Nora decided the only approach to handle the painful situation was to take it a day at a time. She’d have to find a way to stay on the Rocking Horse Ranch and take care of Bubbles that didn’t cause Levi or Seth any extra work, and certainly without attending any family functions. Regardless, she’d probably be working closely with Seth. The very thought made her nerves go all fluttery. Don’t you have enough to worry about without focusing on Seth?
She texted Felicia to let her know the results of Doc’s exam. Levi was at the ranch to supervise the unloading of the donkey into a fenced paddock that housed a miniature barn. It was neatly painted a rusty red color.
“We have rescue horses pretty regularly,” Seth explained, “so this is their quarantine accommodation until they can be acclimated. It’ll be perfect for Bubbles.”
She had to agree. Bubbles would be secure, warm and comfortable at night when the temperatures dropped, but she’d also be able to see people and horses coming and going, an important first step in domesticating her...if she survived. The donkey was still way too listless and it pained Nora so see the ribs protruding against her dull hide. Levi leaned his elbows on the rail and watched.
Seth described what Doc had recommended. “He said she might not make it.”
Levi nodded. “We’ll see. She can get to know Floyd if she sticks around.”
“Floyd’s a donkey Levi rescued from a neglectful owner. He’s a character,” Seth explained then he turned to Levi. “We have other problems you should know.”
Levi listened, mouth quirked to show his surprise as Seth told him about the letter bomb and the binoculars. “The guy’s after you and Felicia then?” he said to Nora.
“Looks that way.” She paused. “If you aren’t comfortable with me staying here, I understand.”
Levi shrugged. “Between myself, and all the Dukes coming and going, this is the safest place in Furnace Falls. And Willow’s the best shot of all of us, save Jude.” He paused. “Willow’s already called to tell me to count you in for the party tonight.”
“Oh.” Nora could not push out an answer through her suddenly dry mouth, but Levi didn’t seem to notice. Without another word, he waved and strode back to the main house.
She didn’t want to delve into a conversation with her emotions hopping like fleas, but as if he knew that, Seth merely guided her to the far end of the paddock, let her through the gate so she could examine the stable. Everything inside was perfectly in order, from the fresh bedding to the full water trough and small amount of hay and loose salt. It calmed Nora. At least if the outcome was bad, the jenny would be comfortable and safe for her last days.
Nora stepped out of the stable into the paddock. The jenny eyed her. Nora moved closer one small step at a time until the donkey’s ears flattened.
“I’m here to help. We’re going to get you through this. You’re going to get well and have your baby and we’ll find a home for you,” Nora said. Home was what this jenny needed the most. A home where she felt secure, confident that she would be cared for unceasingly. Who didn’t want that?
Nora recalled her mother and brother standing shoulder to shoulder in the doorway after high school graduation when she’d left her family and Furnace Falls for good. She hadn’t looked back, in spite of her mother’s sniffled cries. Nora wouldn’t have wanted them to see that she’d been crying too. That teenage Nora had been a confused young woman who could not accept a truth that had devastated her a few hours before, the truth about the man she’d idolized, whose chin dimple she’d inherited, along with a passion for donkeys.
Bubbles took an unexpected step and shoved her nose forward. In a flash, she’d swiped the peppermint from Nora’s pocket and danced away before she slicked it out of the wrapper and swallowed it. Nora laughed.
“Got ourselves a pickpocket,” Seth called, laughing.
It was a good sign, she thought as she backed away and exited the paddock just as her phone rang.
“Hey, Nora,” Felicia said. “How’s our girl?”
Nora gave her a quick report. “Touch and go, I’d say, but she’s got an appetite for candy.”
“She’ll make it.” Nora caught a distracted tone in her normally ebullient friend.
“What’s wrong? Aside from the obvious.”
“Nothing, probably.” Again an uncharacteristic hesitation. “I’m at Zane’s and he’s on the phone. Let me step outside.” Nora heard a door close. “Zane’s very upset by everything, of course. I think...” She trailed off.
“You think what?”
“Do you remember Zane’s brother, Kai?”
The question surprised her. She mentally scanned her high school memories. “Actually, I do. I think I only met him once. He was a year older but I think he repeated a term, right? He went to a different school eventually, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, the kind they send you to when you steal cars and beat people up.”
This was getting serious. Nora looked at Seth. “Mind if I put this on speaker for Seth?”
Felicia agreed and recapped.
“What happened to this brother Kai?” Seth said.
“Zane didn’t want to talk much about it. I get the sense Kai left the area and came back only for their mom’s funeral. When the date farm went to Zane, Kai took his part of the settlement and left. I gather it wasn’t a cheerful parting. Zane said his brother had problems, but he wouldn’t be more specific.”
“Are you thinking that Kai is behind the ATV attacks and the binocular thing?” Seth said.
There was a long pause. “I don’t know. What would be the purpose? If he was angry at Zane, why attack us? I’m gonna look through my old stuff and see if I can jog my memory about Kai.”
“And we’ll ask Jude to check on it,” Seth said.
Felicia breathed out. “Weird.”
“Felicia,” Nora said, “is there something you’re not saying?”
She hesitated. “I’m sitting on the porch, alone, but I feel like someone’s watching me.”
“All right,” Nora said. “You need to leave there immediately. If Kai’s on the property...”
“Don’t worry. I poked my head in and waved goodbye to Zane and I’m walking to my car now. I’ll text Zane later.” They heard the sound of the car door shut and the engine come to life.
“Stay on the phone with us until you get to the main road,” Seth said.
