Accidental Cowgirl (29 page)

Decker pulled the reins gently to the right, steering Chance away from the valley. Did he feel a longing to stay? To keep putting his stamp on the ranch? To, dare he say it, make it partly his again?

God, yes.

An hour later, he dismounted near an overgrown patch of weeds hidden in a clearing a couple miles northeast of the ranch buildings. Last year, Cole had ridden out this way and had come across this suspiciously cultivated plot. He’d never figured out who was growing illegal marijuana on their land, but had destroyed the plants before a low-flying DEA plane could discover them. Decker hoped he wouldn’t need to do the same this year.

Decker walked the clearing as Chance grazed, but he saw nothing suspicious as he swished through an acre of scratchy grass and late-summer wildflowers. As he got to the edge of the woods, he heard a muted meow to his left. His first thought was to retreat quickly, as the last thing he needed was to scare up a bobcat kitten. He peered into the darkness as he backed up, and almost jumped six feet upward when his legs tangled with a tabby cat winding her way through the grass. She mrrr-owed, muffled by the tiny black kitten in her mouth, then trotted toward the edge of the woods, where she stopped and looked back at him.

“Got some babies hidden in there, Momma?” Decker smiled. She looked just like Lady Di, the cat Ma had coddled in the kitchen when he was a kid. He watched the tabby, who seemed to be waiting for him. “What do you want, little one?” She took a couple of steps and looked
back again. Crazy cat wanted him to follow her.

“All right, all right. Whatcha got to show me?” He shook his head as he stepped toward her. “Let’s keep this between us, though, okay? It’d kind of ruin my tough-guy image if they knew I was out here chasing kittens.” She trotted for a couple hundred feet, then angled down toward a gully, looking back as if to make sure he was coming with her. He followed her downhill until she came to a monstrous pine tree with low-hanging branches. She eyed him one more time, then ducked under the branches.

He pulled a pine bough up to peer under it and was greeted by a chorus of tiny mews. The momma cat had just laid down, and her kittens were obviously hungry. Decker tried to count how many kittens there were, but with all of them tumbling around, it was impossible to tell. He watched for a moment as they settled down, then lowered the branch. He remembered how intrigued Kyla’d been by the baby foxes, and he’d be willing to bet that if she’d found these kittens, she’d want to take each and every one of them home with her.

As Decker headed back up the gully toward the clearing, a glint of glass caught his eye. He looked to his right and squinted. He pivoted to change direction, heading toward where he’d seen the reflection. Straight ahead of him was a badly weathered structure built with what looked like leftover bits of lumber and mismatched windows. What the hell? Was somebody
living
out here without their knowledge?

He didn’t see a stovepipe, and as he got closer, he realized the cabin was probably only twelve by twelve feet big, so it didn’t look likely that someone actually lived in it. The side facing him had a big window looking out toward the gulley. The other three sides looked practically built into the hill. It was covered with spider webs and leaves, and when he stepped close enough to peer inside, the dust was so thick he couldn’t see a thing.

Decker stepped carefully around the little structure, pushing away branches and thorns as he walked. The cabin had to have been here for fifty years. The roof was tilting to the left, and one of the walls was starting to buckle, but the four-paned windows on each side were intact. He scanned the ground around the cabin, but could see no signs of anyone being here recently. As he came around the front and examined the door, he found a padlock.

A shiny, almost-new silver padlock.

Decker stared at the padlock, then around at the surrounding woods. Who in the world did this place belong to? He stepped to the left and rubbed a thick layer of dust from the window beside the door. He leaned down and peered into the dusty cabin, but couldn’t see much in the gloom. He tried the window to see if it would open, but it was shut tight. He really didn’t want to have to break a window, but if he had to, he would. Dammit, this was Ma’s property. No way was somebody going to get away with being out here on the sly.

He stalked around the cabin again, trying the other windows. Two of them were locked, but on the big one, he lucked out. With a groan and a squeak, it lifted enough for Decker to see inside. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, but once they did, he got an eyeful. The walls were covered with girlie posters and calendars, and there was a beat-up metal desk against one wall. A ratty old recliner was shoved in one corner with an ancient quilt over the back of it.

