Family Tree Read online

  She glanced at Brandon and took a deep breath. “Look, Mr.—Mr. Marsh, isn’t it? I’m really sorry about this. I realize you’re looking for privacy and I assure you you’ve come to the right place. If there’s anything I can do to help you get settled, show you around town or introduce you to some people, whatever—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, mister,” the boy said with a wave of his hand. “Be seeing you.”

  No, you won’t, Brandon thought. Not if I can help it. But he waved anyway. It was just an automatic gesture. It wasn’t because he couldn’t stand to see any more disappointment on the small face pressed against the side window.

  The woman didn’t give him a backward glance. Her balding tires squealed on the gravel before she shifted again and tore down the driveway as if she was just as anxious as he was to put an end to their meeting.

  “Get those valves adjusted,” he yelled. She probably didn’t hear him. And if she did, she probably wouldn’t do it. She looked like the stubborn type. With her freckles and determined chin. What did it matter to him if she let the truck fall apart? If it died on that deserted road out there? Where they’d be stuck on that empty road with their household goods. Maybe she intended to junk the truck and buy a new car when they got to town. Now that she had his money she could certainly afford it. That and a house in town. At least that’s what the Realtor Byron “Buzz” Busby had said when Brandon asked why the owner was selling the most beautiful piece of land in Nevada.

  “Financial difficulties as well as a desire to move to town. The way Laura tells it, she’s had enough of livin’ so far out. Be closer to her aunt, too, who’s ailing. There’re folks who’ll tell you the real reason has more to do with that no-good, rotten, no-account bastard and the way he ran through her money…but here I go, tellin’ tales out of school,” Mr. Busby had said. “Suffice it to say that I could’ve sold that ranch a hundred times over. It’s a city dweller’s dream with good airport access, a plentiful water supply thanks to your own reservoir and views to die for. Yep, you got it’ cause you outbid everybody else, Mr. Marsh. I’m sure you’re gonna be happy there.”

  Happy? He didn’t count on being happy there or anywhere. He’d be satisfied not to feel anything. No pain, no joy, no happiness. Nothing. That was his goal. To become numb. To get through just one night without his recurring nightmares. And then one more. One step at a time. To wake up in the morning without a black cloud hanging over his head. That’s why he was there. If it didn’t work, he’d…He didn’t know what he’d do. He’d tried everything else. And he’d reached the end of his rope.

  LAURA HAD the distinct feeling that everyone in town stopped what they were doing to turn to watch her drive through town on her way toward her aunt Emily’s remodeled Victorian. She could almost hear the whispers behind the shutters. The talk behind closed doors.

  “Oh, how the mighty are fallen.”

  “Serves her right for marrying an outsider.”

  “Heard she made a bundle on the ranch. Been McIntyres there since anyone can remember.”

  “Sold out to a city slicker who paid through the nose for the privilege of living like a McIntyre.”

  “Gonna turn it into a shopping center, I heard.”

  “Or a dude ranch.”

  “Good thing her daddy didn’t live to see it, or her granddaddy, the mayor.”

  “Or her great-granddaddy, the prospector.” She chastised herself for her overly active imagination. Told herself there were no voices. No one cared what had happened to her. But still she stared straight ahead, afraid to catch anyone’s eye, afraid of what she might see there—pity, compassion, embarrassment, condolences. Whatever it was, she didn’t want it. She knew they weren’t bad people, just curious.

  It wasn’t a bad town, as towns went. Like so many of Nevada’s boom-and-bust small towns, it was founded when gold and silver were discovered there one hundred and twenty-five years ago and had been in a state of genteel decline ever since the mines played out.

  Left behind were a handful of hardy souls and the hollow monuments to the past. The old opera house, the hotel, the brothel and the Front Street row of stately Victorian houses with their gingerbread trim. All saved from destruction by the Silverado Historical Society, founded by her father.

