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If only he’d gotten the letter, he thought angrily. He would have run off and married her in a heartbeat.
Colton took one last look at the spot under the trees. “I’m so sorry, Jessica,” he whispered on the warm spring breeze rustling the leaves on the branches over his head.
A part of him ached for what could have been. They would have run away together. He could have gotten a job on a ranch. She could have gotten a job cooking for the hired hands. Or maybe he would have made enough that she didn’t have to work, especially if they’d gotten a place to live along with his job.
He sighed, realizing that they had both been kids back then. The chances of his getting hired on some ranch would have been slim. Not only that, Jessica didn’t know how to cook and she would have gone crazy living on a ranch. She’d always yearned to kick the dust of Montana off her heels and live in some big city. She had this idea that she would be a model. Or even a movie star.
“I’m going to be famous someday,” she used to say. “You’ll look back and say, ‘I knew her when she was a girl.’“ It used to make him sad when she talked that way because he knew he would never leave Montana.
What would he have done if he’d gotten the letter?
He would have figured something out, he told himself. He’d have had to. With her family being the way they were, he was all she had. She depended on him.
As he started to turn away, his boot toe caught on something. At first he thought it was a small root from the new growth at the base of one of the cottonwoods.
But as he reached down to free his boot, he saw that it wasn’t a root but a leather strap protruding from the dirt. It was attached to something buried under one of the exposed roots.
He pulled on the strap and a small leather shoulder bag came up out of the dirt. The leather was discolored, the design faded over the years, but he recognized it at once.
His heart pounded against his injured ribs. Jessica’s purse.
Chapter Two
Emma had just put the pies in the oven when the phone rang. She stared at it a moment, not sure she wanted to answer it after the last time.
“You want me to get that?” the cook asked. Celeste was a thirty-something woman, robust, flush-faced and tireless. What she lacked in a sense of humor was made up by her work ethic. At least that’s what Emma told herself.
“No, I have it.” Emma wiped her hands on her apron and walked to the wall phone in the kitchen. She picked it up on the third ring, praying it wasn’t a repeat of the two other calls she’d gotten since arriving here.
“Chisholm Cattle Company,” she said into the phone.
A beat of silence, then, “Mrs. Hoyt Chisholm?” The voice was a woman’s. She sounded elderly and according to the caller ID, a local number.
“Yes.” Emma held her breath, hoping the woman was someone from the nearby town of Whitehorse who’d called to welcome her to the area and wish her well on her marriage.
“You need to get out of that house before you end up dead, too. Your husband is cursed when it comes to wives.”
“I’m sorry, but what are you talking about?” Emma asked.
“The Chisholm curse. You’ve been warned.” As the woman slammed down the phone, Emma jerked the receiver away from her ear.
“Something wrong?” Celeste asked.
“Wrong number.” She hung up hoping the cook didn’t see the way her hand was shaking. Emma wasn’t ready to confide in either Celeste or the housekeeper, Mae. She’d seen how shocked they’d been that Hoyt had remarried. While neither of them had said anything, she’d noticed that they stayed to themselves, rebuffing any attempts she made to gain their trust—let alone their friendship.
“How long have you worked for Mr. Chisholm?” Emma asked Celeste now. She hadn’t want to ask too many questions, hoping to gain the employees’ trust by being helpful and pleasant and find out more about each of the women—and more about Whitehorse and how Chisholm Cattle Company fit into the scheme of things—as time went on.
That, she’d come to realize, wasn’t going to happen.
“Just over a year,” Celeste said.
“And Mae?”
“About six months.”
Emma felt her brow shoot up in surprise.
“Not a lot of people want to work out here,” Celeste said.
“Why is that?” She knew the wages were good and Hoyt was congenial and easy to work for, from what she’d seen.
The cook seemed to search her gaze, as if she wondered if Emma was joking. Or testing her. “It’s a long drive.”
She could tell there was more, but that the woman wasn’t going to tell her for some reason. “Surely someone lasted longer.”
Celeste shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
Emma wondered if it had anything to do with the Chisholm Curse. She hated to admit that the phone calls had shaken her a little.
“Those women who have been calling you, they’re just jealous,” her friend Debra had said when she called Denver later that afternoon. Celeste had left for the day and it was Mae’s day off. Emma had the house to herself until supper when Celeste would return to help her cook for her large new family.
