Gramps, ready for bed an hour ago, shuffled into the kitchen in his bathrobe. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on here?”
“Ask her!” Lizzie barked, pointing at Amelia.
Amelia pulled in a deep breath and went to the fridge to pull out coffee creamer. “Believe me, if I knew, I’d tell you. I don’t think we’ll know anything until Boone arrives.”
“Boone? Why is Boone coming here?” Grandpa had never been a fan of late-night visitors, much less angry ones.
“He sounded upset. Like he was sick or something.” Lizzie dumped three teaspoons of sugar into the coffee and stirred it vigorously. “Something’s wrong.”
“Well, that’s clear enough,” Grandpa huffed. “I’m going to have to go get dressed again. Beats me what’s so important it can’t wait till morning.”
Amelia had entertained the same thought. “You don’t have to stay up for this, Gramps.” In fact, she rather envied his excuse to hide. This had the makings of a world-class drama, and she wasn’t in the mood for it. The last thing she needed was Finn walking in on this explosion when she needed time alone with that man. Lord, I want to believe You saw this coming, but I’m stumped but good.
Just as she was filling her coffee cup, she saw the high, wide lights of Boone’s truck pull into the driveway.
“He’s here.” Lizzie put down her cup and rushed to the door.
Amelia took a long drink and closed her eyes in a prayer for grace. Her eyes shot wide open when she heard Lizzie’s scream. “Lord have mercy! Call 911!”
Amelia grabbed the phone and rushed to the hallway to see a bloody, angry Boone being thrust through her front door by none other than Finn. Boone’s shirt was caked with blood and his eyes were practically swollen shut behind the bag of ice he held to his nose.
As Amelia started to dial, Finn held up his hand. “He doesn’t need an ambulance. Lizzie can take him to the ER when we’re through here if he still wants it, but I don’t think I broke his nose.”
Amelia practically dropped the phone. “You? You punched Boone in the nose?”
“Kicked,” Boone corrected through what sounded like a very fat lip. “He kicked me in the head like a mule.”
Lizzie alternated between fawning over Boone and shooting black looks at Finn. “Why did you hurt him like that?”
In seconds everyone was shouting at everyone else until Amelia banged the phone against the wall as loudly as she could. “Please! Let’s get into the kitchen where Boone can sit down and we can make some sense of this.” If there is any sense to be made of this, she thought as she pointed toward the kitchen A whimpering Lizzie, a brooding Boone and a completely unreadable Finn followed her directions.
Finn seemed the calmest of the bunch, so she started with him as she wet a dishcloth and handed it to Lizzie. “What on earth happened?” With Boone now slumped head back in one of the kitchen chairs, Lizzie began to wipe blood off of the man’s streaked and swollen face.
“Did something happen at work, Pookie?” Lizzie sounded near tears and she replaced the ice bag.
“Boone wasn’t at work.” Finn’s sharp, factual tone reminded Amelia that he was a Ranger.
“Of course he was,” Lizzie countered, one hand on Boone’s cheek as she glared over her shoulder at Finn.
“I came across his truck turning just outside of town on my way back from Austin. I followed him.”
“You followed him?” Lizzie’s words were more accusation than question. “Since when are you the police?”
Boone made a growling sound at that, and Amelia stepped in before the growl became a roar. “Finn is with the Texas Rangers, Lizzie.” It didn’t come close to explaining whatever was happening, but someone had to start somewhere. “What happened when you followed Boone?”
“So you weren’t at work?” Lizzie’s pity was in sudden danger of evaporating into annoyance.
“Well, I...” came Boone’s voice from under the ice bag.
Lizzie pulled off the ice bag to scowl at Boone. “So you lied to me? You skipped out on premarital counseling by lying to me?”
The look in Finn’s eyes told Amelia this was about to get much worse than a simple lovers’ spat. She repeated her question as calmly as she could. “What did you find when you followed Boone?”
Finn picked up a dishrag from the stack Amelia had put on the kitchen table and began to wipe the blood off his own hands. “I found him hitching a trailer of stolen cattle up to his truck.”
