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“Only on top. He still had to have the sides trimmed.”
As the scissors made steady progress along the nape of his neck, Chase warned, “Watch my ear.”
“Look on the bright side,” Hattie told him. “If it should accidentally get nicked, you have a nurse right here. Now keep your head down.”
Chase tucked his chin lower and grumbled, “Something tells me you are a better nurse than a barber.”
“Are you always such a grump?” she chided. That sobered him. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“Now, that isn’t entirely true,” Hattie admonished while deftly switching from comb to scissors, snipping, and switching back again. “You’ve remembered a few more things.”
“Yeah, from when I was child,” he admitted, unimpressed. “It’s not exactly important to remember that one time I caught a fish with my bare hands when Buck and I were skinny-dipping in the river.”
In his mind’s eye, he could see again the dappling of sunlight on the water, feel the fish’s firm but slippery sides, hear Buck’s gleeful shouts, and smell the odor of the river. It was a happy memory, but one that didn’t bring him any closer to knowing who tried to kill him or why.
Caught up in the past, Chase almost missed the faint humming noise carried by the breeze. The instant he became aware of it, his head came up, his body stiffening.
“Will you hold still,” Hattie said in exasperation.
“Wait a minute.” He held up a hand. “I hear something.”
Hattie paused to listen. “It’s a vehicle.”
“Coming this way.” He let go of the towel and stood up.
“Maybe it’s Jessy.” Hattie darted him an anxious glance.
“Maybe.” But it was that uncertainty that had him moving toward the corner of the cabin where they had rigged up a hiding place for him, under a bunk bed, disguising it to look like a set of storage drawers.
Before he had taken three steps, a horn honked twice. After a short pause, it sounded again.
“That’s Laredo,” Hattie said with surprise, recognizing their prearranged signal. “What’s he doing back here in the middle of the day?”
“I doubt if he’s coming to bring good news,” Chase replied, his mind already racing to anticipate what it might be.
Of all the potential problems he had considered, none of them were even close to what Laredo told him. The set of his jaw hardened when he heard about Tara’s part in the confrontation between Cat and Jessy.
“Good God,” Chase muttered in disgust. “And my son was once married to a woman like that.”
“She is a looker, Chase,” Laredo said in Ty’s defense.
“She is a divisive bitch,” Chase declared and shot a skeptical glance at Laredo. “Would you have been taken in by her?”
“I don’t know.” Laredo thought about it. “When I was younger, if she had turned those dark eyes on me . . . maybe. But I’m older now, and a little wiser. I expect that’s what happened with your son.”
“That’s beside the point. Right now our problem is with Cat,” Chase stated as his thoughts turned inward to examine his options. “The last thing we need right now is a battle for control of the ranch.”
“Jessy gave me the impression that’s exactly what she thinks will happen if she can’t get Cat settled down soon.”
“Who would have thought leasing the feedlot would cause such an uproar?” Chase muttered to himself.
“I didn’t understand myself why your daughter would consider it a betrayal,” Laredo admitted. “But on the way here, I remembered some gossip I picked up at your funeral. From what I gathered, you spent most of your life fighting to gain title to ten thousand acres of rangeland within the ranch boundaries. Tara was mixed up in it somehow, but I never got the straight of that. I do know that shortly after your son was killed, she deeded the land over to you, but kept the right to live in the house she built there.”
“Wolf Meadow. Dy-Corps had leased the mineral rights to it from the government so they could strip-mine the coal on it,” Chase recalled in a sudden flash of memory. “I can remember Ty telling me about it.” He had an image of a hospital room, of being surrounded by tubes and monitors, and of a tall, broad-shouldered man with a dark mustache standing by the bed—the same man he had seen lying dead in the coulee. His son. He felt a deep swell of tenderness and pride and a su
dden tightening ache in his chest.
Hattie laid a hand on his shoulder. “You see, it is coming back, Duke.”
