by Lisa Jackson
“You have a lotta nerve,” Harriet said quietly. She hardly looked old enough to be Beth’s mother.
“So I’ve been told.”
“Do you honestly think Beth would come back here and put her heart and pride and child on the line all for the sake of a lie? Think about it!”
“Depends on how much money is involved, I suspect.”
She reached for a partially smoked pack of cigarettes and shook one out. Her fingers seemed to tremble slightly as she placed the fliter tip into her mouth. “Money! Always money with you people.”
“With most people.”
Harriet struck a match and held the flame to the tip of her cigarette. “You sure think you can run things, don’t you? Just like your father.” A shadow crossed her eyes as she waved out her match and drew on her cigarette. “He took the cake, that one. You know, I have half a mind to call up Mavis and tell her to back off.”
Despite his anger, Jenner felt the corner of his mouth lift a little as he thought about Harriet and Mavis squaring off. Kind of a battle of the grandmothers. “I’ve already tried. It didn’t work.”
Harriet didn’t see an ounce of humor in the situation. “You be careful, Jenner McKee,” she advised as she shot an angry plume of smoke from the corner of her mouth. “Don’t think you can do the kind of fast shuffle your dad was so good at.”
“I’m not like my dad,” he said evenly, and Harriet, through a haze of smoke, gave him the once-over.
“Aren’t you?”
“No way.” His eyes narrowed as he studied the woman whom he’d heard rumors about all his life. Rumors that linked her to just about every available male in Rimrock. Harriet Winward Crandall Something-or-other Forrester. There had been other names he’d heard, too. Floozy. Whore. Bimbo. You name it and Harriet had been called it. Though she’d never been linked to any married men, Jenner couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been involved with his father. Maybe it was the way she’d nearly sneered when she’d brought Jonah up, as if she’d been familiar with him. That thought made him uneasy as he watched her take a seat on a worn couch and motion for him to sit, as well.
“So what’re your plans?”
“Haven’t got any.”
“McKees always have plans.”
He’d been polite long enough. “Let’s be straight with each other, Mrs. Forrester—”
“Harriet. Just call me Harriet.”
“Okay. Ever since I walked through the door you’ve been using me for a punching bag.” Wielding his crutches, he moved so that he was standing directly over her. “So why don’t you give me your best shot and tell me what it is you don’t like about me?”
“You mean other than the fact that you used my daughter—got her pregnant—then left without a backward glance? Or if that’s not good enough, let’s take ridiculing her when she gathered the nerve to come and tell you about Cody.”
“After the letter from Mavis.”
“Whatever.” She waved impatiently, and smoke swirled around the hand holding her cigarette. “The point is, it took guts to come back here and face you.”
“It would’ve taken more a couple of years ago.”
“Back then she came up against Jonah. You do remember your father, don’t you? How he tried to manipulate everyone in this town?” With a final drag, she shook her head, then jabbed out her cigarette in a glass ashtray. “He didn’t want you tied down to my daughter and he wouldn’t accept the fact that Cody was his grandson. Prince of a fella, your old man.”
“She should have talked to me.”
“You should’ve stuck around. Loving ‘em and leaving ’em isn’t exactly admirable.”
“I think that’s enough, Mom,” Beth said, her cheeks flushed slightly, as if she’d heard more than she should have when she walked back into the room.
Jenner offered a lazy smile. “Your mother was only expressing her opinon about my family. No harm done.”
Cody ran pell-mell into the living room, his feet in new sneakers pounding loudly. His hair was combed and he was wearing a pair of stiff new Levi’s. Grabbing a book from a basket near the fireplace, he crawled onto the couch and smiled up at his grandmother. “You read?” he asked her, his eyes glinting as if he knew how adorable he was.
“Of course I will.”
“I think you and I should talk,” Beth said to Jenner, then shot her mother a meaningful glance. “Alone.”
“Fine with me,” Harriet said. “I was hoping to take Cody into town later anyway.”
