by B. J Daniels
She also had the best view in the county. From her living room window she could see three of the four mountain ranges surrounding the area. She loved this old building and the life she and Darby had built with it. But deep in her heart there was always that feeling of something missing. Someone. Even when she didn’t say his name or imagine his face, there was always that ache of something lost, something she feared she would never have again.
“Come on, let’s see what we can cook up for you,” she said to her father.
He smiled over at her. “Could use some breakfast now that you mention it.”
She laughed. His appetite was legend. “What do you say to chicken fried venison steak, eggs, hash browns and biscuits and milk gravy?”
“That’s my girl,” Ely said.
But as she started to open her door, she saw something...someone move along the side of the building. Her brother Darby wasn’t here yet or his pickup would have been parked in the spot next to the big old pine tree. She’d gotten only a glimpse of what she thought was a man hiding in the trees.
She handed the keys to the place to her father. “Here, you go on in and I’ll be right with you.” She waited for him to climb out before she reached under the pickup seat and pulled out the .45 pistol she kept wrapped in a piece of an old blanket.
Slipping from behind the wheel, she unwrapped the gun, tucked it into the waist of her jeans and covered the weapon with the hem of her T-shirt.
Her father had made it as far as the front door. He turned and looked back at her. “Everything all right, Lillie Girl?” he called.
“Fine, Dad. Just need to check something.”
He nodded, hesitating as if worried about her. Say what you will about Ely Cahill, he wasn’t as far gone as her brother wanted her to believe, she thought.
“I’m fine. You make yourself at home. I’ll join you in a minute.”
As he unlocked the front door of the bar and disappeared inside, she moved to the pine trees that flanked the stone building on three sides.
Stepping to the edge of the building, she began to work her way carefully along the side, keeping to the shadows. Even as she did, she told herself she had imagined the broad shoulders, the slim hips, the glimpse of dark wavy hair under the Western straw hat as she had so many times over the years.
She’d gone only a dozen yards when she saw him. She felt a tremor move through her. With shaking fingers, she reached under her T-shirt and pulled the gun to level it on the broad back of the man standing only feet away.
“Don’t move!” she ordered, surprised that her voice sounded so unruffled when her heart had taken off like a wild horse in the wind at the sight of him.
“You wouldn’t shoot a man in the back.”
The deep resonance of his voice sent her pulse thundering in her ears. She’d heard that voice only in her dreams for the past nine years. The ache she felt was laced with hurt and anger, not to mention the hit her pride had taken.
“In your case, I’ll make an exception,” she said, easing her finger onto the trigger. Her thoughts whirled like tumbleweeds in the wind. Trask Beaumont had the nerve to show his face around her after all this time? After all that he’d done?
He raised both hands in the air and turned slowly as if he hadn’t lost all of his good sense during those years away. He’d known her like no other man, like no other man ever would because she’d never let another get that close again.
Staring at him, she couldn’t believe it. How many times had she told herself that she would never see that face again, a face so handsome it had to be crafted by the Devil himself.
Her finger twitched on the trigger of the pistol as she reached into her jeans pocket for her cell phone.
“Easy, darlin’,” he said, taking a step toward her. “You don’t want to shoot me. You don’t want to call your sheriff brother on me, either.”
“You sure about that?” She thought of the night she’d waited for him until the sun rose and she’d realized he wasn’t coming back for her.
Trask Beaumont’s lips curved into the grin that had haunted her sleepless nights for years. That grin had not just let this man into her jeans but into her heart. “Damn, Lillie. I can’t tell you how I’ve missed you.”
“What are you doing here?” She hated the tremor she heard in her voice. She had her cell phone out. All she had to do was hit 9-1-1. Her brother would be there in a heartbeat. “I asked what you’re doing here.”
Before he could answer, a vehicle roared up on the other side of the building. She recognized the sound of the engine. Engine cut, the driver’s-side door opened and slammed. She listened as her brother Darby entered the bar, then yelled her name.
She glanced over her shoulder, afraid he’d come looking for her and catch the two of them out there. Knowing how her brothers’ felt about Trask, she hated to think what would happen. It was one thing to have him arrested. It was another to let one of her other brothers at him.
When she turned back, Trask was gone. Lillie blinked. It was as if he hadn’t been there at all. And yet her heart still thundered in her chest. If she dialed 9-1-1, Flint would come running.
She stood, the gun in her hand growing heavy, the phone just one keystroke away from the sheriff’s department dispatcher. Trask. He’d come back.
And now he was gone. Again. Had she not been sane, she might have believed that she’d conjured up his image from a desire she’d spent years trying hard to bury. But she hadn’t dreamed him. He’d left behind his boot prints in the dirt, and even if her eyes had deceived her, her heart had not.
Trask was back. Conflicting emotions warred inside her. Trask, after all these years. She pocketed her phone and slowly lowered the gun as she began to shake all over. Tears burned her eyes. Why would he come back now? How could he come back, knowing how dangerous it was for him?
