by Janet Dailey
As she paused to get her bearings, a man walked toward her with an assured gait, his arms swinging loose and easy by his sides. Dressed in faded Levis and an equally faded denim jacket, he wore a weathered Stetson hat pulled low on his head. Recognition jolted through her, and with it, a sawing mixture of intense pain and pleasure. Turn and walk away—now!
Before she could obey that thought, his voice reached out to her, low and swift with surprise. “Delaney.”
The moment to run was lost. Now pride held her rooted to the sidewalk. Delaney tilted her chin a fraction of an inch higher.
“Jared.” She acknowledged him and heard the evenness in her voice, gaining confidence from it.
He took another step toward her, then stopped and swept off his hat, running a hand through his sun-streaked hair, eliminating its flatness, an action that was automatic rather than self-conscious. Delaney stared at the hat he held in front of him, reminded of the way he’d always treated her with old-fashioned courtesies. She forced her gaze to his face that was full of crags and hard surfaces like the mountains, yet one that could be touched with humor with no warning.
“It’s been a long time.” His gray-blue eyes studied her with a half-haunted look.
“I guess it has.” She pretended that she didn’t know exactly how many years, months, and days it had been.
There was a slight turn of his head as he glanced at the entrance to the police station, then back at her. “I saw you come out. Anything wrong?”
“No,” she insisted with a small, stiff shake of her head. “Just business.”
“That’s where I’m headed.” He nodded at the door, a grim smile edging the corners of his mouth. “To make my regular monthly visit and see that they don’t stick my sister’s file in the back of the drawer and forget her.”
“Then Kelly is still missing? You never heard from her?”
“No.” As always, he was spare with his words, never using a lot when a few would do.
“I’m sorry, Jared.” There was nothing else she could say, but somehow she wasn’t surprised that Jared McCallister hadn’t given up the search for his younger sister.
She remembered how desperate—how determined—he’d been to find Kelly the first time she met him. Wescott and Associates had still been in its growing stages. Although clients hadn’t been few and far between, the telephone hadn’t exactly rung off the wall, either.
Back then, she had run the company out of a two-room office on the second floor of a stuccoed building that tried to pass for Spanish, two blocks off La Cienega. She hadn’t spent a lot of money on furnishings, keeping it to the basic necessities of desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and miscellaneous office equipment. The many bare spots were filled in with plants she’d hauled in from home. Her father had affectionately teased that the decor was contemporary greenhouse and chrome. But the crisp, no-nonsense air seemed to create the right impression with clients.
She had been at her chrome and black metal desk that second day of October more than six years ago drafting a proposal she was to present when the phone rang. Initially she had ignored it, expecting Glenda to answer it.
The phone rang a second time, then a third. Delaney threw an impatient look at the connecting door to the reception area. It never ceased to irritate her the way her prematurely steel-haired secretary and receptionist, Glenda Peters, could calmly finish folding a letter, slip it into an envelope, seal it, and stamp it while the phone jangled right beside her. Personally, she couldn’t stand to hear a phone ring without immediately answering.
It rang a fourth time and started on the fifth before Delaney remembered that Glenda had told her not two minutes ago she was going down the hall to get water for coffee.
Delaney picked up the phone before it finished its fifth ring. “Wescott and Associates.” She used her shoulder to cradle the receiver against her ear while she continued sorting through her presentation, arranging the sheets in order.
A man’s voice came on the line, its tone firm, its manner concise, and possessing the slightest trace of a Western drawl. “I’d like to speak to Delaney Wescott, please.”
“This is she.”
“She? You’re a woman?” His reaction was more confused than startled.
Delaney smiled faintly. “Thankfully, yes.”
“Good answer.” His voice conveyed the impression of a smile on his end. “Personally I don’t care if you have two heads and a tail, Miss Wescott, as long as you can help me.” It was said quite seriously, with no attempt to make light of the fact he was a man with a problem.
