The Wind Comes Sweeping

The Wind Comes Sweeping
Marcia Preston

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Chapter Thirty

Author Note

Discussion Questions

Prologue

THE LEGEND OF SILK MOUNTAIN

Oklahoma Territory, 1895.

This is the way the story came down to me. The way it might have been.

Even before daylight, Leasie awoke to the yawling wind. It rang across the flat plains and scoured the shale rocks on Silk Mountain. It whistled through cracks in the cabin walls so fiercely that she could feel it on her cold cheeks where she lay in bed, cocooned in three quilts. Nothing was safe from the long, prying fingers of the wind. Day and night, it never ceased.

Jacob was already up, dressing on the other side of the curtain that served as their bedroom wall. She heard one boot clunk on the wood floor after he’d laced it, then the other, and the rustle of his coat as he pulled it on. The cabin door opened and sucked the curtain outward, the cry of the wind suddenly close and loud until he shut the door again.

She ought to get up. Jacob would need a hot breakfast when his chores were finished. She lay for a moment longer inside the warm quilts. The cracks of sky in the log walls were getting lighter; the sun would be up soon, but inside the cabin it was still hazy dark. She pictured Jacob forking prairie hay into the pen for their horse, Brownie, and for the mule and the milk cow. Grain was scarce, but he rationed one cup a day for the mash of milk and table scraps he fed the hog. The scrawny pig would become bacon and ham and chops and fatback, meat to last through the next arduous winter.

The last thing Jacob would do before coming in for breakfast was to break ice on the half barrel where the animals drank, and bring a bucket of the water inside. She would have to boil it to make it safe for cooking or drinking or washing dishes. Every two days he hauled water from the river. Come spring, he would try again to dig a well. When they had a well with a windmill, Jacob said, the days would be easier for them both. She pictured the paddles of the windmill spinning in the endless wind.

Leasie rolled to the edge of the bed and stuck her stockinged feet out from under the covers. Jacob had lit the fire in the cookstove before he went out, but its heat never reached the floorboards or the corners. She pulled yesterday’s clothes from the chair next to the bed and dressed herself under the quilts. Three petticoats, for warmth. Her camisole, then the coarse muslin dress, and her apron on top of that. She couldn’t face going out in the cold to the outhouse before breakfast, so she used the chamber pot in the corner and covered it with a square board. Then she laced up her brown boots and ran a brush through her hair, twisting it up behind her head in a vertical roll. It had grown so long that the ends sprouted like a turkey’s tail at the crown of her head. She secured it with the four hairpins she’d laid on an upturned bucket beside the chair.

She ducked past the curtain, leaving the bed to air out before she made it, and set about making breakfast. All the while, the frenzied wind licked around the cabin walls, through the cracks at the window. It curled up from the floor-boards and snaked beneath her skirts. Her feet were already cold inside her boots. She made bacon and biscuits. With yesterday’s boiled water she made coffee. Lots of strong coffee.

Before the biscuits were ready, Jacob came in, riding a gust of wind into the house. Whatever heat had accumulated inside the cabin was sucked out the door. He didn’t even say good-morning, just stood beside the stove and warmed his backside.

Jacob was thirteen years older than Leasie, and sometimes he acted more like a father than a husband. A strict father, at that. She was nearly nineteen; she didn’t need a father. She needed a husband who was soft sometimes, especially in the bed they shared. A husband who would talk to her about something besides the plowing and the crops. Most days he disappeared into the fields after breakfast and she didn’t see him again until supper. She was by herself all day in the tiny cabin, no bigger than one room of the house in Kansas City where she’d grown up. When he came home and she asked him about his day, he would talk about the work that still needed doing, and complain about the lack of rain. Once he’d seen Indians in the distance, on horseback. She questioned him about that, but he didn’t know what tribe they were, or where they were going. Then he’d fall silent, concentrating on his food. He never asked what she’d done all day. Maybe he knew how lonely she was and didn’t want to hear about it.

In warm weather she could spend her time outdoors. She tended a garden, spindly though it was, and washed their clothes in a big iron pot. Sometimes she walked out across the prairie until the cabin was no more than a dot in the distance, then turned around and walked back. If she went too far and lost sight of the cabin, she might lose her bearings and never find it again.

Once, though, she had kept going. She walked all the way to Silk Mountain. Jacob said people called it Silk Mountain because after a rainstorm, if the sunlight broke through the clouds just right, the mountain’s flat top turned silver and shiny. She’d watched for that the first spring, and the second, but she never saw it happen.

There was no way to judge the distance out here, and the mountain looked closer than it really was. It took a long time to get there, and when she stood at the foot of the rocky outcropping that rose so unexpectedly from the grassy prairie, she was disappointed. Up close, Silk Mountain didn’t look like a mountain at all, just a big upheaval of boulders. Still, she would have liked to climb up and look off from its top. But she was already going to be late getting home to start supper.

Jacob never said a word while he waited on his meal that evening, and she didn’t tell him she had walked miles across the prairie and thought of never coming back.

She crossed off days on the Montgomery Ward & Co. calendar Jacob brought home from the mercantile store. The nearest settlement lay a full day’s ride to the east, and when he went for supplies, he was gone two nights and three days. She couldn’t go along because somebody had to stay and tend the animals.

On the first week of spring weather in 1895, Jacob put on his cleanest clothes and hitched the horse to the wagon. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said, meeting her eyes briefly before he climbed onto the wagon seat. His eyes were lake blue and always seemed to be looking at something she couldn’t see. He had loaded the rifle and hung it beside the door within her reach. “Don’t shoot nothing you don’t have to,” he said.

That year the weather went from winter to summer with only a week of spring in between. The day Jacob left turned hot and windy. At first she enjoyed being on her own, not having to cook big meals. She worked in her garden, fed the livestock and milked the cow. But that night, lying alone in the drafty cabin with the wind huffing at the door, she heard coyotes nearby, their howling lonesome and eerie. Finally she drifted into frightening dreams and was awakened by the echo of a scream on the wind. She sat up straight in the bed, her heart pounding.

People said the cry of a panther sounded like a woman screaming. She didn’t want to know which one she had heard. She was afraid she was that woman.

What if she became pregnant and had to bear her baby out here alone, no friend or midwife to help her? What if the creatures from her dream were attracted by the sharp aroma of blood and came to devour the child? Leasie didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

The next morning she arose exhausted but with a sense of purpose. She put up her hair and made the bed and cleaned the kitchen. She threw the quilts across the clothesline to air out. The day was even warmer than yesterday, and windier. For miles around her the prairie grass rippled, undisturbed by animal or human. A lone hawk circled high above Silk Mountain.

She thought of writing a letter to her family back in Kansas City, but after the first few words she stopped. That world didn’t exist anymore; there was only this place, and the wind.

Leasie filled the big iron pot in the yard with soapy water and carried a bucket of it to the cabin. She took off her dress and left it outside the door. In her petticoats and camisole, she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the wood floor of the cabin. Her knuckles were raw and red. When she’d finished, she left the door open so the floor would dry.

She put both her dresses in the wash water, swishing them up and down, then rinsed them in a separate bucket. Dust whipped across the trampled yard and stung her bare arms. Her wet clothes would get dirty again just hanging on the line, but that couldn’t be helped. She turned the two dresses wrong side out to lessen fading by the sun and hung them on the clothesline next to the bedding.

She dumped the soapy water, poured the rinse water onto her garden and set out walking across the prairie.

It was late morning and the sun warmed her shoulders. She imagined her camisole and full petticoats as a white sundress, like a Kansas City girl might wear to a party. She picked a yellow flower from the knee-high grass and wove its stem into her hair. A jackrabbit startled from the grass and bounded away, and three shiny crows crossed the sky. She saw no people, no houses.

The sun was straight overhead when she reached Silk Mountain and began her climb. Her brown boots wedged in rock crevices and her palms reddened with shale dust where she grabbed on to boost herself up. She had forever, so she took her time.

She was sweating by the time she reached the flat rock at the top. From the ground it looked square as the bottom of a buckboard, but once she’d climbed onto it, she found the south edge was cropped off like a bite mark and it slanted slightly to the west. She stepped over two gaping cracks and stood at the flaking edge of a shale boulder that faced east. The slab jutted over the rocky slope below like the prow of aship.

Her hair had come undone and it whipped around her face. She held it back with both hands and looked across the land in all directions. Somewhere there were towns and people, but here the land was empty and endless and offered no respite from the wind. The only feature besides rolling grassland and a line of trees along the distant river was a rocky ridge, not as high as Silk Mountain, several miles to the north.

Leasie spread out her arms. Closed her eyes. Tipped her head back, and fell forward over the edge.

Only God knows what she thought of in those few seconds, the warm wind ripping past her white skin until she went to ground.

It was days before Jacob found her body. The vultures had found it first.

He didn’t bury her remains on his little homestead, nor on Silk Mountain. For reasons known only to him, he buried Leasie on the slope of that rocky ridge she’d seen in the distance. Later he married a Kiowa woman who’d received ownership of the ridge as part of her tribal allotment. Jacob Youngblood was one-eighth Indian himself, though no one remembers which tribe.

Gradually Jacob and his second wife bought or traded for her relatives’ allotments and the adjoining unassigned lands. They amassed two thousand acres, more or less, that became the original Killdeer Ridge Ranch. His Kiowa wife didn’t live long either, but she bore him three sons. One of those sons was my grandfather.

Jacob Youngblood was my great-grandfather; the Kiowa woman called Tia-Ma my great-grandmother. I never knew much about Tia-Ma, but the legend of Leasie was kept alive through the generations. Sometimes I think Leasie was my true ancestor, more than Jacob or the Kiowa woman whose death from influenza was much less dramatic.

Oklahoma gained statehood in 1907 and Jacob married again, a woman named Naomi who helped him build the ranch into a prosperous cattle operation. The ranch passed down to my grandfather, Stone Youngblood, who bought out his brothers, then to my father, J.B. And now to me. My name is Marik Youngblood.

Hard times took a toll over the years, and the ranch isn’t the sprawling two-thousand acres it was a century ago. I left it once, intending to be an artist and a teacher instead of a ranchwoman. But as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. At my father’s graveside on Killdeer Ridge—in the family plot that grew up around Leasie’s bones—I promised J.B. two things, hoping to make up for all the ways I’d failed him. One of those things was to preserve what was left of Killdeer Ridge Ranch and keep it in the family. The other was to find his only heir and grandchild, the daughter I’d given away.

