Front Range Cowboys (5 Book Box Set)

by Evie Nichole

  Cal got to his feet and picked up the small stack of boxes. “Good idea.”

  Jesse began unloading the contents of the buffet. It was a lot more stuff than she had initially imagined. There were ten boxes total of loose cards and letters. Then she pulled the twenty-eight journals out of their far corners and set them in the center of the dining table.

  “Okay.” Cal set a pretty lacy-paper-edged card on the tabletop. “This pile is for immediate family.” Then he placed a second card on the table in presumably what would become another pile. “These will be friends.”

  “Male or female?” Jesse wanted to know.

  Cal’s brow knit together. “Let’s go with both for now. If there’s something suspicious, we’ll make another pile. Does that sound good?”

  “As good as anything else could.” Jesse looked at the huge amount of stuff on the dining table and sighed. “This seems like a ridiculous task.”

  “These have meaning, Jesse. We just have to find it.” Cal reached out and gently hugged her to his body. “Those men were looking for something. Maybe we’ll never really know what they wanted or who sent them, but there’s no doubt that it would help to know what happened all those years ago. This is the closest thing we have to answers.”

  “Then, I suppose we need to get reading.” Jesse chose a chair and sat down. Then she picked up a card. “And I apologize in advance for any creepy weirdness you learn about my family.”

  He actually laughed and offered her a wink. “I think I’d better say the same.”

  That was certainly true enough. The second card that Jesse picked up was to her mother from Joe Hernandez. It wasn’t really all that old. Or rather it had been sent to her mother in the mail just a few months before her death. That was according to the postmark.

  Jesse stared at the masculine handwriting on the yellowed surface of the card. It was so very strange to see this from Joe. She cleared her throat. It was tempting to just set the card down and forget about it. She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to wonder. She just wanted to pretend that nothing had happened.

  “What’s wrong, Jesse.”

  Why was it so easy for Cal to read her? It was a little irritating sometimes. “I found a card from your dad to my mom. It was on her birthday the last year of her life.”

  “What does it say?” Cal wasn’t being pushy. He remained seated in his chair halfway down the table. Resting his elbow on the tabletop, he put his chin in his hand and waited for her to get her thoughts together.

  Jesse sighed. “He tells her to remember that she has a neighbor close by who knows her better than anyone else. He makes a comment about how she’s still nowhere near his age but that she makes him feel younger every year and he’s grateful for that.”

  “Is that weird?” Cal wanted to know. “I don’t think I would have said anything like that to someone that I didn’t know really well. Like you, for instance. I’m not going to send that to some random neighbor.”

  Jesse waved the card in front of her. “Would you send a birthday card through the mail to a neighbor at all?”

  “I wouldn’t give them a card. Period,” Cal said firmly. “It’s just not my place as a neighbor. And if I wanted to give a neighbor a birthday gift and they were, say, married with a child, it would be a gift to the family.” Cal shrugged. He looked kind of uncomfortable. “It just seems weird, I guess.”

  Jesse was nodding as she reached for a new box. She pulled the white ribbon and opened the pasteboard lid. As she pulled out the first letter, she realized that she was looking at a letter from her mother to Cal’s father.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Jesse muttered. She set the letter down and rifled through the contents of that box until she could be sure what she was seeing was right. “I think I found an entire box of letters from my mother to your father.”

  Jesse pulled out the first letter and quickly perused the contents. “I don’t get it. She’s talking about a baby.”

  “A baby?”

  “Yes.” Jesse nodded her head and kept reading. “I keep thinking about that baby and wondering what happened to him. I keep wondering what he would have been like when he became a man. Would he be like you? We won’t ever know.” Jesse stared at the words again and again before looking up at Cal. “What baby?”

  “Did your mother have any other children that you knew of?” Cal asked slowly. She could actually see him thinking this through in his head. “It almost sounds like your mother had a miscarriage or gave a kid up or something.”

  Jesse felt as though her gut was twisting into a horrible knot of doubt. “So, obviously, I’m not this baby.”

  “Obviously,” Cal agreed. “What do the other letters say?”

  Jesse began opening them quickly, skimming the contents and then putting them aside. They were mostly focused on how depressed Amelia was feeling. She felt isolated. She felt angry. She felt sad. There was a lot of bitterness in those lines of handwritten text.

  “When were those written?” Cal suddenly wanted to know. “Is there a date or anything?”

  “No.” Jesse tried to look at the handwriting, but her mother had been one of those women who had very pretty writing with big loops and swirls that seemed to be as consistent as a computer font. “There’s no real identifier. They have dates, but not years. They start in February and then go through about—well, February.”

  “So, about a year,” Cal mused. “But when?”

  “Oh!” Jesse gasped as she read quickly through a letter that sent chills racing down her spine. “This one talks about meeting a man named Rawling.”

  “Shit.”

  Cal’s low expletive was a pretty good reflection of how she felt about this whole thing too. Jesse looked at the date. “February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day a little over a year since the first letter. She’s talking about going by herself to the burger joint in town. She felt sad because she was all alone and everyone else had someone. Then she met a man named Rawling who was alone too. He bought her dinner, and now they have another date.”

