by Janet Dailey
“Ty?” The soft sound of his name was an intrusion. He looked to the source of it with a hard frown. Tara glided into the study, the thin silk of her cranberry robe and nightgown making whispering sounds as she walked. “It’s after one o’clock. I think you’ve worked late enough for one night.”
He pushed his arms off the desktop to glance at his watch, confirming the lateness of the hour. The tired lines in his face remained etched in a frown.
“I don’t have much to finish.” But he felt like neither working nor sleeping.
“It can wait,” Tara insisted and came around the desk to turn his swivel chair away from the paperwork. As he leaned back, she made a graceful half turn and slid onto his lap. Ty experienced conflicting reactions—a trace of impatience countering a silent appreciation of her beauty. She combed her fingers into his hair. “When I came in just now, you seemed to be mentally wrestling with some important problem. What were you thinking about?” Tara inquired in idle curiosity.
“The ranch,” he lied while he breathed in the perfumed scent of her body, conscious of the desires her physical presence was stirring.
“I wish you’d let Daddy help.” Quickly, she added, “But it’s your decision and we aren’t going to discuss it tonight.”
When her left hand came down to rest lightly on his chest, Ty caught the diamond glitter around the black opal of her engagement ring. It reminded him of the fevered anticipation he’d felt when he’d selected the mounting—years ago, it seemed. He held her hand, lightly fingering the ring and thinking of all it signified.
“Are you happy, Tara?” There was something troubled beneath his seemingly absent inquiry, a sense of knowing he hadn’t found what he’d been seeking with this ring and wondering if she had.
“I’ve never been happier.” There was an underlying fervency in her voice. “It’s all turning out just the way I hoped it would.” An avid light gleamed in her dark eyes, so confident and sure. “I know right now you’re having business problems. Your father left the ranch in such a financial mess. But we’ll work out of them. You already know there’s a way to solve them,” she said, carefully alluding to her father’s proposal. “I know you’re anguishing over the decision, but you’ll make the right one. Then you’ll see how wonderful it’s all going to be.”
“Yes.” But there was a lack of enthusiasm in his reply.
“You don’t sound very happy,” Tara chided him lightly.
“I haven’t had very much to be happy about lately.” Ty shrugged and continued to hold her ring hand, his thumb running over the smooth surface of the midnight-colored opal. It seemed to hold his attention more than their conversation. “What was wrong with Cat? She appeared very moody at the dinner table tonight.”
“She had some silly quarrel with Repp.” Tara dismissed it as unimportant. “So now she’s sulking. I’ve arranged for all of us to go riding tomorrow, late in the afternoon. Now she insists she isn’t going because she wants to visit that crazy uncle of yours instead. I don’t think you should let her go.”
“Culley’s harmless.” Ty saw no reason to object. “I wouldn’t worry about her.”
The lack of attention he was paying her began to bother Tara. He seemed more absorbed with his own thoughts than anything else. “Ty, what are you thinking about?” she finally insisted on knowing, a touch of apprehension in her voice.
When he looked up, one of the rare times he’d met her eyes since she’d entered the room, there was a hint of regret in the studied thoughtfulness of his gaze. “I was thinking about a man’s promise and what it means.” Just for a second, his thumb rubbed her wedding ring with added pressure.
“That sounds very serious.” Tara tried to laugh, but there was an instant when she was frightened by the specter of another woman. Yet there was reassurance in his comment, so she used the peculiar code of honor observed by the men of the ranch to tighten the wedding knot that bound Ty to her. “But I guess they are serious, because I meant the vows I made to you when we were married. I am your wife—for better or worse.”
“Yes.” His reply was slow in coming. “You are my wife.” Maybe it was finally coming to grips with reality. Maybe it was finally growing up and acknowledging that he had a responsibility to Tara . . . and to the marriage they had made. If he couldn’t find the comfort he desired in his marriage, he had no right to seek it elsewhere. He owed it to himself and to Tara to prevent their marriage from becoming a sham. If the soul and the spirit had gone out of their relationship, leaving only the fiery side, then so be it.
