“The truth?”
“The truth,” Meg said, without enthusiasm.
“Zero to zip. Sierra’s been pleasant enough to me, but she’s as stubborn as any McKettrick that ever drew breath, and that’s saying something.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You said you wanted the truth.”
“How can you be so sure Mom won’t be able to get through to her?”
“It’s just a hunch,” Travis said.
Meg was quiet. Travis was famous for his hunches. Too bad he hadn’t paid attention to the one that said his little brother was in big trouble, and that Travis ought to drop everything and look for Brody until he found him.
“Look, maybe I’m wrong,” he added.
“What’s your real impression of Sierra, Travis?”
He took his time answering. “She’s independent to a fault. She’s built a wall around herself and the kid, and she’s not about to let anybody get too close. She’s jumpy, too. If it wasn’t for Liam, and the fact that she probably doesn’t have two nickels to rub together, she definitely wouldn’t be on the Triple M.”
“Damn,” Meg said. “We knew she was poor, but—”
“Her car gave out in the driveway as soon as she pulled in. I took a peek under the hood, and believe me, the best mechanic on the planet couldn’t resurrect that heap.”
“She can drive my Blazer.”
“That might take some convincing on your part. This is not a woman who wants to be obliged. It’s probably all she can do not to grab the kid and hop on the next bus to nowhere.”
“This is depressing,” Meg said.
Travis got up off the bed, peeled back the plastic covering his dinner, and poked warily at the faux meat with the tip of one finger. Talk about depressing.
“Hey,” he said. “Look on the bright side. She’s here, isn’t she? She’s on the Triple M. It’s a start.”
“Take care of her, Travis.”
“As if she’d go along with that.”
“Do it for me.”
“Oh, please.”
Meg paused, took aim and scored a bull’s-eye. “Then do it for Liam.”
CHAPTER FOUR
1919
DOSS LEFT THE HOUSE AFTER supper, ostensibly to look in on the live stock one last time before heading upstairs to bed, leaving the dishwashing to Tobias and Hannah. He stood still in the dooryard, raising the collar of his coat against the wicked cold. Stars speckled the dark, wintry sky.
In those moments he missed Gabe with a piercing intensity that might have bent him double, if he wasn’t McKettrick proud. That was what his mother called the quality, anyhow. In the privacy of his own mind, Doss named it stubbornness.
Thinking of his ma made his pa come to mind, too. He missed them almost as sorely as he did Gabe. His uncles, Rafe and Kade and Jeb, along with their wives, were all down south, around Phoenix, where the weather was more hospitable to their aging bones. Their sons, to a man, were still in the army, even though the war was over, waiting to be mustered out. Their daughters had all married, every one of them keeping the McKettrick name, and lived in places as far-flung as Boston, New York and San Francisco.
There was hardly a McKettrick left on the place, save himself and Hannah and Tobias. It deepened Doss’s loneliness, knowing that. He wished every body would just come back home, where they belonged, but it would have been easier to herd wild barn cats than that bunch.
Doss looked back toward the house. Saw the lantern glowing at the kitchen window. Smiled.
The moment he’d gone outside, Hannah must have switched off the bulb. She worried about running short of things, he’d noticed, even though she’d come from a prosperous family, and certainly married into one.
His throat tightened. He knew she’d been different before he brought Gabe home in a pine box, but then, they all had. Gabe’s going left a hole in the fabric of what it meant to be a McKettrick, and not a tidy one, stitched at the edges. Rather, it was a jagged tear, and judging by the raw newness of his own grief, Doss had little hope of it ever mending.
Time heals, his mother had told him after they’d laid Gabe in the ground up there on the hill, with his Grandpa Angus and those that had passed after him, but she’d had tears in her eyes as she said it. As for his pa, well, he’d stood a long time by the grave. Stood there until Rafe and Kade and Jeb brought him away.
Doss thrust out a sigh, remembering. “Gabe,” he said, under his breath, “Hannah says it’s wrong of me, but I still wish it had been me instead of you.”
