by Janet Dailey
On the surface, it seemed a thoughtful gesture, yet Tara kept remembering that Jessy Niles had gone to comfort the old woman when the news had come about the plane crash. There was no reason to believe Jessy had gone there after the funeral, but the nagging suspicion wouldn’t leave her, even though it seemed inconceivable that Ty might be going to the Haskell home in the hope of seeing her.
She crossed the porch to the front doors, letting Cathleen go ahead of her. She paused in the doorway to watch Ty driving away from the house.
“Tara Lee, is something wrong?” Stricklin came to the doorway, his flat blue eyes looking out at the sight that had captured her attention.
“No.” It was a quick answer as she turned smoothly away. “Nothing at all.” She stepped inside, briskly tugging off her gloves. “Where’s Daddy?” she inquired calmly, then saw him talking with two other people in the living room. She went forward, at long last the mistress of the Calder Homestead.
“Hello, Vern.” Ty shook hands with the sullen-faced man who admitted him into the Haskell home. “How have you been?” He removed his hat and unfastened the top buttons of his charcoal-dark topcoat.
“Poorly.” The old and stooped man leaned heavily on his cane and hobbled to a rocking chair. “Not that I ever asked for sympathy,” he declared sourly and lowered his arthritic body into the chair. “You’ll be wantin’ to see Ruth. She’s in her room lyin’ down.” He pointed toward a door with the end of his cane; then his expression took on a sly look. “The Niles girl is with her, which maybe you knew and maybe you didn’t.”
“Thanks.” Ty let the last remark pass without comment and crossed to the door. Meeting Jessy had not been his motive in coming, but he couldn’t deny the warm tingle it had given him when Vern informed him she was here. He rapped lightly on the door, and Jessy’s voice bade him to come in. As he stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind him, he caught the small leap of light in Jessy’s hazel eyes and was pleased. Her long, straight hair was coiled in a shimmering knot atop her head, adding dignity to her strong features. Her dress of mourning was a simple blue wool, a warm color like the sky between dusk and night.
Ty walked to the bed where the ever-thinner Ruth Haskell sat, propped up with a stack of soft pillows. An old-fashioned quilted bedjacket trimmed with lace covered her bony shoulders.
“Hello, Nanna Ruth.” He used Cathleen’s pet name for her as he bent to kiss a withered cheek. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” she insisted, and he couldn’t recall ever hearing her complain. “I so wanted to come today.” Her trembling hands clutched at his while her teary eyes looked up at him. “Jessy told me what a fine service it was. So many people came. I only wish. . .” Her weak voice trailed off, then found a new subject. “I feel so badly about Chase.”
“I spoke to the hospital this morning. They said he was doing much better.” “Holding his own” was actually the phrase that was used, but he chose to sound more optimistic with Ruth.
“He is like a son to me. What a pair of boys I had,” she declared, smiling in fond reminiscence. “Chase and my Buck. Buck should be here. He could always make Chase smile. He was so outrageous sometimes—and the tales he’d come up with.” She clucked her tongue in loving affection, then sobered slowly and looked anxiously at Ty. “He never meant to be bad.”
“I know,” Ty said to assure her, but kept his own counsel on that subject.
“I think you should take some of the medicine the doctor left for you, Ruth,” Jessy suggested, “and see if you can’t get some rest.”
“Maybe I should,” Ruth agreed hesitantly, showing uncertainty and a willingness to be told what to do.
“Here.” Jessy shook two pills from the prescription bottle and handed them to the woman, then poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the bedstand. After Ruth had taken her medicine, Jessy rearranged the pillows so she could lie down in comfort, then pulled the window shade to darken the room.
“I’ll come by to see you again,” Ty told the woman and moved quietly to the door. Jessy followed him, then paused short of the door. “Aren’t you leaving now?” he asked in a low murmur.
“No, I’ll stay until she sleeps. Have you learned anything about the crash? How or why it happened?”
