Linda Lael Miller Bundle (46 page)

Downstairs, Farley put on his coat, took the necklace from the safe, left the house and strode toward the barn. Most of the men were in the bunkhouse, since the day’s work was over, but he found Charlie puttering around in the barn.

Farley touched the brim of his hat as he passed the man, but he didn’t trust himself to speak. He needed to ride, cold as it was, and let the fresh air clear his mind. Maybe then he could figure out some way to change things.

He entered the separate part of the barn where Lobo was stabled, led the big stallion out of his stall and saddled him. The animal nickered and tossed his head, as eager for the open spaces as Farley was, and it was then that a profound, almost mystical bond took shape between the man and the horse.

Farley led Lobo outside, under a full but icy moon, and swung up into the saddle.

“Everything all right, boss?” Charlie inquired. He was leaning against the paddock fence, Soldier at his side, both of them lonely for Wilbur.

Farley looked around him at the land, the kind of land that could soak up a man’s blood and sweat and still make him happy. In his mind the ranch would always be Rue’s, even if he managed to keep himself from getting shot back in 1892 and found his way home to her. One day, though, the land on either side of Ribbon Creek would belong to their child, if he’d been fortunate enough to sire one, and Farley wanted to guard the place and make it grow almost as much as he wanted to stay with Rue.

He looked toward the big house, adjusted his hat and finally answered the ranch hand’s question. In a way. “You’ll look out for her if something happens to me?”

“Exactly what is it you’re expectin’ to happen to you, Mr. Haynes?”

Farley lifted a shoulder. “Maybe nothing.” He reined an impatient Lobo toward the south, where the moon spread silver over the snow.

He rode until neither he nor the horse could travel any farther, until he wasn’t even sure he was still within the borders of the ranch. He pulled off his gloves and reached into his coat pocket for the thin cigars he loved, but instead of the package, he felt a cold, fragile chain between his fingers.

He’d tried to forget he was carrying the necklace.

“Go on,” he muttered hoarsely, glad nobody was there to hear him talking to a trinket. “Do your worst and get it over with!”

Farley held the pendant up, watched the moonlight do a twinkling dance along the length of the chain. He considered flinging it aside into the snow, but he knew now that that would do no good. A force he did not begin to understand had brought the necklace into his life, for good or evil, and that force would not be denied. He had to tie up the loose ends of his old life so that he could live the new one to the fullest.

“Rue.” Her name was a ragged, broken whisper on his lips. Once again, his vision blurred, and he wasn’t sure whether the necklace was working its bitter magic or if he was finally giving way to the grief dammed up inside him.

Five minutes passed, then ten, while the stallion rested and Farley waited.

When the transition occurred just as the sun came up, it was a subtle one. There was a roaring in Farley’s ears, and Lobo fretted and sidestepped beneath him. The power lines and the distant gray ribbon of the highway dissolved into nothingness.

Farley knew without consulting a calendar that he and the horse were back in his own century, and it was a long way back to Pine River from the Big Sky Country.

Still, he dropped the necklace into his pocket and rode back to the place where the house should have been, where Rue should have been drinking coffee in a warm kitchen and Soldier should have been barking. There was nothing except for an abandoned cabin and a single grave marked with a wooden cross.

Farley took off his hat for a moment, his throat thick with misery, his heart full of the kind of loneliness that can drive a person to do stupid, reckless things. He lowered his head for a few moments, struggling with his emotions, and then turned Lobo west, toward his destiny.

Rue stirred in her marriage bed, dreaming. She saw Farley riding alone through a winter dawn, his horse’s gleaming onyx coat contrasting starkly with the pristine snow. Knowing she could never catch up with her husband, she struggled to awaken instead.

The instant Rue opened her eyes, however, she knew the nightmare was real and she hadn’t escaped it. She and Farley had said their vows and consummated them, and now he was gone.

A frantic sob tore itself from her throat and she covered her face with both hands, trying hard to get a grip on her emotions. Farley was probably downstairs, reading one of his how-to books with one eye and watching his favorite TV program with the other.

She jumped out of bed, found her robe, pulled it on and dashed downstairs.

“Farley?”

The parlor fire was out, and the TV screen was blank.

