The McKettrick Legend (10 page)

She accepted the paper cup Travis offered and set the ubiquitous clip board aside to take a sip. Travis drew up a second chair.

“Does this happen a lot?” he asked, after a long and remarkably easy silence.

Sierra shook her head. “No, thank God. I don't know what we would have done without you, Travis.”

“You would have coped,” he said. “Like you've been
doing for a long time, if my guess is any good. Where's Liam's dad, Sierra?”

She swallowed hard, glanced at the boy to make sure he was sleeping. “He died a few days before Liam was born,” she answered.

“You've been alone all this time?”

“No,” Sierra said, stiffening a little on the inside, where it didn't show. Or, at least, she
hoped
it didn't. “I had Liam.”

“You know that isn't what I meant,” Travis said.

Sierra looked away, made herself look back. “I didn't want to—complicate things. By getting involved with someone, I mean. Liam and I have been just fine on our own.”

Travis merely nodded, and drank more of his coffee.

“Don't you have to go back to the ranch and feed the horses or something?” Sierra asked.

“Eventually,” Travis answered with a sigh. He glanced around the room again and gave the slightest shudder.

Sierra remembered his younger brother. The wounds must be raw. “I guess you probably hate hospitals,” she said. “Be cause of—” the name came back to her in Eve's telephone voice “—Brody.”

Travis shook his head. His eyes were bleak. “If he'd gotten this far—to a hospital, I mean—it would have meant there was hope.”

Sierra moved to touch Travis's hand, but just before she made contact, his cell phone rang. He pulled it from the pocket of his western shirt, flipped open the case. “Travis Reid.”

He listened. Raised his eyebrows. “Hello, Eve. I wouldn't have thought even
your
pilot could land in this kind of weather.”

Sierra tensed.

Eve said something, and Travis responded. “I'll let Sierra explain,” he said, and held out the phone to her.

Sierra swallowed, took it. “Hello, Eve,” she said.

“Where are you?” her mother asked. “I'm at the ranch. It looks as if you've been sleeping in the kitchen—”

“We're in Flag staff, in a hospital,” Sierra told her. Only then did she realize that she and Travis were both wearing the clothes they'd slept in. That she hadn't combed her hair or even brushed her teeth.

All of a sudden she felt in credibly grubby.

Eve drew in an audible breath. “Oh, my
God
—Liam?”

“He had a pretty bad asthma attack,” Sierra confirmed. “He's on a breathing machine, and he has to stay until tomorrow, but he's okay, Eve.”

“I'll be up there as soon as I can. Which hospital?”

“Hold on,” Sierra said. “There's really no need for you to come all this way, especially when the roads are so bad. I'm pretty sure we'll be home tomorrow—”

“Pretty sure?” Eve challenged.

“Well, he'll need his medication adjusted, and the inflammation in his bronchial tubes will have to go down.”

“This sounds serious, Sierra. I think I should come. I could be there—”

“Please,” Sierra interrupted. “Don't.”

A thoughtful silence followed. “All right, then,” Eve said finally, with a good grace Sierra truly appreciated. “I'll just settle in here and wait. The furnace is running and the lights are on. Tell Travis not to rush back—I can certainly feed the horses.”

Sierra could only nod, so Travis took the phone back.

Evidently, a barrage of orders followed from Eve's end.

Travis grinned through out. “Yes, ma'am,” he said. “I will.”

He ended the call.

“You will what?” Sierra inquired.

“Take care of you and Liam,” Travis answered.

1919

That morning the world looked as though it had been carved from a huge block of pure white ice. Hannah marveled at the beauty of it, staring through the kitchen window, even as she longed with bittersweet poignancy for spring. For things to stir under the snow bound earth, to put out roots and break through the surface, green and growing.

“Ma?”

She turned, troubled by something she heard in Tobias's voice. He stood at the base of the stairs, still wearing his night shirt and barefoot.

“I don't feel good,” he said.

Hannah set aside her coffee with exaggerated care, even took time to wipe her hands on her apron before she approached him. Touched his forehead with the back of her hand.

“You're burning up,” she whispered, stricken.

Doss, who had been re reading last week's newspaper at the table, his barn work done, slowly scraped back his chair.

“Shall I fetch the doc?” he asked.

Hannah turned, looked at him over one shoulder, and nodded. If you hadn't insisted on taking him with you to the widow Jessup's place, she thought—

But she would go no further.

This was not the time to place blame.

