The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6
Juliette Harper
Contents
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Part 2
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
Part 3
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Epilogue
Part 4
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Epilogue
Part 5
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Part 6
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Epilogue
Part 7
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Part 8
Chapter 138
Also by Juliette Harper
About the Author
Copyright
Part I
Book 1 - Langston’s Daughters
1
"Damn it," she muttered, raking through hangers in her closet. "There's no AC at the ranch."
Mandy Lockwood ran her fingers through her hair, caught sight of herself in the mirror, and artfully scrunched the blonde waves back in place. She could be a wilted mess once she got to that God forsaken little town, but not here in her world. Not in Houston where the women who shopped at Neiman's depended on her perfect taste and unerring sense of style.
God only knows where that came from. Her poor dead Mama, maybe, but certainly not from her newly dead father. The only thing Langston Lockwood managed to do with style was buy Stetson hats.
In spite of herself, Mandy smiled. Her father was a foul-tempered, cantankerous old bastard, but he wore the most beautiful Western hats she'd ever seen. It was his only vice. With every other thing in his life, including his wife and his three daughters, he was tighter than bark on a tree, but he would pay a thousand dollars for a 100x Silverbelly in a heartbeat.
And that's why she didn't believe her Daddy walked out to the barn wearing a brand new Stetson and blew his brains out with that hat on his head. He might kill himself, but he wouldn't ruin a good hat doing it.
Jenny's hand shook as she picked up her pencil. It didn't matter that all her real work took place on the trio of 27" iMac screens on her desk. All her graphic ideas still began with a sketch. Nothing technological would ever replace the feel of lead on clean, smooth paper. Or the sound. That slight scratch of an idea coming to life.
She had just gotten off the phone with her older sister, Kate. Their father was dead, and she was expected to get on a plane and fly to Texas for the funeral and the reading of the will. When she told Kate she didn't want to come, the clipped reply that came across the line was pure small town, "It's bad enough people are already talking about us, Jenny. Don't you go making it worse.”
Sighing, Jenny took off her glasses and wearily pinched the bridge of her nose. How long had it been? Four Christmases? Or was it five? She wasn't even sure why she went then. The whole thing had been one tense, holiday-tinged nightmare. She could barely stand to be in the same room with her father -- but Mama would have wanted her to try. So she did. It hadn't accomplished anything but giving the old reprobate a platform to rail about "goddamn Yankees" for three days.
A ghostly voice flitted through Jenny's mind. "You don't understand your father. He doesn't mean the things he says."
"Then why does he say them?" her younger self demanded through hurt tears.
"That's the way he is."
It made no sense to Jenny when she was 11, and it didn't make sense now. That was the year her sweet-voiced Mother died. Six years later Jenny left the ranch and never looked back. She put herself through college, majored in graphic design, landed a job with a big New York firm, and made a life for herself. One where no one cared she was Langston Lockwood's daughter.
Without thinking, Jenny began to sketch a wide-brimmed Stetson hat. She traced the crease in the crown by memory, the dip of the brim in the front. Never one time in her life had she seen her father step out of the house without a hat on his head. Fine felts for the cold months, crisp straw in summer. The best hats money could buy. No matter what else befell the ranch, he found money for those hats.
Kate said he did it in the barn, with a pistol. Exac
tly where she would have expected a Texas ranchman to kill himself. But Kate added, "And he was wearing his hat."
Something cold snaked through Jenny's blood with those words. "What did you say?" she asked.
"You heard me," Kate said. "He was wearing his hat."
"Something's not right," she whispered.
"Exactly, which is why you're coming home."
So she had agreed. To go to Texas. She couldn't bring herself to call it home.
Kate teased apart the broadsheets of the local paper and carefully covered the top of her kitchen table. She took out her supplies -- cleaning rod, brass brushes, patches, soft rags, and gun oil. Her rifles didn't need to be cleaned. She never put one back in the rack dirty. She needed something to do with her hands.