“Nothing certain. The initial reports from the wreckage indicate a broken oil line as the possible cause, but they’re still trying to determine if it had ruptured before or after the crash.” And his father had been able to provide the authorities with only scant details. “I have to leave.” There was a reluctance in his tone. “There’s company at the house, and I can’t let Tara entertain them on her own.”
“Somehow, I don’t think she’d mind,” Jessy murmured cynically.
A vague irritation rippled through him at the implied criticism. “You don’t know her well enough to judge that.”
“You’re still defending her,” she observed.
“She’s my wife.”
“I know.” It was very quietly said as Jessy turned away and walked back to the bed.
Ty hovered indecisively between anger and regret, then reached for the doorknob and let himself out. The dark scowl on his face didn’t go unnoticed by Vern Haskell, who smiled to himself. He’d always been treated like a kind of outsider by the Calders, even though he’d married into one of the old families. When his son had gone bad, he knew they had blamed it on the Haskell blood in him, not the good Stanton blood from Ruth’s family. It did him good to see a Calder getting denied something he wanted, and his little talk with Jessy Niles had obviously not turned out the way he’d planned.
A full month had gone by since the funeral. Between hospital visits and the full load of the ranch management resting on his shoulders, Ty had been going from morning until night. Plus there had been meetings with the attorney, in connection with both the disputed title to the ten thousand acres of land and his mother’s estate, made complicated by some of her California holdings.
A lot of the routine paperwork and reports had been shoved to the side and allowed to pile up. Unable to postpone the deskwork, Ty had finally closed himself in the study to wade through it. At first, he merely glanced over the monthly balance sheet and its accompanying profit-and-loss statement. When the figures finally registered in his mind, he felt a glimmer of alarm. He went to the files and extracted the previous six months’ statements for comparison. His concern mounted.
“Ty?” The door to the study was pushed open as Tara stuck her head inside, then knocked on the door. A blue silk bandeau shimmered around her black hair and across her forehead. “Can I interrupt you a minute?”
“Sure.” He breathed in deeply and leaned back in the chair, almost welcoming the intrusion that broke up the whirl of figures in his head. She walked into the study, holding something behind her back. “What is it?”
“Do you remember this old photograph you showed me a long time ago?” She held it out to him. “The man in the middle was your great-grandfather, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. Chase Benteen Calder. My father was named after him.” Ty nodded that the tall man in the broadcloth suit was his ancestor, or so his father had told him. “What about it?”
“The woman with him—didn’t you say she was some English lady?” Tara prompted.
“Yes.” He frowned slightly, not recalling that part of it too well. “Duncan or Dunhill, something like that. In those days, it was fairly common for a rancher to have a European backer, a financier of sorts.” His puzzled but interested glance held a trace of amusement. “Why?”
“I was packing away some of your mother’s things, and I went into the attic to see if I couldn’t find room in some of those old trunks upstairs. While I was going through them, I found this.” She showed him a second photograph, this one of a young woman. The edges of it were burnt, as if it had been in a fire. “Doesn’t she look familiar?”
At first, Ty didn’t understand what she meant. Then he noticed the similarity between th
e two women in the photographs. “It’s hard to tell, but there is a resemblance.”
“They are the same person, and I’d bet on it,” Tara stated; then a light glittered in her eye. “Do you know who she is?”
“Lady Dunhill or Duncan, I’ve forgotten her name.”
Tara shook her head. “According to the back of this photograph,” she said, indicating the one of the younger woman, “she is Madelaine Calder, Benteen Calder’s mother.”
“I was told she ran away when he was a small boy.” He frowned, doubting Tara’s discovery.
“She ran away and obviously married into some titled English family, then came back. Imagine that, Ty,” she declared with a suppressed eagerness. “You are descended from English royalty. Well, not exactly.” She shrugged her shoulders to dismiss the lack of real blue blood. “But a little family scandal is always more exciting, especially when it’s connected to lords and ladies. I can hardly wait until the Franklins arrive this weekend so I can tell them. They’ll spread the story around like wildfire. You’ll be the talk of everyone who is anyone.”
