Rancher's Double Dilemma

by Pamela Browning

  Cody was staring disconsolately into the refrigerator when Lacey arrived. “The pickings are kinda sparse,” he said apologetically as he stepped aside.

  Lacey treated herself to a quick survey of the contents. The first thing she saw was a plate of something indistinguishable, all covered with mold. The second thing was an empty beer can. She wrinkled her nose in distaste before dumping both into the garbage.

  “We don’t clean out the refrigerator much,” Cody said. From the looks of things around here, Lacey figured they didn’t clean anything much. A bit of hot soapy water would work wonders.

  “These eggs fresh?” She held up the carton so he could look at it.

  “Sure, a neighbor brought them over a few days ago.”

  “And there’s bacon,” Lacey said. Further exploration produced a hunk of cheese misplaced in the meat compartment.

  “I can whip you up a nice omelet,” she offered, and after his enthusiastic approval, she soon had bacon sizzling in the skillet.

  “Garth’s upstairs. He’s changing Ashley’s diaper,” Cody told her.

  “Well, I can hardly wait to meet her,” Lacey said as she whisked the eggs around in a bowl. She’d found the whisk in the bread box along with an assortment of bottle openers and old silverware. One thing for sure, they could use a bit of organizing around here. Otherwise, it was a nice kitchen and had seen some remodeling. The cabinets were made of mellow maple wood, and each door had a white knob for a handle. The counter was white laminate—although you would hardly know it was white, it was so stained. Well, Lacey knew how to get the stains out. You just rubbed them with baking soda, and if that didn’t work, maybe a little bleach mixed with water. The round kitchen table was next to a big bay window that looked out on what had once maybe been a flower garden. The window had a striped curtain on one side, but its mate on the other side had either fallen or been taken down. Lacey wouldn’t mind making new curtains if there was a sewing machine around. She thought something in blue gingham would look homey.

  Cody sat at the kitchen table, knife and fork at the ready.

  “Where do you keep the dishes?” she asked.

  “Cabinet over the dishwasher.”

  Lacey found them, though she didn’t like them much. They were plain white with a drab brown design in the middle, nothing like her own bright Fiesta Ware, which she’d collected since she was a teenager and used for every meal.

  Cody was watching her, and she shot him a questioning look. “Next to the last nanny we had, she didn’t cook much,” he said, to explain why he was looking.

  “Well, I was a short-order cook for a while, and I’ve waitressed a lot, so I know my way around food.”

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that,” Cody said fervently.

  “Don’t you or your brother know how to cook anything?”

  “Naw. Not much. Kim says she can cook good enough for both of us, so I never saw a need to learn.”

  Lacey’s ears perked up. “Who’s Kim?”

  “My fiancée.”

  She’d wondered about the ages of the Colquitt men. Cody looked young, maybe twenty-five or so. As for Garth Colquitt, he was a good bit older. Thirty-five if he was a day, Lacey figured, though the beard stubble hid a lot. He was a strong-looking man, though, and his shoulders looked as wide as oxen yokes. As the omelet began to bubble around the edges, she recollected that the lady in the drugstore had said that the Colquitts were good-looking, and she reckoned she agreed with that. Though, truth be told, like the house they lived in, they needed a bit of spiffing up.

  “What brought you to Mosquito?” Cody asked. “We don’t get many strangers around here.”

  “Just passing through.” It didn’t seem like a convenient time to elaborate.

  “What do you think of it so far?”

  “Nice little town. I don’t know what to make of a mule for the mayor though.”

  Cody hooted. “Neither do most of us. What happened, you see, was that the town council passed an ordinance that you could no longer keep livestock in the town. Well, it really made our most elderly resident mad. He’d kept Horace the mule in a shed out back of his house as a pet for years. He said he didn’t want to get rid of Horace, that he’d die if he had to ship his old friend off to a ranch where he wouldn’t get any special treatment. So the council figured that the way to remedy this was to appoint the mule a member of the council. Then he’d have to live within the town limits.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope, I’m not. Then the old fellow kicked the bucket, and the mayor died soon after. Nobody wanted to run for the mayor’s job, and the town charter requires a mayor, so the town council up and appointed Horace the mayor. All the major TV networks picked up on the story. Mosquito was famous for a while. I thought you might have seen the stories on TV.”

