At Close Range (13 page)

“Remember that piece of cloth Chance found?”

“Oh, yeah. That.” She sounded unconvinced. Mack knew exactly how she felt. His insides were still shaking from his first glimpse of the ghostly figure outside the barn.

He pulled open a drawer and withdrew a small handgun.

“You have a gun?” Corrie asked.

“Chance gave it to me before he left. It's only a .25 caliber, more of a noisemaker than a threat.”

“It looks menacing enough,” she said.

“Good.”

“I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad you have it.”

He turned for the door, intending to disregard her wishes and leave her behind. She matched him step for step.

He signaled her to be quiet and carefully opened the door. “Watch the creak on the top step,” he whispered, creeping along the wall of the bunkhouse, avoiding the steps altogether.

He stopped at the end of the bunkhouse and peered around the corner.

The woman was gone.

His eyes strafed the shadows, but he couldn't spot her anywhere. He held out his hand at Corrie to have her stay in place. He slid around the edge of the bunkhouse, facing the barn with his back against solid adobe.

“I don't see her,” Corrie whispered from right beside him.

He sighed. Corrie might call herself a follower, but she followed right where golden-voiced angels should fear treading.

“She's probably in the barn,” he murmured.

“Can we call Pablo now?”

He gave her a look. “Why don't you do just that?”

She shook her head and stuck her hand in his back pocket. When he didn't move, she gave a half smile and shrugged. He'd thought her a potent mix before. He found her much more than that now. She was utterly unlike anyone he'd ever known. Childlike, all business, a dreamer, a skillful negotiator, soft and strong. Playful and wistful simultaneously. All woman
in his bed, wholly game for a ghost search after midnight. She wasn't merely potent, she was irresistible.

“After you.” She gave a forward wave.

“Stay behind me,” he whispered back.

“No problem whatsoever.”

They crossed the drive, making far too much noise. Once he stumbled over a large rock lining the drive, and a second later, she ran into him when he paused to listen. He ground his teeth and vowed to make adult training part of the safety ritual at Milagro, starting with Corrie and himself the very next day.

Thankfully, Corrie did hang back when he slowly opened the big doors of the barn. He didn't fumble around in the dark; he immediately flipped up the switches for the overhead fluorescents.

He heard a horse whicker softly. And heard a soft, choked sob.

With his gun outstretched, he made his way deeper into the barn.

“Hello?” he called out, first in English, then in Spanish. “Who's there?”

Another sob.

A child's sob.

And coming from one of the stalls.

“It's Pedro,” Corrie said, materializing beside him.

Mack didn't ask how she knew the crying belonged to the little boy they'd retrieved from town; she seemed to know the tiniest of details. He only had to remember how she'd known exactly what troubled him the most. And what gift to offer to make even his darkest feelings subside.

“Pedro?” she called. “It's okay, little one. We're here. Where are you, honey?”

Another muffled sob led them to the boy. He was huddled in the back of an empty stall, half hidden by a pile of hay.

Corrie immediately knelt beside the boy. “I'm so sorry you're sad, Pedro,” she said, her Spanish flawless, even if her voice was choked. “What can we do to help?”

“I want my mama,” he sobbed.

“Of course you do, darling,” Corrie said, sitting beside him and wrapping an arm around him.

“I want my mama.”

Corrie drew him closer, pulling him onto her lap. She rocked him in her arms, her eyes meeting Mack's over the boy's head.

“I brought her some food,” Pedro said. “I'm sorry I stole,
señor,
but I knew she was hungry. There was enough to share.”

“Your mother?” Mack asked sharply, then softened his tone. “You brought your mother some food?”

“I saw her from my window. I climbed out to bring her food, but it wasn't my mama.”

“I think we better get back to the main house,” Mack said.

“Where is my mama?” Pedro sobbed.

“Don't worry, honey,” Corrie said. “We'll find her.”

