A Dark Lure

by Loreth Anne White

  Shit. The woman had hung up on him. Shaking with adrenaline, anger, he hit the button to recall the last number. Nothing happened. He examined his phone. Battery was dead. He glanced out over the shimmering, heaving ocean and swore again. Now he couldn’t even find the number of this woman to call her back. What did she say her name was? Olivia?

  He pocketed his phone and placed both hands on the railing, steadying his thoughts. He stood for a moment, abstractedly watching the heave and pull of the sea under the command of a fat yellow gibbous moon.

  His father was dying. Was it true?

  Sometime last year Jane had mentioned he had cancer, but she’d also pointed out that their father was strong. Nothing to worry about at this point. Had it under control. Would his father even tell Jane if he was going downhill? No. No, the hell he wouldn’t. When had he actually spoken to Jane? She’d called him a ways back.

  Cole scrubbed his hand hard over his forehead as he tried to recall why Jane had called. Right. She’d phoned to ask if he was prepared to sign some digital letter of intent, something to do with the sale of the ranch. He’d been drunk. Par for the course. He’d told her he didn’t care what happened to the ranch, that she and his father could do whatever they wanted with the land.

  She’d then e-mailed him a document full of tiny print. He hadn’t bothered reading the thing before signing it with an e-signature.

  But now that he actually thought about it, there was no way his dad would want to offload that precious ranch of his. Not while he was alive.

  Had Jane known at the time that their father’s health was failing? Was she trying to cash in on the farm already?

  That would be Jane. No surprises there.

  Cole pushed himself off the railing, started weaving down the boardwalk. A cab. He needed a cab.

  His buddy came running out of the bar behind him. “Cole! Wait up!” He caught up and grabbed Cole’s arm as he was crossing the road.

  “Where are you going?”

  Cole turned to face his mate. And Gavin stilled as he caught sight of his friend’s face under the street lamp.

  “Jesus. What happened?”

  Cole stood there, swaying a little, trying to pull into place the jigsaw pieces that had exploded through his head with that call.

  “I’ve got to get back to the motel, charge my phone. I need to call my sister.”

  “Who was that on the phone? Everything okay?”

  No. It was not. His father was dying.

  . . . you’re wallowing in your own self-pity . . . drinking yourself into a stupor every night is not going to bring your family back to you. You’re no survivor, you know that? You know dick about surviving . . .

  Who was this woman, and where did she get off passing judgment on him? What did she know about survivors? Or the family he’d lost?

  “My father is dying,” he said quietly, a coolness and clarity crawling into the periphery of his muddied brain. “And I’m not even sure how I feel about that, but I need a favor. Take me back to the motel. I need to pick up some gear, my passport. Get me to the airport.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “And I’ll be half sober by the time I get on a standby flight. By the time I land at YVR, I’ll be clear as glass.”

  From Vancouver International he’d need to get up to Pemberton, where he’d left his Piper Cub with a friend who rented his and Holly’s old house there. From there he’d fly into the Cariboo. As the intent formed in his mind it hit him—he was making a decision to go home. For the first time in thirteen years. The prodigal son was returning.

  “At least you will sober up. Don’t know how many more nights like this you could tolerate before you kill yourself. Who was it? On the phone?”

  “Some woman called Olivia.”

  Gavin regarded him steadily. “Some woman called Olivia probably just saved your sorry ass, you know that? Come, let’s go.”

  Olivia sat in her bed, flicking irritably through Cole’s book while Ace snored at her feet. He’d cut her off, the bastard. Under a thumping sense of personal affront, she felt pity for Myron. She’d come to believe this would be good for him—to make peace. Maybe it would have even been good for his son. Waste of bloody time.

  Something caught her eye in the text. She brought the page closer, read the words.

