Ty walked to the bed where the ever-thinner Ruth Haskell sat, propped up with a stack of soft pillows. An old-fashioned quilted bedjacket trimmed with lace covered her bony shoulders.
“Hello, Nanna Ruth.” He used Cathleen’s pet name for her as he bent to kiss a withered cheek. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” she insisted, and he couldn’t recall ever hearing her complain. “I so wanted to come today.” Her trembling hands clutched at his while her teary eyes looked up at him. “Jessy told me what a fine service it was. So many people came. I only wish. . .” Her weak voice trailed off, then found a new subject. “I feel so badly about Chase.”
“I spoke to the hospital this morning. They said he was doing much better.” “Holding his own” was actually the phrase that was used, but he chose to sound more optimistic with Ruth.
“He is like a son to me. What a pair of boys I had,” she declared, smiling in fond reminiscence. “Chase and my Buck. Buck should be here. He could always make Chase smile. He was so outrageous sometimes—and the tales he’d come up with.” She clucked her tongue in loving affection, then sobered slowly and looked anxiously at Ty. “He never meant to be bad.”
“I know,” Ty said to assure her, but kept his own counsel on that subject.
“I think you should take some of the medicine the doctor left for you, Ruth,” Jessy suggested, “and see if you can’t get some rest.”
“Maybe I should,” Ruth agreed hesitantly, showing uncertainty and a willingness to be told what to do.
“Here.” Jessy shook two pills from the prescription bottle and handed them to the woman, then poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the bedstand. After Ruth had taken her medicine, Jessy rearranged the pillows so she could lie down in comfort, then pulled the window shade to darken the room.
“I’ll come by to see you again,” Ty told the woman and moved quietly to the door. Jessy followed him, then paused short of the door. “Aren’t you leaving now?” he asked in a low murmur.
“No, I’ll stay until she sleeps. Have you learned anything about the crash? How or why it happened?”
“Nothing certain. The initial reports from the wreckage indicate a broken oil line as the possible cause, but they’re still trying to determine if it had ruptured before or after the crash.” And his father had been able to provide the authorities with only scant details. “I have to leave.” There was a reluctance in his tone. “There’s company at the house, and I can’t let Tara entertain them on her own.”
“Somehow, I don’t think she’d mind,” Jessy murmured cynically.
A vague irritation rippled through him at the implied criticism. “You don’t know her well enough to judge that.”
“You’re still defending her,” she observed.
“She’s my wife.”
“I know.” It was very quietly said as Jessy turned away and walked back to the bed.
Ty hovered indecisively between anger and regret, then reached for the doorknob and let himself out. The dark scowl on his face didn’t go unnoticed by Vern Haskell, who smiled to himself. He’d always been treated like a kind of outsider by the Calders, even though he’d married into one of the old families. When his son had gone bad, he knew they had blamed it on the Haskell blood in him, not the good Stanton blood from Ruth’s family. It did him good to see a Calder getting denied something he wanted, and his little talk with Jessy Niles had obviously not turned out the way he’d planned.
A full month had gone by since the funeral. Between hospital visits and the full load of the ranch management resting on his shoulders, Ty had been going from morning until night. Plus there had been meetings with the attorney, in connection with both the disputed title to the ten thousand acres of land and his mother’s estate, made complicated by some of her California holdings.
A lot of the routine paperwork and reports had been shoved to the side and allowed to pile up. Unable to postpone the deskwork, Ty had finally closed himself in the study to wade through it. At first, he merely glanced over the monthly balance sheet and its accompanying profit-and-loss statement. When the figures finally registered in his mind, he felt a glimmer of alarm. He went to the files and extracted the previous six months’ statements for comparison. His concern mounted.
“Ty?” The door to the study was pushed open as Tara stuck her head inside, then knocked on the door. A blue silk bandeau shimmered around her black hair and across her forehead. “Can I interrupt you a minute?”
“Sure.” He breathed in deeply and leaned back in the chair, almost welcoming the intrusion that broke up the whirl of figures in his head. She walked into the study, holding something behind her back. “What is it?”
“Do you remember this old photograph you showed me a long time ago?” She held it out to him. “The man in the middle was your great-grandfather, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. Chase Benteen Calder. My father was named after him.” Ty nodded that the tall man in the broadcloth suit was his ancestor, or so his father had told him. “What about it?”
“The woman with him—didn’t you say she was some English lady?” Tara prompted.
“Yes.” He frowned slightly, not recalling that part of it too well. “Duncan or Dunhill, something like that. In those days, it was fairly common for a rancher to have a European backer, a financier of sorts.” His puzzled but interested glance held a trace of amusement. “Why?”
“I was packing away some of your mother’s things, and I went into the attic to see if I couldn’t find room in some of those old trunks upstairs. While I was going through them, I found this.” She showed him a second photograph, this one of a young woman. The edges of it were burnt, as if it had been in a fire. “Doesn’t she look familiar?”
At first, Ty didn’t understand what she meant. Then he noticed the similarity between th
e two women in the photographs. “It’s hard to tell, but there is a resemblance.”
“They are the same person, and I’d bet on it,” Tara stated; then a light glittered in her eye. “Do you know who she is?”