The house felt abnormally still when Jesse walked into the back door. She brushed her fingers over the cardboard that Ty and the other ranch hands had used as a temporary repair on the tiny square windows set into the back door. She stepped carefully around the glass scattered over the kitchen floor. She was going to have to come back in here and sweep up in a little while. But first she needed to see if her worst fears had come true.

Ty had been right. There was nothing missing. At least nothing obvious had been touched or even moved. The furniture was exactly the way that Jesse had left it. Over the last few months, she had begun to declutter a little bit. But that was only natural since she had just about everything from the days of her parents living in this house. Jesse didn’t need years’ and years’ worth of magazines or her mother’s crocheting supplies. There had been a lot of trips to the thrift store and donations made to the local school rummage sale since Jesse moved in.

Now she rested her hand gently on the back of the sofa and tried to see the room as someone who was looking for something very particular. Moving toward the credenza where the tiny television rested, she opened the drawers. They had been tossed. The contents had most certainly been rifled through. Any notebooks or any kind of stray papers were gone. Even the pad of sticky notes that Jesse kept in the top right drawer to write down any phone numbers she saw on the television ads was gone. What did they think they were going to find?

“No,” Jesse whispered. “They didn’t really know what they were looking for. Whoever came in here was just following orders.”

“Jesse?”

She heard boots in the kitchen and knew that Cal was right behind her. Not waiting for him to appear, she headed straight into the dining room and went to the buffet. She knelt in front of the double doors.

Before heading over to Cal’s the other night, she had put everything back exactly the way it had been. It was difficult to believe that it had been almost forty-eight hours or even more since that moment. It felt like centuries had passed. Joe Hernandez was dead. She would never be able to ask him for the truth about his relationship with her mother.

“Jesse?”

“In here,” she called back to Cal. “The dining room.”

Cal’s boots tromped on the hardwood floors as he headed across the front foyer and into the dining room from the direction of the living room. He was moving slowly and deliberately. She knew that he was looking for evidence of intruders, but Jesse knew that anything they’d left was probably miniscule. They hadn’t made a mess. They hadn’t had to.

Jesse pulled the doors open and leaned into the small, dark space. She spotted the silverware immediately. The big rosewood box had been the last thing she had put away before going to find Cal. Now she pulled it out once more. If anyone had looked inside here, they would have seen that silverware and the wedding china right behind it. Jesse could almost believe that poor Amelia had purposefully tucked all of her correspondence into the back corners.

“Oh.” Jesse felt her heart seize in her chest. The ribbon holding that first box of cards and letters closed had been slit with a knife. “Oh, please, no.”

“What’s wrong?” Cal squatted down beside her. “What is that thing?”

“My mother kept every card and letter she ever got.” Jesse held the box in her lap and opened it. “They were in here looking for notes. I can’t believe they didn’t take this.”

He frowned and reached for the card on top of the pile inside the box. “How do you know what they were looking for?”

“All of the pads of paper and even my sticky note pile are gone from the credenza in the living room. They had to be hired thugs or something. They were just told to come in here and dig around looking for this stuff. I’m sure of it.”

“But why?”

“I’m not sure.” Jesse pulled out the second box. The ribbon holding it closed had been slit. “But they don’t appear to have taken these.”

“I guess they didn’t figure cards from other people fell under the heading of notes or letters.”

“They’re fools,” Jesse whispered. “My mother’s journals are in here, Cal. I bet that’s what they were looking for. You just have to dig to the back.”

Jesse reached into the buffet and pulled out box number three. The ribbon was still intact. She had a mental image of a couple of rough-and-tumble cowboys squatting here on the floor and being annoyed out of their minds that they were poking through a woman’s pink poodle-themed pasteboard box filled with birthday cards from three decades ago.

Cal gently untied the ribbon on box number three. “Have you looked through these?”

“No. Why?”

“I just wonder why she hid them.” Cal’s low murmur poked at something in Jesse’s memory.

Jesse sat back on her heels and stared at the buffet. Cal was right. Her mother had been hiding these things. There was no way her father would have ever had a reason to look in here. Jesse had occasionally explored in places like this, but she could often remember her mother telling her that the buffet was off-limits because of the expensive china plates stored here. They had belonged to Jesse’s great-grandmother. The old rose vine pattern around the edges had fascinated Jesse, but she had never paid much attention to what else might have been stored back here.

“I guess I need to take a look at this stuff.”

Cal reached for the box in her lap. “Can I help you?”

“You want to?” Jesse tilted her head to one side and tried to imagine what he might find. “What if we find cards from your father to my mother?”

“Then, that’s what we find.” Cal’s lips were a thin line, and his blue eyes were like the surface of a calm lake. “It’s not like I have illusions about my father, Jesse. He was a man who kept his secrets close. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad thing to find out what some of those were.”

“If you think so.” Jesse could think of no other reason to prevent him. “Have at it, I guess.”

The two of them began pulling out cards and making smaller stacks around them. Jesse stared up at the dining table. This promised to be a huge job. In fact, she could see them sitting here doing this for the rest of the day. So much for that shower she had wanted so badly only an hour ago. Now all she could think about was finding what those men had been sent here to collect.

“Let’s use the table,” Jesse suggested. “You take one end, and we’ll make stacks.”

Cal got to his feet and picked up the small stack of boxes. “Good idea.”

Jesse began unloading the contents of the buffet. It was a lot more stuff than she had initially imagined. There were ten boxes total of loose cards and letters. Then she pulled the twenty-eight journals out of their far corners and set them in the center of the dining table.

“Okay.” Cal set a pretty lacy-paper-edged card on the tabletop. “This pile is for immediate family.” Then he placed a second card on the table in presumably what would become another pile. “These will be friends.”

“Male or female?” Jesse wanted to know.

