She slammed her eyes shut as she reached the car Harold had rented for her. They'd impounded her truck as evidence and she had to get back home to Moody, who'd come out to look after Geronimo.
Opening the door to the Toyota, something caught her eye on the van parked across the street. She squinted and shaded her eyes with her hand to read the writing on the side of door. Her heart stuttered. It said, Remus/Trimark Development Corp., Denver, Colorado.
* * *
Chapter 14
« ^ »
Forty minutes later, Maggie watched from the driver's seat of her rental as three men—strangers in business suits—and Laird Donnelly walked out of the professional building on the corner of Main and Crescent that housed a dental office, the local Bureau of Land Management offices and Nelson, Kramer and Associates, a construction firm. They headed toward the parked van.
Of course Donnelly was with them, she thought with a sinking feeling.
She slumped down in her seat, staying out of view. The three men were still engaged in conversation with Donnelly and he was pointing toward the road that led out of town. The three men nodded and Donnelly shook their hands, then headed to the tan Range Rover parked half a block down.
Maggie turned the key in her ignition and followed them as they pulled out and headed in the direction of Maggie's ranch. She kept a quarter of a mile between their little caravan so that they wouldn't notice her, feeling ironically fortunate she wasn't in her more recognizable truck.
The Range Rover and the van pulled off the road halfway between Laird's property and hers and the men got out. She pulled over, too, waiting.
Laird pointed to his land, the upper third of his property that hugged the Musselshell River and forked into hers. Here, along this stretch of the river, was the only level playing field in the whole valley. Then he gestured at her land, encompassing it in the same conversation. One of the men went back to the van and pulled out a tube of some sort and withdrew a rolled up set of papers.
Maggie opened her door and got half way out, squinting into the glaring sun at the men. Blueprints? Pieces began to fall into place like puzzle bricks. Blueprints involving her land, Remus/Trimark Development Corp., Kramer Construction…
For a long time, the town of Fishhook had talked about ways to increase revenue and tourism. Besides the quaintness of the town itself, there were only two real selling points: the Musselshell, with its incredible fly fishing, and the local game hunting. Other towns had exploited these assets. Built tourism and brought in jobs. But Fishhook, as a whole, remained staunchly opposed to commercialism, seeing what it had done to other towns. Prime forests had been trampled, traffic had increased exponentially and the reason residents loved living where they did disappeared with the invasion. This was a small ranching community and most wanted to keep it that way.
But she suspected Laird Donnelly had other plans. He had enough land to develop whatever he wanted. What he didn't have, what Fishhook had always opposed, was access. The nearest airport was eighty-five miles away in Helena.
Maggie blinked. And the only piece of land flat enough to accommodate a landing strip was the piece of land adjacent to his. Her land. And nothing could prevent him from putting a private landing strip on it once he owned it.
She suddenly remembered the morning Ben had come home drunk from a casino, pouring himself in the door at 3:00 a.m. He'd been angry about something one of Donnelly's men had said to him. He'd muttered something about not trading horses for Cessnas. It made no sense to her at the time. But it did now.
She thought about Brent Hayden's phone call and what he'd said about Ben's death. If Laird Donnelly had wanted their land that badly, and Ben was the only thing standing in his way, then the slow ruination of a man—a man with weaknesses like Bens—would not have been hard to orchestrate. It would have taken merely the opportunity and the will. Laird had both. And Ben had been an unwitting accomplice.
The men were still talking, but Maggie jumped back in her car and turned back toward town. While his destruction of Ben had been slow and deliberate, his plot against Cain seemed almost desperate. If time was running out for him, he was desperate enough to make mistakes. She only needed one. And she intended to force him into making it.
* * *
"Why don't you let me make you up some soup?" Moody asked, watching Maggie rifle through a box of old papers she'd brought up from the garage.
"I don't have time to eat," Maggie answered, pulling a receipt for baling wire out of the stack of papers in the box. She tossed it aside and dug into the pile again.
