Cottage by the Sea (44 page)

   All three had stared at one another for an eternity, gasping for breath.

   "My brother is dead!" Blythe screamed. "He's dead because of
you! Virgil told you to get rid of that horse, but you wer
e too
busy!" Otis continued to gaze blankly at her as if they wer
e separated by soundproof glass. She had turned toward Ellie and shouted, "Pull up your pants, you slut!" As her younger sister fumbled to zip her jeans, Blythe confronted the rodeo hand, both fists still clenched like a prizefighter's. "If you ever mention to a soul you were in here fucking my sister, I swear I'll get the men in this town to cut off your balls!"

   Then she grabbed Ellie's wrist, hauled her out of the shed, and shoved her against a two-horse trailer.

   "You were buying a Pepsi when it happened," Blythe commanded hoarsely, threatening her sister with the whip, but able—just barely—to restrain herself. "You didn't even see the accident—got that?" Then she swiveled in place and retched her guts out into the horses' water trough.

   After that night the Barton sisters had kept the secret between them—and Blythe never climbed on the back of a horse again.

   Otis McCafferty kept the bargain, as well, she remembered bitterly. He had immediately moved on to Bozeman, Montana, or so she'd heard. Ellie had graduated from high school and enrolled in Cal Arts near Los Angeles. When Blythe had saved enough money, she arranged for her sister to receive counseling from a psychiatrist. That same year Blythe finished her master's program in landscape design at UCLA, and Christopher Stowe graduated with honors from the university's film school.

   Foolishly Blythe had thought that Ellie's subsequent accomplishments as a children's book illustrator were a sign that her sister was getting some direction in her life. Her latest series of juvenile books were proving to be steady sellers and, lately, dependable moneymakers. Yet despite both sisters' career successes, Blythe and Ellie had never found common ground, nor mentioned what had happened behind the rodeo arena that summer night.

   Until today.

   At length Blythe turned around and met Ellie's challenging stare.

   "You had the affair with Chris to pay me back for finding you that night with Otis—isn't that right?"

   "It may surprise you to learn that Christopher and I had fallen in love!" Ellie retorted.

   "Oh, give me a break!" Blythe said, rolling her eyes. "I called you a slut that night. I forced you to carry the burden of knowing that you were the reason Otis forgot to pull that bronc from the rodeo. I was trying to protect Dad and Grandma and you—though you never saw it that way."

   "Don't pretend to be so noble," Ellie replied, rancor lacing each word. "You were just ticked off that Otis thought I was pretty hot stuff. And you can't believe that Chris loves
me
instead of
you,
can you?" She smiled spitefully. "Not Miss Rodeo Wyoming! Not Miss National Merit Scholar! Not the person in the Barton household who could do no wrong!"

   "I made plenty of mistakes along the way!" Blythe shot back. "The trouble with you is that you refused to acknowledge or value the hard work that went into it all! You only saw the rewards and wondered why I got more than you did!"

   If it hadn't been for the baby sleeping peacefully in the corner of her cottage, Blythe would have begun to shout a litany of harsh invectives at her sister. Instead, she added hoarsely, "The reason you never got as many rewards yourself for so long was that you deliberately screwed up every time you got close to something worthwhile—and that wasn't my fault."

   "Well, it wasn't my fault that the whole family thought you were the bee's knees and I was a dope," her sister said in a tight voice.

   "For God's sake, Ellie, you were five when Mom died. How do you know what she felt about anything?" Blythe demanded.

   "She didn't want another daughter," Ellie cried bitterly. "She already had you and Matt. I was a mistake."

   "Oh, don't give me that 'I was an unwanted child' crap!" Blythe countered. "You're twenty-nine years old! Mom was three years younger than you are now when she had you!"

   "Exactly!" Ellie retorted venomously. "I hardly remember her."

   "She got really sick after you were born," Blythe replied with mounting exasperation. "She didn't do it on purpose! Why do you always cast yourself as the victim?"

