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She moved to the front of the house, peered between the lace curtains in the parlor. Jesse’s truck was gone, leaving deep tracks in the patchy mud and snow, rapidly filling with gossamer white flakes.
Bemused, Sierra returned to the kitchen, grabbed her coat and went out the back door, shoving her hands into her pockets and ducking her head against the thickening snowfall and the icy wind that accompanied it. Nothing in her life had prepared her for high-country weather; she’d been raised in Mexico, moved to San Diego after her father died and spent the last several years living in Florida. She supposed it would be a while before she adjusted to the change in climate, but if there was one thing she’d learned to do, on the long journey from then to now, it was adapt.
The doors of the big, weathered-board barn stood open, and Sierra stepped inside, shivering. It was warmer there, but she could still see her breath.
“Mr. Reid?”
“Travis,” came the taciturn answer from a nearby stall. “I don’t answer to much of anything else.”
Sierra crossed the sawdust floor and saw Travis on the other side of the door, grooming poor old Baldy with long, gentle strokes of a brush. He gave her a sidelong glance and grinned slightly.
“Settling in okay?” he asked.
“I guess,” she said, leaning on the stall door to watch him work. There was something soothing about the way he attended to that horse, almost as though he were touching her own skin….
Perish the thought.
He straightened. A quiver went through Baldy’s body. “Something wrong?” Travis asked.
“No,” Sierra said quickly, attempting a smile. “I was just wondering…”
“What?” Travis went back to brushing again, though he was still watching Sierra, and the horse gave a contented little snort of pleasure.
Suddenly the whole subject of the teapot seemed silly. How could she ask if he or Jesse had moved it? And, so what if they had? Jesse was a McKettrick, born and raised, and the things in that house were as much a part of his heritage as hers. Travis was clearly a trusted family friend—if not more.
Sierra found that possibility unaccountably disturbing. Meg had said he was single and free, but she obviously trusted Travis implicitly, which might mean there was a deeper level to their relationship.
“I was just wondering…if you ever drink tea,” Sierra hedged lamely.
Travis chuckled. “Not often, unless it’s the electric variety,” he replied, and though he was smiling, the expression in his eyes was one of puzzlement. He was probably asking himself what kind of nut case Meg and Eve had saddled him with. “Are you inviting me?”
Sierra blushed, even more self-conscious than before. “Well…yes. Yes, I guess so.”
“I’d rather have coffee,” Travis said, “if that’s all right with you.”
“I’ll put a pot on,” Sierra answered, foolishly relieved. She should have walked away, but she seemed fixed to the spot, as though someone had smeared the soles of her shoes with superglue.
Travis finished brushing down the horse, ran a gloved hand along the animal’s neck and waited politely for Sierra to move, so he could open the stall door and step out.
“What’s really going on here, Ms. McKettrick?” he asked, when they were facing each other in the wide aisle, Baldy’s stall door securely latched. Along the aisle, other horses nickered, probably wanting Travis’s attention for themselves.
“Sierra,” she said. She tried to sound friendly, but it was forced.
“Sierra, then. Somehow I don’t think you came out here to ask me to a tea party or a coffee klatch.”
She huffed out a breath and pushed her hands deeper into her coat pockets. “Okay,” she admitted. “I wanted to know if you or Jesse had been inside the house since you brought the baggage in.”
“No,” Travis answered readily.
“It would certainly be all right if you had, of course—”
Travis took a light grip on Sierra’s elbow and steered her toward the barn doors. He closed and fastened them once they were outside.
“Jesse got in his truck and left, first thing,” he said. “I’ve been with Baldy for the last half an hour. Why?”
Sierra wished she’d never begun this conversation. Never left the warmth of the kitchen for the cold and the questions in Travis’s eyes. She’d done both those things, though, and now she would have to explain. “I took a teapot out of the china cabinet,” she said, “and set it on the counter. I went up to Liam’s room, to help him settle in for a nap, and when I came downstairs—”
A startling grin broke over Travis’s features like a flash of summer sunlight over a crystal-clear pond. “What?” he prompted. He moved to Sierra’s other side, shielding her from the bitter wind, increasing his pace, and therefore hers, as they approached the house.
“It was in the cabinet again. I would swear I put it on the counter.”
“Weird,” Travis said, kicking the snow off his boots at the base of the back steps.
Sierra stepped inside, shivering, took off her coat and hung it up.
Travis followed, closed the door, pulled off his gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of his coat before hanging it beside Sierra’s, along with his hat. “Must have been Liam,” he said.
