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“I heard you were in rehab,” she said, hoping to get under his hide.
“That’s a nasty rumor,” Brad replied cheerfully.
“How about the two ex-wives and that scandal with the actress?”
His grin, insouciant in the first place, merely widened. “Unfortunately, I can’t deny the two ex-wives,” he said. “As for the actress—well, it all depends on whether you believe her version or mine. Have you been following my career, Meg McKettrick?”
Meg reddened.
“Tell him the truth,” Angus counseled. “You never forgot him.”
“No,” Meg said, addressing both Brad and Angus.
Brad looked unconvinced. He was probably just egotistical enough to think she logged onto his Web site regularly, bought all his CDs and read every tabloid article about him that she could get her hands on. Which she did, but that was not the point.
“You’re still the best-looking woman I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he said. “That hasn’t changed, anyhow.”
“I’m not a member of your fan club, O’Ballivan,” Meg informed him. “So hold the insincere flattery, okay?”
One corner of his mouth tilted upward in a half grin, but his eyes were sad. He glanced back toward the truck, then met Meg’s gaze again. “I don’t flatter anybody,” Brad said. Then he sighed. “I guess I’d better get back to Stone Creek.”
Something in his tone piqued Meg’s interest.
Who was she kidding?
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 carefully 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 autograph 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 some things 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 Blackstone, the original landowner, 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 forefinger, 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 somewhere participating in a rodeo or a poker tournament, in the house Jeb had built for his wife, Chloe, high on a hill on the southwestern 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.
Everybody, 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 sometimes.
“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 afterlife, 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 countryside, 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 Blackstone, all right.” Angus smiled at some memory. “He and I used to arm wrestle sometimes, 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 headstone 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 downright 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 some things 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 gracefully.