“That would probably be a good idea.”
This was gonna be trouble. If Jenner stuck around, Beth was going to mess up his mind, sure as shootin’. But he couldn’t very well just walk out on her. Besides, a part of him was curious to know what she had up her sleeve this time.
“All right,” he drawled.
“Then you and I,” Harriet said, giving her grandson a wink, “will go down to the Pancake Hutt where Grandma works. Since it’s my day off, we’ll splurge on lunch and I’ll show you off to some of my friends. I’ll buy you a Belgian waffle with strawberry jam and whipped cream. How would you like that?”
“Mommy come?” Cody said, and his brow furrowed.
“Not this time.”
“Mommy come!” This time it was a command.
“I’ll be back soon, sweetheart,” Beth promised.
“Noo!” He started to wail and Beth picked him up. He let his picture book fall to the floor. “You stay! Mommy, you stay!”
Beth bit her lip, obviously torn. “We’ll be back soon,” she said to the boy, and Cody, clinging even more tenaciously to his mother, glared up at Jenner.
“No!”
“It’ll be all right, honey,” Beth whispered, holding the boy close. “I’ll bring you a surprise.”
“You stay with me!”
“I can’t, honey, really.”
“Let me take him. You two run along.” Harriet peeled her distraught grandson from Beth. “We’ll be fine. The minute you leave this’ll be over.”
Beth didn’t look convinced as she grabbed a jean jacket from the coat tree standing guard near the front door. “I can drive—”
“No!” he snapped quickly as he pushed his crutches out in front of him and concentrated on limping as little as possible. “I’ll drive.” Cody’s wails followed them to the front porch and Beth cast a guilty look behind her as she crawled into the cab of his truck and he threw his damned crutches in the back. Now what?
Trying to ignore the sounds of her son’s cries, Beth eyed Jenner and wished she didn’t care for him. Not at all. It wasn’t as if she was in love with him or anything, but there was still a part of her that found him fascinating—on a purely sensual level. She tried to convince herself that her feelings existed simply because he was the father of her child, that of course she should care for him, but deep inside she worried that she still might harbor a little seed of the old crush she’d had on him. It was silly, really, but there it was, buried deep in the back of her mind, ready to sprout if given the least bit of encouragement.
Which she wouldn’t get from Jenner, so she was safe. Out of habit, she checked her watch.
“You have to be somewhere?” he asked, braking for a red light.
“It’s just that Cody...he doesn’t like it when I leave him. I really shouldn’t be away a long time.”
“What about when you work?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “He adjusts. I’ve got a wonderful baby-sitter who treats him like he’s one of her own grandkids.”
“You mean she spoils him.”
“You can’t spoil a two-year-old,” she said defensively. She felt her maternal talons beginning to show.
“You spoil him, too.”
“As I said—”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard. ‘You can’t spoil a two-year-old.’ Well, that’s a pile of B.S. and we both know it.” He slid her a glance that could cut through steel, then shifted into first gear as the light changed.
“So now
you’re the expert on child rearing?” she asked, arching a dubious eyebrow as he worked gas, brake and clutch with relative ease.
“Nope, just an expert on being spoiled rotten. My father thought you could buy a kid’s affection and my mother always worked under the assumption that being a slave to your husband and your kids would assure you a place in heaven or some such crap. Sometimes she played the martyr so well I was certain she’d be cannonized.” He snorted and his hands seemed to grip the wheel a little tighter. “It doesn’t take a genius to see where my folks screwed up.”
“You all seemed to survive.”
“If that’s what you want to call it.” He was driving north where the highway cut through the foothills of the mountains. The sun was shining, but thin clouds had appeared on the horizon. “Max did everything he could to please Dad. Became a damned yes-man for a while. And Mom, hell, she knew Dad cheated on her, but she pretended that it didn’t happen, that he was faithful. She still goes around acting as if he were some kind of saint. Casey’s a hothead, always runnin’ off at the mouth and getting herself in trouble. Doesn’t seem to know what she wants out of life. Like I said, I know spoiled.”