   "Well, Grandma Barton certainly didn't need another kid to raise at that point in her life. She already had you! You were the star… and you pretended to like whatever the old crank liked."

   "I didn't pretend—"

   "You said you loved those goddamned flowers of hers," Ellie cut in mockingly, "just so she'd pay attention to you."

   "I do love flowers," Blythe replied wearily, "and by the way, that's not the only reason we got along. When you hit your teens, she was getting to be an old lady, and she just didn't have a high tolerance for brats anymore."

   "Matt was Dad's favorite," Ellie continued, unleashing the rest of her detailed accounting of long-held grievances. "Even you couldn't get his attention. And let's face it. Grandma Barton was an ornery old bat—and a show-off. All she ever did was get on my case."

   "That's because all you ever did was behave like a dink."

   "No one gave a shit about me!"

   "I did," Blythe said quietly. "Despite your consuming envy from the time you could talk, I cared about what happened to you."

   "Not that I noticed," she snapped.

   "I know you didn't. And you didn't notice how much alike you and Dad were. You were his clone."

   "The main thing I remember was that he went away for weeks at a time, taking tourists on those pack trips. When he was home, all he did was moan about the collapse of the cattle industry."

   "He was a rancher and an outfitter," Blythe protested. "Grandma Barton worked her ass off with her flower business. That's how we were fed and clothed, in case you didn't pick up on that part."

   Tragically, many ranching families like theirs that had been on Wyoming land for a hundred years had discovered that it was becoming nigh impossible to earn a decent living by raising cattle—given the economies of scale enjoyed by the huge food producers. Eventually, tourists and "dudes," not cows and roundups, became the mainstay at spreads like the Double Bar B.

   After Janet Barton had dropped dead beside her clothesline, Blythe had watched her father work harder than ever. During his few hours off, he withdrew behind his copy of
Feedlot News.
Meanwhile, her grandmother worked days, nights, and weekends to make a go of her mail-order flower business so that they wouldn't lose the land.

   Considering all those years of struggle, who could blame their father for his decision to sell the place for top dollar? He'd earned it.

   The problem for Ellie in her formative years was that neither parent nor grandparent had the time or energy to focus enough attention on this "afterthought," as Will Barton had affectionately dubbed his youngest child. And no one knew what to do with a moody kid who could sketch and paint but was bored with reading and hopeless at math.

   Grandma Barton, of course, had tried to take her granddaughter in hand when the girl was young, but by the time Ellie became a rebellious teenager, the old woman was growing increasingly frail and, it was true, cantankerous.

   
Everybody did the best they could…

   Wasn't that the truth that Blythe had eventually accepted about Will, Janet, and Lucinda Barton? Why couldn't Ellie come to the same conclusion?

   "Why did you name the baby after Mom?" Blythe asked after a long pause.

   "I had a perfect right, if I wanted to," Ellie answered belligerently. "You didn't think I'd honor the sacred Barton tradition and name her Blythe, did you?"

   "I just wondered why you named her Janet, since you just said you hardly remember Mom."

   "Dad said the baby kinda offered a clean slate," Ellie said in a low voice. "A new start. I went to see him in Wyoming after… after you and Chris had filed for divorce and right before we flew to Mexico to get married. He introduced me to Bertha Pyle when I was there, and I figured they had a thing going. That was when he asked me to call the baby Janet if she was a girl… so I did… to please him," she finished, a note of triumph edging her voice.

   Blythe recalled the conversation she'd had with her father early in her stay in Cornwall. Will Barton had always been a man of few words, and the family debacle in far-off Hollywood had rendered him more taciturn than ever.

   "I'm sorry for the fix you're in," she recalled his saying. "But remember one thing. You're a lot stronger'n Ellie. You gotta take that into account."

   Gazing at her sister now, thousands of miles from the Wyoming ranch where they grew up, she wondered if the weak didn't prevail in the end.

