The Lost Hart Triplet
Autor
Nicole Helm
Leituras
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23
Chapter One
The town of Wilde, Wyoming, was nothing like its name nor its nearest neighbor, Bent, which harbored centuries-old feuds and murderers and kidnappers and the like.
Wilde was small, quiet and boring. Aside from two people disappearing fifteen years ago which was clearly just a May-December romance leaving judgment behind, and a bank robbery in 1892 that many claimed was fictional, nothing ever happened in Wilde.
Until now.
At least, in Zaraleigh Hart’s estimation.
Zara, because no one except her family was allowed to call her Zaraleigh, for heaven’s sake, watched her six employers with narrowed eyes. She didn’t trust them, and she sure as heck didn’t believe their cockamamie story about being brothers looking for the simple life.
The town—if one could call a tiny dot on the map surrounded by state parks and wildlife refuges and the Wind River Range of the Rockies, populated by only fifty people, many of them related, a town—had been abuzz since these six men had appeared six weeks ago. In the middle of winter. Ready to ranch.
Her ranch. Stolen out from under her by these...men. Who didn’t look or act like any brothers she knew. Or ranchers, for that matter. They’d paid way over market price for the land and cattle—so much more than it was worth that her father simply hadn’t been able to refuse their offer. And because of the outrageous amount, Dad had chosen to sell the ranch instead of passing the homestead down to her like he should have done.
But mostly Wildeans wanted to talk about the handsome, single out-of-towners, men who weren’t related to any of their young daughters or nieces.
Zara didn’t care about such frivolous, pointless nonsense. Zara wanted to know why they were here. And clearly lying. They weren’t brothers in search of a simple life. For one, there was nothing simple about any of them. They were all tall and far too muscled. They all possessed a stillness and a wariness that made her nervous.
When she’d never been nervous a day in her life.
She’d helped them for over a month now, teaching them the ropes of how to run a ranch, even as they sank into the hard, uncompromising Wyoming winter—because they didn’t know, of course. About ranching or real winters or anything.
Fortunately, they paid quite well for her tutoring, but a salary didn’t earn trust.
Before they’d arrived, she’d called her cousin, a county deputy over in Bent, and he’d told her their backgrounds were clear.
Zara didn’t believe it, but still, she taught them. Day in. Day out. Waiting for someone to slip up so she could figure out what their deal was.
They were quick learners. She’d give them that. They’d all taken to horseback riding easy as you please, except Dunne Thompson, who had some kind of injury which made getting up on the horse too difficult. They’d learned the lay of the land, the rhythms of ranch life. Quite frankly, Zara wasn’t sure how much longer they’d keep her around—especially paying what they were paying.
But this was Hart land, and Zara was bound and determined to get it back once she figured out what these men were really up to.
Zara fingered the mane of the horse under her—they’d bought everything, down to Sam, her three-year-old mare. Her only saving grace was that she and Hazeleigh got to rent the dang cabin their great-grandpa had kicked the bucket in.
She looked at the men again. She understood men. Maybe she’d grown up in a house full of women, aside from Dad. Two sisters, identical because they were the Hart triplets. But she’d been the tomboy of the three girls. She liked ranching and sports and fighting.
These six weren’t like the men she knew and had spent her life hanging out with. They were too...serious. Oh, they didn’t all have the same personality. Six men were never all the same, but there was a guarded look in their eyes—which were all different shades and shapes—that matched.
Trauma could do that, she supposed. She figured hiding a body together or some such could too.
“All right, guys, you’ve got this side. I’m going to work from the other.” She turned Sam around and ignored the offers to split up and help.
She didn’t want their help or their proximity. They could work on fixing the fence from this side. She’d head several yards west and deal with the other broken section. Snow and ice wreaked havoc on a fence.
Zara eased Sam into a gallop and let the short ride clear her head. She was almost in a good mood when she pulled Sam to a stop. Until she saw Hazeleigh running toward her.
Zara sighed. She knew she should get down. Intercept Hazeleigh’s wild run. Calm her sister down and tell her to take a breath.
Sometimes Zara felt like she was drowning under all the responsibilities left on her shoulders.
Hazeleigh came to a stop next to Sam, her hand immediately reaching out for purchase. She curled her fingers into Zara’s pants leg.
“Stop. Don’t.”
“Stop, don’t what?” Zara replied, resisting the urge to pull her leg away from Hazeleigh’s grasp. “I was just going to fix the fence here.”
