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Megan stared up at him.
“Did you want Rory for yourself?”
Her mouth dropped open, then she shook her head and managed a true smile. “I want the bride and groom to have all the happiness they deserve. I wish them the best.”
He looked skeptical for a second, then shrugged. “How do we announce their departure?”
“We pass out the bags of birdseed.” She slipped around his tall, lithe frame and pointed to a side table.
He helped her make sure each guest had a little net bag of seed to send the wedded couple off in a shower of blessings. When the bride and groom were gone, others began to take their leave.
Later, when all the guests had left, except for Kate, who’d stayed to help with the cleanup, Megan kicked off her shoes with relief.
“You don’t have to do that,” she scolded Kate, who was washing up a crystal bowl.
“This is the last piece. The caterers did a good job, didn’t they?”
“Lovely.” Lifting her left foot, Megan wiggled her toes. She was much more used to boots than heels—and preferred the more casual wear. Training horses and giving riding lessons was how she made her living. Horses were somewhat predictable. People weren’t.
Kate dried the bowl and put it away. She hung up the dishtowel. “I hate to leave you here alone.”
“I’ll be fine.” Megan managed another smile.
Her cousin wasn’t fooled. Kate was seven years older. As a teenager, she’d often baby-sat Megan and Shannon. She’d been there when Bunny had drowned. Kate had been the rock that held steadfast for Megan then and five years later when her father had died in an automobile accident.
Their grandfather’d had a stroke shortly after his son died and lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair, hardly able to speak. It was all so sad—
Hot tears filled her eyes, startling her.
“Megan?” Kate said, concerned.
Megan grabbed a tissue and mopped her eyes. “I’m feeling terribly sentimental today. The wedding and all. Wasn’t Shannon lovely?”
“Yes. Rory has been good for her.”
Megan nodded.
“I can spend the night,” Kate offered. “Jess took the children home. I have my car here.”
Kate had brought over the roses that filled every vase in the house. The family green thumb belonged to her.
“Actually I prefer the quiet. It’s been so hectic lately, I’m looking forward to not feeling compelled to talk to anyone or be social. Besides, I’m going out to check on a mare as soon as I change. If she’s foaling, I’ll be in the stable the rest of the night. You go home and take care of your family. You’ve done enough here today. Shoo.”
“Okay,” Kate agreed. “Come over for dinner tomorrow night. The guys have promised us fresh fish.”
Megan had to decline. “I have late classes on Mondays.” She walked her cousin to the driveway and waved her off.
It wasn’t until Kate’s taillights disappeared that she felt the loneliness close in on her once more. She stood at the top of the stairs, on the way to her bedroom, and listened to the silence of the old mansion that had sheltered several generations of Windoms.
Their grandfather, the family patriarch, had died during the spring, which was why Shannon had postponed the wedding until June. Now Megan was totally alone in the family homestead. It gave her an odd, unsettled feeling.
Like being the last of her kind.
Which wasn’t true in the least. She had her two cousins, who’d been her friends and mentors all her life. She had her uncle, plus the two new cousins, Jeremy and Amanda. She knew everyone in Wind River, population one thousand, and the county. Besides her cousins and their families, other ranchers lived around the lake and along the county road. She wasn’t alone, not at all.
After changing to a shirt, jeans and boots, she did go to the stable. The light flickered when she turned it on. If the electricity was going to go out, she’d better check the flashlight and fill the oil lantern. After doing so, she looked in on the mother-to-be.
The mare slept peacefully, waking only when Megan leaned over the stall. The horse rose and came to Megan, blowing gently into her ear and reminding her of the way a lover might tease during their lovemaking.
An image formed in her inner vision. Kyle Herriot. Now that her cousin was wed to his best friend, would she be forced to endure his company often?
Rather than recoiling from the idea, she studied it from several angles, trying to assess her own reactions.
The past wasn’t his fault. Nor was it hers. It was just there, a barrier as big as a boulder field laid down by the glaciers that had moved through these parts thousands of years ago.
Her grandfather had hated the Herriots because his fiancеe had run away from him only days before the wedding and eloped with Sebastian “Sonny” Herriot instead. Megan wondered what had caused the flight.
A neighboring woman had once said her grandfather’d had a terrible temper during his youth, that he and his fiancеe had had a fierce quarrel over her brother, who was in jail for cattle-rustling and needed a lawyer. Grandfather had refused to help. Megan supposed Kyle’s grandfather had supplied the necessary funds.