“Why doesn't she come? Why is there a ghost?”

“There could be lots of reasons why your mother isn't here,” Corrie said, feeling as if her heart were breaking. “But I'm sure she doesn't want you to be scared and sad for her. So let's go back to the main house and get you warm.”

The little boy put his arms around Corrie's neck,
and she was grateful when Mack assisted her to her feet. He kept his hand on her arm for a moment longer than necessary and she glanced at him in question.

“I'll walk you back,” he said. “Then I'm going to have a look around the barn.”

She nodded, glad he would be with them on the short journey across the drive. The night seemed infinitely darker now, and more ominous. The boy had seen someone, just as they had. Some
thing
that wasn't the mother he'd been aching to see.

A distraught Rita and half-dressed Pablo met them on the veranda.

“Dios mio,”
Rita said. “What's happened?”

“Pedro went to the barn, hoping to find his mother. He was taking her some food.”

“I think I understand now,” Pablo said.

“
Señora,
I'm so sorry I didn't hear him leave.”

“It's okay, Rita. I doubt anyone could have. He snuck out the window. But we'd better get him inside now.”

“I'm going to go back to the barn,” Mack said. “I left the lights on.”

“I'll go with you,” Pablo said.

Until that moment, Corrie had forgotten that Pablo used to work for the federal marshal's office, and that he was Chance's cousin. In the dim light on the veranda, he looked formidable.

The two men nodded, almost in unison, and left the womenfolk and children.

“Are you all right,
niño?
” Rita asked Pedro.

“La Dolorosa was there,” he said.

“Dios mio,”
Rita said.

“I was scared.”

“Of course you were. You're smart to be scared.”

“I was looking for my mother. I was taking her two of your tamales. She would like them.”

“I'm sure she would. We'll make her a big batch in the morning. And you'll help me, won't you?”

“And some of your cookies, too?”

Rita exchanged a glance with Corrie over the boy's head. “Such cheek.” But she kissed the boy's head. “If you promise not to climb out any more windows.”

“I promise.”

“Then okay.” Rita held out her arms for the child and, taking him, cradled him gently against her chest. “
Pobrecito.
Poor, poor little boy.”

 

“Who did the boy see—his mother or La Dolorosa?” Pablo asked Mack as they entered the barn.

“I suspect the two are one and the same,” Mack said.

“That's what I was thinking, too,” Pablo said.

Mack went directly to the stall where they'd found Pedro. He pulled back the hay and discovered a Milagro blanket and a paper sack filled with tamales, a couple of broken cookies and an apple. The boy had included one of the canned sodas in this midnight picnic lunch for his mother.

“What did the boy say?”

“He said he was bringing the food to his mother, but when he got here, there was only La Dolorosa. Then he asked why there has to be a ghost.”

“Jeez. So what do we do?”

“Not much we can do. Stake her out, I guess. Keep our eyes peeled. Especially at night.”

“The boy claimed to see her—his mother, at any
rate. During that game you were playing with the kids earlier tonight?” Pablo shrugged at Mack's questioning look. “Rita told me.”

“Right. He said he saw his mother by the bunkhouse. Then he said she was gone. It struck me odd at the time, but I figured, poor kid, he's seeing what he wants to. Dumb. I should have checked the bunkhouse then. She was probably hiding in my own place.”

“Maybe. But then again, maybe it's really La Dolorosa. The new sheriff thinks Turnbull killed Pedro's mother and has her body hidden somewhere.”

“That makes sense except for one big problem.”

“And what's that, Señor Mack?”

“I can't bring myself to believe in a tamale-eating ghost.”

C
orrie felt as if she'd misplaced her mind somewhere.

The sun was shining brightly, the day dawning cool with ninety-degree temperatures predicted by mid-afternoon. The children, with the exception of a slightly heavy-eyed Pedro, were boisterously gathered around Mack for a new game, a variation on his training theme. Rita polished the front hall Saltillo tiles. Pablo and Clovis were out on the prairie somewhere gathering calves.

