Montana Creeds: Logan (10 page)

“Well,” Logan answered, “Chet hasn’t been mending fences—for two hundred a month, I don’t blame him. Just the same, the rails are old and some of them are rotting. A couple of good kicks or a head-butt, and that bull will be out and about, looking for trouble and bound to find it. That’s why I ordered enough steel posts and pipes to enclose the whole pasture.”

Dylan must have used up all his hot air. “How much do I owe you? For the fencing, I mean?”

“I won’t know until the job’s done,” Logan lied. He had an estimate, to the penny, and he’d made sure the contractor understood he was getting the figure inked in on the bottom line. Any cost overruns were going to be
his
problem, not Logan’s. But he didn’t want Dylan to write a check; he wanted him to come home, if only long enough to see what was going on.

“Oh,” Dylan said.

“I’ve seen your house,” Logan told him. This, too, was a calculated remark, meant to smoke his brother out on the subject of a certain very pretty neighbor. “Briana’s taking good care of it.”

Nothing from Dylan. Logan knew he was chewing on the information, deciding whether he ought to be pissed off or not. With Dylan, it could go either way.

“Hello?” Logan said.

“You’re already visiting Briana?” Dylan asked. “Pretty fast footwork.”

“’He who hesitates is lost,’” Logan quoted blithely, but inside he was as uneasy as he had been in the bad old days, when Jake was late getting home on payday and the current stepmother was trying to put a good face on things. If Dylan had something going on with Briana, it would change things, and not for the better.

“She’s a nice woman, Logan,” Dylan said, testy again. “Do her a favor and leave her alone.”

“You sound like a man with a claim to protect.”

“I barely know her. But she’s decent and she works hard, and from what I’ve heard, she’s had all the mantrouble she needs. If you have any ideas, back off.”

“Not a chance,” Logan said.

Dylan swore and broke the connection.

Logan smiled down at Sidekick, who’d been watching with interest the whole time. “So far, so good,” he said.

Sidekick whimpered. It was a good bet he didn’t agree.

Logan put a bowl of kibble on the floor for the dog, then went to the kitchen sink to wash the attic dust from his face, hands and arms. That done, he dried off with a wad of paper towels and returned to the business at hand.

He took the lid off the container, imagining the scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies, when somebody had opened the Ark of the Covenant. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just turned loose a lot of howling spooks and specters.

Logan lifted the
Our Family
album off the top, shaking his head at the naive optimism that title expressed.

He turned back the cover, and felt a pinch in his heart at the inscription he found on the first page.
For Jake and Teresa, on your wedding day. With love, Cassie.

So, Cassie had been the optimist who’d bought the
Our Family
album. She’d lived in Stillwater Springs all her life, so she had to have known what Jake was like. Maybe back then, unlike now, she’d believed that wishing could make it so.

Thick-throated, Logan pulled back a chair and sank into it, knowing he wouldn’t be able to look at the pictures stuffed into that album while he was standing up.

Sidekick rested his chin on Logan’s thigh and made a sympathetic sound.

Logan braced himself, turned the first page.

Right off, he was proved wrong—there
was
at least one smiling photo of his dad. Jake, very young and bearing a strong resemblance to Dylan, clad in what he would have described as a monkey suit later in his life, gazed joyfully out of a cheap wedding portrait. Beside him, Teresa
beamed, a dark beauty, proud of her new husband and her mail-order wedding dress.

Logan’s eyes smarted again.

He curved the fingers of his right hand, touched her face, almost expecting to feel the soft warmth of living
flesh. Teresa couldn’t have been older than seventeen, if that. She’d been pregnant with her first and only child, but if either she or Jake regretted that, their smiles gave no sign of it.

On that day, at least, they’d both expected to lead long, happy lives.

Teresa had probably believed her love would change Jake, inspire him to give up his wild ways.

Maybe Jake had believed that, too.

Swallowing hard, Logan turned the page.

There were more pictures of the wedding—old-fashioned snapshots with yellowing, zigzag edges, some in color, some in black and white, all of them fading, slowly disintegrating.

