Back in the Saddle

by Ruth Logan Herne

  “Tony called me.” She kept her voice soft as Noah worked the puzzle packaging open.

  “He wants you back on the force,” her mother guessed. “This is good, because you are your father’s daughter, an officer of acclaim.”

  “He reminded me how well we worked together and that good police work should rule the day.” Angelina watched as Noah concentrated on a particularly tough corner of the puzzle box. When he got it open, he screeched success.

  “I did it!”

  “So you did, clever boy. Dump them out, and I’ll be right there to build it with you.”

  “Okay!”

  Isabo kept her voice soft. “They have space on their squad?”

  “He suggested there would always be a space for me.”

  “You miss it.” Her mother slipped plastic wrap over the tray of sweet rolls. “As your father did before you.”

  She missed parts of it. She’d loved her job. But shouldn’t sacrificial love always take precedence? “I miss being on the force. But I’m the reason we’re here. Perhaps more diligence after the conviction would have saved my father’s life. So now we have different choices, Mami.”

  “You have no guilt.” The rise of Isabo’s voice drew Noah’s quick interest. She breathed deep and softened her tone. “Guilt lies with the coward who pulled the trigger. Not with the daughter who served her city so well, who filled her parents with such pride. We are family, Mary Angela. But I do not like being alone all the time, even with my precious grandson so near. Too much cold, too much snow, too much darkness. I think sometimes I am to go crazy here.”

  “I will change things soon, I promise you.”

  Tears brightened her mother’s eyes. The solitude and the long darkness of winter were taking their toll. “I know you want to go back.” Angelina sighed, watching Noah spill the forty-eight piece puzzle onto the floor. “Although I have come to love it here.”

  “A trained detective, working as a domestic.”

  “Well, it’s a little more than your typical housekeeper’s job,” Angelina replied. “I don’t mind the work and I love the people. I feel as though I am a member of this family. And I love this part of the country. So open, so free.” She handed her mother a clutch of tissues. “But I want you and Noah happy, so we must look at that.”

  “We pray for guidance,” Isabo declared as she swabbed her eyes with the tissue. “Do not mind me. The long hours of darkness wear me down. I will be fine, and Noah will be fine. In the meantime, there is a small child who waits.”

  “His wait is now over,” Angelina announced as she crossed the small room with a fresh cup of coffee in hand. “I’ve come to do puzzles with my boy.”

  “How many? A lot?” Noah’s emphasis meant he was concerned about how much time she had.

  She set her coffee down and sat beside her son on the floor. “I have an hour. How many do you think we can do in an hour?”

  He made a face. “How long is an hour?”

  “It is the length of two Dora episodes. Plus a little bit more.”

  Noah scrubbed his runny nose with some tissues, his forehead wrinkled with intensity. “Th-that is a long time. I think it is at weast four puzzles.”

  “L-l-least,” she taught him, stressing the l. “Then we shall test your theory and see, my son.”

  Five puzzles later, Noah glanced up. Always at the end of her visits, he would study the clock as if wondering why the small machine had so much power over his mother. And despite their reclusive life, Noah already sensed differences in their existence. He saw families on TV living together. Moms who came home from work and had supper with their children. One day soon he would ask why they were different, and how would she answer? Besides, was he really any safer here, on the far side of the ranch, than he would be in the ranch house with her?

  Having a degree of separation had made sense when she first moved here, her father’s murder fresh in their hearts and heads. But it didn’t make sense to keep hiding her mother and son any longer. And Tony’s phone call opened a new door of possibility.

  “Will you come tomorrow?” Noah looked up, hopeful.

  She shook her head as they boxed up the fifth puzzle. “There’s a snowstorm coming.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “There are scientists who study the air over the ocean, and they watch what is happening in Canada, the land north of us. They see that a great wind and a big push of cold air are going to mix together, and that will bring a lot of snow.”

  “Like when I help ’Buela mix things?”

