The Colton Ransom Read online

  It took Clara a few minutes to form an answer, and when she did, she blurted out the words. “For lying to you.”

  Instantly, the humor of the moment and everything that had come before faded into the background. This was serious.

  “And what is it that you lied to me about?” he asked.

  It was obvious that the shift in his tone frightened the maid to the point of near incoherence. Her expression was that of a deer caught in not one but two sets of headlights.

  “You have to understand, I was just trying to protect him because he was afraid that if you found out what he was doing, you’d have him fired.”

  Gabby could see Trevor’s agitation growing. She could also see that Clara was terrified of Trevor as well as terrified of the consequences of her part in all this, whatever that part actually turned out to be. The only way they were going to get anything coherent out of the maid was if she managed to calm her down and did the questioning herself.

  So she did.

  “Slow down, Clara,” she told her gently, then urged, “Take a breath.” She waited until Clara complied. Aware that Trevor was all but chomping at the bit beside her, she still went slowly, her words emerging far more slowly than she would have wanted them to. But this was for the greater good. “Who are you talking about, Clara? Who’s him?”

  “Duke.” Clara all but choked out the name in a whisper.

  “Duke Johnson?” Trevor asked, stunned. Duke was one of the regulars who’d been on the ranch longer than he had. His suspicions had been focused on some of the newer hands, not Duke. He felt his temper mounting. If that cowboy had played him...

  Clara avoided Trevor’s eyes, staring down at her hands instead as she nodded.

  It took her a moment but Gabby recalled what Clara had initially told them when they’d questioned her. She’d upheld Duke’s alibi that he had spent that morning with her.

  “So Duke really wasn’t with you?” Gabby pressed, trying to get the story straight.

  Clara was close to tears as she moved her head from side to side. “No, ma’am.”

  Trevor was through sitting on the sidelines, waiting for Gabby to work her way up to getting an answer out of a girl who looked as if she was afraid of her own shadow. “And where exactly was Duke, since he wasn’t with you?” he asked gruffly.

  Clara raised her head, her eyes all but pleading with him to understand why she’d done what she had. “I’m very, very sorry—” she began.

  “Where was he?” Trevor asked again, enunciating each word carefully as his face all but turned a bright shade of red.

  Incredibly nervous now, Clara hiccuped before answering. “He told me he was buying some drugs at the time—he’s got this awful pain in his back, you see, and he can’t get the doc to write him any more scripts for it, but he knows this man who knows this other man who can get them—”

  She sounded as if she were winding up for an incredibly long explanation now that she’d finally got started. Trevor held his hand up to get the maid to stop before she went off on the completely wrong track. “And that’s where he was during the time in question?” he demanded. “Buying drugs?”

  “Yes, sir.” Clara’s head bobbed up and down several times like an over-energized bobblehead stuck on the dashboard. “He was afraid you’d fire him if you found out—or worse, that you’d think he was lying about where he was.

  “But he swears he didn’t have anything to do with your baby being kidnapped, Mr. Trevor. He just has all this pain sometimes, and—” Her voice cracked as she looked frantically from one to the other, apologies flowing from her lips like water through a crack in the dam. “I’m sorry, Mr. Trevor, Ms. Gabby, really sorry. I didn’t want to lie to you. You’ve always been nothing but kind to me,” she said, addressing the words to Gabby. “It’s just that I didn’t want Duke to be fired—or arrested,” she added as the horrifying thought hit her. “Duke told me he was going to marry me just before this all happened. But he can’t marry me if he’s got no job.”

  Trevor was still chewing on the information he’d just learned, trying to come to grips with the idea that the kidnapper was someone he wouldn’t have suspected.

  Hell, he would have thought Mathilda Perkins capable of kidnapping his daughter before he would have laid the blame at Duke Johnson’s doorstep. The wrangler had been a hand on the ranch for a lot of years.

  A hell of a lot of years.

