Chapter Forty-One

I'd thought thatfirst day that the Elk Rock Ranch cabins and barn and other buildings and fences formed a stage with no actors on it.

As we pulled in today, after I picked up Diana from where she'd parked the NewsMobile, the play appeared to be in progress. Though which act was impossible to tell.

Wendy moved back and forth, back and forth inside the two open doors to the tack room.

From just outside, Randall, again in a version of Western wear, mirrored Wendy's movements, like a predator trying to adopt its prey's coloring.

A truck I'd seen before was parked off the entry road near the front of the barn. I detoured to look in the front passenger window as Diana and I walked past. Books were on the back seat, a file box in the footwell. One glance at the book titles and I said to her, "Sam McCracken."

He was not in sight — off stage for now, but Serena sat on the steps of the unoccupied middle cabin, her head down as if contemplating her hands clasped between her knees. Brenda was not around.

That left Robin, leaning against the fence opposite the tack room, watching her father, looking torn between relief and unhappiness.

"Go away," Randall shouted at us. "We're talking business."

"No, we're not," Wendy said emphatically.

Leaving them to sort that out, I tipped my head toward Robin and Diana and I went to her.

"You must be feeling a lot better than yesterday," I said.

"Yeah."

"Why aren't you and your dad out celebrating his release?"

And why was he released?

She had her shoulders hunched under her jacket, maybe against the chill wind, maybe not. "That deputy guy said not to leave town."

"You weren't going to anyway, were you? Not right away."

"I suppose." With her fear for her father under control, she was much less forthcoming.

"What's all that about?" Diana asked her, sliding her eyes toward the duo at the tack room entry.

"I dunno."

"Don't you?" I asked mildly. "You said your dad could offer Wendy a lot of money, but what would she do with it if she didn't have the ranch."

Wary but unsure where the danger stemmed from, she acknowledged slowly, "I guess I said that."

"But you know what she'd do with a lot of money if she had the ranch?"

She relaxed. "Sure. She'd pay bills, get rid of debt, fix up things she's put off."

I tried to imagine Wendy Barlow confiding those details to Robin Kenyon. Especially last summer when everyone — including Robin — agreed she had not endeared herself to anyone at Elk Rock Ranch. "How do you know?"

"My father told me."

My brain jammed even worse trying to imagine Wendy sharing such information with Randall Kenyon. "How did he know?"

"He started researching after he got the idea to buy the ranch."

"When was that?"

"Last fall."

"When you gave Keefe the computer, followed by the DNA test." An example of Randall's timing in angling for an ally?

Did Robin participate knowingly?

She ducked her head. "To thank him. It... What happened when I was here changed my life. Not just getting hurt. But... Do you know what happened. I mean what led up to it?"

"I heard some."

She smiled. At least that's the best term I can think of. It had a foundation of a saint's patient lifting of lips for the foibles of a sinner, combined with a self-directed grimace of that sinner.

"I bet you did. About me running Rio and staying out late and slipping the wranglers. That's when they said I had to leave. I couldn't believe it. I was so angry. And it was only after Wendy said I'd have to go on the next van to the airport that I realized I liked it here. I didn't want to leave."

As she spoke, her voice sped up. On those last words, I heard an echo of petulant entitlement. As if she were not simply remembering events, but reliving them as the person she'd been.

"I was supposed to stay in my cabin until someone drove me to the airport the next day. I slipped out and started up the trail on Rio. Alone. Breaking rules again.

"And I was crying. A lot. So I didn't hear the group ahead of me. Not until there was no avoiding them. Keefe was at the back. He spotted me, but didn't say anything. It was all Brenda, shouting how horrible I'd been to Rio and I shouldn't be allowed on another horse the rest of my life, with those other people staring at me. I tried to get past them, to get off by myself. I..."

We waited a long time for her to continue.

"Rio didn't throw me. I lost my balance and fell. Onto rocks. Broke a bone in my leg. Bad break. Hit them just wrong... Or maybe just right."

"Must have hurt like hell," Diana said.

"Not really. Not then. In fact, I didn't believe them that it was broken. Tried to get up. I couldn't. I couldn't move my leg. I couldn't do anything. I don't think I passed out, but when they splinted my leg, it was like... like I went calm sort of. I could hear all the voices deciding what to do, but from very far away, and talking about someone else.

"Then they were all gone and it was Keefe and me. He put a jacket under my head, got it so a roll supported my neck and it felt like all the muscles in my neck just... let go. Like I'd been holding my head up forever, but in that moment I didn't have to.