  “Yes, but bigger. This will bring much snow for many miles. The roads will have to be cleared. After that I will come.”

  “If you lived here, I wouldn’t have to miss you so much.” Head down, he whispered the words, not daring to look at her.

  Her heart shattered into a thousand tiny sharp-edged pieces, and it took great effort to keep her face placid. “I know. And one day soon that will be the case. But right now we are so blessed to have a warm home for you here with your grandmother who loves you as much as I do.”

  Her mother placed the large wrapped pan of cinnamon rolls next to Angelina’s purse.

  It was time to go. Past time, actually. She stood, grabbed her coat, and bent to kiss her son’s soft head. “I will be back soon, little man.”

  He nodded, still looking at the puzzle.

  She didn’t push him to give her a long hug good-bye because she knew his tender nature. He’d do it if she asked, but his sympathetic heart was better equipped to handle the moment of separation if she quietly went out the door. A hug of longing would make them both weep. In the end, staying unemotional was the better way to go.

  She climbed into the car, started the engine, and cried all the way home.

  Colt stared, rubbed his eyes, then peered through the first sifting snowflakes, precursors to the impending storm.

  His father’s SUV, the one Angelina took to the city that morning, was traveling down the old gravel road that led up to the rustic cabin his father and uncle had used for hunting long years back. The forest on that slope had thickened over the last decade. He couldn’t see the cabin from where he stood. Nor could he see any smoke that would be coming from the wood-burning stove if someone was staying there.

  Why would anyone—he corrected himself—why would Angelina drive up to the old cabin?

  The SUV slid as it turned onto the curving two-lane below. The car swerved, skidded, then straightened, but not before his heart did the very same thing.

  The dark green SUV disappeared from view. If it actually was Angelina, that should put her home in about fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty with back roads already growing slick.

  He turned the red gelding and scanned the thick woods again.

  Nothing.

  But he couldn’t let it go.

  Working hedge funds was a lot like playing poker. A skilled player keyed in on more than the cards, and Colt was a skilled player on Wall Street. He’d developed a keen instinct for subterfuge that usually served him well in the financial markets—especially his skills in assessment of people.

  Concerns about Angelina had been eating at him.

  She brushed off compliments, but liked them.

  She maintained a quiet profile, even when happy.

  She kept an almost solemn affect, an even keel in every situation.

  He’d seen guys with the same MO in downtown Manhattan. A little too careful, a touch overcautious, trying too hard to blend. But what did a Latina American housekeeper in Gray’s Glen have in common with some of the more successful financiers on Wall Street?

  A secret.

  Why else would the beautiful housekeeper venture up the eastern slope if not to go to the empty cabin? Was she hiding something there? Someone?

  Probably a boyfriend, he reasoned. She gets to have a life, doesn’t she?

  The bawl of a calf brought him back on task, but as he spurred the horse over to help Hobbs, he decided a trip to the old cabin wo
uld become a priority once the storm passed. If there was something shady going on without Sam Stafford knowing, it was up to him and Nick to check it out.

  He pulled up alongside the old cowpoke, helped direct three young cows through a gate to the lower pasture, then backed up the horse to give a calf room to follow. The calf sidestepped through the gate as if dancing; unfazed by the combination of wind and cold.

  Hobbs’s offhand remark from the night before came back to Colt as he headed back up to lead more pregnant heifers to the accessible lower pasture. “Too many people usin’ this, that, and the other thing to mess up their brains.” Could someone be using the out-of-the-way cabin for illegal purposes? Could Angelina be involved in something like that?

  The flood of drugs hadn’t seemed as problematic when he was growing up. Or maybe it was because his father kept them too busy and too tired to have much time for messing up their lives. When Trey’s wife died of a drug overdose four years back, they’d faced a new reality.