  And on Main Street—the nuts and bolts of the present-day community—the drugstore, the hardware store, the café and the feed-and-fuel. No, it wasn’t a bad town, it was just that she’d never imagined living there. She was born on the ranch, was brought up there and always assumed she’d live her whole life there like her parents and grandparents before her. But that was before she met Jason Bradley. And made the biggest mistake of her life.

  “Why do we hafta stay with Aunt Em?” Dylan asked as they pulled into the circular driveway of her aunt’s bed-and-breakfast.

  “Because she invited us. She’s family. About all I’ve got left of my family. And she has room for us. And we’ll be able to help her out while she’s recovering from her surgery. But it’s just temporary. Until Willa Mae Miner leaves and I get my promotion. Then we get to live in her apartment over the post office. There’s a park across the street. You’ll like that.”

  “No, I won’t. I don’t like parks. I’m not a baby. I wanna go home. I wanna go home now and wait for my daddy to come back,” he wailed.

  Laura sighed and looked at her son for a long moment. At his shaggy, sunbleached hair, his stubborn chin and at the holes in the knees of his jeans. And remembered when he was a baby. A round-faced, chubby-cheeked angel. Her baby. But he was right, he wasn’t a baby anymore. This would be so much easier if he was. Then there wouldn’t be these painfully tiring explanations. She was tired—tired of being a single parent, tired of covering up, tired of being brave, of keeping a stiff upper lip when all she wanted to do was join in and cry along with him, “I wanna go home.”

  “I don’t like Aunt Emily,” he said crossly as they parked in the driveway next to a new Dodge sport utility vehicle and her aunt’s station wagon. So they weren’t the only guests tonight.

  “Of course you like her. You just don’t know her very well. This is a chance for us both to get reacquainted with her. Aunt Emily is being very kind to let us stay here, and don’t you forget it,” she said sternly. “Besides, she’s a wonderful cook.” Emily Eckhart watched every cooking show available on cable TV and was the founder of the Silverado gourmet club. When she turned her empty nest into a bed-and-breakfast, she offered dinners, too, for a price her guests seemed willing to pay. As she said with a twinkle in her eye, “It keeps me out of trouble.”

  Dylan curled his lip. “She makes yucky food.”

  “I’ll have you know people drive for miles to stay here and eat her ‘yucky’ food,” Laura said. To Dylan, “yucky” meant rich sauces, undercooked vegetables and her specialty—poached salmon with hollandaise sauce. Laura would never admit it, but there was one drawback to staying at her aunt’s which had nothing to do with the “yucky” food. That was the fact that Emily might gently pry into her niece’s affairs, and when she found out anything, it would soon be all over town. Laura wanted to be forthcoming with her mother’s sister, and yet she was worried about being an object of pity.

  “And she’s got yucky stuff in her house,” he added.

  “That ‘yucky stuff’ is the antiques she’s spent a lifetime collecting, young man. So don’t knock anything over.”

  Laura appreciated Emily’s food and her artifacts—treasures such as the spinning wheel in the living room and the butter churn in the one of the bedrooms. Her mother, too, had collected antiques. What a shame Laura had had to sell most of them in the past year. How many times her aunt and her mother had taken little Laura along on their forays in the countryside, to a garage sale here or an auction there. She’d watch as they bargained, then she’d ride home in the back seat of the car, nestled between an end table and an old oak chair they planned to refinish or a si
lk-tasseled ottoman to be reupholstered.

  How could she blame Aunt Emily for being a gossip? Who wasn’t, when gossip was one of the main pleasures of life in Silverado, along with bingo on Thursday nights in the church basement. Aunt Emily was family. Family Laura desperately needed at a time like this. Like the antiques and the land she’d been selling off for the past year, the family members had dwindled down to a precious few.

  “Hellooo,” her aunt called from the front steps, wiping her hands on a frilly apron.

  Laura grabbed her suitcase, nudged her son until he reluctantly slid out of his seat and even more reluctantly climbed the front steps and kissed his great-aunt on the cheek. She only hoped Aunt Em didn’t see him rub the kiss off with the back of his hand immediately afterward.

  “How are you feeling?” Laura asked, noting that her usually robust aunt looked as if she’d shed a few pounds since her surgery.

