Big Sky Mountain

by Linda Lael Miller

  Maggie clicked the mouse, and her printer began spewing sheets of paper as she turned to face Hutch and Slade head-on.

  “I’ll spare you all the legal jargon,” she said, gathering the papers from the printer tray, separating them into two piles and shoving these across the top of her desk, one set for each of them. “All the facts are there—you can read the wills over at your leisure.”

  Slade barely glanced at the documents and made no move to pick them up.

  “And what facts are those?” Hutch snapped, peevish.

  Pecker-head, Slade thought.

  Maggie interlaced her fingers and smiled benignly. It took more than a smart-ass cowboy to get under her hide. “The estate is to be divided equally between the two of you,” she announced.

  Stunned, Slade simply sat there, as breathless as if he’d just taken a sucker punch to the gut. A single thought hummed in his head, like a trapped moth trying to find a way out.

  What the hell?

  Hutch, no doubt just as shocked as Slade was, if not more so, leaned forward and growled, “What did you say?”

  “You heard me the first time, Hutch,” Maggie said, unruffled. She might have looked like a gracefully aging pixie, but she regularly chewed up the best prosecutors in the state and spit them out like husks of sunflower seeds.

  Slade said nothing. He was still trying to process the news.

  “Bullshit,” Hutch muttered. “This is bullshit.”

  Maggie sighed. “Nevertheless,” she said, “it’s what Mr. Carmody wanted. He was my client, and it’s my job to see that his final wishes are honored to the letter. After all, Whisper Creek belonged to him, and he had every right to dispose of his estate however he saw fit.”

  Slade finally recovered enough equanimity to speak, though his voice came out sounding hoarse. “What if I told you I didn’t want anything?” he demanded.

  “If you told me that,” Maggie responded smoothly, “I’d say you were out of your mind, Slade Barlow. We’re talking about a great deal of money here, in addition to a very profitable ranching operation and all that goes with it, including buildings and livestock and mineral rights.”

  Another silence descended, short and dangerous, pulsing with heat.

  Hutch was the one to break it. “When did Dad change his will?” he asked.

  “He didn’t change it,” Maggie said without hesitation. “Mr. Carmody had the papers drawn up years ago, when my father and grandfather were still with the firm, and he personally reviewed them six months ago, after he got the diagnosis. This is what he wanted, Hutch.”

  Hutch snapped up his copy of the document and got to his feet. Slade rose, too, but he left the papers where they were. None of this seemed real to him—he was probably dreaming. Any moment now, he’d wake up in a cold sweat and a tangle of sheets, in his lonely, rumpled bed over at the duplex where he’d been living since he came back to Parable ten years ago, after college, a stint in the military and a brief marriage followed by a mostly amicable divorce.

  “I’ll be damned,” Hutch muttered, his voice like sandpaper. He was dressed for ranch work, in old jeans, a blue cotton shirt and a pair of well-worn boots, which probably meant he’d had no more notice about this meeting than Slade had.

  “Thanks, Maggie,” Slade heard himself say as he turned to leave.

  He wasn’t grateful; he’d spoken out of habit.

  She got up from her chair, rounded the desk and pursued him, forcing the printout of his father’s will into his hands. “At least read it,” she said. “I’ll set up another meeting in a few days, when you’ve both had time to absorb everything.”

  Slade didn’t answer, but he accepted the paperwork, felt it crumple in his grasp as his fingers tightened reflexively around it.

  Moments later, as Slade opened the door of his truck, Hutch was beside him again.

  “I’ll buy your half of the ranch,” he said, grinding out the offer. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the money—I’ve got plenty of that anyway—but Whisper Creek has been in my family for almost a hundred years, and my great-great-grandfather built the original house and barn with his own hands. The place ought to belong to me outright.”

  The emphasis on the phrase my family was subtle, but it was an unmistakable line in the sand.

  Slade met his half brother’s fierce gaze. Reached in to take his hat off the passenger seat where he’d left it earlier, resting on its crown, before heading into Maggie’s office. “I’ll need to give that some thought,” he said.

