“The thing is,” he continued, “I was worried enough I called Dad and Taggert. Dad acted so damned strange that Jeannie and I went to Denver over the weekend to talk to him. They had some very interesting information. Some things I had forgotten over the years and a few things I didn’t know about.”
As Jack continued talking, with Jeannie injecting information where she remembered a few things, Cami began remembering things she had forgotten as a girl as well.
The Corbins’ attempts to take Crowe Mountain just after Crowe’s parents’ deaths were well known. What Cami hadn’t heard was the Corbins’ attempts to destroy the Ramsey ranch after Clyde Ramsey, Rafe’s uncle, had taken all three boys in.
Corbin hadn’t managed to destroy the property, but he had managed to affect it financially for several years.
Then there had been the acts of vandalism, cattle missing or poisoned, equipment sabotaged, and several pastures salted.
As the Corbins were targeting Crowe, Logan’s grandparents, Saul and Tandy, had gone after Logan’s inheritance: the two-story house in town that was listed as one of the first houses built in the county, as well as a cash inheritance that at the time had come to more than a million dollars.
Crowe’s trust fund was larger, the inherited account coming from the trust his mother had inherited from her grandparents as well as the property and cash her parents had added to it. She had died only days after coming into the inheritance and within hours of signing the will that made her only son her beneficiary.
Then there were the bits of information that seemed more sinister. The night the three couples had been killed, the sheriff had closed the accident site completely off. Only the coroner and a young attorney Wayne Sorenson had been allowed onto the site for hours.
Even Clyde Ramsey, Marshal Roberts’s brother-in-law, had been barred from the site. In those early-morning hours he received a call from a ranch hand in the area who suspected Clyde’s niece and her husband had been in the accident along with the Raffertys’ daughter and son-in-law, and in the Corbins’ case, their daughter and son-in-law as well as the newborn infant daughter — the only child her parents had taken with them to Denver that day while supposedly visiting friends.
It had been learned later that it hadn’t been friends they were visiting. Rather, it had been a lawyer and a well-known resort developer. The sons of JR and Eileen Callahan, the first Callahans to have considered turning their property into a resort, had passed that dream on to their sons.
Nothing had been mentioned about the sons passing the legacy on to their sons. Or why the daughters of the barons who had married the Callahan sons would have considered something their families would have found so heinous.
The bodies had been burned beyond recognition, and only DNA had confirmed the identities of the dead. The coroner had quickly identified the three couples and the infant before the burials had been hastily arranged.
That was when the campaign to ostracize the cousins began, Jack told Cami, though it had been there even before the parents’ deaths. So much so that the three couples were looking at selling Crowe Mountain and the Rafferty house in town and gathering together the inheritances of the three women and buying a ranch farther west. There had even been talk that Clyde Ramsey had discussed selling his property as well and following them.
Kimberly Anna Corbin Callahan had been so enraged with her parents and brother that she had told several people that despite her brother’s affection for her daughter, she would never allow any of them around her. Anna was done with her parents as well as the brother she had once idolized. She had even had them removed as secondary beneficiaries on her will. The papers had actually been signed with an attorney in Denver that day. Clyde had been named as that beneficiary barring any children Crowe or her daughter might have had.
Her daughter hadn’t had a chance to see her first birthday, let alone reach maturity and the chance to conceive. She had barely been three months old at her death.
Then there had been the confrontation at the funerals. With only one funeral home, the three couples had been there together. Shockingly, the wives had been placed in another room and separated from their husbands. At first. Until Clyde had threatened to sue the funeral home, the director, and the families involved. Then, when Crowe and Logan had attempted to go in to attend their parents’ funerals, their way had been blocked by their grandfathers and, in Crowe’s case, by his uncle as well.
The entire county had attended those funerals and had seen the families’ treatment of the cousins. Most of the county worked the Corbin and Rafferty ranches or in some other way benefited from their business. They hadn’t been able to afford backing the boys and hurting their own finances or positions.
The result had been the steady unearned condemnation of an entire community toward three young, grief-stricken boys.
Clyde Ramsey had done the best he could by taking not just his own nephew in but also the others and raising them himself. His own grief at losing his treasured niece, and his inability to understand the hatred directed at their children had nearly destroyed him.
Clyde had suffered from the decision, though. Ranch hands quit on him, accidents happened around the ranch, and he was constantly warned to leave the county. But stubbornness had been set in his bones and he had refused to go, even as he advised the boys to fight against them. That this was their parents’ home, they owned part of it, and they should never forget that fact.
As Cami fixed more coffee, Jack broached another subject she hadn’t expected.
“Did you know about the phone calls Jaymi got before she was killed?” he asked gently.
Cami remained silent for long moments, finished the coffee, then turned back with the pot to refill the cups. She needed time to gather the strength to talk about Jaymi. No one mentioned her anymore, and Cami found it hurt more with each passing year.
She gave a brief nod as she sat down again. “I was here when she got a few of them. They were similar to the ones I’m receiving, except Jaymi figured out who her caller was a few nights before Thomas Jones—” She couldn’t say it. She had relived that part of the past too much in the last few weeks the way it was. “I know that voice, too though,” she said fiercely. “I know it; I just haven’t been able to place it.”
She described the voice. The regret. The hint of tears.
Jack nodded. “I remember that though Jaymi didn’t say anything about realizing who the caller was, she left the social early that night, and she appeared angry.”
“She was angry when she came back to the apartment too.” Cami swallowed tightly. “When she answered the call that night she went to the bedroom. I’m not sure, but I think I heard her say something about her knowing why her caller hated ‘him’ so bad. Though I don’t know who the ‘him’ was, and she wouldn’t tell me. I always suspected it was Rafe they were discussing.”
Jack and Jeannie exchanged a frown, though Cami didn’t see a sense of recognition in their gazes either.
When Jack turned back to her, he leaned forward intently, his gaze somber. “Dad was managing the garage then. But do you remember the accident Jaymi had about a month before she was killed?”
Cami nodded warily. “She nearly went over one of the mountain cliffs that day.”
It had terrified her, and Cami knew Jaymi had been shaken by it. Her brakes had failed on one of the long mountain roads. Though it hadn’t been the one the Callahans, their parents, or Clyde Ramsey had gone over.
“I’d rather you didn’t mention this to anyone who doesn’t need to know. The sheriff knows, but Dad swears her brake lines had been messed with,” Jack told Cami as he rubbed at his jaw in frustration. “He remembers it as clear as day, and there’s not a lot Dad remembers real clear these days. But he remembers Jaymi, because he swears that when he saw those brake lines after he towed the car in he told Mother Jaymi would be dead before the summer was out. He knew someone had tried to kill her and the sheriff, Archer’s father, didn’t seem interested in believing him when he went to talk to him. The lines were clean-cut, not frayed. Someone sabotaged those lines and they hadn’t meant for her to survive her drive back from Aspen.”