Chapter One

Killdeer Ridge Ranch

Before sunrise, Marik drove her father’s old truck along the white gravel service road that wound up the ridge to the giant windmills. Dust funneled up behind the pickup’s tires, and a chilly wind gusted through the passenger window, stuck permanently halfway open. The pickup’s heater poured warm air on her boots. A preseason thunderstorm had blown through the night before, with plenty of bluster but only a spattering of rain. Spring was weeks away.

She took it slow over a patch of graded ruts, coffee sloshing against the lid of its thermal mug in the console, the arthritic joints of the pickup creaking. Her dad had named the truck Red Ryder, after an old-time hero of cowboy comics. Every time she climbed into the cab to make her morning rounds on the ranch, she caught her father’s scent, though he’d been gone nearly two years.

She was nearing the apex of the ridge where she stopped every morning to watch the sun rise over the ranch and the river valley. Against a blue-gray sky, forty-five giant wind turbines towered above the horizon, catching the first rays of sun in their long white arms. Below them the earth waited in shadow.

The first time she’d seen windmills like these at the White Deer facility in West Texas, their stark beauty and clean design had stopped her breath. Their slow, rhythmic turning sounded like a heartbeat, the mystical pulse of the earth itself. Regardless of storms or heat, the white giants stood inscrutable, heads turned to the wind. These forty-five turbines produced enough electricity to power nearly a million homes, and this was only phase one of the wind farm.

Marik parked Red Ryder at her usual spot on the highest point of the ridge. That’s when she saw it—a dark mass on the rocky ground, something that didn’t belong. It lay at the foot of Windmill 17, where the service road wound back on itself before disappearing behind the low hill.

She leaned forward against the steering wheel and squinted into the predawn light. The blackish mound was about the size of a newborn calf, nearly hidden by last season’s sagebrush and dried yucca. But it couldn’t be a calf; the cattle were in the lower fields now, on winter-wheat pasture. Maybe a runaway trash bag that blew up here in the night? But it looked too solid for a trash bag, and heavy. It wasn’t moving with the wind. She had the sinking impression that whatever it was, it had once been a living thing.

She searched the dusty floorboard for the binocular case. The binocs, too, had been her dad’s. She could see his calloused hands on the metal when she removed the beat-up glasses and got out of the truck. Wind whipped her ponytail and the loose ends stung her eyes. Should have brought a stocking cap. It was always cooler up here than in the ranch yard, where the ground was flat and trees sheltered the buildings. She zipped her jacket and stood on the running board with the door open, steadying her elbows on top of the cab.

The sun had breached the horizon now, and the slim rotors of the windmills cast moving shadows across the land. Next month wild verbena and prairie daisies would thrust up from the rocky soil. But in February the ridge was a tonal study in pale gold and shades of russet brown. She liked to paint it that way, but those paintings were hard to sell. Buyers wanted more color.

She held the binoculars to her eyes and searched the landscape for the alien object. Low brush and shadows obstructed her view, and the lenses of the old binocs were fogged with scratches. She tossed the field glasses on the truck seat and walked down the service road toward number 17.

Gravel crunched beneath her boots. The only other sound was the unhurried soughing of the windmills.

An immense canopy of sky arched cloudless from horizon to horizon. Severe clear, her pilot father would have said. It was the kind of day her grandmother had written about in diaries, a diamond of hope after a long, cold winter. Soon when she walked here she’d have to watch for killdeer eggs at the edge of the road, the speckled eggs perfectly camouflaged among the rocks.

When she drew closer to the dark object lying in the scrub growth, she saw the wind ruffle its edges—like feathers. Her chest closed up. Please, not an eagle. But no other bird would be that large. She left the roadbed and crossed open ground, stepping over clumps of dried timothy and prickly-pear cactus. Another few feet and she stood over the fallen bird. Damn.

Her artist’s eye cataloged the mottled colors—burnt umber, sienna, Payne’s grey. Highlights of gold oak. A golden eagle, she thought, though she’d never seen one this close. She crouched beside it.

The head was bent beneath its body. One wing lay unfurled and obviously broken. Even inert, the hooked talons looked macabre. Those claws could seize a slippery fish right out of the water, or rip apart a small animal to feed the eagle’s young. She touched the bird with the toe of her boot, hoping for movement and a chance for rescue. There was none. The body felt stiff.

From a distant pasture a bull claimed his territory with a wheezy bellow. Above her head, the windmill blades kept up their leisurely whough, whough, whough, whough. She looked up at the turning rotors. The carcass lay right below them, no more than twenty-five feet from the tower base, as if the eagle had simply dropped from the sky. The fiberglass rotors appeared to turn slowly, but that was an optical illusion. Each hollow blade was more than a hundred feet long. The tips of the blades could reach 156 miles per hour and still look slow to the human eye.

Was it possible the eagle had flown into one? She couldn’t imagine that. Eagles’ eyesight was legendary; they spotted prey on the ground or in the water from hundreds of feet above. Nevertheless, if her neighbors found out about the dead eagle, that’s exactly what they’d claim—that the bird had been killed by the blades. Burt and Lena Gurdman had objected to the wind farm from the beginning and had delayed construction of the first phase with their complaints. Folks around here were stoutly protective of the migratory birds that wintered along the river, and Marik had no doubt Burt Gurdman would use the eagle’s death as ammunition for another battle.

The dark feathers glistened in angled sunlight. The bird’s wingspan must be seven feet, at least. Even dead it looked beautiful and strong and utterly wild. Carefully, she rolled it over. Thank God it didn’t have a white head. She was fairly sure bald eagles were still on the endangered-species list, though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had recommended delisting several years ago.

She ran her fingers over the satiny breast feathers. “What happened to you, big brother? I wish you could tell me.”

The coming furor rose in her imagination like a bad movie. It was illegal to be in possession of an eagle feather, let alone an entire animal. If he could, Gurdman would use this new argument to stop construction of the last twenty-five wind towers.

Don’t borrow the jack before the tire’s flat. It was her father’s voice, clear as ever in her head. His easygoing ways had endeared him to everyone but had also led the ranch into deep debt. She’d had no idea how deep until his sudden death.

Marik laid an arm across her forehead, shading her eyes from a brilliant sunrise. Her gaze traveled down the slope and across the wide fields near the river.

She saw three choices. She could turn the bird over to a county official or wildlife ranger and meet the consequences head-on. Or she could haul the eagle to the river, let it be found in its usual habitat—but on the opposite bank that was part of the state wildlife preserve. Not on her ranch.

Or she could bury the creature where it lay and keep quiet.

All three options stunk. But when she thought of the impending brouhaha over the eagle’s death, it was damn tempting to go home and get her shovel.

Her battle of conscience dissolved with the growl of tires on gravel. Somebody was coming. The sound drifted to her across the ridge before she spotted the vehicle winding through the switchbacks and up the rise.

Double damn.

Marik straightened her spine and stood beneath the giant turbines, facing into the wind. Waiting for trouble.

A white pickup tacked toward her at a leisurely pace. She had not closed the gate at the main road and, despite the No Trespassing signs, the driver apparently took the open gate as an invitation. The men who tended the windmills drove white pickups, but she could already see this one was a stretch cab and the power company’s gold logo wasn’t painted on the door. None of the neighboring ranchers drove a truck like that, either.

She lost sight of the vehicle behind a rise and then it emerged again on the high ridge. The truck stopped beside Red Ryder and a tall, lean man got out. He wore jeans and low-heeled boots with a quilted vest over his long-sleeved shirt. She didn’t know him. He clamped a wide-brimmed hat on his head and started down the slope toward her with a rolling stride.

His face looked friendly enough until he saw the mound of feathers at her feet. When his eyes fixed on the eagle, all hints of a smile faded away. He didn’t speak as he approached but knelt immediately and put his hands on the bird, turning it over, spreading out the feathers on the underside of the tail.

“Bad news,” he said. “It’s a bald eagle.”

He looked up at her with gold-ochre eyes. She frowned. “There’s no white head.”

“It’s a young one. They don’t get the distinctive white feathers on the head and tip of the tail until they’re at least four years old.”

“How do you know it’s not a golden?” she said, still hoping.

“The feet, for one thing. Golden eagles have feathers all the way to the claws. This one doesn’t. And see that grayish color of the feathers on the underside of the tail? That’s distinctive to a young bald eagle. A golden would have white on the tail, up next to the body.”

“It’s sure big to be immature.”

“Probably a female. They get larger than males. I’d guess it’s two or three years old.”

Perfect. Not just an eagle; it’s the freaking national symbol.

The stranger looked younger than she was, early twenties maybe, except for those case-hardened eyes. “You talk like a biologist,” she said.

“Not exactly. But I majored in it, along with land management. I’m Jace Rainwater, your nine o’clock appointment.”

He brushed his hands off on his jeans and stood. Six-four, she guessed, even without the big hat. He paused as if waiting for her to introduce herself or offer a handshake. She did neither. She was supposed to interview him about the foreman’s job—two hours from now. Nowadays people called it ranch manager, but she figured if foreman was a good enough title for Monte, her dad’s old friend, it was good enough for whomever she hired.

“Sorry to be so early,” he said. “I drove from Amarillo and made better time than I expected.”

“You must have left in the dead of night to get here by sunrise.”

He offered no explanation. Maybe he awoke hours before daylight the way she did, worming over the things she could change and the ones she couldn’t.

“There was nobody around down there,” he said, gesturing toward the cluster of ranch buildings at the foot of the ridge, “so when I saw the truck up here I figured it must be you.”

She glanced at the eagle again. “Early would be a good trait for a ranch hand, any morning but this one.”

“At least the eagle’s a young one, probably not half of a breeding pair,” he offered.

She blew out a breath, looking across the fields to the west where the Gurdmans’ farm abutted her land. “My neighbors won’t care how old the bird is when they try to block construction on the other windmills.”

“Your neighbors object to the wind farm?”

“Those do.”

He followed her gaze toward a distant clump of trees where the glint of a white farmhouse reflected the early sun. “What for? It’s pollution-free energy and it’s quiet. Cattle can graze right under the turbines.”

“Exactly. But the windmills might emit harmful rays that cause cancer and birth defects.”

“Good grief.”

“Not to mention that the Gurdmans missed out on the lease money from Great Plains Power & Light. The company wanted only this high ground that’s not sheltered from the wind.”

“Ah,” he said. “So it’s about money.”

