Dorothy Garlock - [Tucker Family] (30 page)

Owen’s curiosity had eventually gotten the better of him. Painstakingly, he had inched his way down to the cabin. With every
rock that clicked off his boots, louder to his ears than the thunder that pounded in the distance, he expected to be found
out, but no one came out of the cabin’s door. With sweat streaming down his face, he made it to the cracked window. When he
looked inside, his heart had wanted to leap from his chest.

Charlotte sat at a table opposite a young girl. To Owen’s eyes, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, little
more than a child. But her age was not what sickened him; it was her obviously pregnant belly. He’d looked away quickly, the
sight too much for him to bear. All he could see was his mother, made to suffer and lose all that she had, simply because
she was unmarried and with child. Charlotte was there because of John Grant, because he had brought her there. The pregnant
girl was obviously connected to him as well.

Desperately, Owen had fought against the urge to kick in the front door and demand answers, but his love for Charlotte made
him pause; she might never forgive him for it. There was also no doubt that such an entrance would terrify the girl, and that
was something he would not do. In the end, he’d decided that he would be better off hurrying back to the ranch and waiting
for them to return.

Furiously pushing Cinnamon, Owen had beaten the rain and settled into the horse barn, steeling himself for what needed to
be done. When he had finally seen the truck’s headlights, he’d waved them down and lured them into the barn. It was then he
had begun to take his revenge.

And this is only the beginning…

To Charlotte’s eyes, time seemed to stand still. Outside, the raging storm paused. The blustery wind died as if it ran on
electricity, its current snapped shut. Even a fork of lightning froze in the sky as if it were nothing more than a child’s
drawing, its forks twisting here and there, up and ultimately down, but never striking, never producing its telltale thunder.

Inside the barn, the same held true. No one moved, no one breathed, the very dust motes hanging in the air like snowflakes.
Owen remained perched over John, the furious rage never leaving his twisted face, his fists never unclenching. Everything
around Charlotte was pregnant with violence.

“You worthless son of a bitch!” Owen bellowed, his
brutality finally breaking the spell that held Charlotte’s world temporarily still. His voice echoed, rolling as if
it
were thunder. “You’re going to pay for all that you’ve done! I’ll make you pay!”

“Owen!” Charlotte shouted, tears springing to her eyes. “Don’t do this, Owen!”

“I saw you, Charlotte!” He turned toward her, irate, barely resembling the man who had held her in that very barn only the
night before. “I saw where he took you, who he took you to see!” His attention returned to John, who was sitting upright,
one hand rubbing his aching jaw, suddenly looking much older than his years. “Wasn’t ruining one pregnant girl’s life enough
for you? Why would you destroy another? Answer me, damn you!”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout,” John murmured.

“The hell you don’t!” Owen shouted. Viciously, he kicked John square in the chest with his booted foot, driving the man flat
onto his back, forcing the air out from his lungs. Owen was over him, dropping his weight down onto the man’s chest, a fist
raised and ready to be thrown.

But before Owen could punch John as he lay defenseless beneath him, Charlotte rushed across the distance between them and
grabbed him by the arm, struggling to hold him. “No, Owen! This isn’t right!”

“What’s right is that he pay for what he’s done! For what he did to Caroline Wallace! For what he did to my mother!”

Owen’s words roused John from the cobwebs blanketing his head. He had been dazed, teetering on the verge of losing consciousness,
but the mention of Caroline’s name appeared to stir something in him, like embers in a dying fire, and he began to struggle,
blood smearing the corners of his mouth.

“What… what did you…?” he asked. “Whose name… did you say?”

“Caroline Wallace, you bastard!” Owen raged, renewing his desire to beat John to death, nearly pulling his hand free from
Charlotte’s grasp. “The woman you got pregnant and chased away because you were too much of a damn coward to take responsibility
for what you’d done! The woman whose life you ruined, who died alone!”

“But I… but I didn’t… but I loved her…” John stammered.

Throughout their exchange, Charlotte kept trying to force Owen off John. He fought against her every second, far stronger
than she, but his attention was much more focused on his opponent than on her. She strained hard, desperate to keep Owen from
doing something she felt certain he would come to regret, and, through constant struggle, she finally managed to topple them
both to the floor.