He’d have given anything for an answer, but wherever Gabe was, he was busy doing other things. Maybe they had fishing holes up there in the sky, or cattle to round up and drive to market.
“Take care of Hannah and my boy,” Gabe had told him, in that army infirmary, when they both knew there would be no turning the illness around. “Promise me, Doss.”
Doss had swallowed hard and made that promise, but it was a hard one to keep. Hannah didn’t seem to want taking care of, and every morning when Doss woke up, he was afraid this would be the day she’d decide to go back to her own people, up in Montana, and stay gone for good.
The back door opened, startling Doss out of his musings. He hesitated for a moment, then tramped in the direction of the barn, trying to look like a man bent on a purpose.
Hannah caught up, bundled into a shawl and carrying a lighted lantern in one hand.
“I think I’m going mad,” she blurted out.
Doss stopped, looked down at her in puzzled concern. “It’s the grief, Hannah,” he told her gruffly. “It will pass.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Hannah challenged, catching up with herself. The snow was deep and getting deeper, and the wind bit straight through to the marrow.
Doss moved to the windward side, to be a buffer for her. “I’ve got to believe it,” he said. “Feeling this bad forever doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“I put the teapot away,” Hannah said, her breath coming in puffs of white, “I know I put it away. But I must have gotten it out again, without knowing or remembering, and that scares me, Doss. That really scares me.”
They reached the barn. Doss took the lantern from her and hauled open one of the big doors one-handed. It wasn’t easy, since the snow had drifted, even in the short time since he’d left off feeding and watering the horses and the milk cow and that cussed mule Seesaw. The critter was a son of Doss’s mother’s mule, who’d borne the same name, and he was a son of something else, too.
“Maybe you’re a mite forgetful these days,” Doss said, once he’d gotten her inside, out of the cold. The familiar smells and sounds of the darkened barn were a solace to him—he came there often, even when he didn’t have work to do, which was seldom. On a ranch, there was always work to do—wood to chop, harnesses to mend, animals to look after. “That doesn’t mean you’re not sane, Hannah.”
Don’t say it, he pleaded silently. Don’t say you might as well take Tobias and head for Montana.
It was a selfish thought, Doss knew. In Montana, Hannah could live a city life again. No riding a mule five miles to fetch the mail. No breaking the ice on the water troughs on winter mornings, so the cattle and horses could drink. No feeding chickens and dressing like a man.
If Hannah left the Triple M, Doss didn’t know what he’d do. First and foremost, he’d have to break his promise to Gabe, by default if not directly, but there was more to it than that. A lot more.
“There’s something else, too,” Hannah confided.
To keep himself busy, Doss went from stall to stall, looking in on sleepy horses, each one confounded and blinking in the light of his lantern. He was giving Hannah space, enough distance to get out whatever it was she wanted to say.
“What?” he asked, when she didn’t speak again right away.
“Tobias. He just told me—he told me—”
Doss looked back, saw Hannah standing in the moonlit doorway, rimmed in silver, with one
hand pressed to her mouth.
He went back to her. Set the lantern aside and took her by the shoulders. “What did he tell you, Hannah?”
“Doss, he’s seeing things.”
He tensed on the inside. Would have shoved a hand through his hair in agitation if he hadn’t been wearing a hat and his ears weren’t bound to freeze if he took it off. “What kind of things?”
“A boy.” She took hold of his arm, and her grip was strong for such a small woman. It did curious things to him, feeling her fingers on him, even through the combined thickness of his coat and shirt. “Doss, Tobias says he saw a boy in his room.”
Doss looked around. There was nothing but bleak, frozen land for miles around. “That’s impossible,” he said.
“You’ve got to talk to him.”
“Oh, I’ll talk to him, all right.” Doss started for the house, so fixed on getting to Tobias that he forgot all about keeping Hannah sheltered from the wind. She had to lift her skirts to keep pace with him.
Present Day
“Tell me about the boy you saw in your room,” Sierra said, when they’d eaten their fill of fried chicken, macaroni salad, mashed potatoes with gravy, and corn on the cob.
