Jenny made herself smile. “I hear you,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
But as she left the ranch house, Jenny knew she wouldn’t see Kate in the morning. The light was still on in the barn, so she had time to get ready if she hurried.
First Jenny went to her bedroom, took down a suitcase, and rapidly packed it with clothes and other necessities. Then she carried the bag to her studio and hid it under the desk. Next, she filled her messenger bag, taking her laptop, iPad, and a few drawing supplies.
Finally, she crossed to a painting hanging on the wall and drew it back on concealed hinges to reveal a safe with a digital lock. Jenny punched in the combination, opened the door, and removed three stacks of hundred dollar bills secured in tightly banded bundles. She peeled off $300, stuffed the money in her wallet, and put the rest in her suitcase.
Glancing toward the barn, she saw the lights flicker off. She hurriedly turned off the lamp on her desk and went back to her bedroom, taking off her clothes, throwing on her pajamas, and climbing into bed. By the time Josh came in, Jenny appeared to be sound asleep.
She felt him sit down on the side of the bed and take off his boots. That was followed by the rustle of his shirt and jeans being removed. He drew back the covers and carefully climbed into bed, obviously trying not to disturb her.
Jenny lay perfectly still, her eyes on the clock, listening as his breathing grew steady and regular. She waited an hour until soft snores emanated from the other side of the bed before getting up, gathering her cast-off clothes, and walking back to the studio in the dark.
There, she changed rapidly, sat down at the desk, quickly scrawled a note, sealed it in an envelope, and wrote “Kate” on the outside. Jenny propped the note against the base of the desk lamp, gathered her bags, and let herself out without making a sound.
Once outside, she opened the driver’s door of her SUV and crammed her bags to the passenger side. Then she put the vehicle in neutral and shoved with all her might. It was a downhill grade to the front gate. As soon as the SUV was rolling good, she jumped in and steered herself out into the lane.
The vehicle’s momentum carried her at least 200 yards away and it was only then that Jenny started the engine, but she didn’t switch on the lights.
The moon was full, and using only its dim glow for illumination, she drove five miles before turning on the headlights. She had no idea where she was going, only that right now she had to get as far away from the Rocking L and Josh Baxter as possible.
The next morning, when Jenny didn’t come to the main house by 5:30, Kate headed for the studio. Half-way there, she ran into Josh. “Where’s Jenny?” she asked immediately.
“And good morning to you, too,” Josh answered. “She wasn’t in bed when I woke up this morning. I figured she was up having coffee with you.”
Kate glanced toward the barn. “Her SUV is gone.”
“What?” Josh said, looking perplexed. “Where would she be going this early?”
Fixing Josh with an almost angry glare, Kate said, “What in the hell did you say to her?”
Josh took a step back, clearly shocked by the force of the question. “Katie,” he stammered, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What the hell happened last night?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” he said honestly. “I couldn’t sleep when we got home from the cookout. Jenny was going to work in the studio for a while, so I came out to the barn to put some of the hardware together for the swings. It was about a quarter of 3 or later when I finally went to bed. Why?”
“Because Jenny was in my study pale as a ghost and shaking like a leaf at 2:15,” Kate said. “If the two of you had an argument, you need to tell me what happened right by-God now.”
“Katie,” he said earnestly. “I’m telling you the truth. We haven’t had a cross word in days. My God, before I went out to the barn we . . . well we . . .”
“And?” Kate said.
Josh blushed. “And nothing,” he said. “No, that’s not what I mean, it was . . . it’s always good with us like that.”
“Did you get rough with her?”
A look of horror filled his feature. “You mean in bed? Of course not. I would never . . . I’m not like that, Katie.”
“Then what the hell happened to put her in that state?”
“I honestly have no idea,” he said. “But you’re scaring the hell out of me.”
“Join the club,” Kate said. “Come on. We need to have a look around the studio.”
The instant they entered the room, Kate’s eyes fell on the envelope propped up against the lamp. Ripping it open, her eyes rapidly scanned the page.
“What does it say?” Josh asked desperately.
With a grim expression, Kate read, “My darling Katie, please forgive me. I know I promised I would never leave you again, but he’s like Daddy. I can’t do it. I can’t live the life Mama had. I have to go away. I love you so much. Please make Mandy understand.”
Josh sat down heavily in a chair as if all the strength had suddenly left his limbs. “Like your father?” he said numbly. “What on earth would make her think I’m like Langston?”
Kate sat down beside him. “Did anything happen in the barn last night?”
“I was just putting the hardware together for the swings and it wasn’t going together right,” he said miserably. “That’s why I was so late. I wanted it to be ready for this morning so we can finish the playground and not disappoint Mandy and the girls.”
“Did Jenny come to the barn?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Come on,” Kate said, standing up.
He followed her to the barn without a word. The whole story was written there in the soft dirt. Jenny’s footsteps going in, and then the shuffled, backward haste of her retreat. “Think,” Kate said. “What did she see?”
All the color drained out of Josh’s face. “Oh my God,” he said. “I lost my temper. I threw a piece of the swing across the room. It knocked a bunch of cans over and I had a cussing fit. Jenny must have been standing here. She must have thought it was like that time your Daddy busted the mirror.”
