A Light at Winter’s End

by Julia London

  “I was wondering if I could have Gracie this weekend,” he said. “I’ve been missing the little squirt.”

  “Sure, Wyatt, of course. Want me to bring her to the office Friday?”

  That was their normal arrangement—Macy brought Grace, and he checked into one of those hotel suites for business travelers with a little kitchen and living area. It was easier than trying to babyproof this old house, and closer to Austin and Cedar Springs and all the things for little kids to do. “Ah … no,” he said. “I was thinking of bringing her home.”

  “Where? Do you mean your ranch house?”

  “That’s right. My house.”

  Another long pause. “Are you sure? You always seem so reluctant—”

  “I’m sure. I’ll come pick her up—”

  “No, no, you don’t need to do that,” Macy said. She at least understood how difficult it was for Wyatt to see her and Grace at the house she and Finn had renovated. They ran an animal rescue ranch specializing in larger animals. It had been written up in all the big city papers. Finn had written a book about his ordeal as a captive of the Taliban, and they’d made enough to turn that place into a little Hill Country paradise.

  “I’ll bring her out to you,” Macy said.

  “That’s too far out of the way.”

  “It’s not at all. Friday?”

  “Saturday morning,” Wyatt said.

  “Saturday morning,” Macy said. “I’ll see you around nine.”

  “Great.” He wanted to ask her how she was, how her pregnancy was coming along. “See you then,” he said, and hung up. He’d learned a long time ago it was best not to ask Macy anything, because it just opened wounds that never seemed to heal.

  He looked around the kitchen and living area. Yeah, he’d need to do a little work around here before he could set Gracie lose. Move stuff up out of her reach. He’d have to move the lumber for the pergola he’d started, too; or, better yet, just finish it up. He could put Jesse the magpie to work on that in the morning. Maybe that would shut him up.

  Oh, who was he kidding? He didn’t think even an act of God could keep Jesse Wheeler from talking.

  At Daisy’s Saddle-brew Coffee Shop—Cedar Springs’ answer to Starbucks—Holly struggled through the door with Mason, her laptop, and the diaper bag. She made her way through the boutique part of the coffee shop: a round rack with paperbacks; a couple of counters with hand-beaded jewelry, silk scarves and embroidered linen shirts, lotions and handmade soaps; and a rack of greeting cards. On the other side of the room were some tables and chairs and big, plush armchairs where a couple of young men were sitting with their laptops open.

  Behind the counter, a woman about Holly’s age smiled at Mason. She had dark hair piled up on her head and held in place with a pencil. She was wearing a tank top and, over that, an apron with dancing coffee cups. “Hey, there, kiddo,” she said to Mason. “Coffee, black, right?”

  Mason looked away and she laughed. “What can I do for you?” she asked Holly.

  “He’s going to stick with juice, but I’ll have a vanilla latte and, hopefully, some free Wi-Fi.”

  “You’re in luck on both counts,” the woman said. “We just got free Wi-Fi. What size latte?”

  “Grande,” Holly said.

  “Coming up.” The woman rang it up and suggested that Holly have a seat. “It’s so slow, I’ll bring it out to you. There’s actually a play area in the corner,” she said, pointing. “We’ve got to compete with the Baby Bowl, which just opened up.”

  Holly had seen that place down the street. It was one of those indoor playscapes with a bouncy castle.

  She made her way to the far corner of the store, where a section had been blocked off with plastic fencing about two feet high. Inside were some big plush cubes and a table with an elaborate train track. Mason picked up a train.

  By the time the woman brought the latte, Holly had checked her bank balance.

  “Are you from around here?” the woman asked pleasantly, perching on the arm of one chair.

  “I grew up here,” Holly said. “But I’ve been gone for a while.”

  “Then welcome back! I’m Samantha Delaney, by the way,” she said, and extended her hand.

  “Nice to meet you, Samantha. I’m Holly Fisher. That’s Mason.”

  “Fisher? Any kin to Peggy Fisher?”

