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She had called her father to tell him, to ask if she could come home. But she hadn’t said she was already seven months along, having hidden from her college friends by moving off campus, dropping her classes when she began to show. She’d intended to go it alone, but she chickened out. He must have expected her to look the same as always, not showing yet, with options still available.
“My God, Marik,” was all he said, and her heart was a boulder in her chest.
“I’m sorry, Dad.” It was the first in a litany of apologies, but her father had already wrapped her in a hug.
Two months later she’d taken her last flight with her dad, coming home from the hospital. Marik knelt in the dust and put her hand on Queenie’s metal skin. It felt strangely warm.
A whirlwind swept through the barn door and sifted dust into her eyes. She wiped them on her shirtsleeve. Stood up and straightened her back.
For months after the baby was born, she had continued her self-imposed exile on the ranch, cooking for her dad and Monte, painting landscapes with too many dark colors. Hiding out, waiting for a vacuum to refill. She had no appetite and she spent sleepless hours in the middle of the night. Her father tried to get her to talk; so did Daisy. But she had no words for the emptiness inside her, the strange weightedness of her limbs.
Finally her dad had insisted she shouldn’t give up on her degree with only two semesters left. She was to be the first Youngblood to graduate from college. To make him proud, she’d agreed to go back. She moved to campus, two hours’ drive from the ranch, and rented a room from an elderly lady whose house smelled of lavender and dust.
A week before graduation, she’d received a job offer from a school district three hundred miles from home. The prospect of earning her own way, in a place where no one knew her, felt like absolution. Instead of going back to the ranch, she’d moved away to start her life over.
She’d been teaching four years at the time of J.B.’s accident. Suddenly her father was gone, denied the only grandchild he might have known. Her grief was a cyclone, for her dad and for her unknown daughter—the last of the Youngblood line.
When Marik came out of the barn, Daisy Gardner’s dust-colored Honda was parked on the circular driveway near the house. The sight of it gave Marik an uneasy moment; she had not heard a car drive up. She rolled the barn door shut, latched it and walked across the yard toward her friend. A distinct chill had diluted the February sunshine. In less than an hour the sun would drop behind Killdeer Ridge and cast the outbuildings into premature dusk.
Daisy was leaning against the fender with her arms crossed, one loafered foot angled over the other. She was still in her work clothes, an embellished cotton jacket and khaki slacks that smiled at the knees. Daisy knew what was inside the barn and had chosen not to interrupt, but she didn’t look happy.
“You were supposed to call me,” she said.
“Sorry. I had company until a little while ago. An applicant for the foreman job.”
“The guy who was in your truck today.”
“Right. Seems like a good prospect.”
“Is he married?” Daisy asked.
Marik chose the short answer. “Yes.”
Daisy sighed heavily. “The good ones always are.”
“Come on in,” Marik said, starting toward the house. “It’s happy hour.”
Daisy followed her up the cobblestone path with her tote bag hanging from one arm. She wouldn’t cross the street without that bag. It was her portable office, stuffed with case files, feminine necessities and more snacks than a vending machine.
Beneath the carport, they climbed three concrete steps to a side door that opened into the large, lived-in kitchen. The room stayed a bit too warm, even in winter, but this evening the kitchen’s warmth felt good to Marik. She took off her jacket and tossed it onto a chair.
Daisy parked her tote bag beside the battered oak table that had been the hub of Youngblood family life for fifty years. In the open top of Daisy’s bag Marik saw the toaster tarts and fruit roll-ups Daisy used to calm frightened child clients, and minisacks of Dorito chips to which Daisy was addicted.
“Wine or something harder?” Marik said.
“How about a good stiff scotch. It’s been one helluva day.”
“Uh-oh.” Marik took wine and scotch from a cabinet and two glasses from another, adding ice to one. The Chivas was left over from J.B.’s stash. Marik didn’t drink the hard stuff and had given up beer because of the calories. Her friend had no such restrictions.
Daisy sank her plump backside into a chair at the table. “First I had to repossess a two-year-old from a foster home where he was in great hands and return him to his worthless mother on a court order. And then—and then—I find out you’ve hired a private detective to hunt for your daughter! In violation of your signed legal agreement.”
Marik sighed. “What did he do, call you for information after I warned him not to?”
“Not quite that klutzy. He had somebody else call me.” She made a noise like a snort. “I got more information out of her than she did from me.”
“What a surprise.”
Marik set Daisy’s scotch on the table and sagged into a chair with her wine. “I haven’t broken any laws yet. Only when—and if—I actually contact her or the family.”
Daisy fixed her with a direct look, her hazel eyes large behind her frameless glasses. “If you do contact her, I will report you to the judge.”
Marik looked at her and knew this was a promise. “Thanks for your support.”
“You know how I feel about this. You signed a Consent to Adoption. I have told you she’s healthy and well cared for, and that’s all you get to know. Not only is it illegal for you to meddle in her childhood, it’s selfish and wrong.”
Marik looked into the red depths of her wineglass and said nothing. But Daisy wasn’t finished.
“The parents could get an injunction,” she warned, “maybe even get you arrested. And you’d deserve it.”