  As for being a good worker, Duke was fair to middling, and he was far from conscientious, but as far as he knew, the wrangler was honest.

  Duke really didn’t seem to be the stealing type.

  But almost anyone had his price. Apparently, the ransom he would have got had he taken the right child would have gone a long way to meeting Duke’s price—whatever that was.

  “Do you know where he is now?” Trevor demanded, his eyes all but trapping Clara.

  She’d gone from being nervous and uncomfortable to being terrified. “He’s supposed to be helping with the fences,” she said, stuttering through some of the words. “He told me he might not be around for a while. Fixing fences is an all-day job. Sometimes two.”

  Trevor nodded. The foremen could give him a more accurate account of where the ranch hand was currently supposed to be.

  If Duke believed himself to be safe, there was no reason to suppose he wasn’t exactly where he was supposed to be. At least for the time being.

  “Am I in trouble?” Clara asked, looking from him to Gabby and wringing her hands so hard it looked as though she were about to twist them off at the wrists. “I didn’t want to lie, really I didn’t, not to you. But I had no choice. I didn’t want Duke to lose his job. He’d have to leave this area if he couldn’t find work.”

  Or if he was arrested, Trevor couldn’t help thinking. “I’m not in charge of hiring or firing anyone,” he told her sternly. He felt sorry for her, but at the same time, he didn’t like being lied to. The woman had cost them precious time. Time that could still mean the difference between life and death for his daughter. “That’s not my department,” he bit off, then nodded in Gabby’s direction. “Ms. Colton’s got more to say about that sort of thing than I do.”

  “Am I going to be fired?” Clara turned her terrified eyes toward Gabby.

  “No, you’re not fired,” Gabby said. “But you should have told us the truth right away.”

  Clara gulped, relieved and yet still afraid. “I know, miss, and I’m sorry, really sorry. But—”

  Gabby held her hand up, determined to stop the flow of words before she drowned in them.

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “Believe me, I know,” she emphasized.

  Anything not to be subjected to the torrent of words again.

  Chapter 16

  “Nope, haven’t seen Duke. He’s supposed to be here, but...” the foreman, Gray Stark, shrugged his shoulders in response to Trevor’s question when the latter asked about Duke’s whereabouts.

  The foreman and Stewie Runyon, another wrangler, were both out on the range, working to mend a section of the fence that had sorely needed replacing since a particularly bad late-winter storm had hit it several months ago, chewing that length up rather badly.

  “He didn’t come out with us,” Runyon said, adding his voice to Stark’s. “This still about Faye’s murder?” he asked, no doubt curious as to what would bring the head of security and Colton’s youngest daughter out here just to talk to them.

  “Either one of you know where he is or where he could be?” Trevor asked, looking from Runyon back to Stark. He knew both men, liked both men as much as he was able to like anyone. He knew each to be a hard worker, though Runyon’s background was still somewhat in doubt. He’d just showed up one day, looking for work, promising to work hard. So far, he hadn’t broken his promise.

  As to the foreman, Stark had grown up on the ranch and was the son of the last foreman, working his way up and taking over when his father passed away suddenly. Of the two, Stark was the one with a concrete
alibi. He was performing as a bull rider at the rodeo and was in plain sight the entire time that the murder/kidnapping had taken place.

  In response to his last question, both shook their heads. Gabby noticed that Runyon avoided making eye contact as he disavowed any knowledge of the missing hand’s whereabouts.

  “If you had to make a guess,” Gabby said, speaking up and breaking her own promise to herself to let Trevor handle all the questioning, “where would you guess that he was?”

  “I don’t know, Ms. Colton,” Runyon murmured to the tips of his boots.

  “Just take a wild guess,” Gabby coaxed, doing her best to encourage the wrangler. “No points taken off if you’re wrong,” she added with a warm smile.

  The ranch hand scratched his dirty-blond hair. It was a toss-up whether he was thinking or just stalling for time before he came up with an answer.

