Saddled With Trouble by Michele Scott Page B

out in the barn. I walked out there and Dwayne was telling Ethan to get the hell off the property.”
    “ What happened after that?”
    “ Lou followed him, tried to talk to him, but Ethan wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He shrugged him off. Lou nearly lost his balance as Ethan pulled away. Lou wouldn’t tell me what it was about, and ever since then he’s seemed preoccupied, and sad. Something changed; something Ethan told him changed him, but I don’t know what. I even tried to get a hold of Ethan to find out what it was, but he never called me back.” The phone started ringing. “Excuse me, Mick. It might be that detective or the funeral home. I’m trying to make the arrangements.” She started for the family room.
    “ Sure. Do you have some aspirin? I’m getting a vicious headache.”
    “ In my bathroom upstairs. Oh, your uncle had some Ativan that he was taking for some headaches he was getting. You can try those, if you want. They seemed to help him.”
    “ Ativan is not for headaches. At least I don’t think so. I always thought it was for anxiety or panic attacks.”
    “ I don’t know. I don’t take that stuff anyway, but the doctor gave it to Lou for the headaches. Sorry, I gotta get the phone.”
    It wasn’t like Michaela was a doctor or anything, but she was sure Ativan was prescribed for agitation. Her doctor had recommended it to her when she was splitting from Brad but she’d decided against it. Like Cynthia, she tried to stay more on the holistic route, if possible. But right now, she needed a Tylenol. Why was her uncle taking Ativan? Well, agitation did cause headaches, so what did she know.
    Michaela climbed up to the second floor. Their bedroom was very Home and Garden. Cynthia had given the place life when she’d married her uncle. She put colors together well and had a knack for making a house feel like a home with earthy warm tones and various floral and equestrian paintings around. It was pretty and inviting. But now the house, too, felt different, just as the ranch had when she’d arrived. She didn’t know how Cynthia could stay here. She knew if it were her, she’d want to get away, but maybe it was a comfort thing. Maybe Cynthia needed to be here at the home she’d shared for the last decade with her husband.
    In the bathroom, she found the bottle of aspirin tucked away inside the medicine cabinet, next to a bottle of Ativan. She picked it up. It was a refill prescribed to Lou only two weeks earlier. He had two more refills available. What in the world? Her uncle was never one to take drugs, especially not something like Ativan. His headaches must’ve been horrendous. What was going on in her uncle’s life that he was so stressed-out about? She picked up the bottle and read it again. It was prescribed to Uncle Lou by a Dr. Verconti. Huh. She’d thought he’d gone to the same family doctor as her parents had— Dr. Sherman. He must have switched docs for some reason. Goodness, what had been going on here? And how had she not sensed until the night before her uncle was murdered that something was deeply troubling him? The lawsuits? His memory loss? Where was the money for the breedings? And, what stallion was used to impregnate those mares? Why hadn’t she seen that her uncle was in crisis? Had she been so wrapped up in her own problems that she hadn’t been available to the one person who had always, always , made himself available to her?
    Starting to tear up again, she reached for a tissue, wiped her face and tossed it away. She missed the wastebasket and bent down to pick it up. Her eyes widened.
    “ Oh, my God,” she muttered. There in the trash was a pregnancy test, and Michaela knew from all those she’d taken in the past that this one read positive. Cynthia was pregnant ? But how? Uncle Lou . . .
    From a conversation she’d overheard between her parents when Lou and Cynthia wed, she’d learned that Lou had had a vasectomy. Maybe he hadn’t gone ahead