Missing

“Why do you say that?” Megan shot him a puzzled glance. “Flying W cattle are in huge demand.”

“Even so, the cattle operation barely breaks even,” Liam said flatly.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. And with the threat of mad cow disease cutting into semen exports, the ranch is soaking up money. With a halfway competent divorce lawyer, Dad could have divvied up their assets so that Mom was left without a penny to run the cattle operation. Maybe she kept quiet and pretended not to know anything about his other wife so that she wouldn’t be forced to watch the ranch fall back into wilderness.”

Her mother loved the Flying W enough that she might have stayed in an unhappy marriage to protect the land, Megan conceded silently. But in a marriage where she knew her husband was married to another woman?

She shook her head, vehement in the strength of her denial. “Mom is way too honest to live in that sort of a sham marriage. She’d never condone bigamy, not for a moment, let alone for almost thirty years. I’m sure Mom had no clue. When Harry and I told her about Dad’s wife in Chicago, she was devastated. It took her a good fifteen minutes to get any of her protective barriers back in place even though the sheriff was with us and she clearly hated breaking down in front of him. She didn’t know Dad had another wife and daughter. I’d stake my life on it.”

Liam still looked doubtful. “I would never have believed a man could pull off that sort of deception without complicity from one wife or the other,” he said.

Megan thought for a moment. “Maybe the wife and daughter in Chicago knew.”

“Maybe. Although the same question applies. Why would they tolerate it?”

“I can’t imagine. But then, we don’t know the first thing about them, so we can’t possibly guess at their motives.”

“The bottom line is that like any other scam artist, Dad exploited the fact that we trusted him.” The bitterness was back in Liam’s voice. “I dare say he exploited the same thing with his other family.”

Megan looked at her brother. “Was that a random question you asked just now, or is there some specific reason why you thought Mom might have known about Dad’s bigamy?”

Liam remained silent a moment longer. “I knew,” he said at last. “I figured she must have known, too.”

“You knew?” Megan gripped the porch railing to steady herself. “You knew that Dad was a bigamist?” Her mouth was so dry that the words seemed to stick to her tongue. She felt betrayed all over again, first by her father and now by her brother. The betrayals were so huge that they annihilated all that was familiar, leaving her without signposts to guide her through the landscape of what had once been her relationship with her family.

“Yeah.” Liam gave a terse nod. “I’ve known for a few years.”

Megan’s world shattered and re-formed in a different pattern. So many things that had been difficult to understand about her brother suddenly became clear. His decision to leave the practice of criminal law and open his own firm specializing in divorce took on a whole new meaning. Talk about an in-your-face insult hurled at their father! And no wonder Liam had barely visited the ranch over the past few years. Obviously, he had been doing his best to avoid contact with his parents.

“How did you find out about Dad’s other family?” Megan demanded. “Have you seen them? Met them?”

“No, I’ve never met them.”

“Talk to me,” she said tersely. “Don’t retreat into one of your usual damn silences. Why did you keep quiet about something so incredibly important?”

“I was trying to protect Mom. And you.”

“Protect me?” Megan’s emotions had been in turmoil for forty-eight hours and Liam’s crazy excuse was enough to send anger boiling to the surface. “How the hell does it protect me if I’m allowed to go on believing a massive lie?”

She could see her brother retreat even further into himself as he always did when the emotional atmosphere heated up, but he did at least answer her. “You’re talking with the advantage of hindsight. I was making decisions and trying to guess the consequences for everyone—”

“In another month, I’ll be twenty-seven years old! For heaven’s sake, Liam, I’m not a kid sister you’re permanently obliged to protect. I’m an adult.”

“Sometimes habits die hard—”

“That’s a pretty pathetic excuse.”

“Cutting you out of the loop was an insulting decision, I see that now.” Liam gave an apologetic shrug. “I seem to have made a bunch of bad decisions over the past few years. But I was trying to do what seemed right. At least believe that….”

“You should have told me,” she repeated and turned away, still struggling with her anger.

He touched her on the shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Meg.”

She moved away from him. “You’ve been lying to me for years, at least by omission. That’s hard to forgive.”

