Maggie's Man (13 page)

"And your other brother," Cain
continued levelly, slanting another glance toward her. "I suppose your
other brother will join him?"

"Ah … yes," she declared.

Cain was so impressed he arched a droll blond
eyebrow. "Is he a Marine, too?"

"Brandon? No, he's an investment
banker."

"Wonderful. So one brother can shoot at me
and the other can sell me short. Any shotgun-toting father I should be
concerned about as well?"

"No, my father's dead. His plane went down
in Indonesia when I was seven." She stated this matter-of-factly.
"They never found his body. After a year, we had a memorial service and
buried an empty casket, as if that made sense of it all."

"Oh." The conversation drifted.
Finally, he shifted restlessly on the seat. "Well, what about your mother,
then? Will she come after me with knives? A man needs to know his
opponents."

Maggie, having seen her mother wield steak
knives before, was not amused by the picture. "My mother is a little
wild," she conceded, unconsciously scowling. "She likes to break
things, but only expensive things. If they won't be missed, then they aren't
worth breaking, that's her motto."

"Sounds nice."

"Oh yeah. She's the life of the
party." Maggie didn't want to talk about Stephanie anymore. Supposedly she
was somewhere in the Mediterranean now with some man she'd met on some yacht in
some sea. Stephanie was never without a man. Maggie had no idea how she and her
mother could even be remotely related. "You know who you should be
genuinely terrified of?" she suggested at last, switching from her mother
to a much more pleasant topic of conversation.

"Do tell."

"My grandmother!"

"Your grandmother?" If his eyebrows
had climbed any higher he would have lost them.

"Yes, absolutely. My grandmother is a
Hathaway of the famed Hathaways who used to be incredibly beautiful Southern
belles." He looked even more skeptical—which hurt—but she'd long ago come
to terms with the fact that she hadn't inherited her ancestors' looks. "The
Hathaways," she continued unperturbed, "fell on hard times after the
Civil War. My great-great-great-grandfather decided plantation life was over so
he packed up the whole family and they headed west to Texas and got into cattle
rustling."

"Rustling? As in stealing?"

"Absolutely. No one said my
great-great-great-grandfather was honorable. Actually, we consider him the
first real entrepreneur in the family."

"I see."

"His wife was my
great-great-great-grandmother Margaret, who was renowned for her flaming-red
hair."

"Ah. Now I get the connection."

Maggie beamed at him as if he were a very good
student. "Yes, my grandmother, Lydia, named me after the first Margaret,
but I'm afraid red hair is the only thing we have in common. She wasn't exactly
a marriage counselor. I gather she could ride and shoot like nobody's business,
and she and Harold pretty much ran amok as outlaws in Texas."

"Ran amok?"

"My grandmother's phrasing, not
mine."

"Of course."

"At any rate, Harold was finally captured by
a posse formed by one of the more powerful landowners, and sentenced to hang in
the morning as an example to all cattle rustlers. My
great-great-great-grandmother was so distraught at the news that she approached
the land baron dressed in only a black lace shawl and her flaming-red
hair."

Both of Cain's eyebrows climbed to the ceiling
again. "The plot thickens," he murmured.

"Oh, yes. She strode into the hacienda,
her noble head held high, her bare feet padding against the cool tiles, her red
hair shimmering around her shoulders, and in front of all the slack-jawed,
lusting cowboys, she told the land baron that if he would let her husband go,
she would give him a night like no other."

"She said this, half-naked in front of a
bunch of hired guns?" Cain quizzed dubiously.

Maggie leveled him with an impatient stare.
"She was a very brave woman."

"And a good candidate for gang rape,"
he exclaimed.

"Hey!" Maggie hit his shoulder so
hard she startled both of them. "Don't talk about my
great-great-great-grandmother that way!"

Cain blinked, looked at her stubborn features
and blinked again. "My apologies," he said at last, his voice
perfectly sober.

