mother-in-law, women who didn’t speak evil of anyone and who always expected the best. The rest he’d learned from what they hadn’t said—from the hurt on their faces and the silence that yawned when her name came up.
“Your sister is dead,” he said finally. It made him angry to say it like that. To be helpless to escape the fact.
“You’re lying.” Ruby narrowed her eyes and gave him an accusatory glare. “I don’t know why you’d say such a cruel thing, but you’re lying.”
“I might be a lot of things,” he replied. “But I’m not a liar.”
Her doubt was easy to read.
“Look around,” he suggested. “She’s not here. Hasn’t been here for nearly two years.”
“She’s probably somewhere else. If you’re her husband, she’s at your place.”
“This is my place.”
Ruby’s mouth opened and shut before she asked, “What are you talking about?”
“The Lazy S is my ranch now.”
“This is the Dearing farm.”
“It’s not a farm. Only crops out there are grains to feed the horses. Did you not notice that on your way in?”
She’d noticed. He saw it on her face.
“Two years?” she questioned, as though just grasping the information. “How could she be dead?” She shook her head. “I mean—how? How did it happen?”
“She was driving back from town with supplies. A storm came up and the wagon overturned in Little Wolf Creek. She was trapped under it. She drowned.”
Ruby didn’t want to believe him. “Where’s my mother?”
“You’d have known all this if you’d have been here.”
“Where is my mother?”
He drew a breath, but paused. Finally, he looked Ruby in the eye. “She died in April.”
Something flickered behind her eyes. Disbelief? Anger? “Now I know you’re making all this up. You expect me to believe they’re both dead?”
He shrugged as best he could with his hands bound behind his back. The woman was darned good with a knot. “See for yourself. Your mother’s things are all just the way they were when she was here.”
Plain enough, that statement rang true. Some of the color drained from Ruby’s cheeks.
He jerked his head to indicate an easterly direction, and winced when pain crept up his neck. “There are three graves up on the rise that overlooks Deer Hollow.”
The rest of the color had drained from her face by now. “Three?”
He resented being the one to tell her all this. He resented talking about it at all. “Lost a baby four years ago.”
She got up and left the room.
* * *
Ruby stood at the foot of the stairs, her hand on the worn banister, her heart in her throat. Crushing fear rose up and threatened to suck the air from her lungs. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing this nightmare to end...willing sanity and reason to return. Needing her world to settle back on its axis and stop careening out of control.
The dust everywhere, her mother’s clothing, the vanity set and hairbrush... It all added up to confirm that man’s claims.
But she didn’t know him.
What reason would he have to make up a story like that?
She didn’t know him.
Where else could her mother be if he wasn’t telling the truth?
“Ruby!” The man’s angry voice carried from the kitchen. “Come back here and untie me!”
Trembling, she lowered herself to the bottom step and rested her spinning head on her knees.
His story did explain everything, even the hay field she’d seen on her way here...her mother’s forgotten vegetable garden. If all his claims were true and Pearl and her mother were dead, Ruby was too late. She covered her mouth with a trembling hand. She could never make up for the past.
“Come back here now, Ruby!”
She disregarded his ravings and sat like that until her backside and spine ached. Sat there while the impact of that man’s information sank in. Ruby became lost in her thoughts and the grief that bore down on her. She sank to the floor and half sat, half laid with her head on a step.
She’d waited too long.
He stopped yelling and she lost track of time and place. Eventually, with stiff movements, she stood and crossed the foyer to open the front door. The first rays of morning sun were visible behind the horizon. From the porch, she watched them creep above the cottonwoods that lined the river in the distance, until eventually she made out the yard and barn.
Ignoring her complaining body, she set out across a pasture, dew making the grass slippery under the soles of her boots. A cool breeze lifted her hair from her face and neck. At the top of a rise, silhouetted against the pale orange sky, stood three crosses.
Heart aching, not daring to breathe, Ruby approached.
In the dim morning light she made out the names burned into the wood. Margaret May Sommerton. Pearl Dearing Sommerton. And the last—the newest—in the same neat lettering: Laura McWhirter Dearing.
Ruby dropped to her knees in the dewy grass.
All the way to Nebraska she’d planned what she would say to her family. A million times she’d imagined the scene and their conversation and reactions. She had so much to make up for, so much to explain. She’d made plenty of mistakes, staying away so long being the biggest, but she’d hoped for forgiveness. Now she would never get to say the things she needed to say.
She would never be able to tell her mother she was sorry. She’d missed her last opportunity. While she’d been singing in theaters, eating and sleeping in hotels across the eastern states, her mother and sister had needed her here.
All those years her mother had believed Ruby didn’t love her or care enough to come home—to stay home. But she’d loved Mama. Of course she had loved her.
Tears came then; great racking sobs rose from her belly and her chest heaved.
She hadn’t said goodbye.
Her grief combined with overwhelming guilt and regret until it hurt to breathe. It didn’t seem right to be here with the breaking sun on her face or to hear the sound of birds chirping in the nearby trees when the rest of her family was gone.
Finally, through her tears, Ruby turned her gaze to her sister’s grave. Now that the sky had brightened, the neatly mown grass in this spot and the beds of violets planted
