Chapter Fifteen

When he'd clearedearshot, I said to Krista, "Which room is Robin in?"

"Oh, no you don't." She moved to the center of the doorway, though we easily could have broken past her. "Not letting you disturb a guest in her room."

Especially not with her contentious father nearby.

I didn't say it. Couldn't really blame her.

Diana and I looked at her without saying anything.

"Okay, okay. I'll go see if she wants to talk to you down here." Away from Randall, which suited us, too. "This is about Keefe's death, isn't it?"

"Yes."

Robin came down the stairs behind Krista. Moving slowly, as if reluctant to join us, but her face was intent, interested.

This could go either way. Fast.

"Hi, Robin. We didn't have a chance to officially meet earlier. I'm Elizabeth Margaret Danniher and this is Diana Stendahl. We're from KWMT, the local TV station. We hoped you could give us some background, since you were a guest at Elk Rock Ranch."

She relaxed some. More important, she came into the room and sat across from us.

Was that reaction because my intro moved us away from Keefe's death? Away from Keefe? Away from a time when her father was around?

"Because you were at the ranch as a guest, you can give us some perspectives no one else can."

"Like what?"

Good question. Especially since I didn't want to jump into the meat too soon.

"Like if Wendy is a really sound sleeper."

Her mouth sagged slightly.

"Brenda said Wendy's such a deep sleeper that she'd never hear—" Not the time to bring up gunshots. "—a ruckus at the ranch at night. Say, a dog barking."

"She doesn't have a dog."

"True, but there's Suzie Q."

She relaxed more. "Oh, Suzie Q didn't bark at any of us at the Elk Rock. Not the guests, not the workers."

I came at it from a different angle.

"What do you know about Wendy's and Brenda's sleeping habits?"

She snapped her head around toward me. "The two of them—? God, nothing. I had no idea."

"You still don't." I could have tried to explain that if I'd meant the two of them together, I'd have said Wendy and Brenda's — one possessive apostrophe "s" for the unit. Giving each an apostrophe "s" kept them singular and separate. But I didn't think that grammatical nicety would have made an impression on her. "Sleeping, as in waking up easily."

"Oh. Why didn't you say that," she grumbled. "How should I know?"

"You were here for a week last summer. You had opportunities to observe."

Opportunities, yes. Inclination, probably not. With this a lost cause. I should—

"There was one night," she said abruptly. "Maybe the second night I was there. Some kid started screaming. Guess it was a nightmare, but nobody knew that at the time and everybody came running out of their cabins — you would not believe some of the outfits people had on. Including Keefe in long underwear. Seriously. Long underwear like you'd see someone from centuries ago wearing." As she spoke of the night, her intonations seemed to recall her attitudes from that time. "And Brenda? She was something from a horror movie, with this stuff all over her face. As if anyone couldn't tell her it was way, way late for that. And a pair of men's pajamas, with her feet stuck into her cowboy boots, but not all the way, so she walked like a duck in high heels."

Without moving her feet, she mimicked an awkward, rolling gait, then giggled.

"Anything else?" I asked the question out of an obligation to be thorough. My coolness was for the mean girl/woman she'd been then. The jury was out on now.

"Yeah. What you asked about. Did I notice something? I noticed Wendy didn't come out. Only one who didn't make an appearance, except a honeymoon couple in the farthest cabin. But this kid was in one of those cabins just across from the main house."

So, either Wendy had the steely nerves to not react to a screaming child or she slept like — excuse the expression — the dead, as Brenda reported.

"You said Suzie Q doesn't bark. Not even after you were hurt?"

"No." It didn't have the feel of a complete sentence. "It was mostly quiet up there with Keefe. Except... Suzie Q was one of the things he did talk about when he talked now and then.

"He said when he first got her, she barked at everything and everybody. Wendy didn't like that — thought it made the guests feel unwelcomed. She was threatening that he'd have to give up the dog. He said that one day, in desperation, he sat down with the dog and explained the whole situation and what the consequences would be. And he said she stopped barking right then." She smiled, signaling her disbelief in the story.

"Even if she was left alone?"

"She wasn't, as far as I knew. She was at his side whatever he was doing. Whenever I saw him go out on the trail, Suzie Q went with."

"Did that bother the guests?"

"Not that I could ever tell." A bit of defensiveness crept in. Because she hadn't interacted with other guests? "I suppose novice riders might have been nervous," she said with superiority over such riders. "Didn't take long to recognize that the horses accepted Suzie Q and trusted her to stay out of their way. And she did.