The conviction in his voice gave Tara a sense of victory. All her confidence in ultimately winning out over her competition had been justified. Flushed with success, she bent her head to kiss him. Ty had a glimpse of the black hearth of the fireplace before her dark beauty blocked out any images that might have lingered for him. The warmth of Tara’s body seemed to soak through him, bringing the fever—the hot hunger that was not nearly as consuming as it once had been.
A gate had been installed in the fenceline that separated the Shamrock Ranch from the Triple C range, providing easy access from one to the other. With practiced skill, Cat maneuvered her flashy paint gelding so she could open, then close the gate behind her without dismounting. She let the horse set its own lunging pace up the slope to the crest of the rimrock, spotted with clumps of pine. A faint trail led into the broken country, and Cat followed it.
She was still smarting from her argument with Repp, and dejected by it, too. At times like these, it seemed she had no one to whom she could turn. Once she could have gone complaining to her parents, but her mother was gone. Her father, who had always seemed strong enough and powerful enough to solve any problem, had become someone she wanted to protect from anything unpleasant. Ty was too busy, and Tara, who was sometimes exactly like an older sister, still regarded Cat’s feelings as childish and never took them seriously. More and more, when the loneliness and insecurities crept in, Cat found herself seeking out her uncle so she could have the company of someone who cared.
Always in the past, Culley had intercepted her somewhere along the trail and they had ridden to his small ranch house together. This time she rode all the way to the yard without seeing any sign of him. Although she had never understood how he’d known she was coming the other times, it bothered her that he hadn’t shown up yet. She dismounted in front of the house, scanning the empty yard, and tied the reins to the post supporting the roof of the front stoop. She walked to the screen door and tried to peer through the wire mesh to see inside.
“Uncle Culley?” she called out hesitantly. There was something eerie about the silence. “Uncle Culley!” Her voice lifted imperatively.
A small sound came from inside the house. There was something vaguely alarming about the situation. Although it hadn’t crossed her mind before, it suddenly worried Cat that her uncle lived alone, completely isolated and far from help. If he were hurt or sick, who would know it?
“Uncle Culley?” She yelled loudly in case he was in the barn. “Are you here?” Somehow she didn’t think he was outside, so she entered the house, closing the screen door quietly behind her and listening for any sound. “Uncle Culley?” Her voice sounded hollow in the silent house. The bedroom door was shut. She had barely taken a step toward it when it opened and her uncle came out, looking pale and disheveled, his shirt unbuttoned and half tucked inside his pants. His gray hair was springing in tousled disorder and gray wool socks covered his feet.
“I didn’t expect you today, Cathleen.” His voice didn’t sound right, and he seemed stiff and awkward as he approached her. “I’m afraid you caught me napping.”
He did appear to have just gotten out of bed, and some of her concern faded with his explanation. “I was starting to worry,” she admitted. “I thought something might have happened to you.” Then she caught a glimpse of something white wrapped around his middle where the unbuttoned front of his shirt gaped open. “You are hurt,” she said in sharp accusation.
“Nothing for you to worry about.” The waving gesture of his hand dismissed her concern. “I just banged up some ribs when a horse kicked me.”
“You’d better let me have a look at it.” There was a brisk insistence in her voice as she reached for his shirt to see if he’d bound the injured ribs properly.
“No!” There was a sudden blaze of rejection in his eyes. “I told you I just bruised myself some. Now leave me alone.”
“Look here, Culley O’Rourke. I can be just as stubborn as you,” Cat warned.
“If you come over here to visit, we’ll visit. But if you’re just here to pry your nose into things that ain’t your affair, you can just leave.”
Cat stiffened as if she’d been slapped. Her uncle had never spoken to her like that. “It’s plain to see I’m not wanted or needed. Nothing I do is right anymore.” She swung away to walk to the door, her pride hurt and her feelings.