  Could the beautiful house manager be part of a culture that brought so many to dire straits? Surely not. And why did he hate the idea that Angelina might be involved in something clandestine? He barely knew her. But if he was honest, he’d have to admit a part of him would like to change that, maybe get to know her better—with no weaponry involved. He’d become adept at short-term relationships back east. No harm, no foul. Around here, that kind of thing wasn’t the norm. Too many folks knowing too many other folks’ business, with a nod toward the straight and narrow.

  Colt liked his freedom, liked it just fine, thank you.

  Marriage hadn’t boded well for the Stafford men. Trey lost his wife to drugs, and Nick’s wife ran off to be with another man. Recalling the grief of his father’s two marriages, he realized the so-called sacred institution was anything but sacred in his family, and that was reason enough to avoid the state of matrimony.

  Nick needs a wife.

  It took about three-point-four seconds for that news flash to smack Colt upside the head a few hours later, so his earlier conclusions bit the dust.

  The sight of his two young nieces spilling into the kitchen while arguing over who should sit in the front seat of Daddy’s big Ford truck spelled the solution right quick. If Nick had a wife, she’d be riding up front and the girls would be sitting peaceably in the second seat of the extended cab. End of quarrel.

  “I get to sit up front on the way home.” Dakota hung her jacket on one of the lower hooks inside the kitchen door and moved toward the chair next to her father’s. “Daddy said I could sometimes, as long as I use my booster. So I will.”

  “No, you’re not, Dakota. I’m older; I get first pick.”

  “That’s not a rule!”

  Cheyenne hung her jacket on the back of the chair to her father’s right with a proprietary look and slid into the seat. “It should be.” She picked up her napkin, snapped it with just enough vigor to make her sister unhappy, then smiled across the room at Angelina. “Supper smells divine, Angelina.”

  Colt watched, waiting for Angelina’s smackdown. No way was she going to let the girls’ snippy behavior go unchecked, not after the rolling-pin incident the previous morning. And where does an eight-year-old learn phrases like “supper smells divine”? Not in Gray’s Glen, that’s for sure.

  “Thank you, Cheyenne. How were your dance lessons today?”

  No smackdown, no warning, no…nothin’. Obviously snippy little girls were held to a lower standard than grown men.

  Like that’s a surprise? They’re little kids. Cut them some slack.

  The slap of conscience felt wrong and right. Colt didn’t remember ever being allowed slack except with Hobbs and McMurty—the other long-established backbone of the Double S. “Murt” had retired and gotten himself married the year before, possibly not in that order, and he hadn’t come around as yet. Colt would have to call him. See what was up.

  Considering the girls, he wondered if maybe kids should be given some rope. Not enough to hang themselves, but enough to feel their way.

  Cheyenne looked like she wanted to bark out something she might regret later, but then she paused and drew a deep breath. “Lovely, thank you.”

  Colt read her face about the same time she noticed him in the doorway. And when she did, she didn’t look the least bit snippy or snarly. At that moment she looked like a happy-faced little girl. “Uncle Colt?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Our Uncle Colt is here?” The younger girl spun and looked at him, then her father. “This is Uncle Colt? For real?”

  “The one and only,” Nick told them as the other men took their places around the solid planked table. “We needed his help because Grandpa’s sick. So he came all the way here from New York.”

  “New York.” Cheyenne gazed up at him, mouth open. “Have you been to Broadway?”

  “I sure have.” He moved across the slate-tile floor. “I’ve been to Broadway and to Fifth Avenue, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Battery Park visiting Zelda the wild turkey.”

  “You what?” Her expression made him feel cut down to size, a feeling he should have grown used to on the ranch. “You visit a turkey?” She said it in a way that meant he was a few cards short of a full deck.

  “We have lots of turkeys here, but I bet your turkey is the nicest.” Dakota’s innocent approval made Colt feel tall again.

  He squatted low. “She was special because she was the only one. I liked going to visit her because it reminded me of being back here. In the hills.” He smiled into a pair of innocent blue eyes. “Big cities don’t have animals like you do in the country, and to have a wild turkey living in the park is a wonderful thing.”

