The McKettrick Legend (29 page)

“Right,” Brad said. “I was there for the celebration after your last cardiology workup, remember? You probably have a better heart than I do, so spare me the sympathy plays.”

“You have a heart?” Phil countered, raising his bushy gray eyebrows almost to his thinning hairline. Even with plugs, the carpet looked pretty sparse. Phil's pate always reminded Brad of the dolls his sisters had had when they were little, sprouting shocks of hair out of holes in neat little rows. “Couldn't prove it by me.”

“Whatever,” Brad said, dipping one of Willie's bowls into the kibble bag, then setting it down, full, where the dog could reach it without getting off his bed. He followed up by filling the other bowl with tap water. Then, on second thought, he dumped that and poured the bottled kind, instead.

“This is something big,” Phil said. “That's why I came in person.”

“If I let you tell me, will you leave?” By then, Brad was plundering the fridge for the makings of break fast.

“Got any kosher sausage in there?” the older man asked.

“Sorry,” Brad answered. He'd come up with something
if Phil stayed, since he couldn't eat in front of the man, but he was still hoping for a speedy departure.

Next, he'd be hanging up a stocking on Christmas Eve, setting out an empty basket the night before Easter.

“Big opportunity,” Phil continued. “Very, very big.”

“I don't care.”

“You don't care? This is a
movie
, Brad. The lead. A
feature,
too. A big Western with cattle and wagons and a cast of dozens. And you won't even have to sing.”

“No.”

“Two years ago, even a year ago, you would have
killed
for a chance like this!”

“That was then,” Brad said, flashing back to the night before, when he'd said practically the same thing to Meg, “and this is now.”

“I've got the script in the car. In my brief case. Solid gold, Brad. It might even be Oscar material.”

“Phil,” Brad said, turning from the fridge with the makings of a serious omelet in his hands, “what part of ‘no' is eluding you? Would it be the
N,
or the
O?
”

“But you'd get to play an
outlaw,
trying to go straight.”

“Phil.”

“You're really serious about this retirement thing, aren't you?” Phil sounded stunned. Ag grieved. And petulant. “In a year—hell, in
six months
—when you've got all this down-home stuff out of your system, you'll wish you'd listened to me!”

“I listened, Phil. Do you want an omelet?”

“Do I
want an omelet?
Hell, no! I want you to make a damned
movie!
”

“Not gonna happen, Phil.”

Phil was suddenly super-alert, like a predator who's just spotted dinner on the hoof. “It's some woman, isn't it?”

Again, he flashed on Meg. The way she'd felt, silky and slick, against him. The way she'd scratched at his back and called his name…

“Maybe,” he admitted.

“Do I need to remind you that your romantic history isn't exactly going to inspire a new line of Hallmark valentines?”

Brad sighed. Got out the skillet and set it on the stove. Willie gave him a sidelong look of commiseration from the dog bed.

“If you won't eat an omelet,” Brad told Phil, “leave.”

“That pretty little thing who sneaked out of here when I came to the door—was that her?”

“That was my sister,” Brad said.

Phil raised himself laboriously to his feet, like he was ninety-seven instead of seventy-seven, and all that would save him from a painful and rapid descent into the grave all but yawning at the tips of his gleaming shoes was Brad's signature on a movie contract. “Well, whoever this woman is, I'd like her name. Maybe
she
can get you to see reason.”

That made Brad smile. Meg made him see galaxies colliding. Once or twice, during the night, he'd almost seen God. But reason?

Nope.

He plopped a dollop of butter into the skillet.

Phil made a huffy exit, slamming the screen door behind him.

Willie gave a low whine.

“You're right,” Brad told the dog. “He'll probably be back.”

 

Meg stood as if frozen in the hallway of Indian Rock's only hotel, wanting to turn and run, but too stunned to move.

She'd just gathered the impetus to flee when her father stuck a hand out. “Ted Ledger,” he said, by way of introduction. “Come in and meet your sister, Meg.”

Her sister?

