by C. J. Box
“Jess.”
Jim Hearne was in his late forties, stocky, broad-faced, with thinning brown hair and sincere blue eyes. He had once been the exclusive agriculture loan officer, but his duties and titles had multiplied. A bareback rider who had qualified twice for the national finals, he still had a bow-legged hitch in his walk as he led Jess toward his office and shut the door behind them. The Rawlins Ranch had been his college rodeo sponsor.
Jess sat in one of the two chairs facing Hearne’s desk and put his boot box of documents in the other. He removed his hat and placed it crown down on the floor next to him. On Hearne’s desk was a thick file bound by clips with a tab that read RAWLINS.
“Plenty of moisture lately,” Hearne said, sitting down. “That’s got to help.” Despite the fact that he was now president of the bank, Hearne still handled his old customers personally, and lapsed easily into the old banter. Jess had known him for thirty years, had watched him grow up to become a community leader.
Jess nodded. They both knew why he was here and that Jess wasn’t good at small talk.
“Jess, I’m just not sure where to start,” Hearne said.
Jess owned and operated a three thousand-acre ranch, one thousand eight hundred acres of it outright and the other one thousand two hundred acres deeded from the forest service, state, and federal Bureau of Land Management. He ran 350 Herefords in a cow/calf operation and sometimes, when the grass was good like this year, took in fifty to one hundred feeder cattle on a lease. It was the second-largest private holding remaining in the county. Hearne knew the herd size, deed arrangements, and layout of the ranch from memory, and didn’t need to open his file.
Jess nodded. “There’s not much to say. I can’t make my payments, and I don’t see how that’s going to change, Jim. I’m broke. I laid off Herbert Cooper yesterday.”
Hearne looked at Jess impassively, but Jess thought he noticed a softening in Hearne’s eyes as he spoke.
“Calving is going as well as it ever has,” Jess said. “The alfalfa’s doing great with this moisture. I’ve got several calls from folks wanting to pasture their cows on my open meadows. But even with that …”
Hearne pursed his lips. Silence hung in the air.
“Everywhere you look,” Hearne said, “people are eating beef. Everyone I know, practically, is on that low-carb meat diet. You’d think the prices would rise. That mad cow stuff out of Canada is a red herring.”
Jess agreed. This was a never-ending conversation, one they had had before. Meat-processing conglomerates controlled prices and had long-term options on supply. Jess had agreed to those prices years in advance, before the increase in meat consumption, before costs skyrocketed.
“No one held a gun to my head to make me sign those futures contracts,” Jess said. “I’m not here to whine.”
“I know you’re not.”
“I’m not here to tell you everything’s going to get better, either,” Jess said. “It probably won’t. But I do know I run a good outfit, and I don’t waste your money or mine.”
This was as close as Jess would come to asking for a favor, and it made him uncomfortable. He wouldn’t have even made the statement if he wasn’t still thinking of Herbert Cooper’s packing up. He had made Hearne uncomfortable, too, Jess could tell.
“No one ever said that,” Hearne said. “I sure as hell didn’t.”
Jess nodded.
“It’s just that the day of the pure cattle outfit in northern Idaho may have passed us by,” Hearne said, his face still flushing as he did so.
“I know.”
“You’re land-rich and cash-poor,” Hearne said. “You’ve probably been following the price of real estate the last couple of years.”
“Yup.”
“Your place is worth millions, if developed properly,” Hearne said morosely, delivering news neither one of them really wanted to hear but had to. “There are ways to get out from under this debt, Jess.”
Jess sighed. His back was ramrod straight, but he felt like he was slumping. “I’m no developer.”
“You don’t have to be,” Hearne said. “There are probably a half dozen developers right now who would work with you. I’ve gotten some calls on it, in fact.”
It hurt Jess to know that others knew he was in trouble, that he was a soft target. “I’ve gotten some calls, too, and offers in the mail. I used to just throw ’em out without even opening them. But the Realtors are getting wise to it and sending ’em in unmarked envelopes. Karen even came out yesterday with her new husband.”
