Hed spent the worst years of his life just outside of that town. And now he was going back for the first and last reunion of Harper House. It would end where it started.
But first there were a couple of stops he needed to make along the way. There couldnt be any loose ends.
He checked to make sure he had the switchblade hed cleaned on her tropical-print sheets and told himself it had been destined to end this way.
Still, as he drove away it nagged at him. What kind of mother just drove off and left her son beside the road? He eased his pain with the thought that the babies must have been switched at the hospital. His real mother was out there somewhere. Shed spent her life looking for him, feeling that something was missing.
He felt a little better as he drove west toward Montana. By the time he reached the border hed convinced himself that hed been stolen from his real parentsa mother who loved him and a father who would never have run out on him.
He had to believe that. He couldnt accept that hed killed his own mother. Otherwise, it might be true what shed said about him being like his father.
Chapter Two
She breathed in the warm air, wondering how she could have stayed away from here as long as she had.
The ride south toward the Missouri Breaks was one she knew well. Even before she was able to sit alone in a saddle shed ridden hugging the saddle horn, in front of her older sister Eve.
Lately shed felt antsy and unsure about what she wanted to do with her life. So shed come home to the one place that always filled her with a sense of peace. But since shed been home shed realized this was where she belongednot opening her own veterinarian clinic as shed planned since she was twelve because she loved animals. Especially horses.
On impulse, she angled her horse to the east and watched the structures rise up out of the horizon ahead, an idea taking shape.
The barn came into sight first, a large weathered building with a cupola on top and a rusted weather vane in the shape of a horse. As she drew closer she heard the eerie moaning sound of the weather vane as it rotated restlessly in the breeze. It was a sound she remembered from when she used to sneak over here as a young girl.
As she rode closer, the house came into view. The old Harper place. She felt a rush of adrenaline shed never been able to explain. Something about the house had always drawn hereven against her fathers strict orders that she and her sisters stay far away from the place.
Chester Bailey had said the property was dangerous. Something about it being in disrepair, old septic tanks and uncovered abandoned wells. Things horses and kids could get hurt in.
McKenna had never gone too close, stopping at the weathered jack fence to look at the house. The structure was three stories, a large old ranch house with a dormer window at each end. An old wooden staircase angled down from the third floor at the back. A wide screened-in porch ran the width of the house in the front.
Her gaze just naturally went to the third-floor window where shed seen the boy. Shed been six. Hed looked a couple years older. She had never forgotten him. Hed disappeared
almost at once, and an old woman had come out and run her off.
As she stared up at the window now, sunlight glinting off the dirty glass, she wondered what had happened to that sad-looking boy.
Whoever had lived there moved shortly after that, and the house had been occupied by Ellis Harper, an ornery old man who threatened anyone who came near. He kept a shotgun loaded with buckshot by the backdoor.
McKenna had heard stories about the house. Some of the kids at the one-room school shed attended in Old Town Whitehorse had whispered that Ellis Harper stole young children and kept them locked up in the house. Why else wouldnt he let anyone come around? For years thered been stories of ghosts and strange noises coming from the house.
McKenna didnt believe in ghosts. Even if she had, she doubted it would have changed the way she felt about this place. Shed ridden over here even when Ellis Harper had been alive, but shed never gone farther than the fence. Too many times shed seen his dark silhouette through the screen door, the shotgun in his hands.
As she sat on her horse at the fence as shed done as a child, she realized shed always been so captivated by the house and its occupants that shed never noticed the land around it.
The breeze rustled the new leaves on the copse of cottonwoods that snaked along the sides of the creek and through the rolling grasslands. Good pastureland and, unless she was mistaken, about forty acres worth. There were several old outbuildings a good ways from the house, and then the big old barn and a half dozen old pieces of farm machinery rusting in the tall weeds.
While the idea had come to her in a flash, she knew it had been in the back of her mind for years. She had always been meant to buy Harper House and the land around it.
She just hadnt known until that moment what she planned to do with it.