“Lillie?”
Tucking the gun into the waistband of her jeans and covering it with her shirt again, she turned to find her brother standing a few yards away. Had he seen Trask?
“Have you lost your mind?” Darby demanded, making her fear she had. Before she could respond, he continued, “You leave Dad alone in the bar? Alone in a bar stocked with bright shiny bottles of booze? Didn’t you just get him out of jail?” He stopped his rant to frown. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”
She said the first thing that came to mind that might make sense. “Thought I saw a bear. Didn’t want it getting in the trash again.”
“We have worse problems in the bar. Come take care of your father,” he said only half-jokingly.
“He’s your father too,” she pretended to remind him as she followed him. Inside, she found Ely behind the bar with a bottle of whiskey clutched in his hand and a big grin on his face.
“I’ll be in the back,” Darby said with a disgusted shake of his head. “Apparently, you promised him a Johnson breakfast.” It had been their mother’s specialty named after her family.
The moment Darby disappeared in the back, her father asked, “Find what you was lookin’ for out there?” He was no longer grinning. Nor it seemed had he indulged in the whiskey. Darby’d had no reason to worry. Their father had only been pretending to start the day with whiskey.
Ely put the bottle down and poured them both a cup of coffee from the automatic coffeemaker that Darby had set last night.
“She thought she saw a bear,” Darby called from the back over the clatter of pots and pans.
“A bear?” her father repeated as he studied her over the rim of his coffee cup. He’d definitely seen Trask, she realized, but he was going to keep her secret, since he was the only one in the family who’d ever liked the man his daughter had fallen for at a tender age.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, touched that her father would understand why she wasn’t going to c
all the law on the only man she’d ever truly loved.
“Ya got to watch them bears, Lillie Girl,” her father said, looking worried, “’specially the renegade ones. They’ll turn you every way but loose.”
CHAPTER THREE
“YOUR FATHER GETS crazier every year,” Deputy Harper Cole said from where he lounged against the wall at the entrance to the cell block.
“Nothing wrong with his right hook, though, huh, Harp.” Flint had inherited the deputy when he’d taken the sheriff job with the understanding that the mayor’s son would be kept on.
The deputy straightened, anger marring his handsome features. “He should have to do time for slugging an officer of the law.”
“If you’d cuffed the prisoner last night, you wouldn’t have that black eye,” Flint said. Earlier he’d noticed the deputy admiring his wound in the side mirror. Harp was good-looking and spent way too much time taking selfies. Flint would bet he’d put one up on Facebook last night.
“He nailed me before I could get the cuffs on him. If it had been any of the other deputies, you would have charged him with assault,” Harp whined.
“The other deputies wouldn’t have taunted him.”
“What?” he asked as if incredulous. “Is that what he told you?”
“He didn’t have to. I know you.”
“Well, it’s my word against his and he’s a liar.”
Flint looked over at the deputy. “Be careful, Harp. You’re hanging on by the skin of your teeth as it is because of complaints against you. I would tread lightly. Even your father, the mayor, won’t be able to save you next time.” He rose to his feet. “Let’s take a ride.”
As Flint drove out of town, his deputy said, “Heard the old Chandler ranch just sold to some corporation called L.T. Enterprises. Like we don’t know who’s buying up the whole damned valley. Wayne Duma.”
Flint said nothing, knowing that Harp was needling him. Wayne Duma was married to Flint’s ex-wife, Celeste, and his deputy knew it was a sore point with him.
“That’s a nice ranch. Maybe Duma plans to move up there and sell that big old house he has in town,” Harp said, shooting him a look no doubt to see if he was getting to him.
Ignoring him, Flint turned onto the road into the south forty acres of his family’s ranch.
Harp let out an oath. “Don’t tell me you’re going out to the missile silo.”
“Ely saw something out there last night,” the sheriff said.
Harp shook his head. “He’s a crazy old coot. No offense,” he added.
“Crazy or not, whatever he saw last night scared him, and I can tell you right now, there is little out there that scares my old man.”
“Except for flying saucers and little green men,” the deputy said under his breath.
Flint didn’t take the bait. Ely Cahill was one of a group of people around the world who swore they had been abducted by aliens. It had happened, according to Ely, back in 1967—the same time an unidentified flying object had been seen by the air force stationed in the area. The disk-shaped object had hovered in the air over more than a half dozen of the missile sites—disabling them. It caused a panic with the military.
According to the military’s records, at one missile sight, an officer on duty reported that lights streaked directly above them, stopped, changed directions at high speed and returned overhead again. He described it as glowing red and saucer-shaped, hovering silently.
That information had been classified for years – even though numerous civilians had also seen the flying object. Of course, no one but the US Air Force had known about this until years later when the information was declassified. By then everyone was convinced that Ely Cahill was a nut-job.
All that aside, they still lived knowing what they had out in their pasture—a bomb capable of destroying everything for miles should something go wrong. The night of the UFO sighting, things had definitely gone wrong.
