by B. J Daniels
“What about her relationship with her husband?” Nikki purposely avoided saying Travers’s name.
Patricia rolled her eyes and seemed to relax a little. Gossip was clearly something she could get her teeth into. “I knew the minute I was hired that there was trouble in that marriage. I’d seen the signs. It wasn’t my first rodeo. Marianne was miserable and not just because of this unexpected pregnancy. That’s right, the twins were an accident.” She nodded enthusiastically as she leaned closer. “From the start I could tell that she didn’t want them.”
“Was there another man?”
With a sigh, Patricia sat back. “You should have seen the way she was with that horse trainer. She made a fuss over him. It was so obvious.”
“I’m sure her husband must have noticed.”
Patricia shook her head in disgust. “He was blind to anything she did. Sure he noticed, but he thought she was just being nice to him since he was away from his wife and child and clearly lonely.”
“Maybe that’s all it was.”
“Then why would the two of them cook up this kidnapping scheme?” Patricia demanded.
“Maybe they didn’t. When the horse trainer was arrested, he didn’t have the money. Neither did Marianne. So what happened to the ransom money?”
Patricia shrugged. “Maybe he hid it, waiting until the two of them could run away together.”
“Strange, though, that it hasn’t been found. I know the authorities searched the ranch for any sign of the money—and the twins.”
“You mean searched for graves.”
“But they found nothing.”
“Have you taken a look at this country around the ranch? It’s Missouri Breaks, miles and miles of nothing but gullies and cliffs and pines, millions of places to hide anything you want.”
Nikki couldn’t argue that. “Let’s talk about that night.”
Patricia proceeded to tell her story almost verbatim from her other accounts. Just as Nikki had assumed, she got the same old, same old.
Patricia claimed she’d been awakened by a noise and gotten up to check the twins. As she’d crossed the hall, she’d been surprised to feel the breeze coming in—convinced she’d left their window closed.
On entering the room, she’d gone to close it when she noticed that one of the cribs was empty. She’d quickly checked the other and panicked.
“I stepped to the window, saw the ladder and the footprints below and started screaming.”
“Tell me where everyone else was at that point.”
She frowned. “It’s really a blur. Everyone came running down the hallway toward the nursery. Travers got there first and then the kids. Travers told me to take the children to my room and stay there to wait for the sheriff. That’s about the time Marianne showed up, her hair wet. I didn’t realize until later that she’d been for a swim—in the middle of the night.” She rolled her eyes, making it clear she thought the woman had been crazy even back then.
“Let’s not forget that Jesse Rose’s blanket was found in the pool house after the kidnapping,” Patricia said and raised an eyebrow.
Jesse Rose’s blanket. So that’s what the kidnapper had left behind? She tried not to give away her surprise in her expression. “And you had all three boys with you?”
The woman started to nod, but stopped. “No, Ledger was always the one lagging behind. I saw him down the hall and called to him.”
“Had he come from his room?”
“No.” She frowned, seeming surprised by her answer. “His bare feet were all muddy. I had to wash them in my tub in my room before I let him get into my bed. But that was nothing unusual. Ledger often went out at night and wandered around. Like Marianne.”
“Did he say anything to you that night about where he’d been or what he might have seen?”
“Seen?” She scoffed at the idea. “He was a child. Three years old. Cull was only seven and Boone, he was barely five. None of them said a word. I put them all into my bed. Like me, they were wide-eyed with terror and listening to what was going on outside my room.”
* * *
AFTER TALKING TO PATTY, Nikki went looking for Ledger. But when she reached the barn, it was Cull who she found feeding the horses.
“Have you seen Ledger?” she asked.
“He’s gone into town for breakfast,” Cull said without looking at her.
Abby, she thought, and her heart went out to him.
“Well, since I have you...” she said.
He stopped what he was doing to give her his full attention. “So you think you have me, huh? You think you have the entire family now.” He shook his head.
She ignored him. Patricia had proven Nikki’s theory this morning. There’d been a slight change in her story, giving Nikki new information that Patricia hadn’t remembered before. It was something small, something that even Nikki wasn’t sure mattered.
“What part of ‘it’s not safe for you to be here’ don’t you get?” he demanded.
“I’ve been around horses before—just not unbroken stallions let out into a corral I happen to be in.”
He ignored the accusation. “Not here in the stables. On this ranch. Didn’t dinner last night teach you anything?”
“The soup wasn’t poisoned,” she said as she stepped closer to rub a horse’s neck.
“The point is in this house it could have been,” he said without looking at her. “You have no idea. The past twenty-five years...” He shook his head as if he couldn’t go on. “Everyone is sick of hearing about the kidnapping let alone talking about it.”
“Everyone but your father.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped. “My father is the kind of man who just doesn’t give up.”
“What kind of man are you?”
He shifted those blue eyes to her, welding her to the spot. “The kind who knows a lost cause when he sees one.”
“We’ve already had this argument. I’m not leaving and I’m guessing your father isn’t giving up. He still wants me to do the book.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “And unless I’m wrong, which I don’t believe I am, he asked you to help me.”
