Reunion at Cardwell Ranch (10 page)

He cringed inwardly just as he had the first time Dana had mentioned it. “Like I told you before, I’m not much on—”

Dana shook her head. “I’m not taking no for an answer. Believe me, you don’t want to get on my bad side.”

Hud laughed as he walked into the kitchen. “Trust me, she is so right about that,” the marshal said as he bent to give his wife a kiss. “Whatever she wants you to do, just do it.”

Dana slapped playfully at her husband as she said, “I thought you couldn’t make lunch.”

“I got to thinking about your chili and corn bread,” he said with a shrug as he helped himself and joined them.

“I was just talking to Laramie about the masquerade ball. Now that he is going to own a house here...”

“You bought that house?” Hud asked he sat down at the table.

Laramie nodded.

“Did your brothers ever admit to playing that trick on you?” the marshal asked.

“Hayes swears they know nothing about a cat burglar. Any news on the vehicle?”

“What vehicle?” Dana said. “Did something happen?”

“Some fool ran Laramie off the highway yesterday,” Hud said, keeping his head down as he ate.

“What? And this is the first I’m hearing about it?” Dana demanded.

“I didn’t mention it because I thought you would overreact,” Hud said. “Seems I was right.”

“Are you all right?” Dana demanded of her cousin.

“You can see that he is all right,” Hud said.

Dana shot him an impatient look. “Why would someone run you off the road?”

“The person must have been drinking,” Laramie said. He felt Dana look from him to her husband as if sensing there was more to the story.

“As to the vehicle,” Hud said to him. “Haven’t found it yet.” He took a bite of chili and chewed. “Ever see the woman again?” he asked after a moment.

Dana shot Laramie a conspiratorial look and gave him a slight shake of her head.

“You haven’t had any more sightings?” Laramie asked, avoiding the question.

Hud shook his head. “Fortunately not. I have enough problems with whoever is behind the counterfeit twenties floating around. I got a call earlier from the gas station. Someone passed off another bogus twenty. Once they start circulating...”

They ate in silence for a few moments. “I can’t wait to throw a housewarming party for you,” Dana said.

“Give him a break, sweetheart,” her husband said with a laugh. “You’re going to scare him away with all this talk of parties.”

“Well, be thinking about your costume for the ball—and a possible...date.” She gave him a sly wink. “I promise you, you don’t want to miss the masquerade party,” she said, undeterred. “I’ll write down the name of a local costume shop. You’ll want to get yours soon.”

Hud ate quickly and went back to work. Laramie stayed to help Dana with the dishes even though she protested.

“Why didn’t you mention the horseback ride with my possible cat burglar to Hud?” he asked Dana.

She laughed. “Hud would have just turned into his marshal persona and started asking a lot of questions you clearly can’t answer.”

“Austin is already doing that.”

“Exactly,” she said, eyeing him thoughtfully. “Anyway, as far as we know she hasn’t committed any crimes, right?”

He nodded.

“Also, I can tell that you’re smitten with her. I liked her. Your brothers told me that you’ve dated a lot but haven’t found
the one
. I guess time will tell with Sid, won’t it? I hope she changes her mind about the ball.”

“I don’t see her doing that. She said she wouldn’t be caught dead there.”

Dana shuddered. “Those were the words she used?”

“It’s just an expression,” he said, seeing that Dana was now upset.

“Maybe it’s for the best. Every year at the ball there’s a silent art auction of several paintings to help continue funding the event,” she said slowly. “Last year they were local watercolors. This year they are three works by cowboy artists.”

“Who are the artists?” Laramie asked as his interest was piqued.

“Rock Jackson, Taylor West and H. F. Powell.”

* * *

U
PSET
WITH
HERSELF
, Sid drove through Big Sky and turned on the road back to her cabin. She had let down her guard with Laramie. What was wrong with her? She knew what her best friend, Maisie, would say about it even before her friend answered her call.

“I kissed him again.”

“You
what
?”

“Well, he kissed
me
, but I kissed him back.”

“Sid. How did this happen?”

She told her about the horseback ride. “He caught me at a vulnerable moment. I was talking about...about my father dying and—”

“You went horseback riding with him and told him about your father? Have you lost your mind?”

“I only told him that my father had died.” Sid sighed. “He could see that I’m clearly not over it.”

“You need to be more careful. If you’re right about him suspecting you...”

“I know, but there is something about him that makes me think I can trust him when I’m with him. And when he kissed me...”

