Deep Trouble

by Mary Connealy

  Her sister had been happily married to Abraham since before Tyra was old enough to remember. Adam, their oldest son, was seventeen in a few months, and her nephew had been Tyra’s playmate from her earliest memory.

  Tyra had wondered about Abe’s baby brother many times. She’d met most of Abraham’s family, named in alphabetical order as if their mother were afraid she’d forget what order they were born—Abraham, Bartholomew, Canaan, Darius, Ephraim, Felix, and Gabriel, the baby of the family, just as Tyra was the baby of her big family.

  Tyra’s pa was slowing down, and would welcome help around the ranch with an eye toward Gabe taking over and running the place when he died. Abraham had assured her that this was all fine with Gabe, but Tyra was the youngest in her family, and she knew how big brothers and sisters could plan a person’s life.

  “He should have been here days ago, but Gabe isn’t always the most dependable.” Abe shook his head in affectionate disparagement. “Still just a big kid.”

  “He rode with the cavalry for years, Abe.” Madeline poured steaming coffee into Abraham’s cup and took a second to run one hand into her husband’s dark hair. “If he was a kid when he went in, you can be sure he grew up fast.”

  Abraham tilted his head back and smiled a private smile at Maddy, Tyra’s big sister.

  Tyra wanted like crazy to marry Gabe. It had been a fond wish of her childhood that she’d marry her big sister’s husband. It hadn’t taken much growing up before she’d figured out why that couldn’t happen. Over the years as the brothers had stopped in, Tyra had cast her eye at each of them, but of course, she was always too young. But lately she’d done some growing up and she’d turned her fertile imagination to Abe’s baby brother. The only one of the seven left single.

  She’d even met him about five years ago, before she’d turned into a woman. Gabe had ridden through scouting for the cavalry, and she’d let her dreams run wild. Gabe had treated her like a little child.

  It was infuriating that he couldn’t have waited two years to ride through. At thirteen it had been hopeless. By the time she was fifteen she could have caught his attention. She was eighteen now, and Abe, her pa, and she agreed Gabe ought to marry her and ranch with Pa. The man didn’t have a chance.

  “And he’s been in California visiting your brother?”

  “Yep, Bartholomew and Darius live in the southern part of California. Gabriel just up and handed his stock over to a neighbor and spent the last year roaming.”

  “Wait a minute.” Tyra shook her head so hard she whipped herself in the face with her single, long dark braid. “I thought you told me you and your brothers all ganged up on him and wrote a whole buncha letters begging him to come and see you before he settled down for good.”

  “We did. We hadn’t seen him for a long time. He went through Nebraska to visit Ephraim, and then he went on east to where Canaan farms in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Felix lives in East Texas. He headed to California and was going to end up here before he headed home. I haven’t seen much of him. I moved west when the boy was thirteen, and the only time I’ve seen him since was when he came through with the cavalry. Then he only stayed a couple of days. But Ma always sent her letters, and we’d pass them along to each other. So we stayed in touch that way until Ma died.”

  When Gabe had been here, it had been long enough for Tyra to get ideas. “So if you begged him to do it and he did it, why do you sound like he did something wrong?”

  “No man abandons his ranch like that.”

  “Then why’d you ask him to?” Tyra wanted to fight on Gabe’s behalf. He’d thank her when he finally got here.

  “Figured maybe he couldn’t handle his own place. I told my brothers about Maddy having such a pretty little sister. Your pa needed help on his place. Gabe’s gotten too old to still be wandering. We’ll introduce him to you, show him the ranch, and get him settled for good.”

  “What about his ranch in Wyoming?”

  Abe shrugged. “What about it? Let someone else have it.”

  Tyra wanted Gabe, but she wanted to knock Abe over the head with a stout branch, too. “He’s not gonna thank you for planning his life, Abe.”

  It didn’t miss Tyra’s notice that they were planning hers along with Gabe’s. But since their plans suited her right down to the ground, she didn’t kick up a fuss about herself. She could have her dream husband and never have to leave home.

  “Sure he will, once he sees how pretty you are, Tyra, honey.” Maddy patted her on the shoulder.

