“Goddamn it, Logan—”
Logan stretched luxuriously, and made the sighlike sound to go with it. “Nice talking to you, Ty. Say hello to Dylan for me.”
“Logan—”
Logan yawned. “I’m a rancher now,” he said. “We get up early, if you’ll recall. So I guess I’ll turn in.”
“Do not hang up on me—”
Logan thumbed the end button.
The cell immediately rang again.
Logan checked caller ID. Tyler.
He ignored the ringing, whistled for Sidekick.
And the two of them went inside.
The old house seemed to echo around them, empty of furniture and pictures and all the knickknacks several generations could accumulate. The soles of Logan’s boots made a lonely clunking sound on the plank floors.
The phone stopped ringing, started up again.
Again, Logan looked at the tiny panel.
Sidekick turned his head to one side, perked up his ears. He might have been on his own for a long time— as Logan had expected, the vet hadn’t found a microchip—but he knew a ringing phone was supposed to be answered. Feeling guilty for confusing a dog, Logan shut the cell off and set it on the mantelpiece above the empty fireplace.
“It’s okay,” he told Sidekick, flipping the light switch next to the door that led into the dining room. The pale glow only made the house look worse.
He thought of the album Alec and Josh had shown him over at Briana’s, earlier that evening. And a lonely feeling welled up inside him.
His mother and both his stepmothers had been big on taking pictures—there were scores of photographs, if not hundreds, chronicling his childhood, Dylan’s and Tyler’s.
Where was all that stuff?
He had most of the furniture carted off to storage a year after Jake died. Had the albums and the trunk full of family papers gone with it?
He couldn’t remember—if he’d ever known in the first place.
He had a key to the storage unit in town, but he didn’t feel like driving in there and going through a bunch of old junk with a flashlight. He wanted the pictures, though—because all of the sudden he felt strangely insubstantial, almost as though he didn’t have a past, didn’t exist at all.
He and Sidekick might have been ghosts, the pair of them, haunting that run-down ranch house. All they lacked was chains to rattle and somebody to scare.
Knowing he wouldn’t sleep anytime soon, Logan decided the attic was the logical place to start the search for the pictures. He headed for the back of the house, and Sidekick tagged along, still afraid, apparently, to let Logan out of his sight.
The attic steps were concealed behind a trap door in the kitchen ceiling.
Tall as he was, Logan had to jump, lay-up style, to catch hold of the rope handle and pull them down.
Dust billowed out of the space overhead as the heavy stairs struck the floor, causing Sidekick to leap backward in alarm and Logan to cough until his eyes watered.
“Stay here,” Logan told the dog, before he started the climb, lowering his head to keep from banging it against the heavy timbers edging the opening.
Sidekick ignored the order and scrambled nimbly up behind him.
Logan ran a forearm across his face. He should have brought a flashlight, he thought, but since that would involve descending the stairs again and going all the way out to the truck, he decided to make do with his eyeballs.
There was stuff in that attic, all right.
Trunks. Boxes. A long plastic toboggan with a crack down the middle. An old aluminum Christmas tree, catching stray, winking glimmers of light from outside.
At least the old man hadn’t been able to saw that tree in half, Logan reflected. He’d bought it himself when he was twelve, with money he’d saved mowing lawns and shoveling snow in town and doing odd jobs on neighboring ranches. Gone right into the hardware store and plunked down the cash. He’d even gotten one of those funky lights that rotated, casting a red glow over the tree, then green, then gold. Damn, but Dylan and Tyler had loved that tree.
They’d been too big to believe in Santa Claus—with Jake Creed for a father, they probably never had—but Logan could see the gleam of that garishly lighted silver tree reflected in their eyes as clearly as if he’d gone back in time.
He felt a grinding ache in his throat, remembering.
Back then, he and his brothers had been close. They’d had to be—it was the three of them against the old man and a hard world.
