When Navarone found Charlotte in his bedroom, nude, cool and ripe for passion, their strange drama of sex and love began-so did degradation!
CHAPTER ONE
Mildred Navarone, sitting erect in the saddle, spurred her horse up the last slope and around the curve to a grassy knoll. Down below, the trees parted to afford a view-and a splendid view it was-of San Marina valley, nestled between the mountains and the desert. Also, the Navarone ranch, a sixty-five-thousand-acre spread with almost five thousand beef cattle. One could even glimpse a semi or two on the interstate highway fourteen miles away, silver specks which briefly caught the sun. Also, Lake Renosa's west arm.
Mildred, glancing back at her companion, reined in and flipped long, auburn hair over her shoulders. "Hurry, Marty. You're missing all of it."
Chuckling, Martin Caldwell urged his own mount up the slope and stopped him beside hers. Caldwell was handsome, in an offhand kind of way, although there was a softness to his face, a slackness which some people interpreted as weakness. The hair was dark, however, lending him a certain air of �lan.
"All of what? You've seen it a thousand times before."
"And I want to see it a thousand times more. It's beautiful. I love it."
Mildred, letting the palomino's reins hang loosely in her hand, breathed deeply of the clean air. After a humid night indoors-the ranch house air-conditioning had broken down at dark-she needed to clear her lungs. Caldwell admired the sweep of land and sky for a minute-pretended to-but then cleared his throat in the manner of a man with more on his mind than blue sky and windswept vistas.
"Baby, let's talk. Remember I said I had something to discuss with you? I have. So let's climb down and get to it."
"Later, love, later."
Mildred grabbed her reins and sent the palomino thundering along a trail which ran within five yards of a ravine treacherous with rocks and reptiles. The panorama of the valley below for the moment became lost to view. She wanted to reach Robbers' Lookout near the peak before hearing what Marty had to say. Intuition told her what the something had to do with: he wanted to ask her to marry him. And Mildred had no quick answer ready, either yea or nay, which was sad, because she'd known Marty for seven years, ever since they were seniors in high school and occasional daters. Now she was twenty-five and still living with her parents. Marty? A "struggling young lawyer." The most junior partner in a San Marina law firm.
Caldwell overtook her after a few seconds on his roan, a mount borrowed from the ranch. Like most large spreads in the area, the Navarone Cattle Company, Incorporated, continued to use horses where necessary, jeeps and motorcycles where possible.
"Millie! Have you flipped? You'll break your so-and-so neck! Mine, too. What'll I tell your father?"
She closed her ears and dug her spurs into the palomino's flanks, indifferent to what Lloyd Navarone thought of his oldest daughter's lifestyle as long as he didn't try to change it. Minute after minute, mile after mile, she and Marty raced along, now side by side, now separated by a length or two. When the trail began to climb, Mildred was obliged to slow down. Five hundred yards from Robbers' Lookout, a rocky cliff which, to someone there for the first time or to someone there for the ten thousandth time, seemed to look out over the entire world, she reined in and let her winded horse catch his breath. "All right, tell me."
"I love you and I want to marry you."
Mildred stared. For all the passion Marty put into his words, he might have been informing the court that counsel for the defense rested its case. She felt outraged and insulted, without being able to explain why. "Just like that?" Marty, to her satisfaction, turned the color of a Maine lobster, soft hands tightening on the roan's reins.
"I thought you'd spare me the bended-knee bit, seeing as how we, as how you and I ... Well, shit, if you're going to treat me like a stranger, forget it. I won't beg. Damned if I'll beg."
She looked away to spare both their feelings, unconsciously lapsing into the name he'd once preferred, the name she'd coined for him in high school. "I'm sorry, Marty Cee. Let's walk our horses to the Lookout. I'll be thinking about what you just told me." Caldwell, from the corner of her eye, broke into a relieved smile.
"That's better, honey. That's more like you. I don't want any special favors, you know. Just a chance."
Mildred reflected, as they trudged the rest of the way, their mounts following, that this might be part of Marty's problem: he'd never asked for favors, never demanded them. When she'd wanted an escort who'd make her smile but not try to make her, Marty had always been there. In high school, at a time when sex was still too new and frightening, the arrangement had been fine. Later, she and Marty had drifted apart. They'd gone away to different colleges, to different lives. She, for one, had come to grips with the male/female thing, even if marriage hadn't resulted. But Marty probably thought of her the way he had at San Marina High. She was still the cool, blue-eyed virgin to him. Even if she wasn't. His new preoccupation with her was a recent thing, something which had happened almost overnight. She hadn't had time to sort out her feelings about him, if, indeed, she had any feelings about him.
At the Lookout, they tied their horses and strolled into the sun, hands across their eyes. The silence between them stretched into minutes. Caldwell broke it first. Or rather he smashed into her reverie by yanking her around and crushing his armful against his chest.
"Look at me, Millie! Damn it, look at me! Don't you feel anything when I do this? Don't you?"
She nodded, squirming. "I feel like I should have packed a rifle."
"Don't make jokes with me!" Caldwell stormed. "The fact is, I don't affect you the way a man should affect a woman. Right?"
Mildred twisted futilely in his grasp. "Maybe you haven't tried, Marty. Maybe you should-" She gasped as he ground hard lips into hers, making them, for the moment at least, his own. But even as her body responded to the embrace, her heart and soul rebelled. She wanted him, yet she didn't want him. As he tried to force her mouth open with his tongue, Mildred tore free of him. "Marty, I-I told you. I need time to think about this. It's too sudden. You rush back into my life after ignoring me for seven years, and right away expect-"
"Time!" Caldwell spat out the word as though it were an epithet. "Is that what you gave your dates in college? Time? Time to get it up again?"
Mildred paled in spite of herself. "What are you talking about, Marty Cee?"
"Don't Marty Cee me! I know all about you and what you did at the university! What you really majored in! I didn't believe the stories at first, but they came too thick and too fast. Christ, you must have been pushing for put-out queen or something. How about it? The past blocked itself out when you came home, eh?"
She drew back and slapped Him full across the face. "You bastard! How dare you mention marriage in one breath and speak so low of me in the next! You're filthy, Marty! I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man in San Marina County!" Caldwell, surprising her, took the blow and the rejection without flinching.
"I still want to marry you, even if you did sow a few wild ones. Hell, it was a long time ago. I can understand. I can even forgive."
Mildred replied with a laugh she didn't mean to be taunting, it just came out that way. "Can you? You're a mighty big man, Marty Cee. Are you sure you're big enough for the job?" The fury, the murderous hatred in Martin Caldwell's brown eyes, made her regret the words as soon as they were out. A man she'd once thought of as placid, a man she thought she knew, was glaring at her like a maniac. Mildred backed away. "I'm sorry, Marty, really I am. I take it all back. Let's be friends, nothing more, until we can act civilized again. We came riding, didn't we? So let's ride."
The suggestion provoked, not cooperation but irritation. Jaws hanging limply, his expression glazed, Caldwell started toward her. As frightened as she was, Mildred noticed that he was cunning enough to keep her between himself and the drop. Robbers' Lookout, as no one had to tell her, fell two hundred feet to a mass of limestone rock, far enough to dash her to pieces and then some. Under the circumstances, her "suicide" would seem reasonable-the ranch was in financial distress due to Dorothy Navarone's long and undiagnosed illness.
"M-Marty!"
"I'll have you now," Caldwell declared, voice husky. "I'll have you now even if I have to rape you."
Mildred gulped. She took one final step backward, and knew she couldn't take another. The skin on the back of her neck began to crawl the way it did when a cougar screamed from a hillside on a hot summer night when the men were all out of the house. She could feel rather than see the peril. And still Marty advanced on her. "Yes! You ... won't have to-to rape me. I'll do whatever you want and I'll do it now. I swear to God." Marty smiled, although it wasn't a smile. The lips drew back too tautly over teeth that were clenched too hard.
"Then do it. Strip for me."
Mildred closed her eyes. "Marty, please. Twenty thousand people live down there. What if one of them has a telescope? What if he recog-"
"Let 'em look!"
When she reached for the first button on her blouse, he changed his mind.
"Okay, we'll move back from the edge. Get your horse. But if you try to ride away ..."
Caldwell smacked a fist into a palm with chilling force.
She untied the palomino slowly, so Marty wouldn't think she meant to run. In truth, she was terrified and couldn't have bolted even if all of San Marina County were watching. Aware of Marty's smoldering stare upon her, she led the horse back up the trail a ways and into a stand of young pines. He followed with his own horse.
"Keep walking. Don't stop until I tell you. I have a gun in my pocket. I can catch you and make it look like a neat little case of carelessness. You know-two friends with butter fingers."
Mildred began to shake, and couldn't stop. That something like this should happen to her on such a beautiful day, and with a man she'd always trusted, seemed incredible, like a bill for services rendered from a professional whose name one had never heard before. She walked, and tried to make her numbed brain do what brains were supposed to do. "Marty, can't we talk about it? I mean, this is crazy. Two people who like each other should be able to-"
"Shut up!"
Having caught up with her, Caldwell gave his "fianc�e" a rude shove forward, making Mildred wonder what kind of manners law schools were teaching these days.
"This is far enough. Tie the nag. Mine, too. Then show me what you gave away for four years while I was going blind in law school."
She clenched her fists. "Marty, please listen to me. It's true I haven't been the girl I could have been. I made mistakes, lots of them. But I was never cheap. Never." Caldwell, as she half-expected, set the pines to quivering with harsh laughter.
"Loved 'em all, is that the idea? Sure, baby, I know what you mean. I loved a few in my time, too. Not as many as I should have, though, and that's what burns me. Now get it off before I rip it off your back!"
Mildred took more time than was necessary to tie the horses. Not to hold him off, but because her eyes had begun to fill again. Now her tears were for real. When she turned to face him, the wolfish look on Marty's handsome, weak face sickened her. She'd seen the expression once on a ranch hand who followed her from the house to the north pasture for a dubious purpose. Vern, her younger brother, had ridden up on the ranch hand's heels, and nothing had come of it. Because she'd been fifteen and full of generosity, she'd always kept quiet about the incident.
Steeling herself, she undid the blouse's buttons one at a time. Because of the heat, her bra was a wispy little nothing which barely contained her breasts. When the blouse came open, so did Marty's eyes. Mildred heard a sharp intake of breath from the man who was about to enjoy, unless Vern rode up again, what the ranch hand had missed ten years before. His voice, when he spoke, was a raspy pant.
"That's it, doll. Take it all off."
Turning her head, she dropped the blouse on the ground and groped behind her back for the bra's clasp. When she was a few seconds finding it, Marty made a choking sound deep in his throat. Hurriedly, Mildred drew the halter away and let it fall on top of the blouse. Then she stood erect for him, though still with head turned away. "Marty, for the last time-"
"Now the skirt. Or I'll do it myself, and I won't be gentle about it."
With trembling hands, she worked the skirt's zipper. After letting the garment slide down her legs, she stood clad only in half-slip and panties, the latter visible through the slip's sheer fabric. Marty made an involuntary motion toward her, causing Mildred to tug the slip off her hips and step out of it. When she glanced at Marty, he was licking his lips and making no effort to conceal it. To keep him from breaking the waistband, she peeled the panties down, too, keeping her back to him while she rolled them off her feet. Caldwell swore.
"Well, aren't you the modest maiden. Think I've never seen muff before? Well, I have, by God, and better than yours! Let me see you. All of you."
She whirled to confront him, making sure he saw everything. Men, young and old, had always complimented the Navarone women on their bodies. Mildred allowed Martin Caldwell to view the reasons why. After looking his fill, Marty began to breathe like one of their mounts after a five-hundred-yard gallop.
"Good tits. A great belly. Yeah, I can understand why you went off the deep end at dear old State. Just stand there. I'll do the rest."
Mildred closed her eyes and tried not to hear the zinging zippers and the swish of clothing taking rapid leave of a male body. But a morbid fascination made her open them. She saw an oddly grim-faced Marty Caldwell stripped to his shorts and socks. The boots with the fancy stitching she'd teased him about back at the house he'd kicked off. As she watched, flush-faced with shame-the fact that she felt shame puzzled Mildred, since she'd never been ashamed with a man before, not even at the moment of defloration-he unsnapped the shorts and let them fall to his feet. An erection of rather average proportions popped free, thrusting out at her from its nest of tangled black hair.
"Look at me!" Caldwell ordered, voice laced with excitement. He jerked at his organ. "It's a cock. Know about cocks? Sure you do. A man has a cock, a woman has a pussy. He puts his cock in her pussy, and they call it love. She lets more cocks in, and they call her something else-a cheap fuck. That's damned strange, isn't it?"
Mildred wilted inside at the stream of smutty words, at the attempt to break her spirit. Wanting to show him he hadn't broken her, she smiled and nodded. "Yes. But that's only because men make the rules. When women break them, they're called whores and worse." Caldwell, rather than appear pleased, turned the color of sun-dried brick. But he came toward her and stood, legs apart, just inches away, his penis almost grazing her belly.
"Touch me. Do it right."
With one hand, she grasped the "situation" around the middle, and squeezed. Faster than she could blink an eye, Marty's erection swelled to greater proportions. Some of the hatred left his face. He seemed now just a man with normal sexual interest in the object of his affections. But Mildred had to wonder how much of his affection was real and how much was smoldering jealousy left over from years of yearning for her. Poor man, he'd let the frustration destroy twenty-five years of good sense. She had to wonder if he intended letting her walk away from this encounter, or if the rocks below the lookout held her fate.
When he began fondling her breasts, she relaxed, certain now that she had nothing to fear. Marty wouldn't hurt her unless she resisted, and she wouldn't. Despite the circumstances, despite her lack of feeling for him, she responded. Her nipples started to tingle, rising at last to form sharp points of desire. Aware that she still held on to him, to the fiery, swollen part of him, Mildred halted her jacking. Marty reacted with less rage than she expected.
"Kiss me," he commanded, covering her breasts with his palms and commencing a furious thumb play.
She had to stand on tiptoe to reach his lips. Pressing her mouth to his, she was able to forget, for the moment, the unpleasantness between them and concentrate instead on the waves of excitement flooding her brain, on the moisture starting to trickle between her thighs. Marty's lips lost their cold, unresponding quality and began to kiss hers back. Mildred parted them far enough to admit his tongue. He proceeded to stroke and suck her tongue, the roof of her mouth, the insides of her lips. One of his hands left her breasts and worked its way between him and her until he reached her cunt. In reasonably dexterous, if unimaginative fashion, he found her clitoris and started fingering. Sooner than she would have liked, the little structure betrayed its gratitude by retracting inside its hood.
As though this were the signal he'd been waiting for, Caldwell broke the embrace and stooped, sweeping her up in his arms like a sick child. He carried her deeper into the forest to a spot where the pine needles were thickest. In very ungentle fashion, he put her down.
Mildred searched his face for a little warmth, some sign that this wasn't to be rape after all. "The blankets on the horses ..." She might better had addressed the nearest rock. Marty's greedy expression twisted into an ugly, hating scowl.
"You don't deserve it."
Pushing her onto her back, he spread her thighs and knelt between them. Lifting the hips to effect an entrance, he thrust inside her in one swift lunge, striking the back of her vagina with enough force to hurt them both. Without waiting for her to adjust, he began to move.
Mildred clenched her teeth until the discomfort passed. Then she began to enjoy Marty's unpracticed slams into her most sensitive parts. After a minute, she even found the rhythm and began moving with him. In awkward concert, they pummelled one another to a frantic finish, the ejaculate exploding from the tip of his tool even as her heels dinned a spasmodic tattoo on Marty's bare back. But he went limp a few seconds later, to her disappointment, and pulled out a sated man. A contrite man, too, who actually seemed appalled by what he'd done.
"Give me time to dress," he muttered, turning away from her with head bowed. "I'll leave the horse at the house for one of the hands to unsaddle. You'll never be bothered with me again. Just don't bring charges, that's all I ask. Couldn't face a rape trial. It would kill my old man and lady. Kill them."
Mildred didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Trial? Did you say trial? Two witnesses? Where would we find two witnesses? You didn't tear my clothes or leave any marks. Appears to me you've committed the perfect crime, Marty Cee. Congratulations."
"I'm no good for you. I love you, but I'm no good for you. I guess I'm not man enough."
Furious, she struggled to her feet and started toward him. "Then you didn't mean any of it. All that rot about marriage."
"Does it matter?" Caldwell shouted, face livid. "Could you marry someone who treats you like dirt? No! So stand back and let me go."
Mildred sank down and watched in mingled relief and sadness as Marty dressed, untied his horse and led him back to the trail. She thought he glanced in her direction a couple of times, but wasn't sure. After the roan's hoof beats fell to a soft thud, eventually dying away altogether, she buried her face in the forest's prickly floor and cried until there were no more tears left to cry. Then, because a woman always stopped her weeping if no man was around to care, she composed herself, dressed and went home.
A red July sun was setting.
CHAPTER TWO
"Need any help, Daddy?"
Lloyd Navarone started, having been so engrossed in the ranch's general journal-the entries were at least a week behind-that he hadn't heard the office door open. But Charlotte always had been light on her feet. The ballerina of the family, that's what he'd once called her, until Dorothy started showing signs of jealousy. Navarone ran a sun-browned hand through thick, almost wavy brown hair, and shook his head. "No, baby. You know your accounting's terrible." His stepdaughter, who smelled of bath oil and soap, dropped a hand on his shoulder.
"I can do the Supplies entries. Millie showed me how. And I know you're tired."
Navarone trembled, damning himself for the thoughts he was thinking. No man should feel this way about his own stepdaughter, the child- actually, she wasn't-he'd raised alongside his own. But then no man should be without his wife for six long months. No vigorous man could stand it. "No. I want you to start dinner. That you can do, and well." Charlotte laughed.
"Thank you, Daddy. If you can praise my cooking, Mom's been gone too long, heaven help her. But take a break anyway, huh? I'll bring you a cold drink."
Navarone put his pen down willingly enough, although there were page after page of entries yet to come. "You're on. I'll have a Margarita with a twist of lemon." Also a deodorant, he might have added, but didn't. An afternoon spent indoors with a broken air-conditioning system taxed a man's anti-perspirant to the melting point. Or was it an afternoon spent with a fresh-faced, nineteen-year-old who adored him? The cook and the Mexican maid had gone home for the weekend. He and Charlotte were alone in the house. Vern having driven into town to visit his ailing mother and Mildred having saddled up for a ride into the hills with Martin Caldwell, her long-lost beau who seemed to have rediscovered Millie all of a sudden.
Navarone checked his watch as Charlotte hurried out. Half-past two. The repair service had said they'd send a truck by two p.m. or not at all, the ranch being a half-hour's drive from town and the system probably requiring a major strip down. Repairmen hated to work late on Fridays, especially when they'd be driving in on their own time. Vern, the girls and he would have a miserably hot weekend. The fourteen hands were luckier. The bunk house, though low-ceilinged and drafty in winter, was cooled by evaporation. Sheltered from the afternoon sun, too.
"Here you are, Daddy. Tall, frosty and topped with lemon. I made one for myself so you wouldn't feel guilty."
Charlotte set the tray down on the desk and removed one of the Margaritas. She pulled up a chair and sat down to drink with him. Navarone, after a long draught of the concoction, swallowed and wiped his mouth. "Thanks, baby. It's mixed the way I like. Don't have another, though. I won't have you turning into a lush, like ..." He almost said, "like your mother," but caught himself in time. Dorothy had a strange, rare form of liver disease, but there was no proof connecting the disorder with her boozing. Not yet, anyway.
"I can handle it, Daddy. If you've taught me anything, it's how to handle this stuff. None of my dates can drink me into anything."
He chuckled, trying not to notice the brief shorts she wore, the exciting way smooth, tanned legs disappeared under white linen. The brain in his head told him to think about something else. His body, as men's bodies are prone to do, disobeyed his brain's orders. A swelling-imperceptible at first, then unmistakable-began in his trousers. Navarone, feverishly nursing the drink, prayed the swelling didn't make itself obvious to even a nineteen-year-old's casual eye. But he couldn't help wondering how she'd react. The young were so sophisticated these days, so brimming with fake sophistication. Would she get up, red-faced, and walk stiffly from the room? Pretend she hadn't noticed? Or laugh and kid him about it? Charlotte probably knew her way around. She'd be a college junior in the fall, wouldn't she? Everyone knew how raunchy they were. She probably realized what a tough time he was having. He was a proud man. Too proud to pay a townie, a whore, to have his tensions relieved. Even too proud to have an affair. In San Marina, a conquest would be dinner gossip within twenty-four hours. Dorothy might even find out. The shock, the disappointment, might kill her. He still loved D., still hoped to have her back again.
"I'm going out tonight, Daddy. I told you at breakfast, but I don't think you were listening."
"Alone?" Charlotte owned a Lotus Europa and drove it very hard. He knew. But she shook her head.
"Jim's coming for me. We'll take in the bike races on the dunes."
Navarone shifted so that the prominence in his trousers would be less so. "Careful Jim doesn't take in my favorite coed," he grumbled. Charlotte tossed long brown hair at him.
"Oh, Daddy. Jim's idea of seduction is a wrestling match. Any girl can cope with him."
"Says you."
"Want another of those? If you don't, I'll go start dinner."
She'd finished with her drink and put the glass on the tray. Grateful for the opening, Navarone drained his own and placed the empty beside hers. "One's plenty. And I won't mind seeing rib-eye on my plate again. Call it a hint." The wink Charlotte gave him he called a wink.
"Rib-eye it is."
When she went out, he got up to lock the door behind her. The swelling in his shorts had turned into a throbbing hard-on. The smart thing to do was relieve himself, and soon, before he did something crazy, something he couldn't live with. Dropping his trousers, he took out his aching prick and began administering first aid, fist-style. There was no time to be ashamed or amused. If masturbation meant peace of mind, if only the temporary variety, then he'd masturbate. With three grown children in the house and the only available woman a plumpish cook, what choice had he?
With his left hand, he grasped his organ around the base. With his right, he applied vigorous stimulation. When he felt the spasms coming, Navarone stopped and yanked a handkerchief out of his trousers. Covering the end of his tool with the handkerchief, he blasted forth the results of three weeks privation, gasping out one of the best scores of his life. No, that wasn't right. Jacking off couldn't be compared with what college boys did on the back seats of convertibles at one in the morning. Jacking off was jacking off. A real man got his rocks off the way he was supposed to-inside a real woman.
Still, he felt like a father again instead of a tragedy looking for a place to happen. Navarone, after disposing of the handkerchief, raised and buckled his trousers the way they were before. Then he went to finish the journal entries before the sunlight spilling through the window behind him turned to shade.
* * *
At a quarter 'til four, he had occasion to step outside the house and ask the foreman, Clement Ector, if he recalled the delivery of five hundred gallons of fresh dip, an unpleasant but necessary aspect of beef ranching. Ector, who had a six-by-six office just inside the bunk house, expressed doubt that said delivery had ever occurred. Navarone, after first looking over his shoulder to make sure Charlotte wasn't in the vicinity, blistered the already scorching afternoon air with profanity. A bill for the dip had arrived in the morning mail. The bill totaled more than three hundred dollars.
"Mebbe a truck'll bring it out tomorrow," Ector suggested, in what he probably meant to be soothing fashion. "Don't need it now, nohow."
Navarone, who suspected the ramrod's flush came more from a half-pint of bourbon partially visible under the clutter on his desk than from the heat, stamped back out into the dusty courtyard. The latter separated on four quadrants the house, the bunk house, the stables and the supply building. Someone on a horse nearly ran him down, someone riding in from the south trail which led up into the hills. Navarone swore again and shaded his eyes to see who the "horseman" was. "Caldwell? I might have known. Where's Millie?"
The shrug that came back was both vague and expressive. Lloyd Navarone had never been a fan of Martin Caldwell's. The heat and the day's accumulated frustrations made him even less so. Most guests were entitled to a ten-count, but this one barely deserved the title.
"Well, speak up, man! Has she had an accident? You came back alone, I can see that. There must be a reason. You talk for your living, don't you?" Caldwell, making him boil inside, looked away. The words came out of him like teeth from a ten-year-old.
"We ... had a quarrel. Nothing serious, just a garden-variety spat. I'm afraid Mil-I'm afraid your daughter isn't speaking to me anymore. But she's okay. She'll be along directly."
Navarone looked hard at the other man. Marty's usually neat hair was a mess. A middle button on his shirt stood open. He'd left with a hat, but he was returning without one. But at least his boots were on the right feet. He appeared to be sober, too. If anything vicious had happened up there ... But Marty was a lawyer. No Clarence Darrow, to be sure, but a lawyer. Lawyers knew better than to push women around. "Oh? Anything you'd like to tell me about?" Caldwell's head, as he expected, indicated the contrary.
"Mildred's a grown woman. Ask her. If she wants to tell you, she'll tell you."
Navarone decided not to back his blood pressure into a corner. With Martin Caldwell, the stress wasn't worth it. "Then come in the house for a drink. Better yet, stay to dinner. I'll tell Charlotte to set another place."
"No, thanks," Caldwell declined, and dug his boots into the roan's perspiring flanks. He rode inside the corral, unsaddled his mount with a city man's awkwardness and lugged the trappings toward the tack room. When he came out, Caldwell went straight to his car, a Gran Torino hardtop. He drove away very fast and without looking back.
Navarone scratched his head and went to lock his office. The ranch's safe-and its dwindling supply of working cash-was inside.
* * *
At a quarter past five, Vern returned from town in one of the spread's two jeeps. A billowing cloud of dust from the direction of the highway and three blasts on the horn announced his arrival. Lloyd Navarone put down the hunting knife he'd been sharpening, and went to meet him. There'd been no change in Dorothy's condition in three months, but he had to know the latest.
Vern Navarone, stiff from the jolting ride, climbed down to nod to his father. The two were about the same weight and height, with strikingly similar facial characteristics, although Vern, in the vogue of the day, wore his hair longer. His clothes today were rough ranch togs, but with flared legs and mod patches on the shirt.