“I hope I can.” She laid her papers aside and took hold of the phone, now as serious as he was.
“So do I. If you have time, I’ll come over right now.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t. I have a luncheon meeting at eleven-thirty. Then I have to be in Long Beach by two o’clock. Depending on the traffic, I probably won’t make it back to the office until nearly five. Perhaps we could meet somewhere”—Delaney paused, realizing—“You haven’t told me your name yet.”
“Jared. Jared McCallister. I flew in from Colorado three days ago. Los Angeles is foreign territory to me. I’m staying at a hotel called Los Robles. It’s not far from the airport. Do you know it?”
“Yes.”
“Is it anywhere close to Long Beach? Maybe you could stop here.”
“That would work. Say between three-thirty and four?”
“I’ll be in my room. Six-twelve. Call me as soon as you get here.”
“I will, Mr. McCallister.”
But the rest of the day didn’t go as planned. The food service at the restaurant where she lunched was infuriatingly slow, forcing her to race to Long Beach to keep her two o’clock appointment. She arrived five minutes late and had to wait another fifteen minutes until her prospective client got off the phone. Then his endless questions made her presentation take longer than expected. By the time she left, she was already half an hour behind schedule and a misty rain was falling—the kind the wipers smeared across the windshield and that made the freeways treacherously slick, inevitably snarling traffic.
It was ten minutes to five when she walked into the hotel. She found a house phone and dialed his room. After five rings with no answer, she knew he wasn’t there. She had waited through another twelve before the hotel operator came back on the line.
“I’m sorry. Mr. McCallister is not in his room.”
“I guessed that,” Delaney murmured away from the mouthpiece, then lifted it to ask, “This is Delaney Wescott. Did he leave word where he would be?”
There was a short pause. “Yes, he said he’d be in the lounge. Shall I connect you?”
Delaney spotted the sign for the lounge over her shoulder. “No thanks.”
The lounge had the look and feel of a gentleman’s study. The walls were paneled in dark wood. A deep wine rug carpeted the floor, and the heavy chairs were upholstered in forest green leather, studded with brass. The few recessed ceiling lights were turned low, the effect creating more shadows than light.
Delaney paused a few steps inside the lounge and scanned the room. Other than the piano player seated at the parlor grand, there weren’t more than a dozen people there, all men. Some were in business suits and others were more casually attired; some sat alone and others paired together—whether by choice or chance conversation Delaney couldn’t tell. But she didn’t see anybody that made her think he was Jared McCallister. And not one gave her anything but the eyeing look of a man on the make.
Containing a sigh of frustration, she crossed to the bar. The baggy-eyed bartender slid a cocktail napkin onto the counter in front of her and gave her a bored look. “What’ll you have, miss?”
“I’m supposed to meet a man named Jared McCallister here. Would you know which one he is?”
He pulled the napkin back and nodded at some point behind her. “That’s him. The cowboy at the piano,” he said and almost smiled.
Delaney turned with a start and stare
d at the man playing the piano. There was no light above him, and he hadn’t bothered to turn on the one affixed to the piano. A pilsner glass, half-full of beer, sat on a pressed-paper coaster atop the piano and a cowboy hat was on the bench next to him. His back was to her, and his head was bent over the keys. In the dim light, there was little she could discern about him other than that he had fairly wide shoulders and a rider’s narrow hips.
As she started toward the piano, she became conscious of the music he was playing. The airy, sprightly tune filled the lounge.
Delaney sighed softly in admiration, painfully aware that she’d never been able to master “Chopsticks.” She crossed the last few feet to stand beside the piano’s front leg, close enough now to see the caramel color of his hair and his hard, irregular features—and the strong, blunt fingers moving so sensitively over the keys. He looked up and saw her standing there. He held her gaze for barely an instant, his gray-blue eyes crinkling at the corners. He finished the chorus and held the last note, bringing the song to an end.