“And what about you?” Beth asked as he drove past the tree-lined lane leading to the ranch house.
“Spoiled rotten.” His smile turned cynical. “I did everything I could to be a pain in the old man’s backside. It seemed to work, too,” he admitted, though he didn’t seem pleased with himself.
Giving the wheel a sharp turn, he drove off the main road and onto an overgrown gravel drive that was barely more than two ruts cutting through a stand of pine. A gate with a No Trespassing sign nailed to the top rail warned them off the property, but Jenner ignored the faded red lettering as he climbed out of the truck, grabbed his crutches and hobbled to the fence. After extracting a ring of keys from his pocket, he tried several in the rusted lock before the latch gave way and the chain fell to the ground.
“Drive through,” he yelled, pushing the gate. It opened with a squeal of seldom-used hinges.
Beth slid behind the wheel and shoved the pickup into first. Barely able to reach the pedals, she eased the truck through the opening and Jenner closed the gate. A second later, he was back in the truck and she was sliding across the seat. “Mind telling me where we’re going?”
“To my place.”
“Your place,” she repeated. “But I thought you lived in the apartment.”
“Temporary accommodations.” He angled the nose of the pickup up a steep slope. The truck bucked as it hit unseen rocks, and long, dry grass and thistles scraped the undercarriage. “I wanted you to see something.”
“What?”
He cast her a glance that nearly melted her bones. Her breath stalled somewhere above her lungs and her heart began to beat more quickly.
They were nearly at the crest of a hill when the road seemed to give out altogether. Jenner didn’t even slow down, just kept driving through the openings in the trees until the pines gave way to a meadow. He cut the engine, then climbed out of the cab. Cursing his crutches, he managed to climb the short distance to the crest of the hill with its view of the valley below.
“What is this place?” She saw the John Day River, little more than a blue-green thread weaving along the bottom of the canyon, and the ridges of red rock that she’d always viewed from the valley floor were now huge bolders that felt the sun’s warming rays.
The town of Rimrock was visible, a webbing of streets and buildings spreading around the bend in the river.
“This was the original homestead of the McKee family.” He pointed to a cabin standing near the edge of the clearing. It was small, barely more than one room from the looks of it, the porch sagging, the roof caved in. Other nearby buildings, sunbleached and tumbling down, were covered in brambles. Farther away was a graveyard, fenced and overgrown, the last resting place of McKee pioneers, Beth guessed.
“Over there—” Jenner motioned beyond the edge of a cliff “—is a parcel that used to be Ned Jansen’s copper mine—well, at least the back of it. The main entrance is half a mile west of here.” He leaned against one of the boulders and set his crutches beside him. With one hand shading his eyes against the sunlight, he pointed to the south. “That bit over there is still part of the Rocking M. It’s kept separate from the homestead, but I guess this could all be considered part of it because McKee Enterprises owns the old copper mine.”
“The mine is abandoned, though, isn’t it?” Beth asked. She was standing so close to him she could see the small creases in his skin caused by hours of squinting against the sun. His scent drifted on the breeze. All male and clean, it made her insides shiver in anticipation.
“Was abandoned. Jansen had just about given up on it—thought he’d mined all the copper out of it. His team of geologists agreed.”
“So why did your father buy it?” she asked, dreading the question, dreading the answer more.
“Well, Ned got himself into some trouble. He’s been married a couple of times and divorced. The divorces were expensive. When the mine seemed worthless, he had to borrow money somewhere and the banks turned him down.” He leaned back and studied her, his gaze lingering on her face. “But he was in luck. Good ol’ Jonah P. McKee was more than willing to help bail an old friend out of trouble. He loaned Ned enough money to get his wives off his back and pay off some overdue child support and alimony. Took the mine as collateral. Ned could never repay him, of course, and Jonah ended up with the mine. And lo and behold, guess what?”
