by Wendy Webb
But I wouldn’t get any of those answers, not on that day. It was time to find a parka and boots and follow Mrs. Sinclair out to the stables. That was my job. I had promised Adrian I’d look after his mother in his absence, and I intended to keep that promise, and then some. If it were my mother, I’d expect no less. So, if she wanted to go to the stables, we were going to the stables.
As I hurried up to my room to change, I told myself that the mysteries wafting through the hallways at Havenwood would have to wait for another day. I didn’t know then that our afternoon in the snow would swirl up even more.
ELEVEN
Twenty minutes later, I was waiting for Mrs. Sinclair at the back door leading out of the kitchen toward the greenhouses and stables beyond. I had changed into a pair of jeans, a heavy sweater, and my sturdiest boots. Over that, I put the cozy red parka and mittens I had found in the closet in the foyer earlier in the day.
She burst into the room in full western riding gear—chaps, boots, leather duster, cowboy hat, and all, over a thick woolen sweater and pants. I stifled a grin.
“Oh, come on, darling.” She laughed at me. “You didn’t think I’d show up with a riding crop and helmet, did you?”
I shook my head and let the grin loose. “You are full of surprises, Mrs. Sinclair.”
She pinched my arm as she walked past me. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. Now, my dear, it’s on to the horses!”
We skimmed through the dusting of new snow down the pathway to the stables. Inside a fenced pasture, I saw a man of about my age tightening a saddle on one of two horses, both a deep shade of auburn with black manes and tails. Something about the scene stopped me in my tracks. As I stood there watching this man, that same sense of déjà vu I had felt earlier wrapped itself around me again. I had seen him before. Stood here before. And yet I knew that was impossible. I was beginning to think I was right about having seen a movie that was filmed at Havenwood—that would explain everything.
“Hello, my boy!” Mrs. Sinclair called out to him. Upon seeing us, he dropped the bridle he was holding. I couldn’t see his eyes because he was wearing sunglasses, but somehow I knew he was staring at me. I could feel the force of it on my skin, an intensity that made me shiver.
He shook his head, as if to dismiss whatever he was thinking. He turned to Mrs. Sinclair. “What, may I ask, are you doing?”
This stopped her short. “Whatever do you mean?”
“You’re dressed for riding!” he said, putting his hands on his hips.
“How observant of you,” Mrs. Sinclair cooed, sliding up to him. “When I mentioned riding to you this morning, you didn’t think it would just be you and Julia, did you?”
“I bloody well did,” he said, a Scottish accent making music of his words. “Adrian gave me strict orders to keep you off these horses. He said—”
“My son is not here, unless you know something I don’t.” She smiled, taking the reins of the larger horse. “Hello, my lamb.” She nuzzled her face against the horse’s great head. “You were planning to ride Sebastian, I take it?”
The man threw up his hands and turned to me. “Is this your doing? You should know full well she’s not supposed to be out here.”
I didn’t quite know what to say. But his sheer frustration in the face of Mrs. Sinclair’s amused calm was tickling at my funny bone. She winked at me, a devilish look in her eyes, and I stifled a grin. Mrs. Sinclair laughed out loud.
“Oh, now it’s funny, is it?”
Mrs. Sinclair cleared her throat. “Julia, this is Drew. He’s our vet, stable hand, and all-around worrywart, who, unfortunately, is making a very poor first impression. I assure you he can be quite charming. At times.”
He rubbed his hand clean on his parka and extended it to me. “Welcome to Havenwood.”
Even through my mitten I could feel a spark when his hand touched mine. I drew it away quickly. Before I got a chance to say anything, he turned back to Mrs. Sinclair. “You know that if you insist on going out riding, I’m going with you.”
Mrs. Sinclair glanced mischievously me. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, my darling. Saddle up Nelly for Julia. I’ll take Sebastian today.”
Drew disappeared into the stables. Mrs. Sinclair easily swung up into the saddle and I waited for Nelly, hoping she’d give me a more gentle reception than her vet had.
