He grimaced. “It does sound a little familiar, but neither of us were thinking about these things that have happened in term of how they related to Reese’s arrival.”
She thought about it. “That’s true. I’m not sure if they have any bearing at all.”
“Or maybe they are the very reason why he came to Colville.”
It was a startling idea. “He came to Colville to set all these things in motion? That’s crazy; he didn’t know anything about Frank’s business or me or Denver North before he came.”
“Or maybe he did,” Logan said soberly.
That was worse, because she had thought that too. “I considered that. Sometimes it felt like he was aching to take control of the paper away from me. And then when A.J. died, I thought he was shot so that someone could step in and take over from him.”
“All these feelings,” Logan muttered.
“And one very suspicious sheriff who would just love to find a reason to hang A.J.’s murder on me. He’s still sniffing around. Even that unctuous Mr. Brown mentioned it when I met him just after the fire.”
“Ummm,” Logan said thoughtfully as they reached the outskirts of town. “I think you’re in danger, Maggie,” he said abruptly.
“Not if I sell the burned acreage,” she said. “Dennis has been pressuring me to do it. He claims my finances are sinking lower than a mine shaft these days with all the drain on my income. I could just sell up and be gone if I go crawling to Mr. Brown.”
“What are you going to do, Maggie?”
“I surely don’t know.”
“God, I hate to leave you alone here, but we have to get the cattle out before they hunker down on the Mapes’ land. I can get back in two or three days.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Go to Arwin if you need help.”
“I will. Nothing is going to happen, though.”
“Don’t be too sure,” he said ominously. “Now, do you think Reese had the sense to stable my horse in the hotel’s barns?”
* * *
He had said it, she had answered it with a nonchalance that she was far from feeling, but as she walked into the hotel, Maggie had a pervasive sense that something was not right. She felt a supreme reluctance to return to the suite, and on an impulse she stopped by the desk where Miles was in attendance and asked if there were another free room.
Miles, the ultimate desk clerk, did not blink an eye. He scanned the booking list and finally said “No, ma’am. I’m sorry.” She believed him because it would have meant more money from her pocket.
She had to go back to the suite, where Logan thought she was in danger.
She let herself in bravely. There was no one there. She breathed a sigh of relief and then wondered if they hadn’t sent a search party for her. But why should they? Reese knew she was with Logan.
Reese didn’t like the fact that she had gone with Logan.
She wondered where Reese was.
It was curiously stale and silent in the sitting room. She sat down tentatively on the little sofa, almost as if she expected to have to leap up and dash out.
Her oozing fear seemed radically misplaced in the face of the normalcy of the suite and the fact that both her mother-in-law and Reese were gone. She had expected a confrontation and had walked into blankness. She was exaggerating things in her mind; nothing could be as spooky as it seemed when she went over it in the silence and dark of night.
On the other hand, the man had issued a thinly disguised threat, and days later the something that might have happened did.
Except that Mr. Brown had made it very clear he wasn’t going to make her another offer for that land.
Who, she wondered, would?
She ought to go to him and demand something incredibly outrageous. He would say scorched earth wasn’t worth it. He would try to break her, to pull down the price he initially offered her, she thought, and that was the why of it. She had been bad—she hadn’t cooperated … odd word to use … and she had been punished.
But why would she think in terms of cooperation?
… looked into it… that phrase resurfaced unexpectedly. She was sure Frank had looked into it. Her. Her family. He was the type of man who did not do things impulsively. He checked things out. He must have checked her out.
He wouldn’t have married her, a fresh-faced, innocent twenty year old with a newspaper dowry just out of hand. He hadn’t come to Colville specifically looking for her.
He must have looked into it.
Why would she connect that to her thinking about cooperation?
Cooperation. Colville.
She didn’t see any connection, but the notion of looking into it was so insistent in her mind.
He came from a prominent San Francisco family and he wound up in Colville. She remembered saying those very words to Reese.
“Maggie!”
She heard Reese’s voice and looked up to see him standing in the doorway, so purposeful and vigorous.
… and he wound up in Colville too.
He must have looked into it.
And then the thing clicked that had been nagging at her since she said the words, and a whomp of fear hit her in the stomach like a brick.
She looked up and smiled at Reese. “Reese, I’ve been here for hours. Where have you been?”
* * *
Now she had to tread carefully. She had an inkling of what was going on, just an inkling, and she did not know where to look for the whole explanation. She needed Logan desperately now, and oh, where was he? Herding cows. What could a cowboy do for her indeed!
Reese was ready to court and coddle her, and that was almost unbearable. Mother Colleran came in and out, chiding Maggie for her indiscretion.
“Everybody saw you, Maggie; I could die from embarrassment that you actually went off with that man in front of a hundred people.”
“He’s an old friend, Mother Colleran. I felt faint. My land was burning up. I was grateful he could offer me a place to lie down.” Tonelessly, she offered her mother-in-law all the palliatives she would need to placate her gossipy friends.
