by Evie Nichole
She sat back and turned to look through the arched doorway that led into the kitchen. She’d been in there. One of the movers had been in here. The boxes had all been meticulously labeled. There had been no doubts as to where things went. So, Jesse had been confident in letting the movers unpack without much interference. She’d been more concerned about getting her kitchen put to rights so she would be able to cook and eat. There weren’t a lot of fast food options in the vicinity of her ranch. If the kitchen wasn’t useable, she wouldn’t be able to eat.
“But who packed the stuff and labeled it in the first place?” she whispered.
Jesse peered inside the buffet. She should have brought a flashlight. The alcove beneath the thing was far deeper than she had first imagined. It was like an endless pit. The big wood box filled with her mother’s wedding silver was right in front. Behind that, she spotted stack upon stack of what looked like smaller boxes. Taking the silverware container out, she set it aside and reached for the first mysterious stack. The boxes were made of pasteboard covered in some sort of decorative foil paper. Some of them had yellowing lace glued to their edges. A few even had some tiny plastic pearls added for decoration. They were all very distinctive.
The one on top was secured with a green velvet ribbon. Jesse pulled this open and then lifted the old lid. She heard the pasteboard crack, but it did not fall apart in her hands despite the fact that it seemed ready to do just that. The scent of old paper mingled with some kind of perfume was strong. The box was filled to the top with what looked to be letters and cards. The letters were folded neatly in two stacks.
Jesse reached gingerly into the box and pulled out the letter on top. It unfolded in her hands, and she looked at the date. It had been written before she was born. Many years before that time, actually, and probably a little while after her parents had gotten married. The letter had been written from her mother to her father. It opened with the words My Love.
The sting of tears caused Jesse to put the letter back and close the box. This was not what she was looking for. Rather, it was proof that suggested she was looking for something that did not exist anyway. This letter and probably the rest of the contents of this box and its companions all proved that what Avery Hernandez had told Jesse just a few hours ago at the hospital was entirely false.
With a heavy sigh, Jesse put the box back in the stack. She leaned into the buffet and pulled out two more stacks of these. She suspected that they were not all love letters from her mother to her father. Her mother had kept cards and letters from everyone. She loved to go back and read them later. Sometimes she had shown Jesse what the cards said. This had been the sort of thing to help Amelia Collins through the death of her own parents. They had died of old age, but she had been able to remain connected to them through the letters and cards that they had sent her.
Jesse had a brief bizarre thought that there was a lot lost these days since nobody sent real letters or cards anymore. What would happen if she sent Cal a letter? The thought was preposterous and produced a snorting giggle that made her clap her hands over her mouth despite the fact that she was alone.
This love letter nonsense was a fanciful kind of feeling. Jesse was still chuckling to herself when she reached far into the back left corner of the buffet. Then her fingers brushed what felt like a stack of notebooks. Jesse sucked in a quick breath of surprise. Pulling out a whole stack of her mother’s journals, Jesse eagerly set them on the rag rug beside her and picked up the one on top.
“This was written when I was maybe six or seven,” Jesse muttered. “Where are the most recent ones?”
She looked at the front cover of the notebook. The outside was covered in doodles. Jesse recalled her mother doodling on phone books, message pads, and pretty much everything she could get a pencil on. That was how she kept her brain focused on what she was talking or thinking about.
Flipping the cover open, Jesse realized that there was a tiny number scribbled onto the upper left-hand corner of the inside cover of the journal. It wasn’t a fancy journal. It was just a composition notebook with a black-and-white marbled cover. The number in the corner was twenty-two.
“Twenty-two, as in this is the twenty-second notebook she’s written in? Holy cow!” Jesse breathed.
She scrambled to open the next book. Twenty-one. Then twenty. They were counting backwards as though they had been stacked in here in some semblance of an order. But there was no telling how that order had been affected by the restacking done by strangers.
Jesse hurriedly found another stack of journals. This group began at ten. Then she found a stack that included twenty-nine. But the first date in the journal was well over a year before her parents’ accident.
“I need number thirty.”
Jesse got up on her knees. The afghan fell to the floor, forgotten. She dug in the rear corner of the buffet. There were no more journals on the left side. Reaching to the right, she pulled one stack from there, but most of the contents on that side included more boxes of correspondence.
She finally found journals two through twenty-nine. Her search had not lasted long. Somehow, time seemed to have stopped anyway, and she had no idea what time it was. The journals were all lined up before her on the rag rug in perfect order and set in groups of five. The dates matched. So, why was there no number one? Had her mother thrown it away? It seemed unlikely, considering the fact that she’d kept all of the others. It would not have made sense. And number thirty was missing as well.
Jesse got up and grabbed the afghan. She’d started to feel like an ice cube again. Pacing back and forth in front of the table, she tried to remember if her mother had still been journaling right before the accident that had claimed her life. Squeezing her eyes closed, Jesse tried to recall where her mother had kept her journal. Had there been someplace else that the final journal would have been stashed?
