Reclaiming Nick (5 page)

Now only worry filled her expression when she was awake.

She deserved so much better than this.

Maggy’s hand squeezed his shoulder. “Dr. Lowe asked us to go down to Sheridan. He wants to do some more tests.”

Cole stared out at CJ. “The horse is breaking too early. CJ has to teach him to wait. And he’s not catching the right horn.”

Maggy said nothing.

“I should be out there.” He hated the desperation in his tone, that he’d let his frustration trickle out. She had enough on her, with running the ranch and taking care of him. Maybe it would be better if he went quickly. He prayed for that sometimes. Especially on his bad days.

“CJ’s amazing, and when he comes in you’ll tell him how to fix his errors. He listens to you.”

Cole gripped his wife’s hand on his shoulder, disturbed by how cold and calloused hers felt. A woman’s hands shouldn’t be that toughened. “I don’t want any more doctors poking at me.”

He glanced at her, saw her purse her lips, anger flare in her pretty green eyes. “Are you saying you’re not cowboy enough for another round, Cole? Because I am.”

Cole refused to rise to her tactics. Instead, he smiled, shook his head, and took hold of her wrist, pulling her into his lap. She braced herself on the arm of the chair as she landed, and that irked him. He wouldn’t break. Well, probably not.

Cole put his arm around her, ran his other hand through her hair, then cupped her cheek. It was wet, but he said nothing as he brushed it dry. She leaned her head softly against his neck. She always fit so perfectly in his arms. Or perhaps he’d only wanted her to.

He pushed a lock of her auburn hair behind her ear. “We have a ranch to run and no time to be going down to Sheridan on a wild-goose chase. We’ve done this four times, and they still can’t figure out what’s wrong.”

She met his eyes with such pain that the back of his throat ached.

“I’m not getting better, and we both know it.” He left unmentioned the sorry state of their finances. She as well as he knew what the trips cost them. And he’d had to let their health insurance lapse the second year of the drought. But he didn’t want to argue and cast a further shadow on this day. He had so few left; he simply wanted to cherish them.

She closed her eyes and pushed up from the chair.

Don’t go, Mags.

She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not giving up.”

Of course she wouldn’t. That probably scared him the most. She’d spend every last dime, sacrifice everything. And when it didn’t work, she’d have nothing left to start over with.

He was about to reach out for her when she stepped away from his grasp. She picked up the phone book and put it back in its slot on her kitchen desk. Then she opened the freezer and dug out a pound of ground venison. She didn’t look at him as she put the venison in a pot in the sink. “We need to hire a hand. Roundup is just around the corner, and we’ll need help.”

“What about Stefanie and her outfit?”

“We can’t count on the Silver Buckle every time we need help.” Maggy wiped her hands on a towel, turned, and rested her hip against the counter. Still, she wouldn’t look at him. “I’m going into town later today to put ads up around town.”

Cole’s jaw turned hard, and he turned away from her, staring back at CJ’s roping practice.

The drip into the sink fractured the silence, the sound of their impasse. Finally, he heard Maggy sigh. “I have heifers birthing in the barn. Please just . . . stay here. If you need something, call me on the two-way.” She headed into the entryway.

He wanted to throw the two-way against the wall.

He should have taken the family away from here years ago when Maggy’s parents moved to Arizona. They’d offered to let them live in their two-bedroom home until Cole found a job. But what was a born-and-bred cowboy supposed to do for a living? He knew how to ride broncs and herd cattle, fix a baler or a broken windmill, but he couldn’t make a decent living in the city. Besides, Maggy had practically begged him to stay.

Yeah, sure, blame it on Maggy.

If he were to assign blame, that would go to his pride. And wanting to see Nick Noble’s face when he made something of himself.

I can’t believe I ever called you my friend.

Nick hadn’t been back in a decade—probably wouldn’t ever set foot on the Silver Buckle again. And Cole had two hundred sorry-looking head of cattle on rented land.

Yeah, he’d really made a name for the St. Johns in eastern Montana.

Please, God, provide for my family.
He couldn’t count how many times he’d sat on his horse, praying that very prayer.

Probably he’d go to his grave with the plea on his lips.

But maybe Bishop’s bequest was God’s provision. If so, Cole aimed to make sure that Maggy and CJ used it to start over. They could sell the cattle and the land Bishop had left them—hopefully back to the Silver Buckle—for a tidy sum. Then Maggy and CJ could have a life free of praying over the weather, wrestling stubborn cows, living from hand to mouth, and hoping they had enough to pay the rent.

In the meantime, he had to keep Maggy from mortgaging the land and spending it in vain trying to make him well.

Cole watched Maggy cross the yard, wearing her overalls, a wool cap, and gloves. Birthing could be messy business. He remembered too well the late nights during the early years. Maggy had insisted on sleeping in the barn when the heifers delivered.

How she cried when they lost a newborn or a mother. Back then it felt like they’d taken on the world. Now it was Maggy and CJ wrestling with the land for their future.

Maggy and CJ and a soon-to-be hired hand. While Cole sat in the warm house and quietly faded away.

His leg itched, and he refused the impulse to stick a hanger or a pencil or even a butter knife down the cast and give it a good scratch. His bones had turned to twigs over the past couple of years. First his ankle, then his wrist, and now his leg. It had taken his wrist nearly six months to heal, and his ankle still ached, despite Maggy’s prayers for healing.

These days he prayed only to live long enough to see CJ win the Custer County roping championships. And then that the Lord would take him quickly.

Most of all he prayed that he was right and that Nick wouldn’t show up and steal everything he loved out of his hands.

“Do you even know where you’re going?”

