The McKettrick Legend

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Help me out, here,” Meg said.

  Angus remained silent.

  Meg sighed and turned back to the screen. She’d been scrolling through names, intermittently, for days. And now, suddenly, she had a hit, more an instinct than anything specific. “Creed, Josiah McKettrick,” she said excitedly, clicking on the link. “I must have passed right over him dozens of times.”

  Angus materialized at her elbow, stooping and staring at the screen, his heavy eyebrows pulled together in consternation and curiosity.

  “Captain in the United States Army,” Meg read aloud, and with a note of triumph in her voice. “Founder of ‘the legendary Stillwater Springs Ranch,’ in western Montana. Owner of the Stillwater Springs Courier, the first newspaper in that part of the territory. On the town council, two terms as mayor. Wife, four sons, active member of the Methodist Church.” She stopped, looked up at Angus. “Doesn’t sound like an anti-Irish pirate to me.” She tapped at Josiah’s solemn photograph on the home page. Bewhiskered, with a thick head of white hair, he looked dour and prosperous in his dark suit, the coat fastened with one button at his breastbone, in that curious nineteenth-century way. “There he is, Angus,” she said. “Your brother, Josiah McKettrick Creed.”

  “I’ll be hornswoggled,” Angus said.

  “Whatever that is,” Meg replied, busily copying information onto a notepad. The website was obviously the work of a skillful amateur, probably a family member with a genealogical bent, and there was no “contact us” link, but the name of the town, and the ranch if it still existed, was information enough.

  “Looks like you missed something,” Angus said.

  Meg peered at the screen, trying to see past Angus’s big index finger, scattering a ring of pixels around its end.

  She pushed his hand gently aside.

  And saw a tiny link at the bottom of the page, printed in blue letters.

  A press of a mouse button and she and Angus were looking at the masthead of Josiah’s newspaper, the Courier.

  The headline was printed in heavy type. MURDER AND SCANDAL BESET STILLWATER SPRINGS RANCH.

  Some thing quivered in the pit of Meg’s stomach, a peculiar combination of dread and fascination. The byline was Josiah’s own, and the brief obituary beneath it still pulsed with the staunch grief of an old man, bitterly determined to tell the unflinching truth.

  Dawson James Creed, 21, youngest son of Josiah McKettrick Creed and Cora Dawson Creed, perished yesterday at the hand of his first cousin, Benjamin A. Dawson, who shot him dead over a game of cards and a woman. Both the shootist and the woman have since fled these parts. Services tomorrow at 2:00 p.m., at the First Street Methodist Church. Viewing this evening at the Creed home. Our boy will be sorely missed.

  “Creed,” Angus repeated, musing. “That was my mother’s name, before she and my pa hitched up.”

  “So maybe Josiah wasn’t a McKettrick,” Meg ventured. “Maybe your mother was married before, or—”

  Angus stiffened. “Or nothing,” he said pointedly. “Back in those days, women didn’t go around having babies out of wedlock. Pa must have been her second husband.”

  Meg, feeling a little stung, didn’t comment. Nor did she argue the point, which would have been easy to back up, that premarital pregnancies weren’t as uncommon in “his day” as Angus liked to think.

  “Where’s that old Bible Georgia set such store by?” he asked now.

  Georgia, his second wife, mother of Rafe, Kade and Jeb, had evidently been her generation’s record-keeper and family historian. “I suppose Keegan has it,” she answered, “since he lives in the main ranch house.”

  “Ma wrote all the begats in that book,” Angus recalled. “I never thought to look at it.”

  “She never mentioned being married before?”

  “No,” Angus admitted. “But folks didn’t talk about things like that much. It was a private matter and besides, they had their hands full just surviving from day to day. No time to sit around jawing about the past.”

  “I’ll drop in on Keegan and Molly in the morning,” Meg said. “Ask if I can borrow the Bible.”

  “I want to look at it now.”

  “Angus, it’s late—”

  He vanished.

  Meg sighed. There were no more articles on the website—just that short, sad obituary notice—so she logged off the computer. She was brewing a cup of herbal tea in the microwave, hoping it would help her sleep, when Ted came down the backstairs, wearing an old plaid flannel bathrobe and scruffy slippers.