“That’s what I think, but they won’t admit it. All the farms and ranches out here are struggling financially. The wind farm bailed me out, and the Gurdmans resent me for it. And now, of course, they can say the windmills kill eagles.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” His attention was on the eagle again. “You need to take the carcass to the state wildlife office in Pacheeta. I’ll load it in the truck for you.”

“Thanks,” she said without enthusiasm. Pacheeta was the county seat and fifty miles away. “But I thought I’d just call the local law to come pick it up.”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t. No telling what might happen to it before a wildlife ranger got to see it.”

For a man who’d just arrived on the scene, he had plenty of opinions. She wondered if Rainwater was an Indian name. He didn’t look any more Indian than she did, with her light brown hair and blue eyes. But half the folks in Oklahoma had some Indian heritage if you traced their lineage back far enough.

He pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket and lifted the eagle by its feet, staying clear of the talons. And then he leaned in to smell the bird.

“What are you, the animal CSI? Don’t tell me you can tell how long it’s been dead by sniffing.”

“No. But I think this bird’s come in contact with Diazinon. That might have something to do with why it died.”

“Diazinon—the stuff you spray to kill ticks and fleas?”

“Right. It was outlawed a few years ago, like DDT before it, but lots of people still have some sitting in their storage sheds.”

“How would an eagle get hold of that?”

“Good question. Maybe by accident, but it would take an awful lot of it to be lethal for a bird that size. Even DDT usage didn’t kill the adult birds, just weakened their eggshells so the babies didn’t hatch.”

A crawly feeling rose up her back. “You think somebody poisoned it on purpose?”

“Look, the smell might be something else,” he said. “I’m just guessing. You need to have a wildlife official examine it.”

She followed him up the rise to where they’d parked, and he laid the eagle carefully on the stained bed of her truck. “You don’t happen to have a garbage bag, I guess.”

“The whole truck’s pretty much a garbage bag.”

He didn’t dispute it. “Wait a minute. I might have something.” He rummaged in a storage box mounted behind the cab of his truck and came out with a lightweight tarp. He opened it in her truck bed, laid the bird in the center and wrapped it up.

“Good idea,” she said. “I don’t need everybody in town to see my illegal cargo.”

“Not just that. We want to keep it in the same shape you found it, without damage in transit.”

“We?”

“I’ll ride with you if you want,” he said. “I know some guys in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Maybe I can help smooth any ruffled feathers.”

She made a face but he didn’t seem to notice the pun.

“It couldn’t hurt,” she said. “We can talk about the foreman’s job on the drive. Follow me down to the house and you can park your truck there.”

He touched two fingers to the brim of his hat, like John Wayne in an old cowboy movie, and walked back to his vehicle.

For the space of time it took to open Red Ryder’s mulish door, she watched him go. She’d read the résumé he’d e-mailed. He had good credentials and a background in conservation that was a plus in her view. But a résumé didn’t tell much about a man’s temperament or his character. Could she trust this guy to live within a stone’s throw of her house, with no one else around for miles?

Then she thought of the eagle again. If Rainwater was right about the Diazinon and the bird was intentionally poisoned and dumped beneath the windmills, there was no doubt in her mind who’d done it.

Chapter Two

Red Ryder burped smoke and lurched into gear. With Rainwater following, Marik zigzagged down the ridge toward the two-lane blacktop road that people around here called a highway. This time she closed the gate behind them.

The ranch buildings—her house, the foreman’s cottage and two barns—sat at the base of Killdeer Ridge half a mile from the windmills as the crow flew, a mile and a half by road. From the paved road she turned beneath a cedar-log archway with Killdeer Ridge Ranch branded into the wood. The gravel on the quarter-mile driveway was nearly worn away, the one-lane road in need of grading.

They passed the foreman’s quarters first, where Jace Rainwater would live if she hired him. The two-bedroom cottage sat vacant, its windows dark and lonesome. For months she’d resisted hiring anybody to replace Monte. After J.B.’s accident, Monte had deflated like a wrinkled balloon, his seventy years coming upon him all at once. He’d decided to retire but agreed to stay on a few months to help her get a handle on running the ranch. The few months turned into a year. Monte was her surrogate grandfather when she was growing up, a fixture at the ranch since before she was born. Without him the place didn’t feel right. Marik still held a mean little resentment toward his daughter, who’d finally come down from Oklahoma City with a U-Haul and taken Monte and his things back with her.

She parked Red Ryder in the graveled space in front of the cobblestone ranch house originally built by Stone Youngblood, a grandfather she never knew. The original structure was two-storeys and square as a shoe box. Marik’s mother had supervised several additions, including a southern-style front porch, a carport and a master-bedroom suite on the ground floor at the back. If it wasn’t architecturally harmonious, the big house was comfortable inside and definitely unique. It might have grown even larger if Julianna Youngblood hadn’t taken her plans with her to the grave when Marik was six years old.

Marik wondered if Jace Rainwater could sense the history that lived among these cobblestone buildings, or if he saw only the shabby remains of a once-prosperous enterprise.

His truck pulled in beside her and rolled to a stop. She shouldered her door open and started up the rock sidewalk to the house. “Want some coffee for the drive?” she called. On a ranch, coffee was one of the basic food groups. She’d been addicted since high school.

“No, thanks. I drank about a gallon on the drive out here,” he said.

“Then you’d better come in and use the facility before we go.”

She directed him to the bathroom, then clumped up the split-log staircase to her bedroom and pulled on cleaner boots for the trip to Pacheeta. If Rainwater had waited until nine o’clock to show up for their appointment, she might have fixed her face a bit before then. Or she might not. At any rate, she didn’t see much point in it now.

When she came back down he had gone outdoors. She refilled her thermal mug and turned off the coffeepot but didn’t bother locking the house. Her dad believed that locks kept out only honest men; a thief would break down the door or smash a window. She found Jace checking the cargo still wrapped securely in the bed of her truck.

Red Ryder’s springs squawked as he settled onto the seat, his shoulders filling up his side of the cab. Marik coaxed the truck into reverse and they wheezed down the driveway toward the highway, leaving his nice airtight truck parked by her house. She hoped the old red pickup was up to the trip.

They rattled over the blacktop, watching shadows recede across the landscape as the sun ascended. She saw him try the window handle once, but when it didn’t respond he said nothing and zipped up his vest. He didn’t talk much, which was okay with her. Her social skills had regressed since she’d moved back to the ranch; after Monte left, she often went several days without talking to anyone.

A coyote trotted along a fence, heading toward a grove of leafless trees. Far to their right, above the line of trees that concealed the Silk Mountain River, a dark swosh etched the blue of the sky. The wingspan was too large for a hawk. It was another eagle, probably scanning a pool where the water was deep enough to hunt for fish. The sight of it sent a new pang of dread through her middle.

Rainwater saw it, too. “The river is the south boundary of your ranch?”

“Correct.”

“Does it border your neighbors’ land, too? The ones opposing the wind farm?”

She nodded. “The wildlife preserve butts up to me on the south, across the river,” she said. “The Searcy ranch is to the east, and the Gurdmans’ farm on the west. The land to the north is owned by somebody who lives in Oklahoma City and never comes out here. The elk from the refuge have sort of taken over the pastureland there.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah, they’re beautiful. In the fall you can hear them bugling.” Her mouth twisted. “Burt Gurdman runs ’em off his land with a shotgun.”

Rainwater said nothing, just shook his head.

Marik pulled a folded paper from above the visor and handed it to Rainwater. It had come in yesterday’s mail from the office of Earl Searcy, mayor of Silk. The notice invited local residents to attend a community meeting for the purpose of discussing the rural water system, a proposal to hire a full-time police chief and a possible moratorium on construction of twenty-five additional wind turbines on Killdeer Ridge. GPP&L had already paid half the lease money for phase two of the wind turbines. Marik had used the money to retire some of her debt and to buy a lustful young bull and a new bunch of heifers. If construction was blocked, the company might want that money returned.

The mere sight of the flyer made her angry all over again. The least Earl Searcy could have done was phone her about it in person. Silk didn’t have a mayor when she was a kid, and she liked it better that way.

Except for the Gurdmans, the Searcys were her closest neighbors and good people. Earl had been a friend to her dad. His sons, Jackson and Cade, often helped out on the Youngblood ranch. None of them had ever said anything about opposing the wind farm.

“I don’t know where they get off discussing construction on private property,” she said. “My ranch isn’t inside city limits. There’s no question of zoning or public access or any other damn thing that should concern city government, such as it is. The construction is phase two of a project that was thoroughly discussed, state permits obtained, all the legalese dotted and crossed months ago.”

He handed the flyer back to her and she stuffed it behind the visor again. “But if this eagle was killed by the windmills and some federal agency gets involved,” she said, “that’s a whole new ball game.”

“You need a necropsy on the bird before that meeting.”

She glanced at him. “What’s that? An autopsy for animals?”

“Exactly. That’s why you want to turn it over to the wildlife department instead of a county sheriff.”

Maybe it was a good thing Jace Rainwater showed up early after all.

“During the first phase of construction, somebody put sugar in the gas tanks of the big dirt-moving machines,” she told him. “Shut them down for several weeks. The site boss said they had trouble like that sometimes, but not usually in such an isolated spot. He thought it was probably teenagers, but I had my doubts even then.”

Rainwater nodded but made no comment. She dropped the subject, regretting that she’d aired her grievances to a stranger.

After a minute he pointed through the windshield toward a rocky mound in the distance. “Is that Silk Mountain?”

“Yup. That’s it. The town was named for the mountain, but people dropped the mountain part years ago and just call the town Silk.” A neat irony, she thought, for a village of maybe two thousand that was anything but silky.

The mountain wasn’t much of a mountain, either, just a geographical anomaly that had thrust a tall, red mesa far above the surrounding level terrain. Flat shale boulders stacked up like a deli sandwich that narrowed to a square, treeless summit. Between the mountain and the road they were driving lay a wide, flat plain veined by creeks that drained into the river. In the heat of summer, the creek beds dried up and stranded the resident crawdads.

“I read how Silk Mountain got its name,” Rainwater said.

She nodded. “Did the guidebook tell you about the ghost that lives up there?”

He glanced sideways, his face skeptical. “No. I guess it left out the good parts.”

“They say a young pioneer wife who lived out here before there was a town or a road, or anything, went crazy from loneliness and the unrelenting wind. One day while her husband was gone, she scrubbed the floor of her cabin, fed the milk cow and hung her only two dresses wrong side out on the clothesline. She was wearing a camisole and petticoats and farmer’s boots when she climbed to the top of Silk Mountain and jumped to her death.” Marik didn’t mention her near relation to the young wife. “Sometimes on a moonlit night, people see her ghost standing on the edge of Silk Rock.”