Rue hurried into the study, but she knew before she reached it that Farley wouldn’t be there. His presence had a substance, an impact all its own, and she felt nothing except a rising numbness.

“Oh, God,” she prayed, unable to go farther, stumbling through the darkening house to the kitchen.

No fire in the cookstove, no coffee brewing, no Farley reading at the table.

Rue was still in shock, but she could feel her emotions moving underneath the hard layer of control. Soon they would break through and panic would reign.

She continued to entreat heaven as she ran back up the stairs to shower quickly and dress. Her hair was still damp when she followed Farley’s boot prints along the path that led to the barn. She nearly collided with Charlie at the gate.

“He’s gone,” she choked out miserably when the aging man gripped her shoulders to steady her.

“He took Lobo out hours ago,” Charlie said, his craggy, ancient face looking worried in the light of the moon. “I’m going to wake the other men so we can saddle up and start lookin’ for him soon as the sun’s up.”

“I’m going with you,” Rue insisted, as if anyone had given her cause to argue. “I think we should start right now.”

“Mr. Haynes made me swear to look after you,” Charlie said stubbornly. “And lettin’ you ride out in the dark of night over dangerous ground ain’t my idea of keepin’ my promise.”

Rue’s heart stopped for a moment, and she felt her eyes widen. “Farley asked you to take care of me?” The certainty came to her then that they weren’t going to find her husband, no matter how long or how thoroughly they searched, but since the realization wasn’t one Rue was ready to accept, she pushed it to the back of her mind.

“That’s right,” Charlie responded with a nod. “Now, you just go back in that house and mind your p’s and q’s until we can head out. Remember this, too—you won’t be a damn bit of good to the man if you’ve worked yourself up into a tizzy.”

Doing fierce battle with a flock of instincts that bade her to do otherwise, Rue obeyed. She walked stiff legged into the house, brewed coffee, drank a cup and then ran to the bathroom to throw up.

That ruled out the idea of breakfast—she would only have been going through the motions anyway—and her knees were too shaky for effective pacing. She took a chair at the kitchen table and laid her head on her arms.

The shrill ringing of the wall phone made her jump a good six inches off her chair, and she snatched the receiver off the hook and yelled, “Hello! Farley?” before she realized he wasn’t very likely to call.

Even in the face of logic, however, Rue’s disappointment was keen when an operator announced that she had a telegram for Ms. Rue Claridge.

She closed her eyes. “Read it, please,” she whispered.

“‘A set of sterling is on its way. What do you know about this man? Is he a fortune hunter? Have they found poor Elisabeth yet? Do write. Love, Mummy.’”

“Thanks,” Rue muttered when she was certain the operator had finished. Under other circumstances, the message would have embarrassed her, but she was too distraught over Farley to feel anything so mundane.

“Will there be an answer?”

“Not one you could send over a public-communications system,” Rue answered with wooden sweetness. Then she hung up the receiver. At least the annoyance of her mother’s passionate disinterest had put some starch in her knees and she was able to pace for a while.

Rue even drank another cup of coffee, but that proved to be a foolish choice. She was back in the bathroom, in the midst of violent illness, when she heard the back door open and close.

Quickly, Rue rinsed her mouth and washed her face, but when she hurtled into the kitchen, Farley wasn’t there. Charlie was, and he stood, hat in hand, looking worried and authoritative, obviously trying to do and say the things Wilbur would have. The crisis had made him younger and stronger, if only for a little while.

Rue didn’t speak. She just put on her winter gear and followed him outside. Her mare, Buttermilk, had been saddled, and all the hands were mounted and ready to ride out.

Lobo had left a trail of hoofprints in the hard snow, and they followed it for several miles, their breaths and those of the horses making white clouds in the bitterly cold air.

The tracks led to the middle of a vast clearing, and there they stopped. Rue, who had been riding in front, alongside Charlie and a younger man called Bill, closed her eyes, absorbing the shattering reality that Farley was gone.

Without her.

Recalling the words of Farley’s letter, written from his deathbed, Rue reminded herself that he had left her reluctantly. It was that damn code-of-honor thing, the need to finish all his business before he took up something new.

He was gone, and he surely had the necklace, so there was no way to follow him.