Hazeleigh shook her head, dark hair whipping violently with the movement. “Don’t.”
Zara sighed at Hazeleigh’s pale face, wide eyes and desperate pleas.
“Please, Haze, not another one of your ‘feelings.’”
“Zee, really. Really. Something is wrong. You know I only say something when I can’t get rid of it.” She was grasping Zara’s leg like it was a lifeline.
Zara hardly believed her sister could “feel” things. And sometimes her bad feelings came to nothing, so Zara felt confident in all that disbelief. Except when those bad feelings came to something, and someone—usually Zara herself—narrowly missed out on being hurt or humiliated.
“What am I supposed to do? Not fix the fence and let the cattle get out?” Zara swung off Sam so she could be identical eye to identical eye with her sister. Except no one ever got them confused. They were too different, no matter how alike they looked.
Right now, Hazeleigh was wearing an oversize coat she’d forgotten to button and was next to threadbare anyway. Like most of what Hazeleigh wore, it was a thrift-store find. She wore pants—not jeans, not ranch wear—but some kind of vintage trousers that reminded Zara of the old movies Hazeleigh liked to watch. Her dark hair was a swirling mass around her, likely having fallen out of some colorful, silken scarf or old-fashioned pins, depending on if she was working or not today.
Zara, on the other hand, was in jeans, a flannel shirt and a cowboy hat. She never left home in anything other than her cowboy boots. She kept her long dark hair pulled back in a tight braid at all times.
“Just...” Hazeleigh looked at the place where the fence post was angled too far to the right. She reached out and grabbed Zara’s hand. “You need to get away from here. We need to get away from here.”
Zara pulled her hand away. Frustration warring with sympathy. Love warring with disdain. “I can’t ignore my job.”
“Everything okay?” came another voice, a deeper voice.
Zara glared at Jake Thompson’s approach. She glared at all six of them all the time, whether they deserved it or not, but there was something about Jake that made her always want to glare extra hard.
He was too...watchful. Especially of her. She didn’t care for it. At all. So she glared.
And he always smiled.
Hazeleigh shrunk away a little as he approached. Zara watched Jake notice it and react accordingly. He kept his distance.
Unfortunately, she had to give him credit for that.
As much as she wanted to believe they were killers who’d buried a body in a shallow grave and run away to hide from their misdeeds, they never made her afraid. Not just because she had guts, but because they were polite, careful and ever aware.
Of Hazeleigh’s skittishness. Of not cornering either of them or standing too close. Of their own height and breadth and strength.
Zara wished they were a little less honorable just so she’d have better reason to dislike them.
“Everything is just fine,” Zara said to Jake firmly.
“I was following to give you a hand, but then your sister came running like a bat out of hell. Usually that doesn’t mean things are fine,” Jake replied, a small smile on his face. She supposed it was his attempt at a kind smile.
Zara was not a fan of all the ways he tried to be nice when she was trying to dislike him.
“Maybe, but it’s also very much none of your business.”
“Zara,” Hazeleigh murmured in admonition. She never could stand to see anyone act rude.
Which meant she was in a near-constant state of scolding Zara, who was quite often rude on purpose.
“Go home,” Zara said to her sister, trying to keep her tone gentle. “I have work to do.” She went over to the fence post and gave it a yank.
“Please don’t,” Hazeleigh whispered, but she stayed back. As if she was afraid of the very ground Zara was on.
“Go home, Hazeleigh,” Zara said under her breath, but firm and a little harsh because she could not have this conversation in front of Jake. She got the fence post free in no time. The post had rotted away, and rot was never a good thing.
“I think we’ll need to repour the foundation here,” Zara said to Jake, ignoring her sister’s stubborn presence. “Higher, so the wood doesn’t have as much contact with the soil. It rotted too quickly. It’s just not old enough to warrant this decay.”
Jake nodded. “Something strange around here. Look at the snow. It almost looks like there’s some kind of sinkhole underneath.”
Zara frowned. Yes, that’s exactly what it looked like. She tried to think the last time her father and she had worked in this area, but it was before any major snowfall. There shouldn’t be this much difference in the landscape.
“Could be the wind,” she offered, even though that didn’t make sense either. Why would the wind blow snow away from this one spot?
Jake frowned at the ground, and Zara had to frown at it too. It was an odd place for a sinkhole. Not quite against the post or under the fence line but close enough to cause a problem.
“Maybe it’s buried treasure.” Jake grinned.
