Daisies in the Canyon (12 page)

“Only if you left something behind,” she said. “Loretta left Jackson behind and that’s what haunted her.”

“Be careful, Abby. It can sneak up on you. Want to go to the Sugar Shack with me some weekend for a beer?”

“Maybe. If you don’t find a little brown-eyed doll in San Antonio this weekend who takes your eye. If you get a new girlfriend, she might not understand your friendship with the neighbor,” she said.

“Jealous?”

“Not even a little bit!” she lied.

“I’m hurt,” he chuckled. “I just knew you’d be all jealous and that would give me my ego trip for the whole day.”

She crossed her fingers behind her back. “To be jealous would mean I am more than a friend.”

Cooper’s chuckle turned into laughter. “Now I’m really hurt. I might even be bleeding from a cutting remark like that.”

“I’ve got another stall to clean and I’m sure you’ve got a county to save from drug dealers, cattle rustlers, and outlaws. See you tomorrow at noon. It’s Bonnie’s turn to cook and she might be making Italian too,” Abby said.

“I’m not complainin’ one bit. See you then.”

Holy shit! She’d just agreed to go on a date with him. Her hands actually trembled at the thought of dancing with him.

You are going to the local bar for drinks. You’d go with Haley and not think a thing about it, so why not with Cooper?

Because
, she argued with her conscience,
I’m not attracted to Haley and I am to Cooper. I’m going, but . . .

She stopped and thought about all the thousand
but
s she should consider before she opened that can of worms.

Number one, the biggest
but
in any equation, was never start something that couldn’t be finished. It showed poor judgment. It didn’t matter how his touch made her feel—nothing could last between them. Her fault, not his. She had a deep fear that she’d be like Ezra when it came to a permanent commitment and parenthood and another fear that she’d demonstrated exactly the latter when she blew up that building with the little girl inside. Cooper deserved better than that.

But
number two stated that it was better to nip something in the bud. If she stayed in the canyon, Cooper was and would always be her neighbor.

“But the flirting and the bantering is so much fun,” she whispered. “I like him. I really do. He’s a decent man.”

She finished the last stall seconds before she heard two tractors and a truck pulling up outside the barn. Rusty’s glasses fogged over when he left the cold and came into the tack room.

“Time to call it a day,” he said.

Without the glasses, his eyes weren’t nearly as big and there was a softer look about his face. His lips weren’t as firm and hard looking, yet his chin was stronger. Standing with his feet apart, his jeans tight, his boots scuffed from work, wearing his standard mustard-colored work coat, he’d make any woman take a second look. Yet not one single spark flickered between them. She felt like she was looking at a cousin.

“What?” he said as he put his glasses back on.

“Nothing. When do we get to see the bunkhouse?”

“Anytime you want to after you’ve been here a year and run me off the ranch,” he said. “Until then, by the will Ezra left behind, it belongs to me. I will tell you that it’s small and only houses six men at the most. Oh, and when it’s my time to host poker, we play down there.”

“Rusty, I don’t think any of us will be firing you. As far as I’m concerned, you’ll have a job on the ranch as long as you want it,” Abby said.

“Thank you. We’ll have to see how long I want it. Now, let’s call it quittin’ time. Even old slave driver Ezra knew a body needed rest after long days of hard work.” Rusty smiled.

She stopped long enough to make a ham sandwich out of yesterday’s leftovers, put it and a handful of chips on one plate, and use a second one for a huge slab of coconut crème cake. With a can of beer under her arm, she made her way to her bedroom with barely a nod at Shiloh, whose head was thrown back on the sofa, or Bonnie, who’d let all three dogs into the house to lie on the rug in front of a cold fireplace. When she started down the hallway, Martha got up and meandered toward the bedroom with her.

“Let me grab a shower first,” Bonnie groaned. “No, I’m having a bath—a long one to get the aches out of my poor body.”

“I’ll go second. I’m halfway into a romance book I want to finish tonight,” Shiloh said.

“See y’all in the morning.” Abby carried her food to her room.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, her food spread out around her. Martha plopped down beside her and she fed her bits of cake, sandwich, and even chips. Bonnie hadn’t said that anything but chicken bones would hurt the dog, and the old girl seemed to really like cake.

She could see the corner of one of the boxes. They probably contained exactly what was advertised on the end: three sets of Corelle dishes in that old modernistic gold pattern that was popular when the dishes first came out. There were even a few of them left in the mismatched set of plates in the cabinet. But right there in bold Sharpie letters on the end of each box were her initials—AJM—and she wanted to know why. How in the world had he even known her name? Her mother had said that he hadn’t wanted to see her or to know what she’d been named.

She pulled all three boxes out to find numbers on the tops. One, two, and three—evidently she should start with one, since Ezra had made it easy. It had to be his handwriting, but the perfect numbers and letters had an almost feminine slant to them.

“So he was a perfectionist?” she said.

Pushing her half-eaten sandwich to the side, she decided she would give the rest to Martha. She upended the beer, taking several long gulps.

“Maybe I need some of his white lightning before I open the boxes,” she mumbled as she pulled number one closer.

The tape was yellowed and peeling on the first box. The second one had started to turn colors, but it was still stuck down fairly well. The third one looked fairly recent.

“So he closed them up and never looked back?” She frowned.

She slipped a fingernail under the tape on the first one. It tore lengthwise, leaving some of it stuck firmly. After three tries, she pulled a knife from her pocket, flipped it open, and slit the tape.

“Files?” The frown deepened as she pulled them out. All neatly kept in manila file folders with years printed on the outside in the same slanted hand.

