by Lisa Jackson
As Matt drained his cup, Juanita bustled through the back door. A blast of cold air swept through the room and Harold found his way to his favorite spot on the braided rug under the table. Absently Matt leaned over to scratch the old dog behind his ears.
“Dios, it’s cold out there. Frío.”
“That it is, Juanita,” Matt agreed, as he’d already trudged to the barn and stables to feed the stock, then checked the troughs, making certain they hadn’t iced over. He’d called Mike Kavanaugh, his neighbor, this morning and learned that his own place on the Idaho border was still standing. Mike was making noise about buying it again, but Matt resisted. He’d fought too hard and long to own a ranch of his own and his stay here at the Flying M was temporary. Just until things calmed down, Thorne was back on his feet again and Randi was out of the woods. Then he’d leave Grand Hope and any lingering fascination he had with Kelly Dillinger behind him.
“You mentioned that Randi was writing a book,” Thorne said as Juanita unwrapped herself from several layers of coats and sweaters.
“Sí.” She hung her wraps on hooks near the back door and fussed with her hair, tucking a few wayward strands from the braid she pinned to the base of her neck.
“You saw it?”
“No.”
“But you think it existed?” Another dead end in Matt’s estimation. He stood and refilled his coffee cup from the glass pot warming on the coffeemaker.
“She said it did. The last time she was here.” Juanita poured herself a cup of coffee, took one long gulp, placed her mug on the counter and started searching through the pantry. Her voice was muted as she said, “Señorita Randi, she worked on it for hours, sitting on the couch in the living room.”
Thorne’s eyes met Matt’s as he lounged against the counter by the coffeepot. “So where is it? Her laptop computer?”
From the depths of the pantry, Juanita snorted. “How would I know?”
“Maybe Kurt’ll find it,” Matt said to his brother.
“If he’s as good as Slade says he is,” Thorne scoffed as Juanita reappeared, paused to take another swallow of coffee, then slid into an apron and tied it around her waist.
“He figured out another vehicle was involved in Randi’s accident before the police did,” Matt pointed out. “My money’s on him.”
Juanita was starting to bang some pans on the stove and the sounds of tiny scurrying feet approached. Thorne’s harsh expression melted as the twins raced into the room, their footed pajamas sliding on the worn floor.
“I wondered when you two would wake up,” he said with a chuckle.
“The baby was crying!” Molly wrinkled her nose and put her hands over her ears.
Mindy, who had crawled onto Thorne’s lap, copied her sister, placing her chubby palms to the sides of her head and making a face as if she’d tasted something disgusting. “He cried and cried.”
At that moment Nicole walked into the kitchen carrying little J.R. Her eyelids were still heavy, her normally crisp steps dragging. “We’re up,” she said around a yawn. “Whether we want to be or not.” She was dressed in a fluffy white robe and pink scuffs, her hair mussed, her face devoid of makeup, but she radiated a quiet beauty that came from deep inside. And Thorne was captivated. Never in a million years would Matt have thought his older brother—a harsh, determined businessman hell-bent to make his next million—ever capable of falling in love and settling down, but this lady doc with her twin scamps had captured his heart.
“I’ll take the baby,” Thorne offered, and she shook her head and smiled.
“You’ve got your hands full already.” She motioned toward the twins, both of whom decided they wanted to climb onto Thorne’s lap.
“Here, sit down. Have a cup of coffee. I’ll take over,” Matt said, standing and reaching for the tiny bundle that was his nephew. Bright eyes stared up at him. “Don’t panic,” he ordered the little one. “No matter how clumsy I appear, it’s just an act. I’m really a complete and utter idiot when it comes to taking care of a baby.”
“You certainly instill confidence,” Nicole observed as she poured herself a cup of coffee from the glass carafe. “Hey, girls, what do you say to pancakes?”
“With blueberries and syrup?” Molly asked.
“Well…syrup for sure. I don’t know if we have any berries.”
“In the freezer. I’ll get some,” Juanita said as she wiped her hands and walked into a small alcove by the pantry.
