Читать книгу The Man From Oklahoma - Darlene Graham - Страница 9

ALONE. THE WORD took on a new and terrible meaning as Nathan Biddle stared out at the spectacular sunset he had seen so many times from this broad window. He braced his palms wide on the sill, suddenly remembering the day his grandfather Biddle had installed the majestic expanse of glass in the western wall of the enormous Hart Ranch house.

“Nathan, my boy,” the old man had said, “your grandmother’s people came from those hills out there. The Osage, a fierce and proud nation. And filthy rich, too!” Gramps had slapped him on the back as if it was a great joke.

For so long—months after Susie had disappeared—Nathan had waited for a ransom note that never came. Maybe someone was after the Osage oil money, he and his lawyers had reasoned. Such atrocities, in the name of greed, had been visited upon the wealthy Osage people before. Nathan hoped that maybe someone would demand the millions that he would gladly pay, and then Susie and their unborn child would be magically restored to him.

But now these Osage Hills, beloved resting place, of his ancestors, had become Susie’s resting place, as well. She had been out there all this time. All this time while he had been searching the world for her, she had been right out there on an island in a river…alone.

He had sensed from the first, of course, that Susie would never come back. Had felt it in his body.

Hunters, the reporter woman had said. He hadn’t even turned on the TV. And wouldn’t. He did not want to see what the jackals were saying about Susie, about him, about the one who had done this. That was for the city people in Tulsa to look at, to eat with their nightly meal, digesting someone else’s pain like so much junk food. Tears stung his eyes.

The clouds gathered in radiant silence as the liquid orange Oklahoma sun touched down on the rim of the rolling hills. Nathan focused his burning eyes there, at that convergence of light on the far horizon.

He tried not to think of the last time he had seen Susie, but her voice reverberated in his mind, anyway: “Nathan, I’m pregnant!” Those words would echo in him forever, like his own heartbeat. They had been the words he’d desperately wanted to hear, though he’d never admitted it, not to her, not even to himself.

Their battle against infertility, the child they were finally going to have, none of it seemed real now. It seemed as if the only thing that remained from his former life was this land where he had grown up, these endless hills.

He put his forehead to the glass and fought the rage, the tears, the self-pity. When his mind cooled and he raised his head, the clouds seemed brighter than any he had ever seen. The strange sight caused a sudden unease to pass over him. He looked around the room, cast in an amber glow, and the furniture—his grandfather’s furniture—looked the same as it always had, yet not the same at all.

Grief, he knew by now, could have strange and unpredictable effects on a man’s mind. He turned his head slowly, looking back at the clouds, and they had altered again. Before his eyes they suddenly took shape above the setting sun as first one, then many faces formed. As he stared, this wall of faces stirred in him an unbidden anger, then sadness and finally a strange resolve. It seemed as if this vision had been trying to form for the past three years. He shook his head and blinked, then rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, the faces had vanished. Only ordinary clouds remained, following the sun to bed.

He turned from the window and the room looked ordinary again, too. Like the same old place where the same evening sun had shone in the same way ever since he was a small boy.

He stumbled to the wide leather couch facing the fireplace and sprawled on his back, suddenly stricken with a blinding headache.

Which was where his cousin Robert found him.

“Nathan!” Robert yelled as he crashed through the front door, then halted abruptly when he caught sight of the figure on the couch with one arm flung over his eyes.

“Nathan,” Robert repeated more quietly, and Nathan heard his cousin’s boots clomp heavily as he crossed the hardwood floor. Nathan sensed Robert standing over him. “Are you all right? I came here as soon as I heard the television reports.”

Nathan lowered his arm.

Six and a half feet tall, thick-necked and thick-middled, with a tail of unkempt jet-black hair trailing down his back, Robert Hart looked like nothing so much as a sorrowful young bull, peering down at Nathan. He removed his well-worn baseball cap and held it in both hands. “They said they found her…her bones out there.” Robert inclined his head toward the massive window.

Nathan sat up. “Damn the media—reporting it before I’ve been officially notified.”

“So how’d you know?”

“Long story. A reporter.” He braced his elbows on his knees and pressed steepled fingers to his lips. “What are the news reports saying?”

Robert sat down next to him. “They said they made a provisional identification,” he answered quietly, “by her jewelry.”

