The Colton Ransom Read online

  As for his pale coloring, that had been apparent for a while now, Trevor realized. The man had been spending a good deal of time indoors lately. Not that it mattered right now one way or another.

  “When the call does come in,” the chief was saying to the hard-nosed patriarch, “I think that you should be the one to answer the phone—”

  “Why?” Jethro asked sharply, interrupting the chief’s instructions.

  Because it was Jethro Colton, Drucker knew that he had to put up with the rude behavior. No one flourished in Dead River if they locked horns with the old man. So the police chief did his best to answer as if they were just involved in a casual conversation rather than something that could very well affect a little girl’s life.

  “Because the kidnappers will want to talk to the head of the household since they think they have your granddaughter,” the chief carefully enunciated, taking care not to say anything to offend the man.

  If possible, Jethro’s scowl grew even deeper. “But they don’t have my granddaughter,” the man said with an incredibly icy finality that Gabby found herself instantly disliking.

  The point wasn’t whether or not they had Cheyenne; the point was that they had a three-month-old infant that they thought was his granddaughter. An infant who needed rescuing.

  “Well, they don’t know that,” Drucker reminded the scowling patriarch of the Colton family. “So when they ask for a ransom—”

  Again, Jethro interrupted, this time with an even more detached voice than he’d used previously. “They can ask all they want—I’m not giving them one thin dime and I’m telling them so.”

  “Dad!” Gabby cried, horrified. It was one thing to speculate that he wouldn’t offer a ransom; it was another to actually hear him say as much. “You can’t say that to the kidnappers.”

  Jethro turned to glare at his youngest child. He hated being opposed, especially in front of others. He especially hated being opposed by one of his family. This was common knowledge.

  “The hell I can’t,” he barked. “They’re calling to get money for the kid they took, and it’s not my granddaughter so it doesn’t concern me. Case closed!”

  “It is not case closed,” she argued heatedly. How could the father she loved be so horribly unfeeling? “It’s not your granddaughter, but it’s still an innocent infant.”

  Jethro shrugged, his shoulders rising and falling like so many loose bones. “Lots of kids get snatched every day of the week.” He pinned her with a look that’d had strong men quaking in their boots. “You sayin’ you expect me to buy them all back?” he demanded, his voice thundering.

  “We’re not talking about ‘lots of kids,’” Gabby pointed out, her heart all but freezing in her chest at this display of indifference from her father. “We’re talking about a single, specific infant who belongs to one of our own,” she stressed.

  Jethro’s small eyes grew even smaller as he glared at his youngest child who dared to challenge him this way. “Are you feeble-minded, girl?” he demanded. “These people aren’t ‘one of our own,’” he insisted. “They’re the hired help and they know that. I’m their boss, not their parent. If they do a good job, I pay them for it. If they don’t, they’re fired. It’s just that simple, just that cut-and-dried,” he informed her.

  Gabby was acutely aware of the way the remaining staff was looking at one another and could almost hear their thoughts. This was building a great deal of ill will and animosity with the people who were such an integral part of their everyday lives.

  She fervently wished she and her father were having this discussion in private, but it was too late for that. Still, she tried to maneuver him somewhere where she could speak to him without having every word overheard. This situation was already bad enough without adding hard feelings to it—not to mention that she wasn’t about to see anything happen to Avery because her father wouldn’t come up with the ransom money.

  “Dad, could I talk to you in private, please?” she requested, nodding over toward a more isolated section of the foyer.

  But Jethro remained sitting exactly where he was and gave no indication that he was about to budge so much as an inch. “Out here or somewhere ‘private,’” he told her in a no-nonsense voice, “my answer’s gonna be the same. I’m not paying any ransom.”

  For a split second, Gabby’s eyes darted over toward Trevor. She ached for what he had to be going through right now, what he had to be feeling and thinking at this very moment after hearing her father flatly refusing to step up.

