by Rebecca York
“Perhaps, but I can see you care about him. And he pushes you away.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t give up on him.”
“I won’t,” she said, meaning it. She had learned so much about Luke in the past half hour. Things that made her ache for the boy he’d been. Things that helped her understand his behavior. Things that fueled her admiration for him. Lord, what odds the man had overcome in his life.
Her gaze cut to the door, and she saw him sitting in the SUV, looking impatient.
“I’d better go,” she said, hurrying down the walk and climbing into the passenger seat, feeling a wave of heat envelop her from the vehicle that had been baking in the sun.
Luke started the engine before she’d buckled her seat belt.
“What were you talking about?” he asked.
“I was thanking her.”
“I guess I should have done a better job of that myself,” he answered in a thick voice.
“I think she knew how you felt.”
The conversation died again. The only time Luke spoke was when he borrowed Hannah’s phone to make a reservation at the Yucca Motel in Boylton.
It didn’t take long to leave the dusty town behind and head into the dry landscape that reminded her of scenes from a Western movie. There were a few stunted trees, interspersed with scraggly bushes.
“What are the trees?” she asked.
“Mesquite, mostly.”
“And the bushes?”
“Creosote. Tumbleweed. Leather plant. The big spiky leaves are century plant.”
“And those weird-looking tall things with the orange flowers on top?”
“Ocotillo.”
“You know the names of the vegetation, but you have no specific memories of this place?”
Luke shrugged. “The scenery looks familiar. I just can’t put myself into it,” he said, making it clear by his tone of voice that he wanted to cut off the conversation.
She was silent for several miles, then asked, “I assume we’re going to the ranch?”
“Yeah.”
“To see your father’s grave?”
“To see if anything jogs my memory,” he answered. “Since I apparently lived there for the first sixteen years of my life.”
She smoothed her finger across the textured seat cover, then finally spoke the thoughts on her mind. “I’m the one who forced you to come back here.”
“It was my decision.”
“Well, I thought that meeting someone from your past would trigger your memory. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
“I wasn’t expecting much,” he answered with elaborate casualness. Then, “You probably didn’t like hearing I’d been spotted hanging around in the desert—up to no good, if you read between the lines.”
“Maybe it wasn’t you. Mrs. Contrares said you’d changed.”
“She also recognized me. So did some guy named Jose—and his friend.”
“She wasn’t sure at first and she knew you pretty well.”
“We can argue about that all day. The important point is that I was out there doing something on the hot side of the law.”
“That’s a ridiculous assumption. You might have been leading hikers into the wilderness. You might have been searching for Indian artifacts.”
“Don’t forget prospecting for gold,” he said dryly as they rounded a curve and passed a stand of low, scrubby bushes. “I found the mother lode and converted the bullion to cash!”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Okay. Have it your way. You were smuggling drugs across the border.”
“Probably.”
“Stop!”
She saw his lips tighten, and he said nothing else. She knew he’d had a major disappointment today. He’d found his home, yet he still remembered nothing about his past, even after talking to the woman who had taken care of him when he was a child. He might be covering his feelings by getting into an argument, but she knew he was hurting. She wanted to reach over and touch his hand on the steering wheel. She wanted to tell him that the longer she knew him, the more sure she was that he couldn’t be engaged in criminal activity. Yet she had come to understand there was no point in doing either. He didn’t want her comfort or her reassurances.
So she sat silently beside him as the SUV hurtled down the highway.
In the distance she saw a vehicle slow down and stop before speeding up again.
Leaning forward, she saw orange cones blocking part of the pavement.
“What’s going on up there?” she asked, flashing back to the accident scene the night before, when Luke had been afraid the police were after him.
“Border patrol,” he answered in a flat voice, stepping on the brake. In light of their recent conversation, she felt her nerves jump as they slowed to a crawl. Ahead of them was a contingent of tough-looking men in stark green uniforms with pistols in black leather holsters. One of them was quizzing the driver of the truck that had been pulled over to the side. As she watched, another officer approached their vehicle with a dog on a leash who began to sniff along the underside of the vehicle.
She could see Luke’s hands tighten on the wheel before he made a deliberate effort to relax.
To her relief the officer only asked if they were American citizens. When they both answered yes, he waved them through.
Hannah breathed a little sigh as they left the checkpoint behind. Silently, she tried to analyze why the men looked so intimidating. Their equipment was similar to what she’d carried as a uniformed cop in Baltimore. But their stark caps and the contrast of all that black leather against their green uniforms made them look as if they’d blow you away and ask questions later.
“Are there a lot of checkpoints?” she asked.
“Yeah. To stop illegal immigration. And smuggling.”
She saw he was watching the odometer. Ten miles down the road, he slowed at a huge iron archway, the elaborate pattern making her think of when she’d been at a police convention in New Orleans. At the very top and along the side, the letter S was worked into the design—one facing forward and the other backward. Beyond it was a gravel road that wound into the hills.
