Red-Hot Ranchman
Page 16
Paige’s instincts made her a split second faster than John, but as she ran for the kitchen, he followed close on her heels.
“What’s the matter?” she called along the way.
“Lookit!” Robbie said, pointing out the door as she drew near.
Just outside, hanging by the neck from a porch rafter at the end of a long rope, was one of John’s piglets.
“Oh, my God,” Paige whispered in a shocked voice.
John didn’t waste any time moving around them to go out and untie the tiny pig, but even as Paige tried to shield her son from the sight, Robbie broke away and came out after him.
“Make ‘im better!” the little boy begged.
“The piglet is dead, Robbie,” John said as gently as he could.
“Please! Hold ‘im like you did my frog an’ make ‘im come back!”
Paige had stepped out onto the porch, too, and stood only a few inches away. Watching. Listening.
John cast her a brief glance and then said quietly, “I can’t do that, Robbie.”
“Yes, you can! You brung Pete back to life when he died! I saw it! Do it to the piglet! His momma’ll miss ’im!”
John laid the piglet on the porch behind him to block Robbie’s view of it and hunkered down to be at eye level with the desperate child. At that moment, he would have given anything not to disappoint him, to be able to bring the piglet back to life and be all the little boy believed him to be. But he could only say, “Pete wasn’t dead, Robbie. He was just hurt.”
“Hurt bad ‘nough to be dead! An’ you just holded ‘im an’ he came back.”
Robbie’s pale blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears and the sight nearly broke John’s heart.
“You did somethin’! I know you did!” Robbie insisted adamantly. “Do it again!”
John was torn. He knew that to protect his past, to go on in Pine Ridge the way he wanted to, he should act as if Robbie had imagined what he’d seen, with the hope that the boy hadn’t really understood what was going on when he’d held the frog.
But this was Robbie. And he had seen. And he had figured out what was going on. How could he tell the child he’d imagined it all? How could he lie to him just to protect himself?
He couldn’t. Not even with Paige there to hear, too.
Wishing she wasn’t, wishing he wasn’t so aware of her, and in a voice more quiet than before, he said to Robbie, “Yes, I did do something to Pete to make him better. But I can’t do it this time. I can’t.”
“Why not? You did it to Pete. You even did it to Frieda when Mom went into the house to call the vet. Just do it again.”
John glanced up at Paige once more, hating the fact that if she had to find out about him, it would be this way. But there was nothing he could do about it.
He took a deep breath and said, “If the piglet was still alive but sick or hurt, then maybe I could do what I did with Pete and Frieda. Maybe I could hold him and make him well again. But I can’t bring him back to life, Robbie. I can’t do that.”
“But I want you to,” Robbie said in a small voice.
“I know you do. And I wish I could. But I can’t.”
John stood then, keeping a hand on Robbie’s shoulder to comfort the little boy, and met Paige’s stare directly, seeing in her eyes all the questions he wouldn’t be able to avoid answering now.
When she finally spoke, it was in a near whisper, as if she didn’t want Robbie to hear. “What do you mean if the piglet was only sick or hurt you could hold it and make it well again?”
John pressed his eyes closed with the thumb and forefinger of his free hand for a moment before he looked at her again. “Take Robbie in and call the sheriff,” he said. “I’ll get the piglet out of here and we can talk tonight.”
She didn’t do anything but stare at him with an expression of profound shock and disbelief that John had seen too many times in his life. An expression he would rather never have seen on that beautiful face that had come to mean so much to him.
But that moment was not the time to go into it all. Not when Robbie was right there and so upset.
“Go on,” he urged. “This is an ugly thing somebody has done here and the sheriff needs to be told. He needs to know about the stalking in the woods yesterday and that someone shot an arrow at you, and be needs to do something about these things. The rest can wait.” It’s waited this long. If only it could wait forever. But he didn’t say that. Instead, he added, “If the sheriff needs to talk to me, call and I’ll come back.” Then he gave Robbie’s shoulder a squeeze and said, “You stay with your mom. I’ll teach you to shave another time.”
He let go of the child so he could pick up the piglet and carry it across to his own place. Still, he could feel Paige’s stunned stare on his back as he went. And he couldn’t help wondering if what had been between them was going to end now.
And if the peace he’d found here for the past two months would, too.
“DON’T TELL ME you believe this,” Burt nearly shouted at Paige an hour later, sitting in her living room.
He wasn’t referring to what John had said to Paige and Robbie on the porch over the piglet that morning. Paige hadn’t said anything about that. He was talking about the confrontation he’d just had with John himself.
The sheriff had come immediately when Paige had called him. She’d told him all about the incident in the woods the day before and the piglet this morning. He’d had her ask John to come over and he’d questioned him. Aggressively.
So aggressively that the two men had almost come to blows before Paige had eased John out of the house just a few minutes earlier.
Now, alone with Paige, the sheriff was mincing no words. And no suspicions, either.
