The pinochle group was in full gossip mode by the following morning.
Gray heard their chatter as soon as he stepped into the diner.The core detail—that the first cream-colored calves had arrived at the Foster Ranch—was correct.The second detail was also true.The calves were enormous.
But that was where the story started to go off the rails.Ruth Sanger was crediting Gray with singlehandedly saving all the calves’ lives.Which was patently not true.If anyone should get the credit, it should be Dillon.He tried to explain this to pinochle posse when they waylaid him on the way past their booths, but to no avail.Apparently, his part in the great white calf debacle had already been embellished to the point of local mythology.
“I heard one of them is the size of a golf cart,” Walter was saying as Gray set down his book bag.
“That's an exaggeration,” Gray said, without looking up.
“One-hundred-and-twenty-two pounds,” Ruth said triumphantly.“I got it from Irma who heard it from Jenna's neighbor who heard it from Sully that the last calf weighed 122 pounds.At birth!”She looked over at him archly.“Am I right?”
“The information chain does seem solid,” Gray observed dryly.He slid into his usual seat with his back to the corner but looked up surprised as Irma materialized beside his booth without a coffee pot or even a glass of water so she could pretend to be doing her job.
“May I help you?”he asked her.
Irma lowered her voice, confiding, “There's a betting pool.On the calves' birth weights.Walter wants to know if you'd be willing to give him a general weight range for Charolais calves at birth.He says it's not a fair bet unless everyone's working from the same information.”
“Tell Walter the usual range is roughly ninety to one-hundred-thirty pounds,” he said.
Irma's eyes lit up.She was already moving back toward the pinochle table.
He tuned out the ensuing debate from across the diner and studied while they argued about the difference between average and median values.
At about 11:20, Rose set a cinnamon roll on his table.He hadn't ordered one and looked up questioningly.
“Bonnie called,” Rose said.“She asked me to save you one.She said you'd probably be here, neck-deep in a textbook, and you would forget to eat.”
“That was thoughtful of her.”
“It was.”Rose gave him a loaded look that suggested Bonnie wasn’t in the habit of worrying about whether single men in town forgot to eat.
Outside, the cold was breaking.He could feel it in the air, a slight softening, the first suggestion of warmth in the wind off the mountains.The snow on the fields west of town had thinned overnight.In three weeks, maybe four, the valley would be green.
As he ate the cinnamon roll, his mind strayed to the problem of finding someone who could tell him definitively if there had ever been a sprinkler system in the Shoemacher barn.
He’d asked several people in the local area who lived near the Shoemacher place or were horse people, but they’d all refused to talk with him, let alone answer any questions about the Shoemachers or their ill-fated barn.He supposed it didn’t help that he was a newcomer to town.An outsider.Folks didn’t seem to like strangers poking around in the town’s business or a prominent local family’s business.
Maybe he’d approached the people he’d tried to talk to wrong.Put them off by being too direct.Maybe he should have pretended to talk about something else and snuck up on asking the one question he really needed answered.
But along with his people skills, subtlety wasn’t exactly his strong suit.
How was he going to convince anyone to talk with him?
7
The Cobbler Cove Fire Department consisted of one aging fire engine, one ambulance, one building that, until very recently, smelled like motor oil and mouse droppings, and exactly zero qualified drivers.
Gray intended to fix the last part of that.
He’d passed the ambulance driving certification on his second try, which Tucker said was respectable and Cooper said was “about what I’d expect from the brother who reads more than he drives.”The ambulance was essentially a large van with medical equipment bolted into it.It went where you pointed it.The steering was responsive.The mirrors made sense.
The fire engine was a different beast entirely.
It was a 1998 Pierce Saber, thirty-one feet long, eleven feet tall, and about as maneuverable as a freight train on ice.The steering had a two-second delay that made every correction feel like a suggestion rather than a command.The mirrors were positioned for a driver roughly the height of a professional basketball player, which meant he could see either the sky or the rear bumper but never both at the same time.
Forward driving was manageable.He’d taken the engine out on back roads twice and made it back to the station without incident.He learned its braking distance when empty and when filled with 1500 gallons of water.The two were wildly different.With practice he even figured out how to navigate wide turns.
But backing up the engine was going to be the death of him.He had no idea if he was ever going to get the engine back into its parking bay.For the past several days, he’d had to park it in front of the station because he couldn’t get it back into its usual parking spot.