“You could diversify,” Hearne said. “Look at the Browns.” The Brown Ranch was the other remaining family ranch in the area. “One son runs cattle and a meatpacking facility. The other son runs a gravel operation. The daughter operates a guest ranch on the property.”
Jess snorted. “I had plans like that once,” he said. “You know what happened.”
Hearne sat back and sighed. He knew.
The silence groaned.
Hearne said, “None of us who grew up here wants to see you lose that ranch. I sure as hell don’t. I think if all of the old ranches are replaced by those five-acre ranchettes, like we’re seeing now, the county just won’t be the same. But I can’t let sentiment run my bank. Those newcomers built this building, and they’re sending my kids to college.”
Jess wondered why Hearne felt it necessary to tell him that.
“Jess, is there any way you would consider selling some of it? Maybe half? That would buy you some time to figure out the rest and maybe save some of it.”
Jess bristled. The thought of being the one to dissolve the operation was a bitter pill. He thought of his grandfather, his father, his mother. They had left him a legacy, and he had screwed it up. The ranch was all he had that defined him, or the Rawlins name. How could he get rid of half of it?
“I’m a rancher,” Jess said. “I don’t know anything else.”
Hearne rubbed his face with his hands. Jess noticed that Hearne’s hands were soft. They didn’t used to be. He looked down at his own hands. They were brown, gnarled, and weathered.
“We’ve got to figure something out,” Hearne said. “We can’t extend any of the loans anymore. I’ve got directors and auditors who want to know what the hell I’m doing with these bad loans.”
“I’m sorry, Jim.”
“Don’t say that,” Hearne said. “I can’t stand for you to say that.”
The intercom chirped, and Hearne leaned forward and picked up the headset. “I’m in a meeting, Joan.”
Jess could hear Joan’s muffled voice. Whatever she said had enough import to keep Hearne on the line.
“Oh, I hate to hear that,” Hearne said. “Of course they can put it up. Of course they can.”
Hearne continued to listen, then glanced over Jess’s shoulder into the lobby. “Yeah, I see him. He’ll have to wait,” and cradled the handset.
“Sorry,” Hearne said, his face drained of color.
“No problem. What’s the matter?”
“Do you know the Taylor family? Monica Taylor?”
“I’ve heard the name,” Jess said, trying to think of the context.
“She’s got two kids, a girl and a boy. Apparently, they’re missing.”
“Oh, no.”
“Been gone since yesterday,” Hearne said. “Some other women want to put a poster up of the missing kids in the lobby.”
Jess shook his head. “They’ll probably turn up.”
“Things like this never used to happen,” Hearne said. Then, remembering why they were there, the banker said, “Jess, give me a couple of weeks to come up with some options for you. You don’t have to take any of them, of course. But we both know you’re in default. If I can come up with something to get us out of this mess we’re in, I will.”
Jess sat back, overwhelmed. “You don’t have to do that, Jim.”
“I know I don’t,” Hearne said, deflecting the emotion. “But we’ve known each other for a long time. I don’t want to see
your ranch turned into more starter castles for California transplants, either. I want there to be a couple of ranches in this county, too.”
Jess stood, clamped on his hat, and extended his hand to Hearne across the desk. “Jim, I…”
“Don’t say it,” Hearne interrupted. “It’s good for business, is all. We’ll give a lot more loans out to people to live in a place that has ranches, that isn’t completely overdeveloped, is all.”
Jess said nothing but wanted to embrace the banker who was lying to him.
AS HE OPENED the office door, Jess recognized Fiona Pritzle as one of the women putting up the posters in the lobby. Before he could slink away, she saw him and came rushing over.
“Jess,” she said, trapping both of his hands in hers, standing too close, looking up into his eyes, “did you hear about the Taylor children?”
“Just did. It’s terrible.” Her hands were as dry as parchment.
“I was the one who gave them a ride along Sand Creek yesterday,” she said, her eyes shining. “They were going fishing, and I dropped them off. But they didn’t come home last night.”
