CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
R UBY HAD HER WORK CUT OUT FOR HER . T HE HOUSE ON THE Hollister Ranch hadn’t had a thorough cleaning in years. The two people who lived here were neat in their habits. But Sidney, the butler, had a bad back and hadn’t been able to give the place more than a passing swipe with a feather duster or a kitchen towel. Mrs. Dollarhide—whose given name, Amelia, Ruby wasn’t allowed to use—was much too fine to soil her hands with housecleaning, and she didn’t trust anyone from town to come in and do the work—they would either steal valuables or carry tales back to their friends.
The walls and ceilings were dingy with coal dust. The worn and matted carpets were gray with dirt and dog hair.
The outside of the windows was layered with road dust and rain spatters. And that was only the beginning.
Ruby suspected that the house’s aging residents were too nearsighted to see all that needed to be done, or maybe they’d been here too long to notice.
Taking advantage of the mild fall weather, she’d washed the windows. She’d also had one of the hired men haul the rugs outside to the clothesline. Ruby had spent an afternoon beating them until her arms ached. Then they were carried back inside to be laid on the floors she’d mopped.
The work kept Ruby occupied. She liked being busy. But her thoughts dwelt constantly on Mason, especially when she lay in his bed, in the darkness of his boyhood room. Was he still in prison? Was he safe? Could she trust the federal agents to get him out when the time came, or would they break their word and turn on him the way they’d turned on her?
One incident worried her, although not in the way she worried about Mason. She’d been outside, beating the rugs, when an airplane—a Jenny—had flown over the house, coming in so low that its wheels almost skimmed the trees. The roar of the engine had rattled the windows.
These days, airplanes were becoming a common sight. Ruby hadn’t been unduly alarmed—until she saw the identification number stenciled on the fuselage. The plane was the one she had flown for Colucci.
Panic had shot through her body. Ruby had willed the fear away as the plane flew south over the airstrip and the cave, then rose, banked, and headed back toward Miles City and the farm.
Colucci must have hired a new pilot, she reasoned. It made sense that they would be checking out the delivery routes. Maybe they wanted to see if the site was still active or if any cargo had been left behind. Now that Mason had been re-arrested, they would have no reason to come back.
Putting her worries aside, she’d done her best to focus on the tasks at hand. She’d cleaned and polished the big coal stove in the kitchen and scrubbed the floor and fixtures in the bathroom. Then, after consulting with Amelia, she’d turned her efforts to the parlor.
The floors had been mopped and the rugs laid back into place, but the rest of the room hadn’t been touched. The shabby furniture, although it needed replacing, would probably have to stay, especially Amelia’s high-backed armchair with its worn brocade upholstery. But the walls and ceiling were in want of a thorough cleaning.
Ruby started early with a stepladder from the tool shed and a pile of cotton rags she’d gathered the day before. The plastered ceiling needed wiping to remove the coal dust and cobwebs. While the ladder was in place, she cleaned and polished the electric chandelier. The room was looking brighter already. But the papered walls would probably take hours.
Amelia, dressed and coiffed for the day, came into the parlor, followed by the loyal Brutus. Ruby had covered the chair with a sheet while she cleaned the ceiling, then uncovered it again. Like a queen ascending her throne, Amelia took her seat and waited for Sidney to bring her breakfast of tea and toast.
“So you’re working in here today, are you?” she asked Ruby.
“That’s what we decided.” Ruby was perched partway up the ladder. “I was about to start on the walls.”
“You’ll want to be very careful,” Amelia said. “That wallpaper is old, but it was made in Italy before the war and cost a great deal of money. Damage it, and you’ll be out the door.”
“Thank you for the warning,” Ruby said. “First, I’ll need to take down those pictures on the walls. I’ll clean the glass and polish the frames before I hang them up again.”
“That will be fine.” Amelia sipped the tea her butler had brought. “Leave the nails in place. We don’t want to hammer new holes in the walls, do we?”
“I’ll be very careful.”
Framed photographs of different sizes and ages decorated the parlor walls. Ruby counted sixteen of them. She found it odd that whoever had hung them over the years hadn’t hesitated to hammer nails into the costly Italian wallpaper. But that wasn’t her problem.
Taking care, she began lifting each picture off its nail and laying it on a sheet she’d spread on the floor. The wallpaper she uncovered behind each one was almost pristine, a lovely white and gold damask. The framed pictures, like the wall between them, were grimy with dust. But the photographs, she realized, showed the history of the ranch and the people who’d lived here—including Mason. Ruby wanted to know more. Maybe Amelia would tell her.