“He’s asleep,” Sierra replied. The coffee she’d made earlier was still hot, so she filled two mugs, casting an uneasy glance toward the china cabinet as she did so. Liam couldn’t have gotten downstairs without her seeing him, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to reach the high shelf in the china closet without dragging a chair over. She would have heard the scraping sound and, anyway, Liam being Liam, he wouldn’t have put the chair back where he found it. There would have been evidence.
Travis accepted the cup Sierra offered with a nod of thanks, took a sip. “You must have put it away yourself, then,” he said reasonably. “And then forgotten.”
Sierra sat down in the chair closest to the wood-burning cookstove, suddenly yearning for a fire, while Travis made himself comfortable nearby, on the bench facing the wall.
“I know I didn’t,” she said, biting her lower lip.
Travis concentrated on his coffee for some moments before turning his gaze back to her face. “It’s a strange house,” he said.
Sierra blinked.
Cool place, Liam had said, right after they arrived, but it’s haunted.
“What do you mean, ‘It’s a strange house’?” she asked. She made no attempt to keep the skepticism out of her voice.
“Meg’s going to kill me for this,” Travis said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“She doesn’t want you scared off.”
Sierra frowned, waiting.
“It’s a good place,” Travis said, taking the homey kitchen in with a fond glance. Clearly, he’d spent a lot of time there. “Odd things happen sometimes, though.”
Sierra heard Liam’s voice again. I saw a kid, upstairs in my room.
She shook off the memory. “Impossible,” she muttered.
“If you say so,” Travis replied affably.
“What kind of ‘odd things’ happen in this house?”
Travis smiled, and Sierra had the sense that she was being handled, skillfully managed, in the same way as the horse. “Once in a while, you’ll hear the piano playing by itself. Or you walk into a room, and you get the feeling you passed somebody on the threshold, even though you’re alone.”
Sierra shivered again, but this time it had nothing to do with the icy January weather. The kitchen was snug and warm, even without the cookstove lit. “I would appreciate it,” she said, “if you wouldn’t talk that kind of nonsense in front of Liam. He’s…impressionable.”
Travis raised an eyebrow.
Suddenly, strangely, Sierra wanted to tell him what Liam had said about seeing another little boy in his room, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. She wouldn’t have Travis Reid—or anybody else, for that matter—thinking Liam was…different. He got enough of that from other kids, being so smart, and his asthma set him apart, too.
“I must have moved the teapot myself,” Sierra said, at last, “and forgotten. Just as you said.”
Travis looked unconvinced. “Right,” he agreed.
1919
Tobias carried the letter to the table, where Doss sat comfortably in the chair everyone thought of as Holt’s. “They bought three hundred head of cattle,” the boy told his uncle excitedly, handing over the sheaf of pages. “Drove them all the way from Mexico to San Antonio, too.”
Doss smiled. “Is that right?” he mused. His ice-blue eyes warmed in the light of a kerosene lantern as he read. The place had electricity now, but Hannah tried to save on it where she could. The last bill had come to over a dollar, for a mere two months of service, and she’d been horrified at the expense.
Standing at the stove, she turned back to her work, stood a little straighter, punched down the biscuit dough with sharp jabs of the wooden spoon. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to Tobias that she might like to see that infernal letter. She was a McKettrick, too, after all, if only by marriage.
“I guess Ma and Pa liked that buffalo you carved for them,” Doss observed, when he’d finished and set the pages aside. Hannah just happened to see, since she’d had to pass right by that end of the table to fetch a pound of ground sausage from the icebox. “Says here it was the best Christmas present they ever got.”
Tobias nodded, beaming with pride. He’d worked all fall on that buffalo, even in his sick bed, whittling it from a chunk of firewood Doss had cut for him special. “I reckon I’ll make them a bear for next year,” he said. Not a word about carving something for her parents, Hannah noted, even though they’d sent him a bicycle and a toy fire engine back in December. The McKettricks, of course, had arranged for a spotted pony to be brought up from the main ranch house on Christmas morning, all decked out in a brand-new saddle and bridle, and though Tobias had dutifully written his Montana grandparents to thank them for their gifts, he’d never played with the engine. Just set it on a shelf in his room and forgotten all about it. The bicycle wouldn’t be much use before spring, that was true, but he’d shown no more interest in it once the pony had arrived.
“Wash your hands for supper, Tobias McKettrick,” Hannah said.
“Supper isn’t ready,” he protested.
“Do as your mother says,” Doss told him quietly.
He obeyed immediately, which should have pleased Hannah, but it didn’t.
