Читать книгу A Lawman's Christmas: A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Miller Lael - Страница 7

Early December, 1914

If the spark-throwing screech of iron-on-iron hadn’t wrenched Clay McKettrick out of his uneasy sleep, the train’s lurching stop—which nearly pitched him onto the facing seat—would surely have done the trick.

Grumbling, Clay sat up straight and glowered out the window, shoving splayed fingers through his dark hair.

Blue River, Texas. His new home. And more, for as the new marshal, he’d be responsible for protecting the town and its residents.

Not that he could see much of it just then, with all that steam from the smokestack billowing between the train and the depot.

The view didn’t particularly matter to him, anyhow, since he’d paid a brief visit to the town a few months back and seen what there was to see—which hadn’t been much, even in the sun-spangled, blue-sky days of summer. Now that winter was coming on—Clay’s granddad, Angus, claimed it snowed dust and chiggers in that part of Texas—the rutted roads and weathered facades of the ramshackle buildings would no doubt be of bleak appearance.

With an inward sigh, Clay stood to retrieve his black, round-brimmed hat and worn duster from the wooden rack overhead. In the process, he allowed himself to ponder, yet again, all he’d left behind to come to this place at the hind end of beyond and carve out a life of his own making.

He’d left plenty.

A woman, to start with. And then there was his family, the sprawling McKettrick clan, including his ma and pa, Chloe and Jeb, his two older sisters and the thriving Triple M Ranch, with its plentitude of space and water and good grass.

A fragment of a Bible verse strayed across his brain. The cattle on a thousand hills…

There were considerably fewer than a thousand hills on the Triple M, big as it was, but the cattle were legion.

To his granddad’s way of thinking, those hills and the land they anchored might have been on loan from the Almighty, but everything else—cows, cousins, mineral deposits and timber included—belonged to Angus McKettrick, his four sons and his daughter, Katie.

Clay shrugged into the long coat and put on his hat. His holster and pistol were stowed in his trunk in the baggage compartment, and his paint gelding, Outlaw, rode all alone in the car reserved for livestock.

The only other passenger on board, an angular woman with severe features and no noticeable inclination toward small talk, remained seated, with the biggest Bible Clay had ever seen resting open on her lap. She seemed poised to leap right into the pages at the first hint of sin and disappear into all those apocalyptic threats and grand promises. According to the conductor, a fitful little fellow bearing the pitted scars of a long-ago case of smallpox, the lady had come all the way from Cincinnati with the express purpose of saving the heathen.

Clay—bone-tired, homesick for the ranch and for his kinfolks, and wryly amused, all of a piece—nodded a respectful farewell to the woman as he passed her seat, resisting the temptation to stop and inquire about the apparent shortage of heathens in Cincinnati.

Most likely, he decided, reaching the door, she’d already converted the bunch of them, and now she was out to wrestle the devil for the whole state of Texas. He wouldn’t have given two cents for old Scratch’s chances.

A chill wind, laced with tiny flakes of snow, buffeted Clay as he stepped down onto the small platform, where all three members of the town council, each one stuffed into his Sunday best and half-strangled by a celluloid collar, waited to greet the new marshal.

Mayor Wilson Ponder spoke for the group. “Welcome to Blue River, Mr. McKettrick,” the fat man boomed, a blustery old cuss with white muttonchop whiskers and piano-key teeth that seemed to operate independently of his gums.

Clay, still in his late twenties and among the youngest of the McKettrick cousins, wasn’t accustomed to being addressed as “mister”—around home, he answered to “hey, you”—and he sort of liked the novelty of it. “Call me Clay,” he said.

There were handshakes all around.

The conductor lugged Clay’s trunk out of the baggage car and plunked it down on the platform, then busily consulted his pocket watch.

“Better unload that horse of yours,” he told Clay, in the officious tone so often adopted by short men who didn’t weigh a hundred pounds sopping wet, “if you don’t want him going right on to Fort Worth. This train pulls out in five minutes.”

Clay nodded, figuring Outlaw would be ready by now for fresh air and a chance to stretch his legs, since he’d been cooped up in a rolling box ever since Flagstaff.

Taking his leave from the welcoming committee with a touch to the brim of his hat and a promise to meet them later at the marshal’s office, he crossed the small platform, descended the rough-hewn steps and walked through cinders and lingering wisps of steam to the open door of the livestock car. He lowered the heavy ramp himself and climbed into the dim, horse-scented enclosure.

Outlaw nickered a greeting, and Clay smiled and patted the horse’s long neck before picking up his saddle and other gear and tossing the lot of it to the ground beside the tracks.

That done, he loosed the knot in Outlaw’s halter rope and led the animal toward the ramp.

Some horses balked at the unfamiliar, but not Outlaw. He and Clay had been sidekicks for more than a decade, and they trusted each other in all circumstances.

