Song of Oestend (12 page)

“It’s fine.”

“Maybe you should move back to the barracks.”

“No!” Anything seemed preferable to that. “Besides, there’s only one empty bed and if you’re going to hire another hand next time you go to town, he’ll need it.”

Deacon sighed, but he stopped arguing.

After eating a late breakfast, Aren couldn’t quite face going back to the house. He went to the barn, where he found Garrett and Simon mucking out stalls. “You look like shit,”

Garrett said to him.

“So I hear,” Aren said as he grabbed a pitchfork and went to the next stall.

He saw the way the two friends glanced at each other, as if trying to determine which of them would pursue the matter. It turned out to be Simon. “House haunted like they say?” he asked.

Aren debated how to answer. He didn’t want to admit to Deacon that anything was

awry, but could he trust Simon and Garrett? “If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said no.”

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“What happened?”

It wasn’t exactly that he’d decided to tell them but once he started talking, the words kept coming out, and before he knew it, he’d told them the whole story of the night before.

When he’d finished, he looked up to find them both staring at him with wide eyes.

Garrett shook his head and whistled. “You’re a braver man than me.”

That surprised Aren. He’d just finished telling them in embarrassing detail how scared he’d been. “I doubt it,” Aren said.

“No fucking way I would have stayed in the house,” Garrett said. “You must have the

biggest set of balls in Oestend.”

Aren felt his cheeks turning red at the comment, but he felt oddly flattered by it, too.

Strength and bravery weren’t things he’d ever been accused of before.

“You know,” Simon said, looking thoughtful, “way I heard it, nobody’s died inside the house. They all got scared and ran into the night. But Brighton and that wife of his lived there a month and they survived. Brighton said Shay near left him over it, and vowed to never step foot in there again. But they weren’t harmed.”

“Small comfort that is,” Garrett said, and the three men all bent back to their work.

Despite Garrett’s quick dismissal of Simon’s statement, Aren found himself pondering

it for the rest of the day. Nobody had been harmed in the house. Standing in the sunshine with the cool Oestend wind blowing his hair, Aren found the terror of the night before harder to remember.

He finally climbed the porch steps to his front door. Inside the house, there was nothing to hint at the chaos of the night before. The house was the same as always—slightly chilly because the fire had burnt out sometime in the night and Aren had never stoked it back to life—but other than that, there was nothing at all out of the ordinary.

Aren went into the pantry. As always, it seemed to be a few degrees colder than the

living room, but otherwise, it was only a room like any other. Aren looked down at the mark on the floor. Olsa had said it was good. The paint was not chipped or faded. He felt sure it would keep him safe. The rug was lying in a heap where he’d dropped it the night before. He spread it back over the door.

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Yes, something was in the house, but it was trapped in the cellar. Olsa and Deacon had sung their song over it. As long as he didn’t let it out, and as long as he didn’t let his fear drive him outside into the night, he’d be fine.

He felt good as he walked back to the house to eat dinner with Deacon.

“I don’t think you should stay in that house,” Deacon said, predictably.

“I’ll be fine,” Aren assured him, and he must have been more convincing than he’d

been earlier that day, because Deacon let the subject drop long enough for them both to eat.

After dinner, he followed Aren back to the house, and Aren poured them both drinks as he did almost every night.

“I know something happened last night,” Deacon said, looking down at the whisky in

his glass. “You were spooked this morning. You can’t tell me you weren’t.”

Aren sighed, contemplating the amber liquid in his own glass. He didn’t want to lie to Deacon. On the other hand, he feared Deacon would insist he move out. “I heard some noises,” he relented. “That’s all.”

“Only noises?”

“
Only
noises,” Aren confirmed, telling himself it wasn’t exactly a lie. “It was probably just the wind.”

In the cellar.

Right.

Deacon looked sceptical. “I wish you weren’t alone out here. Anything could happen.”

“What, you want me to invite one of the hands to stay with me?” Aren asked, joking.

