CHAPTER THREE
Although Brad liked to downplay his success, especially now that he didn’t go out on tour anymore, he was clearly still a very big deal. When Olivia arrived at the building site on the outskirts of Stone Creek at nine forty-five the next morning, the windswept clearing was jammed with TV news trucks and stringers from various tabloids. Of course the townspeople had turned out, too, happy that work was about to begin on the new animal shelter—and proud of their hometown boy.
Olivia’s feelings about Brad’s fame were mixed—he’d been away playing star when Big John needed him most, and she wasn’t over that—but seeing him up there on the hastily assembled plank stage gave her a jolt of joy. She worked her way through the crowd to stand next to Meg, Ashley and Melissa, who were grouped in a little cluster up front, fussing over Mac. The baby’s blue snowsuit was so bulky that he resembled the Michelin man.
Ashley turned to smile at Olivia, taking in her trim, tailored black pantsuit—a holdover from her job interview at the veterinary clinic right after she’d finished graduate school. She’d ferreted through boxes until she’d found it, gone over the outfit with a lint roller to get rid of the ubiquitous pet hair, and hoped for the best.
“I guess you couldn’t quite manage a dress,” Ashley said without sarcasm. She was tall and blond, clad in a long skirt, elegant boots and a colorful patchwork jacket she’d probably whipped up on her sewing machine. She was also stubbornly old-fashioned—no cell phone, no Internet connection, no MP3 player—and Olivia had often thought, secretly of course, that her younger sister should have been born in the Victorian era, rather than modern times. She would have fit right into the 1890s, been completely comfortable cooking on a wood-burning stove, reading by gaslight and directing a contingent of maids in ruffly aprons and scalloped white caps.
“Best I could do on short notice,” Olivia chimed in, exchanging a hello grin with Meg and giving Mac’s mittened hand a little squeeze. His plump little cheek felt smooth and cold as she kissed him.
“Since when is a year ‘short notice’?” Melissa put in, grinning. She and Ashley were fraternal twins, but except for their deep blue eyes, they bore no noticeable resemblance to each other. Melissa was small, an inch shorter than Olivia, and wore her fine chestnut-colored hair in a bob. Having left the law office where she worked to attend the ceremony, she was clad in her usual getup of high heels, pencil-straight skirt, fitted blazer and prim white blouse.
Up on stage, Brad tapped lightly on the microphone.
Everybody fell silent, as though the whole gathering had taken a single, indrawn breath all at the same time. The air was charged with excitement and civic pride and the welcome prospect of construction jobs to tide over the laid-off workers from the sawmill.
Meg’s eyes shone as she gazed up at her husband. “Isn’t he something?” she marveled, giving Olivia a little poke with one elbow as she shifted Mac to her other hip.
Olivia smiled but didn’t reply.
“Sing!” someone shouted, somewhere in the surging throng. Any moment now, Olivia thought, they’d all be holding up disposable lights in a flickering-flame salute.
Brad shook his head. “Not today,” he said.
A collective groan rose from the crowd.
Brad put up both hands to silence them.
“He’ll sing,” Melissa said in a loud and certain whisper. She and Ashley, being the youngest, barely knew Brad. He’d been trying to remedy that ever since he’d moved back from Nashville, but it was slow going. They admired him, they were grateful to him, but it seemed to Olivia that her sisters were still in awe of their big brother, too, and therefore a strange shyness possessed them whenever he was around.
Brad asked Olivia and Tanner to join him on stage.
Even though Olivia had expected that, she wished she didn’t have to go up there. She was a behind-the-scenes kind of person, uncomfortable at the center of attention. When Tanner appeared from behind her, took her arm and hustled her toward the wooden steps, she caught her breath. Stone Creekers raised an uproarious cheer, and Olivia flushed with embarrassment, but Tanner seemed untroubled.
He wore too-new, too-expensive boots, probably custom-made, to match his too-new hat, along with jeans, a black silk shirt and a denim jacket. He seemed as at home getting up in front of all those people as Brad did—his grin dazzled, and his eyes were bright with enjoyment.
