I’ve been remiss in my duties.

  Face flushed, she tried to rectify that now. “Pleased to meet you. I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to greet you properly when you arrived here last fall. I feel I should have made more of an effort to call.”

  “It’s quite alright,” he said, obviously distracted by his daughter who was fumbling with her book strap. “We live a long way out, and the winter was a hard one. Besides, you’ve got important things to do. Speaking of which…Come on Rachel, let’s not keep Lady Addams any longer than we need to.”

  Rachel’s sadness had turned into a cloak that draped around her. Just watching her shuffle to the coat pegs and picking up her things was heartbreaking to watch. The girl never once so much as looked up.

  “’Lady Addams’?” Linda said smiling at the man. “You make me sound like a duchess.”

  “Well,” Thomas said, staring at his boots, “I don’t know about that, but it seemed right.” Now it was his turn to flush. He kind of shrugged, and turned away, clapping his hat back on his head as he headed out to where his wagon was parked under the only shade tree near the school.

  “Goodbye Miss Addams,” Rachel called in a voice that was nearly a whisper.

  “Have a good summer, Rachel,” Linda called back. Thomas’ hand came down and rested on his daughter’s shoulders. Rachel didn’t look up, she stared at the ground in front of her feet as she trudged alongside him, refusing to engage even with him.

  That’s the way she is at school. Withdrawn. Maybe it isn’t the teasing or the way she’s treated here. Linda looked at the back of Rachel’s father. Tall, straight back, wide shoulders. She felt like she was missing something, something that hadn’t anything to do with how he looked but in who he was. There was something about him.

  She leaned on the doorjamb and watched him help his daughter up into the wagon. He had to be older than Linda herself, but not by all that much. He was still a young man. Handsome even. But what did she really know about him? Or about the child either?

  I had nearly sixty children in this school all year long. I guess I paid attention more to the loud ones, the troublemakers. Quiet children were easy to ignore. Here she’d been patting herself on the back for being able to keep the bullying down, but she couldn’t help but think she’d missed something much more important along the way.

  Chapter 2

  Feeling somewhat ill at ease and frustrated with herself, Linda hurriedly finished pulling her things together and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. After temperatures below freezing for months on end, the spring could give a false sense of heat and comfort, but the truth was that it was still chilly out and it wouldn’t do to catch a cold now, at the end of the school year. This was the time she had to help her sisters and father at home. There was also that trip to Chicago coming up in a few weeks.

  She looked at the little schoolhouse and realized that it needed a lot of work before it could be closed for the summer. There were needed repairs, and the whole building could use a good cleaning. She looked down the tree-lined lane where Rachel and her father had long since disappeared and wondered what awaited them at home. What kind of place did Rachel live in?

  The Calverts lived a long way out from town. This had only recently become a large ranching and farming community. Back when she’d just arrived, the railroad had still been a new thing, a water stop on the way to Denver. With the trains had come a lot of growth. Even now she didn’t know half the families in the area and next year, from what she was seeing, the school would be positively bursting if something didn’t change soon. They needed a bigger building. A second teacher. The fact that she hadn’t been able to visit the Calverts was only one symptom of a much bigger problem. She hadn’t gotten around to a lot of the families before the winter blizzards had swept over the plains, and the spring thaw had brought so much mud, she’d justified putting it off. Besides, visits over the summer would be a good way to reconnect with the students and talk to them and their parents about the coming year.

  She sighed and shook her head. No point in worrying at that right now. It would probably do everyone some good if she made a few home visits before the fall term. In the meantime, she had to take care of her own responsibilities.

  I’ll come back tomorrow. Get some of this work done then.

  She locked up the building and headed into the town proper. The schoolhouse stood at the edge of the city, though the town was starting to grow up around it. The wagon traffic was heavy on Main St, the railroad could be thanked for that as well. The platform at the end of the street was where Farmers and ranchers brought their goods into town and shipped them off to far-flung lands that Linda had only dreamed about. Places like Chicago, where, God willing, she would be going again at the beginning of August. She dodged out of the way of a man herding sheep toward the depot. A cloud of dust made her choke, and she lifted her handkerchief to her face until the rancher had ridden past, rifle laid across his thigh.

  There was still a good deal of tension between farmers and ranchers out here. Sheep especially were not popular with the cattle ranchers, and both were enemies of the farmer. She shook her head and crossed the street, her feet echoing on the boardwalk that connected the buildings while she contemplated her problem.

  How to deal with one sad little girl?

  She picked up her pace, but, as was always inevitable, there were too many well-wishers and people who loved to chatter as she passed by. Even Willy, the owner of the dry goods store, had time to chat today. Spring had come, broken through the ice and snow, and people seemed to be freer too, as though they had been buried under the snow and were only just now coming out to face the sunlight again.

  Willy was reading the local newspaper again, seated out front while his wife ran the counter. Linda took a deep breath and plastered a smile on her face. Willy usually accosted her about current events, but on occasion, Jedidiah would slip a word into his newspaper that Willy didn’t fully understand. Then he would stop her for a vocabulary lesson.

  “Afternoon, Miss Addams,” he called and waved her over. “Have you seen the article in today’s paper?” He waved the Sentinel under her nose as though the content was her fault.

