"Dark Paradise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoag Tami)CHAPTER 6 I’LL TELL you how the sun rose,’ ” Mari murmured, the words slipping out of her almost without her awareness. She sat on the same rock she had chosen the night before to watch the moon rise over the mountains. Now dawn was streaking the sky behind those same peaks in pastel shades that were at once as soft as mist and strong enough to take her breath away. The experience was new, and yet she felt strangely as if she had seen it a hundred times in some other existence. She felt as if she had been waiting forever to see it again. The beauty of it renewed her as six hours of fitful sleep had not. Something essential in her soul drank it in as if it were the elixir of life, and a deep sense of peace flowed in her veins. “‘I’ll tell you how the sun rose,’ ” she murmured. “‘A ribbon at a time,’ ” Drew finished the line from Emily Dickinson, his voice soft so as not to break the spell of the moment. Mari turned to find him standing beside her rock. He was dressed for a workout in second-skin black spandex bike pants and a sweatshirt heralding the Oxford Cricket Club. A mountain bike leaned against his right hip. “I used to enjoy sleeping in,” he said. “Then I saw this sunrise. I vowed to never miss another.” Mari pulled her denim jacket closer around her to fend off the morning chill and swiveled around to face him. “Do you ever miss England?” “Now and again,” he admitted with a candid smile. “But I visit often enough. There will always be an England, as the song goes. This is home now. I love it here.” “It’s not hard to see why,” Mari said, glancing around, soaking it up. She felt it herself, that tickle and tingle of new love. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel that kind of rush for a place instead of a person. She tried to imagine Lucy feeling it, but couldn’t see her friend falling for something that sounded so corny. “I always wondered what drew Lucy here,” she said, her gaze sweeping the dew-drenched meadow as she swept a strand of hair behind her ear. “I mean, she always liked to be in the eye of the storm. She had to be in on all the hottest trends and first to know the gossip. I couldn’t see her moving to the outback and growing vegetables… watching the sun rise. When I knew her, if she saw the sun rise, it was because she hadn’t gone to bed yet.” “She wasn’t so different here.” Drew propped his bike on its kickstand and moved to lean against the boulder, his shoulder half a foot from her hiking boots. “Don’t let all the natural splendor fool you. New Eden has its secrets and its conflicts. Lucy was always in the thick of it, stirring things up.” “With Evan Bryce’s crowd?” “Hmm. I dare say, that’s a set that runs as fast and flashy as any from her days in Sacramento. Evan Bryce is a powerful man. Powerful men have powerful friends. He always has a host of celebrities of one variety or another tagging after him. Actors, directors, models, politicians, lawyers. Many of them have second homes here as well.” “What you’re saying is that Lucy didn’t leave the world behind; she was actually on the cutting edge moving here?” “Montana is the trendy place to be. Much to the dismay of the local ranchers. One has to sympathize with their plight. Escalating land prices, skyrocketing taxes.” He sighed, his shoulders sagging as if the weight of the moral dilemma were pressing down on them. “But then, Kevin and I are part of the problem, aren’t we? We may feel sorry for the poor buggers, but we’re not about to leave.” “Where did Lucy stand?” The look Drew gave her was knowing and honest. “For herself.” An ache echoed through her, leaving behind the useless regret that her friend hadn’t been a better person. “You don’t seem much like her, luv,” Drew said gently. A sad smile pulled at the corners of her mouth as she slid down off the rock. “No. We didn’t have much in common… except that we were friends. That doesn’t make much sense, does it?” He slid a brotherly arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “It makes as much sense as relationships ever do. I can’t say that I found Lucy to be of sterling character, but I liked her as well. She had a rare sense of humor and if she found you worthy of friendship, she would fight to the finish for you.” “She was just… well, she was just Lucy. And now she’s gone.” For several moments, they stayed side by side, leaning against each other as if they had been friends forever instead of a day. The sunlight spilled over the shoulders of the Absarokas like liquid gold, and the valley began to come to life. A meadowlark trilled. Halfway up the side of the mountain an eagle soared above the tops of the Douglas fir and lodgepole pine, wings outstretched to catch the updrafts. Mari watched in silence, letting the peace seep into her and wash the rest away. She took a deep breath of cool, clean air that was scented with pine and cedar and the soft perfumes of a dozen wildflowers, and let it soothe her as the