Drugstore cowboy, Olivia thought, but she couldn’t work up any rancor. Tanner Quinn might be laying on the Western bit a little thick, but he did look good. Way, way too good for Olivia’s comfort.
Brad introduced them both: Tanner as the builder, and Olivia—“You all know my kid sister, the horse doctor”—as the driving force behind the project. Without her, he said, none of this would be happening.
Never having thought of herself as a driving force behind anything in particular, Olivia grew even more flustered as Brad went on about how she’d be heading up the shelter when it opened around that time next year.
More applause followed, the good-natured, hometown kind, indulgent and laced with chuckles.
Let this be over, Olivia thought.
“Sing!” someone yelled. The whole audience soon took up the chant.
“Here’s where we make a run for it,” Tanner whispered to Olivia, and the two of them left the stage. Tanner vanished, and Olivia went back to stand with her sisters and Meg.
Brad grinned, shaking his head a little as one of his buddies handed up a guitar. “One,” he said firmly. After strumming a few riffs and turning the tuning keys this way and that, he eased into “Meg’s Song,” a ballad he’d written for his wife.
Holding Mac and looking up at Brad with an expression of rapt delight, Meg seemed to glow from the inside. A sweet, strange alchemy made it seem as though only Brad, Meg and Mac were really there during those magical minutes, on that blustery day, with the snow crusting hard around everybody’s feet. The rest of them might have been hovering in an adjacent dimension, like actors waiting to go on.
When the song ended, the audience clamored for more, but Brad didn’t give in. Photographers and reporters shoved in close as he handed off the guitar again, descended from the stage and picked up a brand-new shovel with a blue ribbon on the handle. The ribbon, Olivia knew, was Ashley’s handiwork; she was an expert with bows, where Olivia always got them tangled up, fiddling with them until they were grubby.
“Are you making a comeback?” one reporter demanded.
“When will you make another movie?” someone else wanted to know.
Still another person shoved a microphone into Brad’s face; he pushed it away with a practiced motion of one arm. “We’re here to break ground for an animal shelter,” he said, and only the set of his jaw gave away the annoyance he felt. He beckoned to Olivia, then to Tanner, after glancing around to locate him.
Then, with consummate showmanship, Brad drove the shovel hard into the partially frozen ground. Tossed the dirt dangerously close to one reporter’s shoes.
Olivia thought of the finished structure, and what it would mean to so many stray and unwanted dogs, cats and other critters, and her heart soared. That was the moment the project truly became real to her.
It was really going to happen.
There were more pictures taken after that, and Brad gave several very brief interviews, carefully steering each one away from himself and stressing the plight of animals. When one reporter asked if it wouldn’t be better to build shelters for homeless people, rather than dogs and cats, Brad responded that compassion ought to begin at the simplest level, with the helpless, voiceless ones, and grow from there.
Olivia would have hugged her big brother in that moment if she’d been able to get close enough.
“Hot cider and cookies at my place,” Ashley told her and Melissa. She was already heading for her funny-looking hybrid car, gleaming bright yellow in the wintry sunshine. “We need to plan what we’re taking to Brad and Meg’s for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“I have to get back to work,” Melissa said crisply. “Cook something and I’ll pay you back.” With that, she made for her spiffy red sports car without so much as a backward glance.
Olivia had rounds to make herself, though none of them were emergencies, and she had some appointments at the clinic scheduled for that afternoon, but when she saw the expression of disappointment on Ashley’s face, she stayed behind. “I’ll change clothes at your house,” she said, and got into the Suburban to follow her sister back through town. Ginger had elected to stay home that day, claiming her arthritis was bothering her, and it felt odd to be alone in the rig.
Ashley’s home was a large white Victorian house on the opposite side of Stone Creek, near the little stream with the same name. There was a white picket fence and plenty of gingerbread woodwork on the façade, and an ornate but tasteful sign stood in the snowy yard, bearing the words “Mountain View Bed-and-Breakfast” in elegant golden script. “Ashley O’Ballivan, Proprietor.”
In summer, the yard burgeoned with colorful flowers.