Nathan nodded. “The Claremont ring. I can imagine what Wanda and Fred are feeling.”

Thinking about Susie’s mother and father tore at Nathan’s heart. He didn’t mention his own parents, although he suspected that Robert was picturing them now. Nathan wondered if his cousin was grateful, as he himself was, that Clare and Drew Biddle were not alive to witness this sorrow. Despite Robert’s hokey Indian ways, Nathan was suddenly thankful to have this particular man at his side for the ordeal ahead. Robert was a guy you could count on. The cousins were men of one accord, though they lived in different worlds, believed in different things.

“Nathan, don’t you want to turn on the TV so you can see for yourself what they’re saying?” Robert offered.

No, he did not. But to satisfy Robert, he said, “Okay. Put it on Channel Six.” He was, in fact, curious to know if Jamie Evans had used the footage of him. It would feel good to have some petty reason to get righteously angry right now.

Robert got up and opened the doors of the massive armoire and pushed the buttons on a big-screen set. He returned with the remote and handed it to Nathan. A weatherman was talking, pointing at scrolling satellite images of clouds.

“Switch to another channel,” Robert suggested. “Maybe one of the other stations has something about it.”

“No. I want Channel Six.”

“Why Six?”

“Jamie Evans was out here today. She and her photographer. I told them not to use the tape they shot.”

“Jamie Evans? That little blond reporter? She was out here on the ranch?”

“If you’d get your head out of your Wordsworth and Shakespeare and step foot out of that rotting old cabin once in a while, you’d know these things, cousin. I spotted them up on the north plateau a little over an hour ago.”

“And coming up at ten o’clock,” the news anchor was talking again, “complete details on the discovery of the body of missing oil heiress Susan Claremont Biddle. Jamie Evans has more on this late-breaking story. Jamie?”

A stunning strong intelligent young face filled the screen. “Authorities aren’t telling us much right now, Nick, but apparently they have reason to believe the remains found by hunters this morning belong to Susan Claremont Biddle. Mrs. Biddle was the twenty-eight-year-old granddaughter of well-known Tulsa oilman Ross Claremont and the wife of Tulsa philanthropist Nathan Hart Biddle. Authorities are awaiting positive identification from dental records.”

The blond woman holding the mike had a creamy complexion and amber-green eyes that caught fire when the studio lights reflected in their depths, then narrowed with reined-in emotion as she spoke. Her perfect full mouth, set in a square jaw, moved with precision over every word. She had the ideal media face, Nathan thought with detachment, a classic movie-star face. Sincere. Appealing. Unforgettable.

“The remains were found by black-powder deer hunters who told authorities they thought they had stumbled on a deer scrape on a sandbar in the Arkansas River. But what they found was the victim’s shallow grave. The state medical examiner’s office has not released cause-of-death information, but we hope to have more details at ten, as well as a statement from Tulsa County District Attorney Trent Van Horn about the status of this shocking case.”

Nathan hit the mute button and they watched the attractive young reporter mouthing her sign off.

“She’s in the studio,” Nathan mumbled. “The footage I’m looking for was shot out here in the open. She said it was a teaser, so I guess we missed it. I’d like to know what she showed.”

“What’s the deal with her?”

“She’s an up-and-coming little reporter who’s been digging around ever since she came to town. She’s young, smart, ambitious. Hot after the sensational crime story that will boost her career.”

“Your private investigator can probably find out if she used that footage of you. Although I kinda wonder about old Frank. Goes by the book too much for a private dick, if you ask me. Why hasn’t he called?”

“He may not know they found her.” Nathan’s voice was emotionless. “The sheriff doesn’t notify the suspect’s private detective.”

Robert sat stone still for a moment before he slowly nodded. “Suspect. That occurred to me, too, when I was flying down the ridge on my bike. I didn’t see any cars around your house, and I thought, what if they haven’t contacted Nathan yet because…well…you know…”

“Because they think I killed her?”

Robert turned his head and let his sympathetic brown eyes speak for a moment before he said, “You are in danger, cousin, and you need powerful help.”

Nathan studied Robert’s serious expression and, despite his emotional turmoil, felt his face pulling into a crooked smile. “Robert, my man, don’t even think about that.”

“Just talk to him. Or come away with me for a few days. So we can plan, so we can think.”

