McKettrick's Luck (12 page)

She stayed where she was, gazing at the backyard, which looked even worse than the front. There was the old tire swing, where her dad used to push her when she was little. When he hadn't been drinking, or playing cards, or locked up in jail, that was.

He'd made so many promises back then.

I'll take care of you, princess.

You and me and your mother, we'll get us a house of our own, in some other town, where we can start new.

Soon as I draw that royal flush, princess. Soon as I draw that royal flush.

Cheyenne wrapped her arms around her knees, laid her head down.

The screen door opened behind her.

“Everything okay?” Ayanna asked softly.

Cheyenne didn't look up. She was going to have a chenille imprint on her forehead from her bathrobe, but she didn't care. “I might ask you the same question,” she replied.

“I'm on my lunch break,” Ayanna said. Cheyenne felt her mother plunk down on the step beside her. Give her a shoulder-bump. “That's some company car out there, and the ramp looks great. So where's Mitch and what's with the communal glum mood?”

“Who says there's a glum mood, communal or otherwise?”

“Well, you're sitting on the back step in your bathrobe, in the middle of the day. You won't look at me. Your brother must be shut up in his room, and he isn't playing a video game unless he switched the sound off on his laptop. The atmosphere around here is thick as yesterday's gravy. I don't have to call the psychic hotline to know there's something going on.” She began to rub Cheyenne's back in slow, comforting circles. “Come on, kiddo. What's up?”

Cheyenne turned her head on her knees, looked into her mother's kind, tired face. “You've been through so much, Mom,” she began. “Dad. Mitch's accident. Pete taking off when you needed him most. How can you keep the faith the way you do? How do you stay so optimistic?”

“I have my down times,” Ayanna said quietly. “But there are plenty of things to be thankful for. Mitch could have been killed when that four-wheeler rolled over, but he wasn't. You've made me so proud, working your way through college, landing such a good job.”

“I'm a complete fraud,” Cheyenne moaned and pressed her face into her knees again.

Ayanna laughed softly and continued the back rub. “How so, sweetheart?”

“You saw that car out front. Nigel brought it, after you left for work, along with another phone and a new computer. He still believes I can get that land. I know I can't. I've accepted all that stuff on false pretenses—along with a continuing paycheck.”

“Business is speculative, Cheyenne. Yours more than most. Methinks something—or some
one
—else is bothering you.”

Cheyenne didn't reply.

Ayanna got up, without another word, went into the house and came back a few minutes later, nudging Cheyenne until she sat up straight.

“What's that?” Cheyenne asked. Her mother was holding a battered shoe box in both hands.

“See for yourself,” Ayanna said, placing the box in Cheyenne's lap.

Cheyenne lifted the lid, and inside were the pictures of Jesse she'd collected in high school, and the clippings, with yellowed edges now and smidgens of tape still clinging to their corners.

Cheyenne's throat went dry.

“
That's
why you came back to Indian Rock,” Ayanna said, and then she left Cheyenne alone again, with her box of memories.

B
RANDI
B
ISHOP SHIFTED
uncomfortably in her chair and checked her watch for the third time since she'd arrived at the little street-corner café near her Santa Monica beach condo. She drew the usual number of sidelong looks from the men at the surrounding tables, to the usual irritation of the women they were with. She'd finished work for the day, but she still had three hours of class ahead, and her poor dog, Shimmy, was at home, waiting to take his walk.

A waiter wafted over. “May I bring you something, madame?”

Madame?
She was twenty-seven, not
fifty
-seven. “Cappuccino,” she said, deliberately leaving off her customary
please.
“Non-fat, extra espresso.”

The waiter, immune to her charms, tightened his mouth and executed a terse little bow.

Gay for sure,
she decided wearily. Not that it mattered.

She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. Looked at her watch. Ten minutes to six. Sighing, Brandi took out her cell phone and called her neighbor and best friend, Geoffrey. Maybe she should introduce him to the waiter, she thought. They'd probably hit it off right away—except that Geoffrey was nice and the waiter was snooty.

“Hey, girlfriend,” Geoffrey said with his usual warmth.

“Shimmy needs a walk,” Brandi answered, as a tall, elegantly dressed man appeared, stopped to speak to the hostess and immediately turned to sweep the gathering with his gaze, which immediately stopped on her. “And I'm not going to make it home before class starts—again. Can you help me out? Please?”

“As if the world needed another lawyer,” Geoffrey teased as Brandi watched the stranger approach, weaving his way confidently between tables, his lithe frame dappled in the shadows of palm leaves. “Sure, sugarplum. I'll take care of Shimmy. You just concentrate on torts and depositions or whatever it is you're learning.”