But winter had officially come to the high country, and the blooming lilacs, peonies and English roses were just a memory. The day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas lights would go up outside, as though by the waving of an unseen wand, and a huge wreath would grace the leaded-glass door, making the house look like a giant greeting card.
Olivia felt a little sad, looking at that grand house. It was the off-season, and guests would be few and far between. Ashley would rattle around in there alone like a bean in the bottom of a bucket.
She needed a husband and children.
Or at least a cat.
“Brad was spectacular, wasn’t he?” Ashley asked, bustling around her big, fragrant kitchen to heat up the spiced cider and set out a plate of exquisitely decorated cookies.
Olivia, just coming out of the powder room, where she’d changed into her regulation jeans, flannel shirt and boots, helped herself to a paper bag from the decoupaged wooden paper-bag dispenser beside the back door and stuffed the pantsuit into it. “Brad was—Brad,” she said. “He loves being in the limelight.”
Ashley went still and frowned, oddly defensive. “His heart’s in the right place,” she replied.
Olivia went to Ashley and touched her arm. She’d removed the patchwork jacket, hanging it neatly on a gleaming brass peg by the front door as they came in, and her loose-fitting beige cashmere turtleneck made Olivia feel like a thrift-store refugee by comparison.
“I wasn’t criticizing Brad, Ash,” she said quietly. “It’s beyond generous of him to build the shelter. We need one, and we’re lucky he’s willing to help out.”
Ashley relaxed a little and offered a tentative smile. Looked around at her kitchen, which would have made a great set for some show on the Food Channel. “He bought this house for me, you know,” she said as the cider began to simmer in its shiny pot on the stove.
Olivia nodded. “And it looks fabulous,” she replied. “Like always.”
“You are planning to show up for Thanksgiving dinner out at the ranch, aren’t you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Olivia asked, even as her stomach knotted. Who had invented holidays, anyway? Everything came to a screeching stop whenever there was a red-letter day on the calendar—everything except the need and sorrow that seemed to fill the world.
“I know you don’t like family holidays,” Ashley said, pouring steaming cider into a copper serving pot and then into translucent china teacups waiting in the center of the round antique table. Olivia would have dumped it straight from the kettle, and probably spilled it all over the table and floor in the process.
She just wasn’t domestic. All those genes had gone to Ashley.
Her sister’s eyes went big and round and serious. “Last year you made some excuse about a cow needing an appendectomy and ducked out before I could serve the pumpkin pie.”
Olivia sighed. Ashley had worked hard to prepare the previous year’s Thanksgiving dinner, gathering recipes for weeks ahead of time, experimenting like a chemist in search of a cure, and looked forward to hosting a houseful of congenial relatives.
“Do cows even have appendixes?” Ashley asked.
Olivia laughed, drew back a chair at the table and sat down. “That cider smells fabulous,” she said, in order to change the subject. “And the cookies are works of art, almost too pretty to eat. Martha Stewart would be so proud.”
Ashley joined her at the table, but she still looked troubled. “Why do you hate holidays, Olivia?” she persisted.
“I don’t hate holidays,” Olivia said. “It’s just that all that sentimentality—”
“You miss Big John and Mom,” Ashley broke in quietly. “Why don’t you just admit it?”
“We all miss Big John,” Olivia admitted. “As for Mom—well, she’s been gone a long time, Ash. A really long time. It’s not a matter of missing her, exactly.”
“Don’t you ever wonder where she went after she left Stone Creek, if she’s happy and healthy—if she remarried and had more children?”
“I try not to,” Olivia said honestly.
“You have abandonment issues,” Ashley accused.
Olivia sighed and sipped from her cup of cider. The stuff was delicious, like everything her sister cooked up.
Ashley’s Botticelli face brightened; she’d made another of her mercurial shifts from pensive to hopeful. “Suppose we found her?” she asked on a breath. “Mom, I mean—”
“Found her?” Olivia echoed, oddly alarmed.
“There are all these search engines online,” Ashley enthused. “I was over at the library yesterday afternoon, and I searched Google for Mom’s name.”
Oh. My. God, Olivia thought, feeling the color drain out of her face.
“You used a computer?”
