Petticoat Ranch (4 page)

She closed the door and whipped the foul-smelling scarf off her neck. She shoved it into the covered pail and slammed the lid shut tight. It seemed to ripen in that pail, getting more hideous with every passing day.

“Ma, it takes a week to air the house out after you’ve done that,” Sally groused from overhead.

Mandy started down the ladder.

“Sorry,” Sophie answered. There was no point discussing it because it had to be done. Her disguise had evolved over the course of time. She had come to fear the attention of the men around Mosqueros, so she’d decided to play down her appearance. The trouble was, her main appeal was her ranch, and no disguise could conceal that.

Then the ranch loan had come due, and Sophie had been forced into choosing between the banker, Royce Badje, and eviction. It hadn’t taken her a second to decide on the latter.

“I want to see the hurt man before he dies, Ma.” The ladder creaked under Sally’s feet as she brought the sleeping baby down to her crib. “I don’t want to stay with Laura.”

Sophie sighed at her insistent daughter. Her children’s safety had been the reason she’d ended up here. She had no family anywhere, and nowhere to go. She had discovered this cabin during one of a hundred picnics with her girls. It had been like a little playhouse to them, deep in the thicket. When it became apparent that she was losing the ranch, she’d shifted what possessions would fit into it before the ranch was sold.

“You’ll see him in the morning, Sally. I know you’re curious, but someone has to stay with Laura, and I need Mandy. We might have to lift him, and she’s stronger.” Sophie removed her costume quickly, while Mandy threw open the two little windows so the smell would get
out. Sophie removed the rest of her disguise and ran a quick hand to tidy her bun before giving it up as a hopeless cause.

“Can’t I just take a peek?” Sally persisted. “If I have to wait till morning, he’ll most likely be dead. I want to see him afore he croaks.” It occurred to Sophie that her children were remarkably calm in an emergency, and just the littlest bit bloodthirsty. Part of being Texans, she supposed. They’d adopted Texas ways along with the drawl.

Sophie had to smile at Sally’s wheedling. Really, the child didn’t ask for much, and this was the most excitement they’d had in a long time. It had long ago become clear to Sophie that excitement was usually a bad thing, and she never quit being thankful to God for a boring life. “Is Laura fast asleep?”

Sally laid her little sister down and gently patted the baby’s back to keep her asleep, but there was really no need. Once the toddler dropped off for the night, she could take a ride on a cyclone without waking.

“Just like always, Ma. I’ll only stay out a minute. I promise.” Sally acted like it was Christmas. Then Sophie remembered their scanty Christmas and knew this was easily bigger.

“All right, just for a minute. You girls can run on out while I get changed out of my nightgown.”

The girls dashed off, and Sophie quickly discarded her cold, muddy flannel and pulled on a dry calico. She rushed after the girls, not wanting them alone for a second longer than necessary, even with an unconscious stranger. Beth knelt beside him, holding a damp cloth on the cut on his forehead. Her second born, who had an unusual love for all living creatures, was caring for the injured man as well as anyone could.

“Has he shown any signs of waking?” Sophie asked.

“Nope. He’s been knocked witless. Out cold as a carp.”

Sophie knelt on the other side of him and let Sally get in close to have her look. It took Sally about ten seconds to figure out nothing was going on.

“We may as well clean him up a bit.” Sophie took a clean cloth from
the stack Beth had brought and soaked it in the now-cool water. “It’s chilly out here, but there’s nothing for it but to bundle him up. We can’t risk a fire in the shed with this dry prairie grass, and until he can walk, we can’t get him in the house.”

She wished she’d thought to put more water on to heat. She began bathing his face, the mud now almost dry and beginning to cake and fall off. It only took her a few seconds to clean away the grime. While she turned to rinse out the cloth, first one, then another, then the third of her girls gasped out loud.

Sophie became instantly more alert. Had the night riders doubled back on foot? She looked into the darkness for trouble, but the trouble wasn’t out there. It was right here under the dirt.

Mandy said incredulously, “It. . .it can’t be.”

“What can’t be?” Sophie turned her attention sharply to Mandy, still trying to find the danger.

“But it is!” Beth cried out. “It is, isn’t it, Ma?”

Sophie realized both girls were staring in stunned fascination at the wounded man. Sophie turned to follow their gaze, but before she could look, Sally started to cry.

Sophie put her arm around her daughter but saw where she was staring. She turned to see what her girls were seeing.

“It can’t be.” Beth’s voice broke. “But it is.”

It was.

“It’s Pa,” Sally spoke through shuddering tears.

The husband Sophie had personally cut down out of a tree. Had personally released from the noose around his broken neck. Had personally buried on a rise overlooking the ranch they’d worked on so hard.

The husband whose death had etched her heart with hate and made her long, only moments ago, to commit cold-blooded murder. He was lying here unconscious, as men sought him to kill him all over again.

After what seemed like hours of stunned silence, Sophie leaned closer to the man.

Cliff.

“It isn’t possible.” She scrubbed more quickly at his face as if, when enough dirt was removed, the truth would be revealed.

“But it is, Ma. This is Pa,” Sally said firmly.

Sophie considered herself to be broad-shouldered and levelheaded. She took what life handed to her, and with fervent prayers to her Maker for help, she made do with what she had. She wasn’t a woman given to fancy. She stared at the man in front of her and knew it was Cliff. She thought back to that awful night two years ago and knew she’d buried Cliff. Those two absolutes clashed inside her brain and nothing that made any sense emerged. She stared and she washed and she tried to make the impossible fit into her sensible head.

Beth started crying next. She lifted the hand of the man who lay before her. “Pa?” She spoke so softly, it had the reverence of a prayer.

Mandy added her tears in next. “I c–can see it’s him, but I saw you bury him. We all helped wr–wrap him”—Mandy’s face crumpled—“in the quilt. How can this be, Ma?”