"Anything new?" Navarone expected to see a shake of the head, and that's what he saw. A gloomy countenance, too, because Vern was about as attached to his stepmother as he'd been to his real mother, who'd died some sixteen years before.
"I got the hospital's new statement, though. But maybe you need a belt of something before you see it."
Lloyd Navarone decided to risk spoiling his dinner by looking at the bill then rather than later. "No, I'll take it neat."
Vern Navarone surrendered a statement of account from San Marina General Hospital, an eighty-bed institution with better-than-average facilities for its size and location. The statement was folded twice and damp with perspiration. His father unfolded it, glanced at the figures on the bottom line, then whistled softly.
"I'm sorry, Dad."
"You've no reason to be. Go wash up for dinner."
Lloyd Navarone waited until the twenty-three-year-old disappeared inside, then crumpled the bill in one, massive fist. Eighty-nine thousand, one hundred fifty-six dollars was a lot of money, even for the Navarone family. If Dorothy's illness cost one hundred thousand, they'd probably have to sell some of the breeding stock and a good part of the yearling herd. Maybe even ... Navarone shuddered. Maybe even his two prize show horses, Aramis and Zephyr, Arabian stallions, both. They'd dismiss three or four of the hands, and force everyone else to work an hour longer. There were ways. He'd think of them.
Concerned more for the moment about Mildred, he checked his watch. Five-thirty. If she wasn't back by seven-thirty or eight, he and Vern would saddle up and ride out to look for her. The girl wasn't in the habit of mooning her day away. Usually she managed the household as well or better than Dorothy herself. Certainly better than Charlotte, bless her.
Lloyd Navarone went back inside to lie down. Lying down and fanning oneself was the only respite against the summer heat that still clung like a plague to San Marina Valley, a valley squeezed between the hills and the desert. He felt weary and a little faint, his day having begun at five a.m. Gratefully, he stretched out on the bed in the east guest room, not even bothering to roll back the covers. Mealtime clatter from the direction of the kitchen soon lulled him to sleep.
* * *
Someone rapped on the door at half-past seven. Trying to swallow a groan and the taste in his mouth at the same time, Navarone raised his head to hear what was wanted. Rather than rested, he felt groggier and more exhausted than ever. "Yo?"
"Dinner's ready, Daddy. Are you coming?"
Charlotte. Navarone didn't even try to decipher the tone in his stepdaughter's voice, the intimacy. "Set a place. I'm coming."
He got up to pull on his boots and straighten his clothing. There was no point in changing. Dinner at the Navarone Ranch without Dorothy was no longer an occasion, just another meal. This one would be like all the others-somber, the levity forced.
When he sat down at the table, Mildred occupied her usual place. Her eyes were red and swollen, however. Figuring she didn't want to talk about it, Navarone engaged Vern in a discussion of how best to re-seed the south pasture. But when Charlotte went after the ice cream, his curiosity got the better of him. Leaning forward, talking around his last bite full of rib-eye steak, he mentioned Martin Caldwell's abrupt departure.
Mildred's shoulders lifted and fell. "We had a scene."
Lloyd Navarone cocked his head. "Marty struck you? Why, I'll-"
"Daddy, don't be ridiculous. There aren't any marks on me, are there?"
To him, the reply was unsatisfactory. But he heard Charlotte returning with the ice cream, and let the evasion go by.
CHAPTER THREE
A cicada's shrill din outside her bedroom window woke Mildred Navarone from a troubled sleep Saturday morning. She opened her eyes, swallowed away the cottony taste in her mouth and tried to remember why she should feel so wretched. Marty. Mildred groaned into her pillow, made a fist of one hand, then slammed it into the covers. Marry him? Never. Sooner one of the hands.
A burning, no, an itching sensation in her genital track was her first impression of the new day. Mildred tossed for a few minutes, hoping the itching would pass. When the irritation intensified rather than abated, she silently damned Martin Caldwell for an inept, bumbling half-man. He'd left her with either an infection or ...
She rolled out of bed, and dressed only in a negligee, went into the bathroom down the hall, the one reserved by mutual agreement for the girls. Mildred relieved herself, then searched through the medicine cabinet for something to help the itching. Rejecting the first-aid spray, salve and baby powder, she'd almost settled for a cold-water douche when the door opened and Charlotte came in, the latter rubbing sleepy eyes.
"Excuse me, Sis. You didn't lock it."
Mildred wasn't annoyed, just startled. She and Charlotte were too close to make an issue of privacy. She beckoned her stepsister nearer. "What do you use when ... you know." Mildred made a gesture down below that another woman would understand. "I woke up with the most dreadful itch."
"You, too? But I thought I heard you tell Daddy that you and Marty ..."
"What Marty and I did, or didn't do, doesn't concern you," Mildred retorted. "Just tell me where you keep your douching salts." Charlotte, under this kind of goading, reached into the medicine cabinet, groped on the top shelf for an unmarked package, then shook out an envelope she said contained salts.
"But hurry. I need to use one, too."
"Jim?"
"Jim Carlisle has to be the worst lover in San Marina County."
"Then why do you keep seeing him?"
"Why do you keep seeing Marty?"
Charlotte walked out and slammed the door. Mildred reflected, while setting up the douching apparatus and assuming the proper attitude, that the question made sense, lots of sense. There were hundreds of men in San Marina County who'd like to know her better. She'd never, never have to confront Martin Caldwell again.
After breakfast, she announced to the others that she was driving into town. "I'll see Mom and stay the day. Anyone want a letter mailed?"
"No. but you can take a checkbook and pay a couple of bills," her father replied. "Vern and I are going to the north pasture to count yearlings. I've half a mind to drag You-know-who."
Mildred heard Charlotte yelp. Neither girl was as keen on saddle sores as they once were, Charlotte probably less so.
"But you gave my sorrel to one of the hands!"
"Who said anything about horses? We'll ride up in one of the jeeps."
Mildred laughed in spite of herself at the stricken look on Charlotte's face. A day spent on a bouncing, stiff springed vehicle with two sweaty men wasn't the average woman's idea of fun. "She needs it, Daddy. I heard Charlie come in at two this morning. She used the staff entrance. Does that clue you?"
Lloyd Navarone scowled. "It certainly does. All right, young lady. You're riding with your brother and me in half an hour. Dress accordingly. And don't forget to pack some sandwiches. We'll be out most of the day."
Mildred smiled at her stepsister. "Seeing as how you won't be needing it, do you mind if I borrow your car, honey? I'll be careful with it. The gas tank, too." Her own car, a four-year-old Triumph, was in the shop. Everything the Navarone's owned, it seemed, was either broken or running on one leg.
"Please feel free. One back-stabbing lesson should make us even."
Mildred, biting her lip, followed Charlotte to the west wing to collect the Lotus' keys.
* * *
Upon reaching town, she drove directly to the hospital and went inside to visit her stepmother. Every member of the family, including Rex, the Doberman, saw Dorothy Navarone at least three times a week. Some saw her every day. The illness by now was taken for granted, a sad fact of life. Except for doctors, of whom there'd been many, both in and out of town, no one discussed the condition with outsiders. The subject was taboo for dinnertime conversation.
Not that anyone understood Dorothy's medical problem. None did, although Mildred, as she was being shown into her stepmother's private room on the first floor, could recite, word-for-word, a medical encyclopedia's explanation. Dorothy Navarone's liver problem had to do with the "manufacture, storage and liberation of glycogen, whose conversion to glucose is required to maintain blood-sugar levels." This particular function had gone awry, causing dizzy spells which eventually turned to blackouts. Specialists from as far away as San Francisco professed bewilderment. Treatment for the past month had consisted of intravenous feeding and round-the-clock monitoring, both expensive.
Mildred smiled down at the wasted woman on the bed. Dorothy could manage only a wan reflection of the smile. A still-handsome woman with strong- facial features and dark-brown hair, she was as much a mother to Lloyd Navarone's two children by a previous marriage as to Charlotte, her own. "Hello, Mom. You're getting all the hospital gossip. What's the latest?"
"I'll keep it in my head, child, and write a book. Did you come alone?"
Mildred confessed that she had, but not that she'd be spending the remainder of the day in San Marina. She had plans which her stepmother need not know about, for both their sakes. "But Vern's driving in tomorrow. I'll make him sneak you a slice of pie. Just for tasting, understand. You can't swallow it."
"Did your father mention me this morning?"
"Of course he mentioned you," Mildred replied, squeezing the other woman's hand. "He talks about you every time one of us is alone with him. He misses you. Terribly."
"But he hasn't been in since Wednesday. And he stayed only-"
"I'll speak to him tonight. But please try to understand. The ranch is a full-time job. If he's on the road every morning and every afternoon, who's going to drive the hands?"
"Clement?"
"Clem's drinking again. Dad's threatened to fire him, but so far he hasn't."
Mildred heard two nurses struggling to bring an unwieldy contrivance into the room, and realized it was time for another of Dorothy's feedings. As best she could, Mildred excused herself and fled for the car. Her stepmother's brooding over her condition and the state of her marriage was beginning to make the visits uncomfortable for everyone concerned, herself included.
* * *
After lunch in San Marina's best restaurant, Mildred felt better. Pointing the Lotus toward the other end of town, she guided it out Ascension Street until she passed the high school. The football practice field was empty today. Would be for another month. But near the end of August ...
At the end of the street, Mildred stopped the car in front of a simple white frame house set far back from the road in a grove of Cottonwood trees. Her heart went into second gear and stayed there. San Marina High's football coach lived here. The ruggedly built blond who opened the door a minute later stared out at her, then broke into a delighted grin.
"Millie!"
"Hello, coach. Lifting weights again? My, but the body does keep us busy, doesn't it?" She went inside as fast as the words were out, because he grabbed her by the arm and yanked her through the door.
"No. I moved the air-conditioner around to the rear. That's why I couldn't hear you." Gil Tomlin closed the door and stood with arms folded smiling down at her. "If you'd tried to make it to your car, though, I would have crashed a picket fence and two ditches to reach you. What brings my favorite pupil around on a Saturday?"
"I'm not your 'favorite pupil,'" Mildred corrected, backing away. "I didn't even know you had others. Who are they?"
Tomlin winked. "My tongue must have gotten tangled with my teeth. What's this I hear about you and Martin Caldwell?"
She turned the color of ripe beets. "Has he been talking about him and me? Why, there-there's nothing to talk about!"
"Oh? They threw him out of Kelly's bar at three this morning. He was soused to the gills and raving about you. No one could make any sense of it, but they gathered you rolled him, pushed him into a ravine and left him to walk back in. Shameful way to treat a guest."
Mildred clenched her fists and waved them under Gil's nose, although he'd had nothing to do with what happened to her at Robbers' Lookout. "If you only knew. Some 'guest.' Marty-" Gil, before she could blurt out something she hadn't even intended to think about again, clapped a hand over her mouth.
"I don't want to hear it. So far things have been going well for me today. Let's not rub my nose into Martin Caldwell's poo-poo, huh?"
When she nodded her head up and down, he replaced his hand with his mouth. The kiss, hard and gentle at the same time, reached her at once, the way Gil's kisses always reached her. Mildred kissed him back and felt his large hands covering her breasts. The hands caressed her nipples through the blouse and bra as though they weren't there. She went rigid for an instant, then relaxed. Marty's abuse of her should in no way spoil this moment with Gil. The two were in no way connected.
Without breaking the kiss, he tipped her head back and tongued her lips until she parted them for him. After inserting his tongue, he sucked and teased her to slow madness, now exploring her mouth, now inviting similar explorations of his. When she thought she'd explode from the tension, he took his mouth away and trailed hot kisses down her neck and throat. Mildred began to tremble with anticipation and need. Chuckling, Gil picked her up and slung his "burden" over one, bulging shoulder, carrying her as easily as he would a child.
"Back to the air-conditioning, men."
Mildred closed her eyes and enjoyed the ripple of muscles powerful enough to rip her apart. She opened them-the eyes-as soon as he deposited her on the bed in his combination bedroom/study. Limp from his handling of her, she gazed wordlessly up at him, certain that she loved this generous man, yet unable to tell him. He admired her for a moment-the gleam in his eyes was her clue-then kicked off his loafers to climb up and join her.
"Two weeks?"
She shook her head, smiling. "Three. Was there someone else two weeks ago? Someone who reminded you of little addle-witted Millie? Don't be bashful, coach." Gil, as any other man would have done, any man this close to getting what he wanted, snuggled up beside her and swore that she was the only woman he'd ever loved.
"Give or take a couple for instructional purposes. Whose instruction? Mine, of course. I have to set an example for the kids, you know. A good clean life and all that. Rah-rah-rah."
He tugged her blouse loose from its skirt and opened same more deftly than any coach's manual, lifting it from under her with little or no difficulty. "You're a rake and a liar, Gil Tomlin," Mildred declared, loving the open, unabashed way he let his interest be known. "Other than that, no woman could complain. You're-ouch!"
He'd released her breasts and turned her over like a bag of feed to work the bra's clasp. After drawing it away, he held her down with one hand and finished undressing her with the other, tossing all the garments-blouse, bra, skirt, panties and nylons-halfway across the room to a desktop. Then he stood up, and while she watched, took off his own clothing.
Mildred experienced the familiar shiver of fear when she saw his awesome biceps and powerful thighs and calves, although she knew Gil would hurt himself before he'd hurt her. Only his gigantic tool possessed a capacity to hurt her, and he usually handled himself and the stallion-sized appendage with consideration. When he waggled the thing a few times for her benefit, she had to tear her eyes away, waiting with held breath while he got back into bed with her.
"Want to know something you've never done for me? Okay, I'll tell you. No, I'll show you."
Playfully, Tomlin made as if he'd put his penis in her mouth. Mildred recoiled, not in disgust but because none of the women in her family ever did anything like that. "Gil, no. Someday, maybe, but not now. I love you, but not that much. Is one of your other 'pupils' spoiling you?" She saw pretended hurt on his face.
"How many times do I have to tell-I give up."
Burying his face in her breasts, he nuzzled their points until they erected again. Then he took each one into his mouth and raked it across the roof, applying a slight suction. The nipples swelled until his tongue could barely cover them. Gnawing the rubbery structures, he made her twitch and toss with each nibble while his hands held her from behind, intensifying the caress several times over.
Mildred thrashed about like a bucking horse, offering the rest of herself to him. The offering, for now, was ignored. "G-Gil! Gil, please! Don't treat me like a little girl. I'm not. God knows I'm not."
He took away one of his hands and slipped it between her thighs and into her cunt. The lips were already hot and slippery with excitement. Stroking a few times, avoiding the supersensitive tip of her clitoris and concentrating on the shaft, Tomlin conceded that she wasn't.
"You're wet enough to be screwed through the ceiling, kitten. What gives?"
She clutched at the hand, trying to keep it pressed against the place every women knows about but few understand. "Gil, you monster, must you play games at a time like this? I want you inside me!" Tomlin, assuming a mock-serious attitude, cocked his head.
"Can you be more specific? I mean, you're the English major. They must have taught you to say exactly what you mean."
"Fuck me, that's what I mean!" Mildred groaned. She reached out, on impulse, and seized him by the only handhold available, squeezing hard enough to bring his erection to a glorious head. "Unless this is just for show and the things men say about you are true."
"What kind of things?"
"Oh, the usual. 'Funny a guy with his rep isn't married.' Or, 'If he's getting so much, why am I still getting so much?'"
She expected a reaction, and got it. Gil pushed her flat and leaped astride her, placing one leg atop each of hers. The "match" was no match at all; he was by far the stronger, and by merely lying still could use his superior weight to subdue her. Having subdued her, he crooked each leg one after the other, preparing her to receive more than most women ever saw, much less took.
"If it's meat you want, it's meat I've got. I'll make you laugh, I'll make you cry, I'll even make you scream for more."
He balanced himself on two knees and a hand, guiding just the head of his tool past the entrance to her womanhood. Mildred, midway through the guiding, bit back an exclamation. In three weeks, a girl could forget the agony and ecstasy of a big man's phallus. She dug her fingers into Gil's broad shoulders and let him find his own way. He was almost a minute getting inside, the walls of her vagina having to strain to accommodate him. Less than on former occasions, however. Finally, he was able to make his chest meet hers and his lips brush her lips.
"You're quiet, kitten. Like to tell ol' Gil about it?"
"N-no," she whispered between clenched teeth. "I don't want to tell you."
"Suit yourself."
He thrust straight ahead a few times, making her move with him. When she wrapped her legs around his waist and locked them at the ankle, they found a rhythm which carried them at roughly the same rate up a common ascent. Gil's breath became a raspy pant, hers an answering pant spaced a split second apart. The Hollywood-style bed began to squeak and toss beneath them.
Mildred felt the tremors ignite in her genitals and spread wavelike to her breasts and her brain, where they exploded in a white-hot conflagration which nearly set her afire. The fists she pounded on Gil's bare back seemed to belong to someone else; the heels she drummed on his buttocks were another woman's. "Harder! Fuck me harder!"
He slammed into her more recklessly until the spasms passed and she went limp underneath him. Then he resumed a more deliberate pace, applying his sexual organ to hers in a circular screwing motion which rebuilt her own excitement without making him lose whatever it was men lost. The air-conditioning cooled their perspiring bodies just enough to keep them going, although they still labored in a pool of wetness.
Her second one was much longer in coming and several times more intense. Mildred thought she'd tie herself in knots and have to spend the rest of her life around Gil Tomlin's middle. He weighed almost a hundred pounds more, and still she threw him halfway across the bed. Scrambling up, he rammed back in so fast she screamed, startling him into a hasty completion of the act. Hasty from his standpoint, not hers. Gil pulled out grumbling.
"Lucky I live far back from the road. You'll bring the sheriff, the marshall and a troop of eagle scouts."
Mildred slumped back and tried to fill her lungs with air. "And if I do?"
Tomlin grinned. "I'll tell them whose idea this was."
She made his smile fade with a quick come-back. "And I'll tell them you forced me. Knowing your reputation, they'll believe me. You'll be coaching at the state prison this fall. The schedule's rough and so's the material-darling."
"I believe you would, kitten. I believe you would send a fun-loving boy up to save your own neck. But what woman wouldn't? You're all the same."
When he tried to roll down off the bed, she reached out to grasp him by a sweaty shoulder. "Gil, listen to me. This time I'm serious. I want you to keep an eye on Marty Caldwell. I think he may try to make trouble."
"Trouble?"
"He ... wanted me to marry him. When I refused ... Well, things got nasty. I can't tell you how nasty. Will you do it?"
Tomlin nodded. "That's a promise. I have three weeks before my kids show up. For you I'll play detective."
CHAPTER FOUR
At one p.m. Sunday afternoon, Lloyd Navarone, pantless, lay sprawled across the bed in his bedroom, fighting both the heat-KSAM in San Marina had predicted a high of 112 degrees by mid-afternoon-and the effects of overeating. Everything he did these days, Navarone reflected, he seemed to do to excess. If Dorothy ever came home ...
As he was about to lose consciousness, a car's horn brought him off the bed and on his feet. Navarone grabbed his pants and struggled to get into them. Visitors were coming. No vehicle the ranch owned had a horn like that. He crammed his bare feet into a pair of boots and sped off to the nearest bathroom. A man couldn't meet guests on a full bladder.
When he came out, the first person he saw was Mildred, who looked frantic herself. "Who in blazes is it?" Navarone demanded, unwilling to take a pat on the shoulder for an answer. He was too young to be humored, patronized or sent off to a back room.
"Just two of Charlotte's friends from college, Daddy. They'll want to go riding, so relax. You won't have to entertain them. 'Bye now. I'm going to change."
She ran off and left him standing there. Navarone thought about the temptations he already had, and silently cursed the addition of two new ones. But he wheeled toward the living room and arrived in time to find Charlotte, half-dressed as usual, conversing with two post-adolescents-Navarone could only think of them as such-in city clothes and city hairstyles. One was a blonde, the other a brunette. The girls, as an old-timer would say to another, were passably fair, notwithstanding sunburned noses and road-wrinkled clothing.
"Daddy, this is Paula Henson," Charlotte said, introducing the brunette. "She's from Louisville."
"How do you do," Navarone said, holding out a hand and reminding himself not to put too much on the shake. He rather liked Paula's frank gaze and long, shoulder-length black hair.
"And Nancy Seavers from Miami. Florida, not Ohio."
Navarone nodded at Nancy, but his mind was still on Paula. "Pleased to meet you." He looked at Charlotte. "Why don't you take them out on the veranda? I'll mix up a few cold ones and run them out on the cart."
"That's a good idea, Daddy."
Charlotte herded her two guests toward the veranda on the east side of the house.
Sloppily, because over-the-rocks was the way he knew best, Navarone mixed a brace of daiquiris, put them on a tray, set the tray on a cart and wheeled the cart out to the veranda. There he discovered that Vern had joined the group. Every drink was taken. Disgruntled, Navarone trundled the cart back to the kitchen and mixed one final daiquiri for himself. By the time he carried it out, the girls had finished theirs, and led by Vern, were strolling toward the stables.
Navarone drank the ill-tasting dake in silence and went to finish his nap.
* * *
Something woke him at half-past two. He stared up at the ceiling and tried to figure out what it was. The something that woke him, not the ceiling. Between the oak beams and the mice in the rafters, a cacophony of rustles, squeaks and sighs filled the room, all of which he was used to. Then he heard a door close down the hall. Navarone sat upright, alert in an instant. Neither Mildred nor Charlotte ever went into the guest rooms except to clean them when the maid was on vacation. One of Charlotte's guests must have come back. Alone.
Navarone put his pants and boots back on. Excited and a little fearful-the latter puzzled him, since a man should never feel fear in his own home-he stole out into the hallway and listened. The house was quiet. He crept toward the guest room and put his ear to the door. For a few seconds, nothing. Then he detected a sigh and the unmistakable lurch of bed springs. Navarone dared himself to open the door and see who the someone was. His hands accepted the dare. Paula Henson, fully clothed except for shoes, lay across the bed. She raised her head to look at him. "Who is it?"
Navarone smiled, and hoped the smile was convincing. "Just me. Is anything wrong? I heard you come back and I thought you might be ill." A shake of the head reassured him on this last point. Paula smiled back, but she looked wary just the same.
"The heat sent me in, Mister Navarone. I thought I could take it, but I guess I can't. The others rode on without me. I didn't want to spoil it for Nancy."
Navarone searched the girl's face, and wasn't certain what he saw there. "I'm sure you didn't. Did they say where they were heading?"
"To a place called Wild Horse Mesa. Charlie said it was a long ride."
Navarone, by an effort, avoided rubbing his hands together. He knew it was a long ride. The rest of the party couldn't be back before five p.m., maybe six p.m., depending on how long they stayed and how many mustangs they spotted. "Shall I ... make you another drink?" Paula disappointed him by shaking her head.
"I feel fine. You don't have to coddle me, Mister Navarone. Just treat me like one of the family."
Navarone considered the odds, decided they were worth it, and went into the room, remembering to close the door behind him. "I can't very well do that, now can I? When you're so sweet and fetching? No, my dear, I refuse to treat you like one of the family."
The girl's eyes widened. She sprang up to sit on the edge of the bed and look for her shoes.
Navarone chuckled, raising his palms in a show of indifference. "Don't be upset. People tell me I'm blunt, but they never tell me where to go. I hope you won't. Can't we be friends?" The ploy worked. Paula opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again.
"Mister Navarone, your wife-?"
"My wife's become a more or less permanent resident of San Marina General Hospital. Charlotte's away entertaining your friend. Let's not worry about either of them." Paula gulped, but she also stopped groping for her shoes.
"I didn't say ..."
Hoping to put the clincher high and center, he paused in front of her, tipped the dimpled chin up to his and pressed a knee to hers. "Do you find me attractive, child?" The barb, as he expected, found its mark. Resentment blazed in the girl's brown eyes, replaced an instant later by curiosity. Then she slowly nodded.
"You don't look ... the way I expected. I thought you'd be ..."
He laughed. "Fat and paunchy? Jowls on my cheeks, bags under my eyes?"
"Instead, you're tanned and fit. Your waist is almost as slim as mine. I guess it's-oh, I don't know what it is."
Navarone allowed himself to be pleased. He didn't allow himself to show it, just to increase the pressure on her knee. "It's being outdoors every day, rain or shine. Keeping track of everything that goes on here. That's how I make my living. I didn't go to college, you see, so I never got a chance at a paunch. Know what I mean?" At a spot where most women were sensitive, Dorothy included, he lightly pinched her cheek. "No, I don't suppose you do."
"I'm not as naive and immature as you think," Paula declared, quivering at the touch.
"I don't think you're immature, child," he countered, taking her hands in each of his and bringing her to her feet. Navarone let his gaze fall to her breasts and beyond. Concealing his own excitement was becoming more and more difficult. In a few seconds, impossible. "Excuse me, my dear. I won't call you that again."
Swiftly, too swiftly for her to take them away, he put the hands on his shoulders and drew her to him. Her lips parted and he covered them with his own. Paula's mouth was soft and warm, with a sweetness that delighted him. After a second's resistance, she kissed him back, pressing firm young breasts against his hard chest.
Navarone, even as he stroked her face and hair, listened for sounds in the hallway that would tell him the seduction couldn't proceed. He heard nothing. Moving his hands lower, he locked them behind Paula's back and prevented her from breaking the embrace, assuming she decided to. Paula's arms, meanwhile, tightened about his neck. Her mouth turned hungry. She seemed to have made up her mind about him the way he'd made up his mind about her, and if she had any misgivings, she kept them to herself. When he maneuvered her away from the bed, she followed.
Navarone seized one of her lips between his teeth, and bit. Gently, of course. She understood, because she opened at once, holding her own tongue out of the way to make room for his. Like a starving man-and he was a starving man-Navarone burrowed in, lashing his tongue from side to side and top to bottom, drinking her saliva as fast as she could produce it. After a minute, Paula began to moan. The moan, to his flattered ears, was more nearly a purr.
When he extracted his aching tongue to rest it, she inserted her tongue into his mouth. Now she did all the "work." His respect for the power of example increased a hundredfold. The prick inside his pants ballooned to the most formidable hard-on he'd experienced in twenty years. And yet he forced himself to go slowly, to plan his next move before he made it, in order not to lose her. He hadn't forgotten how slowly a young girl took fire.
