The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's Homecoming

A startling grin broke over Travis’s features like a flash of summer sunlight over a crystal-clear pond. “What?” he prompt ed. He moved to Sierra’s other side, shielding her from the bitter wind, increasing his pace, and there fore 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 down stairs 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 some times, 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, skill fully 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 hazel 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 grand parents 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, mean while, 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 country side: 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 any thing 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 for warded 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.”

Hannah closed her eyes, opened them again.

“Set the table, please,” Doss told Tobias.

Tobias hurried to the cabinet for plates and silver-ware.

Hannah met Doss’s gaze across the dimly lit room.

A charge seemed to pass between them, like before, when Hannah had come back from getting the mail and found To bias outside, in the teeth of a high-country winter, building a snow fort.

“It’s too damn dark in this house,” Doss said. He walked to the middle of the room, reached up, and pulled the beaded metal cord on the overhead light. The bare bulb glowed so brightly it made Hannah blink, but she didn’t object. Some thing in Doss’s face prevented her from it.

Present Day

Travis had long since finished his coffee and left the house by the time Liam got up from his nap and came down stairs, tousle-haired and puffy-eyed from sleep.

“That boy was in my room again,” he said. “He was sitting at the desk, writing a letter. Can I watch TV? There’s a nice HD setup in that room next to the front door. A computer, too, with a big, flat-screen monitor.”

Sierra knew about the fancy electronics, since she’d explored the house after Travis left. “You can watch TV for an hour,” she said. “Hands off the computer, though. It doesn’t belong to us.”

Liam’s shoulders slumped slightly. “I know how to use a computer, Mom,” he said. “We had them at school.”

Between rent, food and medical bills, Sierra had never been able to scrape together the money for a PC of their own. She’d used the one in the office of the bar she worked in, back in Florida. That was how Meg had first contacted her. “We’ll get one,” she said, “as soon as I find another job.”

“My mailbox is probably full,” Liam replied, unappeased. “All the kids in the Geek Program were going to write to me.”

Sierra, in the midst of putting a package of frozen chicken breasts into the microwave to thaw, felt as though she’d been poked with a sharp stick. “Don’t call it the Geek Program, please,” she said.

Liam shrugged one shoulder. “Every body else does.”

“Go watch TV.”

He went.

A rap sounded at the back door, and Sierra peered through the glass, since it was dark out, to see Travis standing on the back porch.

“Come in,” she called, and headed for the sink to wash her hands.

Travis entered, carrying a fragrant bag of take-out food in one hand. The collar of his coat was raised against the cold, his hat brim pulled low over his eyes.

“Fried chicken,” he said, lifting the bag as evidence.

Sierra paused, shut off the faucet, dried her hands. The timer on the microwave dinged. “I was about to cook,” she said.

Travis grinned. “Good thing I got to you in time,” he answered. “If you’re anything like your sister, you shouldn’t be allowed to get near a stove.”

If you’re anything like your sister.

The words saddened Sierra, settled bleak and heavy over her heart. She didn’t know whether she was like her sister or not; until Meg had emailed her a smiling picture a few weeks ago, she wouldn’t have recognized her on the street.

“Did I say something wrong?” Travis asked.

“No,” Sierra said quickly. “It was—thoughtful of you to bring the chicken.”

Liam must have heard Travis’s voice, because he came pounding into the room, all smiles.

“Hey, Travis,” he said.

“Hey, cowpoke,” Travis replied.

“The computer’s making a dinging noise,” Liam reported.

Travis smiled, set the bag of chicken on the counter but made no move to take off his hat and coat. “Meg’s got it set to do that, so she’ll remember to check her email when she’s here,” he said.

“Mom won’t let me log on,” Liam told him.

Travis glanced at Sierra, turned to Liam again. “Rules are rules, cowpoke,” he said.

“Rules bite,” Liam said.

“Ninety-five percent of the time,” Travis agreed.

Liam recovered quickly. “Are you going to stay and eat with us?”