Under her breath she muttered, "You shoot it, you clean it." Just one of dozens of her Daddy's rules that had, over time, become engrained habits of mind for her. Kate ran a few hundred acres down the same road from the place where she grew up. Her spread was tiny in comparison, but the land belonged to her, bought and paid for with money she made herself and nothing beholding to Langston Lockwood.
The day she put up the sign on the front gate, "K-Bar Three, Katherine Lockwood, Owner," her father drove up in a cloud of yellow caliche dust.
"You could have worked for me," he growled without preamble. "The Rocking L not good enough for you?"
"The old home place is plenty good," she said, climbing down off the ladder. "I just didn't like your offer. I might have worked with you Daddy, but I sure as hell wasn't gonna work for you."
"Don't you get on your high horse with me, girl," he said, spitting tobacco juice in the soft dirt between them. "You don't know a damn thing about running a ranch."
"The hell I don't," she said, her temper flaring. "You taught me everything you know, and I learned it all. I'm just not good enough to help you run the place now because I'm not your son."
"Keep talking like that and you won't be my daughter much longer neither."
The two stood glaring at each other under the hot afternoon sun, mirror images of pure stubbornness. Finally Langston Lockwood blinked. With begrudging appreciation he said, "You never would back down from me, Sister, not even when you was little. Don't you know you're supposed to be scared of me?"
"Day late and a dollar short for that, Daddy."
"Fine," he said, tugging his hat brim lower over his eyes. "Go ahead and run this little pissant place, but don't come hollering to me when you go belly up."
But she didn't go belly up. When her sheep and goats began to command higher prices than her father's livestock in the auction ring, men Langston's age started saying she was just a chip off the old block -- words she never heard from the old block himself no matter how much she secretly longed for his approval.
They passed each other on the country road, occasionally spoke over a fence line, and in general maintained a tenuous relationship. They cussed each other too much for anyone to ever call them "civil."
Still, it counted for more than what her sisters had with the irascible old coot. So, when the sheriff stood on her front porch twisting his hat in his hands and said, "Kate, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Langston killed himself last night," real tears came to her eyes.
She didn't let them fall. She asked for details with a steady voice even though she continued to stare at the rough planks under her feet. Then Sheriff Harper said, almost as an afterthought, "Sure was a beautiful Stetson he had on. Damn shame."
Kate's head snapped up and her voice was sharp. "What are you talking about, Lester?"
"We found his hat there in the . . . well, it was . . . the hole was in . . ."
"He didn't kill himself," she said with complete conviction.
"The gun was in his hand, Kate," the Sheriff said, his face mournful and sympathetic. "The only prints in the barn were from his boots. Doc Granger says the angle of the shot is consistent with suicide. I know it's hard to accept . . ."
"If he had his hat on," she said through clenched teeth, "he did not pull that trigger himself."
The argument got her nowhere. The coroner ruled the death a suicide. "Self-inflicted gunshot." Her sisters were on the way and the women at the Methodist Church were preparing to feed the family after the funeral.
Kate would go through all the necessary motions, but none of that implied "accepting" anything. Someone murdered Langston Lockwood, and regardless of how he had treated them all, she owed it to her father to find out who did it.
2
Jenny walked down the ramp at the San Antonio airport, smiling automatically at the gate crew. Her bag came bumping down the carousel first. She popped the handle and rolled her way to the Enterprise desk. "What kind of car would you like?" the clerk asked with a bright smile.
She almost said "a hybrid" and then remembered where she was and where she was going. "I'm attending a funeral in the country out in West Texas," she said. "I need something that can handle a ranch road."
They settled on a serviceable SUV, finalized all the paperwork, and in 30 minutes, Jenny was on Loop 410. To her considerable surprise, she found her way to Interstate-10 and headed west. It was a two-hour drive to town and another half an hour to the ranch.
She fiddled with the radio until she found classic country and felt a little of the tension ease out of her body with the comforting beat. City life hadn't taken away all the Texas in her and she supposed it never would.
As the countryside opened up around her, a surge of love for the rough land filled her heart. The rolling hills dotted with mesquite. The low growing juniper "cedar." The rocky pastures and limestone outcroppings. The landscape moved her to the core of her being.