“Don’t let this force a wedge between the two of us.” Liam’s voice had lost all trace of its usual ironic edge. “Dammit, that’s exactly what I was trying to avoid by remaining silent.”

“It’s bewildering—make that infuriating—to discover that two of the people I trusted most in the world were lying to me.” Megan shoved impatiently at her hair, feeling as if her entire body was misaligned and out of sorts. “I hate that you kept me in the dark.”

“I didn’t want to put you in a position where you would have been forced to lie to Mom. It was bad enough for me, and I only saw her a couple of times a year.”

“I wouldn’t have lied to Mom. I’d have told her the truth.”

“Yes, you probably would have done,” Liam said. “And that’s a big part of why I didn’t confide in you.”

“Why were you so determined to shield Mom from the truth? I don’t understand why you covered for Dad. Or why you felt Mom was in such great need of protection.”

“You think of Mom as a pillar of strength….”

“Yes, of course. Because she is.”

“She’s a pillar of strength here at the ranch, surrounded by everything she loves. Without the ranch, she’d wither away.”

Megan gave an impatient shake of her head. “You underestimate her. Just as you underestimated me.”

“Maybe. I wasn’t willing to put Mom’s happiness to the test and Dad exploited that vulnerability. Basically, he blackmailed me into keeping quiet. He warned me not to make him choose between his wives, because he swore that he’d choose Avery.”

Each new revelation seemed to bring a little more pain than the last. If Avery had been Ron Raven’s favorite wife, had Kate been his favorite daughter?

Megan pushed away the insidious jealousy. “How did you find out about his other family, anyway?”

“By chance. And even then, I practically had to be beaten over the head with the evidence before I put the pieces together.” Liam was visibly relieved to change the subject, even if only slightly. “Six years ago, I went to Atlanta for a business meeting. The night before I was due to fly home I happened to run into Dad at a political fund-raiser for one of the local senators—”

“In Atlanta?”

Liam nodded. “Avery’s family is from Georgia, and she was with him at the party. It was obvious that she and Dad knew each other well. It was equally obvious that he was desperate to shepherd her away before I could speak to her. She’s a beautiful woman, a few years younger than Mom, and I assumed they were having an affair.”

“Why didn’t you confront them before Dad could hustle her away?” Megan demanded.

“I was with the senior partner of the law firm where I worked in those days, and we were being hosted by one of our most important clients. I didn’t want to expose my own father in front of a client, so Dad managed to make his escape.”

“Did you confront him later?”

Liam nodded. “But only after some internal debate. Naturally, the truth never crossed my mind and I wasn’t sure if it was my place to shove my nose into my parents’ marriage by accusing Dad of having an affair. In the end, I made a special trip to Chicago, just to talk to him. He assured me the ‘affair’ was already over. That being caught by me at the fund-raiser had made him realize the risks he was running and how much he cherished his relationship with Mom. And so on and so on, through the laundry list of lies.”

“And you believed him?”

“At the time.” Liam’s smile was bitter. “You won’t be surprised to hear that Dad lied very convincingly. It was another two years before I found out that Avery was much more than a passing affair—that our father had actually gone through a formal marriage ceremony with her and that they had a daughter a few months younger than you.”

“How did you find out those important details?” Megan heard the shake in her own voice. She wasn’t sure if the tremor was caused by anger or something more complicated and even more painful.

“Again, by accident. I was sent unexpectedly to Chicago by my law firm. They needed me to take depositions for a criminal case we were working on. The witness I was sent to interview had offices in Oakbrook—“

“In Oakbrook?” Megan repeated. “That’s where the offices of Dad’s company are located.”

Liam gave a tight, angry smile. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. In fact, I was working only six or seven blocks away from where I believed R & R Investments was headquartered. So when I finished taking the depositions, I decided to drop in on Dad and invite him to dinner. We’d been estranged since the incident in Atlanta, and I figured it was time to get our relationship back on track.”