“Thanks, Geoff,” Brandi replied. “Bye for now.”

“Use me and throw me away,” Geoffrey said.

Brandi laughed and hung up.

“Mr. Meerland?” she asked. He was looming over her table now, smelling of expensive cologne and money.

The man nodded. Smiled. His teeth were capped, and the tan was probably fake. “Ms. Bishop, I presume? May I join you?”

Brandi suppressed another sigh. Until she'd met Dan Simmons a few months ago, she'd measured every man she encountered against Jesse McKettrick. Handsome and smooth as he was, Nigel Meerland fell short either way. “I don't have much time, Mr. Meerland,” she said.

He dragged back a chair, sat down and turned to the waiter, who was just mincing over with Brandi's cappuccino. “I won't keep you long,” Meerland promised her after putting in an order for a scotch, neat.

All Brandi knew about Nigel Meerland was that he ran a real-estate development company based in San Diego. He'd looked her up on the Internet, he'd explained when he'd called her at work, promising it would be “worth your while” to meet with him. She'd been about to refuse when he'd mentioned Jesse's name, and something inside her had gone on red alert. Instinct told her this was something she needed to deal with. Beyond that, she was mystified.

“I have a class in forty-five minutes,” she said. “And traffic will be bad, since rush hour's on.”

Meerland smiled easily.
I've got all the time in the world,
his manner said. “You sell shoes in the daytime and attend law school at night,” he commented. “Impressive. You're obviously ambitious, and I like that in a person.”

Brandi's internal warning system spiked to
shrill.
She scooted back in her chair, her spine stiffening. “What do you want, Mr. Meerland?” she asked.

“I understand you were briefly married to a man named Jesse McKettrick.”

Brandi frowned. She hadn't touched her cappuccino, even though she
really
needed the caffeine. It was more than disquieting to realize just how much of her personal information and history was available to anybody with access to a computer.

“You're a beautiful woman,” Meerland went on, when Brandi didn't speak. “McKettrick was a fool to let you go.”

“The parting was mutual,” Brandi said. The guy was really beginning to creep her out. What if he was a serial killer or some kind of stalker?

The waiter brought Meerland's scotch, presented it solicitously, and gave Brandi an irritated glance.

Meerland took a sip, his eyes smiling at Brandi over the rim of the glass. “Relax,” he said after swallowing. “I'm here to present you with a significant financial opportunity.”

Brandi pushed her chair back, tossed down a bill to cover the cost of her cappuccino. “You're selling something, all right,” she said. “But I'm not buying.”

“Please hear me out,” Meerland wheedled.

Brandi remained seated, though she couldn't have said why. “Make it quick,” she told him.

“You're aware that your husband won some five million dollars in a poker championship last year and bought a significant tract of land with the proceeds?”

“Ex-husband,” Brandi clarified. “I saw the tournament on TV. What Jesse did with the money is his own business.”

Meerland rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Search though I might, I can't seem to find a record of the divorce,” he said.

Brandi sat up straighter. She and Jesse
were
divorced. She'd signed the papers, and so had he. She had a copy at home, in her file cabinet. “What are you getting at?”

“My company desperately needs that land I just referred to. We're offering almost double what Mr. McKettrick paid for it. He refuses to even consider the deal. If you take this to court—whether you're divorced or not—you can probably claim as much as half his winnings.
Or
you can force him to sell the property he purchased, and collect your share of the proceeds.”

Brandi swallowed. She made good money, selling shoes on commission in an upscale department store, and whenever she was in a pinch, all she had to do was call Jesse and he'd transfer funds straight into her bank account. She'd kept a tally, intending to pay him back when she got out of law school.

Now, as the possibilities of what Meerland was suggesting crashed over her like a tsunami, she felt herself go pale.

“We're talking about approximately four and a half million dollars here,” Meerland said, pressing his advantage. “That would be your share.
If
McKettrick sells us the land.”

“No,” she said. “
No.
I couldn't do that to Jesse. Anyway, we
are
divorced, and I can prove it.” Not that she
intended
to prove anything to Nigel Meerland. She didn't have to.

“Your marital status may not matter, if you get the right lawyer and the right judge.” Meerland turned his glass round and round with one hand, idly, frowning into the amber swirl of liquid. “I understand your dad got hurt at work,” he said. “He'll be out of commission for a while. Bills are bound to accumulate. And you're up to your eyeballs in student loans, aren't you? So is your fiancé, the soon-to-be doctor. It takes a lot of money just to start a practice, what with the cost of malpractice insurance, for example—”

Brandi stood up, shaking. “I've heard enough,” she said. “I'm not for sale, and I'm not selling Jesse out to make a few bucks. Goodbye, Mr. Meerland, and thanks for nothing.”