“You get back into bed,” she told Tobias, briskly efficient and purely terrified. The bout of pneumonia that had nearly killed him during the fall had started like this. “I'll make
you a mustard plaster to draw out the congestion, and your uncle Doss will go to town for Dr. Willaby. You'll be right as rain in no time at all.”

Tobias looked doubtful. His face was flushed, and his night shirt was soaked with perspiration, even though the kitchen was a little on the chilly side. The boy seemed dazed, almost as though he were walking in his sleep, and Hannah wondered if he'd taken in a word she'd said.

“I'll be back as soon as I can,” Doss promised, already pulling on his coat and reaching for his hat. “There's whisky left from Christmas. It's in the pantry, behind that cracker tin,” he added, pausing before opening the door. “Make him a hot drink with some honey. Pa used to brew up that concoction for us when we took sick, and it always helped.”

Doss and Gabe, along with their adopted older brother, John Henry, had never suffered a serious illness in their lives, if you didn't count John Henry's deafness. What did they know about tending the sick?

Hannah nodded again, her mouth tight. She'd lost three sisters in child hood, two to diphtheria and one to scarlet fever; only she and her younger brother, David, had survived.

She was used to nursing the afflicted.

Doss hesitated a few moments on the threshold, as though there was something he wanted to say but couldn't put into words, then went out.

“You change into a dry night shirt,” Hannah told Tobias. His sheets were probably sweat-soaked, too, so she added, “And get into our bed.”

Our bed.

Meaning Gabe's and hers.

And soon, after they were married, Doss would be sleeping in that bed, in Gabe's place.

She could not, would not, consider the implications of that.

Not now. Maybe not ever.

She was like the ranch woman she'd once read about in a Montana newspaper, making her way from the house to the barn and back in a blinding blizzard, with only a frozen rope to hold on to. If she let go, she'd be lost.

She had to attend to Tobias. That was her rope, and she'd follow it, hand over hand, thought over thought. Hannah retrieved an old flannel shirt from the rag bag and cut two matching pieces, approximately twelve inches square. These would serve to protect Tobias's skin from the heat of the poultice, but like as not, he would still have blisters. She kept a mixture on hand for just such occasions, in a big jar with a wire seal. She dumped a big dollop of the stuff on to one of the bits of flannel, spread it like butter, and put the second cloth on top, her nose twitching at the pungent odors of mustard seed, pounded to a pulp, and camphor.

When she got upstairs, she found Tobias huddled in the middle of her bed, and his eyes grew big with recollection when he saw what she was carrying in her hands.

“No,”
he protested, but weakly. “No mustard plaster.” He'd begun to shiver, and his teeth were chattering.

“Don't fuss, Tobias,” Hannah said. “Your grand father swears by them.”

Tobias groaned. “My
Montana
grandfather,” he replied. “My grand pa Holt wouldn't let
anybody
put one of those things on him!”

“Is that a fact?” Hannah asked mildly. “Well, next time you write to the almighty Holt McKettrick, you ask. I'll bet he'll say he wouldn't be without one when he's under the weather.”

Tobias made a rude sound, blowing through his lips, but he rolled on to his back and allowed Hannah to open
the top buttons of his night shirt and put the poultice in place.

“Grandpa Holt,” he said, bearing the affliction stalwartly, “would probably make me a whisky drink, just like he did for Pa and Uncle Doss.”

Hannah sighed. Privately she thought there was a good deal of the rough neck in the McKettrick men, and while she wouldn't call any of them a drunk, they used liquor as a remedy for just about every ill, from snake bite to the grippe. They'd swabbed it on old Seesaw's gashes, when he tangled with a sow bear, and rubbed it into the gums of teething babies.

“What you're going to have, Tobias McKettrick, is oatmeal.”

He made a face. “This burns,” he complained, pointing to the mustard plaster.

Hannah bent and kissed his forehead. He didn't pull away, like he'd taken to doing of late, and she found that both reassuring and worrisome.

She glanced at the window, saw a scallop of icicles dangling from the eave. It might be many hours—even tomorrow—before Doss got back from Indian Rock with Dr. Willaby. The wait would be agony, but there was nothing to do but endure.

When Tobias closed his eyes and slept, Hannah left the room, descended the stairs and went into the pantry again. She moved the cracker tin aside, looked up at the bottle of whisky hidden behind it, gave a disdainful sniff, and took a canned chicken off the shelf instead. It was a treasure, that chicken—she'd been saving it for some celebration, so she wouldn't have to kill one of her laying hens—but it would make a fine, nourishing soup.

After gathering onions, rice and some of her spices—which she cherished as much as preserved meat, given how costly they were—Hannah commenced to make soup.

