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He hurried out the door. It didn’t take long to reach the nursing home and when he walked in, he said a quick prayer that he never had to put someone he loved in this type of place.
The nurse at the front desk told him which room Mr. Cruz was in.
He hurried down the hall, trying to breathe through his mouth and not his nose because of the smells.
He knocked on the door, and then saw an old man in a chair watching television.
“Are you Gary Cruz?”
“Yes,” he said. “Who wants to know?”
“My name is Nathan Alley,” he said.
“Is your father Scott Alley?”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“What do you want?”
There was no place to sit. No place he really wanted to put his butt on. The room was small and there were pictures on the wall of when the man was the sheriff.
“You were the sheriff of Blessing for many years,” he said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Loved my job. Until I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“I remember when I was kid, you were a fine sheriff for our community,” he told the man, thinking the opposite but wanting to feed his ego a little before he started asking questions. Questions he feared the man was not going to want to answer.
“Thank you. Why are you here?”
The man was direct and his brown eyes were staring at him like he knew he wanted something.
“I’m working on a case, and I wanted to know what you could tell me about Barbara Thomas’s death. The death certificate said it was from a fall. Is that true?”
The man chuckled and shook his head. “That’s what her husband told me. The autopsy showed that she fell down some stairs and cracked her skull.”
“Did you see the body?”
“Yes,” he said not giving any details.
“Did she have any other bruises?” Nathan asked.
With a sigh, he stared at him. “She fell down the stairs. Of course, she had bruises all over her body.”
If she had died suspiciously, he wasn’t going to tell him.
“This was about the time that Ron Thomas acquired the Sweet B Ranch,” he said, wondering how the man would react to that information.
He watched him carefully.
“Yes,” he said.
The man was tight-lipped.
“I’m really confused about how Mr. Thomas was able to get the ranch without purchasing it. Can you explain to me how that happened?”
With a deep breath, he glanced out the window. “That stupid Paul Bradley got drunk while playing poker. He signed over the ranch because he thought he had a winning hand and lost. It broke my heart when I had to evict his wife, daughter, and granddaughter. If only he’d stayed home that night, he would still own that ranch property.”
“Did you see the signed agreement?”
