Montana Darling(7)
“Oh, wow. I forgot you had it.”
She passed the camera to him but didn’t let go right away. “That’s not like you. It’s not like you to leave without saying goodbye, either. Something’s wrong.”
“Maybe everything.”
She glanced at her watch. “It’s time for my break. Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
He didn’t argue. His life was in the toilet—and he was being evicted from his own land. He’d take any help he could find. “Thanks. I’d like that.”
“I’ll meet you outside in a minute.”
“Good. I need to make a call.”
He trotted down the steps and jogged to a nearby park bench. He opened his phone, grateful to see a small charge. Enough to call his stepfather. His fingers drummed impatiently on the curved metal armrest as he waited.
“Ryker. I was expecting this call weeks ago. Still playing the dilettante arteest, I see. Where are you?”
“Montana. Where I’ve been camping on land that apparently no longer belongs to me, if a woman named Mia Zabrinski is to be believed.”
“I don’t recognize the name, but…she could be right.”
“How is that possible, Howard? I didn’t sell my land. I’m pretty damn sure Flynn didn’t sell my land.”
“Actually, he did.”
“Bullshit.”
“Watch your language, young man. Settle down or we won’t be discussing anything further.” Same autocratic, hardline Howard. A man Ryker had hated on sight the moment Mom introduced him to her two grieving sons.
“Flynn would not sell our father’s property. We planned to subdivide the ten acres into two lots and both build cabins here for our retirement.”
“Yes, well, plans change. The economy changes. As administrator of your trust, it’s incumbent upon me to make sure your investments are diverse and a mix of safe and aggressive. A couple…three years ago, a hiccup in the market made some of the riskier investments bottom out. In an attempt to recoup those losses, I needed capital. You were in Africa, I think. Your brother authorized the sale. It’s only dirt, Ryker. Once your portfolio is healthy again, you can buy another patch of dirt in any state you wish. There are fifty, you know. Montana is not Nirvana.”
A blur of red clouded Ryker’s eyes. The color he associated with seeing Colette die. The pressure on his chest made his voice low and harsh. “You sold my land without my permission. Is that even legal?”
“I told your mother you’d climb on your high horse and start spouting legalities when you found out. She promised me you’d understand. We have three kids in college, Ryker. Do you have any idea how much that costs?”
“Yes. I do. Since you refused to pay for my college, I know exactly how much we’re talking about.”
The last came out as a full-blown shout.
Howard hung up. He had warned Ryker to watch his tone, and Howard Margolis never went back on a threat. He’d threatened to cut off Flynn and Ryker if they didn’t live at home and follow the career path he thought best. Since Flynn already had two years in Penn State and wasn’t about to change majors to become an accountant, he dropped out of college and got a job in the US Forest Service as a firefighter. Ryker spent his final months of high school feeling like an unwelcome stranger in his own home—a home Howard and his four children, Peter, Penny, Charlotte and Ben, more or less took over. And Mom let them.
“But your room is so big,” Mom had reasoned. “The girls will share it, and you and Peter can have Flynn’s room. Ben needs a room of his own because of his condition.” Some mysterious breathing problem that sucked up everybody’s time, attention and money. The fat, ugly kid reminded Ryker of the Garbage Pail Kids cards his friends used to collect. He’d hated the little brat and even wished he’d die.
He wondered how old Benny was now? Was he attending college on Ryker’s dime, too?
His fingers tightened on his phone. He was so damn furious he didn’t even hear Louise approach.
“Ryker?”
Her voice held a note of caution.
He shoved the phone in his pocket. “Sorry.”
“Bad news?”
“You could say that. It appears my stepfather has been draining my trust fund dry over the past year…or longer.” Before Colette’s death, Ryker had been so in love he hadn’t paid any attention to his U.S. accounts. Since Ryker went off the deep end trying to make sense of life, love, loss, he’d lived mostly off the grid, using a pay as you go phone and spending cash for his purchases. “And there’s a good chance he sold the land I’ve been living on. A woman claiming to be the rightful owner dropped by this morning to tell me to get off her land or she’d call the sheriff.”