Turning off the highway, Luke headed up the lane, his eyes fixed on a rise of land in the distance where she could see trees and a windmill spinning. After seven or eight miles, the vegetation thickened, and the trees grew taller. They drove into what would have passed for a forest in this area of the country. Coming out into a clearing, she saw a house that made her jaw drop open.
The architecture in town had been strictly utilitarian. This place was a veritable mansion in the middle of the desert. It looked as though it was made of stucco, with a tin roof and a two-story porch spanning the front, supported by Doric columns made of wood.
The first impression was of well-kept luxury. But as they got out of the car and walked toward the structure, the blemishes became more apparent. The bottoms of the porch posts were rotting and the windows were boarded up.
“What are all these trees?” she asked.
Luke blinked. He’d been so intent on drawing some meaning from this plot of land that he’d forgotten anyone was in the truck with him.
“Cottonwoods, crepe myrtle, pecans, figs,” he answered, then glanced back toward the spinning windmill. “It looks like the well is still watering them.”
“Do you remember the ranch?”
The brittle feeling that had followed him all the way from town intensified. Deliberately, he looked around. To the right of the mansion was a stretch of broken fence that had apparently once separated a complex of barns from the front yard. The barns were in even worse shape than the house. To the left and right, various outbuildings dotted the property. Several had collapsed into heaps of weathered boards and sections of tin roof. It was clear his father had stopped caring for the place long before his death.
He moistened his dry lips. “No.”
When Hannah started toward the house along a path made of flat slabs of lim
estone, he caught up with her and grabbed her arm.
“Don’t go up there.”
“Why not?”
“The boards look like they could be rotten. You don’t want to fall through into a nest of snakes.”
She shuddered and gave the porch a wide berth, stopping beside two rusted lawn chairs and a table, all fashioned from horseshoes welded together.
Like a mortgage inspector evaluating the property, Luke walked slowly around the side of the house, then headed for the barn. Hannah stayed a couple of paces behind him, and he hoped she wasn’t going to ask any more questions he couldn’t answer.
Another path behind the house led toward a little hill several hundred yards away. Staring at it, he went still. The area at the top was surrounded by a three-foot-tall iron fence and more cottonwoods. Poking up through the weeds were several gravestones, some looking as though they were about to topple over.
The graveyard. Where Lucas Somerville’s ancestors were buried. Lucas Somerville.
He was supposed to be that man. He was supposed to have grown up here. But he felt no more connection to the place than he would have felt to an Alaskan igloo.
He had come here hoping for answers. Now there was only a hollow feeling in his chest as he said, “I’m going up there.”
His throat was so clogged that speech was impossible. Hoping his body language made it clear that he didn’t want Hannah to follow, he strode up the hill. Arriving at the fence, he hesitated for a moment, then lifted the gate that was hanging from one hinge. After stepping inside the fence, he stooped to look at one of the gravestones.
The name and the inscription were too worn to read. So he went on to the next one. The newest one.
Andrew Somerville. His father.
A hard, cold man. A drinker. A wife beater. A man who took out his anger and frustration on his son.
Luke pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, fighting the feeling of numbness that had grabbed him by the throat. He remembered none of it. Because he didn’t want to remember. That was obvious.
HANNAH WATCHED Luke’s shoulders slump in defeat. Her heart squeezed and she turned away, fixing her gaze on the flower beds along the side of the house where a few ornamental plants struggled to poke their heads among the weeds.
She wanted to yank the weeds away so the struggling flowers would have the benefit of the soil and water. But she could see small cacti with wicked-looking thorns poking their heads through the other vegetation, so she kept her hands pressed to her sides.
Once more she directed a covert glance toward Luke’s back, then turned quickly as a flicker of movement in the direction of the highway caught the edge of her vision.
An animal?
Shading her eyes with her hands, she was surprised to see a trail of dust kicking up through the desert. From a car or truck, she assumed.
She glanced toward Luke, but he was still in the graveyard, reaching out to straighten one of the listing tombstones.
Turning back, she watched a vehicle coming toward them along the access road. Although she couldn’t make out many details, she could tell that it was some sort of light-colored big pickup, similar to scores she’d seen since arriving in Texas.
Apparently Luke had company. Did people come out here often? Was it a caretaker thinking he was dealing with trespassers? Or was it someone looking for them—someone who’d talked to Mrs. Contrares?
The guy was in a tearing hurry, and she wanted to yell at him to slow down. Still at full throttle, the vehicle disappeared from view as it reached the screen of trees, then came roaring out of the greenery. As the truck plowed through the front yard of the house, she saw that it was heading straight toward her.
Was the driver blind? She waved her arms, then realized he wasn’t planning to slow down—and she had only seconds to get out of the way.
CHAPTER TEN
If she could have made it into the trees, she might have been safe. But the vehicle blocked her path.