Jesse might have thought that was a real possibility if it hadn’t been for the fact that journal number one was also missing. Not only that, but she could well remember that her mother had continually put her journal in and out of the buffet. That was what had given Jesse the idea to look here in the first place. This was where her mother kept her correspondence and her personal papers. Birth certificates, deeds, and other legal papers had gone in the safety deposit box at the bank. Personal items went in here. This was a place that her father never touched. It had belonged solely to Amelia Collins, and the whole family knew it.
Standing still, Jesse shivered as she felt a chill slide down her spine. She was already cold. This was different. This was more. If number one and number thirty were missing, it suggested someone other than her mother had decided to take those journals for a reason. Why?
It seemed like the best way to find those journals was to find the person who had packed up her parents’ things all those years ago. That person would have had unfettered access to those journals and to any other “proof”—if that was even what someone was trying to find in those journals.
What if this house was full of proof? What if that’s why Joe Hernandez had wanted this place cleared out and still had no desire to allow Jesse access to her parents’ home and belongings? If he was hiding something, then it would make perfect sense that he would go to great lengths to cover up his shame or his secrets. Joe Hernandez did not like to be exposed. He would rather pretend that he was always perfectly right.
Jesse returned to the fire. She was so cold now, much colder than she should have been on a wet summer night. Her fingers were icy, and her blood felt sluggish in her veins. Perhaps it was time to admit that she was frightened.
Standing very close to the fire, Jesse let the crackling flames soothe her agitation. She could find the answers that she needed. She wasn’t a helpless eleven-year-old anymore. She was a grown woman. She had control of her destiny. And right now, that meant it was time to uncover the lies that had been woven around her life when her parents died so mysteriously in an accident that nobody could explain away.
Cal rolled over in his bed and blinked at the clock. Two o’clock. Something had most definitely woken him up. What was it? Had that truck finally made it out of the pasture? That could have created a noise that had the potential to wake him out of a sound sleep.
Then he heard it. There was a knocking on the front door. No. Not just a knocking. Someone was pounding on the front door. With all of the crap going on in his life right now, there was absolutely no telling who it might be.
He threw his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Reaching for a pair of sweatpants, he managed to step into the legs without toppling over. He hiked them up over his hips and then looked around for a shirt. The only thing that caught his eye was a sweatshirt. He pulled that over his head without paying any attention to what it was. Then he made his way out of his bedroom and down the hallway.
Cal had moved into his parents’ bedroom years before. It was bigger. The bed was bigger. And somehow, it just felt wrong to Cal to be sleeping in his childhood bed at nearly thirty years old. The pounding on the front door continued as he traversed the long hallway upstairs in the old farmhouse. His feet were bare and the floor was squeaky.
“This had better be a freaking emergency,” he muttered.
He almost added that someone better have died, except the recent events with his father had sort of changed his view of that possibility. He wasn’t fond of his father. Joe Hernandez was a difficult man to love, but Cal wasn’t ready for him to die.
“Okay!” Cal shouted when he got to the bottom of the stairs. “I’m coming, dammit! Stop pounding on the damn door!”
Of course, the stairwell in this rambling old house hit the first floor at the back of the house instead of by the front door like most modern floor plans. That meant Cal still had to wind his way through the maze of rooms all tacked haphazardly together in a way that suggested the house had been built and then added onto more times than the architecture could handle.
Finally, Cal made his way to the front door and fought to get the old deadbolt undone. He’d been meaning to spray the thing with some lubricant forever. He just never got around to it. When he managed to get the door open, he was shocked to find himself staring down at Jesse. Somehow, he had mentally convinced himself that one of his brothers had come out here—probably Laredo—to tell him he needed to go back to Denver to be with their family because of his father’s illness.
“Hey.”
He blinked at her. “You pound on my door at two in the morning, and that is what you have to say about it?”
“I need to talk to you about something.” She pushed her way past him into the house. “Now.”
That was the problem with people when they felt far too comfortable in a space. This house had been Jesse’s home for a long time. Of course she felt like she should be able to just walk inside. But a few hours before, she had refused to talk to him. Now she wanted to change her mind. Now?
Cal had to mentally pause for a moment to collect himself. Jesse was already heading for the kitchen. He could hear her in there banging around, probably looking for the kettle to make tea. But for the moment, he needed to assure himself that the truck was no longer stranded in his pasture.
Stepping out onto the porch, Cal wrapped his arms around his midsection as he stared into the blackness of the home pasture. The telltale yellow, white, and red running lights were no longer hovering out there in the dark. It was eerily silent. No more hum of a diesel engine. It appeared that the trucker had taken Cal’s advice and left the way he’d come in. That was good. Wasn’t it?
“Cal!” Jesse’s voice drifted through the house. “Are you trying to catch a cold or something? It’s freezing out there. Shut the door and come inside.”
