Free Justice at Cardwell Ranch by B.J. Daniels

icing on them, Courtney,” her mother said to the girl who had the spoon again and was dribbling thin white icing over each cookie as if making a masterpiece. The other girl watched, practically drooling as her sister slowly iced the warm cookies. “Okay, enough sugar for one day. Go get cleaned up.” They jumped down and raced toward the stairs. “And don’t argue!” she called after them.
    With a sigh, Brittany glanced around the messy kitchen, then plopped down on a stool at the counter and took one of the cookies before turning her attention on Liza. “Sure you don’t want one?” she asked between bites. “They aren’t bad.”
    “They smell delicious, but I’m fine.”
    “You didn’t come by for cookies,” Brittany said. “This is about Alex, isn’t it?” She shook her head, her expression one of sadness. “I heard it was a hunter.”
    “A hunter?”
    “You know, someone poaching at night, a stray bullet. It had to be. No one would want to hurt Alex. He was a sweetheart. Everyone liked him.”
    “Not everyone,” Liza said.
    Brittany turned solemn. “So it was murder. That’s the other rumor circulating this morning.” She shook her head.
    “Any idea who didn’t think he was a sweetheart?”
    “No one I can think of.”
    “What about Tanner Cole?”
    Brittany blinked. “Even if he came back from the dead, he wouldn’t have hurt Alex. They were friends.”
    Liza smiled. She liked the woman’s sense of humor. “Do you know why Tanner killed himself?”
    “No. I suppose someone told you that Tanner and I were dating at the time.” Brittany chuckled as she realized whom. “Shelby. Of course.”
    “She did mention that if anyone knew, it would be you. Did Tanner seem depressed?”
    “Far from it. He was excited about graduating. He had all these plans for what he was going to do. I think he already had his bags packed.”
    “He was planning to leave Big Sky?”
    “Oh, yeah. He’d been saving his money for years. He wanted to backpack around Europe before college. He had a scholarship to some big college back east.”
    “What about you?”
    “I was headed for Montana State University.”
    “Weren’t you upset that he was leaving?”
    She shook her head as she helped herself to another cookie. Upstairs, Liza could hear the kids squabbling over the water and towels. “It wasn’t like that between me and Tanner. I liked him. A lot. But I knew from the get-go that it wasn’t serious.”
    “Had it been serious between him and Shelby?”
    Brittany stopped chewing for a moment. She sighed and let out a chuckle. “If you talk to Shelby it was. She was planning to marry him, apparently. She loved his parents’ ranch and used to talk about when she and Tanner lived on the place, what their lives were going to be like.”
    “She must have been upset when he broke it off and started dating you.”
    Brittany laughed. “Livid. But Tanner told me he’d just gone through a scare with her. She’d apparently gotten pregnant.”
    “On purpose?”
    “Tanner thought so. He said he’d dodged a bullet when she miscarried…” Brittany seemed to realize what she’d said. “So to speak. Anyway, he didn’t trust her after that, said he didn’t want anything to do with her. They broke up right before Christmas. She’d been so sure he would be putting an engagement ring under the tree for her.”
    “How could Shelby have thought that was going to happen?” Liza asked. “Surely she knew what Tanner was planning to do once they graduated.”
    “Sure, she knew, but Shelby was so used to getting what she wanted, I think she’d just convinced herself it was going to happen.”
    “Maybe she thought a baby would be the tipping point,” Liza suggested.
    “And it probably would have been. Tanner loved kids. He wanted a bunch when he settled down. If she had been pregnant, I still don’t think he would have married her, but he would have stuck around to help raise his child. He was that kind