by B. J Daniels
“Then you understand why I don’t want to believe that your mother and my father...” Her voice broke and she sounded close to tears.
“They were just friends.” He brushed a lock of her hair back from her face, his fingertips grazing the soft smooth skin of her cheek. “I’m going to help you find out the truth.”
Her eyes widened. “Why?” she asked on a breath.
“Because I liked your father—because I like you.” His gaze dropped to her mouth and then his mouth was on hers. He dragged her to him, deepening the kiss as she came willingly into his arms.
Chapter Fifteen
NIKKI WOKE THE next morning to a knock on the pool house door. She quickly dressed and went to answer it, hoping it was Cull. She’d had a hard time getting to sleep after The Kiss. Unlike their first kiss, they’d both been into this one. It had sparked a fire to life inside them both. She shuddered to think what they might have done right there in the barn if they hadn’t been interrupted.
The memory of that kiss sent a wave of need through her. She’d wanted Cull desperately, but they’d been interrupted by one of the ranch hands who’d apparently needed him more than she did. She hadn’t seen him again last night.
Cull had unleashed a desire in her that she hadn’t known existed. This morning she had to remind herself that she never mixed business and pleasure. But who was she kidding? She hadn’t met anyone who made her interested in dating, let alone losing herself in pleasure.
She opened the door, a smile already on her lips, only to find it wasn’t Cull on her doorstep looking worried.
“Ledger?” she said, unable to hide her surprise.
“My father sent me.” From his expression, it was clear he wouldn’t have been here on his own. “He was surprised you hadn’t talked to me yet about the kidnapping.”
“I was looking for you yesterday before Cull and I went for a horseback ride.”
He nodded as if he’d made himself scarce knowing it was just a matter of time. “Is now a bad time?”
“No.” She could see that he wanted to get it over with. “Let’s go sit by the pool.”
Once they were seated, Nikki put the recorder on the small end table between them. “Let’s talk about that night.”
“That’s just it, I don’t remember anything. I was only three.”
Nikki nodded, then smiled. “I heard you loved to go outside at night after everyone was asleep.” He said nothing. “In fact, when I spoke with Patricia, she told me that you had been outside that night.”
His eyes widened in alarm. “Why would she say that? I was in bed asleep.”
“I thought you didn’t remember?”
“I’m just saying, I must have been in bed asleep.” He looked flustered.
“I’ve already spoken with Cull. He said he awakened that night to find you weren’t in your bed. He’d gotten up to go find you when he heard Patricia start screaming.” It wasn’t exactly what Cull had said, but it was close enough to the truth to hopefully jog Ledger’s memory of that night.
He had a faraway, scared look in his eyes. “I told you, I don’t remember. But it that’s what Cull said...”
“Patricia also told me that when you showed up your bare feet were dirty. She had to wash them before she put you and your brothers into her bed.” She let that sink in for a moment. “Does any of this bring back memories?”
He shook his head.
“You’d been outside that night. I think you saw something. Someone. Maybe the kidnapper. Maybe someone carrying away the twins.”
He shook his head again and looked away as he shifted in his chair. “I told you—”
“But you saw someone, someone you recognized.”
She watched him swallow and look toward the woods. Her heart began to pound. “Who did you see?”
He started to shake his head. The next words out of his mouth were so soft that she had to lean toward him to hear them. “I saw the bogeyman.” He looked up at her, clearly embarrassed. “You see now why I never said anything. I was three. Who knows what I saw.”
“You saw a man who scared you?”
He nodded. “He came out of the dark pines. He was big and scary.”
“Did he see you?”
“No, I hid.”
“Where did he go?” she asked, her voice cracking a little.
“Toward the house.”
Toward the house. Nikki said nothing for a moment before she asked, “Was he carrying anything when you saw him?”
“No, not that I saw.”
“Did you see him again?”
“Not that night,” he said, and met her gaze. “I never told. I was too scared. I thought he would come back for me.” That long-ago fear made his eyes shine with the terror he’d felt as that three-year-old.
“But you saw him some other time?”
He swallowed and avoided her gaze. “A few days before the kidnapping. He was standing on a street corner in town talking to our cook, Frieda. They seemed to be arguing. He looked up right at me.” Ledger shivered. “It was the way he looked at me. But it might not even have been the same man. Another reason I never said anything.”
“Did you ever see him again after the kidnapping?”
“No. Only in my nightmares.”
“Did you say anything to Frieda?”
He shook his head. “Do you think he was the man who took the twins?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t have them when you saw him, so probably not,” she said, realizing that she wanted to reassure him.
But her heart was pounding. She feared that Ledger’s bogeyman had been the kidnapper—before he’d taken the twins.
* * *
NIKKI FOUND PATRICIA coming out of the kitchen.
“Whatever it is, I don’t have time for it,” the woman said in greeting.