“I’m sorry, Paige, but I just don’t buy it. He was on the couch and somebody came all the way onto your back porch to hang a piglet—one of his piglets—and he slept through it? He didn’t hear a thing?”
“I don’t think that’s so hard to believe. Nothing woke me, either.”
“Your room is upstairs. And you thought you had the great protector down here. You were probably sleeping like a baby.”
Hardly, even though she’d told John she had. But the truth of it was that she’d slept fitfully through the night. Although it wasn’t fear that had kept her from a restful slumber. It had been John himself and knowing he was just a staircase away, reliving what she’d cut short between them, thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have because she’d still wanted him so much…
But that wasn’t what she was going to say to Burt.
“My room is right over the back porch, my window was partly open, and I wasn’t sleeping like a baby. I was up and down all night long. I would have been more likely to have heard something and I didn’t. And I certainly would have heard John unlocking the back door, sneaking out to get the piglet and then sneaking back in.”
“Not necessarily. He was inside. He would have known when you were sleeping the soundest. And who besides him knew he had those piglets?”
“Nobody had to know. Whoever has been lurking around could have just been looking for something to make mischief with, found them and hit on this latest—and most awful—idea.”
Burt shook his head as if he thought she was hopelessly naive. Then he changed tack. “And what about that deal in the woods yesterday? If John Jarvis had been the person stalking you, that means he was behind you. He could have slipped into his barn when you ran to the house, stashed the bow and arrow there and then come out as if that’s where he’d been the whole time.”
There was nothing about his version of events that she could argue, so instead she said, “But why? Why would he do that? Or any of the rest of it?”
“I don’t know why! I just don’t like the way that the burglaries started the same time he showed up around here. And I like even less that every time something happens to you or your place, he manages to be right in the thick of it.”
“Helping out,” Paige reminded him.
“I just don’t see why he would,” Paige said, but with less conviction as Burt’s words struck a chord. Hadn’t she suggested a similar scenario to John himself early on about his setting things up to make her indebted to him when he saved her from them?
“There’s still the water rights,” Burt contended. “I checked with the Powells. Jarvis hasn’t pursued buying their place beyond asking if they might be willing to sell. To me that means he could be holding out for your property and the water that comes with it. Or maybe he’s trying to drive you out because you’re the person closest to him, the one most likely to eventually see whatever it is he’s hiding. Hell, maybe Robbie’s already seen something he shouldn’t, spending so much time there. Maybe Jarvis needs to be rid of the two of you before you figure out you know more than you think you do and expose him.”
The exchange she’d heard between John and her son over the piglet that morning made it impossible for her to try to convince Burt he was wrong. Something was definitely going on with John. Something that Robbie had seen.
But was it illegal? Nefarious? Dangerous to her or her son?
It didn’t seem so.
Strange? Yes. Very, very strange.
But did John’s situation have anything to do with the burglaries or what was happening to her?
She didn’t know how it could have. And if it was so terrible that John would try to drive her out of Pine Ridge to protect himself, he certainly wouldn’t have admitted anything to Robbie, to her, this morning, would he?
No, until she found out just what was going on with John, she decided it was better all the way around to keep her doubts and questions to herself.
Burt took a breath and sighed. His frustration over everything that had been going on and his own failure to solve the mysteries was obvious.
Then, in the voice of a friend instead of an authority, he said, “Maybe you should get out of here. At least for a while. Maybe you should go live in that house you inherited in Topeka until I get this whole thing figured out. Whether it’s John Jarvis or somebody else, I don’t like what’s happening here with you and Robbie. This is bad, Paige. And I can’t be with you every minute of the day and night to keep it from getting worse than it already is.”
“I can’t just pack up and go away indefinitely. This ranch is my sole source of income. How would Robbie and I live?”
“You could get work in Topeka…” Burt’s voice dwindled away as Paige shook her head at the suggestion. “I don’t know. I just know it isn’t safe for you out here, being alone and all. And don’t tell me you feel better having John Jarvis next door, because something is up with that guy. I know it. I can feel it. I’m still waiting for the state police to check him out, but I’m scared to death that when I finally do find out just what it is that’s got him so secretive, it’ll be too late for you or Robbie or both of you, at the rate things are going.”
Paige appreciated her old friend’s concern. But still she said, “I can’t go away. It’s more urgent to find out who’s doing this stuff and stop them.”
“I think I have figured out who’s doing it. But proving it and stopping him are the hard parts.”
“John said you were welcome to search his place. Why don’t you take him up on it?” she suggested, thinking that a guilty man wouldn’t have been so free with that offer and feeling slightly better about not telling Burt everything.
“You can bet I’m going to. But I still wish you’d think about getting out of Pine Ridge. Or at the very least, steering clear of that guy.”
STEERING CLEAR OF JOHN was not what Paige was doing at six o’clock that evening. She was getting ready to go to dinner with him and his brother in Tinsdale just the way she’d agreed to that morning when John had invited her. And Burt’s suspicions of her neighbor were not uppermost in her mind as she did. The things John had said to Robbie that morning and what they meant were.
