The Mckettrick Way. Linda Miller Lael

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      Angus didn’t reply. He appeared to be deep in thought. Or maybe as he looked out at the surrounding countryside, he was remembering his youth, when he’d staked a claim to this land and held it with blood and sweat and sheer McKettrick stubbornness.

      “You must have known the O’Ballivans,” Meg reflected, musing. Like her own family, Brad’s had been pioneers in this part of Arizona.

      “I was older than dirt by the time Sam O’Ballivan brought his bride, Maddie, up from Haven. Might have seen them once or twice. But I knew Major Blackstone, all right.” Angus smiled at some memory. “He and I used to arm wrestle sometimes, in the card room back of Jolene Bell’s Saloon, when we couldn’t best each other at poker.”

      “Who won?” Meg asked, smiling slightly at the image.

      “Same as the poker,” Angus answered with a sigh. “We’d always come out about even. He’d win half the time, me the other half.”

      The house came in sight, the barn towering nearby. Angus’s expression took on a wistful aspect.

      “When you’re here,” Meg ventured, “can you see Doss and Hannah and Tobias? Talk to them?”

      “No,” Angus said flatly.

      “Why not?” Meg persisted, even though she knew Angus didn’t want to pursue the subject.

      “Because they’re not dead,” he said. “They’re just on the other side, like my boys.”

      “Well, I’m not dead, either,” Meg said reasonably. She refrained from adding that she could have shown him their graves, up in the McKettrick cemetery. Shown him his own, for that matter. It would have been unkind, of course, but there was another reason for her reluctance, too. In some version of that cemetery, given what he’d told her about time, there was surely a headstone with her name on it.

      “You wouldn’t understand,” Angus told her. He always said that, when she tried to find out how it was for him, where he went when he wasn’t following her around.

      “Try me,” she said.

      He vanished.

      Resigned, Meg pulled up in front of the garage, added onto the original house sometime in the 1950s, and equipped with an automatic door opener, and pushed the button so she could drive in.

      She half expected to find Angus sitting at the kitchen table when she went into the house, but he wasn’t there.

      What she needed, she decided, was a cup of tea.

      She got Lorelei’s teapot out of the built-in china cabinet and set it firmly on the counter. The piece was legendary in the family; it had a way of moving back to the cupboard of its own volition, from the table or the counter, and vice versa.

      Meg filled the electric kettle at the sink and plugged it in to heat.

      Tea was not going to cure what ailed her.

      Brad O’Ballivan was back.

      Compared to that, ghosts, the mysteries of time and space, and teleporting teapots seemed downright mundane.

      And she’d agreed, like a fool, to meet him in Stone Creek for a drink. What had she been thinking?

      Standing there in her kitchen, Meg leaned against the counter and folded her arms, waiting for the tea water to boil. Brad had hurt her so badly, she’d thought she’d never recover. For years after he’d dumped her to go to Nashville, she’d barely been able to come back to Indian Rock, and when she had, she’d driven straight to the Dixie Dog, against her will, sat in some rental car, and cried like an idiot.

      There are some things I’d like to say to you, Brad had told her, that very day.

      “What things?” she asked now, aloud.

      The teakettle whistled.

      She unplugged it, measured loose orange pekoe into Lorelei’s pot and poured steaming water over it.

      It was just a drink, Meg reminded herself. An innocent drink.

      She should call Brad, cancel gracefully.

      Or, better yet, she could just stand him up. Not show up at all. Just as he’d done to her, way back when, when she’d loved him with all her heart and soul, when she’d believed he meant to make a place for her in his busy, exciting life.

      Musing, Meg laid a hand to her lower abdomen.

      She’d stopped believing in a lot of things when Brad O’Ballivan ditched her.

      Maybe he wanted to apologize.

      She gave a teary snort of laughter.

      And maybe he really had fans on other planets.

      A rap at the back door made her start. Angus? He never knocked—he just appeared. Usually at the most inconvenient possible time.

      Meg went to the door, peered through the old, thick panes of greenish glass, saw Travis Reid looming on the other side. She wrestled with the lock and let him in.

      “I’m here on reconnaissance,” he announced, taking off his cowboy hat and hanging it on the peg next to the door. “Sierra’s worried about you, and so is Eve.”

      Meg put a hand to her forehead. She’d left the baby shower abruptly to go meet Brad at the Dixie Dog Drive-In. “I’m sorry,” she said, stepping back so Travis could come inside. “I’m all right, really. You shouldn’t have come all the way out here—”

      “Eve tried your cell—which is evidently off—and Sierra left three or four messages on voice mail,” he said with a nod toward the kitchen telephone. “Consider yourself fortunate that I got here before they called out the National Guard.”

      Meg laughed, closed the door against the chilly October twilight, and watched as Travis took off his sheepskin-lined coat and hung it next to the hat. “I was just feeling a little—overwhelmed.”

      “Overwhelmed?” She’d been possessed.

      Travis went to the telephone, punched in a sequence of numbers and waited. “Hi, honey,” he said presently, when Sierra answered. “Meg’s alive and well. No armed intruders. No bloody accident. She was just—overwhelmed.”

      “Tell her I’ll call her later,” Meg said. “Mom, too.”

      “She’ll call you later,” Travis repeated dutifully. “Eve, too.” He listened again, promised to pick up a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread on the way home and hung up.

      Knowing Travis wasn’t fond of tea, Meg offered him a cup of instant coffee, instead.

      He accepted, taking a seat at the table where generations of McKettricks, from Holt and Lorelei on down, had taken their meals. “What’s really going on, Meg?” he asked quietly, watching her as she poured herself some tea and joined him.

      “What makes you think anything is СКАЧАТЬ