Lizzie pulled back in shock. “You’re the Robin Hood Rustler?”
“No!” moaned Boone.
“No,” said Finn.
“No?” Amelia and Lizzie said in shockingly perfect timing.
“I didn’t do all that other stuff,” Boone said, his battered nose distorting the words.
“But you did steal cattle?” Lizzie glared at her fiancé. “Rustling? Boone, how could you do such a thing?”
“Evidently Boone thought he could pull in a few extra dollars with some petty theft from some of the smaller ranches while everyone’s attention was diverted by the crimes on the bigger outfits,” Finn explained. “A poor copycat, I’m afraid.”
And not a very smart one at that, Amelia thought. While she would have liked to say the revelation surprised her, it hadn’t. Lizzie, on the other hand, was deflating with more heartbreak and disappointment by the second. Whatever other doubts Amelia had about the couple, two things were becoming quickly clear. One, that Lizzie had indeed loved Boone deeply; and two, that it didn’t look as if their engagement would last the night. Another Klondike engagement gone bust. We sure could use a dose of happiness soon, Lord. The Christmas carol clock chimed the late hour with “Silent Night.” This night is anything but silent, and all is definitely not calm. Help me, Jesus, I don’t know what to do.
“Are you going to arrest him?” Lizzie’s question to Finn was so weary and emotionless Amelia couldn’t tell if Lizzie wanted Boone in custody or feared it.
“Technically, I’m on leave from the Rangers. I don’t have the authority to arrest him.”
Amelia very much wanted to know why Finn was on leave, but now didn’t seem like a prudent time to ask.
“Now he tells me,” Boone said from under his ice pack. Amelia found the young man awfully cocky for someone in so much trouble.
“I do have the authority to force you to come clean to your fiancée and her family. About everything.”
Lizzie leaned back against the kitchen wall. “There’s more?”
Finn leveled a chilly glare at Boone. “How many times have you stolen cattle from small ranchers, Boone?”
“Just a few.”
Lizzie put her hands over her eyes, and Amelia reached out to touch her poor sister’s shoulder. As bad as Rafe’s skewed priorities were, finding out the man you loved was a criminal—and a seemingly unrepentant one at that—had to feel much worse.
“An actual number, if you don’t mind,” Finn pressed.
“Three. Well, four. The fourth one was just some equipment. I didn’t keep none of it. I sold it to a guy I know the next town over. Really, it was for money for the wedding.”
“And maybe a shiny new truck?” Lizzie had drawn the same conclusion Amelia had.
“I wanted the best for us, baby,” Boone cooed, pulling the ice bag from his face to look at Lizzie and reach for her hand.
Lizzie kept her hand away from Boone’s and straightened up off the wall. “The best for us, baby,” she gave the endearment a knife’s edge, “would have been to get a real job and show up at church like you promised.” She held up her left hand. “The best thing for me is to end this right now.” With that she worked the small ring off her finger and tossed it at him. “We’re finished.”
“Baby, Pookie...” Boone pleaded.
“Actually, you’re not finished. Not quite yet. Lizzie and Amelia, I think you both need to hear what else Boone has to say.”
Amelia couldn’t think of anything that could be worse than
what she’d just heard. She looked at Finn for any clue, but his face was hard and cold. “Tell them,” he said to Boone. Amelia could practically hear Finn’s teeth grinding behind the words. “Now,” he growled when Boone hesitated.
“I...well, I didn’t know it at the time, but...I’m the one who hit Finn.”
* * *
Amelia felt the room spin as she sank into a chair.
“It was at night. He was in the road trying to stop me. I panicked and knocked him off the road. I didn’t know he fell all the way down the ridge.” Boone was slumping into his own chair now, looking as if it was finally dawning on him just how deep a whole he’d dug for himself.
She looked up at Finn, her face drawn tight with fear and confusion. She couldn’t be more than four feet from him and yet she felt as if miles stretched between them. “How is that possible?”
