I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why don’t you ask Ridge what happened the one and only time he was stupid enough to point a gun at me. It didn’t go his way. I’ll tell you that much.”
Harold tossed Ridge a questioning glance, but I could feel Ridge’s eyes on me while mine remained on Harold’s.
“You should know the laws if you’re going to be threatening me, sir. You’ll go straight to jail, and my papa will have every right to buy your land the moment the state condemns it. That your plan?”
“Not if you just threatened my son’s life and I shot you to defend him.”
“Did I threaten your life, Ridge?”
Ridge took a step forward. “No, you did not. Let her go, Harold.”
Harold tilted his head at me, surprise written clearly on his face. “Maybe it’s not your daddy I need to be cautious of after all. Maybe it’s you, darlin’. Seems you’ve got more balls than a pit at Chuck-e-Cheese.”
“That, I do. Now, I suggest you let me go before you leave a bruise that I can tell my papa about. Trust me—he’d love to hear all about it.”
Ridge stepped closer to Harold, his hand still pressed against his chest. “C’mon, Harold. Leave the girl alone.”
Harold tightened his mouth and looked between Ridge and me. Then he released me and took a step back with a growl. “Your daddy would love that, wouldn’t he?” he roared. “It’s not enough that your old man ripped my family apart years ago or killed off my business. He’d gladly do all of it again. But this time, he won’t stop there, will he? He’ll take my land and bury us all in it before he ever makes things right.”
I rubbed my arm where he’d grabbed me and shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My papa says he never did a thing to your family.”
Harold scoffed. “Your papa is a liar, Miss Bell. Now go on. Get out of here before I change my mind and it’s you who gets buried in the cornfields you love so much.”
I didn’t wait to see who could win the staring contest, and I didn’t give Ridge another glance. Instead, I let my bare feet carry me as fast as they could.
“And don’t come back!” Harold shouted.
I darted through the darkened woods, over the bridge, and back into my vineyard without stopping to catch my breath.
17
Ridge
“Are you fucking crazy? You could have killed her!” I roared. As soon as Camila was out of earshot, I stomped off after Harold, ready to let him have it.
Harold whipped around, pointing the butt of his shotgun at me. “I was just scaring her a little,” he grumbled. “You should be wishing I had killed that little brat. She’s a nuisance. And soon to be the heir to the Bell throne. She’ll be your problem one day, not mine. Good to set her straight now.”
“You’re not helping the problem, you know. This goddamn feud between you and Patrick Bell only hurts you both.”
“No, son.” Harold faced me and pointed between us. “It only hurts us. The Bells have the upper hand in this town, always keeping us on the defensive—what business they let us have and what land we get approved to purchase. If it were up to that greedy asshole, he would own the entire city. What I did back there—” He gestured to the spot where Camila had almost been mowed over. “That was for you. For your future on this farm.”
“Well, then I don’t want it. Not like this. We’re not the Wild West.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Our guns may have changed shape. Our strategies may have changed. But there’s no escaping where you came from. Not here.”
“Then I don’t want to be here anymore.” I took a step back and watched Harold’s eyes grow wide with surprise. “You said it was Patrick Bell who tore our family apart, but it was you who gave him the power, wasn’t it?”
Harold shook his head, his face red with frustration. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, son.”
“Then tell me,” I demanded. “For two and a half years, I’ve worked with you on this farm and lived in your home, and I’ve never asked a single prying question about what happened back then. I figured you’d tell me in due time and that none of it was important, anyway. But now I want to know. I’m demanding to know it. What happened between you and Patrick Bell?”
Seconds, maybe even minutes, passed. He just blinked like he was working through his words in his mind. Then he spoke. “Your mother was a runaway, son. At seventeen years old, she showed up on our farm, with bruises and cuts all over her body, asking to work for nothing except a barn to sleep in without question. My parents agreed. At that time, we were a cattle ranch, and she proved herself when it came to wrangling, so she was hired. Over the next six years, we fell in love. When she got pregnant, we couldn’t hide her anymore, but we thought maybe the reservation—her family and everyone—would have given up the search by then. What we didn’t expect was for Patrick Bell to tell the tribe where to find one of the girls he’d long ago added to the rapidly growing list of missing. If we didn’t give her up, we could have all been arrested for harboring the missing girl. So we let Molly go with my baby inside her. I thought she would come back, but she never did.”
I gulped, taking in the load of information that had just been dumped on me. “You haven’t said anything before today.”
“You haven’t asked, boy. I thought you knew.”
Then I realized Harold was right. I’d always thought the past was as good as buried, and I would never get the details of the whys that had become my life.
“But she wasn’t safe. She went missing again, only this time, she won’t be turning up alive. And you can thank Patrick Bell for that.”
The firmness of his words and the certainty of his tone felt like two hands clasped around my throat. “What did you say?”
A breeze blew in with the next few beats of uncomfortable silence, whistling through the air and whipping the remaining stalks halfway to the soil. The scene was as eerie as the moment felt, with darkness at every turn and only the headlights of the tractor illuminating us both.
“Ah, son, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.”
I could feel the blood draining from my face. “What did you say?” I repeated the words slowly and quietly, with all the venom I could muster. I knew what he’d said, but I needed to hear him confirm it.
While the number of women that had gone missing from the rez was unbelievably high, I’d still held on to a glimmer of hope. And after hearing his story about how she’d come to Telluride and conceived me in the beginning, my glimmer of hope only grew, and I’d wondered if she found a new safe haven and was still alive.
But the truth was that no one had followed up with me regarding my mother’s missing status after I moved. I didn’t know of any investigation, and we had no family left there. At just fifteen years old, I’d been alone, trying to cope with the fact that my mother might never come home and that I might never see her again. Harold’s words had destroyed any hope I had, and I felt more broken than ever.