“They’ll probably show today,” he said.
“Oh, with that rushing creek, they could have been swept away and drowned!”
Jess would have had more sympathy for Fiona, but she seemed to be reveling in the fact that she was a major character in the drama and was playing it to the hilt.
“And who knows who could have taken them,” she whispered. “There are a lot of people here now we don’t know anything about. Who knows how many sexual predators have moved up here?”
Jess winced. “Is there a search team?”
“Thank God, yes,” she said. “The sheriff has his deputies out, and people are lining up to volunteer to look for them.”
“That’s good to hear,” he said, gently breaking loose from her grip, at the same time wishing he had more confidence in the new sheriff, who seemed to Jess to be more of a public relations/chamber of commerce type than a lawman. As he thought this, Jess realized he had trapped Hearne in his office because Fiona had blocked him in the doorway.
“It is good,” Fiona said. “I heard that a bunch of those retired police officers have volunteered to help the sheriff head up the investigation. They showed up this morning. Isn’t that great?”
Jess nodded. “I suspect the new sheriff will welcome their help.”
“It shows you that a lot of these newcomers have good hearts,” she said. “And they have experience in these kinds of horrible crimes. It’s the kind of thing they did all the time in L.A.”
“Excuse me,” Hearne said, sliding past Jess.
Jess watched as Hearne strode across the lobby and greeted a man sitting in a lounge chair. The man was portly, Hispanic, and well dressed in a light brown suit, Jess noticed.
“Well,” Jess said, extricating himself and nodding at the poster Fiona had mounted on the wall, “that’s a good thing you’re doing. I’ll keep an eye out myself since I’m upstream of Sand Creek.”
Hearne and the well-dressed man went into Hearne’s office, and before the door shut, the banker said, “Take it easy, Jess. I’ll call you.”
“Thank you, Jim.”
Fiona watched the exchange, and Jess could see the wheels spinning in her head.
“Does that mean you get to keep your ranch?” she asked eagerly.
ON HIS WAY out of the lobby doors, Jess paused to look at the poster. MISSING, it said, ANNIE AND WILLIAM TAYLOR. LAST SEEN AT 2:30 P.M. FRIDAY NEAR RILEY CREEK CAMPGROUND ON SAND CREEK. It said Annie was last seen wearing a yellow sweatshirt, jeans, and black sneakers and William was dressed in a short-sleeved black T-shirt, jeans, and red tennis shoes; one of them might be wearing an adult’s fly-fishing vest.
The school photos of the children tugged at his heart. Jess thought about how you could see the future personalities of adults in the photos they took when they were children if you cared to look hard. Even now, when he stared at the photos of his son in his home, he could see what he would become. Not that he’d known it at the time, though. But the clues were there, the blueprint. If only he had known.
William smiled broadly, his hair a comma over his forehead, his chin cocked slightly to the side. He looked happy-go-lucky and tragic at the same time. It was Annie who most affected him, and he found himself staring at her likeness, mesmerized by it. She was blond, open-faced, clear-eyed, and looked to be challenging the photographer. But there was something in her eyes and the set of her chin. He immediately liked her and felt an affinity he couldn’t explain. Had he met her before? He searched his memory and came up with nothing.
Maybe it wasn’t that he’d seen or met her before, but what she represented to him. Maybe her photo made him realize how much he had wanted grandchildren. The thought embarrassed him. It wasn’t something he thought about or pined over. In fact, this was the first time it had occurred to him with such force. He wished he could start over somehow, maybe do things differently this time, maybe do things right. So instead of an empty house and failing ranch, he would have kids around like these to spend his time with, impart some of his knowledge, tell them they could be … exceptional.
He stood back and shook his head at the thought but continued looking at the poster.
Phone numbers for the sheriff’s department were written underneath the photos.
As he walked outside, Jess glanced over his shoulder and could see the well-dressed man opening a briefcase and spreading the contents out over Jim Hearne’s desk.
Saturday, 9:14 A.M.