  Survival is a journey. It is the quest that underlies all Story. No matter the geography, or culture, or era, in one form or another, the story of survival is the same story we listen to, riveted, around the flames of the hunter’s fire. Or hear from the mouth of the astronaut returned from a burning spaceship, or from the woman who trumped cancer. We listen in the hopes of learning what magic they used to conquer a great beast, to deliver a decisive victory, to make it alone down the peaks of Everest alive . . .

  She flipped to the back jacket of the book. There was another photo of him.

  In this image his steel-gray eyes were tempered by a glint of what appeared to be amusement. The photo had been shot in some African locale. His skin was tanned dark, and a half-smile played across his wide, sculpted mouth. As if he knew a secret. Perhaps the secret of feeling alive. She swallowed, feeling an odd sensation as she once again noted the genetic echoes between son and the father for whom she cared so deeply. And it hit square between the eyes why she disliked this man.

  It wasn’t that he seemed to exude a screw-you, rugged in-your-face alpha virility. Nor was it the way he seemed to flip a bird at caution. It wasn’t that she envied his courage to bite into life so fully and zestfully—no, it was none of that.

  It was a slow-dawning admission that she was attracted to him. In a way that felt dangerous to her. And it was not just his looks but his mind. She was turned on by the masculine beauty of his prose, the clean, muscular sentences that bespoke a latent empathy in the author. He was an acute observer of the world and human nature in it.

  The idea of a man like Cole McDonough was both alluring and threatening. Olivia set the book aside and turned off her kerosene lantern. It was a good thing he wasn’t coming. She’d rather not face him. She didn’t want to find any man attractive again. Seeing revulsion in her own husband’s eyes when he’d perfunctorily tried to make love to her after she’d healed had crushed her.

  She had no intention of even getting close to putting herself through that debasing kind of humiliation ever again.

  Eugene watched the small light in her cabin go out. Wind whispered cold about his ears, and a wolf howled in the distant black hills. Hairs rose along his arms at the haunting sound. His thoughts turned to home. Wilderness. Freedom. Yes, he could taste it. After all this time she—all of it—was finally within reach. He could fulfill his purpose, go back to the beginning, end it where it had all started. He liked the sense of destiny in this. It had the right patterns.

  He’d arrived just before sunset today. He’d scoped out the campsite, the cabins, the stables, the lodge. He now had a decent sense of the lay of the land. There weren’t many people about. Once darkness had come, he’d gone up to the lodge and watched the lighted windows for a while, trying to get a handle on how many people stayed there, worked there.

  That’s when he’d caught sight of her through a big picture window on the second floor, talking to a gray-bearded man in a wheelchair. He’d known it was her in a blinding instant.

  Known it with every fiber of his being. It was in the color and fall of her hair. The shape of her face. The way she angled her head to the right as she talked. It was in the line of her neck, the curve of her chin.

  He knew Sarah Baker more intimately than any man ever would. He knew the taste of her mouth, the taste of her most intimate parts, the taste of her blood and meat. He swallowed at this thought. She was inside him, part of him.

  Already he’d catalogued much about how she handled herself out here. He’d seen the sheathed fixed-blade knife on her belt. H
er dog wasn’t young and looked as though it navigated primarily by scent. She moved with confidence through the dark, but the slightest crack of a twig brought fear, fast. She was quick. Alert. Which meant, surely, that she still remembered him well. She still carried with her a fear he’d put there. He smiled quietly.

  The nearby cabin through the trees appeared vacant. No telephone lines led into her cabin. No satellite dish was mounted on her roof. He couldn’t see hydro wires, either. She carried a phone on her belt. It was likely reliant on the cell tower he’d seen in the mountains when he came in. There were landlines to the lodge house, and a big dish on the roof. The dish was most likely for television. Possibly Internet. Apart from those lines, this whole area was likely dependent on that one tower for cell coverage. This worked in his favor. Especially with the coming snow that he could taste on the night breeze.

  Adrenaline rustled through him.

  But the game was not on. Yet.

  It wasn’t a game until she knew she was playing.