Corrie should have been thinking of a thousand different things—the children at the ranch, her dream of writing music, the bit of cloth Chance and Mack had discovered in the barn—but she couldn't seem to think of anything but Mack Dorsey.

Mack, with his icy-blue eyes that turned to cobalt fire when he couldn't speak, or to a deep denim blue
when he was relaxed and smiling. Mack, with his scarred face that looked old before his time and yet felt brand-new. She thought of the way his passion stirred her as none other had ever done before. And more than that, she cherished his kisses that left her craving more even as she feared allowing herself to fully succumb to believing in a future with him.

Her hands didn't tremble when she was with him. Why was that? They'd trembled constantly, as long as she could remember. They'd shaken at her high school graduation, they'd trembled at every interview she'd ever accomplished. But they didn't shake uncontrollably, some portent of terror, whenever Mack touched her.

Such a little thing, but it seemed a powerful omen. Did it mean she was comfortable with him as she was with no one else? Or was she looking for meanings where none were needed?

No. It meant something. Something huge. A big thing to be acknowledged, to be reckoned with.

And, discounting the miracle of not shaking, he made her body feel sensual, sexy, and some restless part of her transcended. Oddly, this new inner peace and unusual confidence seemed to reawaken the journalist inside her. For the first time in at least two years, she actually wanted to do research.

She wanted to know every detail about Mack, every nuance of what he thought, dreamed or had ever wanted. She wanted to know what he liked for breakfast, what his favorite color might prove to be, and how many times his heart had been bruised in his life. She wasn't curious; she was obsessed with knowing
these things and an infinite array of complexities in addition.

“Corrie?” Analissa asked from the doorway to her suite.

“Yes, honey?”

“Why are you inside? Mack's out playing games. Wanna come?”

Corrie waved the little girl over; her arms open wide. Analissa ran and leaped into her lap.

They giggled together as Corrie caught her and rocked her in her arms.

“Are you sick?” Analissa asked.

“Not a bit,” Corrie said.

“Why aren't you outside?”

“I was thinking.”

“Were you thinking about Mack?”

Everything in Corrie stilled for a moment, even as she took in the fact that Analissa was the only child who didn't give Mack a formal title. To this little one, he was “Mack.” To everyone else, he was Señor Mack. Just as she'd always been just Corrie, never more.

“I guess so,” she temporized.

“Are you going to marry him?”

Corrie knew the question wasn't directly personal. Most children Analissa's age asked such embarrassing questions only to gauge relationships in general. Corrie had listened to enough theories in her time to know how to answer the girl. “What makes you think I should?”

“Because he loves you.”

That wasn't the prescribed answer. She was in deep trouble.

“And you love him,” Analissa said dreamily.

Instead of trying to reason with the tiny angel in her arms, she tickled the child instead. “Love him? What makes you think that? Love him?”

Analissa giggled wildly and flailed ineffectively. When she couldn't seem to get her breath, Corrie stopped and hugged her tightly to her chest.

“Like, like that,” Analissa said, gasping for breath. “That's why you love him. He makes you feel like that.”

“Like what?” Corrie asked, though in the little girl's words she knew the answer.
Just like that.

“That's how you feel about Mack. Laughing and crying at the same time.”

Corrie chuckled. “I've never heard love described quite that way,” she said.

“But it's true,” Analissa said. She wriggled in Corrie's arms and wrapped her arms around her neck. “I love you, Corrie.”

The little girl with jet-black hair and eyes looked straight at her, her youth disappearing in her intensity.

“I love you, too, darling.”

The tears in Corrie's eyes blurred her vision of Analissa sliding from her lap.

“It's a happy time,” Analissa said. “You did right.”

“What's that?” Corrie asked through a choked voice, but she asked it of an empty room for Analissa had bolted through the door.

