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 downstairs 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 sometimes, 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, skillfully 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 ice-blue 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 grandparents 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, meanwhile, 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 countryside: March 17, 1918.
Gabe had still been well when he wrote that letter. He’d been looking forward to coming home. It was
