LITMIR.BIZ

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daughter. “She told me you were rude and impossible to manage.”

      “She was a jerk!” Ellie said passionately. “I hated her!”

      Dan struggled to be patient.

      “You hate all of them, sweetheart. But we need some help, and it’s not easy to find a housekeeper like Mrs. Graham who’s willing to live in Crystal Creek and drive back and forth every day. Most of them want to live in, but we don’t have an extra room.”

      “We don’t need her! I hate having strangers in my house, Daddy. Especially jerks like her who don’t even know what they’re doing.”

      “She was highly recommended by the last family she worked for,” Dan said. “And she was willing to do housework and child care and make a hot meal in the evening. It seemed like a pretty good deal to me.”

      “But it must have cost a lot.” Ellie turned to look at him directly.

      “Quite a bit,” Dan admitted.

      “And you’re always talking about how we don’t have any money.”

      “Things are tight, but some expenses are necessary, Ellie. I worry about Chris and Josh. They need more attention than they’re getting, and I’m too busy to look after them properly.”

      “I can look after them,” Ellie said stubbornly. “And Chris and I can work harder to keep the house clean. I’m learning to cook supper, too.”

      “Macaroni and cheese every night isn’t exactly a balanced diet, honey.”

      “Aunt Mary can teach me other stuff. She said I could come over any time I wanted to learn to cook.”

      Dam looked in despair at his daughter. He loved her dearly, but Ellie was the most frustrating, inflexible person he’d ever known.

      She’s just like you, his wife used to point out. Everybody in Crystal Creek knows where that stubbornness of hers comes from, Dan Gibson.

      “Do you ever give any thought to what life is like for me, Ellie?” he said quietly.

      “I don’t know what you mean.” She stood on tiptoe to put glasses away in the cupboard.

      “Well, you keep telling me how you and Chris can look after things and we don’t need a housekeeper. But the two of you are in school all day. That means I have to take Josh with me all the time, no matter what I’m doing. It’s not easy to do a full day of farm work with a two-year-old running along behind you. And he still needs a nap in the afternoon, you know.”

      She considered this, frowning. “Aunt Mary would look after him anytime you asked. She loves him.”

      “You kids are my responsibility,” he said. “Mary and Bubba have been good to us since your mother went away, but I can’t ask Mary to be a full-time baby-sitter. She has work of her own to do.”

      Ellie put the plastic rack in a lower cabinet and wiped out the chipped sink.

      “Well, I still don’t see why we need to have some creepy stranger around the house,” she said. “And I just hated that Mrs. Graham. She looked in all my dresser drawers.”

      “She was housecleaning,” Dan said wearily. “God knows, this place could use it.”

      “Chris and I can clean,” Ellie said again. “We can clean as good as she did.”

      Dan watched his daughter, wondering what made her so prickly and defensive. But he understood her well enough to know he wasn’t getting anywhere with the argument.

      He’d just have to try again, and see if next time he could manage to hire somebody who wouldn’t alienate this difficult child of his.

      “I’ll go and help Chris put Josh to bed,” Ellie told him, sidling from the room.

      At least she seemed anxious to appease him.

      “Thank you,” Dan said, opening up the newspaper. “Call me and I’ll come in and read to them when they’re in bed.”

      He barely had time to scan the headlines before Chris trailed into the kitchen wearing what passed for pajamas with both girls—jogging pants and a T-shirt. She carried her old Raggedy Ann doll and was looking for a glass of milk.

      Dan gave her the milk and a couple of cookies, then took her down the hall and supervised as she brushed her teeth, ignoring her protests that she’d already brushed them.

      He tucked her into the upper bunk, smoothed the blond hair back from her forehead and gave her a kiss while Ellie carried Josh into the room and deposited him in the lower bunk.

      The little boy snuggled drowsily into the pillows, his thumb in his mouth again, his teddy bear held close to his face.

      The girls had washed and dried his hair, and it smelled pleasantly of strawberry shampoo. Dan bent to kiss his son, then settled on the floor near Josh’s bed, reading aloud to the two younger children from an old copy of Peter Pan.

      Josh didn’t understand the story, but he was usually too sleepy at bedtime to care what his father read as long as he was nearby for a while. Chris, however, was passionately caught up in the adventures of Peter and Tinkerbell. Several times recently Dan had caught her trying to fly off the haystack.

      Ellie left the crowded little bedroom, heading out to the front porch where she had a private sleeping space on all but the coldest winter nights, when she bunked on the sofa in the living room.

      After the younger children were settled, Dan went out through the house and knocked on the door of the little screened veranda.

      “Come in,” Ellie called.

      She was lying in bed, reading a copy of My Friend Flicka from the school library.

      “I loved that book when I was a kid,” Dan told her, pausing near her bed. “There are two more in the series, you know.”

      “I already got the librarian to reserve them for me. Can I tell you something, Daddy?” She looked up at him gravely.

      “Sure. What is it?”

      “I’m not sorry Mrs. Graham went away, because she was a real stupid woman, but I’m sorry the place is such a mess all the time. If we don’t get another housekeeper, I’ll try harder to keep things nice.”

      “Thank you, Ellie.” He kissed her cheek and went back toward the living room. “Don’t leave your light on too long,” he said over his shoulder.

      “Okay, I won’t.”

      He paused to smile at her. She lay in a warm circle of lamplight while crickets chirped beyond the window and moths fluttered softly against the screens.

      “Good night, kiddo.”

      “Night, Daddy.”

      Dan wandered back to the kitchen, too tired to think about reading a book himself or even watching television. All he wanted was to have a shower in the damp, cluttered bathroom and fall into bed.

      But first he made himself a cup of instant coffee and carried it over to the table to read the rest of the newspaper.

      A small article on the second page, accompanied by a photograph, caught his attention.

      “Heiress missing after car plunges into the Claro River,” the caption read.

      Dan scanned the article, realizing the fatal accident must have happened last night, quite close to his farm. A young woman named Isabel Delgado, age twenty-seven, had been in a car and plunged to her death from the rocky promontory overlooking Rim-rock Park.

      “It is unknown at this time,” the article said, “whether Delgado’s death was accidental. She is the daughter of well-known Texas industrialist Pierce Delgado, who is on his way home from a business meeting in Belgium. Isabel Delgado was divorced two years ago from Eric Matthias, a police lieutenant in Austin. Matthias told reporters he has not seen

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