His mouth already full, Josh glanced up, smiled, and still chewing, nodded. The sight almost made Alice laugh. She didn’t care what their age was, she still saw little boys sitting at her table.
“Well, glad you’re all up.” She didn’t like the look on Carson’s face. “It may be nothing, but I was looking at the footage from the cameras, and I could have sworn I saw shadows in the distance along the back forty fence line.”
Kade squinted, his forehead pleating with concentration. “That’s pretty far to see from where the cameras are.”
“I know,” Carson said. “That’s why I prefaced my observations with it could be nothing.” His hand rubbed along the back of his neck. “Maybe I’m just paranoid with all the weird crap that keeps happening around here, but maybe—”
“Maybe,” frowning, Clint leveled his gaze with Carson’s, “someone is still messing with us. I’ll check out the fence line first thing.”
Alice flipped the last pancake, slid it onto an already-high stack and then put the dish in the oven. “If anyone wants more, they’ll be warm in here.”
All heads nodded, except Clint. “Maybe I should check this out alone.”
Shaking her head, Alice caught herself in time to stop from rolling her eyes. “It will be daylight by the time we get to the back forty, I’m sure the boogeymen will be gone.”
Though she knew he was still concerned, she spotted one corner of Clint’s mouth tilting upward before he bit down on his back teeth and drew his lips into a thin line and nodded at her.
As if the man had ears in their kitchen, Alice’s phone buzzed with a text from Brooklyn.Call me when you’re up.That made her laugh. Apparently, the former SEAL had no idea about ranching hours. Quickly hitting the call button, she waited for him to pick up on the second ring. “Hi, Brooklyn.”
“One of my men managed to get a lead on Ray.”
Everyone stopped eating and looked up at her phone.
“From what we can tell, he holed up for a while working a few ranches in Wyoming, then Colorado, onto Oklahoma, and now he’s turned up in the panhandle.”
“He’s heading back,” Kade muttered.
“That’s our take,” Brooklyn confirmed.
Alice tried to process the idea that Ray might be returning to the scene of the crime. Which told her two things: first, he probably had no idea they’d found his stash—at least one of them—and second, if that vermin ever set foot on this ranch again, she was still angry enough to kill the SOB with her bare hands. “Someone should tell Sheriff Brody.”
“He’s next on my list to call,” Brooklyn told her. “In the meantime, keep an eye out. Do you need me to send a few men to help secure the property?”
Alice scanned the faces in the room. They all seemed to be thinking about it when Kade, after sharing a glance with Carson, sighed. “The man’s a thief, he probably just wants to come back for his money and get out fast. We’ll be fine.”
Carson nodded.
Clint merely ground his teeth until the muscles at the base of his jaw twitched.
Yep. Right about now, no one was happy.
None of what he was hearing made Clint happy, but hopefully the family was right. Ray might be a crook without a conscience, but so far he hadn’t proved dangerous. That didn’t mean they had to sit back and do nothing.
“Come on.” Alice slid into her boots and grabbed a jacket. “We’ve got a fence to check out and some line shacks to search. We’ll bring Brady. If anyone is lurking, that dog will sniff him out even if he’s upwind.”
Clint nodded. What more could he do? She was his boss, not his wife. As much as he wanted to tell her to stay put, that he and Brady, or maybe even Benny too, would check things out. Unfortunately, though he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be enough to get him fired, he also knew that it would go over about as well as a skunk in the kitchen.
Taking the four-wheeler to make better time, they pulled up to the section of fence where Carter thought he might have seen some movement where there shouldn’t have been any cows. Hopping out, the two of them walked slowly along the fence line, carefully looking for anything out of the ordinary.
Walking ahead of Clint, Alice came to a sudden stop, squatted down on her haunches, and not touching anything, studied the ground in front of her.
“What did you find?” Clint squatted beside her, his gaze immediately falling on what Alice had seen. “Hmm.”
“My thoughts exactly.” She fingered the freshly turned dirt. “This section of fence was repaired months ago.”
Clint nodded.
“Which means…”