  “Why would she tell my father that?” Cal shook his head. “What kind of sense does that make?”

  “I’m going to suggest that your father was already married, because we know that he’s quite a lot older than she is and you’re a lot older than I am,” Jesse added. “So, basically, it sounds like your father and my mother had a thing going. I don’t even know why she would have been here though. She wasn’t from this area.”

  “Staying with a friend?”

  Jesse shook her head. That wasn’t how things went in her family. Her grandparents had been strict. Her mother hadn’t kept contact with them after she had married Rawling Collins and moved down here to the front range. Only Amelia’s sister had remained in contact.

  “I don’t know why my mother was here. I wonder if I’m somehow related to the Farrells. Maybe my mother was staying with them. Maybe that’s how she met your father. She fell in love with him, got pregnant, and then ultimately either lost the baby or gave it up because your father was already married.”

  “My mother must have known some of this,” Cal said softly. He gazed at Jesse with a look of mingled shock and horror on his handsome face. “She’s furious with you for something that not only wasn’t your fault but happened before you were born!”

  Well, if that didn’t just fit right in with all of the other crap going on in Jesse’s life right now. Sheesh! Except, if this was about a child that nobody knew existed and had no claim to anything because it had been adopted, then who had searched Jesse’s house to try and find old letters and papers? What if there was another player in this story that they hadn’t even identified yet?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  There was too much running through Cal’s mind for him to have any ability to nail down a single thought and try to absorb it. The information was so strange. There were too many pieces and too many players. Had he ever suspected that his father might have a sixth child? It seemed
preposterous. For so long, the whispers had all been surrounding Jesse, but she was quite literally an innocent in this.

  “Cal?”

  He looked up to find Jesse staring at him. His brain was on overdrive. All he could think about was the number of times that he had heard his mother being upset at his father in the last few weeks. Had his father been telling her things? Had Joe Hernandez sensed that his time was getting short? Had he been trying to make peace? And how could his mother have completely missed the mark on what was going on?

  “Cal.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not ignoring you.” Cal rubbed a hand down his face. “I’m just trying to figure out how this could go so completely wrong.”

  “What could go wrong?” Jesse was still looking through the contents of that box. “I’m over here trying to figure out how my mother got these letters.”

  “Huh?” Cal’s brain stuttered. “What do you mean?”

  “They were sent to your father. I mean, presumably.” She glanced into the box. “There aren’t any envelopes. Do you think she wrote him letters but never sent them?”

  Cal hadn’t even considered that possibility. “You mean that she felt so alone that even her journaling wasn’t cutting it?”

  “These predate those journals.” Jesse’s voice began to rise as she seemed to get more and more excited. “Think about it! These letters are like the prequel to her journals. The journals were from her marriage. I said she always journaled, but that’s because she did as long as I was around. I remember her writing in a journal from the time I was little.”

  “Therapists tell people to write letters,” Cal mused. “My mother used to do that. She said her therapist told her to.”

  “What?” Jesse drew back, looking alarmed. “Your mother had a therapist? What happened to the letters?”

  “She burned them.” Cal began to wonder. He scratched his lower lip and gave it a tug. He was starting to see a lot of things that had happened in his childhood as slightly suspect now. “She claimed that the therapist had told her to burn the letters as a way to let go of her feelings.”

  Jesse made a face. “I suppose that seems reasonable.”

  “I suppose. But what if part of the reason she burned them was that she didn’t want this happening?” Cal made a gesture to the table in front of them. “Your mother kept everything. It hasn’t exactly done us any good though, has it? We have more questions than ever before.”

  “We have answers,” Jesse insisted. “We know that my mother had another child. There is another kid out there. I’m not the love child.” Jesse jumped to her feet suddenly and fisted her hands together. She waved them at the ceiling and laughed as though she had lost her mind. “I’m not your sister! Do you know how good that feels?”

  Cal did not remind her that, for whatever reason, their parents had continued to carry on the affair long years after that so-called love child had been born. Which brought his mind back around to a question that he’d tossed around a lot lately. “Can you remember your parents fighting about anything before they died?” Cal asked Jesse.

  “Fighting?” She looked confused. “About your dad? No.”

  “No. About anything.” He struggled to get his point across without deliberately tarnishing her memories of her parents. “You know, do you remember if they were having just run-of-the-mill marital problems? Were they arguing? Were they not speaking to each other?”

  She sat back in her seat and frowned. “I guess that’s kind of hard for an eleven-year-old to judge, really. My dad had been on edge lately. He had been super grouchy. The day before they died, he got pissed at me for something I thought was pretty minor. I took Pixie out in the snow to ride, and he blew up at me when I got back.”

  “About what?”

  “That’s the thing,” she murmured thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I’ve always thought of that as part of the unfinished business when they died. It felt like there were plenty of things like that. Why did Daddy yell at me? What did I really do? Why had my mother been in the house sitting in her bedroom for like two days? Was she really sick? Was it something else?”

  “Sick?” Cal immediately picked up on this. “You said your mother was sick the last few days before the accident?”

