For months after Tucker left, Flint had waited for him to return. He’d been so sure that whatever the trouble was, it was temporary. But after all these years, he’d given up any hope. He’d feared he would never see his brother again.
“Tell them not to open it. I’ll stop by the ranch and check it out.”
Lillie met his gaze. “It’s out in my SUV. I brought it with me.”
Flint swore under his breath. What if it had a bomb in it? He knew that was overly dramatic, but still, knowing his sister... There wasn’t a birthday or Christmas present that she hadn’t shaken the life out of as she’d tried to figure out what was inside it. “Is your truck open?” She nodded. “Wait here.”
He stepped out into the bright spring day. Gilt Edge sat in a saddle surrounded by four mountain ranges still tipped with snow. Picturesque, tourists came here to fish its blue-ribbon trout stream. But winters were long and a town of any size was a long way off.
Sitting in the middle of Montana, Gilt Edge also had something that most tourists didn’t see. It was surrounded by underground missile silos. The one on the Cahill Ranch was renown because that was where their father swore he’d seen a UFO not only land, but also that he’d been forced on board back in 1967. Which had made their father the local crackpot.
Flint took a deep breath, telling himself to relax. His life was going well. He was married to the love of his life. But still, he felt a foreboding that he couldn’t shake off. A package for Tucker after all these years?
The air this early in the morning was still cold, but there was a scent to it that promised spring wasn’t that far off. He loved spring and summers here and had been looking forward to picnics, trail rides and finishing the yard around the house he and Maggie were building.
He realized that he’d been on edge since he’d gotten the call about the human bones found in the creek. Now he could admit it. He’d felt as if he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. And now this, he thought as he stepped to his sister’s SUV.
The box sitting in the passenger-side seat looked battered. He opened the door and hesitated for a moment before picking it up. For its size, a foot-and-half-size cube, the package was surprisingly light. As he lifted the box out, something shifted inside. The sound wasn’t a rattle. It was more a rustle like dead leaves followed by a slight thump.
Like his sister had said, there was no return address. Tucker’s name and the ranch address had been neatly printed in black—not in his brother’s handwriting. The generic cardboard box was battered enough to suggest it had come from a great distance, but that wasn’t necessarily true. It could have looked like that when the sender found it discarded and decided to use it to send the contents. He hesitated for a moment, feeling foolish. But he heard nothing ticking inside. Closing the SUV door, he carried the box inside and put it behind his desk.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Lilly asked, wide-eyed.
“No. You need to take Dad home.” He started past his sister but vacillated. “I wouldn’t say anything to him about this. We don’t want to get his hopes up that Tucker might be headed home. Or make him worry.”
She glanced at the box and nodded. “Did you ever understand why Tuck left?”
Flint shook his head. He was torn between anger and sadness when it came to his brother. Also fear. What had happened Tucker’s senior year in high school? What if the answer was in that box?
“By the way,” he said to his sister, “I didn’t arrest Dad. Ely voluntarily turned himself in last night.” He shrugged. Flint had never understood his father any more than he had his brother Tuck. To this day, Ely swore that he had been out by the missile silo buried in the middle of their ranch when a UFO landed, took him aboard and did experiments on him.
Then again, their father liked his whiskey and always had.
“You all right?” he asked his sister when she still said nothing.
Lillie nodded distractedly and placed both hands over the baby growing inside her. She was due any day now. He hoped the package for Tucker wasn’t something that would hurt his family. He didn’t want anything upsetting his sister in her condition. But he could see that just the arrival of the mysterious box had Lillie worried. She wasn’t the only one.
* * *
TUCKER CAHILL SLOWED his pickup as he drove through Gilt Edge. He’d known it would be emotional, returning after all these years. He’d never doubted he would return—he just hadn’t expected it to take nineteen years. All that time, he’d been waiting like a man on death row, knowing how it would eventually end.
Still, he was filled with a crush of emotion. Home. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it, how much he’d missed his family, how much he’d missed his life in Montana. He’d been waiting for this day, dreading it and, at the same time, anxious to return at least once more.
As he started to pull into a parking place in front of the sheriff’s department, he saw a pregnant woman come out followed by an old man with long gray hair and a beard. His breath caught. Not sure if he was more shocked to see how his father had aged—or how pregnant and grown up his little sister, Lillie, was now.
He couldn’t believe it as he watched Lillie awkwardly climb into an SUV, the old man going around to the passenger side. He felt his heart swell at the sight of them. Lillie had been nine when he’d left. But he could never forget a face that adorable. Was
