herself again. She could do this for Daddy Gene. This one last thing for him. The man who’d been her father and the one person she could count on no matter what. “Love you, Daddy Gene,” she said quietly, looking out toward the mountains dark against the brilliant pinks, purples and reds of the sunset. “Thanks for the show.” She smiled and then wiped away the tears. Time to honor a life well lived. She wouldn’t remember those last days of illness and pain. She’d remember him laughing. That was her favorite Daddy Gene.
* * *
“FAYE ASKED ME to do the reading of the will tonight.”
Pepper stared at Bobby Ames, Angel Crossing’s attorney and part-time taxidermist.
He went on, “Everyone grab a seat. This won’t take long.”
They were in the living room of the ranch house, sitting on an assortment of chairs salvaged from roadside garbage piles or built by Faye’s friends.
“Come along, Pepper Moonbeam,” Faye said, formal and stiff. She’d been holding back her sadness tonight so they could “rejoice in” Daddy Gene’s life, not mourn his death. Pepper knew how tough that was as she’d worked over and over to hold her own tears in check. He’d been gone for just a month. They’d scattered his ashes weeks ago, but today was the real goodbye and much more painful than the one at his bedside. She didn’t understand what the lawyer was doing. Gene had left the ranch to Faye, what else could the will say? My god, he’d named the place for her: Santa Faye Ranch.
Pepper sat and waited for the attorney to speak again, a moment out of a soap opera or a telenovela. Bobby Ames finally started to read the will. Daddy Gene named a couple of friends and gave them his riding gear and two of his trophies. Then Bobby Ames did the strangest thing. He put the will down, sucked in a breath and spoke in a voice that Pepper was sure he’d learned from Law and Order. “I want to let you know that if Gene had come to me... I’ll just read this, then you can ask questions.”
What had Daddy Gene done? Put the rest of the will in verse? Or maybe he’d set up a scavenger hunt for the remaining items, like his bear-claw necklace. That would be like him. He’d been just a big kid at heart.
“The ranch goes to my cousin and savior, Arthur John McCreary.”
Pepper’s breath clogged her lungs as she ran over the words again in her head. They didn’t make any sense.
“He left me the ranch?” AJ asked. He didn’t sound like a man who’d just hit the jackpot.
“You’ve got the wrong will,” Pepper told the attorney. Well, maybe more like accused him of gross incompetence.
“Now...” Chief Rudy started.
“It’s wrong,” she said. It’s got to be. She’d used the inheritance she’d been sure she and her mother would get on the grant application to get the Angel Crossing Community Garden Project started. “Daddy Gene always said... I used the property—”
“How could I have forgotten,” Faye said with something like regret and worry, two emotions she rarely acknowledged. “You told that agency you would use the value of the ranch as the matching money.”
“You did what?” AJ’s storm-gray gaze locked on her. No chance that she couldn’t figure out what he was thinking. “There’s a lien on the property?”
“Not exactly,” she said.
He hitched up his sleeping daughter so her head fit more firmly on his shoulder. “You. Me. The attorney. We need to talk now.”
“What are you, a caveman? I already told you there’s some mistake.” She moved closer to whisper what needed to be said so no one—especially not her mother—could hear. “You didn’t even visit. When he was...when the doctors said that he...you didn’t visit. Why would he leave this to you? Did you call him? Talk to the attorney?”
“Are you saying that I scammed Gene? My God, he was kin. He watched out for me when I first started riding bulls.”
“What other reason could there be?”
Bobby Ames pretended to clear his throat.
Pepper moved around the room restlessly as the silence stretched. Not only was her plan on the line, her mother’s future was, too. The ranch would have been plenty to keep Faye in yogurt and tofu. One good thing about her mother was that she didn’t need a lot of cash to get along. That’s why Pepper had been so sure the community garden plan would work.
“Now, we need to discuss this frankly,” Bobby Ames said, still using his TV-attorney voice. “There’ll be no more talk about this will not being legal. It is. Faye and the chief looked everywhere for another one. There was nothing at the house. I called around to other attorneys and there was nothing. This is his will.”
Pepper wanted to say no. She wanted to scream no, but she was nothing if not a realist. She left the dreaming to her mother.
“Why me?” AJ asked.
Yeah, she wanted to know that, too.
Bobby Ames adjusted his glasses. “Could be that it’s an old will and you were his cousin? Or maybe because you saved his life.”
“I’m not sure I saved him,” AJ said, moving his daughter to his other shoulder.
“The way Gene told it was that if you hadn’t run into the arena and grabbed him, he’d have been stomped to death. He said the clowns had gotten tangled up with a loose calf and you were the first one to him. He said you took a good kick to the ribs.” AJ’s hand went to his side. “I believe you nearly lost your spleen.”
“He thanked me plenty,” AJ said. “I never expected—”
“You don’t need to make any decisions today,” Bobby Ames said, “except this thing with Pepper and the grant. What did Faye mean?”
Pepper searched for a way to understand the new lay of the land. She’d never imagined Daddy Gene wouldn’t leave the ranch to Faye. She’d never asked him about it in those last weeks. They’d all known he was dying but they’d still tried to deny it until the very end.
No one spoke and the silence stretched out long enough that she could hear the deep breathing of the baby. Come clean, girlie girl, Daddy Gene’s voice said in her head. Dear Lord. What would they do? What would the state office where she’d filed her paperwork say?
Pepper said, “Daddy Gene loved Faye, you all know that. You know what he would do.” Her voice squeaked to a stop. Her chest hurt from holding back the tears. She had to get through this next bit, then she could fall to pieces. She needed to protect Faye’s future and her own plans for the garden, her patients and the town. Pepper breathed deeply as she’d seen her mother do before a big announcement. “I’m planning the Angel Crossing Community Garden here at the ranch and we needed a grant for the equipment. Faye agreed I could use the value of the ranch’s land and outbuildings to match the money the state would grant us. It was the only way to get the money, so I put that on my application. I’ve already set up the greenhouse using my own savings and promised loans to my farmers. I told you all about it, chief. Remember? There would be fresh food for those who worked the ground and plots where others could grow specialty plants that they’d then sell and pay me land rent. It would be run by a nonprofit and support small businesses as well as
