Page 21 of Killer on the Homestead
The entire group was made up of Duncan, his parents, Owen, and a handful of the ranch hands, including Terry. It would have just been Kirk Ranch people, but Rosalie was there.
With Audra and their cousin—Duncan couldn’t quite remember her name—but he mostly just saw Rosalie and the way the afternoon sun glinted off her red hair, and the way a little breeze teased the tendrils around her face.
And maybe, most of all, the way she held herself. A little stiff. A lot formal. Like there was something she was bracing herself against. Not a weight, exactly, but something akin to one.
When the funeral ended, and Audra and the cousin drifted over to a section of the cemetery where the nameYoungseemed to dominate, Rosalie didn’t follow. She stood a ways back, staring ahead at seemingly nothing without blinking.
It was then Duncan finally realized that she was likely bracing herself against grief. Because her dead were buried here.
But she didn’t go pay them any respects, and that struck Duncan as…sad. Twisted something in him, so he stepped away from his parents—who were thanking the minister for handling the small, brief ceremony—to approach Rosalie.
“Afternoon,” he offered in greeting, coming to stand next to her. He looked straight ahead too, trying to determine what she might be staring at.
“Audra thought it would do your mom some good if more than just Kirk Ranch came.”
“She’s right. It eased her heart some.”
Rosalie sighed, and Duncan thought he should understand that sigh, but he couldn’t quite reason it out. Or the almost wistful expression on Rosalie’s face.
“Any news on the investigative front?” he asked, even though he figured he knew the answer. He doubted she’d keep information from him. They’d told Detective Beckett about thecows, as Rosalie had advised, but since then, nothing had really come to light.
“Not much,” she said, and he could hear the frustration in her voice. “Anyone been back out to search the guns?”
Duncan shook his head. “Detective Beckett came out to talk to Terry yesterday, but I don’t know what they talked about. I assume he told Dad, but Dad… He doesn’t like to talk about it.” And Duncan couldn’t bring himself to press. “I told Beckett about the cows myself the day after I talked to you. He didn’t have much interest in a connection.”
Rosalie frowned a little at that, but she didn’t offer anything else.
“I don’t think anyone thinks we’re in any immediate danger. It seems the consensus is that whatever Hunter had been mixed up in back in North Dakota followed him here. And if it had anything to do with cows, it was primarily coincidental.”
“That would make the most sense, I suppose,” Rosalie said, sounding less than convinced. Which Duncan had to admit, eased some small portion of the worry on his shoulders.
He looked over at his father. Pale. And in a strange kind of daze neither Duncan nor his mother seemed to know how to get through. “But Dad is taking it personally. Someone being hurt on his land.”
Rosalie nodded slowly. “It’s a desecration of something holy.”
When Duncan stared at her, because that was exactly it and beautifully said, she shrugged in a jerking motion.
“To him,” she said somewhat defensively.
“To him,” Duncan agreed, surprised to find his throat a little tight. He understood that his parents lived in a tight-knit community. He tended to think of small-town life as one of gossip and a slow pace of running errands, but in the past few days, he’d been reminded of this.
It wasn’t just community—nosiness and pettiness existed here just as assuredly as they did everywhere—but it was people who understood why some virtual stranger who had no family to bring him home might mean something to his parents.
Because the land was holy, and someone had desecrated it.
“I’m going to stop by the sheriff’s department after this,” Rosalie said into the heavy silence. “Rattle some cages.” She offered him a pathetic attempt at a smile. “If there’s anything of note, I’ll let you know.”
She started to move, but Duncan moved with her. He didn’t know what he was going to do if he stayed here. He couldn’t keep standing still, trying to hold everything together with just one working arm. He needed to…do something.
“Let me come with you,” he said, on a whim, without thinking it through.
But when she looked at him with a kind of condescending refusal, the idea took root.
“Duncan,” she said, shaking her head. “No.”
He wasn’t taking no for an answer. “Why not?”
“Because I’m a licensed private investigator off to do my job and you’re…” She looked him up and down, no doubt weighing how mean she was going to be.