“All right,” Drew said to me, emerging from the stable leading a horse. “Do you remember the last time you rode?”
I shrugged, eyeing Nelly. “It’s been a long time.”
“Not to worry.” He smiled at me. “Nelly is as gentle as a kitten, and I’ll be right by your side.”
He helped me get a foot in one of the stirrups—there was that spark again—and gave me a shove upward. I swung my leg around Nelly’s back and sat down as delicately as I could, holding the reins with both hands.
“That’s the way!” Mrs. Sinclair sang out to me, as her three enormous dogs bounded out of the stables. “Look, Julia, we’ll have an escort party through the woods to town! We won’t have to worry about wolves with these girls by our side!” She cackled loudly then, and clucked for her horse to start moving. “On, Sebastian!”
“Now all we have to worry about is keeping up with Barbara Stanwyck there,” Drew said under his breath with a chuckle, nodding his head in the direction of Mrs. Sinclair. “Not too fast!” he called out to her as we began to follow along.
I snorted. She did sort of look like Barbara Stanwyck.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said to him, trying to keep my balance in the saddle as my horse sidled up beside his. “I didn’t know she’s not supposed to be riding.”
“Adrian would prefer she didn’t,” he said. “But if you know anything about Amaris Sinclair, you know she’s not one who takes direction easily.”
I chuckled. “I’ve only been here for a couple of days, but I have figured that out.”
“He’s worried she’ll fall and hurt herself or worse,” Drew said, his eyes on Mrs. Sinclair. “But look at her. Sheer joy. And she’s an expert, better than you and me combined. She loves these horses but I can’t remember the last time she rode.”
With Mrs. Sinclair in the lead and Drew next to me, we fell into an easy rhythm as the horses walked along the river, which was not yet frozen over by the cold temperatures though the trees were dotted with snow. I took in the landscape around me. This was the wilderness, no doubt about it. Not a car or house or telephone pole as far as the eye could see. Only enormous, age-old pine trees, rolling hills, and clean, crisp air. There was an ancientness that was hard for me to define. The trees themselves seemed to be holding secrets within their ramrod-straight trunks, their pine needles swaying gently in the breeze. It seemed as though they were signing a message to us as we passed.
I could see why Andrew McCullough had wanted to build Havenwood on this land.
We crested a ridge and I saw a lake before us—not Lake Superior, which was still some distance away, but an inland lake. Its surface held a thin layer of ice that glinted in the bright sunshine, and its rugged, rocky shoreline was covered with more enormous pine trees. I held my breath as a massive moose appeared from within the forest, broke the ice with its hoof, and lowered its great head, enormous rack and all, to take a drink.
Drew pulled his horse to a stop next to mine. “Ever seen that before?” he whispered, lifting his sunglasses to get a better look.
I just shook my head, watching until the moose had drunk its fill and disappeared back into the pines.
I looked at Drew, my heart beating hard and fast in my chest, and knew my eyes were as wide as saucers. He smiled with the pride that comes from showing the wonders of one’s home to a newcomer.
“We have a lot of them up here,” he said, clucking for his horse, and mine, to resume walking. “Not as many as in years past, but we still do see them, especially in the winter. It’s a great treat, isn’t it?”
“This is what it must’ve looked like
here, hundreds of years ago,” I mused, knowing I was seeing the land just the way Andrew McCullough had. “Civilization hasn’t yet crept in, with its paved roads and telephone poles. This is how the native peoples saw it, back before…” I suddenly felt a bit ashamed when I thought of the end of that sentence. Before my ancestors came and destroyed life as the natives knew it.
Drew nodded. “You’re exactly right. Not everybody picks up on that. This view hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. It’s just as rugged and beautiful and harsh as it was back then.”
We rode in silence for a while, listening to the wind whisper to us through the pine needles. I had never heard such a thing before. The world around me was utterly devoid of the sound of civilization—no planes flying overhead, no car noise from any nearby street, no radios blaring, no voices. Just the soft hoofbeats of the horses’ feet crunching through the snow, and the whispering pines. It was a wispy, almost human sound that seemed to convey welcome and wisdom and warning.
