“You’re going to give him the letter?”
Kate nodded and helped her grandmother cross the gravel drive and negotiate the path to the kitchen door. “He can decide what to do with it.”
“He’s not going to like any of this,” Gran warned.
“I don’t either,” Kate said and braced herself.
“Danny told me Lisa was here,” Dustin said, following them into the kitchen. “I can’t stay long,” he added, with a glance toward Kate, “but I wanted to thank both of you for taking care of him this afternoon. I’m really sorry she scared you. She has a mean temper when she gets going.”
“We wouldn’t let anything happen to that boy. And we were fine, didn’t even need the sheriff,” Gert said, patting his arm. “I’m off to bed. Come over in the morning and tell me all about our new cattle. I assume you bought some?”
“I sure did,” Dustin said, standing close to Kate. She moved away from him. “Good night, Gert.”
“Good night, Dustin. That boy of yours did just fine,” she said, before she left the room and headed for her bedroom.
“What a mess,” he said, turning to Kate. “I’m really sorry you had to deal with it.”
“Lisa wrote a letter to Danny.” Kate moved away and reached on top of the refrigerator for the legal pad. “Here. I suggested she write to him instead of trying to talk to him, so I hope you don’t mind.”
He took the pad and glanced at the brief note. “Fair enough. Danny said she’s going away?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “We both are.”
His eyes narrowed. “You want to explain that?”
“Not necessarily. I don’t think you’ve wanted to explain things to me either. Not about Danny’s father and mother. Not about who he really was, or who you really are. So I guess we’re even.” She managed to keep her voice from trembling.
“Just like that,” he said. “You’re going back to New York?”
“Yes. I’m flying out first thing Saturday.” She looked away, hoping that he wouldn’t see how much she was hurt. “Gran will sell you the ranch, I’m sure.”
“Yeah.” She could hear the anger in his voice. “When you decide to leave, you don’t waste a hell of a lot of time, do you?”
She didn’t know how to answer, but then again, she didn’t think he expected her to say anything.
“I should have learned the first time,” he muttered and walked out the door.
“Me, too,” Kate said, and this time she let herself cry.
“THIS IS ALL WRONG.” Gert rearranged her papers again, then poured herself another cup of coffee to take back to her chair. “I don’t like this a bit, young lady.” She didn’t understand young people. How foolish could they be? Didn’t they know how quickly time passed?
“I’m sorry, Gran.” Kate finished washing the breakfast dishes and dried her hands. “But I have to leave.”
“Nonsense. You and that young man can patch things up.” Kate didn’t fool her grandmother. The girl wasn’t leaving because of her fancy job. Why, she’d only returned a couple of the dozen or so phone calls she’d gotten from New York. And she’d stopped watching the show on TV after the first couple of days.
“I don’t think so.”
“Where’s the boy this morning?”
“George Bennett picked him up. He’s taking the boys fishing for the day. I guess John’s gotten tired of having a new sister.”
“Sounds nice,” Gert said. “Means Dustin’s free to talk some sense into you.” She leaned forward to look out the window. “Oh, dear. Here comes your mother with that Jackson fella. I sure hope she isn’t having one of her fits.”
“Me, too.” Kate stepped into the living room and eyed the piles of paper. “What decade are you in? I’m going into Marysville today to buy you your own laptop and printer so you can take your time finishing the book.”
“Aw, hon, that’s real nice, but—” She looked out the window again. “They’re raisin’ a lot of dust, and the sheriff is right behind them. Do you think it’s one of them high-speed chases like they have in California?”
Kate hurried over to the window. “Is that Jake’s truck?”
“It’s a regular parade,” Gert declared, hauling herself out of her chair. There was no reason getting upset until there was something to get upset over. “I’d better make a fresh pot of coffee. Looks like we’re getting company.”
Before she fixed the coffeepot, she hung the red rag in the back window to summon her foreman. She might need some help and Kate might need a man. A woman never knew when one would come in handy.
“REMEMBER HOW I told you there was a dead body in the drive-in?” Martha wrung her hands and looked at everyone gathered around her mother’s kitchen table, except for Dustin Jones, who leaned against a wall and looked like he’d rather be anywhere else but inside this house. That nice sheriff thanked Kate for his coffee and acted like he was here on a social call, but Martha knew different. She’d be arrested by noon and all hell would break loose. Her picture would make the front page of the next issue of the Beauville Times and it would be all grainy and make her look twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier.
“Mom,” Kate said, reaching out to take one of her hands, “are you sure you—”
“I’m sure,” Martha said, giving Kate’s fingers a little squeeze before she took her hand away. “Carl’s offered to dig it—him—up. If I want him to. But he has to do it soon or miss his window of opportunity.”
“Dig who up, Martha?” her mother asked. Martha couldn’t look at her mother. This really wasn’t going to be a very good morning.
“Excuse me,” that nice Sheriff Sheridan interjected. He gave her a kind smile. “Why don’t we make this an unofficial conversation? You could say something like, ‘what if?’ and we could all assume you were just asking for information and not making an actual confession.”