“Great story.” He looked toward the shale outcropping and smiled. “So have you ever seen her?”

Marik paused. “I don’t know you well enough to answer that.” It might have been just a trick of the light.

The blacktop road led them directly down the unnamed main street of Silk. It was still early, and only a few dusty pickups and the postmistress’s PT Cruiser were parked in the slanted spaces beside the street. Half of the storefronts sat vacant, sad reminders of somebody’s retail dreams gone up in dust. Around windows dimmed by gray grime, the painted facades peeled like a bad sunburn.

“There’s the P.O.,” Marik said as they rolled past, “and the grocery store–slash–drugstore, and the DHS office.”

“Every little town needs a welfare office,” he said drily.

“It isn’t just welfare. Daisy’s an area supervisor for Child Protective Services.” Daisy Gardner was the sole full-time employee at the local Department of Human Services office, and Marik’s closest friend. Actually her only friend, now that Monte had gone.

There was one traffic light in Silk, perpetually blinking yellow, never red. “The bank’s a branch of Pacheeta Farmers and Merchants,” she said. “Up ahead is the farmers’ co-op where I buy feed, and here’s our Sonic, the only fast food in town.”

“How’s the food?”

“Anything I don’t cook tastes great to me. And their cherry limeade is outstanding.”

Outside the little town the speed limit rose again. She urged Red Ryder up to sixty, its top speed, and the shimmy magically disappeared. The gas gauge jittered on a quarter of a tank; she would have to fill up in Pacheeta.

Her companion cleared his throat and segued into his job interview. “Did you have a chance to look at the résumé I sent?”

“I did, and it’s impressive. But that doesn’t tell me about your work ethic, or whether you’d have trouble being bossed by a woman.”

“Depends,” he said. “How bossy are you?”

“Huh. I’m supposed to ask the questions.”

“I see,” he said, and smiled.

“Frankly, with your background and work history, it makes me wonder why you’d want a job out here, which most people consider the middle of nowhere. You could make more money working for the USDA or even the state, in some environmental capacity.”

“That’s what I was doing in Amarillo, at the county level. Believe me, the pay wasn’t that great.” His gaze traveled across the land in front of them, from horizon to horizon. “I need more space, and I love this country. I came from Oklahoma originally.”

“So you’re not employed now?”

“I quit my job last week. For personal reasons,” he added. “I didn’t get fired.”

“Are these personal reasons going to follow you to the next job?” She glanced sideways and saw a muscle in his jaw tighten.

“My marriage is on the rocks. My wife just took a job she likes in Amarillo and she doesn’t want to move. We’re going to try separating for a while.”

He set his mouth in a way that let her know that’s all the personal information he cared to discuss. Fair enough. But a shaky marriage could mean that he’d be here just long enough to become helpful and then hightail it back to his wife.

The trouble was, the only other person who’d shown any interest in the job was not somebody she wanted on the place. She wouldn’t admit it aloud, but sometimes it was eerie living out there by herself after Monte left. And some of the work simply required more physical strength than she had. She was five-seven and strong, but even now she was nursing a strained shoulder from hefting sacks of feed into the back of the truck. She would reserve judgment about Jace Rainwater. If he could help her out of this eagle mess, that was a definite mark in his favor.

“Okay. Your turn to ask questions,” she said.

“Tell me about the ranch.”

“Twelve hundred and eighty acres, more or less. Small by ranching standards. Dad had to sell a piece of it a few years back. What’s left is about two square miles, though it isn’t square because of the river. I inherited it when my father died and my sister didn’t want anything to do with it.” She had a quick flash of Anna at the oak table in the kitchen, signing over her rights to Marik the day after their father’s funeral. Neither of them knew then that the ranch was immersed in debt.

“My sister’s five years older and escaped to California right after high school. I stayed here with Dad and helped him run the place along with Monte, the previous manager.” In those years they’d all assumed she would take over the ranch someday. But that had changed after she went off to college and fell in lust.

“Anna’s husband is a producer in L.A. and makes a ton of money. She said I deserved the ranch because I always loved the land.” Her smile twisted. “She thought she was doing me a favor.” Her sister’s jewelry alone could pay off most of the ranch’s debts, but Marik would never tell her that.

“I didn’t know how much trouble Dad was in until I moved back and took over,” she said. “The cattle market went to hell a few years back and he’d made some bad decisions. I had to sell off most of the herd to pay a note that was overdue. I was hanging on by a thread when Great Plains Power & Light came out here and proposed leasing the ridge for a wind farm. I studied the concept and really liked what they were doing. It seemed like a good use of the land, not to mention keeping me out of bankruptcy, so I signed a fifty-year lease. Monte and I thought Dad would approve.”

“The wind farm was what attracted me to the job,” Rainwater said. “I’ve always thought we ought to find a way to harness all this wind energy. It wasn’t the railroad that settled this part of the West—it was the windmill. If windmills can provide water for cattle and homes, why not electricity?”

“Why not, indeed.”

“But you still run cattle?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s a working ranch, just not a profitable one. I’m slowly building up the herd again, but I can’t manage more cattle until I have some help.” She shrugged. “I paint pictures, too, and during the leanest times I started selling a few to help pay the bills. There’s a big landscape I did of Silk Mountain hanging in the local bank.”

“My mom encouraged me to paint when I was a kid,” he said. “The kitchen, the living room, the barn…”

Marik laughed. “I do some of that, too.”

They’d gone another mile before he spoke again. He cleared his throat first, and she heard the hesitation in his voice.

“I have a son,” he said. “If you hired me, I would want to make sure it was okay for Zane to spend some time with me here. Mostly weekends, maybe longer in the summer.” He looked out across the fields beside the road, as if the thought of his son made him sad. “He’s a quiet kid, not rowdy.”

Maybe that had something to do with his wanting the job—a good place in the country for his son. Marik smiled. “I like kids. I was teaching school before Dad died and I came back here. As long as it didn’t interfere with your work, I’d have no problem with your son coming to visit. How old is Zane?”

“He’s eight.”

The same age as my daughter. She squinted toward the road ahead and waited out a sensation like her insides turning over.

Somebody else’s daughter.

Chapter Three

A July morning, eight years and seven months ago…From the right seat of the single-engine Cessna, Marik looked out across a bluestem pasture beyond the runway of a country airport. The bleached tips of the grass rippled like an ocean in the Oklahoma wind. The pasture looked solid enough to walk on, but looks were deceiving; the thigh-high grass could conceal a coyote or a newborn calf, or even a person. She imagined lying down in the grass, hiding from the ache that filled her spongy stomach.

A clear sky umbrellaed the landscape. Far to the southwest, toward the ranch, a few clouds hugged the horizon. She leaned back on the padded seat and watched her father on the tarmac, going through his preflight checks. He examined the gas sumps for water, lifted the cowling and checked the oil stick. She’d done it with him dozens of times, but today she had no desire to copilot, or to be in charge of anything. She was just a passenger, sore and tired, going home without a baby in her arms.

She closed her eyes and saw a tiny face, ruddy with frowning, the puffy eyes squinted shut. My daughter, she had thought, trying on the phrase like an unfamiliar wrap. But not for long.

The alarming red imprint of forceps just behind the temple. No harm, the nurse said, perfectly normal for a first delivery. The mark would go away.

The only thing beautiful about a newborn, she thought, is the fact of its being, the miracle of its life.

Then the nurse took her away.

The attorney sat in the hospital administrator’s office, his hair streaked with gray. A crucifix on the wall of the office…the smell of furniture polish. On the desk, a photo of two small children, a boy and a girl. She glanced at them and turned away.

Manicured hands laid the papers before her.

The room felt cold. She pulled the collar of her robe around her neck. Beneath her robe she wore the pajamas her father had brought her, cream with pink roses. His hand lay warm and familiar on her shoulder.

“Are you sure, honey? Once you sign these papers, there’s no going back.” His voice low, his face creased and tight.

They had talked it over endlessly; nothing else to say.

“It’s the right thing. Isn’t it?” Her voice raspy, not like hers.

“I believe it is, yes.”

Now she picked up the gold pen, scrawled her name, handed it back without looking up.

“I know it’s hard,” the attorney said. “But they’re a wonderful couple.”

Her father’s arm supported her when she tried to stand.

In the antiseptic-scented hallway, a woman in a seersucker robe passed them and peered at Marik’s puffy face. Marik turned away, laid her forehead on her father’s shoulder.

“I couldn’t get through this without you,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to,” he said, petting her hair. “I’ll always be here.”

Her father ran his hands over the prop blades, checking for blemishes. A yellow sun flowered in the east, heating the cockpit through the high windshield. The Cessna rocked as J. B. tested the flaps and trim tabs, manually working the ailerons and rudder. Marik thought, not for the first time, how young her father looked. Too young to be a grandfather, she told herself, but didn’t believe it.

A widower for fifteen years, J.B. was still lean and fit. When he came to visit her on campus her freshman year, her roommates had flirted with him. If he had moved to town instead of staying on the isolated ranch after her mother died, he probably would have remarried. But he loved the ranch, and he wanted to raise his daughters there.

Now lines of worry etched his sun-weathered face, and she was responsible for those lines. She would make it up to him, stay on the ranch and help him run it, like a son.

J.B. climbed inside the four-seater and buckled himself in, yelled the regulation warning out the window—“Clear the prop!”—though there was no one close enough to hear.

The Cessna’s engine fired to life and the plane shuddered. She watched the oil pressure come up while her father checked the fuel gauge and the alternator. He tested the magnetos one at a time, listening for roughness. Queenie was running like a dream. She always did.

J.B. looked at her. “How are you doing?”

Her episiotomy pulled like barbed wire and her swollen breasts throbbed with every vibration of the engine.

“Fine,” she said.

“Let’s fly.”

He handed her a headset and she put it on. The engine revved and the Cessna strained forward, lusting for the sky. At the end of the runway her father brought the plane around, checked the mags again, switched the radio to tower. They were the only aircraft on the strip. Clearance for takeoff came immediately and Marik laid her head back, waiting for the plane’s slight sideways skid after liftoff, like a feather caught in a breeze.

J.B. banked right. Wind buffeted the plane like a motor-boat on choppy water until they gained altitude and leveled off. The hospital was several counties from home, where she could remain anonymous, but the flying time would be short. There was nothing to do but watch the horizon until they approached the grass landing strip on the ranch.

