Everything about him piqued her interest. As much as she didn’t want that to be true, it was.
“I was sorry to hear about Big John’s passing,” she said. She almost touched his arm, but managed to catch herself just short of it. If she laid a hand on Brad O’Ballivan, who knew what would happen?
“Thanks,” he replied.
A girl on roller skates wheeled out of the drive-in to collect the tray from the window edge of Brad’s truck, her cheeks pink with care fully restrained excitement. “I might have said something to Heather and Darleen,” the teenager confessed, after a curious glance at Meg. “About you being who you are and the au to graph and everything.”
Brad muttered something.
The girl skated away.
“I’ve gotta go,” Brad told Meg, looking toward the drive-in. Numerous faces were pressed against the glass door; in another minute, there would probably be a stampede. “I don’t suppose we could have dinner together or something? Maybe tomorrow night? There are—well, there are somethings I’d like to say to you.”
“Say yes,” Angus told her.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Meg said.
“A drink, then? There’s a redneck bar in Stone Creek—”
“Don’t be such a damned prig,” Angus protested, nudging her again.
“I’m not a prig.”
Brad frowned, threw another nervous look toward the drive-in and all those grinning faces. “I never said you were,” he replied.
“I wasn’t—” Meg paused, bit her lower lip. I wasn’t talking to you. No, siree, I was talking to Angus McKettrick’s ghost. “Okay,” she agreed, to cover her lapse. “I guess one drink couldn’t do any harm.”
Brad climbed into his truck. The door of the drive-in crashed open, and the adoring hordes poured out, screaming with delight.
“Go!” Meg told him.
“Six o’clock tomorrow night,” Brad reminded her. He backed the truck out, made a narrow turn to avoid running over the approaching herd of admirers and peeled out of the lot.
Meg turned to the disappointed fans. “Brad O’Ballivan,” she said diplomatically, “has left the building.”
Nobody got the joke.
The sun was setting, red-gold shot through with purple, when Brad crested the last hill before home and looked down on Stone Creek Ranch for the first time since his grandfather’s funeral. The creek coursed, silvery-blue, through the middle of the land. The barn and the main house, built by Sam O’Ballivan’s own hands and shored up by every generation to follow, stood as sturdy and imposing as ever. Once, there had been two houses on the place, but the one belonging to Major John Black stone, the original land owner, had been torn down long ago. Now a copse of oak trees stood where the major had lived, surrounding a few old graves.
Big John was buried there, by special dispensation from the Arizona state government.
A lump formed in Brad’s throat. You see that I’m laid to rest with the old-timers when the bell tolls, Big John had told him once. Not in that cemetery in town.
It had taken some doing, but Brad had made it happen.
He wanted to head straight for Big John’s final resting place, pay his respects first thing, but there was a cluster of cars parked in front of the ranch house. His sisters were waiting to welcome him home.
Brad blinked a couple of times, rubbed his eyes with a thumb and fore finger, and headed for the house.
Time to face the proverbial music.
Meg drove slowly back to the Triple M, going the long way to pass the main ranch house, Angus’s old stomping grounds, in the vain hope that he would decide to haunt it for a while, instead of her. A descendant of Angus’s eldest son, Holt, and daughter-in-law Lorelei, Meg called their place home.
As they bumped across the creek bridge, Angus assessed the large log structure, added onto over the years, and well-maintained.
Though close, all the McKettricks were proud of their particular branch of the family tree. Keegan, who occupied the main house now, along with his wife, Molly, daughter, Devon, and young son, Lucas, could trace his lineage back to Kade, another of Angus’s four sons.
Rance, along with his daughters, was Rafe’s progeny. He and the girls and his bride, Emma, lived in the grandly rustic structure on the other side of the creek from Keegan’s place.
Finally, there was Jesse. He was Jeb’s descendant, and resided, when he wasn’t off some where participating in a rodeo or a poker tournament, in the house Jeb had built for his wife, Chloe, high on a hill on the south western section of the ranch. Jesse was happily married to a hometown girl, the former Cheyenne Bridges, and like Keegan’s Molly and Rance’s Emma, Cheyenne was expecting a baby.