“Talk to your crazy medicine man so he can blow on my face and make me invisible or something?”

“Mr. Elliott has the power to help you. I’m not asking you to go up there and stay forever. Just long enough to prepare yourself. If you went into hiding for a while, we might even have a half a chance of finding the real killer.”

“Be sensible, Robert.”

“Nathan, you be sensible. Van Horn hasn’t believed your story from the start. If he doesn’t get a conviction, he could lose the election next spring, and you’re the only suspect he’s got. Is that what you want? To go to prison, to die, for something you didn’t do? How does that help Susie? If we seek guidance from the shaman—”

“I’ll fight this battle my own way. I don’t need some old Indian guy singing chants and rattling turtle shells.” Nathan shifted and reached for the portable phone on the marble table in front of them. “I’d better call Frank.” His private detective was going to be less than thrilled to learn that his missing-person case had turned into a murder investigation. Frank was a sharp old dog, but he was about ready to retire. He wouldn’t like taking on something this complicated.

Robert threw up his hands, then stood. “Let me call him. But first let me get you some water. You look like hammered buffalo dung.”

“Bring some aspirin, too,” Nathan said. “I’ve got a killer headache. But don’t blow on ’em,” he added without looking up at his cousin.

Robert glanced back and said, “Humph,” before he disappeared behind the stairs, down the long hallway toward the kitchen.

Nathan eased his pounding head back onto the couch and stared up at the high cedar-beamed ceiling. For three years he’d been living with this nightmare. Would it never end? He thought about what lay ahead and the dark crossbeams above him blurred. But a steel-hard resolve quickly cleared his vision. He no longer cared about the ambitions of political phonies in Tulsa, about society’s judgment, their courts, their reporters. He no longer cared about anything at all except finding Susie’s murderer.

All along his gut had told him that Susie would never be found alive. And now he would probably be charged with her murder. A sensational suspect for a sensational crime.

JAMIE COULDN’T SHAKE OFF the haunting image of Nathan Biddle’s face when she’d told him about his wife. As soon as the news crew cleared out after the six-o’clock broadcast, she grabbed the sleeve of Dave’s faded flannel shirt. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Ah, man!” Dave whined and bounced backward on one sneaker. “Give me a break, lady. Just because you live, eat and breathe this crap doesn’t mean I have to. I have a life, you know.”

“I need you more than the boys at the Apocalypse Club. Come back to the archives and help me locate an old video of Nathan Biddle. The one on the horse.”

“You mean the stuff I shot at that fancy golf tournament for children’s medical research?”

“Correct.”

“I know exactly where that one is.” Dave bit at the challenge. “Follow me.” He set off with long lanky strides down the narrow corridor that led toward the editing bay.

The room, no bigger than a closet, was arranged like a command module: two Beta tape decks canted on the desk, two monitors angled inward on the shelf above. Dave took the chair without asking and popped in the tape he’d retrieved. Jamie hovered behind him.

He didn’t take long to locate the footage of Nathan Biddle sitting atop a horse in a white cowboy hat and western-style tuxedo, looking like the man who had everything.

“This what you want?” Dave asked as he toggled doorknob-size dials back and forth, cutting and moving footage to the blank tape in the other Beta deck. “I remembered exactly when I shot this, because how many people would think of using a horse, instead of a golf cart?” A close-up shot of Biddle resting his five iron across the saddle horn zoomed forward on the screen. Dave twisted the knobs again. “This kind of work will be a lot easier to do when we get the new AVID system,” he said. “We’ll be able to do enhancements, pull out nat sound, do perfect lay-downs, everything.”

More interested in her subject than the technology Dave adored, Jamie commented softly, “Biddle would pull any stunt to get publicity for his charities.”

“Man, his looks sure have changed.” Dave brought the face on the screen into sharper focus. “Doesn’t even look like the same dude.”

“Okay. You can go play now.”

Dave got up and gave Jamie the chair, but then he hovered at Jamie’s shoulder and studied the viewer as she froze a frame showing a young woman smiling in the background.

“Biddle’s wife,” Dave said, and Jamie nodded.

“Film often catches things you miss in real time.”

They watched while the pale-skinned brunette beauty glanced over her shoulder at someone in the crowd. When she turned back toward the camera, she looked pensive, biting her perfect lower lip.