  Holly blinked with surprise. She couldn’t imagine that her mother had frequented a coffeehouse. “Peggy Fisher was my mother. Did you know her?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Samantha said. “No, I didn’t know her, but I know Hannah. She must be your sister.”

  Holly’s heart skipped. “Hannah? Have you seen her? I mean recently?”

  “Not in a few weeks. Not since she was working out here.”

  Working out here? When had Hannah ever worked out here? “You mean when my mom was alive,” Holly suggested.

  “Well, really after that,” Samantha said. “She was working on the house, I think. You know … taking care of things that needed to be done.”

  Holly didn’t know.

  “I had the impression she was working on the actual house, like sprucing it up.” She laughed. “She always looked like she’d been dragged through the attic when she came in here. I mean, you know, she’s so pretty and neat, and to see her when she’d been working was funny.”

  What was she talking about? When had Hannah ever worked on a house? “You’re talking about Hannah Drake, right?” Holly said. “About my height? Auburn hair?”

  “Right,” Samantha said. A man in a suit walked in the door and moved briskly to the counter. “Okay, back to the grind,” she said, and winked. “No pun intended.” She jogged to the counter.

  Holly knew Hannah had taken care of some things—all of their mother’s important papers were neatly stacked and rubber-banded together on the desk in the living room. But Holly hadn’t seen signs of any other kind of work—certainly not the type that would make Hannah look like she’d been dragged through the attic. Her mother’s things were just like they’d been when she’d left that homestead and gone to live with Hannah. So, what could Hannah have been doing out here?

  Affair. The thought popped into Holly’s head. Maybe she’d turned the old place into a love shack. Maybe that’s where she was right now, in another love shack, beating Loren at his own game. Nothing would surprise Holly anymore.

  Holly sipped her coffee and used the little time she had to answer some e-mails. She made arrangements to meet Quincy a week from Tuesday and made the completely outrageous promise that she’d have the first song for him then. She assured Ossana she was not kidding, that she really could not accompany her to The Shady Grove on Saturday night to hear Guy Clark.

  When she’d finished with her e-mails, it was time to head to the attorney’s office, and she gathered up her things and Mason.

  The Harper & Preston Law Firm in Cedar Springs was a little less opulent than where either Hannah or Loren worked; for starters, the offices were in an old Victorian house that had been converted to house three lawyers. The reception area was in what had once been the front room. There was a desk and some upholstered chairs that looked as if they’d been snagged from government surplus.

  The receptionist sat a few feet away, perusing a Web page that looked to be about romance novels. She had a stack of them next to the computer.

  Mason was making a game of waddling from one chair to the next. He was walking more and more each day. He was still unsteady, and Holly thought it must be impossible to teeter about on such tiny feet. But teeter he did, laughing every time he reached a chair, then squealing with delight when he started for the next chair.

  She heard Jillian Harper before she saw her, her heels striking a decisive staccato on the porch floor before the door burst open and a woman strode through. She was tall and lean, with sharp elbows and hair pulled tightly back into a chignon. She looked to be around fifty, and was smartly dressed in a sleek, form-fitting lavender dress and carrying a bla
ck clutch that matched her black pumps. She paused at the desk to pick up a stack of pink messages.

  “Your two o’clock is here,” the receptionist said, and nodded in Holly’s direction.

  The woman turned around and gave Holly a quick once-over.

  Holly smiled. She wished she’d had something a little more professional than the jeans, tunic, and boots she was wearing. She’d toyed with borrowing one of her mother’s dresses, but she wasn’t quite ready to take on the nineteen-seventies housewife look.

  “Holly Fisher, glad to meet you. I am Jillian Harper,” Ms. Harper said, marching forward, her hand extended. Her gaze drifted to Mason for a moment, then back to Holly.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” Holly said, and rose to her feet, hopping over the diaper bag to shake the woman’s hand.

  “We can go to my office,” Ms. Harper said, and stood back, gesturing in that direction.

