Twilight, Texas
Page 1
If she could avoid the Parkers, reach Twilight by any other route, she would.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Books by Ginger Chambers
Title Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
Copyright
If she could avoid the Parkers, reach Twilight by any other route, she would.
But the tiny town had only one road in and the same road out. And to get there Karen had to skirt a border of the massive Parker Ranch. She itched to floor the accelerator. To fly along this part of her journey and put it quickly behind her.
“This is a travesty!” Karen could still hear Mae Parker, the family’s matriarch, telling that to any wedding guest who’d listen.
But it hadn’t been her fault! She’d done nothing except fall in love and agree to marry one of them. It was them, the Parkers, who‘d—
Trying to shake off the painful memory, Karen took a deep breath and glanced out the car’s window. Somewhere between this narrow strip of road and those distant mountains lay the heart of the Parker Ranch. She’d never seen ranch headquarters, only heard about it from her former fiancé. Since he was descended from a Parker who’d left years ago to make his way in the city, he and his family were referred to as “off-ranch Parkers.”
But a Parker was a Parker. They were all extensions of the same arrogant clan. People she had good reason to never, ever want to see again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The history of the West has always fascinated Ginger Chambers. The struggles faced by people trying to make their lives in an often hostile environment meant that small towns sometimes sprang up, prospered and then failed, leaving their remains for new generations to wonder at. She decided to write about such a town—the fictional Twilight, Texas—and the tenacious few who still call it home.
A proud native Texan, Ginger now lives in Northern California. This is her fourth story involving the Parkers of West Texas. Watch for upcoming books!
Books by Ginger Chambers
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TWILIGHT, TEXAS
Ginger chambers
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID
PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
For Chris, who also loves “old things”
CHAPTER ONE
“I’M REALLY GOING TO MISS you, Karen,” Rachel Anderson said from her perch on the kitchen stool.
“I’ll only be gone a week.”
“I know. That’s what you keep telling everyone. But I’ve had one of my dreams, remember? And if there’s anything I’ve learned to trust in life it’s my dreams. You should, too. I was right about Jim Singleton winning a car and George Davis’s long-lost brother showing up.”
Karen Latham straightened from rummaging through the refrigerator for perishables to look directly into the soulful face of her friend. “What about Mrs. Meyer? She’s still single.”
“I never set a date for when she’d get married again. Just said that she would.”
“She’s seventy-four!”
“Romance can happen at any age!”
Karen extended a questionable wedge of cheese. “Do you think this has had it?”
Rachel sniffed, grimaced, and the reject went into the trash.
“All right,” Karen said, still smiling as she shut the door. “That’s it. Everything else should be fine.”
“And if you do turn out to be away longer, I’ll check it again when I water your plants.”
“I won’t be away longer,” Karen insisted.
“Maybe that’s what my subconscious is trying to tell you—you should!”
“Shouldn’t the pizza be here by now?” Karen asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Martin’s pressing you for an answer, isn’t he?”
“And I can’t forget to empty the trash. Not with that smelly—”
“Karen!”
Karen sighed. “Yes...yes, he is.”
“If you want my opinion, I say put the man out of his misery. Marry him!”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Isn’t it always?” Rachel retorted.
The doorbell rang and Karen hurried to answer it. But instead of the expected delivery boy, she found a tall blond man with a pleasant face and a nice smile standing on her doorstep. “I know we’ve already said our goodbyes,” Martin explained, “but I wanted to see you again to—”
“Aha! At last!” Rachel rushed up to peek over Karen’s shoulder. Her jubilation flagged, though, when she recognized the caller. “Ah-no! Martin! Did they lose our order, do you think?”
Martin Frederick stiffened the instant Rachel appeared. For some reason the pair had to strain to be civil.
“Would you like to come in?” Karen asked in an attempt to bridge the gap.
“Yes, why not?” Rachel agreed. “We’ll be glad to share our meal...if it ever gets here!”
“I’ve already eaten. I only came by to—”
“I can disappear awhile if you two want,” Rachel interrupted him yet again.
“No,” Karen said quickly. Too quickly? “That would be silly.”
Martin stubbornly completed his thought. “To tell you to have a safe trip and not to forget to call.”
“Oh, isn’t that sweet!” Rachel mocked. “A man who cares.”
An angry light flashed in Martin’s eyes, but before he could respond, Karen stepped outside and closed the door, shutting Rachel inside.
“I promise to call as soon as I get there,” she said.
Martin’s good humor was instantly revived as he touched one of the loose chestnut curls resting on her shoulder. “Are you sure this place even has a telephone?”