Though the little girl couldn't have known about the night before, it was as if her words had zeroed in on Corrie's confession to Mack. She knew instinctively that she'd done the right thing in going out to him the
night before, in revealing her past, in melting in his embrace.

But she didn't know anything else she'd done right lately.

“It doesn't change anything,” she admitted aloud. “He likes me. Wow. Stop the presses. And I don't think anyone's waiting for a banner header that says I like him.”

She covered her eyes with her hands. “I've got to stop this. I'm brainless. I'm idiotic. I'm acting like I'm in love.”

She stilled, Analissa's statement ringing in her ears.
“And you love him.”

She hadn't answered the little girl, not knowing how. But here, in the privacy of her own room, could she at least answer her own question?

When Corrie Stratton says it's true, it's a fact.

Was she in love? What did that even mean?

Was it love when she couldn't think of anything but Mack? Did love mean she couldn't see straight unless he was in her line of vision?

Or did it mean she was simply and wholly succumbing to the lure of Rancho Milagro, that wanting something was halfway to achieving it. Hadn't she told little Pedro something like that?

And Mack? What did he feel?

Corrie didn't have the sense that her actions, her confession, had changed anything but his uncertain feelings for her. He wanted her, she knew that much. And he admired her as well. But, if she left passion—passion that left her gasping for air and craving more—out of the equation, she was afraid he would
hold her every bit as much at arm's length as he did the children.

But did he really stand apart from them? He carried Analissa as if she'd always been in his arms. He flicked Pedro's cheek with one of his fingers. He ruffled Juan Carlos's hair. He touched them, the little ones, the children; he let them hang all over him. She'd seen him only that morning, sitting on the front steps of the veranda, head to head with little Jenny, and her heart had constricted when she heard the little girl who never talked giggling with him.

He patrolled the grounds, walked the fences, taught the children history and mathematics, snippets of poetry. And he trained them against danger.

He carried them, jostled with them, made them call out dates and times, and accepted them as they were. And every child, from Juan Carlos to little Analissa, would call out tidbits of history, timelines and facts as they marched around the drive. And they loved it. God, they really loved it.

He wasn't an easy man. He was kind with the children, almost unfailingly, but abrupt with adults. He was sweet with her, in his rough way. And his touch could make her crazy and sated all at the same time. What did that mean?

What, on heaven's earth, did all that really mean?

Not everyone could be expected to lose themselves in stories as she did. And what did he do that was so different than herself, than Jeannie, than Chance? She wasn't distant with the children, not at all, and they adored her. Mack was distant, in his fashion, but the kids adored him as well.

A question popped into her head.
Did she adore him?

Of course not, she answered herself swiftly. Adoration inferred blindness, a determined refusal to focus on reality. She didn't
adore
Mack Dorsey. She only wanted…

She didn't know what she wanted from Mack Dorsey. Everything, maybe. Everything and more.

If only he could be granted some measure of peace for the five children that perished in that fire, then perhaps there could be some glimmer of hope for a future together.

Even the word
together
scared her, made her want to pack a bag and run away as far as she possibly could. No matter that some corner of her heart had always yearned for union, she'd never, as Jeannie had—now twice—explored the dream. But unlike her, Jeannie seemed born for melding with a mate.

Corrie had decided years before that she simply wasn't the marrying kind. No man seemed to be able to touch her heart and she certainly had never tried reaching into theirs.

Until now.

She'd decided long ago that she would serve as the playful aunt to Jeannie's brood.

So why was she stumbling over the idea of marriage now?

Mack Dorsey.

And until she knew exactly how he felt, she wasn't about to go out on any proverbial limbs announcing her half-baked intentions.

She suspected Mack feared failing, but only because he pushed himself so far beyond reasonable expecta
tions that failure was possible, even probable. In her case, she'd spent a lifetime living within the limits, doing her job, but never stretching the parameters beyond easy reach.