The hands were circled around the pattern of tracks in the snow, exclaiming. Naturally, they’d never seen anything like that before. One even speculated that both Farley and his horse had been abducted by aliens, and Rue wondered disconsolately if that theory was really any stranger than the truth.

Reining Buttermilk toward the house, feeling too broken inside even to cry, Rue let the animal take her home. She was aware of the men riding with her, although she didn’t look at them even once.

“I’ll get the sheriff out here quick as I can, Mrs. Haynes,” said one. “Don’t you worry. We’ll find your bridegroom.”

Tears glittered in Rue’s eyes, but she kept her chin high. “They won’t find him,” she managed to say. “Nobody could find him.”

“You don’t believe that crackpot idea of Buster’s about the spaceship and the little green men, do you?” Bill asked.

Rue meant to laugh, but a sob came out inside. “Right now,” she said when she could speak, “I don’t know what I believe, but I’m sure of one thing—wherever Farley is, that’s where I want to be.”

The sheriff came, and he called in the state police. They summoned the FBI, and all the ruckus attracted reporters from the tabloids. A week passed, and no trace of Farley or the horse was found, and in every supermarket check-out line in the country, the front page of the
National Scoop
screamed, UFO SNATCHES MAN AND STALLION, STATE OF MONTANA ON RED ALERT.

If Rue hadn’t been in mourning, she would have thought it was all a wonderful joke.

I
t took Farley a full week, riding hard, to reach Pine River. Having no money and no gun, he’d lived on what he could scavenge, which wasn’t much, considering there was snow on the ground. Lobo, once fat from his winter confinement in the stables at Ribbon Creek, was now sleeker and leaner, the kind of horse a man could depend on.

Folks shouted from the sidewalks and waved from the windows as Farley rode through the center of town, but he not only didn’t stop to talk, he didn’t even acknowledge them. His whole being was focused on a single objective: getting back to Rue.

As he came abreast of Jon Fortner’s office, Farley saw his friend waiting by the hitching rail out front, his arms folded, his gaze steady.

“That’s a fine-looking horse, Farley,” the doctor said.

The marshal drew back on the reins, dismounted and tethered the stallion to the rail. He needed to talk with Jon, but he feared to start because his emotions were so raw and sore and so close to the surface.

Jonathan came down the steps and laid a reassuring hand to Farley’s shoulder. “I’ve been there, too, remember?” he said, keeping his voice low so the gawking townspeople wouldn’t hear. “Come on inside, and I’ll pour you a cup of my special medicinal coffee.”

For the first time in more than a week, Farley smiled, though he knew the effort was probably somewhat on the puny side. “How about just giving me a cup of medicine with a little coffee in it?”

Rue was lying in bed one night, a month after Farley’s dramatic disappearance, when the memory invaded her mind, three-dimensional and in full color.

She saw herself in Pine River, at the churchyard, talking with a dark-haired young man. Michael Blake, that was his name, and he’d said Elisabeth and Jonathan Fortner had been his great-great-grandparents.

Now her heart was pounding like some primitive engine, and the fog of pain and confusion was finally lifting. She heard the young man say cordially,
My grandmother would really like to meet you, since you’re a shirttail relation and everything. She lives with my mom and dad in Seattle. Why don’t you give her a call sometime?

Rue threw back the covers and leapt out of bed. Michael had written a name and telephone number on a page from a pocket-size notebook. She squeezed her eyes shut. Where had she put that piece of paper?

At the same time she was pulling on clothes, Rue was ransacking her memory. Whenever someone handed her a business card or anything like that, she always slipped it into her pocket, and she’d been wearing a Windbreaker jacket that day….

Her stomach clenched into a painful knot as she struggled to pursue the recollection further. It was like trying to chase a rabbit through a blackberry thicket, but Rue followed tenaciously, because finding Farley and saving him from the bank robber’s bullet was so critically important to her.

“My purse!” she yelled, flipping on the overhead lights. She snatched her bag from the bureau top and upended it over the bed, sending pennies and gum wrappers, credit-card receipts and scruffy tissue all over. After a feverish search, however, she unzipped the change pocket and found the paper folded inside.

On it, Michael had written a name, Mrs. Elisabeth R. Blake, and a telephone number.

