“You’re not just going to be hanging your hat,” Miss Joan informed him. She eyed Sully, trying to decide if he was just talking or if he was serious. If it was the latter, he needed to be set straight. “You understand that you’re going to be working for your keep once you’re at the ranch. My foreman doesn’t have much patience with people who don’t pull their own weight or are waiting to be served,” she told Sully.
“Oh, I understand,” he answered, not wanting there to be any misunderstandings. “Uncle Seamus made the terms of this arrangement very clear, and to be honest, I’m really looking forward to working with my hands.”
Miss Joan studied him for a moment, decided he was being honest and then nodded. “All right then, about those directions you wanted.”
Flipping over the menu she had just used earlier, Miss Joan took out the pencil she had in her apron pocket. Using a minimum of strokes, she drew a very basic map for Sully that took him from the center of the town to edge of the ranch that she and Harry owned.
Finished, she put the pencil back into her pocket with a flourish and let him have the map.
“You sure you don’t want to wait for Harry?” she asked, looking at him somewhat dubiously.
“No, this’ll do fine,” Sully assured her, tapping the map she had drawn for him.
Miss Joan had never accepted anything at face value. This was no exception. “How often do you get lost?”
“I don’t,” he said simply. “I just keep on going until I get there.”
Her expression was only partially skeptical at this point.
“All the same, I wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for losing one of Seamus’s great-grandkids, even if he does have a bunch of them to spare,” Miss Joan said.
“You won’t be.” His tone was final, indicating that the discussion was at an end. Sully reached into his pocket again, this time to take out his wallet. He was about to flip the folded leather open. “How much do I owe you for lunch?”
Miss Joan’s face darkened, like clouds gathering in the sky just before a storm. “You take your hand out of your pocket, boy, or your journey’s going to be over before it ever gets started,” she warned him. Under her watchful eye, Sully did as he was told—for now. “Nothing was said about there being a charge for lunch.”
Still, Sully’s hand lingered by his pocket. “I’d feel better paying my own way.”
“And I’d feel better if I were twenty years younger, but we can’t all get what we wish for,” Miss Joan snapped. “Now get going. And be sure to tell Rae I sent you.”
“Ray?” Sully asked.
Miss Joan nodded. “That’s the foreman. Rae Mulcahy. Otherwise you might find yourself being shot for trespassing.”
He should have known, Sully thought. People out here stripped things down to the basics.
“Right. I’ll introduce myself first thing,” he promised the woman. “Thank you for lunch, Miss Joan. It really was every bit as good as you said.”
She accepted her due. “Of course it was. You don’t stay in business as long as I have by lying to people. Don’t let Rae work you too hard,” she told him as an afterthought as Seamus’s great-nephew began to leave the diner.
Sully’s mouth curved a little as he took in her warning. “Not possible,” he replied just before he took his leave.
* * *
The twenty-some-odd mile trip to the J-H Ranch went by so quickly, Sully found that he was there before he realized it. If it weren’t for the tall wooden gate proclaiming the ranch’s name, he wouldn’t even have known that he had reached his destination. He would have just thought he was out on the open range.
Part of the problem was that the land had a sameness to it that didn’t set apart one area from another.
Getting out of the 4x4 truck he had rented at the airport when he had landed here in Texas, Sully opened the gate. Getting back in, he drove through to the other side, then got out a second time in order to close the gate behind him. He didn’t want to accidentally allow one of the horses to escape, although right now, he saw no sign of any kind of life forms in the vicinity.
Well, you said you wanted a change, right? Sully asked himself. And this is certainly a change.
While Aurora wasn’t a bustling metropolis the way Los Angeles and San Francisco were, it was definitely not anywhere nearly as deserted-looking and desolate as the land just outside of Forever was.
A person really had to be comfortable in their own skin to live out here, Sully thought. Otherwise, they could easily go stir-crazy inside of a day and a half.
Maybe two if they were particularly well-adjusted, he mused.
For a moment, he seriously considered turning the truck around, returning to the airport and catching a flight back to civilization.
The moment passed.
He was here, he silently argued, and Seamus seemed to think that being here would help him get through this unsettled part of his existence. He might as well at least meet this ranch foreman who was going to put him to work the second he set foot on the property.
He glanced at Miss Joan’s map that he had placed on the passenger seat in the truck. It looked as if the ranch house was straight ahead—wherever that was.
Sully drove more than a mile beyond the gate before he finally caught sight of the ranch house. There looked to be another structure some distance behind it. He guessed it was either the barn or the stable.
He still didn’t have all these ranching terms straight, he thought and wondered if Miss Joan’s foreman would cut him some slack until he got oriented. He hoped the man didn’t turn out to be one of these smug characters that built up his ego on the carcasses of workers he put down.
“Can’t worry about that,” Sully muttered. He was here, and he had to make the most of it. He hadn’t traveled all this way looking to make new friends. He just wanted to get back his zest for life. The zest he’d lost along the way while tracking down a serial killer.
Sully decided that he might as well pull his vehicle up in front of the ranch house and see if there was anyone there who could tell him where he could find the ranch foreman. He didn’t want to wander around aimlessly—for all he knew, that could get him shot out here.
Sully smiled grimly. He supposed that would be one way to deal with the funk he had slipped into.
After parking the truck, he got out of the cab. For now he left the one suitcase he’d packed where he’d put it, in the back seat. No sense in lugging it around until he found the foreman.
Sully smiled to himself as he approached the ranch house. The outside looked as if it had come straight out of one of those old Westerns he used to watch with his father. According to his dad, Angus, the Westerns had been old when he was a kid watching them with his father. That just made them classics in his book, his father had said.
Smiling