He stood up—and for some strange reason, she was pleased to discover he was an inch taller than she was. His glance made a quick sweep of her, not in the stripping way the other men in the lounge had looked at her, but in a measuring that noted every detail about her—from her navy and white business suit to the large white bow that secured her long hair at the nape of her neck.
“You must be Miss Wescott.”
She nodded once. “I apologize for being so late, Mr. McCallister.”
“Just plain Jared will do, Miss Wescott.”
“Then make it just plain Delaney,” she countered.
“You know,” he studied her thoughtfully, “I’ll bet you intimidate the hell out of most men.”
But not him, she noticed. “I’ve never asked. And I probably wouldn’t have gotten a straight answer if I had.”
“You can bet on that.” He reached into the brandy snifter and took out the dollar bills inside. “Tips,” he explained and shoved them into his jeans pocket.
“Looks like it was a good afternoon.”
“It’ll buy us a couple drinks.” He picked up his hat from the piano, gestured, and motioned with it to a nearby table. “Shall we sit down?”
In the next second, his hand was at her elbow, guiding her to the table. Delaney noticed a leather blazer, a tan shade of palomino gold, draped over the back of one of the chairs. She guessed it belonged to Jared as he reached around and pulled out one of the heavy leather chairs for her—as deftly and naturally as if he’d done such things all his life. When she sat down in it, he just as easily pushed it up to the table. Yet Delaney had the feeling he didn’t do it to impress her.
He sat opposite her and laid his hat on the seat with the blazer. “What would you like to drink?”
“A beer’s fine.”
“Draft or—”
“Draft.”
He turned in his chair and showed the bartender two fingers. “Draw two, Barney.”
Delaney waited until the bartender strolled over to deliver their beers and strolled back, then said, “Why don’t you tell me about your problem, Jared?”
“It’s simple.” He leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “I want to hire you to find my kid sister.”
“I’m afraid there’s been some sort of misunderstanding. Wescott and Associates isn’t a private detective agency,” she said regretfully. “We don’t look for missing persons, or follow cheating wives. We don’t do any kind of investigative work. We specialize solely in personal protection.”
He turned his head away from her, one hand doubling into a tight fist. “I was told you could help me.”
“I’m sorry—” she began, then sensed the uselessness of the words. “Look, I don’t know what happened to your sister, but there are agencies, shelters—”
“I’ve been to them.” He lifted his head, a coldness and an anger in his eyes that Delaney knew wasn’t directed at her but rather at the helpless feeling inside himself. “I’ve talked to all of them. Three weeks ago I even hired a private detective to look for her. He distributed a bunch of posters and collected three thousand dollars from me.” His voice never altered its level pitch, yet each word came out hard and clipped, betraying his frustration. He paused and drank in a deep breath and laced his fingers around the beer glass. Sighing, he stared at the beer’s foamy head. When he spoke again, his tone was quieter, softer. “The hell of it is, Delaney, if Kelly was lost in the mountains, I’d know where to look—how to look. But here…I don’t even know where to start. She’s my sister, dammit, and I have to find her.”
“You love her a lot, don’t you?” As an only child herself, Delaney had often wondered what it would be like to have brothers and sisters. Looking at Jared, she felt a twinge of envy for his sister, who obviously didn’t realize how lucky she was to have a brother who cared so much about her.
“She’s all the family I have. It’s been just Kelly and me since our parents were killed in a crash ten years ago. Kelly was only seven then—old enough to understand what death was but…not really old enough to cope with it.”
“How old were you?” She tried to guess his age and failed. The sun-bleached streaks in his hair created a youthful look, a look destroyed by the leathering of his skin from too much exposure to the sun and the wind.
“Twenty-two. I was in my last year at the University of Colorado.” Although he didn’t say so, Delaney guessed he never completed his senior year.
“Then Kelly’s seventeen now.”
“Yes—No, she’s eighteen. She had a birthday two weeks ago.” He took a slow sip of beer, then set the pilsner glass back on the table and absently pushed it around on its coaster. “I always baked a cake for her—and she always used to gripe about the mess I made in the kitchen doing it.”