Her dad drove an armored car for a security company, over in Phoenix, and six weeks ago he'd been shot in an attempted robbery. He'd need several surgeries to repair the shattered bones in his right leg. Brandi knew his disability payments would barely allow him to keep body and soul together—and he had a second wife, a mortgage and four kids. It
would
be nice to help him out.

Meerland fell into step beside her as she left the café by the outside gate.

“I hope I didn't offend you,” he said mildly.

Brandi's eyes burned and her stomach pitched. She'd never loved Jesse McKettrick, and he hadn't loved her. She'd forgotten whose crazy idea it was to get married—though neither one of them normally drank to excess, they'd met in a club one night in Vegas and had gone on a bender together. Brandi had just been through a bad breakup, and Jesse had been having some kind of hassle with his family. They should have skipped the wedding entirely and gone straight to the sex, which had turned out to be nuclear. After a week locked away in a hotel suite on the Strip, practically swinging from the chandeliers, they'd discovered how little they shared in terms of common interests and long-term goals and had filed for a quickie divorce and gone their separate ways.

“Four and a half million dollars,”
Meerland reiterated.

“No,” Brandi said. Her wheels were parked at the curb, an old wreck of a pickup truck, painfully out of place in Santa Monica, and she wished Meerland hadn't seen it. Hoped it would start when she cranked up the engine so she could peel out.

“It would be so easy,” Meerland persisted. “Solve so many problems. Think of the start you and Dr. Dan could make with that much money. No debts. Maybe even private practice for both of you, right out of the chute. Smooth sailing.”

Everybody had a price, and for all her high regard for Jesse, who had been both generous and fair, for all her protests that she wasn't for sale, Brandi was dangerously tempted.

She couldn't help imagining what it would be like to make things easier for her dad, untangle her own financial snarl, and help Dan get established on top of that. She wouldn't mind going straight into private practice herself, skipping all the hoops she'd have to jump through working her way up in someone else's firm.

She climbed into the truck, slammed the door and fired up the engine.

Thank God, the motor roared to life.

Thank God, no parts fell off.

Brandi sped away. Half a mile from the restaurant, she pulled into a parking lot, fumbled for her telephone and called Dan.

 

F
IRST THING
S
ATURDAY MORNING
, Cheyenne called the local equipment-rental place and ordered a tiller. Ayanna had already gone to work, and Cheyenne and Mitch were sharing an awkward breakfast—they'd barely spoken since yesterday's argument—when the wonder machine was delivered.

Wearing a pair of her mother's jeans and an old T-shirt she'd found in a bureau drawer, Cheyenne went outside to watch as the small tractor was unloaded from a flatbed truck. She'd cleared away the twisted coils of barbed wire and the old tires the day before, so she was good to go.

“Big job,” the deliveryman said, assessing the half acre of weeds surrounding them. “For a C-note, you can leave the driving to me.”

“Just show me how to run this thing,” Cheyenne answered, after considering the proposition for a few moments. A hundred dollars was a hundred dollars, and since Nigel might pull the plug on her paycheck at any time, considering how precarious his financial situation was, she wasn't inclined to be extravagant.

The fellow shrugged. “Okay,” he said doubtfully.

The screen door slammed, and Cheyenne looked back to see Mitch coming down the ramp in his wheelchair.

“Just turn this key,” the deliveryman told Cheyenne. He pointed out the brake pedal, with exaggerated care, glanced at Mitch and shoved a clipboard into Cheyenne's hands. “Sign here,” he told her. “I'll come back for the tractor sometime this afternoon. If you're not going to be around, leave the key under the seat.”

Cheyenne nodded, signed, and waited until the man got back into his truck and left before turning to Mitch.

He'd wheeled himself up on the other side of the tractor.

“Does this thing have a hand brake?” he asked. Cheyenne knew by his distracted tone that he was thinking aloud, rather than expecting an answer from her.

She answered anyway. “I don't know.” She could start the machine and shut it off. The tilling blade was already attached, and there was a slide lever on the dash that probably raised and lowered it.

“It does!” Mitch cried, exultant, and before Cheyenne could react to that, her brother had hoisted himself out of the wheelchair and onto the seat of the small tractor. Granted, it was fairly low, but she'd never imagined he had that much upper-body strength.

The pit of her stomach quivered. “Mitch—”

He glared her into silence. Turned the key and fired up the engine. “I can
do
this,” he told her, and just like that, he was moving.

Cheyenne looked on, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand, as her brother began mowing under more than a decade's worth of weeds. Like a farmer who had been tilling fields for years, he started at the outside of the yard and worked his way inward in ever-narrowing circles.