Outside, in the brisk, snow-dappled wind, having traversed the slanted iron plate with no difficulty, Outlaw blinked, adjusting his unusual blue eyes to the light of midafternoon. Clay meant to let the gelding stand un-tethered while he put the ramp back in place, but be fore he could turn around, a little girl hurried around the corner of the brick depot and took a competent hold on the lead rope.

She couldn’t have been older than seven, and she was small even for that tender age. She wore a threadbare calico dress, a brown bonnet and a coat that, although clean, had seen many a better day. A blond sausage curl tumbled from inside the bonnet to gleam against her forehead, and she smiled with the confidence of a seasoned wrangler.

“My name is Miss Edrina Nolan,” she announced importantly. “Are you the new marshal?”

Amused, Clay tugged at his hat brim to acknowledge her properly and replied, “I am. Name’s Clay McKettrick.”

Edrina put out her free hand. “How do you do, Mr. McKettrick?” she asked.

“I do just fine,” he said, with a little smile. Growing up on the Triple M, he and all his cousins had been around horses all their lives, so the child’s remarkable ease with a critter many times her size did not surprise him.

It was impressive, though.

“I’ll hold your horse,” she said. “You’d better help the railroad man with that ramp. He’s liable to hurt himself if you don’t.”

Clay looked back over one shoulder and, sure enough, there was the banty rooster of a conductor, struggling to hoist that heavy slab of rust-speckled iron off the ground so the train could get under way again. He lent his assistance, figuring he’d just spared the man a hernia, if not a heart attack, and got a glare for his trouble, rather than thanks.

Since the fellow’s opinion made no real never-mind to Clay either way, he simply turned back to the little girl, ready to reclaim his horse.

She was up on the horse’s back, her faded skirts billowing around her, and with the snow-strained sunlight framing her, she looked like one of those cherub-children gracing the pages of calendars, Valentines and boxes of ready-made cookies.

“Whoa, now,” he said, automatically taking hold of the lead rope. Given that he hadn’t saddled Outlaw yet, he was somewhat mystified as to how she’d managed to mount up the way she had. Maybe she really was a cherub, with little stubby wings hidden under that thin black coat.

Up ahead, the engineer blew the whistle to signal imminent departure, and Outlaw started at the sound, though he didn’t buck, thank the good Lord.

“Whoa,” Clay repeated, very calmly but with a note of sternness. It was then that he spotted the stump on the other side of the horse and realized that Edrina must have scrambled up on that to reach Outlaw’s back.

They all waited—man, horse and cherub—until the train pulled out and the racket subsided somewhat.

Edrina smiled serenely down at him. “Mama says we’ll all have to go to the poorhouse, now that you’re here,” she announced.

“Is that so?” Clay asked mildly, as he reached up, took the child by the waist and lifted her off the horse, setting her gently on her feet. Then he commenced to collecting Outlaw’s blanket, saddle and bridle from where they’d landed when he tossed them out of the railroad car, and tacking up. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the town-council contingent straggling off the platform.

Edrina nodded in reply to his rhetorical question, still smiling, and the curl resting on her forehead bobbed with the motion of her head. “My papa was the marshal a while back,” she informed Clay matter-of-factly, “but then he died in the arms of a misguided woman in a room above the Bitter Gulch Saloon and left us high and dry.”

Clay blinked, wondering if he’d mistaken Edrina Nolan for a child when she was actually a lot older. Say, forty.

“I see,” he said, after clearing his throat. “That’s unfortunate. That your papa passed on, I mean.” Clay had known the details of his predecessor’s death, having been regaled with the story the first time he set foot in Blue River, but it took him aback that Edrina knew it, too.

She folded her arms and watched critically as he threw on Outlaw’s beat-up saddle and put the cinch through the buckle. “Can you shoot a gun and everything?” she wanted to know.

Clay spared her a sidelong glance and a nod. Why wasn’t this child in school? Did her mother know she was running loose like a wild Indian and leaping onto the backs of other people’s horses when they weren’t looking?

And where the heck had a kid her age learned to ride like that?

“Good,” Edrina said, with a relieved sigh, her little arms still folded. “Because Papa couldn’t be trusted with a firearm. Once, when he was cleaning a pistol, meaning to go out and hunt rabbits for stew, it went off by accident and made a big hole in the floor. Mama put a chair over it—she said it was so my sister, Harriet, and I wouldn’t fall in and wind up under the house, with all the cobwebs and the mice, but I know it was really because she was embarrassed for anybody to see what Papa had done. Even Harriet has more sense than to fall in a hole, for heaven’s sake, and she’s only five.”

