A Lawman's Christmas: A McKettricks of Texas Novel (2 page)

“I reckon maybe you ought to show me where you live, after all,” he said, at some length. At least that way, he could steer the child homeward, where she belonged, make sure she got there, and rest easy thereafter, where her welfare was concerned.

Edrina pointed past a general store, a telegraph and telephone office, the humble jailhouse where he would soon be officiating and a tiny white church surrounded by a rickety picket fence, much in need of whitewash. “It's one street over,” she said, already veering off a lit
tle, as though she meant to duck between buildings and take off. “Our place, that is. It's the one with an apple tree in the yard and a chicken house out back.”

Clay drew up his horse with a nearly imperceptible tug of the reins. “Hold it right there,” he said, with quiet authority, when Edrina started to turn away.

She froze. Turned slowly to look at him with huge china-blue eyes. “You're going to tell Mama I haven't been at school, aren't you?” she asked, sounding sadly resigned to whatever fate awaited her.

“I reckon it's
your
place to tell her that, not mine.”

Edrina blinked, and a series of emotions flashed across her face—confusion, hope and, finally, despair. “She'll be sorely vexed when she finds out,” the girl said. “Mama places great store in learning.”

“Most sensible people do,” Clay observed, biting the inside of his lower lip so he wouldn't laugh out loud. Edrina might have been little more than a baby, but she sat a horse like a Comanche brave—he'd seen that for himself back at the depot—and carried herself with a dignity out of all proportion to her size, situation and hand-me-down clothes. “Maybe from now on, you ought to pay better heed to what your mama says. She has your best interests at heart, you know.”

Edrina gave a great, theatrical sigh, one that seemed to involve her entire small personage. “I suppose Miss
Krenshaw will tell Mama I've been absent since recess, anyway,” she said. “Even if
you
don't.”

Miss Krenshaw, Clay figured, was probably the schoolmarm.

Outlaw's well-shod hooves made a lonely,
clompety-clip
kind of sound on the hard dirt of the road. The horse turned a little, to go around a trough with a lacy green scum floating atop the water.

“Word's sure to get out,” Clay agreed reasonably, thinking of all those faces, at all those windows, “one way or another.”

“Thunderation and spit!” Edrina exclaimed, with the vigor of total sincerity. “I don't know why folks can't just tend to their own affairs and leave me to do as I please.”

Clay made a choking sound, disguised it as a cough, as best he could, anyway. “How old are you?” he asked, genuinely interested in the answer.

“Six,” Edrina replied.

He'd have bet she was a short ten, maybe even eleven. “So you're in the first grade at school?”

“I'm in the second,” Edrina said, trudging along beside his horse. “I already knew how to read when I started in September, and I can cipher, too, so Miss Krenshaw let me skip a grade. Actually, she suggested I enter
third
grade, but Mama said no, that wouldn't do at all, because
I needed time to be a child. As if I could
help
being a child.”

She sounded wholly exasperated.

Clay hid yet another grin by tilting his head, in hopes that his hat brim would cast a shadow over his face. “You'll be all grown up sooner than you think,” he allowed. “I reckon if asked, I'd be inclined to take your mama's part in the matter.”

“You weren't asked, though,” Edrina pointed out thoughtfully, and with an utter lack of guile or rancor.

“True enough,” Clay agreed moderately.

They were quiet, passing by the little white church, then the adjoining graveyard, where, Clay speculated, the last marshal, Parnell Nolan, must be buried. Edrina hurried ahead when they reached the corner, and Clay and Outlaw followed at an easy pace.

Clay hadn't bothered to visit the house that came with the marshal's job on his previous stopover in Blue River. At the time, he'd just signed the deed for two thousand acres of raw ranch land, and his thoughts had been on the house and barn he meant to build there, the cattle and horses he would buy, the wells he would dig and the fences he would put up. He could have waited, of course, bided on the Triple M until spring, living the life he'd always lived, but he'd been too impatient and too proud to do that.

