Day Of Reckoning Part 6

She mumbled something under her breath but entered, going to a booth at the back out of earshot from the other diners. He followed her, glad to see her angry. Earlier when she'd been with her father, she'd looked broken. He needed her to be strong and if being angry was what it took, he could oblige.

He also needed her to trust him. That, he realized as he slid in the booth across from her, was going to take some doing.

A YOUNG WAITRESS Roz didn't recognize brought them menus. Roz didn't even bother to open hers, knowing she wouldn't be able to eat a bite. She was worried about her father, although knowing that Jesse Tanner was in the hospital room watching over him helped. Now if her father would just come out of his coma- "Give us two western omelettes, extra cheese, and two cups of black coffee," Ford said without opening his menu, either. He didn't even bother to ask Roz if she would have liked cream.

"Well?" she demanded the moment the waitress was out of earshot. "You got me here, now talk."

"Are you always this impatient?" he asked.

"No, I'm actually on my best behavior. You wouldn't want to see me when I'm not," she snapped.

He smiled, obviously recognizing his own words from earlier.

He wasn't bad-looking when he smiled. Under the bright fluorescent lights of Betty's Cafe, she could see featherings of gray at his temples and tiny laugh lines around his sea-green eyes. He had a rugged look about him as if he'd spent a lot of time outdoors.

It surprised her. He was nothing like she had pictured him in her mind all these years. He must have been very young when he'd written the article about her father, she realized.

The waitress returned with the coffees.

Roz cradled the mug of hot coffee in her hands, needing the warmth as she sat waiting, glaring across the table at a man she had hated since the age of sixteen without ever knowing anything more about him than his name. Ford Lancaster. Her idea of the devil incarnate.

She was sixteen when the article had come out about her father. She felt cold inside as she remembered how it had devastated him.

Liam Sawyer had been on a camping trip with a friend when the two had stumbled across a large creature in the woods. Her father, who always had his camera, had hit the motordrive. But his hands had been shaking from shock and surprise, and the photographs of the creature were out of focus, the image blurred.

But still the photographs had been big news when they'd hit print. Liam had believed that his discovery would change the world's att.i.tude about Bigfoot's existence.

That seemed the case, until Ford Lancaster called in some so-called experts to denounce the photographs as an elaborate hoax instigated by her father.

No one had believed Liam or his friend after Ford Lancaster's article came out and the news. .h.i.t the papers. No one except people who knew him. But Liam Sawyer had never gotten over the humiliation. Whenever there was a Bigfoot sighting in the years since, his photographs and the incident were always mentioned.

Her father had sworn that he'd get irrefutable proof of Bigfoot's existence or die trying. But as many times as he had returned to the Cascades, he'd never seen the creature again.

Some years later another photographer had admitted that his Bigfoot photos had been faked, casting even more suspicion on her father's photos.

Roz had spent over a decade hating Ford Lancaster and now he was sitting across the table from her.

Ford didn't seem to notice her glaring in his direction. He was without a doubt the most arrogant, rude, obnoxious man- "I'm sorry about the way I acted earlier," he said, lifting that pale gaze to meet hers. "At the waterfall."

She shrugged and looked down at her coffee, a little thrown by the fact that he'd apologized. Not so thrown that she didn't have a comeback. "Now that I know who you are, I wouldn't expect anything less than your behavior at the waterfall."

He pretended to be wounded. "Seriously, I'm trying to change."

"Not having much luck, huh?"

He smiled. He had a nice mouth, but then she already knew that from earlier in the garden.

"Stop stalling. Don't make me sorry I covered for you with the sheriff."

He shook his head, still smiling as if he found her amusing. "Why did you?"

"Why did you lie to Emily about being a friend of my father's?"

"What makes you so sure it's a lie?"

She reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone and started to dial the sheriff. He reached across the table and gently touched her hand holding the phone. She met his gaze.

"Can you sit still long enough for me to tell you my way?" He shook his head, answering for her. "Then I'll try to make it quick. I was twenty-four when I wrote the article about your father's photographs." She did the math. That made him thirty-six now, eight years older than she was. "It wasn't just about your father. There was someone else with him when he took those photos."

"John Wells." Her father's friend.

Ford nodded. "His name is John Ford Ford Wells. He's my father." Wells. He's my father."

Her jaw dropped. "How could that be since his name is Wells and yours-"

"My parents divorced when I was four. My mother remarried. I hardly ever saw my biological father-just enough to...resent the h.e.l.l out of him."

She felt her eyes widen with understanding.

He nodded. "It wasn't your father I was going after in that article. It was mine."

She was dumbstruck. "You did that to your own father."

"Yeah, well, I'm a jerk, but you already know that about me." He met her gaze, his eyes the color of a warm Caribbean lagoon she'd once photographed for one of her books.

"That makes it easy for you, doesn't it."

"No, actually, nothing has been easy." He seemed to turn serious and she felt her breath catch at his next words. "John Wells hadn't been well. I was with him the day Liam called." He nodded. "I took the call. Liam sounded...scared. He wasn't making a lot of sense, almost as if he'd been drinking."

She was shaking her head. "My father never has more than a gla.s.s of wine with dinner."

"You want to hear this or not?"

She made a face at him and he continued, "He sounded as if he'd been drinking. He said he couldn't get through to the sheriff, that he was in trouble, that he'd found something. I thought he said bones."

"Bones?"

Ford nodded. "Then he said what I thought was, 'John, they're trying to kill me' and we were cut off."

She felt a s.h.i.+ver but couldn't help being skeptical given who was telling the story. "Why would my father call you? you?"

"I answered the phone. I guess I sounded enough like John Wells, and that Liam just a.s.sumed-"

"Why didn't you give the phone to your father?"

