Rio hit the speed-dial and tapped her hand against the steering wheel while she waited for James Laraquette to answer his phone. Finally, when she heard his voice on the other end of the call, relief washed over her. “Daddy?”
“Rio...?” Her father’s voice was filled with apprehension, which didn’t surprise her. He could always pick up on her anxiety right away. “Are you okay?” he asked, confirming her suspicions.
“I’m fine, Daddy.” She realized the lie as soon as it left her mouth. “Well, no.” She straightened in her seat and cleared her throat. “That’s not really true.”
“Rio, honey...are you in trouble?”
“Daddy—” She nearly choked on the lump crawling up her larynx. “Is Abby really my mother?”
“Why would you ask me that?” Her father’s tone went from apprehension to panic—suggesting that he’d been dreading this moment for a long time.
“Well...?” She held her breath, waiting. When he didn’t say anything right away, she knew she’d have to give him a nudge. “It’s recently been brought to my attention that a woman named Audrey Tajan might possibly be my mother.” The tears turned on like a faucet at full blast. “Were you married to her, Daddy?”
James Laraquette’s silence reached out across the wire and grabbed hold of Rio like a huge suffocating strap. After the deafening stillness came the confirmation of her worst nightmare when her father said, “How did you find out about Audrey?”
“Is she my mother?” Rio screamed into the phone.
“Yes, Rio...she is.”
She wept with fury, indignation, desolation and sorrow. Four little words had ripped her world apart. Now, the childhood treatment that Abby had bestowed upon her made sense. In some weird way that helped.
When Rio’s tears had tapered down to sniffles, James cleared his throat. “Rio, honey—” As he spoke, she swiped the tears with the base of her palm. “—do you want me to come there?”
“No!” The thought of her father coming to Carson City sent her senses reeling. That could not happen. “You cannot come here!”
* * *
From the time Audrey Tajan met James Laraquette and married him—and up until the time she met Turner Atkins, she hadn’t changed much. Something happened to Audrey when, as a teenager, she ran away from home with Johnny Morton. Audrey was sixteen and Johnny was nineteen. Her parents had been livid at the older boy chasing after their young daughter. Needless to say, Audrey was infatuated with Johnny. The more her parents tried to stop her from seeing him, the more she was determined to do just that. It didn’t take much effort on Johnny’s part to convince her to run away with him. The boy made grand promises of a wonderful, magical life together.
The magic lasted less than a year. Johnny came home from work one day and announced that he’d been seeing someone else. To make matters worse, he was in love with the other woman. Without any remorse, he packed his things and left Audrey to fend for herself.
She didn’t dare go home, feeling a reconciliation between herself and her parents could never happen.
After a brief period of wallowing in self-pity, Audrey pulled herself up off the ground and did whatever she had to do to take care of herself. That, is how she acquired a taste for the finer things in life.
One wild weekend in Vegas, when she was in her late-twenties, she met a handsome young man named James Laraquette. Audrey was taken with his wholesome good looks and his unwavering focus. He knew exactly what he wanted and precisely how he was going to get it.
And, James was fascinated with the young Native American beauty. She had the most beautiful green eyes he’d ever seen.
James and Audrey married with the grandest of plans for the future. She spent the first year of their marriage waiting for the birth of their first child. She was also waiting for the other shoe to drop. She anticipated the same thing happening with James that had happened with Johnny. By the time their little girl, Rio, was born—Audrey was miserable.
She had to get out and she had to do it right away. She knew James would never allow her to leave with the baby, so she did what she thought was the only option open to her. When Rio was two weeks old, Audrey went to the grocery store and never came home.
James Laraquette knew his wife had gone to L.A. because that’s the last place the credit card company told him she’d used the card before he had her cut off. After that, he never heard from Audrey again.
Rio was less than a year old when James met Abigail McKenzie, a lovely young woman who appeared to love his daughter very much. He quickly decided that Abby would make a wonderful mother for Rio and he wasted no time at all in asking her to marry him.
Abby happily agreed to adopt Rio with the hope that they would give the child lots of brothers and sisters. They would have too, if James hadn’t gotten that awful fever right after the wedding, leaving him unable to father any more children.
Well, that wasn’t exactly what Abby had agreed to. She’d only resolved to adopt Rio with the understanding that she would be able to have her own children. Rio was a little over three when they finally discovered James was no longer capable of fathering children. That notion ate at Abby like a vicious disease, until she got to the point where she resented Rio and hated James because it was all his fault that she wasn’t able to have her own children, yet she was still stuck having to take care of his kid.
James put up with it for a few years, hoping Abby would get over not being able to have her own children. She never did.
Finally, after realizing it would be better for Rio to lose her mother than to have to continue on with the one he’d stuck her with, he asked for a divorce.
* * *
Rio paused silently on the other end of the wire. The story her father had relayed would have been almost unbelievable if she hadn’t already heard the beginnings of the tale from Tajan.
“Sweetheart, I know it doesn’t mean much,” James Laraquette’s voice was dripping with regret, “but I never meant to hurt you.”
