A Dark Lure Read Online Free PDF

when I’m dead, when my ashes are scattered and my memorial cairn has been placed up on that glacial ridge alongside Grace’s and Jimmie’s. Then my ghost can haunt them.” He paused, looking suddenly bone tired but no less determined. “You’ll do it for me. Scatter my ashes, sort out that stone cairn.”
    She rubbed her brow, stole another look at the photo above the fireplace. “Where is he now?”
    Silence.
    She turned to look at Myron. An odd expression had overcome his features. His shoulders had rolled inward, compressing him into his chair. In his eyes she detected regret.
    Olivia felt a sharp tug of emotion.
    If it were my father I’d want to know. I’d want the choice of saying good-bye . . .
    Was it possible to set certain wrongs right? Was it foolhardy to even attempt to do so when anger, bitterness, regret, blame were all so deeply rooted in the soil of one’s psyche, each twisting so tightly over the other that if you tried to extract one root, the whole tree died?
    “He’s in Havana,” he said finally. “Drowning his sorrows.”
    Surprise rippled through her. “Havana, Cuba? How do you know?”
    He gave a halfhearted shrug and looked away, staring into the flames, his veined hands resting limp on the arms of his chair. The fact that he even knew where Cole was told Olivia he still cared. At least a little. And she was besieged with a sense that Myron needed to do this—to make peace with his son. His daughter, too.
    Or was it Olivia’s subterranean guilt about her own estranged family that was fueling this sentiment? She swallowed, forcing herself to remain present. Bad things happened when she allowed her thoughts to feather back into the past.
    “What sorrows?” she said quietly.
    Still refusing to give Olivia his eyes, he said, “Cole seems to have come to a standstill after his woman and her kid left him.”
    “I . . . didn’t know he had a family. Was he married?”
    “Common-law partner. Holly. She had a son, Ty, from a previous marriage. She returned to her ex after some horrendous incident with Cole in the Sudan that endangered her kid’s life. Took the boy with her, back to his father. The boy would be eight now.”
    “How do you know all this?”
    “Read about it in that magazine he writes for. He has a knack for that, you know—living his own life to the extreme, chasing the storm, at the expense of those around him. Cole never even brought Holly or Ty home—I never met them.” Myron gave a harsh snort. “Then again, Cole stopped calling Broken Bar ‘home’ a long, long time ago.”
    “What happened in the Sudan?”
    Myron waved his hand, brushing the whole thing away like a bad smell. “Don’t want to talk about it.” He cleared his throat, then said, “Jimmie was also eight. When Cole drove him into the river.”
    A chill washed over Olivia. She was overcome by an eerie sense of time warping and weaving and replicating like the double-helix strands of DNA.
    Myron fell silent, his mind seemingly drifting away on some sea of secret sorrow, buoyed by booze and painkillers.
    She stole another look at Cole’s image above the fireplace.
    “All things have their season, Liv,” Myron said, his words thick and slurring slightly now. “Each life has a cycle. One makes one’s choices and bears one’s punishment. Even this ranch . . . maybe it is time. The end of an era. The end of the McDonough legacy.” He reached for his glass, swirled the dregs with a shaky hand, watching as the liquid refracted firelight. “It’s unrealistic to expect my progeny will carry it on.” He cleared his throat and continued.
    “Even if someone did want to start running cows again, the financial outlay would be huge. But the guest and tourism business—that could be year-round. The lodge could be full again. With some work the cabins could be refurbished, go a little higher end, bring greater yield per guest. There’s a market for that sort of thing now. German tourists.