Dorothy Garlock - [Tucker Family]

by Keep a Little Secret

  Unbidden, Charlotte’s heart had begun to pound in her chest. Only a glance had passed between them, but she found him so devastatingly handsome, so rugged and strong, so different from the few other men who had entered her life. She couldn’t help but wonder about him, if he possessed more than just his looks, and found herself hoping that if she got to know him a bit, she wouldn’t be disappointed. Blinking, she looked away, startled at her emotional response, a bit flustered at how she, usually so confident and sure of herself, felt on slippery ground. She could only hope that he hadn’t seen the foolishness of her thoughts written large on her face.

  “Evenin’.” He nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Pleased to meet you, too,” she answered.

  Without another word, Owen turned on his heel and left the room, and all returned to their conversations. Still, Charlotte watched him go, wondering if she had imagined a connection between them, no matter how thin it might have been.

  But just as Owen reached the door he stopped, looked back to where she stood alone watching him, and held her eyes for a moment longer. Then he was out the door and into the darkening night, leaving her to wonder about the tumultuous feelings that surged through her.

  Chapter Four

  OWEN WILLIAMS WORKED the bristle brush across the tall mare’s back, swept along the length of her side, and brought it down the horse’s long flank. Carefully yet forcefully, he repeated his chore. Dipping the brush into a tall pail of water that had been warmed over the work stove, he brought the steaming liquid to the animal’s back. Over and over he brushed, pulling out loose hair and flecks of dirt embedded from the day’s work. The large brown and white horse occasionally snorted, flicking either her alert ears or wiry tail, but remained contentedly still, enjoying the attention.

  Outside the open barn doors, the nearly full moon had risen above the eastern horizon in a sky filled with thousands of bright stars. Though the setting of the sun had brought with it a cooling of the day’s heat, whatever breeze that managed to stir the air elsewhere was lost in the close confines of the horse’s stall. Sweat ran in rivers down Owen’s face, and the sleeve of his work shirt was damp from repeatedly wiping his brow.

  Usually, working his way through the chores of caring for his own two horses calmed Owen’s tumultuous thoughts after a busy day; the procuring of feed, the monotonous brushing, and even the shoveling of manure allowed him to relax, however long it took.

  But this night was different…

  Lately, the thought had begun to nag at Owen that the longer he remained at the Grant Ranch, the less he seemed able to soothe the raging emotions that had necessitated his coming in the first place.

  When Owen had watched the doctor drive away into the whirling snowstorm six months earlier, he had known that the end of his mother’s life was mere moments away. Watching her die, a shell of the vibrant woman she had once been, nearly broke him. At the instant she had finally given up the futile struggle to defeat her illness, there had been a part of him that had been relieved, and instantly ashamed for having had such a terrible thought. Never once had she opened her eyes. He had dug a deep hole in the frozen Colorado earth, listened while the priest had mumbled a few words into a stiff eastern wind, and then Owen and Hannah had set about formulating their plan for revenge.

  The first thing he had done was rifle through his mother’s belongings over Hannah’s protests. No matter how many times he attempted to explain why it needed to be done, how it was the only way they would ever learn the truth, his sister still had fought him every step of the way, through every faded photograph, every scrap of paper containing a bit of their mother’s handwriting, and even to the meager clothing she had afforded herself over the years.

  But then his perseverance had paid off…

  Folded into a small, worn book of poems wedged into a back corner of his mother’s dresser, Owen had found a piece of paper on which Caroline had scribbled a few notes. Most of them were either illegible or nonsensical, but there was one pair of words that stood out:

  SAWYER, OKLAHOMA

  Neither Owen nor Hannah could ever remember hearing their mother speak about Oklahoma. They thought that Caroline Wallace had been born and raised in Colorado. So what was the reason for her writing? While Hannah insisted that whatever their mother had meant in making note of such a far-off place, it likely had absolutely nothing to do with the mysterious and absent man who had made her pregnant, then deserted her. Owen hadn’t been so sure.

  He had asked around the small town of Longbow, questioning anyone he thought might have some clue as to what his mother had meant in writing down the name of the town. Finally, after applying enough liquor to loosen the flapping tongue of Franklin Sullivan, who was what passed for the town’s attorney, Owen learned that, in the years before he and Hannah had been born Caroline Wallace had left the town of her birth and headed to Oklahoma. The reason for doing so had been lost in the haze of years gone by, but the lawyer remembered the sliver of a conversation he’d had with Caroline upon her eventual return. In it had been a name.

  “Grant, I believe, was the name,” he’d muttered, his words slurred by alcohol. “Or was it Griffin? Hell if I can ’member!”

  Whichever of the two names it was hardly mattered. Owen had packed whatever of their belongings fit into their dented trunk, sold their meager home for even less than the pitiful building was worth, and led them off in search of the unknown man who had helped give them life.

  The mare’s annoyed whinny brought him back from his memories; apparently he had been brushing too hard, lost in the rising of his temper. With a scratch behind the horse’s ear, he apologized.

  “Sorry, old girl,” Owen soothed. “I’ll try to be more careful.”

