Nealy's eyes misted. “Thanks is enough. I'll call you later.”
Nealy looked around. It was a beautiful hotel room, almost like someone's private apartment. It was tastefully decorated with a small sofa and two wing chairs that matched the drapes and carried through to the thick comforter and designer pillows on the king-size bed. She eyed the bed. Maybe she needed a nap to drive away the drained feeling that seemed to be taking over her body. What was it Maud used to say? Oh yes, “I'll just sit here and get forty winks and then I'll be good to go.”
Forty winks it is. Not yet though.
She had one more phone call to make.
Nealy listened to the phone ring on the other end of the line. Seven rings later the breathless attorney said, “Hello, Clementine Fox speaking.”
“Clem, it's Nealy Clay,” she said cheerfully.
“Nealy, can this wait, I'm going to miss my flight if I don't leave right this second.”
“That's why I'm calling you, Clem. You don't have to leave. It's over and done with. I took care of everything. The Colemans and I have settled up so to speak. Send me your bill, and we'll call it a day.”
The attorney's voice dropped to a whisper. “Nealy, what did you do?”
“I just came back from Sunbridge. I gave them back their homestead. I signed off on all the loans. It's over.” For some reason she still couldn't believe she'd done it. It had been a last-second decision but the right one for all concerned.
“And . . .”
“There is no âand.' It's done. It was the right thing to do. I think I might still be angry deep inside, but the anger will go away at some point. I did feel good when I did it. I don't want to be like them. I don't want to belong to that family. Thanks for everything. See you around.”
“Nealy, I'm not sending you a bill. It was a pleasure doing business with you. For whatever it's worth, I'm proud of you.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Nealy's mouth as she hung up the phone.
Nealy smacked her hands together in satisfaction. Now it was
really
over.
Feeling good about herself, Nealy curled into a ball on the big bed and was asleep within minutes.
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Forty miles away in the Coleman kitchen at Sunbridge, the occupants stared at one another, their faces registering shock, dismay, and shame.
An ugly look on her face, Sawyer slammed the coffeepot on the counter. “Now that the roof over your head is secure and the hallowed ground once more belongs to you, I think I'll head back home to my husband and my new job that I shouldn't have to work at.”
“I can pay you and Adam back now, Sawyer,” Riley said, a desperate look on his face.
She glared at him. “That's pretty funny, Riley. You're going to pay me back with Nealy Clay's money. No thanks. Get off your ass and make this ranch profitable. The drought's over. Don't call me, I'll call you.” She slammed the door behind her.
Cole clicked his tongue in disgust. “She's a hothead, always was, always will be,” Cole said, his eyes on his mother, Maggie. “Mom, what do you think?”
“What I think is that Nealy Clay is like Mam used to beâone tough cookie when the chips were down,” Maggie said, referring to Billie Coleman, the matriarch of the Coleman clan. “I don't care what any of you think; I, for one, admire Nealy Clay. I'm sorry it all ended like this. Somewhere, someplace, somehow, all of us came to believe this place called Sunbridge was something special. It's like thousands of other places. It's brick and mortar and acreage. It's not sacred. Home is wherever you are. Home is where your things are with the people you love and care about. A trailer, a tent, an apartment can be home. I'll be leaving now, too. If I were you, Riley, I'd call Ivy and ask her to come home. I am just sick over this. And no, like Sawyer, I don't want you paying Henry and me back with Nealy Clay's money.” Her gaze narrowed as she homed in on her son and nephew. “Mam thought you were man enough to take over Sunbridge, Riley. You failed her, and don't blame it all on the drought either. Cole, Shad turned over a multi
billion
dollar aeronautics empire to you, and you're in the hopper. If you had been on top of things, this wouldn't have happened. You were both asleep at the switch. I want to leave you both with this thought. Coleman Aviation with Sawyer at the helm was thriving until you mortgaged it to the hilt. Billie Limited is alive and well thanks to me. We're women. If we can do it, why can't you? One last thing, don't either one of you
ever
forget that Nealy Clay and her brothers rightfully belong here. More so than any of us. Illegitimate or not, they are Seth Coleman's children. Children.