Ashley nodded. “I’m thinking of getting one. Setting up a Web site to bring in more business for the B and B.”
Things were changing, Olivia realized. And she hated it when things changed. Why couldn’t people leave well enough alone?
“There are more Delia O’Ballivans out there than you would ever guess,” Ashley rushed on. “One of them must be Mom.”
“Ash, Mom could be dead by now. Or going by a different name…”
Ashley looked offended. “You sound like Brad and Melissa. Brad just clams up whenever I ask him about Mom—he remembers her better, since he’s older. ‘Leave it alone’ is all he ever says. And Melissa thinks she’s probably a crack addict or a hooker or something.” She let out a long, shaky breath. “I thought you missed Mom as much as I do. I really did.”
Although Brad had never admitted it, Olivia suspected he knew more about their mother than he was telling. If he wanted Ashley and the rest of them to let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie, he probably had a good reason. Not that the decision was only his to make.
“I miss having a mother, Ash,” Olivia said gently. “That’s different from missing Mom specifically. She left us, remember?”
Remember? How could Ashley remember? She’d been a toddler when their mother boarded an afternoon bus out of Stone Creek and vanished into a world of strangers. She was clinging to memories she’d merely imagined, most likely. To a fantasy mother, the woman who should have been, but probably never was.
“Well, I want to know why,” Ashley insisted, her eyes full of pain. “Maybe she regretted it. Did you ever think of that? Maybe she misses us, and wants a second chance. Maybe she expects us to reject her, so she’s afraid to get in touch.”
“Oh, Ash,” Olivia murmured, slouching against the back of her chair. “You haven’t actually made contact, have you?”
“No,” Ashley said, tucking a wisp of blond hair behind her right ear when it escaped from her otherwise categorically perfect French braid, “but if I find her, I’m going to invite her to Stone Creek for Christmas. If you and Brad and Melissa want to keep your distance, that’s your business.”
Olivia’s hand shook a little as she set her cup down, causing it to rattle in its delicate saucer. “Ashley, you have a right to see Mom if you want to,” she said carefully. “But Christmas—”
“What do you care about Christmas?” Ashley asked abruptly. “You don’t even put up a tree most years.”
“I care about you and Melissa and Brad. If you do manage to find Mom, great. But don’t you think bringing her here at Christmas, the most emotional day of the year, before anybody has a chance to get used to the idea, would be like planting a live hand grenade in the turkey?”
Ashley didn’t reply, and after that the conversation was stilted, to say the least. They talked about what to contribute to the Thanksgiving shindig at Brad and Meg’s place, decided on freshly baked dinner rolls for Ashley and a selection of salads from the deli for Olivia, and then Olivia left to make rounds.
Why was she so worried? she wondered, biting down hard on her lower lip as she fired up the Suburban and headed for the first farm on her list. If she was alive, Delia had done a good job of staying under the radar all these years. She’d never written, never called, never visited. Never sent a single birthday card. And if she was dead, they’d all have to drop everything and mourn, in their various ways.
Olivia didn’t feel ready to take that on.
Before, the thought of Delia usually filled her with grief and a plaintive, little-girl kind of longing. The very cadence of her heartbeat said, Come home. Come home.
Now, today, it just made her very, very angry. How could a woman just leave four children and a husband behind and forget the way back?
Olivia knotted one hand into a fist and bonked the side of the steering wheel once. Tears stung her eyes, and her throat felt as though someone had run a line of stitches around it with a sharp needle and then pulled them tight.
Ashley was expecting some kind of fairy-tale reunion, an Oprah sort of deal, full of tearful confessions and apologies and cartoon birds trailing ribbons from their chirpy beaks.
For Olivia’s money, it would be more like an apocalypse.
* * *
Tanner heard the rig roll in around sunset. Smiling, he closed his newspaper, stood up from the kitchen table and wandered to the window. Watched as Olivia O’Ballivan climbed out of her Suburban, flung one defiant glance toward the house and started for the barn, the golden retriever trotting along behind her.
She’d come, he knew, to have another confab with Butterpie. The idea at once amused him and jabbed through his conscience like a spike. Sophie was on the other side of the country, homesick as hell and probably sticking pins in a daddy doll. She missed the pony, and the pony missed her, and he was the hard-ass who was keeping them apart.