“How do you know about that?” Kate asked.
“Mandy told me,” Josh said. “She was trying to explain to me why it’s so hard for Jenny to trust that I won’t hurt her. Oh my God. What have I done?”
Kate reached in her pocket and took out her cell phone. She hit a speed dial button and listened, then put her hand over the phone. “It’s going straight to voicemail,” she said. After a second, she spoke into the phone. “Honey, I know what happened last night. We need to talk. Please, Jenny, call me.”
When she switched off, Josh looked at her with pleading eyes. “Tell me what to do, Katie,” he begged. “I’ll do anything to fix this.”
Taking pity on him, Kate laid a hand on his arm. “You didn’t do anything to her, Josh. You didn’t even know she was there. I feel like an idiot for not making her talk to me last night when I knew she was so upset.”
“But to run away like this,” he said, his voice breaking. “To run away from you and Mandy. Why?”
“Reflex,” Katie said. “She wasn’t thinking. She was just reacting. Running on fear.”
“And now she thinks I’m like him,” Josh said in a strangled whisper. “How do I make her see that I’m not? I love her, Katie. She’s never going to trust me now.”
“Stop that,” Kate said. “Never is a long time. I just have to get her to talk to me.”
“What do I do?”
“You go on down and work with Joe and Jake,” Kate said. “You need to be doing something with your hands or you’ll go out of your mind. I’ll come get you the instant I hear from her.”
“What do I tell them?” he asked.
“There’s no sense hiding it,” Kate said. “Tell them the truth.”
“Do you know where she would go?”
Kate shook her head. “No,” she said.
“I have no idea. She really did promise me she’d never do this again. It’s not something I’ve been worried about.”
“It’s my fault,” Josh said. “I’ve been trying to get her to set a wedding date and I’ve been talking about children. It was too much for her. And now this.”
“Stop,” Kate ordered. “Those are the kind of things a man’s got a right to talk about when a woman says she’s going to marry him. This is all just a huge misunderstanding. I can get her to see that if she’ll just talk to me.”
“And until then?” he asked. “What do we do until then?”
“We wait,” Kate said. “We don’t have any other choice.”
98
The other men working on the playground forced Josh to take a break at noon. He accepted the plate with a sandwich and chips on it that Joe offered to him, then mumbled an apology and wandered off to eat alone on the retaining wall at the end of the pool.
Phil Baxter watched his nephew, and then, taking his own plate, said quietly, “I’m going to go eat with Josh.”
He approached tentatively and said, “Son, may I have my lunch with you?”
Josh looked up, nodded silently, and took another half-hearted bite of his sandwich. Phil sat down beside him. Neither man spoke for several minutes until Phil cleared his throat and said quietly, “There seems to be a lot of talk around here about Langston Lockwood and not nearly enough talk about Irene.”
When Josh didn’t comment, Phil went on. “I’m the only person still alive who knew Irene as a woman,” he said. “The girls remember her as their sainted mother, someone fighting a disease that was killing her. I remember her as the lover who shared my bed, and the woman with whom I briefly dreamed of having a different kind of life.”
Glancing at his uncle’s blushing face, Josh said, “You don’t have to tell me any of this if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“Yes,” Phil said, “I do. Because I look at your Jenny and she is the image of my Irene. I don’t generally speak of private things, Josh. You and I don’t really know each other yet, but, well, I’d like to change that. We’re the last Baxter men. When we were young boys, your father, Jimmy, and I were close. Eddie was the troublemaker.”
“He’s dead, too?” Josh asked.
“So far as I know,” Phil said. “The last we heard of him was years ago. He was living down in Mexico. Got himself knifed down there. So really, you and I are the last Baxters.”
“Don’t I have cousins?”
Phil looked away and then said, “You do, but they haven’t spoken to me in years and I don’t want to make trouble in their lives. My boy, David, is a doctor in Dallas and my daughter, Kathleen, lives out in California with her family.”
“How do you know that?” Josh asked.
“Google is a marvelous thing,” Phil smiled. “Were you happy living with Uncle Melville after your parents were killed?”
Josh nodded. “He was good to me,” he said. “He was an old bachelor, so he let me do pretty much what I wanted, but he taught me right from wrong. My folks left enough for my education and then Uncle Mel left me the ranch. I guess really, though, it’s part yours.”
“I don’t want it,” Phil said without hesitation.
“Well, we’re really just kinda running it all in with the Rocking L now that Jenny and I . . .” He caught himself and swallowed hard, unable to go on.
Phil patted him on the knee. “Shall I tell you about Irene?” he asked.
Josh just nodded.
“She was a beautiful, passionate woman,” Phil said. “Is your Jenny like that?”
It was Josh’s turn to blush. “Yes,” he said. “She’s all of that and more. Sometimes I think that’s the only part of our lives that isn’t complicated.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” Phil chuckled. “From my experience, the more men try to talk, the more we get ourselves into trouble.”
“Was Irene the kind of woman you could talk to?”
