“Jesus, Bodine,” Rory began, but Bodine shut him down with one scorching look.
“But that careless act doesn’t mean she deserved what happened to her. Nobody deserves that. And nobody at this table is responsible for what did happen. So stop it, and eat.”
“I don’t care for that tone,” Maureen said stiffly.
“I don’t care for sitting here while my mother takes on guilt that isn’t hers to take, and taking it tosses a share on my grammy. I don’t care for my grammy doing the selfsame thing to my mother.”
“I don’t like the tone, either.” Miss Fancy ate another bite. “Just like I don’t much like that the girl has a point.”
“One that could be made more respectfully.” But Maureen picked up her fork again.
“If she’s getting away with it…” Rory glanced around the table. “Feeling bad about how you felt doesn’t do a thing to help, Nana. What’s going to help is the family standing together, doing what needs to be done, together. Guilt’s not a uniter, and we’re going to be united on this.”
He added a smirk for his sister. “That’s how you make the point respectfully.”
“I plowed the field,” she reminded him.
Miss Fancy waved that away. “Every now and again the boy makes sense.” She reached over, rubbed the back of his hand. “She’s going to need us, Reenie. They’re both going to need us.”
Maureen ate carefully. “The doctor says physically she’d be able to leave the hospital in a few days. But it might take longer for her to be emotionally ready. They’ll transfer her to the psychiatric unit until … But I…”
“What, honey?”
“I talked a little with Celia Minnow. She’s going to be treating her. She needs to evaluate and talk with Alice, and decide what’s best. It may be we could bring her here. She grew up here. Her family’s here. We’ll get a nurse if we need to. And Celia will either come out here for her sessions or we can take Alice to her. I need to talk it over with Sam, and with all of you because it’s a lot to ask, a lot to expect.”
“Of course she’ll come here.” Bodine looked at Rory, got his nod. “Bodine House is too small when you add in nurses and doctors. There’s plenty of room here, and it’s somewhere she knows.”
“That lightens my burden,” Miss Fancy stated. “Bodine, I can’t eat any more this late at night, but I think I earned one scant finger of whisky to help me sleep. I dearly want that and my bed.”
Bodine rose, got glasses, poured one for Miss Fancy, cocked an eyebrow at her mother. Maureen held up two fingers. She poured that, the same for Rory and herself.
“Well.” Maureen lifted her glass. “However hard a road it’s been for her, however hard a road’s still to go, let’s drink to Alice. To the prodigal’s return.”
Using Grammy again, Bodine convinced her mother to go upstairs, settle Grammy in, get some rest herself while she and Rory dealt with the kitchen.
“She can’t be left alone. Alice,” Rory said. “Do we call her ‘Aunt Alice’? Jesus, Bo.”
“I think Alice will do. We’ll have to take shifts there, too, if and when she comes here. Probably hire nurses with psychiatric experience. Mom will handle that part, and having something tangible to handle is going to help her deal with the rest. It may be Nana and Grammy end up staying here for a while, too.”
“We’ve got room. I wonder how long she’s been back here. Back in the area.”
As she wiped the counter, Bodine sent him a look of approval. “We’re tugging the same line on that.”
“You’d have to figure … I always figured she was dead.”
“I did, too. I couldn’t understand how she could be alive and not even write a letter or call now and then. Nothing for years. Knowing now somebody held her like a prisoner, and was so cruel to her—and all the time close by. Close enough by here. Rory, we could have driven or ridden within a mile of where she’s been.”
“Has to be isolated, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t. Those women in—was it Ohio where that bastard held them for years? That wasn’t so isolated, and nobody knew.”
“I can’t figure it. Can’t figure why any man would want a woman he’d have to keep locked up. It makes me sick.” Filled with disgust, he tossed down his dishcloth. “I’m going to go on up. I can drive in early tomorrow, give Chase and Dad time to come home.”
“Mom’s going to want to go with you, and maybe she can talk Nana into coming back, even just for a change of clothes. If she can, I’ll bring Nana back.”
“We’ll make it work.” He turned to her, drew her in for a hug. “No matter how many times you annoyed the sheer hell out of me, I’d’ve been mighty pissed if you’d ever just taken off.”
“I feel exactly the same.”
“You get some rest, too.” He kissed the top of her head, proceeded upstairs.
She knew she wouldn’t settle, not yet. She told herself she needed a walk, and even though she knew exactly where she intended to walk, she didn’t admit it until she knocked on Callen’s door.
He answered so quickly she knew he’d been waiting.