line from the poem soothed her. She was eating breakfast when Miller Daggrepont descended on her. She saw him coming across the dining room and knew with a sense of fatalism that he was homing in on her. Everyone in the dining room paused with forks and spoons in midair as he passed, their expressions ranging from horror to amusement. He was as wide as he was tall, a virtual cube of a man, with a face like a bulldog’s and a shock of ratty gray hair that stood straight up from his head in a style reminiscent of fight promoter Don King. A gold and black brocade vest stretched around his rotund frame over a white shirt, and a black string tie lurked beneath the folds of his wattle. A huge silver belt buckle set with nuggets of turquoise perched at the forefront of his belly like a hood ornament on a Mack truck. The legs of his black trousers were tucked into a pair of snakeskin boots that looked ridiculously tiny beneath his enormous bulk. Mari froze with a slice of cantaloupe halfway to her mouth, the juice running down her fingertips, as he rumbled up to her table and stopped straight across from her. There was a cigar stub jammed into the corner of his mouth. He looked down on her through Coke-bottle lenses, his dark eyes weirdly magnified behind them. “Little missy,” he said, his voice booming in the high-ceilinged room. “You’d be Marilee Jennings?” Her automatic desire was to say no in the hope that he would go away and embarrass someone else, but her head bobbed in affirmation. He stuck out a hand that resembled an inflated rubber glove, gripping hers before she could wipe the cantaloupe juice off. “Miller Daggrepont, Esquire,” he announced in a voice loud enough to wake the ghost of Madam Belle. “Attorney-at-law and renaissance man. I’ve got a surprise for you, little lady.” “I’m not sure my heart can stand it,” Mari said, only half joking. “Come on along,” he ordered, tugging her up from her seat. “This is important. You can eat anytime.” He appeared to be an expert on that subject. Stomach grumbling a protest, Mari shuffled after him, thinking that wild elephants probably couldn’t drag Miller Daggrepont away from a table. He towed her down the lobby of the Moose and outside, rumbling along like a freight train. Hustling down Main Street, he jaywalked across to First Avenue, and continued on, oblivious of the curious looks people cast their way. The buildings here, as on Main Street, were a jumble of styles and ages. The shops were a mix of practical and pretentious-a dentist’s office, a wilderness outfitter’s post, the Curl Up and Dye hair salon. Designer fashions hung in the window of the Beartooth Boutique. Next door an old man sat on one of several riding lawn mowers parked out in front of Erikson’s Garden Center. They turned in at a brick building with an ornate front window. EDEN VALLEY ASSAY arched across the glass in gold gay-nineties-style lettering, but the brass plaque on the door itself read MILLER DAGGREPONT, ESQUIRE. ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. “This is where I keep my collections,” he said, thumbing through an enormous ring of keys. “I collect everything. Signs, toys, farm equipment, you name it. Never know when the next big rage will hit. I made a killing on Indian artifacts when all the Hollywood types started moving in. They think they’re going native when they hang an old horse blanket on the wall. Damned fools, I say-not because of the collecting. Nothing wrong with collecting. They’re just damned fools in general.” He swung the door open and went in, pulling Mari along behind him like a recalcitrant child. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling. A row of low display cases ran down the center of the floor from the front of the room to the back. Old advertising signs and license plates hung by wires from the ceiling. The floor was littered with a jumble of junk. Toward the back of the main room two of the tall cases had been tipped over, dumping a mountain of toys, glassware, tin canisters, wooden boxes, and God-knew-what onto the floor. “Watch your step,” Miller ordered, grunting his disapproval at the mess. “Some damned drunk broke in the back door last night and turned the place upside down. You know we’re just catercorner from the Hell and Gone. Cowboys come into town and they go crazy. It’s like bringing a wild pony into the house.” Mari picked her way along behind him, stepping over the prone form of a cigar store Indian and a woman’s straw hat decorated with faded silk cabbage roses. “Mr. Daggrepont, I’ve worked with lawyers for six years, and I have to say I’ve never come across an office quite like this one.” His booming laugh rattled the tin signs overhead. “Well, little missy, I’m not your run of the mill attorney. Like I said before, I’m a renaissance man.” He led her down a hall and into a smaller room that was an even worse mess than the front had been. An old desk sat in the middle of it all. Somewhere on the desk, beneath a drift of fishing tackle and assorted