  Holly scooped up Mason and the diaper bag and followed Ms. Harper down the narrow hallway to a cozy office with bay windows that looked out onto a manicured lawn. Ms. Harper had a floral couch and a hooked rug, and the room smelled rosy. The office was completely incongruous with the woman who strode around to her desk—this office was too soft for Jillian Harper.

  “Well, then,” Ms. Harper said as she donned reading glasses and picked up a pen, poised to write. “Tell me what brings you here.”

  Holly handed her a will and her mother’s last handwritten letter, in which she’d left everything to Holly, and explained the circumstances of her mother’s death.

  Ms. Harper perused the documents. “The letter is different than the actual will in that it leaves everything to you,” she said. “Is anyone going to dispute that this is authentic? Siblings? Relatives?”

  Holly thought of Hannah, and of Hannah’s anger over the letter. “No. I told my sister that regardless of what our mother wrote in the letter, I will split it all with her.”

  Ms. Harper’s eyes narrowed slightly. She frowned at the letter. “We can proceed on the assumption that she won’t contest it, but I think you should know that there are few things on this earth that bring out the family claws like money.”

  “I don’t think there is enough money for her to care about,” Holly said confidently.

  “You just never know,” Ms. Harper said shrewdly. “We will have to have this probated, of course. Do you know what that means?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “It means that a court of law is going to have to deem this will and this handwritten codicil are valid. And then there is a period where we wait to see if there are any claims against the estate.”

  “Okay.”

  “That usually takes a little time.”

  “How much time?”

  Ms. Harper shrugged. “I’d say two or three months, but maybe longer, given the discrepancy between the letter and the will.”

  “Two or three months?” Holly looked at Mason, who was sitting in her lap, chewing on her keys. She groaned.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Yes,” Holly admitted. “I need to access my mother’s bank account.” That sounded perfectly wretched. “I don’t mean it like that,” she said. “I have—had—a job and an income, but I got caught in a situation …”

  Ms. Harper arched a brow. “That sounds ominous.”

  Holly looked at Mason. “This is my nephew,” she said, and described her situation to Ms. Harper, including Hannah’s resentment about the will. She told her about Loren, and how Hannah had appeared at her apartment with Mason and had left him, saying she’d be back, then had disappeared, and how Loren was out of the country. She explained that she needed money for her and Mason until Hannah came back, and to make some repairs to the house.

  Ms. Harper listened to it all, nodding and making notes. When Holly finished telling her everything, Ms. Harper leaned back and tapped the end of her pencil against her lips. “I’d say we need to get this will probated before your sister decides she wants to make trouble over it.”

  “Trouble?”

  “You said she was angry about the will. If she’s getting drug treatment, she will come out with a clearer head and might have a different opinion of what she wants to do about your inheritance.”

  Holly thought about that and shook her head. “I honestly don’t think so. I mean, she doesn’t need the money.”

  “Need rarely has much to do with it,” Ms. Harper said. “Have you filed a missing-person report?”

  Holly winced. “No. I should have, I know, but I feared they would take Mason from me and give him to his father.”

  Ms. Harper shrugged. “At this point, you’d need a judge’s intervention to place him back with his father.”

  “I don’t know,” Holly said skeptically. She couldn’t take that risk. “Loren is a high-powered attorney in Austin.”

  “Well,” Ms. Harper said with a shrug of her shoulders. “My advice is the same—file a missing-person report. It will protect you if there is any trouble in probate court later. And you need to get the will probated.”

  “Let’s just go with probating the will for now,” Holly said.

  “Just out of curiosity, what do you intend to do with the property?” Ms. Harper asked as she jotted down another note.

  “Sell it, I think,” Holly said. “My neighbor said I could get a lot.” She laughed at that. “I think he’s overly optimistic, but maybe I can get a decent price.”

  Ms. Harper shook her head. “All of those old farmers believe that,” she said. “How much did he say you could get?”

  “He said five to six million.”

  Ms. Harper snorted. “Who is your neighbor?”

  “Wyatt Clark.”