  Her father undoubtedly thought that since they were in the midst of the staff this way, that she would just back off. And maybe she would have—if it hadn’t involved the life of a child.

  Drawing her shoulders back as if bracing herself against a physical confrontation, Gabby informed her father, “Okay, you don’t have to touch a dime of your money. I’ll use mine—”

  Temper flashed in Jethro’s eyes. “No, you won’t,” he told her.

  Ordinarily, she would have listened and that would have been the end of it—but not this time. “It’s my money and I can do whatever I want with it.”

  “Correction, it’s not your money until your thirtieth birthday,” he reminded her coldly. “Until then, I have control over it and you’re not touching any of it without my say-so, girl.” His tone left absolutely no room for argument on her part.

  But Gabby was completely incensed at her father’s callousness and lack of empathy. It made her wonder if he would have been willing to part with any money if it had been Cheyenne who’d been kidnapped.

  “You can’t do that,” she cried.

  Veins were beginning to pop out along his neck and throat. Had he been a dragon, she had no doubt he would have easily been breathing fire by now. It wasn’t easy holding her ground, but she did.

  “Don’t you be telling me what I can and can’t do,” Jethro shouted at her. “Just who the hell do you think you’re dealing with here, girl?”

  “A heartless shell of a man,” Gabby shouted back before she could think it through and attempt to stop herself.

  At that point, clutching on to the armrests, her father pushed himself up from his chair, his complexion a bright, angry red. He suddenly appeared exceedingly frail to her.

  “Now you listen to me—” he began, shouting over what she was saying.

  Gabby started to out-shout him when her father suddenly made a strange, unintelligible sound, and then, with an utterly surprised and bewildered look on his face, he suddenly clutched at his chest.

  The next moment, he went down in a crumpled heap just as his eyes rolled back in his head.

  One spasmodic, jerky motion that involved his entire body and then he went entirely still. Jethro was unconscious.

  The chief, who had just moved to position himself between the two participants of the shouting match that was going on, was closest to Jethro. Consequently, the law-enforcement officer made an attempt to grab the senior Colton before Jethro hit the floor.

  But the chief missed. The man muttered a few choice words under his breath as he saw Jethro make contact with the tile.

  Standing on the sidelines and looking on, Trevor was convinced it was all an act on his boss’s part to shift attention from the argument over money as well as terminate it. A side effect of this would be garnering sympathy for himself as well.

  But a closer look at the man on the floor told Trevor that this wasn’t an act. Colton was out, cold.

  Had the ornery old coot suffered a heart attack or a possible stroke?

  In any event, the man obviously needed help. Swallowing an oath, Trevor pushed his way through the ring of Colton daughters as well as the chief. Placing two tentative fingers to the side of the old man’s neck, Trevor was the first to ascertain that Jethro was still among the living.

  “He’s still breathing,” he told Gabby. “Call the doctor,” he instructed, leaving it up to someone else to decide just who was going to call for medical aid for the old man.
/>   “Get him over to the sofa,” Amanda instructed. As a vet, she had enough of a background in medical training to be able to render interim service while they waited for another doctor to arrive.

  Though he loathed even to touch the heartless old man again, Trevor put his feelings aside and began to lift Jethro from the floor. Drucker stepped in to help carry the load, but Trevor put him off.

  “I got this,” he said in a voice that made the chief instantly back away.

  The chief was overweight and utterly out of shape. All they needed, Trevor couldn’t help thinking, was two possible heart attacks, back-to-back. That would really mess them up.

  Gabby was already on the phone, calling the doctor as Trevor carried her father to the oversize sofa that faced the fireplace. She rattled off the details quickly, then hung up.

  “Is he coming?” Amanda asked the second Gabby was off the phone.

  “I don’t know,” Gabby told her honestly. “I left a message on his answering machine,” she explained when she saw the look of impatient confusion on her older sister’s face.

  Amanda merely nodded, taking her father’s pulse and doing what she could to make him as comfortable as possible even though the man was still unconscious.

