At Close Range

“It’s time for the bad?”

“Sí, señora, that’s how it works.” Finished with the sheets and the comforter, Rita plumped the pillows with a vigor belied by her tiny frame. Five feet tall, with black hair and snapping black eyes, she couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds dripping wet and could wrestle the most recalcitrant child into washing behind her ears. “And that Doreen at the post office? She’s talking about ghosts again.”

Corrie chuckled, thinking of the bold young mother of three who peddled more gossip than stamps. “I should have thought she was too busy with her wedding plans to worry about ghosts out here,” Corrie said.

“Oh, Doreen was talking wedding plans long before she snagged that young deputy marshal. See, there’s another good thing.”

Corrie nodded absently, already back to studying what she’d written. It was less a journal than a song notebook, but as usual, the lyrics were too sharp and pointed, contrived in a harsh fashion. She sighed. She’d come to Rancho Milagro to join her friends and partners, giving up her safe career—or fleeing it—to help run the ranch. But secretly dreaming she could follow her heart’s desire, she’d run to the ranch in order to give herself the chance to write songs.

If what she’d penned that morning was any indication of the future, and if Reba McEntire decided to sing songs with a decided bite, Corrie Stratton would be a surefire hit; otherwise, she’d better get back into journalism. No one wanted to listen to songs that dripped with romanticism only to end in a kick-in-the-face at the denouement.

Rita moved to the carpet sweeper and began scratching it across the woven rug. “My mother had a saying, ‘Talk about something bad and the Devil won’t notice you.’ The priest, I don’t think he would agree, but me, I think she was right.”

“What rhymes with loss?” Corrie muttered.

“You writing a poem? I like the versos at church. I know, how about sauce? Moss?”

“Or floss.” Corrie groaned and closed the notebook for the fiftieth time in a month. She laid her head down on the desk. “Why did I ever think I was a songsmith, anyway?”

“You’re writing a song? Like ‘Qué Buena Esa Vida’? I like that one. ‘How good life is.’ Mmm. You write songs like that?”

Corrie raised her head from the desk. “I wish,” she said. She pushed up and turned her attention on Rita. “Let me get this right, because so many good things have happened here at the ranch….”

“Sí, like the children coming and being so happy. Like Señora Jeannie falling in love with Chance Salazar and marrying him even if he was a marshal. Like the water coming from the spring after all these years, just like the legend said it would. You coming here, even if your hands still shake and you have no meat on your bones. These things are all good things. Little milagros. Miracles. Of course, you know that because you speak such good Spanish.” She smiled, then sighed, placing both hands on the handle of the sweeper, looking for all the world like a Henriette Wyeth painting. “Now it’s the Devil’s turn. Mischief time. Bad luck.” She raised her hand in the old sign against the Devil himself, a crooked forefinger over a thumb, making a rough cross.

The doorbell of the hacienda rang, and when Rita didn’t make a move, Corrie leaned back, waiting.

Rita looked to the bedroom door and then to Corrie.

Corrie looked from Rita to the bedroom door, sighed and pushed away from the desk.

“Don’t go, señora,” Rita said. “‘When the Devil knocks, don’t answer the door.’ My mama, she says that.”

Corrie withheld a shiver and shook her head. It seemed to her that Rita’s mother was obsessed with devils and demons. She hoped Rita didn’t pass along her mother’s little gems to the children. They’d had enough rough times before coming to the ranch that they didn’t need a heap of superstitious nonsense clouding their fragile psyches.

The doorbell peeled again, the rich chimes echoing throughout Rancho Milagro’s main hacienda before Corrie reached the foyer. If she’d been writing a song about it, the words would have started, Rita’s mama’s Devil knocked at the door….

At least Rita had a mother; Corrie didn’t, nor did either of her partners in the Rancho Milagro venture. There seemed some irony in the notion of three orphans tackling an orphans’ ranch. There was a feeling of coming full circle and, at the same time, one of embarking into completely new territory. They knew how to be orphans, but did they really know how to raise them?

Corrie pulled open one of the heavy wooden doors, sincerely hoping it wasn’t another of the tabloid journalists seeking a miracle story.

The man standing on the veranda didn’t look like a devil, but how could she be sure these days?

He had his back to her, apparently surveying the ranch outbuildings, a few of the children in the corral and the playground, or perhaps he studied the long view to the Guadalupe Mountains in the distance.

He wasn’t dressed in what Corrie thought of as cowboy garb—boots, buckle and snaps—though he still managed to look from the Southwest with his broad shoulders, chinos, crisp cotton shirt and corduroy sport jacket.

If it had been twenty years before, she’d have taken him to be a reporter, but the new breed of journalists didn’t wear sport coats or starched shirts, and their pants usually looked several years worse for wear. She ought to know; she’d seen enough of them in her lifetime, and even more than that in the past month.