  With a visible effort, Hutch unclamped the hinges of his jaws. “What’s there to think about?” he asked, after another crackling pause. “I’ll pay cash, Barlow. Name your price.”

  Name your price. Slade knew he ought to accept the deal, and just be glad John Carmody had seen fit to claim him, albeit posthumously. All he had to do was say yes, and he could buy that little spread he’d had his eye on for the past couple of years, pay cash for it, instead of depleting his savings for the down payment. But something prevented him from agreeing, something that ran deeper than his utter inability to act on impulse.

  Indirectly, John Carmody had, at long last, acknowledged his existence. He needed to be with that knowledge for a while, work out what it meant, if anything.

  “I’ll get back to you,” Slade finally reiterated, climbing up behind the wheel of his truck and putting on his hat. “In the meantime, I’ve got a county to look after.”

  With that, he shut the truck door.

  Hutch thumped the metal hard with the heel of one palm, then turned and stormed away, rounded the hood of the Whisper Creek pickup, yanked open the door and jumped into the driver’s seat.

  Slade watched as the other man ground the engine to life, shoved it into Reverse and threw some gravel in the process. He was all sound and fury, though. Half again too smart to actually break the speed limit with the sheriff looking on.

  With a wry twist to his mouth, Slade waited a few moments, started his own rig and pulled onto the narrow side street. He was supposed to be in his office over at the courthouse, assigning his day shift deputies to patrol various parts of the county, but he headed for the highway instead. Five minutes later, he pulled up in front of his mother’s place, an old trailer with rust-speckled aluminum skirting and a plywood addition that served as living quarters.

  As a kid, Slade had been about half-ashamed of that jumble of metal and wood, jerry-rigged together the way it was, lacking only waist-high weeds, a few rattletrap cars up on blocks and household appliances on the porch to qualify as out-and-out redneck. Callie nagged him into power-washing the two-toned walls of the trailer—the part that housed the shop—at least twice a year, and he painted the rest of it regularly, too.

  This week, all the words on the dusty reader-board at the edge of the gravel parking lot were even spelled correctly. Acrylic nails, half price. Highlights/perms, ten percent off.

  Slade smiled as he shut off the truck and got out.

  The shop didn’t open for business until ten o’clock, but Callie already had the lights on, and, most likely, the big coffeepot was chugging away, too. As Slade approached, the door opened, and Callie, broom in hand, beamed a greeting.

  “Hey,” she called.

  “Hey,” Slade replied gruffly.

  Callie Barlow was a small woman, big-busted, with an abundance of auburn hair held to the top of her head by a plastic clasp roughly the size of the jaws-of-life, and she wore turquoise jeans, pink Western boots and a bright yellow T-shirt studded with little sparkly things.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, setting aside the broom and dusting her hands together. Her expression was warm, as always, but her gray eyes showed puzzlement bordering on concern. She knew Slade took his job seriously, and it wasn’t like him to drop in during working hours. “Is the county running itself these days?”

  “My deputies are holding down the fort,” Slade answered. “Is the coffee on?”

  He knew it was; he could sme
ll the rich aroma wafting through the open doorway, along with tinges of industrial-strength shampoo and a variety of mysterious hair-bending chemicals.

  “Sure,” Callie responded, stepping back so he could come inside the shop. “That’s about the first thing I do every morning—plug in the coffeepot.” The faintest ghost of a frown lingered in her eyes, and then her natural bluntness broke through. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Slade sighed, took off his hat and set it aside on the counter next to Callie’s cash register. “I don’t know if wrong is the word for it,” he said. “I just came from Maggie Landers’s office. It seems John Carmody remembered me in his will.”

  Callie’s eyes widened at that, then narrowed in swift suspicion. “What?” she asked and had to clear her throat afterward.

  He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans and tilted his head to one side, watching her. If Callie had known about the bequest ahead of time, she was doing a damn good job of hiding the fact.