“Hoyt Chisholm must have been the most eligible bachelor in all of Montana,” her friend said. “Don’t let some old biddies get to you. He picked you. He loves you.”
Yes, Emma thought. And she loved Hoyt. “Still, it seems odd.” The last elderly neighboring ranchwoman’s call hadn’t sounded malicious. She’d sounded scared for her.
COLTON WAS WAITING BY THE ROAD when he finally saw the Sheriff’s Department patrol car approaching. His mind was reeling from the letter—and what he’d found under the cottonwood tree.
Inside Jessica’s purse he’d discovered her wallet with her driver’s license, $200 in cash and a bus ticket out of Whitehorse.
One one-way bus ticket? She’d said she wanted them to run away together. While she didn’t have a car of her own, she knew he had his own pickup. Did she have so little faith that he would show up that she’d gotten the ticket just in case? He felt confused. The ticket had been for the 4:00 a.m. bus that would have left just hours after they were to meet at their secret spot.
Why had she thought she’d be leaving Whitehorse alone?
But if her purse was buried under the tree root, then how could she have left town? And why would she bury her purse? It made no sense. It made his blood run cold because he knew she wouldn’t have buried it—just as he couldn’t see how she could have left without it.
A terrible dread had settled into his bones by the time the sheriff’s deputy pulled up next to his pickup and a female deputy stepped out.
She wore jeans, cowboy boots and a tan uniform shirt with a Whitehorse County Sheriff’s Department patch on the sleeve. Colton felt his heart drop like a stone off a cliff as he recognized her. He swore under his breath. Just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse. “Halley?”
DEPUTY HALLEY ROBINSON had told herself after moving back to Whitehorse that sooner or later she was going to cross paths with Colton Chisholm. When she’d left Whitehorse after junior high school, hadn’t she sworn that one day she would return and make Colton sorry?
But that had been a young girl’s dream of revenge. Halley was no longer that young, impressionable girl.
Lucky for Colton, she thought, since here they both were again, and oh, how the tables had turned.
“Colton,” she said, secretly enjoying the fact that he’d remembered her.
“You’re the new deputy?”
She smiled in answer. When the call came in, she’d been the only one on duty in the area. The county was a large one, stretching from the Missouri River to the south and all the way to Canada on the north.
“So, why don’t you tell me what the problem is,” she said, all business again. “You told the dispatcher you’d found Jessica Granger’s purse and you believe something might have happened to her?”
He nodded, looking as if he now regretted making that call to the sheriff’s office. Reaching into the cab of his pickup, he lifted out a weathered leather purse and handed it to her.
“It’s Jessica’s. I found it at a spot we used to meet.”
She raised her gaze to his. “A secret spot, the dispatcher said.”
He chewed at the inside of his cheek for a moment. “That’s right.”
“And there was something about a lost letter?”
Colton rubbed the back of his neck. His hair was longer than she’d ever seen it, but back in junior high, his father had taken clippers to all six of the boys, giving them buzz cuts. That was probably why she hadn’t remembered the color, a combination of ripe wheat and sunshine that brought out the gold flecks in his blue eyes.
She felt that old quiver inside as her gaze me his. Colton Chisholm had been adorable in grade school.
It shouldn’t have surprised her that he’d grown into a drop-dead good-looking man.
He reached into his jean jacket pocket and brought out a worse-for-wear looking, age-yellowed envelope. He held it as if not wanting to relinquish the letter to her, then finally handed it over.
Halley noted the postmark and the return address before opening the envelope. She quickly read what Jessica had written on the single sheet inside. The writing was young, girlish. She remembered Jessica Granger only too well. Jessica had been one of those annoyingly silly, all-girl girls while Halley had been a daredevil, tree-climbing, ball-throwing, horse-riding tomboy.
The letter, she noted, had been mailed fourteen years ago—only a few years after Halley had left Whitehorse brokenhearted because of Colton Chisholm.
Her gaze slid up to his again. He looked damn uncomfortable. Guilt? “What was it she had to tell you?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t get the letter until today.”
“You’re saying you didn’t meet her that night?”
“No. How could I since I never got the letter?” He sounded both angry and upset and she could see that he was more than a little shaken by this. He turned to get a United States Postal Department manila envelope from the pickup cab. He thrust it at her. “You can check with Albert if you don’t believe me.”
Halley wasn’t sure what she believed. She was having a hard time separating the boy he’d been from the man standing before her. As a boy, he’d been too cute for his own good. Now he had a rough, sexy look about him that was enhanced by what was clearly a strong, worked-hard, ranch body.
