Palomino

18

By mid-April Sam had contacted sixty-three ranches. At first she had called the ones in the area, looking for Tate, then those farther north, some farther south, then she had begun to call other states. Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Arkansas, she had even called one in Nebraska that one of the men had suggested. He had talked to Tate about the place and said the food and the pay were real good. But no one had seen Tate Jordan. Sam left her name and address and Caroline's number and asked them to call her if Tate should appear. She used Caroline Lord's name everywhere and it helped her, and the two pored hourly over directories, want ads, listings, advertisements, and the names they got from the men. She had long since asked her office for an extension and had promised them some kind of definitive answer by May 1. If she wasn't coming back to New York, they wanted to know by then. Until then the job would be hers. But she didn't give a damn about her job, all she wanted was Tate Jordan, and he was nowhere to be found. It was as though a month before he had dropped off the face of the earth never to be seen again. He had to be somewhere, Sam knew, but the question was where? It was becoming an obsession with her. She no longer rode with the men, no matter that that began rumors or confirmed their suspicions. From the day that he left she rode with them no more.

She went to the cabin once alone, but couldn't bear it, and had ridden home on Black Beauty, her face covered with tears. Now she seldom even rode the big black Thoroughbred, even when Caroline encouraged her to do so. All she wanted to do was stay at the house, make phone calls, go over lists, look at maps, write letters, and try to figure out where he was. So far it had all been fruitless, and secretly Caroline was beginning to think that it might stay that way. The truth was that it was a big country, and there were countless ranches. There was always the possibility that he had gone to a different line of work entirely, or that he wasn't using his real name. She was much too familiar with the scores of drifters who had worked on the ranch in the years she had owned it to be able to hold out great hope to Sam. It was entirely possible that he would turn up somewhere, someday, but it was equally possible that he would never be seen or heard from again. It was even possible that he had left the country, gone to Canada or Mexico, or even one of the big ranches in Argentina. Often the ranch owners let men like Tate work without papers, or with falsified ones, just so they could have them on their ranches. As ranch foremen went, Tate had a long list of good credentials, he was a reliable, hardworking man, and he had a great deal of expertise to offer any ranch. Any ranch owner with half a brain would recognize that, the question was-which ranch owner and which ranch.

By the end of April there was still nothing, and Sam had three days to call her office and tell them where things stood. She had told them a month before that Caroline was ill and it was suddenly difficult for her to leave when she had said she would. They had been understanding at first, but now Charlie was calling. The fun was over. Harvey wanted her back. They were suddenly having big trouble with her automobile client, and if she was coming back at all, then Harvey wanted it to be right now. She couldn't really blame him, but she couldn't tell them either that she was in worse shape now than she had been when she left New York. More than ever, now that he was gone, she knew how much she loved Tate, how much she respected him and his way of life. It was particularly painful to her now when she saw Bill and Caro, and it was agonizing for Caroline to share in Samantha's loss.

“Sam.” As she looked at her young friend over coffee on the last day of April, she sighed deeply and decided to tell her what she thought. “I think you should go back.”

“Where?” She was glancing again at one of her lists of ranches and wondered if Caroline had thought of one they should try again. But Caroline was quick to shake her head.

“I meant New York.”

“Now?” Sam looked shocked. “But I haven't found him.”

Caroline gritted her teeth for what she wanted to say next, much as she hated to hurt Sam. “You don't know that you ever will.”

“That's a rotten thing to say.” Sam looked at her angrily and pushed away her coffee. She had been testy and nervous since the whole nightmare had begun. She never slept, she never ate, she never got fresh air anymore. She only did one thing. She looked for Tate. She had even driven to some of the ranches, and flown briefly to one.

“But it's true, Sam. You have to face the truth now. You may never find him again. I hope like hell that you do, but you can't spend the rest of your life looking for a man who wants to be left alone. Because if you find him, you don't know that you'll be able to convince him that what you think is right and that he's wrong. He thinks that the two of you are too different. It could just be that he's right. And even if he isn't, if this is what he wants, you can't force him to change his mind.”