Taking his coat and hat down from the peg next to the back door, he put them on and went outside. He was used to being alone, even liked it, but keeping company with Doc O’Ballivan, bristly though she sometimes was, would provide a welcome diversion.
He gave her time to reach Butterpie’s stall, then walked into the barn.
The golden came to greet him, all wagging tail and melting brown eyes, and he bent to stroke her soft, sturdy back. “Hey, there, dog,” he said.
Sure enough, Olivia was in the stall, brushing Butterpie down and talking to her in a soft, soothing voice that touched something private inside Tanner and made him want to turn on one heel and beat it back to the house.
He’d be damned if he’d do it, though.
This was his ranch, his barn. Well-intentioned as she was, Olivia was the trespasser here, not him.
“She’s still very upset,” Olivia told him without turning to look at him or slowing down with the brush.
For a second Tanner thought she was referring to Sophie, not the pony, and that got his hackles up.
Shiloh, always an easy horse to get along with, stood contentedly in his own stall, munching away on the feed Tanner had given him earlier. Butterpie, he noted, hadn’t touched her supper as far as he could tell.
“Do you know anything at all about horses, Mr. Quinn?” Olivia asked.
He leaned against the stall door, the way he had the day before, and grinned. He’d practically been raised on horseback; he and Tessa had grown up on their grandmother’s farm in the Texas hill country, after their folks divorced and went their separate ways, both of them too busy to bother with a couple of kids. “A few things,” he said. “And I mean to call you Olivia, so you might as well return the favor and address me by my first name.”
He watched as she took that in, dealt with it, decided on an approach. He’d have to wait and see what that turned out to be, but he didn’t mind. It was a pleasure just watching Olivia O’Ballivan grooming a horse.
“All right, Tanner,” she said. “This barn is a disgrace. When are you going to have the roof fixed? If it snows again, the hay will get wet and probably mold….”
He chuckled, shifted a little. He’d have a crew out there the following Monday morning to replace the roof and shore up the walls—he’d made the arrangements over a week before—but he felt no particular compunction to explain that. He was enjoying her ire too much; it made her color rise and her hair fly when she turned her head, and the faster breathing made her perfect breasts go up and down in an enticing rhythm. “What makes you so sure I’m a greenhorn?” he asked mildly, still leaning on the gate.
At last she looked straight at him, but she didn’t move from Butterpie’s side. “Your hat, your boots—that fancy red truck you drive. I’ll bet it’s customized.”
Tanner grinned. Adjusted his hat. “Are you telling me real cowboys don’t drive red trucks?”
“There are lots of trucks around here,” she said. “Some of them are red, and some of them are new. And all of them are splattered with mud or manure or both.”
“Maybe I ought to put in a car wash, then,” he teased. “Sounds like there’s a market for one. Might be a good investment.”
She softened, though not significantly, and spared him a cautious half smile, full of questions she probably wouldn’t ask. “There’s a good car wash in Indian Rock,” she informed him. “People go there. It’s only forty miles.”
“Oh,” he said with just a hint of mockery. “Only forty miles. Well, then. Guess I’d better dirty up my truck if I want to be taken seriously in these here parts. Scuff up my boots a bit, too, and maybe stomp on my hat a couple of times.”
Her cheeks went a fetching shade of pink. “You are twisting what I said,” she told him, brushing Butterpie again, her touch gentle but sure. “I meant…”
Tanner envied that little horse. Wished he had furry hide, so he’d need brushing, too.
“You meant that I’m not a real cowboy,” he said. “And you could be right. I’ve spent a lot of time on construction sites over the last few years, or in meetings where a hat and boots wouldn’t be appropriate. Instead of digging out my old gear, once I decided to take this job, I just bought new.”
“I bet you don’t even have any old gear,” she challenged, but she was smiling, albeit cautiously, as though she might withdraw into a disapproving frown at any second.
He took off his hat, extended it to her. “Here,” he teased. “Rub that around in the muck until it suits you.”