While she tongued them both to paradise, he tugged her blouse from her slacks, and while his hands were back there, fumbled underneath until he found the clasp to her bra. Escalating things to a no-turning-back point, he pried her mouth off his and raised the blouse to take it off her head. Paula held her arms high to help him. Navarone, almost choking from excitement, removed the blouse and the bra both, in one brash motion. He'd expected loveliness and he found it: twin cones of warm sponge, erect already with desire. Paula smiled at the expression on his face.
"Do you think they're big enough, Mister Navarone?"
The question almost offended him, so flawless did he find her. "Yes! Yes, of course they're big enough. Why shouldn't they be?"
Young girls were all the same, worried about the size, the shape, as though life were one, long Anita Ekberg contest. Which it wasn't. Paula seemed about to make a retort, then appeared to think better of it. Eyes which had been narrowed with concentration grew large when he stooped to kiss each roseate tip.
"P-Please. Please do that for me."
Navarone closed his own eyes, the better to think about what he was doing. First he suckled each nipple until it swelled against his tongue. Then he used the latter to rake the tender buds across the roof of his mouth. Imagining himself doing this to Charlotte, he nearly came in his shorts. Paula began to squirm and twist so that he had trouble holding her. He solved the "problem" by scooping her off the floor and carrying his fragrant armful to the bed.
As he prepared to peel the stretch pants off her lush young form, a dreadful possibility occurred to him: she'd gone this far with young men before, but maybe no further. Navarone grasped Paula by the shoulders and made her look him in the eye. "You're not cherry?" She shook her head at him, smiling.
"No."
Divesting her of the stretch pants, he reduced his stepdaughter's fairest guest to a pair of briefs which failed-utterly-to conceal the stark beauty of the dusky growth between her legs. Paula lay back in apparent calm while he gazed his fill. Only a vein pounding in her throat betrayed the fear she felt, if that's what it was. When he slipped leathery thumbs inside the briefs waistband, Navarone saw regret, or its beginning, on her face. "We have to," he said, and was amazed at the patience, the tone of reasonableness, in his own voice. If they didn't, he'd go berserk, and do it on the rafters. He might even tear her limb from limb.
She'd consented, albeit wordlessly, so he rolled the undergarment down her perfect thighs and over her ankles, letting them fall where they would. The ache in his groin became almost unbearable when he saw the vivid contrast between milk-white skin and glossy-black bush. He itched to shrug out of his clothing and sink his chafing shaft into the warm pit designed for it. But again he restrained himself. Better to forego heaven a little longer than to jeopardize it with haste. Instead, he moistened a finger, and while she twitched like a calf under a branding iron, inserted the digit between the puckered lips of her cunt. The moisture he found there relieved him. Something else relieved him, too. His probing finger detected no hymen, not even a trace of one. Easing into bed beside her, although still fully clothed, he began to pump her in long, even strokes, taking care to stimulate the clitoris without mauling the little organ's delicate head. For him, Paula's rapid ventilation was the best praise he could have had. Navarone gritted his teeth and prayed that nothing would intervene to spoil his triumph. "Are you ... fixed for anything?"
"Fixed?"
"Babies. Brats. Infants. Do you know how to keep them away? Are you wearing anything? Tell me, so I'll know. I'm not an irresponsible kid."
"I take the pill, but ..."
"But what?"
"But sometimes I forget. You'll be careful, won't you, Mister Navarone?"
He decided to risk it. Outside of Vern's stash, wherever he kept it, there probably wasn't a condom in the house. "I'll be careful." He went to draw the curtains and came back to start undressing.
"You're funny, Mister Navarone," Paula said from the semi-gloom.
He was too busy with shirt and pants to figure out what she meant. "How so?"
"You want to undress in the dark, yet you see nothing wrong in this."
"I was thinking about you."
He let his pants fall to the floor, unsnapped his shorts and sent them after the pants. Then he got back in bed with her, confident that she wouldn't deny him whatever he wanted. When he reached out for Paula, she reached out for him, or rather, for his prick, which she squeezed once, as though to reassure herself, nearly making him lose control.
"You're big, Mister Navarone!" the girl said, and her voice trembled.
"Big enough," he panted, thinking about something else for a few seconds in order to hang on to the load. As soon as he felt capable, Navarone rolled Paula on her back and positioned her legs the way he wanted them. Kneeling between them, balancing his weight over her, he took his cock in hand and introduced just the tip into Paula's oozing warmth. She shuddered and tried to open wider for him. Inching inside, he realized all his precautions had been wasted. He'd have to come, and soon, else he'd be no good to her. Six months' deprivation couldn't be willed away out of hand. So he thrust the rest of the way in and let the spasms take hold. In burst after burst, until he thought they'd never end, the edge boiled off his lust, leaving him just enough to continue with. "Hang on!" he whispered into the nearest ear. "I have more for you, much more."
Paula seemed to believe him. She wrapped long legs around his waist and gave herself up to his fierce pounding. The two lost themselves in their labors the way Charlotte and the others had lost themselves in the high country surrounding San Marina County.
CHAPTER FIVE
Monday morning, as a repair crew from town stripped down the ranch house air-conditioning system, Mildred banished some of the noise by locking herself in her father's office with an oscillating fan. There, while flipping through the books, she discovered one reason for the Navarone's financial disarray: errors on almost every page, both in the general journal and in the various ledgers. Good accounting practice had been thrown to the breeze.
The rest of the family had left the house. Charlotte had stepped out to pick fresh vegetables for the cook from the fenced plot behind the spring. Vern had gone to the north pasture to help round up breeding stock. Lloyd Navarone had driven away to attend to unspecified matters in San Marina. So Mildred sat down to straighten the mess. She'd earned a degree in English, Vern in animal husbandry, Charlotte, so far, in education, but her father had always said that she, Mildred, owned the business head in the family.
When she came out at half-past ten, the repair crew had finished and cleared the ranch. Cool air was beginning to flow from ducts and vents, although the house was still far from comfortable. Still, just knowing they wouldn't swelter any more made her feel better.
Mildred went to her room to change, and found the Mexican maid, Bonita, inside. The two exchanged pleasantries, then Mildred decided not to change. Instead, she went to the kitchen to help the cook finish dinner. Sarah Lassiter had worked for the Navarone family for more than twenty years. In many ways, they considered her one of the family. "Have you seen Charlotte?" Mildred asked the plump, gray-haired woman. She received a shake of the head by way of reply.
"Two hours ago I sent her out to the garden. Two hours. Maybe you'd better check, Miss Millie."
Mildred thought so, too. She left the house and climbed the grassy knoll which led to the spring, covered these days with a shed which housed an electric pump. Seepage from the spring made everything green for fifty yards around, which was why the vegetable garden had been planted here, rather than down below. She found her stepsister lolling on her stomach just inside the gate, utilizing the small amount of available shade. Chin in hand, Charlotte was lost in contemplation of nothing more dramatic than a peyote button. But at least she was looking at it and not chewing it. A half-filled basket of squash and beans lay nearby.
Mildred poked her bare foot into the small of Charlotte's back, encountering firm flesh but no bra, which didn't surprise her. On hot days when no visitors were expected, the girls frequently went without. "Lazy bones. Is this how you pass the time while the rest of us are putting out?"
Charlotte glanced over her shoulder and smiled. "Aren't you sorry they had to go?"
"Your friends?" Mildred sniffed. "You could have gone with them for all the good you're doing here."
Charlotte yawned. "Don't be silly. I've seen the Grand Canyon a dozen times. So have you. It's just a hole in the ground. And it's too hot."
She got up and brushed her clothing, still smiling over some secret thought. Mildred, however, dropped to one knee, the better to inspect her stepsister's gathering.
"Millie?"
"Um?"
"Do you know what Paula told me last night?"
"I can't imagine."
"You'll have to swear to keep quiet. He's still your father. And my stepfather."
Mildred stared at her stepsister, mystified. "All right, I swear. What on earth are you talking about?"
"Yesterday, when Paula left us and rode in alone ..."
"Yes?"
"She and Daddy ... You know. They had a real session together."
Mildred gasped. "Charlie, of all the vile, filthy things to say about your stepfather! And coming from you, of all people! I simply don't believe it!"
"Well, he had the opportunity, didn't he? He'd gone without Mom too long. Didn't you notice how ill at ease he was at dinner, and how cheerful at breakfast, when they were leaving? I did. Why would Paula make it up? Millie, I trust her. She doesn't imagine things."
"But you do!" Mildred snapped, furious with her stepsister. But within a very few seconds, another part of her found the idea fascinating and quite credible. After all, inside every man, young or old, married or single, was a beast, an animal who stayed under cover as long as possible. When cover failed, the beast came out and ran amuck. Martin Caldwell had shown her that. Oh, how he'd shown her that. Mildred thrust the basket at Charlotte. "Here. Finish the beans and bring them to the house. I-I don't want to hear any more."
She whirled and ran away before Charlotte could add the details. But Mildred imagined she heard a lewd chuckle from the younger girl. She ran faster to drown out the chuckle.
* * *
Over lunch, she studied her father, without appearing to do so. He did seem more relaxed, certainly more tractable. But that could come from having gotten away from the ranch for a few hours, from the cares and responsibilities. Still ... When he turned and looked straight at her, she wanted to sink through the floor.
"... and I stopped by the Pontiac place. They've finished with your car. You can ride in with Vern and pick it up if you like."
Mildred held her embarrassment in check through a strenuous effort. Also, by fixing her gaze on the middle of her plate. "Thank you, Daddy, I will. Did you ask them how much?"
"Fifty-four dollars and thirty-seven cents. I'll give you the money."
Mildred didn't know which bothered her the most, imagining her father draped over the body of their nineteen-year-old guest or being given money because she'd never left home and earned any of her own. The loin cut suddenly stuck in her throat. She put down her fork and pushed back her chair. "Excuse me. I don't think I'm very hungry."
As she left the room, confusion again made her read too much into the smile on Charlotte's face.
* * *
She drove to the hospital with Vern, and like him, did her best to cheer their stepmother. Dorothy Navarone besieged them with so many questions, so many complaints, that both were glad to leave after less than an hour. Mildred climbed back on the jeep and held to her seat as Vern carried her to the San Marina Pontiac agency.
"Shall I wait so you can follow me in? You never know about repair jobs."
Mildred was glad she'd bought dark glasses. They gave her something to hide behind. "No. I have some shopping to do. Tell them not to set a place for me at dinner. I'll warm something when I come in." If, she almost said.
"The Caldwell guy?"
Mildred winced more over the tone of knowing indulgence than the smirk. "Vern, please."
"Okay, Sis. Come home when you're ready to. If you're not old enough now, you never will be. But take care, huh? See you."
With a squeal of tires, Vern Navarone gunned the jeep away and out of sight. But not, she noted, in the direction of the road home. The ranch lay southwest. Vern drove south, toward the new dude "ranch" on U.S. 87, where girls with Eastern accents vied with one another in motel creeping.
Shrugging, Mildred retrieved her Triumph roadster from a week's stay in the back of Pearsall Pontiac Company, pointed the vehicle toward Gil Tomlin's place. Only two days had passed since her last visit, but already she felt poured out, drained and dry. Or maybe Charlotte had started her to thinking. When a woman with time on her hands started to think, action, perhaps the wrong kind, couldn't be far behind.
A note was pinned to Gil's front door, however. The note read: Gone to Civitan football camp. Back at eight. G.T.
Mildred counted the money she had left, and decided there was enough to go shopping. Not since Easter had either of the girls bought a new dress. Afterwards, by the way of penance, she could drive back to the hospital and sit with her mother for an hour.
Returning after sunset, she found Gil's Vega home. But a Sedan DeVille with Smith County plates was parked behind the Vega. Mildred interested but not alarmed, smiled into her rear-view mirror and drove on. Circling back fifteen minutes later, she found the Caddie still there. Interest turned to concern. But there were lights on all through the house, which probably meant ... Mildred wasn't sure what the lights meant.
She left her own car in the high school's lot, and tiptoed back along the dead-end street to stand gazing at the house. Even as she watched, the lights began going out one by one, until finally just the rear bedroom ... Afire with curiosity- shame, too, since what Gil did with his time, and who he did it with, were really none of her business-Mildred approached the house and worked her way around to the rear. Gil owned no dog, she remembered. The shrubbery, what little there was of it, gave her a place to hide in case someone came out.
Upon reaching a window, she discovered that the curtain wasn't completely drawn. Both Gil and his guest were visible, the one sitting on the bed edge, the other lounging in the room's only armchair. Mildred paled with anger when she saw who the "guest" was-Bonnie Beth Mabry, with whom she'd long had something far too bitter to be called a feud. The two had been hair-pullers in adolescence, smoldering rivals as they passed through San Marina High. Even now, she could see scarlet when anyone noted their similarity-both had auburn hair, blue eyes and slender builds. But Bonnie wasn't a Mabry anymore. She'd married one of the sons of oilman Otha Shurden down in prosperous Smith County. The marriage had been one of convenience, it seemed. Or was Bonnie merely paying a social call for old time's sake?
The question soon answered itself. As Mildred bit back an exclamation, Gil finished his drink and stood up. He pulled Bonnie to her feet and kissed her on the mouth. The kiss lasted until Bonnie's hands were locked in Gil's hair and his hands were kneading her shoulders through an expensive-looking summer knit. Twisting his head from side to side, he appeared to be enjoying himself.
Mildred's scorn and anger, which were considerable, subsided after a few seconds to mere excitement. Her feet felt rooted to the ground. She couldn't have returned to her car now even if she'd wanted to, and she didn't want to. Gil Tomlin was hers. Bonnie Beth Shurden had no right to him. But since they were inside and she, Mildred, was outside ...
After what seemed like the longest embrace on record, Gil broke the kiss. He stood smiling down at Bonnie, or possibly at the anticipation on her face. The latter was saying something, but the words didn't carry over the air-conditioner mounted around the corner. But their import came across when the philandering Mrs. Shurden reached out and fondled Gil's organ through his clothes. Tomlin liked this very much, because he took her hand and held it there. A prominent swelling became noticeable in the area, even to Mildred outside the house, who had to set her teeth to keep from screaming out her objection to this, to her, unearned bit of familiarity.
But Gil stopped the play after a minute. Lean face taut with concentration, he started on the buttons of the knit suit's top. After removing the garment, he stooped to kiss Bonnie's breasts through a lacy excuse for a bra. Then he took the bra off and laid it across the chair back. While Bonnie stood with eyes closed and lips tightly compressed, he squeezed and flipped the firm white boobs to a point where even Mildred could see their engorgement. Bending again, Gil grasped his partner by the shoulders and proceeded to suckle her breasts until Bonnie's shrill cries communicated her pleasure outside, as did her uninhibited wriggles.
Mildred stared, open-mouthed. Because she knew both of the participants, knew them, had related to them, she felt a part of this torrid scene, a not-so-reluctant third party of a menage a trois which no one had planned, least of all herself. She even fancied her own response was growing in pace with the other woman's, although common sense and a residue of pride told her this wasn't possible. But her nipples had erected in spite of herself. Now they strained against her bra cups.
Having finished satisfying his oral cravings, Gil turned his attentions elsewhere. After unfastening Bonnie's suit skirt, he helped her step out of it. The half-slip, too. She pretended to fight him when he went after her panties, but naturally he got these, too, laying them atop her other garments on the chair. While she fended him off in mock-serious fashion, he grinned and thrust a hand between her thighs, applying one or more fingers to a sensitive area every girl has.
Mildred, who could remember quite well her own feelings when Gil touched her there, went limp with envy. Or was it something else? There was no need to check the state of her underpants; she could feel the wetness. The wise thing to do was go, before the pair inside destroyed forever anything she might still feel for Gil Tomlin. Only she couldn't. A terrible fascination kept her rooted in the foliage.
Gil was getting out of his own clothing now, tossing shirt, pants and shorts in three different directions. Owner of a substantial erection, he stood erect while Bonnie tweaked the head of his tool a few times. Then, to Mildred's utter disbelief, she dropped to her knees in front of him. No trace of shyness here, real or feigned. The girl who'd had a reputation as being hard to make in high school was about to ...
Mildred held her breath. When Bonnie actually took the head of Gil's penis into her mouth, the cool air outside became clammier than ever. Mildred expelled the breath and waited for ... for what? For Bonnie to stop the charade, to tear her mouth away and berate Gil Tomlin for asking such a thing. But the girl inside began to bob her head in long, clean motions, and if she felt disgust over what she was doing, her face didn't show it. Judging from his expression, Gil was experiencing almost unbearable ecstasy. But after little more than a minute, he grabbed Bonnie by the hair and almost wrenched her off his manhood. With a smile that could only be described as dazed, he gestured at the bed near the window. Bonnie, face flushed with passion, nodded.
Mildred moved back two steps so they wouldn't catch the reflection from the whites of her eyes or the dinner ring on her finger. She watched Gil help the girl into bed and climb up after her. When the man she thought she cared for knelt between Bonnie's white thighs and prepared to sink himself into a strange vagina, Mildred turned away so that she" wouldn't see. On shaky legs, she returned to her car, driving home in a state of acute depression.
CHAPTER SIX
When Vern drove away with his sister, Lloyd Navarone left the house, too. In his new mood of satiety, short-lived though it might be, he didn't want to be alone with Charlotte, not even if Bonita and the cook were around. Paula Henson, if she never came to visit again, if she were three hundred miles away by now, would nonetheless make matters uncomfortable between himself and his stepdaughter for a few days. Navarone supposed it was his Methodist upbringing. Out here on the range, a man could forget some of it, but not all.
He saddled his favorite roping horse, Caesar, a six-year-old gelding, and with Rex behind, prepared to ride to the east pasture to see if Ector might not be right in his estimate about the number of calves they could expect for the fall branding. Clem, particularly if he'd pulled a cork in the past hour, had a tendency to see two calves where there was only one.
As he tightened a cinch, Ector himself, about to ride back to the south pasture with three of the hands, walked into the corral to stand silently behind, the way he did when he'd come across something which bothered him. Navarone turned to look at him. "What is it, Clem?" The ramrod, as he'd seen him do a thousand times before, spat a stream of tobacco juice on the ground, squinted once out the gate, and shrugged. "Mebbe nothing."
Navarone snorted. "You don't walk up behind me on a rush afternoon for no reason. Spill it."
"Thet Caldwell fellow, the one who was here Friday and lit out with his tail afire ..."
"Yeah? What about him?"
Ector shifted his chaw to the other side of his mouth. "Wal, he came back yesterday ... I think. I mean, he was here and he wasn't here, if you know what I mean."
Navarone called upon the little patience still left a man after he's endured everything that a malevolent fate can send him. "Will you stop talking nonsense and tell me what's on your mind? And, no, I don't know what you mean. How in blazes could I? You haven't told me!"
"Yestiddy after the little filly rode in alone-"
"What little filly?"
Ector looked away. "Henson, I think she said her name was. Paula Henson. I unsaddled her horse and she went inside."
Navarone hoped his face resembled the kind a man should have in a tight poker game, because that's the kind of face he needed now. "So? That's what I pay you for, isn't it?"
"So about twenty minutes later, up rides Caldwell in a rented car. I know it's Caldwell, even if he's wearing dark glasses and a gray Stetson pulled low over his eyes. He knocks on the front door and can't raise anyone from inside, so he-"
"You can take in all that from out here? Or the stables?"
Ector again treated the sun-baked ground to Red Man. "The Henson girl frays a halter and I'm "mending it, see. The light's bad in the bunk house, worse than bad in the stables, so I'm sitting in the shade of the sycamore tree up beside the gate. Only he never sees me. Caldwell, I mean. When he leaves, I duck behind the wall, on account of-"
"When he couldn't get anyone to the door, what did Martin Caldwell do?"
"He goes around to the side entrance and, uh, walks in without a by-your-leave."
Navarone went cold inside, because he was beginning to see where all this was leading. And he liked it not at all. "That's strange," he remarked, putting just the right amount of wry humor on the words. "I don't recall letting Mister Caldwell in or out. Or fixing him a drink. I overate, you see, and after Vern and the girls left, I went to lie down. Must have dozed off." Ector, to his vast relief, gave all the outward indications of believing him, although there was a glint of amusement in the faded blue eyes which hadn't been put there by any crack about letting Martin Caldwell in or out.
'"Wal, after about five minutes, Caldwell comes out. He's smilin' like the cat in the creamery. He looks both ways, gets in his car and drives out easy. Me, I-"
"Thank you, Clem. I'll have Sarah count the silver. We're both glad you told us this. But for now, why don't you and the boys get started for the south pasture?"
"Sure, boss, we'll get on it."
Ector spat one final time in the dust, and sauntered out.
* * *
After the foremen and the men rode out, Navarone walked back inside the house. On his office phone, he dialed the San Marina County sheriff's department and asked for Luke Guthrie himself. He and -Luke, without stretching the point, had grown up together, having survived public education, the U.S. Army and one or two fist fights without parting company. Face grim, Navarone waited. This would be no drinking date.
"San Marina County Sheriff's Office. Dispatcher speaking. Is it urgent?"
"No. Just connect me with Sheriff Guthrie."
"You got it."
"Hello? Luke, this is Lloyd. Yeah, it is too hot to die. But I've got my system back in operation, so I can't-Luke, listen. I have a problem. Maybe you can help. What's that?"
The sound coming through the receiver was either a belch or a gunshot frog. The voice that replaced the belch, on the other hand, allowed that its owner was still sheriff, and therefore obligated to help people with their problems, whether he wanted to or not.
"It's about Greg Caldwell's boy, Luke. The one who just hung out his shingle. Have you ever had any trouble with him?"
"Marty? What kind of trouble?"
"Does he go into people's houses without being invited? Does he have any traits that strike you as being, well, a little odd?"
"Should he have?"
"My ramrod says Marty came on the place yesterday, knocked on the front door, then went in a side entrance without being told to. I was there at the time, but I never heard anything, as God is my witness." Navarone realized he sounded like a hysterical woman, but he didn't care.
"Don't talk around me, boy. Marty's a lawyer. Green, but licensed. Why would he go into your house at all, much less on Sunday? I'm not disputing your word, understand, but I don't see-"
"Just forget it, Luke. I'm sorry I wasted your time. We'll get together sometime this week for a beer or two, huh?"
"Now hold on, Lloyd. I'm not trying to brush you off. I'm sheriff to all the people, even my friends. Is anything missing? Have you checked the ranch safe?"
Navarone, appalled, realized that he hadn't. The possibility of robbery made him feel much better, even if the head on his shoulders told him he was crazy. Five minutes wasn't enough time for an amateur like Martin Caldwell to crack a ten-year-old Mosler. "No, as a matter of fact, I haven't. Don't go away, Luke. I'll be right back."
He put down the phone and crossed the room to the safe concealed behind louvered doors which also locked. Neither doors nor combination area contained tell-tale marks of forced entry. But just to be sure, he worked the combination and looked inside. Nothing was missing. The cash drawer hadn't been jimmied and the accounts receivable ledger was still locked. Dorothy's diamond watch and Mildred's sorority jewelry lay exactly where he remembered.
Navarone returned to the phone and admitted as much. "But I still don't like it, Luke. He had a tiff with Mildred and none of us expected to see him back here again, at least not so soon."
"Maybe he came out to apologize, Lloyd. Men do, you know."
"Maybe. The way things have been going for us lately, I'm too jumpy to live with. I swing at shadows."
"So Millie still hasn't found the right man, eh? Lloyd, if I were ten years younger, I'd shuck Grace and give Mildred a whirl."
"If you were ten years younger, I'd still beat you into a coma with one hand tied behind me," Navarone replied, only half-joking. He and Guthrie had once brawled one another to a draw, more or less, over a girl whose name neither could recall now. They could fight over Mildred, too, given the right-or wrong-circumstances.
"I believe you would, boy, I believe you would. Well, I can't spare a deputy now, but if you want, I'll drive out and dust for fingerprints myself. Got a kit I've never used. Probably need the practice."
Navarone bared his teeth at the far wall. "Stay where you are. At your age, a man shouldn't go out alone. But I'll hold you to that beer. Expect me Friday afternoon, around three."
"I will, you old faker. Don't swing at any more shadows."
When he replaced the phone on its cradle, Navarone felt someone else's presence in the room. He turned to find Charlotte watching him from an open doorway. The expression on her face-a look of intense curiosity, along with something else he wasn't sure of-stunned him. He knew dismay showed on his, and struggled to remove it. Also, the vexation at her dress, or lack of it. Tight shorts and a half-blouse knotted in the middle probably wasn't proper attire for a nineteen-year-old living in the middle of twenty men.
"What was that about, Daddy?"
She's always called him that, even if he wasn't. Navarone countered the question with a reminder. "Years ago, if you recall, we had an understanding that no one in this family would ever eavesdrop on anyone else. The penalty was no phone for a month. I'm afraid you just earned it." Charlotte's reaction wasn't quite what he expected; the cool smile bothered him a lot less than the arms folded across the chest.
"That's when we were little girls, Millie and I. But we aren't little girls any more, Daddy. You can't discipline us as though we were. We're grown women now. We know ... what's going on."
Navarone, deciding that he'd have a little respect, came up out of his chair like a bronc from a chute. From a height of six-feet-three, he glared down at his stepdaughter. "The penalty stands, young lady. I'll personally enforce it. And you will be so kind as to explain your last remark." She glared right back at him as he expected, Dorothy to the life, although less buxom, less commanding. "Well?"
"You think Marty Caldwell may have heard or seen too much, that's why you want Sheriff Guthrie to shut him up. Am I right, Daddy?"
"You're wrong! Wrong and impertinent on top of everything else! If anyone needs to be shut up, it's you, my own stepdaughter, who thinks she can-"
"Did you enjoy Paula, Daddy?"
"Charlotte!"
"Well, she told me. She told me everything. And you needn't look so stricken. You didn't force her. You didn't have to."
