It was a cow, but it had a “wrong” look to it. Cows spent a lot of their lives lying down, but not stretched out on their sides as this one was, with her legs straight out and her head pressed sideways against the ground.
It lay as no living cow ever would.
She must have simply keeled over and died there on the spot, Annabelle thought at first. Death had to happen to all of God’s creatures eventually, and not every one of High Rock Ranch’s livestock made it to the slaughterhouse. A few went out the old-fashioned way, as this big old girl appeared, at first, to have done.
A shudder went through the big horse.
Annabelle slid off him again and walked toward the prone cow.
Dallas stepped backward. Annabelle turned to him and said, “Stay there.”
Not that she blamed him for wanting to move. The smell was terrible in the heat, because the cow had emptied its bowels and bladder, and there was drying blood…
“Blood?” Annabelle felt a touch of dread for the cow’s sake.
This was a pasture of pregnant cows that had just been weaned from their latest calves. Had this one miscarried and bled to death?
Why else would there be-
A gush of blood was pooled all around the fallen cow, as if every drop in her had poured out. The ground beneath her was so dry and hard that very little of the blood had soaked in; it remained a viscous, jellylike mass rapidly turning crusty and attracting flies, which also buzzed around the cow’s orifices.
“Oh, no,” Annabelle murmured when she got close enough to see more.
The blood had not come from the rear of the animal, as it would in a miscarriage, but from the front. It had all poured out of the head, and from a smiling gash across her throat. Coyotes were the only predators, and she knew they didn’t normally go after cattle this size. Even the calves were big for coyote prey. Maybe the drought was altering the natural order of things.
Or maybe the cow died first and then the coyote-
But why wasn’t any of the carcass torn away or consumed?
There weren’t any bulls here; what would scare away a coyote?
None of it was making sense to Annabelle as she struggled to fit what she was seeing with what she knew of life and death on the ranch. Like all the cows in this pasture, this one had been pregnant, which meant an unborn calf was now dead inside of her, so this was a loss to the ranch of two, not just one valuable life, as these things were measured in money.
And then she realized with a shock which cow this was.
It was the cow that had caused all the ruckus yesterday, the old breeder that Billy Crosby had kicked in his rage.
Annabelle had directed Dallas to this pasture expressly to check up on this particular animal, to make sure that Billy hadn’t done any terrible damage to her eye, and that they didn’t need to call out the vet to treat her. She didn’t know all the cattle by sight, not by any means-the ranch was much too big for that-but she knew some of the ones who’d been around a long time, especially the ones she affectionately thought of as “good old girls” and “good mamas.” Just like humans, or dogs, or cats, some cattle were “pretty” or “cute” or “handsome,” and some were homely ol’ critters. This one had been one of those, with a long bony face, a sway back, and knobby knees that only its own offspring could love.
“I’m sorry, old dear,” she murmured to it even as she held her breath to keep from breathing in the foul odors of its passing.
Speaking of its offspring, where was its “weaned” calf?
Annabelle looked around, but it was impossible to tell which of all the calves might be motherless at the moment, and they were too spread out for her to count. It had probably been frightened, then spent some time trying to nudge its mother to her feet, or to nurse from her, and then wandered off to graze. This was a hard way to get weaned, Annabelle thought sympathetically, but maybe-for the cow, herself-this was better, more merciful in its way, than going to the slaughterhouse, which was the fate that awaited all the cows past their breeding days.
Annabelle would have liked to place a hand on the cow, to pat its curly rough red hair and feel if its body was cool or if the death had happened recently enough for the carcass still to be warm. But she didn’t want to step into the blood, and so she didn’t get any closer.
Instead, she pulled herself back onto Dallas without the aid of any bucket or stump and rode home to give her husband the bad news.
UNLIKE HIS WIFE, Hugh Senior didn’t hesitate to walk into the blood, or to touch the brutal wound, which was how he came to the conclusion that no coyote had killed her.
“Annabelle,” he said, looking up at her, “somebody’s cut her throat.”
“Oh, Hugh! Oh, no! Are you sure?”
He didn’t even bother to answer, and so she knew it must be obvious. What he did say was, “And we know just who would have done that to this particular cow, don’t we?”
Tears came to Annabelle’s eyes and she felt pity.
Her pity wasn’t only for the poor cow, but also for Billy Crosby, and she thought, Oh, Billy, what have you done?
She thought of the times she’d sat down with the boy and tried to talk to him about high school diplomas and jobs and being a husband and a father. She felt sickened by the blood, and the smell, and sickened for him. Her stomach heaved and she bent over the dirt and grass, though nothing came up. It was then that she noticed the cause of the burnt vegetation smell she had noticed earlier.
“Hugh!” she called, holding her hand over her mouth. She took her hand down and pointed. “He started a fire here.”
Hugh stalked over and then walked around, examining the ground and coming to an analysis: “He tried to set a fire to burn her body… which means he didn’t care if he burned the whole ranch down, and all the animals and us with it.” He stood up straight, and was framed in front of the distant, dramatic clouds like a photograph of a rancher in his element. “I wonder why his fire didn’t catch.”
“Because her blood put it out before it could, that’s why.”
Annabelle’s pity turned to rage with these new facts.
“This is a horrible thing to do, horrible! How dare he, Hugh, how dare he?”
“Because that’s the kind of person Billy is, Annabelle. I’m sorry I didn’t figure that out sooner.”
A FEW MINUTES LATER, on their ride home, her anger weakened.
“Hugh, maybe it wasn’t Billy.” She offered up her one last benefit of the doubt to him. “It could have been anybody. Some crazy person driving by. A trespasser, an illegal hunter.”
Her husband threw her a disbelieving look.
“And this stranger just happens to find that pasture and kill that particular cow out of all of our cattle. You can’t be serious, Annabelle. You know as well as I do it was Billy. This has Billy’s fingerprints all over it, and I mean that literally. I’ll bet you that boy’s so stupid he’s left a trail of evidence.”
“What will happen to him? What about his family?”
“His family is better off without a man like him.”
She nodded, feeling on the verge of tears for their sakes.
“We’d all be better off without Billy Crosby,” Hugh said, and Annabelle recognized his tone. It was the one he used when he came to a hard and irrevocable decision.
“People will say we never should have tried to help him.”
“Let them say it,” Hugh snapped. “Maybe we stopped worse from happening.”
“Maybe we did.” Annabelle felt a little comforted by that possibility, because who knew what Billy might have become, even before now, if they hadn’t stepped in to try to push him along a better path. Yes, they had failed this time with this one boy. But there had been success stories, like Hugh-Jay’s best friend Meryl Tapper, who had found love and inspiration among the Linders. Meryl was going to be a lawyer, and maybe marry their daughter, which could never have happened without their intervention in his troubled life. He wasn’t out setting fire to pastures, and none of the other boys they’d helped had done anything like this, either.
“This could have been worse,” she murmured, thinking of the burnt patch.
They were a few hours away from finding out what “worse” could mean.
