PEPPER WATCHED HER granddaughter drive away. The pride she felt surprised her, as did the guilt. She wished she’d known McCall sooner. She’d lost twenty-seven years of McCall’s life. Her own fault.
She brushed angrily at the sudden tears that blurred her eyes, surprised by them and these feelings. She hadn’t believed for a moment that the baby Ruby Bates had been carrying was her son Trace’s. Because she hadn’t wanted to.
But the two had produced McCall, and there was little doubt she was a Winchester. She hadn’t even needed to see the DNA test. The young woman looked just like Pepper had at that age.
Trace had been her baby, her undeniable favorite, and she’d been sick with worry because she knew she was losing him. He’d married Ruby Bates because she’d been pregnant. Or maybe because he really had loved her. Pepper had never really known. Trace was dead, and maybe even Ruby didn’t know the truth.
Not that it mattered. They had produced McCall, and she made up for everything.
It still amazed her that McCall seemed to have forgiven her for her past sins, unlike her children and even her other grandchildren. McCall knew that she’d tried everything to get Trace to dump Ruby and come back to the ranch.
So maybe Trace had loved McCall’s mother. Loved McCall even though she hadn’t been born before he was murdered. After all, according to McCall, it had been her father’s idea to name her after her grandfather Call.
She wiped her tears as the dust from McCall’s patrol car settled over the wild landscape, hating these sentimental emotions and wondering if she should have just left well enough alone and died in her sleep without ever getting her family back to the ranch.
“Mother?”
She turned to see Virginia standing in the doorway. She’d been so lost in thought, she hadn’t heard her enter.
“I’m bored to tears. I’m going into town again. Can I get you anything?”
“No, but you should ask Enid if she needs any groceries, since you’re going,” Pepper said.
Virginia made a face. “She already gave me a long list. I hope to be back by supper. Enid wanted to know if you knew if Jack and his wife would be joining us. Apparently, they missed both breakfast and dinner.”
A good sign, Pepper thought. “Tell Enid to plan on it. If they decide to skip another meal, that will be fine also.”
Virginia didn’t look happy about being asked to relay the message to Enid, but acquiesced. “Too bad Enid is such a horrible cook. I can’t understand how you have survived eating her food all these years.”
Her daughter had no idea.
AS MCCALL DROVE back to Whitehorse, she thought about her relationship with her grandmother. She’d never even laid eyes on the woman until last month. But since that time her life had changed—and Pepper Winchester had had her hand in that.
She wasn’t sure why she’d forgiven her grandmother for denying her existence for more than twenty-seven years. Maybe she saw herself in Pepper Winchester—and not just the fact that they resembled each other. Or maybe what had brought them together was the shared loss of a father and son. McCall had never gotten to know her father. Trace had been killed before she was born. Her grandmother’s loss had been even greater because Trace had been her favorite, and losing him had made her lock herself away for the past twenty-seven years.
A call pulled McCall out of her reverie. “I’ve got Sharon Turnquist on the line. She says her husband is missing.” Sharon farmed and ranched with her husband John south of the Breaks.
“Put her through.”
“John left to go into Winifred and never got there,” Sharon said, sounding worried and scared. “Neighbors are out looking for him, driving the road south, thinking he must have gone off somewhere along the way.”
The Turnquist Ranch was a good fifteen miles from Mobridge on a narrow dirt road that wound through the rough badlands country. What were the chances this wasn’t connected to Ray Allan Evans Jr.?
“I’ve got a deputy down that way,” she said. “I’ll have him help in the search. You let me know when you find him.”
She hung up and called to make sure that the deputy she’d sent down to Mobridge had returned with a signed agreement from the Hanovers. Both had been faxed to the phone company, she was informed.
McCall hung up feeling antsy. She just hoped to hell that RJ hadn’t stumbled across John Turnquist. She knew the elderly farmer and his wife. You couldn’t ask for two nicer people.
Unfortunately, John was the kind of man who would stop and offer a ride to anyone walking along the road. This was rural Montana, where people still helped one another. Even strangers.
JACK AND JOSEY finally came up for air and realized they were both starving. They laughed and played in the huge clawfoot tub before getting dressed in time to go downstairs for supper.
There was an unspoken truce between them, Jack thought. It was as if they knew they didn’t have much time together—although right now, feeling the way he did, he couldn’t imagine a day without Josey in it.
He was surprised when Virginia was the one late for supper. She came into the lodge complaining about the road into Whitehorse, the dust, the distance, the rough road. She plopped down at the table, announcing she was starved as she distractedly thumbed through the newspaper she’d bought in town.
“Do you have to do that at the table during supper?” Pepper asked with no real heat behind it.
Jack had noticed that his grandmother didn’t seem to be herself. She appeared even more distracted than even Virginia.
“I picked up the Whitehorse newspaper since everyone in town was talking about the front-page article,” Virginia said, as if she hadn’t heard her mother. “A car was found in the Missouri River south of town after a fisherman hooked into