  Lord, he wanted to talk.

  Now, from the look on his face.

  She wasn’t ready, and that didn’t matter.

  The time had come.

  Dragging back a chair at the table, Ted crumpled into it.

  “Tea?” Meg asked, and immediately felt stupid.

  “Sit down, Meg,” Ted said gently.

  She took the mug from the microwave, grateful for its citrusy steamy scent, and joined him, perching on the end of one of the benches.

  “There’s no money,” Ted said.

  “I gathered that,” Meg replied, though not flippantly. And the dizzying thought came to her that maybe this was all some kind of con—a Paper Moon kind of thing, Ted playing the Ryan O’Neal part, while Carly handled Tatum’s role. But the idea fizzled almost as quickly as it had flared up in her mind—a scam would have been so much easier to take than the grim reality.

  Ted ran a tremulous hand through his thinning hair. “I wish things had happened differently, Meg,” he said. “I wanted to come back a hundred times, say I was sorry for everything that happened. I convinced myself I was being noble—you were a McKettrick, and you didn’t need an ex-yardbird complicating your life. The truth gets harder to deny when you’re toeing up to the pearly gates, though. I was a coward, that’s all. I tried to make up for it by being the best father I could to Carly.” He paused, chuckled ruefully. “I won’t take any prizes for that, either. After Rose died, it was as if somebody had greased the bottom of my feet. I just couldn’t stay put, and it was mostly downhill, a slippery slope, all the way. The worst part is, I dragged Carly right along with me. Last job I had, I stocked shelves in a discount store.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Meg said, blinking back tears she didn’t want him to see.

  “Yes,” Ted said, “I do. I loved your mother and she loved me. You need to know how happy we were when you were born—that you were welcome in this big old crazy world.”

  “Okay,” Meg allowed. “You were happy.” She swallowed. “Then you embezzled a lot of money and went to prison.”

  “Like most embezzlers,” Ted answered, “I thought I could put it back before it was missed. It didn’t happen that way. Your mother tried to cover for me at first, but there were other McKettricks on the board, and they weren’t going to tolerate a thief.”

  “Why did you do it?” The question, more breathed than spoken, hovered in the otherwise silent room.

  “Before I met Eve, I gambled. A lot. I still owed some people. I was ashamed to tell Eve—and I knew she’d divorce me—so I ‘borrowed’ what I needed and left as few tracks as possible. That got my creditors off my back—they were knee-breakers, Meg, and they wouldn’t have stopped at hurting me. They’d have gone after you and Eve, too.”

  “So you stole the money to protect Mom and me?” Meg asked, not bothering to hide her skepticism.

  “Partly. I was young and I was scared.”

  “You should have told Mom. She would have helped you.”

  “I know. But by the time I realized that, it was too late.” He sighed. “Now it’s too late for a lot of things.”

  “It’s not too late for Carly,” Meg said.

  “Exactly my point. She’s going to give you some trouble, Meg. She won’t want to go to school, and she’s used to being a loner. I’m all the family she’s had since her mother was killed. Like I said before, I’ve got no right to ask you for anything. I don’t expect sympathy.
I know you won’t grieve when I’m gone. But Carly will, and I’m hoping you’re McKettrick enough to stand by her till she finds her balance. My worst fear is that she’ll go down the same road I did, drifting from place to place, living by her wits, always on the outside looking in.”

  “I won’t let that happen,” Meg promised. “Not because of you, but because Carly is my sister. And because she’s a child.”

  They’d been over this before, but Ted seemed to need a lot of reassurance. “I guess there is one other favor I could ask,” he said.

  Meg raised an eyebrow. Waited.

  “Will you forgive me, Meg?”

  “I stopped hating you a long time ago.”

  “That isn’t the same as forgiving me,” Ted replied.

  She opened her mouth, closed it again. A glib, “Okay, I forgive you” died on her tongue.

