Twice in a Lifetime

by Merline Lovelace

  Ellen hadn’t changed a picture or moved a chair when her mother-in-law left, wanting Jake to feel comfortable in the ranch house he’d always loved. Wanting to keep the place feeling like home, too, to her husband’s four younger brothers. Reece’s job as a structural engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation had taken him all across the country and to most of the major waterways of the world, yet Ellen had always welcomed him back to the Bar-H with the shy smile that was hers alone.

  The memory of her smile brought Reece’s gaze back to his oldest brother. They had all taken Ellen’s death hard. She had always been there in Jake’s shadow, quiet, shy, deferring to him without conscious thought. The Henderson brothers had all grown up thinking of her and Jake as a pair, treating her with the careless affection of a sister. If Reece and the rest of his brothers had wished that she’d take Jake down a peg or two once in a while, maybe shave off a few of those do-it-my-way-or-not-at-all layers, they’d never said so to anyone outside their tight, closed circle.

  Only now that he’d found Sydney could Reece even begin to appreciate the devastation Jake must have suffered when Ellen died. The mere thought of drifting off to sleep without his wife’s warm body curled up against him put a kink in Reece’s gut that wouldn’t go away. He couldn’t imagine life without her, hoped he’d never see a sunrise or listen to the wind soughing through the pines without hearing her murmur about the incredible sound effect. She’d taught the engineer in him to see the world through her filmmaker’s eye. To visualize the poetry in the soaring concrete and earthen dams he worked on and the richness in the often remote civilizations they traveled to. Like Ellen had with Jake, Sydney completed him.

  Yet as he observed Jake’s rough and tumble antics with Matt, Reece couldn’t help wishing his brother would put his grief behind him and find someone else, someone who’d stand up to him occasionally. Rock him back on his heels every so often, the way Sydney did Reece.

  That thought was drifting around at the back of his mind when Jake pitched his voice over Matt’s giggling screeches to ask if he remembered Rachel Quinn. The question was offhand, but something about the deliberate casualness of it sent Reece’s antennas shooting up.

  “Rachel Quinn? Is she any relation to Alice Quinn?”

  “Her niece. She spent a summer in Flagstaff some years back. Had a thing going with Sam.”

  “That boy sure does get around,” Reece said with an admiring shake of his head. Noting Sydney’s sudden frown, he instantly corrected himself. “Did get around, before Molly clipped his wings.”

  With his wife reassured on her sister-in-law’s be-half, Reece once again tuned in on his older brother. “So what about this Rachel Quinn?”

  “She’s back in Flagstaff for a month or so, staying with her aunt while Alice recovers from a hip replacement.”

  “And?”

  Pinning the wildly wiggling Matt to the floor with a big hand, Jake shrugged off the question. “And nothing. I bumped into her earlier tonight at the fairgrounds and just wondered if you remembered her.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Tall. Dark hair. Nice bu…er, build.”

  Well, well! As far as Reece knew, this was the first time Jake had noticed a woman’s butt since Ellen died. Or admitted noticing it, anyway.

  “She couldn’t believe Sam’s the father of three girls. I invited her out to the Bar-H next week to see the evidence with her own eyes.”

  “You did, huh?” Reece covered his own sudden spurt of interest in Rachel Quinn with a lift of his broad shoulders. “Hope she comes ready to ride. We can use all the hands we can get. How many extra men does Shad have lined up?”

  As it always did when the Henderson brothers got together, the talk turned to the business of the Bar-H. The logistics of searching the high wooded pastures for upwards of six hundred cows, bringing them and their offspring down to the bottom lands, weaning the calves, and loading them on trucks for shipment to feeder operations in Kansas and Oklahoma soon consumed Jake and Reece.