She laughed, and the sound—well, it caused a powerful and wholly unexpected shift inside him. Scared the hell out of him and, paradoxically, made him yearn to hear it again. “That would be a little drastic,” she said.
Tanner put his hat back on. “You figure me for a rhinestone cowboy,” he said. “What else have you decided about me?”
She considered the question, evidently drawing up a list in her head.
Tanner was fascinated—and still pretty scared.
“Brad told me you were widowed,” she said finally, after mulling for a while. “I’m sorry about that.”
Tanner swallowed hard, nodded. Wondered how much detail his friend had gone into, and decided not to ask. He’d told Brad the whole grim story of Kat’s death, once upon a time.
“You’re probably pretty driven,” Olivia went on, concentrating on the horse again. “It’s obvious that you’re successful—Brad wouldn’t have hired you for this project if you weren’t the best. And you compartmentalize.”
“Compartmentalize?”
“You shut yourself off from distractions.”
“Such as?”
“Your daughter,” Olivia said. She didn’t lack for nerve, that was for sure. “And this poor little horse. You’d like to have a dog—you like Ginger a lot—but you wouldn’t adopt one because that would mean making a commitment. Not being able to drop everything and everybody and take off for the next Big Job when the mood struck you.”
Tanner felt as though he’d been slapped, and it didn’t help one bit that everything she’d said was true. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t deny it.
“I love Sophie,” he said grimly.
She met his gaze again. “I’m sure you do. Still, you find it easy enough to—compartmentalize where she’s concerned, don’t you?”
“I do not,” he argued. He did “compartmentalize”—he had to—but he sure as hell wouldn’t call it easy. Every parting from Sophie was harder on him than it was on her. He was the one who always had to suck it up and be strong.
Olivia shrugged, patted the pony affectionately on the neck and set aside the brush. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she told the animal. “In the meantime, think good thoughts and talk to Shiloh if you get too lonesome.”
Tanner racked his brain, trying to remember if he’d told Olivia the gelding’s name. He was sure it hadn’t come up in their brief but tempestuous acquaintance. “How did you…?”
“He told me,” Olivia said, approaching the stall door and waiting for him to step out of her way, just like before.
“Are you seriously telling me I’ve got Mr. Ed in my barn?” he asked, moving aside so she could pass.
She crossed to Shiloh’s stall, reached up to stroke his nose when he nuzzled her and gave a companionable nicker. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, with so much smug certainty that Tanner found himself wanting to prove a whole bunch of things he’d never felt the need to prove before.
“Because I compartmentalize?” Tanner gibed.
“Something like that,” Olivia answered blithely. She turned from Shiloh, snapped her fingers to attract the dog’s attention and started for the barn door.
“See you tomorrow, if you’re here when I come by to look in on Butterpie.”
Utterly confounded, Tanner stood in the doorway watching as Olivia lowered a ramp at the back of the Suburban for Ginger, waited for the dog to trot up it, and shut the doors.
Moments later she was driving off, tooting a merry “so long” on the horn.
* * *
That night he dreamed of Kat.
She was alive again, standing in the barn at Butterpie’s stall gate, watching as the pony nibbled hay at its feeder. Tall and slender, with long dark hair, Kat turned to him and smiled a welcome.
He hated these dreams for being dreams, not reality. At the same time he couldn’t bring himself to wake up, to leave her.
The settings were always different—their first house, their quarters in the American compound in some sandy, dangerous foreign place, even supermarket aisles and gas stations. He’d be standing at the pump, filling the vehicle de jour, and look up to see Kat with a hose in her hand, gassing up that old junker she’d been driving when they met.
He stood at a little distance from her, there in the barn aisle, well aware that after a few words, a few minutes at most, she’d vanish. And it would be like losing her all over again.
She smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes, in the set of her full mouth. “Hello, Tanner,” she said very softly.
He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Somehow he knew that this visit was very different from all the ones that had gone before.
She came to stand in front of him, soft as summer in her white cotton sundress, and touched his arm as she looked up into his face.
“It’s time for me to move on,” she told him.
No.
The word swelled up inside him, but he couldn’t say it.
And Kat vanished.