Stumped
SIX
Jake
The last stump in the way of the hayride staging ground was a green cottonwood with roots halfway to China, and it fought us until sunset.
“Quit babying it,” Cash hollered over the grinder. “It’s a stump, McCall.”
I ran the wheel through the heart of it and the cottonwood gave up in a spray of wet chips. We’d cleared an area big enough for the hay wagons, and to turn the draft team without backing them.
Opening weekend of the Off-Duty Rescue Ranch Pumpkin Patch started tomorrow, per the printed signs Ivy had some of the guys post everywhere around town, and up the highway turn. She had come by twice today to check on progress, worried we were falling behind.
We weren’t, but you don’t argue with a woman holding a clipboard and a vision for a family fun event like this.
Cash killed the grinder and the quiet came down over the field the way it does in the mountains, all at once. He surveyed the ground and nodded, satisfied, the way he used to nod on a mission when we’d cleared a building.
“Kids are gonna lose their minds out here,” he said. “Hayride, corn maze, the little pony ride. Hell, I might lose my mind out here.”
“Ivy’ll charge you the kid rate. You’re about that mature.”
“Hilarious.” He picked up some of our tools. “You bringing your two?”
My two… rolled off his tongue easily.
I stacked the chainsaw and the fuel can in the truck bed and since I didn’t answer, he stopped right in front of me.
“Might as well say whatever you’ve been working on in that head of yours all day.”
Of course he read me like a book. Stand shoulder to shoulder with a guy long enough in intense war-like situations and you get to know every twitch.
“Yeah, something has been bugging me for a few weeks now,” I admitted.
“Harper caught me at the truck after Knox’s wedding, and told me there’d been a stranger in town at the Copper Cup, asking questions about a woman with a baby.
It has put me on alert ever since, looking over our shoulders, checking the rearview mirror, reminding Autumn to lock her doors. ”
Cash’s guard went up, same as mine. “You think he’s looking for her and the baby?”
“Maybe. She ran from a guy who hurt her. Took his baby with her. I always wondered if he’d come back around to claim what he thought was his.
” I threw a rope over the tarp in the truck bed, and cinched it harder than the load needed.
“Then last week, Trig called me, checking in about Autumn. He told me his lawyer heard from that family; they’re looking for her. ”
“Looking to what?”
“That’s the question I chew on all night, every night.” I leaned on the tailgate. “She’s got a boy those people consider theirs, Cash, even if she had every right to run and protect herself and that boy.”
Cash absorbed that, arms folded on top of the tailgate beside me, both of us looking at a field we’d made ready for hayrides.
“How is she handling it?”
“That’s the other thing.” It took me a minute, this part I hadn’t said out loud to anybody.
“Since the wedding she’s been—guarded. More than usual, and her usual would qualify as a fortified position.
All summer I could feel her easing up. Laughing more.
Letting me closer by inches. Now she has a fear in her eyes I didn’t plant there.
I reached past her for the diaper bag yesterday, and she actually flinched.
” I heard my own jaw tighten around it. “She hasn’t flinched at me since the day I met her.
I’d never hurt her—” I stopped, shaking my head.
“But I’d hurt the son of a bitch who did. ”
“Can I say the obvious thing?” Cash guffawed.
“Go ahead.”
“You’re in love with her.”
I didn’t blink. He stated the truth, and when it sneaks up on you it’s loud.
“Probably.”
“Well, thank God.” He slapped the tailgate.
“The whole bunkhouse has a pool going. Pete had you confessing by Halloween, so keep this between us or I owe him forty dollars.” Then the grin banked down and he turned square to me.
“Tell her. That’s the play, Jake. Not standing guard in the parking lot for another year—telling her.
You and I both know how fast the ground goes out from under a life.
We’ve seen it, lived it, watched guys thinking they had time, but they didn’t.
You want to still be calling it friendship a year from now?
” He shook his head. “Stop holding yourself back, brother. Go get what you want.”
“She’s not ready to hear it.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she flinches because she’s carrying it alone, when there’s a man right here she can’t lean on because he keeps filing himself under the label of babysitter.
” He shrugged. “Worst case, you scare her a step back, so then you’re patient and you try again, which is the only thing you’ve ever been good at.
Best case—” He tipped his chin at the field.
“You get the hayride, McCall. The whole corny ride of love.”