“It didn’t feel like a kiss from a man who was looking for an art thief?”

“No,” Sid said with a groan. “It felt like kiss from a man whose reasons were strictly carnal. And I liked it,” she cried.

Maisie laughed. “You know what you need, don’t you?”

“If you are going to say a man—” As she pulled up beside her cabin she saw tracks in the snow where someone had walked along the back of the property. The tracks disappeared behind the house. “I have to go. If I don’t call you back in five minutes...”

“I know what to do,” her friend said solemnly.

Stuffing her cell phone into her pocket, she opened her glove box and pulled out the gun. Dropping it in her other coat pocket, she opened her car door and stepped out.

The snow crunched under her feet, a sign that the temperature was dropping as snow drifted down from a blinding white sky. She’d heard that another winter storm was coming in and was surprised it hadn’t hit sooner.

Instead of going in the front, she walked along the side of the cabin to the back and looked toward the woods where the fresh boot prints in the snow had apparently come from. She saw a snowmobile parked some distance from the cabin. She could still smell the exhaust. Whoever was inside hadn’t been here long.

Her hand in her coat pocket, her finger on the trigger, she opened the door and stepped in.

Chapter Eleven

Laramie had always been the sensible one. He was the brother the others came to when they had financial questions. He was the one who tried to keep them out of trouble. He was the one—though the youngest—they all expected to be the rational, clear thinking one.

Given what had happened in the past few days, he shouldn’t have been that surprised to see that all four of his brothers were waiting for him when he returned to his house. He suspected they hadn’t come to see his new residence as he got out and walked toward the waiting vehicle—and his waiting brothers.

“I hope you brought me supper from the restaurant,” Laramie said as his brothers all piled out of Austin’s SUV. “And more beer.” None of them even smiled. He braced himself for the lectures that he knew were coming as he opened the front door of the house.

“Why don’t we all have a cold one?” he suggested as he walked into the kitchen. Behind him, they all trudged in, stopping to take their boots off at the door. He turned around to stare and then laugh.

“What’s so damned funny?” Jackson demanded.

“All of you. You’re all so well...trained now. Is that what marriage does to you? If so, I’ll pass.”

“Don’t try to change the subject. You’re in enough trouble,” Hayes warned.

“I’ll take that beer you offered,” Tag said. The other three brothers shot him an annoyed look. “Hey, we can lay into him and still have a beer while we do it.”

“If this is about Sid...” He opened the refrigerator and brought out five bottles of beer.

“We just heard about someone running you off the highway in the canyon,” Hayes said. “You didn’t even bother to tell us?”

“I’m fine,” Laramie said. “But I appreciate your concern,” he said as he handed them each a bottle.

“Where have you been?” Austin asked, sounding as though he was interrogating one of his suspects back when he was a deputy sheriff in Texas.

“At Cardwell Ranch having lunch with Dana and Hud,” Laramie said, twisting off the cap from his beer. He took a drink, then added, “Before that I went on a horseback ride.”

“Alone?” Austin asked, then sighed when Laramie said nothing. He wrenched the top off his bottle of beer. “I told you to be careful. A horseback ride?”

“You probably want to see the house,” Laramie said. He was still too happy about his afternoon ride with Sid to want to argue with his brothers. Not that he didn’t understand their concern. He was too smart not to realize he was playing with fire.

“I want to see these damned paintings,” Tag said. He looked toward the stairs. “Are they up there?”

“They were when I left,” Laramie said.

* * *

S
ID
EASED
HER
FINGER
off the trigger of the gun in her coat pocket. Her older sister stood over the painting on her easel—after having picked the lock on Sid’s back door. Sid tried to tamp down her annoyance. Seeing her was like seeing a ghostly image of herself. People used to think the two of them were twins. They looked that much alike, especially when Zander had gone strawberry blonde.

The fact that they were half sisters wouldn’t have surprised anyone to see them together—same father, different mothers. But few people knew they were even related because Zander was always gone and they were never seen together.

“Zander, what are you doing here?” Sid hated the edge to her voice. But from past experience, she feared a visit from her half sister didn’t bode well.

Zander turned and smiled. “Merry Christmas!”

She slipped out of her coat and hung it on the hook by the back door. “You’re here for
Christmas
?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” her sister said, stepping to her to give her a hug. “We’ve missed too many holidays. I decided not to let another one go by without spending it with my little sis.”