“I know, Daddy,” she said. “You were just trying to protect me.”
“I truly was.”
“I know, Daddy.” Rio’s tears escaped again. “This is a lot to take in.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come there?”
“No, Daddy.” She nearly choked on her objection. “You can’t.”
“Well, I know that tone,” he said, half laughing. “You’re not in danger are you?”
“No, Daddy…I’m not in any danger.” She even managed to crack a smile. Her father would be blown away if she told him where she was—more to the point, who she was with.
~~~~
CHAPTER 31
Billy found Rio sitting motionless on the couch in his living room. She had this blank look on her face. It was her shield against the world. But he had a pretty good idea about the chaos going on inside her. Who wouldn’t be confused—considering?
He eased down onto the couch. She didn’t move. She didn’t look at him. He gave her a little nudge. She finally looked at him with sad, sorrowful eyes.
“You okay?” he asked, yet he knew the answer. It was clear, even with the stone-faced mask she wore to disguise her pain.
She turned away and looked straight ahead before answering him with a soft, simple response. “Sure.”
Silence hung in the air between them, and Billy’s mind had begun to fill with all kinds of worse-case scenarios when she looked back at him. “My whole life turns out to be one big, fat lie.” Her tone was as helpless as her feeble shrug. “But sure...” She let out a weak smile and wry laugh. “I’m just hunky-dory.”
The one thing Billy had noticed about Rio when he first met her was she had this fire that seemed to sparkle and crackle and shoot out from her eyes. But now as he looked into those same eyes the flame was gone. She appeared to be nothing more than an empty shell. Everything about her that had fueled her existence was gone now. It had flown right out the window. Billy knew—and she probably did, too—it wa
sn’t coming back. Rio wanted to be somewhere else. But for all the good it would do her, she might as well be a trillion miles away from her desired location.
“Do you want to quit?” he asked in a tone that offered more than questioned.
“No. I don’t want to quit.” She shook her head. “I’ve got to try and figure out how I’m supposed to carry on with this life—” Her melancholy seemed to deepen. “—when I can’t get past the last one!”
“Why don’t you tell me everything that happened the other night?” Billy said. “And I don’t mean a sugar-coated version. Give me full disclosure.”
She appeared to be thinking about it, and then finally said, “It’s too wild for words.” Whatever had happened, she wasn’t ready to talk about it. She threw him a quick, engaging look. One that said she was going to try to change the subject. “What happened in your vision?”
God, he was good. Billy fought the smirk trying to tip the corners of his mouth. “I had a little chat with Tajan and Maggie. At first I thought she was you. She did tell me that you and she were one and the same.” He snuck a peek at her, knowing she was freaked out by the implication. But she’d asked for details and maybe that’d help her to reveal some of her own. “Tajan didn’t stay long, but he did tell me to stop hating the color of my skin. And...to stop blaming Maggie for his death.” He fell silent, having to regroup after that. “You know…” He gave the room a quick scan. “He showed me how much he loves her—you. He stepped inside my body and I could actually see and feel what he feels.” He shook his head and an eeriness rippled down into his body, shaking his shoulders. “It was really weird, but after seeing and feeling what it’s like to love someone that much—” His tone carried an unmistakable quality. “—it made me realize how alone I really am.” He looked at Rio. “That’s when Maggie said something really strange.”
“What?” Rio asked, totally engrossed in his story.
“Well, she said there was someone out there for me, too. And that she’s coming very soon.” Billy didn’t hide his bewilderment. “Is that weird or what?”
“Everything else made sense though, huh?”
Billy thought about it. “Yeah…” he said. “Granted, it was pretty much unbelievable, but it made perfect sense.”
Well, except for that thing about Rio’s identity being questioned. But Billy was wrapped up in the possibility of his soul mate coming into his life. Now that he’d seen what it felt like to love someone with your whole heart, he wanted that more than anything and he unconsciously tucked away the obscure tidbit into the deepest corners of his mind.
“That is so weird. The same kind of thing happened to me,” she said with a nod. “It was pretty much unbelievable, but I understood it all...except for this one thing Tajan said to me.”
“What?”
“He said my destiny was with my partner.” She didn’t understand that and it showed. Rio had never had a partner in any shape, form, fashion or capacity. In light of that, Tajan’s statement confused the hell out of her. She’d been a loner for as long as she could remember. She liked it that way. She’d learned a long time ago that the only person she could depend on was herself.
“Can you take me back up there?” she asked, looking at Billy. “Back to where they died?” Suddenly, the locale and her reaction to it had new meaning.
“Yeah,” he said. “But are you sure you want to go back there?”
“Yes.”
* * *
Billy parked the Jeep in the same area he had the last time they’d come to this place he called Clear Creek. Rio’s nerves had had a healthy workout on the way over, and by now her heart was doing double-time.
He cut the engine and she hopped out of the vehicle. She strode across the road and stopped at the hillside. Billy paused at her side. She peered down into the ravine, instantly mesmerized by the sound of the rushing waterfall and the spray misting her face.