“You want the same?” Nicole asked her other daughter.
Mindy nodded vigorously. “Yeth.”
“Easy deal,” Thorne said, and Matt wondered about Thorne and his built-in family. It appeared to work. He was nuts for those kids and crazy about Nicole, acting as if she was the only woman on this entire planet for him.
Matt had trouble swallowing it. For years Thorne had dodged marriage, though many a beautiful and smart woman had set her matrimonial sights on him. But he’d never been interested and certainly hadn’t committed. Until Nicole. And then all bets had been off.
Matt settled into a chair. He couldn’t blame Thorne. Nicole was beautiful, smart, ambitious and a helluva mother. A catch.
Without preamble Kelly Dillinger’s image sparked unexpectedly through Matt’s mind. She, too, was beautiful…well, he supposed she would be if she ever shed her uniform and cop attitude, and she was smart as a whip, could handle herself in most situations, suffered no fools and, even in uniform, was sexy as hell. Too bad she lived here, so far from his ranch on the western Montana border, he thought, then caught himself up short. What the hell was he thinking? He wasn’t even close to settling down, and certainly not with a woman—a cop—who lived hundreds of miles away from his home.
“So is that the consensus?” Nicole asked, searching the faces around the table. “Pancakes?”
Thorne nodded. “And bacon, eggs—”
“Cholesterol, fat…”
“Exactly.” Thorne winked and Nicole laughed, a deep husky laugh.
“Well, okay. I know a great heart surgeon just in case we have a problem.”
“Load me up!” Thorne said as the twins scrambled out of his lap. For the first time in his life Matt felt a touch of envy. What Thorne shared with Nicole was deep. True. With the kind of bond Matt hadn’t believe existed. His father and mother, Larissa, had split up when Penelope had come into the picture. John Randall had married the younger woman, becoming a father again within six months of the wedding date, and that union, too, had crumbled, unable to stand the test of time.
Restless, Matt watched as his brother hobbled into the kitchen, gave Nicole a playful swat on her rump, then actually helped make breakfast around Juanita’s sharp protests.
The self-made millionaire and CEO, playboy in his own right, was flipping flapjacks as if he’d done it all his life. Matt’s gaze caught Juanita’s and he saw that she was just as surprised as he. She didn’t say it, but the words will wonders never cease came to mind as surely as if the housekeeper had sent them via mental telepathy.
Holding the baby and letting his cup of coffee grow cold, Matt stared through the window where ice had collected and snow gathered in the corners of the panes. What about his own life? He’d never considered marriage, had thought it all a waste of time, and children, well, there was plenty of time before he needed to become a father. And when he did, he’d find a homebody, not a career woman, someone who would want to live on his ranch, someone who cared as much for the land as he did, a woman who would want to share his life the way he wanted to live it. But that was someday. Not today. He just wasn’t ready for a family.
He glanced down at the baby snuggled in his arms and for the first time second-guessed himself.
Maybe he’d been wrong.
* * *
“I think it was one of the brothers,” Karla asserted as she worked on her last client of the day. Standing in the first station of her small salon, she swiped the strands of Nancy Pederson’s hair with a small brush dipped into a r
ed color, then wrapped the lock in foil until Nancy’s head looked like it could pick up radio signals from Pluto.
Nancy, while twisting her head this way and that to accommodate Karla’s ministrations, was doing a crossword puzzle. The pounding beat of a Shania Twain song underscored the sound of Karla’s popping gum and conversation. Plants grew in profusion near the windows at the front of the shop, and on an antique armoire painted salmon-pink, bottles of shampoo and conditioner were displayed. The faint odors of a recently developed perm mixed with traces of perfume. The counters were a deep purple, the walls brown, and head shots of celebrities adorned the area around each individual station. Karla had been a beautician for ten years. She’d owned this shop for two.
“You think one of the McCafferty brothers tried to kill his sister?” Kelly said as she leaned against the manicurist’s table and stared at the bottles of polish.
