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She hugged herself tighter, rubbing her arms against the nighttime chill. “I’m glad. It’s selfish and I know it. But, Grant, I’m so glad.”
He found himself wishing he could be the man for her. That man would be one lucky sonofagun. And he was going to hate that man when he started coming around. He’d be hard-pressed not to beat the poor guy to a bloody pulp just for living, just for being what Grant could never be.
He brought it back around to business. “You said you could make this place turn a profit. Rufus seems to think you can, too.”
“It’ll take time. But, yeah. I’m gonna do it. You just watch me.”
“Oh, I will.” He put the Range Rover in gear and drove away, sticking a hand out the window to give her a last wave, watching her in his rearview mirror as he rolled around the circle and headed for the highway.
During the drive back to the resort, he almost let himself wonder, what their lives might have been…
If things had gone on the way they’d started out. If the Julens still owned the Triple J and Grant still worked Clifton’s Pride at his father’s side. If Marie and Grant’s mom still sat at the kitchen table together in the long summer afternoons.
If Andre Julen and John Clifton hadn’t been murdered in cold blood out by the Callister Breaks nine years ago.
Chapter Seven
The dream was always the same—and much too real. It was like living that dark day all over again.
It started with Grant and Steph on horseback, just the way it had been that Saturday in September almost nine years ago. It was well past noon, the sun arcing toward the western mountains. Well past noon and cool out, rain on the way, clouds boiling up ahead of them to the northeast, rolling on down from Canada.
Steph, on Malomar, her hat down her back and her pigtails tied with green ribbons, was babbling away about how much she hated school. Grant rode along in silence, almost wishing he was twelve again like the mouthy kid beside him. Twelve. Oh, yeah, with years of the school she so despised ahead of him.
He’d graduated from UM the year before. He was a rancher full-time now. And he had an ache inside him, an ache that got worse every day. He missed the excitement and challenge of being out among other people more, of rubbing elbows with the rest of the world.
Steph stopped babbling long enough that he turned to look at her.
“You didn’t hear a word I said,” she accused.
“Sure I did.”
“Repeat it to me.”
“Don’t be a snot. I got your meaning. It’s not like I haven’t heard it a hundred times before. You hate school, but your dad and mom want you to go, to be with other kids, get yourself a little social interaction, learn to get along with different folks. But you’d rather be driving the yearlings to market. You’d eat dust, working the drag gladly, if only your folks would give you a break and your mom would homeschool you, so you could spend more time on a horse.”
“I’m not a snot.” She laid on the preteen nobility good and heavy. “And I am so sorry to bore you.”
“Steph. Don’t sulk, okay?”
“Oh, fine.” She was a good-natured kid at heart and couldn’t ever hold on to a pout all that long. She flipped a braid back over her shoulder and sent him a grin. “And okay. I guess you were listening. Pretty much.” She pointed at the rising black clouds. “Storm coming.”
“Oh, yeah.” The wind held that metallic smell of bad weather on the way.
Ahead, erupting from the rolling prairie, a series of sharp outcroppings appeared: the Callister Breaks, a kind of minibadlands, an ancient fault area of sharp-faced low cliffs, dry ravines and gullies. The Breaks lay half on Clifton’s Pride and half on the Triple J.
“Wonder what they’re up to?” Steph asked no one in particular. “They should have been home hours ago…”
Their dads had headed out together at daybreak from the Clifton place to check on the mineral barrels in the most distant pastures. They took one of the Clifton pickups, the bed packed with halved fifty-gallon drums filled with a molasses-sweetened mineral supplement that the cattle lapped up.
The two men had said they’d be back at the Clifton house by noon. It was almost three now…
Grant and Steph rode on as the sky grew darker.
“We don’t come up on them soon,” Grant said as they crested a rise, “we’ll have to head back or take cover.”
And that was when Steph pointed. “Look…”
Down there in the next ravine was the pickup, half the full barrels traded out for empty ones, both cab doors hanging open.
Grant’s heart lurched up and lodged in his throat. “Stay here,” he told her.
But she didn’t. She urged Malomar to a gallop and down they went. They raced to the abandoned pickup, and past it, up the next rise, as lightning split the sky and thunder rolled across the land.
Below, they saw two familiar figures, tied together, heads drooping, not moving…
And the tire tracks of pickups and trailers and even an abandoned panel from a portable chute.
“Rustlers!” Steph cried.
The sky opened up and the rain poured down.
“Wait here,” he commanded. Even from that distance, he could see the blood.
