Chapter 4
836 Words
Chapter Four
“You told me she was the next best thing to Monty Roberts in this part of the panhandle. That she’s got a gentle touch and can straighten out Storm, find out what the horse’s problem is, but the only thing I’m seeing is an uptight broad with a pole shoved too far up her ass. She hasn’t changed one bit from school,” Joe said as he slammed his fist on the pressboard counter at the feed store.
Stan Jerow and his wife, Hazel, were the hub of Post Falls. Well into their seventies, they knew everything about everyone. Stan had been close friends with Carl Spick, Margaret’s crotchety old grandfather. He frowned from behind his bifocals. “Now, I think you’re misreading things a bit there. She’s a hard-nose, but Margaret’s got a heart of gold.”
“Yeah, gold, my ass. More like gold-digger,” Joe barked. “I’ve got a mind to go back over there and pick Storm up. Last thing I need is him hurting her. She’d be coming after me next, suing me for everything.”
“You know Margaret’s not like that,” Stan said. “She’s a good girl. Had a hard time, you know, growing up. Just give her a chance.” He called out to the back room, “Hazel, Joe’s here about the Gordon girl!”
Hazel Jerow was the other half of the husband–wife team that ran the feed store, and she could talk anyone’s ear off for an hour, catching up on all the community gossip. She always had big curls from the rollers that she was sure to set in her thin gray hair every night.
“Now, Joe, don’t you go fretting about Margaret,” Hazel said, tapping his arm with her bony, wrinkled hand. “She’s a tough girl. I’ve seen her take her own mama down a peg or two, and that woman has ice water flowing through her veins. If you’d seen her with Angel, what she got her to do, why, that horse follows her around like a puppy dog now.” She patted his hand this time. “Remember, Stan? Every time we go out there, she’s with that horse, talking away to it. With the way that horse responds to her, well, let’s say she’s got the touch.”
“Touch, my ass,” Joe scoffed. “All I’ve seen is a woman who annoys the hell out of me, and that’s when she’s not tripping all over herself to run the other way.”
Stan and Hazel exchanged a glance. “Hmm,” Stan said, and Hazel clucked her tongue. Then they both smiled in the way people do when they know something you don’t.
“What?” Joe asked, stifling the urge to slam his fist on the counter.
They exchanged a look again, and it was Hazel who spoke. “Well, you make the girl nervous, always have, and she’s having a rough time after what happened to that little boy.”
“What little boy? What are you talking about?” Joe asked again.
“The reason she’s home, some boy she was operating on. All I know is what she told me. She made a mistake on a simple surgery, a simple tumor, she said, and something went wrong. The kid couldn’t talk or recognize his parents. She’d left him brain damaged,” Hazel whispered loudly.
Joe had known Margaret was some highfalutin’ surgeon, but he didn’t know why she was back in Post Falls. “I just thought she was back here, getting the place ready to sell,” he said.
Joe remembered when old Carl Spick had died alone. He had gotten a frantic call from Stan Jerow about how Hazel had found the crotchety old guy’s decomposing body. He’d driven as if the hounds of hell were on his heels down to the Spick house, beating the emergency services, and he’d stood in the background and listened when Hazel called Margaret and told her the news. He’d even rode out on his horse when Stan Jerow asked him to and found the one hundred or so cows Carl owned. Although they were fine, with plenty of pasture to graze and a large pond to keep them watered, he rounded them up and brought them in so Stan could look after them until something else could be figured out.
He worried about Margaret and had even come to pay his respects, offering his help. But the day of the funeral, Margaret’s high-class corporate mother had shown up at the farm in a chauffeured limousine, stirring up all kinds of s**t, and he’d overheard them arguing about selling the place and money and who got what. Well, he’d walked the other way. He never thought Margaret would be a money-grubbing high-society snob like her mother. Joe couldn’t believe it.
“Sell? Hell, no,” Stan said, almost choking, and Hazel stared at Joe as if he had a screw loose. “She’d never sell the Spick place. She promised her grandfather. My God, Carl and Mary and their three young ’uns are buried there. That just wouldn’t be right.”
“Well, then, why is she still here?”
They stared at each other again, and Stan cleared his throat. “She was fired,” he said.
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