Phil’s expression turned wistful. “We talked for hours,” he said. “She wasn’t just beautiful, she was smart. Well educated. Well read. Opinionated. Not afraid to take a position. They talk about her like she was the sort of woman who would just break, but I assure you she had an iron will.”
“Uncle Phil,” Josh said, looking a little uncomfortable, “you did meet her in a mental hospital.”
Phil laughed. “She wasn’t broken. I was. Irene was . . . tired. She felt out of options. She’d already lost her sister, Amanda; they were like Kate and Jenny. The only person Irene really felt she could talk to was her friend Clara. Irene described her as a ‘force of nature.’”
“Wait until you meet Clara,” Josh said. “She’s hell on wheels. And she loved Irene like nobody’s business. Clara and all those women in that Study Club of theirs made it possible for the girls to get this ranch. I’m telling you, those women may be old now, but I wouldn’t cross a one of them.”
“If there’s one thing I have learned in life,” Phil said, “it’s that women are pretty incredible. And when they band together to help each other? Hell hath no fury.”
“That’s for damned sure,” Josh agreed.
“So you see, Langston may have hurt Irene terribly, but he didn’t break her. These girls took the worst of it after she was gone,” Phil said. “That was what Irene feared the most. From what Mandy has told me, their mother did what she could for them before she died, making sure they’d get this land, but they were still raised by a cold-hearted son of a bitch. What you’re coping with now is his fault, not yours.”
Josh stared out over the pasture. “What do I do, Uncle Phil?” he asked.
“Well, even though you didn’t do anything wrong, you apologize,” Phil said. “You tell Jenny what happened in the barn and you tell her it won’t happen again, and you don’t let it. You be the man she needs you to be. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve more or less been where you are right now.”
“You have?” Josh asked.
“The relationship Irene and I had was strictly against the rules in the facility, so we had to sneak around. But even then, Irene was always afraid how I’d be the next time she saw me,” Phil said. “Langston turned on her the morning after their honeymoon. Did you know that?”
“Not really,” Josh said, “but I knew the marriage went south pretty fast.”
“Irene and I didn’t have long together, but she was still afraid how things would be between us after . . . well, after. It was more important for me to be loving then than during. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Josh said.
“I know it doesn’t feel fair, son,” Phil told him, “but you’re still in a position of regaining Jenny’s trust. She’s like an animal that has been frightened too badly. She knows that a hand offered in kindness can deliver the cruelest blows.”
Josh took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair. “What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on that son of a bitch Langston Lockwood,” he said.
“I haven’t raised my hand in violence to another human being since I left Vietnam,” Phil said, “but I wouldn’t mind having a piece of that man either.”
“You know what the worst part of it is, Uncle Phil?”
“What?”
“Jenny knows she’s difficult,” Josh said. “She can’t stop herself, and it just makes her feel worse.”
“Then you have to make sure that the difficult makes no difference,” Phil said. “Look, son, in the relationship I had with their mother, I was the weak one. I should have left my wife and children and taken Irene and these girls out of here. It would have been better for everyone. My marriage was a sham, and I didn’t know how bad Irene’s situation really was, but I still have to live knowing I didn’t help her.”
“How did you and Irene leave it?” Josh asked.
Phil drew in a long breath. “We had one last night together,” he said, smiling. “I’ve lived on that night all these years. She sent me back to my life without a hint of recriminatio
n. If I had possessed so much as a particle of that woman’s strength, all of our lives would have been different.”
“Will you tell Jenny all of this?” Josh asked.
“Of course, I will,” Phil said. “I want these girls to know what kind of woman their mother really was. Kate tells me that Jenny is afraid she inherited instability from both sides of the family. That’s not true. Irene was not unstable. She was just cornered.”
“Thanks to me, Jenny thinks she’s cornered, too,” Josh said hoarsely.
“I know you don’t believe it now,” Phil said, “but this is all going to work out.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Come on. Let’s get back to building that playground. Work won’t make your troubles go away, but it helps.”
Josh allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. “Thank you, Uncle Phil,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” Phil replied. “Now let’s go compact some gravel.
Kate felt the mattress sag under Jake’s weight, but she didn’t open her eyes. “Is Josh finally asleep?” she asked.
“Yes,” Jake said. “I put a blanket over him.”
“Is he still on the couch?”
“I couldn’t get him to move,” Jake said. “He wants to be able to hear if her car pulls in the gate. How are you?”
“Tired,” she mumbled. “Worried.”
“Come here,” he said, sliding his arm under her.
Kate rolled on her good side and put her head on Jake’s shoulder. Without being asked, he started to massage the muscles in her upper arm.
“Hmm,” she said, “that feels good.”
“You can’t carry this much tension, honey,” he said. “I know it makes the pain worse.”
“Don’t fuss,” she groused. “You know how I hate being coddled.”
“For a woman who hates coddling,” he chuckled, “I don’t notice you’re moving much.”
“I’m too tired,” she said, “and you’re comfortable.”
“I’m comfortable?” he said, feigning indignation. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man.”
“Sweetheart,” she said sleepily, “you can be all handsome and sexy tomorrow. Tonight, I need comfortable.”
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