“Do you really think that would make any difference?”

Deacon shrugged. “I could stay.”

It was a tempting offer. Aren thought he might feel better if Deacon were with him. But then he considered what a wreck he’d been the night before, huddled on his bed, trying desperately not to cry. He didn’t want Deacon to see him like that. He didn’t want Deacon to know he was weak.

“It was probably just the wind,” he said again.

Deacon didn’t exactly look convinced.

“Where would you sleep, anyway?” Aren teased. “On the floor?”

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Deacon eyed the hard boards at his feet. Aren knew what he was thinking. Even

sleeping on the cow pelt in front of the fire was bound to be exceedingly uncomfortable.

“I’ll be fine,” he told Deacon. “And you’ll sleep better in your own bed.”

That was all easy enough to say while Deacon was there, but once he’d left and Aren

had bolted the door behind him, his courage began to fade. He turned on the generator, then checked every lock twice. He checked the cellar door three times. He dragged his heaviest chair from the living room to put on top of it. He drank two more shots of whisky.

In the end, he climbed the stairs to his room and closed himself in. After some debate, he pushed the dresser in front of it again. He undressed and climbed into bed.

Midway through the night, the pounding started. On and on it went, and Aren’s heart

pounded faster and louder each time. But eventually it stopped. Eventually, he heard only sobbing. He lay in his bed, and finally, he drifted off to sleep.

When he awoke the next day, he knew—he was as safe in the house as in the barracks,

where some fool hand might open a door and let in the wraiths. Or grope their way into his bed. He missed sex, but not enough to debase himself again.

Not yet, anyway.

Whoever’s ghost was in the cellar, Aren decided it was of no concern to him.

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The next few nights were still rough, but each morning that he awoke safe and sound in his bed seemed to prove there was nothing to fear. After a week the sounds stopped and the house again fell silent. Aren was relieved, but not such a fool as to think it was over.

It took another week for Deacon to stop asking him constantly if everything was all

right, and Aren was relieved when the big cowboy finally let the subject drop. Aren hated lying to his only real friend, but he wasn’t going to risk being sent back to the barracks, either.

A few days later, he walked across the grassy expanse from the house to the courtyard to meet Deacon for breakfast as he did every morning. The wind was blowing, as it ever did in Oestend. Sometimes it was quiet. Sometimes it was loud. Often it built to a crescendo in the deep of night. But this morning, it was faint and soothing, heard only in the soft rustle of the long, swaying grass that Aren walked through. A path was beginning to form through it from his many trips back and forth. Seeing it made him smile. It somehow solidified his place at the BarChi, and his place in the world as a whole. It seemed like proof that he belonged.

The fact the track through the grass was two men wide was the best part of all. It meant that he wasn’t alone.

He went to the kitchen first, but he knew before he entered that Deacon wasn’t there.

He could hear raised voices coming from inside.

“I know what you’re doing!” It was a man’s voice, although Aren couldn’t place it right away. “I know you were with him last night!”

“What do you care?” The second voice was female.

“I won’t have you lifting your skirt all over the blessed ranch!”

Aren stopped outside the door. He had no business listening—he knew that—but he

couldn’t quite resist the entertainment.

“My skirts are none of your business,” the woman said.

“You’re my
wife!
How can you say it’s not my business who you fuck?”

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It could only be Daisy and Dante. He didn’t think either Tama or Shay ever slept with the hands, and if they did, they were smart enough to not argue about it where anybody could hear.

“We both know you don’t care,” she said, her voice like ice. “We both know you’ve

never had any interest whatsoever in what’s between my legs!”

“That doesn’t give you the right—”

“It gives me every right! Why should you care, anyway? You’ve never pretended to

love me.”

“I won’t have the hands snickering behind my back because my wife acts like a common whore! At least a whore has the brains to ask for money in exchange, rather than giving it away for free!”

“You’d do the same, if the one you wanted would have you.”