Sure, they’d fought with each other, the way boys do, more for sport than out of any particular hostility, but when there was trouble—and that was often—they’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder to face it down.
When had that changed?
It must have happened before Jake’s funeral, or they wouldn’t have been ready to go for each other’s throats the way they had, but for the life of him, Logan couldn’t remember a turning point.
“Shake it off,” he told himself aloud. The words, like so many things, were an unwanted legacy from Jake.
Shake it off, boy. That had been Jake’s answer for everything.
Dylan’s broken arm, in fifth grade, so bad that the bone came right through his skin.
Tyler’s screaming nightmares, after Sheriff Book came to tell them his mother had been found dead in a distant motel room.
Logan’s emergency appendectomy, the night of his senior prom. He’d damned near died in the ambulance.
Shake if off, boy.
“Fuck you, old man,” Logan said. “Fuck you.”
Far in the back of his brain, he thought he heard Jake laugh.
He started opening boxes and trunks.
Papers. Journals so old the pages were crumbling. Deeds and maps and what appeared to be a family tree, rolled up scroll-style and tied with a disintegrating ribbon.
He set those things aside and moved on. He’d come in search of the albums kept by Teresa, Maggie and Angela, and he was nothing if not single-minded.
He found the fat books inside a large plastic container with a snap-on lid, the word pictures scrawled on the side with a black marker. The handwriting was Jake’s bold, slanted scribble.
Logan didn’t allow himself to wonder—not consciously, at least—if that meant anything, Jake’s apparent effort to preserve the albums he’d always scorned. Even without refreshing his memory by looking, Logan knew he probably wouldn’t find a single picture of Jake simply smiling for the camera, like anybody else. He always had to mug, scowl or duck out of the frame at the last second before the flash went off.
Always had to screw it up somehow.
Logan attributed the burning in his eyes to the freerange dust he and Sidekick stirred up with every movement. After blinking a couple of times, he hoisted the surprisingly heavy container, into which much of his, Dylan’s and Tyler’s lives were compressed, and started for the stairs.
In the kitchen, he set the plastic box on the only original furniture left in the place—the round oak table and mismatched chairs that had belonged to every generation of Creeds since Josiah.
Sidekick’s toenails made a clicking sound on the linoleum as he leaped over the last couple of steps, did a Bambion-ice thing and finally righted himself in a way that said “I meant to do that” as clearly as if he’d spoken in a human voice.
Logan chuckled hoarsely and bent to muss up the dog’s ears.
“I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” Logan said.
At the same moment, the wall phone rang. It was old, so he couldn’t screen the call. In case Briana had bears on her back porch, or Cimarron had escaped the pasture to go on a rampage, Logan answered.
Dylan launched right in. “What the hell are you doing out there?” he demanded.
Logan smiled. Dylan and Tyler might have been on the outs about something, but Tyler had obviously passed on the news about the pasture fences. “Right now? I’m standing in my kitchen.”
“Tyler said you’re fencing off the whole ran
ch so you can run cattle,” Dylan accused.
“That’s right,” Logan said. “I might even breed some of my heifers to your bull, since he doesn’t seem to be serving any other purpose besides burning through a lot of grass and grain.”
“You own a third of that ranch, not the whole thing!”
“What is the big deal about fences?” Logan asked, popping up a corner of the container lid and peeking in at the dusty cover of an old album. Our Family was stamped on the front in flaking gold letters. “It’ll be an improvement, and I didn’t ask either you or Tyler to contribute a dime.”
“Just leave my third of the ranch alone, okay?”
“I might do that, if it weren’t for your bull.” He paused, letting that sink in, subtext and all. “I shouldn’t have to tell you, Dylan, even considering how many times you’ve had your brains rattled by rodeo stock, that if Cimarron gets out and hurts somebody, there will be a lawsuit. And the plaintiff isn’t going to give a rat’s ass which of us owns the animal. If it happens anywhere on the property, it’ll be our responsibility, since we own it jointly. Maybe you don’t mind taking that chance, but I do.”