  “That’s what Dad said,” Jesse amended. “He told me she was sick and we needed to leave her alone.”

  “So, maybe they were fighting?” Cal mused. “They were fighting. Your mother came over to my place to talk to my dad because she needed an old friend and he was the only person she had ever felt really understood her. Right?”

  “Right.” Jesse did not sound happy about this development. “I guess that’s possible.”

  “Why did they go to the Farrells’s that night without you?” Cal suddenly realized that nobody had ever really answered this question. It had been over a decade, and it still made no sense why Jesse would not have gone to the Farrells’s house with her parents for a family dinner.

  “I always stayed home when they went over on Tuesday nights for supper.” The words came out automatically. Jesse’s expression said as much. Then she seemed to realize what she was saying. Her expression froze, and she looked almost sick.

  Cal got up from his chair and moved closer to Jesse. “Why?”

  She was looking positively twitchy. She stood up and began to pace back and forth in front of the buffet. The old carpet was worn nearly threadbare in places, and Cal could nearly imagine her mother doing the exact same thing when she was trying to puzzle through how her life had ended up so much differently than she had imagined it would.

  “Who were the Farrells to us?” Jesse whispered. She stopped pacing and looked right at Cal. “Do you think we could talk to Melody? She’s engaged to your brother Cisco, right? She owns the Farrells’s house. All of their stuff is still in it.”

  Jesse’s words reminded Cal that there were still pieces of this puzzle that went together but did not make a picture. “You know who was very close to the Farrells? Or at least he says he was.”

  “Weatherby!” Jesse began bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “Oh my God, I forgot about that! He was always showing up at their place pretending to be nice. At least that’s what my dad always told the Farrells.”

  “What?” Cal drew back and looked at her. It was like he’d never seen her before. “You’ve never said anything about that before.”

  “It never seemed important.” She shrugged it off. “Think about it. Why would anyone care what my father thought of Paul Weatherby? The guy is fake. He’s always been fake. I can even remember Mr. Farrell tsking at my father and telling him that Weatherby meant well. The Farrells were always just so nice to everyone.”

  “And it got them screwed over in the end,” Cal muttered. It still burned him to no end that Paul Weatherby had tried to snatch the Farrell ranch right out from under their granddaughter, Melody. “If Cisco hadn’t intervened and set that situation right, Melody Farrell would be living on the streets and still owing the state for back taxes on that property instead of owning the whole thing and leasing it.”

  “To the Hernandez Land & Cattle Company,” Jesse mused. “That must stick in Weatherby’s gut like a dirty knife.”

  “Okay, we have too many pieces.” Cal took Jesse’s hand and dragged her toward the front door.

  “What are you doing?”

  He unlocked the door. “Getting some fresh air.”

  “You know we have two poor horses who would probably like their saddles off and a chance to lounge in the barn for a while,” Jesse reminded him.

  Cal shrugged it off. “They’re working animals. As long as they aren’t chasing after cows or riding fence lines, they’re happy.” He pushed the door open and stepped onto the little porch. It was really a nice house. “Wasn’t this place in your father’s family for years?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you ever remember your parents saying that they were related?”

  “What?” She jerked her hand out of
his grip and put it on her hip. Then she glared at him. “Are you calling me inbred?”

  “No!” Cal rolled his eyes. Was she really this obtuse? Sometimes Jesse’s brain moved too quickly for her logic to catch up. “I’m not talking about first cousins. I’m talking distant. Very distant. Think about it. Why else would your mother come here? At all. Ever?”

  “Oh.” She finally stopped looking daggers at him and moved toward the porch railing. Her fingers seemed to find grooves that were as familiar as breathing. She leaned away from the porch post and hung there for a moment as though she were a child once again. “I see what you’re saying. You think my mother was visiting the Farrells when she met your father. She gets pregnant, has to stay here to have the baby, because let’s just say my grandparents would have flipped out. Then she meets my father and has dinner with him on Valentine’s Day, and the rest is history.”

  Cal figured this was all reasonable. “It wouldn’t be a stretch to think about your father and your mother both being distantly related to the Farrells. Your father had probably been over to the Farrell place a few times while your mother was there, so he wasn’t totally unfamiliar. Having dinner with him would have been a pretty logical next step.”

  The slow recanting of the hypothetical story of her parents’ first meeting and subsequent relationship seemed pretty reasonable to Cal. Jesse’s gaze was focused faraway. It was almost as though she were looking out toward the Farrells’s ranch to try and puzzle out what had happened in the past.

  She shuddered quite suddenly. It was as if someone had poured ice down her back. “Melody’s mother.”

  “What?”

  “Melody is how old?”

  “I don’t know. Cisco’s age?” Cal hadn’t exactly asked everyone for birth certificates. “Why?”

  “Melody’s mother would have still been alive!” Jesse turned to stare at him. Her eyes were alight with excitement. “Do you know what that means?”

  Cal could picture it in his head, two young women, both attractive, and both ripe targets for men who took shameful advantage of them. Then they were left here with an aging couple that could not afford to take care of their babies.