But she no more obeyed him that time than she had the time before. The rain beat at their faces, soaking them to the skin in an instant, as they raced toward the two still figures on the wet ground below.
After that, the dream had no coherence—just as the rest of that day, when it happened, had none.
It was all brutal images.
Two dead men who had once been their fathers, tied together, the blood on the ground mixing with the pelting rain, so the mud ran rusty. He dismounted first and went to them.
Steph cried silently, tears running down soft cheeks already soaked with rain. “Daddy…” She whispered the word, but it echoed in his head, raw and ragged, gaining volume until it was loud as a shout. “Oh, Daddy, oh, no…”
And she was off Malomar before he could order her to stay in the saddle. She knelt in the mud and the blood, taking her dad’s hanging head in her arms, pulling him close so his blood smeared her shirt.
Grant left her there. He took his rifle from his saddle holster, mounted up and went hunting. He didn’t go far. Out of that ravine, and into the next one.
Just over the rise from where their fathers sat, murdered, bleeding out on the muddy ground, he found a man. Gutshot. Dying. John Clifton and Andre Julen hadn’t gone easily. They’d taken at least one of their murderers down with them.
Grant knelt in the driving rain, took the dying man’s head in his lap.
“Names. I want names,” he commanded. “They left you here, didn’t they, to die? Tell me who they are and you get even, at least. You get to know you died doing one thing right.”
And the man whispered. Two names.
Grant left him there, moaning, pleading for help that was bound to be too long in coming, for rescue that would only happen too late. He checked out that ravine, found no one else. In his head was a roaring sound, louder than the thunder that rolled across the land—a roaring, and one word, repeating, over and over in an endless loop.
No, no, no, no….
He saw himself returning to Steph, to the bodies that once had been fine men.
She’d cut the ropes that bound his father to hers. She sat between them, there in the mud, holding one up on either side of her, her braids soaked through, caked with mud and the dead men’s blood, one green ribbon gone, the other no more than a straggling wet string.
“I didn’t want them tied,” she told him, eyes wild as the storm that raged around them. “They would hate that, being tied. But they were falling over. They shouldn’t be left to lie there in the mud…”
He knew he should dismount, get down to her, where he could pull her free of death, and hold her. That he needed to tell her some nice lies, to reassure her that it would be all right. Because that was what a man did at a time like this, he looked after the young ones and the females. And Steph was both.
But as he sat there astride his horse, looking down at her in the mud, before he could act on what he knew he should do, she looked up at him and she said, “Get the pickup. I’ll wait here. I’ll wait with them…”
“Steph—”
“Get it.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. Lightning turned everything bright white. “Just go on.” Thunder cracked, so loud it sounded like it was inside his head. She commanded, “You get it. Get the pickup now.”
Time jumped. They were lurching through the mud in the pickup, the two dead men in the bed in back. Steph sagged against the window on the passenger side, covered in mud and their fathers’ blood. She had her eyes closed. She opened them and glanced his way. He thought that he’d never seen eyes so old.
And then, with only a sigh, she shut them again.
And all at once he stood in the front room of the ranch house, holding his mother as she sobbed in his arms, calling for his father, yelling at God to please, please take her, too…
Grant lurched up from the pillows. The breath soughed in and out of him, loud and hard. He stared into the darkness, he whispered, “No…”
It took a few minutes. It always did.
He sat, staring, shivering, panting as if he’d run a long race, shaking his head, repeating that one word, “No, no, no, no,” as, slowly, the past receded and he came to know where he was. Slowly he realized that it was over—long over, that terrible day nine years ago.
Eventually he reached for the bedside lamp. The light popped on and he blinked against the sudden brightness. He was covered in sweat.
For several more minutes once the light was on, he sat there, unmoving, staring in the general direction of the dark plasma television screen mounted on the opposite wall.
He reminded himself of the things he always forced himself to recall when the dream came to him: that it had all happened years ago, that he’d caught up with the other two rustlers himself and seen that they paid for what they’d done.
Things had been made about as right as they could be made, he told himself. There was nothing to do but let it go, forget the past.
Still, though, occasionally, less and less often as the years passed, the dream came to him. He would live that awful day again.
And maybe, he thought for the first time as he sat in his king-size bed, satin sheets soaked through with his sweat, staring at nothing…
Maybe that was right. Good.
Maybe it wasn’t bad to have to remember the brutal murder of two good men. To remember how senseless it was. How cruel and random.
Maybe now and then, it was right and fitting to take a minute to mourn for John Clifton and Andre Julen and all that had been lost with them.
To live again his mother’s grief and pain.