  Ms. Harper stopped writing and looked up. “Wyatt Clark? That’s different. Wyatt knows what he is talking about. Of course, even at that price, the government is going to take a huge chunk of it, but you ought to come out good. And if you do get that, your sister is definitely going to want a piece of it.”

  “What?” Holly asked, skipping right over the part about how much she’d get. “You know Wyatt?”

  “Oh, I know him,” Ms. Harper said with a laugh. “He was married to my daughter, Macy.”

  Holly was shocked. Obviously, Wyatt had been married, but the coincidence was too much. “I … I didn’t know that. Does your daughter live around here?”

  Ms. Harper smiled a little. “She lives out at the Hill Country Animal Rescue Ranch. You know where that is, right?”

  Holly shook her head, and Ms. Harper’s eyes widened a little. “Honey, do you know anything about Wyatt Clark?”

  “No. I’ve only met him a couple of times.”

  Ms. Harper put both of those sharp elbows on her desk and leaned forward. “Let me tell you something. Wyatt Clark is a good guy, and if he says you can get that for your ranch, listen to him. Better yet, let him sell it for you. He’ll get you the best deal to be had.”

  “Wyatt Clark,” Holly said.

  “Wyatt Clark, the one and only,” Ms. Harper said. “He doesn’t get into town very often, but if he tells you that land will bring millions, you can bank on it. He was a developer for a very long time. One of the best.”

  “Ah,” Holly said. She was shocked that the reticent cowboy who had shown up with firewood was a developer. Almost as shocked as she was that her family home could bring so much money. She was learning all sorts of surprising things today.

  “Let me give you some things to look at,” Ms. Harper said. “Here is the contract I use with my clients and my fee schedule. I take it you don’t have the money for a retainer, so we’ll work something into the agreement that I’ll be paid from the proceeds of the probated will.”

  Holly took the papers that Ms. Harper shoved at her. She said she would call the next day after she’d looked everything over. She thanked her, picked up Mason, and left. Her mind was not on the windfall she’d just learned of, but on Wyatt Clark. He was suddenly even more interesting to her.

 
; After a quick trip to the grocery—Holly was dying to bake her mother’s red velvet cake—she headed back to the homestead. It was a twenty-minute drive from Cedar Springs, twenty minutes of miles and miles of fences and grazing cattle and dizzying thoughts of a cowboy who was much different than he appeared. And Hannah’s secret life.

  Holly turned in through the open gate and onto the pitted caliche road, which desperately needed to be graded, and bounced up to the house. She opened the car door and stepped out. It was one of those clear and mild fall days when there was no sound but the steady creaking of the windmill.

  And Mason fussing in the back of the car.

  She took him into the house and sat him in the middle of the playpen to chew on a frozen washcloth while she hauled the groceries in and put them away. When she’d finished, she looked around. What had Hannah been doing out here? The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was exactly as it had been all the years Holly had lived here. She opened some of the cabinets to assure herself of that. There was the plastic spice rack with the red tins of odd spices that Holly guessed were at least as old as she was. There were the everyday Fiestaware dishes, orange and blue and green, from which they had eaten pancakes and meat loaf and chicken-fried steaks. There were the red plastic tumbler glasses and the matching red plastic pitcher.

  What were you doing, Hannah? Nothing had changed but that neat stack of papers. There was nothing else, nothing to indicate that Hannah had spent any appreciable time here after their mother had died, much less engaged in something that made her look like she’d been dragged through the attic.

  Holly shrugged it off. Samantha’s memory was wrong, that was all. She had Hannah confused with someone else.

  Mason started to cry, and Holly put him down for a nap. She returned to the kitchen and boiled water for tea, then picked up her guitar and carried it and her tea into the living area to work on her song. She made good progress and felt good about how it was developing. She really had found her vibe out here, and thought Quincy would be pleased with what she had.

  The chorus was the only thing that didn’t seem right, and she messed with it awhile, finally hitting on the right cadence. When she did, she fell back on the couch in a moment of gleeful relief and promptly knocked her forgotten teacup from its precarious perch on the couch’s arm. It fell to the wood floor and broke, splattering tea everywhere.