Wrangled

He’d stayed put even though it was hard. He couldn’t hear what was being said. For all he knew, Courtney had been found and that was why the sheriff was here.

Zane jumped at the tap on the bathroom door. He quickly turned off the shower and opened the door.

“The coast is clear,” Dakota said as he came out.

“What did McCall want?” He hated the fear he heard in his voice. From Dakota’s reaction, she’d heard it too. She had to be wondering if she was wrong about him.

“Apparently Courtney called about a disturbance out here between you and me.”

“Courtney called? Then she’s all right?”

“Apparently.”

He shook his head. “But why would she …” The thought struck him like a brick. “She wanted the sheriff to see the scratches on my face and arm. What the hell is going on with her?”

“She seems to have it in for the two of us,” Dakota said. “That’s why we have to find her and find out what she’s up to.”

“The two of us?”

Dakota looked away for a moment as if she hadn’t meant to say that. “The last time I saw her was a few days ago. Right after that I realized she’d been in my house and taken something of mine.” She waved a hand through the air. “The point is, I want it back. She had no business in my house, let alone taking anything of mine.”

He nodded, seeing that whatever Courtney had taken, Dakota didn’t want to talk about it. He changed the subject. “What did McCall make of all this?”

“She seemed to think it was my sister being jealous.”

“We know better.” The date last night, what he could remember of it, hadn’t been anything special. In fact, he recalled before he’d lost his memory that he hadn’t planned to see Courtney again. She was beautiful, but not that interesting.

His head still hurt, but a thought wormed its way through. “You said Courtney showed up two weeks ago. That’s the same time someone broke into my house and used my computer to set up the rural dating account. Could she have been planning this that long ago, trying to set me up for more than a date?”

“Why go to the trouble?” Dakota asked, frowning as if she was trying to work it out herself.

“Why me at all?” It didn’t make any sense to him either. “The requirements I put down for the perfect date apparently made Courtney the perfect match.”

Dakota raised an eyebrow.

“I didn’t put down any requirements, but whoever signed me up must have rigged it so that my requirements matched Courtney’s. It had to be Courtney.”

“A lot of trouble and to what end?”

“I guess that depends on what happened last night,” he said as he glanced around the living room. Nothing seemed to be missing, but then he’d made that mistake before.

“You really don’t remember what happened after your date?” she asked.

“I’ve never had a hangover like this before.”

Dakota was looking at the scratches on his face again. “Maybe you should get a drug test at the hospital.”

Dakota was willing to consider that he’d been drugged? Zane was surprised and relieved. But why hadn’t he thought of it? Because he’d been running scared from the moment he’d opened his eyes this morning.

He had to know what he was dealing with. Courtney Baxter seemed to be setting him up. But why? He was just grateful that Dakota seemed to be on his side. If he’d just gotten drunk and didn’t remember, that was one thing. But if Dakota was right and Courtney had drugged him …

“I think a drug test is a good idea,” he said, but Dakota didn’t seem to hear him.

She was looking at Courtney’s cell phone. She had picked it up by two fingers. He could see the smeared blood from here.

“Any idea how it got blood on it?” she asked. “Or how it ended up under your bed? I noticed there was also a broken lamp on the other side of the bed. You probably don’t know anything about that either.”

He shook his head. “You said you heard something crash in the background when you were on the phone with her.”

“Could have been the lamp.” She looked down at the phone again. “Maybe we should see about getting DNA off this phone to find out if it is even Courtney’s blood. We can have a doctor run a blood test on you at the same time for possible drugs. Do you have a small plastic sandwich bag we can put this in?”

“Top drawer on the right.” He watched her head for the kitchen, trying to figure out what about Dakota was bothering him. She certainly was taking all this better than he would have thought.

“I doubt there will be fingerprints other than ours, but …” She stopped on her way back from the kitchen, the cell phone in a plastic bag she’d found in the drawer. “What’s wrong?”

He wasn’t sure. “You just kept me out of jail—at least temporarily—and now you’re going to help clear me? What’s going on, Dakota?”

“I told you. I need your help to find Courtney.”

“Because she took something of yours that you want back. If you just wanted to find Courtney, you could have told the sheriff everything you know and thrown me to the wolves,” he said. “The sheriff, with all her resources, would be looking for your sister right now. So why didn’t you? It wasn’t just to keep me out of jail so I could help you find her. I hate to sound suspicious, but I have to wonder why you’re so anxious to find her that you would throw in with me.”

