sat in the hospital administrator’s office, his hair streaked with gray. A crucifix on the wall of the office…the smell of furniture polish. On the desk, a photo of two small children, a boy and a girl. She glanced at them and turned away.
Manicured hands laid the papers before her.
The room felt cold. She pulled the collar of her robe around her neck. Beneath her robe she wore the pajamas her father had brought her, cream with pink roses. His hand lay warm and familiar on her shoulder.
“Are you sure, honey? Once you sign these papers, there’s no going back.” His voice low, his face creased and tight.
They had talked it over endlessly; nothing else to say.
“It’s the right thing. Isn’t it?” Her voice raspy, not like hers.
“I believe it is, yes.”
Now she picked up the gold pen, scrawled her name, handed it back without looking up.
“I know it’s hard,” the attorney said. “But they’re a wonderful couple.”
Her father’s arm supported her when she tried to stand.
In the antiseptic-scented hallway, a woman in a seersucker robe passed them and peered at Marik’s puffy face. Marik turned away, laid her forehead on her father’s shoulder.
“I couldn’t get through this without you,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to,” he said, petting her hair. “I’ll always be here.”
Her father ran his hands over the prop blades, checking for blemishes. A yellow sun flowered in the east, heating the cockpit through the high windshield. The Cessna rocked as J. B. tested the flaps and trim tabs, manually working the ailerons and rudder. Marik thought, not for the first time, how young her father looked. Too young to be a grandfather, she told herself, but didn’t believe it.
A widower for fifteen years, J.B. was still lean and fit. When he came to visit her on campus her freshman year, her roommates had flirted with him. If he had moved to town instead of staying on the isolated ranch after her mother died, he probably would have remarried. But he loved the ranch, and he wanted to raise his daughters there.
Now lines of worry etched his sun-weathered face, and she was responsible for those lines. She would make it up to him, stay on the ranch and help him run it, like a son.
J.B. climbed inside the four-seater and buckled himself in, yelled the regulation warning out the window—“Clear the prop!”—though there was no one close enough to hear.
The Cessna’s engine fired to life and the plane shuddered. She watched the oil pressure come up while her father checked the fuel gauge and the alternator. He tested the magnetos one at a time, listening for roughness. Queenie was running like a dream. She always did.
J.B. looked at her. “How are you doing?”
Her episiotomy pulled like barbed wire and her swollen breasts throbbed with every vibration of the engine.
“Fine,” she said.
“Let’s fly.”
He handed her a headset and she put it on. The engine revved and the Cessna strained forward, lusting for the sky. At the end of the runway her father brought the plane around, checked the mags again, switched the radio to tower. They were the only aircraft on the strip. Clearance for takeoff came immediately and Marik laid her head back, waiting for the plane’s slight sideways skid after liftoff, like a feather caught in a breeze.
J.B. banked right. Wind buffeted the plane like a motor-boat on choppy water until they gained altitude and leveled off. The hospital was several counties from home, where she could remain anonymous, but the flying time would be short. There was nothing to do but watch the horizon until they approached the grass landing strip on the ranch.
Her dad’s hand reached over and covered hers. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Once we get you settled in, I’ll drive to town for some groceries. And anything else you need me to pick up.”
Like extra maxi-pads. Breast pads, a prescription. Would the clerk at the Pacheeta Wal-Mart recognize him and wonder about his purchases?
She hadn’t been off the ranch since she’d come home, sequestering herself in the house, her car in the barn. No one else had known she was home and pregnant except Monte, whose silence was ironclad, and Daisy Gardner. Daisy had put them in touch with a private adoption agency, and she, too, would never breathe a word.
All of them would protect the awful thing Marik had done.
Chapter Four
The clock atop the county courthouse showed ten minutes before nine when Marik drove into Pacheeta with a dead eagle in the back of her truck. Half the parking spaces along Main Street corralled pickups and SUVs, and the lighted windows of the Corner Café displayed a late-break-fast crowd. There were no boarded-up storefronts here; compared to Silk, the county seat swarmed with commerce.
The regional office of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation sat next to the courthouse and across from the town square. In the square, a community pavilion flaked white paint onto the dormant grass, and a statue of Will Rogers stood sentinel above a concrete pool drained for winter. A lariat dangled from Will’s hand, and his bronze hat sat askew above a face expertly modeled with his whimsical smile. Unlike the state’s amiable native son, Marik had met plenty of men she didn’t like. But she’d always loved that sculpture.
Beside her on the breezy seat of Red Ryder, Jace Rainwater observed the town without comment. Except for the sculpture, Pacheeta looked like a hundred other small towns, and Rainwater looked as if he’d seen them all before.
She circled the block, past the Pacheeta Tribune that supplied the county with local news and gossip. An alley ran behind the wildlife building and she turned into it, hoping to unload her cargo away from the eyes of curious pedestrians. Two vehicles occupied a potholed gravel area next to the alley. Marik parked close to a metal door with ODWC stenciled in white letters on its brown paint.
The door was locked, and nobody responded to her pounding. She went back to the truck, where Rainwater was securing the tarp around the eagle after its windy trip. “I guess we can leave it here for a few minutes while we go inside,” she said.
He nodded. “Not much traffic back here.”
They walked down the alley and turned on to a quiet, spider-veined sidewalk. A brittle sun warmed their shoulders until they rounded the next corner, where the shade swaddling the front entrance of the building still felt like winter. Rainwater opened a glass door and held it for her. Marik stepped onto the industrial-strength carpet of a small outer office.
A young woman with straight, jaw-length hair sat behind a desk, staring into a computer screen. Her hair looked too black to be natural, but it was striking against paper-white skin. One or two strategic piercings and she could be a Goth girl. The phone on her desk rang and she held up a red-nailed finger. “Be right with you.”
“Department of Wildlife,” she said into the receiver. There was a long pause while the girl rolled her eyes. “Gee, you’re the first guy who thought of that joke,” she said. “Is there something else I can help you with?” Another pause. “Just a moment, I’ll see if he’s in.”
She punched the hold button and hung up. Her eyes flickered over the lanky form of Jace Rainwater and she smiled brightly. “Now then. How can I help you folks?”
“We need to see a ranger, if we can, or some other conservation official,” Marik said.
“You’re in luck. Ranger Ward is actually in this morning.” She turned her head toward a hallway behind her desk and hollered in a voice that could have brought cattle in for milking. “Roger? Somebody here to see you!”
In seconds a wiry, fortyish man with a fairy ring