“The Franklins?”
His blank look brought a trace of exasperation to her mouth. “Ty, I told you at dinner last week that I had invited them for the weekend.”
Maybe she had, he conceded. Most evenings he had been either too tired or too preoccupied to listen. “Sorry. It slipped my mind. You know, of course, I’ll be going to the hospital on Sunday.”
“Surely you can postpone your visit one day,” she urged.
“Can’t. Spring roundup starts,” he announced. The knowledge of the full schedule ahead of him seemed to prod him back to the monthly reports spread across the desktop.
“I suppose that means we won’t see a thing of you all weekend.” The impatient edge was in her voice, honing out the drawl that usually softened it. “Lyle Franklin could be very helpful to you. Put someone else in charge of overseeing the roundup. Considering the number of people you have on the payroll, one of them should be qualified to do it. If none of them are, it’s time you hired someone who is.”
“It’s my job and I’m going to do it,” Ty informed her patiently and glanced down at the damning figures on the papers. “It seems I have enough problems without arguing with you.”
“Problems? What do you mean?” She was quick to catch the troubled note in his voice. Her expression was instantly serious and intent.
“It appears the ranch operation has been steadily losing money over the last few months.” He gathered the reports together. “And I think it’s time I found out just how long this has been going on, and whether it’s as serious as it looks.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised, considering the way your father has run this ranch,” she said, careful to keep her criticism from becoming too sharp. “He’s still paying people who are too old to work. It’s a very noble gesture if you can afford it, but it would be much cheaper to set up a pension fund for them. Most of these old fogies around here should have retired years ago.”
“They do what work they can.” Ty rose from the chair.
“Where are you going?”
“To see Bob Crane. He prepared these reports, so it will be a lot faster to get to the bottom of them by talking to him, and find out whether it’s payroll or something else.”
After two hours in the accountant’s office, Ty discovered there were many factors that had contributed to the present situation.
“As you can see,” Crane pointed out to him, “if it weren’t for the income from the wells that are pumping out at Broken Butte, we wouldn’t have broken even the last five years. It would have been a struggle under normal operations, but to throw in two large capital expenditures with the feedlot and the horse-breeding facilities and stock . . . the expansion simply came at the wrong time.”
“I can see that,” Ty agreed grimly, aware both had been his programs.
“Of course, there have been abnormally high legal costs this last year as well, because of that land dispute with the government. And it hasn’t been resolved yet,” the accountant reminded him. “And this doesn’t show the medical costs that are being incurred every day your father is in the hospital. I’ve heard”—he glanced hesitantly at Ty—“that with the operations and therapy he’s going to require, it might be as long as a year. That’s going to cost a small fortune.”
“My father must have seen what was happening,” he insisted, his forehead creasing in a frown.
“Yes. But he was gambling on an upturn in the cattle market that didn’t materialize.”
“There don’t seem to be many options,” Ty noted, “except to pare down expenses or create an income stream by selling off expendable assets.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Crane agreed. “Sorry, Ty. I would have said something to you, but I thought you regularly saw the reports.”
“I saw them, but always separately. I never recognized the trend they were showing.” The corners of his mustache were pulled down by the grim curve of his mouth. He rolled the reports in his hand and tapped them absently on the desk as he rose. “Thanks, Bob.”
His steps were heavy when he entered The Homestead, weighted by problems he hadn’t expected. Some hard decisions had to be made, and they needed to be the right ones. He walked straight to the study and tossed the reports on the desk. Crossing to the wet bar, Ty poured himself a shot of whiskey, then wandered over to the large stone fireplace with its mounted set of longhorns. Tara called to him, but he didn’t answer.