“And she’s better now,” Reese said. “We’ll just have a nice dinner out in the hotel dining room and she will be fine.”
“I won’t be fine,” she said to him later. “The grassland is burned to a cinder.”
“That’s too bad, Maggie.”
“Yes it is, and I have been feeling as though the fates really have it in for me. What are the chances of two destructive fires happening in a single lifetime, let alone within weeks of each other, Reese?”
He looked startled. “I hadn’t thought about it. Look, Maggie, some drifter camped on your land and was a bit too careless with a campfire. The other … I don’t know.”
“That would be a reasonable explanation if the other hadn’t happened, and if Mr. Brown hadn’t suggested that that land was ripe for disaster. It was so heavy-handed it is almost laughable.”
“Mr. Brown never struck me as being obvious,” Reese said.
“I would not have thought so either. I suppose now everyone thinks I’d be better off unloading the land, including our Mr. Brown. Including, perhaps, you?”
“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, you do whatever you have to do. You’ve been so adamant about it, how could anyone fault any decision you make?”
“You tell me, Reese.”
“I can’t,” he murmured, but he thought he would like to. He wanted to tell her other things, things she was missing by denying him. He was spending himself extravagantly at Melinda Sable’s and somehow he wanted her to know it.
“What will you do then?” she asked suddenly.
“I like Colville,” he said.
“But the estate is not limitless, Reese. I can’t support you and Mother Colleran on it, and frankly I don’t intend to. And if I don’t sell my property, I’m going to be close to appropriating principal. By the terms of the will I can’t do that, no matter what.”
“I’m working on
something,” he said in a faintly resentful tone.
“Good,” she said. “We have one more week of luxury in the suite, and then I’m afraid we’ll all have to find other accommodations. I can’t afford the hotel, either.”
“That fire really scared you, didn’t it?” he asked nastily.
“No, Dennis scared me. He’s given me an either-or-choice. I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t have a business to offset the drain on my income, unfortunately. We don’t have living quarters that we own. We have nothing, Reese, that isn’t coming directly from Frank’s estate, and frankly, I resent the expense.”
“All right, Maggie. That’s damned clear. Frank left everything to you, and by God, you are the only one who is going to benefit. You want it all. Fine. You’ll get it all. I can make other arrangements. I’m afraid you’ll have my mother to contend with for a while yet. I can’t take her where I will be going right now.” He stood up abruptly and threw down some money. Bitch, bitch bitch, he was screaming inside, She would deny him everything, everything. The cowdog would get it all, every last cent that had been Frank’s and should have been his and his mother’s. Damn, damn, damn.
He stalked out of the dining room, looking tall and elegant and so much like Frank in his manner that people just stopped and stared.
Maggie looked down at her plate. On it was a hundred-dollar bill.
“Arwin, do you know precisely when Denver North came scouting around here looking for a route to join up in Cheyenne?”
“Well now, Maggie, let me think. Hmmm. Do you know, I think it was a few years before Frank came, yes I do. They sent a party of boss types up here along with a survey team and they all rubbed their chins, and said, yep, it looks okay, and then they went away and nobody came for a while.”
“Thanks, Arwin.”
“Why did you want to know?”
“I’m not sure, isn’t it strange? I mean, just after Frank died was when we got the first notice that they were coming in and buying up land and going to survey. They had permits and government rights of way and whatever other kind of paper they always have. I was just wondering …”
But she didn’t know what she was wondering.
Did Frank know Denver North was going to be coming and buying up every piece of land in sight?
There, she had phrased the question and it sent a chill down her spine. What if she asked Arwin? What would he say?
“Wondering what, Maggie?”
“Whether it has any bearing on why someone fired my land last night,” she said slowly.
“Reese said it was a drifter.”
“Reese was here?”
“Bright and early this morning.”
Spreading the story, she thought grimly.
She walked slowly back to the hotel, thinking. She had her amazement that Frank had settled in Colville, and her astonishment that Reese had followed him here. She had everything that had happened since Reese had arrived, including the pressure being put on her to sell the ranch land. And she had the fact that Frank had left her everything to dispose of as she would. What did it all add up to?
She had Logan.
He would come tomorrow, she knew he would. She only had to get through one more night, a much easier task since she had asked Reese to leave the suite.
She had to remember to ask Miles to locate a room for Mother Colleran and herself, preferably far apart, for the rest of the time they would spend in the hotel.
Dennis was waiting for her when she returned to the hotel.
“Out early?”
“Taking a walk.”
“I have to remind you, Maggie, your month of deliberation is almost up.”
“I’m aware of that. In fact I want to make arrangements to move to single rooms for another, oh, month, and by then something should be settled, I should think. Don’t you?”
“Don’t give me your light and airy voice, Maggie. You know very well that you must give an answer to Mr. Brown on the town property. I wish you would say yes to his offer today.”
Maggie scanned his face. It was the face of her earnest lawyer with her best welfare at heart. She saw nothing else there, and she made an intuitive decision right then. “Tell him no, I don’t want to sell the town property.”