Zara had to fight very hard not to grin back. A ridiculous thought but kind of fun. “Maybe from that bank robbery back in 1892.”
“You guys are really proud of that 130-year-old heist.”
“The only thing interesting that’s ever happened here,” Zara said, trying to fight the feeling of easy camaraderie as they both grabbed short shovels from where Zara had packed them in the horse’s saddle bag.
They wouldn’t need to dig deep to get through the snow. The frozen ground might be an issue, but the other men could bring a post hole digger if necessary. Getting the fence back up was the most important thing.
They both began to clear the snow around where she’d removed the post. Once the snow was cleared, Jake dug in the hole left by the removed post. Zara knew she should too, but she couldn’t stop looking at the strangely muddy ground next to where she stood. The grass hadn’t grown back where the snow had accumulated less. Like someone had been digging just off the fence line.
She poked at it with her shovel, unable to ignore her curiosity. She didn’t really think it was buried treasure, but it had to be something.
They needed to check before they poured more foundation here. Maybe something was causing the fence-post rot.
She jammed her shovel into the frozen patch. Not as frozen as it should be. She pulled out a chunk of dirt and then another. After a few scoops, her shovel hit something...strange. Not hard like an old cement foundation or anything of the like. Not frozen solid down below the surface. Hard but with an odd...soft give.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” Hazeleigh said desperately, covering her face with her hands. “Don’t do it.”
Zara looked at her sister. Dread curdled in her stomach, but how could she just ignore it? Maybe Hazeleigh’s “feelings” had saved her from disaster once or twice, but what could be waiting in the earth that might harm her?
“Should we stop?” Jake asked, eyeing Hazeleigh balefully.
“No. She just... Ignore her. Here, I found something. Help me dig it out.”
Jake nodded and moved closer to her. Too close. She could smell him. Soap and saddle leather. She could count the whiskers on his jawline that never seemed to fade no matter how often he shaved. She could see the glint of summer sky blue in his eyes. The sheer size of him, which oddly and unlike just about any other man she’d ever met, didn’t make her want to challenge him.
And she did not care for her reaction to any of those things.
Jake let out a yelp of a curse, nearly falling backward as he scrambled away. She wanted to laugh at his reaction, tease him, but Hazeleigh’s whispered don’ts made her unable to come up with a smart remark.
“It’s you,” he said, looking at her like he’d seen a ghost.
Zara frowned, peering down into the hole Jake had made.
In an instant, her vision went gray. Because there was a face in the dirt.
One identical to hers.
JAKE MANAGED TO catch Zara before she tipped over like a tree that had just been felled. She was a sturdy woman, so it wasn’t an easy catch.
Luckily he was strong enough to manage.
He looked back at the hole they’d dug. Had he really seen...?
Yeah, it was a face all right. Decaying a bit, but absolutely no doubt it looked exactly like the two women renting the cabin on the ranch. The two women standing right here.
“It’s Amberleigh,” Zara said. She sounded, for the first time in the six weeks he’d known her, rattled. She wasn’t even standing on her own two feet. She was leaning on him as he held her upright.
A strange sensation, but one he didn’t have time to analyze because there was a dead body buried on his property.
One who looked exactly like Zara and Hazeleigh.
“No,” Hazeleigh was saying. Over and over again. “No, no.”
Zara inhaled and exhaled noisily, then seemed to find her feet and took a step away from him. She wrapped her arms around herself as if that could hold her upright. “We need to... We have to...”
“Go on back to your cabin. I’ll call the sheriff’s department,” Jake said. Though the dead body had surprised him, mostly because of how much it looked like their pretty ranch hand and her sister, it was hardly the first one he’d seen. Maybe he’d been optimistic enough to think he’d seen his last, but he’d get over his disappointment.
He didn’t think these two women would be getting over this anytime soon.
“The police will want to talk to us,” Zara said. She looked down at the ground like she wanted to look at the face again but couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“Sure, but there’s no reason you have to stand around here and wait.” He put his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened but let him turn her away from the hole and toward her sister. Her living sister. “Go on.”
Zara turned. Her chin came up, her eyes met his. “I’ll stay with her.”
Her. Meaning the dead body.
Hazeleigh reached out and grabbed Zara’s hand. “We have to stay. And we should call Thomas... He’ll handle it. Won’t he?” Hazeleigh looked at Zara a little desperately.
Zara nodded faintly. Jake wasn’t sure her eyes were really seeing anything. “Yes, I’ll call Thomas,” she said, her voice firm but tinny.
