“Then why does it feel as if he’s still here? I swear I’m afraid to do anything. I even look up when I go into all the rooms, looking for the cameras he had to watch us all the time.” Jase looked about to cry.
“I destroyed the cameras and all the tapes, Jase. I did it right in front of you. We cleaned him out of here.” Cole cleared his throat. “Maybe we should try a Christmas tree and a few decorations. Let’s take the house back completely. He can’t dictate to us what we can or can’t do. If you’re still feeling him here, it’s because we haven’t made the house ours.” He tried not to wince as he repeated Maia’s logic. “So it’s really up to you if you want to try to celebrate Christmas this year. I’m game if you are.”
Jase shrugged, trying to look casual. “Well, maybe we should do it for the doc. I’d hate for her to be out here looking after Wally and missing something she loves.”
Cole kept his expression carefully blank. He wasn’t about to take away the boy’s courage by letting on that the very thought of trying to celebrate the holiday scared the hell out of him. He knew what he was getting himself into. Brett Steele had been particularly cruel at Christmas, and the number of Cole’s nightmares increased in direct proportion to days of celebration. “Since I’ve never actually had a Christmas, we might need a little help in figuring out what we’re supposed to do.”
“You know how pathetic that makes us, Cole?” Jase asked. “I can’t go to school with a bunch of other kids and pretend my life is okay. I know you think I should, but I’m never going to be like them. I don’t want to have to pretend anymore.”
Jase took every occasion to remind Cole he objected strenuously to going into a classroom. Cole sighed. “I want you to have friends, Jase. You don’t want to end up being a loner. If you don’t get out there and mix it up with your peers, you’ll never be able to.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Jase asked, belligerence creeping into his tone.
“As a matter of fact, yes. I grew up the same way you did, remember? You aren’t alone in this. I wasn’t allowed friends either. I had tutors right here on the ranch. If I liked one of the hands too much, he was sent packing. I don’t have friends, and I don’t make them. It’s a hell of a way to live.”
“I don’t want to go to school,” Jase said stubbornly.
Cole was happy the boy was at least telling him how he felt. That said he had grown comfortable enough with Cole to do so. In the first few weeks they’d been together, the boy had rarely offered an opinion on anything. “Let’s do this, Jase. We’ll start with this Christmas thing for the doc. If we can manage to get through it without the two of us going nuts, maybe we can move forward from there.”
Jase nodded. “I don’t mind trying for the doc, but I’m not promising about school.” He scooped up more eggs and rolled them in a tortilla. “She’s a pretty good cook, isn’t she?”
“I thought so.”
“You like her don’t you, Cole?”
Cole went very still inside. He tried a casual shrug. “What’s not to like?”
Jase pushed his fork around the table. “Have you gone into the old man’s office since he died?”
Cole’s head went up alertly at the boy’s tone. “A couple of times, not recently.”
“He has a couple of maps of the ranch that I wanted. I was going to put them in my room, but they’re gone. They were in his desk drawer.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’? No one’s here but the two of us. I didn’t touch the maps, didn’t even know they were there.”
Cole felt a twinge of alarm. It was a silly thing, a missing map meant nothing at all, so alarms shouldn’t be going off, but he’d long ago learned to pay attention when a small detail was out of place. “Jase, are you certain the maps were still there after Brett was killed? Someone could have borrowed them.”
Jase nodded. “I looked at them a week or so after he died.”
Cole drummed his fingers on the table. “That was before I fired Justine and Ben Briggs. It didn’t occur to me they might take anything. I wouldn’t know it if they did. They worked here for years, so they’d know more about what was in the house than either of us. They could have robbed us blind, and we wouldn’t know.” But why would they take maps and not the Ming vase or the artwork worth thousands? Or any of the other priceless objects decorating every room of the house. “You’re certain of the time line?”
“Cole, I was terrified to go into his office. I waited a week after he died, then when I pulled the maps out, I couldn’t make myself take them to my room. I folded them carefully and put them back in the drawer in his desk.”
Cole decided the kid looked scared. “Jase.” His voice was very gentle. “Brett Steele is dead, and his ghost can’t do a damned thing to us. It certainly didn’t remove maps from his office. You have to stop reading those books.”
“I didn’t think about Justine or Ben taking anything,” Jase admitted with a small sigh of relief. “That makes more sense.”