Dark Horse

“She accompanies her husband most of the time. You can tell Patty doesn’t like him visiting his ex-wife,” Tess said. Nikki got the impression that Patricia McGraw also didn’t like being called Patty.

“She won’t even step into Marianne’s room,” the nurse’s aide was saying between puffs. “Not that I blame her, but instead she stands in the hallway and watches them like a hawk. Imagine being jealous of that poor woman in that room.”

“I also heard that Travers McGraw himself might have been involved,” Nikki threw out.

Tess shook her head emphatically. “No way. Mr. McGraw is the nicest, kindest man. He would never hurt a fly, let alone his own children.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially even though they were alone at the back of the hospital and there was only open country behind them. “He hardly ever leaves the ranch except to come here to see his now ex-wife—that is until recently. I heard he’s not feeling well.”

Nikki had heard the same thing. Maybe that was why he’d agreed to let her interview him and his family for the book.

When Nikki had first approached him, she had expected him to turn her down in a letter. The fact that she’d made a name for herself after solving the murders in so many of her books had helped, she was sure.

“You seem to have a talent for finding out the truth,” Travers McGraw had said when he’d called her out of the blue. He’d been one of just three people she’d contacted about interviews and a book, but he’d been the one she wanted badly.

That was one reason she’d tried not to sound too eager when she’d talked to him. McGraw hadn’t done any interviews other than the local press—not since a reporter had broken into his house and scared his family half to death.

“I work at finding the truth,” she’d told him, surprised how nervous she was just to hear his voice.

“And you think you can find out the truth in our...case?”

“I want to.” More than he could possibly know. “But I should warn you up front, I need access to everyone involved. It would require me basically moving in for a while. Are you sure you’re agreeable to that?”

She’d held her breath. Long ago she’d found that making demands made her come off as more professional. It also shifted the power structure. She wasn’t begging to do their story. She was doing them a favor.

The long silence on the other end of the line had made her close her eyes, tightening her hand around the phone. She had wanted this so badly. Probably too badly. Maybe she should have—

“When are you thinking of coming here?” Travers McGraw asked.

Her heart had been beating so hard she could barely speak. “I’m finishing up a project now.”

“You do realize it’s been twenty-five years?”

Not quite. She’d still had two weeks before the actual date that the two babies had been stolen out of the nursery and never seen again. She wanted to be in the house on anniversary night.

“I can be there in a week.” She’d crossed her fingers even though she’d never been superstitious.

“I’ll take care of everything. Will you be flying to Billings? I can have one of my sons—”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll be driving.” Though she was anxious to meet his sons. But the only other way, besides driving to Whitehorse, was to take the train that came right through town.

“I hope you can work your magic for us,” McGraw said. “If there is anything I can do to help...”

“We’ll talk when I get there. It would be best if no one knew I was coming. I’m sure in a small town like Whitehorse, word will get out soon enough.”

“Yes, of course.”

She’d left a few days before she’d told him she would be arriving. She’d wanted to see Marianne McGraw and get a feel for Whitehorse before she went out to the ranch. Once word got out about her, she would lose her anonymity.

Tess put out her cigarette in the dirt.

“If Travers McGraw is so devoted to the mother of his children, then why did he marry the nanny not long after his divorce?” Nikki asked, hoping to get more out of Tess before she went back inside.

“It was nine years after the kidnapping. I heard Patty showed up with a baby in her arms and a sob story. He’s a nice man so I guess he was taken in by it.” Tess definitely didn’t like Patricia McGraw.

“A baby? Was it his?”

Again Tess shook her head stubbornly. “He adored his wife Marianne. He still does. Who knows whose baby Patty brought back with her.”

“So what are the chances that nanny Patty had something to do with the kidnapping?”

Tess raised an eyebrow as she looked anxiously toward the back door of the hospital. “She got the husband, didn’t she? Everyone says she married him for his money since there’s a pretty big difference in their ages and she wouldn’t have wanted Marianne’s babies to raise. She has her hands full with her own child. Talk about a spoiled brat.”

Nikki wondered what had brought the nanny back to the ranch after almost ten years. What if Patty Owens knew something about the kidnapping and Travers McGraw had married her to keep her quiet? But then why wait all those years?

“It certainly does make you wonder, huh,” Tess said as she reached for the hospital keys. But she hesitated before she opened the door. “Something horrible had to have happened that night to turn her hair white. Something so horrible she can’t speak.”

“Something other than having her babies kidnapped?” Nikki asked.

Tess shuddered. “I try not to think about it. But if she was in love with the horse trainer...” She leaned toward Nikki and said conspiratorially, “What if she killed the babies before she dropped them out the window?”

Nikki felt a chill race through her. That was something she’d never considered. From what she’d read about the case, it was believed that someone—Marianne, according to the prosecutor—had given the babies cough syrup containing codeine so they would be quiet. Maybe she’d given them too much.