“Ty, didn’t you hear me? Dinner will be ready as soon as you’ve showered and changed.” She appeared in the doorway and paused to skim his brooding look. “Bad news?” she guessed and crossed the room to his side.
“It wasn’t good,” he admitted and poked at the fireplace ash in search of a hot coal to rekindle the fire.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” She watched him, a certain complacency entering her expression.
“I have some thinking I need to do.” He lifted the shot glass and tossed down part of the whiskey.
“You can think out loud,” Tara urged and masked it with an idle shrug. “Maybe I can help. I do know something about business. I am my father’s daughter.”
“Beneath all the Dior and diamonds.” Ty mocked the elegant afternoon dress she was wearing and the diamond studs in her ears,
“There are brains, yes.” She smiled with slow provocation, using the combination of wiles and charm that served her so well.
“I don’t doubt that there are business areas where you are knowledgeable, but you don’t understand how this outfit is run.”
To be so lightly regarded goaded her. “I understand that it’s been run the wrong way, or it wouldn’t be in the trouble that you’ve found it,” she retorted. “It hasn’t been operated like a business. It’s been run like some benevolent society where everything but profit comes first.”
“This is a working ranch, and you can’t base its operations on short-term profits. You have to look at long-term gains.” His patience was on the thin side.
“How can you do that when the ranch is operating under methods that are twenty years old, if not older than that?” Tara argued, but she kept a reasoning tone. “Times change, and methods have to change with them. You don’t still see longhorn cattle grazing out there on that land, do you?” she said, gesturing toward the curved and twisted horns above the mantel. “You need to start throwing out these outmoded ideas and begin modernizing. It has to be run more efficiently.”
“You say that as if there’s nothing to it.” A muscle ridged along his jaw. “I’m faced with the problem of finding a way to cut costs or create a new source of income, preferably both. The kind of program you’re suggesting would be damned expensive to implement. And I can’t go out in the back forty and sink a well to pay for it like some of your Texas friends, because there isn’t any oil or gas there!”
“But there’s coal, Ty.” She said it quietly, eyeing him closely and containing
the eagerness that vibrated inside. “Tons of it. Enough to make you so rich it wouldn’t matter if this ranch earned a penny. You could become the coal and cattle king of the whole country.”
“No.” It was a hard sound, poised on the edge of anger. “You know damn well how my father feels about surface-mining.”
“It doesn’t matter how he feels. He has no say in it. You’re in charge,” Tara reminded him with that same intense quiet. “You have absolute control of everything.”
“For the time being.” He qualified it even though there had been no time restrictions set forth in the documents his father had signed. His power was limitless.
“Be realistic, Ty,” she insisted. “Your father is going to be hospitalized for at least a year. And after that, you know as well as I do that he’ll never be able to take this kind of stress and strain. There will be a limit to what he can do. So it’s your ranch from now on. And it’s up to you to decide how best to run it.”
“It’s going to be hard enough on him when he learns that I’m dropping the suit to regain title to that land.” Ty stared at the whiskey in the bottom of the glass, a coiled tautness about his expression. “I’ll have to, at least for the time being, in order to cut the high legal costs. But to tear up Calder land for coal—that’s something else.”
“Tear up the land! You make it sound like a sin,” Tara chided him. “It’s only dirt and grass, which can be put back. You studied all about land reclamation in college, Ty. Don’t be like your father and condemn the idea without looking into it. Talk to my father; let him show you his operation. I know he could help if you’d let him.”
“I’ll think about it.” It was a tersely low statement, designed to end the conversation and commit himself to nothing.
“My father is flying up here in a couple of weeks. I can call him and tell him that you want to speak with him. I know he’ll arrange to spend a couple extra days here,” she said confidently.
“Dammit, Tara! I said I’d think about it.” The heated words tumbled from his throat. “Don’t push it!” He swung away from the fireplace, shoving the whiskey glass onto the first table he passed.