The force of her words silenced them both. Daisy sat back and drank a lusty draft of her scotch.
There was more gray in her brown hair than Marik had noticed before, and age spots speckled her efficient hands. Despite the difference in their ages, they had always been close. “I promised Dad I’d find her,” she said quietly.
“Graveside promises aren’t binding.” Daisy’s eyes softened. “I know you miss J.B. so much you can hardly stand it. And you regret that he never got to know his grandchild. Believe me, I get that. I miss him, too.” She blinked several times and traced a damp circle on the table beneath her glass. “I guess I was more or less in love with your dad for twenty years.”
Daisy had never admitted this before, but Marik had seen the way Daisy looked at her father. If he’d shown the slightest interest, Daisy might have been her stepmom. Instead, because her own early marriage had dissolved without children, Daisy looked after the interests of dozens of kids on her caseload. She delivered tough love and strict ethics, but there was nothing she wouldn’t do to help a child in need—and that had always included Marik.
The kitchen clock ticked, and Marik heard the wind gust through the carport.
“I’ve regretted giving her up a million times,” she said, her voice low. “I wasn’t thinking of the best interests of the child, or even my dad. I was only thinking of me, that I wasn’t ready to be a mother. Dad supported my decision so I could go on with my life like the self-involved college kid I was. He would have loved to raise a granddaughter here on the ranch. But I chose not to think about that.”
Daisy shook her head. “You’re too hard on yourself. You always were. But that doesn’t give you the right to renege on your decision.”
Marik met her eyes. “My daughter is all the family I have left.”
“You have Anna.”
“Not really. I haven’t seen her since Dad’s funeral, and before that it was years. Anna never even knew I had a child.”
Ice cubes clinked in Daisy’s empty glass. “You wouldn’t be able to leave it at just finding your daughter. I know you. If you saw her you’d want to be involved in her life, and that isn’t fair. Not when she’s so small and innocent.”
A realization popped quiet as a soap bubble in Marik’s mind. “You know where she is, don’t you?”
Daisy’s eyes didn’t flinch. “I have always known. I kept track so I could assure you—and J.B.—that she was loved and happy. And she is.”
“You told Dad that?”
“Yes, I did. Several times.”
Marik’s nose burned. At least he knew that much. “Have you seen her?”
“Not for quite a while.”
The light outside the window had turned dusky pink and Marik felt the coming sundown in her bones. “I wonder if she looks like Dad.”
“Maybe she looks like her own dad,” Daisy said pointedly.
For all her ethics, Daisy was excruciatingly curious. Marik had never told anyone who fathered her child—not J.B., not even the baby’s father—and Daisy never missed an opportunity to prod for clues. Marik guarded that secret as faithfully as Daisy protected the privacy of adoption.
Daisy sighed and pushed herself to her feet, her knees cracking. “I’ve got to go. Mounds of paperwork yet tonight.” She shouldered the tote bag. “I guess you know about the town meeting and what’s on the agenda.”
“I know, all right.”
“The power company will no doubt send a representative. Maybe they’ll make a good argument.”
“Hmm.”
At the door, Daisy turned. “I’m serious, Marik. Do not go looking for that child. She doesn’t belong to you, and she hasn’t since you signed those papers.”
Marik watched the taillights disappear down the driveway, feeling Daisy’s censure like an anvil in her chest. Finally she refilled her wine and put on her jacket.
She passed through the living room without turning on a light. The glassy eyes of a bull elk and two whitetail bucks glittered from the high walls below a vaulted ceiling. They were J.B.’s trophies from years ago, his hunting phase. Someday she’d get rid of them, but not yet. Her boots thumped quietly on the padded rug, noisily on the hardwood floor at the room’s perimeter, and out the front door to the cedar-planked porch.
The porch was wide and deep, her favorite place to watch the evening come down. She eased into a wooden glider that centered a cluster of chairs in the shadow of the overhang. All those chairs—as if company might drop by at any moment. Nobody else had sat here since Monte cleared out months ago.
It was a credit to their shockproof friendship that she and Daisy could disagree and move on with no permanent damage. They’d done it before. But Marik wasn’t sure that would hold true this time, not if she actually contacted her daughter.
Was Daisy right? Was her desire to find her child selfish and wrong?
Her decision to give up her baby had hinged to a large extent on the fact that she couldn’t be a single mom without the father’s knowing. And she had reason to believe he’d be a lousy father. She had told herself the baby deserved better parents, but part of her wanted to punish him for disappointing her. Maybe that was selfish, too. But none of it changed her desire to find her child.
She’d given up her legal rights, but how did you give up regret, or the knowledge of a shared biological link? She remembered the feel of that heartbeat inside her, the wrinkled reality of those tiny hands.
Marik drained her wine, inhaled against the vise of her rib cage. The glider squeaked back and forth. If she lost Daisy’s stalwart friendship, she’d be even more alone than she was now.
Up on the ridge, the windmills turned steadily, reflecting the last rays of a winter sun that had slipped behind the horizon. She watched the fading light climb the towers. When shadow swallowed the highest rotors, darkness fell quickly. Uncountable stars dotted the sky. Here there were no streetlights, no neon signs of civilization. Only the tiny red beacons atop the wind towers, blinking like sleepy eyes.
