No Ordinary Hero Read online

  She nodded slowly, absorbing what he was saying. He gave her credit for not arguing with him. “I get the feeling you regret your choice.”

  “Once in a while. But not often. I mostly feel that I’m doing what I was meant to do.”

  “That’s a good feeling to have.”

  She was letting him out of the noose of tightening questions, and he felt grateful to her. But at the same time, just talking about it raised the questions he’d never really answered for himself—like whether he had indeed made the right choice.

  Del spoke. “It must have been a hard decision to make, to go against what your uncle thought you were called to do.”

  “There’s nothing like being young and headstrong.”

  Another smile graced her face. “True. I was supposed to marry the son of the rancher next door, thus combining the two ranches. Clearly, I didn’t live up to expectations.”

  “Did your folks object when you went off to college?”

  “Pretty much. They figured I’d meet someone there and never come home to the ranch permanently. They were right. After my parents passed away, I sold the ranch to the rancher’s son next door.”

  The way she said it made him chuckle. But he felt compelled to add, “I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “I miss them. What about you?”

  “My parents are gone, too. Mom died last year. And my sister married a Seminole and they live in Florida now. I fly down to see them once a year.”

  “In the winter, I hope.”

  “Of course. If I’m going to take a trip to the Sunshine State it has to be in February or March, right about the time I’ve decided I’m going to hate the cold and snow forever.”

  “And it does start to feel like forever about then.” She sighed a little, as if thinking about it, then said, “You’ve had an interesting life. Very different from mine.”

  “I could say the same for you.”

  She laughed. “I guess you could.” Then she looked around at the shadowy room. “I’m starting to feel edgy.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  She shook her head. “I wish. It’s just a feeling.”

  “This whole house gives me feelings.”

  It must have been an opening she had been waiting for, because she immediately asked, “What did you mean when you said the house feels sad? What exactly? Some kind of mystical feeling?”

  “I can’t explain it.” He wanted to evade her question, realizing that they were probably about to get into a conflict for which there could be no easy resolution. Yet he knew evasion would be exactly the wrong answer now. For them both. “It just feels to me as if this whole house is weeping for something.”

  “And you don’t get that feeling in your house.”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “Well, damn.” All of a sudden she jumped up from the sleeping bag and hurried from the room.

  He thought about sitting right where he was, waiting for her to deal with this however she needed to. Then he considered just how much that woman had on her plate, from strange noises in her house to a paralyzed daughter.

  He couldn’t do it. With a sigh, he rose and went to meet his fate head-on.

  Chapter 7

  D el stood in the kitchen, trying to make coffee even though she was shaking. She didn’t know if she was mad, or if she felt he was trying in some way to con her, or what. Just because Mike Windwalker had been the vet in town for the past few years didn’t mean he was someone she could trust.

  All that stuff about being a medicine man. She had been willing to accept it as part of his cultural heritage, but now she wondered if he hadn’t been making up stuff to try to impress her some way…or to scare her.

  After all, it had been Mike Windwalker who had suggested that someone was trying to scare her out of her house. She couldn’t imagine any earthly reason why anyone should want to do that, so why had that even popped into his mind? Because he was the one trying to scare her away?

  “Del?”

  “I don’t want to talk right now.” She almost spilled coffee as she scooped it into the filter.

  “Then I’ll talk. I’m sorry I upset you, but I can’t pretend to be somebody I’m not.”

  She turned then to face him, seriously annoyed though damned if she was sure why. “And just what are you?” she demanded. “All this talk about feelings and shamanism, and then trying to scare me out of my house because you say it feels sad? I’m supposed to swallow that?”

  His jaw dropped a little, and then his dark eyebrows drew together. “I’m not trying to scare you out of your house. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been busting my back trying to help you find out what’s going on.”

  “Sure. And dropping little hints in my ear about feelings you get, about how somebody might be trying to scare me out of this place. Suggestions.”

  “They’re not suggestions! I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m trying to help solve the problem.”

  “If they’re not suggestions, what are they?” She wanted an answer, and it had better be a good one.

  He looked away for a moment, then faced her again with a steady gaze. “They are what they are. Feelings. Intuitions. Something I was taught to be open to since my earliest childhood. This house speaks, for those with ears to hear, and you can like that or not. It doesn’t change what I sense.”

  “Why would you sense it and no one else?”

  “You already sense it. Your daughter has heard noises. You’ve heard them. I’ve heard them. Something is wrong with this house.”

  “There’s plenty wrong with it. And I’m fixing what’s wrong with it.”

  “But there’s something you can’t fix with all the hammers and nails in the world. If you think I’m trying to get you out of this house, if you really believe that, I’ll leave now.”

  She couldn’t immediately answer. For some reason what he had said had knotted her emotions in some way and she couldn’t fully untangle the skein of feelings and thoughts. But as he started to turn away, clearly intending to leave, she knew one thing for certain.

  “I trust you,” she said. Words that came from her heart, more than her brain. Her brain kept saying she must be nuts, all this talk of intuition and feelings and the house speaking…

  But her heart believed something very different.

  He faced her again, slowly. Reluctantly. “Are you sure about that?”

  She almost winced when she heard the edge of bitterness in his tone, and she knew where it came from. God, she felt about two inches tall. “Look, I’m not criticizing your heritage. Let’s get that clear.”

  “Really?” He folded his arms.

  “Really. But you’re asking me to accept things I don’t believe. You’ve lived in my world. I haven’t lived in yours. So suppose you tell me how someone from my world is supposed to believe that this house is sad? That a house, an inanimate object, is capable of having feelings?”

  “That’ll take the Golden Gate Bridge, to span that gap.” Again, an undercurrent of bitterness.

