"Hiding out," Ledger said with a wisp of a grin. In his youth, he'd probably been handsome. Now he was thin and gray-haired, with dark shadows under his pale blue eyes.
Carly looked Meg over again and jutted out her chin. "I don't want to live with her," she said. "She probably doesn't need a kid hanging around anyhow."
"Go in the kitchen," Ledger told the child.
To Meg's surprise, Carly obeyed.
"Live with me?" Meg echoed in a whisper.
"It's that or foster care," Ledger said. "Sit down."
Meg sat, not because her father had asked her to, but because all the starch had gone out of her knees. Questions battered at the back of her throat, like balls springing from a pitching machine.
Where have you been ?
Why didn 't you ever call?
If I kill my mother, could a dream-team get me off without prison time?
"I know this is sudden," Ted Ledger said, perching on the edge of the white velvet wingback chair Eve had had sent from her mansion in San Antonio, to make the place more "homey." "But the situation is desperate. I'm desperate."
Meg tried to swallow, but couldn't. Her mouth was too dry, and her esophagus had closed up. "I don't believe this," she croaked.
"Your mother and I agreed, long ago," Ledger went on, "that it would be best if I stayed out of your life. That's why she never brought you to visit me."
"Visit you?"
"I was in prison, Meg. For embezzlement."
"From McKettrickCo," Meg mused aloud, startled, but at the same time realizing that she'd known all along, on some half-conscious level.
"I told you he was a waste of hair and hide," Angus said. He stood over by the fake fireplace, one arm resting on the mantelpiece.
Meg took care to ignore him, not to so much as glance in his direction, though she could see him out of the corner of one eye. He was in old-man mode today, white-headed and wrinkled and John Wayne-tough, but dressed for the trail.
"Yes," Ledger replied. "Your mother saw that there was no scandal—easier to do in those days, before the media came into its own. I went to jail. She went on with her life."
"Where does Carly fit in?"
Ledger's smile was soft and sad. "While I was inside, I got religion, as they say. When I was released, I found a job, met a woman, got married. We had Carly. Then, three years ago, Sarah—my wife—was killed in a car accident. Things went downhill from there—I was diagnosed last month."
Tears burned in Meg's eyes, but they weren't for Ledger, or even for Sarah. They were for Carly. Although she'd grown up in a different financial situation, with all the stability that came with simply being a McKettrick, she knew what the child must be going through.
"You don't have any other family? Perhaps Sarah's people—"
Ledger shook his head. "There's no one. Your mother has generously agreed to pay my medical bills and arrange for a decent burial, but I'll be lucky if I live six weeks. And once I'm gone, Carly will be alone."
Meg pressed her fingertips to her temples and breathed slowly and deeply. "Maybe Mom could—"
"She's past the age to raise a twelve-year-old," Ledger interrupted.
He leaned forward slightly in his chair, rested his elbows on his knees, intertwined his fingers and let his hands dangle. "Meg, you don't owe me a damn thing. I was no kind of father, and I'm not pretending I was. But Carly is your half sister. She's got your blood in her veins. And she doesn't have anybody else."
Meg closed her eyes, trying to imagine herself raising a resentful, grieving preadolescent girl. As much as she'd longed for her own child, nothing had prepared her for this.
"She won't go to foster care," she said. "Mother would never allow it."
"Boarding school, then," Ledger replied. "Carly would hate that. Probably run away. She needs a real home. Love. Somebody young enough to steer her safely through her teens, at least."
"You heard her," Meg said. "She doesn't want to live with me."
"She doesn't know what she wants, except for me to have a miraculous recovery, and that isn't going to happen. I can't ask you to do this for me, Meg—I've got no right to ask anything of you—but I can ask you to do it for Carly."
The room seemed to tilt. From the kitchen, Meg heard her mother's voice, and Carly's. What were they talking about in there?
"Okay," Meg heard herself say.
Ledger's once-handsome face lit with a smile of relief and what looked like sincere gratitude. "You'll do it? You'll look after your sister?"
My sister.