Sad, what people do to their lives.
The hot rush of tears assailed her again. She hugged the mare and pressed her face into the rough mane, then drew away. “Go back to sleep, love.”
Honestly, if weddings affected her this much, she was going to have to swear off attending them. She smiled, but the odd tumult inside didn’t let up.
A warm, furry body wrapped itself around Megan’s legs. Tabby dropped a mouse at Megan’s feet.
“Thanks,” she said wryly, bending down to pat the cat. “I think I’ll let you keep the mouse. I hope this was the only one.”
Satisfied that all was well here, she flicked out the light and headed for the house. On the deserted patio, she paused, feeling the rush of overwhelming emotion again.
Her father had wept here, alone in the night, for the wife he’d lost.
Megan sensed, if not his presence, then his grief, terrifying to the child she’d been at the time, utterly sad to the adult she was now. The soul of Sean Windom had died that night, although his body hadn’t gone until five years later, when he’d had an automobile accident.
Drunk again, people had whispered. Driving too fast.
A sixteen-year-old at the time, she had vehemently denied he’d wanted to die. Now…now she wasn’t so sure.
The thought seemed a betrayal of her father’s memory. Pushing it out of her consciousness, she wondered why the past weighed so heavily of late. Since her grandfather’s death in March, it had preyed on her mind and emotions.
The specter of cleaning out drawers and closets loomed over her. It was something she should do, but she dreaded it. Kate and Shannon would help, but she wasn’t ready to face that task just yet.
Another shiver chased down her spine. Glancing once more around the patio, she slowly entered the house and felt its haunting emptiness. She walked upstairs, but instead of going to her bedroom, she went to the suite that had belonged to her parents.
She hadn’t been back in here since she and her cousins had gone through and disposed of the clothing and personal items. Jess had searched the room last summer, sure he would find a clue to his sister’s death. They had found only the usual things—photo albums, mementos from anniversary dinners, birthdays and the few vacations they’d had.
Gazing at the portrait of her mother, Megan was overwhelmed with love and despair and questions.
“Why?” she whispered, staring into green eyes that were so like her own. “Why were you out on that lake? Why were you with a man hated by our family? Why?”
The woman in the portrait returned her stare, the rose-petal lips caught forever in a soft, dreamy smile of perfect happiness, her belly flagrantly rounded with child.
The painting had been commissioned by her father for the couple’s first anniversary. The unborn child was a girl. Herself. Megan Rose Windom, her parents’ only child.
Closing her eyes, she tried to recall those early years. The happy times, she termed them. She had dozens of pictures of picnics, horseback rides and birthday parties to prove it. Her mother had been radiant in each of the early snapshots. When had their lives changed?
The past haunted her like a ghost at a banquet, demanding attention but refusing to show itself fully. Sometimes she got flickers of memories, but not enough…never enough to put the pieces together….
Turning abruptly, she fled down the hall to her room.
Dressed for bed, instead of climbing in the four-poster, she lingered with one knee on the window seat as she observed the moonstruck landscape sweeping down the pasture to the lake. Its surface was unnaturally still, splashed with pewter by the brilliant moon, reflecting the scattered clouds that drifted over the peaks to the west of the ranch.
The lake.
It looked beautiful, lying in a glacier-carved bowl, mysterious…treacherous.
The lake.
The place where a sailing yacht had crashed upon the rocks, and her mother, unconscious from a blow on the head, had drowned. An accident? The police report said so.
The lake.
It pulled at her as if the deep, cool water was a magnet of liquid metal, calling to her in nightmares that made her wake with cries of despair, fear eating her soul.
She blinked the sting of unwelcome tears from her eyes, her body tensed as if to run for her life.
The silvery surface of the water winked back at her, ruffled by a sudden wind blowing down from the mountain. From the cottonwoods by the creek, she heard the harsh caw of the ravens.
The ravens. Once they’d frightened her, too. The birds had cawed the night before her mother’s death, or so it was rumored. She didn’t remember.
What would it take, she wondered, to gather all the pieces of the past and put them in order?
Fear shuddered through her, but she ignored it. She wouldn’t give in to terror like a child locked in a dark closet. The light of truth was what she needed to dispel the horror of her nightmares.
She would start in her grandfather’s quarters. Soon. Next week. She would start next week.
It was a promise to the child who lived in the dreams that troubled her.
