state. There hadn’t been many turns off the freeway, but he could have chosen the wrong one. Maybe he wasn’t where he thought he was. Right then, a gust of wind came out of nowhere. The gray shapes shifted and the town’s church materialized out of the swirling storm. “Whoa.” He braked to a stop, his fingers gripping the wheel and his breath coming hard. He wasn’t as indifferent to this place as he had thought.
The large white building had no steeple. Cement steps led up to an ordinary double door made out of wood. On the ground, a plastic tarp had been laid over flower beds that went along both sides of the church.
One thing was certain, though—he was looking at the Dry Creek church and none other. Every year the congregation here forced daffodils to bloom for their sunrise Easter service as a sign of their faith.
Clay let the pickup idle for a bit and took a few deep breaths. He wasn’t going to be hurried through this town, especially not by his own bad memories. Just then a light was turned on in one of the houses down the road. He tensed for a bit and then shrugged. He told himself that whoever it was would go back to bed. He didn’t need to worry. Clay might not be welcome within a hundred miles of here, but he had every legal right to be where he was. The paper in his pocket made that clear when it stated the terms of the early parole he would earn if he spent the next year working as a horse wrangler on the Nelson ranch.
The storm lessened as Clay kept going along the snow-packed road. Finally he came to the drive that led to the heart of the Nelson ranch. When he’d lived here, a locked metal gate always spanned the road just behind the cattle guard. The gate swung free now. Snow had filled in the ditches at the side of the road, but the height of the dead stalks told him that no one had cut back the weeds last fall.
Clay let the pickup sit as he took more time to look around. It was hard to maintain his upbeat attitude looking at the place. He saw a dim light coming from what would be the kitchen of the distant house, but the upstairs was dark. Old habits die hard, and he couldn’t help but count across the line of second-floor windows until he found the one that marked Allie Nelson’s former room. She was the rancher’s daughter. Back before all of his troubles, Clay used to check that window every night from his place in the bunkhouse to see if she had gone to sleep. He never questioned why he did it, but it made him rest easier to know she was safe.
The first portrait sketch Clay had ever drawn was of Allie’s young face looking out that window at night, her whole being showing a yearning that touched him in its simplicity. Looking back, he should have known drawing her had been a mistake. She was the one who had made him yearn for some of those promised family ties the social workers told him about.
As Clay pulled closer to the barn, he saw that it wasn’t just the weeds that had been neglected. Several poles in the corral were down. He realized then that the windows in the bunkhouse looked deserted. They’d built that log structure the year before he’d been sent here. It was long, with two big main rooms and a porch along the length of it. If there were any ranch hands around, they would have been up stirring by now.
He looked out at the fields then. There used to be dozens of horses standing or galloping around the dirt track that lined the small field to the right. The Nelson ranch supplied stock to other ranches and even managed to sell a few to small racing stables. He and Allie both loved discovering which horses had the strength and speed to be racers. It’s what bound them together. Now he saw no animals of any kind.
“Something’s wrong,” Clay said to himself as he kept looking around.
A light flickered and a woman stepped in front of one of the kitchen windows. Clay could see only her shape, but something about the tilt of her head made him think that it was Allie. His breath stopped at the thought. She’d been a girl of sixteen when he knew her. She had to be twenty years old now. Maybe even twenty-one since her birthday would have been last month. But it couldn’t be her; he’d heard she was working at some fancy resort down in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
He’d rather come up against a dozen raging blizzards than face Allie again. The fierce anger in her eyes at his trial had been harder to bear than hearing the judge pronounce him guilty of armed robbery. He might have endured the censure of the rest of the town if she had stood by him.
He’d been clueless that night about what Allie’s older brother, Mark, was capable of doing when he was drunk, but no one believed Clay’s version of what happened, especially not Allie. Everyone thought Clay had planned the robbery of the gas station, but it had been Mark’s impulsive move.
Clay closed his eyes until the rush of memories stopped. He didn’t like thinking about Mark. Allie’s brother had been shot in the head that night in a scuffle with the store clerk. At first, everyone expected Mark to come out of his coma in time to testify, but it hadn’t happened. The last Clay had heard was that the doctors were saying Mark was not expected to ever regain consciousness. He’d had some kind of fever that compounded the swelling in his brain.
Clay turned the engine off. The pickup jerked as the muffler rattled to a stop. He heard a cat’s indignant hiss then and he looked down. He’d forgotten about his passenger. A starving cat had snuck into the pickup when Clay stopped for gas a few hours ago. She was too tame to be feral, but none too friendly, either.
He figured that big empty-looking barn over there might as well house the cat and the kittens that, if he was any judge, she’d be having soon. From the looks of the place, the ranch could use a good mouser. So Clay grabbed the tabby and, without giving her time to protest, tucked her under the coat he was wearing. Someone had left the sheepskin coat on the seat of the pickup that had been left for him in the prison parking lot.
Clay briefly wondered who his benefactor was as he opened the pickup door, stepped down and started walking. Then he told himself he was making too much of the kindness. He was a man who stood alone. That was unlikely to change here.
* * *
Inside the house, a thin trail of steam was still rising from the skillet that Allie Nelson had dropped into the sink water before she stepped over to push open the only window that wasn’t painted shut in her father’s cluttered kitchen. She’d spent the past couple of years working as a fry cook in a popular restaurant in Jackson Hole and, even with that, she had burned the eggs on her first morning back on the ranch.
She’d been in the hall tying her nephew’s shoes, but that would be no excuse in her father’s eyes. Despite her shouldering the loan payments for her brother’s medical bills, which had taken everything she and her father had and which led to her father borrowing against the ranch to pay the rest, her father still treated her like she was barely older than young Jeremy.
The smoke from the skillet was disappearing. The winter air blew in through the open window, and Allie closed her eyes before leaning forward against the counter. She was tired to the bone, she thought as she stood there. But she couldn’t give up. The next trip here to the ranch she was going to make sure all of the windows opened as they should. Then she’d get down some of those leftover building supplies from the hayloft in the barn and paint the kitchen walls a bright sunny yellow. She would not like Mark to see the house like this; it was depressing. She’d make their house look happy again before he came home.
Against all odds, her brother had started to slowly come out of his coma this past fall. For a long time the doctors said they expected him to recover. But, when he didn’t, they decided things were worse in his brain than they had initially thought. However, Allie’s father kept saying Mark had an IQ of 156 and that his son’s genius brain would find a way to heal itself.
Allie had heard that IQ statistic so many times growing up that she figured it was seared on her memory. But she did not share her father’s confidence in her brother’s high IQ to heal him. She turned to someone more powerful. More than once she knelt at her mother’s grave and pleaded with God to save her brother, promising she would take better care of him this time if she could only have one more chance.
Now Mark was coming out of his coma. The doctors couldn’t explain it. They said it was impossible, but the swelling in his brain had gone down. First, a finger moved, and then some weeks later Mark cleared his throat and tried to speak. Finally,