Broken Wings (15 page)

Rio was beginning to understand how a
deer caught in the headlights
felt. She knew she should say
something...but what? What could she say? “
I had sex with a dead
guy, and worse yet, I wanted to stay with him
?”

Humph. She came to the conclusion that
it was best to keep her mouth shut. There was nothing she could say
that would make sense, so she walked away.

She heard Billy order, “Everybody stay
back!”

She could easily guess he was following
her as she headed out of the clearing. But it didn’t stop her from
hurrying through the thicket of trees until she’d the mountain’s
edge.

In silence, she gazed out across the
canyon.

Billy stopped a few feet from her. “I
can’t imagine what you’re going through right now.” There was a
measure of sympathy in his tone.

Rio closed her eyes, caught momentarily
by the recollection of Tajan’s lips and tongue making her body
sing, as it had never done before. Trying to shake the memory, a
chill rushed through her. She took her time looking at Billy. “You
wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“
Now I know why you got so
spooked when I took you to the place where Tajan and Maggie died,”
Billy said, his tone was calm.

A touch of fear and a bit of disbelief
passed across her face.

“
Let me guess…in your vision
Tajan came to you?” He posed it as a question but it wasn’t really.
“How do I know this?” he asked, not waiting for an answer. “Because
Tajan and Maggie came to see me before he came to you.”

Rio’s eyes glistened and she skewed her
mouth tightly. “I should never have come here.” She sucked back her
frustration. “I should never have done this.”

She took off again and Billy chased
after her. When he caught up to her, he grabbed her arm. “Rio,” he
said with newfound hope, “I know how to read the map. Maggie showed
me.” His tone grew solemn. “She also told me that you and she are
one and the same.”

Rio paled, and it was like all
reasoning drained from her face right along with the color. She
stared at him and he saw the never-ending need to understand what
was happening to her glistening in her eyes.

That’s when he knew—she’d gotten the
same news. “Tajan told you that, didn’t he?”

Rio’s scathing laughter rippled around
him. “Oh, that ain’t the half of it.” Her head shook like a
bobble-head doll. “The thing is, Billy—” She flashed him a
judgmental glare. “—you and I...we took a controlled substance. One
that induces hallucinations.” She threw her hands into the air.
“Are we really supposed to buy into the fantasies that we created
last night? Because they were, after all, just
that...illusions.”

“
Vision. Hallucination.
Fantasy. Or illusion,” he said, remaining calm. “Call it whatever
you like, but I have just one question for you...If it wasn’t real,
how did you and I both come up with the idea that you and Maggie
are the same person?”

~~~~

CHAPTER 29

Taylor and Biggs had worked for Turner
Atkins a number of years. Their current assignment was out of the
ordinary and not exactly their forte. They were used to using
intimidation and scare tactics to accomplish their goals. Being
ordered to sit, wait and watch was a first, and as it turned out, a
mission that neither of them was good at.

Even so, from a hilltop across the
canyon, they watched the boss’s ringer. Taylor peered through the
binoculars as the party began to awaken.

Biggs was on the phone with Atkins.
“It’s beyond me, boss.” He rolled his eyes to keep from complaining
about this farce of an assignment. “All they did was sit around a
fire all night.” He paused, listening to his boss. “They’re packing
up to leave.” After another brief interlude, Biggs said, “All
right, boss…we’ll stick to them like glue.”

~~~~

CHAPTER 30

Rio had to make an escape—at least for
a little while—and she had to do it alone. She had to call her
father. She needed answers, and she needed them now.

In the Raley’s parking lot, she stowed
away between two large trucks, feeling confident that somebody
would have to be looking for her to sneak up on her. She left the
engine running and fished her cell phone out of her bag.

Rio hit the speed-dial and tapped her
hand against the steering wheel while she waited for James
Laraquette to answer his phone. Finally, when she heard his voice
on the other end of the call, relief washed over her.
“Daddy?”

“
Rio...?” Her father’s voice
was filled with apprehension, which didn’t surprise her. He could
always pick up on her anxiety right away. “Are you okay?” he asked,
confirming her suspicions.

“
I’m fine, Daddy.” She
realized the lie as soon as it left her mouth. “Well, no.” She
straightened in her seat and cleared her throat. “That’s not really
true.”

“
Rio, honey...are you in
trouble?”

“
Daddy—” She nearly choked
on the lump crawling up her larynx. “Is Abby really my
mother?”

“
Why would you ask me that?”
Her father’s tone went from apprehension to panic—suggesting that
he’d been dreading this moment for a long time.

“
Well...?” She held her
breath, waiting. When he didn’t say anything right away, she knew
she’d have to give him a nudge. “It’s recently been brought to my
attention that a woman named Audrey Tajan might possibly be my
mother.” The tears turned on like a faucet at full blast. “Were you
married to her, Daddy?”

James Laraquette’s silence reached out
across the wire and grabbed hold of Rio like a huge suffocating
strap. After the deafening stillness came the confirmation of her
worst nightmare when her father said, “How did you find out about
Audrey?”

“
Is she my mother?” Rio
screamed into the phone.

“
Yes, Rio...she
is.”

She wept with fury, indignation,
desolation and sorrow. Four little words had ripped her world
apart. Now, the childhood treatment that Abby had bestowed upon her
made sense. In some weird way that helped.

When Rio’s tears had tapered down to
sniffles, James cleared his throat. “Rio, honey—” As he spoke, she
swiped the tears with the base of her palm. “—do you want me to
come there?”