  They interrupted their discussion only long enough for Reece to scoop up his son and tote him upstairs to bed. Matt protested volubly every step of the way, of course. It took threats from his father and his uncle’s solemn assurance that he’d take him up in the saddle with him tomorrow to get the boy into his Pokémon pj’s. By the time the men had accomplished the Herculean task of putting the two-year-old to bed and returned downstairs, Sydney had a pot of coffee brewing and the remains of Martina’s chocolate cake served up.

  The three of them climbed the stairs again several hours later. As he bid his brother and sister-in-law good-night, Jake experienced the same mix of emotions that always hit him when one of his brothers came home. Genuine enjoyment of their company. Satisfaction in knowing that for a few days the walls would echo with more than just the thud of his own boots and those of the couple who kept the house running. A visceral little pang of envy for their happiness, which he fought like hell but couldn’t quite vanquish.

  Particularly not with Ellen smiling up at him from the bureau. Jake stood with his shirttails hanging out and half the buttons undone and stared down at the snapshot. It was his favorite, taken a few years after they’d married. She was leaning against a split-rail fence, with a stand of aspen behind her. The leaves were a shiny, liquid gold, almost as bright as her hair. She’d tipped her face to the sun and looked so young. So happy.

  Blowing out a ragged breath, Jake turned away. It took only minutes to strip down, minutes more to scrub his face. Then he stretched out in the bed he and Ellen had shared for so many years, crossed his arms behind his head, and watched the shadows dance across the ceiling.

  He wasn’t even aware that his thoughts had drifted from the slight, dainty blonde he’d married to the tall, confident brunette he’d taken in his arms tonight until he felt himself harden. With a muttered curse, Jake rolled over, punched the pillow, and willed Rachel Quinn out of his head.

  Eighteen miles away, a phone shrilled, breaking the silence of the night.

  Rachel dived for the instrument on the nightstand in her aunt’s tiny guest room. She’d been pacing and prowling for hours, waiting for Russ Taggart to return the call she’d made to the duty officer at the FBI’s Denver region headquarters.

  “This is Rachel Quinn.”

  “Taggart here, Rache. It’s been a while since I heard from you.”

  Five months, in fact, since the task force had been formally dissolved and the FBI assumed full responsibility for the still-open investigation.

  “The duty officer contacted me and said you wanted to talk. What’s up?”

  “I spotted one of the bills from Flight 6219.”

  A stark silence greeted her breathless announcement. Rachel could hear her blood pounding in her ears, sense the sudden tension on the other end of the line.

  “When and where?”

  “In Flagstaff. Tonight. I’m here visiting my aunt and bumped into an acquaintance at the county fair. He passed a fifty to a concessionaire. I got a glimpse of the serial number, Russ. It’s part of the shipment that was aboard the downed DC-10. I’m sure of it.”

  Taggart’s swift reply slashed through her excitement like a saber. “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Don’t. Hang on a sec, let me check the airline schedules.”

  A few clicks of a keyboard later, he came back on the line. “There’s a United flight that gets me into Flagstaff at ten-fifteen tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll meet you at the airport.”

  “Right. Give me the name of this acquaintance so I can run him through the computers.”

  “Henderson. Jake Henderson.”

  “Henderson,” Taggart repeated. “Got it. If this character has received so much as a parking ticket in the past five years, I’ll soon know about it.”

  A frown etched between Rachel’s brows. In her simmering excitement, she’d formulated a dozen possible scenarios explai
ning how that bill made its way from the crash site high in the Rockies to Jake’s wallet. That he might be anything more than an innocent conduit hadn’t figured among the possibilities.

  “He’s a local, Russ. He’s lived in Flagstaff all his life. Someone’s obviously passed him the bill.”

  “There’s nothing obvious about it at all,” the FBI agent shot back. “I’ve been working this case for almost a year. At this point, I’m taking nothing for granted, least of all this guy Henderson. I’ll run him through the computers.”

  Chapter 3

  “I think you’ve got it clean enough.”

  Rachel paused in the act of swiping down the kitchen counter and darted a glance over her shoulder at the woman seated at the knotty pine table. Her aluminum walker was planted close beside her chair.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “You’ve been scrubbing that countertop for the past five minutes. You’re going to take off the Formica finish.”