Piper clicked the cell phone into its dashboard cradle, yanked out the map, and unfolded it across the steering wheel. Tapping her brakes, she swallowed a retort as a cattle truck pulled out of a dirt road and lumbered up to speed ahead of her. Didn’t he ever hear of right-of-way?

“Piper?”

“Yes, I’m here, Carter. Of course I know where I am. I wrote down everything you said. It’s just that . . . well, your landmarks weren’t great.”

“I told you to MapQuest it!”

“MapQuest gave me a big red star in the middle of Montana.”

In her mind’s eye she could see Carter shaking his head. “I told you this is a bad idea. You’re gonna get yourself in trouble. Starting with getting lost out in the middle of nowhere. I’ll find your carcass in July, being eaten by coyotes.”

The thought of her skinny friend and colleague Carter Eaton, in his pressed khaki Dockers and Doc Martens, flying halfway across Montana to Billings from their office in Kalispell, then driving another two hundred miles to search for her corpse put a smile into her long and torturous day. If three hours in a plane the size of a station wagon didn’t give her the willies, winding through the back roads of Custer National Forest in a rented Jeep after taking a wrong turn off the highway had plopped her back into the center of her nightmares. Or rather her memories. Last time she’d been in cattle country she’d been running with her mother for their lives as they escaped the rage of Russell McPhee.

She’d forgotten the barren land, the feeling that it could swallow a person whole.

After an hour of following the two-lane pavement cutting through rolling hills and limestone that rose like sentinels to her journey, she’d spotted a highway sign. She’d been so relieved that she didn’t care when she emerged a mere thirty miles from where she’d entered. So much for a shortcut.

That brief tour through her dark memories only left her more
determined to make Nick Noble pay for his sins. She owed it to Jimmy—the one person who had made sure she’d escaped that world.

“I’m not going to be eaten by coyotes, Carter. Don’t forget you’re talking to the woman who snuck across the border not once but twice to expose the porous Montana borders.”

“You nearly got shot, if I recall.”

“
And won an award
. You need a memory course.”

“No, you’re the one with the memory lapse—I distinctly remember the word
probation
being used by your boss after your second arrest at the border.”

That wasn’t all.
“Piper, your work is good but jaded,”
her editor at the
Kalispell Gazette
had said as she paced her small office.
“Someday you’re going to go too far and fabricate what isn’t there. And then this paper is going to pay the price.”
The words had stung, even though Piper shrugged them away. “She wasn’t serious—especially after the publicity I got for the paper—”

“And the legal bills—”

“I won’t need the paper after I send in my audition tape to
Wanted: Justice
.”

The cable show had contacted her twice after she’d won her second award and again last week after she’d returned from Wellesley, saying she had just the “spunk” they were hunting for in their
Wanted: Justice
series. Living in Seattle would put her about as far as she could get from her childhood, short of going overseas. And dedicating her career to helping people find justice struck at the very core of her life goals.

Even if she did wonder at times if she weren’t in three leagues over her head.

If she was honest, yes, there were moments when she didn’t exactly like the person she had to be in order to enact that justice.

It seemed Carter, as usual, had ESP. For a restaurant critic, he had uncanny psychic abilities. “Piper, are you sure this is what you want? Ever since your mother’s death and then Jimmy’s arr—”

“This is
exactly
what I want—a chance to strike back at all those bullies in the world who think they can run over people without a thought. Who use people for their own gain.”
Who take out their anger on women and small children.
She loosened her grip around the steering wheel. Oh no, her stomach had started to burn. She fished around in her purse for an antacid.

“As long as you don’t end up one of them.”

Carter’s words had the effect of a jab to the ribs. “No chance of that,” she said, keeping the pain from her voice and hating how close to her fears he’d struck.

“I’m holding you to that promise. But I’m a little worried you’re going to starve. I’ll bet they don’t have Thai food and a Starbucks in Cow Land.”

She popped the antacid into her mouth, crunching and washing it down with a gulp of bottled water. “I’m the queen of adaptation. I can live without my tofu and chai. For a week or two.”

“Do you seriously think it’ll take only a week?”

“I’m hoping less. If anyone knows how to cut to the truth—”

“Piper, are you sure this is a good idea? Because if you’re right, then this guy is a murderer.”

Piper tried to ignore the churning Carter’s words started inside her. According to the police report—and collaborated by witnesses—Noble had an argument with the victim outside a bar only two hours before her time of death. It felt so convenient that Jenny had
gone inside and hooked up with Piper’s brother. And even more convenient that Noble had been the one to pry from Jimmy a so-called confession. Which Jimmy later recanted. She’d bet every award she’d earned that Noble had some hand in Jenny’s death even if it wasn’t directly, making this little excursion dangerous indeed.

But she’d vowed long ago to stand up for the innocents, to expose the bullies of this world. She wasn’t the same girl who had hidden under her bed, hoping to be invisible. Her half brother had his faults, but she could be dead right now if it hadn’t been for his courage and the way he had stood up for her to their father. She felt partly to blame for the mess Jimmy’s life had become. If only he’d escaped with her and her mother, maybe his life would have turned out better. This was the only way she could think of to apologize. To show that she believed in him. To put things right and free Jimmy to move on. “I don’t know if Noble actually
killed
her, Carter . . . but he didn’t even try to find her killer. Simply pointed the finger at my brother and pulled the trigger.”

“Well, he’s not going to be exactly thrilled with someone sneaking around his past, digging up dirt.”

“Yeah, my brother wasn’t
exactly thrilled
with losing five years of his life either.” Five years. She’d just gotten out of graduate school when he’d been arrested. She’d been ashamed. And a part of her wondered . . . even believed . . .

“Be careful, Piper. You yourself said this guy had bully written all over him. And I don’t want you to go through—”