She was sure women found him irresistible and wondered how many hearts he’d broken. It made her think of her own fragile, small one that had taken a beating all those years ago because of him.
“Jessica didn’t phone you when you didn’t show up? Didn’t try to contact you?”
His golden gaze met hers and held it. “I never saw her again. I was told that she left town, just like she said she was going to do in the letter. I tried to find out where she’d gone, but …” He wagged his head and looked down at the toes of his Western boots. “Her family wouldn’t tell me anything. Her dad didn’t like me.”
Imagine that. “You have a fight?”
He looked away toward the foothills, his face filled with a pain that could have been guilt. Or she supposed it was possible he’d really cared about this girl. It amazed her that the thought could still hurt.
“It was just a stupid disagreement,” he said finally.
“Over … ?”
“Nothing, just dumb high school stuff.”
He was lying. Halley wondered what the fight had been about and whom he was trying to protect. Jessica Granger? Or himself? Jessica had said in the letter she wanted to tell him something that night.
“Would you have gone away with her?”
He swung his gaze back to her as if surprised by the question. “I was in love with her. I would have done anything she asked.”
Halley nodded, unable to hide her surprise by his impassioned response—or her quick flash of jealousy. There’d been a time she would have given anything to have the boy Colton had been feel that way about her.
“Why do I get the feeling there is a whole lot more to this?” Maybe she just wanted to believe it because this was Colton Chisholm she was dealing with.
He didn’t answer. The look he gave her said he feared she was incapable of believing anything he told her. He could be right about that. Clearly, she wasn’t the only one who remembered their history. Call it puppy love, kid stuff, whatever, those old hurts lasted a lifetime.
“Why a letter? Why didn’t she just call you and ask you to meet her?”
Colton hung his head, studying his boot toes again. “I don’t know. Maybe her father wouldn’t let her call.”
“Or maybe she thought you wouldn’t take her call.”
He shot her an angry look. “We had an argument. Her dad didn’t want her seeing me. It was complicated. None of that has anything to do with anything.”
Halley lifted a brow, unconvinced.
“Look, I don’t care what you think about me, I just need to know what happened to her.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
Colton shifted, anger making his broad shoulders appear even broader. He looked ready to take her on, just as he had when they were kids. Except that he appeared to have already been in a fight. He was favoring his ribs and there was discoloration around one of his eyes. This time it hadn’t been some skinny, spunky tomboy in the school yard who’d given him the shiner, though, she suspected.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” he said, a muscle tightening in his jaw. “Jessica wouldn’t have left without her purse that night.”
“So you think she’s still out there,” Halley said and felt a chill snake up her spine. “I think you’d better show me this secret place of yours and I’m going to have to keep this letter—at least until we get this cleared up.”
COLTON DIDN’T WANT TO come back to the spot on the creek. It had been tough enough earlier. Now it was pure hell. He felt sick to his stomach as Halley parked the patrol SUV in the clearing and cut the engine. She’d insisted that he ride with her. He could feel her watching him, looking for … what? Proof that he was everything she thought he was and worse?
Hell, he’d never felt more guilty in his life. He’d let Jessica down. Hadn’t been there for her when she’d needed him the most. Because in his heart, he knew what they were going to find here. In his heart, he knew Jessica had never left their secret spot that night.
The sun pounded down with a heat that stole his breath. The quiet was deafening as they climbed out of the SUV and walked along the secluded path toward the stand of cottonwoods. It was as if every living thing had deserted the area. Even the water in the small creek fell silent.
“This is where I found the purse,” he said when they finally reached the grove of trees. “I tripped on the strap.” He could feel her gaze on him before she glanced around. He could imagine what she was thinking. He felt anger rise in him again, but swallowed it back. “I didn’t kill her.”
Halley’s brow quirked up. “You’re that sure she’s dead?’
“Can we please stop playing games here? We both know she’s dead. She wouldn’t have left without her purse and she damn sure didn’t bury it herself under that tree root.” His voice broke. “You have to find her so she can get a proper burial.”
“Where would you suggest we look for a body?” the deputy asked, clearly baiting him.
“Do you have any idea how hard this is on me?” he asked through clenched teeth. He had taken a step toward her, but now stopped, suddenly aware that her hand was resting on the butt of her gun. Did she really think he’d killed Jessica?
