Colorado High

by Joyce C. Ware

  Tessa peered out the kitchen window, hoping to see Jed’s battered pickup rattling up the drive. But the rutted road was empty, and the only sound she heard was Pop slurping his milk. She sighed and drew one finger down the dusty pane. I may owe you an apology, old friend, but unless you get home pretty damn quick, the only thing you’ll get from me is a view of my tail pipe leaving.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Put on notice by the sight of Tessa’s pickup parked in the turn-around, Jed entered the old house with mixed emotions. Hearing voices in the kitchen, he approached warily, holding the bag of groceries bought at the Cottonwood Mercantile in front of him like a shield. He pulled a white waxed bakery sack from under his arm and handed it to his father. “The brownies may be a little dented. Sorry.”

  Walt Bradburn peered into it. “Squashed is more like it.” He looked up, frowning. “Took you long enough.”

  “I had other things to do, Pop. I told you that. Afternoon, Tessa,” he said as he began unloading the groceries onto the table between them. “What brings you here?”

  “I stopped in at Lloyd and Pauline’s this morning. Jack and Patty were there, too—an added bonus, you might say—and, well, a cup of coffee and a chat with my wonderful in-laws was enough to remind me what a nice person you are.”

  Knowing that was as near an apology he was going to get, Jed allowed a smile to relax the stiff set of his mouth. “That must have been some chat.”

  “Let’s just say that by comparison, that little, um, exchange we had up at the cabin Saturday was positively lovey-dovey.”

  Jed considered this. “You want to tell me about it?” he asked quietly.

  Tessa slid her eyes toward his father. “Not just now . . . maybe later?”

  “Maybe later what?” the old man demanded. “No one tells me anything anymore.”

  “I asked Tessa if she’d like to see the Beefalo bull we bought.”

  “We bought? Hell, that was your idea, and a damn fool one if you ask me. Ain’t natural mixing animals up like that. He’s turning my spread into a goddamn ark, Tessa. Who does he think he is, Noah?”

  “Have a brownie, Pop,” Jed suggested.

  “Thanks to Tessa here, don’t need ‘em now,” his father said smugly. “She brung me some pound cake she made. Best I ever ate.”

  “Tessa made it?” Jed’s eyebrows shot up. “Is this it?” he asked, reaching towards the demolished loaf.

  “He says it’s springy,” Tessa warned.

  “Oh.” Jed’s hand hesitated, then fell to his side. “Well, maybe later.”

  Maybe never, she mouthed.

  “I wouldn’t say no to another piece,” Walt said, obviously fearing from their conversation that the cake might soon be snatched away from him.

  “It’s going on half-past four, Pop,” Jed said. “Don’t you think you ought to save room for supper? I’ve got some fresh lettuce and a couple of nice ripe tomatoes—”

  “Rabbit food! That cake suits me fine for supper, and for lunch and breakfast, too.”

  “You know what Dr. Strunk said about eating too much sugar,” Jed reminded him.

  “Mind your own business, Jed. That goes for Doc Strunk, too. Tessa?” He thrust his plate toward her like a demanding child.

  “It’s for your own good, you know,” Jed persisted doggedly.

  “No, it ain’t,” the old man snapped. “It’s for your good. He doesn’t want the bother of tending me when I’m feeling poorly,” he told Tessa, “but he’ll be getting his reward soon enough. Not in heaven neither . . . he’s seen to that.”

  Tessa looked at Jed, who shrugged in answer to the question in her eyes. She breathed a resigned sigh and picked up the knife.

  “Not one of those stingy little slices, honey. I want something—”

  “You can sink your teeth into. Okay,” she said, plopping a hefty slab on his plate, “this should hold you for a while.” She crossed to the refrigerator for the milk carton and refilled his glass a third time, hoping to provide him with at least a token amount of nutrition.

  Ten minutes later, after promising to return at six with his daily shot of whiskey, Jed wheeled his father to his room for a brief rest.

  “Is he okay, Jed?” Tessa asked on his return to the kitchen.