debris, a telephone rang. Daggrepont ignored it. He let go of Mari to work on the combination lock of an old vault set into the back wall. “This was the assay office back in the 1860s,” he explained. “Gold was discovered up in the Absarokas. The place went bonkers with gold fever. The town boomed. Didn’t last long though. The lode wasn’t rich enough and it was too damned hard to get to. Those mountains are rugged sons a’guns.” Mari had read all about it in her guide books, but she didn’t comment on it as she picked her way across the office. He heaved the vault open and she raised up on tiptoe in an attempt to peer over his shoulder. “Uh, Mr. Daggrepont, would it be too much to ask what this is all about?” He shot her a look of annoyance, his eyeballs swimming behind his thick glasses. “Lucy MacAdam,” he said, cigar stub bobbing above his chins. “I was her attorney. You’re her heir.” The news knocked her in the head like a mallet. Mari swayed a little on her feet and stumbled back. “I’m her heir? That can’t be. I mean, why-what-?” Daggrepont ignored her stammering, searching for the proper file among the boxes on the shelves that lined the vault. “Thank heaven for this vault,” he grumbled. “There’d be hell to pay if some drunk dumped these files. Inez would be sorting paper from now till kingdom come. Ah! Here it is. Lucy MacAdam.” He pulled the file and herded Mari back out into the office, where he swept off a chair and ordered her to sit. He leaned his bulk back against the desk and told her the gist of Lucy’s last bequests. “She didn’t have any living relatives. Left everything to you. Her place, her bank account, this letter-” He held out a sealed envelope to her. Mari took it with limp fingers and held it in her lap. “All subject to inheritance taxes, funeral expenses, and, um, my fees, of course.” “Of course.” “But it’s all yours as soon as it clears probate. Oh, and there’s one other thing. Damn near forgot.” He trundled back into the vault and came out with a foot-tall old tin replica of Mr. Peanut, which he thrust into Mari’s hands. She stared at the smirking peanut, then up at Daggrepont and back again. “What is it?” she asked at last. “Why, it’s Lucy. She had herself cremated.” She drove out to the ranch with Mr. Peanut strapped into the passenger seat beside her. Daggrepont had immediately tried to persuade her to sell the ranch. Inheritance taxes would be astronomical, considering how property values had gone up. What would she want with a ranch anyway? She had a life back in California, didn’t she? No, she didn’t, but she didn’t tell that to Daggrepont or to his weasely real estate buddy who had just happened to drop by. The same way a vulture just happens to drop by road kill. She shuddered at the thought of the pair of them-Shamu in cowboy boots and the Earl Scheib of Montana real estate. “Lucy,” she said, cutting a look at the tin peanut. “You always did have a bizarre sense of humor, but this is really too much.” The peanut just smirked at her. She had to get away, to think, to try to sort through it all in her mind. The ranch seemed the best place to do it. Somehow she thought an answer might come to her there. But another part of her knew there would only be more questions, and her stomach churned at the prospect. By daylight the place Lucy had called home for the last year was as picturesque as anything Mari had ever imagined. The log house was set on high ground overlooking a broad valley with a wide, glittering stream running through it. The hills above were covered with pine and aspen. The valley beyond the stream was dotted with grazing horses. She fell in love with it the minute she stepped out of the car. It radiated a sense of peace, a sense of constancy. Nothing about it struck her as being Lucy’s style at all. She climbed the steps onto the porch and followed it around the side of the house to a broad deck that overlooked the stream. The bent willow furniture and Adirondack chairs had escaped the vandals’ zeal. Setting the tin on the glass-topped table, she sank down onto the cushions of a high-backed chair and stared out at the panorama. It was hers. The idea wouldn’t penetrate. It made no sense. She had never even been here to visit Lucy. She had never thought of their friendship as being something that went so deep as this. They had shared laughs and gripes over a few beers. They had been drinking buddies, comrades in arms against the vicious lawyer hordes who never wanted to pay them and always wanted to get them into bed. The thought that their relationship had meant something more to Lucy left her feeling confused and vaguely guilty, the way she had felt in high school when one of the nerd boys had revealed that he had a crush on her. Hoping for an answer or at least a clue, she pulled the envelope Daggrepont had given her out of her jacket pocket and opened it with a nail file from her purse. Inside was a strip of green paper folded in half, torn on both ends. Stenographer’s notes, a set of hieroglyphics