  “Johnson likes to hang around that maid, Clara something-or-other,” he finally volunteered.

  They already knew that, Gabby thought, feeling somewhat frustrated. “Her last name’s Peterson,” she told Runyon matter-of-factly.

  “We’ve already talked to her,” Trevor added. “She’s the one who told us that he was supposed to be working out here.”

  “Supposed to be,” Stark repeated, adding emphasis to the first word. “Doesn’t mean that he would, though.” Because the boss’s daughter was there, the foreman appeared to bite back a few choice words of complaint. “He’s been acting pretty strange these last few days,” he told Trevor.

  “Exactly how many days?” Trevor asked.

  When Stark looked as if he was trying to understand exactly what Trevor was after, Gabby interrupted by saying, “Like, was it around the rodeo, before the rodeo, after the rodeo...”

  She let her voice trail off, waiting for the foreman to jump in and clarify his statement for them.

  “Before,” Stark answered without any sort of hesitation. “Definitely before.”

  “Okay.” Trevor nodded, accepting the foreman’s reply. “How long ‘before’?”

  By now, both the foreman and Runyon had temporarily abandoned any pretense of working on the fence and instead focused on this far-more-interesting pursuit. The two men exchanged looks, as if silently trying to arrive at an agreement.

  Runyon was the first to speak up. “I’d say maybe just before—say, a day.”

  But Stark shook his head. “It was more like two,” he contradicted.

  Runyon was silent for a moment, staring into the foreman’s eyes, as if checking out the man’s mindset. And then he relented.

  “Yeah, I guess it was like that. Closer to two,” the wrangler confirmed. He paused for a moment, as if debating.

  “You think Johnson had something to do with taking your baby?” he finally asked.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Gabby replied, stepping in when Trevor appeared to be preoccupied with maintaining his silence, leaving the question unanswered.

  “That means he would have had to have killed Ms. Faye,” Runyon realized, startled by the connection he’d just made. “He wouldn’t have done that,” he declared with feeling. “Duke liked her,” he stressed, then added, “We all did.”

  “Well, somebody sure didn’t,” Trevor reminded the two men grimly. He looked from one to the other and saw that both had told him all they knew—or at least all they thought they knew. “You boys think of anything else, you know how to reach me,” he told them. Then, looking at Gabby, he said, “Let’s go.”

  Gabby fell into step without a word. It was only once they had left the two wranglers to get back to their work did she ask, “Where are we going?” She lengthened her stride to keep up with Trevor as they returned to where he’d left his truck.

  The way he saw it, since they were still trying to locate Johnson, there was only one logical answer to her question. “Back to the house to talk to that girlfriend of his again.”

  When they’d questioned Clara, she’d been fairly certain that the maid had told them all she knew. That didn’t seem to be the case anymore. “You think she’s holding something back?” Gabby asked him.

  Trevor answered her honestly rather than just putting her off. “Dunno. But I intend to find out.” And then he did something out of character. He shared something with Gabby rather than just keeping it to himself the way he usually did. “I’ve got a feeling about Duke,” he told her just as they reached his truck.

  “A bad feeling?” she asked, watching his expression as she got into the truck.

  Trevor slid in behind the steering wheel before answering. “Let’s just call it a gut feeling,” he countered, recalling that she’d said she thought people in his line of work tended to have them.

  Thinking back to when he’d initially questioned Johnson, he realized that the man’s answers had been too pat, as though he’d practiced them first before he’d said them out loud.

  At the time he hadn’t paid much attention to that, since he’d known the man for more than five years. Now that he thought about it, he knew he should have gone along with the old cliché about trusting no one.

  Especially since that was the usual way that he proceeded.

  “You think Duke did it, don’t you?” Gabby pressed, breaking the silence as Trevor pushed his truck, driving back to the house.

  He never liked pinning himself down until he was absolutely sure about taking the course of action that he did. So he left his reply deliberately vague.