  Arriving in Sawyer at the onset of spring, they discovered that John Grant was a successful horse rancher, well respected, and an upstanding member of the community. No one would say a harsh word against him, not one offhanded slight. Owen had mentioned his mother’s name to a couple of people, but no one seemed to recognize it.

  He had not one thing to go on. He just knew he was right. He was certain John Grant was the man.

  Owen’s first impulse was to kick down the door to John Grant’s ranch house, pull him out into the yard by his hair, and give him the beating he undoubtedly deserved. Hannah restrained him, arguing that they had no proof that the rancher was the man they were looking for, nothing but the drunken ramblings of Franklin Sullivan.

  Over Owen’s protests, Hannah explained that it was in their best interests to try to learn the truth before resorting to violence. Swallowing his pride, Owen had gone to John Grant’s door, faced the man who just might be his father, and asked for a job. Fortunately, the ranch had just found itself a man short. John had looked him up and down, judging whether he was capable of backbreaking work, before finally nodding his head, taking Owen on right then and there. Within hours, he found himself working for the very man he had come to Sawyer to ruin.

  “And here I still am,” he muttered. “Still working…”

  The worst part was that Owen had found he had little reason to resent John Grant. Unlike other men Owen had known who, in a position of authority, lorded it over those who worked for him, the rancher never shied away from any demanding, grueling tasks; he could often be found pounding away on a hot anvil, corralling a stubborn horse, or even performing the same menial task in which Owen himself was now engaged.

  But Owen also knew that appearances could often be deceiving, as easily changed as a horse’s shoe. It was possible that behind Grant’s friendly exterior resided a conniving, manipulative son of a bitch fully capable of getting a young woman pregnant and then throwing her out on her ear. He believed that John Grant was such a man, and that if he looked long enough, watched him closely, his assumptions would be proven true.

  “You should have been nicer when you came in the house.”

  Owen looked up from his chores to see Hannah entering the barn. She wal
ked over to where he was working and leaned against the closed gate, resting her head upon her crossed arms.

  “I didn’t see much of a point in it,” Owen argued, resuming his brushing. “Besides, you know I don’t like to spend a lot of time around him.”

  “You say that like it’s supposed to be some kind of secret.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that if it weren’t for the fact that you’re such a good worker on the ranch,” she said, a bit exasperated with her brother, “and that I’m so completely likeable, I believe that John Grant would have asked you to leave his ranch a long time ago.”

  Owen snarled in answer. From the first moment they had set foot on the property, he had marveled at Hannah’s ability to be so friendly, so natural, with the man who may have driven their mother to her grave. That she berated him for acting the way he did only made it worse.

  It made him angry.

  “Would it kill you to be nice to the man?”

  “It just might!” Owen snapped.

  “This whole thing was your idea!” Hannah persisted. “And it would be a lot easier if I wasn’t the one who had to show a friendly face.”

  Once they had talked their way onto the ranch, Hannah had taken a secretarial position in Sawyer with Carlton Barnaby, the town’s old lawyer. She put up with the man’s come-ons and lecherous stares because the job afforded her the opportunity to look through whatever pertinent information she could get her hands on, in the hopes of finding clues that would link their mother with John Grant. It was a risky task, illegal in more ways than one, a crime for which she would undoubtedly be fired or even jailed if she was discovered, but Owen had convinced her that it was necessary.

  “You know that the reason we were so late in getting back to the ranch was because I finally had some time alone with the files in Barnaby’s office,” she snapped.

  “And that might have been worth a spit if you’d managed to find anything worthwhile!”

  “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, Owen!”

  “Then look harder!”

  “All of this… this scheming is starting to feel like it’s too much to bear!” Hannah argued, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “Ever since we left Colorado, we’ve done nothing but lie every step of the way to each person we’ve met! You even changed our names!”

  “What choice do we have?” Owen countered. “It’s not as if we could have walked up to John Grant’s front door and introduced ourselves as Owen and Hannah Wallace. Besides, as closely as you physically resemble our mother, I keep expecting him to see through our ruse.”

  “But ‘Hannah Williams’ sounds so ridiculous!”

  “It’s not forever. Just until we find the proof that Grant is guilty.”

  “If we find it, you mean.”

  Owen threw the horse’s brush in such a fury into the closed pen door just beneath where Hannah leaned that she leaped back, shocked. Without pause, he lashed out, kicking at a pail near his feet, sending water soaring up into the heated air.

  The horse who had until then been content under his caring touch became spooked, rearing up on her back legs and skittering nervously backward toward the rear of the stall. Quickly, Owen moved forward rather than shying away and gently laid his hand on the startled mare’s front quarter, attempting to ease her agitation. With a soothing voice, he whispered to the animal, reassuring her that everything was as it was before his outburst. Finally, the horse’s anxiety passed and she relaxed, save for a derisive snort and a furtive pawing of the ground with one hoof.

  “It’s all right, girl,” he promised. “Everything’s all right.”

  Owen turned toward his sister, ready to see her relieved that the horse’s outburst was under control, but the look in her eyes stopped him cold; when she was pushed far enough, Hannah’s reaction often resembled that of their mother. Though weakened by constant illness, Caroline’s stare, made up of equal parts determination and pity, had always been able to quell his most intense angers. Now, Hannah’s stare did the same.

