This Calder Sky (Calder Saga 3)

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.”