Navarone put a hand to his head, took it away, brought it back. But whether he felt remorse or simply embarrassment, he wasn't sure. To be apprehended hurt a man's pride. To be apprehended by his own kin, under his own roof, smarted twice over. In order not to see either triumphant brown eyes or the swell of ripe young breasts through a blouse at least one size too small, he stared at the floor. "I suppose you'll tell Mildred. Or your mother."
"Millie knows. But I'll never tell Mom. It might kill her."
Navarone shuddered. By an effort he hadn't known was in him, he raised his eyes to Charlotte's. "But you did tell your stepsister."
He wanted to laugh, only it wouldn't come out. And just as well. "It may sound hypocritical, but I don't believe it, myself. I don't. I don't believe I'd behave like a filthy old lecher with someone young enough to be my-"
"You've been under a terrible strain, Daddy. We understand, Millie and I. If Mom were home ..."
"Your mother may never be home again," Navarone replied, bowing his head. "I've been afraid to say it before, but I'm saying it now. I talked with a doctor this morning, and he told me a lot by not telling me anything. I want her back, you know that. I'd give up the ranch to have her back."
"Of course you would, Daddy. All of us would. But you ... have to think of yourself. No one's asking you to shrivel up and die."
"Shrivel up? No, I can't do that. But I can do better than I've been doing. We all can, yourself included. I expect you to."
"Does that mean I don't lose my phone for a month? I'm forgiven?"
He gave her a sad smile, which, considering the amount of bare skin exposed to his scrutiny, took almost more than he had in him. "You know you are. I can whale the daylight out of Vern or Millie, but you, you wrap me around your bedpost."
"Daddy! What a cute double-entendre!" What a risqu� thing to say to one's own stepdaughter, Navarone thought, red-faced. But he accepted Charlotte's peck on the cheek and a nearly chaste hug to go with it. "Tell Sarah I said to find you something to do. That's an order that can't be rescinded."
"Hah!"
When she passed from his field of vision he relaxed and went to re-cinch his horse.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wednesday afternoon, as she started across the courtyard to the stables to saddle Zephyr for his annual picture-the San Marina Star had promised to send a photographer-Mildred heard her father call her name from his office. Curious, she went back inside to see what he wanted. Lloyd Navarone's erratic behavior of late, his fits of moodiness, troubled her. Mildred supposed he was under terrific stress from all sides, but mainly from the ranch. His first words seemed to prove it.
"We've decided to sell some of the breeding stock, Vern and I. I've already talked by phone to a good prospect in Mineral Springs. A rancher named Singletary. But he doesn't know how to get here. I want you to drive there and show him the way back. Try to impress him, if possible. I'll give you some registration papers to take with you."
Mildred let her unhappiness show. Mineral Springs was almost a hundred miles away. By the time she arrived, carried out her mission and fueled the roadster for the trip back, darkness would have set in. "Can I stay overnight?" Her father checked his watch.
"Yes, stay the night. I don't want you on the road so late. Pick a decent place to sleep. If you start within the hour, you should be in Mineral Springs by six o'clock. Good luck, daughter."
"Why can't Vern go?"
"Vernon's filling in for Clement today. Clem's in bed with a virus."
Mildred rolled her eyes. "In bed with a bottle, you mean. All right, I'll go. For you I'll go." Her father smiled in undisguised relief. When Lloyd Navarone smiled, some of the fresh wrinkles in his brow bunched around his eyes, which right now were tired. The latter came from having been up since seven a.m.
"That's the spirit. I'll make a rancher out of you yet. Find you a husband, too, if you're interested."
"Never touch them," Mildred replied, trying to picture the man who'd sired her, in bed with a woman six years younger than herself. Though she tried hard, the images simply wouldn't come. "Am I excused?"
"You're excused."
She'd almost reached the door when, glancing up from his books, he called her name. Mildred looked back. "Now what?" Lloyd Navarone picked up one of his briar pipes and began tamping it full of scented, Dutch tobacco. The tamping gave him an excuse not to look her in the eye.
"Has What's-his-name bothered you lately? Caldwell? Followed you while you rode or anything?"
"No. Should he?"
"Don't be cute, Millie. The man may be dangerous. If I were you, I wouldn't see him anymore."
"But you aren't me." Mildred longed to snatch her father by the hair and yank his head around, to tell him she knew, that he couldn't play games with her. He fairly reeked of Paula Henson, yet he had the gall to sit there and tell her, a grown-up twenty-five-year-old, who she could, and couldn't go out with.
"Unfortunately, no. Now please find my buyer. Find him, don't romance him."
Mildred closed the door with unnecessary force when she went out.
* * *
As she passed through San Marina on U.S. 87, a light rain began to fall, their first in almost a month. Ten miles out of town, the rain turned into a downpour, a deluge which would soon swell creeks and rivers to five times their usual size and flood low-lying areas. Mildred, for safety's sake, slowed to thirty miles per hour. At the top of a hill, she spied a solitary figure trudging along with a backpack on his shoulders. Disregarding her father's "advice," she honked the horn and pulled over in front of the someone, who took his time about catching up.
When he climbed in, she saw that he was only a boy, whatever that meant. His dark hair was plastered to his head and his clothes dripped at the cuff. Panting from his fifty-yard run, he wedged his pack behind the passenger seat, then closed the door.
"Thanks, whoever you are. I didn't ask for it, but thanks."
Mildred was amused, not at his condition but at the pride, the tone of sturdy independence in his voice. "I'm going as far as Mineral Springs. From there, you're on your own again. I promise. Do you have a name?"
"Stephan. Stephan Braniwicz."
After four scrutinies, she decided the boy's strong profile and brooding eyes made an impression any girl would take note of. "That's Polish, isn't it?"
"You're right. And so is East Chicago, although I don't suppose you've ever been there."
"I'm afraid not. Your home?"
"Yeah. Got any cigarettes on you? Mine are all soaked."
Mildred gave him a cigarette and a light, also lighting one for herself. Stephan, she surmised, was a college student out to see the American West without benefit of credit cards or cash. He asked few favors, other than occasional rides, and probably received about what he expected. Mildred rather admired him for it. She also found herself pursuing a train of thought which ended she knew not how. "You must have many interesting experiences traveling this way. Like to tell me about some of them?" The look Stephan wore, combined with the rain's din on her sportster's cloth top, made shivers run up her spine.
"I was rolled in Silver City three weeks ago. Lost my wallet, my watch and a class ring. I had most of my money in the pack, though. And then a guy picked me up. He-but you don't want to hear about that. Not a girl like you." He exhaled a puff of smoke and leaned forward to finger some of the dials and gauges on the car's dashboard. "Nice. I had a Tee-Are Six once myself. It was used, though. I suppose you got a fleet of 'em. Spend your time chasing the sun and beating off the guys."
Mildred smiled and shook her head. "This is the only one I have. Honest. And I'm on an errand for my father, that's straight, too." With no reason not to, she found herself relating the whole story of Dorothy's illness, omitting only a few, highly personal details. "So you see, you're not the only person with bad luck. Lots of people have it. Did I tell you to call me Millie? It's short for Mildred."
"Wow. I'm sorry ... Millie."
The pair drove on in silence, smoking in a kind of quiet comradeship. The rain stopped after they entered Laredo County. When the sun came out, Stephan's hair and clothing began to dry. He took out a comb and began to restore some order to his world. Debating whether or not to stop the car and lower the roof, Mildred studied him from the corner of her eye while she drove. Put him out in Mineral Springs? He was far too handsome to relinquish without a fight. Without something. From his long lashes to his sandaled feet, Stephan Braniwicz exuded animal grace, an attraction which, for her, became stronger by the minute.
She fought the attraction for twenty minutes. Wearying of fighting, wearying of holding to a moral code that no one else seemed to believe in, she began to plot her own downfall. The watch on her wrist read half-past four. Even if they stopped for an hour, she could still reach the Singletary Ranch outside Mineral Springs by six p.m. Even if they stopped ...
"What's in Mineral Springs?"
Mildred ran her tongue over suddenly dry lips. "It's bigger than San Marina, the last town. Remember San Marina? No, I don't suppose you would. Well, Mineral Springs has thirty thousand people, so you'll take better note. A state college, too. Will you stay there tonight?"
"If it doesn't cost too much. I'm running out of money, and it isn't even August. Last summer I didn't go home until September."
Mildred felt her face grow warm over where a good profile and her own imagination were leading her. "Stephan ..."
"Yeah?"
"Do you ... like me?" the boy turned to gaze at her, although the look of calm assurance never left his face. He laughed in what seemed to be unaffected puzzlement.
"Of course I like you. You took me in out of the rain and now I'm dry again. So I like you."
Mildred tightened her hands on the Triumph's steering wheel, letting the speedometer needle fall to fifty and flicker there. But she kept her voice soft and her eyes on the highway ahead. "I mean, do you like me ... in a certain way? The way I'm beginning to like you? Do you?" She held her breath as soon as the words were out, knowing she'd have to stop and order him from the car if he said no. Her pride couldn't stand a rebuff. Not from Stephan Braniwicz, not from anyone. He took just a second to consider what any young man would have to consider an invitation.
"Yes. Yes, I like you that way. You're ... good people."
She reached across the shift handle to grasp him where that same young man would love to be grasped, squeezing once. "Can you do it, Stephan?" Again a tremor disturbed the calm on his face.
"I can."
Mildred, still with her hand on the situation, steered them over a small rise and down the other side. "Would you like to do it with me?" The quick swell in his trousers made her stop the fondling. Young men excited so quickly. She didn't want to be raped while traffic raced past them at sixty miles an hour, while solid San Marinafolk on their way to or from town took incredulous, outraged notice. Stephan's reply, however, stunned her for its unexpectedness.
"No. You're a-a-"
"A tease? No, honey. I never promise a man something I won't give him. Never."
Mildred glimpsed a secondary road up ahead. From having been this way many times in the past, she knew vaguely where it led. The road meandered through scrubby mesquite to brooding hills spiked with cactus, rocks and a few pines-the Laredo Badlands.
Tripping her turn signal, she advised him where he stood. "If you don't want me, you'll have to tell me. Then you'll have to get out."
"I ... want you. But you'll have to stop giving the orders."
"Whatever you say, dear."
Mildred began to swim inside from the possibilities. She hadn't been completely honest with Martin Caldwell. In college she had, on one occasion, experienced sex with a stranger. After graduation, after returning home, she'd vowed, never again. Now, in view of Marty's despoiling of her, in view of her father's conquest of a girl six years her junior, she felt reckless again. She'd give herself to Stephan and take what pleasure there was in the giving. If Gil Tomlin lived this way, then so could she. Considering what was going down, where was the harm?
She made the roadster's tires spin in her haste to leave U.S. 87. For mile after mile, until the hills crept closer and civilization, its outward marks, anyway, vanished in their dust, she concentrated on her driving. The flush on her face spread to her breasts and thence to her thighs. She felt consumed by a slow fire.
"Why?" Stephan asked, breaking the silence.
Mildred laughed. "I like you."
"You're crazy."
If she was, the symptoms felt delicious. After finding a place to leave the road, Mildred parked the car and turned off the ignition. Then she handed him the keys. "There's a blanket in back. Or was. My brother may have taken it out."
"Your brother?"
She patted the boy's cheek. "He's sixty miles away. I don't think he'll know. And, really, I expected more of you. Are you going to disappoint me?"
The appeal to his pride made him leap out to get the blanket. When he spread it in the shade behind the car, she climbed out to join him, prepared for anything he might suggest, no matter how bizarre or outrageous. If one couldn't have an open mind, where was the adventure?
This new, reckless side of herself made Mildred remember a flask of whisky in the glove compartment, left over from some long-passed spring night when the spirit had been willing but enough was enough. Fetching it back, she uncorked the Scotch and tipped her head skyward for a long, deep draught before passing the flask to Stephan. He drank deeply, coughed and handed the whisky back, reaching for her as soon as their fingertips touched.
"Don't try to tell me how. Don't try. You promised."
Mildred nodded, smiled and closed her eyes, expecting to be kissed softly and somewhat inexpertly. Instead, Stephan came at her like a Gil or a Marty, bruising her lips with his, almost driving his teeth between them. He was much stronger than she'd imagined. When he fastened his hands on her shoulders and sank to the blanket, she sank with him. She had to.
Rolling on top of her, he used his tongue to pry her teeth apart. Then he began to french her in a way no one else ever had before, reaching her in a way no one else ever had before, until she was kissing him back in sheer gratitude. Working a knee between her legs, he made both tongue and knee speak to her soul. Not only speak to it, but command a reply. Mildred had to break for air after a few minutes, but Stephan, scorning a rest, trailed hot kisses down her throat, across the patch of tender skin above her blouse, over each fulsome mound thrusting up at him.
"Open it!" she begged, forgetting her promise. "Open it now!"
He fumbled with the blouse's buttons, and reaching inside and underneath her, managed to unhook her bra without ever seeing the hook- something the average twenty-year-old needed to practice. But then Stephan Braniwicz wasn't your ordinary twenty-year-old. After drawing the bra away, he bared her breasts, and in the very same motion, covered the pair with his palms. Whatever he did before, he could do better now, with his hands and his lips and his knee in her crotch.
Mildred let the sensations take hold and begin a hectic tattoo in her brain. The pounding she heard in her ears was her own heart. Only Gil Tomlin standing beside them could have made her stop, and she was rapidly forgetting about Gil. When Stephan rolled off her and thrust a hand inside her skirt's waistband, she heard a moan, realizing an instant later that the moan was her own. And then she felt rough fingers enter her womanhood, search higher, for a swelling projection and commence a furious play. Instinctively, she opened wider for the fingers.
Stephan returned to her breasts, this time with his mouth. Rolling the nipples between his lips, he made their points swell to tight points of ardent desire. Then he tongued the nipples until they were no longer cool but simmering from the heat of his mouth. Then he took each breast into his mouth and raked its nipple across the projections of his palate.
Mildred shuddered and climaxed. Rather than exhausting her, the orgasm, once she recovered from its tremors, left her refreshed and more eager than ever. "Inside me!" she implored when breath would permit. "I want you inside me!"
"No orders," Stephan rasped, yanking the skirt down her hips. "You promised."
He laid her skirt across the bra and peeled her panties off her thighs, again without lifting her from a supine position. Getting to his feet, he began to undress, removing the pullover to expose a tanned chest which seemed much too broad for his wiry frame.
Mildred admired the swift, unhurried way he went about the task. When he dropped his jeans and unsnapped his shorts, she had something else to admire: a thick, somewhat stubby penis which he exhibited with great pride, possibly because he realized his stout organ's advantages. "I like your prick," she said, to please him. "It's a lovely prick. A beautiful prick." Stephan shrugged off the compliment, coming near to kneel beside her.
"It does what pricks are supposed to."
She reached up to touch the bright red head. "Are you certain?"
He compressed his lips in a tight, hard line which delighted rather than alarmed her. After stroking her clitoris a few more times, he placed his knees inside hers and leaned forward. Supporting himself on one hand, he used the other to insert his congested manhood inside her vaginal sheath. She helped him by wriggling her pelvis from side to side. When he'd entered as far as he could-as far as he could expect to, considering his organ's length-Stephan lowered until their chests were touching.
Mildred turned her head until his head lay in the hollow of her shoulder. For half a minute, they breathed into one another's hair, their perspiration intermingling and trickling into the blanket. Then she bit him on the ear lobe and whispered one, last command. "You can fuck me now, honey. You can fuck me for as long as you want."
He began to move, to drive himself inside her. But his driving was no aimless thrusting. There was real art to the way Stephan made her body his body, genuine finesse to his side-to-side maneuvers. Without speeding his own finish, he hastened her toward another climax by applying a stiff forefinger to the shaft of her clitoris, supporting himself on one hand until she came. Mildred found that the emotional excitement of having him inside her made the orgasm more intense, the mental images more electrifying. And still he labored, pausing now and then to catch his breath.
"Gotta-come-now!" he panted, when she was near a third.
Locking his hands in her hair, he began to pound at her in jack hammer fashion. Mildred found the rhythm and arrived with him at a wrenching climax which nearly turned her inside out. Stephan groaned and spent himself inside her in four, huge bursts. But he continued to slam into her until the spasms trailed off for both, leaving the two weak, spent and sated. Then they fell apart.
Until the sun was low in the west, they lay and smoked a common cigarette, allowing the breeze to cool their fevered bodies. "Where will you go now?" Mildred asked finally, because she was curious. The boy was silent for so long, she turned to look at him. His expression behind narrowed lids was difficult to read. "Well?"
"I don't know. Maybe I'll stay over in-Mineral Springs, did you say?-for a week and find a job. Or maybe I'll go home."
"If you need money, I can-"
"No."
"Not even twenty dollars?" Stephan, as she expected, opened his eyes to scowl at her.
"I said no. I meant no. Keep your money. Didn't you say you were nearly broke yourself?"
"Yes," Mildred said, although she hadn't. The Navarone Ranch was far from bankrupt, hospital bill or no hospital bill. The last time she went through the books, assets had totaled six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand dollars, depending on whether or not one counted the ranch house itself-twenty rooms encased in native stone, furnishings passed down for six generations. This aside from the herd and the horses, some of which were worth more than Mr. Stephan Braniwicz would probably ever see in one lump sum.
"You said you were on an errand for your father."
"That's right. He sent me to find a buyer for some of our breeding stock. Find him and lead him back to the ranch."
"Then after the errand's done, we could go away together."
She concealed a smile, because the offer seemed to be serious. "It's something to consider. I have to warn you, though. I'm the oldest in the family. The bookkeeper. I think my father would have us traced and then try to take me back. He'd send my brother and four or five of the hands. There'd be a terrible row-and what did you say your blood type was?"
Braniwicz scrambled up to look for his clothes. "I didn't. Sure you can take us back to the highway in this light?"
A little hurt, Mildred dressed and drove them- finished driving them-into Mineral Springs, letting Stephan out on the first corner. The last she saw of him was a wave and a smile from underneath a street light before he turned his back on her forever.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wednesday night, with the house still, Lloyd Navarone tossed on his bed, unable to sleep. He told himself the two extra cups of coffee at dinner were to blame. He knew better. Charlotte was to blame. The girl and he were alone in the house, Bonita and Sarah having gone home for the day. Mildred was in Mineral Springs, or supposed to be. Vern had taken a bedroll and rifle and ridden up into the hills with one of the hands to hunt lynx. There were too many of the predators this year, Ector had said. Lynx spooked cattle into breaking legs and necks by stampeding herds in the dark.
To lull himself to sleep, Navarone tried counting the general journal entries he'd made during the day, a technique which usually worked. Tonight the trick failed him. He recalled every one, backwards and forwards. His brain simply wouldn't close up shop. Sitting erect in bed, he shook out two aspirin from the bottle on the night stand, and by the light of a pale moon, washed them down with a glass of water from the pitcher placed there by Bonita before she went home. He sank back down and waited for sleep. Sleep wouldn't come.
Sighing, he got up, turned on a light and dictated a short message for Dorothy into a small, cassette-type recorder. The idea had occurred to him earlier. On days when he couldn't go in personally, he'd put on tape his regards, his compliments, his love.
His love? Right now he wasn't even sure if he loved Dorothy. The affection he felt for her, if that's what it was, resembled no honeymoon stereotype. Their honeymoon was too far in the past. Fifteen years, to be exact. His response to her was one of habit, not ardor, although she was still a very handsome woman. Other men told him so. Still, he was used to having her around and she was no longer around.
Navarone pressed the recorder's rewind button, then listened to the words he'd dictated. Clapped a hand to his head in disgust. The microphone had been too far away, the volume setting too low. Not a word was distinguishable. Shrugging, he set about erasing the mess, intending to record in the morning, when he'd know what he was doing.
Midway through the task, the ears he could always rely on picked up a stealthy creak in the hallway. Navarone shut the recorder off and listened, not wanting to get his adrenalin to surging without good reason. A second creak seemed reason enough, making the hair rise on the back of his neck. When the knob on the door began to turn, Navarone, thinking about Martin Caldwell, crouched to leap, either at the intruder or toward his desk drawer on the other side of the room, where he kept a loaded .44-40 Magnum. But the "intruder" was only a stepdaughter named Charlotte in a baby-doll sleeping outfit too brief to mention.
"Hi, Daddy. I was passing by and saw the light. Is anything wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," he replied, more annoyed that she should see him in pajamas than being caught playing with a cassette recorder at two a.m. "Can't I get out of bed in the middle of the night without having to give an account of myself?" She laughed before replying, vexing him further.
"Would you believe the sauna room? I couldn't sleep, so I started there. Something's wrong with the heater, though. Could you ...?"
"No. Of all the-a sauna bath when we spent the weekend living in one? At two in the morning? I hope they're teaching you something at the state university. It certainly isn't logic."
"And you? What are you doing with a recorder in your arms and that crazy look on your face?"
He swallowed a retort too caustic for a nineteen-year-old's tender ears. "If it's any business of yours, which it isn't, I was dictating a few things to your mother. Trying to. Things I couldn't say to her face. Never have, that is. Only they came out wrong this time, too. The damned recorder went haywire." He tossed the device on the bed, where it landed with a dull thump and probably no damage. Charlotte stopped smiling, but she made no move toward the door.
"I'm sorry, Daddy. Really I am."
Navarone threw up his hands. "Sorry? For what? You've nothing to be sorry about. A man reaches my age, he gets neurotic. Starts to feel sorry for himself. He-oh, to hell with it, and my apologies for the language." To his amazement, she came a pace nearer, and face alight over something, stood gazing up at him.
"But you're not that old-Lloyd. You're just in your prime. There's lots more to come, I'm sure of it."
For him, the ringing in his ears went well with a dry throat and a pounding chest. Lloyd. She'd called him Lloyd. Not "Daddy," or "Pop," or any of the things he'd tried to be to her in place of her real father, but Lloyd. One equal to another. But why did she have to be inside an outfit which teased the beholder rather than concealed its wearer? A man could stand only so much temptation. "Thanks. But I think you'd better go back to bed now." If the shiver he got back wasn't real, then the air conditioning was too high.
"The house is so big. And we're alone tonight. Just the two of us. I don't think I can sleep. Can't we just ... stay up and talk?"
Navarone fussed with the cuffs of his pajama top. "We can talk tomorrow. Unless you have something so important it can't wait."
"Oh, no, nothing like that. But, Lloyd, I-I think you're wonderful."
Before he could stop her, she walked into his arms and embraced him. After an instant's surprise, an instant's shocked disapproval, he embraced her back, then tried to disentangle himself. But Charlotte's arms tightened about his neck. He couldn't peel them off. Twisting in his grasp, she tilted her face up to his and kissed him. There was both fire and determination to the kiss. Fire? There was pure expertise in the way she planted her lips on his.
A thrill of horror coursed through Lloyd Navarone. Not because she was kissing him, but because he was kissing her back, his own stepdaughter. A fearful, angry voice inside him cried out its indignation. Navarone pleaded with the voice, arguing for just a few seconds more. The seconds passed and the voice subsided to a groan of sorrow, a groan which soon fell silent. Then he was merely a man responding to a woman who pleased him.
The kiss seemed to last forever, although its actual duration was probably less than a minute. Charlotte's lips pressed to his were indescribably soft, with a honey-sweet warmth reminding him of Paula Henson. And little wonder. They were both the same age. The same, reckless age.
Navarone realized that she was taking the lips away, that soon he'd have to look her in the eye without blanching, without cringing. He wondered if he was man enough for it, if he'd ever again be man enough for it. But the awful moment came and passed. He neither fell dead at her feet nor stumbled backward into bed, to bruise his spine on the useless cassette recorder.
She cocked her head, tossing long hair over her shoulders and staring up at him in some bemused fashion which wasn't either triumphant or incredulous. The corners of her mouth twitched, but whether she was fighting back a smile or a shrill of scorn, he couldn't be sure.
"Do you still want me to go?"
"No," he whispered. "No, I don't want you to go. I want you to stay. If God strikes me dead ..."
"Then I'll stay."
The pronouncement came too readily. This and the drunken way her head rolled made him think she'd been into the liquor cabinet. The suspicion almost crushed him. Relieved him, too, because, if true, it meant she'd remember very little in the morning about what happened tonight. But he hadn't tasted anything on her breath. Stepping nearer, he tipped the smooth, unlined chin up to his bristly, lined one. "You're not-?" Charlotte shook her head at him.
"I'm not drunk, Lloyd. I know what I'm doing. You, too. We both know what we're doing."
"We're both crazy," he mourned, and tried to make the tingling in his spine go away- Charlotte, too-by closing his eyes. The ploy backfired. She slipped lithe young arms around his neck and kissed him again, this time with much more feeling. Navarone shuddered. The last of his qualms, if qualms they were, took ill and died. When Charlotte parted her lips, he inserted his tongue between them and moved it from side to side a few, experimental times. She made a sound of contentment and opened wider for him.
After tonguing the roof of her mouth for several minutes, he realized two disturbing developments: one, an erection almost painful in its intensity; and two, a knee that seemed to belong to someone else, jammed between pliant thighs. Charlotte neither encouraged nor discouraged the knee. But her arms tightened around his neck, which was encouragement enough.
In an almost instinctive progression, he placed his palms over her firm young breasts. Only when their points began to erect did he remember they were his stepdaughter's breasts. He had no business touching them. He was vile, contemptibly vile, for going so far. Not even in his imagination could he proceed further. Not even in his imagination ...
Navarone gulped. A hand had crept between them to grasp him at the one place where a stepdaughter should never touch her stepfather. In less than a second, the hand teased him to a state of swollen excitement. In weak, futile fashion, like a fighter on the ropes, he wrestled with the last of his remorse, discovering when he tried to shrug free of her that she wouldn't let go. Not wanting to strike her and leave a bruise that couldn't be explained to Vern or Mildred, he gave up.
Tugging the negligee part of her outfit down over smooth, creamy shoulders, he bared her to the waist. Charlotte helped him by shaking loose from the gown and letting it fall to the floor. Still holding him captive in her mouth, she tapped an invitation on his shoulders. Gently, because he hadn't forgotten how sensitive young tits could be, he covered the pair with his hands, a thumb over each nipple, trying to time his squeezing with his swirls across her palate. Charlotte began to tremble. Her knees shook and her teeth chattered, so much so that he was obliged to leave off frenching her.