"Yes," Meg said. On the outside, she probably looked calm. On the inside, she was shaking. "What happens now?"
"I go into the hospital for pain control. Carly goes home with you for a few days. When—and if—I get out, she'll come back to stay with me."
Meg nodded, her mind racing, groping, grasping for some handhold on an entirely new, entirely unexpected situation.
"We've got a room downstairs," Ledger said, rising painfully from the chair. "Carly and I will leave you alone with Eve for a little while."
Over by the fireplace, Angus scowled, powerful arms folded across his chest. Fortunately, he didn't say anything, because Meg would have told him to shut up if he had.
Her father left, Carly trailing after him.
Eve stepped into the kitchen doorway the moment they'd gone.
Angus vanished.
"Nice work, Mom," Meg said, still too shaken to stand up. Since a murder would be hard to pull off sitting down, her mother was off the hook. Temporarily.
"She's about the same age as your baby would have been," Eve said. "It's fate."
Meg's mouth fell open.
"Of course I knew," Eve told her, venturing as far as the white velvet chair and perching gracefully on the edge of its cushion. "I'm your mother."
Meg closed her mouth. Tightly.
Eve's eyes were on the door through which Ted Ledger and Carly had just passed. "I loved him," she said. "But when he admitted stealing all that money, there was nothing I could do to keep him out of prison. We divorced after his conviction, and he asked me not to tell you where he was."
Meg sagged back in her own chair, still dizzy. Still speechless.
"She's a beautiful child," Eve said, referring, of course, to Carly. "You looked just like her, at that age. It's uncanny, really."
"She's bound to have a lot of problems," Meg managed.
"Of course she will. She lost her mother, and now her father is at death's door. But she has you, Meg. That makes her lucky, in spite of everything else."
"I haven't the faintest idea how to raise a child," Meg pointed out.
"Nobody does, when they start out," Eve reasoned. "Children don't come with a handbook, you know."
Suddenly, Meg remembered the lunch she had scheduled with Cheyenne, the groceries she'd intended to buy. Instantaneous motherhood hadn't been on her to-do list for the day.
She imagined making a call to Cheyenne. Gotta postpone lunch. You see, I just gave birth to a twelve-year-old in my mother's living room.
"I had plans," she said lamely.
"Didn't we all?" Eve countered.
"There's no food in my refrigerator."
"Supermarket's right down the road."
"Where have they been living? What kind of life has she had, up to now?"
"A hard one, I would imagine. Ted's something of a drifter—I suspect they've been living out of that old car he drives. He claims he homeschooled her, but knowing Ted, that probably means she knows how to read a racing form and calculate the odds of winning at Powerball."
"Great," Meg said, but something motherly was stirring inside her, something hopeful and brave and very, very fragile. "Can I count on you fop-help, or just the usual interference?"
Eve laughed. "Both," she said.
Meg found her purse, fumbled for her eell phone, dialed Cheyenne's number.
It was something of a relief that she got her friend's voice mail.
"
This is Meg," she said. "I can't make it for lunch. How about a rain check'?"
Chapter Nine
Meg moved through the supermarket like a robot, programmed to take things off the shelves and drop them into the cart. When she got home and started putting away her groceries, she was surprised by some of the things she'd bought. There were ingredients for actual meals, not just things she could nuke in the microwave or eat right out of the box or bag.
She was brewing coffee when a knock sounded at the back door.
Glancing over, she saw her cousin Rance through the little panes of glass and gestured for him to come in. Tall and dark-haired, he looked as though he'd just come off a nineteenth-century cattle drive, in his battered boots, old jeans and Western-cut shirt. Favoring her with a lopsided grin, he removed his hat and hung it on one of the pegs next to the door.
"Heard you had a little shock this morning," he said.
Meg shook her head. She'd never gotten over how fast word got around in a place like Indian Rock. Then again, maybe Eve had called Rance, thinking Meg might need emotional support. "You could say that," she replied. "Who told you?"
