“We’re not hiding anything,” Ryan said. “Talon probably has post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in the military. We’ve talked to him about getting help for it, but he’s not open to that. There’s nothing more we can do.”
“He went to see a doctor, though, that Dr. Carmichael who was at the ER. So maybe he is open to it.”
“And you saw how that went,” Jonah said.
Marj didn’t respond. I had lots more questions, but I let them go. It was one thing for Marj to demand answers, quite another for me to. When the timer rang on the oven, Marj got up and pulled the manicotti out. She set it on the table and brought over my salad. She passed the salad bowl around, and we each took some.
“This is great dressing, Marj. New recipe?” Ryan asked.
Marj shook her head. “Jade made the salad.”
“It’s just a simple French vinaigrette,” I said and took a bite.
Back to small talk for the remainder of the dinner.
And I was still filled with questions about Talon.
* * *
I was lying on my bed reading when a knock sounded on my door. My heart skipped a beat. Perhaps Talon had come back. “Come in,” I said.
Marj walked through my door. Though I was little let down not to see Talon, I was glad to see her. Jonah and Ryan had volunteered to clean the kitchen after dinner, so Marj and I had gone our separate ways, but we still had that college roommate bond. We could each tell that we wanted to talk, but we couldn’t with the brothers there.
“Did they leave?” I asked.
She nodded. “And I got a text from Talon. He’s staying in the city tonight.”
My heart lurched a bit. Why was he staying in the city? Why had he the other night? Did he have a woman there? Probably many women. The thought broke my heart a little.
On the other hand, if Jonah and Ryan had left and Talon was gone for the night, Marj and I could talk.
“So what do you think?”
“They’re lying,” Marj said. “I’ve been wondering about Talon for a long time, and he may very well have post-traumatic stress disorder. I was a teenager when he left for Iraq, but even still, I remember him being pretty much the same way before he left. So I’m not sure it can all be blamed on his service.”
“I guess there’s not much we can do about it,” I said.
Marj gave me a devious grin. “Want to bet? I think we need to do some investigating. We can start with my father’s old files. I’ve always thought about going through them, but then figured it was none of my business. But you know what? I own a quarter of this ranch. And Talon is my brother. I love him. So it is my business.” She grabbed my arm and yanked me off the bed. “Come on.”
Marj led me not to the office, where I thought we would be going, but down the stairway to the basement. The basement was finished into a gorgeous rec room and three extra bedrooms, but she took me to none of those places. In the back was some crawl space. She slid the door open and crawled inside, beckoning for me to follow. I did, hurting my knees in the gravelly dirt. It smelled musty and moldy.
“Marj, do I really need to be in here? Can’t you just find what we need and pull it out?”
“It’s just that I’m not quite sure what we need, Jade. There are a bunch of boxes in here marked private. They’re taped up pretty good.”
“What are they?”
“Old stuff of my father’s. I was always told it was junk, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
My eyes adjusted to the dark. Lots of brown cardboard boxes, well over twenty, sat in the space, taped up just as Marj had said.
“Let’s get them all over here close to the doorway,” she said. “Then we can pull them out one by one and go through them.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
The two of us yanked all the boxes near the entrance. By the time we were done, my knees were crusted with dirt and hurt like hell. I crawled out of the crawl space, and Marj followed, lugging the first box. She pulled it down into the extra bedroom and then repositioned the door to the crawl space.
“We’re going to need something to cut through this tape,” I said.
Marj smiled. “Not a problem.” She pulled a Leatherman out of her pocket. “I always come prepared.”
She quickly cut through the tape and opened the first box. “Just as I suspected. Bunch of old files and records.” She sighed. “Well, let’s go through them.” She handed me a pile.
I opened the first file and went through it. “This looks like mostly old quitclaim deeds. I mean, these go way back, over a century ago.” I leafed through the delicate papers. “There are even some old chattel mortgages in here. You don’t see those anymore.”
“What’s a chattel mortgage?” she asked.
“A mortgage on a thing, rather than on a piece of property. These are old ones, from England.”
“The Steels are originally from England,” she said.
“You don’t see them in the US,” I said. “What we have here are secured transactions.”
“You mean like collateral?”