Besides, it was his nature to be restless, and so, in order to keep himself occupied until spring, he'd accepted the town's offer of a laughable salary and a star-shaped badge to pin on his coat until they could rustle up some damn fool to take up the occupation for good.

“There it is,” Edrina said, with a note of sadness in her voice that caught and pulled at Clay's heart like a fishhook snagging on something underwater.

Clay barely had time to take in the ramshackle place—the council referred to it as a “cottage,” though he would have called it a shack—before one of the prettiest women he'd ever laid eyes on shot out through the front door like a bullet and stormed down the path toward them.

Chickens scattered, clucking and squawking, as she passed.

Her hair was the color of pale cider, pinned up in back and fluffing out around her flushed face, as was the fashion among his sisters and female cousins back home in the Arizona Territory. Her eyes might have been blue, but they might have been green, too, and right now, they were shooting fire hot enough to brand the toughest hide.

Reaching the rusty-hinged gate in the falling-down fence, she stopped suddenly, fixed those changeable eyes on him and glared.

Clay felt a jolt inside, as though Zeus had flung a light
ning bolt his way and he'd caught it with both hands instead of sidestepping it, like a wiser man would have done.

The woman's gaze sliced to the little girl.

“Edrina Louise Nolan,” she said, through a fine set of straight white teeth, “what am I going to do with you?” Her skin was good, too, Clay observed, with that part of his brain that usually stood back and assessed things. Smooth, with a peachy glow underneath.

“Let me go to third grade?” Edrina ventured bravely.

Clay gave an appreciative chuckle, quickly quelled by a glare from the lady. He didn't wither easily, though he knew that was the result she'd intended, and he did take some pleasure in thwarting her.

At that, the woman gave a huffy little sigh and turned her attention back to her daughter. She threw out one arm—like Edrina, she wore calico—and pointed toward the gaping door of the shack. “That will be quite enough of your nonsense, young lady,” she said, with a reassuring combination of affection and anger, thrusting open the creaky gate. “Get yourself into the house
now
and prepare to contemplate the error of your ways!”

Before obeying her mother's command, Edrina paused just long enough to look up at Clay, who was still in the saddle, as though hoping he'd intercede.

That was a thing he had no right to do, of course,
but he felt a pang on the little girl's behalf just the same. And against his own better judgment he dismounted, took off his hat, holding it in one hand and shoving the other through his hair, fingers splayed.

“You go on and do what your mama tells you,” he said to Edrina, though his words had the tone of a suggestion, rather than a command.

Edrina's very fetching mother looked him over again, this time with something that might have been chagrin. Then she bristled again, like a little bird ruffling up faded feathers. “You're
him,
aren't you?” she accused. “The new marshal?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Clay said, confounded by the strange mixture of terror and jubilation rising up within him. “I am the new marshal. And you are…?”

“Dara Rose Nolan. You may address me as
Mrs.
Nolan, if you have any further
reason
to address me, which I do not anticipate.”

With that, she turned on one shabby-heeled shoe and pointed herself toward the “cottage,” with its sagging roof, leaking rain barrel and sparkling-clean windows.

Edrina and another little girl—the aforementioned Harriet, no doubt—darted out of the doorway as their mother approached, vanishing into the interior of the house.

Clay watched appreciatively as the widow Nolan re
treated hurriedly up the walk, with nary a backward glance.

Chickens, pecking peacefully at the ground, squawked and flapped their wings as they fled.

The door slammed behind her.

Clay smiled, resettled his hat and got back on his horse.

Before, he'd dreaded the long and probably idle months ahead, expecting the season to be a lonesome one, and boring, to boot, since he knew nothing much ever happened in Blue River, when it came to crime. That was the main reason the town fathers hadn't been in any big rush to replace Parnell Nolan.

Now, reining Outlaw away toward the edge of town, and the open country beyond, meaning to ride up onto a ridge he knew of, where the view extended for miles in every direction, Clay figured the coming winter might not be so dull, after all.