Clay suppressed a smile, tugged at the saddle to make sure it would hold his weight, put a foot into the stirrup and swung up. Adjusted his hat in a gesture of farewell. “I’ll be seeing you, chatterbox,” he said kindly.

“What about your trunk?” Edrina wanted to know. “Are you just going to leave it behind, on the platform?”

“I mean to come back for it later in the day,” Clay explained, wondering why he felt compelled to clarify the matter at all. “This horse and I, we’ve been on that train for a goodly while, and right now, we need to stretch our muscles a bit.”

“I could show you where our house is,” Edrina persisted, scampering along beside Outlaw when Clay urged the horse into a walk. “Well, I guess it’s your house now.”

“Maybe you ought to run along home,” Clay said. “Your mama’s probably worried about you.”

“No,” Edrina said. “Mama has no call to worry. She thinks I’m in school.”

Clay bit back another grin.

They’d climbed the grassy embankment leading to the street curving past the depot and on into Blue River by then. The members of the town’s governing body waddled just ahead, single file, along a plank sidewalk like a trio of black ducks wearing top hats.

“And why aren’t you in school?” Clay inquired affably, adjusting his hat again, and squaring his shoulders against the nippy breeze and the swirling specks of snow, each one sharp-edged as a razor.

She shivered slightly, but that was the only sign that she’d paid any notice at all to the state of the weather. While Miss Edrina Nolan pondered her reply, Clay maneuvered the horse to her other side, hoping to block the bitter wind at least a little.

“I already know everything they have to teach at that school,” Edrina said at last, in a tone of unshakable conviction. “And then some.”

Clay chuckled under his breath, though he refrained from comment. It wasn’t as if anybody were asking his opinion.

The first ragtag shreds of Blue River were no more impressive than he recalled them to be—a livery on one side of the road, and an abandoned saloon on the other. Waist-high grass, most of it dead, surrounded the latter; craggy shards of filthy glass edged its one narrow window, and the sign above the door dangled by a lone, rusty nail.

Last Hope: Saloon and Games of Chance, it read in painted letters nearly worn away by time and weather.

“You shouldn’t be out in this weather,” Clay told Edrina, who was still hiking along beside him and Outlaw, eschewing the broken plank sidewalk for the road. “Too cold.”

“I like it,” she said. “The cold is very bracing, don’t you think? Makes a body feel wide-awake.”

The town’s buildings, though unpainted, began to look a little better as they progressed. Smoke curled from twisted chimneys and doors were closed up tight.

There were few people on the streets, Clay noticed, though he glimpsed curious faces at various windows as they went by.

He raised his collar against the rising wind, figuring he’d had all the “bracing” he needed, thank you very much, and he was sure enough “wide-awake” now that he was off the train and back in the saddle.

He was hungry, too, and he wanted a bath and barbering.

And ten to twelve hours of sleep, lying prone instead of sitting upright in a hard seat.

“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 little, 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 lightning 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 retreated 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.

INSIDE 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 setting 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?

Dara Rose knew she’d be paralyzed by these various scenarios if she didn’t put them out of her head and get busy doing something constructive, so she headed for the kitchen, meaning to start supper.

Last fall, someone had given her the hindquarter of a deer, and she’d cut the meat into strips and carefully preserved it in jars. There were green beans and corn and stubby orange carrots from the garden, too, along with apples and pears from the fruit trees growing be hind the church, and berries she and the girls had gathered during the summer and brought home in lard tins and baskets. Thanks to the chickens, there were plenty of eggs, some of which she sold, and some she traded over at the mercantile for small amounts of sugar and flour and other staples. Once in a great while, she bought tea, but that was a luxury.

She straightened her spine when she realized Edrina had followed her into the little lean-to of a kitchen.

“I like Mr. McKettrick,” the child said conversationally. “Don’t you?”

Keeping her back to the child, Dara Rose donned her apron and tied it in back with brisk motions of her hands. “My opinion of the new marshal is neither here nor there,” she replied. “And don’t think for one moment, Edrina Louise Nolan, that I’ve forgotten that you ran away from school again. You are in serious trouble.”

Edrina gave a philosophical little sigh. “How serious?” she wanted to know. “Very serious,” Dara Rose answered, adding wood to the fire in the cookstove and jabbing at it with a poker.

“I think we’re all in serious trouble,” Edrina observed sagely.

Out of the mouths of babes, Dara Rose thought.

“Do we have to be orphans now, Mama?” Harriet asked. As usual, she’d followed Edrina.

Dara Rose put the poker back in its stand beside the stove and turned to look at her daughters. Harriet clung to her big sister’s hand, looking up at her mother with enormous, worried eyes.

“We are a family,” she said, kneeling and wrapping an arm around each of them, pulling them close, drawing in the sweet scent of their hair and skin, “and we are going to stay together. I promise.”

Now to find a way to keep that promise.