She was surprised when, only an hour after he'd ridden out, Doss returned with another man she recognized as one of the ranch hands down at Rafe's place. She frowned, watching from the window as Doss dismounted and left the new comer to lead both horses inside.

That was odd. Doss hadn't been to Indian Rock yet; he couldn't have covered the distance in such a short time. Why would he ask someone to put up his horse? Puzzled, impatient and a little angry, Hannah was waiting at the door when Doss came in.

“Bundle the boy up warm,” he said, without any preamble at all. “Willie's going to stay here and look after the horses and the place. Once I've hitched the draft horses to the sleigh, we'll go overland to Indian Rock.”

Hannah stared at him, confounded. “You're suggesting that we take Tobias all the way to Indian Rock?”

“I'm not ‘suggesting' anything, Hannah,” Doss interposed. “I met Seth Baker down by the main house, when I was about to cross the stream, and he hailed me, wanted to know where I was headed. I told him I was off to fetch Doc Willaby, be cause Tobias was feeling poorly. Seth said Willaby was down with the gout, but his nephew happened to be there, and he's a doctor, too. He's looking after the doc's practice, in town, so he wouldn't be inclined to come all the way out here.”

Hannah's throat clenched, and she put a hand to it. “A ride like that could be the end of Tobias,” she said.

Doss shook his head. “We can't just sit here,” he countered, grim-jawed. “Get the boy ready or I'll do it myself.”

“May I remind you that Tobias is
my
son?”

“He's a McKettrick,” Doss replied flatly, as though that were the end of it—and for him, it probably was.

Present Day

T
RAVIS WAITED UNTIL
S
IERRA HAD DRIFTED
off into a fitful sleep in her chair next to Liam's hospital bed. Then he got a blanket from a nurse, covered Sierra with it and left.

A few minutes later, he was behind the wheel of his truck.

The roads were sheer ice, and the sky looked gray, burdened with fresh snow. After consulting the GPS panel on his dash board, he found the nearest Wal-Mart, parked as close to the store as he could and went inside.

Shopping was something Travis endured, and this was no exception. He took a cart and wheeled it around, choosing the things Sierra and Liam would need if this hitch in Flag staff turned out to be longer than expected. He'd spent the night at his own place, a few miles from the hospital, showered and changed there.

When he got back from his expedition—a January Santa Claus burdened down with bulging blue plastic bags—he made his way to Liam's room.

Sierra was awake, blinking and be fuddled, and so was Liam. A huge teddy bear, holding a helium balloon in one paw, sat on the bedside table. The writing on the balloon said Get Well Soon in big red letters.

“Eve?” Travis asked, indicating the bear with a nod of his head.

Sierra took in the bags he was carrying. “Eve,” she confirmed. “What have you got there?”

Travis grinned, though he felt tired all of a sudden, as though ten cups of coffee wouldn't keep him awake. Maybe it was the warmth of the hospital, after being out in the cold.

“A little something for every body,” he said.

Liam was sitting up, and the breathing tube had been removed. His words came out as a sore-throated croak, but he smiled just the same, and Travis felt a pinch deep inside. The kid was so small and so brave. “Even me?”

“Especially you,” Travis said. He handed the boy one of the bags, watched as he pulled out a portable DVD player, still in its box, and the episodes of
Nova
he'd picked up to go with it.

“Wow,” Liam said, his voice so raw that it made Travis's throat ache in sympathy. “I've always wanted one of these.”

Sierra looked worried. “It's way too expensive,” she said. “We can't accept it.”

Liam hugged the box close against his little chest, obstinately possessive. Everything about him said, I'm not giving this up.

Travis ignored Sierra's statement and tossed her another of the bags, this one fat and light. “Take a shower,” he told her. “You look like somebody who just went through a harrowing medical emergency.”

She opened her mouth, closed it again. Peeked inside the bag. He'd bought her a sweat suit, guessing at the sizes, along with tooth paste, a brush, soap and a comb.

She swallowed visibly. “Thanks.”

He nodded.

While Sierra was in Liam's bathroom, showering, Travis helped the boy get the DVD player out of the box, plugged in and running.

“Mom might not let me keep it,” Liam said sadly.

“I'm betting she will,” Travis assured him.

Liam was en grossed in an episode about killer bees when Sierra came out of the bathroom, looking scrubbed and cautiously hopeful in her dark-blue sweats. Her hair was still wet from washing, and the comb had left distinct ridges, which Travis found peculiarly poignant.

Complex emotions fell into line after that one, striking him with the impact of a runaway boxcar, but he didn't dare explore any of them right away. He'd need to be alone to do that, in his truck or with a horse. For now, he was too close to Sierra to think straight.