 

I
NSIDE THE HOUSE,
Dara Rose drew a deep breath and sighed it out hard.

Heaven knew, she hadn't been looking forward to the new marshal's arrival, given the problems that were sure to result, but she hadn't planned on losing her composure and behaving rudely, either. Poor as she was, Dara Rose still had high standards, and she believed in set
ting a good example for her children, prided herself on her good manners and even temperament.

Imagining how she must have looked to Clay McKettrick, rushing out of the house, scaring the chickens half to death in the process, she closed her eyes for a moment, then sighed again.

Edrina and Harriet watched her from the big rocking chair over by the wood-burning stove, Edrina wisely holding her tongue, Harriet perched close beside her, her rag doll, Molly, resting in the curve of one small arm.

The regulator clock ticked ponderously on the wall, lending a solemn rhythm to the silence, and snow swirled past the windows, as if trying to find a way in.

Dara Rose shivered.

“What are we going to do, Mama?” Edrina asked reasonably, and at some length. She was a good child, normally, helpful and even tempered, but her restlessness and curiosity often led her straight into mischief.

Dara Rose looked up at the oval-framed image of her late husband, Parnell Nolan, and her throat thickened as fresh despair swept over her. Despite the scandalous way he died, she missed him, missed the steadiness of his presence, missed his quiet ways and his wit.

“I don't rightly know,” Dara Rose admitted, after swallowing hard and blinking back the scalding tears
that were always so close to the surface these days. “But never you mind—I'll think of something.”

Edrina slipped a reassuring arm around Harriet, who was sucking her thumb.

Dara Rose didn't comment on the thumb-sucking, though it was worrisome to her. Harriet had left that habit behind when she was three, but after Parnell's death, nearly a year ago now, she'd taken it up again. It wasn't hard to figure out why—the poor little thing was frightened and confused.

So was Dara Rose, for that matter, though of course she didn't let on. With heavy-handed generosity, Mayor Ponder and the town council had allowed her and the children to remain in the cottage on the stipulation that they'd have to vacate when a marshal was hired to take Parnell's place.

“Don't worry,” Edrina told her sister, tightening her little arm around the child, just briefly. “Mama
always
thinks of something.”

It was true that Dara Rose had managed to put food on the table by raising vegetables in her garden patch, taking in sewing and the occasional bundle of laundry and sometimes sweeping floors in the shops and businesses along Main Street. As industrious as she was, however, the pickings were already slim; without the house, the situation would go from worrisome to destitute.

Oh, she had choices—there were always choices, weren't there?—but they were wretched ones.

She could become a lady of the evening over at the Bitter Gulch Saloon and maybe—
maybe—
earn enough to board her children somewhere nearby, where she could see them now and then. How long would it be before they realized how she was earning their living and came to despise her? A year, two years? Three?

Her second option was only slightly more palatable; Ezra Maddox had offered her a job as his cook and housekeeper, on his remote ranch, but he'd plainly stipulated that she couldn't bring her little girls along. In fact, he'd come right out and said she ought to just put Edrina and Harriet in an orphan's home or farm them out to work for their keep. It would be good for their character, he'd claimed.

In fact, the last time he'd come to call, the previous Sunday after church, he'd stood in this very room, beaming at his own generosity, and announced that if Dara Rose measured up, he might even marry her.

The mere thought made her shudder.

And the
audacity
of the man. He expected her to turn her daughters over to strangers and spend the rest of her days darning his socks and cooking his food, and in return, he offered room, board and a pittance in wages. If she “measured up,” as he put it, she'd be required to
share his bed and give up the salary he'd been paying her, too.

Dara Rose's final prospect was to take her paltry savings—she kept them in a fruit jar, hidden behind the cookstove in the tiny kitchen—purchase train tickets for herself and her children and travel to San Antonio or Dallas or Houston, where she might find honest work and decent lodgings.

But suppose she
didn't
find work? Times were hard. The little bit of money she had would soon be eaten up by living expenses, and
then
what?