As painful as it was to look at those images—Logan could barely manage it without flinching—he knew he couldn’t let them be lost. As soon as his desktop and scanner arrived, he’d preserve every one, store them on a disk.

For now, all he could do was look.

Had he ever seen these pictures before? If so, he didn’t remember.

Slowly, he turned another page, and then another.

Teresa in a polka-dot sundress, posing beside a tree, magnificently pregnant.

Jake, grinning as he sudsed an old jalopy, the spray from the hose frozen forever on the paper.

And then the first baby picture.

Logan looked down at his bald and patently unremarkable infant self. Teresa was in the picture, too, still in her hospital bed, holding her baby and glowing as if she’d just given birth to a second savior.

Jake’s arm was visible—it must have been his, the hand resting on Teresa’s shoulder.

Dear old Dad,
Logan thought. Already easing out of the picture.

After that, he couldn’t turn any more pages.

He closed the album, noticing that it was jammed at the front, and empty at the back. Put it back in the box and snapped on the lid, as if to corral the ghosts again, trap them in plastic.

But there was no containing the retro-spooks now, he knew. They were out for good, and sure to haunt him.

Wishing he’d never come back to Stillwater Springs Ranch, never opened this particular can of worms, Logan pushed back his chair and stood. Ran one forearm across his face, and almost stumbled over Sidekick, who’d been lying patiently at his feet, waiting for whatever came next.

The jolt put things into perspective.

If he hadn’t headed for home, he wouldn’t have found the dog. And as short as their acquaintance was, Logan couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten along without Sidekick for company.

He frowned. Briana called her dog Wanda. Maybe he should have given the critter a “people” name, like Gus or Bob. Something, well,
chummy.

Logan still wasn’t ready to sleep—he was keyed up from supper with Briana and the telephone conversations with his brothers and looking at all those old pictures. Like his computer gear, his TV hadn’t arrived yet, not that he would have watched it, anyhow. He just missed having the option.

He found his duffel bag, ferreted through it for the
spy-thriller he’d bought somewhere along the way home and stretched out on the sleeping bag on the floor of his old room.

The ranch house might have been about to fall down around his ears, but it was big. He and Dylan and Tyler had each had a room to call their own, though when he was little, Ty had often sneaked in in the middle of the night and curled up on the rug next to Logan’s bed, much as Sidekick might have done if there’d
been
a bed. Let alone a rug.

The recollection choked Logan up all over again and, as lonesome as he felt, he was glad it was just him and Sidekick. If somebody had been around to ask him what was wrong, he might have broken down and told them.

Or just plain broken down.

Sidekick curled up close against his legs.

Logan opened the book, found his place and read.

At some point, he fell asleep, but all night long, the ghosts kept poking him awake. Once, knowing he was dreaming, he’d seen Jake—the prime-of-his-life Jake, from the album—peek in at him from the hallway, smile and shut the door again.

In the morning, letting the dog out and then back in, starting the coffee brewing, he recalled the dream as clearly as a mystic would recall a visitation.

“Why couldn’t you love us, old man?” he asked the sunrise, standing on the back porch and
watching fingers of peach-colored light reach over the eastern hills.

He didn’t know the answer, but he had a theory.

Jake Creed hadn’t loved his wives, or his children, because he hadn’t loved himself.

T
HE FENCING CONTRACTOR
and his crew arrived at seven, just as Logan was finishing breakfast, and started work. The freight truck came at nine-thirty, to Sidekick’s great excitement, and two men got out to unload Logan’s computer, camera gear, books, bed and dressers, clothes and assorted household stuff.

He was on the bedroom floor with a screwdriver, setting up the metal frame that would hold the mattress and box springs, when he heard voices out in the living room.

Sidekick, a little slow on the uptake when it came to guard-dogging, rose to his haunches and gave a tentative bark.

“Logan?”

He recognized the voice. It was Josh, Briana’s older boy.

“In here!” he called. “End of the hall, on the right!”

Footsteps pounded along the wide corridor, and Josh and Alec appeared in the open doorway, flanked by Wanda.