  They probably hadn’t got his message yet—there’d been nothing on the radio today, nor in the papers he’d perused at the gas station in Clinton on his way up to Broken Bar. But it shouldn’t be long now until his message was found. And what a message it was.

  He’d strung the body up in a grove of cottonwoods just off the road.

  He would drive back into town maybe tomorrow or the next day, pick up a newspaper and other supplies he’d need. A few more days, and she would be his.

  An owl hooted softly. Wings fwopped invisibly through trees. He waited until the mantle of night was cold and heavy upon him, until frost began to glitter on grass in the rising moonlight. Until the constellations had moved across the sky, then he sifted like a ghost back into the shadows.

  He’d return in the morning, bearing the first little gift. It was time his presence began to whisper around the periphery of her consciousness.

  CHAPTER 4

  O’Hare International. Friday.

  Cole lugged his duffel bag toward a coffee stand, questioning his motivations for having boarded the plane in the first place.

  He’d snagged a flight four hours after Gavin dropped him at the small Keys airport. In Miami it’d taken three hours to score a standby seat to Vancouver with a layover at O’Hare. Outside the terminal windows dawn was a soft orange streak along the Chicago horizon. A mother of a headache dogged him. He felt surreal, as if suspended in a dreamscape between day and night as he chased time westward. Part of him began to think he’d imagined Olivia West’s phone call in a drunken delirium.

  He ordered a double-shot of espresso and headed off to find his gate. This was a mistake. He was the last person on earth his father would want to see, especially if the old codger was weak. His old man detested showing weakness. Especially to his son.

  A trickier, darker thought snaked through him as he took a sip from his cardboard cup—given his absence for so many years, suddenly showing up on the ranch now that his father was apparently dying was going to smack of Machiavellian opportunism. The last goddamn thing Cole wanted was to let his father think he needed, or wanted, anything from him. Like an inheritance. A share of the ranch. He meant what he’d told Jane—they could do what they liked with the place, and its ghosts.

  Cole found a seat near his gate and opened up his laptop, head pounding, brain thick. While it fired up, he called Jane in London. She hadn’t picked up when he’d tried before departing Miami.

  This time she answered on the third ring.

  “Jane speaking,” she said in her adopted, clipped-Brit accent. His sister could be such a fraud.

  “It’s Cole. Did you know that Dad was dying? Is it true?”

  There was a moment of dead air.

  Cole cursed inwardly. “Goddammit, Jane, you knew?”

  A sigh. “No. Not really. Not until I got a call from his manager at some ungodly hour this morning about Dad needing hospice care. It was a shock, to be honest. All I knew was that he had the cancer, but he’d told me he was fine after the chemo. He’d said he was in remission. Appears he was lying—which is nothing new. Always ‘fine, all fine,’ you know how he is. I’ve been trying to reach you. Where are you?”

  He inhaled deeply as he watched a father and his boys pushing bags. It made him think of Ty. Holly. Lost chances. “O’Hare. I’m going home.”

  “What?”

  “I got on a plane, and I’m going home.”

  “I . . . well . . . I . . . no, this is good.” She cleared her throat. “This actually works out really well, because Toddy and I can’t get away right at this moment. It’s a bit tricky with the ambassador position possibly coming up in Belgium. Once you’re at the ranch you can let me know how Dad really is, and whether things are as serious as his manager claims, and whether I need to come.”

  Cole closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. He counted to ten, then said, “Who is this ranch manager, anyway, this Olivia West? Do you know anything about her?”

  Another odd hesitation. “She works on the ranch as a fishing guide and general farmhand, I believe. This was the first time I’ve actually spoken to her.” She wavered. “Listen, about Dad’s will—”

  “Jesus, Jane, stop. Right now.”

  “But you’re still on board, right? To sell the ranch?”

  “I don’t know where they found you, do you know that? When you called me in Havana about selling, I was under the impression . . .” He swore under his breath. He couldn’t even remember what Jane had really been going on about. He had zip idea what she’d gotten him to sign.