  “Half,” he said. “He left me half of everything he had.”

  Callie sank into one of the dryer chairs, nearly bumping her head on the plastic dome. She blinked a couple of times, and one of her false lashes popped loose at the outside corner of her eye. She pressed it back down with a fingertip.

  “I don’t believe it,” she murmured.

  Slade raised the dome above the chair next to his mother’s and sat down beside her. Took her hand just long enough to give it a slight squeeze.

  “Believe it,” he said, not knowing where to go from there. He loved Callie and they were close, but she hadn’t raised him to come running home to her with this or any other kind of news.

  “What happens now?” she asked in a small voice. Her lower lip wobbled a little, and her eyes, usually bright and mischievous, looked dull, almost haunted.

  “I have no idea,” Slade answered quietly. “Not surprisingly, Hutch didn’t take it real well. He’s already offered to buy out my share of the ranch.”

  Callie closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again, the shine was back. She was tough—she’d had to be, orphaned young and later giving birth to a child out of wedlock in a town where such things mattered, and mattered a lot—but her problems hadn’t hardened her the way they would’ve some women. She’d taken things as they’d come, made the best of them and raised Slade to respect her—and himself. She was one of the most emotionally balanced people he’d ever known, but he wondered sometimes how much of that was an act.

  “Once or twice, when you were growing up,” she recalled now, her tone musing and a little distant, “John slipped me a few dollars for groceries or light bills or something you needed for school—things like that—but I never thought he’d do this. Not for one moment.”

  “He was full of surprises, I guess,” Slade said with a touch of irony.

  “He was full of himself,” Callie said. “He was so afraid I’d up and name you after him and make the scandal worse than it already was, but when I called you ‘Slade,’ he said I’d been watching too many TV Westerns. I never bothered to tell him that I got your name from a story I read in Ranch Romances.”

  Slade smiled. She’d told him about the magazines she’d loved to lose herself in back in the day, and how she’d named him after one of her favorite heroes.

  She hadn’t gone to Carmody’s funeral, hadn’t even mentioned the man’s name in recent memory, and only then did it occur to Slade that she might be grieving his loss just the same. She must have loved John Carmody once.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  She nodded. Swallowed. “Are you going to take Hutch up on his offer?” she finally inquired.

  He sighed again. “Damned if I know,” he said. “On the one hand, I could see myself accepting, buying that land I’ve had my eye on all this time—building a house and putting up a barn. But on the other…well, there’s a part of me that wants to claim my birthright and have the whole world know it.”

  Callie patted his hand, rose from the dryer chair and crossed to the coffeepot, a gleaming metal monstrosity that sounded like an old-fashioned steam boiler when it was plugged in.

  “I guess that’s understandable,” she said, keeping her back to him as she filled a good-sized foam cup and popped a lid onto the top. “Wanting folks to know the truth, I mean.”

  Slade was on his feet, retrieving his hat from the counter, turning the brim slowly in his hands. “I don’t reckon it will surprise anybody,” he reminded her, recalling the gossip that had started so many schoolyard brawls while he was growing up.

  Callie had been barely twenty years old when she’d taken up with Carmody; naive and alone in the world, and fresh out of some fly-by-night beauty school in Missoula with nothing but her license to cut hair, the old trailer she’d grown up in and the two hardscrabble acres sloping down to Buffalo Creek behind it. Her beloved “granddad” had been dead two years by then.

  “I’m sorry, Slade,” she said now. “For all you had to go through on my account, I mean. Practically everybody I knew said I ought to put you up for adoption, once I knew John had intended to marry someone else all along, but I just couldn’t do it. I guess it was selfish of me, but you were my boy and I wanted to see you grow up.”

  “I know,” Slade said, as he stooped to kiss her forehead. He’d heard all of it before, after all, and while he understood Callie’s personal regrets, the fact of the matter was, he was glad she’d kept him. She’d sacrificed a lot, working long hours to build the business that had supported them both, though just barely sometimes, passing up more than one chance to get married, move away from Parable and finally enjoy a degree of respectability.