Her head ached. She’d thought of little else but this case since she’d stumbled across the old newspaper clippings in her mother’s trunk and learned about her father, Nate Corwin—and the McGraw kidnapping.

At first she hadn’t understood why her mother would have kept the stories. That was until she recognized the man in the photograph. The photo of him had been taken on the day Nate Corwin was convicted.

“I always wondered why if you loved my father, you didn’t keep the Corwin name since you were legally married, right?” she’d asked her mother, and had seen horror cross her features.

“Why would you ask—” Her mother had never remarried but had gone back to her maiden name, St. James.

“You told me my father died.”

“He did die.”

“You just failed to mention he died on the way to prison for kidnapping and murder.”

“He didn’t do it. He swore he didn’t do it,” her mother had cried. She was convinced that her husband hadn’t been involved with Marianne McGraw nor had anything to do with the kidnapping, let alone the double murder of two innocent babies.

But someone had. And if not her father, then someone had let him be convicted and die for a crime he hadn’t committed.

Nikki was determined to get to the truth no matter what it took. She had just short of a week before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the kidnapping to get the real story. Travers desperately wanted her to do the book. It was the family she was worried about.

She’d been thinking about how to get close to at least one of the sons before she headed for Sundown Stallion Station and met the rest of the McGraws.

If there was one thing she believed it was that the people in that house had more information than they’d given the sheriff twenty-five years ago. They just might not realize the importance of what they’d seen or heard. Or they had their reasons for keeping it to themselves.

“So how did you get into writing crime books?” the nurse’s aide asked as if putting off going back down that long hallway by herself.

“It’s in my blood,” Nikki said. “My grandfather was a Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper reporter. From as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be just like him.”

“He must be proud of you,” Tess said almost wistfully.

Nikki nodded distractedly. Proving herself to her grandfather was another reason she would do whatever it took to get the real kidnapping story—or die trying.

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.”

She’d always assumed that was true. Nothing stopped her grandfather from getting what he wanted. He’d go to any extreme to get a story and later to run the newspaper he bought, even if it meant risking his life or his business. But then again, that was one of the reasons Nikki suspected her grandmother had left him to marry another man. Not that her grandfather had seemed to notice. Or maybe he hid his pain well.

Ledger McGraw was in pain and it couldn’t help but touch her heart. Nikki knew her grandfather would encourage her to use this new information to her advantage.

“Keep your eye on the goal,” he’d always said. “The goal is getting the best story you possibly can. You aren’t there to try to make things better or bond with these people.”

That had sounded cold to her.

“It’s all about emotional distance. Pretend you’re a fly on the wall,” he’d said. “A fly that sometimes has to buzz around and get things going if you hope to get anything worth writing about.”

Nikki now felt anxious. She had to make her move today. Ledger would be finishing his breakfast soon. She couldn’t put this off any longer. Just as she decided it was time, she saw Ledger grab the redhead’s wrist as she started to step past his table.

Nikki saw those too shallowly buried emotions arc between them as the waitress reacted to whatever he was saying to her. The waitress jerked free of his hold and looked as if she might cry. But Nikki’s gaze was on Ledger’s face. His pain was so naked that she couldn’t help feeling it at heart level.

Ledger McGraw was incredibly young, his protectiveness for this woman touching. He’s still a boy, Nikki thought, and felt guilty for what she was about to do.

* * *

LEDGER IMMEDIATELY REGRETTED grabbing Abby’s wrist. Without looking at her, he said, “He’s hurt you again.”

“Don’t, Ledger.”

As she jerked free of his hold, he raised his gaze to meet hers again. “Abby.” The word came out a plea. “Any man who would hurt you—”

“Stay out of it, please,” she whispered, tears in her eyes. “Please.” Her lowered voice cracked with emotion. “You don’t understand.”

He shook his head. He understood only too well. “A man who hurts you doesn’t love you.”

Her throat worked as she hastily brushed at her tears. “You don’t know anything about it,” she snapped before rushing toward the kitchen and away from him. “He just grabbed my wrist too hard. It’s nothing.”

He swore under his breath, realizing he didn’t know anything about it. He’d never understood what she saw in Wade Pierce. He especially didn’t understand why Abby stayed with the man.

Ledger finished what he could eat of his breakfast. Digging out the cost of his meal and tip from his jeans’ pocket, he dropped the money on the table, grabbed his hat and left.

Once outside, he stopped in the bright sunlight as he tried to control the emotions roiling inside him. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the bruises, even though Abby had done her best to hide them. The bastard was mistreating her—he was sure of it.

He wanted to kill Wade with his bare hands. It was all he could do not to drive over to the feedlot and call the man out. But he knew that the only thing that would accomplish was more pain for Abby.

When was she going to see Wade for what he really was—a bully and a blowhard and... With a curse, he realized that Abby might never come to her senses. She was convinced he couldn’t live without her.