Cal’s brow knit together. “Let’s go with both for now. If there’s something suspicious, we’ll make another pile. Does that sound good?”

“As good as anything else could.” Jesse looked at the huge amount of stuff on the dining table and sighed. “This seems like a ridiculous task.”

“These have meaning, Jesse. We just have to find it.” Cal reached out and gently hugged her to his body. “Those men were looking for something. Maybe we’ll never really know what they wanted or who sent them, but there’s no doubt that it would help to know what happened all those years ago. This is the closest thing we have to answers.”

“Then, I suppose we need to get reading.” Jesse chose a chair and sat down. Then she picked up a card. “And I apologize in advance for any creepy weirdness you learn about my family.”

He actually laughed and offered her a wink. “I think I’d better say the same.”

That was certainly true enough. The second card that Jesse picked up was to her mother from Joe Hernandez. It wasn’t really all that old. Or rather it had been sent to her mother in the mail just a few months before her death. That was according to the postmark.

Jesse stared at the masculine handwriting on the yellowed surface of the card. It was so very strange to see this from Joe. She cleared her throat. It was tempting to just set the card down and forget about it. She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to wonder. She just wanted to pretend that nothing had happened.

“What’s wrong, Jesse.”

Why was it so easy for Cal to read her? It was a little irritating sometimes. “I found a card from your dad to my mom. It was on her birthday the last year of her life.”

“What does it say?” Cal wasn’t being pushy. He remained seated in his chair halfway down the table. Resting his elbow on the tabletop, he put his chin in his hand and waited for her to get her thoughts together.

Jesse sighed. “He tells her to remember that she has a neighbor close by who knows her better than anyone else. He makes a comment about how she’s still nowhere near his age but that she makes him feel younger every year and he’s grateful for that.”

“Is that weird?” Cal wanted to know. “I don’t think I would have said anything like that to someone that I didn’t know really well. Like you, for instance. I’m not going to send that to some random neighbor.”

Jesse waved the card in front of her. “Would you send a birthday card through the mail to a neighbor at all?”

“I wouldn’t give them a card. Period,” Cal said firmly. “It’s just not my place as a neighbor. And if I wanted to give a neighbor a birthday gift and they were, say, married with a child, it would be a gift to the family.” Cal shrugged. He looked kind of uncomfortable. “It just seems weird, I guess.”

Jesse was nodding as she reached for a new box. She pulled the white ribbon and opened the pasteboard lid. As she pulled out the first letter, she realized that she was looking at a letter from her mother to Cal’s father.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Jesse muttered. She set the letter down and rifled through the contents of that box until she could be sure what she was seeing was right. “I think I found an entire box of letters from my mother to your father.”

Jesse pulled out the first letter and quickly perused the contents. “I don’t get it. She’s talking about a baby.”

“A baby?”

“Yes.” Jesse nodded her head and kept reading. “I keep thinking about that baby and wondering what happened to him. I keep wondering what he would have been like when he became a man. Would he be like you? We won’t ever know.” Jesse stared at the words again and again before looking up at Cal. “What baby?”

“Did your mother have any other children that you knew of?” Cal asked slowly. She could actually see him thinking this through in his head. “It almost sounds like your mother had a miscarriage or gave a kid up or something.”

Jesse felt as though her gut was twisting into a horrible knot of doubt. “So, obviously, I’m not this baby.”

“Obviously,” Cal agreed. “What do the other letters say?”

Jesse began opening them quickly, skimming the contents and then putting them aside. They were mostly focused on how depressed Amelia was feeling. She felt isolated. She felt angry. She felt sad. There was a lot of bitterness in those lines of handwritten text.

“When were those written?” Cal suddenly wanted to know. “Is there a date or anything?”

“No.” Jesse tried to look at the handwriting, but her mother had been one of those women who had very pretty writing with big loops and swirls that seemed to be as consistent as a computer font. “There’s no real identifier. They have dates, but not years. They start in February and then go through about—well, February.”

“So, about a year,” Cal mused. “But when?”

“Oh!” Jesse gasped as she read quickly through a letter that sent chills racing down her spine. “This one talks about meeting a man named Rawling.”

“Shit.”

Cal’s low expletive was a pretty good reflection of how she felt about this whole thing too. Jesse looked at the date. “February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day a little over a year since the first letter. She’s talking about going by herself to the burger joint in town. She felt sad because she was all alone and everyone else had someone. Then she met a man named Rawling who was alone too. He bought her dinner, and now they have another date.”

“Why would she tell my father that?” Cal shook his head. “What kind of sense does that make?”

“I’m going to suggest that your father was already married, because we know that he’s quite a lot older than she is and you’re a lot older than I am,” Jesse added. “So, basically, it sounds like your father and my mother had a thing going. I don’t even know why she would have been here though. She wasn’t from this area.”

“Staying with a friend?”

Jesse shook her head. That wasn’t how things went in her family. Her grandparents had been strict. Her mother hadn’t kept contact with them after she had married Rawling Collins and moved down here to the front range. Only Amelia’s sister had remained in contact.

“I don’t know why my mother was here. I wonder if I’m somehow related to the Farrells. Maybe my mother was staying with them. Maybe that’s how she met your father. She fell in love with him, got pregnant, and then ultimately either lost the baby or gave it up because your father was already married.”

“My mother must have known some of this,” Cal said softly. He gazed at Jesse with a look of mingled shock and horror on his handsome face. “She’s furious with you for something that not only wasn’t your fault but happened before you were born!”

Well, if that didn’t just fit right in with all of the other crap going on in Jesse’s life right now. Sheesh! Except, if this was about a child that nobody knew existed and had no claim to anything because it had been adopted, then who had searched Jesse’s house to try and find old letters and papers? What if there was another player in this story that they hadn’t even identified yet?