  Ted smiled sadly. “While you’re at it, forgive your mother, too. We were both wrong, Eve and I, not to tell you the whole truth from the beginning. But she was trying to protect you, Meg. And it says a lot about the other McKettricks, that none of them ever let it slip that I was a thief doing time in a Texas prison while you were growing up. A lot of people would have found that secret too juicy to keep to them selves.”

  Meg wondered if Jesse, Rance and Keegan had known, and decided they hadn’t. Their parents had, though, surely. All three of their fathers had been on the company board with Eve, back in those days. Meg thought of them as uncles—and they’d looked after her like a daughter, taken her under their powerful wings when she summered on the Triple M, and so had her “aunts.” Stirred her right into the boisterous mix of loud cousins, remembered her birth days and bought gifts at Christmas. All the while, they’d been conspiring to keep her in the dark about Ted Ledger, of course, but she couldn’t resent them for it. Their intentions, like Eve’s, had been good.

  “Who are you, really?” Meg asked, remembering Carly’s remark about changing last names so many times she was no longer sure what the real one was. And underlying the surface question was another.

  Who am I?

  Ted smiled, patted her hand. “When I married your mother, I was Ted Sullivan. I was born in Chicago, to Alice and Carl Sullivan. Alice was a home maker, Carl was a finance manager at a used car dealership.”

  “No brothers or sisters?”

  “I had a sister, Sarah. She died of meningitis when she was fifteen. I was nineteen at the time. Mom never recovered from Sarah’s death—she was the promising child. I was the problem.”

  “How did you meet Mom?” She hadn’t thought she needed, or even wanted, to know such things. But, suddenly, she did.

  Ted grinned at the memory, and for just a moment, he looked young again, and well. “After I left home, I took college courses and worked nights as a hotel desk clerk. I moved around the country, and by the time I wound up in San Antonio, I was a manager. McKettrickCo owned the chain I worked for, and one of your uncles decided I was a bright young man with a future. Hired me to work in the home office. Where, of course, I saw Eve every day.”

  Meg imagined how it must have been, both Ted and Eve still young, and relatively mistake-free. “And you fell in love.”

  “Yes,” Ted said. “The family accepted me, which was decent of them, considering they were rich and I had an old car and a couple of thousand dollars squirreled away in a low-interest savings account. The McKettricks are a lot of things, but they’re not snobs.”

  Having money doesn’t make us better than other people, Eve had often said as Meg was growing up. It just makes us luckier.

  “No,” she agreed. “They’re not snobs.” She tried to smile and failed. “So I would have been Meg Sullivan, not Meg McKettrick—if things hadn’t gone the way they did?”

  Ted chuckled. “Not in a million years. You know the McKettrick women don’t change their names when they marry. According to Eve, the custom goes all the way back to old Angus’s only daughter.”

  “Katie,” Meg said. Her mind did a time-warp thing—for about fifteen seconds, she was nineteen and pregnant, having her last argument with Brad before he got into his old truck and drove away. Late that night, he would board a bus for Nashville.

  We’ll get married when I get back, Brad had said. I promise.

  You’re not coming back, Meg had replied, in tears.

  Yes, I am. You’ll see—you’ll be Meg O’Ballivan before you know it.

  I’ll never be Meg O’Ballivan. I’m not taking your name.

  Have it your way, Ms. McKettrick. You always do.

  “Meg?” Ted’s voice brought her back to the kitchen on the Triple M. Her tea had grown cold, sitting on the tabletop in its heavy mug.

  “You’re not the first person who ever made a mistake,” she told her father. “I hereby confer upon you my complete forgiveness.”

  He laughed, but his eyes were glossy with tears.

  “You’re tired,” Meg said. “Get some rest.”

  “I want to hear your story, Meg. Eve sent me a few pictures, the occasional copy of a report card, when I was on the inside. But there are a lot of gaps.”

  “Another time,” Meg answered. But even as Ted stood to make his way back upstairs, and she disposed of her cold tea and put the mug into the dish washer, she wondered if there would be another time.

  Phil was back.

  Brad, accompanied to the barn by an adoring Willie, tossed the last flake of hay into the last feeder when he heard the distinctive purr of a limo engine and swore under his breath.