“Ledger?”

He turned at the sound of a woman’s voice.

Marta, the other waitress and a friend of Abby’s, held out the newspaper to him. “You forgot this,” she said, sympathy in her expression.

That was the trouble with a small town. Everyone knew your business, including watching your heart break. He hadn’t looked at the newspaper, wasn’t sure he wanted to. He hadn’t been thinking when the publisher had cornered him.

He took the paper from Marta and mumbled, “Thanks,” before the door closed. Gripping the newsprint, he turned toward his ranch pickup. He felt light-headed with fury and frustration and that constant ache in his heart. Not to mention he was worried about what would happen when the rest of the family saw the story in the paper.

And yet, all he could think about was driving over to the feedlot and dragging Wade out and kicking his butt all the way from Whitehorse to the North Dakota border.

But even as he thought it, he knew he was to blame for this. He’d let Abby get away. He’d practically propelled her into Wade’s arms. He hadn’t been ready for marriage. As much as he loved her, he’d wanted to wait until he had the money for a place of his own. He couldn’t bring Abby into the house at Sundown Stallion Station. He could barely stand living on the ranch himself. He’d told himself he couldn’t do that to her. Then Wade had come along, seeming to offer everything Ledger couldn’t.

Head down, he was almost to his pickup when he heard someone call his name.

* * *

THE COWBOY WHO got out of the second Sundown Stallion Station pickup made Nikki catch her breath. She’d seen photos of Cull McGraw, usually candid paparazzi shots over the years, but none of them captured the raw power of the man in person.

From his broad shoulders to the long denim-clad legs now striding toward his brother, he looked like a man to be reckoned with. The one thing he had in common with all the photos she’d ever seen of him was the scowl.

“Ledger!” Cull looked like he wanted to tear up the pavement as he closed in on his brother. “Have you seen this?” he demanded, waving what appeared to be a newspaper clutched in his big fist.

Ledger stared at him as if confused, as if he was still thinking of the waitress back in the café. Clearly, he hadn’t bothered to look at the newspaper he was now gripping in his own hand.

“Why in the hell did you talk to the press? Not to mention, why you didn’t tell me that Dad had raised the reward. Again!” Cull slapped the paper against his muscular thigh. “Patricia is going to lose her mind over this. All hell is going to break loose.”

“We probably shouldn’t talk about this out here,” she heard Ledger say. “Enough of our lives is open to public consumption, don’t you think?”

Cull swore and looked toward the café. Two waitresses stood looking out the large plate-glass window along with several patrons.

“Fine. We’ll take this up at home,” Cull said through gritted teeth as he turned on his boot heel and headed back toward his pickup.

With an expression of resignation, Ledger turned toward the café window. The redheaded waitress was no longer at the window. He stood for a moment, looking as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders before he headed for his truck and climbed behind the wheel. The engine revved and he roared past, sending up dust from Whitehorse’s main street.

Nikki shifted her gaze to Cull, realizing her plan had just taken a turn she hadn’t expected. She hesitated, no longer sure.

Cull had reached his truck, but hadn’t gotten in. He was watching Ledger leave, still looking angry.

If Cull was this upset about the article in the newspaper and new reward, wait until he found out that she would be doing a book about the family and the kidnapping case.

She almost changed her mind about the truly dangerous part of her plan. Almost.

* * *

JERKING THE DOOR of his pickup open, Cull climbed in, angry with himself for coming here this morning to confront his brother. He should have waited, but he’d been so angry with his brother... He knew Ledger hadn’t meant any harm.

Tossing the newspaper on the pickup seat, he reached for the key in the ignition. Like most people in Whitehorse, he’d left his keys in his rig while he’d confronted his brother. Had it been winter instead of a warm spring day, he would have left the truck running so it would be warm when he came back.

The newspaper fell open to the front-page story. A bold two-deck headline ran across the top of the page. Twenty-Five Years After Kidnapping: Where Are the McGraw Twins?

The damned anniversary of the kidnapping was something he dreaded, he thought with a shake of his head. Like clockwork, the paper did a story, longer ones on some years like this one. He hadn’t seen anything but the first few quotes, one from his brother Ledger and the other from their father, when he’d grabbed up the paper and headed for his truck.

It was just like the publisher to talk to Ledger. His brother was too nice, too polite. If the publisher had approached him, the man would have gotten one hell of a quote. Instead, Ledger had said that the loss of the twins was “killing” his father after twenty-five years of torture.

How could their father still be convinced that Oakley and Jesse Rose were alive? Travers McGraw had this crazy fantasy that the twins had been sold to a couple who, not realizing the babies were stolen, had raised them as their own.

Cull and his brothers had tried to reason with him. “How could this couple not have heard about the kidnapping? It was in all the newspapers across the country—not to mention on the television news nationally.”

His father had no answer, just that he knew the twins were alive and that they would be coming home one day soon.