“Corny—what do you know about love?” I snickered, and regarded the wagons for a long minute. Then I did what any cornered man does. I returned fire. “You’ve played around with women for years. From where I stand, why should I take advice from a man who won’t even unpack a duffel?”
That landed. Cash’s jaw tensed. He opened the cooler, took two beers, handed me one, and chugged one down.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something, and it stays between us.”
“What is it?”
“After I got out of the Navy, I fell in love. Deep. Thought it was forever. But then she vanished. No trace of her.”
“Shit. Sorry to hear.” I forget my life before Autumn entered it half the time. But vanish now? I probably wouldn’t be able to function. Yet here he was, upright.
He nodded. “I’ve searched everywhere, still do.
Take that file out now and then and relive every moment hoping I find a new lead to follow.
Meanwhile, I got my license as a private investigator.
Turns out the skill set transferred from the SEALS—reconnaissance, action.
I’m good at it. And rich people pay real money to find other people.
That’s most of the trade, Jake. Rich people, looking.
Like your ranch owner, Chris Magnus. He hired me on behalf of one of his workers on the ranch back east—Ryder, who runs Magnus’s operation out there.
Ryder’s wife has a long lost sister. Long enough that the trail’s stone cold and two other investigators already gave it back.
They put me on it this spring, so I’m doing it the only way I know—starting at the beginning and walking every step she walked. ”
“So you’re here undercover?” I squinted at him in a whole new light.
He turned the bottle in his hand. “Yeah. This town’s part of it, and your friendly local biker gang too, which is why I’ve been befriending and losing at pool to large bearded men in the bars every weekend.
” He glanced up. “The ranch work’s real.
Glad to be here with you, too. But that’s what I’m really doing. Finding lost souls.”
“Damn. That’s real hero shit. What can I do to help?”
“Nothing. Keep it to yourself. Just continue being the man Autumn and her baby need. As long as I’m here buddy, I’ll do whatever I can to help you if you need it.”
“You already helped enough the other night with Tess,” I chuckled.
He scratched at his beard, a mischievous smile under it. “Yeah. Like I said. Anything you need. Now come on. Let’s call it a day.”
We rode back to the bunkhouse in silence. I checked my phone at the sink. Autumn had texted earlier that she had the closing shift at the Sapphire, and Avery was watching Stetson.
So I checked with Avery instead. She confirmed the baby was doing well, obsessed with holding onto everything and making his way around the room. But the kid was still not walking on his own.
After a while, thinking over everything Cash said, I sent Autumn a text, asking if she’d like me to take her and Stetson to the opening of the pumpkin patch.
The message sat there, delivered, but unread all night.
So I hung around the bunkhouse and tried not to drive myself crazy over her.
I got dealt into the poker match, with Cash and Pete and two of the seasonal hands.
I never was much of a card player, and lost every hand.
My eyes kept drifting to the phone sitting face-up by my stack, and Cash kept seeing me do it and saying nothing, which was its own conversation.
It was late, and I’d about retired my poker face, when the phone finally lit. My heart jumped, but the name on it wasn’t Autumn or Avery. Smitty from the Sapphire.
I was up and out the door before the second ring, into the cold to answer it. “What’s up?”
“Jake. Can you come get Autumn?” The bar noise behind him sounded thin for a Friday.
Everything in me sat on edge. “What happened?”
“Hell, I don’t know. She started the shift already upset about something and then it got worse. She dropped a whole tray of glasses, white as a sheet. Couldn’t hardly work after that. I finally told her to go home.”
“And?”
“That was two hours ago, Jake. She’s been sitting at my bar instead. Drinking. Keeps mumbling about a bad man who found her today.”
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck, every one, old radar spinning. A bad man found her today. Harper’s stranger? Her ex? Somebody worse?
Behind Smitty’s anxiety, a woman’s voice sailed up at a note, missing it and cracking.
“Smitty, who is that singing?”
“That’s Autumn.”
“When did you start karaoke?”
“I didn’t.” He sounded tired down to his socks. “A few minutes ago she got up and took over the mic all on her own. Now can you please come get her?”
“I’ll be right there.”
The Sapphire on a weekend typically ran wall to wall with the locals and tourists alike. Tonight I counted six customers as I walked in, five of them sitting as far from the little stage corner as the building allowed.
There Autumn was, under the one sad spotlight with the dead microphone in both hands, swaying on her own axis, absolutely singing out her poor little heart.