Every body, it seemed to Meg, was expecting a baby.
Except her, of course.
She bit her lower lip.
“I bet if you got yourself pregnant by that singing cowboy,” Angus observed, “he’d have the decency to make an honest woman out of you.”
Angus had an uncanny ability to tap into Meg’s wavelength; though he swore he couldn’t read her mind, she wondered some times.
“Great idea,” she scoffed. “And for your information, I am an honest woman.”
Keegan was just coming out of the barn as Meg passed; he smiled and waved. She tooted the Blazer’s horn in greeting.
“He sure looks like Kade,” Angus said. “Jesse looks like Jeb, and Rance looks like Rafe.” He sighed. “It sure makes me lonesome for my boys.”
Meg felt a grudging sympathy for Angus. He’d ruined a lot of dates, being an almost constant companion, but she loved him. “Why can’t you be where they are?” she asked softly. “Wherever that is.”
“I’ve got to see to you,” he answered. “You’re the last holdout.”
“I’d be all right, Angus,” she said. She’d asked him about the after life, but all he’d ever been willing to say was that there was no such thing as dying, just a change of perspective. Time wasn’t linear, he claimed, but simultaneous. The “whole ball of string,” as he put it, was happening at once—past, present and future. Some of the experiences the women in her family, including herself and Sierra, had had up at Holt’s house lent credence to the theory.
Sierra claimed that, before her marriage to Travis and the subsequent move to the new semi-mansion in town, she and her young son, Liam, had shared the old house with a previous generation of McKettricks—Doss and Hannah and a little boy called Tobias. Sierra had offered journals and photograph albums as proof, and Meg had to admit, her half sister made a compelling case.
Still, and for all that she’d been keeping company with a benevolent ghost since she was little, Meg was a left-brain type.
When Angus didn’t comment on her insistence that she’d get along fine if he went on to the great roundup in the sky, or whatever, Meg tried again. “Look,” she said gently, “when I was little, and Sierra disappeared, and Mom was so frantic to find her that she couldn’t take care of me, I really needed you. But I’m a grown woman now, Angus. I’m independent. I have a life.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Angus’s jaw tighten. “That Hank Breslin,” he said, “was no good for Eve. No better than your father was. Every time the right man came along, she was so busy cozying up to the wrong one that she didn’t even notice what was right in front of her.”
Hank Breslin was Sierra’s father. He’d kidnapped Sierra, only two years old at the time, when Eve served him with divorce papers, and raised her in Mexico. For a variety of reasons, Eve hadn’t reconnected with her lost daughter until recently. Meg’s own father, about whom she knew little, had died in an accident a month before she was born. Nobody liked to talk about him—even his name was a mystery.
“And you think I’ll make the same mistakes my mother did?” Meg said.
“Hell,” Angus said, sparing her a reluctant grin, “right now, even a mistake would be progress.”
“With all due respect,” Meg replied, “having you around all
the time is not exactly conducive to romance.”
They started the long climb uphill, headed for the house that now belonged to her and Sierra. Meg had always loved that house—it had been a refuge for her, full of cousins. Looking back, she wondered why, given that Eve had rarely accompanied her on those summer visits, had instead left her daughter in the care of a succession of nannies and, later, aunts and uncles.
Sierra’s kidnapping had been a traumatic event, for certain, but the problems Eve had subsequently developed because of it had left Meg relatively unmarked. She hadn’t been lonely as a child, mainly because of Angus.
“I’ll stay clear tomorrow night, when you go to Stone Creek for that drink,” Angus said.
“You like Brad.”
“Always did. Liked Travis, too. ’Course, I knew he was meant for your sister, that they’d meet up in time.”
Meg and Sierra’s husband, Travis, were old friends. They’d tried to get something going, convinced they were perfect for each other, but it hadn’t worked. Now that Travis and Sierra were together, and ecstatically happy, Meg was glad.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “About Brad and me, I mean.”