  Instead, she’d stuck it out, right there in the old hometown, where she believed she had every right to be, as did her son, whether John Carmody, his high-society bride or the snootier locals had liked it or not.

  Slade had tried to put it into words how grateful he was for the rock-solid courage she’d always shown, for the example she’d set by working hard, standing her ground and just plain showing up for life and doing what she could with what she had. Because of her, he’d grown up strong, sound-minded and at home in his body, with a quiet confidence in himself and in his own judgment that had never failed him, even during a tour of duty in Iraq and the rough patch when his marriage ended.

  He paused in the doorway, hat in hand, looking back at her. “You can retire now,” he said. “Maybe go on a trip or something.”

  Callie laughed, the sound almost musical. “That’ll be the day, Slade Barlow,” she replied. “If you think I’m going to accept a big check from you and spend the rest of my life eating bonbons and taking tours of other people’s gardens, you’d better think again. Why, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have this place—and what would all my clients do without me?”

  Slade shook his head, a grin quirking up one corner of his mouth. “Just give it some thought,” he said, full of a strange, sweet sadness. “There’s a whole world beyond the borders of this town, Mom.”

  Callie waved a dismissive hand and reached for the broom again. “Maybe so,” she said, “but I’m staying right here.”

  “You’re stubborn as hell, you know that?”

  “Where do you think you got it?” she countered.

  Like his looks and the framework of his bones, he’d always figured most of his pigheadedness had come down from John Carmody, but now he recognized the quality as the downside of his mother’s fierce persistence.

  He waved once, crossed to his truck, got in and drove away.

  He should have been at work half an hour ago.

  By this time, he reckoned, all his deputies and Becky, the longtime receptionist, were probably fixing to send out a search party, complete with cadaver dogs and a plan drawn out on a grid.

  The idea made him smile as he headed back toward the courthouse.

  * * *

  JOSLYN KIRK OVERSLEPT that morning, and when she opened her eye
s, it took her a few seconds to recognize her surroundings and realize she was right back in the one place she’d sworn never to set foot in again—Parable, Montana.

  Joslyn sat up in her sleeping bag—she’d arrived late the night before and hadn’t bothered to put sheets on the antique brass bed—and looked around, taking in the cabbage-rose wallpaper, the worn planks in the floor and ornate woodwork, the heavy wardrobe that served as a closet.

  She was in the guesthouse behind the mansion that had been her home for most of her childhood. Memories swamped her—on the other side of the broad green lawn, her mother would have been sitting on the screened-in sunporch on a bright morning like this one, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. The housekeeper, Opal, would have been busy in the huge kitchen, preparing breakfast.

  Now, her mom was in Santa Fe, living with husband number three, a successful artist. Husband number two, Elliott Rossiter, had died in prison of an embolism, and heaven only knew where Opal was by now. She and Joslyn had parted tearfully, with promises to stay in touch, but they’d lost each other’s trails years ago.

  Joslyn sighed, pushed back her long brown hair and wriggled out of the sleeping bag. There was no sense in moping about the past—she’d come back to Parable for a reason, and she needed to get on with the plan.

  So she could leave again.

  After a brief stop in the bathroom and a quick splash at the sink, she padded barefoot into the tiny kitchen and groped through various plastic shopping bags until she unearthed the cheap coffeepot she’d purchased the day before, along with a few other essentials, at the big discount store out on the highway.

  She fumbled with the pot, then the small can of ground coffee beans, then the old-fashioned water spigot.

  A rap at the door interrupted the process, but only briefly. She’d be useless without coffee, and, besides, she knew who the visitor was.

  “Come in!” she called.

  There was a metallic jiggle at the front door, and a moment or two later, Kendra Shepherd, Joslyn’s best friend since forever, stepped into the kitchen.

  Blonde and elegant like a ballet dancer, Kendra looked ready to take on a new day in her crisp green suit and high heels. She ran Shepherd Real Estate, and she was clearly making a success of the enterprise.