"Let's cool it, baby. Go back to your room. We'll forget we ever-"
"No! Please don't stop. If you stop, I'll-I'll hate and despise you. I will."
He chose to believe the threat, even if common sense told him otherwise. At this point, the predatory male in him would have believed anything. Whatever the consequences might be, he itched to get inside the pajama bottom. Drawing Charlotte back to him, Navarone burned her neck and throat with kisses, meanwhile working a hand inside the pajama bottoms waistband. Loath to rush matters, he took all of three minutes to reach the furry triangle of hair, another minute to burrow his way through and aim a stiff digit at her clitoris. When he made contact, she jumped, satisfying him on two important scores. A woman might fake a response, but not the cream.
Still kissing her, he probed like a gynecologist for a minute, wanting to know. If Charlotte carried a hymen, he couldn't find it. Navarone didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Someone, maybe two or three someone's, had been before him. But with no right to be there himself, he couldn't complain. Before he could say a word for or against experimentation, she read his mind.
"No, little Charlie isn't cherry. She lost it to one of the hands two summers ago. And don't ask her which one. She won't tell. You'd only fire him, and jobs aren't that easy to come by."
Navarone clenched his fists, realized she was right and unclenched them. He probably would fire the hireling callous enough-or bold enough-to despoil the boss' stepdaughter. Fire him or kill him. So there was no point in knowing. No point at all. Instead, he stood up to turn her to the light. One or the other would be in charge from here on out, and she might as well find out who. Not bothering to wipe his face clean of hardness, of brawling, lustful purpose, Navarone stepped back to admire. If he'd hoped to make her shrink from him, to sob that it was only a game, that she wasn't serious, the hope went the way of his other illusions. Charlotte exhibited herself calmly, proudly. There was no shame and no fear. None, leastways, that he could detect.
Capped with roseate points, breasts he'd seen only through fabric before thrust out at him, begging for his attention. Navarone sprang and lifted his prize off the floor, carrying her to the bed and depositing her there. Anything worth doing from here on out was worth doing in comfort. When he lay down beside her, Charlotte's eyes glistened in what he suspected was girlish satisfaction. He had only a second in which to figure it out. A conquest. Of course. To her, he was the biggest, most impressive conquest of her young life. The realization saddened him. Made him uncomfortable, too.
"The light. Can't you turn out the light?"
So she was capable of a little modesty herself. Feeling better, Navarone got up to do as she asked. After stretching out again beside her, he heard the rustle of clothing taking leave of a female body. "I'll do that. I want to do all of it."
In a reassuring darkness, alone in a house which at least was his own, he removed Charlotte's pajama bottom and tossed it over the headboard. Now he felt nothing but smooth, satiny skin, heard no sound save breathless female sounds. She was alive, she was warm, she was his. His nostrils filled with the smell of her, his brain with the possibilities. But all he could think of to say, as he started to undress, was, "I don't suppose you're protected."
"Protected? Hah!"
He undid the last button, wincing over the mockery in her voice. "Being safe isn't anything to make sport of. Answer my question."
"I can take care of myself, Lloyd. You don't have to worry about me."
"I'll worry about you, anyway. I'm a born worrier. And I'll worry about Vern coming in the back without knocking and finding us like this. You're just as much a sister to him as Millie, you know." Navarone, biting his tongue over this last, bent to the breasts he couldn't see.
"Really? Then why does he treat me like-oooh!"
There wasn't any mockery to the way she seized him by the hair, or the way she drove sharp nails into his scalp, only heart-felt appreciation for what his lips and teeth were doing to the nipples of both breasts, what his finger was saying to her clitoris and the structures around it.
"Yes, yes! Don't ever stop doing that for me! Don't ever stop!"
With stopping the last thing on his mind, he worried and sucked her tits to hard points of desire, maintaining all the while a steady, rhythmic fingering of her clitoris. When he judged she was ready-and only a man's instinct served him in this-Navarone got on top of the situation and fought his conscience one last time. His conscience lost, because he balanced himself on hands and knees, bumped Charlotte's soft thighs apart and aimed between them.
She gasped when the head of his tool eased past the outer lips, whimpered when he stretched the tightness to capacity and then some. But she sighed when their pubic regions met, his hair meshing with hers. Arching her back, locking her ankles high around his waist, she struggled to accept him.
"So big. So big ..."
"I'm hurting you," he suggested, stopping all movement. The excitement and the feel of her, a hot, moist vise of flesh clamping him around his most sensitive part, had him near to bursting.
"No! I love it! Keep hurting me that way. See? I can take it!"
Navarone saw, although he wasn't particularly happy to see. Gritting his teeth, he began to move to satisfy a compulsion to make her flesh his flesh. Tomorrow there'd be remorse, a ton of it. Tonight there was only a blind seeking after pleasure, a frantic quest for the elusive part of a woman that a man could never own but felt compelled to seek. At first he kept his thrusts high and small, stimulating her without overly stimulating himself. Then he began to ask himself, why. Why should he drag the thing out until the dawn, creating an experience both of them might want to repeat? This night's misdeed must never be repeated. Never.
So he began to slam into her the way a younger man would, speeding both their climaxes. Her orgasm started first: noisy, obscene pants, limbs blindly flailing, razor-sharp nails digging into his shoulders. And then his own: tremors of ecstasy which nearly made him black out, spasms so intense they seemed to tear him inside out. When they subsided, when he knew the deed, the dreary, dreadful deed was done, Navarone took reluctant leave of the warmth and crawled over Charlotte to sit on the bed edge. There was something he wanted to say, but the finish had taken so much out of him he didn't have the breath to say it. Not right away, at least. When his wind returned, so did his voice. "Know what-we two are, you and me?"
"We're two lonely people who made one another feel better."
"No. That crap belongs in novels. We two are party to a crime of ... I can't even say it."
"That's because we didn't do it. Not really. Incest? Is that what your fumbling old Puritan instincts want to call it? Lloyd, we're not even related. Not by blood, not by anything. Can't you get that through your head? You're not my father and I'm not your daughter. So it's all right."
"Nothing's right about it. What we did was all wrong. It-oh, to hell with it. I'm going to shower. When I come back, I don't want to see you here. I don't ever want to see you here again. Understand?"
He took no reply to be a yes.
CHAPTER NINE
"Well, what do you think of my little spread, Miss Navarone?" Ike Singletary inquired, crossing one tailored leg over the other. Singletary's brown eyes twinkled. Carefully trimmed hair turning silver at the roots caught the morning light. "Just from having driven in."
Mildred, sitting on the canopied veranda with an after-breakfast drink in her hand-nonalcoholic-smiled to humor him, and speculated that she'd need a map and a guide to tour the Single T Ranch. The latter covered almost a fourth of Laredo County-two hundred thousand acres of grazing land, forest and hills. In fact, Singletary wasn't a rancher at all, at least not in a strict sense. He operated Mineral Springs' only television station, KMS-TV, and served as a director in the Mineral Springs Bank of Commerce. He was also a widower.
"When Lloyd Navarone said he'd send someone, I thought he meant a son or his ramrod," Singletary remarked, gazing out over a portion of his sprawling domain. Three hands on horseback herded yearlings in the distance. A Chinese yard boy with hedge clippers was busy manicuring the shrubbery down below. "I had no idea San Marina County produced women such as yourself. Seems I've lived my life in the wrong place."
Mildred laughed, seeing no need to be wary. The Singletary household swarmed with servants. Ike Singletary was at least fifty years old, with ample opportunity in or out of town to satisfy whatever yearnings a lonely man might develop. "But you have lived your life. Not every man can say as much." She might have added, or do as much, because two Cadillac's and a Mercedes sat in the Singletary carriage house. For taking to the air, a twin engine plane parked on an apron adjoining a landing strip behind the house would probably suffice.
"How is it you've managed to stay free? Does your father drive them off?"
Mildred shook her head, determined to bring the conversation back to the reason for her being there in the first place. Singletary affected great interest in acquiring the Navarone breeding stock, all or part of it. "He wants me to stay and help him run things. Claims I have a 'good business head.'"
"Oh? So that's why he sent you. Brainy and an eyeful to boot. Well, forewarned is forearmed, they say. I think I can look out for myself."
"Then you'll go back with me? You really must see our bulls, Mister S. I could have brought some of the ribbons. First place at San Marina County Fair, every year since sixty-six. Red ribbons at the state fair in seventy-four. They're champions, everyone."
"I'm sure of it. No, I think I'll send one of my foremen. They're better judges of bulls than I am. Me, I've always admired a clean-cut critter. When I see the fat hanging in folds, well ..."
Singletary shrugged, transferring his drink to another hand and removing a gold cigarette case from the inside pocket of an immaculately white tropical jacket. When he leaned forward with the offering, Mildred accepted one. Also, a light, from a lighter which appeared to be sterling silver and probably was.
She puffed on the menthol filter tip and chafed over the way Ike Singletary did business-at his own leisure, not someone else's. By half-past ten, she'd expected to be on the road and halfway back to San Marina. Instead, neither price nor transportation had been mentioned. But too much haste suggested a forced sale. Distressed merchandise brought distressed prices. "You've no children?"
Singletary half-turned on the settee and expelled a huge puff of smoke in the general direction of the Mexican border. "Two. The girl married a junior-type network executive back East. The boy's in Los Angeles studying at an actor's school. They come to visit me once or twice a year. Usually ask for money. Usually give it to them. I guess that's what fathers are for. A little odd, Miss Navarone, your staying with the family longer than a grown woman should. Is there any special reason?"
Mildred paused in mid-draw. "Reason?"
"If it's loyalty, I applaud you. If it's self-doubt, I deplore it."
She colored. "Does it have to be either? I like living at home. And I'm only twenty-five, for heaven's sake. Not your-your-"
"Typical old maid?" Singletary threw back his head and laughed. "No. And I like the way you defend yourself, young lady. I like you. I ... wish there were some way I could show it."
Mildred listened to the snip-snip-snip of the yard boy's clippers, and wondered if he-the yard boy-wasn't getting an earful of the conversation. Not that it mattered. No one could do any more damage to her good name and reputation than Martin Caldwell had already done. "There is. You can buy three of Dad's best bulls. Their names are-but I have the registration papers here in my handbag."
She went inside the handbag, found the papers and passed them across. Her host put down his drink and flipped through the documents of lineage and blood, all notarized. But his interest, to Mildred's dismay, seemed more polite than genuine. He had breeding stock of his own, Singletary's attitude said, even if he strove to conceal it. Finally, he handed the registration papers back.
"Maybe there's something I should tell you, Millie. Do you mind if I call you Millie?"
In bewilderment and hurt, she folded the papers and put them away. "No. What is it?"
"I've heard about the trouble your father's been having. Yes, word spreads quickly when a man's in a bind. I can sympathize with him. Your father, I mean. I've known trouble, too. I lost my wife, Wilma, in a crazy hunting accident that should never have happened. The truth is, I'm offering to buy part of Lloyd Navarone's breed herd as a favor, not out of need. I'm telling you and I'm trusting you to keep it between the two of us. Your father, I know, is a proud man. He'd read patronizing intent when there isn't any. Probably never forgive me."
Mildred put her glass down on the veranda ledge in exaggerated slow motion. Trying not to show it, she nonetheless felt as though she'd been slapped in the face. "Then it was charity all the time? Pity? My God, have you no-"
"Please, please. I don't usually waste my time with pity. With words. Action speaks louder. And I don't make a habit of giving away money, believe me. If I buy Virilius and the others, I expect to get value for my money. If they're all you say, why, they'll enhance my herd, too. I'll even sell them back at cost, if Lloyd decides he wants them again. That's fair enough, isn't it?"
"No." She wrenched her shoulder away from his hand and got up to go, intending to drive off with at least her pride intact. "I think you're the cruelest, most insensitive man I've ever met. Good day, Mister S."
When she snatched up her handbag, Mildred remembered that she'd left her sunshades somewhere inside the house. She marched in to find them, too furious to even stub out the cigarette burning between her fingers. Singletary caught up with her in the hallway as she struggled to fit the shades on her face.
"Don't be an idiot. We still have business to finish. How will you explain coming home without a yes or a no? Have you thought about that? No, of course you haven't. Well, I suggest you start thinking about it now."
He yanked her around and forced her chin up to his. Before she could twist away, he turned her face sideways and kissed the lips that had no reply at hand. Mildred went stiff, but the woman in her enjoyed the kiss. Not enough to keep her from aiming a hand at his face, of course, but enough. "You-You bastard! I'm going to tell Daddy about this, you can be sure of it! Condescension is one thing, an insult is something else!" Singletary, grabbing her arm while she fought back the tears, cackled like one of his laying hens.
"A regular spitfire, aren't you. The color of your hair should have clued me. Want to know something? I like my women with spirit. Come along to the den."
He took her by the wrist, and with his greater strength, towed his captive along with him. Rather than create a spectacle for the servants, Mildred went. But after he locked the door to his den, she gave profane vent to her rage. While he stood in smiling ease, arms folded across his chest, she called Ike Singletary every purple name her mind could recall. Finally, with chest-and breasts- heaving, having run out of names and breath, she glared the defiance she could no longer verbalize.
Singletary, as though satisfied he had the right girl, stepped nearer and kissed her again, this time with more tenderness and no small amount of skill. He made the kiss last until there was no more resistance in her, no more will to fight him. Now she was weak with wonder, at what he'd managed in the space of a minute, to do to her.
"Now shall we finish our transaction? Or start our other business?"
"We've-We've nothing to finish."
"Haven't we? I'm prepared to pay what you're asking for the bulls. Just name it."
Mildred shook her head in a stubborn show of pride. The Navarone mule streak, someone outside the family had once called it. "Won't-sell to you." Singletary, as she expected, winked and squeezed her arm.
"You'll sell. I'll go over your head if I have to. Pick up a telephone and call your Daddy."
"You're an SOB!"
He grinned. "No, but I am man enough to master you."
She made a sound of great derision with lips and tongue.
"I can see you don't believe it, so ..."
He grasped her in his arms and bent her almost double with a kiss. When she parted her lips to scream at him, he snaked his tongue through and commenced a vigorous play, first on her tongue, then on the roof of her mouth. He made her gasp, he made her squirm, he made her writhe in what may have begun as protest but now was invitation, even if she'd never acknowledge it out loud.
Mildred went limp in Ike Singletary's arms, knotting fingers in his hair simply to stay on her feet. She knew right away when he covered her breasts with his hands; the contact enhanced the one in her mouth and sent a new surge of feeling to her loins. As though realizing the fact, he pressed nearer to let her feel his own excitement, a hard prominence which thrust out through his Dacron slacks with a young man's vigor.
A phone rang nearby, but Singletary ignored it. After a minute, the ringing stopped. As though on cue, he left off frenching her and drew back to start on the buttons of her blouse. When the garment fell open, he reached behind her and unhooked her bra, removing both blouse and bra in one clean motion. Then he bowed his head and kissed each straining point, brushing the cool tits with puckered lips.
Mildred watched in fascination, powerless to stop him, powerless to say no with any degree of conviction. She trembled when he drank in her left nipple and nibbled at it with tightly stretched lips. She quaked when he tried to tongue the little bud out of sight, shuddered when he abandoned the effort and began flicking the nipple back and forth across his palate. Similar attention to its mate produced identical results. She began to burn with need, with an urgency to have him inside her. As though this kind of a response were no more than his due, he stopped and glanced up at her.
"Say it."
"What?"
"You want me. You need me."
"N-Never!"
Singletary swept her off the rug and carried her to a couch beyond the billiard table. Before she could scratch or kick him, he tugged her skirt down her hips and over her ankles. While she froze in disbelief, having trouble believing that all of this could happen to her in the space of an hour, he peeled her panties off her thighs and dropped them atop the skirt. Then he pulled her to the edge and knelt on the rug in front of her. Crooking her legs at the knee, he spread them apart and began to ...
Mildred closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, biting back a groan. Eating was as close a comparison as anything with what Ike was doing. His teeth were gnawing the tender folds of her labia, his tongue was lapping dog-like at her clitoris. She began to breathe, to inhale and exhale, in time with the lapping. The moan which filled the room, was her own. For minute after pulsing minute, the sweet sensations drummed a cadence on her brain. But he seemed to know when she was near a climax. After fetching her to the brink, he took his mouth away. "D-Don't stop! For God's sake, don't stop!"
"Then tell me what I have to hear."
She gulped. "I want you. I need you. Just ... finish me."
Chuckling, he stepped away to undress, stripping shirt, trousers and underclothing from a frame both stalwart and fit. With a stiff penis in front of him, he climbed on the couch to arrange her limbs and torso to his liking. Then he got between her legs, and as easily as mounting one of his prize stallions, took possession of her.
"Can you straighten your legs? That's a girl. You don't have to do a thing, you know. Just lie there and enjoy yourself. If I don't rave and rant, don't worry about it. Raving and ranting just isn't my way."
He seemed to prize passiveness, so that's what she gave him. Mildred was to decide later that the "seduction" was probably the best of her life, from a purely physical standpoint. Only the emotional buttressments of affection and compatibility were lacking. A woman, she'd learned, could respond to a man and still feel exasperation, even contempt, for him.
But for now, she lay quietly and let him pleasure the two of them as much as he could. Supported on hands and knees, his legs inside her, their surfaces touching, Ike Singletary utilized limited movement to remarkable advantage. Mildred began to suspect, when her thought processes would permit, that this was his favorite love making style. Given enough time, he could probably bring his partner to multiple completion in this position.
Probably? She rode out her first climax in less than a minute, remembering to inhibit the outward proof of same. Then she concentrated on the next. Like a well-oiled machine, aging but still in perfect mechanical condition, Singletary labored above her. He brought her to two additional finishes before ejaculating himself and pulling out a winded man.
"Get-my checkbook!" he wheezed, climbing down off the couch to pick up his trousers. He put them on and produced a checkbook and a pen from a dresser top. "A price. Give me a price."
Mildred, raising her head to look at him, discovered that she could neither think nor speak. Feeling quite foolish, she groped for her voice.
"P-Price?"
"The bulls your father wants to sell. How much does he want for them?"
The Navarone in her jumped on the opening. "Oh. Seventy-five thousand. Cash. Transportation to be arranged."
CHAPTER TEN
Lloyd Navarone, a flat-brimmed hat pulled low over narrowed eyes, watched the stake-bed truck back up to the loading pen, and rear wheels spinning, bump the railing. The truck's doors bore the inscription Single T Ranch, Inc. Inside the pen were three of the finest Angus bulls the Navarone ranch had ever owned. In fact, Virilius, the oldest, had sired every other bull on the spread. He'd fetched $45,000 of the $75,000 sale. As soon as Ector and two of the hands herded them into the truck, they'd take their last look at one another, Virilius and himself. A man could get sentimental about the damnedest things.
Navarone glanced at Mildred six yards away, garbed this morning in riding togs, sunshades and a white hat. Millie had been quieter than usual since returning home from Mineral Springs. Right now she was gazing off into yon reaches, her mind obviously elsewhere. He wondered what had happened on the road or off to leave her so pensive. Whatever it was, probably not even a hot branding iron on the backside could drag it out of her. Millie was that way. Charlotte, too, he hoped.
Someone from behind tugged him by the sleeve. He looked around to find Vern, in Levis, well-scuffed boots and a run-over hat, holding the morning's mail, which consisted, as usual, of assorted bills and letters, with bills, as usual, predominating. Navarone grimaced. "Anything important in there, Son? If not, dump it on my desk and help Clem with the loading."
"The serum's ready, Dad. That's the only one I opened."
"Yeah?"
Navarone raked off the first letter and shook out the correspondence inside. The letterhead was the state university's agricultural research station, the signature that of the station's chief veterinarian who prepared serum injections on demand for various maladies peculiar to cattle.
"I'll drive down and pick it up, huh, Dad? If I leave now, I can make it by dark."
Navarone squinted into the sun until the urge to smile disappeared. The ear fungus among the yearlings in the south pasture was bad, but not that bad. "And spend the rest of the weekend chasing sorority tail? Okay, Son, it's your weekend. Only bring back just the serum, not another fungus."
"I read you, old-timer. Take care of things while I'm gone."
Navarone stared after the boy until he vanished indoors. Take care of things. An innocent remark? Sure. A man's conscience could play tricks on him. But he glanced back at Mildred and saw that she was watching him. A little smile played about her lips.
Pulling the hat a little lower over his eyes, he went to help separate three tons of bulls.
* * *
Vern drove away in Charlotte's Europa after lunch. His stepsister had spent the morning helping Sarah make apple butter, insisted she'd stay home for the rest of the day. Navarone, who was planning to ride alone to the north pasture and check on construction progress of a new line shack, nearly choked on his roast beef when he heard an offer from Charlotte to change her plans.
"Uh, no, baby. I'll take Mildred if she's interested. You stay here and help Bonita re-hang the drapes. It's too much for one woman."
"Whatever you say, Boss."
He wondered if the two girls didn't, for entirely different reasons, exchange amused glances. The suspicion made him more uncomfortable than ever.
* * *
When he and Mildred rode in at six o'clock, the help had gone home for the weekend and Charlotte was setting the table for dinner. The three ate in near-silence, fatigue being his excuse for not talking. In truth, he'd never felt so ill at ease with his own children before. What he and Charlotte had done troubled him less than the possible consequences to a once-warm family life. Four strangers who spoke to one another only when necessary, that's what they were in danger of becoming. Millie mistrusted Charlotte, Vern wondered if he really should treat the two girls the same, Charlotte envied the other two their blood relationship. When Dorothy was around, she'd been a soothing influence, the one whose skill as arbiter had kept petty confrontations from smoldering into raw conflict. Now there was no arbiter. For better or worse, he'd abdicated the role.
"I'm going into town, Dad," Mildred announced when the dishes were cleared. "Shall I take a message to Mom? Or do you want to come along?"
Navarone, panicky at the idea of being alone with Charlotte again, almost said yes. But he thought about what he'd say to Dorothy, what he couldn't say, and shook his head. A woman's intuition had proved the undoing of better men than himself. One glance, one guilty flush, and D. might divine it all. "I'll go tomorrow, honey. Tell Dot to look for me after breakfast."
Mildred Navarone glanced at her stepsister. "You've been indoors all day, cupcake. Why don't you take the air with me?"
Charlotte shook her head. "I read my horoscope this afternoon. It says, "Avoid long trips until ..." "Catch me next time."
Lloyd Navarone excused himself and went to lie down. Twenty minutes later, he heard Mildred's Triumph turn over and start out the gate toward San Marina. Navarone got up to lock his door. In the state of mind Charlotte was in, she couldn't be trusted. Himself, either.
After stretching out on the bed, he fell into a troubled sleep. When he awoke, darkness had descended outside. His watch read half-past nine. Puzzled as to what had roused him, he listened and heard metallic clicking's at the door. Someone was trying to get inside. Navarone's palms went clammy. Charlotte had no intentions of giving him up so soon. But the lock held and she went away. Twenty minutes later, Mildred's headlights stabbed through the drapes at the window, and he was safe. Safe enough to get up and unlock the door, then lie back down again. He slept.
Minutes or hours later, someone shook his shoulder. Navarone peered up at the intruder, weary brain slow to function. "Who-?"
"It's me, Lloyd. If you're glad I came, move over."
"No, damn it!" He raised to fling Charlotte's hand off his shoulder. "It's done with, don't you understand that? Done with! We're finished. I'm not glad you came and I want you out of my room on a count of five." Navarone stared at the second hand on his watch's luminous dial. "One ... two ... three ..."
"Lloyd, I loved it!"
She moved so that her breath was warm against his face. Fingers smelling of a scent she'd doused herself with before creeping into his room entwined themselves in his hair. There was no escape from the mistake they'd made, the mistake that was about to repeat itself.
"It was the kickiest thing that ever happened to me. If you try to send me out, I'll scream and bring Millie running. You know how fast she is with the old noodle."
"... five." Navarone groaned, but he kept the groan low. "For God's sake, don't you know when to quit? We can't keep this up forever. I don't want to live with my heart in my throat. How do you know Mildred hasn't already figured out what a pair of fools we are?" In the darkness, Charlotte seemed to smile.
"Millie's watching television in the game room. I told her I had a headache and not to disturb me. Wasn't that clever of me? So, podnuh, you'll have to make room for me."
With no other choice, he rolled across the king-size bed and made room for her. Navarone discovered, and hated the fact, that his own excitement had taken hold; without having ever laid a hand on her, he was breathing in short, race-horse pants. While she snuggled close to him, he groped for the switch on a lamp next to the bed. The lamp wasn't bright enough to read by, just bright enough to see her face while he deliberated as to his next move. Charlotte seemed to pale a little under the light, but she made no effort to cover herself.
"Lloyd, please don't hate me. I didn't want to come. I didn't plan to. But you were here and I ... remembered."
He covered his eyes with his hands, and shuddered. There's been a dream-like quality to their first meeting. Or nightmarish, depending on how one looked at it. An hour after her leaving, he'd had trouble convincing himself it really happened. Tonight was a reminder that it had. Only he didn't want it to happen again. Never again. "I-don't hate you, baby. I love you. You know that. I love you like a father and I love you the way no father should ever love his stepdaughter."
"Then look at me."
He looked, and wished he hadn't. Charlotte wore a negligee tonight, a filmy, scented showcase for her ripening charms. Her dark hair hung loosely and shined with silky life. She'd probably shampooed it just for him. His stepdaughter was more beautiful than any woman he'd ever known, and in his younger days, Lloyd Navarone had known plenty. "You're ... quite the stunner."
With a pleased smile, she held out her arms to him. "Kiss me. Make it a real kiss."
He took her face in his hands and kissed the softly parted lips. He made it a real kiss. Charlotte slipped her arms around his neck and made him keep his mouth to hers until there was no chance of his letting her go. Not until he'd quenched in her loins the fire in his. Despite his having been in the saddle for much of the afternoon, despite the hour, he ached to have her now. Mildred's presence in the house only added another shiver of risk, another thrill of danger. Charlotte seemed to realize it, giving a shaky laugh when they broke.
