They giggled together as Corrie caught her and rocked her in her arms.
“Are you sick?” Analissa asked.
“Not a bit,” Corrie said.
“Why aren’t you outside?”
“I was thinking.”
“Were you thinking about Mack?”
Everything in Corrie stilled for a moment, even as she took in the fact that Analissa was the only child who didn’t give Mack a formal title. To this little one, he was “Mack.” To everyone else, he was Señor Mack. Just as she’d always been just Corrie, never more.
“I guess so,” she temporized.
“Are you going to marry him?”
Corrie knew the question wasn’t directly personal. Most children Analissa’s age asked such embarrassing questions only to gauge relationships in general. Corrie had listened to enough theories in her time to know how to answer the girl. “What makes you think I should?”
“Because he loves you.”
That wasn’t the prescribed answer. She was in deep trouble.
“And you love him,” Analissa said dreamily.
Instead of trying to reason with the tiny angel in her arms, she tickled the child instead. “Love him? What makes you think that? Love him?”
Analissa giggled wildly and flailed ineffectively. When she couldn’t seem to get her breath, Corrie stopped and hugged her tightly to her chest.
“Like, like that,” Analissa said, gasping for breath. “That’s why you love him. He makes you feel like that.”
“Like what?” Corrie asked, though in the little girl’s words she knew the answer. Just like that.
“That’s how you feel about Mack. Laughing and crying at the same time.”
Corrie chuckled. “I’ve never heard love described quite that way,” she said.
“But it’s true,” Analissa said. She wriggled in Corrie’s arms and wrapped her arms around her neck. “I love you, Corrie.”
The little girl with jet-black hair and eyes looked straight at her, her youth disappearing in her intensity.
“I love you, too, darling.”
The tears in Corrie’s eyes blurred her vision of Analissa sliding from her lap.
“It’s a happy time,” Analissa said. “You did right.”
“What’s that?” Corrie asked through a choked voice, but she asked it of an empty room for Analissa had bolted through the door.
Though the little girl couldn’t have known about the night before, it was as if her words had zeroed in on Corrie’s confession to Mack. She knew instinctively that she’d done the right thing in going out to him the night before, in revealing her past, in melting in his embrace.
But she didn’t know anything else she’d done right lately.
“It doesn’t change anything,” she admitted aloud. “He likes me. Wow. Stop the presses. And I don’t think anyone’s waiting for a banner header that says I like him.”
She covered her eyes with her hands. “I’ve got to stop this. I’m brainless. I’m idiotic. I’m acting like I’m in love.”
She stilled, Analissa’s statement ringing in her ears. “And you love him.”
She hadn’t answered the little girl, not knowing how. But here, in the privacy of her own room, could she at least answer her own question?
When Corrie Stratton says it’s true, it’s a fact.
Was she in love? What did that even mean?
Was it love when she couldn’t think of anything but Mack? Did love mean she couldn’t see straight unless he was in her line of vision?
Or did it mean she was simply and wholly succumbing to the lure of Rancho Milagro, that wanting something was halfway to achieving it. Hadn’t she told little Pedro something like that?
And Mack? What did he feel?
Corrie didn’t have the sense that her actions, her confession, had changed anything but his uncertain feelings for her. He wanted her, she knew that much. And he admired her as well. But, if she left passion—passion that left her gasping for air and craving more—out of the equation, she was afraid he would hold her every bit as much at arm’s length as he did the children.
But did he really stand apart from them? He carried Analissa as if she’d always been in his arms. He flicked Pedro’s cheek with one of his fingers. He ruffled Juan Carlos’s hair. He touched them, the little ones, the children; he let them hang all over him. She’d seen him only that morning, sitting on the front steps of the veranda, head to head with little Jenny, and her heart had constricted when she heard the little girl who never talked giggling with him.
He patrolled the grounds, walked the fences, taught the children history and mathematics, snippets of poetry. And he trained them against danger.