Angus didn’t reply. He appeared to be deep in thought. Or maybe as he looked out at the surrounding country side, he was remembering his youth, when he’d staked a claim to this land and held it with blood and sweat and sheer McKettrick stubbornness.
“You must have known the O’Ballivans,” Meg reflected, musing. Like her own family, Brad’s had been pioneers in this part of Arizona.
“I was older than dirt by the time Sam O’Ballivan brought his bride, Maddie, up from Haven. Might have seen them once or twice. But I knew Major Black stone, all right.” Angus smiled at some memory. “He and I used to arm wrestle some times, in the card room back of Jolene Bell’s Saloon, when we couldn’t best each other at poker.”
“Who won?” Meg asked, smiling slightly at the image.
“Same as the poker,” Angus answered with a sigh. “We’d always come out about even. He’d win half the time, me the other half.”
The house came in sight, the barn towering nearby. Angus’s expression took on a wistful aspect.
“When you’re here,” Meg ventured, “can you see Doss and Hannah and Tobias? Talk to them?”
“No,” Angus said flatly.
“Why not?” Meg persisted, even though she knew Angus didn’t want to pursue the subject.
“Because they’re not dead,” he said. “They’re just on the other side, like my boys.”
“Well, I’m not dead, either,” Meg said reasonably. She refrained from adding that she could have shown him their graves, up in the McKettrick cemetery. Shown him his own, for that matter. It would have been unkind, of course, but there was another reason for her reluctance, too. In some version of that cemetery, given what he’d told her about time, there was surely a head stone with her name on it.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Angus told her. He always said that, when she tried to find out how it was for him, where he went when he wasn’t following her around.
“Try me,” she said.
He vanished.
Resigned, Meg pulled up in front of the garage, added onto the original house sometime in the 1950s, and equipped with an automatic door opener, and pushed the button so she could drive in.
She half expected to find Angus sitting at the kitchen table when she went into the house, but he wasn’t there.
What she needed, she decided, was a cup of tea.
She got Lorelei’s teapot out of the built-in china cabinet and set it firmly on the counter. The piece was legendary in the family; it had a way of moving back to the cupboard of its own volition, from the table or the counter, and vice versa.
Meg filled the electric kettle at the sink and plugged it in to heat.
Tea was not going to cure what ailed her.
Brad O’Ballivan was back.
Compared to that, ghosts, the mysteries of time and space, and teleporting teapots seemed down right mundane.
And she’d agreed, like a fool, to meet him in Stone Creek for a drink. What had she been thinking?
Standing there in her kitchen, Meg leaned against the counter and folded her arms, waiting for the tea water to boil. Brad had hurt her so badly, she’d thought she’d never recover. For years after he’d dumped her to go to Nashville, she’d barely been able to come back to Indian Rock, and when she had, she’d driven straight to the Dixie Dog, against her will, sat in some rental car, and cried like an idiot.
There are somethings I’d like to say to you, Brad had told her, that very day.
“What things?” she asked now, aloud.
The teakettle whistled.
She unplugged it, measured loose orange pekoe into Lorelei’s pot and poured steaming water over it.
It was just a drink, Meg reminded herself. An innocent drink.
She should call Brad, cancel grace fully.
Or, better yet, she could just stand him up. Not show up at all. Just as he’d done to her, way back when, when she’d loved him with all her heart and soul, when she’d believed he meant to make a place for her in his busy, exciting life.
Musing, Meg laid a hand to her lower abdomen.
She’d stopped believing in a lot of things when Brad O’Ballivan ditched her.
Maybe he wanted to apologize.
She gave a teary snort of laughter.
And maybe he really had fans on other planets.
A rap at the back door made her start. Angus? He never knocked—he just appeared. Usually at the most inconvenient possible time.
Meg went to the door, peered through the old, thick panes of greenish glass, saw Travis Reid looming on the other side. She wrestled with the lock and let him in.
“I’m here on reconnaissance,” he announced, taking off his cowboy hat and hanging it on the peg next to the door. “Sierra’s worried about you, and so is Eve.”