Sophie noticed several things about the man. He was more muscular than Cliff. He had an ugly round scar high up on one shoulder that could be nothing else but an old bullet wound. He had three slashing cuts on his right arm that were scarred but looked pink and fairly new. Cliff had none of these things. But that proved nothing. A man could build a lot of muscle in two years. And he could get himself shot and stabbed. Sophie remembered that sense of familiarity when she’d been bathing and doctoring his chest. The reason it had seemed familiar was, despite the bigger muscles, the man had hair on his chest the exact color, texture, and thickness of Cliff Edwards’s.

With a sudden start, she thought of Cliff ’s birthmark on his right shoulder blade. “Help me roll him over. Your pa had a mole.” All three girls added their strength, and they lifted the heavily muscled man a bit.

What they saw was an exit wound from the bullet. In the exact spot where Cliff had a large black mole, nearly an inch across. Or was it the exact spot? The wound was close enough that she couldn’t be sure.

“Let him lie back, girls.” Sophie sank from her knees to sit fully on
the shed floor. Feeling boneless from the shock, she almost sank all the way down. The girls were all crying softly, and with a start, she realized she was, too.

She shook her head to clear away the fog, and then she gathered her senses. “I know one thing.” The girls tore their eyes away from where they drank in the sight of their father and looked at her. “Your father is dead.”

Sally shook her head. Sally had always been Daddy’s girl, more than the rest of them. He’d left when Sally was too young to remember him, but in his absence, he’d grown into a heroic figure in her mind. And he’d only been back a few short months when he’d died—just long enough to get that longed-for son to growing in Sophie’s belly, the one that turned out to be another girl.

Sophie had tried to help Sally see Cliff as he was, without harming her little girl’s love for her father. But Sally had never been able to protect her heart from Cliff ’s small cruelties. She’d believed her pa’s criticisms were just and tried harder than ever to win his love. She had been the one to be the tomboy. To be the son they’d never had. She’d carved out a special place in her pa’s heart by tagging along with him everywhere for the little time they’d had together after the war. And it was no small trick to carve out a place in Cliff ’s heart. He wasn’t a demonstrative man. He was a decent, honest man, but he was given to dark moods and sarcasm. Now, Sally had her pa back. She wasn’t giving him up easily.

“It’s him, Ma. We know our own pa!”

“It’s. . .it’s. . .” Sophie struggled to let go of the wild surge of hope that was building in her. Although their marriage hadn’t been perfect, she’d loved her husband, at least to the extent he would allow it. But she couldn’t build her life on a fantasy. “I’ve heard it said that for each of us, somewhere in the world, there is a double. Now, I’ve never put much stock in that myself, just because I’ve never seen any evidence of it. I’ve never seen two people who looked exactly like each other, except sometimes brothers or sisters come close, or a parent and child. But
maybe it’s true. Maybe—no, definitely—your pa has a double. Because here he is.”

“Did Pa have a brother?” Mandy, the analyzer, asked.

“No. He was an only child and his pa died when he was little. His ma had passed on several months before I met him. He told me there was no one. Not even cousins. No, this man can’t be a relative. At least not a close one. That’s one of the reasons we ended up here after Pa died. With my folks gone, we have no family on either side to help us.”

“So you think this man looks like Pa, even down to that birthmark?” Sally began chewing on her bottom lip.

“Now, Sally, honey, we don’t know if there’s a birthmark under that scar.”

“It was right there, Ma, I remember,” Sally insisted.

“Do you really think it’s possible two men could look this much alike?” Beth asked skeptically.

Sophie was skeptical herself. But she also knew who she’d cut down out of that tree. “There can be no other explanation, girls.” Sophie said quietly to her weeping daughters, “Look at me.”

One by one they tore their hungry eyes away from a dream that all children who have lost a parent carry with them. They looked at her and waited.

“I don’t know who this man is,” Sophie said. “But I know who he is not. He’s not your pa. Your pa is dead.”

Mandy and Beth nodded. They knew it, too. They’d seen it with their own eyes. Only Sally wouldn’t give up the dream.

They all turned back to look at him again. As they did, his eyes fluttered open.

Sally began sobbing and leaned over him. “He’s alive!”

T 
H R E E
                 

H
e was dead.

That was the only possibility. He was dead, and he must have been good, because he was in heaven being ministered to by angels. They floated around his head. They cried for him as if his death were a sad thing, which made him feel like his life must have been one worth living. They touched him, held his hand, leaned against his legs, and knelt and bowed over him. And every one of them had her blue eyes riveted on his face, as if he held the answers to all the world’s problems.

He’d never known there could be such love for him. He’d never seen so many blue, blue eyes. The closest one caressed his head with a gentleness that almost broke his heart, it was so sweet. He sighed under the loveliness of heaven.

The angel who touched him spoke, but he was having trouble making sense of what she said. His mind seemed to be groggy, not working much at all. He thought a man should listen carefully when an angel spoke, so he tried his best to pay strict attention. Finally, after she’d repeated it several times and stroked his cheek as if to coax an answer out of him, it made sense.

She said, “Who are you?”

Shouldn’t an angel know the answer to that?

The nearest angel was also the biggest. He looked from one angel to the others. They seemed to come in all sizes. One of them was crying
hard, broken sobs that stabbed into his heart, as he wondered if he was the cause of her unhappiness. He couldn’t remember the angel’s question, and instead of answering her, he said to the one who wept so, the littlest one, “Don’t cry, little angel.”

He reached a hand up to comfort her. A spasm of pain cut across his chest. He cringed, as his head spun and his stomach lurched with nausea. He thought he might be sick all over his glorious angels.

Funny, he wouldn’t have expected there to be pain in heaven.