He carried them, jostled with them, made them call out dates and times, and accepted them as they were. And every child, from Juan Carlos to little Analissa, would call out tidbits of history, timelines and facts as they marched around the drive. And they loved it. God, they really loved it.
He wasn’t an easy man. He was kind with the children, almost unfailingly, but abrupt with adults. He was sweet with her, in his rough way. And his touch could make her crazy and sated all at the same time. What did that mean?
What, on heaven’s earth, did all that really mean?
Not everyone could be expected to lose themselves in stories as she did. And what did he do that was so different than herself, than Jeannie, than Chance? She wasn’t distant with the children, not at all, and they adored her. Mack was distant, in his fashion, but the kids adored him as well.
A question popped into her head. Did she adore him?
Of course not, she answered herself swiftly. Adoration inferred blindness, a determined refusal to focus on reality. She didn’t adore Mack Dorsey. She only wanted…
She didn’t know what she wanted from Mack Dorsey. Everything, maybe. Everything and more.
If only he could be granted some measure of peace for the five children that perished in that fire, then perhaps there could be some glimmer of hope for a future together.
Even the word together scared her, made her want to pack a bag and run away as far as she possibly could. No matter that some corner of her heart had always yearned for union, she’d never, as Jeannie had—now twice—explored the dream. But unlike her, Jeannie seemed born for melding with a mate.
Corrie had decided years before that she simply wasn’t the marrying kind. No man seemed to be able to touch her heart and she certainly had never tried reaching into theirs.
Until now.
She’d decided long ago that she would serve as the playful aunt to Jeannie’s brood.
So why was she stumbling over the idea of marriage now?
Mack Dorsey.
And until she knew exactly how he felt, she wasn’t about to go out on any proverbial limbs announcing her half-baked intentions.
She suspected Mack feared failing, but only because he pushed himself so far beyond reasonable expectations that failure was possible, even probable. In her case, she’d spent a lifetime living within the limits, doing her job, but never stretching the parameters beyond easy reach.
Maybe it was time to try. Maybe she could exercise the skills she’d acquired all those years at PBS and turn them to good use. To Mack’s use.
And maybe, for once, to her own ends.
She dug out a yellow pad, a couple of fine-point felt-tipped pens, and cleared the desk in her bedroom. As she slipped her song notebook into a drawer, she caught a line she’d penned several nights before. “He walks with ghosts…”
She penned the line in capital letters at the top of a blank sheet of paper and picked up the telephone and punched in the numbers she’d used daily for ten years. After a few pleasantries with her loyal sources, she launched into her request. “I need a list of all of the survivors of that incident, okay? Particularly those he rescued. I also need a list of the parents of the children who died. And the cafeteria worker, too. In fact, I need everything.” She gave the ranch fax number
and her e-mail address.
Please let this work, she prayed. And then, in a secondary prayer, she added, Please let me understand it.
She didn’t dare consider what would happen if her research only made things worse.
Rita called Mack to the phone midway through the afternoon. She began dusting the mantel in the living room as he picked up the receiver.
“You Mack Dorsey? Pete Salazar, here. Chance’s cousin—his daddy was married to my aunt? Hell of a job you did at that fire. You’re all right. Anyway, Chance dropped by a piece of cloth a couple days ago and asked me to run an analysis on it. He told me to call you if I had any luck.”
“Right. Anything?”
“I’d sure be interested in knowing where Chance found this scrap,” Pete said.
Mack frowned. “On the floor in the barn. A nail in one of the nearby stalls had a black thread on it. We assumed the piece of cloth had been ripped off a shawl or skirt. Or maybe even one of the kids’ sweaters. Why, is there something?” He glanced at Rita. She was busy replacing a small, framed photograph of Jeannie, Leeza and Corrie back onto the hearth seat.