"She also..." She hesitated. "When we were up there, waiting, after... Well, she was... sweet. She spent almost the whole time lying alongside me. First one side, then the other. It was nice to have the warmth, but even nicer to have her."

"You were grateful to her — and Keefe. Is that why you and your dad gave him the DNA test?"

"Yeah. Mom used to say that to thank people you gave them what they wanted, not what was easy for you." She ducked her head slightly. "It was easy, but it was what he really wanted."

"He asked you to get him the DNA test?"

"No. He didn't know anything about them, didn't know what they could find out, how it worked. But I knew that's what he needed — wanted. When I messaged him the test was coming... he was so excited." With a faint lift of her lips she added, "I was happy for him. I hoped the results would prove that outlaw was his great-great whatever like he wanted. Now it's too late."

She'd approached the edge of real emotion. By her uneasy shifting, that would not make it easy to get more out of her.

I went businesslike. "Had you also given him a computer?"

"Yeah, but he wasn't any good on it at all. That why I moved on to the DNA test."

"Your father said the results were later than expected."

"He knew that?" She hid the surprise in that by saying immediately, "He messaged me about that — Keefe did, about not having the results."

"Why?"

"He wasn't very good at things like that, apps or on the computer or even on the phone. So I checked with the company right before we came out here. They had a record of sending the results and he should have had them. They said they'd send another set to him."

Sure, do it for a Kenyon, when they'd stonewalled me. Though, in fairness, she was asking for a repeat send to the test-taker, rather than the results. Still...

"You told your father Keefer Dobey was the architect of your turnaround."

She frowned. "I never said that."

"Not in so many words, but didn't you say how important that time with Keefe up the trail was to you?"

"Sure. And Keefe was nice, especially because he didn't shout at me, telling me how stupid I was or what I'd done wrong. He just kept quiet. That was a nice change."

The sharpness of that gave another glimpse into how she'd been as a guest last season. The staff of Elk Rock Ranch had my retroactive sympathies.

Then she sliced a look toward Diana and me, and my sympathies extended to her.

"Your dad?" Diana asked with perfect neutrality.

"Yeah. After Mom died. Before that, he wasn't that interested in me. It was... I was so mad at her for leaving me with him. Dying was a release for her. I knew that. Not just from pain..." She stared at her hands for three long breaths, jerked her gaze up to us, then back again. "From him. And, yeah, she was under heavy meds, but she said it more than once. She told me she would have divorced him if she wasn't dying."

Robin wasn't asking for sympathy. She had it. And not just on the tough-on-a-girl to lose her mother at that age level.

Still, how much had her mom known what she was saying? Because that was a heck of a burden to put on your daughter.

Damage to the father-daughter relationship didn't seem to be all Randall's doing.

Although the damage to the relationship with his wife might have been, so indirectly, this, too, could have been his fault.

Chicken or egg. We couldn't know.

"So, yeah, it was a nice change to be up there with Keefe not after me about something, everything.

"I don't remember anything particularly wise he said. He'd be quiet for a long stretch, then he'd ask what I saw. And then sometimes rambling, stories about how to do things I never in my life considered doing or about this outlaw and the woman who loved him and how he'd died and she disappeared, all in this low-key mumble that said it was okay if I didn't listen, it was okay if I did.

"It was... different. I was different. I don't know how to explain it."

She shifted. "Maybe it was the physical pain. Finally feeling in my body the way it felt inside. I was back in sync. Pieces of me together again. From looking up at the tops of the trees and the sky."

We let her be quiet for as long as she wanted.

"The weird thing is, as I got better physically and that pain mostly went away, so did a lot of the other pain. I never expected that. Not all of it went away — either kind of pain. They say I might be able to predict changing weather patterns with my leg for the rest of my life. Just like I still feel sudden jolts or lingering aches of Mom dying. But I can walk and I can ride and I can live."

She said again, "I don't know how to explain it." This time, she added, "But I don't need to."

We'd just encountered her father in her.

****

As we leftby the back door, we said thanks to Krista, and I added a question. "Were Randall and Robin here all Monday night?"

She pursed her lips, then a quick head-shake.

For a second I thought—

"No way I can know one way or the other. We're in the private quarters and unless a guest calls us, or a fire alarm goes off, we don't have contact until the morning. Privacy for them, privacy for us."

I had to accept that her head-shake was that the question didn't apply to her.