Her dad’s hand reached over and covered hers. “Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Once we get you settled in, I’ll drive to town for some groceries. And anything else you need me to pick up.”

Like extra maxi-pads. Breast pads, a prescription. Would the clerk at the Pacheeta Wal-Mart recognize him and wonder about his purchases?

She hadn’t been off the ranch since she’d come home, sequestering herself in the house, her car in the barn. No one else had known she was home and pregnant except Monte, whose silence was ironclad, and Daisy Gardner. Daisy had put them in touch with a private adoption agency, and she, too, would never breathe a word.

All of them would protect the awful thing Marik had done.

Chapter Four

The clock atop the county courthouse showed ten minutes before nine when Marik drove into Pacheeta with a dead eagle in the back of her truck. Half the parking spaces along Main Street corralled pickups and SUVs, and the lighted windows of the Corner Café displayed a late-break-fast crowd. There were no boarded-up storefronts here; compared to Silk, the county seat swarmed with commerce.

The regional office of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation sat next to the courthouse and across from the town square. In the square, a community pavilion flaked white paint onto the dormant grass, and a statue of Will Rogers stood sentinel above a concrete pool drained for winter. A lariat dangled from Will’s hand, and his bronze hat sat askew above a face expertly modeled with his whimsical smile. Unlike the state’s amiable native son, Marik had met plenty of men she didn’t like. But she’d always loved that sculpture.

Beside her on the breezy seat of Red Ryder, Jace Rainwater observed the town without comment. Except for the sculpture, Pacheeta looked like a hundred other small towns, and Rainwater looked as if he’d seen them all before.

She circled the block, past the Pacheeta Tribune that supplied the county with local news and gossip. An alley ran behind the wildlife building and she turned into it, hoping to unload her cargo away from the eyes of curious pedestrians. Two vehicles occupied a potholed gravel area next to the alley. Marik parked close to a metal door with ODWC stenciled in white letters on its brown paint.

The door was locked, and nobody responded to her pounding. She went back to the truck, where Rainwater was securing the tarp around the eagle after its windy trip. “I guess we can leave it here for a few minutes while we go inside,” she said.

He nodded. “Not much traffic back here.”

They walked down the alley and turned on to a quiet, spider-veined sidewalk. A brittle sun warmed their shoulders until they rounded the next corner, where the shade swaddling the front entrance of the building still felt like winter. Rainwater opened a glass door and held it for her. Marik stepped onto the industrial-strength carpet of a small outer office.

A young woman with straight, jaw-length hair sat behind a desk, staring into a computer screen. Her hair looked too black to be natural, but it was striking against paper-white skin. One or two strategic piercings and she could be a Goth girl. The phone on her desk rang and she held up a red-nailed finger. “Be right with you.”

“Department of Wildlife,” she said into the receiver. There was a long pause while the girl rolled her eyes. “Gee, you’re the first guy who thought of that joke,” she said. “Is there something else I can help you with?” Another pause. “Just a moment, I’ll see if he’s in.”

She punched the hold button and hung up. Her eyes flickered over the lanky form of Jace Rainwater and she smiled brightly. “Now then. How can I help you folks?”

“We need to see a ranger, if we can, or some other conservation official,” Marik said.

“You’re in luck. Ranger Ward is actually in this morning.” She turned her head toward a hallway behind her desk and hollered in a voice that could have brought cattle in for milking. “Roger? Somebody here to see you!”

In seconds a wiry, fortyish man with a fairy ring of brown hair appeared in the opening to the hallway. He wore jeans crimped at the knees, cowboy boots and a tan-colored shirt with a Wildlife Department logo on the pocket. “We do have an intercom, Kim,” he said to the receptionist, but his voice was as mild as the rest of him.

Kim shrugged, grinning. “Sorry.” The hold button on the phone continued to blink.

“Morning. I’m Roger Ward,” the ranger said, offering his hand to Marik first.

Marik thought how she would sketch him: oval head, round bald pate, oval wire-rimmed glasses, oval body and thighs. He wasn’t fat, though, just compact, and no taller than she was. She introduced herself and her companion.

The ranger shook hands with Rainwater. “Come on back to my office.”

Ward’s office was just what she expected. Battered wooden desk, cluttered bookcase, a faux-tile floor that felt slightly gritty underfoot. Dusty but impressive portraits of Oklahoma’s larger wildlife hung on the walls—whitetail deer, bobcat, elk, even a woolly black bear. Marik recognized the artist’s name. From atop the bookcase, mounted specimens of bobwhite quail, wood duck and wild turkey fixed them with glassy stares. There was almost room to sit down in the two straight chairs Ward offered.

“Actually,” Marik said, “the reason we came is out back in the bed of my truck. Can we bring it inside?”

Ward’s interest perked up. “An animal?”

She saw a sharp intelligence in the faded blue of his eyes. “A bald eagle, we think.”

The eyes widened. “Alive?”

“Unfortunately, no. I found it on my place this morning.”

“Killdeer Ridge, right? Where the wind farm is.”

“Right.” He had recognized her name, like everybody else since the windmills went up. Sometimes she missed being debt ridden and anonymous.

“Let’s take a look.” He grabbed his oval ranger hat from beneath the turkey’s wattle.

Why did men around here never step outdoors without a hat on?

In the alley, Rainwater carefully uncovered their cargo and they all leaned over the truck bed, arms on the sidewalls. Ranger Ward whistled through his teeth. “Isn’t that a beauty.”

“I’m guessing an immature female,” Rainwater said.

Ward checked the tail feathers. “Good eye. Most people can’t tell an immature bald eagle from a golden.” He looked up at Jace. “It isn’t banded. Any idea what killed it?”

Marik and Rainwater glanced at each other. “No visible blood or bullet wound,” Rainwater said.

“Huh. Exactly where was the eagle when you found it?”

“Up on the high ridge,” she said.

“You found it beneath the windmills?”

She nodded, her face glum.

“Uh-oh,” he said.

“You know the Gurdmans, my neighbors?”

“Not personally, but I’m familiar with their complaints about the wind farm.”

Marik sighed. “I’d like to keep this quiet until we know for sure what killed the eagle.”

“No need to make an announcement. Let’s get the carcass inside and look at it closer.”

In a back room, the ranger laid the eagle out on a table and checked it over. Within a minute, he leaned over and smelled it.

“Diazanon?” Rainwater said.

Ward gave him a sharp look. “That’s what I was thinking. Why the heck would an eagle smell like tick poison?”

“Good question,” Marik said. “My friend here suggested a necropsy.”

“Absolutely. We can learn a lot from a carcass. Birds have practically no sense of smell. It might have eaten poisoned meat despite the odor. Eagles do eat carrion sometimes.”

Ward bagged and tagged the bird, then laid it gently in a chest-type freezer. “I’ll put in a call to our chief biologist in Oklahoma City. Either he’ll get a local vet to do the necropsy, or we’ll send it to a special U.S. Fish and Wildlife installation in Wisconsin.”

“That could take a long time.”

“Yup. That’s why we’re going to freeze her. If Wendell can’t come get the carcass, I’ll have to pack it in ice and haul it to the city.”

“Maybe we should call Sam Sullivan,” Rainwater said, “up at the Sutton Avian Research Center in Bartlesville. I know they keep records on Oklahoma eagles.”

“Good idea,” Ward said. “They’ve coordinated with the department on migratory-bird incidents before.” He smiled. “You know Sam?”

“Went to school with him a year or so. And I did some volunteer work at the research center.”

“Sam’s a good guy. Knows his stuff.” He washed and dried his hands. “We need to fill out a report. Where you found it, date and time, any other circumstances.”

He led them back into his office and cleared off a space in the center of the desk. After two tries, he found a ball-point that worked. Marik and Rainwater sat, their knees touching the front of the desk, while she supplied the information the ranger asked for. He finished the paperwork and sat back in his chair, the springs squeaking.

“There’s a town meeting coming up in Silk in about a week,” she told him. “I’d sure like to know what killed the eagle before that.”

His frown looked doubtful. “It usually takes longer. But I’ll do what I can to hurry things up.”

“Do you believe an eagle would really fly into those windmill blades?”

Ward shrugged. “It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. Out in California, there was an incident like that, but those windmills were built directly in the eagles’ migration path, and it isn’t a migration month here. The trouble is, there’s a shortage of science on how the windmills might affect the ecology. Since the power companies don’t announce where the wind farms will be built much before they build them, nobody’s had a chance to map the ecology of a location beforehand. There’s no control data, we don’t know the natural patterns of the wildlife or even the plants in the area before the windmills—only after.

“Some biologists think the eagles might view the windmills as perches when the blades are still, and try it again when they’re moving.”

“That seems hard to believe.”

“Yeah, it does. But we don’t know about the songbirds or game birds in the area, either. Some might not nest there anymore because they view the wind towers as raptor perches, or the flickering shadows as raptor wings.”

Marik frowned. “Even if that’s true, wouldn’t they just move over to the next pasture or creek?”

He shrugged. “Probably.”

“Well, there aren’t any trees on Killdeer Ridge, but the killdeer still nest all over the ground up there.”

Ward smiled. “That’s good to know. Wildlife is pretty darned adaptable. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t have any left. If you want my personal opinion, we’ve got to do something to cut down fossil fuel consumption, and for producing electricity, at least, wind farms are the best idea yet. The long-term benefits to the ecology far outweigh any short-term potential for harm.” He shrugged. “But the real scientists want more proof.”

“I don’t think my neighbors’ objections have anything to do with science,” Marik said. She took a paper from a cube on his desk and jotted down a number. “That’s my cell. It’s the best way to get me.” She stood up. “I appreciate your time.”

He gave her a direct look. “Thanks for bringing the bird in. You did the right thing.”

“Yeah, well. We’ll see if good deeds go unpunished.”

She followed Rainwater out through the front entrance. Kim was multitasking, the phone receiver gripped under her chin while she typed an e-mail and waved goodbye.

Marik filled up with gas at a Love’s Country Store at the edge of town. On the drive they talked about her ranch operation and the proposed second phase of wind turbines. Rainwater said all the right things, but she listened for subtext that might signal problems. She didn’t fault him for the wall of privacy around his family; she wouldn’t discuss her personal life with a stranger, either. The main things that concerned her were the estranged wife and his over-qualification. She didn’t want to train a ranch manager for six months only to have him quit and move on to a better-paying job.

