McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [20]
Lorelei smiled. “Good,” she said.
“You’re welcome to visit him anytime, if you’re so disposed.”
“Thank you,” she replied softly.
“I could see you home,” Holt ventured, turning the fancy hat in his hands.
She shook her head. “I don’t think I’m ready to go there just yet,” she said.
He didn’t press for a reason. “Well, I guess I’d better get along.”
He turned, put a foot in the stirrup and mounted with an ease Lorelei couldn’t help admiring. She yearned to ride, just get up on a horse’s back and race over the ground, travel as far and as fast as she could, with the wind buffeting her face and playing in her hair. Her father had forbidden her that pleasure, along with many others, claiming it was not a suitable enterprise for a lady.
In reality, it was because her older brother, William, had been thrown from a pony when he was nine. He’d struck his head on a rock and died three days later. The judge’s mourning had been terrible to behold.
Holt tilted his head to one side, watching her face. “Something the matter?”
Lorelei was swamped with memories—her father’s utter grief. All the mirrors in the house draped in black crepe. The sound of the rifle shot, ringing through the heavy air of a summer afternoon, as William’s pony was put down.
All of this had happened the day she turned six. Raul had led away the little spotted Shetland that was to have been her birthday gift, later admitting that he’d given it to a rancher.
Child that she was, she’d mourned the lost pony more than William, at the time, and the recollection of that caused a sharp pang of guilty sorrow.
She sighed. “No,” she lied, catching hold of his question, left dangling in the air for a long moment. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“I don’t believe you,” Holt answered quietly.
Then he took the reins in one hand, touched the brim of his hat and went on, toward town.
Lorelei stared after him, wondering when he’d leave San Antonio and go back to wherever he’d come from.
CHAPTER 8
GUILT, AND A NEED for some errand to quiet her mind and keep her out of the house for a while, sent Lorelei toward St. Ambrose’s, an old mission at the edge of town. The walk was long and the heat insufferable, but when she reached the shady plot where her mother and William rested side by side, she found some solace.
Selma Hanson Fellows’s marker was a marble angel with a trumpet raised to its stone lips. The angel’s eyes gazed with longing into the far reaches of eternity, and the mold and lichen in the crevices of its finely chiseled face and the folds of its flowing gown gave it an eerie dimension.
Lorelei kissed the tips of her fingers and set them against the S in her mother’s name. A gentle breeze wafted through the cemetery, cooling her scalp.
She searched her mind for even the ghost of a memory of her lost mother and waited, but nothing came.
William’s grave was more modest, with a smaller angel to oversee it, but the words carved in the granite base had a poignancy that Selma’s lacked.
BELOVED SON OF ALEXANDER FELLOWS MY SOUL PERISHED WITH HIM.
Lorelei pulled out her handkerchief, for the second time that morning, and touched it to her eyes. The judge had stayed drunk for a solid month after William’s funeral, night and day. She remembered his ragged beard, his unkempt hair, standing up in ridges from the repeated thrust of his fingers. The sweat-and-tobacco stench of his clothes, underlaid by the subtler smell of despair.
“You,” her father had muttered once, when she’d crept into his study and tried to crawl into his lap. He’d pushed her away with a rough motion of one hand and a surly, “If one of you had to die, why did it have to be him? My only son. My only hope.”
Lorelei wrapped both arms tightly around her middle and lowered her head, remembering. That day, in the space of an instant, Alexander Fellows had stopped being “Papa” and become the Judge. They’d been on opposite shores of an invisible river ever since, and if there was a ford or a bridge, Lorelei had yet to find it.
Except for Angelina, and