Rue reached for the bedside telephone, then caught sight of the alarm clock and realized it was four o’clock in the morning, and just three in Seattle.

“Hell,” she muttered, wondering how she could contain herself until a decent hour. Maybe Mrs. Blake was one of those old ladies who have trouble sleeping, and she was sitting up, working a crossword puzzle or watching one of the cable channels.

Rue’s speculations changed nothing. Michael had said his grandmother lived with his parents, and
they
were probably sleeping, with no clue of what a mystery their existence really was.

She went downstairs and made herself a cup of tea, since she could no longer tolerate coffee, a drink she’d once loved. She felt dizzy sometimes, too, and she was cranky as a bear recovering from a root canal, but she attributed these symptoms to the stress she’d been under for nearly a month. Pregnancy was both too wonderful and too terrible a prospect to consider.

Soldier, who had been sleeping on the hooked rug in front of the cookstove, as usual, traipsed over to give Rue a friendly lick on the forearm. Idly, she patted his head and went right on sipping her tea.

Perhaps this delay was a good thing. Rue didn’t have any idea what to say to Mrs. Blake once she reached her, but she knew the woman was her only link with Elisabeth and Farley, now that the necklace was gone.

Slowly, the icy gray light grew brighter at the windows. Rue fed Soldier, let him out and wandered back to the study.

The photographs taken at the wedding were there, tucked into a place of honor in a drawer of her grandfather’s cherrywood desk. Although it always did her injury to look at them, Rue could no more have ignored those pictures than she could have given up breathing or stilled the meter of her heartbeat.

She flipped through them, smiling even as tears pricked her eyes. Farley with coconut frosting all over his mouth. Herself wearing the gauzy dress from the attic. The bride and groom kissing right after the justice of the peace had pronounced them man and wife….

Rue carefully returned the photos to their envelope, then put on her coat and boots and made her way to the woodshed. She brought back an armload of pitchy pine logs, feeling better because of the effort of wielding the ax.

She made a fire and watched an early-morning news show in the study. When eight o’clock came around, Rue simply could not wait any longer. She sat down at the desk, pulled the telephone close and carefully punched out the number Michael had given her that day in the graveyard.

There were a few vague thumps on the line, then a long ring, then another.

“Blake residence,” a pleasant male voice answered.

“My name is Rue Claridge-Haynes,” Rue blurted. “I’d like to speak with Mrs. Blake—the senior Mrs. Blake—about some genealogy research I’ve been doing.”

“That would be my mother,” the man said. “If you’ll wait just a moment….” There was a thumping sound as he laid the receiver down, and Rue chewed a fingernail while she waited.

After what seemed like a long time, though it was probably not more than a minute or two, a woman’s voice came on the line, almost drowned out by the racket of an extension being hung up.

“Rue Claridge?”

Rue shoved a hand through her hair. “Yes. Mrs. Blake, I’m calling about—”

“I know what you’re calling about,” the old lady interrupted, crisply but not unkindly. “I’ve been waiting all my life for this moment.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My grandmother, Elisabeth Fortner, left something for you under the flyleaf of her Bible.”

Rue’s heart was hammering. This, she realized, was what she had been subconsciously hoping for. Elisabeth had found a way to reach across a hundred years, to send word about herself or Farley.

“Miss Claridge? Are you there?”

“My name is Claridge-Haynes now,” Rue said. It sounded totally inane, she knew, but she was in shock. “I’m married.” She paused, cleared her throat. “Mrs. Blake, what did my cous—your grandmother leave for me?”

“It’s an envelope,” Bethie’s descendant answered. “A letter, I suppose. I didn’t look because Grandmother’s instructions said I mustn’t. No one but you is to open the packet, and I cannot send it through the mail or by messenger. The note on the front specifically says that you will contact me when the time is right and that I must insist on your coming for it in person.”

Rue was practically dizzy with excitement and suspense. “I’m in Montana, Mrs. Blake,” Rue said. “But I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Mrs. Blake gave Rue an address and told her to call the moment she arrived in Seattle, no matter what time it was. “I’ll be waiting by the phone,” she finished.

