Titans (46 page)

L
eon did not move for several blinks behind his eyeglasses before he availed himself of the space Samantha moved over to offer. He put his cap back on and laid the newspaper beside him. “That so?” he said. “How did you find her?”

Samantha had liked him the day she'd met him, and Nathan loved and trusted him. She'd go by Nathan's judgment any day. Samantha opened her purse and took out Bridget Mahoney's letter. “This is how.”

After reading the letter, Leon handed it back. “It's as it happened, sure enough, I'm ashamed to say,” he said.

“Fill out the rest of the picture,” Samantha said. “Why did my mother not want my twin brother and me?”

Leon rubbed his knee. “It had to do with the man who got her pregnant with you. I am not your father, Samantha.”

“I know that. Trevor Waverling is my father and Nathan Holloway is my twin. Neither one knows I'm aware of those facts. Never mind how I know.”

Leon's eyebrow shot up above the rim of his glasses. “So you know most of the truth already.”

“Not the part I need to know.”

“All right, then, here it is. Millicent despises your father—your real father,” Leon corrected. “She claims he raped her. I don't believe that myself, not even doin' my best to give her the benefit of the argument. He
rejected
her. That's more like it. Knowin' your mother like I do, you should believe that, too. He was her first love, and she gave him her all—heart, body, and soul—and he walked off and left it all behind.”

“When my father…
rejected
her, did he know she was pregnant?”

“I'll go to my end believin' he didn't. He's admitted to us that he knew of Nathan before he showed up to claim him, but that was years later. I'd bet my last pair of overalls he didn't know about you. Until now, that is. You might as well know that, too.”

Samantha's heartbeat held. “What do you mean?”

“He came here one Saturday last July and arranged to meet with me, unbeknown to Millicent. He was full of speculations about you and your birth that he wanted me to confirm as truth. I didn't. I promised my wife I'd never tell a soul that Nathan had been born a twin—”

“But she had to keep one of us because it was known she was pregnant,” Samantha interrupted, fury warming her cheeks. “Otherwise, Nathan would have been given away, too.”

“That's what Trevor Waverling figured out based on facts and observations regarding you.”

“What sort of facts and observations?”

Leon related them as best he remembered. There was the rare color of Samantha's hair, the coincidences of her and Nathan's birth dates, the similarity of her features and gestures to Trevor's mother. Somehow he'd discovered the name of the doctor he thought had delivered her. Actually, as Samantha now knew, it was Bridget Mahoney who'd had the honor, but Dr. Tolman arranged her adoption. Leon said that later he learned that Trevor Waverling had made a trip across the Red River to Marietta in the Oklahoma Territory and called at Dr. Tolman's office. There he spoke to a midwife who'd told him that a young woman of Samantha's description had been by to inquire about her birth family. Trevor had told the woman that he might be the girl's father. She didn't have an address to give him but remembered that the young lady lived in Fort Worth. The midwife had been quite proud that she might have helped to reunite the handsome man from Dallas, Texas, with the pretty girl from Fort Worth.

“I learned all that from the midwife's husband,” Leon explained. “He ferries across the river every Wednesday for a game of checkers.” He peered at Samantha over his reading glasses. “ 'Course I never imparted that information to my wife.” Leon paused a moment to cross and recross his legs. “I'm afraid I can't bring myself around to likin' Trevor Waverling, but that's just resentment talkin'. He'll always have a part of my wife that'll never belong to me, and now he has the boy I raised, but I can sympathize with him. Can't think of nothin' worse than lovin' a child from a distance you cannot acknowledge.”

Samantha took a deep breath to relieve the painful pressure under her ribs. “So my father is guilty of nothing but a questionable accusation?” she said.

“That's how I see it from here. He's tried to make it up to Nathan.”

“He cares for him,” Samantha said, eyes straining to remain dry. “It's evident that Nathan cares for him, too.”

“As it was meant to be, sure enough.” Leon removed his glasses and reached into his overalls' back pocket to withdraw a large handkerchief, its first unfolding of the day. It had been ironed, Samantha noticed irrelevantly.
By his wife's hand?
She hoped so. The man who'd put up with Millicent Holloway and obviously loved her all these years deserved at least that much mindfulness from the woman. Leon applied the cloth to the lens. “Your other father came to see me, too. You ought to know that as well.”

Samantha coughed from the force of the shock. “My adoptive father, Neal Gordon? When?”

“During harvest, back in June. There he was at the fence one day, almost the spot where you'd stopped, this tough Texas rancher sittin' on his horse. I knew immediately who he was and why he'd come, even 'fore he'd given his name. I recognized it from when you came in answer to the ad, same as I recognized, or at least suspected, right then that you were Millicent's daughter.”