"You have to eat," Moody reminded her. "You're not going to be any good to him if you make yourself sick."
"I'm not going to be any good to him at all if I can't find something to help him," she said without looking up. Ben's copy of a gelding sale fluttered into the discard pile and she sighed hopelessly. "This is impossible. I don't even know if there's anything here."
"You've been at this for two hours. Let me fix you something to eat."
"I can make a sandwich later." She looked up at Moody, who was hovering over her like a sweet old hen. "You should get back. Dinner rush is almost here."
Moody waved a hand. "That's why I hire help, darlin'. They can handle the dinner rush without me once. You're more important right now."
Her kindness almost undid Maggie. It wasn't as if Moody wasn't always good to her. But she felt horribly alone today and having the older woman stay with her made her almost feel like she could tackle this impossible task. She squeezed Moody's hand.
The sound of a car crunching gravel on the driveway drew Maggie's gaze to the window. She couldn't see the car, but was sure it must be Harold with news. Jumping up, she rushed outside. But the car wasn't Harold's. It was a Lincoln Town Car. And the silver-haired gentleman getting out of the driver's seat was no country lawyer. He could have been a banker or an oilman, she thought, the way he was dressed, but he walked like he'd been sitting a horse most of his life. More than that, there was something familiar about him.
"Maggie Cortland?" he asked, nearing the steps of her porch.
"It's MacCallister," she corrected. "Maggie MacCallister. And you're—?"
His lips fell open. A thousand emotions flickered through his sky-blue eyes as his gaze swept over her. "I see," he said gruffly. He held out his hand. "My name is MacCallister, too. Judd MacCallister. And I'm looking for my son."
* * *
Cain eased back on the lumpy cot in the holding cell, clenching his jaw against the ache in his ribs and the ache everywhere else and trying to ignore the snoring coming from the other side of the room. He'd spent the last eight hours cooling his heels in this cell with Sleeping Beauty over there—a drunk named Charlie Grinow, who hadn't moved in the last four hours—while Donnelly's men high-tailed it out of Montana. They'd never find them now.
He squeezed his eyes shut wishing he'd never laid eyes on this damned town. In the next breath, he knew that was a lie.
There was one part of it he wouldn't trade for another fifty years of freedom.
Maggie.
She was probably the only reason he was still alive. A month ago, before he'd met her, he wouldn't have thought twice about swinging that crowbar and trying to take out as many as he could before they killed him. He'd been at the end of his rope a month ago and somehow, she'd given him back a reason to live. But he'd failed her. And now she doubted him.
He'd seen it in her eyes this morning. There would always be doubt with a man like him. A man with his past. It would follow him the rest of his life. So what the hell? He should just resign himself to the fact that his life was headed in the same meaningless direction as Charlie's over there.
But that wasn't the hard part. The hard part wasn't giving up on himself. It was losing Maggie.
The guard appeared at his cell door. "You got a visitor, MacCallister."
"I don't want to see her," he said, turning his head. He couldn't stand for her to see him in here.
>
"It's not a her. It's a him."
"My attorney?" Cain asked with a frown.
"Says his name is Judd MacCallister."
Shock rifled through him as he rolled to a sitting position. His father? Here? He glanced around the cell, the crashing awfulness of this kind of a reunion more than he could face. "I don't want to see him."
"Well, you're going to see me," a voice boomed behind the guard. Judd appeared at Cain's cell door in all his silver-haired glory, strong-arming the help as usual. He got his first good look at Cain and his expression lost its edge. He swallowed thickly. "Because," he said more softly, "I didn't drive all the way to this godforsaken wilderness to be turned away now."
Cain thought he'd rather have glass shards shoved under his fingernails than sit in this stinking cell with his old man, but he gestured to the guard to let him in.
The door clanged shut behind him and Judd hovered just inside. Cain stretched out indolently on the cot and put his hands beneath his head, ignoring the throb in his ribs.