Dylan was still seething, but the mention of a lawsuit must have reined him in a little, the way it did most people. “I’ve been paying Chet Fortner two hundred bucks a month to make sure Cimarron’s looked after,” he said. His voice had shrunk a little.
“Well,” Logan answered, “Chet hasn’t been mending fences—for two hundred a month, I don’t blame him. Just the same, the rails are old and some of them are rotting. A couple of good kicks or a head-butt, and that bull will be out and about, looking for trouble and bound to find it. That’s why I ordered enough steel posts and pipes to enclose the whole pasture.”
Dylan must have used up all his hot air. “How much do I owe you? For the fencing, I mean?”
“I won’t know until the job’s done,” Logan lied. He had an estimate, to the penny, and he’d made sure the contractor understood he was getting the figure inked in on the bottom line. Any cost overruns were going to be his problem, not Logan’s. But he didn’t want Dylan to write a check; he wanted him to come home, if only long enough to see what was going on.
“Oh,” Dylan said.
“I’ve seen your house,” Logan told him. This, too, was a calculated remark, meant to smoke his brother out on the subject of a certain very pretty neighbor. “Briana’s taking good care of it.”
Nothing from Dylan. Logan knew he was chewing on the information, deciding whether he ought to be pissed off or not. With Dylan, it could go either way.
“Hello?” Logan said.
“You’re already visiting Briana?” Dylan asked. “Pretty fast footwork.”
“’He who hesitates is lost,’” Logan quoted blithely, but inside he was as uneasy as he had been in the bad old days, when Jake was late getting home on payday and the current stepmother was trying to put a good face on things. If Dylan had something going on with Briana, it would change things, and not for the better.
“She’s a nice woman, Logan,” Dylan said, testy again. “Do her a favor and leave her alone.”
“You sound like a man with a claim to protect.”
“I barely know her. But she’s decent and she works hard, and from what I’ve heard, she’s had all the mantrouble she needs. If you have any ideas, back off.”
“Not a chance,” Logan said.
Dylan swore and broke the connection.
Logan smiled down at Sidekick, who’d been watching with interest the whole time. “So far, so good,” he said.
Sidekick whimpered. It was a good bet he didn’t agree.
Logan put a bowl of kibble on the floor for the dog, then went to the kitchen sink to wash the attic dust from his face, hands and arms. That done, he dried off with a wad of paper towels and returned to the business at hand.
He took the lid off the container, imagining the scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies, when somebody had opened the Ark of the Covenant. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just turned loose a lot of howling spooks and specters.
Logan lifted the Our Family album off the top, shaking his head at the naive optimism that title expressed.
He turned back the cover, and felt a pinch in his heart at the inscription he found on the first page. For Jake and Teresa, on your wedding day. With love, Cassie.
So, Cassie had been the optimist who’d bought the Our Family album. She’d lived in Stillwater Springs all her life, so she had to have known what Jake was like. Maybe back then, unlike now, she’d believed that wishing could make it so.
Thick-throated, Logan pulled back a chair and sank into it, knowing he wouldn’t be able to look at the pictures stuffed into that album while he was standing up.
Sidekick rested his chin on Logan’s thigh and made a sympathetic sound.
Logan braced himself, turned the first page.
Right off, he was proved wrong—there was at least one smiling photo of his dad. Jake, very young and bearing a strong resemblance to Dylan, clad in what he would have described as a monkey suit later in his life, gazed joyfully out of a cheap wedding portrait. Beside him, Teresa beamed, a dark beauty, proud of her new husband and her mail-order wedding dress.
Logan’s eyes smarted again.
He curved the fingers of his right hand, touched her face, almost expecting to feel the soft warmth of living flesh. Teresa couldn’t have been older than seventeen, if that. She’d been pregnant with her first and only child, but if either she or Jake regretted that, their smiles gave no sign of it.
On that day, at least, they’d both expected to lead long, happy lives.