Rue immediately called the nearest airport, but there were no planes available, charter or otherwise, because of the weather. Rue accepted that disappointment. She told Wilbur, who was recuperating at the ranch house under the care of a nurse, that she was leaving and he was boss until further notice, then threw her suitcases into the back of the Land Rover and left.

The storm started out as a light, picturesque skiff of snow, but by the time Rue reached Spokane, it had reached blizzard proportions. She stopped there and forced down a hearty dinner while a man at a service station across the street put chains on her rear tires.

“You shouldn’t drive in this, ma’am,” he said, when Rue returned from the restaurant and was settling up the bill. “It’s a long way to Seattle, and you’ve gotta go over the mountains. Snoqualmie Pass is probably closed anyway….”

Rue smiled, nodded, got behind the wheel and went right on.

Hours later, she reached the high mountain pass that connected the eastern and western parts of Washington state. Sure enough, traffic was backed up for miles, but the road was closed only to people who didn’t have chains on their tires.

On the other side of the mountain range, there was hardly any snow, and a warm, drizzling rain was washing that away.

Just over an hour after that, Rue pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store in the suburbs of Seattle. She called Mrs. Blake, who was awake and waiting, as promised.

After washing her face, combing her hair and brushing her teeth in the rest room, Rue bought a tall cup of hot chocolate and went on.

She found the Blake house with relative ease, but even though her exhausted state made her feel slightly bewitched, Rue wouldn’t let herself attribute the fact to anything mystical. She had always had a good sense of direction.

A white-haired old woman with a sweet smile and soft blue eyes came to the door only an instant after Rue rang the bell.

“Rue,” she said, and something in the very warp and woof of the woman reminded Rue of Elisabeth and filled her with an aching sense of nostalgia. Bethie’s
granddaughter
—how impossible that seemed. “Come in.”

“I hope I haven’t awakened anyone….”

“Mercy, no,” Mrs. Blake said, linking her thin, age-spotted arm with Rue’s and ushering her into a large, tastefully decorated room to the left. “Phillip, my son, is a surgeon, and he’s been up and gone for hours. Nadine, my daughter-in-law, is at the health club, swimming, and, of course, Michael lives in one of the dorms at the university now. I pretty much have the place to myself, except for the maid. Won’t you sit down?”

Even though she felt sure she would faint any moment, Rue was so tired, she was almost painfully tense. She sat in a graceful Queen Anne chair, upholstered in a pretty blue-and-white floral pattern, and tried to keep calm.

“Would you care for some coffee?” Mrs. Blake inquired, taking a chair facing Rue’s and gesturing gracefully toward the silver service on the cocktail table.

Rue shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said, and then bit down hard on her lower lip to keep from demanding the envelope Elisabeth had left for her.

“Well, then, there’s no sense in dragging this out, even if it is the biggest thing to happen around here since Nadine’s friend Phyllis crawled out on the roof during last year’s Christmas party and made a world-class fool of herself. She sang twenty-two different show tunes before the fire department got her down, you know, and every note was off key.”

Rue smiled and nodded and tapped the arm of the chair with her fingertips.

Mrs. Blake flushed slightly. “I’m sorry, I do get to running on.” She pulled a battered blue vellum envelope from her bag, which was resting on the marble-topped table beside her chair, and held it out to Rue.

Rue forced herself not to snatch it out of Mrs. Blake’s fingers. She must have looked calm on the outside, but inside, Rue was suffering an agony of hope. If this was nothing more than a cosmic postcard—“How are you? I am fine. Wish you were here”—the disappointment would be beyond tolerance.

Rue made herself read the faded but familiar lettering on the front of the envelope, and tears filled her eyes. Elisabeth’s cryptic instructions were all there, just as Mrs. Blake had relayed them.

Finally, like a child opening a fascinating, fragile present found under the Christmas tree, Rue broke the old wax seal and pulled a single page from inside the envelope.

The necklace did not tumble to her lap, as Rue had hoped it would, but she’d mourn that oversight later. Now, she would read words that had waited a hundred years for her attention.

Rue stopped there, fighting to hold on to consciousness while the gracious room swayed around her, then forced herself to go on reading.

When Rue let the letter crumple to her lap, Mrs. Blake was ready with a glass of cool water.