“Who’s this?” She held up one of the smaller photographs as she wiped away the dust with a clean cloth. It showed a slender, handsome man in an old-fashioned suit.
Amelia leaned forward, her green eyes squinting slightly. “That’s my father, Loren Hollister. He bought this land and built this house. It was one of the few choice parcels Benteen Calder didn’t get his greedy hands on first. My father was a gentleman, not a roughneck like Benteen. He raised fine cattle and blooded horses.”
“And your mother? Is her picture here, too?”
“No. My parents separated when I was a little girl. My mother never came here. I stayed in the city with her until I grew into my teens. Oh, I was a handful—there, that picture with the silver frame. That’s me at sixteen.”
Ruby picked up the photograph and wiped off the dust. The young woman in the picture, wearing ecru lace and holding a fan, was gazing at the camera with a roguish smile on her face. She was stunning. “What a beauty you were!” Ruby exclaimed.
Amelia chuckled. “That was a long time ago. I had plenty of beaux, but I was a wild and willful little thing. When my mother couldn’t control me, she sent me to my father with orders to find me a husband who could keep me in line. He found me Joe Dollarhide.” She pointed to a larger picture. “Over there.”
Ruby cleaned off the wedding photo—the bride wearing a veil and a radiant smile, the groom tall, dark and rugged, with a restless look about him, as if he were anxious to be done with the wedding and get back to building his kingdom.
These were Mason’s parents. She could see parts of him in each of them. His mother’s green eyes and chestnut hair. His father’s athletic build and chiseled features. And what about Mason’s reckless, passionate nature—had that come from the young Amelia?
“I’d have burned that picture a long time ago, but I wanted Mason to see where he came from. I loved Joe, but it wasn’t meant to be. He didn’t want to work for my father, even if it meant inheriting this ranch as my husband. He wanted his own land, his own kingdom on the bluff. And when his first love, Sarah, showed up with their son, that finished it for us. Our divorce gave me sole ownership of this ranch. I never married again.”
“So you ran the ranch yourself, all these years.” Ruby dusted off the picture of a woman seated on a tall bay horse. She was strong, confident, and beautiful. A rifle in a scabbard was slung from the saddle. One gloved hand held a coiled whip. It was a younger Amelia.
“I did, with hired help, of course,” she said. “But why should that matter to you? Why should you even care about our family and how it fell apart? Is it because of Mason?” Her eyes drilled into Ruby. “Do you love him?”
Ruby’s silence answered the question.
Amelia shook her head. “You poor, foolish girl! My son’s got no more sense of responsibility than a tomcat. I raised him to take over this ranch. But he wasn’t interested. First, he got some poor girl pregnant and had to leave town. He stayed away for years. When he came back all he wanted was to make money bootlegging. Now look where he is! Run away, girl, or he’ll break your heart, just like his father broke mine!”
“You’re wrong,” Ruby said. “Mason went back into prison to save me. He’s changed.”
“Nonsense!” Amelia snorted. “Men don’t change—least of all men like my son. He’s disappointed me every day of his adult life.”
“And yet, you love him,” Ruby said. “You’ve never stopped believing in him. I can tell. And I can tell that you worry about him, just as I do. I see the way you wait for the mail and how you jump every time the telephone rings.”
“That’s enough talk for now!” Amelia snapped. “Get back to work. I want those walls clean by tonight.”
Ruby picked up another rag and moved the ladder closer to the front door. “What about that?” She nodded toward the gun rack that was bolted to the wall next to the door. It had brackets for several guns but held only one, a Winchester rifle that looked like the one in Amelia’s photograph.
“Just clean around it,” Amelia said. “And don’t touch the gun. It’s loaded. I’ve kept it there for varmints—coyotes and such, including the human kind. I used to be a deadly shot, though I haven’t fired a gun in years. There was a time when problems could be taken care of with a bullet or two. But these days, the world has grown too civilized.”
She set her tray on the side table, picked up a thick-looking book, and began to read. After a time, her head began to droop. Her eyes closed. The book slipped from her hands, onto her lap. Strange that Amelia would fall asleep when she’d been so alert earlier, Ruby thought. Maybe she should ask Sidney about that tea he was making for her.
The cotton rag she was using was getting the surface dust off the wallpaper. But the pattern, where it hadn’t been covered, was still dingy. It needed more cleaning. Soap could damage the fragile paper. But Ruby remembered, growing up, how a neighbor woman had rubbed her walls with hunks of bread. As she recalled, the bread had done a good job. She would have to ask Sidney for some leftover bread to try.