Liam’s gaze was clear as he regarded her from his side of the long table. “He’s a ghost,” he replied, and waited, visibly expecting the statement to be refuted.
“Maybe an imaginary playmate?” Sierra ventured. Liam was a lonely little boy; their life style had seen to that. After her father had died, drunk himself to death in a back-street cantina in San Miguel, the two of them had wandered like gypsies. San Diego. North Carolina, Georgia, and finally Florida.
“There’s nothing imaginary about him,” Liam said staunchly. “He wears funny clothes, like those kids on those old-time shows on TV. He’s a ghost, Mom. Face it.”
“Liam—”
“You never believe anything I tell you!”
“I believe everything you tell me,” Sierra insisted evenly. “But you’ve got to admit, this is a stretch.” Again she thought of the teapot. Again she pushed the recollection aside.
“I never lie, Mom.”
She moved to pat his hand, but he pulled back. The set of his jaw was stubborn, and his gaze drilled into her, full of challenge. She tried again. “I know you don’t lie, Liam. But you’re in a strange new place and you miss your friends and—”
“And you won’t even let me see if they sent me emails!” he cried.
Sierra sighed, rested her elbows on the tabletop and rubbed her temples with the finger tips of both hands. “Okay,” she relented. “You can log on to the internet. Just be careful, because that computer is expensive, and we can’t afford to replace it.”
Suddenly Liam’s face was alight. “I won’t break it,” he promised, with exuberance.
Sierra wondered if he’d just scammed her, if the whole boy-in-the-bedroom thing was a trick to get what he wanted.
In the next instant she was ashamed. Liam was direct to a fault. He believed he’d seen another child in his empty bedroom. She’d call his new doctor in Flag staff in the morning, talk to the woman, see what a qualified professional made of the whole thing. She offered a silent prayer that her car would start, too, because the doctor was going to want to see Liam, pronto.
Mean while, Liam got to his feet and scram bled out of the room.
Sierra cleared away the supper mess, then followed him, as casually as she could, to the room at the front of the house.
He was already online.
“Just what I thought!” he crowed. “My mailbox is bulging.”
The TV was still on, a narrator dole fully describing the effects of a second ice age, due any minute. Run for the hills. Sierra shut it off.
“Hey,” Liam objected. “I was listening to that.”
Sierra approached the computer. “You’re only seven,” she said. “You shouldn’t be worrying about the fate of the planet.”
“Somebody’s got to,” Liam replied, without looking at her. “Your generation is doing a lousy job.” He was staring, as if mesmerized, into the computer screen. Its bluish-gray light flickered on the lenses of his glasses, making his eyes disappear. “Look! The whole Geek Group wrote to me!”
“I asked you not to—”
“Okay,” Liam sighed, without looking at her. “The brilliant children in the gifted program are engaging in communication.”
“That’s better,” Sierra said, sparing a smile.
“You’ve got a few emails waiting yourself,” Liam announced. He was already replying to the cybermissives, his small fingers ranging deftly over the keyboard. He’d skipped the hunt-and-peck method entirely, as had all the other kids in his class. Using a computer came naturally to Liam, almost as if he’d been born knowing how, and she knew this was a common phenomenon, which gave her some comfort.
“I’ll read them later,” Sierra answered. She didn’t have that many friends, so most of her messages were probably sales pitches of the penis-enlargement variety. How had she gotten on that kind of list? It wasn’t as if she visited porn sites or ordered battery-operated boy friends online.
“They get to watch a real rocket launch!” Liam cried, without a trace of envy. “Wow!”
“Wow indeed,” Sierra said, looking around the room. According to Meg, it had originally been a study. Old books lined the walls on sturdy shelves, and there was a natural rock fire place, too, with a fire already laid.
Sierra found a match on the mantelpiece, struck it and lit the blaze.
A chime sounded from the computer.
“Aunt Meg just IM’d you,” Liam said.