  Looking into Maddy’s blue eyes, the exact same color as Tyra’s, she knew she was being treated like a child. Tyra was a tough woman. Born and raised on some mighty hard land in southern New Mexico. But she’d be the baby of the family until the day she died.

  She did want Gabe though. So she postponed fighting to be treated like an adult. She’d do the fighting after she was a married woman. Then she and Gabe’d stand shoulder to shoulder and tell all their bossy family to leave them alone.

  Except for her pa. He needed help, but as long as he was drawing breath, he’d always be in charge of the Morgan spread. The Rocking M was his. He had shed his blood for that land. Tyra had three older brothers who had struck out on their own after they realized Pa was too stubborn to move aside and let one of his sons be a real partner. But now Pa was aching in his joints and he got tired a lot faster. He’d lost a lot of his love of the ranch when Ma had died. She was buried in a quiet grave along with two little sisters. Pa was ready to let a son-in-law in, Tyra just knew it.

  She sure hoped that suited Gabe okay, because her heart was set on it.

  “So when is he supposed to come then?” Tyra tapped her toe impatiently as she sat at the kitchen table in Abraham and Maddy’s cozy cabin, quiet now with their four sons in school.

  Abe grinned. “Why don’t you and Maddy come to town with me? I’ll take the wagon in to pick up the young’uns. It’s the last day, so we won’t make ‘em walk this once. I told Gabe to write if’n he got delayed. If there’s a letter or a wire, we’ll know when he’s showing up.”

  Tyra smiled. “I’ll run home and see if Pa needs any supplies, but I’ll be back in plenty of time to ride along to town.”

  “She’s gone!” Lurene stared, shook her head and stared, started down the ladder, stopped, climbed back up, and stared some more. Because she couldn’t stop herself, she climbed the rest of the way into the cave and ran her hands all around the walls. There was no back door into the heart of the mountain. No secret tunnel. No big rock with Shannon hiding behind it. No sign that a giant bald eagle had landed and carried her off. No amount of staring would make a woman appear in this small space.

  “She can’t be gone.” Cutter shouted at her as if yelling would make a woman who wasn’t there suddenly become visible. “Are you sure that was the right cave?”

  There were three of these high-up caves, and their group had searched each of them in turn with Miss It’s-Not-about-Gold-It’s-About-Education Dysart. Lurene knew she had the right cave, but she wanted to deny it, too.

  Lurene’s eyes fastened on blood, dried black on the stone floor. Shannon had only bled in one cave.

  Shaking her head, trying to make her jumbled thoughts come into order, finally, Lurene forced herself to climb back down the ladder. “I saw blood, Lobo.” The ladder shrieked like a tormented soul. Lurene carefully stepped down each rung. The ones that were there anyway—about every third rung was missing. When she reached the narrow ledge the ladder was resting on, she heaved a sigh of relief, then got mad and turned to Cutter.

  “How could she have gotten down from there?” Cutter was the only one who’d come up this far with her.

  These ledges were just looking for a good reason to crumble away. Lurene glared at Cutter to get him moving. “Go on up if you want to hunt around, but the cave is about ten feet square. I’m sure I didn’t miss a woman lying up there.”

  Cutter glared at that worthless excuse for a ladder, obviously almost crazed to
check for himself. “Where could she have gone?”

  Lurene looked at the ledge they were standing on. It was more gone than there. But was it worse than it had been earlier? More broken away? Hard to tell.

  “She must have…” Lurene shrugged as she looked at the ledge and the one below and the one below that, ending in the hard stone of the canyon floor. “Jumped?”

  Lurene and Cutter exchanged a doubtful look.

  “What’s going on, Lurene?” Ginger and the Lloyd brothers had stayed down. There was no use in them all coming up.

  “Just a minute!” Lurene wanted to hurt someone, and right now Ginger seemed like a good choice. Good thing the woman was beyond her reach.

  “Okay, she’s gone.” Cutter’s voice was at least gratifying. He believed she wasn’t so stupid he had to risk his life to check on the woman himself. “Impossible as it sounds, she got down somehow.”