Meg put a hand to her forehead. She’d left the baby shower abruptly to go meet Brad at the Dixie Dog Drive-In. “I’m sorry,” she said, stepping back so Travis could come inside. “I’m all right, really. You shouldn’t have come all the way out here—”
“Eve tried your cell—which is evidently off—and Sierra left three or four messages on voice mail,” he said with a nod toward the kitchen telephone. “Consider yourself fortunate that I got here before they called out the National Guard.”
Meg laughed, closed the door against the chilly October twilight, and watched as Travis took off his sheep skin-lined coat and hung it next to the hat. “I was just feeling a little—over whelmed.”
“Over whelmed?” She’d been possessed.
Travis went to the telephone, punched in a sequence of numbers and waited. “Hi, honey,” he said presently, when Sierra answered. “Meg’s alive and well. No armed intruders. No bloody accident. She was just—over whelmed.”
“Tell her I’ll call her later,” Meg said. “Mom, too.”
“She’ll call you later,” Travis repeated dutifully. “Eve, too.” He listened again, promised to pick up a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread on the way home and hung up.
Knowing Travis wasn’t fond of tea, Meg offered him a cup of instant coffee, instead.
He accepted, taking a seat at the table where generations of McKettricks, from Holt and Lorelei on down, had taken their meals. “What’s really going on, Meg?” he asked quietly, watching her as she poured herself some tea and joined him.
“What makes you think anything is going on?”
“I know you. We tried to fall in love, remember?”
“Brad O’Ballivan’s back,” she said.
Travis nodded. “And this means—?”
“Nothing,” Meg answered, much too quickly. “It means nothing. I just—”
Travis settled back in his chair, folded his arms, and waited.
“Okay, it was a shock,” Meg admitted. She sat up a little straighter. “But you already
knew.”
“Jesse told me.”
“And nobody thought to mention it to me?”
“I guess we assumed you’d talked to Brad.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because—” Travis paused, looked uncomfortable. “It’s no secret that the two of you had a thing going, Meg. Indian Rock and Stone Creek are small places, forty miles apart. Things get around.”
Meg’s face burned. She’d thought, she’d truly believed, that no one on earth knew Brad had broken her heart. She’d pretended it didn’t matter that he’d left town so abruptly. Even laughed about it. Gone on to finish college, thrown herself into that first entry-level job at McKettrickCo. Dated other men, including the then-single Travis.
And she hadn’t fooled anyone.
“Are you going to see him again?”
Meg pressed the tips of her fingers hard into her closed eyes. Nodded. Then shook her head from side to side.
Travis chuckled. “Make a decision, Meg,” he said.
“We’re supposed to have a drink together tomorrow night, at a cowboy bar in Stone Creek. I don’t know why I said I’d meet him—after all this time, what do we have to say to each other?”
“‘How’ve ya been?’” Travis suggested.
“I know how he’s been—rich and famous, married twice, busy building a reputation that makes Jesse’s look tame,” she said. “I, on the other hand, have been a workaholic. Period.”
“Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself? Not to mention Brad?” A grin quirked the corner of Travis’s mouth. “Comparing him to Jesse?”
Jesse had been a wild man, if a good-hearted, well-intentioned one, until he’d met up with Cheyenne Bridges. When he’d fallen, he’d fallen hard, and for the duration, the way bad boys so often do.
“Maybe Brad’s changed,” Travis said.
“Maybe not,” Meg countered.
“Well, I guess you could leave town for a while. Stay out of his way.” Travis was trying hard not to smile. “Volunteer for a space mission or something.”
“I am not going to run,” Meg said. “I’ve always wanted to live right here, on this ranch, in this house. Besides, I intend to be here when the baby comes.”
Travis’s face softened at the mention of the impending birth. Until Sierra came along, Meg hadn’t thought he’d ever settle down. He’d had his share of demons to overcome, not the least of which was the tragic death of his younger brother. Travis had blamed himself for what happened to Brody. “Good,” he said. “But what do you actually do here? You’re used to the fast lane, Meg.”
The McKettrick Legend Page 25