all this.
He supposed a tiny part of him hadn’t turned cynical yet and still believed in miracles.
So he sat in his vehicle, trying not to notice how stuffy it seemed with the windows rolled up and his doors locked, and he called his sister’s number.
After a short delay, he heard the cell phone start to ring. Waiting for Greta to answer her phone, Ryan counted off the number of times her cell rang. After four, her voice mail kicked in. Impatient, he was about to terminate the call and try again in a couple of minutes when he heard Greta’s breathless voice as she came on the line.
“Hello?”
Rather than relax, he felt his shoulders stiffen. “Greta? It’s me. Ryan.”
“Hi.” And then he heard her ask guardedly, “What’s up?”
Was that just his imagination—or her guilty conscience stepping up? “I’m coming up to the ranch to see you.”
He heard her laugh softly. “Well, you can come up to the ranch, but you won’t see me.”
Was he tipping her off with this call? Was she planning on taking off? He needed more to work with. “Why?” he asked.
“Why do you think?” Not waiting for him to respond, she gave him the answer to her own question. “Because I’m not at the ranch. I’m not in Tulsa at all. I’m back in Oklahoma City.”
Ryan frowned to himself. Ever since Greta had gotten engaged, she’d spent more and more of her time in Oklahoma City, where her fiancé lived. She’d even taken on horse training jobs there.
“I thought you’d stick around the ranch for a while, you know, because of Mother.”
There was silence on the other end of the line and for a moment, he thought that the call had been dropped. But then Greta said, “Yes, well, I wasn’t really doing her any good just hanging around the house. Especially since she kept looking at me as if she was afraid of me. As if she thought I was going to do something to her. I don’t know what’s with that,” Greta complained, sounding as if she was at a complete loss.
“Did you ask her about it?” Ryan asked.
“Yes. But when I asked her why she was looking at me like that,” Greta went on, obviously upset about the matter, “she denied it.”
“So what’s the problem?”
He heard Greta sigh. “I got the feeling she denied it because she was afraid if she didn’t, I’d do something to her.”
He couldn’t believe that things between his mother and sister had actually degenerated down to this, but then Abra was prone to mood swings. “You’re imagining things, Greta.”
He heard Greta sigh. “I suppose that maybe I am, but just the other day she asked me if I was doing any recreational drugs. Me, who’s never taken anything stronger than an aspirin. I think that beating Mother took might have been even more serious than any of us suspected.”
It was Ryan’s turn to sigh. No one was more frustrated about not being able to find whoever had hurt his mother than he was. But right now, he had the break-in to deal with.
The break-in with the evidence mounting against Greta. There had to be an explanation for all this, he thought, but he needed to talk to her in person to get at the truth.
Growing up, Greta had been a tomboy almost in self-defense. She’d been outnumbered by her brothers five to one and had learned to hold her own at a very early age. At five-nine she was tall and willowy, and at first glance, very feminine.
But she was also tough to the point that he was certain no one could easily push her around. As far as he knew, his sister didn’t really have much of a temper, but then he supposed everyone could be pushed to their limit. What was Greta’s limit? he couldn’t help wondering.
Was there something that could push Greta over the edge?
His thought process suddenly took him in a very new direction, almost against his will. What if, for some reason, their mother had suddenly taken exception to Greta’s pending marriage to Mark Stanton? Handsome and glibly charming, it was no secret that the younger brother of the president of Stanton Oil got by on his looks, not his work ethic. Maybe, despite the fact that she had been instrumental in throwing Greta and Mark an engagement party—their father always left such things to his wife—Abra had told Greta to slow down and think things through and Greta had balked. One thing could have had led to another and—
And what? Ryan silently demanded. Greta had had a complete reversal in personality and gone ballistic on their mother? That account just didn’t fly for him.
None of this was making any sense to him—and he was getting one hell of a headache just reviewing all the various details over and over again in his head.
“Ryan? Are you still there?” The stress in Greta’s voice broke through his thoughts.
“What?” Embarrassed, he flushed. Luckily there was no one to see him. “Yeah, I’m still here, Greta. How long have you been in Oklahoma City?” he asked her abruptly, changing direction.
He heard her hesitate. Was she thinking, or...?
“A couple of weeks or so,” Greta finally answered. “Why?”
Ryan suppressed his sigh. “Which is it? A couple of weeks? Or ‘so’?”
“Three weeks,” she replied more specifically, irritation evident in her voice. “Just what’s this all about, Ryan?”
He didn’t address her question. Instead, he asked her another one of his own. “So you weren’t there—at the ranch—yesterday morning? Or the night before?”
“No, I already told you,” she replied, annoyed. “I was here, working. Why are you asking me all these weird questions?” she asked. And then, as if she had a premonition about what was happening, she asked, “Ryan, what’s going on?”
He gave her the unvarnished details. “Someone broke into the stables early yesterday morning.”
“That’s awful,” she cried, upset. And then realization entered her voice, as did abject horror. “Wait, why would you think that it was me?”
Maybe he should have refrained from telling her this until later, but Greta was his sister and he had to give her every benefit of the doubt. “Because one of the windows had been deliberately broken and there was blood on the jagged edges.”
Even as she said the words, she couldn’t really get herself to believe it. It was there in her voice as she asked in stunned disbelief, “My blood?”
He had never hated sharing a piece of information more than this. “Yes.”
She felt as if she had slipped into some sort of parallel universe, one that was not bound by the laws of reason—or reality for that matter.
Stunned, she protested, “That’s not possible,” because she couldn’t see how it could be. “What reason would I have to break into the stable, going through a window for heaven’s