Wind whipped through the passenger window and the truck bounced along the two-lane road. “Okay, direct question,” she said. “And remember that I can check on this. Have you ever been arrested or jailed for anything?” She glanced at him sideways.

“No.” He smiled. “Check all you want to.”

“Then why are you willing to work for the pay I’m offering?”

He took a breath before answering. “I don’t like cities, even if that’s where the money is. And I would expect that after six months or so, if you were happy with my work, you’d be willing to raise the salary.”

She nodded but said nothing. Her finances were too iffy to make promises.

It was eleven o’clock when they approached Silk. “How about a Sonic burger and a cherry limeade?” she said. “I’m starving.”

She pulled into a drive-in stall and killed the engine. The day had warmed, and with their jackets on, the cab was comfortable even with the half-open window. She let him look over the menu a minute before she punched the call button. A teenage voice with a West Texas accent emerged with a hail of static from the speaker box. Marik wondered why the girl wasn’t in school.

“I’ll have a bacon burger and onion rings,” Marik said and looked at Rainwater.

“Broiled-chicken sandwich and a side salad with Italian.”

She gave him a shocked look, but repeated his order into the speaker and added two cherry limeades.

“High cholesterol runs in my family,” he said.

“Ah. You had parents.”

He smiled. “Grandparents, too, so I’m told.”

Marik’s cell phone vibrated in her jacket pocket. She glanced at its tiny window and smiled. Daisy Gardner had seen her truck in town.

“Excuse me,” she said to Rainwater as she flipped the phone open. Then to Daisy, “You’ll never get your paperwork done if you keep watching out the window.”

“In my job it pays to be nosey,” Daisy said. “Can you stop by the office?”

“I’ve just ordered lunch, actually. And I’m not by myself.”

“I know, and it looked like a man in there.”

“What, you’re using binoculars now?”

“Why are you riding him around in that old wreck of a truck instead of your perfectly nice SUV?”

“Long story. How about lunch tomorrow? I want to come in and get horse feed anyway.”

“Okay, but call me this afternoon when you’re alone. We need to talk. Today.” She sounded pissed off.

“What’s up?”

“I’ll tell you later. And you can tell me who that is in your truck.”

“Right. See you.”

Marik closed and pocketed the phone. “My friend Daisy,” she said to Rainwater. “Just another reason there are no secrets in this town.”

Which wasn’t quite true. Daisy had kept at least one secret for eight years.

The carhop brought their food, and after the obligatory rustling of sacks and paper-clad straws, they settled down to eating. Static crackled sporadically from neighboring speaker boxes, and from the top of a power pole, a mockingbird sang a forecast of spring. Marik kept thinking about Daisy’s warning: We need to talk.

Had Daisy somehow learned about the private investigator she’d hired?

“You’re right about the cherry limeade,” Jace Rainwater said, his mouth half-full. “Good sandwich, too.”

That afternoon she drove Rainwater over the parts of the ranch he hadn’t seen earlier—the north quarter, hilly and forested, where elk sometimes passed through; and next to it the upper pastures, still dormant in February. Killdeer Ridge bisected the ranch at a slight angle from east to west. South of the ridge, two herds of cattle were grazing on winter wheat in the flat fields close to the river. A large pasture also bordered the river, part of it fenced off around a sheet-metal hangar and a grass landing strip for lightplanes. Today the airstrip was unmowed and looked abandoned.

“The foreman will be the only full-time hand, at least for now,” she told him. “I’ll hire extra help for jobs like cutting and branding.”

Rainwater’s hands clenched and unclenched on the knees of his jeans, as if they were anxious to get to work. He asked smart questions, and she saw the thirsty expression in his eyes when he looked at the landscape. “It sure would be good to work cattle again,” he said.

She knew the feeling. Marik loved cattle and she loved the land, even though she had once abandoned it. Monte used to say, You can’t beat out of the hide what’s bred in the bone.

Jace Rainwater was her best prospect for the manager position, and she could use an ally who had an appropriate education to back up the things she knew instinctively about ranching. Marik had majored in art and education—not the sort of credentials that carried much weight with a bank or her ranching neighbors. But she couldn’t afford to make a quick decision about someone she’d be working with daily, who would live a few steps from her house. She sent Rainwater back to Amarillo with a promise that she’d make a decision within two weeks. Meanwhile, she could phone a couple of his references and have the P.I. do a background check. Might as well get something for her money.

She stood on the gravel driveway and watched Rainwater’s white truck drive away, wishing Monte were here to help assess his possible replacement. Monte was a better judge of character than anyone she knew.

Wind swept across the yard and solitude surged around her. She was the only living person for farther than her voice could carry. If she dropped dead like that poor eagle, no one would know and few would care.

Okay, that’s pathological. Cut it out.

The place was too damn quiet. She ought to get a dog. The last dog on the ranch was Monte’s old basset hound, a low-slung submarine named Rush Hour. The dog was lovable and useless, and when he died Monte was so broken up neither he nor J.B. got around to replacing him. What Marik wanted now was a big, furry ranch dog that would set up a ruckus if a stranger came onto the place.

She carried a bucket of horse feed and dumped it into the feeder in the corral. A ranch without horses was just wrong, so she had kept Lady and Gent. The blaze-faced mare and chestnut gelding coexisted in the small pasture behind the barn. When she was a kid and the ranch was prosperous, they’d had a string of twenty.

Her melancholy persisted, and instead of calling Daisy back right then, she walked toward the small barn next to the corral. It used to be a hay barn, but now it held something altogether different.

Her boots crunched in the silence. The barn door’s curved handle felt cold in her palm when she rolled it open. In the barn’s shady interior, the remnants of her father’s green and white Cessna airplane lay mangled on the dirt floor.

Chapter Five

Marik stepped into the triangle of light on the barn floor and paused to let her eyes adjust to the surrounding shadows. No matter how many times she confronted the wreckage, her breath caught hard in her chest. J.B. had worshipped that plane, a sweet little Cessna 210 that he treated like royalty. Marik had loved it, too, once. But something faulty with its engine or wiring had killed her father. It was hard to look at the ruined fuselage, but even harder to have it hauled away as junk. To her the aircraft was still an indivisible part of J. B. Youngblood.

The musty smells of mice and old hay closed around her, and beneath that the metallic scent of engine oil. Overhead, sparrows chirped from the lofted darkness. When she was very young, the hay barn had been a magical place. She remembered two little girls scrambling over a mountain of hay bales that reached to the rafters. In a crevice between the prickly bales, they’d found a nest of sightless kittens. Nowadays hay was packaged in giant round bales and lined up along fences like Jurassic caterpillars. Today’s ranch kids didn’t know the joy of playing in the hay.

She took a deep breath that stuttered in her chest as her gaze settled on the ruined airplane. The left side of the cockpit was torn raggedly open, as if bitten away by monster teeth. The monster was a grove of hackberry trees that had ripped J.B. from his seat as the plane cartwheeled. She tried not to imagine the horror that must have seized him as he vaulted through the sky, out of control. Did images of his life pinwheel before him? Did he think of the granddaughter he never knew?

In her nightmares she flew with him and felt it all.

They’d found his body hanging in the branches, fifty yards from where the Cessna finally scraped to a halt. He was only twenty miles from the ranch when he crashed, on his way to pick her up for a visit. She was living halfway across the state at the time, a traveling art teacher for a sprawling rural school district. If she had promised to drive home for spring break, maybe he would be here today.

Funerals should be held in the gray chill of November, or in August’s punishing heat. Not in springtime with the pasture singing flowers. After he was buried, she’d made the hay barn available to FAA officials for their investigation. Aeronautics experts brought the aircraft here piece by careful piece and laid it out like a jigsaw cadaver, just as it remained now. Their verdict was inconclusive. The plane had undergone its required annual inspection and maintenance only a few weeks before, and J.B. never did trust those annuals. He said something was more likely to go wrong with the plane after it was tinkered with by unfamiliar hands. Maybe he was right.

The Cessna was the last thing her father had touched, and he felt more alive to her here than in the little family cemetery where she and Anna used to play. When they were six and eleven, they had set up their dolls on their mother’s grave and talked to her when the lonesomeness got too strong. But they grew older and the memory of their mother dimmed. Anna stopped going to the cemetery, but Marik never did. Now both her parents lay in the tall grass beside two generations of grandparents, a bachelor uncle, several family dogs and Leasie, the ghost lady of Silk Mountain. All of them watched over by the towering windmills.

Marik walked around the tail section of the airplane and looked down at the grounded right wing, the only part left completely intact. She’d made her first solo flight in this plane when it was new and she was seventeen—her dad waiting with a magnum of champagne when she returned, even prouder than she was. Anna was gone by then, but Monte was there to help them celebrate. In the barn’s artificial dusk, she saw J.B.’s jubilant face that day—and then the quick contrast of his wounded eyes four years later, the day she’d driven home from her apartment at the University of Oklahoma.

He couldn’t avoid staring at the expanse of her stomach when she’d dragged her lumpy suitcase up the front-porch steps. She read his disappointment—his artistic, college-educated daughter caught in a clichéd mistake, her bright future in jeopardy.

She had called her father to tell him, to ask if she could come home. But she hadn’t said she was already seven months along, having hidden from her college friends by moving off campus, dropping her classes when she began to show. She’d intended to go it alone, but she chickened out. He must have expected her to look the same as always, not showing yet, with options still available.

“My God, Marik,” was all he said, and her heart was a boulder in her chest.

“I’m sorry, Dad.” It was the first in a litany of apologies, but her father had already wrapped her in a hug.

Two months later she’d taken her last flight with her dad, coming home from the hospital. Marik knelt in the dust and put her hand on Queenie’s metal skin. It felt strangely warm.

A whirlwind swept through the barn door and sifted dust into her eyes. She wiped them on her shirtsleeve. Stood up and straightened her back.

For months after the baby was born, she had continued her self-imposed exile on the ranch, cooking for her dad and Monte, painting landscapes with too many dark colors. Hiding out, waiting for a vacuum to refill. She had no appetite and she spent sleepless hours in the middle of the night. Her father tried to get her to talk; so did Daisy. But she had no words for the emptiness inside her, the strange weightedness of her limbs.

Finally her dad had insisted she shouldn’t give up on her degree with only two semesters left. She was to be the first Youngblood to graduate from college. To make him proud, she’d agreed to go back. She moved to campus, two hours’ drive from the ranch, and rented a room from an elderly lady whose house smelled of lavender and dust.