As Nikki had come into the house, she’d heard mother and daughter arguing about shopping. Apparently, Patricia was going shopping and wasn’t waiting until Kitten got out of school so she could go with her.
“I just need to ask you a few quick questions,” she said. “I’m sure your shopping can wait that long.”
Patricia gave her a haughty, irritated look, but then glanced toward Travers’s office. He was behind his desk and he was watching their discussion. The woman’s expression sweetened like saccharine. “I guess I could spare a few minutes.”
“Use my office,” her husband said and wheeled out from behind his desk. “I’ll go see if I can make Kitten feel better.”
Patricia let out a low growl as her husband passed, but kept a smile plastered on her face. She sighed as her husband disappeared into the back of the house. “I really don’t have time for this.”
From what Nikki had seen, all Patricia had was time. She was overdressed for a shopping trip into Whitehorse. Was that really why she was going into town, or was she headed somewhere else? Nikki wondered, catching the sweet scent of the woman’s perfume.
“I’ll make it quick,” Nikki promised as Patty glanced at her watch in clear irritation. She walked behind her husband’s desk, but didn’t sit.
Nikki took a chair facing her and turned on the recorder and said, “After twenty-five years, maybe there are things you remember that you didn’t that night.”
“Well, there aren’t. We already did this. And I don’t want to relive all of it again. I’m sure you also have my testimony that I gave the FBI and sheriff at the time. That should be sufficient. It isn’t going to change. Anyway, I don’t understand what the point is since we already know what happened that night.”
Nikki ignored that. “I can imagine how hard all this has been on you, living under the suspicion and the mystery of what happened to the twins,” she said, trying another approach.
“You have no idea what it is has been like for me,” Patricia said, her voice breaking. “It isn’t just the suspicion. I live in Marianne’s shadow.” She put a world of contempt into that one word as she dropped her voice. “You think it doesn’t bother me that Travers goes to see her every day? She’s completely loony-bin nuts, doesn’t speak, doesn’t do anything but rock. Does it make any difference to him? No. He still loves her. He still misses her.” She sniffed and looked away toward the window as she folded her arms over her chest. “There are days when I just want to get in my car and drive as far away from here as I can. But where would I go? What would I do? I have Kitten to think about.”
Nikki had listened without interrupting, but now she asked, “Why did you come back?”
Patricia turned to look at her as if for a few minutes, she’d forgotten she was there. “I had nowhere to go and Travers had always been kind to me. When I’d left, he told me that I always had a home at Sundown Stallion Station.”
“And now you’re his wife.”
“I didn’t come back to marry him, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was...desperate, if you must know. I’d lost my job and with a baby to support... He was lonely.”
“What about Kitten’s father?”
“Travers is her father.”
“Her biological father?”
“Of course not,” Patricia snapped. “Her biological father was never involved.”
Nikki could have argued that point since he was the one who got her pregnant. “You left here soon after the kidnapping.”
“It wasn’t like I could stay!” Her voice rose to shrill. “Even after Marianne went crazy and Nate Corwin was arrested, everyone still blamed me. I was the nanny. How had I let this happen?”
“It must have been hard to come back,” Nikki said.
“I guess I thought after almost ten years that things would be different.”
“And you had Kitten to think about.”
Patricia narrowed her gaze. “You think I came back for Travers’s money?”
“You’re a lot younger than your husband.”
The woman actually smiled. “You and the rest of the county can think whatever you want.” She stretched to her full height. “I really don’t care. But you’d better not write anything bad about me. If you defame me, I will sue you for everything you have.”
“Yes, your husband employs his own lawyer. You must have known Jim Waters when you were the nanny, back when you were nineteen. You also knew Blake Ryan, the ranch manager and close family friend.”
Patricia narrowed her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” she said, but Nikki was sure she did. “You should be careful making accusations. If I had my way, you wouldn’t have gotten near my house, near me or my daughter. I personally am not going to do this anymore, no matter what my husband says.” With that, she stalked out. A few moments later, Nikki heard her raising her voice in the kitchen, arguing with her husband and berating Frieda.
But Nikki was going to find out once and for all why Frieda put up with it.
* * *
AFTER THE KITCHEN cleared out, with Patricia storming off to town, Kitten taking Travers’s car to school and Travers locking himself in his office, Nikki went into the kitchen.
Frieda was hard at work, but she seemed more beaten down than ever this morning.
“I thought Wednesday was your day off?” Nikki asked.
Frieda turned from what she’d been doing. “Patricia had a few things she wanted me to do before I left.”
“One of the problems of living under the same roof,” Nikki commented. “Well, I really want to go with you to your quilting group. If that’s all right.” She could see by Frieda’s anxious look that it wasn’t.
The woman glanced around as if frantically trying to come up with a way out of it. “I wasn’t planning to quilt today.”