Maybe it was time to try. Maybe she could exercise the skills she'd acquired all those years at PBS and turn them to good use. To Mack's use.

And maybe, for once, to her own ends.

She dug out a yellow pad, a couple of fine-point felt-tipped pens, and cleared the desk in her bedroom. As she slipped her song notebook into a drawer, she caught a line she'd penned several nights before. “He walks with ghosts…”

She penned the line in capital letters at the top of a blank sheet of paper and picked up the telephone and punched in the numbers she'd used daily for ten years. After a few pleasantries with her loyal sources, she launched into her request. “I need a list of all of the survivors of that incident, okay? Particularly those he rescued. I also need a list of the parents of the children who died. And the cafeteria worker, too. In fact, I need everything.” She gave the ranch fax number and her e-mail address.

Please let this work, she prayed. And then, in a secondary prayer, she added,
Please let me understand it.

She didn't dare consider what would happen if her research only made things worse.

 

Rita called Mack to the phone midway through the afternoon. She began dusting the mantel in the living room as he picked up the receiver.

“You Mack Dorsey? Pete Salazar, here. Chance's cousin—his daddy was married to my aunt? Hell of a
job you did at that fire. You're all right. Anyway, Chance dropped by a piece of cloth a couple days ago and asked me to run an analysis on it. He told me to call you if I had any luck.”

“Right. Anything?”

“I'd sure be interested in knowing where Chance found this scrap,” Pete said.

Mack frowned. “On the floor in the barn. A nail in one of the nearby stalls had a black thread on it. We assumed the piece of cloth had been ripped off a shawl or skirt. Or maybe even one of the kids' sweaters. Why, is there something?” He glanced at Rita. She was busy replacing a small, framed photograph of Jeannie, Leeza and Corrie back onto the hearth seat.

“That explains the bits of straw, then. Of course, it doesn't explain anything else. The deal is, I've got a gal in crime-scene forensics looking at it now. She's been flipping out all morning. She's an expert on textiles. I called her in when our guys couldn't figure it out.”

“Did she find blood on that scrap or—”

“Naw, nothing like that, but weirder. Ready for this? The wool in that little bit of cloth is hand-woven by a master weaver. That's strange enough, but now we get to the really good part. My textiles expert says this cloth was what she'd called wool-dyed, meaning the black color was added to the wool before it was even spun into yarn. And that the yarn was then coated with flax oil. That's linseed oil to us nowadays. Except this wasn't linseed, not in the modern sense.”

Though Mack was relatively sure Rita couldn't possibly be hearing what Pete Salazar was saying on the
phone, her features seemed to pinch nevertheless. She whisked out of the living room and down the hall.

“Are you with me, so far? Not even a remotely current process went into the making of the piece of cloth.”

Mack felt the hairs on the base of his neck tingling. “So because it was wool-dyed and has this flax oil on it, you're thinking this cloth is old?”

“You could certainly call it that,” Pete said. “Linda says this little scrap of cloth is at least two hundred years old. Maybe more.”

Mack's mouth felt dry, his tongue thick. He remembered reaching across the woman in black to open the back door of the Bronco. He thought of Corrie's duster, left behind for them to find. He pictured little Pedro creeping across the drive to present a midnight snack to his mama, only to find La Dolorosa, seeking her missing children.

“Could your Linda tell what the piece of cloth came from? Skirt, shawl, jacket, whatever?”

Corrie came into the room, Rita hard on her heels. Mack shook his head but raised his shoulders.

Pete said, “No way to tell. But Linda went on about carbon dating, DNA and other technical stuff. She says the wool comes from a type of sheep known only in New Mexico, Mexico and—are you sitting down? Afghanistan. Some kind of an angora goat, something the natives call Navajo sheep. She's as excited as I've ever seen her, and trust me, she's not that easy to rile up. She's already signed her name on the initial report, though. Bottom line is that swatch of material came from some bigger piece that's at least two hundred years old.”