Just Over The Mountain Read Free

would come. But this wasn’t a barn fire or illness; it was a serious domestic dispute. It required the presence of an intimate friend. Or a professional.
    In the end he called Jerry Powell, the only private therapist in town.
    “Does she want to talk to me?” Jerry asked.
    “It doesn’t matter, Jerry. She can either talk to you or go to the police station. Come on over.”
    All this transpired at the stable while, in town at the clinic, June had been plucking shot out of Daniel’s behind, asking repeatedly what he might have done to drive Blythe to such ends. “Woman’s just plain crazy” was all he would say on the matter.
    One of Daniel’s hired men came for him in a pickup with a couple of bales of hay in the back, which he was happy to lie over on the ride home.
    Then there were patients to be seen, an uncomfortable number of them asking questions about Daniel’s condition. It was midmorning before June took the clip out of her hair and plied it with a brush. It was perfectly hopeless. After being twisted into a clip while damp, it had a mind of its own. She’d always assumed hernatural wave would come in handy if she had any talent with hair, but alas, none. She pulled it back and re-clipped it.
    It was late for her to be getting her first cup of coffee at Fuller’s Café across the street; she usually stopped there on her way in to the clinic at about seven. It’s possible this delay of caffeine and sugar had had an effect on her disposition, though June was typically even-tempered.
    “Full morning, huh, June?” George Fuller wanted to know. “Daniel Culley gets a rumpful of shot and Chris Forrest is coming home, all divorced and everything. You still have a shine for him, June?”
    “George, that was high school. Don’t be silly.”
    “Why else would he come back to Grace Valley?”
    “Well, George, gee… Why indeed? Could it be because he has family here? Or could it be it’s a good little town in which to raise teenagers? Or maybe he just likes the place where he grew up?”
    George grinned stupidly. “And what if he wants to get back together with you?”
    “George, it was high school! ”
    “I wonder, does he know how cranky you’ve gotten over the years?”
    “If you’d just shut up and give me my coffee and a bear claw, I could mellow out. But every morning you have something to give me grief over.”
    “I’ve been giving you bear claws and sticky buns for ten years now, June, and you’re still as thin as you were in junior high. You reckon you have an over-active metabolism?”
    “Probably.”
    George slapped a hand on his belly, which was straining the buttons on his shirt. He looked about seven months along. “You reckon mine’s broken?” he asked with a huge grin.
    “That, and a few other of your mechanisms,” she said, taking the coffee and bun.
    She turned away and behind her, he said, “I don’t take no offense. I’d be crabby if I’d spent all morning pickin’ shot out of some old rancher’s butt.”
    It had made for an interesting morning so far, she thought. She would have taken her coffee and bear claw back to the clinic, but she spotted Tom down the counter with a couple of the locals, so she went in that direction.
    “We got a little bet going, Doc,” Ray Gilmore said. “I say Blythe put about thirty pellets in Dan’l’s arse, but Sam says he sold Dan that old gun and it’ll only give about nine pellets per round and isn’t steady enough for anyone to put four rounds in a target as small as Daniel’s skinny butt. Sam says a dozen pellets, tops. Who buys the coffee?”
    “Don’t you boys have anything better to do?” she asked.
    Sam and Ray looked at each other, shrugged and said, “Nope. You?”
    “This town,” she said, shaking her head. She looked at Tom. “What did you do with Blythe?”
    “She seems all calmed down now,” he said, which was neither accurate nor did he disclose any information.
    “Wouldn’t they be about the last