Cowboy PI (17 page)

“We have to go back to the fork,” he said.

“Yes,” Samantha said hopefully, turning the mare. “Maybe we’ll have better luck with the other branch.”

But he could detect the first threads of panic in her voice, and he knew he had to distract her, to occupy her mind with something other than the gravity of their situation. And, anyway, he wanted the knowledge she could provide him.

“Tell me about them, Samantha,” he said as they arrived at the fork and made their way along the right branch. “The members of our outfit. All I know about them as individuals is what I’ve been able to observe on the drive. But you grew up on the Walking W. You must have a lot more than just impressions.”

“Not really. Not when you consider I left the ranch not long after my mother died and never went back, except for a single visit, and by then the staff had changed.”

“Like who, for instance?”

“Shep Thomas, for one. The foreman before him had quit, and my grandfather replaced him with Shep. He and his wife occupy a cottage on the ranch. I think they came from somewhere near Dallas, but I’m not sure of that. In fact, I’m not really sure of anything about Shep, except I get the feeling he’s a lot deeper than he seems. Another fork! Which one this time?”

They took the wider of the two passages.

“Go on with what you were telling me,” Roark encouraged her.

“Why do you want to know? Is it that useful, or are you just trying to keep me busy?”

She was no fool. “Both,” he said honestly.

“You think my information is going to bring you closer to learning who wants me out of the way?”

“It’s possible. What about Dick Brewster?”

“In his case, he was hired on a few months before I left the ranch. Long enough for me to learn that, where Dick is concerned, what you see is what you get.”

Maybe, Roark thought, and maybe not.

“This is no good, is it?” Samantha said.

She was referring to their route. It had narrowed, was so tight in places that it barely accommodated horse and rider. But it hadn’t dead-ended. Yet.

“Let’s give it a chance.”

They continued to pursue it, claustrophobic though it was.

“And Cappy?” he prompted.

“There isn’t much to know about Cappy. He’s been on the Walking W forever. He and my grandfather went way back. Cappy gave me my first riding lesson. Roark, we’re losing the light.”

The shadows had thickened in the gorge.

“I know. How about Ramona?”

“She was hired as housekeeper to replace my mother. That happened after I was gone. She was there when I came back for the one visit, which wasn’t long enough to learn anything about her history. We did get to be on friendly terms, though, and I could see how efficient she was. I suspect that’s all that mattered to my grandfather.”

“So Ramona is something of a mystery.”

“Not as much as her son is. Roark, what are we going to do if it gets completely dark before we find our way out of here?
If
we ever do.”

“We still have time, and we will.”

But he was less confident about that than he wanted her to think, particularly when the route divided again. There were three galleries this time, and the first two they tried turned out to be impassable after a few yards.

The third artery allowed them to proceed, but Roark realized by now that this entire section of the mesa was seamed with deep rifts. A network nature had carved into a bewildering maze of fissures. For all he knew, they were riding in circles, crossing routes they had already traveled.

“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” Samantha said in a small, bleak voice. “We’re lost.”

“Don’t give up. We still have enough light left to guide us. Come on, you haven’t told me about Alex yet.”

“Yes, Alex. Well, his father’s ranch adjoins the Walking W. They’ve always been good neighbors. But you know that already. After all, the McKenzies are your neighbors, too.”

“What with keeping my own spread going, along with the agency in San Antonio, I never had the time to learn much of anything about my neighbors. Like, just how serious is this crush Alex McKenzie has on you?”

Samantha laughed softly. “It’s a leftover from our high school days. He used to leave notes for me in my locker, but since he was a freshman and I was a senior…well, you know what it’s like at that age. We were light-years apart. Satisfied?”

“For now.”

There was a pause, and then she said quietly, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Keeping me from going hysterical on you. But maybe I should have been screaming my head off. Do you think the others would have heard us if we’d hollered?”

“Not much chance of that down here.”

There was another silence between them, no sound but the steady clopping of the horses’ hooves on the hard bed of the defile. The precious light continued to fade. The silence lengthened.