Chapter Two
K yle Herriot held the door for his mother, closed and locked it, then set the alarm to go off if the door was opened again during the night. His mother’d had the security system installed fifteen years ago…shortly after his father’s death.
“I’m glad that’s over,” she said, setting her purse on the marble-topped foyer table. “There’s only the Windom girl left. When she marries, the name will be gone.”
“Unless she chooses to stick with her maiden name.” He followed his mother into the study. After pouring her a cordial of Riesling late harvest, he splashed an inch of brandy into a snifter and gazed out the windows that lined the western wall of the house.
The French doors opened onto a covered patio that looked out upon the mirror-smooth lake. One by one, the lights clicked off in the Windom mansion. He watched as headlights came on and the last vehicle in the circular drive sped away into the night.
Through the reflection in the glass, he saw his mother sit in her favorite chair, her eyes also drawn to the night scene beyond the windows.
“I’ve hated looking at that house,” she said in musing tones. “For fifteen years. Since your father died.”
He remembered the day as if it were yesterday. He’d been eleven, determined to go sailing with his dad, although he was on restriction due to some infraction of the rules. However, someone else had been with his father when he’d arrived at the boathouse on the lake.
Hearing an odd sound, he’d sneaked around the corner of the building and heard a woman crying. Sensing it would be unwise to butt in, he’d returned home, resentful that his plans had been interrupted due to adult problems.
“I wish I knew what happened that day,” Joan Herriot continued, a thread of bitterness in her tone as always when discussing her husband’s death.
“It was a long time ago.”
She sighed. “I know.”
They sat in silence for a while. Kyle saw the last light in the Windom house go off. Megan’s bedroom, he assumed, from which she’d watched her father weep over the loss of the wife who had died with another man.
He resisted a stirring of pity for her, shaking his head slightly, denying the emotion. Like his mother, he had no sympathy for the Windoms.
His grandfather had hated them. He’d called Megan’s grandfather an autocratic tyrant with an uncontrollable temper, a man who’d ruled the 5000-acre Windraven Ranch with an iron hand and little patience.
All that had changed after the old man’s stroke, of course. It turned out the ranch had been in trouble. The three cousins had pooled their resources and saved the family homestead. He had to admire them for that.
Megan actually owned the house due to some convoluted inheritance from her grandmother—the woman Patrick Windom had married three months after Mary Sloan ran away from him and married Sonny Herriot, thus becoming his grandmother.
Now there was a tangled web, indeed. As far as he knew, no one had ever really known what had caused her flight.
“Are you all packed?” he asked his mother, trying to change the direction of his own thoughts.
“Yes,” she said in a happier tone. “I’m not sure whether I’m growing more excited as the trip draws closer or more apprehensive. I keep thinking of a million things I should do here before I leave in the morning.”
He laughed. “You’ve left a list of to-do’s that will keep me busy for the next two years. Enjoy your vacation. You’ve earned it.”
She finished her nightcap and stood. “I can’t wait to see all the plays I’ve read about. I need to get to bed if I’m going to be fresh in the morning for the trip.”
After she kissed him on the cheek and left, Kyle turned back to the house across the lake, his mood dark and thoughtful. Perhaps while his mother was on the month-long New York trip with a friend he would unravel some of the mystery surrounding his father’s death.
With old man Windom’s death back in March, there’d be no one to object if he nosed around on their side of the lake. Since he would have some time to himself, without having to worry about his mother’s feelings, this would be the perfect opportunity to check out the sailing yacht that had never been brought to the surface.
Hmm, how hard would it be to bring it up?
That was something he could look into. Going to his office, he flipped on the computer, then went on the Net with instructions for the search engine to find information on boat salvaging.
Three hours later, he had most of the salient facts. Now all he needed was a bit of luck. And no interference from the ranch across the way.
Why should Megan object? The sailboat was abandoned. The insurance company had paid off and left the yacht on the bottom of the lake. According to what he’d read, it belonged to anyone who could bring it up. That’s exactly what he wanted to do.
Climbing into bed in the wee hours of the morning, he heard the wind pick up, blowing down the mountain into the long valley of ranches and summer homes to the tiny town tucked into the far end. From across the lake came the sound of the ravens, crying out harshly from the cottonwoods by the creek.
There was a legend about the cawing of the ravens, something about true love going awry. But then, legends were always about lost loves or lost treasures or both.