Not that anyone believed it had been a spaceship filled with aliens—except for their father.
Flint drove out of Gilt Edge toward the missile silo, where his father had claimed he’d seen something last night. Most people drove past the silos without even knowing they were there. The only indication that one of them was there was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence around a small area of land in the middle of the pasture. At the center of it was a concrete pad, a few wires and antennae sticking up, but nothing that gave away the fact that a nuclear missile was resting below ground waiting for someone to push a button.
“Wait here. I’m going to take a look around,” Flint said and got out. He knew better than to get too close. Alarms would go off at the command center and within minutes a military vehicle would come flying up with armed officers inside.
Instead, he walked away from the missile silo, his gaze on the ground ahead of him. The air was crisp this morning. Only a few puffy clouds floated on the breeze. Snow still capped the mountaintops that surrounded the valley. Flint breathed in the rich spring scents and studied the Western landscape.
The grasses had started to green up in the pastures and alongside the highway. Summer was coming, a busy time because of the tourists who traveled through the state. Not that the locals weren’t a handful all year long, especially his father.
He thought of Ely with affection and aggravation. No man was more stubborn or independent. He hoped Lillie was right and that the old man wasn’t losing his mind. He couldn’t imagine him locked up in some nursing home, let alone any of them trying to corral him if he moved in with them.
He hadn’t gone far when he picked up the huge footprints. Flint stopped to glance back at his patrol SUV. Harp was watching him. Anything he did would get back to the mayor and his friends. He took another step, then another as he dropped over a rise, careful not to disturb the tracks he’d found.
Once out of sight, he pulled out his cell phone and took several photographs of the oversize footprints—and the man-size boot prints where there’d clearly been a scuffle.
Before he could pocket his cell phone, it rang. A glance at caller ID showed the call was from his office. “Cahill,” he said into the phone, turning back toward his patrol SUV and the waiting Harp. In the distance, he could see dust as a military vehicle roared toward them.
“Sheriff, I have Anvil Holloway on the line. He says his wife is missing.”
* * *
BACK AT THE Stagecoach Saloon, Darby made enough breakfast for the three of them, but Lillie had lost her appetite. She kept thinking of Trask in the days before he’d left nine years ago. Something had been bothering him for several weeks. A darkness had taken hold of him. Her usually cheerful, laid-back lover was moody and irritable. She’d often found him scowling and he’d definitely been distracted.
“Is it your job?” she had asked.
“What?”
“This mood you’re in.”
“Sorry, I’ve just had things on my mind.”
“Things you want to talk about?”
He’d pulled her to him, kissed her and said, “It’s nothing to do with you. I’ll handle it, okay? Just give me a little time.”
She’d had no idea what that meant. He’d even been at odds with his best friend, Johnny Burrows. She’d seen the two of them having a heated argument one day when she’d went by the Lazy G Bar Q Ranch, where Trask worked. When Trask had seen her, he’d quickly stepped away and pretended it was nothing.
“I’m not a fool. What’s going on between you and Johnny?”
“Just a difference of opinion. It’s nothing.”
She suspected that all of it had been leading up to the fight with his boss, Gordon Quinn, and him getting fired. But did she really believe that Trask had come back that night and killed Gordon?
Now she half listened distractedly as her father and Darb
y talked about the weather, the price of gold and the decline of elk in Yellowstone Park and the rest of Montana because of the reintroduction of wolves. She’d been pushing her food around on her plate until her brother finally took her plate along with his own and her father’s, and headed for the kitchen. She followed him, wanting to talk to him alone.
“Flint thinks we need to do something about Dad,” she told him, making sure their father was out of earshot.
“What do you think?” Darby asked as he began stacking the rinsed dishes in the commercial dishwasher, then looked at her.
“I don’t know. One minute he seems so like his old self, and then he starts talking about aliens and abductions. He swears they came after him again last night. Apparently, that’s why he got so drunk and so...‘disorderly,’ as Flint put it.” She smiled, feeling almost ashamed as she did. “He punched Harp in the eye.” She winced. “His eye was swollen shut when I saw him at the jail this morning.”
Darby chuckled. “You can bet that Harp asked for it. As for Dad, it doesn’t sound like anything new to me. But you shouldn’t always be the one to take care of him. Call Cyrus or Hawk next time. They aren’t that busy on the ranch that they can’t get Dad out of jail once in a while. And you know you can always call me.”
“I know, but I didn’t mind going,” she said with a shrug. Her brother’s smile was thanks enough. “I’d better get him home. He’s determined to stay there alone. At least until he can’t take it anymore and heads for the hills.”
“You want me to come with you? Billie Dee should be here soon.” Billie Dee was their cook, a large, older Texas woman with a belly laugh and twinkle in her eye. “She can hold down the fort until we get back.”
“No, I could use the drive. Wouldn’t mind a little time to myself on the way back.”
Darby caught her hand before she could turn away. “Everything all right, sis?” That was the problem with being twins. They sensed when something was wrong with their former womb-mate.