"Well," Maggie said, instantly
relaunching into her story, "since the land baron apparently didn't have a
mind as filthy as yours, he didn't toss her to the rabble. Instead, he agreed
to her offer. If she could make him unconscious with satiated lust by morning,
Harold would go free."

"Hmm," Cain said and shifted a bit in
his seat. He wasn't sure this was a good story for a man of six years'
abstinence to hear, but on the other hand, he certainly didn't want to
interrupt. "So did she conquer the man with passion?"

Maggie looked at him triumphantly. "Of
course not! My great-great-great-grandmother was a one-man woman. She was also
incredibly devious. She took a thick lotion, added arsenic and rubbed it all
over the evil land baron's body, telling him it was a Far Eastern aphrodisiac.
When he was still blubbering about how this was going to be the best night of
his life, she pulled out his own gun from his holster and turned it on him. He
tried to fight, of course, but by then he was too sick to move. She calmly put
on his clothes, pulled his hat low over her head and grabbing the keys to the
prison, marched right out to the shed, freed her husband, stole the land
baron's two best horses and rode off into the sunset! Ta-da!"

She grinned at him, her cheeks flushed and her
eyes brilliant with vicarious triumph.

"Happily ever after," he filled in,
amused in spite of himself.

"More or less." Then on a more
serious note, she concluded, "Unfortunately Harold wasn't as good a rider
as Margaret and broke his neck falling off his horse a year later. But Margaret
lived to be eighty-five years old, outliving her own children, and at the age
of seventy-two she still lived by herself and protected her land by pulling out
her false teeth and chasing warring braves from her log cabin with the
chattering dentures."

"That must have been a sight to
behold," he concurred.

"Yes." Then abruptly she jabbed her
finger in the air at him. "And my grandmother comes from that stock, and
she doesn't take any garbage from anyone, let me tell you. If you have a choice
about whether to get captured by my brother C.J. or my grandmother, pick C.J.
He's only a trained Marine. My grandmother is a Hathaway woman!"

"I'll remember that," Cain promised
soberly, having a hard time taking his eyes off Maggie's face. Flushed and
triumphant, she was something else. His ever-uncontrollable mind took in her
old, dowdy clothes and replaced them with a simple, black lace shawl. His hands
tightened instantly on the wheel and he swallowed two times really fast, then
made his brain promise never to do that again. Six years, Cain. Six years, and
she looked at you like she wanted to inhale your lungs. God give him strength.

When he trusted himself enough to speak, he
said as carefully as possible, "You're a Hathaway woman."

It must not have been the right thing to say.
Maggie seemed to simply wilt beside him. Her shoulders hunched. Her gaze fell
to her lap and her fingers picked restlessly at her wool skirt. Then she gave
up on her skirt and toyed with the old locket around her neck. He wasn't even
sure she was aware she was doing that. "I suppose," she said at last,
but the doubt was evident in her voice. Finally, she simply shrugged. "All
gene pools get a mutant sooner or later."

His forehead creased and though it wasn't his
business, he was insulted for her. "Who told you that?"

Her head came up and she peered at him
curiously. "No one told me that," she said clearly. "But it's
fairly obvious. I mean, just … look at me." Her hands came up, doing a
little motion as if to say, This is it and don't I know it.

Cain's frown deepened to a full-fledged scowl,
and he hated scowling. His fingers flexed and unflexed on the wheel again. Then
he found himself saying abruptly, "Don't sell yourself so short, Maggie.
Maybe you just need to meet the right Harold, or get into cattle
rustling."

She smiled softly, but he could tell from her
expression that she didn't believe him. She shrugged and that was the end of
the matter. "And
your
parents?" she asked lightly. "Were
they cattle rustlers?"

"I don't know. They're not storytellers
like your family."

"What did you do at night?"

"Read from the Bible."

"Oh."

He offered her a crooked grin. "From the
little I know, my mother came from well-to-do people back East. I don't know
how she met my father, but she fell in love with him for reasons that escape
the rest of us, and he convinced her that cities were too dangerous for raising
a family. So they moved from Newark to the untamed mountains of northern Idaho,
for it is said, 'On the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.'"

