Rough Rider

“Tell me more about the kidnapping case,” she said, giving him her full attention. “Don’t leave anything out.”

He took a drink of his coffee to collect his errant thoughts and carefully set down the mug. Last night she’d been so sure that the kidnapping case couldn’t be what had gotten her partner killed. He wondered what had changed her mind—if that was the case.

“We all lived on the Sundown Stallion Station ranch, where my father raised horses. I was five. My older brother, Cull, was seven, Ledger was three. We had a nanny—”

“Patricia Owen, later McGraw after she became your father’s second wife and allegedly tried to kill him,” she said.

He nodded. “Patty stayed across the hall from the nursery. She heard a noise or something woke her. Anyway, according to her, she went to check on the twins and found them missing. When she saw the window open and a ladder leaning against the outside of the house, she started screaming and woke everyone up. The sheriff was called, then the FBI. A day later there was a ransom demand made. My father sold our prized colt to raise the money.”

“Why wasn’t the kidnapper caught when the ransom was paid?” she asked.

“The drop was made in a public place, but a fire broke out in a building close by. Suddenly the street was filled with fire trucks. In the confusion, somehow the kidnapper got away with the money without being seen.”

She shook her head. “Who made the drop?”

“The family attorney, Jim Waters.”

C.J. raised a brow. “Isn’t he the one who was also arrested trying to leave the country with a bunch of money and has also been implicated in your father’s poisoning?”

Boone nodded, seeing that she knew a lot more than she was letting on. “But so far no charges have been filed against him in the poisoning and there is no proof he was involved in the kidnapping. We now know that Harold Cline, a boyfriend of our cook, climbed the ladder that night and got away with the twins. The person who hasn’t been found is the one who it is believed administered codeine cough syrup to the twins to keep them quiet during the ordeal and passed them out the window to the first kidnapper.”

“What about the broken rung on the ladder?” she asked.

“It was speculated that the kidnapper might have fallen or dropped the babies, but we now know that didn’t happen. The babies were alive and fine when they were found by our family cook and taken to—”

“The Whitehorse Sewing Circle member Pearl Cavanaugh. Wasn’t she or her mother the one who started the illegal adoptions through this quilt group years ago?”

C.J. had definitely done her homework. He figured she must have been up before daylight. Either that or she had known more about the case than she’d led him to believe last night.

“That’s right. Unfortunately, they’re pretty much all dead, including Pearl.”

“So there is no record of what happened to the twins,” she said and picked up her coffee mug, holding it in both hands as she slowly took a sip.

“In light of what we learned from our family cook before she died, the babies probably went to parents who couldn’t have children and were desperate,” he said.

“I can’t imagine how they couldn’t have known about the kidnapping. So in their desperation, they pretended not to know that the child they were adopting was a McGraw baby? Didn’t Oakley’s and Jesse Rose’s photos run nationally? So no one could have missed seeing them.”

He nodded. “It makes sense that whoever got each of the twins knew. We’ve been led to believe that the adoptive parents were told the twins weren’t safe in our house.”

She put down her cup, her brown-eyed gaze lifting to his. “Because of your mother’s condition.”

He thought of his mother in the mental ward, the vacant stare in her green eyes as she rocked with two dolls clutched in her arms. “We now believe that her condition was the result of arsenic poisoning. It causes—”

“Confusion, memory loss, depression... The same symptoms your father was experiencing before his heart attack. Patty’s doing is the assumption? So you’re saying your mother probably wasn’t involved.”

He met her gaze and shrugged. “In her state of mind at the time of the kidnapping, who knows? But she definitely didn’t run down your partner. She’s still in the mental ward. And neither did Patty, who is still behind bars.”

C.J. bit at her lower lip for a moment. He couldn’t help noticing her mouth, the full bow-shaped lips, the even white teeth, just the teasing tip of her pink tongue before he dragged his gaze away. This snip of a woman could be damned distracting.

“You said Oakley has been found?”

That wasn’t information she could have found on the internet. “He has refused to take a DNA test, but my father is convinced that the cowboy is Oakley. He owns a ranch in the area. Apparently he’s known the truth for years, but didn’t want to get his folks into trouble. They’ve passed now, but he still isn’t interested in coming out as the infamous missing twin. Nor does he have an interest in being a McGraw.”

She raised a brow. “That must be both surprising and disappointing if it’s true and he’s your brother.”

“It’s harder on my father than the rest of us. He’s been through so much. All he wants is his family together.”

She said nothing, but her eyes filled before she looked down as the waitress came over to refill their coffee cups.

* * *

C.J. STUDIED BOONE while he was distracted with the waitress refilling his cup. She’d known her share of cowboys since this was Montana—Butte to be exact. Cowboys were always wandering in off the range—and usually getting into trouble and needing either a private investigator or a bail bondsman. She and Hank had been both.

But this cowboy seemed different. He’d been through a lot because of the kidnapping. He wasn’t the kind of man a person could get close to. Last night she’d noticed that he didn’t wear a wedding ring. This morning online, she’d discovered that only one of the McGraw sons, Ledger, the youngest one, had made the walk to the altar.

“You drove a long way yesterday,” she said after a few moments. “Seems strange if all you had to go on was Hank asking a few questions about the kidnapping and Jesse Rose.”

He pushed away his plate, his pasty only half-eaten. “I quizzed the attorney when he told me about the private investigator calling. Truthfully, I figured this whole trip would turn out to be a wild-goose chase.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because my father asked me and because our attorney said that Hank Knight sounded...worried.”

Her pulse quickened. “Worried?”

Boone met her gaze with his ice-blue one. “I think he knew something. I think that’s why he’s dead.” When she didn’t argue the point, he continued. “From what you found last night, we know that he knew more about the ribbon on the stuffed toy horse than has been released.”

“Why would he keep that information to himself?” she asked more to herself than to him.

“Good question. He told our attorney that he had to take a trip and would be out of town,” Boone reminded her. “Makes sense he’d want to verify what he was worried about, doesn’t it?”

It did. “Except I don’t think he left town.”

“Or maybe he had a good reason not to want me following up on it.”

She bristled. “Hank was the most honest man I’ve ever known. If he knew where Jesse Rose was, he would have told your family.”

“Maybe. Unless someone stopped him first.”

Chapter Seven (#ud8aa55e5-1064-5278-937c-b2e70e3406a8)

After he paid the bill, they stepped outside the café. The morning air had a bite to it although the sky was a cloudless blue overhead. He was glad he’d grabbed his sheepskin-lined leather coat before he’d left home. Plowed dirty snow melted in the gutters from the last storm. Christmas wasn’t that far off. There was no way Butte wouldn’t have a white Christmas.

“What do you know about Butte?” C.J. asked as she started to walk up the steep sidewalk.

He shook his head as he followed her, wondering why she’d called him. Was she going to help him find out the truth? Or was she just stringing him along?

“What most Montanans know, I guess. It’s an old copper mining boomtown and we’re standing on what became known as the Richest Hill on Earth,” he said. “It is now home to the Berkeley Pit, the most costly of the largest Superfund sites and a huge hole full of deadly water.”