“You heard.”
“Clementine.” He pulled her inside. “I went over hoping to mooch Sunday dinner. Are you okay?”
“I don’t know what I am, but that’s the least of it.”
“It’s on my list.” His hands rubbed up and down her arms as he drew her back to take a good look at her. “I didn’t call or text because I didn’t want to get in the way. Didn’t go over when I saw the lights come on in the kitchen for the same reason.”
But he’d waited for her, she thought. He’d waited. “Do you think you could just hold on to me a minute?”
“I can do that. Is Cora holding up?”
“She’s still at the hospital. Won’t leave yet. Callen, can we lie down—I don’t mean sex. Can we just lie down so I can tell you all of it? I’m too tired to stand and don’t want to sit.”
He hooked an arm around her waist, led her to the bedroom.
“Let’s get those boots off.”
She let him tug them away as she stretched out on the bed. “Thanks. I’ve been going at it all in sections, and in bits. I want to run through it altogether. Maybe it’ll finally make some sort of sense.”
He stretched out beside her. “Go ahead.”
“When I got home from work, Mom was crying.”
She took him through it all, step-by-step. He interrupted rarely, simply let her tell him what she’d seen, heard, felt, as it came to her.
“Mom’s going to bring her home to the ranch,” she concluded. “It may be soon, it may be months from now, but she’s made up her mind on it.”
“That worries you?”
“I worry how much stress it’ll add to Mom’s life, but she’d have the stress anyway. I worry they won’t catch the son of a bitch who did this, and it’ll just hang over us like a storm ready to break. I worry that somewhere close to home—close enough to home—there’s somebody who’d do this. Children, Callen. She had children. She could have one my age or Rory’s or have young ones. Are they being held and hurt like she was, or are they part of it? Like, I don’t know, a cult.”
He smoothed her hair back from her face. “That’s a lot of worry.”
“It’s like the bad shoved in. Two women dead, Alice. It’s like the bad shoved in and changed the world on me. Could you hold on again? I need to shut my eyes for a minute.”
“Sure.”
He held on, felt her fall away into sleep almost as soon as her eyes closed.
He understood her worries, every one of them. But there was one she hadn’t come to yet that leaped straight to the top of his pile.
Alice Bodine wasn’t dead. A live woman could, once her mind settled in again, identify whoever had kept her a prisoner, beaten her, raped her.
He worried a man who would do those things wouldn’t hesitate to kill the woman who knew his face, and anyone who stood in his way.
* * *
She woke with her head pillowed on his shoulder, and him still holding on. The comfort of that? She didn’t know how to express her gratitude for the simple comfort of that.
When she started to ease away, he held tighter.
“Get some more sleep,” he told her.
“I didn’t mean to sleep at all. I need to get back, in case they need me.” She sat up, shoved her hair back.
He sat up with her, stroked his hand down its length. She wanted to lean into him, lean on him, just another minute. But …
“Is that clock right?”
He glanced at it, read three-thirty-five. “Yeah.”
“It’s a late hour to bring this up, but we may need you to shuffle some between resort and ranch until we figure all this out. At least a couple of us need to be at the hospital. We’ll be taking shifts.”
“It’s not a problem.”
“Not tomorrow—or today, I should say.” She located her boots, pulled them on. “You’re visiting with your mother.”
“I can put that off.”
“No, don’t. I need to figure out some sort of schedule anyway, and your mother, she’ll be counting on it.” She leaned into him a moment. “Thanks for being a friend when I needed one.”
“I’m a friend even when you don’t. But next time I’m going to want sex.”
He made her laugh, as intended. “Me, too.” She cupped his face, kissed him. “Me, too.”
“Keep in touch about this, Bodine.”
“I will.” She pushed up. “I’m going to head to the hospital, since I got some sleep in me, relieve Dad and Chase whether they want me to or not. Chase is going to need a friend, too.”
“I’m his friend, needed or not. But I’m not having sex with him.”
Laughing again, she started out. “You and Alice both left, but you sure came back different ways. Get some more sleep, Skinner.”
Still fully dressed, he lay back when he heard the door close. But he didn’t sleep again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Callen added to his already-packed day by pitching in with the stable horses. Hell, he was up anyway, he thought as he mucked out a stall.
He’d chosen that particular duty because he knew Chase’s habits as well as he knew his own.
Twenty minutes after he’d begun, Chase came in.
Looked tired, Callen thought, and worn around the edges.
“Are you on our roll today?” Chase asked him.
“Nope, just killing some time.”