“Roark, stop!”

He drew rein. “What is it?”

“Don’t you hear it?” she asked, her voice excited.

He listened, and now he could hear it, too. The murmur of water over stone. It came from somewhere in front of them.

“Do you think…”

But Roark was afraid to count on anything. Snapping the reins, he moved forward again, leading the way toward
the source of the water. It was louder now, identifying itself as a stream tumbling over rocks.

There was something else. The deepening gloom had lessened. He was puzzled about that until he realized that the walls on either side had diminished considerably in height, permitting the last light of day to enter the trench. The channel had also widened. He and Samantha could ride comfortably now side by side.

Smelling the water, the animals quickened their pace without urging. They rounded a last bend, emerging from the mouth of the defile into a low canyon. And there in the gray, lingering twilight, situated above the stream that had beckoned them, was a sight that astonished them.

Chapter Eight

“Look at them, Samantha! They’re incredible!”

She
was
looking, and she was impressed, though her interest couldn’t begin to match Roark’s excitement over the spectacle of the tumbled sandstone walls. In fact, she found more pleasure in his enthusiasm than in the reason for it.

“I’ve seen the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde,” he said, “and they’re more extensive than these. Probably in a better state of preservation, too, but it’s not the same as stumbling onto our very own ruins like this!”

She knew he realized, just as she did, that they couldn’t possibly be the first to discover these crumbling structures, isolated though they were in a remote region. But it was fun to claim them as their own.

They went on standing there, feasting their gazes on the mass of finely crafted masonry above them in a deep alcove under the overhanging rim of the mesa. From what Samantha could tell in the rapidly dwindling light, the compound consisted of a series of connected rooms and towers, some square, others round, all of them positioned on terraces at various levels.

Roark, who could scarcely control himself, started to climb down from his roan. “I’ve got to have a better look at this while we still have a glimmer of light.”

“Do you think we should?” she said, hating to temper
his exhilaration. “I mean, while we have any light left at all, shouldn’t we be concerning ourselves first with a few practical matters? Like how we’re supposed to find our way back to the outfit when we’re still lost in the wilderness? And, if we can’t manage that, where we’re going to spend the night and what we’re going to eat?”

“Samantha, we’re looking at prehistory here. This stuff has got to be centuries old.”

“I know, but I’m hungry, and I’m thirsty. I imagine the animals are, too.”

“You’re right.” Muttering something about the joyless necessity of reality, Roark directed a last, regretful glance at the roofless ruins before turning his attention to their more immediate needs. “I don’t see any point in our trying to go on in the dark.” He looked around. “We couldn’t ask for a better spot to camp. There’s the stream here and grass for the horses and Irma.”

Which didn’t solve the problem of what she and Roark were going to eat, Samantha thought, but she had to agree that spending the night here was the wisest plan. “There’s another advantage,” she pointed out to him. “If we’re here when the sun comes up, we’ll have some real light to explore the ruins.”

She anticipated the chance to share an interval like that with him and hoped that he felt the same. It pleased her when he responded warmly, “You and me playing archaeologists together sounds good.”

Unsaddling the horses, they watered them and the heifer. There was no risk in turning the animals loose afterward. They were too exhausted to wander, including Irma, and were content to graze in the immediate area.

It was completely dark by then, but the moon had risen. Its pale glow shed sufficient light for their other chores. There were cottonwoods along the stream and the ever-present quaking aspens elsewhere in the canyon, providing a supply of fuel.

Samantha gathered wood and built a fire in a level spot
beside the stream while Roark tried his hand at fishing in one of the pools. Or his version of it, anyway. This amounted to whittling the end of a long stick into a sharp point. It was hard to have faith in his intention, especially when he was operating by moonlight. But, miracle of miracles, he actually managed to spear and land a fat trout.

Impressed, she watched him as he cleaned the fish with his knife before crouching beside the fire to toast his catch on a makeshift spit. “Survival skills you learned in cowboy class, I suppose.”