  “Have you ever stopped to ask yourself if you might be wrong, Owen?” Hannah argued, her voice as flat as a knife’s blade. “And that John Grant might not be the man you’re so desperately looking for?”

  Owen wanted to argue, to defend himself against her, but found that he couldn’t and remained silent.

  “You carry around all of this… this anger,” she continued. “No matter how much I try to reason with you and make you understand how completely wrong you might be, you never listen.”

  “Hannah, I—” he began, but she wasn’t finished talking.

  “You brought all of this with you from Colorado, just like the belongings you threw into our trunk, and if you don’t learn to live with it, if you aren’t able to walk away, it will destroy your life every bit as much as it destroyed our mother’s.”

  Owen desperately wanted to step forward, to open the horse stall gate, wrap his sister into his arms, and explain that what he was doing was for both of them, for the honor of their mother, so that they could return to Longbow and erase the stigma from their mother’s name. Instead, he could only stand mutely, his hand never straying from the mare’s dark mane.

  Hannah sighed, turned on her heel, and left him to his work.

  Carter Herrick drew hard on his cigarette, savoring the burn of the tobacco deep within his lungs before blowing it out in a plume. The milky smoke pushed insistently against the closed window, swirling and dissipating upward. Soon the cigarette was little more than a nub beneath his gnarled fingers.

  The room of his dead son was as dark as a tomb. Though two weeks had passed since Walter had slipped away, days from his fifteenth birthday, Carter couldn’t bring himself to look upon the boy’s belongings. No matter how many times his manservant lit the oil lamp on top of the dresser, Carter extinguished it. The blackness felt right, appropriate to match the melancholy that had settled upon his heart.

  “And I can’t imagine it will ever change,” he muttered into the evening.

  Oddly, his wife’s death two years earlier, the result of a fall down the enormous staircase of their home, had been much easier to bear. In his own strange way, Carter supposed that he had loved Emma, his spouse of over thirty years, but her passing hadn’t affected him any more than the changing of the seasons, something to be expected rather than marveled over. She had done what all good wives were expected to do: she had borne him a son.

  But the loss of the boy was different…

  When Walter had first fallen ill, Carter had regarded it as temporary. But the disease, something the old quack in town thought might come from the boy’s brain, did not pass. What started as fatigue and dizziness became something far worse. For days on end, Walter was unable to get out of bed. No matter what was prepared for him, he was unable to keep down his food. And worst of all were the eye-splitting headaches ravaging him day and night.

  Through it all, there was nothing for Carter to do but watch. His professional life had been spent amassing a substantial wealth, but no amount of money, no number of doctors brought in from Tulsa or Kansas City, nothing, could stop the fate that awaited Walter. When the boy died in the hours just before dawn, something of Carter went with him.

  And that was why nothing mattered anymore…

  Carter Herrick walked out of his dead son’s room and down the long hallway of the second floor to his own office. Without turning on any lights, he opened a cupboard beside his oak desk, poured himself a stiff whiskey, and swallowed it hurriedly, before pouring another.

  The hardest thing for him to accept about Walter’s death was that it demonstrated how hollow his life had become. For days this bitterness gnawed at him. My son isn’t even cold in the ground and not one goddamn person has bothered to offer condolences! At the boy’s funeral, faces passed by one by one, but Carter was sure that everyone who was there came only because of the standing his ranch afforded him. It was then that he’d had a revelation.
<
br />   He had discovered that he had power… and little else.

  All his life, Carter felt as if he had been a step behind, not quite in a position for fortune to smile upon him. Certainly the deaths of both his wife and son were evidence of such hardship, but it was more than that. His ranch wasn’t successful in the ways of others. His position in Sawyer was based on respect for his power rather than his person. And even when it came to love, he had failed to get what he had wanted.

  And it was all because of one man…

  “John Grant, you son of a bitch,” Carter snarled.

  Chapter Five

  CHARLOTTE STEPPED OUT of the ranch house and into glorious morning sunlight streaming down from a cloudless sky. She’d always been an early riser, awakening shortly after dawn, but she was surprised to see how many others on the ranch shared her habit: cowboys scurried about working on chores; women were already hanging clothes on the wash line. There was activity everywhere despite the early hour.

  Inside the house had been every bit as hectic; even as she washed herself from her basin and dressed, she heard the sounds of scraping chairs, clinking glasses and silverware, and male voices. Though she had been prepared to fix her own breakfast, she readily accepted the plate Amelia offered her, heaped high with fried potatoes, ham, and eggs. Even the coffee had been delicious!

  This is the beginning of something wonderful, she thought.

  Charlotte finished her meal, carried her dishes to the kitchen, and went out the back door.

  She heard a burst of whistling, clapping, and hollering. It rose above the competing regular sounds. She followed the noise around to the front of the house. Hale stood next to the corral shouting encouragement to a couple of men as they herded a pair of horses into the enclosure. Once they had been brought safely inside the fence, he hurled the gate shut behind them, securing it with a sliding pole he used as a bolt. When he finished, he yanked off his hat and wiped his brow.