  “You’re the one with the bright idea to leave her here.” Lurene glared at him.

  “Yep, I know. We shoulda put a bullet in her. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “A’course if she had a bullet in her, she wouldn’t be able to tell us where she hid that map, would she? So we’d be even more out of luck than we are now.”

  “I know how to read a trail. If she got down without dying, then she had to get out of this canyon.” Cutter looked at the other high caves. “No way to get from one to the other. No sense climbing up there.”

  Cutter’s eyes practically burned through stone they were so fiery hot with rage. “The only way is down. On a lower level, like this one, there are other caves she could hide in, rocks on the canyon floor she could be hiding behind. Let’s go find her.”

  Cutter and Lurene took the time to look in every cave on that level. Then Cutter, still furious, stepped aside to let Lurene pass him and descend using the precarious handholds. It wasn’t the first time Lurene had to force herself to turn her back on him.

  They painstakingly checked the caves on the other levels. As they searched, the others were snarling and snapping at her and Cutter.

  Once on the ground, she strode to the others. “She’s not there.” Lurene saw no reason to break it to them gently.

  “Not there?” Ginger roared and glared up at the cave. “She has to be there.”

  “Are you sure there isn’t a back corner of the cave?” Darrel gazed up at the cliff as if ready to climb the rocks and check himself.

  “We were all in it a couple days ago. We were hunting for hidden gold.” Lurene was annoyed with herself for answering. “I think we all checked pretty carefully.” Let the idiot go up there if he doubted her ability to see with her own two eyes. “You know there wasn’t a back room in that place.”

  She was particularly aware of Randy’s sharp eyes as he looked up. He made no comment. Immediately he began scanning the ground.

  Lurene joined him. “She’d never have survived a fall.”

  Randy looked up again. “Apparently she did.”

  And Lurene felt as stupid as Ginger and Darrel were, which made her mad.

  “Everyone quit moving. You’re wrecking any sign she left.” Cutter was like a wolf trying to catch a scent.

  “A little late for that.” Randy stopped moving but continued to scour the ground with his eyes, then looked back overhead. “Somehow she…” He fell silent, thinking.

  For some reason, it made Lurene nervous when Randy was thinking. She wanted to join the pack of angry wolves snarling when she should be sniffing around.

  “If she jumped—” Randy kept his eyes on the cliff side with its four levels.

  “She’d be dead,” Ginger cut him off.

  “If.” Randy began again. “She.” His voice became more forceful. “Jumped.” He glared at Ginger until she closed her mouth. “She could have landed on the ledge. Slid down on her belly and caught the ledge somehow. That’s what I’d have done if I was desperate. If it was live or die. That’s what anyone would have done, though I’m surprised she got desperate as fast as she did. Most people would be a day working up the nerve, sitting around caterwauling and hoping for a miracle.”

  “So she’s a woman of action,” Cutter said. “I never figured her for one. She seemed like the type to curl up and die. I shouldn’t have left her alive.”

  “Except we need her alive because we need the map,” Lurene reminded them all. “So it’s a good thing she’s alive. If she hid it, cached it somewhere, then picked it up and headed out with it.”

  “Where?” Randy wasn’t asking a stupid question; he was thinking out loud.”

  Cutter jabbed a beefy finger at the ground, back in the direction they’d just ridden in. “Those aren’t our tracks.”

  Lurene was no tracker, so she couldn’t begin to tell one horse from another. But she knew Cutter was good.

  “One horse came in and rode back out. Hard to tell on the rocky ground, but it looks to me like a rider carrying a heavier load leaving than coming.”

  “Someone found her.” Lurene remembered the screaming and shooting. Good chance that anyone within ten miles would have heard it and come to check. “This is Navajo country.”

  “Pony’s shod.” Cutter shook his head. “That don’t always mean nuthin’. Navajos are purely tame Indians these days. They’ll sometimes shoe a horse or buy or steal a horse with shoes.”

  Lurene looked back at the gap they’d ridden through. “Let’s see which way she went.” Then Lurene had a notion that cheered her considerably.

  “What?” Randy asked. He was watching her mighty close to have seen that she’d had a comforting thought.