  “Just fine, dear. If you wouldn’t mind pulling your truck around to the rear and coming in through the back door,” her aunt suggested, “that would be lovely.”

  “Oh, of course.” She should have thought of it herself. How incongruous an old truck partially covered with a blue plastic tarpaulin looked in front of an impeccably restored Victorian house. Incongruous was putting it mildly. It looked awful. She and Dylan didn’t look so good, either, in their jeans and T-shirts, which was probably why Emily had suggested they go in the back door. After all, they weren’t guests, they were poor relations.

  Before they went inside via the back entrance, Dylan demanded that Laura get his bicycle out of the back of the truck. She had no idea where it was in the pile of household goods under the tarp and she was too tired to go looking for it. And too depressed.

  “Tomorrow,” she said wearily. “We’ll find it tomorrow.”

  “I want it now,” he said, hopping up onto the fender.

  She gave in as usual. Unable to resist his determination, wanting to make up for moving him away from the only home he’d ever known, for the lack of a father in his life, wanting to see him smile, wanting so much…for so long.

  It took at least fifteen minutes of routing through their belongings, but when they uncovered his bike, his shout of glee made Laura almost forget her fatigue. Her aunt waved off her offer to help with dinner, and when Laura walked into the dining room she felt like a guest instead of a poor relation.

  AUNT EMILY PRESIDED over the large oval dinner table with all the dignity of the wife of the gold baron who’d lived there one hundred years ago. The two other guests at the town’s only B and B were from Los Angeles, taking a tour of historic silver mining towns, taking a turn at panning for gold, visiting the museum and shopping for silver jewelry. They knew nothing about Laura or her circumstances. Not yet, anyway. Not that they weren’t curious.

  “You mean you were born and raised right here in Silverado?” the silver-haired retired schoolteacher asked Laura over apple dumplings.

  “About five miles outside of town,” she said.

  “We live on a ranch,” Dylan said, licking his spoon for the last remnant of caramel cinnamon sauce.

  “With horses and cows?” the woman asked.

  “We had to sell the stock on account of—” Dylan began.

  “Our moving to town,” Laura interrupted. Heaven only knew what Dylan was going to say. Or what he really knew about his father’s disappearance.

  “Some day when my daddy comes back we’re gonna get it all back,” he said. “The cows and the horses and a new car. Aren’t we, Mom?”

  “We’ll see,” Laura said with a forced smile. Inside she was cringing. She knew she should deny that her ex-husband was coming back, but this was not a good time. Not in front of strangers, her aunt and Dylan.

  “How nice,” the woman said. “Where is your daddy now?”

  “He’s on a business trip,” her son said importantly. That had been the official story of why Jason was never around. One that sounded better than saying he’d deserted his wife and child when he’d used up their resources on his get-rich-quick schemes.

  “What kind of business does he do?” the other woman asked.

  Laura paused to wonder how a stranger, a woman she’d never seen before tonight, had the nerve to pepper her son with questions. She stifled the urge to tell the woman to mind her own business. But the woman was her aunt’s guest, and a paying one at that. And she was being altogether too sensitive. People were going to wonder, people were going to ask. She’d better get used to it.

  “He’s in sales,” her aunt interjected sparing Laura the humiliation of admitting her ex-husband’s only job for the past nine years was spending her money on one scheme after another. She shot her aunt a grateful look, then changed the subject by directing a question at the woman. “How do you like Silverado?”

  “It’s a charming little town.”

  “It sucks,” Dylan said.

  Laura frowned at her son and nudged him under the table. “You may be excused,” she said.

  He slid off his seat and was out the back door in a flash. The guests looked at each other, her aunt changed the subject and the guests finally left for a walk down Main Street, which was slowly being upgraded with gas lamps by the historical society.

  “I apologize for Dylan, Aunt Emily. He’s going through a bad time right now. Leaving the ranch has been hard on him.”

  “Of course it has. Poor little fatherless boy. You don’t really expect Jason back at all, do you?” her aunt asked, her eyes brimming with sympathy.