It was that, added to a desire to commit matricide, that brought Meg over the threshold and into her mother's simply furnished, elegantly rustic suite.

Eve was nowhere in sight, the coward. But a little girl, ten or twelve years old, sat stiffly on the couch, hands folded in her lap. She was blond and blue-eyed, clad in cheap discount-store jeans and a floral shirt with ruffles, and the look on her face was one of terrified defiance.

“Hello,” Meg said, forcing the words past her heart, which was beating in her throat.

The marvelous blue eyes narrowed.

“Carly,” said Ted Ledger, “say hello.”

“Hello,” Carly complied grudgingly.

Looking at the child, Meg couldn't help thinking that the baby she'd lost would have been about this same age, if it hadn't been for the miscarriage.

She straightened her spine. Turned to the father who hadn't cared enough to send her so much as an e-mail, let alone be part of her life. “Where is my mother?” she asked evenly.

“Hiding out,” Ledger said with a wisp of a grin. In his youth, he'd probably been handsome. Now he was thin and gray-haired, with dark shadows under his pale blue eyes.

Carly looked Meg over again and jutted out her chin. “I don't want to live with her,” she said. “She probably doesn't need a kid hanging around anyhow.”

“Go in the kitchen,” Ledger told the child.

To Meg's surprise, Carly obeyed.

“Live with me?” Meg echoed in a whisper.

“It's that or foster care,” Ledger said. “Sit down.”

Meg sat, not because her father had asked her to, but because all the starch had gone out of her knees. Questions battered at the back of her throat, like balls springing from a pitching machine.

Where have you been?

Why didn't you ever call?

If I kill my mother, could a dream-team get me off without prison time?

“I know this is sudden,” Ted Ledger said, perching on the edge of the white velvet wingback chair Eve had had sent from her mansion in San Antonio, to make the place more “homey.”

“But the situation is desperate.
I'm
desperate.”

Meg tried to swallow, but couldn't. Her mouth was too dry, and her esophagus had closed up. “I don't believe this,” she croaked.

“Your mother and I agreed, long ago,” Ledger went on, “that it would be best if I stayed out of your life. That's why she never brought you to visit me.”

“Visit you?”

“I was in prison, Meg. For embezzlement.”

“From McKettrickCo,” Meg mused aloud, startled, but at the same time realizing that she'd known all along, on some half-conscious level.

“I told you he was a waste of hair and hide,” Angus said. He stood over by the fake fire place, one arm resting on the mantelpiece.

Meg took care to ignore him, not to so much as glance in his direction, though she could see him out of the corner of one eye. He was in old-man mode today, white-headed and wrinkled and John Wayne-tough, but dressed for the trail.

“Yes,” Ledger replied. “Your mother saw that there was no scandal—easier to do in those days, before the media
came into its own. I went to jail. She went on with her life.”

“Where does Carly fit in?”

Ledger's smile was soft and sad. “While I was inside, I got religion, as they say. When I was released, I found a job, met a woman, got married. We had Carly. Then, three years ago, Sarah—my wife—was killed in a car accident. Things went downhill from there—I was diagnosed last month.”

Tears burned in Meg's eyes, but they weren't for Ledger, or even for Sarah. They were for Carly. Although she'd grown up in a different financial situation, with all the stability that came with simply being a McKettrick, she knew what the child must be going through.

“You don't have any other family? Perhaps Sarah's people—”

Ledger shook his head. “There's no one. Your mother has generously agreed to pay my medical bills and arrange for a decent burial, but I'll be lucky if I live six weeks. And once I'm gone, Carly will be alone.”

Meg pressed her finger tips to her temples and breathed slowly and deeply. “Maybe Mom could—”

“She's past the age to raise a twelve-year-old,” Ledger interrupted.

He leaned forward slightly in his chair, rested his elbows on his knees, inter twined his fingers and let his hands dangle. “Meg, you don't owe me a damn thing. I was no kind of father, and I'm not pretending I was. But Carly is your half sister. She's got your blood in her veins. And she doesn't have anybody else.”

