Biddle, a source informed me about an hour ago that…that your wife’s…her remains were found this morning. By hunters. I’m…I’m sorry.” Jamie’s voice grew weak and the last word had come out almost soundless.
For one moment Nathan Biddle sat so still atop the paint that he looked like a statue. He didn’t even seem to be breathing. Then he closed his eyes, swallowed and drew in a tortured breath. “Where?” he said through tightened lips.
“On a sandbar, a small island, out in the Arkansas River,” Jamie answered softly.
Biddle did not turn his head, but his eyes moved to the camera. “Use any of that—” he angled the hat subtly toward Dave “—and I will sue your asses off.”
Dave slid his fingers around and pressed the off button on the camera, this time for real.
Biddle turned the paint, heading back the way he had come. This time the squeak of leather and the crunch of gravel made an eerie counterpoint to the fading light and gusting evening air. He didn’t look back as he galloped across the road, up the embankment and around the rocky base of the cliff.
Jamie, with her gift for glibness, could only stare at his back as he rode away, unable to think of a thing to say. But what could one possibly say to a man who had just been told that after three long years, his wife’s remains had been found in this wild lonely country?
“I promise,” she finally murmured, “I won’t use the footage.” But Dave was the only one who heard her.
CHAPTER TWO
ALONE. THE WORD took on a new and terrible meaning as Nathan Biddle stared out at the spectacular sunset he had seen so many times from this broad window. He braced his palms wide on the sill, suddenly remembering the day his grandfather Biddle had installed the majestic expanse of glass in the western wall of the enormous Hart Ranch house.
“Nathan, my boy,” the old man had said, “your grandmother’s people came from those hills out there. The Osage, a fierce and proud nation. And filthy rich, too!” Gramps had slapped him on the back as if it was a great joke.
For so long—months after Susie had disappeared—Nathan had waited for a ransom note that never came. Maybe someone was after the Osage oil money, he and his lawyers had reasoned. Such atrocities, in the name of greed, had been visited upon the wealthy Osage people before. Nathan hoped that maybe someone would demand the millions that he would gladly pay, and then Susie and their unborn child would be magically restored to him.
But now these Osage Hills, beloved resting place, of his ancestors, had become Susie’s resting place, as well. She had been out there all this time. All this time while he had been searching the world for her, she had been right out there on an island in a river…alone.
He had sensed from the first, of course, that Susie would never come back. Had felt it in his body.
Hunters, the reporter woman had said. He hadn’t even turned on the TV. And wouldn’t. He did not want to see what the jackals were saying about Susie, about him, about the one who had done this. That was for the city people in Tulsa to look at, to eat with their nightly meal, digesting someone else’s pain like so much junk food. Tears stung his eyes.
The clouds gathered in radiant silence as the liquid orange Oklahoma sun touched down on the rim of the rolling hills. Nathan focused his burning eyes there, at that convergence of light on the far horizon.
He tried not to think of the last time he had seen Susie, but her voice reverberated in his mind, anyway: “Nathan, I’m pregnant!” Those words would echo in him forever, like his own heartbeat. They had been the words he’d desperately wanted to hear, though he’d never admitted it, not to her, not even to himself.
Their battle against infertility, the child they were finally going to have, none of it seemed real now. It seemed as if the only thing that remained from his former life was this land where he had grown up, these endless hills.
He put his forehead to the glass and fought the rage, the tears, the self-pity. When his mind cooled and he raised his head, the clouds seemed brighter than any he had ever seen. The strange sight caused a sudden unease to pass over him. He looked around the room, cast in an amber glow, and the furniture—his grandfather’s furniture—looked the same as it always had, yet not the same at all.
Grief, he knew by now, could have strange and unpredictable effects on a man’s mind. He turned his head slowly, looking back at the clouds, and they had altered again. Before his eyes they suddenly took shape above the setting sun as first one, then many faces formed. As he stared, this wall of faces stirred in him an unbidden anger, then sadness and finally a strange resolve. It seemed as if this vision had been trying to form for the past three years. He shook his head and blinked, then rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, the faces had vanished. Only ordinary clouds remained, following the sun to bed.
He turned from the window and the room looked ordinary again, too. Like the same old place where the same evening sun had shone in the same way ever since he was a small boy.
He stumbled to the wide leather couch facing the fireplace and sprawled on his back, suddenly stricken with a blinding headache.
Which was where his cousin Robert found him.
“Nathan!” Robert yelled as he crashed through the front door, then halted abruptly when he caught sight of the figure on the couch with one arm flung over his eyes.
“Nathan,” Robert repeated more quietly, and Nathan heard his cousin’s boots clomp heavily as he crossed the hardwood floor. Nathan sensed Robert standing over him. “Are you all right? I came here as soon as I heard the television reports.”
Nathan lowered his arm.
Six and a half feet tall, thick-necked and thick-middled, with a tail of unkempt jet-black hair trailing down his back, Robert Hart looked like nothing so much as a sorrowful young bull, peering down at Nathan. He removed his well-worn baseball cap and held it in both hands. “They said they found her…her bones out there.” Robert inclined his head toward the massive window.
Nathan sat up. “Damn the media—reporting it before I’ve been officially notified.”
“So how’d you know?”
“Long story. A reporter.” He braced his elbows on his knees and pressed steepled fingers to his lips. “What are the news reports saying?”
Robert sat down next to him. “They said they made a provisional identification,” he answered quietly, “by her jewelry.”
Nathan nodded. “The Claremont ring. I can imagine what Wanda and Fred are feeling.”
Thinking about Susie’s mother and father tore at Nathan’s heart. He didn’t mention his own parents, although he suspected that Robert was picturing them now. Nathan wondered if his cousin was grateful, as he himself was, that Clare and Drew Biddle were not alive to witness this sorrow. Despite Robert’s hokey Indian ways, Nathan was suddenly thankful to have this particular man at his side for the ordeal ahead. Robert was a guy you could count on. The cousins were men of one accord, though they lived in different worlds, believed in different things.
“Nathan, don’t you want to turn on the TV so you can see for yourself what they’re saying?”
