Into the Light (26 page)

“I would like to ask your advice — help — with what to do about Trey, Mr. Van Cleve,” she said.

“Let’s not stutter-step,” Caleb said, taking a cup of coffee from Norah, “Trey it is. What do you want me to do to him?”

“Nothing! I don’t want you to do anything to him. I want you to help him.”

“Help him what?”

“Stay alive. His sister is trying to kill him, and he won’t do anything to stop her because she’s his sister, and I want you to make her stop.”

Caleb leaned back in his chair, dark eyes wide with disbelief. “You want me to kill his sister?”

“No, of course not, but I want.... Isn’t there some other way to make her stop?” she said in a small voice.

“You better tell me the whole story.”

She did. She told them everything, back to the time when Trey had described his sister as like Lady MacBeth before the murder and admitted Alice wanted him dead.

“So you don’t know it’s the sister,” Caleb said when she finished. “You have a strong suspicion, but there’s no evidence.”

“He said....”

“What he said, joking with a stranger, isn’t evidence. His father is twisted enough to kill his own son if there was money in it, and his mother is a very strange woman. The sister’s husband has all the same reasons she does, and there may be others. I’ll talk to him.”

Caleb was on his feet and headed out the door before Deborah registered what he was going to do. “No! You can’t do that. You can’t tell him I told you.” She jumped up and started after him, but the door shut in her face.

“Make him listen. Make him stop,” she implored Norah.

Norah stirred sugar into a fresh cup of coffee, unmoved. “You asked for help. He’s going to help. You can’t expect to tell him how to help when you don’t have the slightest idea what to do yourself.”

Deborah sat back down, unsure whether to be angry and at whom to be angry. “This is why I didn’t ask him before. I knew he’d just go off like that without listening.”

“He did listen. He just isn’t going to take orders from someone who doesn’t know a thing about what to do or how to do it. Trust him.”

“Trust him? When the first thing he’s going to do is talk to Trey?”

“How else are they going to resolve things? Calm down and stop fussing. We’ve been married almost twenty years, and it’s never done me a bit of good, and it won’t do you any good now. Tell me what’s going on instead. Judith says you’ve been dragging Trey home and pulling his clothes off in her kitchen.”

Deborah drew herself up very straight. “Judith is having you on. He was hurt because he came looking for me, and he wouldn’t have done it except for Judith being ridiculous, and she ran off and wouldn’t clean and bandage the wound, and I had to do it. I had to put in stitches.”

Norah’s dark brows did exactly the same annoying wiggle Judith’s often did when the subject was Trey Van Cleve. “That must have been an interesting evening.”

She rose, piled cookies from a tin box on a plate, and brought it to the table.

“If Miriam knew I was here, drinking her coffee and eating her cookies, she’d have a fit,” Deborah said, helping herself to one of the cookies.

“I don’t know. I’ve heard about your quarrel from everyone in the family except Miriam, and she’s been very quiet when I’ve seen her. If she’s as unhappy as she looks, she may be rethinking some of her positions. She spends too much time trying to impress some of the worst snobs in town, and I don’t think Joseph likes it any more than you do.”

They munched Miriam’s cookies and drank her coffee companionably for a few moments until Deborah blurted, “He kissed me.”

“Did he?” Norah didn’t looked as surprised as Deborah thought she should. “I’d wager he’s good at it, isn’t he? He has the look of a man who would know how to kiss very satisfactorily.”

Satisfactorily?
“You can tell how a man kisses by the way he looks?”

“Of course not, but we’re getting to know him a little now, aren’t we? He spent that night with us. Are you telling me I’m wrong?”

“No, you’re not wrong. At least he’s better than the other two I know about.”

“Two?”

“Hiram Johnson cornered me in the barn last spring. He held me by the arms, and the barn wall was behind me. I struggled and tried to get away, but he just....” Even telling it, her breath came in fast spurts. “I kicked him and that finally got through to him and he let me go. I told him if he ever did it again, I’d tell Caleb.”

Norah’s blue eyes had narrowed and her expression turned grim hearing the tale. Now she relaxed. “So that’s why he went from tripping over your skirts to staying so far away Emma has to take him by the arm and drag him over to you. You should have told someone. Jason and Eli would have turned him inside out.”