“Cathleen, I’m sorry. I—” The last was abruptly cut off by a stifled groan of pain, followed by the grate of a chair leg under some weight. Alarmed, Cat pivoted to see her ashen-faced uncle gripping the back of an armchair. She rushed to his side.
“You are hurt. I don’t know why you tried to pretend it was nothing,” she accused impatiently and helped him into the chair. When she attempted to lift aside his shirt, he protested weakly and tried to stop her. But it was too late when she saw the crimson stain seeping through the white cloth bandage. “You’re bleeding,” she accused in a mixture of puzzled shock and alarm. “I thought you said you just bruised your ribs.”
“It’s just a scratch,” he insisted as the faintness that had attacked him began to pass. “I’m okay, I tell ya.”
“I’m not taking your word for anything,” Cat retorted and began untying the crudely knotted bandages that held the cloth in place. She tried to be as gentle as she could be, but it obviously hurt when she lifted the pad off the wounded area. The sight of the long, jagged line of purpling red flesh ripped open nearly made her sick to her stomach. It was all she could do to keep from gagging. “Uncle Culley, you’ve got to go to the doctor and get this treated.” Her limited experience in minor first aid didn’t include a wound as serious as this.
“No.” He shook his head, his face pale and drawn. “Just pour some disinfectant on it and put on a clean bandage.”
“Uncle Culley, please,” Cat pleaded with him to listen to her. “I know you don’t like doctors, but this isn’t a scratch. Let me go get the doctor and bring him here. You could get poisoning or something.”
“No. I can’t go to a doctor. I can’t let him see this.” He gripped her hand, nearly crushing the bones of her fingers together. “Cathleen, you’ve gotta promise me you won’t tell anyone about this.”
“Why?”
Again, he shook his head. “Don’t ask questions. Just promise me,” he begged.
She looked into his pleading eyes, then at the raw, open wound, and slowly shook her head. “I can’t promise that.” It hurt her to deny him. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. I’ve got to get the doctor.” She started to pull away from him so she could ride to the ranch for help.
“No.” He tried to call her back. “You don’t understand, Cathleen. The doctor would have to report this to the sheriff.”
“The sheriff?” Cat hesitated a foot away from him. “But why?”
There was a long moment when he seemed torn between answering her and keeping his silence. “Because . . . it’s a bullet wound.”
An incredulous light entered her eyes. “What?” His answer had completely thrown her. “But . . . why would anyone want to shoot at you? And why does it matter if the sheriff finds out?”
“Just believe me.” He struggled against her questions. “I don’t want you to get involved in this.”
She came back to the chair and dropped onto her knees in front of him. “If you don’t tell me what this is about, I’ll go to the doctor and the sheriff myself,” she threatened, because she was frightened by the failure of any of this to make sense. Culley was talking and acting mysterious and wild.
“I don’t want to leave you, Cat.” Tears shimmered in his eyes, but they weren’t caused by pain. “But if the sheriff finds out, he’ll arrest me . . . and I’ll never see you again.”
“But why would he arrest you?” she persisted.
“Because I ... I know who killed your mother.”
For a moment, his statement lay in the absolute stillness of the room while Cat stared at him. “What?” It was a small, little sound. She was almost convinced he was crazy. “She died in a plane crash.”
“Caused by a broken oil line.” He nodded. “But it didn’t break on its own. It had help. Someone cut it partway through.”
“How . . . how do you know that?” She was skeptical and hesitant, yet he sounded so convincing.
“Because ...” An anguish swept through his expression. “Remember the night you met the Taylor boy in the hangar and you thought you heard something?”
“Yes.” She nodded slowly. “Was that you?”
“No. It was him. I saw him tampering with something in the motor. After you and Taylor left and he’d sneaked away, I checked. I figured he’d done something to it, but I couldn’t tell what.”
“You mean . . . you knew something was wrong with that plane? You knew and didn’t tell anyone?” She stared at him, drawing back when she realized the crash that had killed her mother and so severely injured her father could have been prevented.
