Apparently Arlene was trying to live down her reputation as a gossip. “Do you know where Laura moved from?” asked Dulcie.

“California. That was another reason it was odd. Californians move to Montana all the time, just not this part of Montana, if you know what I mean.”

She did. California though? Not the Chicago area. So how was it that her parents knew this woman?

“Can you tell me what happened to her?”

“You don’t know?”

Dulcie wanted to hear it from Arlene. “Please, I really need you to be honest with me. I heard she might have been murdered?”

“Well, it’s not like I’m carrying tales. Everyone knows. She was murdered in one of the upstairs bedrooms twenty...oh, my gosh, twenty-four years ago this month!”

Did that explain why Roselee at the museum had gotten so upset? “Murder must be rare in this part of the country,” she said, thinking of the woman she’d run into earlier with the copies of the newspaper clippings about a murder.

“It is rare, but this murder...” Arlene shook her head. “It was quite vicious. She was stabbed to death over a dozen times and the killer was never caught.”

Dulcie was trying to take this all in when Arlene said, “What made it all the more horrific was her daughter.”

“Her daughter?”

“She was just a little thing, four or five, as I recall. They discovered her bloody footprints in the bedroom where she’d come in. She must have seen her mother lying there and ran.”

Chapter 4

Kate Corbett saw at once that her oldest stepson wasn’t himself at supper. The quietest of the five brothers, Russell also was the most grounded. He was the one who’d gone into ranching with his father right out of college. Grayson couldn’t manage without Russell working the ranches with him so Kate was thankful for that.

When Grayson had sold out his holdings in Texas and moved to Montana, his sons had been shocked and blamed Kate, she knew.

Later when Grayson had asked them all to come to Montana for a family meeting, the other four had come, but not happily.

Fortunately that had changed, she thought, as she glanced around the supper table at the large family she’d married into. It had grown since they’d all been in Montana.

The second oldest, Lantry Corbett, was a divorce lawyer of all things. And while he was still in Montana on the ranch, Kate didn’t expect him to stay.

Shane Corbett, the next oldest, had been on medical leave from the Texas Rangers. Kate knew that if he hadn’t fallen in love with a local girl, he would have returned to Texas.

Instead, he’d hired on with the Whitehorse sheriff’s department as a deputy. He and Maddie Cavanaugh had recently married in a triple wedding with his twin brothers, Jud and Dalton.