“I remember the offices,” Megan said. “Dad took us there the summer you graduated from high school. I was in fourth grade and I spent at least an hour making Xerox pictures of my hands on the copying machine. Then Mom and I went back for another visit years later when I was about to start college. Dad suggested that we might like to come to Chicago and do some shopping. He said it would be a good opportunity to meet his office staff and his partners.”

Liam laughed, the sound harsh. “You have to give the guy credit. He sure had outsized balls. And you met his staff, of course? And his partners?” Her brother’s questions were heavy with sarcasm.

“Well, yes, we did—”

“No, you didn’t,” Liam said, his fists clenching. “You met a bunch of actors. Both times. Both visits.”

“What?”

“I guarantee that every so-called employee you were introduced to during that visit with Mom was an out-of-work actor, hired for the day. Just like they were the time you went there with me. R & R Investment Partnership isn’t even the real name of Dad’s corporation.”

“What’s his company called?” Her dry, cracked lips had to be forced to shape the words.

“The company is called Raven Enterprises, and the head office isn’t in Oakbrook. It’s miles away, northwest of Chicago, in Schaumburg, near O’Hare airport.”

Megan shook her head, which did nothing to clear the fog of befuddlement. “Dad actually set up a fake company and a fake set of offices just to deceive us?” She sat down on the porch bench because her legs suddenly wouldn’t hold her up.

“He didn’t keep the fake company active on a permanent basis. Just long enough to convince us that we’d visited the headquarters of his company—the mythical R & R Investments.”

Megan rubbed her forehead although she’d given up hope of banishing her headache anytime soon. “But even if he hired actors to play his employees, how did he have access to office space?”

“That was easy. He owns the building in Oakbrook and leases it out. He invited us there when he was between tenants. He even had an automated phone service set up so that if Mom or any of us called there, we’d be greeted by a message supposedly from R & R Investments.”

A shiver crawled down Megan’s spine. She’d learned a lot that she didn’t like about her father over the past couple of days, most of it pretty major stuff. It was odd that these relatively trivial deceptions bothered her so much. “It makes his dealings with us seem so calculated. So petty and…cruel.”

Liam’s eyes glittered, dark with anger. “The extent of his lying takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? It was quite a shock for me when I arrived unannounced at the Oakbrook offices and discovered the employees of an import-export firm working at the address I thought was the headquarters of R & R Investments.”

“What in the world did you do? Did you assume there was some sort of honest mistake?”

“No. Not for an instant.” Liam shrugged. “I guess at some level I’d been suspicious of Dad for a while—”

“You suspected he was a bigamist?” Megan heard the incredulity in her voice.

“Not that, but I was pretty sure he was lying to us about something important. To be honest, I’d begun to worry that maybe his business wasn’t a legitimate legal enterprise.”

Megan drew in a quick, nervous breath. “Is it?”

“As far as I know, yes, and I’ve researched the whole setup with a fair degree of intensity. We don’t have to worry that Raven Enterprises is a front for organized crime. Which, under the circumstances, has to be considered a major plus.”

It was a measure of how far she’d traveled in her view of her father that Megan wasn’t entirely reassured. “I hope you’re right.”

“I have a lot of experience researching criminal business enterprises. I was a criminal lawyer, remember? Last time I ran a check, I can pretty much promise you that Dad’s business partnership was clean. He’s a shrewd, successful businessman.” Liam corrected himself. “He was a shrewd, successful businessman.”

Megan seized the hope that none of her father’s business dealings had taken place on the shady side of the law and clung to it. Given that Ron Raven had been murdered, it struck her as depressingly possible that he’d been involved in at least a few ventures that wouldn’t have passed muster with the Better Business Bureau. A criminal deal gone wrong struck her as one of the more likely causes for murder.

She drew in a shaky breath, reverting to their previous topic of conversation. “I don’t quite see how you made the leap from realizing that Dad had deceived us about his office address to the fact that he was a bigamist.”

“Obviously, from the moment I walked into the Oakbrook offices it became clear that Dad had been doing some heavy-duty lying. I decided not to approach him and ask for an explanation. I figured that was likely to trigger nothing but more lies. Instead I initiated a full-scale investigation, tackling the problem exactly as if he were a suspect in a criminal case.”