  “This is getting old,” he told Willie.

  Willie whined in agreement and wagged his tail.

  Phil was walking toward Brad, the stretch gleaming in the early morning light, when he and Willie stepped outside.

  “Good news!” Phil cried, beaming. “I spoke to the Holly wood people, and they’re willing to make the movie right here at Stone Creek!”

  Brad stopped, facing off with Phil like a gun fighter on a winds wept Western street. “No,” he said.

  Phil, being Phil, was undaunted. “Now, don’t be too hasty,” he counseled. “It would really give this town a boost. Why, the jobs alone—”

  “Phil—”

  Just then, Livie’s ancient Suburban topped the hill, started down, dust billowing behind. Brad took a certain satisfaction in the sight when the rig screeched to a halt along side Phil’s limo, covering it in fine red dirt.

  Livie sprang from the Suburban, smiling. “Good news,” she called, unknowingly echoing Phil’s opening line. “The Iversons’ cattle aren’t infected.”

  Phil nudged Brad in the ribs and said in a stage whisper, “She could be an extra. Bet your sister would like to be in a movie.”

  “In a what?” Livie asked, frowning. She crouched to examine Willie briefly, and accept a few face licks, before straightening and putting out a hand to Phil Meadowbrook. “Olivia O’Ballivan,” she said. “You must be my brother’s manager.”

  “Former manager,” Brad said.

  “But still with his best interests at heart,” Phil added, placing splayed fingers over his avaricious little ticker and looking woebegone, long-suffering and misunderstood. “I’m offering him a chance to make a feature film, right here on the ranch. Just look at this place! It’s perfect! John Ford would salivate—”

  “Who’s John Ford?” Livie asked.

  “He made some John Wayne movies,” Brad explained, beginning to feel cornered.

  Livie’s dusty face lit up. She had hay dust in her hair—probably acquired during an early morning visit to the Iversons’ dairy barn. “Wait till I tell the twins,” she burst out.

  “Hold it,” Brad said, raising both hands, palms out. “There isn’t going to be any movie.”

  “Why not?” Livie asked, suddenly crestfallen.

  “Because I’m retired,” Brad reminded her patiently.

  Phil huffed out a disgusted sigh.

  “I don’t see the problem if they made the movie right here,” Livie said.

>   “At last,” Phil interjected. “Another voice of reason, besides my own.”

  “Shut up, Phil,” Brad said.

  “You always talked about making a movie,” Livie went on, watching Brad with a mischievous light dancing in her eyes. “You even started a production company once.”

  “Cynthia got it in the divorce,” Phil confided, as though Brad wasn’t standing there. “The production company, I mean. I think that soured him.”

  “Will you stop acting as if I’m not here?” Brad snapped.

  Willie whimpered, worried.

  “See?” Phil was quick to say. “You’re up set ting the dog.” Another patented Phil Meadowbrook grin flashed. “Hey! He could be in the movie, too. People eat that animal stuff up. We might even be able to get Disney in on the project—”

  “No,” Brad said, exasperated. “No Disney. No dog. No petite veterinarian with hay in her hair. I don’t want to make a movie.”

  “You could build a library or a youth center or something with the money,” Phil said, trailing after Brad as he broke from the group and strode toward the house, fully intending to slam the door on his way in.

  “We could use an animal shelter,” Livie said, scrambling along at his other side.

  “Fine,” Brad snapped, slowing down a little because he realized Willie was having trouble keeping up. “I’ll have my accountant cut a check.”

  The limo driver gave the horn a discreet honk, then got out and tapped at his watch.

  “Plane to catch,” Phil said. “Big Hollywood meeting. I’ll fax you the contract.”

  “Don’t bother,” Brad warned.

  Livie caught at his arm, sounding a little breathless. “What is the matter with you?” she whispered. “That movie would be the biggest thing to happen in Stone Creek since that pack of outlaws robbed the bank in 1907!”

  Brad stopped. Thrust his nose right up to Livie’s. “I. Am. Retired.”

  Livie set her hands on her skinny hips. She really needed to put some meat on those fragile little bones of hers. “I think you’re chicken,” she said.