In all of Robbie’s stories about John, his claims that John had brought his frog back to life and in all his hero worship of their neighbor, Paige had never so much as paused to consider they were anything but a six-yearold’s fanciful embellishments. More fiction than fact.
To Robbie, John was bigger than life. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. So when Robbie had begged John to resurrect the piglet, Paige hadn’t thought that was particularly strange. She’d just expected John to deny that he’d done anything at all to the frog, that the frog’s reviving as he held it was just a coincidence. As surely it had to be.
But John hadn’t denied it. He hadn’t insisted that Pete’s recovery in his hands had only been a coincidence.
In fact, John had conceded that he had been involved in resuscitating the pet.
Somehow.
Just by holding it.
But how could that have made the frog well again?
Paige couldn’t believe the things she was thinking. Bizarre, impossible things that couldn’t be true.
Suddenly, she also couldn’t help thinking about Frieda the cow being down, bleeding from the mouth and looking as if she wasn’t going to live long enough for the vet to even be called, only to be back on her feet minutes later, perfectly fine, after nothing more than being left with John.
And there was Nijjy’s fetlock wound. How many weeks had she treated it with that very same salve that hadn’t worked until John had stepped in, until John had applied it?
And what about his own head that first night when she’d hit him with the baseball bat? She knew she’d hit him hard; she’d seen the blood to prove it. Yet in just the time it had taken her to dampen a washcloth, the cut had stopped bleeding and been completely closed with no more ministration than his holding his own hand over it…
“There couldn’t be a connection,” she told her reflection in the mirror as she stepped out of the shower.
John’s being around when animals revived or took a turn for the better didn’t mean he had done anything. His head wound closing fast didn’t mean anything but that he hadn’t been hurt as badly as she’d thought.
How could any of it mean anything else?
Yet she had asked what he meant when he’d said that if the piglet were only sick or hurt he could hold it and make it well again. And he hadn’t said that she’d misunderstood what she was hearing. That of course he hadn’t caused any kind of miraculous healing because that wasn’t possible.
Instead, he’d essentially admitted that that’s exactly what he’d done.
“But it isn’t possible,” she said out loud again.
He must have meant something else. Something that made more sense. Something he’d explain tonight, just the way he’d said he would. Maybe he was a doctor and that’s what he was alluding to.
But that didn’t seem to fit what he and Robbie had said to each other. It didn’t fit what Robbie had said about John before. Nothing fitted. And she felt as if she were grasping at straws trying to understand any of it.
All she could do, she decided, was get ready for their dinner together and count the minutes until he satisfied her curiosity.
Her shower finished, Paige pulled her hair back into a French knot and held it in place with a single comb that let the ends erupt in curls on the crown of her head.
She only applied eyeliner, mascara and blush, but she did it with extra care and even stroked on a second layer of the mascara.
As she had for Burt’s birthday party, she’d gone up into the attic and chosen something she hadn’t worn since moving back to Pine Ridge. It was a tight-fitting short black sheath with a bodice that plunged dangerously low into her cleavage. What made it more modest was the black lace overlay that covered the whole thing rising to a high collar that reached all the way up her neck an
d left an alluring transparency across her shoulders and ending in sleeves that went down to points just at the backs of her hands.
It was a very sexy dress, but she felt safe wearing it because she and John would have Dwight as a chaperon. Which was also what she thought when she chose three-inch spike heels to go with her black hose rather than more conservative pumps.
The doorbell rang just as she was going down the stairs. Through the glass in the front door she could see John.
It was a breathtaking sight.
He had on a silver gray suit with a tiny white pinstripe running through it; a crisp, snowy shirt and a pale gray tie with a Windsor knot. The cowboy was still evident in that bushy mustache and the way he stood, his weight mainly on one hip. But there wasn’t a cosmopolitan man anywhere who could hold a candle to him. He looked terrific.
Apparently, he thought as highly of her efforts for their evening out because by the time she had opened the door, he was grinning appreciatively and giving her the once-over.
“Ooo-ee,” he said in what was really only a breathy whisper.
Paige dipped in a small curtsy, embarrassed and delighted by his admiration, yet reminding herself that she still needed to keep some perspective to the evening ahead of them. Sexy dress or not, there were things that needed to be delved into and she didn’t want to be distracted from them.
She opened the screen for him to come in, expecting Dwight to appear from somewhere behind John.
But John was alone.
“Where’s your brother?” she asked when she realized it.
“He changed his mind about coming. Thought it might be better for just the two of us to talk.”
A slight shiver skittered up her spine at the prospect of being alone with him, but she tamped it down, again thinking that she had questions to ask and answers to hear, whether they were chaperoned or not.
“Our reservations are for seven-thirty, so we probably ought to head out,” he said. Then, as Paige took her small beaded evening bag off the hall table, he glanced around the house. “Did Robbie go to Julie’s?”