Not
grandchildren,
not
nieces and nephews. His children. It was all in the papers the attorneys gave to us. We could never dispute it. Good-bye everyone.”
“Guess she told us,” Cole mumbled as he reached for the bottle of Jim Beam. He poured a healthy jolt into Riley's cup, then filled his own. “What should we drink to, cousin?”
“How about shame?” Riley said, holding out his cup.
“I got a bellyful of that. To shame. Ours. We can never make this right, Riley.”
“I know.”
Cole poured again. “We need to talk. Let's go up to the hill and hash it out the way Colemans always do when they have problems.”
“That's the best idea I've heard in a coon's age.” Riley reached for the Jim Beam. Cole reached for the other bottle.
Together they walked up to the hill to the family cemetery, their hearts troubled, their eyes downcast. Other family members who had made the same trek thousands of times over the years had worn the round medallions of stone on the pathway to a smooth, satiny finish.
“See that tree, Cole,” Riley said, pointing to an ancient cottonwood. “That's what Ivy and I hung on to when the tornado whipped through here. I thought that day was the worst day of my life. I was wrong. This is the worst day of my life. In minutes it was all gone. Ivy said in a way it was a good thing. It was a new beginning for all of us. He was a bastard, Cole,” Riley said, waving the whiskey bottle in the general direction of Seth Coleman's grave. “I don't know if I want to be buried up here with
him.
If you stay in Japan, are you going to want to be buried on the Cherry Blossom Hill?”
“I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. I feel like bawling. We fucked up, Riley. We didn't just fuck up, we
really
fucked up. I want your permission to go back to Japan and boot those black suits the hell out of there.”
Riley took a long pull from the bottle. “You shoulda listened to me a long time ago. I told you the old ways don't work anymore,” he said, slurring his words. “Fire them all. Kick ass and take names later. Do it! You don't need my permission.”
“Maybe I don't need it. I want it. You okay with it?”
“Yeah. Tell me what to do, Cole. I'm swimming upstream here.”
“If you trust me, if you give me six months, I can bring Rising Sun around to where it was. What's mine is yours. There's oil here, Riley, I can smell it.”
“I can smell it, too. Bankers don't go by smells. Six months it is, cousin.”
“There's a glitch, Riley.”
“There always is,” Riley said, tilting the bottle.
“You need to go back to Japan with me. The black suits will take it better with you standing next to me.”
“Okay.”
“You gave in too easily, cuz. I thought I would have to fight you to agree.”
“It's time for me to go back. I have to clean up all my loose ends before I can ask Ivy to come home. Whatever it takes. I wish I was a kid again. We can pull it together, can't we, Cole?”
“Hey, we've been through a lot of shit together. This should be a walk in the park compared to that plane rescue in the Alps.” Cole stared up at the old cottonwood tree, remembering the time he and Riley had flown to Switzerland to save the passengers on a downed airliner because his mother Maggie's stepdaughter was on board. “That was a nightmare from hell, but we did it and no one died,” he said, clapping Riley on the shoulder. “We'll leave in the morning.”
Riley nodded. “Do you miss them, Cole?” he said, pointing to the line of gravestones.
“More than you know.”
“Do you think
he's
in hell?”
“Yeah. 'Cause that's where he belongs. Let's say our prayer and go back to the house. We're soaked to the skin. We must be nuts standing out here like this. Hell, I didn't even realize it was raining until just now. I guess we really are drunk.”
“Our Father, who art . . .”