Meg closed her eyes, trying to imagine herself raising a resentful, grieving preadolescent girl. As much as she'd longed for her own child, nothing had prepared her for this.

“She won't go to foster care,” she said. “Mother would never allow it.”

“Boarding school, then,” Ledger replied. “Carly would hate that. Probably run away. She needs a real home. Love. Somebody young enough to steer her safely through her teens, at least.”

“You heard her,” Meg said. “She doesn't want to live with me.”

“She doesn't know what she wants, except for me to have a miraculous recovery, and that isn't going to happen. I can't ask you to do this for me, Meg—I've got no right to ask anything of you—but I can ask you to do it for Carly.”

The room seemed to tilt. From the kitchen, Meg heard her mother's voice, and Carly's. What were they talking about in there?

“Okay,” Meg heard herself say.

Ledger's once-handsome face lit with a smile of relief and what looked like sincere gratitude. “You'll do it? You'll look after your sister?”

My sister.

“Yes,” Meg said. On the outside, she probably looked calm. On the inside, she was shaking. “What happens now?”

“I go into the hospital for pain control. Carly goes home with you for a few days. When—and if—I get out, she'll come back to stay with me.”

Meg nodded, her mind racing, groping, grasping for some handhold on an entirely new, entirely unexpected situation.

“We've got a room down stairs,” Ledger said, rising painfully from the chair. “Carly and I will leave you alone with Eve for a little while.”

Over by the fire place, Angus scowled, powerful arms
folded across his chest. Fortunately, he didn't say anything, because Meg would have told him to shut up if he had.

Her father left, Carly trailing after him.

Eve stepped into the kitchen doorway the moment they'd gone.

Angus vanished.

“Nice work, Mom,” Meg said, still too shaken to stand up. Since a murder would be hard to pull off sitting down, her mother was off the hook. Temporarily.

“She's about the same age as your baby would have been,” Eve said. “It's fate.”

Meg's mouth fell open.

“Of course I knew,” Eve told her, venturing as far as the white velvet chair and perching grace fully on the edge of its cushion. “I'm your mother.”

Meg closed her mouth. Tightly.

Eve's eyes were on the door through which Ted Ledger and Carly had just passed. “I loved him,” she said. “But when he admitted stealing all that money, there was nothing I could do to keep him out of prison. We divorced after his conviction, and he asked me not to tell you where he was.”

Meg sagged back in her own chair, still dizzy. Still speechless.

“She's a beautiful child,” Eve said, referring, of course, to Carly. “You looked just like her, at that age. It's uncanny, really.”

“She's bound to have a lot of problems,” Meg managed.

“Of course she will. She lost her mother, and now her father is at death's door. But she has you, Meg. That makes her lucky, in spite of everything else.”

“I haven't the faintest idea how to raise a child,” Meg pointed out.

“Nobody does, when they start out,” Eve reasoned. “Children don't come with a handbook, you know.”

Suddenly, Meg remembered the lunch she had scheduled with Cheyenne, the groceries she'd intended to buy. Instantaneous motherhood hadn't been on her to-do list for the day.

She imagined making a call to Cheyenne.
Gotta postpone lunch. You see, I just gave birth to a twelve-year-old in my mother's living room.

“I had plans,” she said lamely.

“Didn't we all?” Eve countered.

“There's no food in my refrigerator.”

“Supermarket's right down the road.”

“Where have they been living? What kind of life has she had, up to now?”

“A hard one, I would imagine. Ted's something of a drifter—I suspect they've been living out of that old car he drives. He claims he home schooled her, but knowing Ted, that probably means she knows how to read a racing form and cal cu late the odds of winning at Power ball.”

“Great,” Meg said, but something motherly was stirring inside her, something hopeful and brave and very, very fragile. “Can I count on you for help, or just the usual interference?”

Eve laughed. “Both,” she said.

Meg found her purse, fumbled for her cell phone, dialed Cheyenne's number.

It was something of a relief that she got her friend's voice mail.