A knot of tension had been tightening in Beth’s stomach. She hardly dared breathe because she knew the answer. “The mine was valuable.”
“Give the lady a prize!” Jenner mocked. “It was valuable, all right, probably worth millions in copper and silver.”
“But why would Ned’s own team of geologists lie to him?”
Shrugging his shoulders, Jenner stared into the distance. “I don’t have any proof, but my guess is that they were bought off—paid more money than they would ever see in their lives—to fudge their reports.”
“You’re saying that your father had his eye on the mine all along?”
“Of course he did! Don’t you understand? Haven’t you figured the old man out yet? Jonah never got involved in any deal unless it would make him money. That was the bottom line. Always. No exceptions.” Pain seemed to flicker in his blue gaze.
“What did Ned do?”
“When he found out?” Jenner shrugged. “Nothin’. He couldn’t do a thing. Jonah hadn’t done anything illegal.”
“Except bribe the experts.”
“But that couldn’t be proven, could it? And Ned tried to sue everyone involved, but his geologists had moved out of state, dissolved their partnership. Ned had no recourse because he couldn’t prove criminal intent. Even geologists make mistakes now and again.”
The wind crept up the hillside and goose bumps rose on Beth’s skin. She rubbed her arms and wondered about the man Jenner had called father, the man who had rejected her son as his grandchild. She remembered him as imposing, with thick white hair that ruffled in the breeze. She’d gone to the ranch to find Jenner, and instead had come face-to-face with his father. Jonah had just dismounted. A cigar had been clamped between his teeth, a rifle clenched firmly in his hands. Seven or eight squirrel carcasses were tethered to his saddle, little, bloody scraps of brown fur that were his trophies for the day.
“You’re here lookin’ for Jenner, unless I miss my guess.” His smile had almost seemed sincere as he’d closed the gate behind him and motioned for one of the hands to deal with his horse. “You just missed him. He took off two days ago for some rodeo in Canada, I think. Alberta or British Columbia, I b’lieve.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“Because of the baby.” She’d been stunned, had felt her skin go white. “This is a small town—bad news travels fast.”
“But no one knows. Just me and Dr.—” Her words had nearly strangled in her
throat when she’d seen the flicker in Jonah’s eyes.
“Oh, hell, there’s plenty of people who work in the clinic. Word’s bound to get out.”
“But not about the father.”
Jonah had shrugged, struck a match against the fence post, and puffed on his cigar. “Doesn’t matter. Jenner’ll never claim the kid and Doc Fletcher can arrange to have the whole business dealt with. There’s a physician in Dawson City who’ll—”
“No!” she wrapped her arms protectively around her middle. Jonah’s eyes had narrowed; he wasn’t used to people disagreeing with him. “I’m not going to get rid of this baby.”
“It’s not a child yet.”
“It’s your grandchild, Mr. McKee.”
His face had turned to stone. “It’s a bastard—nothing more. Things would be different if you and Jenner were dating seriously, but you aren’t. He’s about to become engaged to Nora Bateman and I won’t have you ruining his life, or hers.”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“Why?” He rolled the cigar between his teeth. “Do you think he even remembers you? He and Nora, they broke up a few months back and Jenner decided to sow a few wild oats, kick up his heels, but now he and Nora are planning to get married and you’re just one of a dozen or so women he’s had a fling with.”
She swallowed hard and felt like being sick.
“What?” Jonah asked, smoke sailing into the sky. “You didn’t think you were special to him, did ya?” He barked out a laugh that rattled her to the bone. “Jenner’s not the settlin’ down kind. If it wasn’t that he’s been in love with Nora since he was sixteen, I wouldn’t believe he’d ever get married. But he loves that gal. Always has. Always will.”
There was more than a trace of truth in Jonah’s words. Beth had seen Jenner and Nora together years before. They’d dated in high school and even later when he was on the road. Then Nora had gone off to college and Beth had assumed they’d broken up. It had been a long time ago.