  “I missed it, I’m afraid,” Lacey said, laughing.

  The omelet was done, so she deftly transferred it to a plate. “How do you usually call your brother for dinner?” she asked Cody.

  “He just cranks up his voice and hollers,” said a voice from the doorway, and when Lacey whipped around, there was Garth.

  Well, he was handsome, she thought. Those notable shoulders tapered to a narrow waist, and she skipped over the hips to his thighs. They weren’t half-bad, either, filling out the denim of his jeans admirably. She did so like a guy who could do justice to a pair of Levi’s; it was what had first attracted her to Bunny. Not wanting to think about that, she forced her gaze back up to Garth’s face. Chunky cheekbones, set high like maybe he was part Indian. A strong, straight nose, flaring nostrils. Eyes the color of strongly brewed coffee, heavy brows. White teeth, lined up like a row of Chiclets.

  He was smiling, making the corners of his eyes crinkle agreeably. “How about coming upstairs to meet Ashley?”

  Lacey, discovering that her palms had gone damp for no reason at all, wiped her hands on a towel and followed Garth up the stairs, trying not to watch the working of his haunches under those jeans. “I just gave Ashley Anne her bath,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve set her in her playpen and she’s playing as cute as can be with her stuffed animals.”

  “That’s a nice name, Ashley Anne.”

  Garth reached the landing and paused to wait for her. “My wife gave Ashley her name,” he said, a shadow flickering across his eyes. His gaze came to rest on a framed photograph on the wall. It was of a woman with a round face, the sort of sweet and kind-looking woman Lacey had often had as a Sunday school teacher when she was growing up in east Texas. “That’s Joan,” he said. “She died a month after Ashley was born.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lacey said, wanting to tell him about the loss of her baby although it didn’t seem like the time. “What…what happened?”

  “Her health wasn’t good. She’d been pregnant before, but she always lost the babies. We’d had two stillborn,” he said. In that moment Lacey’s heart went out to him.

  They passed a room with twin beds and a lot of stuff lying around—an old saddle, a tangle of horse tackle, a pile of dirty clothes. “Cody’s room, though he doesn’t stay here much,” Garth explained. The next room they passed was somewhat neater and had a big king-size bed with the bedspread pulled up carelessly over the sheets. The blinds were closed, but Lacey saw that the walls were painted a warm shade of sage green and that the furniture looked solid. “My room,” he said.

  He turned and led the way into a nursery across the hall. From the looks of the toy basket in the corner, it seemed as if Ashley Colquitt must have every toy known to man and baby as well as all the accessories of babyhood, from monitor to music box. The room was painted pale robin’s egg blue with a wallpaper border around the top. The border featured blocks and teddy bears, standard baby stuff, on it. Lacey’s eyes widened. She said, “Oh! I do like this decor.”

  “Joan’s work,” Garth said. “She had a flair for homemaking.” He went to the playpen, his tall, broad-shouldered shape blocking her v
iew of the baby that he then picked up.

  He turned to face her, pride written all over his face. “This,” he said, “is Ashley. Ashley, hon, meet your new nanny.”

  Lacey opened her mouth to say something to the baby, but as soon as she saw Ashley’s face, she could not speak a word. Try as she might, no speech would come out. Her knees grew weak with shock, and she had to grab hold of the side of the crib to steady herself.

  Because the soft golden hair, the round gray eyes, the curve of the cheek and the little pointed chin—they were the exact duplicate of her own baby, Michele’s.

  Chapter Two

  Eternity passed before Lacey’s eyes in that moment. And every last snippet of every nightmare she’d had about her lost child crowded all reason from her mind. Memories flooded over her: The blinding lights in the delivery room. The excruciating pain of bearing the twins. Her terror at being all alone with people she’d never seen before in her life. The elderly nurse telling her that her baby had died and knowing with all the certainty in the whole wide world that it couldn’t be.