She glanced at Liam, softened noticeably as she saw how much he was enjoying Travis's gift. His small hands clasped the machine on either side, as though he feared someone would wrench it away.

Some thing similar to Travis's thoughts must have gone through her mind, because he saw a change in her face. It was a sort of resignation, and it made him want to take her in his arms—though he wasn't about to do that.

“I could use something to eat,” he said.

“Me, too,” Sierra admitted. She tapped Liam on the shoulder, and he barely looked away from the screen, where bees were swarming. Music from the speakers portended certain disaster. “You'll be all right here alone for a while, if Travis and I go down to the cafeteria?”

The boy nodded distractedly, refocused his eyes on the bees.

Sierra smiled with a tiny, forlorn twitch of her lips.

They were well away from Liam's room, and waiting for an elevator, when she finally spoke.

“I'm grateful for what you did for Liam and me,” she said, “but you shouldn't have given him something that cost so much.”

“I won't miss the money, Sierra,” Travis responded. “He's been through a lot, and he needed something else to think about be sides breathing tubes, medical tests and shots.”

She gave a brief, almost clipped nod.

That McKettrick pride, Travis thought. It was something to behold.

The elevator came, and the doors opened with a cheerful chiming sound. They stepped inside, and Travis pushed the but ton for the lower level. Hospital cafeterias always seemed to be in the bowels of the building, like the morgues.

Down stairs, they went through the grub line with trays, and chose the least offensive-looking items from the stock array of greasy green beans, mock meat loaf, brown gravy and the like.

Sierra chose a corner table, and they sat down, facing each other. She looked like a freshly showered angel from some celestial soccer team in the athletic clothes he'd provided, and Travis wondered if she had any idea how beautiful she was.

“I'm surprised Eve hasn't shown up,” he said, to get the conversation started.

Sierra's cheeks pinkened a little, and she avoided his gaze. Poked at the faux meat loaf with a water-spotted fork.

“I don't know what I'm going to say to her,” she said. “Beyond ‘thank you,' I mean.”

“How about, ‘hello'?” Travis joked.

Sierra didn't look amused. Just nervous, like a rat cornered by a barn cat.

He reached across the table, closed his hand briefly over
hers. “Look, Sierra, this doesn't have to be hard. Eve will probably do most of the talking, at least in the beginning, and she'll feed you your lines.”

She smiled again. Another tentative flicker, there and gone.

They ate in silence for a while.

“It's not as if I hate her,” Sierra said, out of the blue. “Eve, I mean.”

Travis waited, knowing they were on uneven ground. Sierra was as skittish as a spring fawn, and he didn't want to speak at the wrong time and send her bolting for the emotional under brush.

“I don't know her,” Sierra went on. “My own mother. I saw her picture on the McKettrickCo website, but she told me it didn't look a thing like her.”

Still, Travis waited.

“What's she like?” Sierra asked, almost plaintively. “Really?”

“Eve is a beautiful woman,” Travis said.
Like you,
he added silently. “She's smart, and when it comes to negotiating a business deal, she's as tough as they come. She's remarkable, Sierra. Give her a chance.”

Sierra's lower lip wobbled, ever so slightly. Her blue, blue eyes were limpid with feelings Travis could only guess at. He wanted to dive into them, like a swimmer, and explore the vast inner landscape he sensed within her.

“You know what happened, don't you?” she asked, very softly. “Back when my mother and father were divorced.”

“Some of it,” Travis said, cautious, like a man touching a tender bruise.

“Dad took me to Mexico when I was two,” she said, “right after someone from Eve's lawyer's office served the papers.”

Travis nodded. “Meg told me that much.”

“As little as I was, I remembered what she smelled like, what it felt like when she held me, the sound of her voice.” A spasm of pain flinched in Sierra's eyes. “No matter how I tried, I could never recall her face. Dad made sure there weren't any pictures, and—”

He ached for her. The soupy mashed potatoes went pulpy in his mouth, and they went down like so much barbed wire when he swallowed. “What kind of man would—”

He caught himself.

None of your business, Trav.

To his surprise she smiled again, and warmth rose in her eyes. “Dad was never a model father, more like a buddy. But he took good care of me. I grew up with the kind of freedom most kids never know—running the streets of San Miguel in my bare feet. I knew all the vendors in the market place, and writers and artists gathered at our
casita
almost every night. Dad's mistress, Magdalena, home-schooled me. I attracted stray dogs wherever I went, and Dad always let me keep them.”