"And then he asked me what I saw." She'd said that at the BB, but not with her guard down as it was now. "I opened my eyes and looked up and there were the tops of the trees way, way up, with the sky beyond them and I felt like I floated right up to them. Swaying.

"We talked some. Not a lot. I know I told him about Mom dying and he said, ‘That's tough.' Just like that. Nothing more. But it was like that's all he needed to say, all he could say. It was tough. Still is. But it's... bearable, I guess. Lying there, drifting up to where the tops of the trees met the sky, it was bearable. For the first time."

She seemed prepared to stop there. I wasn't.

"You must have been in a lot of pain."

"Oh, hell, yes." This smile was wry, but grim. "After a while, absolutely. Like an electric shock of throbbing heat. Wave after wave. Couple of times I thought I'd pass out. Maybe I did. I never asked Keefe. I'd come to or the waves would ease back, and he'd be there. Sitting beside me. He'd ask again what I saw. I'd look back up to the trees and the sky and then I'd float up to them and we'd talk. I don't remember all of it. I know he said how to fell a tree. Another time about a truck engine he'd fixed. And then he'd talk about how he might be the descendant of a famous outlaw from the Wild West. I didn't follow most of it. It didn't matter. It was the sound of his voice. Then he'd ask me again, what did I see..."

She shifted against the fence at her back, pulling the lapels of her jacket to overlap.

"Keefe gave Wendy some wildflowers for me when she came to the hospital in Cody, and said he'd come see me his next day off. But by then Dad was there and arranged to take me home, even though I wanted to stay. It wasn't until we were home that Dad and I talked. Really talked. And I told him about Elk Rock. I wrote to Keefe. Nothing deep, just a thank you, and to tell him I was coming back for all of the next season, if Wendy would have me.

"Dad said there was no if about it. The more we talked, the more he got excited about buying Elk Rock. Said he'd have me run it — with help, of course. Experienced help. I thought — I expected — that would include Keefe. I know he wasn't a manager or anything, but he knew the place like nobody else. I'll still love it here, but I'll feel his absence, like I feel Mom's absence at home."

She seemed to re-set herself, choosing to set aside those sorrows.

"You know, he's not that bad. My dad. I guess he was pretty lost after Mom died, too. After I got hurt, when Keefe and I were out there, just the two of us, waiting for the help, I started crying. I told him it was from the pain, but it wasn't. I mean, it did hurt, but it was from wanting my mom. It made no sense, because even if she hadn't died, she wouldn't have been with me. She'd've been home with Dad. But I think even being able to say out loud, I want my mom, and knowing she was somewhere in the world would have helped.

"I don't know if I said something or Keefe just knew, but he started talking about him and his mother. How he'd never known his father and how lost he'd felt when he was little, even though he loved his mother a lot. Then they moved here and he started learning about the outdoors.

"He said he realized he'd been hard on his mom, had held back from her, like it was her fault his dad wasn't around. But being here let him see his mom for what she was and not what she wasn't — which was his dad.

"And I got thinking about how I used to love my dad when I was little and wondering if he'd really changed or if I'd been punishing him for not being my mom."

She drew a breath.

I could have asked a question — let's be honest, I could have asked dozens of questions — but sometimes the best thing you can do is wait.

"I'm not saying he's perfect. He still wants to be in charge and everything, but lying up there, I decided to do my best to love him again. I sort of forgot about that." She looked at us. I saw surprise. "And he's been trying, too."

"Like trying to buy this ranch?"

"That's even more reason why my father never would have killed Keefe and I told that sergeant that over and over. Keefe had nothing to do with negotiating the sale of the ranch."

"And everything to do with your emotions," Diana said quietly.

I wish she'd had the camera running to catch the widening of Robin's eyes, but there are things the camera's not meant to catch. Or maybe they don't happen when the camera's there.

"You think highly of Keefe." I didn't need her agreement to keep going. "However much a role he played when you were hurt last year, he was there, with you at an important moment in your life. If only by being there, he helped you through it. That could make a father frustrated about not connecting with his daughter feel... jealous."

"Jealous?"

We'd caught her attention.

Not the way I might have expected. Unlike yesterday's fear and anger, this was tentative, delicate even. "You think he'd do that? For me?"

She seemed to have forgotten the act Randall would have committed as a result was murdering a man. Not only an innocent man, but one who helped her.

Inner mean girl self-centeredness sure didn't loosen its grip easily.