“Okay. I’m going to Mom’s. I promised to help put up the Christmas decorations today and be there for dinner. Nora, can you come over tomorrow morning so we can talk?”
Nora’s mouth went dry. “Your mom doesn’t want me around, Felicia.”
“Text me and I’ll meet you on the porch. We can go get coffee or something. I’ll use the Range Rover instead of the truck so you don’t have to detach the trailer or anything.”
“All right. I’ll come at nine, after I feed Bubbles.”
Felicia agreed, let them know she’d reached the highway, and they disconnected.
Seth glanced at her. “Not my business, certainly, but what happened when you two were in high school?”
Her gut reaction was to clamp her teeth together and remain mute. Instead she found herself telling Seth the truth.
“My dad, um, he betrayed our family and I didn’t believe my mom and Jude about it. First heard about it when I was sixteen and it started a downward spiral for me. I went kind of wild, walked away from my faith, and family, started to go to parties. Felicia and I went to a party our senior year and I drank too much.” She felt the pain of it again, the raw shame wash over her. “I drove us into the side of a feed store, ruining Felicia’s knee, which resulted in the loss of her ballet scholarship. When the legal trouble and the financial dust had settled, we hatched a plan to start over again. We ran away from home on graduation night after I... Well, I discovered proof positive that my father was exactly who Jude said he was.”
“Ah. I think I understand a little better now.” Seth walked her to the trailer. “For what it’s worth, I admire you for staying here now.”
She looked at him in surprise. “You admire me?”
“Uh-huh. You’ve got plenty of reasons to speed out of Furnace Falls, but you’re here, even though it makes you uncomfortable. That’s courage, pressing in instead of running away.”
She couldn’t explain why tears crowded her vision at that moment. “Thank you. I...don’t think I would be able to if you hadn’t been so kind.”
“Like Willow said, you belong here if you want to.”
She fell into the comfort of his words for a moment, allowing the fantasy of a home and family to enter her brain, fill it with cozy images, before she brushed it away. Home and family didn’t belong in her reality.
“I don’t want to,” she said, hoping it did not sound rude. “I need to be very clear about that, Seth. I’m here for the jenny, then I’m leaving.” Why did she feel it necessary to state the obvious? Was she saying it for him or herself?
He held her gaze for a long second and she thought he might have looked regretful. Suddenly, she wanted to take back the words, rest her head on his chest and let his heartbeat ease away her angst. Silliness, she chided herself. Nothing but emotional fallout from the traumatic day.
But it was too late. At her words, he said he’d see her later and went to tend to his ranch chores.
Nora let herself into the trailer. “Home away from home,” she said with a sigh. This time it did not feel quite as strange. She helped herself to a few crackers from the box Seth had brought over. It had been nonstop stress since she’d returned to town and she felt depleted down to her bones.
Her gaze found the series of photos on the opposite walls of Seth’s carefully restored trailer. He’d wanted to remake the space to honor his grandparents, but the photo gallery captured memories from the Duke clan as well. She drew close, fingers tracing one filigreed frame. It showed Kitty, her mother, her arm crooked through Jude’s as he escorted her to a seat in a church. Jude was dressed in a suit and Kitty in a fluttery dress of lavender, her favorite shade. Her face tipped sideways, away from the camera, a longstanding family joke that she never liked to have her photo taken. Seth was there too, leaning on a cane. Her mother looked small next to Jude, her head barely level with his shoulder, diminished somehow. How much Nora had missed in the ten years she’d been away.
She flashed back to her days as a grade-schooler when she and her teen brother Jude had pretended to be wilderness scouts, scouring every tiny patch of water for the endangered pupfish that only lived in precisely two miniscule habitats on the entire planet. Never mind the impossibility of their hunt, Jude was always willing to indulge his baby sister and they’d skulk around for hours.
Her memories flipped back to one of their blowups.
“You just want to make me hate Dad because you hate him,” she’d screamed at her mother, an angry sixteen-year-old.
“I don’t hate him,” her mother had said, finally raising her voice to a shout, hands clenched into fists. “I want you to see him for what he is.”
“He didn’t cheat on you, he wouldn’t,” she’d spat.
Jude had arrived home from his police cadet work then, flinging the door open in time to hear her.
“He did,” Jude thundered, “and he spent all your college money on gambling and his new girlfriend. Dad isn’t the hero you make him out to be. Why don’t you wise up and take a look at the truth?” Jude’s eyes had blazed in a way that made him unrecognizable as the brother she’d grown up with.
“That’s not true, Jude. Tell him he’s out of line, Mom.”
But her mother had looked at the floor.
At the time, Nora couldn’t imagine why the two wanted her to believe such terrible lies about Ron Duke. The accusations about the man she’d worshipped could not be true. He’d attended every one of her softball games and tasted each of her disastrous home economics recipes for school. She was his “mini me” he’d always said. Her mother and her brother might betray Ron Duke, but Nora never would.
And she hadn’t. The betrayal had come from his end, when she’d learned a few years later on her graduation night with 100 percent certainty that Jude and her mother had been right.
Turning away from the photo, she pulled out her laptop and wrenched it open. Might as well get her work done. It would give her an excuse for not attending the party or wallowing in self-pity.
The emails were quickly finished and she found herself looking up Kai Freeman. There wasn’t much to be found on him online, so either he was using another name or he stayed away from social media.
Was it possible Zane’s troubled brother was behind the ATV attack and the binocular incident? But, like Felicia had said, what would be his motive? What would he gain?
And why would he want Nora dead?