“It came back to me when I saw the dent in Boone’s truck at dinner last night. I was driving to a family cabin north of here where I had planned to spend December. I got out of the car by the pine woods to pick up some firewood when I came up on Boone moving that same trailer with a different set of cattle. Given the late hour and the fact that there was no ranch anywhere nearby, I was sure he was rustling. I tried to stop him, and that’s when he ran me off the road. I recognized the truck and the black ski mask I found in Boone’s toolbox.”
“I mean it,” Boone insisted. “I didn’t know I’d hurt you bad. I just thought I scared you and you were hiding.”
“Of course you didn’t know,” Finn replied, barely keeping his rising anger in check. “You drove off. Or at least you must have. How would I know what you did, seeing as I was lying unconscious at the bottom of the ridge?” he shouted.
“Boone, you could have killed him!” Amelia cried. “You broke his ribs. You gave him that huge cut and his concussion. You gave him the amnesia!”
“Get out of my granddaughter’s house right now.” Gramps’s voice came from behind Finn with surprising authority. No one had realized Gramps had entered the room. “And if your next stop isn’t the police station to turn yourself in, I’ll call them myself to come find you wherever you are.”
Boone was at least smart enough to sense the very real threat in Gramps’s voice. Within a minute of Finn tossing him the keys, Boone was out the door and into his truck. If he had any sense at all—which Amelia would question—he was headed toward the police station. Would turning himself in buy Boone any mercy? Given all the recent thefts, Amelia doubted Lucy would go lightly on him.
The room was silent for a minute as the roar of Boone’s engine gunned and left the driveway. Then, as they all stared through the window at the fading red lights, Lizzie began to cry. In all her astonishment over Boone’s crimes, Amelia had forgotten that her sister’s heart had just been broken.
Gramps hadn’t. The old man opened his arms to his granddaughter. “There, now, Lizzie girl.” Compassion filled his soft voice. “You cry all you want. You’ve had a whole heap of hurt tonight. Why don’t you come sit with me on the den couch and we’ll fall asleep together like when you were little.” The old man looked at Amelia over Lizzie’s head. “I think these two have a few more things to talk out anyhow.”
As Amelia watched them leave, the weight of the evening pressed down on her. Finn looked exhausted. He moved as if in pain, and his eyes squinted as if the kitchen light gave him a headache. His gazed searched around the room as if he couldn’t figure out what to say next. “I never wanted any of this to happen.”
“You went to your place...your home in Austin.” She stumbled over the word and they both knew why.
“I did. I had to.”
Amelia mustered up the courage to ask, “And what did you find?”
Finn rubbed his hands along the back of his neck, reaching for words. “It’s empty. I mean there’s furniture there, things that belong to me, but...” He shrugged. “It’s...empty. It’s like there’s nothing there, even though there is.”
She had to ask him. “Tell me what you haven’t told me. All of it. Please.”
“You mean Belinda.” Finn’s eyes told her he was fully aware what those words did to her.
“Belinda,” she repeated, folding her hands together on the table. “Is that her name?”
“Yes, that was her name. Belinda was my wife.”
Amelia looked up from her hands. “Was?”
He swallowed hard. “She was killed in a car accident last Christmas. Along with our baby daughter.”
Amelia shut her eyes, reeling from the weight of that declaration. She’d imagined a million things, but none as awful as that. “Oh, Finn. That’s awful. What a terrible time for an accident.”
Finn looked as if he were barely hanging on to his composure. His face was filled with pain, his fingers fisted tight against his palms and the muscles in his arms tensed. “It wasn’t an accident. They were killed.”
What had been sad and cruel became devastating. Amelia felt her heart twist and tears burn in her eyes for all this man had lost.
“The partner of a man I put in jail cut the brake lines on Belinda’s car. He made sure my family would die.” He swallowed again, and she could see him struggle to keep the grief from consuming him. “Dr. Searle showed me the police file that day you found me in the park.” He looked up at her, his eyes so forlorn that Amelia let her own tears come. “I couldn’t even remember them when I saw the photos. How is that fair?” he agonized. “How is that right?”
“Oh, Finn. I can’t imagine...”
“I couldn’t tell anyone—wouldn’t speak their names, even to you—until I felt the grief I ought to have felt. Until I mourned them. Felt their loss the way I was supposed to, not by some cheat of a lost memory.”
