Men Of Moonstone Series Read online

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  Men Of Moonstone Series

  by Christine DeSmet

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  Romance/Mystery/Crime

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  Whiskey Creek Press

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Copyright ©2009 by WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  CONTENTS

  Other Books by Author Available at Whiskey Creek Press:

  Dedication

  THE MOONSTONE FIRE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  ALL SHE WORE WAS A BOW

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PEST CONTROL

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  About the Author

  For your reading pleasure, we invite you to visit our web bookstore

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  MEN OF MOONSTONE SERIES

  by

  Christine DeSmet

  WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

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  Published by

  WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  Whiskey Creek Press

  PO Box 51052

  Casper, WY 82605-1052

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Copyright ©

  2009 by Christine DeSmet

  ["The Moonstone Fire"©

  2008; “All She Wore Was a Bow” ©

  2008; “Pest Control © 2009]

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-60313-526-9

  Credits

  Cover Artist: Karen Wiesner

  Editor: Marsha Briscoe

  Printed in the United States of America

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  Other Books by Author Available at Whiskey Creek Press:

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Christine has stories and novellas in the following anthologies by Jewels of the Quill authors:

  Tales from the Treasure Trove, Vol. 1

  Small Gifts

  Tales from the Treasure Trove, Vol. 2

  Tales from the Treasure Trove, Vol. 3

  Shadows in the Heart

  Tales from the Treasure Trove, Vol. 4

  Christmas Wishes

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to all the men in my family who are all crazy, lovable cowboys, each in their own way, including: my dad, Kenneth; and my uncles Jerry, Bill, Denny, and my godfather, Uncle Tom; and my brothers, Curt, Tim, and Mark; and my nephews.

  Most of all, a big howdy and thanks to my own personal cowboy, Bob Boetzer. Thanks for always being there with the campfire burning and the best chili in the world.

  No book is published without some help. Thanks to the Jewels of the Quill for reading and critiquing my stories. Thanks to editor Marsha Briscoe for her efficient and wonderful work. Thanks to publisher Debra Womack, of Whiskey Creek Press, who believes in letting authors like me stretch my craft and tell zany tales now and then.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  THE MOONSTONE FIRE

  {Men of Moonstone Series, Book 1}

  by Christine DeSmet (Dame Moonstone)

  Chapter 1

  While Peter and Crystal LeBarron slept Sunday night, a fire was set outside their cabin window. In the raw April wind the fire festered in the straw bales insulating the foundation. Then flames—like red snakes—side-winded up the clapboard siding.

  Still the newlyweds slept.

  What to do? Call out? But I'll be punished.

  The fire wicked up to the roof, devouring the wood shingles. The cabin became a birthday cake of sorts, one big candle for one big wish that things in life could be different.

  It's pretty.

  But ... why aren't they coming out?

  Run!

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  Three days later at sunrise, John Hall pushed back his smudged white Stetson. He crouched in the ashes to dig for clues. Grimacing from memories of other devastating fires, he shivered in his sheepskin ranch coat. Death had a stench. Considering all the good Peter LeBarron and his wife, Crystal, did for quaint Moonstone, Wisconsin, who would want them dead?

  Fortunately, whoever intended their death hadn't succeeded. The cabin roof had collapsed in the hallway only feet from their bed. Peter said a firestorm burst across them.

  The couple had moved in with Peter's elderly father, Henri. John smiled thinking back to last evening's phone call. He'd just saddled up to check the livestock on his Bozeman, Montana ranch when Peter called.

  “I can't stay here, Boze,” Peter said. “It's too crowded.”

  “It's a friggin’ mansion with a butler.”

  “I guess we haven't talked for a while. My father remarried.”

  “Isn't he in his eighties?”

  “And crowing. Felicity's chirpy as a spring robin because she's about to pop a baby. Don't laugh, Boze.” John chortled anyway as Peter continued. “On top of that, the restaurant we started downstairs has become a waiting room for a stream of visitors bringing us tater-tot casseroles. And the butler follows me around as if I'm a naughty puppy about to do something on the Oriental rug!”

  John had met the butler when John was in Walter Reed Hospital years ago. Leonard Moline was a tall, dark, dour but caring man. He'd been with the LeBarrons since Peter was a teenager, hired by Peter's mother right before she drowned.

  John asked, “Can't you rent a house?”

  “Crystal has her animals to take care of, a reindeer, alpaca, goats, and now silly things given to her called silkie chickens that look like fuzzy hats and demand to be petted, if you can imagine that. You have to help me convert the haymow to living quarters. She insists. It has plumbing already because we remodeled for watering the chickens.”

  “You built a chicken condo? Man, you must really be in love.” Silence on the phone gave John pause. “Hey, Pete, what's wrong?”