He chuckled as he shook his head again. “All you’re doing is making things worse for everyone, including yourself.”
“Don’t you want to know the kind of woman I am?” When he said nothing, she continued. “I’m like your father. When I start something I finish it.”
Cull seemed to consider that before he turned toward her, his lips quirking into a grin as his eyes blazed with challenge. “Is that right?”
Before she could react, he grabbed her and dragged her to him. His mouth dropped to hers in a demanding kiss as he pushed her back against the barn wall.
Fleetingly she wondered how far he would go. He was angry, frustrated with what was happening to his family, scared. She knew those emotions only too well.
But she thought she also knew Cull McGraw. No matter what her grandfather said, she thought she was a pretty good judge of character. Cull wasn’t the kind of man who would force a woman. He didn’t have to. He was trying to scare her—just as he had with his talk of evil here on the ranch.
She did her best not to react to the kiss. It was a fine one even though she hadn’t asked for it and his heart wasn’t really in it. But she’d felt his fire, his passion fueled by the well of emotions surging through him.
The kiss made her want a real one from him, which was more dangerous for her than a wild stallion. The kiss ended as abruptly as it had started. Cull shoved off the barn wall and took two steps back. If anything, he looked more upset than he had before.
“You should be afraid of me,” he said, his voice rough with emotion as he jerked off his straw cowboy hat and raked a hand through his thick dark hair. “I even scare myself.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“Then you are more foolish than I thought. What happened here changed us all. If you can’t feel the malice...” His gaze shifted toward the open barn door. She could see the house in the distance.
Nikki looked toward the nursery window. The curtain moved but it could have merely been the breeze stirring it.
When she looked at Cull again, all she saw was his backside headed out to pasture. She watched him go, aware of the lingering taste and scent of him, both more disturbing than she’d wanted to admit earlier.
Now she found herself alone in the barn where her father had worked all those years ago. An eerie quiet seemed to fall over it in Cull’s absence.
She moved to the horse she’d petted earlier and again rubbed its neck, needing to feel the warmth. Cull was right. She could feel malice here, but unlike him, she didn’t believe in dark spirits.
Instead, she believed that evil lived in the heart of man—and woman. She thought of Sheriff McCall Crawford and wondered if she’d do anything about her suspicions. Nikki was anxious to find out if she’d been right, if her instincts hadn’t let her down.
Meanwhile, those instincts told her that someone in this house knew what had happened to the twins. She’d never felt it more strongly.
A breeze rustled the nearby pines, making the boughs groan softly. A hinge creaked somewhere deep in the barn. The hair quilled on the back of her neck, a gust of cold air rushing over her skin to raise goose bumps.
Suddenly she had the feeling she was no longer alone. She shuddered at what felt like breath on the back of her neck. As she rushed toward the barn door, she told herself she didn’t believe in evil ghosts. Whatever she’d just felt in the barn was only her overactive imagination, nothing more.
And yet the feeling hung with her all the way to the pool house.
Chapter Twelve
NIKKI CLOSED THE pool house door behind her, shaken by whatever that had been in the barn. She told herself it was a reaction to Cull. Every run-in with him left her off-kilter. He was angry and afraid—she could understand that. But kissing her? That had scared him more than it had her.
At least that’s what she thought. He wanted her gone. Well, it couldn’t be soon enough for Nikki, she thought, surprised she felt that way. She wasn’t safe here from herself. She didn’t scare easily, but Cull was right. There was something on the wind that turned her blood to ice.
Not that she could leave before she was done. Which reminded her that she needed to take advantage of whatever time she had here. She glanced through the window toward the house. Earlier she’d heard just enough of what Patricia had been saying to the cook this morning, to make her anxious to talk to Frieda.
At the main house, Nikki entered the kitchen to find Frieda Holmes sitting in a chair in the corner. The cook had a threaded needle in her hand and a quilt lay over her lap. Nikki had seen her elderly neighbor sew on a quilt binding enough times that she knew at once what the woman was doing.
“What a beautiful quilt,” she said. “Did you sew it yourself?”
Frieda nodded almost shyly. She was a small, almost homely woman with dark hair shot with gray. She was in her early sixties, by Nikki’s calculations, and had been the cook for years.That was back before they could afford a full-time nanny. Back before the twins.
Nikki moved closer. “I love the colors, and your quilting is amazing. My goodness, it’s all done by hand.” This surprised her, since her neighbor quilted with a sewing machine and only hand sewed the binding.
“It relaxes me,” Frieda said proudly as she ran a hand over the tiny, closely spaced stitches.
At the sound of footfalls behind her, Nikki turned as Patricia came into the kitchen. “What’s going on?” she demanded.
Frieda stuck her finger with the needle as she hurriedly tried to put the quilt away. She tucked the needle in the fabric and shoved the quilt into a bag next to the chair. She wiped the blood from her stuck finger on a corner of her apron and rushed to her feet.
“I was waiting on the pies in the oven,” the cook said as if feeling guilty for getting off her feet for even a break.