Dennis was astounded. “Maggie! Why are you spiting yourself and putting yourself in an untenable position financially?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t feel that I should sell the Morning Call site.”
“All right, Maggie. Pretty soon you’ll drive yourself so far into the ground you may have to take the only way out.”
“What is that?”
“Accept my proposal, of course.”
“I couldn’t possibly, Dennis. Not even in the most adverse of circumstances.”
“This is not the place to talk about it, Maggie. And you don’t know what the future will bring.”
“No I don’t. Is that a threat, Dennis?”
“It’s a wise word to a wise woman who might be wise to cooperate occasionally.”
“I see,” she said. Cooperate. Exactly. Cooperate.
God, if only she had the Morning Call morgue to rummage around in. All the answers had been there, she just knew it. All she had now were tenuous threads, amorphous connections that didn’t make sense. And they all centered around one thing—no, one person—Frank.
Chapter Seventeen
Her refusal to … cooperate … must have somebody hopping, she thought. Something had to happen, and soon. They were starting to lay track on Danforth land now, and they were getting close to the moment when they had to veer off and begin grading down around Logan’s property.
She felt a tension shimmering in her bones. It was as if she were playing some kind of cat and mouse game with them, where the cat knew where the mouse was hiding, and the mouse knew it would be swallowed up any minute and still gamely dashed around, taunting its tormentor.
She was doing that. She didn’t know who the tormentor was. It could be Mr. Brown, it could be Dennis, it could be Reese. It could even be Madame Mother. Maybe it had always been Frank, she didn’t know.
But she knew, she was absolutely sure, that Frank had looked into it, and he had not turned up in Colville on some peripatetic whim. Frank had come because Denver North was coming, and Frank had bought as much land as he could on the route to Cheyenne because he was sure he would have a commodity that Denver North eventually would want to buy.
And then he had been killed, and he left it all to her the person who least wanted to sell.
It didn’t make sense.
She waited for someone to approach her, to threaten her, to make an overture of some kind so she could see what she was fighting. All she knew was she was fighting Mr. Brown’s determination, Dennis’s deadly desire to have her, and Reese’s easy profligacy with her money.
Nothing happened. No one approached her. No one said a word except what Dennis told her that morning.
But she knew now that her indecision had nothing to do with her being irresolute; some intuition held her back, and she trusted it implicitly. She would find the answers, and then she would know what to do.
“You cannot mean to move me out of this suite,” Mother Colleran protested angrily. “The desk clerk just stopped me and handed me the keys to some little dingy room on the third floor. There has obviously been some mistake, Maggie.”
“No mistake,” she said mildly. “We have another week of luxury before the money runs out.”
“I don’t believe you. Frank’s estate must have been enormous. You were running a business from it. You paid salaries from it. You—”
“I can’t support you and me and Reese with no money coming in, Mother Colleran, it’s as simple as that.”
“You can sell the Colleran land.”
Maggie shook her head. “It is amazing to me how everyone wants me to sell that land. It’s almost as if you think you’re entitled to a piece of the profit.”
He
r mother-in-law’s eyes flickered and she turned away abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Maggie. Frank left it to you. I just don’t think he intended for you to waffle around the decision for so long.”
Maggie felt another little jolt of perception. The old crow didn’t think Frank intended… ? “What did Frank intend, Mother Colleran?” she asked casually.
But her mother-in-law had caught the inference. “He certainly didn’t intend for you to walk around here destitute when you have something that will bring you enough money to live comfortably no matter what you decide to do.”
“And you,” Maggie said pointedly.
“That’s beside the fact. I’m not at all important in terms of this decision.”
“You’re right about that,” Maggie muttered, and her mother-in-law pretended not to hear her.
“You have to do what’s best for yourself, Maggie, always remembering that in spite of the fact that the newspaper is gone, you are still Mrs. Frank, and Mrs. Frank does not live in dingy hotel rooms parsing out silver like she was a recluse.”
“Indeed. And how does Mrs. Frank live?”
“She lives like Frank lived, comfortably, openhandedly, with status—”
“And with the good advice and comfortable companionship of her beloved mother-in-law,” Maggie finished acerbically.
Mother Colleran stared at her. “Really, Maggie, there’s no cause to get nasty. You don’t have to take me into account at all.”
“I don’t,” Maggie murmured. “However, at the moment, I have not made a decision, and we will vacate these rooms in another week and make the best of things until I do decide what to do.”
“Well, I hope to tell you, Maggie, that Frank never would have dawdled around being virtuous about it. What good is the land now anyway since the fire?”
Another little jolt. “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible to reclaim the pastureland. I could marry Logan and we could build a real nice spread on that land …”
Her mother-in-law’s face contorted in the most terrifying expression Maggie had ever seen, murderous, driven beyond all restraint—and then it was gone. “So you could, Maggie. It’s yours to do with what you want, of course. But I tell you, I will never live in the same house with that man, Maggie. Never. Think about it.”
Thea Devine Page 29