“Get off me!” he shouted.

“This is not the way to do this!” she insisted, “This isn’t what your mother would have wanted!”

“Don’t tell me what she would have—”

“Stop! Just… just stop!” John suddenly shouted, the authority in his shaken voice enough to silence the bickering between
Charlotte and Owen; outside, a peal of thunder served as punctuation for his demand. “Just stop for a minute,” he repeated,
but now his voice had lost all of its strength, a balloon that suddenly found itself without any air.

For a moment, everything returned to the instant just after Owen had struck John and the world had gone still. No one moved
or made a sound. But unlike what had come before, when she had wondered at the frozen world, Charlotte knew that it would
regain its natural state, and that was what scared her.

“You’re… you said that… Caroline Wallace is your mother…?” John managed to ask, stumbling over the words.

“She
was
,” Owen spat. “She
was
my mother.”

“And Hannah is your sister… your twin sister…” John said, finally putting together all of the pieces as the strength of the
storm intensified.

“And you are our bastard of a father!”

“No,” John said, his eyes finding Owen for the first time since he and Charlotte had entered the barn; what could be seen
there was best described as pity mixed with sadness. “No, I am not.”

“Liar!”

“Listen to me, Owen,” John protested. “As… difficult as it is for me to hear… that you and Hannah are Caroline’s
children, it is not because I ain’t man enough to accept responsibility. I have been many things in my time on this here earth,
even a coward like you’re cussin’ me, but a liar I have never been. You need to listen good to what I’m sayin’ to you. I’m
tellin’ you the truth.”

“My mother had a letter with your name on it when she died! I read it! It said that you were the love she never forgot, that
she could never have!”

“And she was right,” John agreed, “but the reason we couldn’t be together wasn’t ’cause of my choice, but ’cause of hers.”

Charlotte was floored with disbelief. She found herself captured by John’s words, rapt with attention and desperate to know
more. But there was no pleasure in knowing that she was right, that there was much more to Caroline Wallace’s story than Owen
had ever been willing to accept. It was hard not to believe John, but it was clear that Owen would not be easy to convince.

“I don’t believe you!”

“I loved your mother more than anything in this world.” For an instant, John’s eyes searched Charlotte’s and she remembered
the things he had told her in the truck. “There was nothing I wanted more than to make her my wife, to father her children,
to spend every day and night content by her side, makin’ our way in this world.”

“You’re lying!” Owen said, angrily shaking his head. “You’re trying to trick me, to protect yourself!”

“Goddamn it, Owen! Listen to me!” John thundered,
asserting himself and demanding that he be heard. “Your mother was the finest woman I’ve ever met and she weren’t the sort
that would be happy knowin’ any son of hers wasn’t willin’ to listen to a man explainin’ himself! At least give her that respect!”

Owen was silenced for a moment, uncertain of how he was supposed to react. Charlotte could see that he was thinking it over,
trying to make it work in his head, to make it fit against all of the hate he had been carrying for so long.

“If you loved her like you say you did,” Owen said, losing much of his fury, “if you wanted a family with her so badly, tell
me why she left here and died alone.”

“I… I wish I were your father, Owen… I wish to God…” His voice trailed off.

“Tell him,” Charlotte said, the first words that had been spoken between them since they had entered the barn.

John sighed deeply, nodding. “The first time I set eyes on Caroline Wallace, I knew I wanted her to be my wife more than I
wanted to draw my next breath. She had other suitors, men who had a hell of a lot more to offer than I ever did, but somehow
she saw through my rough exterior for the man I was inside, and gave me her heart. When she made her choice, the other fellas
was surely disappointed, but they understood and let us be. But there was one man who never let it go.

“Carter Herrick… he was a bastard even when we was boys, not far from our daddies’ knees. He never could ’cept
losin’, even when it come to marbles or some other such, so it shouldn’t been no surprise that he wouldn’t come to grips with
losin’ a woman he thought belonged to him. In his own way, he loved Caroline, too. Lookin’ back on it now, we weren’t nothin’
but kids, all of us, even Carter, older than Sarah and ’bout the same age as the two of you. But that ain’t no excuse for
what happened.

