Dark Horse. B.J. Daniels

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       Chapter Three

      Cull McGraw put down the windows on his pickup as he drove into Whitehorse. It was one of the big sky days where the deep blue ran from horizon to horizon without a cloud. In the distance, snow still capped the top of the Little Rockies, and everywhere he looked he saw spring as the land began to turn green.

      Days like this, Cull felt like he could breathe. Part of it was getting out of the house. He just felt lucky that he’d intercepted the newspaper before Frieda, the family cook, had delivered it on the way to the kitchen.

      He didn’t need a calendar to know what time of the year it was. He had seen the approaching anniversary of the kidnapping in the pained look in his father’s eyes. He could feel it take over the main house as if draping it in a black funeral shroud.

      Every year, he just rode it out. The day would pass. Nothing would happen. No one would come forward with information about the missing twins. Another year would pass. Another year of watching his father get his hopes up only to be crushed under the weight of disappointment.

      What always made it worse was the age-progression photographs in the newspaper of what Oakley and Jesse Rose would look like now and his father’s plea for any information on them.

      Ahead, he could see the outskirts of the small Western town. Cull sighed. He should have known there would be a big write-up in the paper, since this would be the twenty-fifth anniversary. He glanced over at the newspaper lying on the seat next to him. He’d read just enough to set him off. When would his father realize that the twins were gone and would never be coming back? Knowing Travers McGraw the way he did, Cull knew his father would hold out hope until his last dying breath.

      But this year, the publisher of the paper had talked his younger brother Ledger into an interview. As he drove down the main drag, he spotted Ledger’s pickup right where he knew it would be—in front of the Whitehorse Café.

      * * *

      JUST AS NIKKI had done for the past few days, she watched Ledger McGraw enter the Whitehorse Café. He had arrived at the same time each morning, pulled up out front in a Sundown Stallion Station pickup and adjusted his Stetson before climbing out.

      Across the street in the park, Nikki observed him from behind the latest weekly newspaper as he hesitated just inside the café door. She saw him looking around, and after watching him for three mornings, she knew exactly what he was looking for. Who he was looking for.

      He tipped his hat to the young redheaded waitress, just as he had the past three mornings, before he took a seat at a booth in her section. He had been three when the twins were kidnapped, which now made him about twenty-eight. There was an innocence about him and an old-fashioned chivalrous politeness. She’d seen it in the way he wiped his boots on the mat just outside the café door. In the way he always removed his hat the moment he stepped in. In the way he waited to be offered a seat as if he had all day.

      She’d keyed in on Ledger when she’d realized that no one else in the McGraw family had such a predictable routine. That wasn’t the only reason she’d chosen him. In the days she’d been in town watching him each morning, she had seen his trusting nature and hoped he would be the son she might get to help her.

      Nikki didn’t kid herself that this was going to be easy. She’d heard from other journalists that the family hated reporters and all of them except Travers had refused to talk about the kidnapping. She desperately needed someone on that ranch who would be agreeable to help her. Ledger might be the one.

      Nikki wished she had more time before making her move. But the clock was ticking. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the kidnapping was approaching rapidly. It still gave her a chill when she looked at the photographs she’d taken of Marianne McGraw. It hadn’t been her imagination. The woman had risen up from her chair, eyes wild, hands clenched around the “babies” in her arms.

      If Nikki had had any doubt that the woman was still in that shell of a body, she no longer did. Now she had to find out if the rumors were true about Marianne and Nate Corwin.

      From across the street, she watched Ledger take a seat in his usual booth. A moment later, the redhead put a cup of coffee, a menu and the folded edition of what Nikki assumed was the Milk River Courier on his table.

      The local weekly had just come out this morning. Ledger had been interviewed, which surprised her, since it was the first time she knew of that he’d spoken to the press, but it also made her even more convinced that Ledger was her way into the family.

      Inside the café, she watched Ledger looking bashful as he picked up the menu, but he didn’t look at it. Instead, he secretly watched the redheaded waitress as she walked away.

      Nikki saw something in his expression that touched her heart. A vulnerability that made her turn away for a moment. There was a yearning that was all too evident to anyone watching.

      But no one else was watching. Clearly this young man was besotted with this redhead. Today, though, Nikki noticed something she’d missed the days before.

      As she watched the waitress return to the table to take his order, she saw why she’d missed it. Along with the obvious sexual tension between them, there was the glint of a gold band on the young woman’s left-hand ring finger.

      Her heart ached all the more for Ledger because this was clearly a case of unrequited love. Add to that an obvious shared history and Nikki knew she was witnessing heartbreak at its rawest. The redhead had moved on, but Ledger apparently hadn’t.

      High school sweethearts? But if so, what had torn them apart? she wondered, then quickly brushed her curiosity aside. Her grandfather had often warned her about getting emotionally involved with the people she wrote about.

      She knew in this case, she had to be especially careful.

      “Care, and you lose your objectivity,” he’d said when, as a girl, she’d asked how he could write about the pain and suffering of people the way he did. “The best stories are about another person’s pain. It’s the nature of the business because people who’ve lost something make good human-interest stories. Everyone can relate because we have all lost something dear to us.”

      “What have you lost?” she’d asked her grandfather, since she’d never seen vulnerability in him ever.

      “Nothing.”