Delaney sensed his need to talk. She glanced at the full glass of beer in front of her, aware that the traffic on the freeway would still be a mess. There was nothing she could do—nothing she was qualified to do—to help him find his sister, but she could listen.
“I’m getting the impression Kelly ran away.” When he didn’t deny it, she asked, “What happened? Was there a quarrel, or—”
“No. At least not any major fight. She had been hard to get along with all summer. Quiet, moody, more withdrawn than usual. But she had just graduated from high school in the spring and—hell, I thought it was another phase she was going through,” he said tiredly. “Summer’s our busiest time. I own a ranch outside of Aspen,” he explained, then released a short, laughing breath, his mouth twisting with unexpected cynicism. Or was it contempt? “Maybe I should qualify that, considering how many Hollywood types have bought three-and four-acre parcels, built two-million-dollar homes on them, then called them ranches, even though the only thing they raise there is Cain. Mine’s a working ranch—eight hundred and sixty acres, plus a cattle permit for four hundred and seventy head. And on a working ranch in the mountains, the only four seasons you know are before haying, during haying, after haying, and winter.”
Delaney looked at the hands wrapped around the pilsner glass. They were working hands, sun-browned and strong, fingers toughened by calluses—the same fingers that moved so lightly over the piano keys, their touch evoking poignant sounds. A cowboy who played Beethoven. She instantly revised that thought. Jared might have all the accoutrements of a cowboy—the yoked western shirt, the bolo tie, the Stetson hat, and the cowboy boots—yet the more he talked, the more she was inclined to believe he also possessed the business savvy of a corporate executive. She found herself wanting to ask personal questions—When had he learned to play the piano? What had he studied in college? Who were his favorite authors? What was his home like?
Instead, she said, “Was it during haying that Kelly left?”
“Yes.” He nodded once. “It had rained. It was going to take a couple days for the hay to dry before we could bale it. I’d gone to Cheyenne to look at some purebred stock. I wanted to cull the
older stock out of my cow herd and replace them with better quality. When I got back, she was gone. She’d packed her bags and left.”
“She didn’t say anything to anyone? She didn’t leave a note?”
“Nothing, not a word.”
“Did she have a car?”
“Not of her own, no, but she had the use of the ranch’s Wagoneer any time she wanted it.”
“But she didn’t take it?”
“No.”
Delaney frowned. “Then how did she leave the ranch?”
“We don’t know. She could have hitched a ride into town…or even in the other direction. Or somebody could have come by the ranch house and picked her up. That’s the police’s theory.”
“A boyfriend, maybe.”
“She didn’t have a steady one. Or if she did, I didn’t know about him.” His expression turned a little grim on that last comment, which suggested to Delaney that the police had offered that possibility, too.
“What about her friends? Did she indicate to any of them that she was thinking about running away?”
He shook his head. “I’ve talked to all of them. And all of them said practically the same thing: they’d had very little contact with her all summer. Even Connie Sommers, Kelly’s best friend, said Kelly had become cool and distant with her. Whenever she called, Kelly never wanted to go anywhere or do anything.” He stopped abruptly, the corners of his mouth drawing down in a tight-lipped look as his eyes challenged her. “You might as well know, the police think she was on drugs.”
In her experience, however limited it was, the police didn’t make assumptions unless they had something to base them on. “Was she?” She could tell he wanted to deny it, but he was caught between a loyalty to his sister and a loyalty to the truth.
“I don’t know,” he admitted heavily, and again his hand doubled into a fist. “Dammit, she knew the way I felt about drugs.” He released another gusty sigh. “But I suppose at seventeen, you don’t particularly care what your brother thinks, especially when the use of it is so prevalent by your so-called betters. It’s no secret that Aspen has a reputation of being a place where good times can be had—in the modern sense of the phrase.”