  “Why no, I haven’t had a chance to read it today,” she said, forcing the smile to stay on her face. Willy was a wonderful man and even handed out a few of the roasted chestnuts to the neighborhood children for free. But sometimes Linda wished she could walk the long way around, skip going through the town and avoid the little chat-fests that invariably followed her.

  “Look at that, right there! Have you ever seen such a thing?” He showed her the folded-up paper opened to an article on Alaska as a US territory. His thumb was directly under a word, “Exemplary.” Linda suppressed a real smile and kept the other firmly in place. Willy was a good man, but proud and wouldn’t dare admit to anyone there was something he didn’t know. Willy was a self-proclaimed expert on all matters.

  “Oh look,” Linda said taking the paper from him and reading it. “The senator had exemplary reasons for his vote which he listed in the speech that followed.” Linda handed it back to Willy and said, “I don’t care how commendable or excellent his reasons were,” she slightly stressed the words, “I would need to read it for myself and get my own opinion!”

  Willy smiled and nodded thanks. “And so you should.” He beamed. “A most exemplary idea, Miss Addams!”

  Linda couldn’t quite hold back the giggle. “Why thank you, Mr. Morgan.” She managed a slight curtsy and walked on, convinced that the man was going to use that word until someone asked him what it meant. The bright side was that a vocabulary lesson didn’t take much time. It was when he needed to form an opinion on something that she could quickly become mired in a conversation that would last at least an hour if not two. Thankfully, more often than not, he took one of hers and put his stamp on it.

  Mary Lynn discovered her and ran to catch up. She’d been out to the bakers, and the smell of fresh bread from the market basket that hung from her arm was pulling at Linda’s empty stomach. Mary Lynn was her age, though while Linda had completed secondary school and continued her education to take up teaching, Mary Lynn had married young and had a flock of children that chattered as much as their mother. The benefit of Mary Lynn was that she never allowed anyone else to get a word in edgewise, as her father would say, so it took no effort to have a conversation with the young woman. On the other hand, given a few years, Linda’s classroom would be filled with Mary Lynn’s offspring. Already Linda had a headache just thinking about it.

  Funny enough, over the years, Linda had come to realize that Mary Lynn really didn’t much care if she was heard or not. There was never a quiz, nor was there ever a request for an answer or comment. The downside of Mary Lynn… there were a few, but one of the most prominent for today was the fact that it was impossible to shake her.

  Linda walked, enjoying the heat of the afternoon sun and smiled and nodded in the right places while Mary Lynn passed the time with the background sound of her own voice until they came to a stop outside the Sherriff’s office.

  It was strange to Linda, even after all these years, that people treated the jail with a respect bordering on superstition. Mary Lynn gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, thanking her for being a good listener, and ran off, giving the jail a sideways glance.

  Linda shook her head to help clear the residual buzzing in her ears and opened the door to the building.

  “Hey, Miss Addams.” Roy Masters waved from behind his desk. He was a good kid, very young for a deputy, but he’d turned out to be a godsend. After some rough “getting broke in,” he allowed for the Sheriff to be home occasionally instead of always on the job.

  “Hey, Roy,” she said smiling at him. “Did you get the paper today?”

  “Sure did.” He tossed it to her. “I put it all back, so it’s in order today, sorry about last time.”

  Linda laughed, “It’s ok, Roy, I found the second half of the article, about the monopoly party. It ended up wrapped around a fish.”

  “Ah… oops?”

  “HEY!” A familiar voice called in mock dismay from the back room. “That was a good fish! Amanda had just the right touch of seasoning on it.”

  “Hey, Daddy.” Linda embraced the sheriff and kissed his cheek.

  “So, what brings you by instead of scurrying home to crawl into a book?”

  “Don’t tease.” Linda slapped his chest and pouted. Since she was a child, she’d had that reaction to his gentle teasing, and it made him laugh every time. Over the years, she’d cultivated it, brought out the parts that made him laugh the most and retracted those that didn’t make him laugh harder.

  Today, though, was not a day for laughter.

  “Daddy,” Linda paused with a glance over her shoulder at Roy who was pretending a great deal of interest in some papers on his desk, “Can I talk to you for a moment?” She turned to Roy, “No offense, Roy, it’s a… family thing.”

  “Sure, no problem!” Roy jumped to his feet and grabbed his hat. A moment later the front door banged shut, and she could hear Roy greeting someone outside.

  “What’s wrong?” Her father looked at her in concern.

  It was hard to say, this thing she’d been turning over in the back of her head since she’d left the school. “I think… I think maybe someone is hurting one of my kids…” She bit her lower lip and watched his expression. Hurting a child was one thing that turned her easy-going father into a very quiet rage. His fists had clenched, his eyes were positively smoldering. “Daddy, what are we going to do?”

  Chapter 3

  “Calvert?” Sheriff John Addams whistled low, under his breath. “I don’t rightly know the man. He moved here, what was it, last year?”

  Linda nodded. “Rachel started with me last fall.”

