Missing. Jasmine Cresswell
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shook her head. “She resisted the idea that he was dead for a couple of hours, but she’s definitely not in denial anymore. Every report that comes in from Miami seems a bit more conclusive. She spent the morning going through papers, sorting out relevant documents to establish that she’s Dad’s legal wife and we’re his legitimate children. Then this afternoon she started working on organizing a prayer service for Dad—”
“Right after she’d spent hours trying to prove she was actually married to him?” Liam’s voice rose incredulously. He shook his head. “Why am I surprised? It’s so typical of Mom to ignore the fact that the son of a bitch totally screwed her over.” His mouth tightened. “What she ought to be doing is celebrating the fact that he’s met the end he deserved.”
Megan flinched at the venom in her brother’s tone. “Nobody deserves to be murdered.”
“I’ve reminded myself of that several times since I got your message, but I can’t pretend I’m in deep mourning—”
“He was a great dad when we were growing up,” Megan protested.
“Yeah, I guess. But anytime I start to feel grief-stricken, I just take another look at the TV images of Avery and Kate. Somehow, that dries all the emotion right up.”
Liam’s rage at their father was palpable, and Megan could certainly understand why. Oddly, she wasn’t angry with their father, at least not yet. She had enjoyed growing up on the ranch and Ron had been a loving parent, despite his frequent absences. Did she have to discard hundreds of happy childhood memories because they were now tainted by the knowledge that her father had been a liar? It was going to take her a while to come to terms with the fact that her idyllic childhood on the ranch had been sustained only at the cost of a series of lies spanning more than twenty-five years.
Megan turned the conversation back to the subject of their mother, which was marginally easier to deal with than her own confused feelings about their father. “Despite the brave facade, I’m pretty sure Mom is devastated. But she’s told me in no uncertain terms that she can handle everything herself, including the arrangements for the prayer service. I suggested that maybe since we don’t have Dad…since we don’t have his body…we could use that as an excuse not to have any sort of memorial service.” She raised her shoulders in a frustrated gesture. “Mom told me to butt out.”
Liam gave a disbelieving shake of his head. “Has Mom considered that it might be a tad awkward to throw a prayer service for a man who hasn’t yet been officially declared dead? Not to mention the even more awkward fact that he was a bigamist when he was alive? What in the world does she expect our neighbors to say when they try to offer their condolences?”
Megan drew in a sharp breath. “I don’t believe she’s allowed herself to think through the practical realities. Part of the problem is that she didn’t sleep last night, so she’s exhausted, and of course you can guess how she reacted when I suggested taking a sleeping pill. The other problem is that she’s walled herself off so completely that she’s getting no input from anyone. She refuses to see anyone except Harry, and although she accepts that Dad is likely dead, she won’t talk about the fact that he seems to have been violently murdered, much less ask at least a few questions as to why. Most especially she won’t talk about the fact that he had another wife and daughter. Last night she cut me off every time I tried to discuss Dad’s bigamy. This morning she flat out told me not to mention those women in Chicago again. Almost as if they were the people to blame instead of Dad.”
“The past few hours have obviously been even rougher for you than I imagined.” Liam dumped his duffel bag onto the swing and put his arm around her. “The truth is, I haven’t been pulling my weight for the past several years. You’ve been left alone to deal with family crises far too often.”
“You’re giving me way too much credit,” Megan said. “I’ve been nowhere near as close to Mom and Dad as you’re assuming. Jackson Hole is only ninety miles from here, but it might as well be on another planet in terms of lifestyle.” She sent him a regretful sideways glance. “I had no more trouble burying myself in my work at the hotel than you did burying yourself in becoming Denver’s most successful divorce lawyer. Somehow, I’ve managed to kid myself for the last five years that if I kept my sights fixed on the goal of being promoted to assistant manager at the hotel, all the problems in my life would be resolved.”
And now that she’d spelled out what she’d been doing, she realized how pathetic her coping mechanism had been. She could have given an ostrich advanced lessons in head-burying, Megan reflected ruefully.
Liam was quiet for a moment. “I guess we’re the poster kids for our dysfunctional family—”
“I guess we are. But until I heard the sheriff say that Dad had another wife and daughter in Chicago, I never even realized we were dysfunctional. How dumb is that?”
“Not dumb necessarily. We were carefully conditioned by our parents—both of them, not just Dad. We were taught not to probe too deeply into the family dynamics and we obeyed our training. You have to keep reminding yourself that Dad’s the person who screwed up, not us.”
“Why do you think he didn’t just divorce Mom?” Megan asked. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s a bigger mystery than who killed him.”
“Who the hell knows? It can’t have been lust, can it? Not for twenty-five years.” Liam’s voice was harsh. He swiveled around on the porch steps and looked out over the land to the distant pasture where a few heifers grazed. “Do you think Mom knew about Dad’s bigamy before he died?” he asked.
“Good heavens, no! Absolutely not!” Megan was shocked by her brother’s question.
“Why are you so sure?” he asked. “The two of us grew up accepting what we were told about Dad traveling a lot on business and getting caught at the airport in snowstorms so he couldn’t make it home for Thanksgiving and so on and so on. But Mom was an adult. How could he have scammed her?”
“Well, he worked hard at it, I guess, and he was a really good liar—”
“Twenty-five years of lying and she never twigged? A quarter of a friggin’ century?”
Megan felt her stomach knot even tighter as she searched for an explanation. “When he was here, he always seemed so happy and committed. There was no reason for us to wonder if he might be leading a double life. Even now, knowing the truth, I have a hard time accepting that he was deceiving us.”
“He was definitely deceiving the two of us. But Mom? She’s a smart woman. How come she never noticed there was something totally screwed up about her marriage? I love Mom, but I can’t buy into that level of blindness.”
Megan threw the question back at him. “If she’d discovered the truth, why would she have stayed?”
“Maybe for some of the same fucked-up reasons Dad didn’t get a divorce.”
“Such as?”
“Follow the money,” Liam said cynically. “If there’s one lesson being a divorce lawyer drums home, it’s that when married couples behave weirdly, there’s always money involved. Money—or power that potentially leads right back to money.”
Megan rejected that idea at once. “Mom couldn’t care less about that. Good grief, Liam, I’ve never met anyone less motivated by money than Mom!”
“I agree that she doesn’t care about cash in the bank or the stock market, but what about the ranch? More than a third of the land that’s now part of the Flying W came from her family, remember. That’s over two thousand acres of her direct family heritage at stake.”
“True, but any divorce settlement would take that into account.”
Liam conceded her point. “Yes, Dad would have had a hard time selling the ranch without her consent, however expert his lawyer was in finding loopholes in marital property law. But the ranch has no practical value without money to run it.”
“Why