"Wow. No one's ever kissed me like that before. Not even you."
Navarone winced. He hadn't kissed her like that the first time because he'd been scared to death and stiff as an old boot. He was still scared to death, but tonight the boot was on the other foot. "I hope you remember well. That's the last one you'll ever get from me." Charlotte, as he expected, reproached him with a look.
"I didn't hear that."
"That's because I didn't say it. I should have said it, but I didn't."
Pulling her to him again, he kissed his way across her face and back again, lingering at the corners of her mouth and over each eye. Charlotte's fingertips began a spasmodic play with the lobes of his ears. He understood the telegraphy and commenced an answering play with hers. After a minute, she parted her lips for him. Gingerly, he went inside a mouth he was only beginning to know, exploring her teeth and the underside of her tongue. She began to tremble in his arms, and he knew she'd experienced a deep, a powerful arousal.
It seemed at this time, as he lost the last of his receptivity to conflicting stimuli, that he heard a rustle in the shrubbery outside. The sound was so slight, so inconsequential, Navarone paid it no mind. Rex prowled through the shrubbery on nights when the gophers behind the stables gave him a minute's rest. Which was why the distraction, like a fly on a car hood, passed into Lloyd Navarone's subconscious. Nothing mattered right now except the girl in his arms. Charlotte.
She'd trapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth and was lapping his saliva as fast as he could make it. Navarone managed to free himself and began swirling his liberated tongue around the recesses of her mouth, the host tongue in pursuit. In a determined counterattack, she forced his tongue out of her mouth and into his, where she mimicked both his technique and his ardor, turning him into a coiled steel spring.
He released her ear lobes and pushed the negligee and rolled it over her head, tossing the garment over the headboard. But before letting her see what he had to offer-and he had a lot to offer-he inserted his little finger to satisfy a doubt. The doubt vanished. She was swimming with excitement. There was enough honey in the hive to ease the way and then some. But he wasn't ready to take her. He wanted Charlotte to be incoherent with need, to beg him to put his manhood inside her. He'd accepted the risk; she had to accept the challenge.
Withdrawing the finger, he replaced it with a larger one. Charlotte squeezed the finger so tightly, he had to wonder if he'd ever been there before. But she relaxed after a few seconds, and he was able to work in two more fingers. While she jerked and twitched underneath him, he fingered her to a climax. The orgasm made her shudder, but she didn't cry out.
When her quiverings stopped and he judged the spasms had played themselves out, Navarone stepped back to undress. He came out of his pajamas and shorts, and lay them on a night stand next to the bed. Hand on the lamp switch, he hesitated, wanting to watch her this once while she watched him. "Do you mind?" Charlotte, as he'd hoped, shook her head. The face which had been eager with anticipation was now flushed with temporary satiety.
"I want to see you this time."
He climbed back on the bed, sword stiffly at attention, and let her view her fill. Up close, a grown man's organ perhaps wasn't the most appealing sight in the world, but if she wished to look ... "One man's landscape is another man's blight," Navarone joked, and then realized the joke went poorly with the mood, which was solemn.
"You're not a blight, Lloyd. You're heavy."
He supposed, and wasn't inclined to pursue the matter, this meant she thought he was well-hung. While she positioned herself better, he addressed her clitoris with a few swipes of his finger. The little organ responded faster than before, erecting after the most superficial of caresses and retracting inside its hood. Charlotte began to writhe in proof of her readiness.
"Now! Let's be together now! I want you inside me!"
"Inside you?"
"Lloyd, please!"
Navarone poised himself above her and began the business of entrance into a vagina which, if it wasn't virginal, certainly hadn't been stretched past tightness. As before, he was obliged to crook her knees and hold her thighs apart in order to effect intromission. As his penis slid into the tangle of hair between her legs, he noticed that Charlotte's eyes weren't closed. They were wide and staring, staring at something in the window.
"Lloyd, look!"
The Lloyd was a gasp, but the look was a scream. What he saw, as he pulled out and whirled, all in the same motion, made his erection fail and his heart lurch. A face, a man's face, moved away from the window. Even through the twelve-inch wall, running footsteps and the crunch of shrubbery could be heard. Navarone remembered enough Western upbringing to snatch up the pants and shirt he'd taken off after dinner, a pair of boots, and put them on. Then he ran toward the gun locker near the ranch house's side exit. Carrying a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with double buck, he pounded out of the house in time to see a Torino's tail lights streak through the gate and head east toward San Marina.
Navarone wheeled toward the carport to give chase. He had no choice.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As a sunset's magnificence yielded to darkness, Mildred braked her roadster in the hospital's parking lot and stared at the six floors of glass and steel. San Marina General was modern and then some. Cheerful, too, as hospitals went. But somehow she didn't feel up to facing her stepmother tonight. Dorothy Navarone would throw a fit as soon as she learned about the sale of the ranch's best breeding stock. She'd throw another fit because Lloyd Navarone hadn't driven in, too. How did one explain to one's stepmother that a man was a man, and always would be?
Guiltily, Mildred put the car in motion again and crept out the nearest exit. She promised herself that she'd come back on Saturday and stay twice as long, even nag her father into making the trip with her, accepting no excuse. But right now, she could only think about her body's craving. Her body craved Gil Tomlin.
* * *
Gil's car was home and so was Gil, although all the lights were in back. When he saw who his caller was, Tomlin made as if to shut the door in her face. Mildred, who still wore riding boots, stuck in one to keep from being locked out.
"I'm not home, doll."
"What have I done?" she asked, puzzled. The scowl on his face seemed real enough. As real as the tight pants he wore. Navarone's were hard to push around, however, and that's how she persuaded him to hold the door aside and allow her entrance.
"What have you done? Nothing. That's just it. I see you twice a month, no more. You fight it as long as possible, then you pay ol' Gil a visit. After dark, of course, when no one can be any the wiser. You've done nothing for me lately. Nothing. I'm just a hired stud who doesn't even get paid."
She laughed and closed the door. "Feeling sorry for yourself again, I see. What's the matter? Your clientele down? Has Bonnie Beth stopped coming in? Maybe she's found a new man in her own backyard. Maybe even her own bedroom."
"Bonnie-that would mean she's dusted off her marriage vows and read them again. I can't buy it, being a tough realist and all. And how in blazes did you know about her?"
Mildred patted the shoulder that was leading her toward the rear of the house. "We're pen pals, dear. Think the world of one another."
Tomlin slapped his thigh. "That's a lulu if I ever heard one. If I ever see the little thing again, I'll tell her you've gone daffy in your middle age. She'll crack up. Believe me, baby doll, you were never her favorite person. Not on a horse's rear end."
Since they were passing through a hallway, making lateral movement difficult, Mildred pinched him sharply on the buttocks. Gil yelled and whirled to cuff her. Knowing what one connecting swing could do to a girl's bridge work, she retreated out of reach. "You won't see her again. Ever. Do you read me, Coach? That play's been stricken from the play book. Whatever Bonnie Beth did for you, I can do better, and more often." She needn't have worried about his coming after her; Gil rubbed the injured area and eyed her in mingled disgust and hopelessness.
"You've flipped. I always knew it would happen. I just never thought you'd pick my place. If I fix you a drink, a strong one, will you tell me what's on your mind? Assuming what you have left is still in working order?"
"I'll do it without a drink," Mildred declared. "You're on my mind. I was having a conversation with myself, and your name came up. I hated it, but there was nothing I could do about it." After another blank look at her, he shook his head.
"I'll fix a drink, anyway. You need settling in an awful way, sweetheart. I've never seen you without your marbles. A sobering sight. Sit down, huh? Before it spreads."
She sat and watched while he mixed two "tonics"-the ingredients, to someone from Cleveland or Buffalo, were a little cockeyed-and handed her one. Mildred sipped the drink and studied a face she was only beginning to understand. Once Gil Tomlin had mentioned marriage to her. She'd reacted with such scorn that he'd shut up. Not wanting to be after-dark company forever, she wondered what she'd have to do to make him think of her that way again. "Don't you ever get tired of living alone? I mean, on those rare occasions when you are alone?"
He sat down at an exaggerated distance from her and swung one leg over his chair arm. The jeans Gil wore were so tight she could see the outline of everything he owned: a giant-sized phallus and two supporting structures, all in apparent danger of bursting out.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
She shrugged. "Does everything I say have to mean something?"
Tomlin grinned and took a sip of the tonic. "Tonight nothing you say means a damn thing. No offense intended. I was busy with a team roster, and you ripped me off."
"Team roster?"
"I have to call all my boys once a week to see where I stand. Some will have decided to drop football, some to move away and so on. If I don't keep in touch, September could be Hang-the-Coach Month. I'm plotting plays and strategy on the basis of last season's results, you see, so figure it out."
Tomlin's gaze fell to her legs, giving Mildred an idea of just how ripped-off he felt. She kept her own expression innocent. "Is there anything I can do? Anything at all?"
He crooked a finger at her. "I think so. Come over here and we'll discuss it."
In no particular rush, she finished the drink and put the glass aside, rising to cross the room to him. Gil, naturally, made room for her on his lap. Seating herself across his swelling crotch, Mildred placed her legs across his and waited. Throw herself at a man she might. Force herself on him she wouldn't. The next move would have to be his. Chuckling, he slipped an arm around her shoulder. Everything she had that might interest a man was within easy reach, much of it within sight.
"I think I love you, doll. I even think I mean it. But let's not tell Bonnie, huh?"
He pressed his mouth on hers before she could reply, making a reply unnecessary. In the same, brash motion, Tomlin managed to cover both her breasts with just one hand, the palm caressing one nipple, an index finger the other, like a switch from Contact Point A to Contact Point B.
Mildred felt her mouth go hot. Through her blouse and bra, the touch of a male hand was electrifying. She circled Gil's neck with her arms and returned the pressure with some of her own. When she parted her lips, Gil drove in his tongue at once, churning away in his usual rough fashion. He began to squeeze her breasts in time with his tonguing, and she began to breathe in ragged bursts.
He paused a few minutes later to open the blouse and bra, drawing the latter away to drop it somewhere behind them. Returning to her mouth, he used his tongue like a whip, lashing her to a state of uncontrollable shaking, all the while flicking her nipples back and forth between thumb and forefinger, stimulating in a way no one else would even think to do the milk glands underneath. There was an unhurried side of his love making which reassured her. Excited her, too, more and more, with each passing second.
When he thrust a hand beneath her jean's waistband, she convulsed, climaxing even before he could touch her. His finger at her clitoris only made the sensations more intense and longer lasting. As she thrashed about on Gil's lap, Mildred felt his erection swell to what, under the circumstances, must have been an agonizing state of advanced arousal. Tomlin groaned as though to prove it.
"You'll have to get up, baby. I mean it-. If you don't move, I'll have to move you."
The tremors were subsiding, so she rolled down off his lap. But she needn't have waited for him to finish undressing her. Gil jumped up to start on his own clothes, stripping away T-shirt and jeans, shorts and socks, even kicking off his shoes. The man who stood naked in front of her grinned like one of his students, probably as much in relief at having made himself comfortable as anticipation of soon satisfying himself.
"Sorry, doll. When you gotta go, you gotta. I nearly hurt myself back there. Let's come out of the rest of those, huh?"
Mildred, having been struck by an idea, a wicked, wonderful idea, stepped back when he reached out for her, shaking her head. "Gil ..."
"Yeah?"
"Remember what you always wanted me to do for you, and what I'd never do?"
Tomlin's blue eyes narrowed to slits, then widened in understanding. "You mean-?"
Mildred nodded, feeling her face grow warmer than a noonday sun. "I want to do that for you. Now."
"You? I don't believe it. You've never given head in your life. You'd choke up and kill yourself. Think I want that on my conscience?"
She set her jaw in a stubborn line. "I want to prove something to myself. And to you. You don't think I can. You're wrong."
Tomlin stood erect and stared straight ahead. "Be my guest, cowgirl. Only I hope you don't mind if I watch. I mean, I want to be sure it's really you, and not some cute machine you got through the mail."
Mildred let the insult go by. Kneeling on the floor in front of him, she leaned forward so that Gil's big penis was just inches away from her face. Up close, a mere seven inches could seem like seventeen. Realizing how he'd laugh if she lost her courage now, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth, allowing just the tip inside. Gil, as soon as she did, expelled a long, shuddering sigh of pure bliss.
"I never thought ... Keep it up, doll, keep it up. You'll make a believer of me yet."
Encouraged, she drank in more and more of him until her mouth bulged with stiffness which was fast becoming stiffer. In fact, Mildred wondered if it were possible to ruin one's jaw muscles pleasuring a man this way. The sheer size almost frightened her. Before she really did choke, she moved back and started nibbling lightly at the sensitive skin around the organ's head. Gil, to her satisfaction, began to quake like a man on the gallows.
"Maybe I ought to tell you something. Under the right circumstances, I'm a quick pop. Fact. The old control isn't. Are you listening, angel lips?"
Mildred heard the warning and understood the significance, but she didn't care. Recalling how Bonnie Beth had bobbed her head like a party-goer after apples, Mildred simulated, via the same action, a man's instinctive thrusts into his partner's vagina. Only she wasn't using her vagina; she was using her mouth. With the latter she could control, in the way a vagina couldn't, both the depth of penetration and the amount of pressure she chose to apply.
"Uhhh! Whoooo! Watch those teeth, doll. Won't tell you but once."
Imagining how she would want this done if she were a man, remembering to keep her teeth out of harm's way, Mildred applied herself to the "task." Most of what she did must have come from a textbook on the subject, because Gil knotted his fingers in her hair finally and began regulating the action of mouth and teeth.
"I told you. I told you how it would be. Now you'll find out. You'll-find-out."
She couldn't have taken her mouth away now even if she'd wanted to, and she didn't want to. Curiosity kept her glued to Gil Tomlin's pulsating tool, curiosity made her taste the molten drops which burst from the tip, curiosity made her swallow every one until there were no more left to swallow. Still holding on to Gil's legs, Mildred stopped and looked up at him. The dazed, almost agonized look on his face frightened her. "Gil! Gil, are you all right? Say something? Let me hear your voice!"
"Gotta sit down," he muttered, weaving on his feet. "Pass out-if I don't."
She released his legs and watched as he staggered to the bed and collapsed on his face. Now she knew why a man wouldn't ask for "head" each and every day. The strains on his cardiovascular system were too great. A woman's, too. Mildred felt limp inside. Perspiration ran down between her breasts and thighs. "Did I do it right?" Gil, by way of reply, made choking sounds into the covers.
"Any more right, I couldn't take it. Never thought-you had it in you."
She smiled and began straightening her clothing. Composed again, she crossed the room to stroke his bare shoulder. "I'm leaving you to your rest, Coach. I think you need it." When he didn't reply, she shook harder. "Gil? Gil, can you hear me?"
Tomlin couldn't. He was fast asleep.
* * *
As she drove back to the ranch, Mildred noticed another car's headlights in her rear view mirror. The car stayed behind her for mile after mile, maintaining the same distance. Concerned, she gave the roadster more gas until the posted limit signs came at her at fifteen-second intervals, like street markers. But a subsequent check of her rear view turned up nothing. Laughing from the side of her mouth seemed like a good idea. So did taking her foot off the accelerator.
The house was quiet when she parked and went inside. Too quiet. After the clamor of town and the "scare" on the highway, Mildred savored the stillness for a few seconds. Then she went into the game room to fix herself a drink.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Navarone stabbed twice at the car's ignition before finding the receptacle. Racing the engine a few times, he put the transmission in 'Drive' and left rubber smoking on the courtyard, clearing the gate faster than Vern after two weeks without leave. From the first hilltop half a mile away, a Torino's tail lights taunted him. Navarone tightened his grip on his own steering wheel and went after the Torino. Caldwell-who else would come strolling past a man's bedroom window in the middle of the night, hoping to get a glimpse of heaven knew what?-had only a minute's head-start, but he, Navarone, owned the better car. An automatic shotgun, too, and a heart full of desperation. As he saw it, only one issue was at stake here: Could he get to Caldwell before Marty reached town and safety?
The man was begging for disbarment, no question about it. Only he wouldn't get it. One blast of buck would solve everyone's problems- his, Charlotte's and Caldwell's. Especially Caldwell's. The man must have been looking for blackmail, something to use as a lever against Mildred. Well, he had it-the lever-but he also had a much bigger problem: staying alive.
Navarone applied a booted foot to the Buick's gas pedal, and watched the speedometer needle flicker past fifty, past sixty, to seventy, eighty and ninety. The posted limit on this stretch of highway, formerly sixty-five, was now fifty-five. But lack of curves, and only an occasional hill, permitted safe speeds of a hundred or more. The Torino seemed to be pulling away, so Navarone eased up to a hundred, then a hundred and ten. After five miles, he began overtaking the younger man. Within another mile, he could even see Caldwell's silhouette behind the wheel.
The shotgun on the seat was a silent, grim reminder of where the chase was going-how it would end. Having never shot another man before, Navarone began making the mental and psychological adjustments for doing so now. He hoped he wouldn't freeze up with the barrel leveled. He hoped the gun didn't jam. He hoped ...
Marty's car appeared incapable of more speed. A Torino's maximum was a hundred and ten, Navarone guessed, his Buick's at least a hundred and twenty. So he pressed the gas pedal to the floor and watched the last five hundred yards between them dwindle to three hundred, to two hundred, to less than a hundred. Finally, only seventy-five feet separated the two cars, both thundering along at a reckless, incredible, speedway clip on a highway devoid of traffic. Navarone prepared to pass, to force Caldwell off the road.
As he pulled abreast, he bumped the Torino hard. The lighter car bounced off the heavier, without slowing either. Navarone repeated the maneuver, with the same frustrating result. He clenched his teeth and crept in front of his quarry, braking as soon as he heard their bumpers meet. The collision gave him a mild whiplash and made him see stars, but he kept his foot on the brake pedal. The stench of scorching rubber filled his nostrils, making him queasy but not nauseous. For more than a hundred yards, he rode both cars. At the last second, Caldwell's car veered off the Buick's bumper and plunged toward the ditch. Navarone wrestled his own car to the highway's shoulder, and stopped. Grabbing the shotgun, he started to crawl out. A buzzing had begun in his brain which wasn't to let up for more than an hour. The most searing hour of his life.
Marty's car had come to rest at an angle in the ditch. Caldwell himself, his face pale when he opened the door, froze when he saw the shotgun.
"Don't shoot! For God's sake, man, don't shoot!"
From a distance of thirty feet, Navarone pointed the weapon, aiming for Marty's chest. But he hesitated, not really hearing the entreaty. The buzzing in his head was too loud. He heard his own conscience cry out its aversion to killing an unarmed man.
"I'll never talk! I swear I'll never talk! I'll leave San Marina! I'll move my practice to California! If you kill me, Navarone, they'll put you behind bars! They'll find out everything! Do you hear me, man? Everything!"
Navarone saw Marty's hand dart under the car seat. In reflex, self-preservation, he fired. The blast slammed Caldwell back under the wheel, although his feet stayed outside the car. Caldwell's mouth opened, but no sound came out. Navarone fired again, thinking that he was about to be fired upon, and Marty's eyes lost their horrified, unbelieving look. Now the eyes closed in death.
A gut silence prevailed. Even the cicadas in a cluster of Cottonwood's nearby stopped their chatter. Navarone, feeling faint, gulped again and again to fill his lungs with air. He turned so that a cooling breeze fanned his fevered cheeks. The nausea was a little tougher to handle, requiring five minutes and repeated attempts to swallow away the stiffness in his throat. He was still standing there with the shotgun in his hand when a sheriff's cruiser on routine patrol happened along. The cruiser slowed. A spotlight came on.
"What's going on down there?"
The deputy probably expected no reply, so Navarone gave him none. A man who's just shot down another man has very little to say on the subject. He waited until the deputies-on night patrol there were always two-parked and got out to level the shotgun at them. "Don't come closer. If you come any closer, I'll use it."
"Mister Navarone!"
One of the deputies had better eyesight than the other. A better knowledge of who lived where in San Marina County, too.
"Mind telling us what happened?"
"I killed a man," Navarone replied. The explanation seemed superfluous and a little ridiculous, but he gestured over his shoulder, anyway. "Caldwell. Martin Caldwell."
"We can see that," the other deputy said. "Why did you do it?"
Navarone bowed his head. "I can't tell you. Need to call my lawyer."
"You certainly do," the deputy agreed. "But Hank and I still have to take you in, sir. It's the law. Only you have the right to remain silent. Anything you tell us can and will be used against you in a court of-"
"Don't touch me!" Navarone snarled, leveling the shotgun once more. "Keep your hands where I can see them. Better yet, climb back in your car. Get on your radio. Tell your sheriff I won't surrender to anyone but him. If he's asleep, have the dispatcher wake him."
In the darkness, the two deputies looked at one another.
"Do it!"
The pair backed away and up the embankment to their cruiser. Navarone, using Caldwell's wrecked Torino for cover, circled around to his own car, crouching low so as to make a small target in case ... One could never tell about deputy sheriffs. After making a wide sweep, shotgun at the ready, he headed back toward the ranch at eighty miles an hour. Sure enough, the cruiser came after him, but without making any real attempt to overtake the "suspect." He drove into the ranch unmolested.
Leaving his car at the door, retrieving the shotgun from the back seat, he made his tiring legs carry him back inside, meeting Mildred as he passed through the door. Her expression-horrified, incredulous-was probably a mirror of his own.
"Daddy, what on earth is going on?"
"I just killed-Martin Caldwell."
"No!"
"Killed him-dead. Did it for you." Navarone watched Mildred's eyes, which showed their whites, turn into bloodshot orbs. Her hands clawed their way into his shoulders.
"Daddy, you didn't!"
"I did," he insisted, quaking inside at the revulsion in her voice. Then he remembered the cause of it all. At the risk of betraying more than a stepfather's concern, he grabbed Mildred by the shoulders, and shook. "Where's Charlotte?" His daughter's lips trembled. Tears welled in her eyes. But whether they were for him, for Marty or herself, he had no idea.
"Charlie fainted in the hallway after you drove away. I had to put her to bed. I think she'll be all right. But, Daddy, you still haven't told me why. Why did you kill poor Marty?"
"Because 'poor Marty' was trying to peep inside my bedroom window!" he snapped, flushing at how it sounded. "I went after him, and I guess I lost my head. But it's over and done now. I'm surrendering to Sheriff Guthrie."
"Surrendering?"
Navarone winced over the tone Mildred used. Relieved that she wouldn't ask him what Marty had been peeping at, he nodded. "That's what I said. I'm going to turn myself in."
"Daddy, they'll put you in prison! You didn't have to do this for us! You didn't!"
"I know. A man does what he has to do. Sometimes it may not be the right thing. He does it, anyway." This time her reaction pleased him; she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him.
"We'll stand by you, Daddy. All of us will. Just tell me what you want done first."
When she came into his arms, he held his first-born and stroked her hair, as much to still his own trembling as hers. "Unlock the office and find our lawyer's number. Not Bud Collier in San Marina. The other one. Jim Stafford in Mineral Springs. First thing tomorrow morning, call him. Tell him I'm in the San Marina County jail, charged with first-degree murder."
"Daddy!"
"I can beat it, honey. Manslaughter, no. Murder, yes. Just call him."
"What else?"
Navarone thought about Charlotte. He ached to go to her, to hold and comfort the one he'd done this for. But where would they be if hysteria turned to insanity? Who would explain this night's nightmare to Dorothy? "Find your stepsister. Make sure she's okay."
"If she's awake, I'll give her a sedative."
* * *
When Luke Guthrie came, Mildred showed him in. Navarone sat in the den sipping the last of a fifth of Johnny Walker, the only Scotch in the house. He glanced up and saw that Guthrie carried neither gun nor handcuffs. No deputy trailed along after him. The "arrest" was to be a civilized one. "Hello, Luke. You look sleepy. And sour."
"I feel sour," Guthrie grumbled. "You shoot down one of the taxpayers, then rout me out of bed to bring you in. Couldn't you drive yourself?"
Navarone, seeing that someone else wanted to hear his side, went below the counter for a clean shot glass. With hands that still trembled, he poured his friend a drink. "An hour ago I wasn't myself. An hour ago I was a raging beast. I'm ashamed to say it, but it's true. If they'd tried to put cuffs on me ..." He watched Guthrie hold the drink without tasting it. And frowning.
"Lloyd, I knew there was bad feeling between Caldwell and yourself, but don't you think this was, well, the wrong way to settle it?"
Navarone grasped the whiskey bottle until his knuckles whitened. "He was trying to look into a bedroom window, Luke. In the middle of the night. What was I supposed to do? Run out in my pajamas and beg him to leave?"
"But my deputies said-"
"I chased him, Luke. Halfway to town. By the time I caught the so-and-so, I had a killing on my mind. They'll make you testify, I know, but I'm telling you all this to get it out in the open."
Guthrie, looking confused, took a hurried swallow of the drink. "Then if you killed him down the road a ways, how do you know he was the, uh, peeper?"
"I know, Luke, I know. His car was inside the courtyard. I didn't see Marty get in it, but I saw him drive out."
"You'll have a devil of a time ... But I suppose Vern or one of the girls can back you up. Just for the record, whose bedroom was it?"
Navarone stared into his drink, knowing his next revelation would probably make Guthrie drop his glass. "Whose? Mine."
"Yours? Come now, Lloyd. Marty had been inside the house before, hadn't he? Why would he stick his nose into your quarters?"
"You tell me. Maybe he got confused. The guy was a-" Navarone groped for a word he'd heard the girls use. "-a fruitcake. A kook. He knew the law, but he didn't know how to live with it. With himself. Damn it, Luke, are you taking me in, or aren't you?"
Guthrie nodded, finishing the drink in a single toss. "I'm taking you in. If I don't, folks will talk. I'll be a one-term sheriff, and neither of us would want that, now would we?"
* * *
As he was being helped into the cruiser's back seat, Navarone gestured at the short wave's microphone. "Maybe I ought to ask you to use that." Guthrie stopped to peer at him through the wire mesh.
"Use it?"