The best she could do was sprint for the porch. Not the front, but the narrow edge on the side of the house.
There were no steps on the side, and the surface was several feet above the ground. Tearing through the flower bed, she bounded upward, thorns ripping at her jeans as she leaped onto the sagging boards. Seconds later, the truck roared over the spot where she’d been standing.
The vehicle missed her with inches to spare, shot past in a cloud of dust and made a screeching turn. Through the obscured windshield she could see a man hunched over the wheel, a cowboy hat jammed down over his face.
Breathing hard, she watched as the truck circled back, this time aiming for the SUV parked in front of the house. He rammed it from the rear, slamming the front end against the wooden porch pillar so hard that the hood crumpled.
The whole porch shuddered as Hannah fought to keep her balance, only marginally aware of what was going on around her.
In the distance she heard Luke yelling something, followed by the sound of gunshots. Did the guy have a gun, or was it Luke shooting? If he was, where had he gotten the weapon? She’d seen him ditch his gun back in Philadelphia. That seemed like a lifetime ago…
Before she had time for further speculation, her attention was captured by another sound—the sickening crack of splintering wood. Seconds later, her foot crashed through a spongy floorboard.
God, no. Not down there with the snakes. In her vivid imagination, she heard them hissing, felt their scaly bodies slithering against her boots, then her jeans-clad legs. A scream rising in her throat, she tried to claw her way back to the surface, but the rotten wood kept breaking away in her hands.
Finally, with some desperate reserve of strength, she wrenched her foot free and flopped to the porch surface, lying prone and spreading out her arms and legs to distribute her weight.
But before she could pull herself to safety, a groan from above warned her of a new danger. A moment later, a loose section of tongue-and-groove ceiling came crashing down in a cloud of dust and debris, missing her by less than a foot.
Shaky and disoriented, she pushed herself to her knees, splinters digging into her hands as she crawled toward safety. She had almost made it to the edge of the porch when she felt the whole structure shudder and knew that disaster was imminent.
Strips of wood were raining down around her. Choking, blinded by the dust, she felt strong arms grab her by the shoulders and pull her away from the collapsing porch and into the yard. A second later, the whole roof came crashing down.
IN THE SWIRL OF DUST, Luke gathered Hannah close.
He crooned low, soothing words to her, his body curving around hers. Then a flash of movement over her shoulder caught his attention. Shifting her weight to his left arm, he grabbed his gun with his right hand and fired off two quick shots.
He felt Hannah flinch as she turned her head to see two snakes twitching on the ground. One was headless, the other was cut in two.
Her fingers clutched at Luke’s forearms. “Rattlers?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Her gaze darted along the edge of the ruined porch. “Are there more?”
“There may have been. Let’s assume they got crushed when their nice shady porch came crashing down.”
Scooping her into his arms, he carried her to the side of the house, putting a solid wall between them and the snakes.
After moving past the flower beds, he slid downward, seating himself and shifting Hannah onto his lap as he rocked her in his arms.
Breathing hard, she clung to him. And he clung just as tightly, knowing that if he had been seconds later she would have been crushed by the collapsing roof.
For a long time, neither of them moved.
He knew she was drawing comfort from him. He knew he was doing the same thing, clinging to her because she was the only thing real and solid in the nightmare world he inhabited.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his hands stroking oh so gently across her shoulders and down her back.
He saw a grimace cross her face, but nothing bad enough to indicate broken bones.
His hand went to the back of her head, gently probing the spot where she’d been injured before.
“Did it split open again?” she asked.
“It feels okay. At least that’s something.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this is what I get for dragging you along with me,” he muttered.
“No.”
“What do you mean no? That guy tried to kill you!” In his mind he saw the truck again, coming straight toward her, and he swallowed painfully as he thought about the consequences if she hadn’t been smart enough to get herself out of the way. “Tell me what happened,” he demanded.
“I saw him on the access road. I thought he was driving too fast, that he was in a hurry to talk to you. When he came at me, I leaped onto the porch, and he rammed the SUV.”
“Then he roared away,” Luke finished. “I got here for the last part.”
“You were shooting at him?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t even know you had a gun. When did you get it?” she asked.
“While you were buying boots and a hat.”
“You can’t just buy a gun like a—a box of popcorn. I thought there was a waiting period and a background check.”
“Not in Texas.” He was silent for several seconds, then asked, “Did you get a look at the guy in the truck? Or maybe get the license plate?”
“I was a little busy!”
“Yeah.”
“But I tried. His hat was pulled down over his face. And I think the plate was smeared with dirt.”
He nodded.
As he took her hand to help her up, she winced.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Splinters.” She turned her palm upward so he could see.
“A couple of wicked ones, it looks like,” he said. “I’d better dig them out before you get an infection.”
He jogged back to the SUV, rummaged in one of the bags and came back with a first-aid kit and one of the water bottles.