“One of them, two of them, maybe all three.” Karla glanced into the mirror and met Kelly’s dubious gaze.
“A conspiracy, I see.” Kelly couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice.
“Don’t mock me.” Karla waved a rattail comb at her sister. “Those brothers never liked Randi, and don’t let them tell you any different. She was the reason their father divorced their mom and married Penelope. And then he left each of his sons one sixth of his ranch, a measly sixth, while she got half. Is that fair?” Karla rolled her expressive eyes and sectioned off another lock of Nancy’s wet mane.
“Then why are they so adamant that I locate the killer?” Kelly asked as the song faded and a country deejay gave a weather report.
“To throw you off track, of course. Jeez, Kelly, don’t be so dense. You’re a detective, for crying out loud. The McCaffertys need to pretend that they’re concerned for Randi or how would it look?”
“I’m not buying it.” Kelly fingered a bottle of Pink Seduction nail polish and shook her head.
“Hey, I’m just telling you what I think, and I’m not the only one. I’ve had three clients sitting in this very chair and Donna’s had four.” Karla pointed toward the second station where Donna Mills, pregnant with twins, was sweeping up snippets of blond curls from the floor around her chair.
“That’s right,” Donna said with a smile.
“Everyone’s talking about the attempt on Randi’s life. I mean, the attempts. Plural,” Karla continued, managing to hold up two condemning fingers before she picked up another tiny piece of aluminum foil. “I even overheard a couple arguing about it at Montana Joe’s when I was picking up a pizza for lunch. They were standing in line and started to argue over which one of the brothers actually did the deed.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Alexis Bonnifant, she grew up with Slade. I gave her a perm not two hours ago. The way she tells it, he hated Randi. They’re in it together, I tell you, just so they can provide one another with alibis!”
“I doubt if they’d want to kill their sister.”
“Murder’s been committed for a lot less than half a Montana spread.”
“Amen,” Nancy added, looking up from her puzzle for just a second. “Who else would want Randi dead?”
Who else indeed, Kelly thought as she left a few minutes later. She’d just dropped by the Bob and Weave to offer to watch her sister’s kids if Karla needed a night out, but she figured it didn’t hurt to listen to gossip and see what the townspeople thought of the case. So far the odds were stacked against the McCafferty brothers.
She walked three blocks to the Pub’n’Grub and ordered a sandwich and bag of chips to go from a kid she’d sent to juvenile court on more than one occasion. He gave her correct change, but avoided eye contact as he placed the order in a computer. As she waited she stood on one side of a brick planter and couldn’t help overhearing conversation from a booth on the other side of the silk philodendrons and ferns.
Over Reuben sandwiches and clam chowder two women were deep in conversation about the biggest news to hit Grand Hope since the mayor’s wife had run off with one of the city councilmen.
“Always out for themselves, those McCafferty boys. Chips off the old block, if you ask me,” Roberta Fletcher said, nodding her head emphatically, her earrings catching in the shivering fluorescent lighting overhead.
“Never got along with their stepmother or little sister. Never tried. Blamed them for their parents’ divorce and well…you know, their mother had her share of problems. The drinking, you know. Probably all started when she was married to John Randall. I would’ve drunk, too, if that son of a gun was my husband.” Kelly didn’t know the other woman by name, but thought she was married to one of the insurance men in town…she also helped out with the local rodeo association.
“And what if he was your father?” Roberta clucked her tongue as she reached for her cola. “Poor girl—grew up with all those hellions, and now look. It’s a shame, I tell you. When I think about that baby, with no father, at least none that we know of, his mother in a coma, three bachelors trying to raise him… Someone should call Child Services.”
“If one of the brothers is a killer.”
“Hard to believe, but stranger things have happened. The poor baby. He’s the cutest little guy you’ve ever seen, I’ve heard,” Roberta added. “My daughter’s a friend of Jenny Riley’s. Jenny, she looks after the baby and the Stevenson twins when Nicole’s working, you know. Jenny says little J.R. is the most adorable baby in the world.”