After a gravid silence, Dave said. “God, she’s pretty. You think he did it?”

Jamie sank back in her chair, hypnotized by the image before her. Susan Biddle had indeed been a pretty woman. “Go get me everything else we’ve got, okay?”

“Jamie, come on. You’ve seen it all a dozen times.”

“Well, I want to see it again, okay? Now go.”

Dave bounded away.

Jamie transferred the segment with the wife onto the new tape, then loaded a different cartridge into the first tape deck. This was tonight’s video. The one she didn’t use. She fast-forwarded past the parts of herself in a fright wig and came to Biddle’s face. Just like in the golf segment, he looked down from high up in a saddle. But Dave was right. He did look different. It wasn’t just the ranch clothes and the fact that he’d let his hair grow out. His Native American blood seemed to stand out now. In the lines of his face she could see shadows of the Osage warrior depicted in the famous George Catlin painting. The same high forehead, wide mouth, prominent nose. But mostly it was his deep-set eyes that seemed changed, transformed, revealed. Handsome and energetic in the older video, they looked darker now, more still. The quiet bottomless eyes of a man who had suffered too much. Even so, something about his face radiated such strength, such compassion, such integrity that Jamie’s instincts told her this was a man who could never murder anyone, much less his wife.

Again she watched the reaction that Dave had surreptitiously captured. The shocked realization that passed over the whole man when she told him Susan Biddle’s remains had been found. Nobody could fake that. Could they?

She froze the frame and her stomach tightened as she relived that first encounter. It had been so long since she’d been genuinely attracted to a man that she’d just about given up. Her big sister, Valerie, oh-so-happily married and busy making babies with a nice ordinary mechanical engineer in Kansas City, claimed Jamie had some kind of complex about bad boys. Valerie would never let Jamie forget her disastrous post-high-school fling with a motorcycle-riding wild guy named Ethan.

Could she help it, Jamie had argued the last time they’d talked about men, if she couldn’t imagine kissing ninety-nine percent of the nice guys she met, much less being married to one of them? But when she imagined kissing Nathan Biddle—as, unfortunately, she had—her insides thrummed. Maybe her sister had a point. Maybe she liked her men…complicated.

“You are going to end up all alone with a closet full of fancy suits,” Valerie had teased when Jamie passed her dateless twenty-fifth birthday.

So within a year Jamie had rekindled the thing with Donald, her tame college boyfriend. Stable, convenient and deadly dull, Donald was still living in Kansas City, practicing routine law. Living in Tulsa while Donald lived in KC hadn’t bothered her, because their relationship had always been long-distance. That should have been her first clue. But within six months they were going through the motions of being an engaged couple, and Donald suddenly became not-so-convenient. He started insisting that Jamie give up her career now that they were ready to “settle down” in Kansas City. Jamie came to the conclusion that going it alone was better than living a life she’d hate with a man she felt lukewarm about.

Even though she’d been relieved when she broke it off, extracting herself from that longstanding relationship had caused Donald, her family and herself considerable anguish. The next guy, she decided, was going to have to be well worth risking that kind of entanglement. He was going to have to absolutely knock her socks off.

But who would have guessed that the guy who would knock her socks off would turn out to be a reclusive murder suspect? She looked at the face on the screen, and suddenly that face, which she had seen in all kinds of poses, looked completely new to her. Studying old footage and photos of Nathan Biddle hadn’t been the same as meeting him in person.

“Somebody out there to see you.” Dave burst through the door, and Jamie jumped. He stood balancing a stack of older tapes and frowned at the handsome face on the screen. “He’s a different kinda guy, isn’t he?”

She hit the fast-forward button. “Who’s out there?”

“You ain’t gonna believe this. The DA.”

“Trent Van Horn? Here?”

“Yep.”

WHEN SHE SPOTTED Van Horn standing in the dimly lit reception area, Jamie’s first thought was, My, don’t we look pretty tonight. Apparently he was on his way to a “do,” dressed in a formal tux, with a red cummerbund to boot. His patent-leather shoes mirrored the low after-hours lighting, his longish hair shone silver where it was slicked back from his temples, and his pungent aftershave permeated the air. No one else was about. Even the receptionist had taken off for the day. Good. Maybe she could get Mr. Van Horn to speak candidly for a change.

“Trent. How are you?” Jamie put out her hand first.

