She only hoped that breaking into the High C ranch tomorrow wouldn’t prove an even worse one.
MITCH CAMPED Saturday night in a grove of trees on the Bar L ranch twenty miles from town and several miles from the ranch house. To be on the safe side, he ate a cold meal and restrained his impulse to go for a walk. He was in no hurry to get himself arrested, even though he had come all this distance for that very purpose.
He kept wondering where Kate was, and hoping she’d had the good sense to call off her wedding.
In spite of everything, he dreamed of a future in which he regained the High C and took back his place in society. A future in which he and Kate got married and settled down, as Gulch City families had been doing for more than a century.
Kate would like the area once she came to know it, he thought, stretching out along the bed. She would enjoy the potluck socials at the ranches, and square dancing at the country club, and the homemade floats at the town’s Fourth of July parade.
He could smell her floral freshness on the sheets. Something essential about her pervaded the camper. For the chance of holding her in his arms again, Mitch would risk almost anything.
Except, he realized with a pang, that he had very little left to risk. Here he was, within a few miles of the place where he’d been born, forced to skulk like an intruder.
Outside the camper, a twig cracked. Mitch’s heart slammed into overdrive and he leaped to his feet, only to find himself staring out the window into the broad, placid face of a cow. It regarded him with wide-set dark eyes, then lowered its head and ambled off.
His blood still thundered and his muscles were tight. Damn, he was jumpy, just when he’d thought himself resigned to his fate.
Slowly Mitch realized what was bothering him. He was about to place his life in the hands of Norris Novo, and he didn’t trust the man.
He visualized the chief: a broad, impassive face and a mouth with an impatient twitch. Novo was loyal to his buddies, skeptical of anything he couldn’t see or touch, and had little regard for the finer points of the law.
Not that Mitch held a grudge against the town’s top cop. Although it was Novo who’d evicted him from his ranch, it had been done in a courteous manner. And he couldn’t blame the chief for wanting to arrest him in the shooting of Jules Kominsky.
But the ambush in Oak Creek Canyon was another matter. What if the chief had been directly involved? If so, once Mitch was in custody, he might not live to stand trial.
He lowered himself onto the couch, his jaw clenched. He could not, would not turn back from his intention of submitting to arrest.
Until this case was resolved, Loretta remained in danger. And he couldn’t even begin to work things out with Kate.
But neither did he have any intention of laying his neck on a chopping block. He had to fix it so Novo couldn’t pull anything underhanded.
Mitch might not trust the chief, but he still believed in the people of Gulch City. He’d known most of them all his life.
He would turn himself in at the church tomorrow morning, in front of several hundred of his fellow citizens. He would let them know that if any harm came to him in custody, it was Chief Novo’s doing.
That might restrain the man. At least, Mitch hoped so.
He was going to have to stake his life on it.
KATE AWOKE EARLY on Sunday morning. She took her time showering, knowing breakfast wouldn’t be served downstairs until eight o’clock.
To her surprise, Loretta arrived at her room at seven-thirty, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Until now, she’d always slept as late as possible.
Plopping into a chair, Loretta began ticking off points on her fingers. “Down at the barn, the hands will be milking and collecting eggs. Somebody’ll need to turn the cows and calves out to pasture, and they’ll check the weather report in case of twisters. So I don’t expect everybody to clear out until half past nine.”
Kate listened, impressed. “You really know the routine.”
Loretta shrugged. “I love the ranch,” she said. “I don’t think Mitch ever understood how much.”
“Is that what you’re looking for?” Kate asked. “Something that proves you’re entitled to it?”
The younger woman shook her head. “No. It’s something personal. Something worth a lot of money, but I wouldn’t sell it. Grandma meant for me to have it.”
“You still don’t trust me?” Kate asked.
Loretta smiled ruefully. “It’s not that. I’ve got kind of a fetish about it. I think it’s bad luck to say anything until it’s actually in my hands. At this point, would it make any difference in whether you come with me or not?”
“No,” Kate had to admit.
“Then let’s go eat breakfast.”
At nine-thirty, they drove to a pay phone and Loretta telephoned the ranch. A machine answered and she hung up.
“Looks like they’ve left,” she said as she got back in the car.
Without thinking, Kate blurted, “I wish Mitch were here.”
“You love him, don’t you?” Loretta started the engine.
“I guess it’s hard for you to understand.”
“Not really. I had a crush on my cousin for years.” They pulled away from the curb and jounced along a two-lane highway. The land was flat and cactusstrewn, although spring rains had turned everything green.
Kate noticed some oil wells punctuating the range, along with a number of fire-ant mounds. She shuddered, grateful that nothing worse than snails and aphids plagued her garden back home.
A pickup passed them, heading toward Gulch City. Loretta averted her face, but it occurred to Kate that someone might recognize the car.
She just hoped Loretta really did know where to look. The less time they spent on the ranch, the better.
DRIVING INTO GULCH CITY was like traveling backward through time.
Mitch turned onto Main Street, and passed the courthouse where he had argued cases and filed wills and divorce papers. His parents’ marriage license had been registered there, and his own birth certificate.