  “As okay as he ever is. His degree of complaint is directly related to how tired he is, and since I wasn’t here to insist on it, he didn’t have his regular two-hour after-lunch nap today. He’ll probably spend the evening fussing about heartburn.”

  Guilt made Tessa drop her eyes. “I never should have given in to him. A goat would have trouble digesting that stupid cake.”

  “If you hadn’t, he’d’ve fussed about that. This isn’t a game you can win, Tessa. God knows I’ve tried often enough.”

  “At least Nell’s brownies wouldn’t give him indigestion, not to mention an overload of cholesterol. There are nine eggs in that pound cake, Jed!”

  Her earnestness tickled him. “Springy, huh?”

  “I never could bake to save my life.”

  He smiled. “Can’t fault your intention, though.”

  Tessa heaved a vast sigh. “Well, we all know where good intentions lead.” She sat down in one of the straight-back wooden kitchen chairs, tipped it precariously back, and folded her arms across her breasts. A crackling sound, issuing from her pocket, brought her upright. “I forgot! How on earth could I have forgotten something like that?”

  Jed waited patiently as she fished in her pocket, extracted a folded rectangle of paper, and held it up to his eyes. “There! What do you say to that?”

  “Maybe, if you held it steady—” he squinted— “and a little farther away . . .” He reached out and circled her slender tan wrist with his fingers. “Twenty thousand dollars? Jesus, Tessa, for what?”

  “For Rain. You know, the buckskin colt I was training for that fellow up in Montrose?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jed murmured, inspecting the signature. “Never heard of him. I could have sworn I knew all the ranchers up there.”

  “He isn’t one—not an honest-to-goodness, fourteen-hours-a-day rancher, anyway.”

  “Sixteen hours,” Jed said.

  “Okay, sixteen. I gather he’s one of those fast-lane type entrepreneurs. Nice guy though . . . not the type to blow his own horn. He said he bought Rain to help him relax. Doctor’s orders.”

  Jed’s eyebrows soared. “I know prescription medicine has gotten expensive, but that’s ridiculous. Take two rides and call me in the morning?”

  Tessa laughed and tucked the check back in her pocket. Seeing a corner of it peeking out, Jed advised her to button it in. “And for God’s sake, remember to take it out before you throw that shirt into your Maytag. In fact, if I were you, I wouldn’t waste time with me when you could be depositing it.”

  She smiled into his dark eyes. “Time with you is never wasted, my friend.” She pushed back the chair and got to her feet. “Now,” she continued briskly, “you going to show me that bull Pop’s so sore about?”

  Jed and Tessa stood side by side at the bull pen’s stout fence, their forearms resting on the top rail, elbows touching.

  “Doesn’t look much like a buffalo,” Tessa mused, “and he’s a lot furrier than any beef cattle I ever saw. What made you decide to get your own bull? Isn’t that kind of a pricey way to go about it?”

  “Lacking twenty-thousand-dollar checks to deposit, sure, but the banks have always been good to me. Credit on my signature, that sort of thing. The breed’s still in the experimental stage, and I have some notions of my own about the best way to go. This fellow’s got a lot of the traits I need to build on.”

  “Hey, you are playing at Noah, aren’t you?”

  Jed turned his head to grin at her. “Noah, or maybe God. I’m not sure which. The thing is, Tessa, Beefalos are fantastic foragers. One of the problems with most of our modern breeds is that they want easy living, and we’ve just about run out of easy grazing land in these parts. That’s why Lloyd
’s so sore about my getting the lease for the Shelby spread.”

  Tessa rested her cheek on her arm and gazed up at him. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that . . . what do you think of her?”

  “Marion Shelby? Interesting woman. Older than you’d expect.”

  “That’s what Jeannie said. Older’n me even.”

  “Good God!” Jed clapped a hand to his forehead. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

  Tessa swatted him. “Cut that out. All I mean was. well, it kind of throws a different light on Scott. Makes me wonder if he’s the predator Garland seems to think he is.”

  “He is.”

  “C’mon, Jed, how can you sound so certain? You don’t know him that well.”

  “Well enough.”

  “So how do you explain him marrying this old broad?”

  “For one thing, she’s not a broad. And there’s something about her ...”

