This Calder Sky (27 page)

“You know I'll do everything I can, Ruth.” He felt a strong urge to reach out and take her in his arms, hold her there and comfort her, but it wasn't his place to offer that kind of comfort.

“Buck is wild sometimes, but he isn't bad,” Ruth insisted.

“I know.” Webb took her clenched hands and smoothed them out to rest between his rough palms. “Don't worry about it. Okay?”

“Okay.” Ruth smiled, but there was a shimmer of tears in her blue eyes. “Thank you.” It was a whisper, given as she squeezed his hands and quickly withdrew hers to follow her husband and son.

Webb stood for a long time after the front door had closed, staring in the direction that had given him the last glimpse of Ruth. He hated to admit it even to himself, but he was worried about Buck. The boy was intelligent, maybe too damned smart for his own good. There was a conflict going on inside of Buck, part of the transformation into manhood when the impulses for good and bad remain matched or tip one way or the other. There was larceny in the soul of every man; it was only a question of degree.

He took a deep breath and turned to glance at his son. Webb was bothered, too, by the blind loyalty of near-brotherhood that tied Chase to Buck. There were flaws to be overlooked in friends, but first they must be seen and recognized before they could be ignored. Otherwise, there would be a hard road of disillusionment ahead. If Chase had a blind spot, it was Buck. Webb wanted to open Chase's eyes.

“What do you think? Did Buck do it?” The sharp challenge within the question was hidden by the offhand delivery, so casual, so smooth.

“Buck?” Chase lifted his head to frown at his father. “Of course he didn't do it. A dollar doesn't stay in his pocket for more than ten minutes, but he doesn't steal it from somebody else's.” He pushed away from the fireplace, a certain agitation in his action that showed he resented the question even being raised. “Besides, he was with me when it happened.”

“I thought you weren't sure about that,” Webb reminded him.

“I'm sure. I'll swear to it,” Chase stated.

“If you supply an alibi for him, the charges will be dropped.” Webb sought to make it clearly understood the power that a Calder's word carried, a power not to be abused.

“The charges should be dropped, because I know he didn't do it. That girl can't be positive it was Buck she saw from the window. It was too dark outside, too many shadows. She made a mistake.”

“As long as you aren't making a mistake,” Webb murmured and moved to his desk.

A month after Maggie had brought Ty home from the hospital, Dad Hogan suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed. Cathleen was forced to admit him to a nursing home, where there were the proper facilities to care for him. The household routine that had been changed once to accommodate the addition of an infant was changed again to include twice-daily visits to the nursing home by the arthritic Mother Hogan.

Cathleen took her to visit every evening for an hour, while Maggie arranged to accompany the elderly woman to the home every morning after Ty had been given his daily bath. The situation was a strain on everyone, but it was especially hard on Mother Hogan. The couple had never slept apart during their entire married life. For hours, the woman sat in the front room staring into space, lost without the company of her husband of fifty-odd years.

Returning from a morning visit, Maggie sighed dispiritedly
and shifted Ty into the crook of one arm so she could unlock the door. They had never locked their door in Montana, but she had quickly learned it was almost a cardinal rule in the city. She pushed the door open, then turned back to assist the elderly woman up the front steps and into the house, and went back outside to get the day's mail from the box.

“The new issue of
Reader's Digest
arrived, Grandma Hogan.” She noticed it among the few envelopes as she re-entered the house, closing and locking the door. “Would you like to look at it?”

There was no reply and no indication the woman had even heard her as she used her cane to lower herself into the armchair in the front room. Maggie didn't press for an answer. Ty had begun to show signs that he was hungry, so she carried him into the kitchen to warm a bottle and some baby food. Fortunately, he was a good baby, a healthy baby, hardly ever crying and always sleeping the nights through.

Once she had Ty fed and tucked in his basket to sleep, she put some soup on to warm for herself and Mother Hogan, then glanced through the rest of the mail. One of the envelopes had a Montana postmark. She opened it and read:

May 20

Dear Maggie,

I was sorry to hear about Aunt Cathleen's father-in-law. I hope he's getting better.