Goosebumps rose on Samantha's flesh. “
You didn't!
”

“I shore did, missy. Think back on it, and you'll see. Anyway, returnin' to your pa. He said he'd come to see if the farm was still for sale, but I knew different. He'd come to check out us Holloways—the people who'd let strangers take their baby girl.” The polishing of his glasses completed, Leon rehooked the earpieces. “I'm thinkin' he had a reason for comin' to look us over?”

“Yes… yes, he did,” Samantha admitted, a lump forming in her throat. “He had plenty reason. I was the young woman from Fort Worth who questioned the midwife about her birth family. I… had reached a point when I wanted to know where I came from, who my people were. I… began a sort of secret investigation, and my father found out about it. The hurt of it just about broke his heart. The trip he made to see you… I guess he'd decided to let me go if… you met with his approval, no matter the cost to him and my mother.”

Leon nodded and slipped back the pipe he'd drawn from his jacket pocket as if deciding against lighting up. “That was my notion, sure enough. I had a feelin' that's what it was all about. If the folks who'd birthed you had panned out, he'd 'a stepped back.” Leon chuckled. “I turned him from that direction soon enough. You were with the folks who deserved and loved you. Wadn't no guarantee of that for you at the Holloway farm.” Leon grinned at her. “I got the impression when your pa left that he'd 'a wrestled a band of Comanche 'fore he'd let us get our hands on you. 'Course he left thinkin' I was your father.”

Tears pressed and Samantha fought against their release. She had not come here to cry. Emotion must not be allowed to cloud clear thinking. At the moment hers was as hazy as feathers unleashed in a pillow fight. She concentrated on placing in order the events that had led her here. Logic said that Dr. Tolman, ill and dying, had sent a letter to Neal Gordon containing information of Samantha's birth. From it, her father had learned she'd been born a twin and the name and whereabouts of the couple who'd given her away, facts he did not wish his daughter to know and the reason for destroying the letter before she could read it. He sent her to the Barrows farm in response to the classified ad with no idea that the seller was Millicent Holloway. Somehow in her absence, Neal Gordon recognized his mistake and immediately dropped interest in the property.

But then Neal Gordon discovered Eleanor Brewster's letter in the basket of figs that alerted him to the inquiries his daughter had made into her birth. The discovery accounted for the hellish months that followed and her father's decision to go to La Paloma as a ruse to check out the Holloways. Samantha's throat burned as she remembered how he'd left her the day he rode off from the Trail Head on his mission of love and sacrifice.
I love you,
Samantha
, he'd said with the last look of a warrior leaving for a war from which he knew he'd never return. And then there came the day of the picnic at Windy Bluff when Neal learned that Nathan went by the last name of Holloway, a revelation that declared the landman to be his daughter's twin brother and Trevor Waverling her father.

Nearly all was clear now. Samantha had the answers she'd come for and the key to the mystery of her father's puzzling animosity toward Trevor Waverling and his clumsy attempts to keep her and Nathan apart. What a web he had spun for himself! How trapped in a net of guilt and fear. Samantha knew she should hate him, but she did not. He'd suffered enough. She understood his motives and forgave them.
A man is defined by his motives
—the mantra that Seth Singleton and now Sloan lived by. Neal Gordon's had not been pure, but they'd resulted from a father's love for his daughter and the fear of her loss. Samantha regretted only that he'd not trusted the depth of a daughter's love for her father.

Tears finally clouded her vision, and Leon laid a rough hand over hers. “ 'Course if I hadn't made us sound so bad, you would have been reunited with your twin brother and that would have been a very good thing, but I had to do what I thought best.”

“Have no regrets, Mr. Holloway,” Samantha said. “Nathan and I have many years to make up for lost time.”

Leon said without apparent surprise, “So you plan on identifying yourself to him?”

“I do.”

“And Trevor Waverling?”

“To him, as well.” A squirrel scampered up a tree branch and perched there eyeing them inquisitively, providing a distraction for her wet eyes. “But to my mother… no. I came here to meet her, but I don't find that necessary now. Can we keep this meeting between you and me? I'd prefer she never knew I was here.”

“I promise you this meeting will be a pleasure I'll keep to myself. It's wise of you to decide not to meet her. Best for both of you. As Millicent would say, ‘What good would come of it?' Nothin' that I can see. You must believe me on that. Go home to all those who love and want you, Samantha, and forget about the mother who didn't.”

“My maternal grandparents? Where are they?”