  “Can you shoot ’er?” Hobbs stayed to the practical side of birds and food.

  “No, Hobbs.” Colt shared a look with Dakota that made her laugh. “She’s like…a pet.”

  The old guy snorted as he helped himself to a plateful of food. “We’re up to six weeks of spring hunting on wild birds now. They’re everywhere. Just the toms, of course, but that’s some mighty good eats right there.”

  “I don’t want you to shoot your turkey, Uncle Colt.” Dakota whispered the words and put a soft hand against his cheek. “It’s okay to love her so much.”

  His heart pressed hard against his ribs. Her face, her tone, the baby-soft look of understanding she shared with him made him feel like everything could be okay.

  Would it?

  Time would tell.

  Dakota’s tiny smile of belief made him realize it could, and that was half the battle. “Would you like to sit next to me, Dakota?”

  “Yes, please!”

  Cheyenne pouted like she’d been bested. Colt followed Angelina’s lead and ignored the behavior, but when Cheyenne’s ill-placed foot hit his shin and not her sister’s, his dark look put an end to her not-so-subtle kicks.

  Clearly Nick needed a wife to ride herd on these girls. Then, as the girls squabbled, he decided every kid should be an only child. He’d make note of that if the marriage bug ever hit him square in the jaw. No siblings meant less fighting at dinner. Digestion was tough enough without constant squabbles rounding the table.

  For now, he settled in next to a tiny feminine person and found his dinner companion to be one of the most inviting creatures he’d shared a meal with in years, realizing that might say something about his personal choices.

  As Dakota chattered on about why certain fairies turned bad, he glanced toward the kitchen and caught Angelina looking at him with approval. Without trying or wanting to, he’d scored points with the Hispanic beauty.

  He had no idea what she was up to, and despite his careless handling of family matters in the recent past, protecting the Stafford legacy meant a great deal to all of them. And yet—he liked her approval. An enigma.

  A slight smile quirked her cheek, and when her eyes crinkled in sweet appreciation of his easy regard for his six-year-old niece, he felt good inside. That wasn’t a bad deal, as long as it did
n’t compromise his intentions. He’d like to figure out what was going on behind Angelina’s careful facade and what Angelina was doing in the upland cabin. Once the storm was a thing of the past, he’d do just that.

  “School’s cancelled for at least a day,” Nick announced as he came down the back steps of the sprawling house a few hours later. “Maybe two days depending on how long the cleanup takes once the storm’s over.”

  “The girls must be thrilled.” Colt withdrew his handgun and shotgun from the gun safe in his father’s office and settled in to clean both. “Remember how we loved snow days? We could beat up Trey, go sledding, eat lots of food, and beat up Trey again.”

  “Someone had to establish pecking order,” said Nick reasonably. “And they weren’t real smackdowns. Were they?”

  “I think they qualified.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t take kindly to that now,” Nick replied as he settled into the wide leather recliner opposite Colt. “And the girls don’t care about snow days. They like school.”

  Shock stopped Colt’s wiping. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “They’re girls, Colt. They’re different.”

  That made no sense, but Colt didn’t have kids, so what did he know? “They’re beautiful kids.”

  “Yep.”

  “And I bet they’re smart.”

  “Real smart.”

  “Do they ride?”

  Nick hesitated too long. “No.”

  Colt wiped down the gun one last time, then addressed Nick’s response. “Why not?”

  When Nick faltered again, Colt understood. “Whitney didn’t want them to.”

  “She preferred to have them dance.”

  “So you teach them things they’ll never use and avoid the useful western stuff? Even now?”

  Nick’s gaze went hard. “What’s that mean?”

  “Well…” Colt spoke slowly, but with conviction. “Whitney’s gone. What would be wrong with the girls learning how to rope and ride now?”

  “You think it’s that easy? You don’t understand anything.”

  “Which part? The wife leaving? Or raising two girls who might want to learn about the ranch but their father won’t teach them?”