Janet Tronstad – Easter In Dry Creek (страница 2)

He’d rather come up against a dozen raging blizzards than face Allie again. The fierce anger in her eyes at his trial had been harder to bear than hearing the judge pronounce him guilty of armed robbery. He might have endured the censure of the rest of the town if she had stood by him.

He’d been clueless that night about what Allie’s older brother, Mark, was capable of doing when he was drunk, but no one believed Clay’s version of what happened, especially not Allie. Everyone thought Clay had planned the robbery of the gas station, but it had been Mark’s impulsive move.

Clay closed his eyes until the rush of memories stopped. He didn’t like thinking about Mark. Allie’s brother had been shot in the head that night in a scuffle with the store clerk. At first, everyone expected Mark to come out of his coma in time to testify, but it hadn’t happened. The last Clay had heard was that the doctors were saying Mark was not expected to ever regain consciousness. He’d had some kind of fever that compounded the swelling in his brain.

Clay turned the engine off. The pickup jerked as the muffler rattled to a stop. He heard a cat’s indignant hiss then and he looked down. He’d forgotten about his passenger. A starving cat had snuck into the pickup when Clay stopped for gas a few hours ago. She was too tame to be feral, but none too friendly, either.

He figured that big empty-looking barn over there might as well house the cat and the kittens that, if he was any judge, she’d be having soon. From the looks of the place, the ranch could use a good mouser. So Clay grabbed the tabby and, without giving her time to protest, tucked her under the coat he was wearing. Someone had left the sheepskin coat on the seat of the pickup that had been left for him in the prison parking lot.

Clay briefly wondered who his benefactor was as he opened the pickup door, stepped down and started walking. Then he told himself he was making too much of the kindness. He was a man who stood alone. That was unlikely to change here.

* * *

Inside the house, a thin trail of steam was still rising from the skillet that Allie Nelson had dropped into the sink water before she stepped over to push open the only window that wasn’t painted shut in her father’s cluttered kitchen. She’d spent the past couple of years working as a fry cook in a popular restaurant in Jackson Hole and, even with that, she had burned the eggs on her first morning back on the ranch.

She’d been in the hall tying her nephew’s shoes, but that would be no excuse in her father’s eyes. Despite her shouldering the loan payments for her brother’s medical bills, which had taken everything she and her father had and which led to her father borrowing against the ranch to pay the rest, her father still treated her like she was barely older than young Jeremy.

The smoke from the skillet was disappearing. The winter air blew in through the open window, and Allie closed her eyes before leaning forward against the counter. She was tired to the bone, she thought as she stood there. But she couldn’t give up. The next trip here to the ranch she was going to make sure all of the windows opened as they should. Then she’d get down some of those leftover building supplies from the hayloft in the barn and paint the kitchen walls a bright sunny yellow. She would not like Mark to see the house like this; it was depressing. She’d make their house look happy again before he came home.

Against all odds, her brother had started to slowly come out of his coma this past fall. For a long time the doctors said they expected him to recover. But, when he didn’t, they decided things were worse in his brain than they had initially thought. However, Allie’s father kept saying Mark had an IQ of 156 and that his son’s genius brain would find a way to heal itself.

Allie had heard that IQ statistic so many times growing up that she figured it was seared on her memory. But she did not share her father’s confidence in her brother’s high IQ to heal him. She turned to someone more powerful. More than once she knelt at her mother’s grave and pleaded with God to save her brother, promising she would take better care of him this time if she could only have one more chance.

Now Mark was coming out of his coma. The doctors couldn’t explain it. They said it was impossible, but the swelling in his brain had gone down. First, a finger moved, and then some weeks later Mark cleared his throat and tried to speak. Finally, his eyes flickered and he started to eat through a straw. That had gone on for months. Everyone had kept Mark’s progress quiet, though. In the beginning, his improvements were so slight that they weren’t sure he’d stay on track with his recovery. Then they weren’t sure he could take the excitement of other people knowing what had happened.

Allie had gotten back to the ranch only last night, but she was planning to drive to the hospital nursing home to see her brother on Monday.

“You making bacon with them eggs?” Her father’s querulous voice floated down the hallway and interrupted her thoughts. “Jeremy and I like bacon with our eggs. Three slices for me.”

She looked up but saw no one. Her nephew and her father were still in the back bedroom.

Allie turned to face the hallway. She heard the giggle of her three-year-old nephew and the creak of the springs on her father’s bed, which meant that the little boy no doubt raced his plastic horse across the edge of his grandfather’s mattress.

Jeremy was bringing joy to this old house, even if they saw him only once in a while. He and his mother lived in Idaho, and this was the first time that she had left Jeremy here alone. Allie had asked for time off from work so she could be here to help watch over him.

“The doctor said you can’t have more than a small slice of bacon,” Allie called to her father. She’d spoken on the phone with the doctor last week. “Your cholesterol is too high.”

Actually, the specialist had said her father should have an aspirin every morning and start eating turkey bacon, but Allie was taking things slowly. Her father refused to consider eating what he called fake bacon. She was stretching the doctor’s advice by giving him a small piece of the real stuff and two eggs.

It wasn’t until she started back to the sink and passed the smaller window in the kitchen that she glanced out toward the barn and stopped midstride. She hadn’t seen that pickup sitting there when she had arrived late yesterday. The pickup was usually parked behind the barn. She didn’t know why her father kept the old thing after what happened with it that awful night when Mark had been shot. The pickup was practically falling apart, the red paint faded to mauve except on the dented bumper where the bare metal showed through in a long scratch.

She twisted her neck to get a full view of the yard. Sure enough, a man was walking toward the house.

“Company coming,” Allie called as she stood back. Her father must have lent the vehicle to a neighbor and the man was bringing it back. “Best get your robe on.”

She picked up the long metal spatula that was lying on the counter. Whoever the man was he had most likely eaten breakfast already, but she didn’t want to turn anyone away without some hospitality. Having company in this house was as rare as a party these days. She’d toast slices of the whole-grain bread she’d brought with her from Jackson Hole and pull down the crock of honey to go with it. The coffee was already brewing. She’d also get started on new eggs. Her father would want some even if the other man didn’t.

She was pleased to know one of the neighbors had felt free to ask her father for the loan of his old pickup. Ever since Mark had been hurt, her father had stopped going to church services. He said it was because he had to rush to make it to the nursing home before visiting hours closed, but she knew, even though Clay West was clearly the one at fault, her father felt the whole family had been shamed that night. He’d been avoiding everyone since then. He had plenty of time to visit Mark after church.

Allie heard a sound and turned.

“Who is it?” her father asked. He was peeking out a door off the hallway. “I hope it’s not Mrs. Hargrove. I’m not presentable. She said she might come by.”

Allie would rather the visitor be the sweet older woman. She was the traditional Sunday school teacher for children of Jeremy’s age, and Allie thought it was time her nephew joined the class, at least when he was staying with her and her father.

“It looks like a man, so your robe will be fine.”

“Does he have on an old sheepskin coat?”

“How’d you know?” she asked as she twirled to stare. Those coats were no longer common. Everyone preferred puffy jackets in neon or pastel colors. For one thing, they were washable, and there wasn’t a dry cleaner this side of Miles City.

“I’ll put my overalls on.” Her father turned without answering her. “I sent Jeremy to his room to get dressed.”

Allie stepped over and opened the main door. No one had taken its screen off last fall, and the latch had gotten damp and rusted even more. There were enough things that needed doing in this old house that she could spend a month here instead of the two weeks she’d arranged to take off from her job.