  “Boze, I think the fire was arson. I think somebody wa
nts my wife dead.”

  John “Bozeman” Hall skipped sleep, hopped on a plane, rented a car in Duluth and showed up this Wednesday morning in the community of a few hundred folks on Lake Superior's south shore. John couldn't deny anything to Peter. Some mistook them for father and son. The men were twenty years apart, Peter fifty-two to John's thirty-two. Both sported dark brown hair showing gray at the temples. They'd met in a hospital under circumstances John still had a hard time dealing with. Years later, when John's widowed father had died and the Montana ranch almost went under, financial wizard Peter saved it by establishing a partnership with a Hollywood movie star couple.

  John limped one careful step at a time in his cowboy boots out of the ashes and into the muddy yard. The volunteer firefighters had obliterated any hope of finding an arsonist's footprints.

  But on his fifth ever-widening circle around the ashes, John spotted a partial shoe imprint in red dirt protected by a tuft of dried grass. The imprint pointed east. He photographed it, but as always he took out his notepad to sketch the tread pattern. A hand drawing allowed him to digest clues in a deeper way. He also liked challenging his hands to defy the tremors that threatened during times of stress.

  He pulled his coat collar up against the bitter breeze, then headed east of the farmstead to search the field of dun-colored hay stubble. Two hundred yards long, the field stopped where a steep, rocky hill jutted to a crest capped with thick timberland. John recalled Peter's warning about the ornery black bear sows with their cubs, so he returned to his rental for the rifle. He also had binoculars and handcuffs given to him by Deputy Lily Schuster. Cursing how this cold air was buggering his knee, John set off again across the field.

  He took the hill in measured steps, leading with the right leg to take the pressure off the left. He'd give anything for a horse. He felt normal on a horse. At the hilltop, a deer trail made the going easier in the woodland. Minutes later the copse of pines and leafless birches parted above a grassy valley with a stream. Movement on the opposite hillside made John duck behind a cedar tree and bring up the binoculars.

  A young woman with flowing black hair was draping clothes over sumac branches. She wore athletic shoes of some sort. Would the tread match his sketch?

  Behind her John spotted clear plastic sheeting serving as a doorway to a cave. It had likely been a root cellar or logger's makeshift shelter. John gasped when a little boy with a curly mop of red hair came out carrying a fuzzy red chicken. It had to be one of Crystal's silkies.

  Was there a husband around? John scanned the area. Finding nobody else, he lumbered down the hillside.

  He was about to cross the stream when a rifle retort ripped the air. John hit the ground.

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  Prostrate in the dead grass next to the stream, John peered up the hill, right into a rifle's crosshairs. What mother would shoot a man in front of her boy? But he knew that kind. Every nerve ending crackled with anger.

  He waved his Stetson. “I'm hunting. I'm a friend of the landowners.”

  She lowered the rifle. He got up, picked up his weapon, then forded the ankle-deep stream.

  He hated how long it took him to climb the hill. He pulled down his Stetson's brim to hide his embarrassment, but he couldn't escape her potent gray-blue eyes. He'd never seen such eyes—like smoke, elusive and eerie.

  With her milky, unlined skin barely ruddied by the weather, he pegged her to be in her late twenties. Her lustrous hair looked thicker than his horse's mane back home. He had the urge to run his fingers through it, to touch her silky neck and murmur words to steady her. But that was how he calmed a brood mare; he'd long ago lost his touch with women.

  She stood about five-eight with a wide stance clad in black denim. She wore a black, insulated vest, and a green-and-blue plaid flannel shirt rolled to the elbows. Her forearms were muscular; John imagined sinewy, soft curves everywhere. He also imagined her flipping him on his ass if he tried anything fancy.

  John beamed a fat lie of a smile. “Howdy. I'm John Hall, friend of the LeBarron's. Nice day, isn't it?”

  “Lose the rifle.” Her husky voice belied sweet-looking pink lips.

  From behind her, the boy peeked at John with wide-eyed fright and a runny nose. He clung to his red chicken. “Mama, aren't you th'pothe to thay ‘pleathe'?”

  The woman's mouth curled up at one corner as she stared down the barrel at John. “Please put down the rifle, Mister John Hall, please.”

  The little boy with missing front teeth wiped his nose on his coat sleeve, then sneezed. Why was this woman camping in this weather with a sick boy?

  John leaned his weapon against sumac branches draped with a wet Spiderman sweatshirt. He winked at the boy. “Your mama thought I was a bear, didn't she?”

  The boy backed up. John regretted the scary bear reference.

  The woman said, “Finn, please take the jug and go down to the stream for water, okay? And don't squeeze that chicken so hard she can't breathe.”