“
No!” The thought of her
father coming to Carson City sent her senses reeling. That could
not happen. “You cannot come here!”

* * *

From the time Audrey Tajan met James
Laraquette and married him—and up until the time she met Turner
Atkins, she hadn’t changed much. Something happened to Audrey when,
as a teenager, she ran away from home with Johnny Morton. Audrey
was sixteen and Johnny was nineteen. Her parents had been livid at
the older boy chasing after their young daughter. Needless to say,
Audrey was infatuated with Johnny. The more her parents tried to
stop her from seeing him, the more she was determined to do just
that. It didn’t take much effort on Johnny’s part to convince her
to run away with him. The boy made grand promises of a wonderful,
magical life together.

The magic lasted less than a year.
Johnny came home from work one day and announced that he’d been
seeing someone else. To make matters worse, he was in love with the
other woman. Without any remorse, he packed his things and left
Audrey to fend for herself.

She didn’t dare go home, feeling a
reconciliation between herself and her parents could never
happen.

After a brief period of wallowing in
self-pity, Audrey pulled herself up off the ground and did whatever
she had to do to take care of herself. That, is how she acquired a
taste for the finer things in life.

One wild weekend in Vegas, when she was
in her late-twenties, she met a handsome young man named James
Laraquette. Audrey was taken with his wholesome good looks and his
unwavering focus. He knew exactly what he wanted and precisely how
he was going to get it.

And, James was fascinated with the
young Native American beauty. She had the most beautiful green eyes
he’d ever seen.

James and Audrey married with the
grandest of plans for the future. She spent the first year of their
marriage waiting for the birth of their first child. She was also
waiting for the other shoe to drop. She anticipated the same thing
happening with James that had happened with Johnny. By the time
their little girl, Rio, was born—Audrey was miserable.

She had to get out and she had to do it
right away. She knew James would never allow her to leave with the
baby, so she did what she thought was the only option open to her.
When Rio was two weeks old, Audrey went to the grocery store and
never came home.

James Laraquette knew his wife had gone
to L.A. because that’s the last place the credit card company told
him she’d used the card before he had her cut off. After that, he
never heard from Audrey again.

Rio was less than a year old when James
met Abigail McKenzie, a lovely young woman who appeared to love his
daughter very much. He quickly decided that Abby would make a
wonderful mother for Rio and he wasted no time at all in asking her
to marry him.

Abby happily agreed to adopt Rio with
the hope that they would give the child lots of brothers and
sisters. They would have too, if James hadn’t gotten that awful
fever right after the wedding, leaving him unable to father any
more children.

Well, that wasn’t exactly what Abby had
agreed to. She’d only resolved to adopt Rio with the understanding
that she would be able to have her own children. Rio was a little
over three when they finally discovered James was no longer capable
of fathering children. That notion ate at Abby like a vicious
disease, until she got to the point where she resented Rio and
hated James because it was all his fault that she wasn’t able to
have her own children, yet she was still stuck having to take care
of his kid.

James put up with it for a few years,
hoping Abby would get over not being able to have her own children.
She never did.

Finally, after realizing it would be
better for Rio to lose her mother than to have to continue on with
the one he’d stuck her with, he asked for a divorce.

* * *

Rio paused silently on the other end of
the wire. The story her father had relayed would have been almost
unbelievable if she hadn’t already heard the beginnings of the tale
from Tajan.

“
Sweetheart, I know it
doesn’t mean much,” James Laraquette’s voice was dripping with
regret, “but I never meant to hurt you.”

“
I know, Daddy,” she said.
“You were just trying to protect me.”

“
I truly was.”

“
I know, Daddy.” Rio’s tears
escaped again. “This is a lot to take in.”

“
Are you sure you don’t want
me to come there?”

“
No, Daddy.” She nearly
choked on her objection. “You can’t.”

“
Well, I know that tone,” he
said, half laughing. “You’re not in danger are you?”

“
No, Daddy…I’m not in any
danger.” She even managed to crack a smile. Her father would be
blown away if she told him where she was—more to the point, who she
was with.

~~~~

CHAPTER 31

Billy found Rio sitting motionless on
the couch in his living room. She had this blank look on her face.
It was her shield against the world. But he had a pretty good idea
about the chaos going on inside her. Who wouldn’t be
confused—considering?

He eased down onto the couch. She
didn’t move. She didn’t look at him. He gave her a little nudge.
She finally looked at him with sad, sorrowful eyes.

“
You okay?” he asked, yet he
knew the answer. It was clear, even with the stone-faced mask she
wore to disguise her pain.

She turned away and looked straight
ahead before answering him with a soft, simple response.
“Sure.”

Silence hung in the air between them,
and Billy’s mind had begun to fill with all kinds of worse-case
scenarios when she looked back at him. “My whole life turns out to
be one big, fat lie.” Her tone was as helpless as her feeble shrug.
“But sure...” She let out a weak smile and wry laugh. “I’m just
hunky-dory.”

The one thing Billy had noticed about
Rio when he first met her was she had this fire that seemed to
sparkle and crackle and shoot out from her eyes. But now as he
looked into those same eyes the flame was gone. She appeared to be
nothing more than an empty shell. Everything about her that had
fueled her existence was gone now. It had flown right out the
window. Billy knew—and she probably did, too—it wasn’t coming back.
Rio wanted to be somewhere else. But for all the good it would do
her, she might as well be a trillion miles away from her desired
location.

“
Do you want to quit?” he
asked in a tone that offered more than questioned.