almost to the summer range, way up the mountain.
Below him, Ty could see the lights of his house winking against the growing darkness. It made him impatient for hot food, a stiff drink, a scalding shower and his bed.
But the horse, Ben, was young and had already demonstrated great heart, had given everything he had, and so Ty did not push him, but let the young gelding set his own pace down a trail that was slick with new snow.
Finally, finally, the cows were back with the herd, the pasture fences secured, Ben fed and watered. Ty followed a path from the barn, worn deep by a hundred years of Halliday boots, to where the “new” house sat on the top of a knoll of land, in the shadow of the mountain behind it.
The house was called new because it shared the property with the “old” homestead place, which his father had built for his first wife twenty-five years before Ty had been born.
Ty swayed on his back porch, his hand going to the doorknob.
Where it froze.
What had he heard?
Silence.
He cocked his head, listening hard, but heard only the lonely whistle of a December wind under the rafters of the house.
Ty felt he was suffering the delusions of a man who had pushed himself to his limit, and then a mile or two beyond it.
But he was frowning now, thinking of the lights inside his house that had winked him home. He lived alone. He was pretty damned sure that he had not left any lights on when he’d left way before dawn this morning.
The sound came again, and he took a startled step back, nearly tumbling down his back-porch steps.
The sound was definitely coming from inside his house. It was an almost shockingly happy sound. His tired mind grappled with it. He hadn’t had a television for years. He didn’t own a computer. Had he left the radio on?
No. He had not turned on anything this morning, some distress note in the faraway bawl of a cow letting him know something had been amiss. He had scrambled out of bed and out of the house in total darkness and in a hurry.
There was only one thing that made a sound like the one he had just heard.
And there was absolutely no chance it was coming from inside his house.
No, it was exhaustion. An auditory hallucination. Ears straining, picking up noises that did not exist.
Just as Ty was about to dismiss the sound he thought he had heard as a figment of an exhausted mind—clearly it was impossible—it came again. Louder. A babbling sound, like cold creek water tinkling over the first thin shards of ice.
And even though he was not a man with much experience in such things, Ty knew exactly what it was.
There was a baby inside his house.
Ty backed off his porch on silent feet, took a deep breath, felt a need to ground himself. He paused at the corner of his house, surveying the rolling land of the foothills, black against the midnight-blue of a rapidly darkening sky.
Snow-crusted pasture rolled away from him, beyond that a forested valley, all of it ringed by the craggy magnificence of the Rocky Mountains. The rugged sweep of his land soothed him, though it was not “safe.” A man could die—or be injured—in this country fast and hard. The arrival of the cougar was a case in point, though getting wet and lost in December was far more dangerous than an old mountain lion.
Still, for all its challenges, if ever a place was made to put a man’s soul at ease, wasn’t it this one? He had gone away from here once, and nearly lost himself.
The baby’s happy squawking from inside the house was revving up a notch and he felt the simple shock of it down to his wet, frozen toes inside his boots.
A baby?
The truth be told, the danger of the cougar that had passed through his pastures appealed to him more than the mysterious presence of an infant inside his house.
Ty moved along the side of the house until he stood at the front. At the top of a long, long drive that twisted endlessly up the valley from Highway 22—sometimes called The Cowboy Trail—a car was parked in the gravel turnaround.
It was not the kind of car anyone in these parts would be caught dead driving.
No, folks around here favored pickup trucks, diesel, big enough to haul cattle and horses and hay. Trucks that could be shifted into four-wheel drive as the seasons changed and the roads became more demanding. People around here drove vehicles that were big, muddy and ugly.
No one Ty knew drove a car like this: bright red, shaped like a ladybug, impractically low to the ground.
Cute.
No surprise that a baby seat sat in the back, cheerfully padded with a bright fabric that had cartoon dogs and cats on it.
Ty placed his hand on the hood. Cold. The car had been here for a time.
He checked the plate. Alberta. A Calgary parking sticker was in the left-hand corner of the windshield. Not so far from wherever home was, then, maybe one and a half, two hours, if the roads had been good.
It would be easy enough to slide open the door and find the paperwork, but when he tried the door, it was locked. Under different circumstances he might have seen that as hilarious. Locked? He allowed his eyes to sweep the unpopulated landscape again. Against what?
He turned back to the house. Then he saw his front window.
For the second time in less than five minutes, Ty felt himself stumble backward in shock. His sense of being in an exhausted state of distorted reality increased. He made himself stand very still, squint through the sleet and snow, demanding it go away.
It was a Christmas tree. And it was real, because when he blinked hard and looked again, it was still there. Behind plate glass, bright lights winked against dark boughs, sent little splashes of color onto the gathering snow in his front yard.
He checked his driveway again, seeking familiar landmarks. Turned and studied his house, reassured himself that had been his pasture the cows had been shepherded into, his barn where he had put up his horse.
His eyes went back to the tree.
As far as Ty knew, there had never been one set up in the new Halliday house.
Or at least not in the twenty-six years he had lived here.
And in Ty’s exhausted mind, a single, vulnerable hope crept in, a wish that he had made as a small boy.
Maybe his mother had come home.
He shook off the thought, irritated that it had somehow breached the wall of his adult world. Wishes were for children, and there had been no chance of his ever coming true, thanks to his father.
In his tired mind it did not bode well that the car in the yard, and the baby in his house, and the tree in his window had stirred something up that was better left alone, that he had not given any power to for years.
He