“I didn’t know for certain ... I didn’t know if he’d had enough time before you heard him. If I had known Maggie ...” The torment was in his voice, a wretched sound to hear. “Don’t you see, Cathleen? That’s my punishment. I thought something was wrong with the plane, but I never told anyone. And . . . she died. Not your father. She died.”
“How could you!” She began to sob angry tears, hurting all over again. “How could you kill my mother!” Her fists beat at his legs and thighs as she cried passionately and released all the stored-up violence that had been churning inside since her mother had died so suddenly.
Culley cried with her, more silently but with no fewer tears. When she had finally exhausted herself and lay crying on his knee, his hand touched her hair, barely stroking the shiny ends.
“Please don’t hate me, Cathleen,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Why? Why didn’t you tell somebody?” It was a plaintive demand.
“Who would have believed me?” he reasoned sadly.
“Maybe he was clever and cut it where it wouldn’t be seen. Maybe they wouldn’t have found it even if I told them. And if they had found it, it was only my word that he’d done it. And they would have started asking what I was doing there . . . saying I did it.” There was a long pause. “A lot of things happened before you were born, but it’s never been a secret that I’ve never cared whether your pa was alive or dead. Folks have long memories around here. They remember ole Crazy Culley, and they’d have believed I did it, not him.”
“Who did it, Culley?” She raised her tearstained face to look at him.
“Stricklin was in the hangar that night, probably carrying out Dyson’s orders.”
“No.” She looked at him with disbelief.
“You see? Even you don’t believe me.”
The sadness in his eyes was touched with irony. Cat slowly began to understand his dilemma. Who would believe such a tale—especially coming from her uncle, who had been institutionalized for so many years? She felt the frustration of his hopelessness.
Conceding it was the truth, she had to ask, “But why would they do it?”
“Calder had something they wanted and he wouldn’t let them have it, so they tried to get rid of him. Maggie just happened to get in the way.” That’s how he’d figured it. No matter how innocent a victim she had been, it didn’t lessen his desire for revenge. When he attempted to shift his position in the chair, the movement pulled at the wound in his side, making him wince and g
o white with the splintering pain. Culley pressed the loosened bandage against the fleshy part of his waist.
“Let me put a clean dressing on that.” Cat wiped the tears from her cheeks and rose to fetch new bandages. “How did this happen? Do you know who shot you?”
While Cat cleaned the wound with disinfectant the best she knew how and folded a torn section of a freshly laundered bedsheet, Culley answered her questions between grunts of pain. “Some security guard . . . over at Dyson’s mine. I’ve been visiting there . . . nights and cutting the oil lines on . . . their equipment. Sometimes . . . pouring sugar in the gas tanks if... I haven’t got time for. . . nothing else. I thought it might spook ’em and . . . flush them out into the open where they’d show their hand. I spooked ’em, all right. That place has ... got more guards than a criminal ward. And I still can’t prove nothing.”
She taped the new dressing in place with small strips of adhesive. “I’ve done the best I can.” The worry showed in her eyes that it might not be good enough. “But it really looks bad, Uncle Culley.”
“No doctor,” he repeated.
“I’ll speak to Ty, explain everything you’ve told me to him and—”
“He isn’t going to believe you.” He shook his head sadly at the hope she placed in her big brother. “He’s married to Dyson’s daughter. He isn’t going to believe anything against the man without proof.”
“But what are we going to do? We just can’t let them get away with it.”
“They aren’t going to get away with it,” Culley assured her. “I’ll think of something. They gotta be plenty uneasy now ’cause they know somebody knows something. We just gotta keep ’em worried. You work on a man’s nerves long enough and he’ll break. They’re bound to be real jumpy right now, not sure who suspects what they’ve done. That’s why you gotta promise not to tell anyone about this—not your father or brother—not the Taylor boy—no one,” he insisted. “We can’t risk letting anything slip.”