Montana Creeds: Tyler (25 page)

And I did plenty.

What the hell did
that
mean?

“I'm done, old man,” Tyler said, slamming the truck into Reverse and hurling up gravel and dirt in every
direction as he peeled out. “
I am done with you,
and all your bullshit, so get the hell out of here and leave me alone.”

Well, I'm not done with you,
Jake told him, stone-serious.
Angie was going to meet another man at that motel, did you know that? You were just a snot-nosed kid, but she might have told you. She was planning to run off with him. I killed her for it. I made her take those pills.

Bile surged into the back of Tyler's throat; he stomped on the brakes, shoved the door open, leaned out to get sick.

It didn't happen, but he still felt as though he'd been kicked in the gut and then trampled. Dazed, he slumped forward, laid his forehead on the steering wheel and breathed. Just breathed, as slowly and deeply as he could.

Relentlessly, Jake's words echoed through his mind, like some devil's litany, though he knew the old man's ghost, or whatever the hell he'd been dealing with, had gone.

There was a tremor in the air, something clean and clear and new.

I killed her for it—I killed her—I killed her.

“Ty?”

Tyler nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of his name; he hadn't heard a rig drive up. Hadn't heard anything, except for Jake's taunts, until Logan spoke.

Standing in the space gap made by the open door of the truck, he laid a hand on Tyler's shoulder. “You all right?”

Tyler straightened. Nodded. Couldn't quite bring himself to face his brother, because Logan had to know he was lying, and Tyler didn't want to see the certainty of
that in his eyes. “What are you doing here, Logan?” he ground out.

Logan leaned in, reached between Tyler and the steering wheel, pulled the keys from the ignition. “We were supposed to meet up at six o'clock, at your place, remember? I was on my way there when I saw Lily pull out of the cemetery road.” He paused, and there was a grin in his voice, if a flimsy one. “Two and two still adds up to four, so I figured you must be around someplace, too. I waited a few minutes, in case you were hunting around the countryside for your clothes or something, but when I heard the engine of this old truck whine like it was going to blow all eight cylinders, I thought I'd better investigate.”

“He killed her,” Tyler said.

Logan thrust out a sigh. Had he even registered what Tyler had just said? “Get out of the driver's seat, Ty,” he said. “I'm taking the wheel.”

“He killed her,”
Tyler repeated.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Tyler got out of the truck, forcing Logan to take a step back. Stood there trying to root himself in the real world while his older brother stared, paler than Tyler had ever seen him. He probably thought his little brother had finally gone around the bend for good.

What was the sense of trying to convince Logan or anybody else that a dead man had confessed to murdering a woman the whole world believed had committed suicide?

Yeah, Logan would think he was crazy, and he'd probably be right.

Once Tyler was out of the way, Logan got behind the wheel, waited. He looked like hell—even in his own state of mind, Tyler noticed that. What was going on?

At the moment, he had his hands full with his own problems. He couldn't stretch his brain around Logan's.

“What do you remember about the year my mother died?” Tyler asked, after sitting there in silence for a long time, trying to figure out how to phrase what he needed to ask without sounding like more of a lunatic than he'd already shown himself to be.

Logan let out a raspy breath. “That was kind of what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. He made no move to start up the truck.

Tyler had been looking straight ahead, through the windshield, a part of his brain counting gravestones; he knew all the inscriptions by heart, who was buried here, who was buried there, when they'd died and in some cases, though not many, how they'd died. Now, because of something in Logan's tone, Tyler turned to face him.

“I've been doing some research,” Logan said. “There were some old pictures up in the attic—some diaries and other stuff, too. That's how I found Jake's suicide note, though you didn't give me a chance to tell you that when I broke the news.”

Of course Tyler recalled the incident—it hadn't been that long ago and he didn't forget much, which wasn't entirely a good thing. He'd seen Logan heading in the direction of the cemetery that day, guessed which grave he planned to visit and followed. He'd sucker punched Logan, knocked him on his ass, expecting a fight,
needing
a fight.

Logan hadn't given him one, though, which should have been a sign, though of what, God knew.

He'd gotten to his feet, dusted himself off and calmly told Tyler that Jake's death hadn't been an accident, or a murder. It had been suicide.

Even now, Tyler was surprised by his own reaction.

He'd felt—nothing. Nothing at all.

He'd called Logan a liar, more out of habit than anything else, turned and walked away.

“I guess you must have found something else, besides a suicide note written by dear old dad,” Tyler said, when Logan didn't say anything more.

“Letters,” Logan said, very quietly. “I found some letters. I didn't read all of them—just part of the first one.”

In a way, Tyler felt more unsettled, sitting there in that truck with his big brother, than he had when Jake was there.

“What
kind
of letters?” Tyler forced himself to ask.

“They were addressed to Angela, Ty,” Logan said. He sounded reluctant, now that he'd finally gotten started, and Tyler knew this was about the last thing in the universe Logan wanted to do.

Once again, Jake's voice grated against Tyler's mind.
Angie was going to meet another man at that motel, did you know that?

“Love letters,” Tyler said, to save Logan the trouble.

Logan's eyes narrowed. “You knew?”

“Not until about five minutes ago. My mother was seeing somebody, wasn't she? Planning to run away, leave Jake and the ranch—”

“Yeah,” Logan said. “She was going to leave.”

“Who wrote the letters, Logan? Who was he, this man?”