Rance proceeded to the coffeemaker, which was still doing its steaming and gurgling number, took a mug down from the cupboard above and filled it, heedless of the brew dripping, fragrant and sizzling, onto the base. Of course, being a man, he didn't bother to wipe up the overflow.
"Eve," he said, confirming her suspicions.
Meg, not usually a neatnik, made a big deal of paper-toweling up the spill around the bottom of the coffeemaker. "It's no emergency, Rance," she told him.
He looked ruefully amused. "Your dad walks into your life after something like thirty years and it's not an emergency?"
"I suppose Mom told you about Carly."
Rance nodded. Ushered Meg to a seat at the table, set down his coffee mug and went back to pour a cup for her, messing up the counter all over again. "Twelve years old, something of an attitude," he confirmed, giving her the cup and then sitting astride the bench. "And coming to live with you. Is that going to screw up your love life?"
"I don't have a love life," Meg said. Sure, she'd spent the night tangling sheets with Brad O'Ballivan but, one, primal sex didn't constitute a relationship and, two, it was none of Rance's business anyway.
"Whatever," Rance said. "The point is, you've got a kid to raise, and she's a handful, by all accounts. I'm no authority on bringing up kids, but I do have two daughters. I'll do what I can to help, Meg, and so will Emma."
Rance's girls, Maeve and Rianna, were like nieces to Meg, and so was Keegan's Devon. While they were all younger than Carly, they would be eager to include her in the family, and it was comforting to know that.
"Thanks," Meg said as her eyes misted over.
"You can do this," Rance told her.
"I don't seem to have a choice. Carly is my half sister, there's no one else, and blood is blood."
"If there's one concept a hardheaded McKettrick can comprehend right away, it's that."
"I don't know as we're all that hardheaded," Angus put in, after materializing behind Rance in the middle of the kitchen.
Meg didn't glance up, nor did she answer. She was close to Rance, Jesse and Keegan—always had been—but she'd never told them she saw Angus, dead since the early twentieth century, on a regular basis. Her mother knew, having overheard Meg talking to him, long after the age of entertaining imaginary playmates had passed, and for all the problems Eve had suffered after Sierra's kidnapping, she'd given her remaining daughter one inestimable gift. She'd believed her.
You 're not the type to see things, Eve had said after Meg reluctantly explained. If you say Angus McKettrick is here, then he is.
Remembering, Meg felt a swell of love for her mother, despite an equal measure of annoyance.
"I'd better get back to punching cattle," Rance said, finishing his coffee and swinging a leg over the bench to stand. With winter coming on, he and his hired men were rounding up strays in the hills and driving the whole bunch down to the lower pastures. "If you need a hand over here, with the girl or anything else, you let me know."
Meg grinned up at him. He'd taken time out of a busy day to come over and check on her in person, and she appreciated that. "Once Carly's had a little time to settle in, we'll introduce her to Maeve and Rianna and Devon. I don't think she's got a clue what it's like to be part of a family like ours."
Rance laid a work-calloused hand on Meg's shoulder as he passed, carrying his empty coffee mug to the sink, then crossing to take his hat down from the peg. "Probably not," he agreed. "But she'll find out soon enough."
With that, Rance left again.
Meg turned to acknowledge Angus. "We are hardheaded," she told him. "Every last one of us."
"I'd rather call it 'persistent,'" Angus imparted.
"Your decision," Meg responded, getting up to dispose of her own coffee cup then heading for the backstairs. She didn't know when Carly would be arriving, but it was time to get a room ready for her. That meant changing sheets, opening windows to air the place out and equipping the guest bathroom with necessities like clean towels, a toothbrush and paste, shampoo and the like.
She'd barely finished, and returned to the kitchen to slap together a hasty lunch, when an old car rattled up alongside the house, backfired and shut down. As Meg watched from the window, Ted Ledger got out, keeping one hand to the car for balance as he rounded it, and leaned in on the opposite side, no doubt trying to persuade a reluctant Carly to alight.
Meg hurried outside.
By the time she reached the car, Carly was standing with a beat-up backpack dangling from one hand, staring at the barn.
