Danger, Sweetheart Page 8

  “Pretty easy, because North Dakota—” Natalie interrupted.

  “—yes, although I passed quite a few hills in my Supertruck, even so at most we would only see fifty percent.” Then, as if he was anticipating Natalie’s furious rebuttal, he added, “But quite a nice view anyway.”

  “Wait till the sun rises at five thirty tomorrow morning; see if you love it then.” She’d gone for bitchy, but it came out exasperated. At least it wasn’t fond exasperation.

  “Thank you for the warning; you are most kind,” he replied, and though he was trying for solemn the giggle ruined it. And the sight of the big, neatly dressed man wriggling around on a double bed over a decade old so he could look out the window while laughing his ass off just slew her. She couldn’t help it, she tried to help it, but she laughed, too. The mingled noise was … how’d he put it? Wonderful.

  Oh, hell. I am not finding Vegas Douche charming. That shit ain’t happening. Not. Happening.

  Right?

  Right.

  Twelve

  Natalie Lane was a would-be murderess, a fiend so vile she had the potential to give Elizabeth Báthory competition. She was clearly trying to kill him, and had an excellent chance of succeeding, but he had yet to fathom her motive. Inherent sociopathy, he assumed, was not a motive, or at least not enough of one.

  Oh God, she’s so beautiful and her hands are so small and I want to hold them, I want to hold them all the time—

  He shook off the sentiment. He would die on this farm. This horrible, hateful, brutal fucking farm. Heartbreak Farm, ha! It ought to be renamed Myocardial Infarction Farm.

  Oh my gaaaawd! Rake laughed in his head. Drama queen is not a good look for you, big brother; it’s worse than that time I dyed your hair orange in your sleep. Sure, everybody called you Mario Batali all summer, but you had some dignity, man.

  He had suspected nothing that first day. In fact, he had taken quite a liking to Heartbreak at first look, not least because Natalie Lane, of all people, worked there! And appeared to love it and everything about it: the work, the animals, the buildings, the house, the best ways to torture Blake … it filled the already lovely woman with zeal that left her dazzling.

  Zeal that left her … my God, man. Get ahold of yourself.

  Good advice. He tried.

  Natalie had given him a tour of the house, the barn (called Main One for a reason she would not explain), the other outbuildings. She had introduced him to several sullen men and women, and if glances could decimate he would have been murdered half a dozen times before lunch. Also, lunch was not at lunchtime. He had missed lunchtime. By thirty-eight minutes.

  “Breakfast at five, lunch at nine thirty, supper at four.”

  “What about second breakfast?”

  Yes! A small smile. “God, I love Billy Boyd.” He found that puzzling but didn’t comment. (Hours later, as his griping stomach kept him awake, he Googled and saw that was the name of the actor who played Peregrin Took in a series of movies that were somewhat popular. And thank goodness. He’d been afraid she had referenced a boyfriend, and then been annoyed he’d been afraid.) “Almost as much as Peter Dinklage,” she’d finished (it was fine; Google had explained Mr. Dinklage was another actor and thus their relationship was platonic at most).

  Along the way he was educated on the difference between a ranch and a farm. “Heartbreak Ranch? Really? Have we somehow ended up in a nineteenth-century Western?”

  “Not a ranch. It’s a farm.”

  “Difference, please?”

  “A farm raises mostly crops. A ranch raises mostly cattle. A farm can have loads of cows and still be a farm. A dairy farm that grows no crops is still a farm. All ranches are farms, but not all farms are ranches.”

  “That makes no logical sense,” he protested, annoyed, as he often was, by imprecise explanations. “Is there a cutoff point? If you have so many acres for farming, and so many cows for milking and what have you, where are you on the spectrum that the addition of one more cow makes a farm of a ranch?”

  She had stared at him and that was the first time he felt close to death by foreman beatdown. Then had bypassed the definitions and added, “And I can’t imagine you care, but it’s called Heartbreak Farm because in the early nineteen hundreds a townie from Sweetheart proposed to a farmer’s daughter.”