“Can I help you?” she asked softly.

He turned slowly, as if steeling himself against something unpleasant, and swiveled an unsmiling and scarred face toward her. Though healed, the scars were obvious results of skin grafting, and done by a rather skilled surgeon. The lack of a smile could be attributed to any of a thousand reasons.

Her first thought was that he must have been a remarkably handsome man before whatever accident had befallen him. Rugged, square features, high cheekbones, piercing blue eyes and graying black hair. Then she realized the scars only accentuated his looks, as if he’d been born of tragedy and it and not genetics had carved his fierce features.

He nodded.

She inclined her head in response and waited, her heart pounding a little faster.

“I’m Mack,” he said. His voice was pitched low and was somewhat gravelly, as though he spoke infrequently or smoked too much. A blues voice. “Mack Dorsey.”

The name seemed familiar, but the man did not. “Corrie Stratton,” she said automatically.

It was customary in the Southwest to hold out one’s hand immediately upon meeting, greeting or saying farewell. But Corrie wasn’t from the Southwest and still found the practice uncomfortable around strangers. Besides which, and to her relief, the screen door still served as a distinct barrier between them.

He gave a half lift of his lips, not, she thought, as if he were trying to smile, but as if trying to remember how. The scars on his face notwithstanding, nothing about him spoke of a damaged man. He looked tough and hard. Cold and unapproachable. His eyes told a story of a sorrow she didn’t think she wanted to know. It was too intense, too wrenching. And too challenging. She suppressed the urge to shut the door and suffer the agonies of rudeness rather than continue to stand there facing the imposing man.

“I’m here about the teaching job,” he said.

Relieved, she almost smiled. She knew who he was now. Jeannie had told her that a new teacher would be coming by for a personal interview. Jeannie and Leeza had already checked his references and investigated his past. Jeannie just hadn’t mentioned that it would be today.

Her partners happened to be in Roswell that day on a shopping run and, perhaps because she’d come to the ranch with trembling hands and jumpy nerves, she hadn’t had a hand in hiring any of the crew there thus far. But she’d been there long enough now that Jeannie and Leeza had been teasing her of late that she needed to take a more active role in the ranch governance, not just play with the children. It was all too likely that, in the manner of swimming instructors of old, they’d simply thrown her into the deep end, foolishly confident she would learn to keep her head above water.

This would be her first employment interview, and while she might have grilled heads of state, she didn’t have the foggiest notion of how to go about hiring a teacher for the children at Rancho Milagro.

Besides which, the man looked nothing like a teacher. With those forbidding icy-blue eyes, squared shoulders and scarred face, he looked as if he’d be more at home riding in a general’s jeep, eyes scanning the horizon for snipers and enemy troops.

“I had an appointment,” he said, and held out one of Jeannie’s cards with the Rancho Milagro logo emblazoned across it. “At one today.”

“Right,” she murmured, though she wanted to ask him to come back another day, sometime when Leeza, Jeannie or her husband, Chance, was there to talk with this stranger.

“And it’s one now.”

“So it is,” Corrie agreed, though, typically, she had no idea what time it might be. She was quaking inside. No matter how many interviews she’d done over how many years, and discounting the numerous tough situations she’d found herself in, she nevertheless still suffered from nervous qualms at bridging the first question. The obvious one seemed easier than most. “Won’t you come in?”

She pushed the screen door out and waited for him to take it, pulling her hand back before his could come within inches of it.

“Thanks,” he said, and let the door fall softly closed behind him as he brushed past her.

She felt the heat he carried on him, and told herself she was imagining things as the day had dawned with frost that covered the ranch. Still, they were in the desert and temperatures could easily soar into the nineties during the daylight hours.

Her hands were shaking as she closed the heavy wood door behind him. Before turning around, she drew a deep breath and whispered the oft-repeated litany that had gotten her through so many bad times in the past and countless interviews after that, “I’m Corrie Stratton, and if I survived my childhood, I can survive this.”

Mack waited for Corrie to turn around and wondered if she might just stay there, forehead pressed against the wood of the oak door, whispering to herself.

Not that he minded the view, he thought. Corrie Stratton was small in stature with a slender frame. Her curves were imperfectly hidden by her long fall of silky chestnut hair, a baggy but elegant emerald shirt and sweatpants that had seen better days. Her feet were bare and her toenails painted a cheery red that seemed at odds with her lack of makeup and inexplicably trembling hands.

“Corrie Stratton. Aren’t you one of the owners of Rancho Milagro?” he asked finally, though the moment she’d spoken to him he’d known exactly who she was. “And from your National Public Radio network, this is Corrie Stratton. Good night.” Maybe she played a larger role in his reasons for appearing at the ranch in the first place.