“Everything okay?” Logan asked. Given the time, their mother was probably working. Did these kids run loose all day, on their own, with only a fat old dog for protection?

You did,
said a voice in his mind.

The reminder made him smile.

“Sure,” Alec said. “We just came to visit, that’s all. It’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Logan replied. “It’s okay provided your mom doesn’t object.”

The boys exchanged guilty glances.

Logan decided to pretend he hadn’t noticed. “Did you
come through the orchard?” he asked casually, concentrating on turning the last screw. Tonight, he’d be sleeping in his own comfortable bed. Things were looking up.

“Nope,” Alec said helpfully. “Mom said there might be bears, or Cimarron might get loose and charge us, so we took the main road.”

“Maybe you ought to call your mother at work. Let her know where you are.”

“We’re not supposed to bother Mom unless one of us is bleeding or we smell smoke,” Josh said.

“That’s reasonable,” Logan answered, getting to his feet. “Let’s go see how the new fence is coming along, then we’ll rustle up some lunch.”

The boys looked delighted.

Spotting his cell phone on the mantel as they entered the living room, which was piled with boxes from the freight truck, Logan snagged it and turned it on.

Five messages—three from Dylan, two from Tyler.

He smiled and slid the phone into his jeans pocket.

Let them stew.

“Mom says we’re going to have a cell phone when she either gets a raise or wins the lottery,” Alec said.

“Hmm,” Logan said. Things must be pretty tight if Briana couldn’t afford a cell phone. Hell, even kindergarteners had them these days.

“She’s not going to win the lottery, stupid,” Josh said, giving his brother a shoulder shove. “She doesn’t
buy tickets.”

“You called me a name,” Alec protested. “I’m
telling.”

Logan whistled through his teeth, a surefire attentiongetter.

The boys stared at him in admiring surprise.

“Chill, my brothers,” Logan said. Then he gestured toward the open front door. “Let’s go.”

B
RIANA FROWNED
at the phone receiver before she hung up.

Millie, on her break, sat on one of the couches thumbing through an old copy of
People,
but otherwise, they had the employees’ lounge to themselves.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

Briana tried to ignore the incipient panic forming into a little whirlwind in the pit of her stomach. “I’ve called home three times since I got to work this morning,” she murmured. “Nobody answers the phone.”

“Maybe Josh is on the Web,” Millie said. Most people had high-speed Internet connections, but Briana still used dial-up, and there was only one phone line in the house.

“You’re probably right,” Briana admitted, wondering why she hadn’t thought of that perfectly obvious possibility.

Because she’d thought of Logan Creed and practically nothing else since the night before,
that
was why. She’d tossed and turned and gone to the living room window twice, when she should have been sleeping, hoping to see the lights of his house gleaming through the trees.

Still, she felt uneasy, and if she hadn’t already pushed the envelope by asking Jim for Saturday
off, she’d have made a quick trip home, just to make sure nothing was wrong.

And so many things
could
be wrong.

The boys might have left the house, bored with
chores and daytime TV and the computer, and gone to the orchard, figuring they could “grin down” any bear they might encounter.

They might have gone to the pasture, to look at the bull.

Or Vance might have come, knowing she’d be working, and stolen them. Granted, that one was a stretch, since stealing Alec and Josh would also involve feeding and clothing them, but stranger things had happened.

Vance loved getting a rise out of her, and abducting her children would certainly do the trick.

She folded her arms and bit down hard on her lower lip. Bills or no bills, she was getting a cell phone as soon as her shift ended.

The yogurt Briana had gobbled down in her car on the way to work curdled and tried to climb into the back of her throat.

“Bree?” Millie fretted. “You don’t look so good. Want me to ask Jim if you can go home sick?”

Briana was sorely tempted, but in the final analysis, she couldn’t bring herself to lie to Jim, even indirectly. He’d promoted her twice and given her Saturday off, even though they were always shorthanded on the weekends. He didn’t deserve to be jerked around.

She shook her head, drew a deep breath and headed back out onto the casino floor to pay out jackpots, make change and keep an eye out for trouble.