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Nealy rolled over in the large bed. She was groggy but alert enough to realize she wasn't in her own bed at Blue Diamond Farms. She squinted when she brought up her arm to look at the hands on her watch. Could it be 10:05 when it was light out? She blinked and then blinked again. How could it possibly be morning? She'd slept almost around the clock. Maybe doing good deeds allowed one to relax to the point of being comatose. She struggled out of bed, reached for the phone to call room service. “A pot of coffee, toast, and a pack of cigarettes,” she said into the phone. “Thirty minutes! Can't you bring it any quicker than that?” Assured they would try, Nealy headed for the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth, showered, washed her hair. She was wrapping her head in a towel when her breakfast order arrived.
She scribbled her name on the charge slip, ripped open the package of cigarettes, then poured coffee. She gulped at it, surprised how good it was for a hotel's.
The envelope she'd brought with her was directly in her line of vision. Maybe she'd open it with her third cup of coffee. A perfect smoke ring escaped her lips. She savored the smoke, knowing full well how bad it was for her. She was going to have to quit smoking very soon if she started training Shufly. She wondered if, at her age, she was up to the three years of gut-wrenching work. She wasn't a kid anymore. Her joints could attest to that. If she pulled this off, she would be riding the Derby when she was fifty-two. The press would have a field day with her. Let them.
She poured more coffee into her cup as her thoughts shifted to her children and the Colemans. Her heart fluttered in her chest.
Let it all go, Nealy. Don't go there. That was yesterday. The kids will be fine. The Colemans will be like the phoenix, they'll rise again from the ashes.
Nealy reached for the thick yellow envelope. It contained complements of the various detective agencies she'd hired, photocopies of old newspaper articles about the Colemans. She'd read them all and had found nothing of help until Smitty pointed out an old picture of Seth Coleman eating lunch in what looked like a diner named the Horseshoe. A waitress with a long braid hanging down her back was smiling at the rancher. The caption underneath the picture said the waitress's name was Martha Ridley. Nealy's mother's name was Martha Ridley.
Smitty had written to the Austin courthouse and, for twenty dollars, secured Nealy's mother's birth certificate as well as birth certificates for Pyne, Rhy, and herself. The birth certificates back homeâthe ones Pyne had sent on with all the boxes belonging to Josh Colemanâhad the last name of Coleman on all three of them. The three certificates spread out in front of her said the last name was Ridley.
There was only one Ridley in the local phone book. Carl Ridley Mortuary. There was no home listing for Carl Ridley. Still, it was a place to start.
Nealy shuffled the papers, the local maps Smitty had stuffed into the envelope, as well as a local telephone book. All she needed was a beginning. Maybe all the lost pieces would surface and fall into place.
Forty minutes later, Nealy was dressed and in the rental car, the map spread out on the passenger seat. It was eleven-thirty when she parked in the mortuary's empty lot. Two long, shiny, black hearses sat under a canopy. She shivered as she made her way around to the front of the building.
Inside, she flinched. The scent of flowers was sickeningly sweet and overpowering. Somber music seemed to waft from the ceiling. She itched to return to her car.
“May I help you, miss?” asked a young man, so perfectly attired, so hushed, so somber as he approached her, his hands folded in front of him, that Nealy thought he looked like one of his own customers.
She cleared her throat. “Are you Mr. Ridley?”
“There is no Mr. Ridley. He passed away several years ago. I handled the remains myself since I was his partner. I'm Jason Lyons, the owner.”
“Well, Mr. Lyons, I'm trying to locate my mother's people. My mother's name was Martha Ridley. She used to live here. Do you know anything about your partner's family?”
“Not much, I'm afraid. Carl never talked about his family. He never had children; his wife passed away many years ago, and he never remarried. I do know that he had a brother who is also deceased. It seems to me there were three sisters. Two of them lived in Dallas but I remember Carl going to both of their funerals some years back. He never said what the sisters' married names were or if there were children. Carl wasn't one for sharing his private life. I think the other sister moved away to someplace where there were horses. I don't know why I say that. Carl must have mentioned horses at some point. I'm sorry I can't be of more help.”