“Nobody you know,” Logan answered, after another lengthy silence. God, for a lawyer, he had a hard time keeping a conversation moving. “Like I said, I only read part of the first one, and there wasn't a return address.”

“After all these years,” Tyler began, getting angry all over again, “you decide I need to know my mother wasn't just a suicide, she was fooling around, too?”

What little color he had left drained out of Logan's face, and his jawline looked hard enough to strike sparks off of with a rock. “No,” he ground out. “I'm telling you because ever since I found those letters, I've been wondering if Angie killed herself or if someone else did.”

“It was Jake,” Tyler said. “That's what I meant when you were talking about seeing Lily leave here and all that, and I said, ‘He killed her.'”

“Holy Christ,” Logan rasped.

“You know he was capable of it,” Tyler insisted.

Logan gave one brief, sharp nod of his head, now in profile again. Tyler saw him swallow and knew there was something else, something he was having one hell of a time spitting out.

“I knew, Tyler,” he said.

“You knew what?” Tyler snapped.

“I knew Angie was seeing somebody else. Way back, when it was happening.”

“What?”

“It was a couple of weeks before she died,” Logan replied. “You'd gone fishing with Dylan. I was supposed
to go, too, but I had some lawns to mow in town. When I was finished, I hitchhiked home, figuring I'd get my gear from the house and catch up with the two of you. There was a strange car parked in the yard, but I didn't think anything about that—until I got inside. They were in the kitchen, Angie and this man I'd never seen before, and the radio was playing. They were—”

Tyler didn't want to think about where
that
sentence was headed, and he must have made some kind of sound indicating that.

“They were
dancing,
” Logan finished, with a sort of mirthless chuckle.

“Oh,” Tyler said, and immediately felt stupid.

“They hadn't noticed me, and I was trying to figure out how to get out of there before they did, when all of the sudden Jake came busting into the house. He came up behind me, threw me to one side and yelled at me to get the hell away and stay gone, and then he went into the kitchen.”

Tyler closed his eyes.

I've done plenty,
he heard Jake say.

I killed her.

“What happened then, Logan?”

“Jake had Angie by the hair, and she was screaming, and the guy—whoever he was—pulled a gun on Jake. I knew he meant to kill him and, God help me, I wished he would, Tyler.
I wished he would.
But Angie begged him not to. He wanted her to go with him, and she said she couldn't because—because Jake would take it out on you, and on Dylan and me, if she did.”

Tyler stared at his brother, full of amazed fury and no
little sympathy for the kid Logan had been. He must have been scared shitless, watching a scene like that, knowing there was nothing he could do to make it stop.

“What happened after that?” Tyler asked slowly, after another long silence had descended on that truck like a cold, wet shroud.

Logan looked haunted. “I don't know,” he said gruffly. “I ran, Ty.”

“You were a kid,” Tyler reminded him. “You couldn't have changed anything by staying.”

Logan was back in the past, unhooked from the present. “Jake caught up with me hours later, at Cassie's,” he went on, almost as though Tyler hadn't said anything. “She was out of town, as it turned out, so I hid in that teepee of hers, but he found me.”

Tyler ached inside. Jake would have been roaring drunk by then; he'd been backed down, humiliated in his own house, and Logan had had the misfortune to witness it.

“He beat the hell out of you, didn't he?”

To Tyler's surprise, Logan shook his head. “It was worse than that,” he answered. “He told me that if I ever said a word to anybody about what I'd seen, he'd kill the whole family, like in one of those slaughter movies, with all the axes and chain saws, and I believed it.”

Inwardly, Tyler shuddered. He'd have believed it, too.

Even now, years later, the story brought blood-splashed images to his mind.

“And you never told anybody?” Tyler marveled hoarsely. “You held a thing like that inside, all this time?”

“Yeah,” Logan said bleakly, coming back from the
long-ago and not-so-far away. “I had my suspicions when your mom died, but Jake was meaner than ever after that, and I was afraid of what he might do to you and Dylan, to all three of us, so I pretended like I didn't remember.” He paused to clear his throat, blink a couple of times. “I'm sorry, Tyler.
Christ,
if only I'd told someone—Cassie or Floyd Book or
someone
—about the man dancing in the kitchen with Angie, and all the rest of it—”

“Jake might not have caught up to Mom at that motel and forced her to swallow a bottle of pills?” Tyler asked quietly, when Logan's voice fell away into a miserable, pulsing silence. “You couldn't have prevented that. You were a
kid,
Logan.”

Logan nodded, started up the truck. Neither of them spoke as he shifted it into gear and they left the graveyard.

Tyler didn't ask where they were headed, and Logan didn't say.

But when they pulled in at the main ranch house, Tyler wasn't surprised.

“They weren't like Jake, the people who lived here before us,” Logan said, after staring at the old place in silence for a long time. “I've read their letters, and a lot of old news clippings, and a few of their diaries, too. It doesn't have to be a curse to be a Creed, that's what I'm trying to say. You and Dylan and I, we can be like they were—good, honest, hardworking people, most of them. Proud of the Creed name.”

In that moment, Tyler did something he'd thought he'd never do. He reached over and slapped Logan on the shoulder. “Most of them?” he joked, grinning.

Logan chuckled, but it wasn't a broken sound, like back at the cemetery. There was a quiet joy in it, and a sort of relief. “Everybody has a few bastards creeping around in the branches of their family tree,” he said.