The dog got up and lumbered over to the foot of the ladder. Ruby had never tried to pet the beast. But at least it seemed to tolerate her now. It looked up at her with clouded eyes. Its white muzzle twitched as it investigated her scent.
“Hello, Brutus,” Ruby said in a friendly voice. “Are you looking for company? Would you let me pet you?” She reached down and put out a hand. Brutus sniffed it, drooling onto her knuckles. When she stroked the huge head, the dog’s tail thumped against the floor.
Suddenly Brutus stiffened and growled. A line of hairs bristled along its back. Ruby stepped off the ladder, moved to the window, and peered out through the glass, remembering the plane, expecting anything.
But it was only the mailman, stopping his Model T to place several envelopes in the roadside mailbox. Maybe one of them was a letter from Mason.
Amelia was still asleep. Not wanting to wake her, Ruby slipped out onto the porch. Keeping the dog inside, she closed the door behind her and hurried down the sidewalk to the opening in the hedge. Fallen leaves crunched under her feet.
By the time Ruby reached the box, the mailman had driven away. From inside the house, she could hear the dog barking. What was wrong with the beast?
She opened the box and took out the mail. None of the pieces looked promising—just bills and advertisements. Shuffling them in her hands, she turned around to walk back to the house. Only then did she see the two men in suits and fedoras, standing on either side of her.
The shorter man was a stranger with a fat, babyish face. He carried a Thompson submachine gun with a 100-round drum magazine. The other, taller man was Leo Colucci.
Pieces of mail fluttered to the ground.
Colucci grinned, showing his yellowed teeth. “We meet again, Ruby. Too bad. We could’ve made a good team, you and me. But now it’s too late. I know you were working with the feds. Nobody gets a free ride after that.”
“So what are you going to do? Kill me?” Ruby knew better than to grovel. That would only goad him.
“Kill you?” Colucci laughed. “That’s a good guess. But first we’re going through that front door to kill everybody in the house, including that damned dog that won’t shut up. And you’re going to watch them die. After that we’ll figure out what to do with you.”
Brutus was barking frantically, lunging at the door from the inside. Ruby remembered the gun on the rack. There’d be no way to get to it before Colucci’s friend sprayed the place with bullets from the deadly submachine gun. The two ranch hands would be out with the cattle at this hour. If the men had any sense, they’d stay away.
“Please,” she begged. “There are just two people in the house. They’re elderly—and they’re harmless. They don’t deserve to die.”
The man with the gun spat in the dirt. Colucci grinned. “Sorry, baby. Leave no witnesses, that’s the rule. Larry, here, will get it over fast. They won’t feel much—at least not for long. But I can’t promise the same for you.”
She could see their late-model auto parked down the road, out of sight from the house. “Just take me with you,” she pleaded. “I’ll go willingly. They won’t have to see you at all.”
“That’s not the way it works, sweetheart,” Colucci said. “I want you to see your friends die before we take care of you. Larry, here, can make it fast or slow. With you, I’m thinking it’ll be slow. Come on, let’s get it over with.”
As they moved up the walk toward the porch, Ruby began to struggle, squirming and kicking. But Colucci’s huge hands manacled her arms behind her back, holding her with an iron grip. He was too big for her, too tall and too strong.
Brutus was still barking and pawing at the door. Colucci swore. “Kill that damned dog, Larry. Just shoot him through the door.”
Larry raised the submachine gun. That was when the scene exploded.
The door flew open. A single shot rang out. Larry dropped the gun and pitched backward with a red hole between his eyes. Brutus leaped at Colucci. As the big man struggled to fend off the dog, Ruby was shoved aside. A second shot, just as deadly as the first, struck Colucci. He spun and collapsed on top of his companion.
In the silence that followed, Ruby scrambled to her feet.
The two thugs lay dead on the front steps. As the dog sniffed at the bodies, Amelia strode out onto the porch, the rifle in her hands.
“Haven’t lost my touch,” she said.
* * *
Ruby, Amelia, and Sidney, who’d been in the kitchen, were waiting for the deputies to arrive when the telephone rang. Amelia took the call. Her face was transformed as she conversed for a few moments, then held the receiver out to Ruby.
“It’s Mason,” she said. “He’s in Miles City. He’s found the car and he’s coming home. He wants to talk to you.”