  Gabby was worried, upset, both over her father’s sudden passing out the way he had and over his stubborn refusal to provide the money to ransom Trevor’s daughter once the call came through.

  Because of that, Gabby didn’t immediately pick up on the whispered conversations. But after a beat, while Amanda worked and Trevor stood over her father, she became aware of the disgruntled fragments of conversations going on all around her.

  Her father had managed to alienate his entire staff by his refusal to help and his blunt dismissal of the plight of one of the “help,” as he viewed everyone who was not directly related to him by blood or by intentional design, such as his ex-wife and her two parasitic children.

  It didn’t help matters any to have Darla come rushing over, making an almost comical show of being distraught.

  She was wringing her hands as she cried, “Is he dead? Is Jethro dead? Oh, I told him to take better care of himself, but he just wouldn’t listen and now just look! He’s—”

  “Not dead,” Amanda informed the insufferable drama queen very calmly, doing what she could to hide the absolute disdain she had for the woman who had been their mother for exactly a year before her father finally came to his senses. Her tone was cold as she told the other woman, “Don’t go dancing on his grave just yet, Darla. He’s not ready to be buried.”

  Clutching her drink—was that Darla’s second or her third? Gabby couldn’t help wondering—the woman peered at Jethro’s unconscious, almost bloodless face and asked, “Are you sure?”

  Gabby took a firm hold of the woman’s shoulders and deliberately moved her aside. “She’s sure,” she assured the other woman.

  Viewed by all as a kind, loving person who saw only the good, redeeming qualities in most people, there was still not a drop of affection in her voice as she addressed her former stepmother.

  With a huff, the other woman shrugged off Gabby’s hands, turned on her heel and marched away.

  Darla was out of Gabby’s thoughts the second the woman was out of her line of vision. Right now, Gabby had far more important things to think about.

  Chapter 8

  Gabby felt as if she could hardly catch her breath today. It seemed as though it was just one thing after another and it was hard to say which was really the worst of it.

  A murder, a kidnapping and then her father collapsing in the middle of a tirade was practically too much to handle. She was afraid that anything more—large or small—would send her careening over the edge.

  But the problems insisted on continuing.

  Barely an hour after her father had been taken to the nearest hospital by ambulance, one of the maids, Gemma Harrigan, sought her out for a private word. The tall, angular young brunette was carrying a suitcase.

  “Are you going somewhere?” Gabby asked the woman. As far as she knew, Gemma hadn’t applied for a vacation or any sort of leave of absence.

  “Yes, I am,” Gemma informed her, choosing her words as if she were picking her way through a live minefield. “I’m going away.”

  “Gemma,” Gabby began, thinking that Faye’s murder was what was frightening the long-time employee into a hasty departure.

  But Gemma was quick to interrupt. “I’m sorry, Ms. Gabby, but I have to go. I know times are hard and I might regret this down the line, but I have to hand in my resignation.”

  “Your resignation?” Gabby repeated, stunned. This was worse than she’d thought.

  “Yes, and I wanted you to know why, Ms. Gabby.” The maid took a long breath, trying to fortify herself for what she had to say. “While I feel very close to you and your sisters,” she began, offering a small, fleeting smile as she looked at Gabby, “in all good conscience I just cannot continue working for a man like your father. I cannot work for a man who had no sense of loyalty toward the people who work for him—and I’m not the only one who feels this way,” the older woman warned Gabby.

  Did that mean that more people would be quitting? Oh, God, she hoped not. All Gabby could think of at this moment was that she wasn’t up to this.

  Torn, Gabby felt tugged in half a dozen different directions at the same time. While she was still angry with her father, her concern over his health outweighed her outrage at his staunch refusal to help save Trevor’s daughter. She wanted to be at the hospital with her father despite the fact that her two sisters had gone with him. But a part of her felt that someone had to remain at Dead River to hold down the fort in case anything else happened.

  And then, of course, there was a large part of her that wanted to help Trevor find his daughter despite the fact that he had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want or welcome her help.

