“He looks like he could take your leg off,” Thomas observed.
“Only when provoked.” Hayden hadn’t seen his uncle for a few years and he was struck again by Thomas’s ageless quality. His hair was thick and white and there wasn’t an ounce of extra padding on his trim body. His trademark mustache was neatly clipped and his eyes were shrewd. Somewhere around sixty, Thomas was as sharp as he’d ever been.
“Thought you’d probably show up sometime,” Thomas said as he smoothed the flat of his hand over his hair. “That’s why I waited. Bradworth said you called and I thought I could clear up a few company matters.”
“I can handle it,” Hayden replied, slightly rankled that his uncle thought he needed help deciphering the company books.
“Well, that’s good to hear.” Thomas rewarded Hayden with a wide smile. “The way Bradworth talked, I thought you might be turning the whole damned operation over to charity.”
“Bradworth talks too much,” Hayden said, retrieving a key from his pocket and unlocking the door. He shoved it open, and Leo, nails clicking, ran through the foyer.
“He only talks to the right people.” Thomas accepted Hayden’s silent invitation to walk into the house. As he did, his practiced smile fell. Hayden guessed that a host of memories crept through his mind. Absently Thomas touched the rail of the stairs and his lips rolled inward. Hayden could only guess what Thomas was thinking. This had been where Jackson Moore had hidden out overnight all those years ago when the whole town of Gold Creek thought he’d murdered Thomas’s son, Roy. Just this past summer, the truth had finally come out and not only had Thomas’s younger son’s wife, Laura, confessed to the crime, but the entire town had learned that Jackson was Thomas’s bastard son.
Hayden, never close to his uncle, was at a loss for words. “Mom told me about Laura,” he said, as much to break the ice as anything. “I’m sorry.”
“Not half as sorry as I am,” Thomas admitted as they walked into the den. “Brian’s never gotten over it, I’m afraid…. He still works for the company, but…” Thomas shrugged, and his shoulders seemed a little more sloped. His life hadn’t turned out as he had planned, Hayden knew. His son Roy had been killed; Brian had embezzled from the company and his wife had been found to be Roy’s murderess. Toni…well, stubborn, strong-willed Toni was off to college back East and Thomas’s political ambitions had all but died in the scandals involving his children. The rift between Thomas and Jackson, his bastard son, would probably never be repaired and he was estranged from his wife.
Hayden almost felt sorry for his uncle. Almost. He still didn’t trust the guy. Thomas was as slippery as a seal in a tank of oil. Opening the old liquor cabinet, Hayden found a bottle of Irish whiskey with an unbroken seal. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Thomas nodded. “Guess you can afford it now.”
Hayden pulled two crystal glasses from the cupboard, wiped them out with the tail of his shirt and splashed amber-colored liquor into each one. “To Roy,” he said, handing his uncle a glass.
Thomas frowned, then touched his glass to Hayden’s and downed his shot. “I wish that boy would’ve lived,” he said.
“Me, too.” Roy had been Hayden’s friend. True, they’d oftentimes quarreled, and just before his death, Roy had proved himself to be a royal pain in the backside, but there had been years…many years while Hayden was growing up a lonely rich kid when Roy and Brian had been his only friends.
Hayden gulped the fiery liquid, feeling the heat slide down his throat. Thomas tossed back his drink, as well, and accepted another shot of whiskey in his glass.
“To your father,” Thomas said, and Hayden gritted his teeth. “May he rest in peace.”
“And get what he deserves.” Again the glasses clinked, but Hayden sipped his drink slowly this time.
“You’re still blaming him.”
Hayden’s muscles tightened. “I just don’t like anyone trying to run my life.”
The silence between them stretched to the breaking point before Thomas, in an effort to change the conversation, asked, “Where were you tonight?” He threw off a dustcover and settled into a worn leather chair. Placing the heel of his shoe on the matching ottoman, he eyed his nephew as Hayden opened the damper of the fireplace and lit the dust-dry logs that had sat for years in the grate. “I heard the boat.”
Hayden tensed a little. For an unnamed reason he didn’t want to discuss Nadine. “Bradworth hired a woman to clean the place. She left a ring here and I took it back to her.”
“By boat?”
“She lives across the lake.”
Thomas scowled and glanced through the windows to the darkness beyond. The lake wasn’t visible through the glass, but lights on the distant shore winked in the night. “Who is she?”
“Someone Bradworth got from an agency in town. HELP!, I think it was.”
A shadow flickered in Thomas’s gaze and the corners of his mouth tightened almost imperceptibly. “Nadine Warne?”
“That’s right.”
Thomas’s eyes darkened, but he didn’t comment and Hayden was left with the feeling that their conversation was unfinished, that Thomas knew something about Nadine that he didn’t. Not that he cared, he reminded himself. What she did with her life, other than cleaning this damned house, didn’t affect him.
Finishing their drinks, they discussed his mother and how she was coping since Hayden’s father’s death. Then the conversation turned to the string of mills he’d inherited. Though the largest sawmill was located in Gold Creek, there were other smaller operations in northern California as well as in southern Oregon.
“Those mills have been in the family for decades,” Thomas said, leaning back in his chair. “Especially the one here, in Gold Creek. It was the first. Monroe Sawmill is a way of life—practically a tradition—to the people of Gold Creek. When times were tough during the depression, the company store or the sawmill and the logging company kept this town afloat. Even employees whose hours had been cut back were given credit to buy food and clothing for their families.