   "And what else did Dad tell you when you visited him?" Blythe wondered aloud.

   "That I was the result of the best night of sex he and Mom ever had," Ellie laughed smugly. "Up in Yellowstone… on a camping trip, when they'd left you and Matt with Grandma Barton."

   Blythe suddenly felt like an orphan… a fatherless child.

   "He told you that?" she marveled.

   Her parents had seemed to spin in such separate orbits on the ranch that she had often wondered, once she'd grown up, if they had ever shared the kind of physical and emotional intensity she'd experienced in her early days with Chris—and now with Luke.

   "I had to know why they'd even bothered to have me!" Ellie said in a rush. "Did you know," she added as a faintly malicious smile began to tug at her lips, "that Mom was pregnant with you when they got married?"

   "Thanks to the second-best night of sex they ever had, I suppose," Blythe responded dryly. Long ago she had subtracted her birth date from the date of her parents' wedding anniversary and come up two months shy of a full-term baby.

   "They were engaged and jumped the gun." Ellie nodded charitably. "But they were in love, Dad said. I asked him what happened to their marriage after I was born, and he just grunted, 'Life.' And then he told me that he hoped I'd do a better job raising my daughter than he and Grandma did with me."

   "I hope you do," Blythe replied, meaning it kindly. She glanced at the baby slumbering peacefully in her carrycot. "May I see her?"

   Ellie glanced warily in Blythe's direction and then nodded. Blythe tiptoed across the slate floor and stared down at her month-old niece. Ellie stood next to her as they both gazed at the child.

   Another Janet Barton, Blythe mused. Perhaps, inside her own womb, another version of Blythe was heading for the planet.

   Or another rendition of Matt.

   Silently she compared her own family drama to that of Luke's hot-blooded ancestors who had inhabited Barton Hall. Would the cycle of blame and jealousy, angry silences and retributions, reverberating down the lines of the BartonTrevelyan-Teagues never end?

   Blythe studied the cherubic face of Ellie's month-old child.

   "She's really very dear," she said on a long breath. "And now I think it's time for you to go. Please tell Chris I haven't heard from California yet."

   "So what? Just sign the forest over to us, Blythe. It belongs to Chris, and you know it! Your name on that deed is just a technicality."

   
Just sign it over to
us.

   Sometimes, Blythe thought with a surge of anger, Eleanor Barton Stowe had the sensitivity of a rhinoceros.

   "I haven't decided. And just so you know, part of my money went to buy it."

   "That's not what Chris says, but what
ever
…" she said, sounding like the Valley Girl she'd become over her years living in California.

   As if to avoid another heated exchange, her sister glanced around the room as if a visitor on a house tour. Her gaze came to rest on Ennis Trevelyan's wooden easel standing in the corner. "Painter's Cottage is a perfect name for this place," she commented. "I'd feel so at home working here…"

   "Your home is on Bristol Drive in Brentwood, California, remember?"

   Ellie pursed her lips but didn't respond. She carefully picked up the infant seat and cradled it in her arms with considerable ceremony. Clearly she was attempting to make a dignified exit.

   "We really do need you to sign those papers Chris gave you."

   Blythe had just about had her fill of Ellie Barton Stowe.

   "So that's why you came here today. No making amends or anything like that. Just business. Just a demand I sign over a half a million bucks. You really are somethin' else, Ellie."

   "Well…" Ellie replied uncertainly. "Chris and I both thought that if you saw your new niece, that you'd… ah… at least like to see the baby," she finished, increasingly flustered.

   "And thus realize how dreadful it would be to deprive my own flesh and blood of life's necessities, once you and Chris returned your rented Rolls-Royce?" Blythe asked sarcastically.

   Ellie lifted her chin with an air of injured innocence.

   "You wouldn't refuse to sign the papers just for spite, would you?" she said in a faintly hectoring tone.

   "I honestly don't know," Blythe confessed. She gestured toward the cottage door. "Good-bye, Ellie," she added pointedly.