Until Spring (18 page)

"I don't think so," Jane said.

"Well, tell Mary Kate she can ride into town with me when Duncan gets back with my truck," Rooney said.

"Mary Kate's not here," Jane replied, her heart turning over.

"Not here? She always stops by after school." He looked rattled.

"She did, but when we were over at the barn, we had a—a slight disagreement, and I assumed she went home," Jane told him. Her forehead wrinkled in a frown. Where could Mary Kate be?

"She's not at the house," Rooney said flatly.

The thought occurred to them at the same time.

"The truck!" both exclaimed.

"She couldn't drive your pickup truck," Jane said, shaking her head in denial.

"The keys were in it—maybe she could. I'm going over to the barn to see if Duncan is there," Rooney said, sprinting away.

"I'm coming, too!" Jane called after him and followed, pulling on her coat as she ran.

Duncan was bent over paperwork in his office and glanced up in surprise as Rooney and Jane burst through the door.

"Mary Kate's gone, and so is the truck!" Rooney shouted.

The three of them ran outside and stood for a moment scanning the ranch. Llamas in their pen looked up in interest. The darkness of a lowering sky hinted at snow in the offing, and there was no sign of Mary Kate. The pickup truck was nowhere in sight.

"Where could she go?" Jane wondered aloud as they all clambered into Duncan's SUV.

"To the highway," Rooney said grimly as a few flakes of snow wafted out of the sky.

"She wouldn't," Jane said with certainty.

"You don't know Mary Kate the way we do," Duncan said in an ominous tone.

Duncan drove as fast as he could in the frozen rutted tracks of the driveway. It wasn't easy driving, and Jane doubted that a child could handle a truck under these conditions. Jane realized that none of them knew what to expect. What had ever possessed Mary Kate to take Rooney's truck?

Jane recalled the anger Mary Kate had shown when she was acting out her frustration at Jane's certain departure. Maybe the girl had deliberately decided to misbehave in a really big way in order to get everyone's attention.

"There! That's the truck," Rooney said, sitting forward in his seat and squinting ahead through the downy swirls of snow.

Jane saw that the pickup truck had pitched headlong into a high snowdrift, denting the snow with its bumper. Clouds of vapor unfurled from the exhaust pipe, and the engine was still running. Loud country music blared from the truck's radio.

Duncan leaped from the SUV and wrenched open the door on the driver's side in an instant. Out tumbled Mary Kate.

"Grandpa!" exclaimed Mary Kate, throwing herself into her grandfather's arms.

Duncan reached inside the pickup and turned off the ignition key, silencing both engine and radio. It was suddenly very quiet.

"You scared us," Jane said, shattering the stillness with her shaking voice.

Mary Kate blinked at her. "I didn't mean to. I only wanted to drive the truck."

"We'll talk about it when we get home," her grandfather said, and they could tell from the tone of his voice that he was furious. The air was filled with frosty clouds of vapor from their breath.

"Is the truck okay? I didn't mean to hurt it, but it slid off the road," Mary Kate said, once they were in the SUV.

"It looks like there's no great harm done. You were lucky, young lady. Exactly where did you think you were going?" Duncan inquired, glancing briefly over his shoulder as he backed and turned.

"To the mailbox. I thought that if it was a half mile to the mailbox and back and I drove at one mile an hour, it should take me an hour to get home. I drove real, real slow."

"Well, 'real, real slow' or not, it was a stupid thing to do, and I'm going to reckon with you when we get back to the house," Rooney said.

Mary Kate looked momentarily chastened, then said, "I had to scrunch the seat way forward to reach the pedals, and I sure wish I knew how to get the emergency brake off."

"You mean you drove all the way up here with the emergency brake on?" Duncan asked in disbelief.

"I guess so," Mary Kate said with a shrug.

"Where'd you learn to drive, anyway?" Duncan asked.

"By watching you and Grandpa."

"Well, next time watch how we release the emergency brake before we shift into gear. Just in case you decide to go for any more little outings around the neighborhood."

"She ain't going on any more little outings," Rooney grunted. "I can promise you that."

Duncan dropped off Mary Kate and Rooney in front of their house and parked the SUV at the barn. When he and Jane had returned to the house, Duncan said, "I thought Mary Kate spent her afternoons with you these days."

Jane heaved a giant sigh. "She usually does, but today we had a disagreement. In a way, I suppose it's my fault that she took the truck."

"Don't be silly. Mary Kate's always doing something she shouldn't do. You know that."

"I think she does these things when she wants more attention and isn't getting it. Like this afternoon." Quickly Jane related how Mary Kate had insisted that Jane mustn't leave the ranch and how she had firmly told her young friend that her departure was inevitable.

"Rooney tries to cope the best way he can," Duncan said. "It's hard being mother, father, sister and brother all rolled up into one. Mary Kate will certainly miss you when you're gone. She models herself after you. As I've mentioned before, ever since you arrived here, her behavior has improved."

"I can't take credit for that."

"Of course you can. You're good with her. Mary Kate listens to you."

"I'm company for her," Jane said.

"No, it's more than that."

Jane thought about it. He was right. She discovered felt good about making a difference in Mary Kate's life, even for so short a time and was pleased that Duncan had noticed it.

"Mary Kate is a sweet child. All she needs is love and attention," Jane said.

"So do we all," Duncan said reflectively. Then, as though he realized he had said too much, he stood up and went to the door, giving her one long last look before going out and closing the door softly behind him.

She stared after him, wishing he had stayed. They had just shared more of themselves than they had in days. She heard the rumble of the SUV's motor as Duncan left and went up to bed before he came home.

While she was lying there in the dark, she realized that their conversation had not been about Mary Kate as much as it had been about themselves.