  “I think that Johnson’s involved somehow” was all he was willing to commit himself to.

  Gabby sighed, reading between the lines. Why wouldn’t Trevor just come out and say he suspected Johnson? It wasn’t as if they were on opposite sides of a bet.

  “You know,” she pointed out, “there’s no penalty payment if you’re wrong.”

  “You’re wrong there,” he told her quietly, never taking his eyes off the road, despite the fact that the odds of seeing another vehicle were rather small.

  She didn’t quite understand what he was saying. “How do you figure that?”

  He spelled it out for her. “If I’m wrong, if I wind up spinning my wheels by going in the wrong direction, I might wind up being too late. Avery might wind up paying the ultimate price,” he added grimly.

  For just a moment, Gabby could feel her heart constricting in her chest. But, battling that, once again she forced herself to think only positive thoughts. Negative ones sapped her strength and did nothing to help the situation a single bit. If anything, negative thoughts actually hindered it.

  “We’re going to find her,” she told Trevor with a fierceness he would have found convincing if he weren’t such a lifelong pessimist.

  But rather than agree with her, he said the only thing he could have, given the situation. “I hope you’re right, Gabriella.”

  “I am,” she replied with a quiet conviction he found himself envying.

  What made someone like Gabby the way she was? Granted, she was better off than most with no need to worry about mundane issues like paying off overdue bills, but she had an overbearing, womanizing father in the picture to balance everything out and to remind her that no matter who she was, there were dues to pay.

  In an absolute sense, he supposed that, given everything, he was better off than she was.

  Trevor parked his truck toward the rear of the house. It was closer to the wing that he and the other staff members who lived on the premises occupied.

  As he got out, his attention was entirely focused on finding Clara and grilling the young woman. He hoped there was something she’d unintentionally omitted that just might help them find Johnson. He had a hunch that Johnson was the key to both the murder and his daughter’s kidnapping.

  The thought that the wrangler had panicked and taken off was something he didn’t want to contemplate just yet, since if he had, finding Avery was going to become more difficult by at least a hundredfold.

  One step at a time, he reminded himself. A man can
take only one step at a time.

  “Soon as I talk to that girl, I’ve got a feeling we’ll be taking off again,” he said to Gabby, “so you can stay in the truck if you want.”

  But she had already got out of the truck. “The hell I will,” she informed him defiantly. She was not about to just sit around, twiddling her thumbs, waiting for him to find the next clue. “Besides, you need me with you when you talk to Clara,” she pointed out, adding, “You scare her.”

  The barest hint of a smile creased his lips. “I don’t scare you,” he noted.

  He had, in the beginning, but she’d got past that, and besides, there was no way she was going to admit that to him, at least, not for a long time.

  “We Colton women are a heartier bree—”

  Gabby didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence as a sound that resembled a car backfiring pierced the air. The next second, it became clear that what she’d heard was actually a gun being fired. The realization occurred at the same time that she’d felt something close to her cheek. A fly? God forbid it was a moth.

  She automatically touched her face just as Trevor came flying across the front hood of the truck and literally tackled her. Her head would have hit the ground if he hadn’t been as fast as he was, cradling the back of her head as she went down under him.

  The air was knocked out of her lungs, and it took her more than a minute to finally be able to speak. “What are yo—?”

  “Quiet!” Trevor ordered, straining to hear any telltale noises coming from the surrounding area. His body might have been on top of hers, but his attention was completely focused on locating the source of the gunfire. He concluded in a matter of seconds that the shot had come from somewhere in the house.

  That left him a hell of a lot of territory to cover and a wealth of people to hold suspect.

  His service revolver drawn, Trevor was ready to return fire if it came to that. But beyond the single shot, no more bullets were fired.

  “You all right?” he finally asked, sparing her a quick glance before scanning the immediate area again.

  “Having a little trouble breathing right now,” she told him. And she was. It was hard drawing air in with what amounted to having a lead weight on her body.