And to remember Steph. Twelve years old. Taking it on the chin, stalwart as any man. Propping up the dead men with her own young body.
Steph.
Brave and solid as they come on the day her daddy died.
Chapter Eight
The offices were formally closed the next day for the holiday. Grant went down there anyway. He had a few calls to make and some e-mails to return.
Then there was an issue with the concierge. He dealt with that. And head of housekeeping needed a little support with an angry guest who felt her room had not been properly made up and refused to be pacified until she’d talked with the manager. He gave the guest a free night and let the supervisor deal with the employee in question.
It was ten-thirty when he got back to his suite and dragged out the big box Arletta Hall had dropped off last week, the one with his costume inside. He took off the lid and stared down at a pair of ancient, battered boots, a grimy bandanna, an ugly floppy hat and some dirty pink long johns.
He was supposed to be a gold miner—a tribute not only to Thunder Canyon’s first gold rush over a century before, but also to the gold fever that had struck two years ago, when somebody found a nugget in an abandoned mine shaft after a local kid fell in there during a snowstorm and the whole town went wild looking for him.
All right. Maybe old-time miners did run around in dirty long johns. Maybe they were too wild with gold fever to bother wearing pants. But the damn thing was a little too authentic. It actually had one of those button flaps in back so a man wouldn’t have to pull them down when he paid a visit to the outhouse. And in front, well, if he wore that thing by itself around Steph, no one would have any doubt about how glad he was to see her.
Something had to be done. And fast.
Arletta’s chunky charm bracelet clattered as she put her hands together and moaned in dismay. “Jeans? But I really don’t think jeans are the look we should be going for…”
Behind him, Grant heard a low, husky chuckle and knew it was coming from Steph. “They’re old, these jeans,” he reasoned. “Nice and faded and worn.” He’d borrowed them from the groom at the stables, the same one who always had a hat to loan. “And I want to be a more responsible kind of gold miner. You know, a guy who remembers to put on his pants in the morning.”
“Oh. Well. I just don’t think we want to go this way….” Arletta moaned some more, all fluttery indecision. Townspeople milled around them, busy getting ready to play their own parts in the parade.
Grant leaned down to whisper in the shopkeeper’s pink ear—she was a tiny little skinny thing, no more than four feet tall and she smelled like baby powder. “Listen, Arletta,” he whispered low. “If you think I’m running around in dirty long johns with no pants, you’ll have to find yourself another prospector…”
“Oh, dear Lord. No. We can’t have that.” She sucked it up. At last. “It’s all right. Those jeans will just have to do.”
He gave her a grin. “Arletta, you’re the best.”
“Oh. My.” She simpered up at him. “You charmer, you…” She tugged on the dirty bandanna around his neck. “There. That’s better. And the hat looks just great, I must say—and tell me now. What do you think of the float?”
They turned to admire it together. It consisted of a papier-mâché mountain topped with sparkly cotton snow. A miniature prairie lay below, complete with split rail fences, a creek made of crinkled up aluminum foil, a couple of homemade cottonwoods and some papier-mâché livestock happily munching away at the AstroTurf grass. There was also a log cabin trailing a construction paper cloud of smoke from the chimney and, clinging to the side of the mountain, a miniature replica of the resort’s sprawling main lodge. A sparkly rainbow bearing the glittery words, Thunder Canyon Resort, arched over the whole creation.
Grant swept off his hat and held it to his chest. “Magnificent,” he solemnly intoned.
Arletta did more simpering. “Oh, I am so pleased you think so.” She grabbed a gold pan from a pile of props and also a baseball-size hunk of papier-mâché, spray-painted gold. “Here you go. Your gold pan and your nugget.”
He hefted the hunk of papier-mâché. “Hey. With a nugget this size, I don’t need this damn gold pan. In fact, I think I’ll just head over to the Hitching Post right now and order a round of drinks for everyone, on me. Isn’t that what miners do when they make a big strike, head for the bar and get seriously hammered?”
“You are such a kidder,” giggled Arletta. Then she chided, “The gold pan is part of the costume—and you can join your rowdy friends at the Hitching Post later. After the parade.”
He pretended to look crestfallen. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, we have to get you in place. And Stephanie, too…” She signaled Steph, who waited a few yards away, wearing a leather cowgirl outfit with a short skirt and a tooled jacket, both skirt and jacket heavy on the leather fringe. Fancy red boots and a big white hat completed the costume. She had Trixiebelle with her, all tacked up in a red and white saddle, with bridle to match. It was a real Dale Evans-style getup. And she looked damn cute in it.
“This way, you two…” Arletta instructed.