Where had he gotten this “Aunt Meg” thing? He’d never even met the woman in person, let alone established a relationship with her. “‘IM’d’?” she asked.
“Instant Messaged,” Liam translated. “Guess you’d better check it out. Just make it quick, because I’ve still got a pile of mail to answer.”
Smiling again, Sierra took the chair Liam so reluctantly surrendered and read the message from Meg.
Travis tells me your car died. Use my Blazer. The keys are in the sugar bowl beside the teapot.
Sierra’s pride kicked in. Thanks, she replied, at a fraction of Liam’s typing speed, but I probably won’t need it. My car is just… She paused. Her car was just what? Old? tired, she finished, inspired.
The Blazer won’t run when I come back if somebody doesn’t charge up the battery. It’s been sitting too long, Meg responded quickly. She must have been as fast with a keyboard as Liam.
Is Travis going to report on everything I do? Sierra wrote. She made so many mistakes, she had to retype the message before hitting Send, and that galled her.
Yes, Meg wrote. Because I plan to nag every last detail out of him.
Sierra sighed. It won’t be that interesting, she answered, taking her time so she wouldn’t have to revise. She was out of practice, and if she hoped to land anything better than a waitressing job in Indian Rock, she’d better polish her computer skills.
Meg sent a smiley face, followed by, Good night, Sis. (I’ve always wanted to say that.)
Sierra bit her lower lip. Good night, she tapped out, and rose from the chair with a glance at the clock on the mantel above the now-snapping fire.
Why had she lit it? She was exhausted, and now she would either have to throw water on the flames or wait until they died down. The first method, of course, would make a terrible mess, so that was out.
“Hurry up and finish what you’re doing,” she told Liam, who had plopped in the chair again the moment Sierra got out of it. “Half an hour till bedtime.”
“I had a nap,” Liam reminded her, typing simultaneously.
“Finish,” Sierra repeated. With that, she left the study, climbed the stairs and went into Liam’s room to get his favorite pajamas from one of the suit cases. She meant to put them in the clothes dryer for a few minutes, warm them up.
Some thing drew her to the window, though. She looked dow
n, saw that the lights were on in Travis’s trailer and his truck was parked nearby. Evidently, he hadn’t stayed long in town, or wherever he’d gone.
Why did it please her so much, knowing that?
1919
Hannah stood in the doorway of Tobias’s room, watching her boy sleep. He looked so peaceful, lying there, but she knew he had bad dreams some times. Just the night before, in the wee small hours, he’d crawled into bed beside her, snuggled as close as his little-boy pride would allow, and whispered earnestly that she oughtn’t die anytime soon.
She’d been so choked up, she could barely speak.
Now she wanted to wake him, hold him tight in her arms, protect him from whatever it was in his mind that made him see little boys that weren’t there.
He was lonely, that was all. He needed to be around other children. Way out here, he went to a one-room school, when it wasn’t closed on account of snow, with only seven other pupils, all of whom were older than he was.
Maybe she should take him home to Montana. He had cousins there. They’d live in town, too, where there were shops and a library and even a moving-picture theater. He could ride his bicycle, come spring, and play baseball with other boys.
Hannah’s throat ached. Gabe had wanted his son raised here, on the Triple M. Wanted him to grow up the way he had, rough-and-tumble, riding horses, rounding up stray cattle, part of the land. Of course, Gabe hadn’t expected to die young—he’d meant to come home, so he and Hannah could fill that big house with children. Tobias would have had plenty of company then.
A tear slipped down Hannah’s cheek, and she swatted it away. Straightened her spine.
Gabe was gone, and there weren’t going to be any more children.
She heard Doss climbing the stairs, and wanted to move out of the doorway. He thought she was too fussy, always hovering over Tobias. Always trying to protect him.
How could a man understand what it meant to bear and nurture a child?
Hannah closed her eyes and stayed where she was.
Doss stopped behind her, uncertain. She could feel that, along with the heat and sturdy substance of his body.
The McKettrick Legend Page 5