“I just wanted him to leave me alone, and since then he has. I can’t imagine that he thought doing that was going to change my mind about him.”

“Some men are remarkably arrogant that way. You said two. Who was the other?”

Deborah waved a hand. “Oh, years ago. Roy Kates. He didn’t force me. He surprised me, and it was more like bumping his mouth on mine than a kiss. One of my front teeth even cut my lip a little. I slapped him, and he never tried it again either.”

“Hmm. Do you know you’ve kissed more men than I have? I’ve only kissed husbands, and I’ve only had two of those. So Trey is the best of a poor lot?”

Deborah hesitated, examining her cousin’s face with the laugh lines radiating from the corners of her eyes and mouth, and remembering all the years of understanding and love.

“He kisses as well as he shoots,” she said slowly. “He asked me to marry him, you know, but he’s changed his mind now.”

“He asked you to marry him, you said yes,
and he changed his mind
?”

“I said no, but then when I asked him later, he said he had reconsidered and he didn’t want me any more.” Deborah squirmed on the chair a little then added the rest. “He said he didn’t want to marry me unless I couldn’t live without him.”

“And what exactly does he think it means that you’re running around hiring men to keep him safe and stitching him up in your sister’s kitchen?”

“I think he knows how I feel, but he knows about me too. He figured it out from things I said and other people said, and when he asked me about it, I got so upset....” Even hinting at a subject she’d refused to say a word about all her life, even to Norah, who had always known, Deborah shuddered and whispered. “He knows.”

“I’m sorry,” Norah said, “but if things are the way I think between you, he needs to know.”

“I think he believes if I admit how I feel, it will fix me, but nothing will fix me, will it?”

“I don’t think people ever get fixed,” Norah said thoughtfully. “Almost all of us are broken in some way, so we patch up the broken places and work around them. You can’t believe with a family like his, Trey doesn’t have some patched places himself.”

Deborah had never considered it. He seemed perfect, handsome, whole. She thought of the scars she’d seen. She had a large family that loved her. Trey had one man, no relation by blood, he regarded as a brother —
he was dying and I was dead from the waist down.

“I suppose you’re right, but he deserves a wife like Judith, doesn’t he? Someone who likes... things I don’t.”

“You didn’t like this kiss?”

“Well, yes, but then.... It was too much, and he could tell, and he stopped.”

“Too much?”

“I started to feel dizzy, and some places were — doing strange things.”

“Oh, sweetheart, that’s supposed to happen. If things — progress to their natural conclusion, that all makes it better.”

“I don’t want things to progress.”

“Kiss him a few more times, and let his hands wander. I think you’ll change your mind.”

Deborah gaped at Norah, unable to believe what she just heard.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Norah said impatiently. “I’m not recommending you throw caution to the wind and risk no marriage and a child, but there’s no reason not to enjoy some more of the kissing you know he’s good at and try out a little of what else he’s probably good at.”

Deborah bit into a cookie with a snap to keep from saying anything. Respectable, married mothers of three, one of them a girl old enough to be in normal school, should not be handing out that kind of advice. Then again, kissing him another time or two couldn’t hurt anything, could it?

T
REY LOOKED UP
at the sound of the bell and watched Cal Sutton stroll into the office as if he owned it. Surely Deborah wouldn’t have her cousin paying visits over a kiss. She had seemed a willing participant in the whole experiment right till the end, and he’d stopped as soon as he sensed her slight withdrawal.

Oh, hell. “Are you here to shoot me?”

“I hear someone else is working his way up to that. Accidents, pipe, knife. Unless he’s afraid of loud noises, it will be a gun next time.”

So Deborah had sent him sure enough, and no one would send Cal Sutton away with a few laughing words and a month’s pay for a working man. “So she sent you to watch over me?”

“That’s what she wants, but I haven’t got the time or the inclination. Nobody can keep anyone else safe, but we might catch him next time he tries.”

Sutton leaned against the counter, looking down at Trey where he sat at the desk. Trey fetched another chair from the back room, positioned it on the other side of the desk, and gestured.