Nikki took a step toward her. “Frieda, I thought it would be nice to get us both out of here. I’d love to see what everyone is working on. We can make it a quick trip.”
Frieda looked resigned. “I can finish up here and leave in about thirty minutes then.”
“Great, we can take my rental. You can just relax and enjoy the ride.”
But even as she said it, Frieda looked anything but relaxed.
She’d just returned to the pool house when there was a knock at her door. She feared it might be Frieda with a better excuse for not going today, but when she opened the door, she found Cull standing there. One look at him and she could tell he was upset.
“You went to the sheriff without mentioning it to me?” he demanded as he pushed his way in, forcing her to step back.
“I’m worried about your father. I would think you would be, too. I didn’t want to say anything to anyone else since it was just a suspicion and I knew you’d get upset.”
He pulled off his Stetson to rake a hand through his thick hair. All the fight seemed to go out of him. “My father just told me about the sheriff coming by the hospital before he was released to take a hair sample. You can’t think that she’s poisoning him.”
Of course that was exactly what she thought. “It can’t be much of a reach for you since you didn’t even ask who I suspected—and neither did the sheriff.”
“If true, Patty can’t possibly think she can get away with it,” he said.
“Why not, if she got away with it before?” Nikki said as she walked into the small pool house kitchen. “Coffee? I made a pot this morning.”
He nodded and joined her in the small space. “What are you talking about—she did it before?”
“I don’t just suspect she is poisoning your father. I think she did the same thing to your mother in the weeks leading up to the kidnapping.”
He stared at her as she poured him a cup.
“Think about it. Your mother was acting...strangely. What if it wasn’t postpartum depression at all? What if she was acting the way she was because she was being poisoned? I know it seems like a stretch but when I saw your father and how he looked...” She handed him his cup of coffee and poured one for herself.
“If what you’re saying is true...”
“It’s just a suspicion at this point. That’s why I went to the sheriff. Hopefully when the lab test comes back, it will prove that I’m wrong.”
“Or right.”
Motioning to a chair, she sat down and Cull did the same.
He seemed lost in thought. “You do realize that if you’re right, I’m going to kill her.”
“No, you’re not. You’re not a killer.”
He met her gaze. “You sure about that?”
“Yes.” Was she basing that on the kiss? Or something more?
Cull swore under his breath. “You’re right, but I’m going to want to.”
“Did the sheriff say when they’d have lab results?”
“She said she’d marked them a priority and would get back to us.”
“What did your father say?” Nikki had to ask.
“He was upset, of course. He defended her, but not very strongly. It made me wonder if he suspected something. What man wants to admit, though, that his spouse is poisoning him?”
“We don’t know that’s the case.”
“Yet,” Cull said. “McCall told me the symptoms of long-term arsenic poisoning. I can understand why you thought of it. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
“I have a suspicious mind, and murder is kind of my business.”
He met her gaze. “I’ve noticed that. What now?”
“I continue gathering information. I still have to talk to Tilly and Frieda. They both were live-in staff at the time of the kidnapping.” She didn’t tell him that she especially wanted to talk to Frieda after what Ledger had told her about his “bogeyman.”
* * *
THE SHERIFF HAD asked the lab to put a rush on the hair samples. She’d never been good at waiting. She especially wasn’t now.
Her husband had called from Winchester Ranch to tell her that her grandmother and mother weren’t at each other’s throats and that their daughter was enjoying being around the grandmas.
“How are you doing?” she asked him.
“I forget how pretty it is out here. And lunch was good.”
Luke always tried to see the good in everything. It was incredibly annoying. But she smiled in spite of herself.
“I’m waiting for the lab to bring me results. A case of a husband possibly being poisoned by his wife.”
“Yikes. I’d better check your mother. I wouldn’t put it past your grandmother to put something in her food.”
She knew he was kidding, but still it worried her. Her grandmother wasn’t the most patient person and the bad blood between her and McCall’s mother, Ruby, ran blood-spilling deep.
“I’m kidding,” her husband said. “You sound too serious on your end of the phone.”
“You can hear that?”
“Because I know you so well,” he said. “I love you.”
“I love you.”
“Hope you get the lab tests soon. What will you do if they come back positive for poison?” he asked. “Do you have enough for an arrest?”
“Not yet. The next step will be to get a warrant to search the house.”
“Sounds like that’s what you’re expecting.”
McCall realized it was. “If true, it gets complicated. This might not be the first time this woman has systematically poisoned someone to get rid of them.”
Chapter Sixteen
UNABLE TO SIT still after Cull left, Nikki found Tilly running the vacuum in the off-limits wing. She called her name, but the older woman didn’t hear her. Matilda “Tilly” Marks had been twenty-five, married and in debt the year the twins were kidnapped.