  “Crazy damn time to start a ranch.” He shook his head. The waves of thick, black hair had streaks of silver now, and his beard was shot through with white. It was a salt-and-pepper beard as some of the ladies said when they spoke of him, and judging from the gossip around town, they spoke of him a great deal.

  “I know it was hard on them, that first winter.” Linda gave him that much.

  “Didn’t his wife die back east somewhere?”

  Linda nodded. “Not long before they came out here I suppose. She took sick and passed from what I’ve been able to gather.”

  The Sheriff shook his head, some of the anger going out of his voice. “That’s a rough thing, for a man to lose his wife.”

  Linda hugged him tightly, feeling him relax in her arms. “I know,” she whispered.

  “It was a real hard time on you gals too. You didn’t know her for too very long, but…”

  “It was long enough. She was still the only mother I ever knew. But we got through that,” Linda pulled away to look up at her father. “Mostly because of you. You got us through that.”

  “It was the hardest thing I ever did. But keep in mind, that when it got real bad, I had you three to help me out. We got through it together.”

  “But,” Linda straightened and put her hand on her father’s arm. “I can’t help but wonder when Rachel changed, and more to the point – why? When she first got out here, she was a little shy, a little withdrawn, and… yes, she was chubby even then, but there was a brightness to her that I don’t see anymore. I keep looking for the happy little girl that played with her classmates, and I can’t find her. Something happened over the winter that I can’t quite put my finger on. It wasn’t just moving out here, and it wasn’t about her mother, that would have taken root before they arrived, not after.”

  “That’s a long leap to go from that to her getting hurt,” her father reminded her. “The law is very specific, there’s not a lot I can do without some proof.”

  “I’d like if you would just… check for me?” She straightened his collar and patted his lapel, shaking her head. “Why don’t you wear that thing on the outside, so people can see it?” She licked her thumb and used it polish the old star he wore just out of sight.

  “I like the flipping up,” he said with a deprecating smile. He demonstrated it for her. “See? Ordinary man, and suddenly… sheriff!” He laughed.

  She couldn’t help but laugh with him, despite the seriousness of their previous conversation. “You could never be an ‘ordinary’ man. You’re too much like that hickory stump you had to pull out of the ground when we were kids. Tough and mean and set in your ways.”

  He laughed at that. “Maybe, but that damn thing burned awful good. kept us warm near a whole winter.”

  Linda looked at him, her brow creased as she took it in. “Yeah, but that’s where the analogy kind of stops working… I’m not going to burn you all winter.”

  “Look, honey, it’s near dinner time,” he said, picking up a handful of wanted fliers and gesturing toward the wall where he tacked them up. Putting up the rewards that others could get for bringing in criminals, but that he would never get. It was the ironic catch of his profession that he could cool his heels behind a desk or go out into the wilderness and get shot for the same amount of pay either way. “I still have some work to do here, then we can call it a night. Why don’t we go and talk to Mr. Calvert in the morning?” He held up a restraining hand as she opened her mouth to protest. “Not that you don’t have a legitimate concern, but tomorrow will be soon enough, alright?”

  Linda took a breath and nodded. It was fair. It was hard when you thought that someone was being hurt to wait and see what happened, but if she were wrong, it would be a long ride in the dark. Her father shooed her out of the jail and Linda made her way home. Mary Lynn had vanished, and the sun was getting a little low on the horizon. It seemed that everyone was hurrying home.

  She thought back to a time when her father would take her and her sisters out in the woods and teach them to shoot or to ride. They would watch the sun setting from the porch, and he’d tell them that the sun lingered there to let the mountaintops tickle its belly before hiding behind them. They had an old cat, Stinker, that did the same thing, but when belly rubs were done, they were done, and he would bite the hand that pet him. For a long time, they called the sun “Big Stinker” in his memory.

  Linda learned how to shoot and hunt and ride, they all did, but Sarah didn’t take well to it, she preferred tea parties and lace. Her father did his best to raise a feminine girl by himself, but much of a young woman’s fancy was lost on him.

  Amanda, however, took to hunting and riding, even roping like a duck takes to water. It was her natural environment, and she reveled in it. As for Linda… she smiled as she got near the house that was once on the edge of the small town and was now all but swallowed up by a sudden sprawl. Her father was right, she did like to curl up in a good book and drag the pages in after her. Where Sarah would have spent a theoretical fortune on dresses and fancy things, and Amanda would have scoured the mountains for a good solid horse and a Henry rifle, Linda would have bought and filled an entire library, even letting it open to the public, just to have books, lots and lots of books, jammed in every corner and falling from shelves that bowed under the weight.

  A book was a friend. Some friends had yet to be met, but they held their promise of friendship in every page. It was lonely sometimes, and she thought about that now as she paused under the trees to watch the last vestiges of the sunset bleeding away over the mountains.

  She found herself wondering about Rachel. What was the girl doing right now? Was she safe? Was she…happy?

  The father though. It was his face she couldn’t shake from her mind. Those eyes. The saddest eyes she’d ever seen on anything that wasn’t a basset hound. She shook her head. She was letting her emotions cloud her judgment. The hard facts were that that little girl was fiercely unhappy. There had to be a reason. What did Linda know about what made a man sad?

 

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