fine,” she offered. Then, seeing Shula’s mouth begin to curl down at the corners, Libby added, “It smells good.”
While Shula fashioned a smile and lifted a wrist to sniff the foul fragrance, Libby once again berated herself for even considering her baby sister’s outsized, overwrought sensibilities when she had much more pressing problems. One anyway. The brutal John Rowan was getting out of jail. Today.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Andy,” she murmured.
Shula made a noncommittal little noise, extending an arm casually across the table, then reaching beneath one of Libby’s gloves to extract the pile of mail. There were three envelopes, two of which she immediately recognized—another notice from the bank and another “polite but firm” note from the dressmaker. She slid them toward her and surreptitiously tucked those two into the folds of her gown, all the while studying the unfamiliar envelope postmarked Texas.
“I don’t suppose you have any suggestions,” Libby said.
“About what?” And who the devil was writing them from Texas? Shula wondered now, frowning as she slid a fingernail underneath the flap then slipped out a single sheet of vellum.
“About what!” Libby’s fist hit the table. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve been saying, Shulamith Kingsland? Don’t you care one whit what happens to that poor little—”
“Oh, my Lord!”
“What?”
Her sister’s face had gone white as the cloth that covered the table except for the dabs of rouge on each of her cheeks.
“Shula,” Libby insisted, “what in the world is the matter?”
“It’s from him,” Shula breathed, still staring at the paper in her hands.
“Him?” A score of young men’s names flitted through Libby’s brain. Shula was forever mentioning this one or that one. None of them, though, struck Libby as capable of shaking the stuffing from her sister or taking the color right out of her face. “Him who?” she demanded.
In a whisper that was more breath than voice, Shula replied, “Him. Our father.”
Libby felt her own cheeks paling. “Give me that.” She grabbed at the letter, but her sister immediately clasped it to her bosom and sighed dramatically.
“He begins it Dear Daughters,”Shula said.
Libby snorted. “That’s probably because he can’t remember either of our names.” Angling back in her chair now, she crossed both arms. “Well, what else does the old goat have to say after fifteen years of utter silence?”
Shula’s lips trembled. “He says he’s dying, Libby.”
“Dying?” The older sister repeated the word as if it were incomprehensible, as if she hadn’t enough breath to clearly speak it nor enough sense to understand it. The Amos Kingsland she remembered was an enormous and vital man. He couldn’t be dying. Every muscle in her body, every ounce of her being seized tight, rejecting the notion. “I don’t believe it.”
“He wants us to come to Texas. To Paradise.”
“Paradise.” Libby’s head was swamped with images, not of angels in long, flowing robes or billowy white clouds, but of huge, dusty cowhands in leather chaps, of wild dark clouds rushing across a shadowed landscape. The music she heard suddenly wasn’t comprised of heavenly harps or choirs of angels, but rather the bawling of hundreds of cattle, the thunder of thousands of hooves. She shivered and blinked, then stared at her sister as if suddenly realizing she wasn’t alone.
Shula was smiling not so much at Libby but at the world in general. The color had returned to her face. It was flushed now, and her eyes were bright. Feverishly so. “I knew it,” she exclaimed, waving the letter aloft. “Didn’t I tell you? Well, I probably didn’t since you close your ears whenever the man’s name is mentioned. But I always knew he’d send for us.”
After pushing away from the table, Shula began fluttering around the small kitchen. “Paradise. Don’t you just adore the sound of it. It’s bigger than the whole state of Rhode Island. Did you realize that, Libby? Bigger than an entire state.” Shula sucked in a breath. “I guess that makes our father about as important as a governor. Do you recollect the house? I confess I haven’t any memory of it. Of course, I was only five when we left. But it must be grand. Was it grand, Libby?”
Her silk gown swished as Shula turned to her sister, who sat rigid and silent. “Libby?”
“I won’t go.” Libby’s lips barely moved when she spoke. “I’m sorry he’s dying, but I will not go. Not ever.”
Shula sniffed, resuming her circuit of the room. “Don’t be silly,” she said dismissively. “Of course you’ll go. Our father’s dying and he wants us. Good Lord, Libby! Think what that means.”
It meant trouble, Libby decided, or worse. Unable to bear a second more of her sister’s outlandish exuberance, she had left the kitchen and had gone up to the spare room to check on the child, whom she found smack in the middle of the big four-poster bed, fast asleep. As gently as she could, Libby unlaced and removed the dreadful brogans from the little girl’s feet.
How fortunate Andy was, Libby had thought, to be able to escape all her trials and terrors in such deep and innocent sleep. For a moment, as she had stood gazing down at her, Libby had envied the child for that. She was sleeping like an angel. Libby couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had such an angelic rest.
But—dammit—yes, she could. It had been at Paradise with the white curtains billowing in, with South Texas sunshine buttering the walls of her room, with the lullaby of cattle and the sweet, sweet smells of hay and mock orange and jasmine.
So long ago.
Libby sat for a long time, keeping watch over the sleeping child, letting her mind drift back to a time and a place she had tried for fifteen years to erase from her memory.
Paradise! Lord, how she’d loved it. Every inch of the place from Caliente Creek where the mesquite tangled to the southernmost pastures where the air was heavy with salt from the gulf. The images—all the sights and sounds—came back so quickly and with such intensity now, it nearly took Libby’s breath away. As if having been locked away for so many years, they were rushing and spilling over one another to make themselves seen and heard. Fast. Bursting its banks like a creek after a summer storm. A flash flood. Or—Libby smiled softly at the notion—as they said in Texas, a real gully-washer.
So many memories. And superimposed on them all was the image of Amos Kingsland. His glossy black boots. His enormous, work-roughened hands. His deep auburn hair and the scratchy beard that bristled from his chin. That beard was what Libby remembered best.
Her father had been a steamboat captain in the Gulf of Mexico before venturing inland to raise cattle. The salt breezes of the gulf seemed to have permeated his beard and to have given it a permanent thrust so that, even in the house, it was as if the wind were tugging at his chin.
Or so his little girl had imagined. It hadn’t been wind at all, Libby thought now, but pure stubbornness, a will to succeed at any cost, and no qualms whatsoever about bending anyone to that will. As he had bent her mother. Bent and nearly broken the sweet, soft Ellen McCafferty Kingsland Carew.
Just then, as if the mere thought of her mother had somehow conjured up her form, Shula poked her curly head in the door.
Quickly Libby touched a finger to her lips, gesturing toward the sleeping child.
“You look so much like Mama sometimes, Shula, I find myself looking twice,” she whispered.
The ruffled apparition rustled across the room and sought her image in the mirror over the dresser. “I do, don’t I?” She rearranged a few curls, then leaned forward to more closely inspect her eyebrows. “Of course, Mama was a fool,