  “We were worried about finding the map, figuring she hid it somewhere.”

  “Yep, so what?” Ginger headed for her horse. Never a thought in her head.

  “Well, it’d’ve been hard to get her to talk. We hoped she’d tell us what we wanted to know in return for us taking her down out of that cave, but she’d’ve known we meant her to die. It might’ve been hard to get the truth out of her.”

  “Sure.” Cutter was watching Lurene now, too.

  “But now she’ll have taken it from wherever she stashed it and have it back where it’s easy for us to find. We don’t have to worry about getting her to talk.”

  “And that means”—Randy smirked—”we don’t have to be overly careful about how we treat her when we find her.”

  “Except for the kidnapping.” Lurene rubbed her hand over her mouth as she pondered. “We need her alive for that.”

  “Why?” Ginger asked. “You know we have to kill her after what we done to her. The law’ll be on us if we let her live.”

  “We’ve just got to convince the folks that’ll pay for her that she’s alive. If we send them a—” A smiled bloomed on Lurene’s face.

  “What?” Randy asked.

  Lurene almost liked the kid. He was showing her a little respect.

  “One of her maps. We’ll prove we have her by sending a messenger with one of the maps and a note telling them to leave the money somewhere if they ever want to see her alive again. We’ll have to think it out, figure a place for them to drop the money that we can get to it and get away.”

  “Why wouldn’t they just think we’d stolen the maps from her?” Ginger shook her wild red hair. “I wouldn’t pay on such flimsy evidence.”

  But Ginger wouldn’t pay ransom to save anyone but herself. So Lurene wasn’t so sure she was right. “For now, I think we need to catch her, take her alive. Make her write a note in her own hand. That oughta prove we have her.”

  “We can take her, get that map away from her, and drag her along on this treasure hunt. We might find what she’s looking for. But whether we do or not, we’ll have her to get the money out of John Jacob Astor.” Cutter smiled. “I heard someone call him the richest man in America. And I’ve heard it’s a big family. All of ‘em are rich. The way I see it, we’ve got something the Astor family wants. I like the sound of that.”

  Ginger laughed with cold ple
asure.

  Lurene couldn’t help laughing right along.

  Nine

  Shannon stepped out of the Kinlichees’ hogan on her wedding day, not one bit the joyful, blushing bride. Rather, she felt like a coyote with her leg in a trap, and she was gnawing everywhere she could think of, but she still wasn’t getting loose.

  Kai Kinlichee had insisted on a bath for Shannon, and she’d even gotten her hair washed and a comb through it, which after the last few days was no small job. Though the day was waning, her hair still dried quickly in the Arizona heat.

  She was wearing one of Kai’s pretty dresses, white with beautifully stitched decorations around the neck and hem using all the colors in the rainbow. Part Mexican, part Navajo, all beautiful. Shannon felt nearly human now that she’d bathed the last of the blood out of her hair and shed her filthy, tattered gingham blouse and sweat-stained riding skirt. Mrs. Kinlichee had even washed those clothes out—after Shannon had discreetly removed the contents of her hidden pocket of course.

  Kai Kinlichee was even determined to remove the worst of the bloodstains and mend the rips. She was a very sweet lady with a spine of pure iron when it came to having this wedding.

  All clean and sweet smelling, fed and given plenty of water to drink, Shannon now had the energy to stop this madness.

  Gabe walked over to her as soon as she stepped outside. He was cleaned up, too. And ready to escort her.

  To the wedding.

  Their wedding.

  Her wedding.

  To a man she’d known for two days.

  They probably had thirty seconds to think of a way out.

  “We can just refuse, point-blank refuse to get married.” Gabe sounded so reasonable, but this wasn’t a situation that called for a lot of reason. It seemed better to think in terms of desperation.

  Shannon caught him by the wrist and took all her need to strangle someone out on his arm. “I already tried that if you’ll remember.”

  “Yes, I remember.” Gabe narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re the one, I believe, who said ‘nothing much’ happened. Nothing much? Which means a little something. Nice work. Just the very thing to reassure the parson.”