He chuffed out a long-suffering sigh. Only that sassy bit of goods would have the audacity to shout something like that at him after barging her way inside his house in the middle of the night. Jesse was unique. It was the reason she had always fascinated him. It was the reason he loved her. And what he felt for her had absolutely nothing to do with any lingering brotherly emotions, no matter what his family seemed to think.
By the time Cal made it to the kitchen, the flame on the stove’s burner was licking hungrily over the bottom of his ancient kettle. The water was beginning to boil. He could hear it hissing against the metal sides of the kettle itself. Soon it started to whistle. He automatically opened a cabinet and pulled out two mugs. Jesse was already reaching for the tea tin.
“I should throw you out,” Cal grumbled.
She didn’t even blink. “But you won’t because you want to know what would bring me here in the middle of the night.”
“After telling me you didn’t want to talk to me? Yeah. I do.” Cal tried to decipher what he was feeling inside but gave up after only a few moments. Everything was so jumbled that he didn’t even want to go there.
She put the tea bags in the mugs. The kettle began to whistle, and Cal swept it up off the stove and poured each mug full of boiling water. Then, as the tea began to steep, he rubbed his eyes and tried to shake the rest of the sleep from his mind.
“I’m sorry to wake you.” She murmured the words so softly that he almost missed them. “I didn’t know who else to turn to.”
He bit back the sarcastic response that wanted to pop out. She didn’t need that kind of thing right now. She obviously had something very serious on her mind. So, he took a seat on one of the barstools and tugged his tea close enough to wrap his hands around the mug. The heat felt good against his hands. Sometimes he thought his chronological age might be twenty-nine but his physical age was more like eighty.
She didn’t sit. That alone told him that she was incredibly agitated. He looked at the very familiar blond hair and tanned complexion. Jesse had always been beautiful. She had the sort of looks that some women paid good money to achieve. She was athletically built and very fit from her work on the ranch. Her hands weren’t soft. They were calloused and scarred like a working woman’s. Her nails were clipped short and unpainted. She never wore makeup, but he’d seen her slather on so much sunscreen that she could be accused of using a bottle a day just because she was so paranoid of looking leathery in her old age.
It was really her hair that had always fascinated him though. The Hernandez men had black hair. Even their mother had dark-brown hair to go with her blue eyes. Jesse’s white-blond locks were soft as silk. She usually tried to keep the waist-length mass of hair tied up. She wore braids and buns and piled the stuff on top of her head just so she could smash a ball cap over the top of it. But right now, all of that glorious hair was hanging over her shoulders and down her back in curly waves of silk that begged a man to run his fingers through it.
Cal clenched his hands together and then forced them back to his mug. She was not here right now because she wanted to explore a romantic relationship with him. Considering everything that had happened in the last day, he would be lucky if she would ever think of him in that way again.
“I need you to remember back to when my folks were in that accident.” Jesse’s words were more a plea than request. “I need you to remember who packed up their house to put everything in storage. Can you think about that for me?”
Cal’s memory of that time was surprisingly sharp, but not for the reasons one might expect. His family had acquired a new child. Generally that would be enough to create an indelible mark in a young man’s memory. But the situation had been so much more complicated than that, and Cal wasn’t sure that Jesse was really ready for all of this.
“What did Avery tell you?” Cal asked, referring to his mother. “I can tell that she said something. Laredo mentioned that you didn’t want to go to the hospital with them.”
“I’d already been to the hospital.” Jesse wrapped the string attached to the tea bag around her index finger and began bouncing the bag inside her mug. She continued to stare at the surface of the mug as though she were seeing nothing else in her mind. “Your mom
called me first. I don’t know why. She wanted me there, I guess. She claims he was asking for me. I don’t buy it. Or maybe I do. Sometimes I don’t know what to believe about Joe.”
Cal could well understand that. “He’s a difficult man to figure out. But if Mom said he was asking for you, he probably was.”
“But why?”
“Because he’s always had a soft spot for you.” Cal sighed. This was going to get uncomfortable. “Because of your mother.”
“Because he’s my father?” She seemed to throw the words out there as if she could not bear to hold them in any longer. “Is that the big secret everyone has been hiding from me all these years?”
“Is that what you believe?” Cal asked quietly. His heart was hammering against his chest, and he felt as though he could not breathe.
“No. It isn’t what I believe!” she shot back. Her hands moved so violently that her tea sloshed over the edge of her mug. “But it’s what your mother told me! That is what she said when I got to the hospital. She told me that your father is my father and that he’s a cheating bastard who was in love with my mother for years! Years, Cal! How am I supposed to believe that? And if I do or if I don’t, what does this do to my life?”
There were tears in her eyes, and Cal wanted to make them go away. He didn’t know what to do. He had not anticipated that his mother would do such a thing or go to such great lengths to hurt the child of a dead rival. What sense did it make?
Cal reached for her. She pushed him away. He reached for her again. This time he wrapped his arms around her body and let her rage at him. She pounded his chest with her hands and cried and moaned and raved like a lunatic until she finally collapsed against him in a fit of tears.