"One of the girls fainted. She may ... need an ambulance."
"No woman who fainted ever needed an ambulance. I'm surprised at you, Lloyd. This thing really has you swinging at shadows, hasn't it? Which one fainted?"
"Charlotte. Caldwell may have run past her window when I frightened him away. I heard a scream, leastways." While Guthrie put the car in motion, Navarone tried to think of other ways to bolster his story. "Remember when I called you, Luke? About Marty?"
"Yeah, I remember. What about it?"
"You'll tell the court, won't you?"
"If I'm asked to testify. The point is-oh, hell, Lloyd, you need a lawyer."
"I have a lawyer. A good one." Navarone sensed that Luke was increasingly uncomfortable with discussing the incident, so he shut up.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mildred stepped to the witness stand and raised her right hand. Simple, first-time fright held her in a terrifying grasp. She knew she must look frightened. There was no help for it. No member of her family had ever been tried for murder before. But she made herself meet the judge's eye-San Marina County Superior Court Judge Maynard Kinney-and the prosecutor's. Neither Ramon Ortega nor his assistant was watching her at the moment, however. They were busy with the various documents they'd use in presenting their case.
"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"
Mildred nodded her head, too dry-mouth at the moment to speak.
"You'll have to verbalize your replies, young lady."
This was Judge Kinney from the bench. Mildred stared out over the courtroom at the four hundred or so spectators, some sympathetic some hostile, the majority just interested. A murder trial, particularly one involving an old-line, frontier-descended family like the Navarone's, broke the monotony of a long, sullen summer. "Yes."
"Please state your name for the court's record. Spell out the last."
"Mildred Navarone. N-a-v-a-r-o-n-e."
Ramon Ortega rose on cat's feet to his full-and somewhat stocky-five-feet-ten height. The Chicano D.A. had established an outstanding record in law school-Stanford-and quickly made a name for himself in private practice. At thirty, he'd been elected prosecutor, the youngest in the state. Mildred watched Ortega's black eyes go over her in a way that would have embarrassed her outside the courtroom. But his voice, when he spoke, was calm, almost pleasant.
"Miss Navarone, you were at home on the night of July fourteen, were you not?"
From the corner of her eye, Mildred saw Jim Stafford, Lloyd Navarone's chief counsel, lean forward from where he sat beside her father. Stafford owned a sunburned face and a towering, if slightly stooped, frame. "Yes. For part of the night, in the game room watching television. For the rest of the night, until the trouble, in my bedroom."
Ortega smiled, locked his hands behind his back in a manner reminiscent of an old-time barrister and turned so that he was addressing the courtroom, the judge and his lead-off witness. The white tropical he wore accentuated Ortega's olive complexion.
"Then you can tell us a great deal about what happened, can't you, Miss Navarone. Not what the defendant says happened, but what actually happened."
She was silent, quaking inside, remembering the oath she'd taken.
"Oh, I remember our agreement. We're not asking you to testify against your father, Miss Navarone, only to tell us what you saw and heard. We're not trying to establish guilt or innocence at this point, only the facts. You'll help us with the facts, won't you?"
"I can tell you what I saw and heard," Mildred said, watching Stafford nod in approval.
"And what did you see and hear that was out of the ordinary?"
Mildred moistened her lips. "At half-past eleven, I heard a scream. A woman's scream. I knew it was Charlotte, my stepsister, so I leaped out of-"
"There were no other women in the house? I understand the Navarone residence is quite large. There must be live-in servants. A cook, possibly? Or a housekeeper?"
"None of our servants live in," Mildred replied. "They work a normal forty-hour week, with Saturdays and Sundays off. Our ranch is operated like a corporation, Mister Ortega."
The prosecutor, for perhaps a second, let his annoyance show.
"Please don't volunteer information, Miss Navarone. Answer just the questions put to you. We've established, then, that the only women in the house on the night of the fourteenth of July were yourself and your stepsister Charlotte. How old is Charlotte?"
"Nineteen."
"From your room, in which direction would one move to reach your stepsister's?"
"West, along the hallway."
"And from which direction did the screams appear to come? Please think, Miss Navarone, before you answer. Remember that you are under oath."
Mildred hesitated. "From the south wing, although I can't be certain. There was only one scream, you see. I wasn't even fully awake."
"Your father's room is on the south wing?"
Mildred's face began to burn. A titter rippled across the courtroom. Maynard Kinney, a fatherly, white-haired man who raised horses when he wasn't on the bench, gaveled the spectators to silence. "Yes, as a matter of fact."
Ramon Ortega unclasped his hands and raised them in what he probably meant to be dramatic fashion. "We may assume, from what you have just told us, that if, in fact, there was a prowler, he did not enter your stepsister's room, or attempt to?"
This kind of leading drew a response, not from the witness, but from Jim Stafford.
"Objection, your honor! The prosecution is attempting to draw an unwarranted conclusion from testimony about which the witness is not sure."
"Sustained," Kinney decreed, and Stafford sat back down.
Ortega re-clasped his hands and commenced to pace to and fro in front of the bench.
"As soon as you heard the scream, Miss Navarone, what did you do?"
"I got out of bed, put on a robe and ran toward the hallway."
"And the south wing?"
Mildred quivered. "Yes, but only because ..." She bit back the rest of it, realizing how foolish she'd sound, how juvenile. Gil was probably out there, somewhere. He'd laugh with the others.
"Yes?"
Ortega's face affected great curiosity, obligating her to add the rest. "But only because a woman's instinct in time of trouble is to run to a man she trusts. Charlotte and I ... trust our father and stepfather."
To Mildred's relief, no one smiled. Ortega, however, waggled his brows-and magnificent ones they were-at the jury, the judge and the courtroom.
"Commendable, I'm sure, but not very relevant. What I would like to establish is the presence-or absence-of a prowler. If there were no prowler- and only the defendant claims to have seen one-then there is no motive for the brutal attack upon Martin Caldwell, which occurred at the defendant's admission some distance from the Navarone ranch. I say this with sorrow, because the defendant is well thought of in the community."
"Objection!"
The objection from Stafford was overruled by Maynard Kinney, who nodded at Ortega. "You may continue, Mister Prosecutor."
"When you reached the south wing, what did you find?"
Mildred searched the front row of spectators until she found Charlotte. Her stepsister's face this morning was a study in grimness, as though Charlotte herself were on trial rather than ... "I found the bedroom door open, but no one inside. And then I heard a car start and saw headlights pointing toward the gate. Someone was driving out very fast. A few seconds later, another car-it sounded like my father's-went after the first."
Making her more than a little nervous, Ortega came near to gaze intently into her face.
"What were your first thoughts, Miss Navarone? What did you suppose had happened?"
Mildred longed for a glass of water, a lemon, anything to bathe the dryness in her throat. But one didn't ask for such things in a crowded courtroom. "I had no idea. When I turned around ..."
"Yes?"
"Charlotte was standing beside me, dressed in pajamas and clutching a robe about her. She was shaking with fear, and so was I." Ramon Ortega, as she expected, let his skepticism show.
"And yet neither of you had seen a thing you could swear to in court. No one at your window, no one inside your rooms. Isn't that a bit strange, Miss Navarone?"
"What?"
"That the alleged prowler should let himself be seen by only the defendant, who instantly recognizes him and goes in pursuit. Why would a prowler pick your father's bedroom out of so many?"
"But there were two cars!" Mildred protested, stung at the implication. "I saw two cars! I heard two cars!"
"My question, Miss Navarone."
"I don't know."
"Thank you."
Ortega turned his back on her and went to address the jury.
"I will now ask my witness questions relating to the relationship between herself and the deceased, Martin Caldwell. I request that you not associate in your minds Martin Caldwell and a prowler who may never have existed. Thank you."
Mildred saw what could be called a worried expression on Jim Stafford's weathered visage. She began to worry herself until remembering that Ortega would try to present Martin Caldwell in the most agreeable of lights, bringing in Marty's church attendance, scouting record, class standing, anything that might impress the jury's eight men and four women. She waited.
"Miss Navarone, please tell us whether or not you knew the deceased."
"I did."
"The acquaintance extended rather a long way back, did it not?"
"To high school. San Marina High."
"Have you ever dated the deceased?"
Again, Mildred gauged her reply. "Several times."
"Enough so to consider marrying him?"
"I object, your honor. The question is much too personal."
Stafford's objection was overruled once more by Judge Kinney.
"A simple yes or no will suffice, Miss Navarone," Ortega coaxed. "Most of us here know one another. The question is merely for the record."
"Yes."
"Is there any chance that your father would not have approved of the match, for reasons we need not go into at this time?"
"He-" Mildred almost clapped a hand to her mouth, having nearly repeated, word for word, Lloyd Navarone's warning about Marty: If I were you, I wouldn't see him anymore. In light of Marty's fate, the words came back in stark forboding.
"Please go on."
"He ... would not have approved. But he wouldn't have tried to stop me. He-my father, that is-would never stoop to murder. Never. I know him better than that."
"Thank you, Miss Navarone."
Ramon Ortega made a little bow and returned to the table where the prosecution had assembled its evidence-a shotgun, two spent shells, a coroner's report-and plan of attack. Before sitting down, Ortega yielded the floor to Jim Stafford.
"Your witness."
The defense's chief counsel ambled onto the varnished oak arena scratching his head. He looked, Mildred thought, less like Mineral Spring's best criminal lawyer than a coach who doesn't know who to send in next, or even if he has any time-outs remaining. She tensed.
"Your honor, I request that we recess and go to lunch. I happened to have missed breakfast this morning."
Maynard Kinney, prompted at least as much by the chuckles sweeping the courtroom as by the motion, granted the recess.
* * *
Mildred ate with her father in a restaurant across the street from San Marina County's limestone courthouse. Charlotte, insisting she wasn't hungry, asked to be excused. Stafford, after cleaning a plate of eggs, sausage, hot rolls and jelly, beckoned Mildred to his booth while the dishes were still being cleared. When she sat down, shrewd brown eyes appraised her with a man's interest as well as a lawyer's.
"Lloyd says there was some unpleasantness between yourself and this Caldwell fellow. Are you willing to tell the court about it?"
She nodded. "I'll do anything that will help free my father. Anything."
"I should warn you, Miss Navarone, some of the big-city papers are covering this one. I saw a reporter from Denver on my way out. If you're not willing to live with what you say under oath, don't say it."
Mildred nodded, beginning to understand why Jim Stafford was in such demand. Her father's best bet for staying out of prison was both direct and blunt. Stafford used words the way a rider used spurs: to show a witness who was boss. "I'm not a child, Mister Stafford. If they laugh or talk, I'll hold my head up and pay them no mind."
"That's the spirit."
Stafford snatched up his third cup of coffee and drained it before putting the cup down.
"But if we convince the jury that Marty was no good, won't that-?"
"Establish a motive for murder? Maybe. After what you said this morning, the jury probably feels that way already. So we have to discredit Caldwell. If your pa's ramrod wasn't such a bumbling old bottle-nurser, I'd have him on the stand tomorrow. But that little firecracker of a DA would have him squirming the seat out of his chair. Well, my watch tells me we have a trial to finish."
* * *
"Now, Miss Navarone, please tell the court what happened on the afternoon of July seventh."
Mildred faced the front of the courtroom and cleared her throat. "At three in the afternoon, the man my father is accused of murdering, Martin Caldwell, drove up at the ranch when he wasn't expected. Being home at the time, I invited him in, although I was puzzled, because we hadn't seen one another in years. He suggested that we go riding, so I had the foreman, Clement Ector, saddle two of our horses. We rode away together, Mister Caldwell and I, at a quarter past three. I remember the time very clearly."
Jim Stafford, who was asking the questions right now, raised his hand. Mildred, determined to make up for her morning's testimony, waited.
"Excuse me, Miss Navarone, but I want you to describe Martin Caldwell's state of mind."
"He was-was-"
"Not his usual self?"
"That's right. He was more ... animated. Or perhaps excited is a better word."
"Really? And to what did you attribute his 'excitement?'"
Mildred found the process of recall much more difficult when four hundred pairs of eyes were focused upon her. "To being out of his office. To being out of doors. Possibly to being with me, although, of course, that's just speculation on my part."
"So you rode with Martin Caldwell to a remote section of San Marina County, the hill country of the southwest, I believe you said. Can you be more specific?"
"Yes, Mister Caldwell had never been to a place called Robbers' Lookout. That's where I took him."
Stafford turned away from his witness to address Judge Kinney. "Your honor, I request permission to confer privately with my witness for a few seconds in order to prepare her for my next question."
"I'll give you a minute, no more."
Mildred knew that Stafford wanted to ask her if she'd changed her mind. She hadn't, and told him as much. While the people out front sat in hushed silence, expecting they knew not what, Stafford resumed his former stance: shoulders bunched, legs spread, chin thrust out like a barroom brawler.
"All right, Miss Navarone, here is my question. Did or did not Martin Caldwell rape you at a point near or adjacent to Robbers' Lookout?"
A collective gasp went up from the rows of spectators. "He did," Mildred declared, undeterred by the shock waves.
"Please forgive me for persisting, but are you sure you understand the strict, legal definition of rape? For a woman past the age of consent, there must be carnal knowledge and there must be force, or the threat of force. Did the, uh, encounter satisfy both requirements?"
She nodded. "Yes. Both."
"What form, or forms, of force did Martin Caldwell apply?"
"When I was between his horse and the drop, he threatened to push me off. And later he claimed to have a gun, although I never saw one."
"This is my last question, Miss Navarone, then you may step down. Did you tell your father about the assault?"
Mildred shook her head. "No."
Stafford, nodding his thanks, wheeled to the jury. "My client knew nothing about the attack upon his daughter, therefore no reason to harbor feelings of revenge. His reaction on the night of the fourteenth was to a wholly different provocation. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your kind attention."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lloyd Navarone, even after his daughter's stunning admission, endured his trial's second day with more equanimity than the first. His appetite returned and so did his self-assurance. Recrimination and doubt no longer twisted his belly into tight knots of fear. Now he knew he'd done the right thing in killing Martin Caldwell. The question was, could they prove it, Jim Stafford and he, and without jeopardizing Charlotte?
Sheriff Luke Guthrie took the stand shortly before noon to testify that on Monday, July 10, Lloyd Navarone had phoned him to make a complaint about Caldwell. A willful trespass complaint, as the sheriff recalled, sitting erect in the witness chair and flicking an imaginary speck from a new suit. But Guthrie admitted under cross-examination that no arrest warrant had been asked for and none had been issued. There wasn't even a record of the conversation, either on tape or a stenographer's pad. Ramon Ortega almost casually brought out the fact that Navarone and Guthrie were friends. Old friends.
Whatever effect the revelation might have had on the jury was probably negated by the testimony of Guthrie's two deputies assigned to night patrol on the country's western side. The pair, under questioning by the prosecution, described the scene they found at midnight ten miles east of the Navarone ranch on the state highway.
"Martin Caldwell was dead when you arrived?" Ortega asked the older of the two, a lean, graying ex-rodeo rider named Henry Stoneham.
"Yes, sir."
"Was the accused still at the scene?"
Stoneham nodded. "Close by the dead man, a twelve-gauge shotgun in his hand. Appeared to us the Caldwell car had been forced off the road and into a ditch. Hard to say how he'd been shot. Or why. Neither of us, Burt or I, saw a weapon."
"The deceased was unarmed?"
"Searched the car twice, never turned up a thing. Nothing, leastways, that a man could defend himself with."
"And how did the accused react?"
Stoneham hesitated, glancing at Navarone himself. "He pointed the shotgun at us. Said he'd surrender only to Sheriff Guthrie and ordered us back out of the way. Seemed plenty worked up."
"Worked up?"
Navarone winced at the way Ortega pounced upon the words. He had been worked up. There was no denying it. Wrath at being spied upon in his own home combined with the excitement of pursuing and catching Caldwell had come boiling to a head. He'd been ready to do murder, although he hadn't. Not, at least, in his judgment. Caldwell had reached under the Torino's driver's seat for what a man in his, Navarone's, state of mind would have to assume was a gun. Unfortunately, no gun had been found.
"Yes, sir."
"He was in an irrational state, is that what you're saying?"
"I've never seen an angrier man."
Navarone leaned close to Stafford because the latter was plucking him by the sleeve.
"We could cop an insanity plea if my instincts tell me we're in trouble-and they do."
Navarone shook his head. He preferred to be convicted. An insanity plea, no matter what the outcome, opened the way for competency hearings later on, with a possible loss of the ranch. Jim Stafford could take his cute stratagems, and jam them. Ortega's next question was a lot more interesting.
"So you got back into your cruiser?"
"Yes, sir. But after the accused drove away, Burt got out to view the other fellow. We had to be sure he was dead, you see. He was. Burt stayed behind, and I went after the suspect, using my radio to reach our dispatcher. He contacted Sheriff Guthrie and told him what our problem was. The sheriff met us outside the gate to the Navarone ranch. I'm told the suspect surrendered to him thirty minutes later." Stoneham turned his palms outward. "That's it."
"Thank you, deputy." Ortega smiled at Stafford. "Your witness."
Stafford, to Lloyd Navarone's relief, declined to cross-examine Hank Stoneham, so Burt Ramsey was sworn in next. Ramsey, a redhead with deceptively sleepy eyes, corroborated most of his partner's testimony with the addition of some of his own.
"In what attitude did you find the deceased, or do you recall?"
Ramsey like most people on the witness stand, found the answer to the prosecution's question in his nails. "He was lying half-in, half-out of his car. The driver's side. There were bloodstains across the front of his shirt. Even with a flashlight ..."
"Yes?"
"Even with a flashlight, you could see he'd taken a couple of blasts at close range."
"From the shotgun of the accused?"
"I'm not prepared to swear to that, no, sir," Ramsey hedged, to the noisy amusement of a group of hands in the upper left gallery, who were sternly gaveled to silence, more or less, by Maynard Kinney. "I mean," the deputy corrected, flushing, "we never actually heard the shots, Hank or me. But a reasonable man ..."
"A reasonable man would assume the shots came from the weapon of the accused, since that was the only shotgun at the scene, would he not? So you checked Martin Caldwell's pulse and found there was none?"
"Yes, sir, as soon as the suspect would let us. When Hank went after him, I covered the deceased with one of our sheets-we always carry a few-and waited for the ambulance."
"Thank you, deputy. If counsel for the defense has no questions, you may sit down."
Navarone glanced at Stafford, who shook his head, leaning close to whisper the rest of it.
"The sooner the jury forgets about that pair, the better for both of us. Let's hope the coroner doesn't weep all over his new Schaffner and get you life on a pile of rocks."
With all his other worries, Navarone had to add heat prostration to the list. The San Marina County Coroner, however, a cheerful enough man in a pin-stripe suit who wore his hair mod, admitted only to having examined Martin Caldwell's body two hours after it was brought in. The cause of death had been relatively easy to determine, Otha McMerrit added.
"The two shotgun blasts, one of which was high to the left, destroyed all four heart chambers. Failure, in my opinion, was instantaneous."
Ramon Ortega, stalking past the bench like a white-clad puma, dismissed McMerrit without even offering him to the defense. "I've introduced all my witnesses for the day, your honor. I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Mineral Springs."
Jim Stafford sighed, gathered up his two hundred and twenty-odd pounds and directed them out onto the floor. "The 'distinguished gentleman from Mineral Springs' asks the court for a lunch-time recess."
The recess was granted. The courtroom, Lloyd Navarone included, went to lunch.
Over whiskey sours, he and Stafford discussed their next step, Navarone arguing for putting Ector on the stand, Stafford threatening to withdraw from the case if he did. Mildred and Charlotte, who seemed oblivious of one another, listened from the other side of the booth. Vern, having been out of the house on both the day Martin Caldwell came to visit Mildred and the night Caldwell was killed, played no role at all in the trial. He was home attending to ranch duties.
Stafford finally agreed to ask for a day's recess in order to gain enough time in which to coach Clement Ector as to what he should say and not say. Twenty-four hours, Navarone estimated, would be sufficient to wring the alcohol out of Clem's system, clearing his, Ector's, head to all the extent possible.
"But I think you're putting your foot in it, Lloyd. All the man can do is tighten a-excuse me-a motive noose about your neck. At the very best. At the very worst ..."
"Let me worry about that," Navarone replied, and touched his lips to the sour. To say he felt less confident than he sounded would have been a fair statement. The rational side of Lloyd Navarone realized his peril as well as anyone else. Death penalty or not, his life, the remainder of it, anyone, had gone on the block. That's why he put down the drink and bowed his head. "Tell me plain, Jim. What do I need for an acquittal? A directed verdict? Whatever the hell they call it. Don't be technical. Just tell me."
"What do you need? I'll tell you what you need. You need a live, breathing witness with no BO's to swear that he or she saw Martin Caldwell outside your bedroom window on the night of July fourteenth. Yeah, that would just about cover it. Then we could make Ramon Ortega, Esquire, beg for a reduction to murder two. Maybe even, yes, involuntary manslaughter, considering the man you are around here. A reputation always helps."
Navarone caught Charlotte's eye, and sent a silent plea for help. He wanted her to testify. If she couldn't do it with a stepdaughter's love, maybe she could do it with a woman's. He fancied he saw agreement in her eyes, a promise to cooperate. Before Mildred noticed and put her intuition to work, he looked down at his plate. "And if I find such a witness?"
"By all means contact me," Stafford declared, reaching for his drink.
* * *
Navarone had no opportunity to talk to Charlotte during the drive home. Mildred sat between them. At the ranch, he went straight to his office, hoping Charlotte would follow. But rather than his stepdaughter, the daughter he'd sired by a woman neither could remember came through the door. Mildred ran into his arms and began to cry.
"Oh, Daddy, what are they going to do to you? I heard the testimony this morning, and it was just awful. Maybe all this is my fault. If I hadn't tried to treat Marty like old times ..."
"He would still have tried to get at you. At us, I should say. I'll be all right. We promised we wouldn't discuss the trial, remember? Go start dinner. If you see your stepsister, tell her I want to talk to her."
"Yes, Daddy." Mildred dried her eyes, smiled up at him and kissed his cheek. "I'll tell her."
Navarone sat down and turned his back to the door. He closed his eyes and counted to a hundred. Slowly. When he opened them, Charlotte, a terrible pallor to her cheeks, a hardness to her mouth that he'd never seen before, was standing beside him. Navarone paled, too. "Close the door," he said. She closed the door and came back, fists clenched, to face him.
"Lloyd, I can't. Don't ask me to, because I can't. I have to live here, too. If people know what we've done, if they even suspect what we've done ..."
"You can. Do you want to see me convicted of murder? A felon? Of course you don't. So tell them you were in the room, too, that you saw and heard a man outside our window. Do it for me, baby. Please do it for me." He reached out for her, but Charlotte stepped back in time.
"No, Lloyd. Don't ever touch me that way again. We both agreed it was over."
"Yes, we did. And now help me pretend it never happened. Tell the court you came in my room because you were frightened. You had a bad dream. You heard something in the hallway. Tell them anything. They'll believe you. Little girls are always running to their fathers. Why not to their stepfathers? Wear an outfit that makes you look younger."
"But that's-that's perjury!"
"No one can dispute your word, honey. Your sworn testimony. They'll want to believe you. Just say you were in my room, and I'm a free man. You'll do it, won't you?" Holding his breath, he watched Charlotte twist her hands into an agonized mass.
"Let me ... think about it. Overnight."
Navarone seized her by the shoulder, and shook. "Think about it now. I have to tell Stafford when he drives out tonight. Give me a yes or a no." The longest minute of his life came and went. Charlotte, her face turned away from his, still had made no reply. "Well?"
"Yes. I'll do it."
The yes was a whisper he had to strain to pick up, but he hugged her around the waist, anyway. "That's wonderful, baby. When this is all over, I'll make it up to you. I promise."
* * *
Jim Stafford made the announcement on the trial's third morning:
"The defense wishes to call a surprise witness. Miss Charlotte Hastings, stepdaughter of the accused, has been ill since the night of the accident. She has been examined by her physician and pronounced fit to testify. Miss Hastings has agreed to do so. With the court's permission, I will call her now."
Ramon Ortega, who seemed less surprised than he might have been, offered no objection. But he did lean close and whisper to his assistant, who began writing on a note pad while Charlotte was being sworn in. Amidst a curious silence, the courtroom waited.
"Now, Miss Hastings, please tell the court who screamed on the night of July fourteenth," Stafford instructed.
"I screamed."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The scream my stepsister heard, the one she couldn't place ... that was me."
"And where were you at the time?"
Lloyd Navarone sat forward in his chair and held his breath. Everything dangled here-his life, her life, everything. Even the ranch. He prayed that she wouldn't make matters much worse, with or without Ortega's help. Not that matters could be any worse.
"I ... was inside my stepfather's bedroom."
Jim Stafford glared once at the lone snickerer, who wisely shut up. "How did you happen to be inside your stepfather's bedroom, Miss Hastings?"
"I heard a noise and became frightened, so I ran there for protection. I ... guess I became a little girl again."
"You ran to your stepfather's room rather than your stepsister's? Why? Two women should be a match for any but the most violent rapist."
"Because. Mildred might have laughed at me. We aren't very close. My stepfather never laughs. I wanted someone strong, and he's strong."
"How long were you in your stepfather's bedroom, Miss Hastings?"
"P-Perhaps ten minutes. I fainted, you see, so I can't be sure."
"Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary while you were there?"
Another snickerer joined the first when this question was delivered. Judge Kinney was obliged to rap several times for order and to warn that court bailiffs would physically remove anyone who disturbed the dignity and decorum of his court for the remainder of the trial.
"Contempt, I should warn you, is punishable by a jail sentence."
"I saw someone outside the window," Charlotte replied, in belated answer to Jim Stafford's question of a minute previous.
"Did you see someone, or imagine you saw someone? Think, Miss Hastings. This is probably the crux of this whole matter."
"I saw someone. When my stepfather pointed a flashlight on the window, he turned and ran. I didn't imagine it."
"You're sure the someone was a he?"
"I'm positive."
"And that's when you screamed?"
"Yes."