“That explains the bits of straw, then. Of course, it doesn’t explain anything else. The deal is, I’ve got a gal in crime-scene forensics looking at it now. She’s been flipping out all morning. She’s an expert on textiles. I called her in when our guys couldn’t figure it out.”
“Did she find blood on that scrap or—”
“Naw, nothing like that, but weirder. Ready for this? The wool in that little bit of cloth is hand-woven by a master weaver. That’s strange enough, but now we get to the really good part. My textiles expert says this cloth was what she’d called wool-dyed, meaning the black color was added to the wool before it was even spun into yarn. And that the yarn was then coated with flax oil. That’s linseed oil to us nowadays. Except this wasn’t linseed, not in the modern sense.”
Though Mack was relatively sure Rita couldn’t possibly be hearing what Pete Salazar was saying on the phone, her features seemed to pinch nevertheless. She whisked out of the living room and down the hall.
“Are you with me, so far? Not even a remotely current process went into the making of the piece of cloth.”
Mack felt the hairs on the base of his neck tingling. “So because it was wool-dyed and has this flax oil on it, you’re thinking this cloth is old?”
“You could certainly call it that,” Pete said. “Linda says this little scrap of cloth is at least two hundred years old. Maybe more.”
Mack’s mouth felt dry, his tongue thick. He remembered reaching across the woman in black to open the back door of the Bronco. He thought of Corrie’s duster, left behind for them to find. He pictured little Pedro creeping across the drive to present a midnight snack to his mama, only to find La Dolorosa, seeking her missing children.
“Could your Linda tell what the piece of cloth came from? Skirt, shawl, jacket, whatever?”
Corrie came into the room, Rita hard on her heels. Mack shook his head but raised his shoulders.
Pete said, “No way to tell. But Linda went on about carbon dating, DNA and other technical stuff. She says the wool comes from a type of sheep known only in New Mexico, Mexico and—are you sitting down? Afghanistan. Some kind of an angora goat, something the natives call Navajo sheep. She’s as excited as I’ve ever seen her, and trust me, she’s not that easy to rile up. She’s already signed her name on the initial report, though. Bottom line is that swatch of material came from some bigger piece that’s at least two hundred years old.”
“I see,” Mack said. He didn’t see at all. Whoever had been in the Bronco that night they’d brought Pablo home had been real, not any revenant. And whoever—whatever—Pedro, Corrie and he had seen the night before was as real as the walls surrounding them, or the telephone receiver in his hand.
“There’s nothing else, really,” Pete said. “Couple of bits of hay, a few grains of adobe mud—also old, by the way, since it had evidence of very old manure in it. Kinda gross, if you ask me. Anyway, Mack, tell Chance all this for me and let me know if you find any more scraps of cloth like this. Linda’s drooling.”
Mack hung up the phone feeling dazed, but still sure the woman they’d seen the night before was every bit as real as the woman staring at him.
“That was about the cloth, wasn’t it?” Corrie asked.
She had a smudge of ink across her forehead and a pen tucked over her ear. Her long, thick hair spilled out of its single pencil confine. As was common indoors, she was barefoot, her toenail polish rubbed off in places and bright in others. Her clothing was a rumpled collection of mismatched items that appeared to have been discovered at the bottom of a Salvation Army heap.
He didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone as staggeringly beautiful in his life.
He felt something hard melting inside him. He couldn’t help but smile at her.
At his smile, something in her eyes seemed to flicker. She smiled back, her harried features softening, a glow suffusing her face.
“The cloth?” she reminded him.
“That was Pete Salazar, Chance’s cousin. He said there was nothing much unusual about the cloth—”
“Except?”
“Except that it was woven about two hundred years ago.”
To his delight, Corrie grinned. “Really?”
Rita crossed herself and kissed the cross she’d taken to wearing around her neck.
“Two hundred years old?” Corrie asked, her eyes wide. She looked like a kid on the verge of hearing a ghost story.