“She’s my sister.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dakota sighed. “Okay, maybe I’ve suspected she was up to something from the first time I laid eyes on her.”

“You said your father’s name and signature are on her birth certificate. Are you saying you’re questioning that?”

She shrugged. “All I know is that something’s wrong with her story. After what you’ve told me, I’m even more convinced.”

“But not enough to go to the sheriff.”

“I want to do some investigating of my own before I get the sheriff involved,” Dakota said.

He suspected there was more, something she was hiding, but right now he was just glad he wasn’t in jail. “Then you believe me?”

“I’m willing to consider you were set up.” She stepped to the door and opened it. “On the way into town, I think we should see who Courtney’s been calling—and who’s been calling her.”

DAKOTA HADN’T BEEN completely truthful. Not that she didn’t have her reasons for wanting to believe Zane and, if she was being honest with herself, some of them had to do with the crush she’d had on him when she was a girl.

He was even more handsome now. Not that she was the kind of woman who was overcome by good looks. Zane hadn’t made fun of her like the other boys when she’d been the skinny, freckle-faced, buck-toothed, mouth-full-of-braces girl who’d hung around him like a lovesick puppy.

Nor was she that smitten girl anymore. But she also believed that Zane, while no longer the lanky boy she’d known as a girl, was still honorable and decent. She had to trust her instincts. Her instincts told her that Zane was telling the truth.

“I’ll drive,” she said, and Zane didn’t argue. He looked like death warmed over, making her also believe she might be right about him having been drugged.

She could tell that his greatest fear was that something really awful had happened to Courtney last night. Dakota told herself it was more likely, after what the sheriff had said, that Courtney was up to her pretty little neck in this and not as the victim. Another reason Dakota wanted to find her as quickly as possible.

As she drove, she watched Zane out of the corner of her eye as he began to check the numbers on the cell phone through the plastic bag.

“There are no contact numbers,” Zane said. “I get the feeling this is a fairly new phone, since there are so few calls and messages. The last outgoing call was …” He read off the number.

“That’s the number at my ranch from when Courtney called last night. Do you recognize any of the other numbers?”

“As for incoming, there are calls and messages from you and Arlene Evans Monroe. I had asked her to call Courtney and get back to me when she heard from her.” He studied the numbers for a moment. “Otherwise there are two incoming calls from numbers that I don’t recognize. Courtney returned one of those calls, but not the most recent one.”

Dakota realized she hadn’t told Zane about the phone call earlier. “Someone was looking for her. Before the sheriff left your house, Courtney’s cell phone rang. I answered it. I could hear breathing on the other end of the line, but the person didn’t say anything before hanging up.”

“Courtney? If she was the one who called the sheriff about a disturbance at my house,” he said, his brows furrowing.

“Or someone else looking for Courtney.”

“Do you recognize either of these numbers?” He read the numbers off to her.

“Sorry, they don’t sound familiar. There’s a notebook and pen in the glove box,” she told him as they neared town.

Zane jotted down the numbers as Dakota pulled into the back of the hospital.

Whitehorse County Hospital was small. As they walked in the back door, Zane spotted Dr. Buck Carrey. He looked more like a rancher than a doctor. A big man, he had a weathered face wrinkled from the sun and from smiling. His gray hair was uncharacteristically long for Whitehorse and pulled back in a ponytail. Today he was wearing jeans, boots and a Western shirt, with his white Stetson cocked back on his head.

He greeted Zane warmly, then shook hands with Dakota, whom he hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting before, and invited them into his office. “You said this was a confidential matter?” he asked, closing the door.

Dakota listened while Zane gave an abbreviated version of what they needed. Doc raised a brow when Zane showed him the phone. “Let’s start with the blood test. As for the DNA, I need something to compare it to.”

“I’m her sister. Well, half sister. Will that work?”

“Close enough.” Doc left and came back with the items he needed to do both tests. He took blood from Zane, then a swab of Dakota’s mouth and another swab of blood from the phone.

“I’ll have to get back to you on your blood test,” he told Zane. “Same with the blood on the phone.” Doc seemed to study Zane’s scratches for a moment. “You sure you don’t want the sheriff in on this?”