“Actually, it was the Boy Scouts, and not out on the open range either. It was back in Illinois where I grew up.”

Samantha knew very little about his history, only that he came from a big family and that all of them were PIs like him, including his parents, who operated the home office of the Hawke Detective Agency in Chicago. She wondered if they were a close, loving family.

For a moment she was tempted to ask him about that, suddenly longing to know more about him. But then she decided her interest wasn’t smart. Not when he looked the way he did hunkered down by the fire, the flames lighting his strong face shadowed by a day’s growth of whiskers, his black hair tousled from his Stetson. The image was a sexy one, all male. It also reminded her of how much Roark had in common with her rugged grandfather, and this was a subject that always made her uneasy.

“It’s ready,” he said, dividing the trout and handing her her portion on a plate. Or what passed for one in the shape of a hunk of birch bark. “Careful, it’s hot.”

The fish was charred and flavored with smoke, but no meal had ever tasted better to her. And no dinner setting had ever been more—well, with the moonlight on the ruins above them, she supposed
romantic
would be the appropriate word, though
mysterious
might be more accurate, even
ghostly.
Contributing to this mood was the soft rattle of dry aspen leaves that had drifted to the ground where a
faint breeze scattered them. That, and a sudden, sharp yelping off in the canyon. Startled, Samantha huddled closer to Roark on the horse blanket they shared.

“Relax,” he said. “It’s just a coyote.”

“I know.”

But it was a nervous sound, reminding her of the danger they had faced today and of an enemy that could still be lurking out there in the darkness, even concealed in the ruins. Not that this was likely. Whoever it was would have returned long ago to the outfit in order to preserve his mask of innocence.

“The others must be worried about us,” she said.

“There’s nothing we can do about that until tomorrow.”

Roark had tried again just after their arrival in the canyon to raise Shep on his cell phone, but his effort had been as unsuccessful as his first attempt.

The fish eaten and the fire replenished, they sat there without talking, listening to the popping of the blazing wood, Irma and the horses stirring nearby, and the babble of the stream. She watched Roark as he stared into the flames. He was working the fingers of that hand again, a restless action that told her he was troubled.

“You’re thinking about the decision you have to make, aren’t you?” she guessed.

He turned his head to look at her. “As a matter of fact, that’s just what I was doing.”

It was uncanny the way she could read him, and even more unsettling that he had the ability to read her as well. Just as though they had been together for years, instead of a few days. “What’s so difficult about it? You obviously prefer ranching to investigative work.”

“It’s not that simple. There’s—” He hesitated, and for a moment Samantha thought he wasn’t going to tell her. But then, apparently deciding he wanted her to know, he finished what he’d started to say. “—an issue involved.”

“Oh?”

Her response didn’t sound very concerned, she realized.
But she sensed he wasn’t ready for either encouragement or sympathy, that he had yet to determine whether he wanted her to hear the rest. So she waited quietly, prepared to listen to him if he chose to continue.

Was it the mood of this place? Samantha wondered. Did it have a kind of magic at work, inviting confidences that otherwise wouldn’t get expressed? Or was it simply the intimacy of their situation which, in the end, had Roark sharing his secret with her? Not that it made any difference either way. His explanation was all that mattered.

“It’s not that I dislike being a private investigator,” he said. “Or that ranching is more important to me. It’s that I don’t trust myself in the role anymore. There’s a reason for that. A damn painful one.”

This is difficult for him, she thought, understanding his struggle even before she knew the cause of it. And why not, when she was no stranger to personal despair and the scars that resulted from it.

“What happened?” she urged him gently.

“A case that went wrong.
Very
wrong.” He went on exercising his fingers, this time with an unconscious rapidity. Evidence of his inner agitation. “I’ve always considered myself a good judge of my clients. Able to read their characters. Whether they’re telling me the truth or withholding information. That’s vital in PI work. But with this guy I missed. Never saw what was coming until it was too late.”