It was springtime and the bar ditches were filled with rivers of blue bonnets. Love of her home state had never been the problem. There was so much about Texas she couldn't stand -- the religious fundamentalism, the conservative politics, the redneck provincialism -- and so much she couldn't bear to do without -- the sense of belonging, the history, the beauty, the night skies alive with stars -- and yes, even the people.
Mixed up with all that narrow mindedness and judgmental self-righteousness was a hardworking, good-natured, neighborly reality. In her artist's mind she had already painted the picture of the funeral at the Methodist Church, the men in their starched shirts and jeans awkwardly holding their hats in their hands, the women in their good church clothes, the condolences, "Your Daddy was a good man."
Of course they'd all head right out to the parking lot, get in their pick-ups and say things like, "Those poor Lockwood girls. Not a one of them married. It was living with Langston. He ruined them all."
And maybe he had. The biggest problem Jenny had with Texas was getting ready to be put six feet under that very ground -- her own father. During that last ill-fated Christmas visit her father told her in no uncertain terms she was no credit to him or to the family.
"Get on back up there with those goddamn Yankees you think are so fine. You're just like your Mother. Always dreaming. Never growing up or turning your hand to a good day's work. Sitting around drawing pictures all day. You can't even catch yourself a man like a decent woman. What the hell's wrong with you anyway, girl?"
She had gritted her teeth not to say, "You, Daddy. You're what's wrong with me." The last thing she wanted was to live the life her Mother had lived. No thank you. The "good wife" gig was not on her bucket list.
Kate held her tongue until the fifth suitcase hit the ground. "Mandy, for God's sake, how many clothes can one woman need?"
When her baby sister flashed her that award-winning smile, the one that had taken her all the way to the stage of the Miss Texas pageant, Kate softened in spite of herself. Mandy was a clothes horse, but she was a thoroughbred clothes horse and far too sweet for her own good.
"I wasn't sure what to wear to the . . . service," Mandy said, her voice cracking a little.
"Baby Sister, since when do you not know how to dress for the Metho
dist Church?"
Mandy's eyes brightened a little when Kate came down the walk and picked up three of the bags. "Think you can handle the other two, or are you afraid you'll break a nail?"
"Oh, these are acrylic."
"Of course they are," Kate said wryly.
Just as they turned to go up the walk, the sound of tires on the rough road made them look up. Jenny maneuvered the rented SUV behind Mandy's car and cut the engine. The instant she got out, Kate said, "You shut the gate?""
Jenny's nerves were already strained. "When have I ever forgotten to shut the gate?" she snapped.
"You live in New York City," Kate countered.
"I grew up in Texas," Jenny shot back.
Mandy angled herself between the two of them and held up her hands. "Now you all stop. Just stop it. Daddy's not even in his grave yet and you're bickering like we were all teenagers again. You didn't ask me if I shut the gate, Katie, and I'm the one who left it open my freshman year and let all the kid goats loose in the road."
Jenny and Kate exchanged a knowing glance and then all three burst out laughing. "And Daddy made you round them up," Jenny said.
"Try to round them up," Kate corrected.
"I can still see her out there in that short skirt," Jenny snickered.
"Oh, come on ya'll," Kate whined, in a perfect imitation of her baby sister's voice. "Please go back through the gate."
"Well, Daddy never made me work the stock the way you all did," Mandy said defensively, but with a grin. "I thought if I asked them nice like they would."
"You got a car full of suitcases, too?" Kate asked, shifting the weight of Mandy's bags in her arms.
"No, just carry on."
Jenny retrieved her bag from the backseat of the SUV and the three of them crossed the yard and stepped up on the porch. The interior of the house was dimly lit, the shades drawn against the afternoon sun, stirring faintly from time to time when a breath of breeze came along.
Without a word they each walked to their old rooms. When Mandy turned the knob and took a step into the room, she gasped, "Nothing's changed!"
"What, you expected Daddy to clean out a room?" Kate asked, moving past her and putting the suitcases down at the foot of the white canopy bed.
The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6: Plus Bonus Short Stories Page 1