She sat beside him. “You need a lawyer.”
“I can’t afford one.” The reality of his situation struck hard. He didn’t have enough money for a train ticket home. “Maybe if I sell my bike…” No. He needed deeper pockets and more resources. He needed help. “Once my brother gets off the fire line in California, he’ll lend me whatever I need to get to the bottom of this.”
Louise shook her head. “That might be too late. The fires sound like they’re getting worse, not better. If this lady is threatening to evict you, you need help now.” She pulled out her phone and punched in a number.
Ryker started to protest but Louise held up one finger, in a bossy librarian manner. When the person on the other end answered, she said, “Good morning, dear. I need a favor. Text me Mia Zabrinski’s number. You mentioned she and Austen are opening a law office. I’m sending her her first client.”
Mia Zabrinski?
Ryker sat back and looked to the sky. A rumble of laughter started low in his belly and crowed upward, releasing in a loud guffaw. The connections in small towns never ceased to amaze him.
“What on earth is so funny?” Louise asked.
He wiped the tears from the corner of his eyes using the back of his hand. “Sorry about that. The irony is so rich. Mia Zabrinski is the woman who said she and her husband bought my land.”
“Oh, my. Well, that’s not good.” Louise took a deep breath and let it out. “Plan B.” She held up her phone and pushed a name on the screen. “We’ll call Ren Fletcher, then. He helped Oscar and me straighten out a problem we had with my husband’s ex-partner. I’m not sure he’s taking new clients—he’s a newlywed, but he’ll point you in the right direction.”
Ryker looked toward Copper Mountain. Where, he wondered, would that be?
Chapter 3
‡
“Mom. Stop. Seriously. This is useless. My head was full of wicked ugly drugs when I packed. I don’t know where anything is.”
Mia, her mother, Sarah, and the kids’ dog, Roxy, had been digging through packing boxes stacked with pyramid-builder efficiency in one stall of the Zabrinskis’s two-car garage. Mom clamped her hands on her slightly widened hips impatiently. “That doesn’t sound like you. It must be here somewhere.”
Mia closed her eyes. The person who packed these boxes was a stranger—a woman possessed by poisonous chemicals, and by an even-more-poisonous anger. She’d wanted to hide all evidence of the perfect life she’d once bragged about to any and all that would listen.
“I have the best husband and most wonderful kids any woman could ever hope to have,” she’d claimed at the birthday party Edward had thrown for her…a few weeks before he broke the news that he was leaving her for another woman. Someone who “…isn’t married to her job,” he’d told her.
After a year or so of trying to hold the fragments of her perfect life together—while battling cancer, her devastated children’s sadness and anger and her ex-husband’s joy, she’d finally admitted the truth: she hated her life. She hated the monstrous house she’d once claimed to love. She hated its five toilets that nobody could flush, let alone keep clean. She hated the pool that absorbed money as fast as it grew algae. She hated Edward and was ambivalent toward their children, who had turned, almost overnight, into snarly, contemptuous, demanding brats. She tolerated Roxy, the mocha-colored labradoodle, who, at least, had the good sense not to bite the hand that fed her. She kept Roxy—for companionship—and sent Hunter and Emilee to Marietta to stay with her parents while Mia set out to deconstruct her perfect life.
In truth, although she blamed chemo for her brain fog, the drugs that may or may not have been necessary to rid her body of any trace of cancer were probably out of her system by the time she started packing. She’d done such a terrible job simply because she didn’t care about any of the crap she’d once valued so highly.
Unfortunately, a few important items—such as the children’s birth certificates and the deed to the lot she and Edward bought to retire on—were nowhere to be found. She’d gotten duplicates of the birth certificates and immunization records in time to register the kids for school. And she probably could obtain a duplicate deed from the Crawford County Clerk as well. She just couldn’t tolerate the idea of having lost yet another piece of herself.