Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

Tony rose a couple of notches in Gideon’s estimation.

“I had no business prying,” Julie said. “I had a few too many beers too.”

Tony took a chair from another table, pulled it over, and straddled it wrong-way-round, with his elbows leaning on the back. The denim over his massive thighs was stretched tight with the strain. “You see-”

“Tony, it’s all right, you don’t have to,” Julie said.

“No, I want to.” He looked at his brother. “Or did you fill her in already, Jamie?”

Jamie shook his head, looking down at the papers he was continuing to arrange. “Not me.”

“Okay, then.” Tony took a rasping breath, gathering his thoughts. “It’s like this. What I started to say-”

Gideon got up, murmuring. “I guess I’ll go-”

Gruffly, Tony waved him back. “Just sit, will you? I got no deep, dark secret here. I just didn’t want to talk about it in front of…” With his chin he gestured at Carl, still busy below with the horses, and well out of hearing range.

“It’s like this…” he said again and had to stop for another noisy, sighing breath. Deep, dark secret or not, he was having trouble getting it out. “See… well, in a way I’m responsible for what happened. With Blaze, I mean. When she… when she…”

“Tony, you are not responsible for what Blaze did,” Jamie said with a patient resignation that suggested they had been through this many times before. “Nobody thinks that. Even Carl doesn’t think so. You’re the only one.”

Tony ignored him. “See, the thing is,” he said mostly to Julie, “things were messy. See, my father made Carl the executor of the will, with full power of attorney-”

“Technically, it wasn’t power of attorney,” said Jamie. “It was-”

“Well, whatever the hell you want to call it,” Tony said with exasperation. “It meant that he was running the damn ranch for the two years it took me to get out of jail and show up. Okay?”

Jamie was silent.

“And you know Carl, he was working his ass off, and not doing too bad, either, considering it was just a horse ranch at the time. He was the boss man, and Blaze, she was the boss lady. And then, all of a sudden, after all that time, in walks the black sheep brother, who never gave a damn about the place, fresh out of jail, to take it all away from them. How could they not be ticked off?” Unexpectedly, he chuckled. “And if that wasn’t bad enough, I was so big-headed I actually fired him, remember?”

“Well, for about five minutes,” Jamie said.

“More like five days.”

“You fired Carl?” Julie said, her eyebrows going up.

Tony shrugged. “Yeah, I did. Amazing, huh? See, I just-well, I wanted him out of my hair, you know? I mean, he was already sending me all this advice about how I should and shouldn’t do things when I got back. I figured he’d cramp my style-I didn’t know him then, you understand. So I sent him this letter telling him I was gonna let him go. I knew this guy Brax, you see-I forget his whole name-”

“Braxton Faversham,” Jamie said.

Tony smiled. “Braxton Pontleby Faversham, right. Is that a name or what? Anyway, he grew up on this ranch in Oregon, so he knew all about that stuff, and I just figured I’d be better off with him as my head wrangler instead of Carl. But, I don’t know, the more I thought about it, the lousier the idea got. My father really thought a lot of Carl, and I didn’t really know Brax all that well. Besides,” he said, laughing, “who ever heard of a head wrangler named Braxton Pontleby Faversham? So I changed my mind, told Carl I wanted him to stay. But the whole thing-he couldn’t have liked it.”

“Tony, that is simply not fair,” Jamie said. “Have you ever once gotten even a smidgen of resentment from Carl?”

“Well no, not from Carl,” Tony admitted, “but, you know, Carl’s pretty good at keeping his feelings to himself. But be honest, how else could he feel? How would you feel? One day he’s the boss of the whole shebang and the next day he’s just another hired hand, taking orders from the jailbird son-the jailbird son on account of whose happy arrival his wife has just taken off with some sleazy ranch hand.”

When Jamie opened his mouth to protest, Tony shushed him. “Anyway, it wasn’t really Carl I was talking about, it was Blaze. And Blaze-I know you agree with me, Jamie, even if you won’t admit it-Blaze was pretty damn hot-tempered, even as a kid. You’ll never make me believe she didn’t resent it when I came back. She must have thought I was gonna boot her out or something.”

“Well, what did she say when you showed up?” Gideon asked. It wasn’t his business, but he’d gotten caught up in the tangled story.

“She didn’t say anything,” Tony said. “She didn’t stick around long enough for me to get there. That’s my whole point. About three days after she finds out I’m on my way-two days before I show up-she’s gone, along with What’shisname-”

“Manolo,” Jamie supplied.

“With Manolo.”

“Manolo and sixteen thousand dollars cash, the entire ranch payroll,” Jamie said bitterly, and to Julie and Gideon: “Did you know he robbed me at gunpoint? It was the worst experience of my life. It was nightmarish, what with his waving the gun in my face and talking that way, without moving his mouth, like something out of Night of the Living Dead.” At the memory a shudder ran visibly up his body and ended by making his head jerk. “I couldn’t understand what he was saying, and he was getting more and more wild. He was like… I thought for sure he was going to shoot me.”

“And you think,” Julie said to Tony after a moment, “that she ran off with this guy because she couldn’t stand losing the ranch to you?”

“That’s exactly what I think.”

“But I don’t understand. She didn’t just leave the ranch, she left Carl. Why would you feel responsible for that?”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t only because of me…”

“It wasn’t at all because of you,” Jamie insisted. “Tony, you’d been residing elsewhere for years-”

Tony laughed. “ ‘Residing elsewhere.’ Don’t you love it?”

“You have no idea what Blaze was like. She was just so darn… She should have been in heaven. She had this beautiful little baby of her own-Annie-and as far as Carl was concerned, she walked on water; he couldn’t do enough for her. But she just couldn’t be happy, she simply didn’t have it in her. Manolo wasn’t the first… the first other man she was involved with, you know that.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Tony said listlessly. “But you know, Blaze and I never got along real well, even when we were kids. I don’t know what it was. I think maybe she resented me because she thought the old man, you know, liked me best of all.”

“The old man did like you best of all,” Jamie said without rancor. He looked at his watch, straightened the papers, slipped them into a folder, and grabbed his cane. “Oh my goodness, Annie will be arriving in less than an hour. I’d better be on my way. Thanks again, Julie, we’ll finish up easily tomorrow.”

As he left, Dorotea appeared with a platter loaded with four more mugs of coffee and a plate of nougat-and-almond bars.

“Gracias, mamacita,” Tony said, brightening and snatching one of the bars off the plate before she could get it to the table. “Ah, turrones, my favorites! Still warm too.”

“What isn’t your favorite?” Dorotea said in Spanish and stomped back to the dining room with the empty platter.

“Dorotea’s personality doesn’t change much, does it?” Julie said, smiling.

“Heart of gold,” said Tony, chomping away. “Best cook in Mexico. Wait till you try these.” He shoved the plate at them.