“I am…I am so sorry,” Jamie stammered. “I didn’t know what else to do. The baby’s father comes from a very rich family. I was afraid that…”

Mae held up her hand. “No need to explain, and you can rest assured that if anyone comes around here looking for you, they’ll get a blank stare from me. The good Lord is looking out for you, honey. He took you to little Janet’s grave then turned right around and directed your path to her great-aunt’s house. She was a sweet child and much loved. Use her name well.”

For a moment Jamie thought her knees were going to buckle. “I will,” she said. “I promise that I will.”

Chapter Twenty-four

GUS LOOKED OUT the window as the plane banked for a landing. The freshly cleared airstrip stood out starkly against the white landscape.

His kingdom was laid out below him, with Hartmann land as far as the eye could see-a sea of snow-covered land. He remembered Grandpa Buck saying that a man could never have too much land. The more land a man owned the more important he was.

He could see the little cemetery where his grandfather, father, and Sonny were buried. And Montgomery’s stillborn baby.

He’d always known that Montgomery worshipped his grandfather, but somehow it had never occurred to Gus that they might have been lovers. Poor Montgomery. How sad she must have been when her baby didn’t live. Had his grandfather also been sad? Or just relieved?

Kelly met the plane.

“More bad news,” she announced as she pulled away from the airstrip. “Jamie Long had the baby.”

Kelly drove him to what once had been the McGraf farm. Gus went in and looked around. At the blood-soaked mattress. The thick pile of ashes in the fireplace. Trash left by previous visitors. No fresh trash, though. Jamie had cleaned up after herself and taken it with her.

He pointed at the mutilated second mattress. “What’s the story on that?”

“Probably she used the stuffing for kindling.”

He noticed something shiny sticking out from beneath the bloody mattress and bent to pick it up. It was a small pair of scissors. Not nail scissors. Larger than that and of better quality. He carried them over to the window. They were engraved with vines and flowers.

“She probably used those to cut the cord,” Kelly said.

Yes, she would have had to do that, Gus realized. It was hard to imagine a woman being alone at such a time-a young woman who’d never given birth before. And with all that blood. She must have been very frightened.

What had made Jamie Long leave the ranch, Gus pondered. What things had she deduced on her own, and what things had his mother told her? Surely the girl realized that Mary Millicent was as crazy as a loon. But not always. Sometimes she understood exactly what was going on. Sometimes she played them for fools. Gus knew that she could walk. When the Mexican gardener had carried her down the stairs to Sonny’s room, he noticed that the bottoms of her house shoes were scuffed.

“I remembered one of my men saying that he’d pointed out the McGraf farm to her,” Kelly said. “I drove up this morning to take a look.”

Gus wanted to be angry. Wanted to yell at Kelly and tell her she should have looked here first. But this wasn’t the only deserted farmhouse on the ranch. He’d paid the back taxes on at least a half dozen of these small spreads and had the occupants evicted. He didn’t like the property of no-count dirt farmers backing up to Hartmann land. Didn’t like their animals wandering onto Hartmann land. Didn’t like them using the ranch store and service station and thinking they should be allowed to attend the Hartmann City church. Didn’t like them tapping into the same aquifer with their wells. Didn’t like them observing the comings and goings at the ranch.

The McGrafs. That was the family who’d frozen to death after the sheriff evicted them. But what did people expect? That they could stay on indefinitely without paying their taxes? It wasn’t his fault that dumb-ass McGraf decided to leave in the middle of winter without first checking the weather report. Even if his generator was broken, everyone should have a battery-operated radio for emergencies. Or he could have listened to the radio in his truck-if it had a radio. Surely the man could have gotten the weather report somehow. He could have asked the sheriff for another day or two or taken shelter with a neighbor. There was no excuse for putting his family in danger like that.

Or maybe it had been like this most recent storm. Kelly said it hadn’t been predicted to come this far north. Somehow Gus knew that Jamie Long had listened to the weather report before she left-for all the good it did her.

Gus walked through the house. Faded wallpaper was peeling from the walls, and tattered remnants of curtains hung from some of the windows. Mrs. McGraf had tried to make the place pretty.

He needed to stop thinking about the McGrafs, though, and focus on Jamie Long. Judging from the pile of ash in the fireplace, she had gathered a lot of wood and been here for a significant period of time. Right under Kelly’s nose. Once again he was all but overcome by the urge to blame Kelly. To berate her.

But he didn’t want Kelly going crazy like Montgomery. He needed Kelly to keep things going at the ranch now that Montgomery was gone.

He walked into the larger of the two bedrooms. Had Mr. and Mrs. McGraf been happy in this room, he wondered.

And he wondered how tall a man Mr. McGraf had been.

With all his riches and power, Gus had never experienced true love and joy with a woman. But he had experienced something just as precious when he was with Sonny. A pure, unselfish love that went all the way to bedrock.

He hadn’t kidded himself into thinking that he was going to love Jamie Long’s baby with anything close to what he had felt for Sonny. Every time he saw the baby, he would think of what he’d had to do to the kid’s mother. But he wanted his sister to have Sonny’s baby to love and raise and to pass off as her own if that was what she wanted. And human nature being what it was, Jamie Long would not have been able to resist blackmailing Amanda or selling her story to the highest bidder.

The closest thing to joy he was going to have for the rest of his days was making Amanda happy. If there was a hell, he already was going to burn in it. One more major sin wasn’t going to make it any worse. What he had to do now was figure out how to find Jamie Long and Sonny’s baby.

“We checked all the hospitals within a hundred-mile radius,” Kelly told him. “And I swore out a warrant with the county sheriff accusing her of stealing money and jewelry.”

“Call the sheriff and tell him that you were mistaken,” Gus said. “I will handle the search-privately. As far as anyone on this ranch or in this county is concerned, she left and was never heard from again.”

What he needed to do now was crawl inside the girl’s head. What were her needs?

Gus took one more look around the pitiful little dwelling, then walked out onto the porch and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. The message on the tiny screen informed him that service was not available. Which irritated him. Even if the population density in Marshall County wasn’t significantly higher than that of the moon, it was ridiculous not to have reliable cell-phone service.

He motioned to Kelly and headed for her vehicle.

After she dropped him off at the ranch house, he went straight to his bedroom, where the phone line was secure.

A man’s voice answered.

“I’m at the ranch,” Gus said. “I need you to come right away.”

“Is this official or unofficial business?”

“Unofficial,” Gus said.

Then he sat staring at nothing.

Montgomery. It was hard to believe that she was really dead. She had always been there for him. Always. He shouldn’t have yelled at her. He’d been yelling a lot lately. The pompous, swaggering ignoramus they’d put in the White House thought that he should actually be in charge. If Gus hadn’t been so aggravated with him, he wouldn’t have lost his temper with Montgomery.