“And I was just admiring Frieda’s quilt,” Nikki said.
Patricia dismissed that with a flip of her hand. “I’ve never understood why anyone would want to cut up perfectly good fabric and then sew it back together. It makes no sense.”
“It makes beautiful quilts,” Nikki said, seeing how Patricia’s remark had hurt Frieda’s feelings. “My neighbor quilts. Unfortunately, I’ve never taken the time to learn.”
“Well, if you like quilts that much, you should drive out to Old Town and visit the Whitehorse Sewing Circle.” Patricia turned to Frieda. “Don’t you still meet in the community center down there? It’s not that far from here. There are always a bunch of old ladies in the back working on a quilt. Isn’t that right, Frieda?”
Frieda looked even more upset. Was it the crack about old ladies? Or something else? “I would love to do that,” Nikki said. “Is there a certain day I could go?”
But it was her boss who answered for the cook. “Frieda goes on her day off, Wednesday. I’m sure she’d be happy to take you.” There was something in Patricia’s tone, an underlying menace, that made no sense to Nikki.
The timer on the oven went off and Frieda quickly picked up two hot pads and opened the oven without saying a word.
“I’m going into town to the hospital to see my husband,” Patricia announced as she looked at Nikki. “You might not be here by Wednesday if Travers has decided to stop this ridiculous book.” She waved a hand through the air, not giving Nikki a chance to remind the woman that she could do the book without Travers’s permission, before she turned to Frieda.
“There are fresh vegetables from the garden that need to be washed and refrigerated right away,” the woman said to the cook. “Please don’t keep Frieda from her work,” she said to Nikki. “I believe Cull has a horse saddled and waiting for you. He told me to tell you to have Frieda provide you with a picnic lunch. Apparently, he’s taking you for a horseback ride.” Her gaze took in what Nikki was wearing. “You might want to change.”
With that she spun on her heel and stormed out in a cloud of expensive perfume.
Cull was taking her on a horseback ride? That was news to her. Frieda still seemed upset even with Patricia gone as she took out four beautiful apple pies from the oven. Nikki noticed that the woman’s hands were shaking. Patricia had upset her and it was unclear to Nikki how exactly other than the woman’s demanding and demeaning tone. So why was Frieda still working for her? Surely she could get a job elsewhere.
“I’ll put together a picnic lunch for you while you change,” the cook said, clearly wanting Nikki out of her kitchen.
“Thank you.” She left to go change and when she returned, Frieda handed her an insulated bag heavy with food. As she thanked her again, Frieda busied herself washing the vegetables as per her boss’s orders.
On the way to the barn, Nikki wondered if this horseback picnic ride was Cull’s idea—or Patricia’s. Either way, it would give her time alone with him away from a lot of the drama.
* * *
CULL WATCHED THROUGH the open doorway as Nikki made her way down to the barn. She’d changed from the slacks, blouse and high heels she’d been wearing earlier. Now she was in a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and tennis shoes. He should have realized she wouldn’t own any cowboy boots.
Still, she looked good. She had a bag in one hand, no doubt their picnic lunch. He smiled to himself. The horseback ride had been Patricia’s idea when she’d found him in the barn.
“Get her out of here for a while,” the woman had said, and he hadn’t needed to ask whom she was referring to. “Take her for a horseback ride. Even better, leave her out there in the wilds. Or...” A look had come over his stepmot
her. “Or cut her cinch so she has an accident. Just joking,” she added quickly at his mock shocked expression.
Patricia had caught him at just the right time. He felt antsy and knew exactly what he needed, and it was to get on the back of a horse and ride out of here. “I’ll take her for a ride,” he said, making Patricia smile.
As Nikki approached the barn, he said, “I should have asked you if you rode.”
“Or if I wanted to go on a picnic with you,” she said but was smiling. “I have ridden before. Once at a fair when I was a child.”
Great, he thought. Green. Just what he needed. “I have a mild-mannered horse you’ll like.” He could see that she was trying to think of a good reason to say no. Who could blame her after earlier in the barn? That had been stupid kissing her. What had he been thinking?
And then springing this horseback ride and picnic on her. If he was her, he’d be suspicious.
“You should see the ranch,” he said, determined that she would go with him. “Consider it research. Also I know you’re dying to get me alone so you can...grill me.”
She was looking skeptically at the horse he’d saddled for her. “I’m not sure about this.” It had been too long since she’d been on the back of a horse, but he didn’t like leaving her here alone with almost everyone gone.
“Where is that woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants?” he asked her.
She smiled and looked resigned.
“Hey, it’s going to be fun. Trust me. You’re in good hands with me.”
Clearly, she wasn’t so sure about that. But he’d promised his father he would help her. And wasn’t that what he was doing? But how long before she realized there was nothing new to write about? How long before she realized that she’d wasted her time coming here?
Soon, he hoped. She didn’t want to believe it, but she’d put herself in danger. She had a reputation for getting to the truth. What if there was someone on the ranch who had more to hide than he did?