She started with the first one, dated 1984. It held her mother and Ezra’s original marriage license and a copy of her birth certificate. She’d weighed seven pounds and seven ounces, had come into the world at twenty inches long on November 16, 1984, at seven thirty a.m. There was a picture of her in the hospital nursery that had begun to fade and one of her in a bassinet on a sun porch.

“Mama, he threw us out. Paid you to leave and promise you’d never come back to the canyon and you sent him pictures of me? What was wrong with you?” Her voice caught in her throat and it took the rest of the beer to swallow down the lump.

There was one folder for each of her first ten years in the box with the number one on the top. Each one held newspaper clippings, report cards, and awards that she’d gotten at school. It ended with a picture of her building a sand castle on the beach with her mother.

Box number two covered her life for the next ten years. It wasn’t until she got to the end and found the copy of her mother’s obituary in the local newspaper that reality dawned.

“Mama didn’t do this. We were stalked.” Goose bumps the size of the canyon wall raised up on her neck and arms. “But why? He didn’t want me because I was a girl, so why would he even care what I did?”

The third box covered from ages twenty-one to thirty, ending with her separation papers. Lord, the man had copies of every commendation and promotion she’d gotten. The only thing missing were actual pictures of her in Afghanistan and Kuwait. Evidently it had cost far too much to hire an investigator to go that far.

It was all surreal, sitting there looking at her life. “But he only knew what I did and what I looked like; he didn’t know who I was. Mama knew the important things.”

She returned the smoky-smelling folders to their proper boxes and shoved them back under the bed, unwound her legs from sitting cross-legged and went straight to the closet for a bag of miniature candy bars. It might take every one of them to get her through the next hour until bedtime and then she wasn’t sure she would be able to sleep.

Her phone rang and she dropped the candy like she’d been caught stealing money from a bank vault.

“Hello,” she answered cautiously.

“Abby, are you okay? Your voice sounds strange.”

“Hello. Did you know about the boxes under the bed?” she asked abruptly.

“No, was I supposed to? Is this some sort of a horror movie?” Cooper asked.

“Did you know that Ezra stalked me my whole life and that he kept files on everything I ever did?”

“No, I had no idea.”

“Well, he did.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know. I’m in shock and I don’t understand why he’d do that if he didn’t want me.”

“Meet me in the hay barn. I can hop the fence and get there faster than if I drive over,” he said.

She started to say something, but the television noise behind him had stopped. When she looked at the phone, she realized he had ended the call. She picked up the disposable plates and headed toward the kitchen, glad to see that both Shiloh and Bonnie were in their rooms.

With one leg propped backward against the wide barn door, he looked more like one of those old Marlboro men than a sheriff. He dropped his boot to the ground and opened his arms. She walked right into them.

He drew her close and she could hear the steady beat of his heart thumping in there against his broad chest. “My God, Abby, you are trembling.”

She’d had those symptoms before, on her first deployment. It had happened when she and another vehicle were on their way to check out some intelligence. By a strange twist of fate, she’d been in the second sand-colored patrol car. The first one hit a bomb and went straight up into the air. Her driver stopped and backed up as fast as he could. Then bodies came floating down from the sky.

She’d made it back to base before she went into shock, but she recognized the symptoms very well.

“I feel violated,” she said.

“Why?”

“He didn’t want to know me, but he sent someone to spy on me. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“Crazy? That was Ezra. He was a controlling old fart. He might not have wanted you on the ranch to undermine a son he might have later, but you were his as much as this ranch was,” Cooper said.

“I was just a pile of hay or dirt or a cow?”

He kissed the top of her head. “Darlin’, I can’t explain Ezra or his crazy notions. He was old-school, back when old school was the only school, if you know what I mean. His ideas went back to the time that Texas was settled. I liked him. He was honest, opinionated, and funny. But that doesn’t mean I agreed with him. We had some damn good arguments.”

“About round bales of hay?” she asked.

“Among a whole raft of more serious issues, believe me.” His arms steadied her nerves as he tipped her chin up with his fist and his lips settled on hers like they belonged there. It wasn’t one of those steamy kisses full of passion and heat but it calmed her, grounded her in reality. Then he drew her closer to his chest and wrapped his arms around her and she felt protected from everything. Not even the boxes under the bed mattered anymore.

“I’m not sure that was a wise idea,” she said.

“What? The kiss?” She nodded. “Maybe not, but it happened,” he said. “Let’s take a drive. Have you been to Silverton?”

“Just through it on my way to the funeral, and I was running late.”

“Then let’s go get a soft drink at the convenience store and I’ll show you the courthouse and the police station and the diner. It’s a nice little Texas town.”

It wasn’t a date. It was two friends going for a cola or maybe a beer. She could damn sure use one more that night and Cooper would be driving.

Cooper had lived next door to Ezra, gone to church with him, talked to him over the fence, but he hadn’t actually known the man. When it came to Ezra, no one really knew what made him tick or think the way he did. So there was no way he could help Abby understand the man who’d fathered her.

If Abby had grown up on the ranch next door, he might have fallen for her when they were teenagers. But she hadn’t and like she said, she had wings. That meant she could fly away at any moment. He liked her, liked her spunk and her determination to learn the business, but . . .

And therein was the problem—a woman who hated the ground she walked on would never be happy for a whole lifetime in the canyon, and he’d never be happy with a lifetime out of the canyon. He wished things could be different, that she’d stand still long enough to grow roots, but that hateful voice that argued with him said that wasn’t likely to happen.

“It’ll be pretty in the spring when the wild daisies are in bloom,” he said.

“That’s what I hear. According to the marriage license, Ezra married Mama about this time of year. Now I wish I’d asked more questions about why she was even in Texas.”