“I suppose you sent those letters, too.”
“Letters?” he echoed.
“For a college graduate, you certainly have a limited vocabulary.”
Noah glared at her and shook his head. He flashed his light along the ground, illuminating the soft loamy soil for a good number of yards in all four directions. “Do you see any tracks besides ours?” he asked abruptly.
“My point precisely,” she said, rattling her pitchfork under his nose.
“Stop that, you’re making me nervous. If someone made that noise as a scare tactic, name one reason why a man in my position would pull such a stunt.”
“Ha! Like father, like son maybe. That was clever of you today, acting as if the church stood ready to welcome me back with open arms. It was especially clever to do it in front of Ed Tanner. Shelby’s accident helped you add to your pretense of good works, because now Kristin Gallagher will vouch for you, too.” Greer made a few short jabs at him with the pitchfork again. Enough to send Noah into full retreat while she stomped several yards up the trail toward her home.
“I’ve got another news flash for you, Father Noah Kelley. Miranda told me your mother served on the Home Free committee. You Kelleys may think this juvenile bullshit will ensure I leave town and not contaminate your oh-so-pure congregation, but the truth is, I wouldn’t take a million bucks to set one foot in your so-called sanctuary. It’s only fair to inform you I’m not the girl who left Homestead ten years ago. I’ve toughened up. This is my land and I won’t be run off. Tomorrow I’m going to Guthrie’s Hardware, and I’ll apply to purchase a twenty-two. If you check with my former boss, he’ll verify I can cut a rattlesnake in half at twenty paces. So don’t mess with me.”
Totally bewildered by her outburst, Noah played his flashlight over Greer Bell’s stiff back as she marched up the trail.
He was really confused when it came to the remarks she’d tossed out about his mom and pop. He guessed his mom was still serving on the mayor’s committee in his father’s stead. But letters? What letters? Noah scratched his head. The other stuff about his father—it was clear Greer must have run afoul of Holden’s judgmental views. Noah understood. Raised in the Episcopal church, Noah found his dad’s over-the-top conservatism stifling, too.
Watching his neighbor disappear from sight, Noah had to smile. He was certainly willing to extend a more love-thy-neighbor policy if that was Greer’s concern. He sobered instantly, remembering the woman’s scream he and Greer had both heard. He wasn’t behind it, and he’d bet Sunday’s offering Greer wasn’t the culprit, either. Short of a ghost, which he definitely didn’t believe in, then who? Clint Gallagher? It was no secret the old so-and-so had tried to finagle getting hold of Greer’s land. Gallagher couldn’t bear the thought of having anyone closer to the Clear River than his Four Aces ranch. The drought had ended, but during the worst of it, the need to ration river water had caused contention. Noah had heard that night-siphoning had caused hard feelings among men, many once good friends who’d gone bankrupt when the K.C. Enterprises consortium failed, largely due to the long drought.
Deciding there was something sinister about the cries, Noah—too keyed up to go back to sleep anyhow—set out to make a thorough search of the area. He traced Greer’s boot tracks from the trees back along the path across her property. Since moving out here, Noah had witnessed Gallagher ranch hands occasionally crossing what was now Greer’s land. Tomorrow, he’d drop in and chat with Ryan Gallagher. Clint’s oldest son was a square-shooter who’d been managing the Four Aces for a while. Clint, known far and wide as a wheeler-dealer, reportedly suffered from macular degeneration, a problem the senator preferred to hide. Failing health or not, maybe the old reprobate wasn’t willing to lose the land. Did he still want it?
Still, this business tonight, with the disembodied scream, smacked of something childish. Too amateurish for a man of Gallagher’s stature, he thought.
Although, if Greer was right and someone was trying to frighten her into leaving Homestead before she fulfilled her contract, who stood to gain the most from her departure? That was a million-dollar question Noah couldn’t answer.
He backtracked to the river again and came across a spot between two flat rocks, where a deep indentation in the sand might have been made by a small boat tying up. There were enough granite slabs between the riverbank and the small copse of trees that a person or two could’ve jumped from rock to rock without leaving footprints.
Noah did that, taking a route designed to keep him out of sight of Greer’s place. Some people were aware he’d bought one of the ranchettes, but he didn’t think it was widely known. So what if his crashing in from the southeast had prematurely upset the perpetrator’s plans to draw out and frighten Greer? He refused to think it might be anything worse.
A tree-by-tree search netted him something lodged in the fork of the largest cypress. This gave Noah immense satisfaction, but left him thinking that his second visit tomorrow morning, after Ryan Gallagher, would be to take his find to Sheriff Wade Montgomery. Dump this in Wade’s lap and see what he made of it.
GREER FELT NOAH’S eyes monitoring every step of her retreat as she hotfooted it home along the lumpy cattle track. Had she not been so furious, his laser-blue eyes would’ve had a paralyzing effect. He’d tried to act so darned innocent. Greer didn’t for one minute believe he was.
She took the pitchfork inside and stood it next to her bed, in case sometime between now and daylight she needed it again.
After locking the kitchen door, she checked to see that the front door missing its locking mechanism had remained shut—that the chair she’d shoved under the knob hadn’t been disturbed. Finding everything as she’d left it, she looked in on Shelby and was profoundly relieved to see that she was still fast asleep.
Greer couldn’t have gone back to bed if her life depended on it. Her nerves felt too ragged.
Remembering that she’d unpacked the box with her herbal teas, she put a kettle of water on the stove and sorted through an assortment of teas one of her favorite guests had given her last Christmas. Julie Masters and her contingent of Western writers happened to be the group Greer hoped would initiate her facility. The women had confessed that they loved exploring new places. Especially spots representative of the Old West. And bless the Sandersons, they’d urged Greer to get in touch with the women as soon as she’d set her opening date. Marisa and Cal both thought Homestead, Texas, would appeal to the writers as the site of their next retreat.
Choosing chamomile tea from the redwood box, Greer passed the kitchen window on her way to nab the kettle before it could whistle and risk waking Shelby. She saw a light in the distance, bobbing along the bank of the river, and stopped short. At first she thought maybe she was looking at the person responsible for waking her up in the middle of the night. Then the person holding the light turned and flashed it up into the trees, where it cast an umbrella over him. Noah.
The pot whistled and Greer absently grabbed it and turned off the burner. She poured water into her cup and dunked her tea strainer up and down as she watched the man who obviously hadn’t gone home when she had.
What was he doing? Was he setting up more dirty tricks?
When her tea was dark enough, she put the strainer in the sink and snapped off the light, plunging the kitchen into darkness. As she sipped her steaming drink, it became apparent that Noah was conducting a grid search of the area that ran from the riverbank and into the trees.
Did that mean he’d told the truth? That he wasn’t the person behind that scare tactic? If not Noah, then who? And why? Greer shivered. The lack of an answer to that question made her feel a lot more uneasy than if she’d been able to pin it on Noah.
Her appetite for tea or anything else was lost as a sick feeling invaded the pit of her stomach. Feet glued to the kitchen floor, Greer stood chewing on her lip until the bobbing light moved from the cypress grove and made a beeline toward Noah’s house. If he’d found anything important, wouldn’t he have come to share the information with her? That was what she would’ve