An owl called low and haunting near the barn, and from the windbreak behind the house, his mate answered. Halfway up the ridge near the cemetery, a coyote sent up its lonesome yipping, sounding like a whole pack.
This was her life now. Was she tough enough to be alone?
She understood why her father spent his life here even after her mother died. He’d loved the solitude. Anna had hated it. Marik wondered how their mother had coped with such exquisite isolation, an East Coast girl who had found her way west. Did Julianna love it as much as her free-spirited husband? Or was she like the ghost of Silk Mountain, driven to the edge by the terrifying beauty of so many stars?
In Marik’s oil paintings, the outline of a hidden figure, feminine, invariably appeared somewhere in the background as if it painted itself. Sometimes she thought of the figure as her mother, who’d died from an ectopic pregnancy too far from a hospital. Other times she thought of the hidden figure as herself, and sometimes as the daughter she had given away.
“I never did belong here the way you do,” Anna had said on the afternoon she signed over her share of the ranch. “We both know that deep down you’re a hard-assed Oklahoma rancher, just like Dad.” And Marik heard the envy in her soft voice.
Maybe Dad wasn’t hard enough. Maybe I’m not, either.
She pulled the cell phone from her pocket and pushed a button to light up its address book. She scrolled down to Casey Scott’s number, the cowboy-booted P.I. who had inadvertently tipped off Daisy about her search. He answered his cell phone on the third ring.
“Casey, it’s Marik Youngblood. Can you talk a minute?” In the background she heard voices and the clank of silverware. “Sounds like I caught you at dinner.”
His baritone came back with predictable breakup. “No problem. I’m eating alone. What’s up?”
“I have another job for you. Just a small one. I need a background check on a man who’s applied for a job here on the ranch.”
“Easy done. Give me his name and whatever else you can.” She pictured him taking notes on a paper napkin, barbecue sauce on his chin.
“Jace Rainwater. Went to school at TCU, living in Amarillo now. He listed the USDA as a job reference there.”
“Okeydokey,” he said. “How soon do you need it?”
“By next week, if you can. I don’t need the whole family tree, just enough to know whether I’d trust him to live here on the ranch.”
“Got it. Should be able to call you back in a few days.”
“Any progress on our other project?”
“Not much. The adoption records are sealed and the hospital was a dead end. Couldn’t find anybody who worked there eight years ago. Whole staff has turned over since then.” She could hear him chewing.
“And you didn’t find out a thing from Daisy Gardner, either,” she said pointedly.
“Had to try. She’s the only link so far.”
Marik blew out a deep breath, watching a sleepy red eye wink off and on, off and on. “Let’s put that on hold for a while,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Yes. Save anything you’ve got for future reference and send me a bill. But for now let’s just check on this guy who wants to be my foreman.”
Chapter Six
Ranch work went on, regardless of anyone’s personal issues. The bucket calf woke up before daylight, bawling his curly head off to be fed. No need for an alarm clock when Bully was on the job. He was gradually learning to eat the calf pellets Marik put in his feeder, but he still needed his milk.
She went out in the semidarkness to feed him. In the big barn she mixed calf formula in an aluminum bucket that had a long nipple on one side and a hook on the opposite rim. She lugged the bucket to a pen in the back of the barn, behind the milking stall that hadn’t been used for years. Tools and horse tack covered the barn walls. In its open center, two tractors, a hay baler and a brush hog gathered the dust of disuse. Her father had bought the big John Deere tractor on credit just a year before he died. She still hadn’t paid it off, nor found the heart to sell it.
The calf’s plaintive cry echoed from the rafters. “Hey, Bully,” she called. “How’s it going today?”
Twice a day she hung a bucket of milk on the railing of the pen and held on with both hands. Bully attacked the nipple with an eagerness that made her laugh. His petroleum-colored eyes, fringed with long white lashes, looked depthless in the shadows of the barn. She loved his hot, milky smell and the way foamy white slobber dripped from the corners of his mouth when he drank.
She leaned over the railing and scratched his bony forehead. “You don’t know enough to miss your mama, do you, Bully?”
A feral cat peered down at her from the loft. Barn cats came and went, and this one looked like a descendant of an old tom she remembered from childhood. When Bully was finished, she poured the last dribbles from his bucket into an old pie pan her father had used for the same purpose, and left it by the door.
It took three tries to crank Red Ryder to life for her pilgrimage to the windmills. The wind was back in the north this morning, chillier than yesterday. On the crest of the ridge, she parked the pickup and stood on the running board, her eyes scanning dried cactus and sage for a mound of indigo feathers. Finding nothing, she exhaled a deep breath. The impending town meeting hung over her like a heavy boot waiting to drop. She’d never been good at waiting.
Across the valley, ribbons of gold light snaked between violet clouds. A group of elk, dark umber smudges at this distance, grazed at the edge of a creek. An urgency arose in her to paint the feeling of that cool light above the river. She’d been away from the canvas too long. When she checked the cattle in the pastures by the river this morning, she would take along her portable easel and do some pleinair work.