  “Oh.” Her ready smile popping out, Rachel folded the damp dishrag over the long-necked faucet. “Guess my thoughts were wandering a bit.”

  “A bit?” Alice Quinn gave a good-natured snort. “They’ve gone every which way but straight since you got up this morning. Since you got back from the fair last night, now that I think on it.”

  Cocking a head crowned with an untamable mass of springy, salt-and-pepper curls, she studied her niece’s abstracted movements.

  “Did you meet up with someone at the fairgrounds?”

  Rachel’s startled gaze snapped to her aunt. For a moment, she was afraid her thoughts were written all over her face. She’d met up with someone all right, and the results of that meeting had kept her tossing and turning for most of the night.

  “Yes,” she answered after a moment. “As a matter of fact, I did. Jake Henderson.”

  “Jake? I haven’t seen him in ages. He used to come by the café at least once a week for coffee and a piece of pie when I was still running the place.”

  “I didn’t know Jake’s wife was killed a few years ago.”

  “Didn’t I tell you about that?”

  “No.”

  “Terrible tragedy. Just terrible. How did you hear about it?”

  “He mentioned it.”

  “Did he?” Alice’s gray brows soared. “Then you’re one of the few people he’s talked to about the shooting. Jake pretty well shut himself up at the Bar-H after it happened. Don’t mix much with his friends anymore, from what I hear. How’s he doing?”

  “We only spoke for a little while,” Rachel said slowly, “but my impression is that he’s still hurting for his wife.”

  “I’m not surprised. Never saw two people more stuck on each other than Jake and Ellen.”

  Tucking her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, Rachel leaned her hips against the counter. The sunlight slanting through the window above the sink warmed her shoulders. In the bright glare of morning, Jake Henderson’s image stayed firmly imprinted in her mind’s eye, just as it had for most of last night.

  She hadn’t been able to get him out of her head since her call to Taggart last night. No, that wasn’t quite right. Henderson had chewed up her concentration from the moment he’d taken her in his arms and ignited small brushfires just under her skin. She still didn’t quite understand how her body could react so swiftly to the brief contact. Or why she’d never experienced that smothering rush of heat with the man she’d been dating off and on for the better part of a year.

  Nor could Rachel figure out why the fact that she’d sicced the FBI on Jake played so heavily on her mind. She’d put months of her life into the crash investigation and subsequent effort to find the missing forty million dollars. She was as eager as anyone on the task force to see the case successfully concluded. Still, she couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that she’d unleashed a pit bull on the unsuspecting Jake.

  She’d worked closely enough with Russ Taggart during those first intense months after the crash. She knew the agent’s short, compact frame housed a triple A-type personality. He’d driven the entire task force unmercifully and sent an army of agents out to track down every lead. In the process, he’d compiled a huge database that included everyone from the members of the ground crew who serviced the downed aircraft to the employees at the manufacturing plant that produced the metal containers for the “bricks” of newly printed bills.

  Now Taggart had entered Jake Henderson’s name into his massive database. Once in, Rachel suspected it would never come out. She knew how the government bureaucracy worked. She was part of it herself.

  As much as she wanted to solve the mystery associated with the downed aircraft, she couldn’t imagine that Jake constituted anything more than an innocent and very minor player in the drama. No doubt someone had passed him the bill. A friend or a business associate. There were probably a dozen or more someones in the string…all of whom Taggart would have to chase down.

  Jake was just the first step, Rachel told herself firmly, the jumping off point for the reenergized investigation. An investigation she could contribute to by finding out more about the man, she decided. What better source than Aunt Alice, who’d lived in Flagstaff all her married life and had dished up generous servings of the town’s news over the years with every one of her blue-plate specials?

  Casually, Rachel refreshed the coffee in the two mugs on the table and reclaimed her chair. Edging aside a pot of cheerful autumn mums, she gently pumped her aunt for information.