Decker took his hat off and scratched his head. How the hell had someone gotten this stuff out here? The cabin sat miles from the ranch, and the closest road was … wait. Decker looked back up toward the clearing. There was an old county road about a mile from this spot, running at the eastern edge of the property. Christ, the thing hadn’t been maintained for twenty years, though. It was practically a cow path with grass growing down the middle. Had someone actually hauled furniture in here from a mile out?

He rattled the window frame to see if it would handle his weight, then hauled himself through the window. He stood in the middle of the little cabin and looked around. Beer cans lined the exposed two-by-fours on one whole wall, while another one held a bunch of clear bottles with black labels. He stared at the bottles for a long moment before reaching out to pluck one off the shelf. He’d never forget the labels. His father’s go-to drink.

Holy shit. Decker spun around slowly, taking in the posters, the beat-up old desk, the recliner and quilt he now recognized from the old basement rec room. This must have been his father’s hideaway cabin.

He thought back to when they were kids and Decker Senior would saddle up Apollo and
disappear for a couple of days, usually after he’d blown up about something stupid like rice for dinner instead of potatoes. The one time they’d tried to follow him to see where he was going, they’d turned around and hightailed it home when a shot rang out and they’d heard the bullet sing high over their heads. This must have been where he was headed.

Decker sat heavily in the creaky wooden desk chair, head cocked in disbelief. He ran his gloved finger through the dust, leaving a jagged line. He leaned back and studied the front. There were three dented-up drawers, and as much as he didn’t want to open them for fear of what he’d find, he couldn’t stop himself. He pulled open the top drawer slowly, but it was filled with a jumble of pens and sticky pads and paper clips.

The second drawer was locked, but it took Decker only a moment to pry it open. In contrast to the dust and dinge of the cabin and desktop, in this drawer was a neat stack of color-coded folders thick with papers. He realized his heart was tripping along faster than normal as he viewed the folders. What had his father been hiding out here? Was he about to find out more secrets than he’d already had to deal with this summer?

He sat back and opened the first folder to find a stack of accounting-style paper etched with his father’s neat block lettering. He scanned the first page, then the second, then flipped quickly through the rest of the folder. Sighing, he put it aside and opened the second one. It was filled with a similar pile of neatly organized pages, and it told a similar story. The dollar amounts varied, and the “Owed To” column changed names often enough, but the plot was clear. When Decker Senior had married Ma, Whisper Creek had been a thriving, profitable enterprise. Ten years later, he’d been up to his eyeballs already.

It looked like he’d put the ranch up for collateral at least six times that Decker could count. Five of those times, he’d managed to find the money to pay off the debt before anyone took hold of the ranch. The sixth time, though, was March of this year, one month before he’d died.

If nothing else, Decker Senior had been quite studious in recording his mounting debt. Where once there had been money, now there was none. Where once there had been property, now there were liens. As much as he’d hoped the bookie might be inflating his father’s debt, it looked like Decker Senior had indeed died with one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of someone
else’s
money on his head.

Decker thumped his feet to the scarred wooden floor, throwing the folders angrily onto
the desk. He couldn’t believe his father had done this. Had he
ever
loved Ma? Or had he seen her land as a gold mine and courted it right out from under her?

From the looks of the figures in the folders, he’d been gambling heavily at least since Decker and Cole had been in elementary school. Decker cringed at the number of times he’d put the ranch up as collateral and had managed to get out from under the debt just in time to avoid losing it for good.

Not this time, though. No, this time he’d gotten completely over his head and
had
been about to lose everything. Decker narrowed his eyes as he stared at the swimsuit calendar above the desk. Miss August peered suggestively back at him. Jesus, his father’d been out here as recently as four months ago?

Looking down at the folders, Decker had a horrible thought. Had he gone for that godforsaken drunken drive on purpose? Had he steered into that goddamn tree in hopes of ending it all and leaving someone
else
to deal with his debt? Had he been
that
much of a goddamn coward?