A week before graduation, she’d received a job offer from a school district three hundred miles from home. The prospect of earning her own way, in a place where no one knew her, felt like absolution. Instead of going back to the ranch, she’d moved away to start her life over.

She’d been teaching four years at the time of J.B.’s accident. Suddenly her father was gone, denied the only grandchild he might have known. Her grief was a cyclone, for her dad and for her unknown daughter—the last of the Youngblood line.

When Marik came out of the barn, Daisy Gardner’s dust-colored Honda was parked on the circular driveway near the house. The sight of it gave Marik an uneasy moment; she had not heard a car drive up. She rolled the barn door shut, latched it and walked across the yard toward her friend. A distinct chill had diluted the February sunshine. In less than an hour the sun would drop behind Killdeer Ridge and cast the outbuildings into premature dusk.

Daisy was leaning against the fender with her arms crossed, one loafered foot angled over the other. She was still in her work clothes, an embellished cotton jacket and khaki slacks that smiled at the knees. Daisy knew what was inside the barn and had chosen not to interrupt, but she didn’t look happy.

“You were supposed to call me,” she said.

“Sorry. I had company until a little while ago. An applicant for the foreman job.”

“The guy who was in your truck today.”

“Right. Seems like a good prospect.”

“Is he married?” Daisy asked.

Marik chose the short answer. “Yes.”

Daisy sighed heavily. “The good ones always are.”

“Come on in,” Marik said, starting toward the house. “It’s happy hour.”

Daisy followed her up the cobblestone path with her tote bag hanging from one arm. She wouldn’t cross the street without that bag. It was her portable office, stuffed with case files, feminine necessities and more snacks than a vending machine.

Beneath the carport, they climbed three concrete steps to a side door that opened into the large, lived-in kitchen. The room stayed a bit too warm, even in winter, but this evening the kitchen’s warmth felt good to Marik. She took off her jacket and tossed it onto a chair.

Daisy parked her tote bag beside the battered oak table that had been the hub of Youngblood family life for fifty years. In the open top of Daisy’s bag Marik saw the toaster tarts and fruit roll-ups Daisy used to calm frightened child clients, and minisacks of Dorito chips to which Daisy was addicted.

“Wine or something harder?” Marik said.

“How about a good stiff scotch. It’s been one helluva day.”

“Uh-oh.” Marik took wine and scotch from a cabinet and two glasses from another, adding ice to one. The Chivas was left over from J.B.’s stash. Marik didn’t drink the hard stuff and had given up beer because of the calories. Her friend had no such restrictions.

Daisy sank her plump backside into a chair at the table. “First I had to repossess a two-year-old from a foster home where he was in great hands and return him to his worthless mother on a court order. And then—and then—I find out you’ve hired a private detective to hunt for your daughter! In violation of your signed legal agreement.”

Marik sighed. “What did he do, call you for information after I warned him not to?”

“Not quite that klutzy. He had somebody else call me.” She made a noise like a snort. “I got more information out of her than she did from me.”

“What a surprise.”

Marik set Daisy’s scotch on the table and sagged into a chair with her wine. “I haven’t broken any laws yet. Only when—and if—I actually contact her or the family.”

Daisy fixed her with a direct look, her hazel eyes large behind her frameless glasses. “If you do contact her, I will report you to the judge.”

Marik looked at her and knew this was a promise. “Thanks for your support.”

“You know how I feel about this. You signed a Consent to Adoption. I have told you she’s healthy and well cared for, and that’s all you get to know. Not only is it illegal for you to meddle in her childhood, it’s selfish and wrong.”

Marik looked into the red depths of her wineglass and said nothing. But Daisy wasn’t finished.

“The parents could get an injunction,” she warned, “maybe even get you arrested. And you’d deserve it.”

The force of her words silenced them both. Daisy sat back and drank a lusty draft of her scotch.

There was more gray in her brown hair than Marik had noticed before, and age spots speckled her efficient hands. Despite the difference in their ages, they had always been close. “I promised Dad I’d find her,” she said quietly.

“Graveside promises aren’t binding.” Daisy’s eyes softened. “I know you miss J.B. so much you can hardly stand it. And you regret that he never got to know his grandchild. Believe me, I get that. I miss him, too.” She blinked several times and traced a damp circle on the table beneath her glass. “I guess I was more or less in love with your dad for twenty years.”

Daisy had never admitted this before, but Marik had seen the way Daisy looked at her father. If he’d shown the slightest interest, Daisy might have been her stepmom. Instead, because her own early marriage had dissolved without children, Daisy looked after the interests of dozens of kids on her caseload. She delivered tough love and strict ethics, but there was nothing she wouldn’t do to help a child in need—and that had always included Marik.

The kitchen clock ticked, and Marik heard the wind gust through the carport.

“I’ve regretted giving her up a million times,” she said, her voice low. “I wasn’t thinking of the best interests of the child, or even my dad. I was only thinking of me, that I wasn’t ready to be a mother. Dad supported my decision so I could go on with my life like the self-involved college kid I was. He would have loved to raise a granddaughter here on the ranch. But I chose not to think about that.”

Daisy shook her head. “You’re too hard on yourself. You always were. But that doesn’t give you the right to renege on your decision.”

Marik met her eyes. “My daughter is all the family I have left.”

“You have Anna.”

“Not really. I haven’t seen her since Dad’s funeral, and before that it was years. Anna never even knew I had a child.”

Ice cubes clinked in Daisy’s empty glass. “You wouldn’t be able to leave it at just finding your daughter. I know you. If you saw her you’d want to be involved in her life, and that isn’t fair. Not when she’s so small and innocent.”

A realization popped quiet as a soap bubble in Marik’s mind. “You know where she is, don’t you?”

Daisy’s eyes didn’t flinch. “I have always known. I kept track so I could assure you—and J.B.—that she was loved and happy. And she is.”

“You told Dad that?”

“Yes, I did. Several times.”

Marik’s nose burned. At least he knew that much. “Have you seen her?”

“Not for quite a while.”

The light outside the window had turned dusky pink and Marik felt the coming sundown in her bones. “I wonder if she looks like Dad.”

“Maybe she looks like her own dad,” Daisy said pointedly.

For all her ethics, Daisy was excruciatingly curious. Marik had never told anyone who fathered her child—not J.B., not even the baby’s father—and Daisy never missed an opportunity to prod for clues. Marik guarded that secret as faithfully as Daisy protected the privacy of adoption.

Daisy sighed and pushed herself to her feet, her knees cracking. “I’ve got to go. Mounds of paperwork yet tonight.” She shouldered the tote bag. “I guess you know about the town meeting and what’s on the agenda.”

“I know, all right.”

“The power company will no doubt send a representative. Maybe they’ll make a good argument.”

“Hmm.”

At the door, Daisy turned. “I’m serious, Marik. Do not go looking for that child. She doesn’t belong to you, and she hasn’t since you signed those papers.”

Marik watched the taillights disappear down the driveway, feeling Daisy’s censure like an anvil in her chest. Finally she refilled her wine and put on her jacket.

She passed through the living room without turning on a light. The glassy eyes of a bull elk and two whitetail bucks glittered from the high walls below a vaulted ceiling. They were J.B.’s trophies from years ago, his hunting phase. Someday she’d get rid of them, but not yet. Her boots thumped quietly on the padded rug, noisily on the hardwood floor at the room’s perimeter, and out the front door to the cedar-planked porch.

The porch was wide and deep, her favorite place to watch the evening come down. She eased into a wooden glider that centered a cluster of chairs in the shadow of the overhang. All those chairs—as if company might drop by at any moment. Nobody else had sat here since Monte cleared out months ago.

It was a credit to their shockproof friendship that she and Daisy could disagree and move on with no permanent damage. They’d done it before. But Marik wasn’t sure that would hold true this time, not if she actually contacted her daughter.

Was Daisy right? Was her desire to find her child selfish and wrong?

Her decision to give up her baby had hinged to a large extent on the fact that she couldn’t be a single mom without the father’s knowing. And she had reason to believe he’d be a lousy father. She had told herself the baby deserved better parents, but part of her wanted to punish him for disappointing her. Maybe that was selfish, too. But none of it changed her desire to find her child.

She’d given up her legal rights, but how did you give up regret, or the knowledge of a shared biological link? She remembered the feel of that heartbeat inside her, the wrinkled reality of those tiny hands.

Marik drained her wine, inhaled against the vise of her rib cage. The glider squeaked back and forth. If she lost Daisy’s stalwart friendship, she’d be even more alone than she was now.

Up on the ridge, the windmills turned steadily, reflecting the last rays of a winter sun that had slipped behind the horizon. She watched the fading light climb the towers. When shadow swallowed the highest rotors, darkness fell quickly. Uncountable stars dotted the sky. Here there were no streetlights, no neon signs of civilization. Only the tiny red beacons atop the wind towers, blinking like sleepy eyes.

An owl called low and haunting near the barn, and from the windbreak behind the house, his mate answered. Halfway up the ridge near the cemetery, a coyote sent up its lonesome yipping, sounding like a whole pack.

This was her life now. Was she tough enough to be alone?

She understood why her father spent his life here even after her mother died. He’d loved the solitude. Anna had hated it. Marik wondered how their mother had coped with such exquisite isolation, an East Coast girl who had found her way west. Did Julianna love it as much as her free-spirited husband? Or was she like the ghost of Silk Mountain, driven to the edge by the terrifying beauty of so many stars?

In Marik’s oil paintings, the outline of a hidden figure, feminine, invariably appeared somewhere in the background as if it painted itself. Sometimes she thought of the figure as her mother, who’d died from an ectopic pregnancy too far from a hospital. Other times she thought of the hidden figure as herself, and sometimes as the daughter she had given away.

“I never did belong here the way you do,” Anna had said on the afternoon she signed over her share of the ranch. “We both know that deep down you’re a hard-assed Oklahoma rancher, just like Dad.” And Marik heard the envy in her soft voice.

Maybe Dad wasn’t hard enough. Maybe I’m not, either.

She pulled the cell phone from her pocket and pushed a button to light up its address book. She scrolled down to Casey Scott’s number, the cowboy-booted P.I. who had inadvertently tipped off Daisy about her search. He answered his cell phone on the third ring.

“Casey, it’s Marik Youngblood. Can you talk a minute?” In the background she heard voices and the clank of silverware. “Sounds like I caught you at dinner.”

His baritone came back with predictable breakup. “No problem. I’m eating alone. What’s up?”

“I have another job for you. Just a small one. I need a background check on a man who’s applied for a job here on the ranch.”

