Hot on the Trail. Vicki Tharp
smile creased his face—the same smile he had when he’d first received his wings—and his throat grew too tight to speak.
“Dismissed, Lieutenant.”
He gave her a curt nod. As he reached the outer office, the breakfast in his belly soured. One month. Four weeks. Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours, give or take.
Considering how long it was taking him to heal, a month wasn’t long at all.
* * * *
Jenna stepped through the back door of her grandparents’ home, otherwise known as the “big house.” Her grandmother, Lottie, was in the kitchen, putting away the last of the breakfast dishes. Her grandmother cooked breakfast and dinner for the family, the ranch hands, and the soon-to-be participants in her Healing Horses veteran therapy program. Simple, hearty fare that never disappointed.
“Kurt hasn’t come by, has he?” Jenna asked.
Lottie stopped mid-swipe, with her towel on a wet plate. The front of her purple apron was damp and her gray curls flat from the kitchen heat. “Something wrong?”
Jenna ignored the prickle of apprehension at the base of her spine and pasted on a plastic smile. No need to worry her grandmother. “No. Dad and I must have gotten our signals mixed up. I thought Kurt was working with Alby and Santos this morning, but he never showed. He probably rode out early this morning with Dad and Mac to check the fences. I’ll catch up with him later.”
But if Kurt had gone with her stepmother, Mackenzie—Mac for short—and her father, then why was Kurt’s horse in the pasture?
She caught the screen door on the backswing, so it wouldn’t slam against the jamb, and headed back to the barn. She counted the animals in the pastures. All the horses were accounted for. No way had Kurt ridden out. The tingle in her spine clawed its way up one vertebra to the next. Dink sucked up against her leg as if sensing something wasn’t right.
Over in the round pen, Sidney, their resident horse trainer, worked a rank mustang that had a mean streak as dark as the horse’s ebony coat. From the ground, Sidney drove the horse forward. He bucked and kicked and almost jumped the six-foot fence. Jenna didn’t call out. Breaking Sidney’s concentration with a horse like that could be deadly.
Besides, Kurt was her responsibility. How could Jenna expect to run a therapy program with multiple participants if she couldn’t even keep track of one person?
One really troubled person.
And no, she wasn’t naïve enough to expect her program to be all sunshine and smiling faces. This program was for real people with real problems. It was going to be hard and trying and soul-crushing and amazing and empowering—all at the same time. For her veterans, as well as herself. But these programs worked. She knew firsthand what people accomplished when they didn’t give up.
Even though Santos had checked Kurt’s cabin, Jenna detoured and headed down the dirt road behind the big house.
With each step, puffs of dust kicked up, the earth dry, wanting for rain. Fluffy white clouds stacked up behind the mountain range and blew northward. No rain again today.
Ahead were two cabins Sidney’s husband, Boomer—well, Bryan, but no one dared call him that except his wife—had built for Jenna’s veterans. Boomer steered the old John Deere, scraping away the topsoil, preparing the dirt for the foundations for two new cabins.
Farther down, there were two much older cabins. Boomer and Sidney lived in one, and the two ranch hands, Santos and Alby, bunked in the other. A ’65 Mustang sat in front of Kurt’s cabin. At least he’d come back from the AA meeting the night before.
“Kurt? You in there?”
Jenna climbed the two wooden steps to the cabin’s covered front porch. Dink slunk between her legs until his head stuck out in front of her knees, the rest of him behind her, the way he did when a storm was approaching. But the sun was up, and the clouds continued their northerly march. Dink’s apprehension wasn’t the fault of the weather.
She knocked on the door. Dink whined. She knocked again. “Open up, or I’m coming in.”
She waited for a beat, two. The John Deere’s engine grumbled and growled, and the metal bucket screeched as it scraped across rocks, raising the hair on her arms. She wiggled the door handle. Locked.
She stepped onto the chair beneath the front window and pulled a spare key from a divot beside one of the rafters. One last time, she pounded on the door with the meat of her fist, not wanting to walk in on Kurt naked.
With no answer, she slipped the key in the lock and pushed the door open. It swung easily on the hinges, hitting the opposite wall with a dull thud. Dink took a tentative step inside and looked back at her, as if he wasn’t willing to go in without her.
She stomped the dust off her boots on the mat and walked in. As with the other cabins, there was a set of bunk beds on each side of the room with footlockers for personal possessions and bare hooks for clothes. A shared bathroom against the back wall, hidden behind a pseudo-kitchen—refrigerator, counter, sink, microwave, coffeepot. The basics.
No point checking the bathroom, Kurt wasn’t there. The air was too still. Still, like he hadn’t been there for a long time. Still, like he hadn’t spent the night in his unmade bed. Since his bed was never made, though, that didn’t tell her anything.
Where was he if he wasn’t with Hank and Mac? Even though Kurt had his problems, in the four weeks he’d been at the ranch, if he was going to be on time for anything, it was for the work sessions with the mustangs or riding out with Alby and Santos. His disappearance baffled her.
Dink backed out of the cabin, having never gone fully inside. Jenna left as well, pulling the door closed behind her, not bothering to lock the door.
She retraced her steps. Rechecked the barn and the makeshift firing range. The parking area for tractors and trailers. She checked the junkyard where the grass had grown high around rusty old implements and dilapidated tractors, then back up toward the hay barn.
The whole time she searched, Dink never left her side, his head Velcroed to her jeans. She tripped over his paws. At the hay barn, there was nothing except row after row, stack after stack, of round and square bales of hay.
Still no Kurt.
Sidney had finished up with the mustang, so Jenna headed back to the round pen. She glanced down. Dink was gone. Turning and walking backward, Jenna spotted her dog digging a hole beside the hay barn.
“Come on, Dink. Give the rats a rest.”
Dink didn’t stop digging. He didn’t even slow down.
“Dink!”
If the hay barn had had a concrete floor, Jenna would have left him there, but her grandfather would take both their hides if Dink tunneled under. She jogged back to the barn, a rooster tail of dirt flying out from between the dog’s legs. Jenna tapped him on the back. The darn dog kept digging. She grabbed his collar and tugged. He struggled free and kicked dirt up into her mouth. She spat it out.
She jerked him back. “Dink. Sit!”
Dink sat. Dirt crusted on his nostrils, his whiskers, his toenails. Tiny clumps of mud clung to the hair at the inner corners of his eyes, and dust coated his lolling tongue.
“Stay.”
He squeaked out a whine.
Jenna dropped to her knees in front of the hole. He’d dug fast and furious and had burrowed under the outer wall. She pushed handfuls of dirt into the hole to fill the void.
Her hand brushed against something.
Not hay. Rat? She couldn’t leave a dead animal there to rot. Jenna grimaced. Dink crawled on his belly to the edge of the hole and whined again. Jenna scooped out the dirt, her face butted up against the wall, and snaked her arm through. She patted the dirt, trying to locate the object.
Her