“I’m fine, Jamie.” He gave her the standard handclasp. “I called and they told me you were still working at the station. I apologize for dropping by unannounced, but when I got your message, I figured you’d want a statement for the ten-o’clock broadcast.”

Jamie didn’t bother to respond to his self-serving apology. If Trent Van Horn wanted to stop by the station unannounced, he did it, no excuses needed. Jamie knew he wanted his face on the ten-o’clock news in the worst way. Shortly after taking this job in Tulsa, Jamie had figured out that Van Horn considered the media a handy extension of his campaign machine. Opportunistic didn’t even come close to describing the man. But normally she would be the one summoned to Trent’s door, like a serf before a landlord. So something deeper was at work tonight.

“What can I do for you?” Jamie wanted Van Horn to believe, always, that she was accommodating him.

“You were out at the Hart Ranch today?”

Uh-oh.

“Yeah. We went out there to shoot a teaser—from a distance—right after the body was found.”

“And?”

Jamie weighed the situation. Subpoena me if you want to know. “And nothing. Has the medical examiner told us the cause of death yet?”

Trent shook his head, apparently letting her evasion go.

“Can you give me a quick interview? Verify a few facts for me?” It would sure be helpful to make Van Horn her second source on this story.

Van Horn shrugged. “Of course. If it will help.”

She stepped up to the reception desk and reached over the counter for the phone. She buzzed the editing bay. “Dave. Studio One’s open, isn’t it? Mr. Van Horn has kindly agreed to give us a sound bite for our ten-o’clock package.”

It turned out to be a very disappointing piece of tape. Jamie had Dave shoot it as a stand-up, trying to create a feeling of immediacy, but the DA, as pompous and long-winded as ever, revealed absolutely nothing. When Van Horn got through talking at Jamie, she and Dave took the footage to the back and tried to make something interesting out of it.

“Another Trent Van Horn commercial.” Jamie sighed.

“From what he says, I gather it’s not his case, exactly,” Dave observed.

“Not exactly. The body was found over in Osage County. But, of course, Van Horn is maintaining that Susie Biddle was moved there after she was killed here in Tulsa.”

“Of course?”

“He wants to prosecute this on his turf, Dave. This is high-profile stuff. Susan Claremont Biddle was connected to half the big-oil-money families in northeastern Oklahoma.”

“Oh. So does he have a suspect?”

“If he does, he’s not saying, but my guess is it’ll be the husband.”

“Our big wild-looking dude, huh?”

Jamie nodded.

Dave whistled softly. “Heavy. At least we got that great footage of him out on the ranch today. You saving that for ten? Gonna weave it into this package or something?”

“No. We’re not using it.”

“Not—!” Dave’s head jutted forward on his skinny neck. “Lady, that’s some of the coolest footage I’ve ever shot. He looks like some kind of throwback brave, up on that horse with his eyes going all furious and misty and everything, and you aren’t even gonna use it?”

“Look, Dave, if you wanna work at the pound, you gotta gas a few puppies. I know it’s great footage. But I have my reasons for burying it.”

“Man! I bust my rear night and day to make you look good, and that ain’t easy, sister, keeping that hair out of the backlighting and keeping those chewed-up stubs off camera.” He pointed at her ragged nails. “And this is the thanks I get—you’re killing some of the greatest emotive footage I’ve shot since I started in this business. I zoomed right in on his eyes at just the right instant. Man!”

Jamie ignored Dave’s rant while the images on the screen flickered on. Her eyes were seeing Van Horn, but it was Nathan Biddle’s face that haunted her. Again she saw him in that moment of breathless silence after she told him about his wife. And Jamie, who could read a face as plainly as printed words on a page, knew what she had seen. For one instant his deep-set black eyes had blazed under the shadow of the cowboy hat as he fixed them on some point distant in time and space. Then tears pooled and were blinked back. She had noted the bitter set of his mouth. The painful swallow. It was great footage. The proverbial picture worth a thousand words. “Nathan Hart Biddle,” she whispered.

Dave sighed in resignation. “So how come you think he did it?”

Jamie turned from the computer. If Dave’s youthful naiveté hadn’t been so clearly visible in the oblique lighting from the screen, she might have popped him one on the back of his dense head.

“That’s just it, Dave. I don’t think he did it.”