  “A story,” he said, leaning against his Supertruck. (After she had given him a tour of the house they had returned to the great outdoors.) “Excellent.”

  “She turned him down because she wanted her kids to grow up the way she had, working the land, and all he wanted to do was leave town and make his fortune and never come back. So he left town and made his fortune … and came back a decade later. He bought up all this land and started building.” She gestured at the house, the barn, the fields. “The house first. And when that was done he asked her to marry him again, and she said no. So he built the garage. She said no. He bought more land. She said no. He built Main One.”

  “And then she said yes,” Blake said, since the answer was self-evident.

  “Well, no, by then she had died of a stroke.”

  “Unexpected.”

  “She was eighty-four by then.”

  “This is a terrible story.”

  Natalie shrugged. “He never built anything else. But for a long time he meant to. The barn was nicknamed Main One because lots of people heard him call it that. ‘This barn is the main one, but I’ll add on a silo.’ ‘This is the main one until I build more outbuildings.’ Like that.”

  “Again: terrible story.”

  “He did eventually settle for someone else and married her and fathered his first child at age seventy-nine.”

  “He must have indulged heavily in powdered rhino horn. Which was a legal indulgence back then, so the only stigma was one of humiliation, not societal.”

  “Dunno about that, but he was your great-grandfather.”

  “Ah.” Blake took a moment to process the new data. A beautiful woman had on short acquaintance told him more about his family than his mother ever had. “So this farm belongs to my mom now?”

  “No. His kid sold it and it’s been changing hands ever since.”

  “Ah.” This, then, was the moral: things come full circle. His grandfather, of whom he knew nothing save that he turned his back on his daughter when she needed his counsel and comfort as she never would again, sold the farm, and three generations later Blake tried to sell and was now penalized. As far as life lessons went, it was obscure and unhelpful.

  “Thank you for explaining.” Then a dreadful thought hit him. “Are you one of the families my mom told me about? Have you done things you never wished to do in order to hold on to your family’s land, which has been in your family a century or more?”

  She was giving him an odd look, but at least it wasn’t a glare. “No. I’m not in one of those families.”

  “Excellent.”

  Later that same day, she had introduced him to the other farm employees,

  (field hands? was that PC?),

  all of whom had rhyming names

  (“Harry, Larry, and Gary? Really?”

  “Really.”)

  and were sullen and disinclined to be friendly. They made themselves very busy whenever approached, whacking nails into posts, using pitchforks to stir things around, starting up a tractor and driving away … random farm chores he didn’t yet understand. What Blake found interesting was that they didn’t seem to care for Natalie, either. Perhaps she was a strict part-time foreman.

  He heard scattered mutterings from Harry,

  (no, the redhead is Gary),

  one of which was, puzzlingly, “douche” and the other “Degas.” He had no idea why a trio of male farmhands would be concerned about feminine hygiene, but such things were not his business. Nor had he been aware those same employees had a passion for the works of Edgar Degas

  (was it Degas’ uncanny ability to depict movement they found worth commenting on, or his penchant for p
ortraying human isolation? must find out),

  but it was heartening to know that there was at least one topic they could all discourse on.

  Well, more than one, but he was reluctant to chat about how they were nearly made jobless and homeless by his various dealings with the local bank, Sweetheart Trust. (Ah, the carefree days of three weeks earlier when he was in his comfortable Residence Inn residence, authorizing wires to Sweetheart Trust while indulging in a Cobb salad with extra bacon and pondering what not to buy Rake for their upcoming birthday, because Rake was terrible.)

  Natalie knew of Blake’s complicity (he wasn’t sure how but assumed it was the grapevine, something small towns were prone to, or so Updike’s Rabbit, Run and Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird indicated). Natalie could have found out who he was in any one of a dozen ways; how she knew his identity wasn’t the puzzle.

  Her continuing manner of strained but polite dislike made no sense. If she knew he had paid off the other mortgages and surrendered the titles to Garrett Hobbes, she must know that, days before the closing was to happen, Blake had left Heartbreak alone. She should be pleased with him, correct? Especially since he was there to try to save the farm by being worked to death. At least, that was what his mother’s logic had indicated. So why the stiff, unpleasant manner with him, with only an occasional smile or laugh, and that given over most reluctantly? It was a conversation he wished for and dreaded in equal parts.