“Because you love shoveling horse shit?”
“It’s my life’s work.” Pausing, Callen leaned on the shovel. “What can I do?”
“I haven’t figured out what anybody can do. We’re all just waiting. Not even sure for what right yet. I know one of us has to be there to catch Nana if she falls.”
His nana, too, Callen thought, and she had been as far back as his memory ran. “How’s she holding up?”
“She’s got steel in the spine. I guess I always knew it, but I never saw it so true as now. She pushed to stay the night in Alice’s room. I looked in a couple of times, Dad, too. It looked like they were both sleeping. Then Bodine walks in, about five-thirty this morning. She’d gone over to the grannies’ house, got Nana a change of clothes and whatever she figured was needed, and told me and Dad to go home. Wouldn’t take no.”
“Apple, tree. Short drop.”
“I know it. I don’t know Alice,” Chase said abruptly. “I don’t have feelings about her, for her. Except feeling sick and sorry finding out she’s been through the worst kind of hell, and likely years of it. But I don’t know her, I don’t have that kind of connection with her. I’ve got to think about the women I do know, I do have that tie with.”
Running out of words for a moment, Chase rubbed his hands over his face. “Grammy’s damn near ninety. How am I supposed to stop her from spending hours in a hospital waiting room?”
“Give her a distraction. Give her a task.”
Chase threw up his hands, a dead giveaway of frustration in a man of economic words and gestures. “Like what?”
“Well, Jesus, I don’t know. A grandmother thing. She’s Alice’s grandmother, so she’s got that tie you don’t—and you sure as hell shouldn’t be feeling guilty over that, son.”
“She’s my mother’s sister.”
“So the fuck what, Chase? You never met her in your life. Clothes.” It struck Callen as inspired.
“What about clothes?”
“Bodine said Alice only had the clothes on her back—and they took those, sent them off to be analyzed. She’s going to need clothes, isn’t she?”
“I expect, but—”
“Think about it. You go back in there and over breakfast you mention how Alice doesn’t have anything but those hospital gowns, I’ll bet you a week’s pay your ma and Miss Fancy jump all over that like they’ve got springs in their feet.”
“I … They would, too. I never thought of it.”
“Likely they haven’t yet, either.” Callen pitched more soiled hay into the barrow. “They’re reeling from all this, but it won’t be long before they think of the practical. You think of it first, get them going on it.”
“That’s a damn good idea.”
“I solve world issues while shoveling horse shit.”
Chase’s smile came fast, but faded just as quickly. “Cal, there’s a man somewhere, somewhere too damn close, who’d do what was done to Alice. Any way to solve that one?”
“I’ll work on it, as there’s plenty of horse shit. Take care of your family, and remember I can warm a seat in a waiting room. I’m going to be in Missoula this afternoon, so I can head to the hospital after I’m done there.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you did.”
Callen nodded. “Then I will,” he said, and went back to his mucking out.
* * *
That afternoon, after readjusting the schedule, tapping Maddie to come in for a last-minute lesson, and putting Ben in charge, Callen knocked on the bright blue door of his sister’s pretty house. The windows flanking the door held chili-pepper-red window boxes he knew his brother-in-law had built. Pansies, with the purple and yellow faces he always thought a little too human, spilled out of them.
His sister would have planted them.
He knew a greenhouse stood in the backyard that—along with a clever swing set that mimicked a spaceship—they’d built together.
Just as they’d built a life together, a family, their clever arts and crafts shop. The backyard also held a kiln house, so some of the pottery on the store’s shelves carried his sister’s mark.
She’d always been clever, he thought now. Able to make something interesting out of something most would take as cast-off trash.
They’d fought as siblings do, and he’d preferred Chase’s company and the ranch to hers and home. But he’d always had an admiration for Savannah’s creativity. Even her near-to-unflappable calm—though when his own blood boiled inside him, her cool attitude frustrated the shit out of him.
But when Savannah opened the door, her brown hair in braids, her face as pretty as a frosted cupcake, and her belly outright huge under a checkered shirt, he felt only a warm shot of love.
“How do you get out of bed hauling that around?” He gave the belly a gentle poke.
“Justin rigged up a pulley system.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. Where’s the big guy?”
“Nap time—though that precious hour is nearly up. Come in quick, while there’s some actual quiet.”
She pulled him inside, bumping her belly—just a little weird—against him in a hug. “He’s got the puppy in bed with him, too. He thinks he’s pulling one over on me.”
She walked into the living room—a big, deep cushioned sofa with