My body swayed in time with Nelly’s gentle gait. I couldn’t pinpoint the last time I had ridden a horse and had been nervous about attempting it, but it was almost as though my body remembered what my mind couldn’t grasp. The movement felt as natural and calming as breathing in and out.
As we rode, Drew kept turning toward me, as though he wanted to say something.
“What?” I said finally.
“What do you mean, what?”
“You keep looking at me,” I said. “I was just wondering why.”
He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again, seemingly fumbling for words. “I was just monitoring how you’re doing on Nelly,” he eventually said.
I knew that wasn’t it, or all of it. But I wasn’t going to push it. Everyone at Havenwood seemed to have their quirks, and I supposed this man was no exception. We rode along in silence for a while, until Mrs. Sinclair turned and called out to us. “I’m just going on ahead a few paces, dear ones!”
“Now, listen, lassie,” Drew began, but she circled around us and cut him off.
“I’m not the one in this riding party who needs your watchful eye, I’m afraid,” she said, winking at me.
“It has been a long time since I last rode, but I think I’m getting the hang of it,” I said, holding tight to the horn on the saddle. “I’ll be fine.”
Her eyes danced. “I know you will, my dear. Nelly won’t go faster than a whisper and you seem to have taken to her quite well. The problem is poor Sebastian wants to stretch his legs.”
“Why do I have the feeling you set this whole thing up?” Drew said, taking off his sunglasses and squinting at her.
“Moi?” She laughed. “Never! I’ll take the dogs with me and meet you at the edge of town. Who knows, maybe we’ll go wild and get a cappuccino. Or a glass of wine!”
“But—” Drew protested.
“Nonsense. I’ve got the dogs. If we come upon anything that frightens Sebastian, the girls will take care of it. Right, girls?”
She didn’t wait for a response. She was off at a trot, the dogs leading the way. It was quite a sight, Mrs. Sinclair in her cowboy getup, surrounded by a posse of giant malamutes.
I turned to Drew and grinned. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
He chuckled. “Oh, Julia, just you wait.”
“You don’t have to babysit me back here, you know,” I said, clutching the reins and trying to look more confident than I felt. “If you’re worried about her—”
He held up a hand to cut me off. “It’s a game we play, she and I,” he said, smirking. “I protest, she goes right on ahead and does whatever it is she wants. We both know she will. But I’ve got to make a good show of it.”
As I watched Mrs. Sinclair loping off into the distance, I was beginning to see what he meant.
“Besides, she’s a better horsewoman than she is a driver, I’ll tell you that.”
“A driver?” I asked.
“You do not want to be anywhere in the vicinity when that woman decides she’s going to get behind the wheel of a car. Trust me on that.”
We lapsed into silence again, broken every once in a while by Drew giving me gentle instruction and pointers. The horses made their way up and down a steep embankment, and we found ourselves in a field of rolling hills. I could see Lake Superior glittering in the distance and a town perched on its edge.
“This is the golf course,” Drew said.
This surprised me. “You’ve got a golf course here?”
“We’re not all wilderness, all the time here, lassie. We have refinements. Besides, a Scotsman founded this town. Of course it’s going to have a golf course.”
I laughed. “Cappuccino, a golf course—what’s next, a yoga studio?”
“Wednesday afternoons in the high school gym.”
“Okay, so my expectations are duly squashed.” I chuckled. “I understood that we were in the middle of nowhere.”
“ ‘Nowhere’ is a relative term,” he said. “By Chicago standards, it’s nowhere. But for me, it’s got everything I need.”
So, he had been informed I was from Chicago, too. I wondered what else Adrian had told him about me. “And what do you need, apart from cappuccinos, yoga, and golf?”