She caught a whiff of her sister’s favorite perfume, a scent that transported her back to their teen years. It also reminded her that it was Zander who’d taught her about breaking and entering. And that was the least of Zander’s crimes.

“So you just happened into the area, grabbed a snowmobile and decided to visit?” she asked as she stepped back from the hug.

Zander sighed. “You’ve always been so suspicious. I came by snowmobile because it had been too many years since I’d gotten to ride on one and I wanted to surprise you. Clearly, I did. Come on, we’re all the family we have left.”

“And you thought after several years of me not hearing from you that you’d just stop by and surprise me,” she repeated.

Her sister laughed and shook her head. “Sid, in case no one has told you, it’s
Christmas
. I’ve heard families get together, exchange presents, sit around the Christmas tree and drink eggnog. At least that’s what they do in movies,” she said, glancing around Sid’s cabin. “But it certainly doesn’t look like Christmas here. Where’s the tree and the eggnog, the stockings hung with care?”

“If I’d known you were coming for a visit—”

“Not to worry. I’ll take care of everything, including filling up your refrigerator. Sid, what do you eat...? Or do you?” She continued, not expecting an answer apparently. “You look thin. I hope it’s because you’re painting and not because of that crazy quest you’ve been on.”

Sid didn’t want to talk about either with her sister. “Where have you been this time?” Zander had taken after her mother, a model who’d disappeared a few years before Sid was born. Her sister had apparently picked up that wandering gene.

“I tend to follow the sun. You know me,” Zander said noncommittally as she moved around the cabin. “Unless, of course, I get a hankering to spend Christmas in Big Sky with my sister.”

Zander couldn’t seem to let grass grow under her feet. According to their father, the photographs she’d seen of Zander’s mother hadn’t captured her wild spirit. Her father, who’d loved women to distraction, had moved on at fifty after Zander’s mother had left, and had another child sans marriage. Even though Sid’s mother was younger than he was, he’d managed to out-live her by twenty years.

“I don’t have an extra bedroom,” Sid said, unable to turn her sister away, “but you can take mine and I’ll—”

“I already have a place to stay. I didn’t come to move in. Or to keep you from your...work. But don’t make any plans for Christmas Eve. I’ll bring everything.”

Sid looked at her sister and felt that old blood bond between them as well as the memories that would always link them. Her timing was questionable, but it
was
almost Christmas, wasn’t it? It had been too long since she’d even seen her sister—Zander was right about that. Also, they were the last of their family and the last link to their father.

Sid hugged her again, harder this time while silently praying her sister was telling the truth about her reason for being here now. “I’ve missed you, Z.”

* * *

“T
HE
PAINTINGS
ARE
identical right down to the picture frame,” Hayes said as he studied them. “I would swear they were painted by the same artist.”

“I took the supposed forgery to an art expert. He offered me thirty thousand for it and offered to document it as the original,” Laramie said. “Even the artist who painted it believed this was the original. At least at first.”

“Are you sure the one you bought with the house isn’t the forgery?” Jackson asked. “McKenzie says most forgeries are easy to spot. All you have to do is look at the colors, the brushstrokes, the canvas...but this one...” He shook his head.

“It is perplexing,” he admitted. “But there is a certificate on the back claiming it is an original and one of a kind. That was good enough for its original owner.”

“Something isn’t right,” Hayes said, looking worried. “Either the artist painted more than one of these and lied, or this is a masterful forger. What about the other houses where this...cat burglar was seen?”

“Hud said the owners checked their artwork,” Austin said. “It hadn’t been taken.”

“That’s why the marshal thinks the whole thing is a hoax,” Laramie pointed out.

“Except you caught the woman and have a second painting that is identical or damned close,” Austin said. “If she’s switching the originals for forgeries, she has one profitable scam going, and so far she’s gotten away with it. Which means she can’t let you keep this painting.” He glanced over at Laramie and swore. “That’s what you’re counting on, isn’t it?”

“Or maybe the artist is in on it,” Hayes said. “You said you talked to him?”

“Taylor West seemed as perplexed by it all as I was,” he said. “But according to him, he’s the top moneymaker with his art. So if you were going to forge anyone’s, it would seem smart to copy his.”

“You were run off the road after you visited this Taylor West?” Austin asked, clearly knowing that was the case.

“Coincidence,” Laramie said, shrugging. Austin mugged a face at him.

“Whoever is doing this is good, really good,” Hayes said studying the artwork.