  “Money, maybe? Of course that would make him a predator of a different sort,” Tessa admitted.

  “There’s more to it than that . . . more to her, too.”

  “You sound almost . . . interested.”

  Jed looked at her, startled. “Me? In Marion Shelby?”

  “Yes, you. And I bet if you played your cards right, good-looking guy like you, upstanding, hard-working ... a woman couldn’t ask for anything more.”

  You did, he thought.

  “An easy-keeper with no bad habits,” Tessa elaborated. “Why, she’d have you coming to heel in no time.”

  “For God’s sake, Tessa. You make me sound like a French poodle.”

  “Oh, no,” Tessa protested. “With those sad brown eyes of yours, you’re more the golden retriever type.”

  “For God’s sake,” he repeated in a mutter. “Speaking of cards,” he countered, “what game are you playing these days? Unless you’ve got strip poker in mind, I sure wouldn’t think you’d want Shelby to do the dealing.”

  Tessa laughed, as he expected, but she avoided his eyes. “Time was, you’d be right, but like I said, he’s not quite what he used to be ... not what I remember, anyway. So, what game am I playing, you ask? Let’s just say I’m still shuffling the deck.”

  It wasn’t really an answer, Jed realized. Maybe she didn’t have one yet. He looked at her strong profile etched against the sky. She never did like dancing to the tune others settled for, he thought morosely, and nothing he could think to say would change that.

  The bull, who had been eyeing them warily, ambled closer to the fence. He extended his thick shaggy neck to snuffle in their scent with his moist nostrils. Tessa reached over to scratch the broad flat spot just above them.

  “Put this fellow in a plaid flannel shirt,” she mused, “and you’d have a Lloyd Wagner look-alike.”

  Jed chuckled. “I’m not sure whether that’s an insult to Lloyd or the bull. Speaking of Lloyd, what made you brave that den of bears this particular morning?”

  “Bulls, bears, what’s next?”

  “Clowns maybe?”

  Tessa’s blue eyes sparkled. “Shame on you! Although I must admit Pauline did act sort of like a ringmaster. Every time things got a little testy, she’d rush in with her sticky buns.”

  “As a peacemaker, I’d say sticky buns beat a Colt or a whip hands down. Aside from gummy fingers, what was the problem?”

  “The usual one where the Wagners are concerned: m-o-n-e-y. Their lack of it, and their schemes to make some. The latest of which involves getting their greedy hands on the land Barry left the twins. After serious reconsideration, Lloyd has decided Barry was right. Scott Shelby did sire them. And— surprise, surprise!— Jack agrees with him. Patty always did think so, of course. Pauline is the only holdout, but she’s not about to say so where Lloyd can hear her.”

  “Why now, two years after Barry’s death?”

  “Well, call it a delayed time bomb. For some time now, Lloyd’s been trying to find a way around our refusal to sell that land to him. If it had just been me standing in his way, he might have bided his time until the twins reached their majority, but no, he had to go wheedling and prodding at Garland and Gav— you know how Lloyd is, about as tactful and subtle as a bull elk in rut—and they set him down hard. He didn’t like that much.

  “Then last week, he happened to pass Scott Shelby down in Cottonwood. Passed real close, he said. Close enough to see his eyes square on. ‘What do they call that color again?’ he asked me.”

  “Jesus,” Jed said. “I thought that foolishness had been laid to rest with Barry. I guess he wasn’t the only paranoid member of his family.”

  “This has nothing to do with paranoia, Jed. Lloyd’s just using it to pry me loose from my responsibilities as the twins’ guardian. He knows damn well a juicy story like that’d spread like mustard on a hot dog, and if people buy it--”

  “Your friends won’t.”

  “It’s not my friends I’m worried about. At this point, with the twins grown and all, it doesn’t much matter if they do or not, but suppose Judge Colby does?”

  Jed regarded her through narrowed eyes. “That bastard really got to you, didn’t he? You just say the word and— “

  “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me, Jed,” she said crisply. “Look,” she added in a softer tone, “it’s not that I don’t appreciate your volunteering to be my knight in denim armor, but if push comes to shove, what I’ll need more is your help in finding an expert to back up what you told me about genetics and eye color . . . you know, how it’s not as simple a matter as most of us think? And there’s that portrait you told me about, the one Barry’s parents took with them down to Texas.”