"Do you have horses?" she asked.
Hallelujah, Meg thought. Common ground.
"Yes," she said, smiling.
"I hate horses," Carly said. "They smell and step on people."
Ted passed Meg a beleaguered look over the top of the old station wagon, his eyes pleading for patience.
"You do not," he said to Carly. Then, to Meg, "She's just being difficult."
Duh, Meg thought, but in spite of all her absent-father issues, she felt a pang of sympathy for the man. He was terminally ill, probably broke, and trying to find a place for his younger daughter to make the softest possible landing.
Meg figured it would be a fiery crash instead, complete with explosions, but she also knew she was up to the challenge. Mostly, that is. And with a lot of help from Rance, Keegan, Jesse and Sierra.
Oh, yeah. She'd be calling in her markers, all right.
Code-blue, calling all McKettricks.
"I'm not staying unless my dad can stay, too," Carly announced, standing her ground, there in the gravel of the upper driveway, knuckles white where she gripped the backpack.
Meg hadn't considered this development, though she supposed she should have. She forced herself to meet Ted's gaze, saw both resignation and hope in his eyes when she did.
"It's a big house," she heard herself say. "Plenty of room."
Rance's earlier question echoed in her mind. Is that going to screw up your love life?
There'd be no more overnight visits from Brad, at least not in the immediate future. To Meg, that was both a relief— things were moving too fast on that front—and a problem. Her body was still reverberating with the pleasure Brad had awakened in her, and already craving more.
"Okay," Carly said, moving a little closer to Ted. The two of them bumped shoulders in unspoken communication, and Meg felt a brief and unexpected stab of envy.
Meg tried to carry Ted's suitcase inside, but he wouldn't allow that. Manly pride, she supposed.
Angus watched from the back steps as the three of them trailed toward the house, Meg in the lead, Ted following and Carly straggling at the rear.
"She's a good kid," Angus said.
Meg gave him a look but said nothing.
Just walking into the house seemed to wear Ted out, and as soon as Carly had been installed i
n her room, he expressed a need to lie down. Meg showed him to the space generations of McKet-trick women—she being an exception—had done their sewing.
There was only a daybed, and Meg hadn't changed the sheets, but Ted waved away her offer to spruce up the room a little. She went out, closing the door behind her, and heard the bed-springs groan as if he'd collapsed onto them.
Carly's door was shut. Meg paused outside it, on her way to the rear stairway, considered knocking and decided to leave the poor kid alone, let her adjust to new and strange surroundings.
Downstairs, Meg went back to what she'd been doing when Ted and Carly arrived. She made a couple of extra sandwiches, just in case, wolfed one down with a glass of milk and eyeballed the phone.
Was Brad going to call, or was last night just another slam-bam to him? And if he did call, what exactly was she going to say?
***
Willie was surprisingly ambulatory, considering what he'd been through. When Brad came out of the upstairs bathroom, having showered and pulled on a pair of boxer-briefs and nothing else, the dog was waiting in the hall. Climbing the stairs must have been an ordeal, but he'd done it.
"You need to go outside, boy?" Brad asked. When Big John's health had started to decline, Brad had wanted to install an elevator, so the old man wouldn't have to manage a lot of steps, but he'd met with the usual response.
An elevator? Big John had scoffed. Boy, all that fine Nashville livin' is goin' to your head.
Now, with an injured dog on his hands, Brad wished he'd overridden his grandfather's protests.
He moved to lift Willie, intending to carry him downstairs and out the kitchen door to the grassy side yard, but a whimper from the dog foiled that idea. Carefully, the two of them made the descent, Willie stopping every few steps to rest, panting.
The whole process was painful to watch.
Reaching the kitchen at last, Brad opened the back door and waited as Willie labored outside, found a place in the grass after copious sniffing and did his business.
Once he was back inside, Brad decided another trip up the stairway was out of the question. He moved Willie's new dog bed into a small downstairs guest room, threw back the comforter on one of the twin-sized beds and fell onto it, face-first.
The McKettrick Way Page 12