Decker stood up and shoved the chair at the desk, wanting to break something. He’d known about this debt since the first visit from the Vegas chump, but seeing it in black-and-white, in his own father’s handwriting, was a whole different matter. He grabbed a whiskey bottle from the ledge and flung it against the far wall. It shattered with a satisfying crash. He grabbed another, and another, and flung them both.

“You. God. Damn. Selfish. Bastard!” he yelled as he flung bottles. “You had the world! The
world
! You had a wife! Sons!” He pitched more bottles at the wall. “I’m sorry about Emily! More sorry than you can ever know! But dammit, making me leave wasn’t the solution! She was gone. Gone! And you still had two sons who needed you!” The crashing was almost constant now as he whirled around the room, grabbing bottles and baseball-pitching them at the walls. His boots crunched on glass shards, but he hardly noticed.

He aimed a bottle at the window, and it flew through, scattering glass outside and in. “It was never enough, was it, Dad?” Crash, crash, whirl, crash. “Never enough!” He flung the last bottle he could find, then collapsed in the wooden chair, head in his hands. “We were never enough, Dad, were we?”

He took off his hat and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “I was never enough, was I, Dad?”

Half an hour later, Decker let out a deep breath as he gathered up the folders on the desk, shaking glass shards onto the floor. He had to show Cole what he’d found, and then they had to figure out how to make sure Ma never saw these pages. As he pushed the second drawer shut, he figured he’d better be sure there was nothing in the bottom drawer, so he pulled it open.

At first he thought it was empty, but when he stuck his hand in, it landed on a soft, flat book of some sort. Decker pulled it out, afraid to know what he’d found now. As he sat back in the chair, he opened the cover warily. In his father’s handwriting was the date
April 1, 2013
. The first line read,
April Fools’ Day. Named after me, I’m pretty sure
.

Twenty pages later, Decker leaned back as far as the chair would allow, placing the book open on his chest and blinking his eyes quickly.
Holy mother of God
.

Dad’s accident hadn’t been an accident at all. He’d spent hours up here in this cabin writing up his confessions in this journal while he downed his last bottle of whiskey, and then he’d gone home and taken that truck out for one last ride. He’d never intended to come back here, never intended to pay off the debts he’d rung up.

Never intended to speak forgiveness to the son he’d sent away.

* * *

“Ma? Are you in here?” Jess heard her voice echo through the kitchen.

“Right here, honey.” Ma pushed open the swinging doors, a basket of laundry in her hands. “How was your walk?”

“Good. I think that’s my favorite trail.”

“Kyla need some space, did she?”

Jess sat down in one of the stools at the counter. “The poor thing was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open. She practically shoved Hayley and me out the door so she could have some peace. I hope she’s still sleeping.”

“You didn’t lose Hayley while you were out there, did you?”

“Nope. She’s back down in the barn. I think she might sleep there tonight. She cannot get enough of these horses!”

“Well, that’s good. I love when other people love my horses as much as I do.” Ma started folding towels on the counter. “I picked up some treats for Kyla at the bakery this morning. I
know how she loves those cupcakes Jenny makes.” She paused her folding. “Other than tired, how is she?”

Jess sighed. “I wish I knew, really. She’s been all brave-faced since we got back from the hospital. I know she’s got to be hurting, but she keeps saying it’s nothing compared to her car accident.”

“It’s all about perspective, I guess. But glory, that girl’s got way more perspective than one body needs.”

“That’s for sure. I think she got more of it here than she expected, too.” Jess almost clapped her hand over her mouth after the words had escaped. Just what Kyla needed was for her to come blabbering to Ma about her feelings for Decker.

“I imagine my son had something to do with that, no?”

Jess watched Ma calmly fold washcloth after washcloth, like she couldn’t care less what Jess’s answer was. “Maybe a little.”

“Decker’s had a lot of … perspective … as well. Not sure what he tells people, but his road hasn’t been easy, either.” Ma looked up. “Doesn’t excuse bad behavior, if there was some, but I’m just saying.”