“Easy done. Give me his name and whatever else you can.” She pictured him taking notes on a paper napkin, barbecue sauce on his chin.

“Jace Rainwater. Went to school at TCU, living in Amarillo now. He listed the USDA as a job reference there.”

“Okeydokey,” he said. “How soon do you need it?”

“By next week, if you can. I don’t need the whole family tree, just enough to know whether I’d trust him to live here on the ranch.”

“Got it. Should be able to call you back in a few days.”

“Any progress on our other project?”

“Not much. The adoption records are sealed and the hospital was a dead end. Couldn’t find anybody who worked there eight years ago. Whole staff has turned over since then.” She could hear him chewing.

“And you didn’t find out a thing from Daisy Gardner, either,” she said pointedly.

“Had to try. She’s the only link so far.”

Marik blew out a deep breath, watching a sleepy red eye wink off and on, off and on. “Let’s put that on hold for a while,” she said.

“You sure?”

“Yes. Save anything you’ve got for future reference and send me a bill. But for now let’s just check on this guy who wants to be my foreman.”

Chapter Six

Ranch work went on, regardless of anyone’s personal issues. The bucket calf woke up before daylight, bawling his curly head off to be fed. No need for an alarm clock when Bully was on the job. He was gradually learning to eat the calf pellets Marik put in his feeder, but he still needed his milk.

She went out in the semidarkness to feed him. In the big barn she mixed calf formula in an aluminum bucket that had a long nipple on one side and a hook on the opposite rim. She lugged the bucket to a pen in the back of the barn, behind the milking stall that hadn’t been used for years. Tools and horse tack covered the barn walls. In its open center, two tractors, a hay baler and a brush hog gathered the dust of disuse. Her father had bought the big John Deere tractor on credit just a year before he died. She still hadn’t paid it off, nor found the heart to sell it.

The calf’s plaintive cry echoed from the rafters. “Hey, Bully,” she called. “How’s it going today?”

Twice a day she hung a bucket of milk on the railing of the pen and held on with both hands. Bully attacked the nipple with an eagerness that made her laugh. His petroleum-colored eyes, fringed with long white lashes, looked depthless in the shadows of the barn. She loved his hot, milky smell and the way foamy white slobber dripped from the corners of his mouth when he drank.

She leaned over the railing and scratched his bony forehead. “You don’t know enough to miss your mama, do you, Bully?”

A feral cat peered down at her from the loft. Barn cats came and went, and this one looked like a descendant of an old tom she remembered from childhood. When Bully was finished, she poured the last dribbles from his bucket into an old pie pan her father had used for the same purpose, and left it by the door.

It took three tries to crank Red Ryder to life for her pilgrimage to the windmills. The wind was back in the north this morning, chillier than yesterday. On the crest of the ridge, she parked the pickup and stood on the running board, her eyes scanning dried cactus and sage for a mound of indigo feathers. Finding nothing, she exhaled a deep breath. The impending town meeting hung over her like a heavy boot waiting to drop. She’d never been good at waiting.

Across the valley, ribbons of gold light snaked between violet clouds. A group of elk, dark umber smudges at this distance, grazed at the edge of a creek. An urgency arose in her to paint the feeling of that cool light above the river. She’d been away from the canvas too long. When she checked the cattle in the pastures by the river this morning, she would take along her portable easel and do some pleinair work.

At the house again, she loaded her art supplies into the truck. She’d intended to drive to town today, but that could wait. She still had a few days’ horse feed and calf pellets in the barn. Soon Red Ryder was jouncing over a flat field where wheat grew ankle high and shamrock green.

When she’d counted all fifty Herefords, Marik turned a wide circle in the field and rumbled back over the cattle guard at the gate. She checked on a herd of heifers, then drove to a fenced field where the airplane hangar hunkered in shaggy grass. J.B. would not approve of the neglected airstrip, but nobody used it now.

She parked beside the hangar, unloaded her gear and backpacked the folding easel, paint box and camp stool across the runway toward a flat spot near the river. Here the slow copper current made a bell-shaped turn around a rock outcropping and then flowed off to her right, reflecting the color of the sky.

Painting on location sounded romantic to nonartists, but in practice it wasn’t always productive: the light changed and the wind blew and bugs got stuck in the paint. Either that, or it was a serendipitous joy. Today held promise for the latter. The morning was warming up, with a diffuse light filtered by thin, high clouds.

Marik tramped through dried grass to a place where an opening in the trees framed the bend of the river in the foreground and a hazy profile of Silk Mountain in the distance. She had painted this scene many times from various angles but was never quite satisfied. Maybe this was the day. She set up her easel with a sense of exhilaration she hadn’t felt in a long time.

She described her composition with a few lines, memorizing the way the light looked on the mountain’s flat crown right this moment, and began to lay down her dark colors first. She painted fast, standing up, with the quiet flow of the river in her pulse and the tremolo of a mead-owlark like light on the grass. Time slipped away without notice.

When at last she stepped back to appraise her work, her shadow lay bunched beneath her feet. The field study was nearly finished and she liked it. She walked away, stretching her shoulders and painting hand, wishing she’d packed a lunch.

The monotone of a lightplane engine purred across the valley. She stood on the open runway and squinted toward the western sky. The airplane was flying the river line, sunshine glinting from its wings. For a disconnected instant she thought maybe it was her dad, and she couldn’t wait to see him when he landed. When the illusion dissolved, there was a lump in her throat.

The plane was a low-wing, probably a Piper. The pilot decreased altitude near the grass landing strip. The strip was still marked on aviation charts, but with no maintenance it would be dangerous to land there.

The plane dropped lower, and her heart rate increased. She stood in the landing path and waved both arms: Go away! The small plane buzzed over, then zoomed southward into the sun. She should notify the FAA that the airstrip was inactive. But that wouldn’t help if a pilot was using an old chart. She didn’t want any accidents here; she’d better mow the grass.

If she had a foreman, she could send him to do the job.

As if by some weird telepathy, her cell phone shimmied in her jacket pocket and when she answered, it was Jace Rainwater.

“Wanted to thank you for lunch and the tour yesterday,” he said. “I really enjoyed seeing the ranch.” Following up on the interview. “I talked to Ranger Ward,” he said. “They’re sending the eagle carcass to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the necropsy.”

Marik frowned. “Good grief. How long will that take?”

“I know the regional director for the USFWS. If you like, I could phone him and explain the situation, see if he can speed things up.”

“I’d appreciate that. I hate to walk into that meeting without any information.”

He signed off with a promise to call if he learned anything. Rainwater was making himself valuable.

Back at her easel, she assessed the painting and with a fine brush added a dark arch in the sky—an eagle patrolling the river. Then she packed up her things and drove back to the real world.

That evening the wind turned sharp and the temperature dropped. One last night of winter. A charcoal sky descended, and in the morning fog lay thick around the outbuildings. The sky had just begun to clear at midmorning when the rural mail carrier drove his truck up to the house to deliver a carton of new canvases she’d ordered from an art-supply catalog.

She carried the carton to her studio. Hazy sunshine lit the north windows. Yesterday’s field study sat on the table beside her easel where she’d been laying out the same scene on a larger canvas. The message machine on the landline phone was blinking. She pushed the button and heard a pause and then the click of someone hanging up. Probably a wrong number, but it reminded her to phone Betty Jane Searcy, the mayor’s wife.

Marik had known Betty Jane since grade school, though Betty was ten years older. She taught piano students at her home for pocket money and she laughed a lot. Best of all, she didn’t take her husband’s position as mayor too seriously. When Betty Jane answered, Marik inquired about her family and then came to the point.

“Do I need to sign up in order to speak on behalf of the wind farm at the community meeting?”

“We’re really not that formal,” Betty Jane said in her leisurely drawl. “Anybody who wants to can talk. We just hope they don’t all talk at once.” Her laugh was contagious. “I’ll put your name down anyway, so you’ll be sure to get your turn. Personally I don’t understand why anybody would oppose the wind farm.”

“I appreciate that,” Marik said. “I hope Earl feels the same way.”

“He does,” Betty assured her. “Say, I’ve been meaning to call you. Jackson’s fiancée saw your painting of Silk Mountain down at the bank and had a fit over it. I’m wondering if you’d consider doing one like it, maybe a little smaller, that I could give them as wedding present. I’ll be glad to pay whatever you usually get for those.”

“I’d be happy to. When’s the wedding?”

Marik made some notes and hung up feeling encouraged.

Pilots have a definition for flying: hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Marik thought the same description applied to life in general. For weeks nothing much had changed at the ranch, and then there was a dead eagle, Jace Rainwater and the threat of that town meeting. So she wasn’t surprised that afternoon when the construction contractor who’d erected the windmills called her on the phone.

“We want to get started on development of phase two,” he said. “Can I come out tomorrow morning and walk the site with you, get everything squared away?”

Two possibilities flared in her mind. Either word hadn’t trickled down through GPP&L that the town was considering a moratorium, or else the bigwigs did know and figured the opposition would have a tougher time stopping a project that was already under way—a sort of corollary to possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Either possibility was fine with her. “Come ahead,” she said. “Eight o’clock too early?”

From the white gravel road beneath the windmills, they walked down the south slope of the ridge toward the family cemetery. Lou Benson, the construction chief, had supplied Marik with a hard hat from the stash in his pickup. The protective hat was required attire for walking beneath the towers, and she put it on without mentioning that she came here every day without one.

She had first met Benson during the construction of phase one, the first forty-five windmills. Benson had a great face, weathered but clean-shaven, with distinctive bone structure. She seldom did portraits, but he would be an interesting subject, with his graying sideburns and a ponytail that trailed out beneath the hard hat and over his jacket collar. Benson allowed no profanity by his work crew and no littering. On a chain around his neck he wore the small silver outline of a fish.

He had brought along an engineer named Jim Blake who was armed with a map of the completed layout of the wind farm and a pocketful of stakes topped with blue streamers. “We’ll mark the preliminary boundaries this morning,” the engineer told her, “then survey it this afternoon.”

The new windmills would sit lower on the ridge than the others, catching the updraft of south wind on the slope. The dirt movers would arrive Monday morning, weather permitting, and start carving out the extension to the access road.

During phase-one construction last summer, Marik had done her daily chores with the grinding of the big machines in the background, modern dinosaurs chewing up the earth. She’d spent time on the ridge watching the spectacle, fascinated and unnerved by the gargantuan scale of it, the magnitude of the engineering.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.