“Not a traumatic child hood,” Travis observed, still careful.

She shook her head. “Not at all. But I missed my mother desperately, just the same. For a while, I thought she'd come for me. That one day a car would pull up in front of the
casita
, and there she'd be, smiling, with her arms open. Then when there was no sign of her, and no letters came—well, I decided she must be dead. It was only after I got old enough to surf the internet that I found her.”

“You didn't call or write?”

“It was a shock, realizing she was alive—that if I could find her, she could have found me. And she didn't. With the resources she must have had—”

Travis felt a sting of anger on Sierra's behalf. Pushed away his tray. “I used to work for Eve,” he said. “And I've
known her for most of my life. I can't imagine why she wouldn't have gone in with an army, once she knew where you were.”

Sierra bit her lower lip again, so hard Travis almost expected it to bleed. Her eyes glistened with tears she was probably too proud to shed, at least for herself. She'd wept plenty for Liam, he suspected, alone and in secret. It paralyzed him when a woman cried, and yet in that moment he'd have re writ ten history if he could have. He'd have been there, in the thick of Sierra's sorrows, whatever they were, to put his arms around her, promise that everything would be all right and move heaven and earth to make it so.

But the plain truth was, he hadn't been.

“I'd better get back to Liam,” she said.

He nodded.

They carried their trays to the dropping-off place, went up stairs again, entered Liam's room.

He was asleep, with the DVD player still running on his lap.

Travis went to speak to one of the nurses, a woman he knew from college, and when he came back, he found Sierra stretched out beside her son, dead to the world.

He sighed, watching the pair of them.

He'd kept himself apart, even before Brody died, busy with his career. Dated lots of women and steered clear of anything heavy.

Now, without warning, the whole equation had shifted, and there was a good chance he was in big trouble.

1919

The air was so cold it bit through the bearskin throws and Hannah's many layers of wool to her flesh. She could
see her breath billowing out in front of her, blue white, like Doss's. Like Tobias's.

Her boy looked feverishly gleeful, nestled between her and Doss, as the sleigh moved over an icy trail, drawn by the big draft horses, Cain and Abel. The animals usually languished in the barn all winter; in the spring, they pulled plows in the hay fields, in the fall, harvest wagons. Summers, they grazed. They seemed spry and vigorous to Hannah, gladly surprised to be working.

Where other horses or even mules might have floundered in the deep, crusted snow, the sons of Adam, as Gabe liked to call them, pranced along as easily as they would over dry ground.

Doss held the reins in his gloved hands, hunkered down into the collar of his sheep skin-lined coat, his earlobes red under the brim of his hat. Once in a while he glanced Hannah's way, but mostly when he spared a look, it was for Tobias.

“You warm enough?” he'd asked.

And each time Tobias would nod. If his blood had been frozen in his veins, he'd have nodded, Hannah knew that, even if Doss didn't. He idolized his uncle, always had.

Would he forget Gabe entirely, once she and Doss were married? Everything within Hannah rankled at the thought.

Why hadn't she left for Montana before it was too late?

Now she was about to tie herself, for good, to a man she lusted after but would never love.

Of course she could still go home to her folks—she knew they'd welcome her and Tobias—but suppose she
was
carrying Doss's child? Once her pregnancy became apparent, they'd know she'd behaved shame fully. The whole world would know.

How could she bear that?

No. She would go ahead and marry Doss, and let sharing her bed with him be her private consolation. She'd find a way to endure the rest, like his trying to give her orders all the time and maybe yearning after other women because he'd taken a wife out of honor, not choice.

She'd be his cross to bear, and he would be hers.

There was a perverse kind of justice in that.

They reached the out skirts of Indian Rock in the late after noon, with the sun about to go down. Doss drove straight to Dr. Willaby's big house on Third Street, secured the horses and reached into the sleigh for Tobias before Hannah got her self unwrapped enough to get out of the sleigh.

Doc Willaby's daughter, Constance, met them at the door. She was a beautiful young woman, and she'd pursued Gabe right up to the day he'd put a gold band on Hannah's finger. Now, from the way she looked at Doss, she was ready to settle for his younger brother.

The thought stirred Hannah to fury, though she'd have buttered, baked and eaten both her shoes before admitting it.

“We have need of a doctor,” Doss said to Constance, holding Tobias's bundled form in both arms.

“Come in,” Constance said. She had bright-auburn hair and very green eyes, and her shape, though slender, was voluptuous. What, Hannah wondered, did Doss think when he looked at her? “Papa's ill,” the other woman went on, “but my cousin is here, and he'll see to the boy.”