“In addition to all of this”—he gestured widely at the landscape—“which for me is nearly everything, there are a couple of fantastic restaurants serving local fare that I love, my favorite watering hole in the entire universe, a movie theater with a full bar attached, a grocery store with gourmet selections, and very nice people who are friendly but don’t ask too many questions. Some might call what we have a small existence. I call it perfect.”
I gazed toward town. “It sounds lovely,” I said, meaning it.
Our horses quickened their pace and soon we saw Mrs. Sinclair waiting for us on the crest of the next hill, dogs lying around Sebastian’s feet.
“There’s the old girl now,” he said, his face breaking into a wide grin. “Thank goodness.”
I gave him a long look. “She’s really lucky to have you,” I said. “You care so much about her.”
“Of course I do.”
“So, where did she find you? I’d ask if you were a local, but your accent betrays you. I don’t know of too many northern Minnesotans with Scottish accents. Canadian, yes, but yours, no. What brought you here?”
“I came with the place,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I’m Andrew McCullough.”
TWELVE
I nearly fell off Nelly when he said that. What could he possibly mean? Before I could ask him to explain himself, Mrs. Sinclair charged toward us on Sebastian at a full-on run. “Goodness me, you two are slowpokes,” she said, her horse circling us as she spoke. She was in complete control of the animal and obviously an expert horsewoman.
“Listen, children, I’ve had an idea. It’s the middle of the month and I haven’t heard from Tom.” She looked at me and explained, “He’s my land manager. He handles collecting all the rents in town. We own the town, Julia. I’m not sure if you are aware of that.”
I nodded. “Adrian said something about it, yes.”
“Anyhoo, I thought, since we’re headed toward town, I’d just stop by and pay him a visit. See what’s up, so to speak.”
Drew’s mouth hung open for a moment before he said, “You’re going to pay him a visit.”
“Yes! Whyever not?”
“No reason,” he said slowly, eyeing her. “In town, though? Are you sure you don’t want me to ask him to drop by the house?”
“No! We’re right here, and I thought I’d save him a trip, and…” She looked at Drew and threw her head back and laughed at his expression, which was a mixture of bemusement and downright horror. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, boy. Don’t get all worked up. My wanting to go into town is not evidence of the apocalypse. We’ve only got three horses here, not four!” She let out another great laugh. “I’m just going to pay a little visit to an office in town to transact some business.”
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With that, she was off. “I’ll meet you at the Laughing Otter in an hour!” she called over her shoulder. “We’ll have cocktails!”
“The Otter is it, now?” Drew said, shaking his head and giving me a look. “For cocktails? I don’t quite know what to make of this.”
“I’m guessing she doesn’t go into town much?” I said, watching her disappear over the horizon, dogs at the horse’s heels.
“Very rarely. Almost never. I can’t remember the last time.” He scowled in the direction of town before calling out: “You’re meant to be lying low! You’re dead, remember?”
This made me chuckle. Dead, indeed. He turned to me. “Do you think you can make it to town alone?”
I eyed the distance. It wasn’t far and on relatively flat ground. “Of course!” I said, not knowing quite where my confidence was coming from. “Nelly and I are old friends by now.” I patted the horse’s neck and hoped she felt the same.
“I’m after her, then,” he said, picking up his pace. “Meet me at the Otter. It’s on the main street. Can’t miss it.” And then he was off, too.
It wasn’t until he was out of sight that I began to wonder what I was supposed to do with Nelly when I got to the bar. Or when I got to town, for that matter. I had never ridden a horse through city streets. How would she react to the cars?
But when I got there, I saw it was really no problem at all. Only a couple of cars were parked on the street, and I didn’t see any people, either. Adrian had been right: this place really did seem to wind down when summer tourist season was over.
The long main street curved with the Lake Superior shoreline. All the buildings on it faced the lake, and there were several cross streets of just a few blocks in length. None of the buildings was more than two stories tall. I rode on Nelly past a department store, a drugstore, a bookstore, and a smattering of shops. I saw the movie theater on the next block, several small restaurants, and a wilderness outfitter. The courthouse stood on the hill a few blocks away, next to a building I presumed to be the library.