“Well the McCaffertys always were a good-looking lot. Every last one of ’em.”
“Too handsome for their own good.” Roberta swirled her straw in her cola. “It’s always been a problem.”
“But you’d think that baby’s father would step forward.” Roberta’s friend rolled expressive eyes as she bit into her sandwich.
“Maybe the father doesn’t know about the little tyke.”
“Why wouldn’t she tell him?” Roberta asked.
“Maybe they weren’t together.”
“Or maybe she doesn’t know who the father is.” Roberta cackled nastily, and the other woman hadn’t commented on the gossip. Kelly had tried to turn a deaf ear as she waited for her order.
Later, back at the office, Kelly picked at her sandwich while she cruised through the notes she’d entered into her computer files. Dozens of questions burned through her brain. Who wanted to kill Randi? Why? Because of the baby? Because of her work? A love affair gone wrong? Did she owe someone money? Did someone take offense to her column? Who were her enemies? Her friends?
She studied the list of people who knew Randi—co-workers in Seattle, people she’d grown up with and gone to school with around Grand Hope, people she’d dated or befriended throughout her life. Nothing made any sense. Randi McCafferty had been a tomboy, probably because of her older half brothers. She’d been adored by her father and mother, a “princess” who had managed not to become too spoiled. She’d graduated from high school here in Grand Hope, gone to college at Montana State and eventually become a journalist. She’d worked on her father’s ranch as well as having a part-time job at the Grand Hope Gazette while in high school, and eventually, after a series of jobs, she ended up in Seattle, where she’d landed the job with the Clarion. Her column had become syndicated, picked up by a few other papers, and she’d done some freelance work.
Then she’d had the accident.
Kelly bit into the pickle that came with her ham and cheese and scanned her notes again. Juanita Ramirez, the housekeeper and the one person who seemed to have kept in contact with Randi in the past few months, claimed Randi was writing a book, that the reason that she was returning to the ranch was to finish the book—wherever the blazes it was. If it existed. Juanita, for all her communication with Randi, hadn’t known she was pregnant. So maybe she’d gotten the book thing wrong as well.
If only Randi McCafferty would wake up.
Before the killer tried to strike again.
Kelly tossed her hair over her shoulder and scowled at
her computer screen. There wasn’t anything new. Even the recent lab reports hadn’t helped much. The hospital room where Randi was attacked had heretofore given up no clues as to the identity of the person who had sneaked into her room and slipped a deadly dose of insulin into her IV. Interviews with everyone on duty had provided no new information and no one had witnessed anything suspicious aside from Nicole Stevenson’s claim that she’d seen someone—man or woman—she didn’t recognize near Randi’s private room. According to hospital records and the pharmacy on the first floor, no insulin was missing from the locked cabinets, but records could be falsified and someone could have had enough in a vial hidden deep in a pocket.
Not much to go on. Not much at all. Kelly wadded up the uneaten portion of her sandwich in the sack from the Pub’n’Grub and tossed it into the wastebasket in frustration. “We’ll get you,” she promised, as if the perpetrator was in her office and could hear her. “And it’s gonna be soon. Real soon.”
She spent a few hours in the office returning phone calls and catching up on paperwork, then decided to finish the interview she’d tried to start with Matt McCafferty in the cafeteria the night before.
He wouldn’t be happy to see her, as she didn’t have any more information on the case, but that was just too bad.
She threw on her jacket and grabbed her gloves. What was it about that guy that got to her? Sure he was handsome in that cowboy, rough-and-tumble way that so many women found irresistible, and yes, he had a certain charm, but she’d met tons of charming cowboys over the course of her life and she’d never felt this attraction—and that’s what it was—before.
Maybe she was just another silly woman who couldn’t resist one of the McCafferty brothers, still the most eligible bachelors in the county. “Oh, give me a break,” she mumbled to herself as she buttoned her jacket, yanked on her gloves and walked outside to the parking lot where her car was parked.