of the founding fathers. John’s roots ran deep.

Things looked quiet this morning. Still, he could almost feel the town’s pulse elevating to a steady drum as the weekenders anticipated the evening. Typical for a Saturday.

The radio, which he kept tuned to a country-western station, came on when he switched on the iginition, John shifted gears and nosed east as George Strait crooned “Amarillo by Morning.” The lyrics told a story of a rodeo cowboy, broke and down-on-his-luck. John had heard the song many times, but it still had special meaning to him, for he himself was a broke, down-in-his-luck rodeo cowboy.

The Karadimos and Rondeau places were about fifteen miles out of town. Because they were the only two dwellings at the end of Stony Creek Road, Callister County’s four-man maintenance crew kept the gravel passage in only fair shape. The Blazer furrowed through mud ruts and rattled over wet potholes, making poor time and giving John’s mind an opportunity to dwell on Izzy.

In school they had been in 4-H together; both had raised steers. A couple of years older than he, she’d had a woman’s body when a lot of the girls his age looked more like boys than girls. He spent his whole sophomore year at Callister High School sporting a hard-on, watching her heart-shaped butt twitch up and down the hallways in tight jeans. And dreading the day she would graduate and take that vision away from him.

He invited her to a rodeo once to watch him rope, but his being the only Callister High School kid ever to be a steer roping champion at the national level hadn’t impressed her. She’d had eyes only for Billy, who wasn’t a champion at anything.

John reached the weathered Rondeau gate, slowed just past the cattle guard and looked at two horses grazing on his right. Their images were blurry in the fog, but they looked like mares. Izzy had fooled with horses when they were teenagers, probably would have competed in rodeo if she’d had some support.

A white frame house of no particular style hunkered at the end of a half a mile of driveway. John couldn’t guess its age, but he was sure it was older than he. Its most obvious distinctive feature was wood siding badly in need of paint. A huge barn in need of more than paint and a couple of outbuildings with attached corrals loomed to the left and slightly back from the house. John ground his way uphill toward the complex.

Near the house a lone horse grazed in a separate pasture adjacent to a small barn on his left. Had to be a stallion. With springtime being peak breeding season, poor old studs got stuck out in a pasture all by themselves until needed for what they were most good for. Some people liked stallions, but he didn’t trust them. Most were unruly and unpredictable. All the horses John had owned had been geldings.

He pulled to a stop in tire tracks worn into the grass in front of the house. A woman zipped up in a bright blue parka stood at the front gate obviously waiting for him. Izzy. John recognized her, even with a hood covering her hair. One arm was wrapped around a little kid who seemed to be all coat and boots.

He scooted out of the Blazer and walked over. Unable to tell if she recognized him, he lifted his hat, offered his right hand and introduced himself.

“Oh, yeah, ” she said, shaking hands and looking up at him with eyes dark as coffee. Even when they were kids, John had wondered what deep secrets those midnight eyes hid. There had always been a lot of talk about the Rondeaus. “I recall, sort of,” she said. “You were in Paul’s class in school. Well, that is, when Paul was in school.”

Paul Rondeau. Izzy’s bad-ass little brother. He had been in trouble from the first grade forward and not much in that regard had changed. He had already tested the law’s authority once by arguing when John confiscated his truck keys and kept him from driving drunk. “That’s right. I was.”

“This is my daughter, Ava.”

The kid frowned up at him from behind glasses sheened with moisture. She had dark brown eyes, freckles and rosy cheeks, and full, ruby lips--just like her mother. She also had red, swollen eyes. Hadn’t Izzy said the dog was her little girl’s?

“Ava.” He touched his hat to her, but she didn’t move a muscle or change her sour expression.

“I didn’t know you were the sheriff,” Izzy said. “Last I heard, you were rodeoing.”

John chuckled. “I quit. Slim pickings if you don’t hit the good money.”

What he didn’t say was when he had reached the brink of the good money, his life had caved in and he had lost his concentration. “I’m filling out Jim Higgins’ term. You probably heard, he went to jail. The county commissioners appointed me. Let’s see, you left town, what, around fifteen or sixteen years ago? With Billy Bledsoe, as I remember.”

“Eighteen,” she said curtly.

John waited for more, to add to the information Dana had volunteered, but all that came was an awkward pause. “Okay,” he said, finally, “where’s your dog?”

She tilted her head toward a fairly new, mud-spattered GMC truck parked beside the barn.

“Let’s have a look.”

“Go in the house, Ava,” she told the girl.

A defiant little chin thrust forward.

He dug a stick of chewing gum from his shirt pocket. “Tell you what, Ava--”

“You can’t bribe me with gum,” the little girl said, not changing her expression or removing her hands from her pockets.

“Ava, go,” Izzy ordered, her tone firmer.

The kid stomped into the house and slammed the door. John followed Izzy toward the pickup, glancing back at the door to see if the glass pane fell out. “How old is she?”

“Ten. Please try to overlook her rudeness. She’s headstrong. And mature for her age....She’s upset.”

“Yeah, I guess she would be.” John pondered if his ten-year-old son knew what a bribe was.

At the pickup, Izzy opened the tailgate where a pretty, but very dead, little border collie lay on the truck bed. It had probably been shot with a .22, the varmint gun of choice. The sight hurt John’s heart. He loved animals and he especially loved working dogs. Growing up on a ranch, two or three had always been present. Anger leaped into him. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I was in the house.”

A little flutter danced through John’s stomach. Art was a grouchy old codger, but surely he had more sense than to fire a gun onto a neighbor’s property. “Where was he when he got shot?”

She pushed her hands into her coat pockets and stared at the ground, pausing a few seconds before she answered. “Over there on the hillside, just below Art’s house.”

John threw a glance at the grazing herd of a hundred-or-so sheep. Uh-oh. It didn’t take a genius to see what happened. “Tell you what. I’ll go up and have a talk with him. See if we can get to the bottom of this.”

“What good’s that going to do? I want the sonofabitch arrested.”

So much for the quiet, sweet natured girl from high school. “Ma’am, er, Izzy--”

Those warm brown eyes gave him a glare cold enough to freeze ice cubes. “No one’s called me Izzy in years. The name I use is Isabelle.”

John hesitated a few seconds, unable to interpret the vibes coming off her in waves. One of the many things he remembered about her as a teenager was she had been a puzzle. It appeared that much hadn’t changed. He ducked her piercing eyes and shook his head. “Look, just hang on here ‘til I get back, okay?”

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