  “'kay.” Finn endured a rib-rattling cough before trotting down the hill.

  John eased onto a rock to massage his aching knee. “You running a meth lab?”

  Her indignant toss of her hair made him smile. His horses did that same thing when they disagreed with him. “Didn't think so. Your skin and teeth are too pretty.”

  She only stared back. He smelled cinnamon effusing from the pot. It made his stomach growl. “So why'd you shoot at me?”

  She kept her rifle steady. “My husband sent you, didn't he? Tell him I'm not coming back and that kidnapping is a federal crime. Want me to shoot you in the foot, too?”

  “Whoa, darlin',” he said, putting up his hands. “I don't even know your name.”

  “Does O'Toole ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “How about Kane?”

  “No.”

  She backed up to the cave's entrance to grab a newspaper. She handed it to him. “Page six.” She sat on a three-legged camp stool, crossed her legs and swung one foot to-and-fro.

  John opened the Superior daily. A photograph of the woman, showing her hair in some fancy ‘do like a Miss America. She wore sparkly jewels and raccoon-like eye makeup. The headline said, “Brendan Kane's Wife and Son Still Gone After Five Weeks.”

  John handed the newspaper back. “So you're Dolly Kane.” He had never heard of these people but thought it wise not to mention that.

  “O'Toole. I don't want anything to do with the Kanes anymore.”

  “Your son doesn't need his dad?”

  She flinched, to her credit. “We're doing fine.”

  “Your son stole a chicken.” And he's on the verge of pneumonia. Horror struck John. She doesn't know how sick he is. A nanny has taken care of this kid all his life.

  She stood, with her finger fiddling with the trigger. “You're going to report us to authorities? Crap, I knew this couldn't last.”

  “I don't need to tell anybody about the chicken. If you return it.”

  “The next time we go—” She clamped her mouth shut.

  “To the cabin?” He knocked his Stetson back a notch. “What else did you steal from my friends?”

  “You think I burned down the cabin? To hide that I was stealing things? I haven't gone near that place.”

  “How'd you know it burned down?”

  “I—” Her eyes darkened to a dusty blue. “I saw smoke.”

  “It burned down at night. You're going to have to do better than that.” When she only glared, he added, “What happened in Chicago?”

  “I filed for divorce two years ago. He's refused to allow me to go through with it, so I finally left.”

  A warning shook his spine. “He didn't ‘allow’ it?”

  Her eyes deepened to the color of spring woodland violets. He found it fascinating—and helpful—that those eyes changed colors like a mood ring his mother used to have. He figured the deeper colors signaled deeper emotions. Maybe truth.

  Finn showed up with the water and red chic
ken. John rose to tousle the boy's curly hair. “Got a name for that chicken that matches your hair and freckles?”

  “Wrigley.”

  “Ah, a baseball fan. Wrigley Field.”

  “My dad took me wunth.” A sneeze lifted the tike off his feet. The chicken shook its fuzzy head.

  “I'm sure you'll see Wrigley Field again soon.” John scowled at Dolly O'Toole Kane. “Maybe you want to move to a motel where it's warmer?”

  “No,” Dolly said. “We're fine.”

  A fat lie, but John held back because of the boy. He said to Finn, “You be careful with the fire, okay?”

  Dolly stepped between Finn and John. “We keep the jug of water full and nearby at all times. We know what we're doing.”

  John held back a guffaw.

  Finn announced proudly, “We're making oatmeal. Want thum?”

  “Another time, but thanks.”

  An hour later, at the farmstead, John pulled out his notepad. When Dolly had sat for that nervous moment he'd noted her shoe sole. The tread matched perfectly. But what was her motive for setting the fire?

  John couldn't shake Finn's runny nose and cough. Because of John's stupidity with a wily woman, he'd loved and lost a boy just Finn's size.

  His hands began to shake.

  ~—~—~—~ ~

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Chapter 2

  John knew she'd run away. After checking on Crystal's animals, he drove east until he found a dirt fire lane amid the pines. According to Deputy Schuster, red dirt lanes dissected northern Wisconsin to provide access for loggers, fire trucks, and forest managers. Meth lab criminals, bears, and wolves also used the desolate lanes.

  It didn't take long to find Dolly's car, a nondescript gray—and locked—Toyota. It didn't take him long to disable it and leave.

  Around noon he headed back to Moonstone and the North Pole—the LeBarron three-story white Victorian mansion with green and red trim. It got its moniker because Peter's old man used to play Santa Claus for the town's holiday festivities. The immensity and perfection of the North Pole taunted John. He still hadn't refurbished his parents’ 1960s two-bedroom ranch house.