A block down City Center Lane lay the Gulch City Free Church, built with squared-off stones as most of the town’s early buildings.
Mitch had always assumed that someday, like his father and grandfather, he would stand at the altar in this old stone church. And he knew now that the only woman he wanted to see gliding down the aisle was Kate, her blue eyes luminous and a circlet of roses crowning her blond hair.
But that day, if it ever came, would be a long time off.
Mitch parked and strode along the sidewalk, his boots clicking. A young couple, approaching from the opposite direction, halted and stared at him, openmouthed.
His back stiffly erect, Mitch turned at the walkway. Out here, the sun shone on a lilac bush and a lush patch of lawn, making the colors glow like stained glass. From inside, he heard an organ playing the introductory notes of a hymn.
Mitch straightened his Stetson. Then he pushed the door wide and entered the shadowed darkness.
A WEATHERED SIGN over the entrance gate read High C Ranch. Loretta stopped in front of the gate. “You’ll have to hold it open for me.”
“Isn’t it locked?”
She shook her head. “There’s half a dozen back ways into the ranch, and besides, these fences couldn’t keep out anything less clumsy than a steer. Just don’t catch your foot in the cattle grate, city slicker.”
Kate wasn’t about to ask what a cattle grate was. She hurried to the gate and lifted the crossbar, then swung it out while the Taurus rattled across.
The grate, she saw, was exactly what its name implied, a metal grille beneath her feet, covering a slight depression. Kate supposed it must discourage cattle from exiting if the latch came open.
She stepped gingerly across, lifted the crossbar into place and got back in the car. They were now officially trespassing, she realized.
They bumped along the dirt road and around a cluster of trees. Loretta halted in a parking ba
y beside a scraggly lawn.
A suburban-style ranch house, its white paint peeling and its roof missing some shingles, sat halfway up a slope. Judging by the graceful bay window and latticed porch, someone had once lavished a lot of love on it. Unlike its current occupant.
This place belonged to Mitch, no matter what the law said. Kate had heard the longing in his voice whenever he spoke of home. It was the same deepdown sense of rightness that she felt on the first day of school when she stood out front, welcoming the children.
Past the house, she glimpsed a barn and a corral. “You can’t see the storage yard from here,” Loretta noted. “Billy’s been stocking building materials and hardware to sell to other ranchers. I don’t think the operation’s paying off as well as he expected, maybe because he cheats people.”
“What now?” Kate asked.
“We ring the doorbell,” Loretta answered. “No sense in sneaking around until we’re sure nobody’s home.”
As the younger woman marched along a walkway to the front door, Kate lingered behind, gazing across a vista of bush-studded grazing land. She pictured Mitch riding the range, the Stetson shading his face, his knees gripping the saddle.
In the evenings, he would come home to a loving wife who would turn the evening bath into a sensual game for two. A woman who knew exactly what to do with a cowboy’s slim hips and muscular thighs...
“No answer.” Loretta dusted her hands as she returned. “Let’s go make sure nobody’s hanging around outside.”
At the barn, the smell of cow manure mingled with the pungency of rotting hay. Loretta frowned. “They need to turn that more often. It’s going bad.”
“I’ll bet Mitch didn’t let things go,” Kate said.
“He sure didn’t.” She halted, frowning. “Gee, I just thought of something. When Mitch inherited the place, he was the same age I am now. I always pictured him as, well, older. In control of things.”
“To a fifteen-year-old, he probably seemed that way.” Kate hoped Loretta was finally beginning to realize she’d been unfair to her cousin. If so, the younger woman gave no sign of it.
Seeing no one about, they retreated behind the house to a weed-filled lawn.
“There!” Loretta pointed toward an excavation, where a flight of stone steps descended to a thick door.
“Wine cellar?” Kate asked.
“Tornado shelter.” With a glance around, Loretta produced a key. “This is the place we need to search. Coming?”
Kate Bingham had spent almost her entire thirty-one years as a living, breathing Little Miss Goody Two-shoes. In the past two weeks, she had abandoned her groom at the altar, run off with a fugitive, survived several shoot-outs and made love to a man who was not her husband.
She was about to add breaking and entering to that list. It was not a reassuring thought.
“Coming,” she said.
Chapter Thirteen
Cold air issued from the cellar as Loretta opened the door. Kate could feel the dankness seeping out into the heat of the day.
“Did you ever use this to escape a tornado?” she asked.
“Not while I was on the ranch.” Loretta pushed the door inward. Kate wondered if it wouldn’t have been simpler to use a trapdoor flush with the ground, then realized it could get blocked by debris. Whoever built this shelter had designed it with care. Mitch’s father, she guessed.
It took a minute or two for Loretta to locate the light switch. When the thin illumination came on, Kate saw that they stood in a small room piled with boxes and furniture. Another room, partially visible through an opening, was similarly cluttered.
“They couldn’t get many people in here if a tornado hit, not with all this stuff piled up,” Kate said. “It doesn’t seem safe.”
The younger woman surveyed the room, hands on hips. “Billy tends to do whatever’s convenient at the moment and worry about the consequences later. He wanted the regular basement to store building supplies, so he moved the family’s old things out here.”