“If we can’t find Courtney, we’ll go to the sheriff,” Dakota promised. Her sister was in trouble, she’d bet on that. But she feared it was Courtney’s own making.

“I’M SORRY ABOUT ALL THIS,” Zane said as they left the hospital. “First your father’s death, then a sister you never knew you had and now this.”

Dakota shrugged as she opened her pickup door and slid behind the wheel. “I think what hurt the most was that I’d always wanted a sister and apparently I’ve had one since I was two—I just didn’t know it.”

“Why do you think your father kept it from you?”

She shook her head. “Guilt maybe. Everyone says he adored my mother, but when she got sick, I don’t think he could handle it.”

“I can’t imagine your father living a double life, not the way he felt about your mother.” He also couldn’t imagine Clay Lansing keeping all of this from his daughter. There had to be more to the story. “So what do you know about Courtney’s mother?”

“Nothing, really,” Dakota said. “Courtney said she died and that she doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Did she mention where she was raised, at least?”

“Great Falls. She wasn’t even that far away, just a few hours. My father must have seen her when he went there, since she was at the hospital when he died.”

“He died in Great Falls?” Zane asked in surprise.

Dakota nodded and seemed to concentrate on her driving. “All of it has come as such a shock—his death, Courtney, the lie he lived all these years.” He could hear the hurt in her voice. “She had more time with him at the end than I did,” Dakota said, voicing her pain.

“If she’s telling the truth,” Zane said as he looked over at her. “You suspected something about her story was a lie, didn’t you?”

She glanced at him in surprise.

He smiled. “I know you, Dakota. You wouldn’t have believed me so quickly if you didn’t suspect your sister was up to something.” True, they hadn’t seen each other in years, but in so many ways she was that kid he knew from the rodeo grounds. She’d always seemed too smart for her own good.

“If you’re right and you were set up, then Courtney is in on it,” Dakota said. “I can’t imagine any other reason she would sign up for Arlene’s rural dating service. One look at her tells me she’s never had trouble finding a date.”

Zane had been one of those men. He cursed himself for it. “I need to see her room where she was staying.”

“She’s not there,” Dakota said. “I checked and her car wasn’t there before I came looking for you.”

“She might have dumped her car somewhere.”

“Why would she do that?”

He shook his head. “Why would she pretend we had a date and possibly drug me?”

“You don’t know she was the one who signed you up for Arlene’s rural dating service,” Dakota pointed out.

“No, but she had to be in on it. That’s the only thing that makes any sense. You didn’t check to make sure she wasn’t at home, a friend maybe had given her a ride home?”

Dakota shook her head. “She doesn’t have any friends here.”

“That you know of,” Zane said. “Let’s try her room first. If she set me up …”

“You think she’s cleared out.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. I’m sure there’s more, but I have a feeling this next part is her being scarce until the other shoe drops,” he said.

THEY REACHED CHINOOK, a small, old town along the railroad, down the Highline from Whitehorse. She turned north on a dirt road toward the Lansing ranch, traveling through the rolling prairie.

It had been a clear blue day, the kind that are almost blinding. Now the sun had dipped behind the Bear Paw Mountains, the sky a silken blue-gray and still cloudless. A meadowlark sang a song that traveled along with them as she drove.

“You say she doesn’t have any friends,” Zane said as he watched the countryside roll by and tried to get a clear picture of what Courtney Baxter was really like. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he hadn’t been out with the “real” Courtney last night. “No one you’ve seen her with, no phone calls?”

Dakota shook her head.

“When I woke up and Courtney was gone, I just assumed she’d left on her own,” he said. “But what if there’d been someone else with her at my house last night after I passed out?”

He felt her studying him again, stealing glances at him as she drove. “Dakota, you know me. I wouldn’t have hurt her.”

She let out a breath. “I know.”

“Thank you for believing in me. I suspect whatever this is, Courtney isn’t in it alone and I have a bad feeling your sister doesn’t realize how dangerous the person she got involved with really is.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I get the feeling Courtney can take care of herself.”

Dakota drove past the large old, white, single-story ranch house to the small matching guesthouse out back. Zane remembered when they were kids and Dakota had told him that her father had built a house on the ranch for her to stay in when she reached sixteen. He recalled her excitement because she was like him. She never wanted to leave the ranch; she just didn’t want to live at home.