no one but another court reporter would have been able to decipher. How like Lucy to be dramatic even from beyond the grave. Mari leaned over the letter with her elbows braced on her knees and read the phonograms. She read it twice. It didn’t make any more sense the second time. All she managed to do was increase the ache of loss and the feelings of abandonment and guilt. She slipped the letter under the feet of Mr. Peanut and curled up in the chair, her gaze fixed, unfocused on the beauty that lay before her. And she thought of Lucy, so brassy, so tough, surrounded by important people… alone in the world with just a drinking buddy for a friend. Full of secrets and hidden pain. Dying alone. Left on a mountainside, forgotten. Foul was a kind word for the mood J.D. was in. As days went, this one had started out bad and gone downhill from there. In the morning Will had shown up just as J.D., Tucker, and Chaske were getting ready to ride out. It had been clear that if he’d spent any time in a bed the night before, he had not been sleeping. His eyes were as red as tomatoes, his pallor a shade of gray generally reserved for corpses. He was in no shape to get on a horse. So, naturally, J.D. had badgered him onto one and then made him ride drag all morning, eating the dust of a hundred fifty cows and their bawling calves. Will hadn’t uttered a word of protest. Tucker had done enough complaining on his behalf. Cut the boy some slack. Give the kid a break. He’s going through a rough patch. Have a heart, J.D. Will didn’t need any slack as far as J.D. could see. What he needed was for someone to knock some sense into him. He needed a good kick in the pants. He had needed that his whole life, but their daddy hadn’t cared enough to do it. He had conceded Will to Sondra. And Sondra didn’t let anyone lay a finger on her baby. Of course, Sondra’s say-so had never meant spit to J.D. “You can’t hit me, J.D.,” Will challenged, his lower lip jutting out, trembling just a little despite the fierce gleam in his eyes. He offered up the only real threat an eight-year-old boy could use to ward off his big brother. “I’ll tell Mama.” J.D. circled around him, his shoulders hunched, his hands curling into fists. Anger was like a red-hot poker inside him, burning, turning his blood to steam in his veins. He was sick of his little brother’s threats. He was sick of his little brother, period. Always slacking, always screwing up and never taking the blame. “I’ll hit you if I want, you little snot-nosed mama’s boy. And if you tell, I’ll whup you all over again. You left that gate open and I had to spend the whole goddamn day chasing horses.” “You swore! You’ll go to hell!” “You’ll be there first, brat.” Will started to dart away, quickness being his best defense. But J.D. was quicker, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and wrestling him to the ground. They tussled in the dirt like a pair of tomcats, howling, arms and legs in a tangle, punching and kicking. Will fought with all the wild fury of someone who knew the odds were stacked well against him, jabbing at his brother with fists and boots and elbows. J.D., who, at twelve, was in the first growth spurt of early adolescence, was taller by a foot and heavier by half. He was too aware of the disparity as he twisted his little brother over in the dirt and rolled on top of him. He loomed over Will, knees on either side of his heaving rib cage, and wished to God the little snot was bigger. He wanted nothing more than the chance to let out all the pent-up anger and pain that had been storing up inside him practically since the day Will was born, but he couldn’t hit something that was so much smaller than him. Picking on little guys was for bullies and cowards, and Tucker had told him no Rafferty had ever stooped so low. Reining back the tangle of feelings inside, he spit in the dirt beside his brother’s head and got up off him. Will scrambled to his feet, glaring, tears streaking mud down his face. J.D. curled his lip in his best sneer. “Go run and tell Mama, you little jerk.” “You’re a jerk first!” Will shouted, running after him as J.D. turned and headed for the corral. “Yeah, I’m everything first,” J.D. grumbled. “First to do the chores, first to clean up all your messes, first to ride after the stock you let out.” He stopped at the gate and unwrapped the chain with angry movements, bruising a knuckle in the process. His eyes burned, and he sucked on the joint and fought off a pain that had little to do with his injury. Will looked at him sideways, his anger melting into contrition. “I didn’t mean to leave the gate open, J.D.,” he admitted in a small voice. “I don’t want you mad at me all the time.” “Why do you care what I think, worm boy?” “’Cause you’re the only brother I got.” J.D.’s hands stilled on the bars of the gate. They were family. That was what mattered more than anything between them. They were Raffertys. Raffertys stuck together and took care of their own. That was important, especially now. He had heard the late-night conversations between his parents. Sondra telling Daddy how unhappy she was on the Stars and Bars, how she wanted out. She wanted to break them up, to leave and take Will with her. But Daddy said they were family and family had to stick together. No one could take a Rafferty off the Stars and Bars. Nothing mattered more than family-except the land. He looked down at Will, a suspicious emotion knotting like a fist in his chest. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I guess that works both ways.” He shook the memory off, disgusted with himself. God knew, he had more important things to do than reminisce about childhood. The day was sliding away and he had spent half of it beating his head against a brick wall. He shifted in his saddle now and urged his gelding into a canter, eating up the distance to the gate of the holding pasture. Will rode out to meet him. If his color was better than it had been in the morning, it was impossible to tell for all the dirt on his face. Both he and the gray horse he straddled looked as if they had been ridden long and hard and were equally grateful to drop down into a walk. “I just brought in the last of them,” he said as he turned his gelding around and fell in step with J.D.’s mount. “Tucker went up to the house to start supper. Chaske’s seeing to the horses. Anything more for today, boss?” Will fielded the narrow look J.D. tossed him with a weary version of his infamous grin. He’d been in the saddle for the better part of ten hours, chasing animals that were too ornery and too stupid to live. He felt as if each and every one of them had trampled over his body on their way to the holding pen. He was beat and dirty. Razzing J.D. was going to be the only high point of his day. On paper, they were equal partners in the ranch. In reality, J.D. was, always had been, and always would be boss of the Stars and Bars. Even when their father had been alive, Will had felt that the real power had lain in J.D., dormant, but strong, far stronger than Tom Rafferty had ever been. All their father’s energy had gone into the useless effort of trying to keep Sondra chained to a life she hated. The ranch, for all he had been bound to it by tradition, had never come first with him. But it was J.D.’s mistress, his first love, his only love outside the horses he nurtured and trained. Will had never felt anything close to his brother’s love of the land. To him it was an anchor, something he had been shackled to by an accident of birth. He had never challenged J.D. for control, had always felt more like a cowboy than a rancher. He did his job and gladly left the worry and the responsibility to fall on J.D.’s shoulders. That weight seemed to be sitting heavy on his brother now. There was a tightness around his mouth, a grim, angry cast to his eyes. “You talk with Lyle?” Will asked. “Yeah. For all the good it did. He said he’d hold off for a time, but his mind is made up. He’s selling. It’s just a matter of who. I told him I’d try to put something together.” “You can’t outbid Bryce.” “I shouldn’t have to.” “You can’t expect Lyle to give you a bargain when Bryce is offering to make him rich. Loyalty goes only so far.” “Is that so?” He shot a hard glance at his brother, then turned to survey his cattle, not wanting to think about how far Will’s loyalty would go. They sat at the pasture gate, their horses content to stand side by side with their heads hanging, nipping at each other in idle play. In the pasture beyond, the cattle that had been herded in during the course of the long day were grazing quietly. Calves slept, curled into lumps on the ground near their mothers, or played in groups, chasing each other, bucking and running. For a moment J.D. allowed himself to appreciate the quality of those animals. He had worked hard to establish a breeding program that would improve the size and grade of the Stars and Bars cattle. The cows were black angus, good mothers who were hardy and gave ample milk. Their calves, which ranged in color from near white to near black, were the result of crossbreeding with top-notch Charolais bulls, a cross that produced big, blocky animals that matured early and finished out well in the feedlots. But beyond their value, J.D. enjoyed just looking at them, knowing they had been bred here, knowing he was responsible for them, knowing that all the hard work had produced something good and worthwhile. He thought of Lyle Watkins and wondered what he was thinking on this spring afternoon as he looked over his cattle. If he sold out- “It doesn’t mean that much to everybody, you know,” Will said, his voice low, as if he were blaspheming in church. J.D.’s jaw tightened. He straightened in his saddle, the old leather creaking a protest. “It’s got to mean that much,” he said. “Or what the hell are we doing here?” With nothing more than the pressure of his legs and a shift of his weight, he turned his horse around and rode away. |
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