She gave the swing a shove and watched it jerk and dance on its chains. To escape the darkness of her thoughts, she wandered down the stairs and around the side of the house. The sound of a forklift diverted her attention. She waved to Damon and Rudy, her newly hired ranch hands and unofficial tour guides to the inn’s guests, as they worked in the feed hold across the corral from the stable. Rudy took a few steps in her direction like he might try to talk to her, so she quickened her step. Most ranch hands she knew were strong, silent cowboy types, but Rudy could flap his lips as fast as both of Rachel’s sisters, which was saying something.

In an effort to be a kind boss, Rachel endured daily conversations with him, but she didn’t have it in her today to stand and nod while he rattled on about his singular passion—the weather. And, sweet Jesus, the man knew a lot about the weather. Not only in northeastern New Mexico, but on a global scale.

Before she realized where she was headed, she stood before the closed stable door. She slipped inside.

It was cooler in the stable than outside. Ventilation fans and swamp coolers whirred and rattled on the ceiling. Five horse heads poked over the doors of their stalls, clamoring for her attention. They stamped and shook their heads. As soon as she made eye contact with Growly Bear, he backed up with a huff and turned a circle, stamping anxiously.

Rachel approached him, her heart sinking. He’d been Lincoln’s best buddy and next-door stall neighbor for years. She stroked his neck. “I know, Growly.”

He whined quietly and pushed his nose into her neck.

She nuzzled his cheek as she continued her methodical strokes. “You don’t have to tell me. I know he’s gone.” Her gaze went to the empty stall.

Grief was nothing new to Rachel. She’d lost both her parents in the past two years. But the pointless loss of an innocent animal before its time hit her in an all-new way. Suddenly, nothing was more important than saying a final good-bye to Lincoln. She’d been too heartsick to ask Vaughn what was to be done with his body, but she suspected it was handled like any other livestock—cremated by Quay County Animal Control.

Rachel had never heard of a rancher holding a funeral for a dead horse, and she certainly wasn’t going to broadcast that she was doing it, but she and Growly Bear needed closure, and Lincoln deserved to be cried over.

“Okay, Growly. You and I are going riding.”

Saddling Growly offered its own challenges. The saddle blanket, halter, and reins were as easy as breathing to affix on the horse, but the saddle took three tries to hoist onto its back. The effort strained the skin around her wound, but despite the pain, she was too obstinate to seek help.

Once Growly was ready, she tucked a baggie of Fig Newtons in the saddlebag, along with a sky-blue ribbon from the accessory drawer Jenna had created for her horse, Disco. The plan was to stop by the west end pasture and gather dried wildflowers for a bouquet. Corny, maybe, but no one else would know.

She’d lost her favorite hat when she fell from Lincoln the day before, so she grabbed her back-up—a worn, soft cream felt Stetson with a braided leather band. She led Growly out, pausing at the door to reach above it and touch the smooth steel of the horseshoe mounted there, a gift from Kate Parrish’s father many years ago, that her father had nailed over the door with the promise it would bring her luck.

When she mounted Growly, a particularly sharp pain shot through her left arm. She ran her hand over the bandage and her fingers came back bloody. Dang it all, she’d probably ripped the scab open. Amy would strangle her tonight when she helped Rachel change the bandage and saw the damage. Oh, well. Nothing she could do to change that now.

She walked Growly out of the stable yard, her thoughts drifting to the day the horseshoe was given to her. The day she’d come to consider the most liberating day of her life.

She’d been ten years old.

Her memory began in the bakery section of John Justin’s Grocery Store on Main Street during one of her mom’s most intense bipolar meltdowns. Back then, Rachel had never heard of the word bipolar, though she lived in a house held hostage by the illness.

Rachel and her sisters’ reactions to their mom’s depression were as different as their personalities. Rachel’s anxiety was paralyzing. She clearly remembered, during Mom’s outbursts, not being able to breathe or make her legs work. Standing there—frozen, her eyes riveted to the scene—her body became a sponge, absorbing the pain of everyone around her, along with the fear. She took it all in and made it her own.