“Yeah. Something about it being wool-dyed and some rare kind of flax oil.”
“My grandmother used to spin her own wool,” Rita said slowly. She crossed herself again. “She had a spinning wheel, and after we would shear the sheep, she would comb the wool and wash it, then comb it again. Then she would feed it into the wheel. I remember the sound of her foot on the floor, tapping a rhythm as her hand would send the wheel spinning and her fingers worked the thread.”
“Did she use flax?” Corrie asked.
“She did something to it. Boiled something, mashed it, maybe. It stank, I remember that. She would have us hold the wands, which she wrapped with the twine, and she would dip her fingers into flax and rewind the yarn into balls.”
“So the process isn’t that unusual,” Mack said.
Rita raised her eyebrows. “My grandmother was in her nineties when I was only ten. I’ve never heard of anyone doing it that way anymore. And people thought she was crazy then, when you could go to the notions store and buy yarn in any color.”
“Hippies,” Corrie said.
“What?”
“Back-to-nature types. You know, Foxfire groups, back-to-nature types, hippies. I’ll bet they still do it.”
“He was pretty adamant about it being at least two hundred years old, mentioned carbon dating and DNA testing.”
“Dios mio,” Rita said.
“What?” Corrie asked.
“She really is La Dolorosa.”
The front door banged open, startling all of them, and Juan Carlos rushed into the room, panting, his hair flying, his eyes wider than they had been on a runaway horse. “She’s here. La Dolorosa! We have her trapped in the barn!”
Chapter 13
The Milagro children and mixed-breed pups were gathered outside the barn, forming a rough semicircle in front of the great doors. Jason, Jenny and Tony huddled on one side; the little ones, Analissa and Pedro, on the other. Pedro was in tears and Analissa, totally ignoring her station at the barn door, was bent over slightly, trying to see his face and cajole him into a smile. The pups were barking excitedly, straining at their tethers.
Mack passed Juan Carlos at a dead run. “Stay outside, kids,” he yelled before plunging into the dark opening of the barn.
Rita plucked at Corrie’s blouse to keep her from following suit, but Corrie shook free, almost as easily as she passed the children in the yard.
The darkness of the
barn was disorienting after the dazzling light of the drive. Corrie could barely see Mack’s shadowy form some twenty feet in front of her. But she’d made a study of his walk, his shoulders, and could have picked him out in a crowd of five hundred at midnight.
“Is she here?” Corrie asked.
“Quiet,” Mack said.
She could tell by the way he cocked his head he was listening to something. He moved toward one of the farthest stalls. Corrie closed the distance between them.
A slight figure cowered in the corner of the stall, a black shadow.
Mack barked, “Quien es?” Who is it?
“Por favor, señor,” a frightened woman’s voice begged. “No dogs.”
Corrie’s heart melted at the note of fear in the woman’s tone. She brushed past Mack and into the stall. For a moment, with her body between Mack’s and the woman-ghost in the stall, she had the strong feeling she’d just crossed some invisible barrier between sympathy and stupidity.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said in Spanish. “Please—”
This small, frightened woman couldn’t begin to be dangerous. She didn’t look nearly as ghostly huddled in the barn stall as she had on the dark ranch road that night. “It’s okay,” Corrie said, stepping closer. “You don’t have to be frightened.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” the woman sobbed. “Please don’t set the dogs on me.”
“You didn’t harm a thing, señora. It’s all right. The dogs are outside. They wouldn’t hurt you, anyway. They’re only puppies.” She took another step and held out a hand. Strangely, it didn’t shake. “You’re Pedro’s mother, aren’t you?”
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said, and broke down into racking sobs.
Corrie could no more have walked away from the pain in the woman’s voice than she could have turned her back on someone injured. She stepped forward and wrapped an arm around the thin shoulders of the sobbing woman. “Don’t cry, señora. Everything will be okay.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’s all right now.”
At Close Range Page 15