Travis shook his head. “I’d like that a lot, but I’m expected some where else for supper,” he answered.

Liam looked sorely disappointed.

Sierra wondered where that “some where else” was, and with whom Travis would be sharing a meal, and was irritated with her self. It was none of her business, and besides, she didn’t care what he did or who he did it with anyway. Not the least little bit.

“Maybe another time,” Travis said.

Liam sighed and retreated to the study and his allotted hour of television.

“You shouldn’t have,” Sierra said, indicating their supper with a nod.

“It’s your first night here,” Travis answered, opening the door to leave. “Seemed like the neighborly thing to do.”

“Thank you,” Sierra said, but he’d already closed the door between them.

Travis started up his truck, just in case Sierra was listening for the engine, drove it around behind the barn and parked. After stopping to check on Baldy and the three other horses in his care, he shrugged down into the collar of his coat and slogged to his trailer.

The quarters were close, smaller than the closet off his master bedroom at home in Flag staff, but he didn’t need much space. He had a bed, kitchen facilities, a bathroom and a place for his laptop. It was enough.

More than Brody was ever going to have.

He took off his hat and coat and tossed them on to the built-in, padded bench that passed for a couch. He tried not to think about Brody, and in the daytime, he stayed busy enough to succeed. At night, it was another matter. There just wasn’t enough to do after dark, especially out here in the boonies, once he’d nuked a frozen dinner and watched the news.

He thought about Sierra and the boy, in there in the big house, eating the chicken and fixings he’d picked up in the deli at the one and only super market in Indian Rock. He’d never intended to join them, since they’d just arrived and were settling in, but he could picture himself sitting down at that long table in the kitchen, just the same.

He rooted through his refrigerator, something he had to crouch to do, and chose between Salisbury steak, Salisbury steak and Salisbury steak.

While the sectioned plastic plate was whirling round and round in the lilliputian microwave that came with the trailer, he made coffee and remembered his last visit from Rance McKettrick. Widowed, Rance lived alone in the house his legendary ancestor, Rafe, had built for his wife, Emmeline, and their children, back in the 1880s. He had two daughters, whom he largely ignored.

“This place is just a fancy coffin,” Rance had observed, in his blunt way, when he’d stepped into the trailer. “Brody’s the one that’s dead, Trav, not you.”

Travis rubbed his eyes with a thumb and fore finger. Brody was dead, all right. No getting around that. Seventeen, with everything to live for, and he’d blown himself up in the back room of a slum house in Phoenix, making meth.

He looked into the window over the sink, saw his own reflection.

Turned away.

His cell phone rang, and he considered letting voice mail pick up, but couldn’t make himself do it. If he’d answered the night Brody called…

He fished the thing out, snapped it open and said, “Reid.”

“Whatever happened to ‘hello’?” Meg asked.

The bell on the microwave rang, and Travis reached in to retrieve his supper, burned his hand and cursed.

She laughed. “Better and better.”

“I’m not in the mood for banter, Meg,” he replied, turning on the water with his free hand and then switching to shove his scorched fingers into the flow.

“You never are,” she said.

“The horses are fine.”

“I know. You would have called me if they weren’t.”

“Then what do you want?”

“My, my, we are testy tonight. I called, you big grouch, to ask about my sister and my nephew. Are they okay? How do they look? Sierra is so private, she’s almost stand-of fish.”

“You can say that again.”

“Thank you, but in the interest of brevity, I won’t.”

“Since when do you give a damn about brevity?” Travis inquired, but he was grinning by then.

Once again Meg laughed. Once again Travis wished he’d been able to fall in love with her. They’d tried, the two of them, to get something going, on more than one occasion. Meg wanted a baby, and he wanted not to be alone, so it made sense. The trouble was, it hadn’t worked.

There was no chemistry.

There was no passion.

They were never going to be anything more than what they were—the best of friends. He was mostly resigned to that, but in lonely moments, he ached for things to be different.