  And now this baby. Her baby, she was sure of it.

  Shocked, flabbergasted, too disturbed to voice her scrambled thoughts, Lacey knew she had to get out of there.

  “I-I’ve thought of something I have to check—my baby—something important,” she blurted, and she darted blindly from the room. Her feet in their clear plastic clogs clattered down the steps, and from the kitchen she heard Cody say, “Anything wrong, Lacey?” Behind her, a puzzled Garth stood at the head of the stairs, his daughter in his arms, speechless.

  Lacey’s heart pounded like a hammer against her ribs as she stumbled across the short distance to the Winnebago. She flung open the door and climbed inside, slamming the door behind her. She threw herself down on the seat of the dinette and buried her face in her hands as she gasped her bewilderment.

  Through her turmoil, she knew that there was only one way that Ashley Anne Colquitt could be the spitting image of her own dear Michele, and that was if they were identical twins. No two babies could look so much alike unless they were related. Unless they were the product of the same womb, the same egg split in two during early development.

  But this was crazy. It was impossible. As her mind grappled with what she had seen, with the similarity of the two children, she tried to qualify it somehow. But she couldn’t, not without thinking the unthinkable.

  She had found her lost baby, the other twin. But how had this happened. How?

  In her dreams, in her nightmares, she had so often seen another baby, looking like Michele but still not Michele, holding her arms out to her. Lacey would run to pick her up, and then somehow that baby had evaporated and there was nothing there. Still, the scene had left her with the feeling that her baby was alive somewhere, somehow.

  She’d described this nightmare many times to Bunny, who at best was impatient and at worst angry. “The first twin died,” he kept telling her. “Get over it.”

  And yet…and yet! Now, at last, she knew that her dreams were real. Her first-born baby was alive. Lacey had seen her with her own eyes.

  Still in shock, wanting the reassurance of her own baby’s presence, Lacey went to the crib and picked up the sleeping Michele. “Hush, darlin’, Mama’s here,” she murmured, hugging her baby tight as she began to fuss, holding what she knew was hers close to her heart.

  “Lacey?” It was Cody, knocking on the Winnebago’s door.

  “Wait,” she told Michele, putting her back in the crib and handing her a bottle of water before going to the door. She smoothed her hair back and tried to calm her pounding heart before forcing herself to open the door.

  “You want me to show you where to park this rig?” Cody asked.

  She knew she didn’t look as flustered as she felt. “Well, sure,” she said. “How about if I follow you over there?”

  Cody agreed, and when he headed over to the pickup parked nearby, she sat down in the driver’s seat of the Winnebago and made herself start up the engine. “Mama?” Michele said.

  “Yes, baby,” Lacey assured her, and the awful thought occurred to her that Ashley had no one to say that word to. But now—now! Ashley had a mother, and it was Lacey.

  Numbly she followed Cody’s pickup around the barn and stopped when he did near a little creek. He waved her onto the concrete pad where the ranch foreman’s mobile home had once been parked.

  “I’ll do the hookups for you,” he hollered through the Winnebago’s open window. Lacey called back, “That’s fine,” and while Cody worked, she busied herself with picking up the toys Michele had thrown on the floor, cautioning herself to act normal, all the time telling herself that she had to figure out what to do.

  While Cody went about the business of hooking up the Winnebago, she thought. One part of her was overjoyed that she knew about Ashley. She had never believed in her heart of hearts that her baby had died. So if that baby was in fact alive and well right here in Mosquito, Texas, that was cause for celebration.

  But Garth Colquitt thought the baby was his. He’d raised Ashley for ten whole months not knowing any different. The light of pleasure in his eyes when he’d introduced the two of them had told her that he wasn’t likely to let Ashley go. Not without a fight, anyway.

  “All set,” Cody called from outside. “Try the electricity. It should work.”

  Wondering how she could deal with these mundane matters even as her whole world was splitting apart, Lacey switched on the TV. “It works, sure enough,” she said.