Stafford struck a Socratic pose and turned so that he was half-addressing the jury. "At this point, what did your stepfather do?"
"He ... ran out of the room. I tried to follow him, because I didn't want to be left alone. When he stopped at the gun locker, I heard Mildred coming. Knowing she'd tease me, I ducked into a linen closet until she passed. Then I heard a car start and a few seconds later, another. I returned to my stepfather's room for my house-slippers and met Mildred in the hallway. She grasped me by the shoulders and ordered me to tell her what was going on. Before I could, I-I fainted."
"Thank you, Miss Hastings. I have no more questions." Stafford, moving back to his chair, glanced at Ramon Ortega. "Your witness, Mister District Attorney."
Ortega and his assistant, asking for consultation time, put their heads together. A minute later, the San Marina County prosecutor, his face much more thoughtful than when the morning's session first began, announced that he had no plans to cross-examine Charlotte Hastings.
"However, in view of the altered circumstances, I'm curious as to whether or not the accused would like to change his plea."
Stafford looked at Navarone, who shook his head.
"My client stands by his original plea-not guilty as charged."
Ortega shrugged. To Lloyd Navarone, the shrug concealed chagrin. Or conveyed chagrin, depending on viewpoint.
"In that case, I'm asking the court for a day's adjournment in order to prepare closing summations. Provided the defense has no more surprise witnesses who remember everything in clearest detail."
Maynard Kinney cleared his courtroom.
The State vs. Lloyd Navarone went to the jury at precisely ten a.m. on the trial's fourth day. The jury did what juries do for almost two hours before filing back in to take its seats. The foreman, a hardware store owner named Tisdale, read the verdict aloud:
"We do find the defendant, Lloyd Navarone, not guilty of the charge of first-degree murder."
If the man in question had expected wild cheering in his behalf-and he hadn't-the gasps of surprise, outrage even, would have been a shock. Navarone wasn't shocked, just relieved. The ordeal, as far as he was concerned, had ended. Oh, people would continue to talk. They'd whisper about the implications in the testimony of the third day's single witness. He and Charlotte would suffer, she more than he. But their secret was safe. Safe forever. Only Dorothy could decipher the implications, and Dorothy was helpless on a hospital bed.
With an elated Jim Stafford running interference, Navarone shouldered his way from the courtroom, minding neither the occasional unfriendly scowl nor the blinding flash of camera bulbs on the courthouse steps. He even manufactured a smile. But his smile vanished when he found Vern sitting on the back seat of his car. The younger man's face was bleaker than desert frost.
"She's gone, Dad. Gone."
"Who?"
"Dot. Dot's dead. An hour ago. I just came from there."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mildred Navarone, blinking in a bright morning sun, put the weekender down until Charlotte could fit it in the Europa's trunk beside the Pullman. "Write me," she encouraged, dropping an arm across her stepsister's shoulders. "If I decide to move into town, I'll send you my new address. And if Gil and I blunder into matrimony, why, you're invited. As bridesmaid, of course." Charlotte, in the middle of pressing on a pair of sunshades, nodded. Her eyes, though no longer red, were still dark with misery.
"I hope you do. Marry Gil, I mean. You two deserve it."
Mildred couldn't think of anything to say to that which wouldn't sound either patronizing, inane or both. So she said nothing. Considering Charlotte's ordeal and her own, there was no point in being cruel by being kind. Both knew where the other stood.
"You won't drive as far as town with me?"
"Who'd bring me back?" Who? Gil, of course. Football practice started at two p.m. He was free until then. "On second thought, honey, I will. You can drop me off at the coach's."
The two went back inside for whatever Charlotte might have left in the way of luggage or clothing. The house was deserted, and not simply because it was Friday. Lloyd Navarone, rather than stay around to see his stepdaughter off to college again, had ridden away after breakfast. Mildred, for one, was glad. She didn't think she could ever again see the pair together, her father and her stepsister, without becoming physically ill, even though she loved them both. The trial had had a searing effect on her, too. She had no doubts as to what had occurred between her father and Charlotte in his bedroom. No doubts and no illusions. At twenty-five, there were no more illusions to lose, unless they were about oneself.
"I need a drink. Wait here at the door. I'll make it myself."
Mildred, alarmed, grabbed Charlotte's arm. "For a two-hundred mile drive? Don't be an absolute ninny. I want to see you again. Alive."
"I'm glad someone does. Do you mind taking the wheel?"
"Of course not. But don't be in such a hurry. You may never see it quite this way again."
"I wish I could say I'd be sorry. I won't. Oh, damn it, I didn't mean that. This is the only home I've ever known."
"I know. It's the only home I've ever known."
The girls drove away from a ranch in which almost all activity had ceased. The only hand on the premises, as far as Mildred knew, was charged only with keeping an eye on things. As she pointed the Lotus out the gate, the state of Charlotte's mind began to bother her. The younger woman was in no shape to be going away, much less driving. Charlotte carried a burden of guilt that was slowly strangling the life out of her. If she'd had any doubt, the other girl's sobs as they neared San Marina erased them.
Mildred checked her rear view mirror, then pulled over. "Like to talk about it? Believe me, I'm hard to shock these days. Nothing shocks me anymore."
"It-it was a terrible thing we did, you father and I. A terrible thing. Do you ... think God will ever forgive us?"
Mildred patted her stepsister's shoulders and stared out through the windshield so Charlotte wouldn't see the look of hurt, the glazed look, in her own eyes. So it was true. They had committed the most abominable of sins. Mildred's flesh began to crawl. But she was surprised herself at how calm, how natural, her own voice sounded. "He forgives everything. Even that." The shoulder under her hand went stiff for a second, then resumed its shaking.
"Did you-did you know all along?"
"I suspected when you screamed, and the scream came from another part of the house-Dad's part. But nothing added up until you testified. Then I knew. Because you don't scare easily. You never ran to Dad's bedside when you were little. We roomed together, remember? And if you had, your mother would have sent you out. She realized you were Dad's favorite. His little desert blossom, that's what he used to call you. Your mother was frightfully jealous."
"Do you think-?"
"No, I don't think jealousy killed her. You read the doctors' report. 'A steady irreversible loss of liver functions ...' The machines helped, but they couldn't do the impossible."
"I-I wish I could be sure."
Mildred, biting her lip, wished the very same thing. "I don't believe she was lucid at the end. None of the staff would have dared tell her what the newspapers were saying. Please, dear, brace up and live. You have too much life left. I can't let you drive away feeling like this."
She waited, hoping she wouldn't have to see another member of the family hospitalized. Relieving her, Charlotte dried her wet eyes and went searching inside her handbag for a compact. After dabbing at her cheeks for a few seconds, the younger woman even produced a wan facsimile of a smile.
"You're right. As usual. You can let me drive now. I'm fine."
Mildred wanted and needed to believe her, so she relinquished the Europa's wheel. But she sat in some apprehension on the passenger side, nonetheless, as the other girl, more accustomed to the car's handling, throttled them through San Marina and deposited her five minutes later in front of Gil Tomlin's house. "You'll call, won't you? As soon as you're on campus?"
"I'll call."
"Promise?"
Charlotte smiled and nodded. "I promise."
After hugging and kissing her stepsister, she drove away without looking back. Mildred, standing under a broiling hot sun without hat or shades, watched until the roadster vanished over a hill. Then, feeling decades older than her twenty-five years, she walked to Gil's door and knocked. Only the sight of a handsome blond face could raise her spirits, and perhaps not even that. The door opened and the face looked out at her. Tomlin feigning astonishment at seeing her. Or was it honest uncertainty over whether or not he should allow her entrance?
"Hello, whoever you are. If I let you in, do you promise not to make a shambles of the place?"
Having been here before, Mildred pushed her way inside without any more of an invitation. "People have been cruel, some of them unbelievably cruel, but I expected better of you, Coach. Or I should say, 'Gilbert.' Do you like Gilbert better?"
"Coach, please. Only my mother can get away with the other. What can I do for you, in or out of my profession?"
"You can fix me a drink," Mildred said over her shoulder. Hearing the door close, she added, "Then you can stop thinking whatever you're thinking in that off-color mind of yours. I'm not interested, and not even you can get me interested."
He whistled, trailing along after her to the only air-conditioned room in the house. "As they say in detective thrillers, hot damn. The only thing in my off-color mind at the moment is who I'm going to start at center against Vocational High three weeks from tonight. None of my Chicanos' are big enough and none of my bronco-busters are smart enough. I'm a man with a problem, and there's not a drop of booze in the house. Drank it all up last night. If you're hurting, though, I can-"
"I'm not hurting. All right, damn it, I'm hurting." Mildred whirled to confront him. Even in T-shirt and paint-stained jeans, Gil Tomlin was the most attractive man she'd ever known. So his take-home pay was just $7000 a year. So what? Money wasn't the only measure of a man, or even the best measure. "And I should have known better than to come here. Not if I'm after sympathy. After all, you don't go into a sty for a mud pack."
"Ouch."
"I'm coming off the worst experience of my life-"
"The worst experience of your father's life, you mean."
"...and you don't give a damn. You're preoccupied with centers and schedules and-"
"Because that's how I made my living. L-I-V-I-N-G. You know-daily bread and all the rest. And I'm really sorry about your pop's troubles. But he's free now, isn't he? As a matter of fact, that's what I wanted to ask you about. It seems to me-"
"Gil, kiss me," Mildred invited, smiling. The smile was a phony. She knew where this questioning would lead unless checked-straight to disaster. Gil had been thinking, too, damn him.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Kiss me, you fool! Or do I have to show you how?"
"Show me."
She stood on tiptoe, slid her arms around Tomlin's neck and pressed her lips to his. When Gil crushed her breasts against his chest and kissed her back, Mildred figured he's forgotten whatever it was he wanted to ask her. And just as well, since she had no ready answers. After a minute, she no longer cared. The only thing that mattered was the easy, the masterful way Gil handled her. He released her finally and stood chuckling at the expression on her face.
"So now whose mind is off-color? Yours, mine or both?"
"Both. And I'm open to suggestion as to what we should do about it."
"And if I'm not interested?"
"I'd say you were a bastard or a liar-and I happen to know your parents were married in church about the same time mine were."
"I'm a liar," Tomlin sighed; and pulled her up tight against him. This time the extent of his interest betrayed itself in the form of a hard shaft thrusting through the jeans. He bent to her lips again, this time worming his tongue past her teeth until he could stroke the roof of her mouth. Whipping his tongue from side to side, describing swirls and counter-swirls, he aroused her with almost insolent ease.
Mildred felt a languor take hold, and realized she wouldn't be leaving until he'd satisfied her aching for him. The ache had been unconscious when she arrived, vague and unlocalized. Now it centered in her genitals and cried out silently for relief, a flame that blazed higher and higher with each passing second.
Gil took his hands off her shoulders and used them to cover her breasts. He began to fondle them in time with his tonguing, until the nipples swelled to form hard points of desire. With a grin of anticipation, he left off frenching her and started down the row of buttons on her Ship-'n-Shore blouse, undoing every one before Mildred could pant out a no.
"You might say it," she complained, fighting for breath. "Even if you don't mean it, you might say it."
"I love you, Dollface. And know something? I'm sure I mean it. Just between you and me, understand. I've a reputation to consider."
Drawing away her bra, he bared her breasts and the moist vale separating them. After burying his face between the shining white mounds, he lowered his mouth to each swollen tip and applied gentle suction. When the nipples erected further, he used the flat of his tongue to dredge them across his palate.
Mildred shuddered, experiencing almost unbearable pleasure. The insides of her thighs began to trickle moisture, and he hadn't even touched her there. But then he raised her skirt and thrust a hand inside her panties' waistband, searching, delving until he found the soft projection of her mons of venus, and immediately below it, encased in a fold of smooth skin, her clitoris. Gil groaned deep in his throat and began to massage her there. He stroked until she planted both palms on his chest and pushed, not wishing to be "brought off" by finger-play. "O-On the bed. Let's get on the bed."
"You're the boss, lady."
While he came out of his clothing, she removed the rest of hers. In complete nudity, not a stitch between them, they stood staring at one another. Mildred laughed first, because a man without his clothes but with all the equipment for love-making, made a ridiculous figure, even a man like Gil Tomlin.
"Is something the matter? Do I have it on wrong?"
"You might have it on right ... I think. But where's the rest of it? I mean, there was some talk a few minutes ago about a reputation. I guess that's all it was-talk."
Tomlin scowled and started toward her. "Looks like there's only one way to shut you up. No, two. Remember the other time?"
Rather than reply, she climbed on the freshly made bed and waited for him to join her. Gil took a running start, and without hurting her, landed between her legs. Kneeling at the same spot, he hooked the legs over his shoulders and took her with no hands, just letting his man-root find the way.
Mildred worked her hips to help him, then locked her heels behind Gil's waist. When she settled back, a ray of sun from an undrawn curtain on the room's east side was shining in her eye. She closed them to lock it out. She locked out everything except the feel of his hard body on her soft one, his gigantic organ stretching her almost beyond belief. Without having to think about it, she opened her mouth and sucked in oxygen, enough oxygen to last her for the trip's duration.
And what a trip. Gil lunged and stabbed like a maniac. He lifted and lowered as though she weren't even attached to him. He made her body his body. Angling and timing his thrusts, he brought her to swift orgasm in less than a minute. Pausing to regain control, he resumed the kind of jack hammer driving she liked best.
If her first climax brought a gasp to her lips, the second brought filthy words Mildred hadn't realized she knew. The third ... when she commenced her final ascent of the heavens, Gil clamped a hand over her mouth, probably to muffle a scream. Then he grunted and spent himself inside her, almost propelling her, with his superior strength, through the mattress. They fell apart to lie side by side, breathing in noisy concert.
* * *
Long after their respiration returned to normal, the pair lay and smoked on a bed damp with perspiration. Then Mildred began to fidget, fearing he'd remember what he'd started to ask her, fearing she'd have to tell him. But Gil cleared his throat and made another, wholly unconnected announcement.
"I got an offer today. A job offer."
She exhaled smoke in his ear. "I thought you had a job. Doing something that you like. And I don't mean what we just got through doing."
"You call trying to make a football team out of fifty delinquents a job? It's a start. No, this is a real opportunity. The one I've been waiting for."
Mildred smothered a yawn and moved her head to his shoulder. "Tell me, tell me."
"New Mexico State's offered me an assistant coach's position. Defensive secondary. You can be the first to congratulate me."
She blinked at him, not knowing whether to be happy or sad, doubtful or impressed. "Just because you made the State AA play-offs last year?"
"Shut up. The real secondary coach bought it in an auto accident three days ago. They need a replacement in a hurry. I've a mind to take it. They can't keep me here, contract or no contract. A violation of the fifteenth amendment or something. I'm too good for San Marina High."
"You've a swelled head," Mildred retorted, amused. "What will I do if you leave?"
"You'll come with me," Tomlin suggested, circling her neck with a strong right arm. "Even if I have to choke it out of you."
"When Dad still needs me? No. Not right now. Not for weeks and weeks."
"But you'll think about it? For me? For us?"
She was silent for a minute, considering the possibilities. Some, such as the chance to leave San Marina and make a life for herself, a chance to forget Martin Caldwell and the hell he'd brought, were fascinating. "Yes. Yes, I'll think about it."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
His mouth a thin, tight line of sadness, Lloyd Navarone stepped down from Zephyr, and head bared, stood staring at the plain marble grave marker. Dorothy Hastings Navarone, 1930-1975, it read. Dorothy was buried here on the wind-swept ridge overlooking the ranch house because she'd asked to be. She'd often reminded him of his promise, and he'd kept it. But he felt wretched just the same. A part of him died with this woman, as with the woman before her, the one he no longer thought about. He might marry yet again, but he'd never resurrect this period of his life, the fifteen years with Dorothy.
"Father, forgive me," Navarone muttered. "I knew what I was doing, I knew it was wrong, I did it, anyway. I've paid and now I feel deserving of another chance." Another chance? Yes. Every man deserved a second chance.
But no reply came back, either from above or from the grave. Only the wind's lonely whistle. A hint of early autumn was in the September air. Letting the breeze ruffle his hair, he wondered if Dorothy had known at the end. Everyone on the hospital staff, from doctors on down to orderlies, had promised to keep the trial from her. Maybe they hadn't succeeded. Maybe Dot knew everything before the jury came back. In her condition, little else would have been needed to push her over the edge.
Navarone spat on the ground and reflected on his own situation. After all, life belonged to the living. Dorothy's illness and the expense of defending himself against the charge of murder had created bills totaling more than $100,000. They'd be coming due soon. He'd probably have to sell the remainder of the breeding stock and a good part of the heifer herd. But not the ranch. Certainly not Aramis or Zephyr. With the stallions, he'd have the heart to rebuild, to come back with a bigger spread.
Only ... Only who'd help him run it? Most of the hands were staying but Clement Ector had announced plans to retire. He'd go to live with a daughter in Sacramento, Clem had said. Navarone, who knew Ector was only fifty-five, and a lean, hard fifty-five, had turned his back and walked away when he heard the announcement. Not out of pique but because he hadn't wanted Clem to see the broken look on his face.
Vern? Vern had stayed for his stepmother's funeral, but then he'd packed. Early the next morning, before anyone else was up and around, he'd driven away in one of the jeeps. Somewhere between the ranch and San Marina, the earth had opened and swallowed the lad, because no one in town had seen him. The look on Vern's face when the pallbearers, grim-faced all, lowered Dorothy into her final resting place, still haunted Navarone. But somehow he felt that Vern would come home, that they'd work this out between them and wind up partners as before.
Charlotte had left for college, where she'd probably spend Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Rather than come home in June, she'd likely prefer to take a summer job or enroll for the summer term. Maybe, if things had turned around by then, he could even send her to Europe. Navarone hoped so, for her sake. The kid deserved something for defending him in front of four hundred spectators, many of them hostile, some of them outraged.
Mildred would be leaving soon to marry Gil Tomlin, a man without prospects, as the saying went. But at least she loved him, and Gil seemed to love her. Millie had been a thoroughbred, too, although she still paled whenever he looked at her. A kind of dazed incredulity clung to his daughter's features these days, as though, even now, she couldn't credit reality.
Sarah Lassiter, soon after the trial began, had complained of chest pains and insisted she couldn't come in again. Nowadays he and Mildred did all the cooking, and ate in numb silence. Bonita, too, had found a new position. After the dust and soiled linen accumulated, he and Millie had learned what brooms and dust pans were for, how to change sheets and pillow cases, and where the cleaning solvents were stored. They'd learned.
Zephyr, shifting behind him, whinnied softly over his master's long funk. Navarone turned to pat the big stallion. After a final look at the grave, he mounted up and began to ride home, a solitary figure bent almost double against the wind.
* * *
As he unsaddled Zephyr, he heard a car drive up outside. Navarone led the horse into the nearest stall and went to see who the caller was. He found Luke Guthrie, in casual wear rather than a uniform, climbing out of his Plymouth. "Luke," Navarone greeted, narrow-eyed, and appended an invitation. "Get out and stretch your legs." The embarrassment Guthrie felt transferred itself in an instant to himself.
"Thanks, Lloyd, I will. Hot as hell, isn't it?"
"Ninety-eight, the thermometer said. Drink?"
"Don't mind if I do."
Navarone led the sheriff inside to the game room. Seating him next to the carom table, he went to mix a couple of sours, bringing them back in porcelain mugs instead of glasses. He and Luke had been beer men in their younger days. Whiskey had been a once-a-month, stoned-to-the-gills indulgence. Guthrie remembered, because his face crinkled into a grin.
"Well, aren't you a card. Mugs. We lifted many of those at Will Catlan's before the Occupation, huh, Lloyd? Seems like only last week."
"For a fact," Navarone agreed, and raised the drink to his lips. Some of the tightness left his belly when the whiskey's fire arrived. "What brings you out this way, Luke? Business?"
"Business and pleasure, Lloyd, business and pleasure."
"Oh?" Navarone experienced a twinge of uneasiness but no real concern, even though Guthrie seemed to be avoiding his eyes.
"Mighty quiet back here. A man can hear himself think. The girls away?"
Navarone stared at a spot on the wall where Vern, a rambunctious eight-year-old, had once driven a hunting knife. His father had yanked the knife out and worn out two razor straps on the youngster. "Charlotte's gone back to college. I guess Millie went as far as town with her. The Tomlin boy will bring her home."
"Yeah, I'd heard they ..." Guthrie bit off the rest of his reply in favor of a pull on the sour. When he put the mug down, none of the whiskey remained. "Your house staff quit on you?"
Navarone nodded, beginning to be uncomfortable with a guest he'd never been uncomfortable with before. Rather than a friend's small talk, Luke's questions were starting to sound like a law officer's grilling. He was damned if he'd be third-degreed in his own home. "Listen, Luke, the trial's over. If you want to know what happened out here on the night of July fourteenth, I suggest you get hold of the transcript and read it for yourself."
"You're edgy, Lloyd. Edgy and maybe a little mean. I'd hoped to find you in a better mood. Even took off my uniform and left my cruiser at the courthouse to keep from setting you off. 'Pears all my plans went to hell on a Honda."
Navarone grabbed his drink and finished it in a single toss. "Get to the point."
"The point is, Vern's in the Albritton County drunk tank, soused out of his head. I got the call two hours ago. As soon as I could, I drove out."
"Drunk tank!" Navarone struggled up and looked about for a hat. "No son of mine is going to be put into a drunk tank. Your information is wrong, Luke. Dead wrong. I'll drive up there and straighten out those filthy-"
"Easy, Lloyd. My information is correct. You see, it's not his first trip there. For the past two weeks ... Well, he's been in and out. As fast as they can sober him up and put him on the street, he's liquored again. I suggest you fetch him back here to dry out. Maybe put him under the care of a good doctor. Considering what the kid's been through, what you've been through-"
"Keep your suggestions to yourself! Better yet, get back in your car and ride out of here with them."
Guthrie shrugged. "I'm only trying to help, Lloyd. One friend helping another."
"I don't need your help."
"Also, he's saying things."
Navarone glared at his long-time friend. "What kind of things?" The way Luke's gaze slid away made him brace for more bad news.
"Wild things. You ... wouldn't want to hear them."
"Try me."
"Well, he's saying that you and Charlotte ... Lloyd, I don't like to repeat something like this. I know there's not an ounce of truth in it."
Navarone, with more calmness than he felt, more calmness than he'd ever dreamed was in him, put the mug down. "We're grown men, Luke, both of us. Tell me what Vern said, please. Tell me now."
Guthrie shook his head. "I won't do it, Lloyd. After the trial, after losing Dorothy, you don't need a malicious lie to sleep on."
"If you don't tell me," Navarone threatened. "I'll beat it out of you, Luke. You know I can. You know I will."
"He's saying that you and Charlotte ... that you and your stepdaughter were intimate. That you were intimate on the night Martin Caldwell was killed and-" Guthrie stopped and shook his head. "I can't say it. It's too preposterous to even think about, much less say out loud. Just forget I-"
"Say it, anyway," Navarone ordered, face beginning to grow warm.
"And that was the reason you killed him. I'm sorry, Lloyd, really I am. If he were my son and hadn't lost his stepmother, I'd whip him within an inch of his life. I swear I would."
Navarone, his thoughts jumbled, heard the apology as though from a great distance. A ringing had begun in his ears, a pounding in his chest. He felt as though he were suffocating. "Then you ... then you don't believe him, Vern."
Guthrie reddened. "Of course not. Would I be out here if I did?"
"No," Navarone muttered, bowing his head. "No, I don't suppose you would. How many people has he told?"
"Just the sheriff, the jailer and one or two bar flies. They think he's, well, crazy. Loco. But the local paper's beginning to take an interest, and the sheriff's starting to squirm. They can't charge him with anything other than public drunkenness, so don't you think you'd better go up there tomorrow?"
"I'll go up tonight," Navarone retorted, and hoped his face showed a father's concern, not raw panic. The brain which up until now had been numb with shock began to apply itself to the crisis. The problem, if you please. As he saw it, there were two people to protect. No, three. Charlotte, Mildred and himself. In order to protect the three, Vern, poor devil, might have to be ... Sacrificed was the word that came to mind, the word he didn't want to think about. "Luke, tell me something." Guthrie, as he expected, leaned forward across the table, a lawman's keenness returning to his face.
"Anything, Lloyd."
"What if he's-" Navarone looked away to make the rest of his question easier for both of them. A circling hawk far off in the distance was the only thing his window offered. He seized gratefully upon the sight. "I hate to say this about my own son, but what if he's violent? He may really believe what he's been saying. If he does, the sight of me may ... It's possible, isn't it?"
"Yes. Anything's possible. If you like, I can call the sheriff up there and ask him to locate a doctor. They can, uh, administer a sedative before you arrive. A tranquilizer, I mean. But, Lloyd, that's only a temporary solution. If he's flipped out, as they say, won't you have to-?"
"Commit him?" Navarone flinched in spite of himself over the way the words slipped out. He should be appalled at the idea of doing such a thing to his own son, and was. But he also realized the peril they were in, Charlotte, Millie and himself. Most perils demanded quick action. "I don't know exactly what's involved, but, yes, I'll have to consider it. I hate asylums, but I've a family to think of."
"Judge Kinney is the one you'll have to see. You sign the papers, he issues the order. And, Lloyd, if you're thinking about a sanatorium, my brother-in-law's nephew came out of a great one. Remember Warren? Threw the fits and broke things? He's holding a job now. Never bothers a soul. I can give you the address. The number, too. It's in San Francisco."
Navarone reached for a pad and pen. "Please."
He felt his fingers start to stiffen as he jotted down the number of an institution he'd only heard of before, a place he'd never expected to become the custodian of his family's darkest secret. When Guthrie got up to go, he followed him to the door, thanking the other man for a favor which wasn't.
"You'll make that call, won't you?"
"I'll make the call, Lloyd. You can count on it. Friendship is walking that extra mile, you know. That extra mile."
Until the Plymouth passed out of sight, Navarone stood staring after it. He felt old, tired and beaten. There was a bitter taste in his mouth that wouldn't go away. He wondered if the taste would ever go away. Or if it even mattered.