  “The one of his hazel-eyed great-grandmother?” Tessa nodded. “You think it could really come to that?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe not. Lloyd looked a little sick when I mentioned lawyer’s fees and court costs. I’d be very surprised if there’s much more coming in from the Wagner ranch than it takes to meet loan payments and put food on the table. Old man Wagner knew more about cattle on his off-days than those boys of his ever did all put together.”

  But Lloyd had Terry Ballou as a partner, Jed recalled, and shrewd developers like him equated view property with money in the bank. Considering how spectacular the land the twins inherited was in that regard, Ballou would probably be eager to supply whatever funds might be needed to snare it. “I’ll do whatever I can, Tessa.”

  She laid her hand on his. “I know that, and I thank you for it. God knows you have enough troubles of your own.”

  “Nothing new about mine.”

  “You think so? Remember me saying I was still shuffling my cards? Seems to me you’ve already thrown in your hand.”

  He frowned. “I’m not good at riddles, Tessa.”

  “Well, look at your situation here. You’re the one who built this spread into a whole lot more than just another break-even operation.”

  “Pop had enough foresight to buy up whatever high basin land your dad didn’t.”

  “Foresight, hell! He bought it because he didn’t want my father to have it all.”

  “C’mon, Tessa, that’s not the whole story. He was a different man before his accident. Hard, yes, even mean sometimes.” A lot of the time. “But I don’t remember him scheming and complaining the way he does now.”

  “Maybe so,” she conceded, “but my point is, you’re the one who put it to profitable use, and that makes the hat-in-hand routine he expects of you all the more demeaning. When are you going to sit that old man down and tell him what’s what?”

  Jed bit back the angry retort that sprang first to his lips. She means well, he told himself. “As a matter of fact, I already have.”

  “You what?” Tessa, turned to face him, her blue eyes wide.

  “It happened after I came down from your cabin Sunday morning. I wasn’t in the best of moods, and something he said or did— I don’t recall just what, but I doubt it was anything worse than usual— made something crack inside me.


  “The last straw breaking, maybe?”

  “Could be,” Jed acknowledged with a wry smile. “Anyway, one thing led to another—you know how that sort of thing goes—and finally I told him that unless he agreed in writing to make me his sole heir, I was going to clear out.”

  He took off his hat and blew the dust off the brim. “Well, you can imagine how he took that. Called me an ungrateful bastard— I couldn’t deny the latter description; I probably am— and went on from there, ending with accusing me of blackmail. I swear, Tessa, there was enough steam in him to drive a locomotive.” He put his hat back on and tapped it into place. “I told him, considering the hints he’d taken to dropping, I felt I had to protect myself.”

  “What hints, Jed?”

  “For it to make sense, I have to go back a bit. You see, the feebler he gets, the craftier he becomes, and it pleases him to keep me off balance. A few months back, about the time I started talking about buying this bull, he asked me to bring his family albums down from the attic. They were covered with dust, pages scalloped by mice— he hadn’t looked at them, hadn’t even mentioned them, for as long as I can remember.”

  Jed paused. “When I was a kid, I used to sneak up there, look at those cracked and faded photos, and pretend those strangers were my family. He’d never bothered to write any captions, so I made up names for them—borrowed them from characters in books. For the children, I chose everyday names, the kind kids I might actually know would have. Tom and Becky and Nancy and Frank . . .” He smiled, remembering. “Some of the grownups were pretty fancy, though. Guinevere and Ivanhoe, for example.

  “What, no Lancelot?”

  “Nope. Seemed too sissy.”

  “I never even heard of Ivanhoe.”

  “It’s the title of a novel by Sir Walter Scott— a romance, really. My mother read her copy over and over. She didn’t have many books, but kids who like to read— not that I was allowed much time for it— aren’t choosy. Actually, it was pretty exciting. All about castles and tournaments, knights and fair ladies.”