“Dead. Both of 'em contemptible. Nathan knows. You're better off never havin' known 'em.”

Samantha nodded and stood. Leon unwound his legs and hefted himself off the bench also. “Well, that all said, Mr. Holloway, I will take your advice and go home.” She held out her hand.

Leon sandwiched it between his. “So when you go home, what do you plan to do with all these cats let out of the bag?”

“Let 'em roam free,” Samantha answered. “No more keeping secrets. No more sweeping dust under the rug. We're all family. Regardless of our misguided steps, our hearts have been in the right place. There's room in them for everybody. Also”—she withdrew her hand to cup her abdomen—“I want that bag empty when my child is born.”

S
loan met her at the train station and held her fast and long. “Your mother is with Neal at the Triple S,” he said. “He's drilling a hole through the front window watching for you.”

“You didn't tell him anything, did you?”

“No, but they know, Sam. Your father figured out where you went and why. From the looks of your mother, he's told her everything. Her eyes are fiery red, and your daddy has on his wooden face, the kind he wears when he's playing poker and has a losing hand.”

“If I know him, he won't play a card until he sees all of mine,” Samantha said.

The Neal Gordons were standing to await her arrival when Samantha walked into the great room, her father stiff as a plank, her mother limp as a pillow with the feathers removed. Estelle's eyes did indeed look sandblasted and fastened on her in mute, heart-rending appeal. Neal's thoughts were indiscernible behind the hard screen of his gaze, but they were as easy to read as the days he'd surveyed the endless brown acres of his ranch that threatened the demise of his domain.

She held out her hands to them. “Mother, Daddy, let's sit down together,” she said. “We have something to discuss.”

She started at the beginning.

When it was all over and the truth exposed, feelings expressed, misperceptions and false impressions set right, transgressions forgiven, and eyes dried, Samantha left the room and stepped out onto the front porch to breathe in fresh air. She had left Neal and Estelle in the great room, her mother revitalized, thrilled over the coming grandchild, her father looking washed-out but like a draw cleaned of debris to receive fresh water in the spring. He would always be wary of Trevor Waverling. Samantha was prepared for that. Neal Gordon would keep an eye out for Trevor's encroachment on his territory as he had for Mexican marauders and the Comanche years after peace was made between country and nation and posed no threat to his land. It was his way.

“What… will you call him… Trevor Waverling?” he had asked.

Samantha had thought a moment. “Whatever the name my child chooses for him,” she'd said.

The night was dark and cold. Samantha shivered and suddenly felt the warmth of her woolen shawl draped about her shoulders. From behind, Sloan wrapped his arms around her, drew her tightly against him, and laid his chin upon her head. “Since it's a night of confessions, will you hear mine?”

At last it was coming. In October an article had appeared in the monthly magazine
The Archaeologist
under the title “Dinosaur Relic Discovered in Box of Libby String Beans.” The mysterious and amusing appearance of the fossil had made national news in the country's scientific community. In shock, Samantha had recognized the accompanying photo. A coldness had seized her bones. Without the description of the box and cup towels, she would have thought Todd responsible for the theft and shipment of the skull to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but the culprit had been Sloan. Paleontologists had identified the partial skull of the dinosaur as a sauropod.

Her heart pumping, Samantha had retreated to her makeshift laboratory where she could count on clarity and reason to prevail. Surrounded by relics and compounds, she traveled back in her mind to the day she found the skull missing. She and Sloan had parted at the crossroads to their ranches after his proposal that Sunday morning. To her disappointment, looking uneasy, he had refused to go with her to the site of her discovery and had posed a strange question.
Sam, you know that I would never make a decision, do anything, that wasn't in your best interests, don't you?

When she'd asked the reason for the question, he'd answered:
Just for reassurance that you understand I'd never do anything intentionally to hurt you.

I know that
,
she'd said.

I love you, Samantha Gordon.

I know that, too.

And she did know that, then and now, and for all the days of her life. Sloan had already taken the skull by then, ostensibly from Todd the afternoon before when he doubled back to the site. From that point of recollection, Samantha could only hypothesize, but she believed Sloan had interrupted Todd's theft of the skull and taken it to prevent him from destroying it as surely as the traitor had destroyed her Kodak. Samantha had figured out how Todd had feigned his innocence of the charge. Possibly Trevor Waverling had worked it out as well but couldn't prove it and was waiting to catch Todd in another false step.

Sloan had meant to return the skull to her, but then Samantha had confided the cause of the conflict between her and her father. Already deeply concerned about the breach between them, Sloan had realized the relic would widen it, perhaps irreparably. Neal Gordon would insist on his oil field; she would fight for her burial ground. The man who loved them both had decided the wisest course was to keep the skull in his care until he could decide what to do with it.