Megan grimaced. “Which he was, more or less.”

Liam nodded. “Yep, he was. Once I got serious, it was only a matter of hours before Dad’s entire web of deception started to unravel. For example, it took me two minutes with a Chicago phone book to discover that there was no company called R & R Investments listed, but that a company called Raven Enterprises was headquartered in Schaumburg. A phone call to Raven Enterprises was all it took to discover that Ronald Howatch Raven was the senior partner. Once I knew that, the rest of his lies began to disintegrate. Amazingly fast, in fact. Dad pulled off his twenty-five-year scam basically because none of us questioned him. A couple of inquires, though, and it was all over.”

“I guess he could never risk having us visit his real office because of his other wife and daughter. They probably dropped in all the time, given that they live right in Chicago.”

Liam nodded. “I’m sure that was one reason he needed to keep us away. The other is that Dad’s business partner, Paul Fairfax, is Avery’s older brother.”

“Oh, no. Oh my God.” Megan couldn’t say anything more. She gripped Belle’s collar so tightly that the dog yelped in protest. Her world, which had seemed totally ordinary only a couple of days earlier, now seemed like a horror movie made by a director who specialized in creating bizarre alternate realities.

“Yeah, that about sums up how I felt when I found out. Speechless, alternating with disbelieving curses. Of course, Dad was deceiving his business partner as well as you and me and Mom. He wanted to keep Paul Fairfax away from us as much as the other way around.”

Megan stared at the distant mountain range. For once, the grandeur of the Tetons provided no solace. “I’m starting to get so angry with him that it scares me.”

Liam turned toward the mountains, following her gaze. His expression became even more bleak. “Now you understand how I’ve felt for the past few years.”

Megan put her arms around Belle, controlling a sudden shiver. “Probably ninety percent of everything Dad ever told us was at least partly untrue.”

“And the other ten percent was a lie by implication.”

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me what you’d found out. And Mom.” Megan drew in a shaky breath. “Good grief, Liam! How could you keep this from her? She absolutely deserved to be told.”

“When I finally learned the whole truth—especially that Dad had another daughter—I tried to force him to face up to his responsibilities and come clean to both his families.” Liam lifted his shoulders, the gesture more despairing than dismissive. “He was very good at applying emotional blackmail. Like I told you, he claimed that if he had to choose between Mom and his other wife, he’d choose Avery. And that he’d not only leave Mom penniless, he’d make sure that she couldn’t keep the ranch.”

The spitefulness of that threat was another blow to the loving image of her father that Megan had been clinging to despite the revelations of the past forty-eight hours. “Well, at least that’s one thing that’s worked out to Mom’s advantage.” She finally recognized the same note of bitterness in her voice that she’d heard earlier in her brother’s. “Since Dad is dead, presumably Mom is going to inherit the ranch.”

“I sure as hell hope so. Who knows how Dad may have written his will.” Liam swung away, his body rigid with tension. “Goddammit, I’m a lawyer and I haven’t the faintest idea what my mother’s financial and legal situation is right now. For all I know, Dad left every penny he owns to Avery Fairfax.”

“If he did, surely Mom has grounds to fight.”

“Absolutely. But we could be in and out of court for years, and in the meantime, the ranch would go belly up. If Dad’s left all his cash to Avery, it’s going to be a real fight to keep sufficient operating funds for the ranch to survive.”

Megan bit back the urge to scream imprecations at her dead father. She was so emotionally drained that she felt exhausted. “What a hideous mess. I’m so furious with Dad that I’m numb.”

“Trust me, however angry you are with him, you’re nowhere near as angry as I am with myself.”

“A little while ago you told me not to blame myself for Dad’s sins. Now I guess I’m saying the same thing to you. The truth is, he put you in an impossible situation and then manipulated your feelings for Mom in order to protect himself. Put the blame where it belongs, Liam. With Dad. Right slap bang with him.”

Four

Sunday, May 7, 2006, Thatch, Wyoming

A prayer service for Ronald Howatch Raven’s safe return was held immediately following regular Sunday services at the hundred-year-old Community Church located at the far end of Thatch’s Main Street. Most people were pretty sure that Ron was dead, but the failure to find his body meant that neighbors felt obligated to at least pretend they wished for his speedy and safe return.