Amy, almost four years younger than Rachel, took Mom’s episodes as a personal affront. Maybe because she looked the most like Mom, or maybe because she’d been born with her heart on her sleeve, but for reasons Rachel didn’t understand—and probably Amy didn’t either—she’d exacerbate the situation, picking fights, goading Mom on. Having her own parallel meltdown.

Jenna, nine years Rachel’s junior, seemed oblivious, like she’d been born with skin too resilient for their volatile home life to penetrate. When Mom would start into an episode, she’d wander off to play. For the longest time, Rachel thought Jenna would be the one to emerge into adulthood undamaged. Then Jenna turned thirteen and she turned wild—partying, drinking, running off for days at a time until a deputy, Vaughn most always, dragged her home kicking and screaming.

Rachel couldn’t remember what Mom’s trigger had been the day of her meltdown at John Justin’s, or if there even was one, but she remembered Mom throwing loaves of bread at the store’s baker, shouting obscenities. Then six-year-old Amy started clearing loaves of bread off the shelves while screaming at the top of her lungs. Jenna, one at the time, popped Cheerios in her mouth from the stroller tray and watched.

In the midst of the anarchy, Rachel, paralyzed and fighting the churning pain of her tummy, felt her fear dissolve for the first time ever. The scene before her narrowed until it seemed as if she were watching it on a small television at the opposite end of a long hallway. Then her legs unfroze.

She took a step back. Then another. Exhilarated by her newfound freedom of movement, she turned her back on her mom and sisters. And she walked away. Stepping through the sliding glass doors of John Justin’s into the quiet, sunlit street was a feeling that would stay with her forever.

It was her moment of liberation.

Their farm was too far away for her to walk home, so she’d gone to the feed store. The Parrish family who owned it had always been kind to Rachel when she’d shopped there with her dad. They passed her sweets and told her jokes. That day, she walked into the feed store, and Mr. Parrish believed her lie that her mom had driven off and forgotten her, probably because everybody in Catcher Creek knew what Bethany Sorentino was like. Mr. Parrish gave her a peppermint and a horseshoe that had been laying on the counter, explaining that it would bring her luck. Then he drove her home, where, horseshoe in hand, she set off on foot over the fields and pastures until she was hopelessly lost.

Hours later, her father, on his horse, found her sitting against a boulder. He sat with her for a long time, and when she asked if she could start working the farm with him in the mornings and after school, he hugged her and told her, Of course you can, Jelly Bean.

She missed her dad so much. Not the part of him who gambled and schemed their bank accounts dry, but the man who’d taught her to be a farmer. The man who found her when she was lost. This was her second spring without him, and though the loss wasn’t nearly as acute as it had been a year earlier, her grief remained, tempered only by the anger and embarrassment she felt at how blind she’d been to his faults.

A mile into the ride, when she sensed Growly had warmed up enough to handle some speed, she nudged his flanks. They took off over the landscape, both woman and horse needing the exertion of a long, hard run to ease the burden of their grief.

* * *

From his vantage point at the top of the mesa, Vaughn looked at the gash in the dirt running along the twenty-foot drop of the mesa’s face. The path Wallace Meyer Jr. took on his way to the valley. Stratis was on the scene with him, and the two had worked all morning to reconstruct a timeline of events from the previous day.

They’d begun in the canyon and followed the path of footprints around the south side of the mesa, where the slope was gentle enough to drive a truck up or walk. The footprints turned to scuffs once they reached the top of the slope, the marks of someone scooting on their knees. The scuff marks ended next to the imprint of a truck tire where, it seemed, Rachel stood and fired at the men. On the ground, scattered near the footprints, were six .38 bullet casings.

Not a good find. Not at all.

Which was why Vaughn was standing on the edge of the mesa, watching a hawk circle in the distance while he overcame his urge to kick something.

His interview with Wallace Jr. yesterday had lasted hours and yielded nothing except a grudging admittance—a demonstration of cooperation, his lawyer proclaimed—of the identity of the fourth man at the scene, the suspect currently at large with Elias Baltierra. Shawn Henigin. Henigin had a history of petty thievery and drug charges from Tucumcari to Santa Fe, the most recent arrest being a year earlier for possession of a stolen car. The charge hadn’t stuck, as the car owner had a sudden change of heart and decided he’d allowed Henigin to borrow it.