Shock. He’d seen a lot of that too. But Zara held firm as Hazeleigh began to cry quietly. Jake stood a few feet away, feeling at a loss.
Then instinct and habit kicked in. Maybe this was a ranch in the middle of nowhere, but he was a man who’d been trained to deal with too many disasters to name.
He sent a text to the guys explaining what had happened, warning them to stay back. As much as they could stay out of this, the better. He’d handle the police as much as possible.
Cops brought attention. Dead bodies brought attention. And that’s what he and his “brothers” had come here to avoid.
But he couldn’t rightly let Zara or her sister make the call, or stand here with another identical woman in the dirt. So, he called the sheriff’s department himself. He spoke with a dispatcher, gave his details too many times to count, asked for the mysterious Thomas the sisters seemed to want and then settled in to wait.
It took too long. Hazeleigh was a mess by the time a lone cop got out of a marked car over by the main house. Zara stood firm, holding on to her sister, but it was the kind of firm that was just seconds away from breaking.
Jake watched the cop’s approach. He was a middle-aged gentleman. Late forties maybe, tall with just the hint of a paunch. He wore a brown uniform and didn’t seem to be any hurry.
Jake tried to keep the scowl off his face. He didn’t like cops on a good day. He knew it wasn’t a fair feeling, but knowing and feeling were two separate things. But he immediately didn’t like this cop and his lack of hurry.
“Zara. Hazeleigh,” the deputy said, nodding at each of the women. He turned to Jake, suspicion in his eyes. “And you’re one of the ranch owners?” he said with some distaste.
Mostly the town of Wilde had been friendly. But there were a few who weren’t happy that Lee Hart had sold. And a few, mostly men, who put the blame for that unhappiness on the buyers’ shoulders. Not the seller’s.
“Jake Thompson.” Jake had to beat back his desire to sneer at the man. He held out a hand instead and forced his mouth to curve. “Good to meet you. Wish it was under better circumstances.”
The deputy nodded. “So, what’s the problem?”
That was the thing about cops. They asked questions they knew the answers to. Hadn’t he gotten a dispatch call? Didn’t he know the problem?
Jake pointed at the hole, at just about the same time Zara did. Seemed neither of them felt like answering the question.
The cop stepped forward, peered into the hole, then stumbled back. “Holy hell,” the cop said, his voice breaking. “It’s...”
“Amberleigh,” Zara finished for him. “Yes, Steven. Now, can we please get her out of the ground? Find out what...?” Zara’s voice cracked, but she ruthlessly cleared her throat.
Jake had seen a lot of people do hard things in terrible circumstances. He’d seen acts of bravery and courage, failure and weakness. But Zara clearing her throat and saying the rest as she held on to Hazeleigh’s shaking frame struck him as particularly poignant.
“We need to know what happened,” she said firmly, her eyes on Steven the cop. “Where’s Thomas?”
“This isn’t his sector, Zara. Hell. Just... Okay.” He took a deep breath, clearly rattled. “I didn’t expect...”
“Steven,” Zara said, her voice sharp. “Get it together.”
The cop nodded and swallowed. He pulled his radio off his chest and began to mutter into it. Jake crossed to Zara and Hazeleigh. “Go home. I’ll handle this.”
“We should be here with her,” Zara said, looking at the hole in the ground. They couldn’t see the face from here, but Jake knew from experience Zara would see it in her mind’s eye, probably forever.
Jake blew out a breath and put his hand on Zara’s shoulder. A strong shoulder, but this was too much for anyone. “You can’t do anything for her now except take care of yourselves.” He nodded toward Hazeleigh.
Zara looked at her sister. A pale, shaking mess. She exhaled and nodded, care for her sister overriding the need to stay here and be strong.
“Come on, Haze,” she said. “We should go home. We can’t do anything here.”
“I knew it was bad, Zara. I knew it was bad.”
“I know. You were right,” Zara said, turning Hazeleigh around, and they began to walk toward their cabin, horse forgotten. That was fine. Jake would take care of it.
He probably shouldn’t. His job here, all six of their jobs here was to lay low. Avoid attention. Blend in.
A dead body on their property wasn’t going to do that. Especially if he handled things for Zara and Hazeleigh.
“Jake?” Zara said, looking over her shoulder.
“Yeah?”
She gave him a firm nod. “Thanks,” she said and then looked away, walking with Hazeleigh toward their cabin.
Yeah, he’d find a way to take care of it. That’s all there was to it.
