“Not too bad. The bleeding’s about stopped. You’re a lucky guy.”
“Absolutely,” Joe said, gazing up at Leigh.
“Wouldn’t you just know it? Now here comes Amanda!” Chase cried in an exasperated tone. “After I specifically told her to stay with Bart. Pardon my French, honey bun, but what the hell are you doing out here? And where’s our son?”
Amanda swung down from the saddle and tied her horse to a tree. “Our son is with Belinda,” she said, striding toward him. “Freddy, Leigh and I had a little talk and decided we had as much right to be out here fighting for the True Love as any of you. Then on the way we heard shots and put on the speed. Leigh outran us. How is he, Freddy?”
“He’ll be fine.”
“Thank God.” Amanda glanced at the rusted chest and did a double take. “Is that real?”
Ry turned to Whitlock. “Tell her, neighbor.” Whitlock just glared at him. “Aw, he must not be feeling too neighborly,” Ry said. “To answer your question, Amanda, I believe you’re looking at the gold shipment from the Butterfield Stage robbery pulled off by Jethro Whitlock about a hundred and ten years ago.”
Amanda walked over to the chest. “Wow.” She gazed down at the gold bars. “Did you notice there’s a piece of paper tucked in here?”
“Probably some invoice,” Ry said. “But we might as well take a look at it.” He crossed to where Amanda stood and peered over her shoulder as she unfolded the paper. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“It’s a letter,” Amanda said, turning toward Leigh and Freddy. “A letter from Clara. Would one of you like to read it? I’m not a relative or anything.”
“Read it,” Freddy said. “You’re one of the True Love women, now.”
Amanda’s face lit with pleasure. “Yes, I believe I am.” She turned her attention to the letter. “It says:
To the person who discovers this gold—On September 19, 1884, Jethro Whitlock and his desperadoes came to my home when Thaddeus was away. They held me at gunpoint while they buried their stolen goods beneath the dirt floor of my home. Jethro will give Thaddeus all the details of my soiled past and implicate Thaddeus and me in the robbery if I tell anyone about the gold. Now that Jethro and his gang has left, I have uncovered the strongbox so that I may insert this note, hoping it will keep suspicion from ever falling on my dear husband. I pray that Jethro retrieves his booty soon and that Thaddeus will never know of its presence in the lovely home he built for me. He risked his reputation to marry a woman of questionable character. I will take this secret to my grave to protect my husband’s good name.
In great remorse,
Clara Singleton
Freddy shook her head in wonder. “To think that the True Love has harbored a fortune for years and none of our ancestors knew it. A treasure was right under Clara’s feet all the time.”
“That’s not where the treasure was, Freddy.” Leigh’s glance rested on Ry and her sister, then moved on to Chase and Amanda. Finally she crouched next to Joe and laced her fingers through his. “And Clara was smart enough to understand that,” she murmured, gazing into the eyes of the man she loved.
Epilogue
Frederica (Freddy) and Thomas Rycroft (Ry) McGuinnes named their twin girls Clara, after Freddy’s great-great-great-grandmother Clara Singleton, and Belinda, after the ranch’s loyal cook, Belinda Grimes. Ry eventually rode Grateful Dead to the buzzer, suffering a broken rib and a two-day tirade from his wife in the process. Amanda and Chase Lavette became parents of a girl they named Helen Marie, after Chase’s mother. Helen turned out to be a boisterous child who got her older brother Bart into all sorts of trouble. She was nicknamed “Hel” by her proud father, who took over most of the child-rearing duties while Amanda ran an ad agency in Tucson. Leigh and Joseph (Joe) Gilardini presented Joe’s son, Kyle, with a baby brother. Kyle was allowed to name the boy, and he chose “Leonard,” for his idol Leonard Nimoy. Joe became a successful private investigator largely due to the information he solicited from his psychic wife. Kyle Gilardini spent all his Christmas and summer vacations at the True Love Ranch and became an accomplished rider who eventually won several junior roping competitions on his Appaloosa, Spilled Milk. Kyle wrote a research paper for school about the True Love Curse, and discovered that the massacre had actually taken place on Eb Whitlock’s property. Ebenezer (Eb) Whitlock spent many years as a guest of the state of Arizona. He claimed that he was no relation to Jethro Whitlock and had merely found the diary by accident while browsing through Arizona Historical Society files. The Reward for the recovery of the Butterfield Gold Shipment provided the True Love Ranch with enough revenue to construct a separate house for each of the partners, with enough left over to rebuild the homestead and open it to the public as a museum. Kenny Rogers’s documentary about Clara Singleton and the cache of gold she kept hidden under her floor aired on national television. The True Love Ranch has become a sought-after travel destination for romantics the world over as word spreads that something magic in the desert air inspires true love. Dexter still fetches the mail every day, but he now pushes a cart to handle the slew of wedding invitations and birth announcements that arrive from former guests. With each new expression of joy, the legend grows....
ISBN: 978-1-4592-8638-2
The Lawman
Copyright © 1995 by Vicki Lewis Thompson
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