Meanwhile, the story of his disappearance kept perking along in the national press. Media outlets were currently salivating over the information that bloodstains from three different people, one most likely female, had been identified as present at the crime scene. Almost equally as intriguing, a boat from the Blue Lagoon Marina had been put to sea without the permission of its owner and had been returned after a trip of some forty-five miles. A cop in Miami, a fan of Fox News, had let drop to his favorite talk-show host the fascinating tidbit that a security camera from the marina showed a masked person, sex indeterminate, using a furniture-moving dolly to transport first one and then another long, black-wrapped object onto the boat. The cop commented that the objects looked mighty like body bags to him and to everyone else who’d seen the video. In light of these images, the Miami police were working on the theory that Ron Raven’s dead body had been disposed of at sea, possibly along with that of a female companion, identity as yet unknown.

The fact that it now seemed likely that there had been a woman with Ron Raven at the time he died provided fodder for a multitude of cable news programs. The delicious possibility that Ron had been husband to three women was chewed over by talk-show hosts and social-commentary pundits with relentless bad taste. The prize for idiocy—hotly contested—went to a congressman who opined that Ron Raven’s bigamy at least showed respect for the institution of marriage, in a society where too many people thought it was okay to cohabit without the formality of getting married.

There were already a half-dozen blogs, much visited, devoted to the juicy details of Ron’s bigamous life and the puzzle of his death. Theories about the murder abounded, and only the fact that both Avery and Ellie had watertight alibis prevented them becoming favorite suspects. The tabloids, of course, assumed that they were guilty anyway, despite the alibis.

MSNBC and CNN, annoyed at being scooped by Fox, scrambled to generate their own catch-up revelations. Meanwhile, they kept the pot stirring by interviewing a variety of clueless witnesses, most of whom seemed to be connected to Ron’s disappearance more by virtue of their vivid imaginations than because of any concrete information in their possession.

In view of the annoying reluctance of either widow to speak to reporters, high ratings had to be sustained somehow, and Ellie Raven’s decision to hold a prayer service for her husband was counted as a blessing by news outlets everywhere. No less than thirty-five camera crews were on hand to record Stark County’s tribute to Ron Raven and lots had to be drawn to determine who would be privileged to film the service from the two available spots in the upstairs organ loft.

The Reverend Dwight D. Gruber, pastor of Thatch Community Church for over twenty years, rose magnificently to the occasion. The choir, his personal pride and joy, performed “How Great Thou Art” and “Amazing Grace” with poignant beauty. Better yet, he achieved the remarkable feat of urging everyone to pray for Ron’s safe return without ever quite mentioning the disconcerting truth that all the evidence suggested the man was already dead and feeding the sharks somewhere off the coast of Miami.

Even this omission paled into insignificance in comparison to the astounding fact that in twenty minutes devoted to recounting the highlights of Ron’s life, Pastor Gruber made not a single reference to the truth that the guy had been a bigamist. A bigamist, moreover, who had disappeared from a hotel room occupied not only by himself, but also by an unknown female companion. Who said that small-town pastors had few oratorical skills?

In addition to the camera crews, the church was bursting at the seams with Ellie’s friends and neighbors. These folk appreciated their pastor’s efforts to put the best possible gloss on the sordid reality of Ron Raven’s life. Ellie was deeply respected in the community, and the residents of Stark County had spent the past week doing their best to remain aloof and dignified despite their collective moment of glory in the glow of the national-media spotlight.

The official consensus among Stark County residents was relief that The Other Wife and her daughter hadn’t attempted to crash the prayer service. Still, Billy Carstairs summed up the feelings of many attendees when he admitted to his wife that he couldn’t believe Ron had been dippin’ his wick into two honeypots—could even be three—with nobody in Thatch any the wiser. He allowed as how it sure would have been interesting to catch a close-up view of the rival family. Sorry as he was for Ellie and her kids, Billy would really have liked to see what Ron Raven’s two wives had to say to each other.