one down in Warren. It had been a hot, miserable morning. On that pre-air-conditioning summer day, the nurses had left the delivery room windows wide open in hopes of capturing some faint hint of breeze. Emily had screamed her fool head off. For several hours running. To a poor, anxious, prospective father waiting outside, that’s how it had seemed.
Harold remembered the whole morning as vividly as if it were yesterday. Left to his own devices in the waiting room, he had been propelled out of the hospital by his wife’s agonized cries. But with the windows open, there was no escape from Emily’s frantic shrieks. No one else in the downtown area-onlookers watching the races or waiting for the parade could escape them, either. The relent less screams echoed off nearby hillsides and reverberated up and down the canyons. People lined up on the sidewalks kept asking each other what in the world were they doing to that poor woman, killing her or what?
Pacing up and down in the small patch of grassy park between the hospital and the building that housed the Phelps Dodge General Office, Harold had wondered the same thing himself. What were they doing to her? And when old Doc Winters finally slipped Emily the spinal that shut her up, Harold had despaired completely. As soon as she grew quiet, he was convinced it was over, that his wife was dead.
Of course, that wasn’t the case at all. Emily was fine, and so was the baby. Men don’t forget that kind of agony. Women do. Had it been up to him, one child was all they would have had. Ever.
Afterward, holding the beautiful baby in her arms, nursing her, Emily had smiled at him and told him Holly was worth it. Harold wasn’t so sure. Not then, not ten years later when Ivy was born, and certainly not now.
Things change. The delivery room where both Holly and Ivy had been born now housed a Sun day-school classroom for the Presbyterian church across the street. A law firm-the biggest one in town-now occupied the lower floor space where the old dispensary and pharmacy had been located. In fact, Burton Kimball, who was Harold’s nephew as well as his attorney, kept his offices there. And as for the wopish Holly? Harold shook his head and clenched his jaw. Once more the powerful fingers tightened their viselike grip on the Scout’s loosey-goosey steering wheel.
Holly was Holly. Had it been in Harold’s power to make her life different, certainly he would have.
She had grown up tough, headstrong, and hard to handle runaway while she was still in high school. Well, she was back in Bisbee now, staying God knows where. He had heard rumors about Holly and that friend of hers tooling around town in somebody’s bright red Cadillac, lording it over whoever saw her. Harold wondered about the car.
It might possibly be hers, but Harold doubted it.
If Holly had enough money to buy a car like that, why was she back home, trying to take his ranch away from him? No, if she wasn’t dead broke, she had to be close to it. After thirty-four years with no letters, no phone calls, why else would she suddenly come back home to a place she despised? As a precocious sixteen-year-old, Holly had found life on the Rocking P worse than prison. What else but abject poverty could bring her home as a fifty-year-old demanding her fair share of the family fortunes?
Holly was Harold’s firstborn daughter. If she had needed help and asked for it, he would have given it to her gladly, regardless of the heartaches and disagreements that might have gone before.
But Holly’s reappearance had come in the form of a legal attack, mounted by some big-time California attorney who expected Harold to just lie down and play dead. And the attack had been aimed, with pinpoint accuracy, at the one place in Harold’s life where he was most vulnerable. And guilty.
Of course, he had denied Holly’s allegations.
And when the People magazine reporter had shown up at the Rocking P and told him she was doing an article on “forgotten memories,” Harold had tried to throw her off track without having to tell his side of the story. But the woman was one of those sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued little city women. He couldn’t remember now exactly how it was she had phrased the critical question.
He may have mentally misplaced the exact text, but he recalled the reporter’s meaning well enough. He had wondered if that particular line of questioning had come directly from Holly or from that so-called hypnotherapist of hers, Amy Baxter. The assumption behind the question was the idea that since one daughter had been forced to run away from home in order to avoid sexual abuse, what about the daughter who didn’t leave?
Was Ivy-the stay-at-home, old-maid daughter-a willing participant?
The reporter had made a big deal about the fact that Harold and Ivy lived alone together on the Rocking P, as though that in itself was enough to raise suspicions. Harold had exercised incredible restraint in not throwing the woman bodily out of his house. It was no surprise that the resulting article had made Harold sound like some kind of sex-crazed monster whose incestuous relations with his daughters had no doubt ruined both their lives.
The usually even-tempered Ivy had been livid when the article came out, and she had blamed Holly for it. Ivy had wanted Harold to sue, wanted him to have Burton Kimball go after the magazine for defamation of character. Harold had his own good reasons for refusing, but when he did, there had been a huge blowup between him and Ivy.
For weeks now, they had barely spoken, doing their chores together around the ranch, but with none of their customary camaraderie. By attempting not to fight with one daughter, Harold had inevitably quarreled with the other.
Determined to solve the problem with the least amount of damage to everyone concerned, Harold had put all his hopes in what would happen once Holly came home for the trial. He had thought that somehow he would be able to get his two daughters together in the same room where he would finally, once and for all, put the past to rest.
But that hadn’t happened.
For the entire week since Holly had been back home in Bisbee, she had insisted that all contact be conducted on a lawyer-to-lawyer basis. Harold hadn’t been allowed access to her by telephone, and no one would tell him where she was staying.
Well, that was changing today. He had figured out a way to make it happen, a way to bring her around.
Harold was coming to town with what, on the surface, would appear to be an enticing carrot. He was prepared to offer Holly the ultimate prize, total capitulation. Everything she wanted. For someone like Holly, that should prove irresistible, but there was a stick as well. And when it came to those two things, both carrot and stick, what he had to say would not be discussed on a lawyer to-lawyer basis.
Those were private matters to be discussed with his daughters alone. No one else.