I was right. The robbery charges against Buck Haskell were dropped. Chase Calder claimed that Buck was with him when Anderson got robbed. The fools believed the murderer's word. And the sheriff made Jake's girl—the one who saw Buck Haskell—leave town.

That Calder crowd think they can get away with
anything. But they won't. Sooner or later I'll find a way to stop them.

I am fine. Will close for now.

Your brother,
Culley

Maggie folded the letter and put it back in the envelope. She could feel her brother's need for vengeance run through her. It was an ever-pervading poison sweeping through her system, hardening her so that she could never forgive.

It worked on her, as did the strain of these last weeks and the natural depression that followed childbirth. Both she and Mother Hogan barely touched the lunch she fixed. Once the kitchen table was cleared, Maggie got out her lessons. Through it all, she hadn't neglected her education, but today she wasn't able to concentrate. She was too restless, too confined. Finally, she gave up trying and wrote a letter to Culley, instead.

When Ty woke up from his afternoon nap, she used the finished letter as an excuse to get out of the house. She asked the next-door neighbor to look in on the elder Mrs. Hogan while she took the baby for a walk and mailed the letter to her brother.

Once Culley's letter was dropped into a corner mailbox, Maggie continued her stroll. It was a considerable distance to the home where her aunt worked for the Gordon family, but she knew she could ride home with Cathleen, so she set a leisurely pace. These outings were too rare for her to rush through them. Carrying the dark-haired, dark-eyed baby in her arms, she walked along the grassy verge of the highway winding through this upper end of the San Fernando Valley.

Being alone without friends was nothing new to her. Neither was the responsibility of keeping a home and taking, care of others, even though she wouldn't turn
seventeen until this summer. But being confined for long periods of time was unusual. Maggie had adjusted to the warmer climate, the large population of the area, and even having a child to look after, but being restricted to the house and small yard was stifling her.

Her lifelong ambition to get away from Montana had not lived up to her expectations, and she blamed the Calders for it. Because they had killed her father, she had been forced to leave home before she was ready. Even though she loved Ty and wouldn't even consider giving him up for adoption, she was aware that he was a burden for a sixteen-year-old girl. That was Chase Calder's fault, because he had tricked her into believing he wouldn't get her pregnant. All her troubles could be traced back to the Calders.

There wasn't any way to shut out her memories of the past. She was linked to it by her brother's letters and his embittered references to the Calders. At night, she had erotic dreams of Chase making love to her—dreams that always ended in nightmares, with the hanging of her father. And the past lived in the man-child she carried, a boy who already showed the big-boned frame of the Calders, instead of the slender bone structure of the O'Rourkes. Maggie couldn't forget, so it burned in her, making her determined to succeed, despite all the obstacles.

Slowing her steps still more, she gazed at the estates she passed, homes as fine as The Homestead, except they were situated on much smaller parcels of ground-forty to one hundred acres, as opposed to hundreds of thousands. White paddock fences gleamed in the California sun while tree-shaded white mansions marked the lane's end. Within the paddocks, horses grazed, their slick coats polished and shining.

Once Maggie had looked on horses as a necessary means of transportation and associated riding with
long, tiring hours in the saddle. Now, she could imagine nothing more enjoyable than having a horse beneath her and the space to ride it… to feel the thunder of its hooves on the ground. She missed the smell of horse sweat and saddle leather, all the things familiar, the bellow of cattle and the taste of coffee boiled over a campfire. An aching grew within her and she gritted her teeth because she had turned her back on that life. Her skin would never again feel flannels and denims. It was going to be silks and laces and perfume.

Shifting Ty to a more comfortable position in her arms, Maggie turned down the private lane leading to the Gordon house, a two-story white Colonial with a colonnade front, and the green expanse of a tree-shaded and shrubbed lawn. Her aunt's car was always parked by the garage at the rear of the house, which was where Maggie always waited the few times she'd met her aunt here. Her destination was the same this day, until she was distracted by a commotion at the stables.