Something—a feeling she couldn’t quite pin-point—dragged her gaze upward, to the steep cliffs looming about them. She stared at the ominous site, her heart on the verge of exploding. At the thought of Tajan losing his life here in this place, a tremendous amount of grief washed over her.
She looked at Billy—who stood beside her in an almost protective manner—and pointed to the cliffs towering above them. “They jumped from up there...?” She was more or less looking for confirmation.
“Yes.” Billy nodded and looked away.
“Can you get me up there?”
“Sure. I can get you up there.” He buried his fingertips in the front pockets of his Levi’s. “Don’t know that you’ll like the getting part...but I can get you up there.”
“Good. Let’s go.” She spun on her heel and hurried back across the road.
Billy followed her back to the Jeep.
They drove to the other side of the mountain and he stalled at the bottom, revving the engine. There was no road or even the hint of a trail that once was anywhere near them. From this angle, nothing but a bunch of sagebrush stood between them and the top.
Rio got the feeling it was going to take a lot more than the state’s shrub to stop him.
He looked at Rio and winked. “You might want to hold on.” He gunned the engine and charged his way up the hill.
The Jeep trampled over the sagebrush, and Rio latched onto the dashboard. “Me and my bright ideas.”
After a rip-roaring, bumpy ride the Jeep skidded to a stop at the top of the mountain. Rio exited the vehicle, feeling herself being pulled, inexplicably, toward the cliffs. The closer she got to the edge, apprehension seemed to turn her legs to jelly. A couple feet from the rim, she dropped to the ground and drew her legs up under her chin. She draped her arms over her knees and stared out across the canyon.
She knew Billy was feet, maybe inches, behind her. He was quiet. Really quiet. She took advantage of the opportunity to do a little soul-searching, even if it was only for a second or two.
The scenery was breathtaking. Even so, it wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough. Not ever again. Overcome with a sense of despondency, she dropped her head to her knees and cradled it in her arms.
She felt Billy sitting down beside her.
“You okay?” His inquiry came softly.
She drew her head up and looked at him. “It’s weird.” She glanced out over the canyon and then landed her gaze back on Billy. “I haven’t any solid memories of Maggie’s life...but I have all the feelings that she felt for Tajan.” She cast a brief glimpse toward the cliffs and then returned her attention to Billy. “Can you tell me what happened? How was it, exactly, that they came to die here?”
Billy understood now why she needed to hear the story of Maggie and Tajan. It was her only connection to the love she’d lost forever.
~~~~
PART SIX
THE BOND
~~~~
CHAPTER 32
Northern Nevada, Lake Tahoe Area
September, 1864
After hearing about the posse heading their way, Tajan and Maggie had left their only child and a few cherished tokens—his pouch, her necklace, their wedding bracelets and their paintings—with Tajan’s parents.
He’d taken her high up into the hills. He had to hide her from the white sheriff and his band of vigilantes. It was the only way to keep her safe—if they didn’t freeze to death first.
The high forest was his best chance to evade the white man’s posse. It was an area he knew well, but the lawmen would have trouble navigating or tracking them without help. The bad news was that at such a high altitude, even in the summer, the nights were cold.
Maggie shivered. The single blanket they shared for warmth did little to provide shelter from the bitter chill of an exceptionally cold night in the Sierra Nevada. But it was nothing compared to the noose at the end of a rope—Maggie Fuller’s fate if they were caught.
Protectively, Tajan tucked the blanket around her and reinforced his embrace. “I am sorry,” he said in English,
“we can have no fire.” Exiled in total darkness, he hadn’t dared build a fire for fear of discovery.
“It’s okay.” Maggie’s voice trembled. “I’m not cold.” Of course it was a lie. She was freezing. Still, it was better than the alternative.
She drifted in and out of sleep several times during the course of the night. Each time, easily awakened by the night’s plummeting temperatures.
Just before dawn Tajan nudged her gently. “Maggie...” he called her name just above a whisper. “Wake up.”
She opened her eyes, surveyed the surroundings and instantly remembered where she was and why she was there. Even so, when her eyes met Tajan’s she smiled gallantly.
“Come,” he said. “We must hurry.”
The couple mounted their ponies and rode off, deeper into the forest. Maggie wondered if the posse was still hot on their trail. He’d warned her during the night that a group of seven or eight men, one of them a renegade Paiute—known for trading his tracking services to anyone with anything of value to him—was leading the way.
Tajan’s first inclination had been to head down into the area that the whites called California, but Maggie had begged him not to go that way. She was afraid of leading the posse toward her grandfather’s farm, and thereby her only remaining sister, Mary.
To please Maggie, Tajan doubled back toward Lake Tahoe and down into the valley south of Carson City. He stood a decent chance of throwing the posse off their trail if the whites were gullible enough to think Maggie would never be foolish enough to return to the scene of her crime.
After a few miles, Tajan coaxed Pico to halt with a soft whistle. He slid off the horse and dropped to the ground.
He lay there for just a few seconds but it felt like an eternity before he jumped up and leapt back onto his horse.
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