Jasmine Cresswell - Missing

And now that she’d spelled out what she’d been doing, she realized how pathetic her coping mechanism had been. She could have given an ostrich advanced lessons in head-burying, Megan reflected ruefully.

Liam was quiet for a moment. “I guess we’re the poster kids for our dysfunctional family—”

“I guess we are. But until I heard the sheriff say that Dad had another wife and daughter in Chicago, I never even realized we were dysfunctional. How dumb is that?”

“Not dumb necessarily. We were carefully conditioned by our parents—both of them, not just Dad. We were taught not to probe too deeply into the family dynamics and we obeyed our training. You have to keep reminding yourself that Dad’s the person who screwed up, not us.”

“Why do you think he didn’t just divorce Mom?” Megan asked. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s a bigger mystery than who killed him.”

“Who the hell knows? It can’t have been lust, can it? Not for twenty-five years.” Liam’s voice was harsh. He swiveled around on the porch steps and looked out over the land to the distant pasture where a few heifers grazed. “Do you think Mom knew about Dad’s bigamy before he died?” he asked.

“Good heavens, no! Absolutely not!” Megan was shocked by her brother’s question.

“Why are you so sure?” he asked. “The two of us grew up accepting what we were told about Dad traveling a lot on business and getting caught at the airport in snowstorms so he couldn’t make it home for Thanksgiving and so on and so on. But Mom was an adult. How could he have scammed her?”

“Well, he worked hard at it, I guess, and he was a really good liar—”

“Twenty-five years of lying and she never twigged? A quarter of a friggin’ century?”

Megan felt her stomach knot even tighter as she searched for an explanation. “When he was here, he always seemed so happy and committed. There was no reason for us to wonder if he might be leading a double life. Even now, knowing the truth, I have a hard time accepting that he was deceiving us.”

“He was definitely deceiving the two of us. But Mom? She’s a smart woman. How come she never noticed there was something totally screwed up about her marriage? I love Mom, but I can’t buy into that level of blindness.”

Megan threw the question back at him. “If she’d discovered the truth, why would she have stayed?”

“Maybe for some of the same fucked-up reasons Dad didn’t get a divorce.”

“Such as?”

“Follow the money,” Liam said cynically. “If there’s one lesson being a divorce lawyer drums home, it’s that when married couples behave weirdly, there’s always money involved. Money—or power that potentially leads right back to money.”

Megan rejected that idea at once. “Mom couldn’t care less about that. Good grief, Liam, I’ve never met anyone less motivated by money than Mom!”

“I agree that she doesn’t care about cash in the bank or the stock market, but what about the ranch? More than a third of the land that’s now part of the Flying W came from her family, remember. That’s over two thousand acres of her direct family heritage at stake.”

“True, but any divorce settlement would take that into account.”

Liam conceded her point. “Yes, Dad would have had a hard time selling the ranch without her consent, however expert his lawyer was in finding loopholes in marital property law. But the ranch has no practical value without money to run it.”

“Why do you say that?” Megan shot him a puzzled glance. “Flying W cattle are in huge demand.”

“Even so, the cattle operation barely breaks even,” Liam said flatly.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. And with the threat of mad cow disease cutting into semen exports, the ranch is soaking up money. With a halfway competent divorce lawyer, Dad could have divvied up their assets so that Mom was left without a penny to run the cattle operation. Maybe she kept quiet and pretended not to know anything about his other wife so that she wouldn’t be forced to watch the ranch fall back into wilderness.”

Her mother loved the Flying W enough that she might have stayed in an unhappy marriage to protect the land, Megan conceded silently. But in a marriage where she knew her husband was married to another woman?

She shook her head, vehement in the strength of her denial. “Mom is way too honest to live in that sort of a sham marriage. She’d never condone bigamy, not for a moment, let alone for almost thirty years. I’m sure Mom had no clue. When Harry and I told her about Dad’s wife in Chicago, she was devastated. It took her a good fifteen minutes to get any of her protective barriers back in place even though the sheriff was with us and she clearly hated breaking down in front of him. She didn’t know Dad had another wife and daughter. I’d stake my life on it.”

Liam still looked doubtful. “I would never have believed a man could pull off that sort of deception without complicity from one wife or the other,” he said.

Megan thought for a moment. “Maybe the wife and daughter in Chicago knew.”

“Maybe. Although the same question applies. Why would they tolerate it?”

“I can’t imagine. But then, we don’t know the first thing about them, so we can’t possibly guess at their motives.”

“The bottom line is that like any other scam artist, Dad exploited the fact that we trusted him.” The bitterness was back in Liam’s voice. “I dare say he exploited the same thing with his other family.”

Megan looked at her brother. “Was that a random question you asked just now, or is there some specific reason why you thought Mom might have known about Dad’s bigamy?”

Liam remained silent a moment longer. “I knew,” he said at last. “I figured she must have known, too.”

“You knew?” Megan gripped the porch railing to steady herself. “You knew that Dad was a bigamist?” Her mouth was so dry that the words seemed to stick to her tongue. She felt betrayed all over again, first by her father and now by her brother. The betrayals were so huge that they annihilated all that was familiar, leaving her without signposts to guide her through the landscape of what had once been her relationship with her family.

“Yeah.” Liam gave a terse nod. “I’ve known for a few years.”

Megan’s world shattered and re-formed in a different pattern. So many things that had been difficult to understand about her brother suddenly became clear. His decision to leave the practice of criminal law and open his own firm specializing in divorce took on a whole new meaning. Talk about an in-your-face insult hurled at their father! And no wonder Liam had barely visited the ranch over the past few years. Obviously, he had been doing his best to avoid contact with his parents.

“How did you find out about Dad’s other family?” Megan demanded. “Have you seen them? Met them?”

“No, I’ve never met them.”

“Talk to me,” she said tersely. “Don’t retreat into one of your usual damn silences. Why did you keep quiet about something so incredibly important?”

“I was trying to protect Mom. And you.”

“Protect me?” Megan’s emotions had been in turmoil for forty-eight hours and Liam’s crazy excuse was enough to send anger boiling to the surface. “How the hell does it protect me if I’m allowed to go on believing a massive lie?”

She could see her brother retreat even further into himself as he always did when the emotional atmosphere heated up, but he did at least answer her. “You’re talking with the advantage of hindsight. I was making decisions and trying to guess the consequences for everyone—”

“In another month, I’ll be twenty-seven years old! For heaven’s sake, Liam, I’m not a kid sister you’re permanently obliged to protect. I’m an adult.”