Teresa had probably believed her love would change Jake, inspire him to give up his wild ways.
Maybe Jake had believed that, too.
Swallowing hard, Logan turned the page.
There were more pictures of the wedding—oldfashioned snapshots with yellowing, zigzag edges, some in color, some in black and white, all of them fading, slowly disintegrating.
As painful as it was to look at those images—Logan could barely manage it without flinching—he knew he couldn’t let them be lost. As soon as his desktop and scanner arrived, he’d preserve every one, store them on a disk.
For now, all he could do was look.
Had he ever seen these pictures before? If so, he didn’t remember.
Slowly, he turned another page, and then another.
Teresa in a polka-dot sundress, posing beside a tree, magnificently pregnant.
Jake, grinning as he sudsed an old jalopy, the spray from the hose frozen forever on the paper.
And then the first baby picture.
Logan looked down at his bald and patently unremarkable infant self. Teresa was in the picture, too, still in her hospital bed, holding her baby and glowing as if she’d just given birth to a second savior.
Jake’s arm was visible—it must have been his, the hand resting on Teresa’s shoulder.
Dear old Dad, Logan thought. Already easing out of the picture.
After that, he couldn’t turn any more pages.
He closed the album, noticing that it was jammed at the front, and empty at the back. Put it back in the box and snapped on the lid, as if to corral the ghosts again, trap them in plastic.
But there was no containing the retro-spooks now, he knew. They were out for good, and sure to haunt him.
Wishing he’d never come back to Stillwater Springs Ranch, never opened this particular can of worms, Logan pushed back his chair and stood. Ran one forearm across his face, and almost stumbled over Sidekick, who’d been lying patiently at his feet, waiting for whatever came next.
The jolt put things into perspective.
If he hadn’t headed for home, he wouldn’t have found the dog. And as short as their acquaintance was, Logan couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten along without Sidekick for company.
He frowned. Briana called her dog Wanda. Maybe he should have given the critter a “people” nam
e, like Gus or Bob. Something, well, chummy.
Logan still wasn’t ready to sleep—he was keyed up from supper with Briana and the telephone conversations with his brothers and looking at all those old pictures. Like his computer gear, his TV hadn’t arrived yet, not that he would have watched it, anyhow. He just missed having the option.
He found his duffel bag, ferreted through it for the spy-thriller he’d bought somewhere along the way home and stretched out on the sleeping bag on the floor of his old room.
The ranch house might have been about to fall down around his ears, but it was big. He and Dylan and Tyler had each had a room to call their own, though when he was little, Ty had often sneaked in in the middle of the night and curled up on the rug next to Logan’s bed, much as Sidekick might have done if there’d been a bed. Let alone a rug.
The recollection choked Logan up all over again and, as lonesome as he felt, he was glad it was just him and Sidekick. If somebody had been around to ask him what was wrong, he might have broken down and told them.
Or just plain broken down.
Sidekick curled up close against his legs.
Logan opened the book, found his place and read.
At some point, he fell asleep, but all night long, the ghosts kept poking him awake. Once, knowing he was dreaming, he’d seen Jake—the prime-of-his-life Jake, from the album—peek in at him from the hallway, smile and shut the door again.
In the morning, letting the dog out and then back in, starting the coffee brewing, he recalled the dream as clearly as a mystic would recall a visitation.
“Why couldn’t you love us, old man?” he asked the sunrise, standing on the back porch and watching fingers of peach-colored light reach over the eastern hills.
He didn’t know the answer, but he had a theory.
Jake Creed hadn’t loved his wives, or his children, because he hadn’t loved himself.
THE FENCING CONTRACTOR and his crew arrived at seven, just as Logan was finishing breakfast, and started work. The freight truck came at nine-thirty, to Sidekick’s great excitement, and two men got out to unload Logan’s computer, camera gear, books, bed and dressers, clothes and assorted household stuff.
Montana Creeds: Logan Page 8