Carl nodded. “That’s a good idea, Martha. Start over again.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath and looked at the sheriff. “What if I—I mean,someone—helped someone else bury a dead person so no one would know he’d been killed?”
Jess Sheridan looked thoughtful. “I guess that would depend on the circumstances.”
“Mother, what about calling a lawyer?”
Martha shook her head. “What if someone had a best friend—” She glanced at her nephew, who stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. “A best friend,” she repeated, “whose husband couldn’t hold his liquor.” She heard her mother’s quick intake of breath but didn’t dare look in her direction. “And he beat her. A lot. And when he found out she was pregnant he threatened to kill her.”
Kate handed her a tissue, so Martha wiped her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to cry, but the whole thing was really getting to be too upsetting.
“Oh, Lord,” she heard Gert mutter.
“What if, uh, this person hit her husband with a frying pan, one of those cast-iron pans?” Everyone nodded. They knew cast iron. “Accidentally, of course,” she added.
“Of course,” Kate agreed.
“As in self-defense,” the sheriff said.
“Yes, that’s it.” She blew her nose. “Then, what if that person called her very best friend and asked for help and they didn’t know what to do because they were pretty young and one was pregnant and they were both very scared and neither one wanted the baby to be born in jail—” Here, at this part, she couldn’t help looking at Jake, hoping he would understand.
“Go on, Aunt Martha,” he told her. “It’ll be all right.”
“Mrs. McIntosh,” Jess said, his voice low and very casual, “let me ask you this. If someone was going to get rid of someone’s friend’s husband’s body, where would someone put it?”
“Maybe in an old well on someone’s great-great-grandfather’s ranch that became a drive-in.”
“And where is the best friend now, the one that was pregnant?”
“She died in 1982.”
“And the alcoholic abusive husband who was killed accidentally in self-defense, what year was that?”
Martha opened her mouth to speak, but it was Gert who answered. “I would imagine that was March of ’65, Sheriff. And the only one who might have missed him was his mother.”
“And his son?” Jake had gone very, very pale.
Martha’s heart ached for him, but she didn’t know what else to say to make him feel better. “No,” Martha said. “His son was better off without him.”
Gert eyed the sheriff. “Well, I guess you’ve heard quite a story today.”
“Is this going in your book, Gert?” He stood and slid his chair into place, then put on his Stetson.
“No. Is it going in yours?”
Martha held her breath when he looked at her.
“Well, let me put it this way. If someone found a body, I’d have to investigate. It probably would be real hard to figure out what happened though, considering how that, uh, incident occurred in 1965.” He cleared his throat and turned to Gert. “If someone wanted to leave well enough alone, maybe fill in that well, then that’d be the end of it. All I heard here this morning was some unofficial conversation.”
“Thank you,” Martha said. If Gert and Jake understood, she would probably be able to sleep tonight—unless Carl insisted on staying over again. “I thought you’d arrest me.”
He smiled and headed toward the door, but stopped to pat her on the shoulder. “No, ma’am. Not unless you insist.”
“IS THERE ANYTHING else you’d like to tell us, Martha?” Gert certainly hoped there wasn’t. She’d always known, deep in her heart, that her only son, Hank, had come to a bad end. And she could admit that it was a relief to find out he hadn’t taken anyone else with him. She’d always been afraid he’d died driving drunk, with innocent victims dead on the road because of it.
“Well,” Martha said, fidgeting with her hands again.
“Mother?” Kate had gone pale. “You mean there’s more?”
“Your grandmother started it,” Martha protested, “with all this talk of history and town secrets and buried treasure. What was I supposed to do? Wait for Hank to get dug up?”
“Please,” Jake said, briefly closing his eyes. “My mother never said much about my father, but—”
“He wasn’t your father,” Martha said.
Jake frowned. “If he wasn’t my father, then who was?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Aunt Martha, if I knew I wouldn’t be sitting here asking.”
“Ah,” Gert sighed. “Of course.”
Kate looked at her. “Of course what?”
Gert smiled at her grandson, who technically wasn’t her grandson at all. “You can’t guess?”
Jake shook his head. “Not R.J.”
“Yes,” Martha said. “He and your mother were very much in love. He would have married her, but she didn’t think it was proper for a man as wealthy as R. J. Calhoun to marry his housekeeper. She was old-fashioned that way.”
“And he left you his mother’s ranch,” Gert said. “Now it all makes sense.”
Carl cleared his throat. “May I say something?”
Since he hadn’t spoken since he’d arrived, Gert figured it was only fair he get a word in now.
“Go ahead,” she told him.
“It’s about the well, and the, uh, body,” he said, with a quick glance at Gert. “What do you all want me to do? I halted construction this morning—told the men I had to get another permit—but I’m gonna have to start up again sooner or later and I have to know what to do about that well.”
Gert noticed that Dustin was trying to sidle toward the back door. She wasn’t going to let him stand by and let Kate leave without a fight, especially not now. “Dustin?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“We’re all going to the Good Night Drive-In. You and Kate are going to take me in the Lincoln.”
Neither one of them protested, which was a darn good thing, too, because Gert had had enough aggravation for one morning.
“GET OUT,” KATE SAID. “Now.”