  Laura sighed. She took a deep breath, prepared to launch into the familiar lies she’d been telling since he left town. Then she stopped and shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t.”

  Her aunt placed one bejeweled hand on Laura’s arm. “There, that wasn’t so hard to say, was it? You know, it’s not your fault what happened. And most everyone knows a divorce was in the works. So why not just come out with it?”

  Laura shook her head. “I will. It’s just…It’s not easy. It’s one thing to know deep inside it’s over. It’s another to say the words out loud. I’m divorced.”

  “Come, dear. You did everything you could to hold things together. I know it and I suspect most other folks know it, too.”

  “Dylan doesn’t,” Laura said, her voice quavering slightly. “All he knows is that his father is gone. You wouldn’t think a father could turn his back on his son and never see him again, would you? But that’s exactly what has happened. Jason has a new life a thousand miles from here. Our divorce is final now and he’s out of the picture. I’ve told Dylan that. But he doesn’t want to accept it.”

  “He’s only eight,” her aunt said gently. “It will take him some time to get used to the idea.”

  “I know. I know.” Laura sighed. “I expect too much of him, I guess.”

  Her aunt nodded, and the unmistakable sympathy on her face was a reminder of why Laura hadn’t told her before. She’d rather have anything than pity. She’d prefer stupefaction, incredulity or disdain. But she no longer had the luxury of hiding behind half-truths and downright lies. She’d told her aunt, and soon the whole town would know. They’d know that Jason wasn’t coming back, but they didn’t have to know how he’d run through her money. They didn’t have to know how naive she’d been, how trusting. Or how ambitious he was, how frustrated with his own failures and with her lack of understanding. And how he’d finally taken off to seek his fortune elsewhere.

  She knew it was for the best. She only wished he hadn’t deserted his son as well as his wife. But it was over now and she was on her own. Older, poorer and a little wiser, she hoped. She’d had to pay dearly for that wisdom, and she’d be paying for a long, long time, too. She’d never be able to quit her job; she needed a steady income. Thank heavens she had a job.

  “That was a wonderful dinner, Aunt Em,” she said, changing the subject. “How are you feeling?”

  “Much better. Not quite up to par yet. But coming along. The doctor says an
other six weeks.”

  “You should take it easy.”

  “I know, but I have a business to run. I’m hoping to be booked up for the whole season.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m afraid we’re imposing. If we weren’t here…”

  “If you weren’t here I wouldn’t have this chance for a good visit with you. Ever since your husband left, you’ve been strangers. Rushing right home after work, burying yourself in the country. I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.” It was true. It was good to have someone to talk to. Someone who’d known her all her life. Someone who loved her. She hadn’t felt like socializing in a long time. Hadn’t invited even her aunt out to the ranch. Let holidays slide by with excuses she was too busy. She was busy—busy making excuses for her husband’s absence. Covering up. “Maybe I can help out with the cooking and cleaning while I’m here,” she suggested.

  “Don’t even think about it. I have two local girls who come by every day to do the laundry and clean. No offense, but I don’t trust the cooking to anyone but myself. You may not know this, but the bed-and-breakfast was just my excuse to cook for people. I’ve always wanted to have a restaurant of my own. But the failure rate of new restaurants is phenomenal. Whereas B and B’s seem to do well. At least around here I have no competition. So when I expanded into dinners I thought I’d open them up to townspeople, but evidently they prefer the coffee shop. Most of them, anyway. So what can you do?” She paused. “By the way, does he know you’ve sold the ranch?” her aunt asked.

  “Jason? No, he doesn’t. And yet he couldn’t be that surprised.” She crumpled her napkin in her hand. She hated talking about her ex-husband. It was painful to admit she’d made such a big mistake in marrying someone she barely knew. Her only consolation was that she had Dylan. The light of her life. Without him she’d have nothing left.

  “I’ve learned one thing, Auntie. I’m not cut out for marriage. I don’t have what it takes—the patience, the understanding, the…the stick-to-itiveness…I don’t have it.”