took a beat to move aside so she could go.
Red-faced and humiliated, she strode down the hallway in her stocking feet. There was a peal of laughter from Rand as the tinkling of silverware resumed.
She fought the urge to run.
*
Cassie felt the presence of someone approaching from the hallway while she pulled on her boots. Then she heard the rustle of clothing.
Margaret eyed her coolly. Her bearing was more serious than what Cassie had observed inside the dining room, as if Margaret had shed the costume she wore around her family. She carried the empty tureen as if she’d used it as an excuse to leave the table.
“You should really go home,” Margaret warned. Cassie was unclear if it was friendly advice or a threat.
“Everyone in this county seems to agree with you. And I will—just as soon as I can.”
Margaret fixed her gray eyes on Cassie. “You have no idea what you’ve stepped into.”
“Your son Blake said the same thing to me.”
Cassie watched carefully for Margaret’s reaction. But the woman didn’t even flinch.
“You don’t understand,” Margaret said. “Blake no longer exists on this ranch.”
“I get that. But he’s still your firstborn son. And you probably don’t know this but he was attacked in jail. From what I understand he may not make it.”
Again, not even a tic. Cassie couldn’t discern if Margaret had heard about Blake before she brought it up. Or if she simply didn’t care.
Margaret sighed and shook her head. “He’s just as bad as the others.”
Before Cassie could respond, Margaret turned and walked away, cradling the empty tureen in her slender hands.
eighteen
A long hour later, John Wayne emerged from the house at the same moment Cassie’s phone lit up with a call from Ben. John Wayne pulled on a barn coat, clamped on a black cowboy hat, and chinned toward his pickup to indicate she should follow him. He looked annoyed.
Cassie nodded that she understood his instructions. The man swung into the cab of his truck and it leaped forward, the rear tires raining gravel on her rental car as it turned in the yard and shot over a cattle guard. She gave pursuit and raised the phone to her mouth because she hadn’t synched it to the rental’s Bluetooth system yet.
“Hello, Ben.”
“Hey, Mom. I just got done with practice and I saw that you called.”
“Thank you. Yes, we got cut off last night after you started telling me that something crazy happened….”
“Did you really get arrested?” he asked.
“Not officially. But a cop pulled me over and took me into the station. I couldn’t call you because they took my cell phone.”
“Mom?”
“What, Ben?”
“You’re breaking up.”
Although she was following John Wayne’s vehicle on the gravel road at bone-rattling speed, she glanced at her phone to see there was only a single bar of reception. The farther she got from the ranch headquarters, the poorer it got.
The screen indicator changed to no service.
“Oh, crap,” she said aloud. She cursed and tossed the phone aside where it landed on the passenger seat.
*
John Wayne either didn’t care that she could barely keep up with him as he raced through his ranch or he wanted to humiliate her further when she lost him and had to find her own way out.
Cassie was fortunate, though, in that the few times he vanished over a hilltop or took a sharp turn he left a telltale cloud of dust hanging in the air to follow. And she did.
She hoped when they got to the crew shack that she’d have the opportunity to question him. The gloves were off as far as she was concerned. John Wayne was no more than a cheap bully, and she’d dealt over the years with plenty of those. He’d been minimally accommodating when they first met when it was just the two of them, but he’d shown his true colors when he tossed her to his family to be demeaned like that.
So many questions. And if he didn’t answer them or lied again, that very fact would be an answer in itself that he was hiding something. She created a mental list of topics:
• Did he or Rand order the sheriff’s department to pick her up and detain her?
• Did any of them at the table know that her car had been torched?
• Had the news of Blake’s assault reached them prior to her arrival? And if so, how?
• Did any of them order the jailhouse attack? Did they have a connection to the perpetrators?
• Was Horst II capable