His father looked older, he thought, and less certain of himself than he once had. It gave Cain some small measure of satisfaction that he looked uncomfortable as hell. This was, after all, Cain's turf. Not the old man's.
Judd stood there awkwardly with his hat in his hands. "It's good to see you again, son."
"What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you. I've been looking for a long time." Charlie gave a snort from the far corner, and Cain gestured grandly at the accommodations. "You always know where to find me, right?"
Judd leaned back against the metal bars of the door. "I met your wife. Maggie."
The careless grin slipped off his face. "I don't want to talk to you about her."
Fingering the brim of his Stetson, the old man said, "She's outside … wanting to see you."
"You didn't come all the way from the Concho to tell me that, did you?"
"No." Judd's gaze took in the bruises on Cain's face. "Are you all right, son?"
"I'll live."
"Say the word and I'll bring Douglas Fleming up from Dallas Memorial to look at your—"
"No."
Wiping his hands against the fabric of his coat, Judd glanced around the cell. "I know you're angry."
Cain snorted. "I'm not angry. I hardly think of you at all anymore." The lie sat between them like the wall it was supposed to be.
"You're not going to make this easy for me, are you?"
"Should I? You want absolution?" He made the sign of the cross. "You're absolved. Now if you don't mind, I'd like you to get the hell out."
Judd sat down on the end of Cain's cot. "I've come to say what I need to say. When I'm finished, if you still want me to go, I will."
Cain dragged two hands through his hair. "Then say it."
"All right." Judd paused, collecting himself. "I was wrong. About Annie. About you and what happened after Annie… I want you to know, I'm deeply sorry for it. More than you can know. For everything that happened. Most of all for turning away from you when you needed me most."
Cain stared at the old man in shock. Never in his entire life had he heard him apologize for anything. But it was too damned little, too damned late.
"I'm sure Annie would have given you a nice warm hug and invited you over for dinner for that little speech, because that's just how she was. But she's dead now. It's a little late for apologies."
"I know." Judd stood and paced to the other side of the cell, looking older and frailer than Cain could ever remember him. "I won't make excuses for it," Judd continued. "I was bullheaded and thought I knew what was best for you. I was dead wrong. She made you happy. Something I was never able to do. I suppose I resented that a little.
"In the beginning I thought she was just your way of getting back at me. Too late, I realized that wasn't the case. And by then, the hole I'd dug for myself was too deep. So when she was … when it happened, and you wouldn't let me help you…"
"You sent your lawyer to see me. Not even a word of regret for Annie."
Judd's deep sigh was full of that emotion. "Did you know I came to her service?"
Cain hadn't known. It shocked the hell out of him.
"I was, of course, uninvited. I … was at the back of the church. I wanted to see you. To tell you how sorry I was. But I lost my nerve. Imagine that. Me? Judd MacCallister. Unnerved by his son's grief. I hoped that by my offering you help, we could somehow… Oh, hell. It doesn't matter what I thought." He went quiet for a minute, then looked up at his son. "It might comfort you to know that her name's on a new wing at Dallas Memorial."
That brought Cain's head around. "What?"
"The Annie MacCallister Pediatric Wing. I donated it in her name. I think she would've liked it."
Shaken, Cain looked away, rubbing a thumb beneath his nose. "Thank you."
"If I could've brought her back for you with all that money, I would have."
The silence stretched between them now like the chasm that yawned between their two lives. There was no going back, Cain thought. No matter what. But the idea that her name would be remembered for something good instead of for the awful way she'd died took some of the sting out of the years of bitterness.
"Your phone call yesterday," Judd continued, "the one that brought me here, was too brief to say the things I've wanted you to know and the letters I'd sent you in prison were returned unopened. You should know that my threat to disinherit you when you married Annie was an empty one. Your trust is still there. It always has been. It's yours, Cain. I want you to have it."