“I’m positive.”
“Considering it’s a veritable ghost town...” His words grew husky as he bent to kiss her.
Karen let him do it. She felt a pleasant tingle, but nothing more, and quickly pulled away. “I have to finish packing,” she said.
“And I have to get back to the restaurant.” Still, he tarried. “I’m going to miss you, Karen. This week will feel like forever.”
“I—I have to go.” Karen stepped back, but he grabbed her to deliver a harder kiss.
“Forever!” he swore, before setting her free.
Karen’s heart was pounding and her breathing was shallow as she escaped back inside... but for the wrong reason! She looked up to find Rachel studying her.
“The man’s besotted,” Rachel said.
“I wish you two would be nicer to each other.”
“I’m nice!” Rachel defended herself.
The doorbell rang again. Martin, needing more reassurance?
This time the caller was the delivery boy
, and after the necessary exchange of money, the two women brought the aromatic box to the kitchen table.
“Just how big is this place you’re going to, anyway?” Rachel asked, helping herself to a thick cheesy slice. “This ‘ghost town’?”
Karen passed her a paper napkin and took one for herself. “Well, technically, Twilight’s not a ghost town. It sort of is and sort of isn’t. People live there. So it’s not really abandoned.”
“How many people?” Rachel asked.
“Around twelve.”
“Whoo-hoo! Big time!” Rachel chuckled as she took another bite.
“Did you ever see the old movie Justice at Sundown?”
“With a young Gary Cooper? I think so.”
“Actually, it started Henry Ives.”
Rachel frowned. “I always get them confused. Both long and lean with those carved features and enough sex appeal to melt the screen. Didn’t something unusual happen to Henry Ives? I can’t remember.”
“He drowned while making his next movie. Sometime in the late thirties. Anyway, Justice at Sundown is about an event from Twilight’s past. An outlaw stopped running from a pursuing posse long enough to rescue a child from an abandoned well, only to be hanged for his trouble. I’ve played by that well. It’s just across the street from my aunt’s antique shop.”
“The shop she left to you.”
Karen nodded. She’d spent every summer from ages six through thirteen with her father’s older sister in the tiny West Texas “ghost town” while her parents went on their yearly anthropological study trips to Central America. She’d played without restraint in that wild and isolated place and made friends with the town’s scant citizenry—experiencing a freedom she’d never known in the more cloistered confines of her parents’ academic world. It was hard to imagine Twilight without Augusta, just as it would be hard to imagine what her own life would’ve become without her aunt’s liberating influence.
“Did your aunt qualify as a town eccentric?” Rachel asked, grinning. “Places like that usually have one or two.”
“Aunt Augusta lived her own life, that’s for sure. She did things her way whether other people thought it strange or not. She was also one of the sweetest people you’d ever want to meet. She’d have given away her last penny—although she had so many it never would have come to that. My uncle left her nicely provided for. She never had to worry.”
“Which was how she could afford to run an antique shop in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t have to make a living!”
“Exactly. She could’ve lived anywhere, but she chose Twilight.”
“Is it even on the Texas map?”
“I’m not sure. An occasional tourist sometimes finds their way there, but they’re usually fans of the old movie. That’s how they know about it.”
“Or they’re lost.”
Karen smiled. “Well, that, too.”
They ate in silence for a time before Rachel asked, “Did Mr. Griffin say anything when you told him you were leaving this weekend? Or did he just grunt?”
“He grunted.”
“Typical. Would it hurt the man to wish you luck or to tell the truth—that he’s going to miss you?”
“He’s not a very demonstrative person.”
Rachel dabbed at her mouth with the napkin. “You realize, of course, he’ll want to have first look at your aunt’s collection and will probably expect an outrageous discount if he finds anything he considers worthwhile.”
Karen shrugged. “I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do with it. If there’s enough I could keep it myself and open my own place. Karen’s Collectibles—doesn’t that have a nice ring?”
Rachel’s eyes opened wider. “Your own place? Here in Kerrville? Mr. Griffin would—You know he has a fit every time a new shop opens.”
“Probably not here. Comfort’s just down the road, so’s Mountain Home.” Karen named two neighboring Central Texas communities.
“What about Martin?”
“What does one thing have to do with the other? I could marry Martin and still—”
“Can I come work for you?” Rachel cut in with a grin.
Karen smiled. “It’s all pie in the sky, Rach. I haven’t been to Twilight in ten years, not since I was eighteen, and that was just for a short visit. After I stopped spending my summers there, Aunt Augusta would come by our place in Austin when she was out on buying trips. I don’t have any idea what she might’ve left me. It could be a few things. It could be more. I won’t know until I get there.” She motioned at the remaining pizza. “Why don’t you take this home, too, okay? No use leaving it to spoil.”