  “Why did you call me about selling? If you thought everything was fine with Dad?”

  “Because Clayton Forbes contacted me with that proposal, that’s why.” Her voice was sharp, defensive suddenly. “He was sounding me out on the hypothetical possibilities because—well, because I’m easier to talk to than our father is, let’s face it. He was hoping I’d massage things in the right direction if I—we—were interested.”

  “Interested in what, exactly?”

  “You’re kidding me, right? You signed the document.”

  “I don’t remember what I signed.”

  “You were blind drunk, probably, that’s why.”

  “Humor me, Jane. Refresh my memory.”

  She muttered a curse. “Forbes wanted to get a read on our family because an incredibly exciting opportunity came up for a major real estate development. He wanted to be certain where you and I stood on selling the ranch before he entered more serious negotiations with financiers, and before he started commissioning plans, environmental impact studies, that sort of thing.”

  “Securing financing? Planning? For Broken Bar?”

  “Yes. For a big high-end commercial development and private estates.”

  His head reeled. “Dad would never agree with that. Ever.”

  “But we agree.”

  “It’s not ours to sell.”

  “Oh, spare me, Cole. Dad’s ill. No one lives forever. I’m a pragmatist, that’s all, and so is Clayton. He knows Dad will leave us the property. And I know you want nothing to do with the place, so what’s the problem?”

  Dark feelings sifted through Cole at the thought of Clayton Forbes. His nemesis at school. Forbes had always had a cunning, duplicitous, aggressive approach to life, and people.

  “What did I sign?”

  “A document of intent to enter into good-faith negotiations with Forbes Development Company when we inherit Broken Bar.”

  Shit. He pinched the bridge of his nose harder.

  A call came over the intercom. His flight was boarding.

  “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I get there.”

  “Wait. There’s one other thing. Clayton believes Dad’s ranch manager is exerting undue influence on him in his frail state. He thinks she’s gunning for her own
share of the inheritance, if not all of it, and if that ever happened, she would not be willing to sell. The whole deal would fall through.”

  “And Forbes believes this why?” He watched the first-class passengers lining up. His ticket said D. Cheap seat.

  “I don’t know. He called me about it and suggested we do something.”

  “When did he call?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Cole, recently.”

  “Like this morning? After the news that Dad will need to move into palliative care?”

  “Listen, I also need to run. Kids have a school field trip. Just call me when you get there and let me know how Dad is. And check this Olivia woman out, okay? Apparently no one really knows what her background is, or where she comes from. She’s young and very attractive, and Dad seems smitten.” She hung up.

  He blew out a chestful of air. Christ, what had he just landed himself in? Myron McDonough being smitten by a younger woman was an improbability, given the way he’d clung so bitterly to the loss of his wife. But what did Cole know—it had been thirteen years since he’d last seen his father. His mind turned instantly to the creased photograph he always carried in his wallet, to the reason he’d fallen afoul of his father’s affections all those years ago, but he quickly shunted thoughts of Jimmie and his mom to the back of his mind. He didn’t want to dwell there, but at the same time, he knew going back meant also having to face those memories.

  As the next seating section was called up, Cole quickly turned his attention to his laptop and pulled up the Broken Bar Ranch website. He found the staff page and clicked on Olivia West’s photograph and bio. Her image filled his screen.

  Cowgirl. Devoid of makeup. Clear green eyes that brought to mind the colors of spruce forests and moss. Direct gaze. Vitality exuded from her features. Her hair was a warm chestnut color and fell in thick waves onto her shoulders. Full, pretty mouth. She wore a red-and-white bandana around her neck, checked button-down shirt, cowboy hat. She was attractive, in an understated, athletic way. Her blurb stated that she’d worked as a fishing guide up north. Yukon. Alaska. Northwest Territories. She’d cooked at remote logging camps and worked at a cattle ranch in northern Alberta. She’d been at Broken Bar for the past three years.