  “Jake mentioned that Sam and the rest of his brothers are coming home to help with the fall roundup.”

  “Isn’t Sam the one you were so stuck on that summer you stayed with me and your uncle Cal?”

  “I wasn’t stuck on him. He just provided an interesting diversion.”

  “I seem to recall it the other way ’round,” Alice chuckled. “You were the one who diverted him…right into a manure pile.”

  “He deserved it,” Rachel responded lightly, just as she had to Sam’s eldest brother last night.

  And it was the eldest brother who interested her this morning, not the youngest.

  “The Bar-H is a pretty big spread for Jake to run by himself,” she continued with studied casualness.

  “One of the biggest around,” Alice confirmed.

  “He must have taken some serious financial hits after the drop in beef prices last year.”

  “All the ranchers ’round these parts did.”

  “I’ve heard that a number of the locals are being forced to sell out to the big conglomerates.”

  You could hardly spend a week in Flagstaff without hearing dire predictions about the demise of the ranching industry. A bustling university center with a growing high-tech industry, the city still drew twenty-five percent of its tax base from ranching.

  Yet so many local cattle operations were being gobbled up by large, multinational conglomerates and wealthy out-of-staters. These distant owners skimmed their profits off the top and put a minimum return back in. It was common knowledge that fewer and fewer Arizona ranchers actually depended on their beef-producing income for their livelihoods. Jake Henderson numbered among that rapidly diminishing minority.

  “Any chance Jake might lose the Bar-H?” Rachel asked her aunt.

  “There was some speculation about it a while back, but I suspect that boy would chop both hands off at the wrist before he’d sell the Bar-H. His father spent most of his life building the spread up from a scruffy little operation with fewer than fifty cows. Jake’s added years of his own blood and sweat to the enterprise, and now runs upwards of six hundred head. The Bar-H is in his blood, in all the boys’ blood. They’d do whatever it took to hang on to the place.”

  Rachel tapped her finger on the rim of her cup thoughtfully and filed that bit of information away for later reference.

  “How did he weather the bad market last year?”

  “Word around town is Jake found an infusion of cash to see him through the winter.”
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  “From where?”

  “I don’t know. He probably floated some sizeable loans. That’s what most of the ranchers who hung on to their spreads had to do.”

  She digested that in silence while Alice rambled on about the plight of various friends and neighbors after last year’s disastrous market plunge. If Jake had taken out any recent loans, Russ Taggart’s computer queries would uncover the exact amounts and due dates. If not…

  Her brow furrowing, she traced the rim of her mug with her finger. She had a few hours to kill before she drove out to the airport to meet Russ’s plane. Maybe she’d make a few discreet inquiries around town, see what else she could learn.

  “I’ve got to run some errands this morning. Anything you want me to pick up for you?”

  “Can’t think of a thing, unless you want to swing by the pharmacy and get a prescription refilled for me.”

  “Sure. Which medication?”

  “I’ll get the bottle.”

  “Just tell me,” Rachel insisted as Alice reached for her walker.

  “Now don’t fuss. The doc said I’m supposed to exercise this hip joint as much as possible.”

  Taking care to keep her right leg outstretched, Alice used the chair arms to lever herself up before transferring her weight to the aluminum walker. One of the physical therapists at the hospital had stenciled her name on the denim pouch snapped to the frame. The convenient little carryall held her aunt’s reading glasses, a plastic water bottle, one of the gory thrillers she devoured like candy, and the pills she took to counter her twinges of pain.

  Her aunt had bounced back amazingly well from the surgery, Rachel thought as she followed the thumping walker down the hall. The ten days of intensive physical therapy she’d received before being released from the hospital had given her a good start down the path to full mobility. Another week, two at most, and she’d progress from the walker to a cane. At that point, she’d be able to drive again and Rachel could head back to D.C. Assuming, of course, the investigation didn’t bust wide open and suck her right in again.