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.
