Page 64 of Whispers

Paige’s footsteps thundered d

own the stairs. “I already told her you were down here playing pool.”

“Damn it all, Paige. Use your head.” He crossed to the bar, wishing he had a good stiff drink, and picked up the phone. “Look, I’m busy right now. I’ll call you back.”

“Wait a minute. Did Jack show up at work today?”

Weston’s gut clenched. “He was late.”

“But he was there.”

“Until I fired his ass.”

“You . . . you what?”

“He’s gone. History. Your brother was the worst worker on the green chain, Crystal. I let him go.”

“But you couldn’t.” He heard the disappointment in her voice, and it got to him. There was something about her that got deep under his skin; that was why he doubted that he’d ever break it off with her, not completely. She’d be his mistress for life.

“I did. Ask him.”

“I would, but he hasn’t come home yet.”

“I’d look down at the local watering hole. Sounds like your brother might just be drowning his troubles in firewater.”

“You’re a bastard,” she said calmly.

“Always have been.”

Before she hung up, she muttered something in Chinook, an irritating habit she had that bothered him. He didn’t like not being able to understand what her gobbledygook language said, and though she probably just called him the Native American equivalent of an asshole, it worried him that she might have leveled a curse in his direction, not that he believed in all that tribal mumbo jumbo. Still, his skin crawled as he disconnected.

“Trouble with the little woman?” Harley taunted. Christ, his brother could be irritating.

“Not for me.” Weston grabbed his cue, took the eight ball from Harley’s weak fingers, and set up his shot again. He didn’t have to worry about his brother’s wisecracks, his sister’s weird antics, or some whore and her curse. After all, he was Weston Taggert.

He could do whatever he damn well pleased.

Fifteen

His old man was drunk.

Again.

And tonight it bothered the hell out of Kane. Why, he couldn’t fathom, but ever since Jack’s revelation that Claire Holland and Harley Taggert were engaged, Kane had been spoiling for a fight. He itched to slam his fist into a wall, a tree trunk, and/or Taggert’s smug face, not necessarily in that order.

“Son of a bitch,” he growled, reaching to the top of a battle-scarred chest of drawers where his keys rested in an ashtray. It was the middle of the month and Hampton had gone through his fifths of expensive booze. For the last week and a half all he’d been tossing back was cheap rotgut whiskey, while he groused about his ex-wife and what a conniving, self-centered bitch she’d been to leave him alone, crippled, and with a headstrong boy to raise.

“You don’t know the half of it, Pop,” Kane muttered under his breath as he slid open the window. He heard his father’s wheelchair zip across the linoleum while the television blared, sounds of laughter for the late night’s talk show host’s monologue seeping through the thin plaster walls.

God, Kane hated it here. Trapped with a bitter cripple who spurned any help neighbors or relatives had extended. Kindhearted, churchgoing people in town had offered Hampton jobs—at the hardware store, the fish cannery, the feed store, and even an insurance company, but Hampton Kane, ex-tree-topper, wasn’t about to take their charity. No, he was content to wallow in his misery and, when he did work, it was at his own form of chain saw art.

The front lawn and porch were littered with sawdust and Hampton’s special kind of sculpture—unsold wooden sentinels that appeared to guard the place. Snarling bears, fierce-faced Native Americans, bowlegged cowboys with matches in the corners of their mouths, and rearing horses with wild eyes and curling manes were carved from the trunks of the kind of trees from which he’d fallen and lost the use of his legs. It was as if Hampton was engaged in a private war with the forests surrounding Chinook and Stone Illahee, and his enemies included every last stick of old growth timber as well as anyone with the last name of Holland.

People who stopped to look at his wares often thought the scarred chunks of fir were quaint, and that Hampton was an eccentric artist, a man whose dark disposition was the result of his inner need to express himself rather than because he held on to his hatred as if it were a gift from God or that he soaked his brain in cheap alcohol.

In Kane’s estimation, it was all crap.

The front door banged shut and a minute later Pop’s chain saw roared to life as yet another unsuspecting stump was about to become a wolf or salmon or some other Northwest icon. Kane wasn’t about to stick around and find out. He lifted himself onto the window ledge, then slid to the edge of the roof and lowered himself to the ground. He wasn’t sneaking out. No, his father wouldn’t even miss him. He just didn’t want to explain himself to the old man tonight.