Late afternoon, Ancel Hawk was in the stables, observing the vet conduct a follow-up exam with his favorite horse, Donner. The stallion had come down with coffin-joint synovitis. Fortunately, the inflammation had been treated before any degeneration in the foot.
Ancel’s iPhone rang. When he saw who was calling, he excused himself and took the call as he moved to the farther end of the stable. “Is this really Chase Longrin or is my phone funnin’ me?”
“How’re you, Mr. Hawk?”
“I’ve been better, been worse, and been here before. No complaints. Your own self?”
“I’m in the same corral you just described, sir. As long as the food’s good and the bed’s warm, I’d be a fool to repine.”
Chase had been Nick’s best friend in high school. In their senior year, they were both smitten with the same girl, Alexis Aimes, and contested for her attention. When she fell in love with the other, Nick handled his disappointment with grace, remaining best friends with Chase and treating Alexis like a sister. It was as if Nick had always known Jane would be there for him in a few years.
“What can I do for you, son?”
“Remember last year you hounded me for that Tennessee Walker?”
“The chestnut mare with the golden mane and tail. I regret if you felt hounded. I’m just a truly persistent horse trader.”
“Her name’s Melosa. You still like to buy her for Mrs. Hawk?”
“If ever a horse and woman were born to further glorify each other, it’s them.”
“After that kind of talk, you won’t whittle my price down.”
“Well, Melosa is a year older, thanks to your intransigence.”
“You’re amusing to dicker with, sir. Anytime you want to come see Melosa, make sure her teeth haven’t fallen out, you’re welcome.”
“Why not now?”
“I could live with now.”
“I’ll set out shortly,” Ancel said.
Leaving the vet to report on Donner’s condition to Juan Saba, the ranch manager, Ancel went to his Ford 550 truck in front of the house and fired it up. His heart was lighter than it had been in a while, though not because of any Tennessee walking horse.
There was a Melosa in Chase Longrin’s stables, and Ancel would not mind buying her for Clare; but the purpose of the call had not been to sell a horse. As had been arranged when Jane went off the grid two and a half months earlier, such a call meant that she had contacted Chase and that he had a message to relay to her in-laws. This was the first time she had rung him up.
The long private lane between the house and the county road was flanked by ranch fencing overhung in places by ancient oak trees. In this season, the world beyond appeared to offer only rich green grasslands, sheep grazing to the left and cattle on the right.
Tens of millions of years earlier, most of Texas had been covered by shallow seas. The skeletons and shells of tiny creatures abiding therein formed the sediment that compacted into the deep limestone bedrock supporting all of what accrued in this territory thereafter. The land was the foundation on which a man and woman could build a life with hard work and love, with faith that it meant something. As long as Ancel could remember, he loved the land but also the vastness of the sky, which was bigger here than in most places, the horizon as far away as aboard a ship in mid-ocean. He felt anchored by the earth and buoyed by the majesty of the big sky, so that life had a sweet tension.
With Nick’s death, the land seemed to fracture under Ancel, its millions of years of stability called into question. Some days the sky paled, as if it might fade to a white arc too empty and terrible for the eye to tolerate. Far horizons that once inspired by their distance now suggested that there were no longer limits in the world, that some never-imagined threat would come from beyond the curve of the earth and fall on them as they lay defenseless.
He spoke to Clare about his grief, but not about its depth or about his fear that it would never diminish. She was suffering, too, and if they were emotionally at sea here where no sea had been for millions of years, his role must be to remain stoic and serve as the vessel that carried her from this sad time to a happier shore.
Ancel’s best hope—and Clare’s—of arriving at a better place was the family that his son left behind. The imperiled woman Nick had loved with such intensity. The grandchild whom Ancel and Clare hardly knew. If the hope of the next world was God, the hope of this one was rightly people; so when people who were part of your heart went lost in the world, the days were hard. The message awaiting him from Jane had brought new color into the sky.
From county road to state route, he minded what little traffic passed him in the oncoming lane and kept an eye on any vehicle behind him, alert for anyone who didn’t seem born to this territory.
Because the truck had a GPS, the self-appointed masters of the universe who could use the full arsenal of modern technology didn’t need to tail him as in those old detective novels and movies. But if they thought there was any chance that Jane might visit here for any reason, they would have people nearby who could swarm to snare her.
Ancel and Clare assumed anything said on any phone, landline or cell, would be heard in real time or reviewed later. Any important issue they needed to address was now discussed out-of-doors.
The Longrins lived nineteen miles from Hawk Ranch, which in this part of Texas was just around the corner. Her mother died of cancer when Alexis was fourteen, and her dad drank himself into an early grave. Alexis and Chase inherited a broken-down farm. They sold the stock and a piece of the land. With a little cash and a lot of sweat, they turned the remaining property into a thriving horse operation: that breed called the National Show Horse, which combined the Arabian and the American saddlebred; show-quality Tennessee walking horses; and standardbreds for harness racing.
When Ancel arrived, Chase was in his office opposite the tack room in Stable 3. His blond hair shone nearly white, his face burnt bronze by the sun. He got up from his desk, and they shook hands, and he closed the door.
Ancel took off his Stetson but didn’t sit, eager to hear why Jane had called.
“She’s on the road with eight children,” Chase said.
Ancel half thought he hadn’t heard right. “Children?”
“She sprung them from someplace they were being held. It’s part of this thing she’s tangled in. She’ll tell you when she sees you.”
Both alarmed and gladdened, Ancel said, “She’s coming here?”
“Not here, but close. She’s hoping Leland and Nadine Sacket will take the kids, off the record for the time being.”
County-born, Leland and Nadine had married at nineteen and gone off to conquer Dallas. It would be foolish to say one was more an entrepreneur than the other. By thirty, they were millionaires. Year by year, they compounded their wealth until, at forty-six, they grew tired of Dallas and bored with making money. They returned to their home ground and bought a half-assed dude ranch. Inspired by what Milton Hershey, the chocolate king, had done in Pennsylvania, they remade the dude ranch into a first-rate school and orphanage.
“I imagine Nadine and Leland will take them in quick enough,” Chase said. “They never turn one away.”
“Just so they know, dealing with Jane makes them accessories after the fact, if it’s ever found out.”
“When everything that’s said about Jane is proved to be damn lies, we’ll be accessories to justice. Anyway, it didn’t stop me.”
“Well, you and Nick had quite some history.”
“Aren’t Nadine and Leland Nick’s godparents?”
“They are.”
“Didn’t they lose their boy to meningitis when he was three?”
“You know they did. And you know his name was Travis.”
Chase smiled. “Something tells me it’s a done deal.”
“When’s Jane figure to get there?”
“Barring trouble, around two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. You want to leave your car in town, meet me somewhere, I’ll drive you?”
“If I learned anything from my daughter-in-law,” Ancel said, “that wouldn’t be cutting the rope anywhere.”
“What rope?”
“The Feds have a rope around me and Clare. We can’t see it, but they can. Me coming here loops the rope to you, till they decide you don’t connect with Jane. However we get to Sacket Ranch, we first need to snip the rope so they can only follow it to the cut end.”
“You have some idea how?”
“If I tell you, then the rope’s not cut.”
Chase’s eyes widened. “You have to think through everything as if revenuers are living in your pockets?”
“Worse than them, son. The most the tax man wants is to strip you of everything you’ve ever worked for.”
“I guess I need to get my paranoid on.”
“These days, it’s best you be that way.”