Ford chewed at his cheek for a moment, glancing out the window before settling that blue-green gaze on her again. "Because John Ford Wells had died just minutes before Liam's call."

Chapter Five.

Ford watched her eyes fill with tears. "I'm so sorry about your father," she said and reached across the table to cover his hand.

"It's all right," he said taking back his hand. He didn't want her sympathy. It made him feel guilty and he felt guilty enough already. "We were never close."

"That's too bad." She looked down, her brown eyes swimming in tears, as she cupped her coffee mug.

He could see that she was thinking about her father, worrying that she might lose him. They were obviously very close. Or had been before his recent marriage, Ford guessed.

Her gaze lifted to his. "Why didn't you call the sheriff right away?"

"I thought your father was drunk. But the more I thought about it... So I came up here determined to get to the bottom of it."

She was eyeing him suspiciously, obviously realizing there was a lot more to it.

"Look, I called your father's house. I talked to Emily. She told me everything was fine, that she expected to hear from Liam at any time and not to concern myself."

"Emily," Rozalyn said under her breath like a curse.

"My old man said Liam Sawyer was one of the toughest men he ever knew and one of the best."

Hope s.h.i.+mmered along with her tears now. "He is something for his age, isn't he?"

Ford nodded.

She shook her head as if she found it all too unbelievable. "Why would anyone hurt him?"

"If he really did find bones-"

"What kind of bones would be worth trying to kill a man over?"

Ford hesitated, then lowered his voice. "Given what Liam had been doing up in the mountains, I'd say Bigfoot bones."

Roz stared at him as if too shocked to speak. "Excuse me? You scientists have discredited the thousands of Bigfoot-like creature sightings around the world saying that if such a beast existed, then why hadn't a skeleton ever been found. Are you telling me now that you you think it's possible he could have found a Bigfoot skeleton?" think it's possible he could have found a Bigfoot skeleton?"

"Possible. Not probable." Hadn't he been waiting most of his life for this? He didn't believe and yet, G.o.d knew, he wanted to.

Roz eyed him, trying to put her finger on her misgivings about Ford Lancaster. Misgivings, h.e.l.l. She didn't trust him. He was the enemy. Wasn't he?

"Why would anyone try to kill my father over Bigfoot bones?" she asked, still wondering why he hadn't gone to the sheriff.

"You aren't really that naive, are you? A Bigfoot skeleton would be an incredible find. It would set the scientific world on its ear." Excitement crept into his voice and his sea-green eyes shone in the cafe lights. "The bones could prove to be hominid, a subspecies of us, human."

"You make it sound as if you believe they exist," she said, surprised by the enthusiasm she heard in his voice.

"It's possible," he said slowly. "After all the Is.h.i.+, the last of a Stone Age Indian tribe, had remained hidden in a canyon only eight miles from Oroville, California, in the early 1900s until they voluntarily came out and made themselves known. The mountain gorilla wasn't proven to exist until 1902. It would make the person who found the bones famous. Not to mention rich."

"Rich?"

"Those bones are worth a fortune," he said. "Not just in the rewards being offered for definitive proof that such a creature exists, but to private collectors."

She'd never thought of a find like that in monetary terms because she knew her father wouldn't have, either. "My father would never have sold them. He would have donated them to a museum."

"But that doesn't mean that someone else out there doesn't realize their value and intends to cash in on the find."

"You're saying that someone found out about the bones and-" A sob choked off her words.

"Liam sounded like he was running scared when he called."

Running scared. That's how she felt right now. "And you think he's still in danger?" she said, brus.h.i.+ng at her tears.

"If the bones are Bigfoot bones, then your father is in danger as long as someone thinks he is going to tell about the discovery."

He reached over and touched her hand, sending a jolt through her. He jerked his hand back, looking embarra.s.sed as he picked up his cup, his gaze set on the coffee.

She stared at him, her heart beating too fast, and all he'd done was touch her. Who was this man who could be so kind one moment and so awful the next? And why did her body have to react this way with Ford Lancaster of all people?

He must feel the same way, she thought as she watched him stare into his coffee. Touching her had been a mistake. No kidding.

She took a drink of her own coffee and realized her hands were shaking.

He didn't look up as he said, "Until the bones are found-"

"But by now, wouldn't the person have gotten the bones out of the woods?"

"I don't think so or we would have heard about it. The bones could be too large to move. Or embedded in the rock. I don't know. Maybe your father found something portable like a skeleton and hid it. But if someone had the bones in their possession, they would have made the announcement by now."

"You think my father might have hidden what he found?" Roz realized her dad had been making some really bad decisions lately. Marrying Emily. Bringing her to the house here at Timber Falls. Maybe he had hidden the bones, knowing someone was following him. She just hoped it wouldn't cost him his life.

"Until Liam regains consciousness we have no way of knowing," Ford was saying. "Or until I find the bones. The sheriff told me where Liam was found. At least I have a place to start looking in the morning."

"I'm going with you."

His gaze locked with hers. "It's too dangerous. If I'm right and your father's fall wasn't an accident, then whoever did it won't hesitate to do the same thing to you if given a chance."

"You don't know this area like I do," she argued. "My dad has taken me up in those mountains since I was old enough to ride in a backpack. I probably know more about Bigfoot hunting than you do and I know my father. You need me."

She wanted to find those bones before whoever had hurt her father profited from them. She also wanted to find the person who'd done this to her father. If his fall really hadn't been an accident. If Ford Lancaster was telling her the truth. "I am going with you," she told him. "So don't even try to stop me."

She caught something in his gaze just an instant before he said, "I should have known I couldn't talk you out of it." What was it that she'd seen in his eyes? Relief? Or triumph?