“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“You can’t be positive.”
“He was faithful.”
“Were you?”
She glared at him.
He shrugged. “Okay, so you were faithful.”
“We had a good marriage. I didn’t keep secrets, and neither did Eddie.”
“He kept one.” He paused in order to give the statement significance, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “Everybody keeps secrets, Honor.”
“Oh really? Tell me one of yours.”
A corner of his mouth tilted up. “Everybody but me. I don’t have any secrets.”
“Absurd thing to say. You’re wrapped up in secrets.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “Ask away.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Idaho. Near the state line with Wyoming. In the shadow of the Tetons.”
That surprised her. She didn’t know what she had expected, but not that. He didn’t look like her image of a mountain man. Of course, he could very well be lying, inventing an unlikely past to protect his cover. But she went along. “What did your father do?”
“Drank. Mostly. When he worked, it was as a mechanic at a car dealership. He drove a snowplow in the winter.”
“He’s deceased?”
“For years now.”
She looked at him inquisitively. He didn’t respond to the silent question for so long that she didn’t think he would.
Finally he said, “He had this old horse that he kept in a corral behind our house. I named it, but I never heard him call it anything. He rarely rode it. Rarely fed it. But one day he saddled it and rode off. The horse came back. He didn’t. They never found his body. Of course they didn’t look very hard.”
Honor wondered if the bitterness lacing his voice was aimed at his alcoholic father or at the searchers who had given up on finding his remains.
“Dad had ridden that horse near to death, so I shot it.” His folded arms dropped back to his sides. He stared out into the rain. “No great loss. It wasn’t much of a horse.”
Honor let a full minute pass before she asked about his mother.
“She was French Canadian. Tempestuous by nature. When riled, she would launch into French, which she never bothered to teach me, so half the time I didn’t understand what she was screaming at me. Nothing good, I’m sure.
“Anyhow, she and I parted ways after I graduated high school. I attended two years of college, decided it wasn’t for me, joined the Marines. My first tour of duty, I got word that she’d died. I flew to Idaho. Buried her. End of story.”
“Brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
His facial expression was as devoid of feeling as his life had been devoid of love from any source.