“Tell me about my sister,” Meg insisted.

“She’s pretty,” Travis said. Real pretty, added a voice in his mind. “She’s proud, and over protective as hell of the kid.”

“Liam has asthma,” Meg said quietly. “According to Sierra, he nearly died of it a couple of times.”

Travis forgot his burned fingers, his Salisbury steak and his private sorrow. “What?”

Meg let out a long breath. “That’s the only reason Sierra’s willing to have anything to do with Mom and me. Mom put her on the company health plan and arranged for Liam to see a specialist in Flag staff on a regular basis. In return, Sierra had to agree to spend a year on the ranch.”

Travis stood still, absorbing it all. “Why here?” he asked. “Why not with you and Eve in San Antonio?”

“Mom and I would love that,” Meg said, “but Sierra needs…distance. Time to get used to us.”

“Time to get used to two McKettrick women. So we’re talking, say, the year 2050, give or take a decade?”

“Very funny. Sierra is a McKettrick woman, remember? She’s up to the challenge.”

“She is definitely a McKettrick,” Travis agreed ruefully. And very definitely a woman. “How did you find her?”

“Mom tracked her and Hank down when Sierra was little,” Meg answered.

Travis dropped on to the edge of his bed, which was unmade. The sheets were getting musty, and every night, the pizza crumbs rubbed his hide raw. One of these days he was going to haul off and change them.

“‘Tracked her down’?”

“Yes,” Meg said, with a sigh. “I guess I didn’t tell you about that part.”

“I guess you didn’t.” Travis had known about the kidnapping, how Sierra’s father had taken off with her the day the divorce papers were served, and that the two of them had ended up in Mexico. “Eve knew, and she still didn’t lift a finger to get her own daughter back?”

“Mom had her reasons,” Meg answered, with drawing a little.

“Oh, well, then,” Travis retorted, “that clears everything up. What reason could she possibly have?”

“It’s not my place to say, Trav,” Meg told him sadly. “Mom and Sierra have to work it all through first, and it might be a while before Sierra’s ready to listen.”

Travis sighed, shoved a hand through his hair. “You’re right,” he conceded.

Meg brightened again, but there was a brittleness about her that revealed more than she probably wanted Travis to know, close as they were. “So,” she said, “what would you say Mom’s chances are? Of reconnecting with Sierra, I mean?”

“The truth?”

“The truth,” Meg said, without enthusiasm.

“Zero to zip. Sierra’s been pleasant enough to me, but she’s as stubborn as any McKettrick that ever drew breath, and that’s saying something.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You said you wanted the truth.”

“How can you be so sure Mom won’t be able to get through to her?”

“It’s just a hunch,” Travis said.

Meg was quiet. Travis was famous for his hunches. Too bad he hadn’t paid attention to the one that said his little brother was in big trouble, and that Travis ought to drop everything and look for Brody until he found him.

“Look, maybe I’m wrong,” he added.

“What’s your real impression of Sierra, Travis?”

He took his time answering. “She’s independent to a fault. She’s built a wall around herself and the kid, and she’s not about to let anybody get too close. She’s jumpy, too. If it wasn’t for Liam, and the fact that she probably doesn’t have two nickels to rub together, she definitely wouldn’t be on the Triple M.”

“Damn,” Meg said. “We knew she was poor, but—”

“Her car gave out in the driveway as soon as she pulled in. I took a peek under the hood, and believe me, the best mechanic on the planet couldn’t resurrect that heap.”

“She can drive my Blazer.”

“That might take some convincing on your part. This is not a woman who wants to be obliged. It’s probably all she can do not to grab the kid and hop on the next bus to nowhere.”

“This is depressing,” Meg said.

Travis got up off the bed, peeled back the plastic covering his dinner, and poked warily at the faux meat with the tip of one finger. Talk about depressing.

“Hey,” he said. “Look on the bright side. She’s here, isn’t she? She’s on the Triple M. It’s a start.”

“Take care of her, Travis.”