Laramie nodded. “I asked West who he would suspect of forging his work. The only artist he could think of who was that good was H. F. Powell.”

“I’ve seen his work,” Jackson said. “He was one of the originals like Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington. But didn’t I hear that he’s dead? Unless he forged this painting before he died...”

Laramie had thought of that. “What do you know about him?”

His brothers all shrugged.

“I just know that one of his paintings is going to be auctioned off at the ball,” Hayes said. “McKenzie expects it to go for a lot of money because there aren’t many of them around. Most of his work was lost in a house fire the night of his death. Apparently he was a character. I guess in his old age, he locked himself in his studio and no one saw him again. He died destitute with what would now be hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of his paintings going up in flames with him.”

“The paintings all burned?” Laramie asked.

“McKenzie said the fire turned out to be arson. The old man apparently started the blaze himself.”

“What about the one being auctioned off at the ball?” he asked.

“Apparently it was one that he’d sold before his death,” Jackson said.

* * *

“I
WAS
HOPING
you’d
be glad to see me,” Zander said, pretending to pout. “After all,
I
taught you everything you know.”

“Not
everything
.” Zander had taught her how to pick locks at a young age, how to break into houses through windows and not leave any evidence. She’d taught her how to steal—and how to get away with it. For that she owed her since that talent had certainly come in handy.

But fortunately, Sid had learned other things that had helped her in life that her sister could have benefited from. Everyone in Big Sky thought she had no siblings. She’d kept Zander a secret for reasons she didn’t want to admit. Now she regretted that—and the times she’d wished it was true.

“So what have you been up to?” her sister said, studying her. “Is there a man in your life?”

Sid shook her head and turned away. “Why would you ask that?”

Zander laughed. “Because you’re young, somewhat attractive,” her sister joked since she was clearly aware how much they resembled each other, “and this place is crawling with rich men.”

Sid groaned. “We’re not all looking for a sugar daddy.” She wondered now where her sister was staying. It would be just like Zander to have met some man who was letting her stay in his guesthouse—if not his master bedroom.

“Well, don’t wait too long to find one,” her sister said. “It gets harder as you get older.”

Sid started to point out there was only seven years between them. But in the bright light reflecting off the snow outside, Zander looked as if the years they’d been apart had taken a toll on her. Her sister lived hard and fast as if that, too, was in her genes.

Zander walked around the cabin, picking up things and putting them back with no apparent real interest. “So are you almost finished with your diabolical plan?”

She sighed and gave her sister an impatient look. “Diabolical?”

Zander shrugged. “You are almost done, though, aren’t you?” She turned to look at her. “You have all the paintings?”

“Not quite.”

Her sister nodded. “Then what?”

“I really don’t want to talk about this with you. Like you said, it’s nearly Christmas. Let’s not dig up the past.”

Her sister looked angry for a moment, but then nodded. “You’re right. We never agreed on much anyway, but we are still blood. Daddy would have wanted us to be friends.”

The mention of their father brought tears to Sid’s eyes. He was the one person in their lives they could agree on. They had both loved him in their own ways.

“I’m not here to keep you from your...work. But if I can help, you’ll let me know. I might be a little rusty at the undercover stuff, but I doubt it would take much to bring it back.” Zander grinned. “In fact, I’d welcome the diversion. Life has been too tame for too long.”

Sid doubted that. “You didn’t seem to have any trouble breaking into my cabin.”

Her sister waved that off with a laugh. “Hardly a challenge. You really should consider getting better locks. You don’t even have a security system,” she said, looking around the small cabin and frowning. “Which means you don’t keep anything you value here.”

Sid had wondered how long it would take her sister to get to the heart of the matter. But she ignored it, determined not to discuss this with her. “If you’re coming back Christmas Eve, I should tell you I don’t like eggnog. But if you still remember how to make nachos like you did when we were kids...”

Zander’s smile never reached her eyes. “Got the message.”

Sid doubted she did. Before the holidays were over, her sister would return to her real reason for being in Big Sky. In the meantime, she wondered what her sister might be up to and asked as much.

“I thought I’d do some skiing and maybe lay around in the hot tub at the place I’m staying.”

Sid said nothing, but that didn’t sound like the sister she’d known and loved. Since she was fourteen Sid had pretty much been on her own. Growing up with a father who worked all the time and a sister who was a thief, she had learned to take care of herself—any way she’d had to.