  Bottom line: she no longer liked him, and it was driving him mad.

  However things would play out, his first day at Heartbreak had been tiring, though he had done little more than explore the area and meet the employees, all of whom liked to discuss douching and Degas when they thought he was out of earshot. Perhaps it was being out in the fresh air most of the day, or perhaps his brain was demanding it power down to process everything he’d learned thus far. Whatever the reason, he collapsed onto the attic bed with a grateful sigh, and darkness began to descend almost at once. Before it took him completely, he reminded himself tomorrow was a new day, a new start, a new chance.

  If I turn out to be even a bit good at this, perhaps Natalie will smile more. And if I prove to have no knack for this, perhaps Mom will relent, which would make me smile more. Either way, tomorrow is another beginning. Not a new beginning; everyone says that, which is odd, because by definition all beginnings are new, so they’re merely indulging in redundancy, which is a waste of nnnnnzzzzzzzzzzz …

  Thirteen

  Myocardial Infarction Farm was like the apple Queen Grimhilde presented to Snow White: lovely on the outside while hiding the excruciating death within.

  Blake realized this when he attempted to get out of bed and at least 400 of his body’s 642 muscles seized in protest. His usual disorientation upon waking in a strange place

  (ow everything hurts did I work out in my sleep? or get run over? in my sleep?)

  kicked in and it took him a few seconds to recall where he was. Sweetheart, North Dakota. The farm. The attic, facedown on the bed. Fully clothed, shoes on. Natalie had delicately suggested he invest in a pair of cowboy boots

  (“You’re not dressed right; you’re not shod right; you look like a cruise ship tourist in those tennis shoes, God, why am I putting up with any of this?”)

  and his verbatim reply had been equally courteous

  (“Never! I would literally, literally and not figuratively, literally die before investing in cowboy boots. And where do you keep the Band-Aids?”),

  if also vehement.

  Sweating, because the sun had been shining on him for hours (in Natalie’s defense, she had warned him of the perils of east-facing windows when one lives on a planet that rotates in that direction). Right hand clutching a tube of BENGAY like a smoker clutched a pack of cigarettes. Left hand clutching his cell phone, as he had been in the middle of texting Rake his threat du jour, because Rake was terrible. Blake cracked one eye open and squinted at the last text he sent.

  The deepest darkest depths of Hell await you, little brommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Text sent 7:45 P.M.

  He slooowly began allowing his muscles to obey his brain’s command to cease their complaining and get to work and calmed himself by pondering his position.

  Must have collapsed on the bed and sank into sleep like I was sucking down ether.

  He wasn’t dying. He hadn’t been in a coma. He hadn’t been in a horrific accident (probably; he hadn’t quite abandoned the cherished daydream that this was all a train wreck–induced delusion). He had worked harder than he ever had in his life, and that included the summer he spent assisting the University of Leicester unearth Richard III’s skeleton from its parking lot prison.

  Working Heartbreak Farm was more difficult than digging up a dead body. But his muscles would adapt, making it easier to get through days like yesterday.

  “Oh God,” he groaned, stumbling to his feet like a drunken octogenarian with two sprained ankles. “My muscles will adapt! That might be the worst news of my week. I’ll get used to this.” The thought was as staggering as it was horrifying.

  He hobbled into the small bathroom just off the stairs, hands pressed to the small of his back

  (so this is why the elderly often walk this way! it’s the only way to curtail the agony. that and an IV full of morphine),

  and groaned at his reflection

  (kill it! kill it with fire! and make it brush its hair)

  and found even the muscles in his fingers had been affected. It took over a minute to finesse the cap off the toothpaste and another before he was brushing his teeth. Muffled groans bubbled from his lips along with toothpaste, making it look like he was in the final stages of rabies.