“Home delivery isn’t something you’ll be getting a lot of out there, I suppose. What else will you be doing without? Electricity?”
“Twilight has electricity.”
“But no fast-food places.”
Karen smiled dryly. “I’ll manage to survive for a week.”
“Or more,” Rachel added with a teasing twinkle. She stood up. “I’d better get going. Let you finish getting ready.”
The telephone rang, but for the moment they ignored it.
“You take care,” Rachel said, reaching out for a hug. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Then again...”
“Don’t you forget the eggs and milk.”
Karen continued to smile as Rachel left by the back door, a pizza box in one hand and a grocery bag in the other. Her good mood lasted until she picked up the phone and heard her mother’s sharp tones traveling over the long-distance lines from Austin.
“Karen!” Gemma Latham said shortly. “Your father’s told me what you told him last night. For the life of me I can’t understand why you want to do this. Your aunt left you a few things...fine. Surely some kind of arrangement could be made to have whatever it is sent on. You don’t have to go to West Texas to get it. What about the Parkers? What if you—What if one of them—” Her mother paused, reorganizing her thoughts. “Twilight is how far from the Parker Ranch? Fifty miles? Fifty miles is nothing in a place like that!”
“It’s more like seventy miles, Mother. And the Parkers have absolutely no interest in Twilight, During all the summers I spent there I never once heard the name.”
Her mother made an impatient sound. “I’m asking you to think about what you’re doing, Karen. You’ve made a good life for yourself in Kerrville. Not the one that your father and I wanted for you, but it seems to be what you want Why hand those people an opportunity to hurt you again? You more than anyone know what they’re like. What the Parkers are capable of!”
The Parkers—the one subject guaranteed to rattle her mother’s coolly competent persona. The mere mention of the name could set her spinning so far out of control that her academic peers and her students would have a hard time recognizing her.
Karen cradled the phone closer to her ear. “It’s what I want to do, Mother. It’s something I—I need to do.”
Her mother was quick to sense an underlying tension. “Why?” she demanded. “Has something happened you haven’t told—”
“I want to be on my own for a while, that’s all,” Karen broke in.
After a short silence Gemma returned to her cause. “Still...to go to Twilight! When you know they’re so close by!”
“They don’t want to see me any more than I want to see them. I’m sure of that.”
“They should still be apologizing!” her mother snapped.
“Yes, they should,” Karen agreed.
“I don’t like it,” Gemma said. “I do not approve. But if you must, keep in touch.”
Karen let the handset slide back into place. Only instead of releasing it, she stood still, her hand outstretched. Where the Parkers were concerned, her mother could be wholly unreasonable. But in this instance, was she right?
Why was she so stubbornly determined to make this trip? Because she felt it only right to go herself to claim what her aunt Augusta had left her and also because it provided a convenient break from Martin�
�s growing insistence? Or, on some deeper level, was it because she felt she still had something to prove to the Parkers? To herself?
She shook her head, denying the last thought No. What had happened between her and the Parkers was well and truly in the past. It no longer had importance. They no longer were important.
“Not any of them!” she said aloud to the empty room. And was pleased by her certainty.
KAREN’S INDIFFERENCE to the Parkers lasted through the night and for most of the next day. While she had other things to think about—gathering her gear, loading it in the car, negotiating the interstate—she was fine. It was only as she abandoned the well-constructed highway for a narrower two-lane blacktop and then, later, turned onto an even narrower stretch of blacktop that the hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle. If she could reach Twilight by any other route she would, but her choice was severely limited. The tiny town had only one road in and the same road out And to reach that road she had to skirt a border of the massive Parker Ranch.
When she was a child, the mile after mile of sunbaked land belonging to the Parkers had looked little different from the landscape she and her parents had been traveling through for what seemed forever. Dusty-beige rocks, distant waves of pyramid-shaped hills and jagged mountains that were even farther away. The mesquite, sage, yucca and creosote bushes... But now that she knew it was theirs...
Her foot itched to floor the accelerator. To fly along this part of her journey and put it quickly behind her. But she made herself keep within the speed limit and was relieved she had when a Briggs County sheriff’s patrol car materialized out of nowhere to pass her in the opposite lane. Not that she expected the Parkers to be disturbed if word somehow filtered out that one of their county deputies had issued her a speeding ticket. Her ill treatment at their hands had been a minor thing to them—a small snag in the rich tapestry of their lives. In her own life it had caused chaos.