“One night when Caroline was headin’ home from this here ranch, walkin’ when she shouldn’t never have been allowed to be alone,
she was attacked by a fella come out of the side of the road. He dragged her…” John faltered, his voice thick with emotion.
“Dragged her… into the bushes… and raped her…”

“Oh, my God!” Charlotte exclaimed.

Owen remained silent, his breathing ragged and fierce.

“No matter how much she fought, no matter how much she screamed, no one heard her or come to help… and her attacker never
stopped…”

Charlotte recoiled in horror; to even imagine a man forcing himself on her against her will made her sick to her stomach.
That it had happened to Owen’s mother was just as bad, but she knew that worse was to come; if what John was telling them
was true, then…

“Caroline never told anyone what happened, not even me, not at first,” John continued, tears in his eyes. “When she found
out she was pregnant, knowing that it had happened the night she was raped, that was when she told me…

“She’d known from the moment he come out into the moonlight that it was Carter Herrick that done it. Said he talked to her
the whole time he was havin’ his way with her, tellin’ her that if he couldn’t have her, that he’d make sure she was ruined
for anyone else, meanin’ me. When he’d left her there, broken and cryin’, the last thing he’d said was that he loved her,
but she hadn’t given him no other choice to make.”

“Is Carter Herrick still alive?” Owen asked, his lip snarling.

John slowly nodded. “He is.”

“Why?” Owen shook. “Why wouldn’t you have made sure the man who raped the woman you loved was dead before the next morning
sun?”

“Because of Caroline. Because she knew that I was little more than a boy, hotheaded enough to go off half-cocked and do something
that I would pay for for the rest of my life,” he explained. “Carter’s family was better off than any in Sawyer. Makin’ him
pay would’ve torn our lives in two. She didn’t want that for me, would not even hear of it. So she made me promise, made me
swear on my love for her that I wouldn’t take revenge on the son of a bitch that had forced himself on her. I didn’t want
to do it, but I couldn’t deny her; I just couldn’t.” Tears flowed freely down John Grant’s face. “She did it ’cause she wanted
to protect me, to make sure I was safe, all ’cause I failed to protect her, to make up for the moment I wasn’t there when
she needed me.”

Charlotte knew that John was telling them the truth; there was no way that he was capable of lying so brazenly. The story
he was recounting had been locked away for a long time, hidden from the world in which he lived. In among the tears, there
may even have been some relief for finally being able to release his burden.

“And then she left Sawyer,” Charlotte suggested.

“I could’ve lived with it,” John struggled, unable to look at either of them so instead he looked down at his shaking hands.
“I could have raised her child as if it were my own, but Caroline decided that the shame of her rape was her burden to bear
alone. She figured that every time I was lookin’ at the child, I’d be remindin’ myself of what had happened, but I wouldn’t
have…

“One day she was just gone, leavin’ her family and disappearin’ into the countryside. She left me a note that I have to this
day. If you still don’t believe me, you can read it.”

Looking at Owen, Charlotte could see that there would be no need for further proof; though his fists were still balled and
there was tension in his shoulders, his eyes had softened; his intent was no longer violence… at least not toward John Grant.

“Why didn’t you go after her?” he asked.

“I tried, Owen. I really did. Pert near spent every cent I had trackin’ all around the Southwest, even down to the border
of Mexico, but I could never find her, ’specially when she didn’t want to be found,” he said, clearly still
pained. “In the end, I found a new life with Amelia. She’d known ’bout Caroline, has always accepted that my heart lies with
another, but what we have is worth carin’ for, worth fightin’ for.

“All these years, I wondered whatever ’came of Caroline’s child… and I guess now I know…”

Outside, the storm kept raging, the wind rising to tug at the barn’s open door, pushing it back into the wall with a crash.
But no one moved until Owen rose up to his feet, pain in his face.

“So my mother… was raped… by Carter Herrick…?” he asked.