Page 19 of Cash
“Have you met my mother? And let’s not forget thelovelyCash Rivers.”
I told Wheeler about what a dick Cash was when I called her a week ago on my drive home from Hartsville.
“Fair point. Although I can’t imagineallcowboys are like that.” She lets out a breath. “Are you sure about this, Mollie? Ranch life and you…well, y’all don’t exactly go together like peas and carrots.”
“No shit, Sherlock. I don’t plan on doing more ranch stuff than I have to.” Although, if I’m being honest, my heart does a little flip at the prospect of being on horseback again. I don’t have many memories of life on the ranch, but riding horses is one thing I do remember. Ilovedit as a kid.
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
“And send pics. Preferably of all the Wrangler butts you’ll see.”
I laugh. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Attagirl. Keep me posted. Godspeed, friend.”
“Wheeler?”
“Yeah?”
“I know we’ve talked theoretically about helping each other bury bodies. But would you actually be my accomplice? If I need you?”
I hear the grin in her voice when she says, “You say the word and we’ll ride at dawn, shovels in hand.”
CHAPTER 5
Cash
ROPE AND RIDE
There are hundreds of them.
Some are compiled into little green booklets from the pharmacy. Others are stacked together, bound with rubber bands. Still, others are loose, tossed into the safety-deposit box, seemingly without order.
The one thing that unites all the pictures: they’re of Garrett, Aubrey, or Mollie, or some combination of the three.
Who goes through the trouble of actually developing physical photographs anymore? And why lock them away in a bank when they’re clearly meant to be enjoyed?
Frowning, I spread them out across my desk in the ranch’s office. Garrett converted an old pole barn into a workspace not long after my brothers and I arrived on Lucky Ranch. On hot days, like today, you can still smell the fresh, clean scent of hay, the scent baked into the walls over countless decades.
My desk is tidy, empty, save for a laptop and a small stack of paperbacks. Nonfiction mostly—biographies, histories—with the odd thriller or Stephen King thrown in there. I’m technically off two days a week, but I always come into the office anyway. Usually, I’m busy, but when I’m not, I never want to be without reading material at hand.
Today, though, my books are shoved to the side to make room for Garrett’s pictures. Surveying them, my chest tightens. There was nothing else in the box. Just stacks and stacks of four-by-six photographs.
The fact that Garrett, a wildly wealthy man, considered these some of his most prized possessions has me feeling short of breath.
He was a damn good human being.
A flawed one too. I know he regretted letting Aubrey and Mollie go. But far as I know, he never chased after them like he should’ve.
The regret is killing you, I told him once.Go get them.
But the next morning, he’d still tacked up his horse, Maria, clearly intent on staying in Hartsville. I think so much time had passed that he didn’t want to disrupt the new lives Aubrey and Mollie had built in Dallas.
I think, more than anything, he was scared. And stubborn. And he used the excuse of running the ranch to avoid confronting his feelings. His failings, too.
Pot, meet kettle.