Maggie nodded wordlessly. The phrase sounded
familiar—she went to church every Sunday with her grandparents—but she couldn't
quite place it.

"I don't think my mother understood what
she was getting into," Cain said abruptly, his hands tightening on the
wheel, his eyes narrowing unconsciously. "People have a tendency to
mistake fanaticism for stupidity and that's not the case—fanaticism is very
clever, very insidious in its own way. You don't ask new members to promptly
walk up to the Cliff of Reason and leap off. You lead them down it one step at
a time, slowly and surely. Was my mother a good Christian woman? Yes. Was she
concerned about the environment? Definitely. Did the disintegrating social
fabric of the U.S. culture worry her? A great deal. Did the growing number of
fractured families scare her? Did schools seem overcrowded and hotbeds for
gangs, violence and drugs? Did she worry about the future for her children? Of
course.

"And so she found herself living on ten
isolated acres of Idaho, educating the children at home to protect their values
and their minds. But my father had read in some pamphlet that children could
also be contaminated by poisoned public water supplies, so the next thing she
knew she was digging wells and pumping her own water. Taxes were no longer
being paid because my father pointed out that the white race is God's chosen
people and God stated, 'The earth is mine,' and thus why should the white race
pay taxes on 'His Land'? Which soon meant disregarding social security cards,
driver's licenses, insurance, vehicle registration, hunting licenses, all that
stuff, because those are 'man-made laws,' ZOG laws, and we have only to follow
the words of the Almighty God.

"The militias haven't 'sprung' from the
earth as everyone seems to think. They've grown slowly and carefully over time,
fertilized by the fear of our decay, and as with most movements, powered by a
deeply buried kernel of truth."

He paused, realizing suddenly everything that
was pouring out and wondering if he'd said too much. His hands loosened on the
wheel. He forced his shoulders straight. For six years, in the oppressive
solitude of his jail cell, he'd turned over these issues in his mind, replaying
his childhood like a movie reel that should have lost its color, as he sought
to understand what of his upbringing he could accept and what he had to reject.
He'd thought it would be a simple matter. He hadn't realized how easily and
tightly natural fears and rampant paranoia could mesh.

Now, Cain forced his voice to sound light.
"Well, at any rate. My mother found herself married to a husband who'd
transformed himself from Bob the accountant to Zechariah the sermonizing
militia leader, and she spent the rest of her days in a one-room cabin,
hand-pumping water from a well and dressing fresh-killed deer." And she'd
grown old too fast, worn too fast. The only time he'd ever seen her faded eyes
light up was when his father was gone and Abraham out. Then she'd sit down
Cain, and tell him her one good story—the time she'd gone to Boise before he
was born. Then her face would become animated once more as she described the
wonders of the city, the crush of the people, the flavor of the streets. She
only shared this story with him. It was their little secret, this quiet longing
to leave the mountains and see what else was out there. To maybe live a little
bit more.

"Oh," Maggie said. Her face had paled
again. "That … that must have been … very interesting."

He smiled and forced himself back to attention.
"You're a lousy liar, Maggie."

She nodded readily. Then as if following his
lead for light conversation, offered, "It's the fresh-killed deer thing. I
don't like blood. I can't even buy hamburger from the grocery store because it
makes me too sad."

"Hamburger
makes you sad?"

"Yes. Haven't you ever seen a cow?"

"I've seen a cow," he agreed slowly
and with something akin to fatalism.

"But have you ever really looked at
one?" She leaned forward earnestly, peering at him with those soulful blue
eyes, and he had a hell of a time keeping his attention on the road. "They're
such gentle creatures, you know. You can scratch them behind the ears, they
love to lick salt off your fingers. And their eyes … they have such huge,
liquid brown eyes and they are so trusting. Can you imagine turning that into
hamburger?"