There was shouting and the angry, panicked whinnying of a horse. The uproar had the other horses in the paddock moving nervously, ears pricked toward the stable, snorting as they shifted anxiously. Curious, Maggie strayed toward the source of the noise, leaving the private drive to follow a side loop to the stables.

A sleek chestnut had escaped its groom and was loose outside the stables and their fenced paddocks. Three men were trying to catch it by trapping it in a corner formed by an outside stable wall and the white rails of a fence. They had succeeded in confining it to that general area and turning it back whenever the horse attemped to dash for the freedom of the unfenced yard, but the chestnut eluded each attempt to grab its halter, striking out with its front feet. All the shouting and arm-waving was exciting the already-high-strung
animal, its dark eyes rolling in panic until the whites showed and its neck darkening with nervous sweat.

A man came around the corner of the stables with a coiled rope in his hand. At his arrival, a tall, lean, gray-haired man withdrew from the participation to direct the capture. Maggie spared him one inspecting glance that took note of the white knit shirt with a rolled neck and the black jodhpurs tucked into knee-high leather boots. His attire set him apart from the other men, clad in shirts and jeans, as did his quiet manner of authority.

Movement drew her attention to the man with the rope. With the first feeble loop he cast, it became apparent to Maggie that he'd never roped anything more than a post in his life. Each try became more pathetic than the last; the stinging slap of the rope on the horse's flank or leg frightened it to a higher state of agitation. The chestnut gelding was shying wildly from anything that moved. Maggie realized that any minute the animal's sheer panic would cause it to injure itself. The ineptitude of its would-be captors was more than she could stand. Disgusted and impatient with what she was witnessing, she strode forward to the tall, grayhaired man. His glance ran down at her in surprise when she pushed the baby into his arms.

“Hold Ty for me,” she instructed curtly and didn't wait for his answer, half-aware that she had left him speechless and staring in bemusement. Without the encumbrance of Ty, she ran to the man with the rope and reached to take it from him. “Give me the rope.”

“Hey!” He scowled in surprise at the grim-faced girl, with her black hair in a ponytail, and tried to jerk the rope out of her grasp. “What are you doing? Get away from here before you get hurt.”

“The only one likely to get hurt is that horse. Now give me that rope. You obviously don't know how to
use it.” Maggie planted her feet firmly on the ground and used every inch of her five-foot, three-inch frame as a lever to pry the rope out of his fingers. Unprepared for her strength and determination, the man lost his grip and Maggie wound up with the rope, quickly backing out of his reach. She snapped an order to the others. “Everybody just shut up and stand still! All that waving is just scaring the horse.”

Shock and the sight of a petite girl taking charge moved them all to obey, and Maggie advanced slowly toward the horse while her fingers absently got the feel of the rope and shook out the noose. The chestnut eyed her for a suspicious second, then bolted for a gap between two men. Maggie's reflexes were just as quick, the pattern of action firmly embedded in her mind, even though it had been months since it had been called into play. With one overhead swing of her arm, she cast out the noose, anticipating which way the horse would shy and leading it. The horse swerved and stuck its head right through the loop.

There was nothing to snub the horse to, and Maggie flanked the end of the rope with her hip, using the entire weight of her body to hold the horse, rather than rely on the dubious strength of her arms. She braced herself for the instant when the chestnut hit the end of the rope and let its impetus carry her forward at a sliding walk. Once the noose tightened around the animal's neck, it ceased to resist the pressure, although it continued to half-rear and prance anxiously. Two of the grooms rushed forward to grab its halter, while the third man, the one who had brought the rope, came forward to assist Maggie. There was grudging admiration in his look, plus a sense of resentment that a mere slip of a girl had succeeded so easily where he had failed.

“I'll take him now,” he insisted. Maggie surrendered
the rope to him without protest. The exhilaration of success was in her eyes.

A plaintive whimper from Ty made Maggie realize she'd left her baby with a perfect stranger. Tyrone was squirming in the man's arms, his fist waving the air as if he, too, realized he didn't know this man who held him. She rushed to claim him before he started a full-blown protest.