Dustin made no move to get out of the car. He rested one wrist on the steering wheel and acted as if he had all the time in the world to sit there and look at her. “That sounds familiar. Get out. That’s what you told me that night I came to pick you up to go to the movies. Get out, you said. Just like that.”
“You could have told me the rumors about you and Lisa weren’t true.” She looked out the side window and prayed that her grandmother would return soon. Jake, Gran and Mom were huddled in the distance, where Kate assumed the well was—where Uncle Hank was. Gert had ordered her and Dustin to stay put and keep anyone from snooping around.
Not that there would be anyone snooping around, not at noon in the summer, in the middle of an empty construction site.
“If I’d had any idea what you were talking about,” Dustin said, which made Kate turn to look at him again.
“You had to know,” she said.
He shrugged. “I didn’t even live at home that summer. I worked out at the Dead Horse six days a week, from dawn ’til dinnertime. I only came into town to see you.” He paused. “You never even asked me if it was true, Kate. You just believed that I’d gotten someone pregnant instead of believing that I loved you too much to do something like that.”
“You never said you loved me. You said ‘no strings,’ and ‘we’ll just have fun.”’
“I lied.”
She held his gaze with her own. “You seem to be good at it.”
“I was going to tell you about Danny,” he said, having the decency to look guilty. “I guess at first I thought you didn’t deserve the truth. And later on there never seemed to be the right time to go into the whole story.” He smiled. “Making love got in the way.”
She wished he hadn’t reminded her of that. “I loved you, too, a long time ago.”
“And now?” He reached over and took her hand.
“No.”
“Now who’s lying?”
Kate shook her head. “It’s not going to work, Dustin. You know it’s not.”
“You’re running away again, Katie,” he said, planting a kiss in her palm. “You ran away from me. Why?”
“I loved you. You didn’t love me. Simple.”
“And you ran away from town after your dad died.”
She turned away and wished he would release her hand. She should go check on her mother and her grandmother. And she bet Jake could use a hug right now. What on earth could they be talking about for such a long time?
“Kate?”
“What?”
“Stay and love me.” He tugged her across the wide seat of the Lincoln and against that hard wide chest. “I’ve been waiting for you to come back for nine years.”
“Liar,” she whispered, but she smiled against his chest.
“It’s true.” Dustin lifted her away from him and looked down into her eyes. “I want to marry you, even though your grandmother thinks she’s going to be famous and your mother helped bury a dead body and my son likes you more than he does me—”
“That’s not true. He worships the ground you walk on.”
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “He told me that his other daddy hit him all the time, but you just make a frowny face.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Definitely. And my grandmother is actually writing a very good book.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said, and with one easy motion lifted her over the seat and into the back. He climbed over the leather upholstery to join her as she scrambled to sit up.
“What are you doing? There are people around. They’ll be back any—”
He kissed her then, his hands holding her face to his, until she melted against him. Habit, she thought. Making love in cars was a very dangerous habit.
“Marry me,” he said, lifting his mouth a fraction of an inch. “We’ll conceive our first child in
the back seat of any vehicle you choose.”
“Second child,” she reminded him. “Danny’s the first.”
“That’s a ‘yes?”’
“Uh-huh,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You get me, the ranch, my mother and my grandmother. What do I get?”
The damn cowboy grinned. “Take your jeans off and I’ll show you.”
Kate looked out the window. “Too late. Here they come. Hurry up, get back in the front seat.”
He grabbed her wrist as she started to straddle the front seat. “Are you going to marry me or not?”
“Kate!” Martha’s voice carried across the wind. “What on earth are you doing?”
“Discussing my honeymoon,” she shouted, and saw her mother’s mouth fall open. Gran waved and Jake gave her a “thumb’s up” sign.
Gran came over to the car. “You two stay there and work things out. Martha and I will get a ride home with Jake.” She winked. “Take your time. I’ve got a lot of writing to do this afternoon and Martha’s going to help me with the 1980s.”
“Okay.” Kate tumbled into the back seat again. “Now,” she said, moving toward her new fiancé, “you were going to show me something?”
He chuckled, his mouth against hers, as they tumbled backward. Kate landed on top of him, which was a very satisfactory place to be.
“Do you think it’s right to leave them here like this?” Kate heard her mother complain. Jake chuckled.
“Martha,” Gert snapped, “leave the children alone. We need a couple of cold beers and a box of tissues and a good long talk, so keep walking and mind your own business.”
Dustin tilted his head to whisper in Kate’s ear, “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”
Kate laughed when she kissed him. It was so good to be home.
EPILOGUE
“TELL YOUR MOM I have big news,” Martha announced, pleased that little Danny had answered the phone so promptly. That boy was growing up. She’d bet he’d shot up two inches this past year and a half since his father married Kate.
“Really, Grammy?What big news?”
“Grown-up stuff, Danny. Where’s your mother?” Martha liked it that he called her “Grammy.” She thought she’d mind at first, but she’d discovered she really liked the sound of that word. And with Kate seven-and-a-half months’ pregnant, it was a good thing she’d gotten used to being a grandmother so quickly.
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