“But you did. You remembered them.”
“This afternoon I sat at my kitchen table in Austin and it came back. Like breaking open a box or...or switching a light on in a dark room.” He swallowed hard, fighting for control. “And I remembered them. Remembered being with them. And then I remembered what it was like to be without them. I remembered their funerals and what it was like to pack up those tiny pink pajamas and...” He put his hands up over his eyes, choked into silence.
Finn gave a groan and pushed up out of the chair. “I thought I wanted to remember,” he told Amelia as he paced the kitchen. “I thought I owed them that much. They deserve to be remembered.” He turned to look at her. “Only there’s so much pain. It wasn’t there when I didn’t remember. But it’s back. I was so sure nothing could be worse than not remembering—” he ran his hands through his hair with a heartbreaking air of desperation “—but it’s so much worse. I wish I didn’t remember—how terrible is that? What kind of man wishes he didn’t remember his family?”
She was openly crying now, not even bothering to stop the flow of tears. “Oh, Finn. Who could blame God for wanting to spare you so much pain even for a little while?”
She wasn’t sure if it was anger or hopelessness that flashed through is eyes. “God didn’t do this to me. Boone Lawton did. It was just dumb luck that you were the one who found me.” He leaned back against the counter farthest from her, wrapping his hands around his chest as if he he might explode from the onslaught of pain. “I almost wish you hadn’t found me at all.”
That pushed her up out of her chair. “Don’t say that. You know it wasn’t luck—there is no luck, Finn, only God’s purposes we can’t always see. I don’t believe I found you for no reason and neither do you.”
He shook his head. “I’m alone, Amelia. I just forgot it for a while, but it doesn’t change what’s true.” She hated that he turned away from her. “I can’t go back to being the person I was when I was here, when I couldn’t remember.”
“Don’t leave now,” she pleaded, wiping her wet cheeks with one hand. “I don’t want you to go. I don’t know how we sort through this but I know I don’t want you to leave.” She grabbed his shoulder and tried to turn him toward her even though he resisted. �
��How could you possibly spend Christmas alone with all you’ve been through?”
“That’s exactly what I was planning to do. That’s where I was headed that night, up to a cabin where I could spend Christmas alone. Where I wouldn’t have to try and be a human being, where I could just...” Finn’s hands flailed in the air. “I don’t even know. Maybe merely survive, come out the other side of it still upright and breathing. Only I’m not even sure that’s possible. It doesn’t feel like it now.”
“You can’t go,” she repeated.
“I can. I have to. Just let me walk out of your life, okay?”
“No, you can’t.” She sniffed, and it took him a moment to realize she was half laughing, half crying. “I mean, you can’t. There’s no car.” He’d forgotten he’d come in Boone’s truck. Near as Amelia could tell, her car was still outside of town by that barn.
He stared at her, stunned. “I can call a cab.”
“Don’t you dare,” she scolded, emboldened by everything she’d just heard and even admitted to herself. “We need to talk. I don’t want you to leave like this.” After a long moment, she dared to add, “I don’t want you to leave at all.”
Finn squeezed his eyes shut. “You say you don’t want me to leave. I didn’t want to leave. I still don’t. But that can’t matter.” He opened his eyes again, his gaze pleading. “None of that changes that I’m still a Ranger. The people I love were killed because of it. This wasn’t just a missed dinner or a broken engagement—this was murder. Murder, Amelia. That’s not a life you want. I don’t have anything you want.”
Amelia stood her ground in front of him. “I believe God led me to that forest to find you. I don’t know if I saved your life—maybe we’ll never know that—but I believe—” she put her hand to her heart rather than reach out to touch his “—I believe in my heart I was sent to help you. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
Finn turned to look out the window. She saw his hands grip the counter. “It counts for everything,” he said, still not turning back toward her. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough for that.”
“Then thank me by not leaving. At least not in the middle of the night like this. Wait until morning, that’s all I ask. Please.”
A Ranger for the Holidays (Lone Star Cowboy League) Page 15