Cain rubbed an aching spot between his eyes. "Do you think a hospital wing changes everything? Do you really think I want your money? That it will solve anything between us?"
Judd stood and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Do you see that man over there? Your snoring friend? Is that what you want for the rest of your life? Is that what you want for Maggie?"
"Maggie and I have an agreement—"
"I know all about the agreement," Judd said. "And I know about the look in her eyes when she told me you were innocent. She's in love with you. Surely this whole mess hasn't blinded you to that."
Cain shook his head. "She's lonely. That's all. And scared. Besides, it's a bit of a moot point, isn't it? I mean, I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison."
"Self-pity doesn't suit you."
Cain bowed his head as he dropped down on the cot again. "Get out."
"Son, I know you're innocent. I won't let this happen again. I promise you that. But you've got to fight for what's out in that hallway, waiting for you. Hang on to her, dammit. Or you're not the man I think you are."
"The perennial convict?"
"No," Judd said carefully. "A man who's not too proud to grab a second chance when it comes around. And one who's wise enough to know how lucky he is to get one. Most of us never do." He rapped on the cell door and called for the guard, then turned back to Cain. "Greg Janeson's on his way here. He should be here within the hour."
Cain frowned. Greg Janeson was the attorney who had single-handedly masterminded his appeal. "You know my attorney?"
Judd didn't reply. He just waited for Cain to catch up. It only took him another moment. "Oh my God. You hired him. You hired him for the appeal. He wasn't some altruistic do-gooder, pro-bono—"
"He's all that and more. But we did just so happen to go to Yale together. If he'd told you the truth, that I'd convinced him to take your case on, would you have let him help you?"
He knew very well that he wouldn't have and today he'd still be sitting in… Hell, he was still sitting in jail.
"We'll get bail set," Judd said, "and have you out of here by sundown. Hang in there, Cain."
The jailer came and opened up the metal door and Judd disappeared down the hallway, leaving Cain to wonder after him. He'd set the appeal in motion? After everything that had happened? He couldn't get his mind around it. He'd spent too many years hating him to feel anything else. Now, he didn't know
what to think.
"Your wife's still out there. You want to see her now?" the jailer asked.
He tightened his jaw. Maggie was another story. His father was wrong about that. Cain knew how that one would end. "Yes. Send her in."
* * *
The swelling on his cheek had gone down a little, Maggie noticed as the guard let her in, but the bruise there had changed to an angry purple. And when he got to his feet, his movements were slow and stiff. But those were just the obvious changes. The ones she was more concerned about were the changes she saw in his eyes when he looked at her. He'd gone somewhere, far away from her emotionally. The last few days between them, all but erased.
Maggie moved toward him, awkwardly touching his arm. "Are you all right?" She lifted her hand to touch his cheek, but he moved away from her.
"Just fine. Great bed—" he gestured at Charlie "—great company. All the amenities…"
"We'll get you out of here. I promise you that." He didn't say anything and she took a step nearer. "I know you think I doubted you this morning—"
He wouldn't meet her eye. "Who could blame you?"
"But I didn't," she whispered. "I know who you are. And I've fallen in love with you, Cain. Did you hear me? I'm in love with you."
His gaze went dark as if she'd struck him. "Don't say that. Don't even think it. This is who I am. Take a good look at it. Is this what you want?"
"This isn't who you are. This is what Laird Donnelly's done to you." She reached out and touched his chest, felt the muscles there quake beneath her fingertips. "It's you I love. The man I've come to know. The man who pulled me out of that wash and held me all night long. The man who has stood by me through things most men would've run from. I never should have asked it of you, but if I hadn't, think what we would have missed."
Angry now, he turned away from her. "Maggie, I'm going back to prison. Hell, there's an open-and-shut case against me."
"It's all a lie and we both know it."
"They had less evidence in my last trial and they sent me up for fifteen to life."
"That's not going to happen. Cain. I'm not going to let it happen."
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