  “See you in the morning,” he told her.

  “Right.”

  With that, Cody climbed back into the pickup and roared away. Lacey was glad he was going. Her mind in overdrive, she made herself fold the clean laundry left over from the last time she’d washed clothes. By this time, Lacey knew without a doubt what she had to do. She’d fight to get Ashley back. This child was the flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone!

  But she knew that Garth Colquitt was a prosperous rancher, undoubtedly a leading citizen of this county. “Nice,” the woman in the drugstore had called him. Nice or not, Garth might be powerful enough around here to make problems for her, she thought. Despite the deplorable state of housekeeping in the house, the cattle in the pastures looked sleek and well fed, the white clapboards of the house were freshly painted, and Colquitt land seemed to roll on forever.

  So how would she get Ashley back?

  She lay in her bed that night smelling the creek scent of water on rocks and listening to a lonely bullfrog calling to his mate. It seemed to her, after much thinking about it, that if Garth saw Michele, he’d know immediately that the two were twins. What would he do if he knew that? Throw Lacey off the ranch, depriving her of access to Ashley? And it might be an irrational thought, but what if he tried to take Michele away? Lacey already lived in unreasoning fear that her ex-husband, though he had so far shown no interest in Michele, might do exactly that.

  By the time she finally fell asleep, exhausted from the thoughts that kept chasing around inside her head, she had come to two conclusions. First of all, she couldn’t let Garth see Michele yet. And second, she needed to get to the bottom of this mystery.

  She was pretty sure that someone must have lied to her in the hospital. Who would do such a thing, tell someone her baby had died and then give that baby to another couple? A horrible thought occurred to her: Maybe Garth and his wife, Joan, had been the instigators. Maybe they had knowingly stolen her baby. The thought made her sick at heart.

  She was even sicker at heart when she thought about something else: maybe Bunny was to blame. What if he gave their baby away? But even as the idea flashed through her mind, she discarded this possibility. Bunny had mourned the death of their first twin. True, he’d stopped grieving long before Lacey, but Lacey was sure that his sadness had been genuine.

  Lacey was too tired to think anymore. The important thing was that tomorrow she would hold her missing baby in her arms at last. And one thing she knew for
sure—she would not be parted from this child ever again.

  “YOU RECKON this Lacey woman’s going to show up this morning? It may not be such a good idea to let her live in that Winnebago. It’s not convenient,” Cody said as he swished some water around a dirty mug and emptied it before helping himself to a cup of steaming java from the pot.

  “I expect she’ll be here,” Garth said. He’d shaved this morning, considering that he wanted Lacey to know he didn’t always look so rough.

  “Seems to me like she could have washed some of these dishes last night before running off,” Cody grumbled. “Seems like that’s the least she could do.”

  “Today is Lacey’s first full day. Cut her a little slack,” Garth said gruffly. “Plus that omelet last night wasn’t half-bad.”

  Cody snorted. “I been ready for breakfast for an hour now.”

  “Throw some cereal in a bowl,” Garth said. He too had hoped that Lacey would show up at the house to cook for them, but he’d neglected to tell her when he expected her to arrive for work.

  Cody cast a glance out the window. “Here she comes now. Carrying her own kid. Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. Company for Ashley,” Garth said.

  Today Lacey was wearing a saffron-yellow scoop-necked blouse and a pair of red clamdiggers. She was across the porch and swinging the door open before they knew it. “Hi, folks. I wasn’t sure what time you got up around here.” The baby, about the same size as Ashley and wearing a sunbonnet with a huge brim, was arrayed over Lacey’s shoulder like a sack of meal.

  “Crack of dawn,” Cody said. “This is a working ranch.”

  Lacey nodded. “I understand that. Is Ashley awake yet?” She made no attempt to explain her hasty departure the night before.

  “I think I hear Ashley making some noise right about now,” Garth said. “I usually let her play in her crib in the mornings until I’m ready to go get her.” He wondered why he felt so self-conscious around this woman all of a sudden.