But something had changed for her to end up in New Mexico, engaged to a guy involved in investment managing.

Zane saw as they climbed out of the pickup that Courtney’s compact car was nowhere in sight.

Dakota knocked at the front door. “Courtney?”

He held his breath, praying she would open the door. Dakota knocked again, then pulled out a key and opened the door.

As the door swung in, Zane caught the scent of perfume, the familiarity of it making him a little sick to his stomach and increasing his dread. What had happened last night? The harder he tried to remember, the worse he felt.

The guesthouse was small, one bedroom, one bath with a kitchenette and living area. The bedroom door was ajar. Dakota stepped over to it, carefully pushing the door all the way open to expose an empty, unmade bed.

“It doesn’t look like she’s been back,” Dakota said as he headed over to the closet and eased the door open.

Only a handful of clothes hung there. He frowned and moved to the chest of drawers. The top drawer held a few undergarments. The next drawer had even less, only a couple of tank tops and pajama bottoms. The third drawer had two pairs of jeans, and the bottom drawer was empty.

He closed the last drawer and turned to look at Dakota. “What woman has so few clothes?”

She shrugged. “Maybe this is all she owns.”

“Or maybe she left most of her belongings somewhere else. Does she have a job?”

“She said she’s been looking locally.”

He smiled at that. “Not looking very hard, right?”

Dakota sighed. “I got the feeling she was waiting for me to offer her half the ranch.”

If Courtney Baxter really was Clay Lansing’s love child, then she could probably legally force Dakota to split the ranch and the rough stock business with her. He swore under his breath. How could Clay have done this to Dakota? Worse, he’d kept her sister from her—and let Dakota learn about her after he was gone. Didn’t he realize the repercussions of his actions?

Zane moved to the bed. A clock radio sat on one of the bedside tables, nothing else. He bent down to look under the bed and was hit again with the smell of Courtney’s perfume. For a moment he thought he would be sick. He stilled his stomach and squinted into the darkness under the bed.

Something glinted. Reaching in, he felt the cool, weathered vinyl surface, found the handle and pulled the old suitcase from under the bed.

He glanced at Dakota.

“Maybe you’d better make sure it isn’t ticking before you open it,” she said.

He popped the latches on each side. The suitcase fell open.

EMMA CHISHOLM GLANCED OUT the window, surprised to see Mrs. Crowley silhouetted against the fading twilight.

Instinctively, Emma stepped back, afraid the woman might have seen her. She was relieved when she stole another glance and saw that Mrs. Crowley had her back to the house.

What was she doing out there? The woman never went outside. At least not that Emma had ever noticed.

Peering around the edge of the curtain, it took her a moment to realize the housekeeper was on a cell phone. Emma had never seen her make or take a call. No cell phone had ever rung while Mrs. Crowley was working. Emma was actually surprised that the housekeeper even owned one.

She couldn’t help but wonder who the woman was talking to. Mrs. Crowley made it clear she had no one who would interfere with her ability to stay at the ranch and work every day except one each week.

When pinned down, the housekeeper had said she was widowed, no children. She’d quickly made it clear she thought Emma had stepped over some invisible line by even asking.

“It could be a friend,” Emma muttered to herself. But even as she said it, she had her doubts. “Maybe a friend from before the accident.”

That was something else that Mrs. Crowley made clear she wasn’t going to talk about.

“People don’t just stare at me,” she said, her voice sharp with bitterness and anger. “They want to know what happened. Like vultures, they would love to hear every horrible detail.” Mrs. Crowley’s one good eye glinted like granite. “Well, they won’t be hearing it from me and neither will you.”

With that, she’d turned and limped off.

Emma watched now from the edge of the curtain as Mrs. Crowley finished her phone call and stood for a long moment as if admiring what little remained of the sunset.

As she turned to come back to the house, her gaze rose to the second floor as though she sensed Emma watching her.

Emma jerked back, heart hammering. The last thing she wanted Mrs. Crowley to think was that she was spying on her, true or not.

After a moment, Emma dared to take another peek. Mrs. Crowley was still standing in the same spot. The harsh glow of the sunset fell across the woman’s disfigured face. She was smiling her crooked half smile, her gaze mocking as she looked up at the second-floor window, making sure that Emma knew she’d been caught spying on her.

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