Matchmaking with a Mission

The barn came into sight first, a large weathered building with a cupola on top and a rusted weather vane in the shape of a horse. As she drew closer she heard the eerie moaning sound of the weather vane as it rotated restlessly in the breeze. It was a sound she remembered from when she used to sneak over here as a young girl.

As she rode closer, the house came into view. The old Harper place. She felt a rush of adrenaline she’d never been able to explain. Something about the house had always drawn her—even against her father’s strict orders that she and her sisters stay far away from the place.

Chester Bailey had said the property was dangerous. Something about it being in disrepair, old septic tanks and uncovered abandoned wells. Things horses and kids could get hurt in.

McKenna had never gone too close, stopping at the weathered jack fence to look at the house. The structure was three stories, a large old ranch house with a dormer window at each end. An old wooden staircase angled down from the third floor at the back. A wide screened-in porch ran the width of the house in the front.

Her gaze just naturally went to the third-floor window where she’d seen the boy. She’d been six. He’d looked a couple years older. She had never forgotten him. He’d disappeared almost at once, and an old woman had come out and run her off.

As she stared up at the window now, sunlight glinting off the dirty glass, she wondered what had happened to that sad-looking boy.

Whoever had lived there moved shortly after that, and the house had been occupied by Ellis Harper, an ornery old man who threatened anyone who came near. He kept a shotgun loaded with buckshot by the backdoor.

McKenna had heard stories about the house. Some of the kids at the one-room school she’d attended in Old Town Whitehorse had whispered that Ellis Harper stole young children and kept them locked up in the house. Why else wouldn’t he let anyone come around? For years there’d been stories of ghosts and strange noises coming from the house.

McKenna didn’t believe in ghosts. Even if she had, she doubted it would have changed the way she felt about this place. She’d ridden over here even when Ellis Harper had been alive, but she’d never gone farther than the fence. Too many times she’d seen his dark silhouette through the screen door, the shotgun in his hands.

As she sat on her horse at the fence as she’d done as a child, she realized she’d always been so captivated by the house and its occupants that she’d never noticed the land around it.

The breeze rustled the new leaves on the copse of cottonwoods that snaked along the sides of the creek and through the rolling grasslands. Good pastureland and, unless she was mistaken, about forty acres worth. There were several old outbuildings a good ways from the house, and then the big old barn and a half dozen old pieces of farm machinery rusting in the tall weeds.

While the idea had come to her in a flash, she knew it had been in the back of her mind for years. She had always been meant to buy Harper House and the land around it.

She just hadn’t known until that moment what she planned to do with it.

NATE DEMPSEY SENSED someone watching the house and looked out in surprise to see a woman astride a paint horse just on the other side of the fence. He quickly stepped back from the filthy second-floor window, although he doubted she could have seen him. Only a little of the June sun pierced the dirty glass to glow on the dust-coated floor at his feet as he waited a few heartbeats before he looked out again.

The place was so isolated he hadn’t expected to see another soul. Like the front yard, the dirt road in was waist-high with weeds. When he’d broken the lock on the back door, he’d had to kick aside a pile of rotten leaves that had blown in last fall.

As he sneaked a look, he saw that she was still there, staring at the house in a way that unnerved him. He shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun off the dirty window and studied her, taking in her head of long blond hair that feathered out in the breeze from under her Western straw hat.

She wore a tan canvas jacket, jeans and boots. But it was the way she sat astride the brown-and-white horse that nudged the memory.

He felt a chill as he realized he’d seen her before. In that very spot. She’d just been a kid then. A kid on a pretty paint horse. Not this one—the markings were different. Anyway, it couldn’t have been the same horse, not considering the last time he had seen her had been more than twenty years ago. That horse would be dead by now.

His mind argued it probably wasn’t even the same girl. But he knew better. It was the way she sat on the horse, so at home in a saddle and secure in her world on the other side of that fence.

To the boy he’d been, she and her horse had represented freedom, a freedom he knew he would never have—even after he escaped this house.

Nate saw her shift in the saddle, and for a moment he feared she planned to dismount and come toward the house. With Ellis Harper in his grave, there would be little to keep her away.

To his relief, she reined her horse around and rode back the way she’d come.

As he watched her ride off he thought about the way she’d stared at the house—today and years ago. While the smartest thing she could do was stay clear of this house, he had a feeling she’d be back.

Finding out her name should prove easy since he figured she must live close by. As for her interest in Harper House…He would just have to make sure it didn’t become a problem.

“I THOUGHT WE’D ALREADY discussed this?”

McKenna Bailey looked up from the real-estate section of the newspaper the next morning as her sister Eve set down a platter of pancakes.

“You don’t need to buy a place,” Eve Bailey said as she pulled up a chair and helped herself to a half dozen of the small pancakes she’d made. “You can live in this one and use as much of the land as you need for this horse ranch you want to start.”

McKenna watched her older sister slather the cakes with butter before drowning them with chokecherry syrup. “Are you nervous about getting married next month?” she asked, motioning at Eve’s plate.

Eve looked up, a forkful of pancakes on the way to her mouth. “No, I’m just hungry.”

“Right,” McKenna said. “Like the way you’ve suddenly started holding your fork with your left hand?”

Eve looked down at the fork, then at the engagement ring on her left hand and smiled. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

McKenna nodded, smiling at her older sister across the table, the same table they’d shared since they were kids.

“I am doing the right thing, aren’t I, marrying Carter?” Eve asked with a groan as she pushed her plate away.

“You love Carter and he loves you,” McKenna said. “Be happy. And eat.”

“You’d tell me if you thought I was making a mistake?”

McKenna nodded, smiling. Carter Jackson had broken her sister’s heart back in high school when he’d married someone else. That marriage had been a disaster, ending in divorce. McKenna had no doubt that Carter loved her sister as much as Eve loved him. For months the poor man had been trying to win Eve back; finally at Christmas he’d asked her to marry him. The Fourth of July wedding was just weeks away now.

Eve pulled her plate back in front of her and picked up her fork. “I really am hungry.”

McKenna laughed and went back to studying the real-estate section of the Milk River Examiner. But none of the houses interested her. There was only one place she wanted, and even though she’d heard the owner had died recently, she didn’t see it listed. Maybe it was too soon.

“I’m serious,” Eve said between bites. “Just live in this house. With Mom and Loren living in Florida, it’s just going to be sitting empty.”

McKenna looked around the familiar kitchen. So many memories. “Dad doesn’t want the house?”

Eve shook her head. “He’s moved in with Susie, and they’re running her Hi-Line Café. He seems…happy.”

“Do you know if anyone has bought the old Harper place?” McKenna asked.

“You can’t be serious.” Eve was staring at her, her mouth open. “Harper House?”

“Did you leave me any pancakes?” their younger sister, Faith, asked as she padded into the room in a pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt and plopped down at her chair. “What about Harper House?”

Eve shoved the platter of pancakes toward Faith without a word and gave McKenna a warning look.

“Is anyone going to answer me?” Faith asked as she picked up a pancake in her fingers, rolled it up and took a bite. She looked from Eve to McKenna and back. “Are you guys fighting?”

“No,” Eve said quickly. “I was just telling McKenna that she could have this house,” she said with a warning shake of her head at McKenna. There was a rule: no fighting, especially when Faith was around.

The youngest of the three girls, Faith had taken their parents’ divorce hard and their mother’s marriage to Loren Jackson even harder. Because of that, both Eve and McKenna had tried to shelter their younger sister. Which meant not upsetting her this morning with any problems between the two of them.

“It would be nice if someone lived here and took care of the place,” Eve said.

“Not me,” Faith said and helped herself to another pancake.