fans. “Brad O’Ballivan,” she said diplomatically, “has left the building.”
Nobody got the joke.
The sun was setting, red-gold shot through with purple, when Brad crested the last hill before home and looked down on Stone Creek Ranch for the first time since his grandfather’s funeral. The creek coursed, silvery-blue, through the middle of the land. The barn and the main house, built by Sam O’Ballivan’s own hands and shored up by every generation to follow, stood as sturdy and imposing as ever. Once, there had been two houses on the place, but the one belonging to Major John Blackstone, the original landowner, had been torn down long ago. Now a copse of oak trees stood where the major had lived, surrounding a few old graves.
Big John was buried there, by special dispensation from the Arizona state government.
A lump formed in Brad’s throat. You see that I’m laid to rest with the old-timers when the bell tolls, Big John had told him once. Not in that cemetery in town.
It had taken some doing, but Brad had made it happen.
He wanted to head straight for Big John’s final resting place, pay his respects first thing, but there was a cluster of cars parked in front of the ranch house. His sisters were waiting to welcome him home.
Brad blinked a couple of times, rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, and headed for the house.
Time to face the proverbial music.
Meg drove slowly back to the Triple M, going the long way to pass the main ranch house, Angus’s old stomping grounds, in the vain hope that he would decide to haunt it for a while, instead of her. A descendant of Angus’s eldest son, Holt, and daughter-in-law Lorelei, Meg called their place home.
As they bumped across the creek bridge, Angus assessed the large log structure, added onto over the years, and well-maintained.
Though close, all the McKettricks were proud of their particular branch of the family tree. Keegan, who occupied the main house now, along with his wife, Molly, daughter, Devon, and young son, Lucas, could trace his lineage back to Kade, another of Angus’s four sons.
Rance, along with his daughters, was Rafe’s progeny. He and the girls and his bride, Emma, lived in the grandly rustic structure on the other side of the creek from Keegan’s place.
Finally, there was Jesse. He was Jeb’s descendant, and resided, when he wasn’t off somewhere participating in a rodeo or a poker tournament, in the house Jeb had built for his wife, Chloe, high on a hill on the southwestern section of the ranch. Jesse was happily married to a hometown girl, the former Cheyenne Bridges, and like Keegan’s Molly and Rance’s Emma, Cheyenne was expecting a baby.
Everybody, it seemed to Meg, was expecting a baby.
Except her, of course.
She bit her lower lip.
“I bet if you got yourself pregnant by that singing cowboy,” Angus observed, “he’d have the decency to make an honest woman out of you.”
Angus had an uncanny ability to tap into Meg’s wavelength; though he swore he couldn’t read her mind, she wondered sometimes.
“Great idea,” she scoffed. “And for your information, I am an honest woman.”
Keegan was just coming out of the barn as Meg passed; he smiled and waved. She tooted the Blazer’s horn in greeting.
“He sure looks like Kade,” Angus said. “Jesse looks like Jeb, and Rance looks like Rafe.” He sighed. “It sure makes me lonesome for my boys.”
Meg felt a grudging sympathy for Angus. He’d ruined a lot of dates, being an almost constant companion, but she loved him. “Why can’t you be where they are?” she asked softly. “Wherever that is.”
“I’ve got to see to you,” he answered. “You’re the last holdout.”
“I’d be all right, Angus,” she said. She’d asked him about the afterlife, but all he’d ever been willing to say was that there was no such thing as dying, just a change of perspective. Time wasn’t linear, he claimed, but simultaneous. The “whole ball of string,” as he put it, was happening at once—past, present and future. Some of the experiences the women in her family, including herself and Sierra, had had up at Holt’s house lent credence to the theory.
Sierra claimed that, before her marriage to Travis and the subsequent move to the new semi-mansion in town, she and her young son, Liam, had shared the old house with a previous generation of McKettricks—Doss and Hannah and a little boy called Tobias. Sierra had offered journals and photograph albums as proof, and Meg had to admit, her half sister made a compelling case.
Still, and for all that she’d been keeping company with a benevolent ghost since she was little, Meg was a left-brain type.
When Angus didn’t comment on her insistence that she’d get along fine if he went on to the great roundup in the sky, or whatever, Meg tried again. “Look,” she said gently, “when I was little, and Sierra disappeared, and Mom was so frantic to find her that she couldn’t take care of me, I really needed you. But I’m a grown woman now, Angus. I’m independent. I have a life.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Angus’s jaw tighten. “That Hank Breslin,” he said, “was no good for Eve. No better than your father was. Every time the right man came along, she was so busy cozying up to the wrong one that she didn’t even notice what was right in front of her.”
Hank Breslin was Sierra’s father. He’d kidnapped Sierra, only two years old at the time, when Eve served him with divorce papers, and raised her in Mexico. For a variety of reasons, Eve hadn’t reconnected with her lost daughter until recently. Meg’s own father, about whom she knew little, had died in an accident a month before she was born. Nobody liked to talk about him—even his name was a mystery.
“And you think I’ll make the same mistakes my mother did?” Meg said.
“Hell,” Angus said, sparing her a reluctant grin, “right now, even a mistake would be progress.”
“With all due respect,” Meg replied, “having you around all the time is not exactly conducive to romance.”
They started the long climb uphill, headed for the house that now belonged to her and Sierra. Meg had always loved that house—it had been a refuge for her, full of cousins. Looking back, she wondered why, given that Eve had rarely accompanied her on those summer visits, had instead left her daughter in the care of a succession of nannies and, later, aunts and uncles.
Sierra’s kidnapping had been a traumatic event, for certain, but the problems Eve had subsequently developed because of it had left Meg relatively unmarked. She hadn’t been lonely as a child, mainly because of Angus.
“I’ll stay clear tomorrow night, when you go to Stone Creek for that drink,” Angus said.
“You like Brad.”
“Always did. Liked Travis, too.’ Course, I knew he was meant for your sister, that they’d meet up in time.”
Meg and Sierra’s husband, Travis, were old friends. They’d tried to get something going, convinced they were perfect