MONICA TAYLOR was beside herself. Annie and William had been missing for over twenty hours. She hadn’t slept, eaten, showered, or changed clothes since Tom had walked out of her home the evening before. It had been a long night, made worse when smoke rolled out of the oven—she had forgotten about the lasagna—and set off the alarms. She stood on her front lawn, weeping uncontrollably, being comforted by a volunteer fireman, while the rest of the crew charged through her front door with extinguishers and hoses, tracking mud across the carpet and linoleum, to emerge a few minutes later with a black, smoking, unrecognizable pan of black goo. The neighbors who had been outside in their bathrobes or sweats went back inside their houses.
Before the lasagna burned, sheriff’s deputies had been there twice, once to hear her initial concerns and again near midnight to obtain photos of the children and descriptions of what they’d been wearing when she saw them last. The difference in their attitudes from the first visit, when one of the deputies had actually tried to pick her up, to the second, when even the flirting deputy averted his eyes and spoke somberly, brought home the growing seriousness of the disappearance.
The sheriff eventually tired of her hourly calls throughout the night, and sent over a doctor, who prescribed Valium. The Valium took the edge off her pain but didn’t make it go away. All she had to do was look at the school photos of Annie and William, the frames now clouded with a film of sticky smoke residue, to bring it all back.
She had developed a routine, of sorts, that consisted of walking through the house and out the back door into the yard, circling the house to the left, and reentering through the front door, all the while clutching the cordless phone as if to squeeze it into juice. As she passed the hallway she glanced at herself in the mirror, seeing someone who was almost unrecognizable. The woman who looked back had redrimmed eyes, sunken cheeks, matted, ratty hair. She seemed to be folding over on herself when she walked. Monica now knew what she would look like when she was old.
When the telephone rang, and it rang often, she would gasp, ask God that it please be one of her children, and punch the TALK button. It was never Annie or William, but the sheriff’s office, a concerned neighbor, the local newspaper, or a rural mail carrier named Fiona Pritzle, who told Monica that she, Fiona, was “the last person on earth to see those kids alive.” The phrase had nearly buckled Monica’s knees, and made her reach out for the wall to steady herself.
O
ver and over, Monica replayed the morning before, each time revising the situation so Tom left the house before breakfast or, better yet, that he’d never come at all. She hated herself for what happened, and she asked God, over and over, for a second chance to make it right. She thought God, like the sheriff, was likely getting tired of hearing from her lately, especially after all these years when He never even entered her mind. But there would be no more Tom, she vowed. No more Toms, period.
Monica had never been blessed with a road map. Her own parents had not provided one, certainly not for a situation like this. She always envied those who seemed to have a map, a plan, a destination, something inside that provided a framework. In times of confusion and despair, she had little to fall back on and no one to call on for advice or support. Certainly not her mother. And who knew where her father was?
It was tough raising two children alone. The men she met were either divorced themselves and loaded with baggage or quirks, married and looking for a fling or an easy out, or immature like Tom. None of them had the potential or desire to be a good father to her children, which was what she yearned for. Annie needed a man in her life, but William needed one even more. Sure, the men she met were interested in Monica. But not Monica and her children. She couldn’t really blame them, but she did. There had been too many years wasted hoping, too many years of listlessness and paralysis, treading water, hoping some man would throw a lifeline. Monica was well aware of the fact that she was not the only single mother in the world. Her own mother had the same experience, after her father—who called Monica his princess, his angel, his button—had left without saying good-bye. But that’s where the similarity ended, because Monica loved her children deeply.
But she’d been weak. The desire she’d had for Tom now seemed to have happened in another life. It had been so pointless, so shallow, so selfish. Sure, she’d wanted him in her bed. Once, there had been many. But she wasn’t an animal. She’d learned to control herself, not to give in to her basest instinct anymore. There’d been other men—better men—who’d wanted to stay over. The most recent was Oscar Swann. But she’d refused him, and them, explained that her children—their family—came first. Her children needed a father but not simply a male, and certainly not a series of them. Monica knew what that did to children because it had happened to her.