“What brought this on? Have you been talking about it to Bill?”

“No more than I have to.” Sam knew that he disapproved of her relentless search for Tate. He called it a “fool manhunt” and thought Sam was wrong to push. “The man said what he wanted to tell her when he left here, Caro. There's nothing more to say.” But then once he had admitted that if he had done the same thing he hoped that she would have tried as hard to find him. “I just think you ought to face the possibilities, Sam. It's been a month and a half.”

“So maybe it'll just take a little longer.”

“And a little longer… and a little longer… and a little longer than that. And then what? You spend twenty years looking for a man you barely knew.”

“Don't say that.” Sam looked exhausted as she closed her eyes. She had never worked as hard on any job as she had on the search for Tate. “I knew him. I know him. Maybe in some ways I knew him too damn well, and that scared him off.”

“It could have,” Caroline agreed. “But the point is that you can't go on living like this. It'll destroy you.”

“Why should it?” The bitterness in her voice was easy to read. “Nothing else has.” John and Liz had had their baby the month before, a little girl, and they had even shown her and victorious Liz in the delivery room on the evening news. But Sam didn't care about that anymore either. All she wanted was to find Tate.

“You have to go back, Sam.” Caroline sounded as stubborn as Sam herself.

“Why? Because I don't belong here?” She looked at Caroline angrily, but this time Caroline nodded at what she said.

“That's right. You don't. You belong back in your own world, at your desk, in your office, in your own apartment, with your own things, meeting new people and seeing old friends, being who you really are and not who you pretended to be for a while. Sam”-she reached out and touched her hand-“I'm not tired of having you here. If it were up to me, you could stay forever. But it's not good for you, don't you see that?”

“I don't care. I just want to find him.”

“But he doesn't want you to find him. If he did, he would let you know where he is. He must be taking care that you don't find him, Sam, and if that's true, then you've lost the battle. He could hide from you for years.”

“So you think I should quit. Is that it?”

There was a long silence between them, and then Caroline nodded almost imperceptibly. “Yes.”

“But it's only been six weeks.” Tears flooded her eyes as she tried to combat the logic of what Caroline had said. “Maybe if I wait another month-”

“If you do, you won't have a job, and that won't do you any good either. Sam, you need to go back to a normal life.”

“What's normal anymore?” She had almost forgotten. It had been a year since she had been “happily” married to John Taylor, since she had led a perfectly ordinary life as an advertising executive in Manhattan, married to a man she loved and whom she thought loved her.

“Normal?” She looked at Caroline in horror. “You must be kidding. I wouldn't know normal anymore if it introduced itself and bit me on the ass!” Caroline laughed at her bleak humor but the look in her eyes didn't waver, and at last Sam sat back in her chair with a long pensive sigh. “But what the hell am I going to do in New York?”

“Forget all this for a while. It'll do you good. You can always come back.”

“I'd just be running away again if I left here.”

“No, you'd be doing something healthy. This isn't a life for you here, not like this.” It hadn't been since he left.

Sam nodded silently, left the table, and walked slowly back to her room. She placed the call to Harvey Maxwell two hours later and then she went out to the barn and saddled Black Beauty. She rode him for the first time in three weeks that afternoon, riding him headlong, into the wind, at full gallop, taking every chance, every jump, every hedge, every stream. Had Caroline seen her, she would have feared for the horse's life, as well as that of her young friend. Had Tate seen her, he would have killed her.

But she was alone now, riding as fast and as hard as she could until she knew that the horse could go no more. She cantered him back to the main compound then and walked him slowly around the corral for half an hour. She knew that she owed that much to the animal, no matter how unhappy she was. And then, when she felt that she had sufficiently walked him and he was cooler, she led him back to his stall and took off the English saddle, stood looking at him for a long time, and then patted his flanks one last time with a whispered, “Good-bye, old friend.”