* * *

Mary Kate's punishment for driving her grandfather's pickup truck turned out to be a restriction to their house every afternoon for a week and a strict prohibition on any contact with Dearling. This hit her harder than any of them anticipated.

Jane, who stopped by the Rooneys' the next day to drop off cookies that she had baked, happened to arrive when Mary Kate was throwing a tantrum.

"But Dearling won't know what happened to me if she doesn't see me for a whole week," Mary Kate was raging when Jane stepped inside the door.

"I didn't know what happened to you, either, when you disappeared with my truck," Rooney pointed out.

"It's not fair, it's not fair," Mary Kate sobbed as she ran off to her room.

"Thanks, Jane, for the cookies. I'm sorry Mary Kate's in such a state," Rooney said apologetically.

Jane had to speak loudly to be heard over Mary Kate's crying. "You're welcome, and tell Mary Kate I said hello," she told Rooney, but Jane found the child's sobs heart wrenching. She knew that Rooney felt that he had to punish Mary Kate for such a serious offense, but she wished he had chosen some way other than prohibiting his granddaughter from seeing Dearling. The llama seemed to be a stabilizing influence on Mary Kate, and she knew that to the child herself, this must be the cruelest punishment that Rooney had ever devised.

Jane went to the barn every day to talk to Dearling the way Mary Kate did but knew that as far as the llama was concerned, she wasn't a good substitute. She always had the feeling that Dearling was looking over her shoulder and expecting to see Mary Kate come bouncing around the corner of the barn any minute.

It was a slow week, and when Mary Kate was finally released from her restriction, Jane didn't have the heart to say no when Mary Kate, showing her old exuberance, appeared on the back doorstep, begging her to come over to the barn for a reunion with Dearling.

Dearling seemed thrilled to see Mary Kate again, butting her in a playful fashion and blowing gently into her face. Mary Kate laughed delightedly.

"She didn't forget me, did she, Jane?" she said, her arms locked around Dearling's neck.

"No, Mary Kate, it would be pretty hard to forget someone like you," Jane replied with a smile.

When clouds blocked out the sun and it became too cold to stay outdoors, Mary Kate, in a lively mood, insisted that they go into the barn, but not just to see the horses.

"Does Duncan let you play in there?" Jane asked doubtfully.

"Sure. Let's play hide-and-seek."

"Well..."

"Come on, Jane, don't be a stick-in-the-mud. I'll be It and you hide." Mary Kate turned her back, hid her eyes against the side of the barn, and began to count loudly by fives.

"Wait a minute," said Jane. "What am I supposed to do?" She wanted to honor Mary Kate's request. It seemed the least she could do after Mary Kate's long confinement, and the child was obviously lonely for playmates.

Mary Kate stopped counting and wheeled around. "Haven't you played hide-and-seek before?" she asked incredulously.

"I don't think so," Jane said. All this made her feel exceedingly incompetent.

"I'm It. I count all the way to one hundred by fives, and when I'm through counting, you're supposed to be hidden. Then I try to find you." Mary Kate crooked an arm over her eyes and started counting again.

Jane looked around her frantically, trying to figure out where to hide. Duncan's horse hung his head over the door to his stall and whinnied. A couple of barn cats, half tame, jumped down from a barrel and ran into the shadows.

Jane, still not completely comfortable around the horses, decided to avoid their quarters as hiding places. Mary Kate had already counted all the way to seventy before Jane finally let herself quietly into the tack room and concealed herself behind the sawhorses where the llamas' panniers were stored.

"Ready or not, here I come," Mary Kate cried, and Jane could hear her slamming doors and growing progressively closer in her search.

When she found her, Mary Kate pounced. "There you are! Now it's your turn to be It!"

So Jane hid her eyes and counted, and afterward she found Mary Kate behind some old clothes hanging in a cubbyhole beside Duncan's office door. The game went on for almost half an hour, much to the interest of Flapjack and the other horses.

They were both tiring of hide-and-seek when Jane found Mary Kate in what appeared to be a storage closet that was seldom used; the door was behind a heap of tractor parts. When Jane opened the door unawares, suddenly Mary Kate reached out, caught her by the wrist, and pulled Jane down into a pile of something soft and warm.

Jane sputtered and pulled herself to a sitting position. Whatever it was, the stuff was full of dust, and she began to sneeze.

"What
is
this, anyway?" Jane asked when she had her sneezing under control. She picked up a handful of it and rubbed it between her fingers.

"It's llama wool," Mary Kate replied, taking a clump of it and lobbing it at Jane. Jane tossed a fistful back, and they exchanged volleys until Jane began to sneeze again.

Finally they pulled themselves to their feet, and Jane brushed the wool off her clothes. It was feathery light to the touch, and she held it up so that she could see it better. The fibers were long and ranged in color from white to every imaginable shade of brown and gray.

"It's beautiful," Jane said, reaching down for another handful. Something about the fibers seemed to awaken a tactile sense that she'd never known she had. Suddenly she longed to feel the pull of it between her fingers as she twisted and drew it out into yarn.

Confused by this thought, she stood there staring down at the wool. A tiny blip of memory sparked her consciousness. It reminded her of the time when she had been sorting Sigrid's fabric and had realized that she knew the meaning of the terms warp and woof.

"Jane? Jane! Come on over to our house, I want to make hot chocolate. Grandpa said it was okay as long as I use hot water from the tap and instant cocoa. Jane? Don't you want some? You can bring a bag of that wool if you want. Duncan wouldn't mind."

Jane followed, her mind cluttered with newfound information that seemed to unwind from a dark place inside her head. In order to spin wool, she would need a spinning wheel. She had used one before. She knew it. And as for the wool from the llamas, it seemed softer than sheep's wool. She had no idea how she came by this information. She just
knew,
that was all.