  Since she was still here with the maid, Gabby did her best to talk the woman out of leaving, but it was like attempting to reason with someone who didn’t understand the language she was using—none of her words were registering.

  “Gemma, my father really didn’t mean what he said. He’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Gabby told the woman, mentally crossing her fingers because she was making it up as she went along.

  As far as she knew, there was nothing to say that her father wasn’t dealing with a great deal of stress—why else would he have suddenly collapsed that way? But she had nothing else to base her theory on except for her gut instincts.

  Still, she could understand why Gemma felt the way she did. Her father could be a very cantankerous old man when he wanted to be. She loved him, and in his own way, she knew he loved her and her sisters, but it was hard at times to hold on to that thought, especially when he could flatly turn her down the way he just had today.

  Gemma wasn’t about to be talked out of leaving, no matter what was said to her. The woman looked at her knowingly.

  “Oh, he meant it, all right, Ms. Gabby. Mr. Jethro always made it very clear that the lines were sharply drawn between us. He was the boss and we were just the ‘hired help.’ Interchangeable parts with no faces, no names, no individual backgrounds that differentiated one staff member from the other. And, for the most part,” Gemma went on, shrugging her wide shoulders, “I guess that’s okay. But when Mr. Jethro acts as if it doesn’t matter that he could easily save the life of an innocent child by parting with some of that money he’s been amassing for such a long time—more money than any one man could possibly use up in a lifetime—well, that makes it time to move on, in my book.”

  Gemma offered her a sad smile. “I’m really sorry, Ms. Gabby. You’ve always been a real pleasure to work with, even more than your sisters. I hope you can find that baby—I truly do,” she said by way of a parting last comment.

  Oh, me, too, Gemma. Me, too, Gabby thought as she watched the other woman pick up her suitcase and then leave.

  The moment Gemma was gon
e, Gabby wove her way back to the main wing of the house, feeling more than a little overwhelmed.

  Well, that had certainly not gone well. She prayed that there weren’t going to be others opting to leave. She needed everyone to remain on board and go about their assigned business. She had no time to try to find replacements. Not when everything was being turned upside down.

  As she walked, she took out her cell phone and placed a call to Amanda.

  The moment she heard her sister’s voice on the other end of the line, she asked, “How is he?”

  “Gabby?” It was more of a confirmation than a guess on Amanda’s part. She went on to answer her sister’s question. “Dad’s still unconscious. They’re running tests on him right now, but no one’s saying anything yet. Where are you?”

  “I’m still at the house.”

  “Still at the house?” Amanda echoed. “I thought you said you were right behind us.”

  “I got sidetracked.” Feeling as if her very nerves were being pulled as taut as possible, Gabby dragged her hand through her hair, trying to pull herself together. “I just spent the last half hour trying to talk one of the maids, Gemma Harrigan, from quitting.”

  “Judging by your tone,” Amanda concluded, “you didn’t succeed.”

  Gabby blew out a breath. “No, I didn’t. Dad created a lot of ill will when he said he refused to release any money—his or mine—to ransom Avery.”

  “I know. It’s not like he can take any of it with him, and there’s certainly more than enough there to spare for something like this.” Amanda sounded as disappointed in their father as she was, Gabby thought. Her sister’s next words confirmed her hunch. “Makes me wonder if he would have taken the same stand if the kidnapper had succeeded in getting Cheyenne.”

  Gabby tried to reassure her sister—for both their sakes. “It’s different with Cheyenne.”

  Amanda didn’t sound all that sure. “Is it?” she questioned.

  “Yes.” Gabby had to believe that, had to believe that underneath, despite the gruffness, her father had a decent heart in there somewhere. He just got in his own way. “She’s his blood. In any case, Cheyenne is safe and sound, so there’s no sense in dwelling on what might have happened,” she cautioned her sister. “Listen, I’ll be at the hospital as soon as I can,” she promised.