The Wind Comes Sweeping. Marcia Preston

understood why her father spent his life here even after her mother died. He’d loved the solitude. Anna had hated it. Marik wondered how their mother had coped with such exquisite isolation, an East Coast girl who had found her way west. Did Julianna love it as much as her free-spirited husband? Or was she like the ghost of Silk Mountain, driven to the edge by the terrifying beauty of so many stars?

      In Marik’s oil paintings, the outline of a hidden figure, feminine, invariably appeared somewhere in the background as if it painted itself. Sometimes she thought of the figure as her mother, who’d died from an ectopic pregnancy too far from a hospital. Other times she thought of the hidden figure as herself, and sometimes as the daughter she had given away.

      “I never did belong here the way you do,” Anna had said on the afternoon she signed over her share of the ranch. “We both know that deep down you’re a hard-assed Oklahoma rancher, just like Dad.” And Marik heard the envy in her soft voice.

      Maybe Dad wasn’t hard enough. Maybe I’m not, either.

      She pulled the cell phone from her pocket and pushed a button to light up its address book. She scrolled down to Casey Scott’s number, the cowboy-booted P.I. who had inadvertently tipped off Daisy about her search. He answered his cell phone on the third ring.

      “Casey, it’s Marik Youngblood. Can you talk a minute?” In the background she heard voices and the clank of silverware. “Sounds like I caught you at dinner.”

      His baritone came back with predictable breakup. “No problem. I’m eating alone. What’s up?”

      “I have another job for you. Just a small one. I need a background check on a man who’s applied for a job here on the ranch.”

      “Easy done. Give me his name and whatever else you can.” She pictured him taking notes on a paper napkin, barbecue sauce on his chin.

      “Jace Rainwater. Went to school at TCU, living in Amarillo now. He listed the USDA as a job reference there.”

      “Okeydokey,” he said. “How soon do you need it?”

      “By next week, if you can. I don’t need the whole family tree, just enough to know whether I’d trust him to live here on the ranch.”

      “Got it. Should be able to call you back in a few days.”

      “Any progress on our other project?”

      “Not much. The adoption records are sealed and the hospital was a dead end. Couldn’t find anybody who worked there eight years ago. Whole staff has turned over since then.” She could hear him chewing.

      “And you didn’t find out a thing from Daisy Gardner, either,” she said pointedly.

      “Had to try. She’s the only link so far.”

      Marik blew out a deep breath, watching a sleepy red eye wink off and on, off and on. “Let’s put that on hold for a while,” she said.

      “You sure?”

      “Yes. Save anything you’ve got for future reference and send me a bill. But for now let’s just check on this guy who wants to be my foreman.”

      Chapter Six

      Ranch work went on, regardless of anyone’s personal issues. The bucket calf woke up before daylight, bawling his curly head off to be fed. No need for an alarm clock when Bully was on the job. He was gradually learning to eat the calf pellets Marik put in his feeder, but he still needed his milk.

      She went out in the semidarkness to feed him. In the big barn she mixed calf formula in an aluminum bucket that had a long nipple on one side and a hook on the opposite rim. She lugged the bucket to a pen in the back of the barn, behind the milking stall that hadn’t been used for years. Tools and horse tack covered the barn walls. In its open center, two tractors, a hay baler and a brush hog gathered the dust of disuse. Her father had bought the big John Deere tractor on credit just a year before he died. She still hadn’t paid it off, nor found the heart to sell it.

      The calf’s plaintive cry echoed from the rafters. “Hey, Bully,” she called. “How’s it going today?”

      Twice a day she hung a bucket of milk on the railing of the pen and held on with both hands. Bully attacked the nipple with an eagerness that made her laugh. His petroleum-colored eyes, fringed with long white lashes, looked depthless in the shadows of the barn. She loved his hot, milky smell and the way foamy white slobber dripped from the corners of his mouth when he drank.

      She leaned over the railing and scratched his bony forehead. “You don’t know enough to miss your mama, do you, Bully?”

      A feral cat peered down at her from the loft. Barn cats came and went, and this one looked like a descendant of an old tom she remembered from childhood. When Bully was finished, she poured the last dribbles from his bucket into an old pie pan her father had used for the same purpose, and left it by the door.

      It took three tries to crank Red Ryder to life for her pilgrimage to the windmills. The wind was back in the north this morning, chillier than yesterday. On the crest of the ridge, she parked the pickup and stood on the running board, her eyes scanning dried cactus and sage for a mound of indigo feathers. Finding nothing, she exhaled a deep breath. The impending town meeting hung over her like a heavy boot waiting to drop. She’d never been good at waiting.

      Across the valley, ribbons of gold light snaked between violet clouds. A group of elk, dark umber smudges at this distance, grazed at the edge of a creek. An urgency arose in her to paint the feeling of that cool light above the river. She’d been away from the canvas too long. When she checked the cattle in the pastures by the river this morning, she would take along her portable easel and do some pleinair work.

      At the house again, she loaded her art supplies into the truck. She’d intended to drive to town today, but that could wait. She still had a few days’ horse feed and calf pellets in the barn. Soon Red Ryder was jouncing over a flat field where wheat grew ankle high and shamrock green.

      When she’d counted all fifty Herefords, Marik turned a wide circle in the field and rumbled back over the cattle guard at the gate. She checked on a herd of heifers, then drove to a fenced field where the airplane hangar hunkered in shaggy grass. J.B. would not approve of the neglected airstrip, but nobody used it now.

      She parked beside the hangar, unloaded her gear and backpacked the folding easel, paint box and camp stool across the runway toward a flat spot near the river. Here the slow copper current made a bell-shaped turn around a rock outcropping and then flowed off to her right, reflecting the color of the sky.

      Painting on location sounded romantic to nonartists, but in practice it wasn’t always productive: the light changed and the wind blew and bugs got stuck in the paint. Either that, or it was a serendipitous joy. Today held promise for the latter. The morning was warming up, with a diffuse light filtered by thin, high clouds.

      Marik tramped through dried grass to a place where an opening in the trees framed the bend of the river in the foreground and a hazy profile of Silk Mountain in the distance. She had painted this scene many times from various angles but was never quite satisfied. Maybe this was the day. She set up her easel with a sense of exhilaration she hadn’t felt in a long time.

      She described her composition with a few lines, memorizing the way the light looked on the mountain’s flat crown right this moment, and began to lay down her dark colors first. She painted fast, standing up, with the quiet flow of the river in her pulse and the tremolo of a mead-owlark like light on the grass. Time slipped away without notice.

      When at last she stepped back to appraise her work, her shadow lay bunched beneath her feet. The field study was nearly finished and she liked it. She walked away, stretching her shoulders and painting hand, wishing she’d packed a lunch.

      The monotone of a lightplane engine purred across the valley. She stood on the open runway and squinted toward the western sky. The airplane was flying the river line, sunshine glinting from its wings. For a disconnected instant she thought