Samantha examined every opportunity for Sloan to have confessed his possession of the fossil but found none that he did not believe would jeopardize first their engagement and then their marriage. He did not know of Anne's visit to pump Samantha for an explanation of Sloan's waning interest. The girl's concern had been justified. Sloan Singleton was in love with Samantha Gordon and always had been. Anne's visit was proof enough that he'd had only her best interests at heart in taking and keeping the skull. Again, as with her father, he had not trusted her love for him not to believe the obvious—that he had married her with expectation of cashing in on the evidence that oil, barrels of it, was under the ground beyond the fence of the Triple S.

The skull had been in the Christmas cabinet. All the evidence pointed to it. Sloan's reaction when Billie June suggested it as storage space for her luggage, his efforts to keep Daniel out of the house, and the bath towel episode over Daniel's repair of the doorjamb made it clear. Sloan had spirited the skull away during the night when he learned the cabinet was to be sorted out the next morning. He stole out of the house to the ranch kitchen, removed the cans of string beans, and used the box and cup towels for packaging material. The address he'd taken from
The Archeologist
. He hadn't had the heart to deny the skull to posterity.
A man's motives define him.
Indeed they did. Sloan's had not been self-serving. He had acted out of love for his wife and a needless desperation to preserve their marriage, but Samantha had to hear the admission from his own lips.

“The confessional is still open,” she said.

Once again she left Sloan behind. She must do this herself, she told him. Samantha boarded the train to Dallas the next morning, Thursday, January tenth. In Dallas from the train station, she took a cab to the office of Waverling Tools and was greeted by Agatha Beardsley, who regarded her appearance with annoyance. “Does Mr. Waverling know to expect you?” the receptionist asked.

“No, he doesn't. I came with the hope I'd find him in and that he'll not view my unannounced visit as an intrusion.”

“He's in, but I'm afraid I can't guarantee the latter. Mr. Waverling is very busy and has a train to catch in an hour, but I'll see if he will receive you.” Miss Beardsley's crisp disapproval of the threat to her employer's schedule made clear, she said, “Please be seated until I come to fetch you.”

“Of course,” Samantha said and obediently took a seat.

She disappeared and within seconds, Trevor, strides ahead of Miss Beardsley, swung through the door to the reception room. “Mrs. Singleton—Samantha! What an unexpected pleasure! I hope all is well.” He searched her face for signs that justified his remark and extended his hand.

Samantha rose to accept it and felt the warmth of paternal feeling through her glove. “All is well but soon to be even better, I believe,” she said, smiling. “Should I return later? I understand you're very busy and have a train to catch.”

Trevor shook his head adamantly to disavow the notion and shot a glare at Miss Beardsley. “Neither is absolutely of any consequence, I can assure you. I can grab a later train. I'm only going to Beaumont on the coast. Come into my office. And Miss Beardsley, will you see that we're not disturbed?”

A little over an hour later, Trevor summoned his receptionist. She was shocked to see signs he'd had a good cry, but she had never seen him look so happy. Mrs. Singleton had her handkerchief out and appeared as if she, too, had recovered from some deep emotion that had left her eyes puffy and pink-rimmed, but her lips were smiling also.
What in the world?

“Miss Beardsley, where is my son?” Trevor asked.

“At the Loving Convalescent Home, sir. He went over there this morning to visit his brother.”

“Call the place and have somebody tell Nathan he's to meet his father at his grandmother's house. It's very important. He's to come as quickly as he can. Have Benjy bring the Concord around, then call my residence and tell my mother to expect us.”

“Uh, Mr. Waverling, what about your trip to the coast? Mr. Lane called from Beaumont to say they've struck a gusher at Spindletop. He's very excited, and he's wondering when you will be arriving. He says the sight is something to see.” Miss Beardsley, herself excited at the news, consulted a lapel watch she pulled from its moorings on her shoulder. “It's twelve o'clock. I took the liberty of checking the next train to the coast, and if you hurry, you can make the one o'clock.” She looked expectantly at Trevor, ignoring the intruder who would keep her employer from his appointed course.

“That's all very exciting news, Miss Beardsley, but I have my own to tell my family. Now if you'll hold down the fort for the rest of the day, my daughter and I will leave you to it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me correctly. Miss Beardsley, meet my daughter, Samantha Gordon Singleton. She's Nathan's twin sister.”

Miss Beardsley's jaw still hung slack when Trevor escorted Samantha through the reception room to the waiting carriage.