This delightful series focuses on the humorous mystery and romantic adventures of the kind folks who live in the environs of a small village nestled on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin. Along the way in the series, silkie chickens, a giant prehistoric beaver skeleton, a kidnapped reindeer, and other flora and fauna contribute to the amusing mischief and mayhem.

 

John “Bozeman” Hall hails from Bozeman, Montana, where he grew up raising longhorn cattle, hunting grizzlies, and eating snake meat over a campfire. He thought he could handle anything. Then he arrives in Moonstone. After a suspicious fire that destroys newlyweds Crystal and Peter LeBarron’s cabin on their Wisconsin farm, John comes to town to find the pyro criminal. His first suspect? The surly squatter refusing to leave a cave on the farm–a young, homeless woman and her son.

(ebooks are available from all sites, and print is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and some from Angus and Robertson)

 

Continue the series:

 

Chapter 1

 

Peter and Crystal LeBarron slept Sunday night while the 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!

 

***

 

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

The roof had collapsed in the hallway only feet from their bed. Peter said a firestorm burst across them.

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

“I can’t stay here, Boze. 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 in Walter Reed 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 it was arson. I think somebody wants 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 limped 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 red fuzzy 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.

 

***

 

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’s 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 wide, 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. “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. Her hair was 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 chicken. 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.