  He changed into inappropriate work clothes (according to Natalie Lane, but he hadn’t had a chance to upgrade, or would that be downgrade? he’d only packed three outfits in the first place) and limped down the stairs into the kitchen. He was in agony, yes, but at least he could look forward to a hearty breakfast, since he could smell bacon and other wondrous things and oh no no no no!

  “What time is it?” he demanded, and it didn’t sound like a whimper at all, dammit.

  “Time to miss breakfast,” Gary chortled, slooowly finishing the last piece of bacon, because even on short acquaintance it was obvious he was a heartless bastard.

  “I’m ravenous.”

  “Prob’ly should’ve gotten up in time to eat, then.” Gary was—was he? He was! He was positively savoring the bacon, which, Blake could not help but notice, was cooked perfectly to his taste. It stood stiffly in Gary’s grip, crisp and dark, and shrank with each chomp. It looked so delicious Blake was giving serious thought to yanking Gary’s plate away and then licking it.

  “That is it.” Blake wondered at the thump, then realized he had stamped his foot like a child having a tantrum. “Fission has been reached.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’m getting a hot plate. Or a microwave. Or a fireplace. Something with which I can cook in the attic so I don’t have to suffer breakfast before dawn, lunch before ten, and supper at four.”

  His outburst seemed to amuse Gary to no end, and the man let out a blatant chuckle as Blake limped to the refrigerator to extract orange juice and pour himself a glass the size of a flower vase. To think there was a time when he eschewed all fruit juice because of the unnecessary glucose high. Now an unnecessary glucose high was the only thing keeping him from constructive manslaughter.

  A short man, red haired and freckled (and how his job wasn’t murder on the man’s complexion Blake did not understand), tanned and lean, Gary was wearing Natalie Lane–approved work clothes: ancient jeans, a clean but faded red-and-black plaid shirt, broken-in boots, a grimy baseball cap. As he chewed bacon his jaws moved laterally, like a bovine’s.

  “Prob’ly you should just hang it up already.” Grind, grind. “Head on back to Vegas.”

  Blake paused in mid-gulp. Orange juice had never tasted more glorious. He could almost hear his starving cells groan their
gratitude. “How do you know where I’m from?”

  Shrug. “Ever’body knows.”

  Hmm. I feel so … what’s the opposite of comforted? “I’m not hanging it up.” Yet. “It hasn’t even been three days.” Yet.

  “Don’t worry.” Gary stood, bussed his own plates, cutlery, and coffee cup to the sink, then stretched, yawned, and ambled to the door. “It gets worse. Gotta get to work. You, too, I guess. Or, dunno, have more juice or something. Either way, like I said, it’ll get worse.”

  Don’t you threaten me, Gary! I could buy and sell you a thousand times over if my mommy hadn’t frozen my accounts. As a manly threat, it left much to be desired. Perhaps something like when my mommy hears you’ve been mean she’ll make you sorry! Perhaps not.

  Blake sucked down another vase of orange juice, liberated some bread from the pantry, ate two slices in twenty seconds, then shuffled out to face another day of Dante’s Inferno.

  Fourteen

  Are you one of the families my mom told me about? Have you done things you never wished to do in order to hold on to your family’s land, which has been in your family a century or more?

  Well, no. Not at all. Natalie Lane knew exactly who she was: the town boogeyman.

  She had known Blake would have no idea who belonged on Heartbreak and who didn’t. And because she wanted a closer look, she presented herself as his part-time foreman. It wasn’t as though she couldn’t make the time; the bank had already cut her hours to fifteen a week. And it’s not like Gary, Harry, or Larry would care enough to notice, never mind rat her out. They’d be saving most of their ire for Vegas Douche, and thank goodness.

  Okay, so he’s here and you’re here and your sinister disguise has fooled him completely and now what?

  She had to make Blake see the folly of his check-writing ways. Which meant she had to make him love Heartbreak. Love it for itself, not the golf course it was in danger of becoming. Which was impossible. But Sweetheart was in the state it was in because too many people gave up. She was in it to win it, if “win it” meant “eventually slink away in defeat.”