Daisies in the Canyon(37)

“So he was a perfectionist?” she said.

Pushing her half-eaten sandwich to the side, she decided she would give the rest to Martha. She upended the beer, taking several long gulps.

“Maybe I need some of his white lightning before I open the boxes,” she mumbled as she pulled number one closer.

The tape was yellowed and peeling on the first box. The second one had started to turn colors, but it was still stuck down fairly well. The third one looked fairly recent.

“So he closed them up and never looked back?” She frowned.

She slipped a fingernail under the tape on the first one. It tore lengthwise, leaving some of it stuck firmly. After three tries, she pulled a knife from her pocket, flipped it open, and slit the tape.

“Files?” The frown deepened as she pulled them out. All neatly kept in manila file folders with years printed on the outside in the same slanted hand.

She started with the first one, dated 1984. It held her mother and Ezra’s original marriage license and a copy of her birth certificate. She’d weighed seven pounds and seven ounces, had come into the world at twenty inches long on November 16, 1984, at seven thirty a.m. There was a picture of her in the hospital nursery that had begun to fade and one of her in a bassinet on a sun porch.

“Mama, he threw us out. Paid you to leave and promise you’d never come back to the canyon and you sent him pictures of me? What was wrong with you?” Her voice caught in her throat and it took the rest of the beer to swallow down the lump.

There was one folder for each of her first ten years in the box with the number one on the top. Each one held newspaper clippings, report cards, and awards that she’d gotten at school. It ended with a picture of her building a sand castle on the beach with her mother.

Box number two covered her life for the next ten years. It wasn’t until she got to the end and found the copy of her mother’s obituary in the local newspaper that reality dawned.

“Mama didn’t do this. We were stalked.” Goose bumps the size of the canyon wall raised up on her neck and arms. “But why? He didn’t want me because I was a girl, so why would he even care what I did?”

The third box covered from ages twenty-one to thirty, ending with her separation papers. Lord, the man had copies of every commendation and promotion she’d gotten. The only thing missing were actual pictures of her in Afghanistan and Kuwait. Evidently it had cost far too much to hire an investigator to go that far.

It was all surreal, sitting there looking at her life. “But he only knew what I did and what I looked like; he didn’t know who I was. Mama knew the important things.”

She returned the smoky-smelling folders to their proper boxes and shoved them back under the bed, unwound her legs from sitting cross-legged and went straight to the closet for a bag of miniature candy bars. It might take every one of them to get her through the next hour until bedtime and then she wasn’t sure she would be able to sleep.

Her phone rang and she dropped the candy like she’d been caught stealing money from a bank vault.

“Hello,” she answered cautiously.

“Abby, are you okay? Your voice sounds strange.”

“Hello. Did you know about the boxes under the bed?” she asked abruptly.

“No, was I supposed to? Is this some sort of a horror movie?” Cooper asked.

“Did you know that Ezra stalked me my whole life and that he kept files on everything I ever did?”

“No, I had no idea.”

“Well, he did.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know. I’m in shock and I don’t understand why he’d do that if he didn’t want me.”

“Meet me in the hay barn. I can hop the fence and get there faster than if I drive over,” he said.

She started to say something, but the television noise behind him had stopped. When she looked at the phone, she realized he had ended the call. She picked up the disposable plates and headed toward the kitchen, glad to see that both Shiloh and Bonnie were in their rooms.

With one leg propped backward against the wide barn door, he looked more like one of those old Marlboro men than a sheriff. He dropped his boot to the ground and opened his arms. She walked right into them.

He drew her close and she could hear the steady beat of his heart thumping in there against his broad chest. “My God, Abby, you are trembling.”

She’d had those symptoms before, on her first deployment. It had happened when she and another vehicle were on their way to check out some intelligence. By a strange twist of fate, she’d been in the second sand-colored patrol car. The first one hit a bomb and went straight up into the air. Her driver stopped and backed up as fast as he could. Then bodies came floating down from the sky.

She’d made it back to base before she went into shock, but she recognized the symptoms very well.

“I feel violated,” she said.

“Why?”

“He didn’t want to know me, but he sent someone to spy on me. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“Crazy? That was Ezra. He was a controlling old fart. He might not have wanted you on the ranch to undermine a son he might have later, but you were his as much as this ranch was,” Cooper said.

“I was just a pile of hay or dirt or a cow?”

He kissed the top of her head. “Darlin’, I can’t explain Ezra or his crazy notions. He was old-school, back when old school was the only school, if you know what I mean. His ideas went back to the time that Texas was settled. I liked him. He was honest, opinionated, and funny. But that doesn’t mean I agreed with him. We had some damn good arguments.”