A heartbeat of stony silence, then, “What do you mean?” Dante’s tone was no longer

confrontational. He sounded alarmed.

“You think I don’t know?” she asked, and there was no missing the gloating tone in her voice now that she had him on the defensive. “You think I’m blind? You think I don’t see you watching—”

Her words were cut off by the unmistakable sound of a slap. Aren started forwards

through the door, thinking he should intervene, but a voice behind him said, “Aren, don’t!”

He turned to find Tama, a bucket of fresh milk in each hand, looking at him with wide eyes.

“Trust me,” she said. “You’ll only make it worse.”

Dante’s voice was tense with suppressed rage. “I won’t be the laughing stock of this

ranch just because you can’t keep your skirts down. It better
stop
. I find out it’s happened again, I’ll take my daddy’s gun and put a bullet in his skull.”

A muffled sob, then the sound of running feet—only one set of footsteps, and too light to be Dante’s. Daisy had fled the room.

Dante cursed, and Aren heard a crash that he guessed was a chair thrown against the

wall.

“Excuse me,” Tama said, pushing past him with the milk to walk into the kitchen.

Braver than I am
, Aren thought. He had no desire to have to face Dante. He turned instead towards the barn, hoping to find Deacon. The big ranch hand wasn’t inside, but when Aren SONG OF OESTEND

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walked around to the far side of the building, he found him. Deacon was leaning on the wooden gate of the corral, staring at the bull inside.

“Hey,” he said as Aren leaned on the gate next to him. “Daisy and Dante done fighting yet?”

“For now, it seems,” Aren said.

“Good.” Deacon pointed towards the bull. “He’s not acting right. Worried he’s got the froth, like the last one.”

“Is that why he’s here, in the corral?”

“Yup. Got to watch him.” He shook his head. “He’s the last bull we got, too.”

Aren wasn’t thinking about the bull, though. He couldn’t stop thinking about the

argument he’d overheard. “Daisy’s sleeping with one of the hands?”

“More than likely.” Deacon turned to look at him. He ducked his head a bit to look

Aren in the eyes, his expression grave. “Is it you?”

“No!”

“Good,” Deacon said, standing up to his full height again. “Lifting that skirt will buy you more trouble than it’s worth, I promise you that.”

“Who do you think it is?”

Deacon shrugged, turning back towards the bull, obviously uninterested. “Don’t rightly know,” he said. “Don’t rightly care, either. I do my best not to get involved.”

The bull suddenly let out a bellow, swinging its head from side to side. It stepped

forwards and knocked its head again the side of the barn.

“Son of a bitch,” Deacon swore under his breath.

“Is that bad?” Aren asked.

“It sure ain’t good.”

“Do you have to put him down?”

“We’ll see.” Deacon pushed his hat back on his head. “Could still be a fever, in which case he’ll come out of it in a day or two.”

“There’s no way to check for sure?”

Deacon grinned over at him. “There is, if you want to get close enough to him to put the thermometer where it needs to go.”

“Ha!” Aren laughed. “No thanks!”

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“Smart man,” Deacon said. He clapped Aren on the back. “Come on. Us standing here

starving ain’t gonna solve anything.”

As always, Deacon had chores to do with his men as soon as they had finished eating.

Aren walked back to the house alone. It was a beautiful day. The breeze was light. The sun was shining overhead. He had no intention of wasting it indoors.

He headed for his bedroom, where he’d left his sketchpad and the leather satchel that held his pencils and penknives. But when he walked through the door, he stopped dead in his tracks.

The ghost had been there! He’d learnt over the course of the previous weeks that her

presence was sporadic, although he’d only ever heard her at night. He wasn’t sure how she’d found her way out of the cellar, but there was no other explanation for what he saw.

There was paper everywhere. Almost every page had been torn from his sketchpad and

tossed onto the floor. His satchel was on the floor, too, but it was empty. All around it lay pieces of pencil.

“Oh, no,” Aren groaned. He fell to his knees and started picking up pieces. “Stupid