Kate’s uneasiness intensified. “You mean you don’t really know if it’s here, this thing you’re looking for?”
“It has to be.” Loretta sneezed as she poked at a dusty trunk. “It isn’t anywhere else.”
“You searched the whole house?”
“Yes, bit by bit. That’s why I stayed here for so long. Help me move this, would you?” Loretta indicated the trunk, which was wedged so tightly in place that it couldn’t be opened.
They shoved it into the clear, both women straining. When they looked inside, there was nothing but tack equipment.
At least their eyes were adjusting to the dimness. Next time she did this, Kate told herself with irony, she would make certain to bring a flashlight.
As they combed through the boxes, Loretta explained that after she came to work at the ranch, she’d expected to find what she sought without trouble. But she got the sense that she was being watched.
“Or maybe it was just Billy sniffing around me,” Loretta admitted as she brushed a wisp of hair from her temple. “He let me know he was interested. I think that’s why he hired me. That, and because it let him rub salt into Mitch’s wounds.”
“He didn’t pressure you to...get involved with him?”
The younger woman shook her head. “I told him I’d had my heart broken at music school and wasn’t ready for a new relationship. He was a real gentleman about it. You see, you can’t always believe Mitch. He wouldn’t give Billy credit for anything.”
“Did you live at the ranch?”
“I had to,” Loretta said. “How else would I get a chance to poke around?”
The woman had been playing with fire. Surely Billy must have been suspicious. Or up to something.
Was he up to something now? Kate went outside and gazed around, but saw nothing amiss.
They finished going through the front room and moved to the back. Aside from a small bathroom, those composed the entire shelter; there wasn’t even a kitchen, although one shelf held canned food.
In the back room, someone had wedged in a filing cabinet, more boxes and a large steamer trunk. The women set to work.
Trying to ignore her sore muscles, Kate asked, “What made you decide to return this year instead of earlier?”
“I got my degree midyear.” Loretta dug through some old clothes. “I was entering singing contests, going to auditions, but I couldn’t seem to focus on my career. Everything reminded me of Grandma Luisa. I decided it was time to take care of unfinished business.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what we’re looking for?” she asked. “I might see it and not recognize it.”
Loretta gave her a crooked smile. “Don’t worry. It won’t get by us.”
Kate checked her watch. It was nearly eleven. If the church service began at ten, it might be ending. “We ought to go.”
“Not yet!” Loretta struggled with a latch on the steamer trunk, which, on end, stood about four feet high. “I’d just managed to swipe the key and get it duplicated, and then Mitch came stomping in and shot Jules. I let myself get scared off, but not this time. There!” She pried the first latch open and started on the second.
A scritching noise reached Kate. It might have been a mouse scurrying beneath the boxes, or a loose piece of gravel rattling down the outside stairs. “I’d better go check...”
“Hold that!” Loretta indicated a strap on the outside of the trunk. “Now pull!”
Kate followed Loretta’s instructions. Straining and grunting, they slowly pulled the steamer open.
Stale perfume wafted out. Inside, glittery dresses and a velvet cape hung from a bar, while drawers lined the other side.
Loretta appeared to be holding her breath as she opened one of drawer. It was full of sheet music.
The younger woman’s eyes widened, and then she grimaced. “Oh, no.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s printed music. I mean, some of it could be interesting, but...” She slid open
a second drawer and a third; and let out a long, disappointed breath. “More of the same.”
“And what we’re looking for would be—?” Kate let the question dangle.
“Handwritten,” Loretta said. “And very old.”
Music. They must be looking for an original music manuscript. “Who wrote it?” Kate asked.
“Mozart,” said Loretta.
Mozart? The great composer had been dead for two hundred years. And Austria was a very long way from Texas.
But through Loretta’s grandmother, Kate supposed it was possible a tiny, rare piece of him had landed here. If so, it would be incredibly valuable. More than that, it was exciting to think of touching a sheet of music actually penned by that genius.
He had written the very opera for which Loretta had just auditioned. How ironic to discover there was a special connection between the two of them, Kate thought.
The younger woman poked behind the hanging clothes. Her breath caught audibly.
“It’s there?” Kate asked.
“I think so.” With infinite care, Loretta lifted out several oversize, yellowing sheets lined with handdrawn staffs. “‘La Speranza di Amore,”’ she whispered. ‘“The Hope of Love.”’
“What is it?” Kate counted two, no, three sheets of paper. “Part of an opera?”
“It’s a song.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“No one’s ever heard of it,” Loretta breathed. “Not these days, anyway.”
“An unknown song by Mozart? It must be worth—”
“Millions,” said a nasal male voice from the outer room.
Alarm jolted through Kate and for the moment she couldn’t react. Loretta shook so hard she nearly dropped the manuscript.
The man who walked in had a sharp nose, a receding hairline and a thickening waist. Feral intelligence glittered in his eyes.
“Billy!” Loretta gaped at him. “Uh, hello. We were just—I forgot to take—”
The Cowboy & The Shotgun Bride (The Brides of Grazer's Corners #1) Page 18