Doss, meanwhile, opened the saddle bags, took out the usual assortment of letters, periodicals and small parcels, which Hannah had already looked through before the mail wagon rounded the bend in the road. She’d been both disappointed and relieved when there was nothing with her name on it. Once, in the last part of October, when the fiery leaves of the oak trees were falling in puddles around their trunks like the folds of a discarded garment, she’d gotten a letter from Gabe. He’d been dead almost four months by then, and her heart had fairly stopped at the sight of his handwriting on that envelope.
For a brief, dizzying moment, she’d thought there’d been a mistake. That Gabe hadn’t died of the influenza at all, but some stranger instead. Mix-ups like that happened during and after a war, and she hadn’t seen the body, since the coffin was nailed shut.
She’d stood there beside the road, with that letter in her hand, weeping and trembling so hard that a good quarter of an hour must have passed before she broke the seal and took out the thick fold of vellum pages inside. She’d come to her practical senses by then, but seeing the date at the top of the first page still made her bellow aloud to the empty countryside: March 17, 1918.
Gabe had still been well when he wrote that letter. He’d been looking forward to coming home. It was about time they added to their family, he’d said, and got cattle running on their part of the Triple M again.
She’d dropped to her knees, right there on the hard-packed dirt, too stricken to stand. The mule had wandered home, and presently Doss had come looking for her. Found her still clutching that letter to her chest, her throat so raw with sorrow that she couldn’t speak.
He’d lifted her into his arms, Doss had, without saying a word. Set her on his horse, swung up behind her and taken her home.
“Hannah?”
She blinked, came back to the kitchen and the biscuit batter, the package of sausage in her hands.
Doss was standing beside her, smelling of snow and pine trees and man. He touched her arm.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She swallowed, nodded.
It was a lie, of course. Hannah hadn’t been all right since the day Gabe went away to war. Like as not, she would never be all right again.
“You sit down,” Doss said. “I’ll attend to supper.”
She sat, because the strength had gone out of her knees, and looked around blankly. “Where’s Tobias?”
Doss washed his hands, opened the sausage packet, and dumped the contents into the big cast iron skillet waiting on the stove. “Upstairs,” he answered.
Tobias had left the room without her knowing?
“Oh,” she said, unnerved. Was she losing her mind? Had her sorrow pushed her not only to absent-minded distraction, but beyond the boundaries of ordinary sanity as well?
She considered the mysterious movement of her mother-in-law’s teapot.
Adeptly, Doss rolled out the biscuit dough, cut it into circles with the rim of a glass. Lorelei McKettrick had taught her boys to cook, sew on their own buttons and make up their beds in the morning. You could say that for her, and a lot of other things, too.
Doss poured Hannah a mug of coffee, brought it to her. Started to rest a hand on her shoulder, then thought better of it and pulled back. “I know it’s hard,” he said.
Hannah couldn’t look at him. Her eyes burned with tears she didn’t want him to see, though she reckoned he knew they were there anyhow. “There are days,” she said, in a whisper, “when I don’t think I can go another step. But I have to, because of Tobias.”
Doss crouched next to Hannah’s chair, took both her hands in his own and looked up into her face. “There’s been a hundred times,” he said, “when I wished it was me in that grave up there on the hill, instead of Gabe. I’d give anything to take his place, so he could be here with you and the boy.”
A sense of loss cut into Hannah’s spirit like the blade of a new ax, swung hard. “You mustn’t think things like that,” she said, when she caught her breath. She pulled her hands free, laid them on either side of his earnest, handsome face, then quickly withdrew them. “You mustn’t, Doss. It isn’t right.”
Just then Tobias clattered down the back stairs.
Doss flushed and got to his feet.
Hannah turned away, pretended to have an interest in the mail, most of which was for Holt and Lorelei, and would have to be forwarded to San Antonio.
“What’s the matter, Ma?” Tobias spoke worriedly into the awkward silence. “Don’t you feel good?”
She’d hoped the boy hadn’t seen Doss sitting on his haunches beside her chair, but obviously he had.
“I’m fine,” she said briskly. “I just had a splinter in my finger, that’s all. I got it putting wood in the fire, and Doss took it out for me.”
Tobias looked from her to his uncle and back again.
“Is that why you’re making supper?” he asked Doss.
Doss hesitated. Like Gabe, he’d been raised to abhor any kind of lie, even an innocent one, designed to soothe a boy who’d lost his father and feared, in the depths of his dreams, losing his mother, too.
“I’m making supper,” he said evenly, “because I can.”