“With all the company I’ve been getting, I think I need to find another chair to keep here permanently.” He reached into the bottom drawer and pulled out the whiskey and glasses he’d been keeping there since Jamie’s last visit. “Too early for you?”

“I never figured what time of day had to do with it.”

Trey poured. “You said ‘catch him’. Deborah didn’t convince you it’s my sister?”

“Not particularly, but a woman could hire it done as easy as a man, and since you didn’t recognize him, he’s hired help. But if we catch him, I bet we can get a name out of him.”

Trey would bet the same. “There’s an old fellow who works at the ranch, Herman Gruner. He was there when I was a boy, so you may know him.”

Sutton just nodded.

“He’s too stove up to stay on a horse for long these days, so he takes care of the stock that’s kept up around the home place, does odd jobs, anything to earn his keep and get to stay on. I’ve talked him into getting me some information.”

Trey pulled his notes from the inside pocket of his jacket. “My sister and her husband have a home in Kansas City. For that matter my parents live there half the year these days too, but this year, when Alice found out she was expecting another child, they all dug in at the ranch. She lost her first at two months old to a fever, and they think the ranch is safer.”

Sutton took a swallow of whiskey. “They must have been delighted when you came limping home after the government quarantined everyone who had been in Cuba for fear of the fevers.”

Trey tipped his glass at Sutton, acknowledging the truth of that statement. “Alice was in favor of throwing me out on the spot. My father showed a preference for a live son over a possible grandson, which made Alice even more furious, and my mother had no opinion. My sympathies were with Alice. I should have left then, but I didn’t have the energy.”

The bargain with God that had brought Trey home was staying between the two of them where it belonged. Maybe he’d tell Deborah about it someday if.... Well, if.

Trey took a sip of his drink and went on. “The thing is Alice hasn’t been off the ranch since I came home. According to Herman, she’s guarding that baby like a lioness and still hasn’t been to town. So if Alice hired someone, he has to work on the ranch, and I’d recognize anyone who works there. You can say she got one of the hands to do the hiring for her, but I don’t think she’s foolish enough to leave herself vulnerable like that.”

“Someone on the ranch cut those reins.”

“Yes, and that’s one thing Alice could have done without help.”

“What about her husband?”

“Vernon Forbes. He travels back and forth on business constantly, so he’s more likely, but there’s nothing telltale in his movements. He was at the ranch when the reins were cut and when the wagon almost ran me down, out of town for the pipe attack, and I don’t know yet about this last time.”

“What about your mother?”

“My mother? She has nothing to do with this. Why would my mother want me dead?”

“Let’s see. She’s angry because you ran off for ten years. She likes your sister better and wants her happy. After being married to your father for years, she hates all men, and you’re a man. Having a son come home on crutches embarrasses her. You want more? Give me a minute, I can think of more.”

“Don’t bother. You’re wrong, and you can forget about my mother.”

“Your mother is not a forgettable woman.”

There was no compliment in the words. Trey glared at Sutton. “You had better forget about her or stop drinking my whiskey and get out of here.”

Sutton took another swallow. “Deborah mentioned a brother.”

“A broth.... Oh, yes, Vernon’s brother, Daniel. I suppose he could want to help his brother, or even think if everything goes to Vernon and Alice’s son, it would benefit the whole Forbes family. You understand there’s absolutely no chance my father is going to leave anything to my sister, Alice. If she never had a son, he’d leave it to a business partner sooner than a woman. The way he sees it, taking care of Alice is Vernon’s job.”

“Your sister and mother ought to get together and kill him. Even if there’s no money in it, they could do it for the pleasure.”

“You are capable of a very ugly turn of thought.”

“And for someone who’s been lucky four times, you are capable of turning a dangerously blind eye. Got that from your mother, did you? Along with pure mule-headed stubbornness from your father? It’s easy to see why Deborah thinks you’re a fine fellow.”

Trey considered smashing the whiskey bottle over Sutton’s head, decided against it, and refilled their glasses instead. “You have room to talk.”

“Not an inch. Have you considered Herman Gruner?”