  And that bitterness pierced her. The study of architectural engineering had not prepared her to cross culture gaps. It hadn’t given her even the smallest of tools for dealing with the gulf that lay between them now. “Help me,” she said finally. “I’ll try.”

  Then she turned to finish making the coffee, letting him decide for himself whether to continue this conversation or leave. Because she just didn’t know what to say next.

  It was beyond any experience in her life.

  When she had switched on the coffeemaker and washed her hands, she turned again from the counter and found Mike still standing there. Even in the bright fluorescent lighting, he somehow looked archetypal, mysterious. And in the course of this single evening, he had indeed become mysterious to her, no ordinary man with ordinary thoughts or an ordinary life. At least not the ordinary kind of man she was used to.

  “In my culture,” he said finally, “there are no inani
mate objects.”

  She caught her breath. “What do you mean?”

  “We believe that consciousness imbues everything. The stones, the earth, the air, the water, even this house. That storm outside, the wind, the fire, the lightning. All of it is aware. When we cut a tree we give thanks to it for its sacrifice. We thank the rocks when we use them to build a fire pit. We thank the rain for choosing to moisten our fields.”

  She nodded but remained silent, afraid of interrupting him. More than anything, she felt a need to understand him.

  “This house is aware,” he said flatly. “Not like you or I, but it is aware. And something has made it sad. It weeps. And if you want to know what my uncle would have said about it, I can tell you.”

  She nodded again.

  “He would have said we need to find out what happened to sadden this place.”

  For long moments there was no sound but the distant rumble of thunder and the nearby sound of the coffeemaker. She stood there, trying to absorb what he was telling her, trying to fit his worldview into her own.

  “I’m trying,” she said finally.

  “I know it’s not easy. It’s alien to you. I’m not even asking you to believe. Just telling you something about who and what I am. About how I see things.”

  She knew then that she had to cross that gulf somehow. Because if she didn’t find a way, right now, Mike Windwalker would once again return to his private life, would once again become the hesitant, reluctant man she had first met.

  But there were no words. She couldn’t say she agreed with his beliefs. She couldn’t, certainly not having just been exposed to them for the very first time.

  So without words, all she could do was show him acceptance. She crossed the kitchen to him and put her arms tentatively around him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was frightened and confused.”

  And slowly, very slowly, he lifted his own arms and hugged her back. “You don’t have to accept it,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, one way or another I do. Because accepting it is accepting you.”

  “That’s a lot to ask of yourself.”

  “No, it’s actually very little. I don’t have to believe it. I don’t have to see the world the same way you do. But I do have to respect your beliefs.”

  It seemed to her that his arms tightened, so she tightened her own around him. He smelled so good from his recent shower, and he felt so good against her. She wanted to believe that he could be a haven, however temporarily, because it had been so long, too long, since she had had one.

  She recognized the weakness in herself, and knew that soon she would have to take up her burdens again, because they were her burdens. But she let herself feel, for just these few minutes, that she didn’t have to shoulder them alone.

  For one wild moment she wished she were just an ordinary woman herself, as free as a bird, but the instant she thought it, she felt guilty. Nothing could make her wish Colleen out of her life. Nothing.

  So she stepped back and turned to pour coffee for them. “How,” she asked, hoping her voice didn’t sound as thick as it felt, “would we go about finding out why the house is sad?”

  “Good question. My suggestion would be to find out what we can about previous owners, whether there were any tragedies.”

  Such a prosaic answer. What had she been expecting? That he would offer to seek a vision? Talk to the house? She could have laughed at herself if she hadn’t already put her foot in it enough for one night.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “We can check the newspaper morgue in the morning. Or I can. I guess you need to be at work.”

  “Unfortunately. I have a full day scheduled. But you might save a lot of time by asking Velma, the dispatcher at the sheriff’s office.”

  “I should have thought of that! Or Nate Tate. That man must know about everything that’s happened in this county in the past sixty years.”

  “Yeah, he probably would.”

  “I’ll start there then, right after I take Colleen to school.”

  They carried their coffee into Colleen’s former bedroom and settled onto the sleeping bags, sitting cross-legged and facing each other.

  Again, Del felt as if something were trying to close in on her, something that hovered in the shadows beyond the camp lantern. And then a thought trickled across her awareness, a thought she usually ignored.

  “You know, maybe the sadness you’re sensing is me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because, well, I’m sort of aware that my grief over Don was truncated because of what happened with Colleen. I had to focus all my attention on getting her through that. There was a counselor who worked with both of us for a while, and she said, basically, that the devil would get his due. That I had to find time for my own grieving.”

  He nodded but said nothing, clearly giving her space and time. She took both, but probably in a far larger way than he meant them. Because this was not the time either.

  “Who’s getting first watch?” she asked.

  “I’ll take it,” he answered promptly. “I think your night last night was far more disturbed than mine.”

  So she pulled back the flap on the sleeping bag and lay down with her back to him, pulling the cover over herself, hunching her shoulder a little as if to hold him away.

  No, she hadn’t had much time for grief. But right now she did, and for the first time in a long time, she let the tears fall silently. In a few hours, maybe in the morning, she could be strong again.

  But right now she felt an overwhelming need to shed tears for her lost husband and her daughter.

  If there was any sadness in this house, she thought, it only echoed her own.

  During the night she awoke to feel strong arms around her, a strong body pressed to hers from behind. The feeling was at once startling and familiar. She felt Mike’s warm breath near her ear, a steady sound as if he slept, too.

  But weren’t they supposed to remain awake to listen?

  She didn’t want him to roll away. No, she wanted him to stay right there. It had been so long since she’d felt this kind of comfort, and this was the second time in a single day that he’d managed to remind her just how much she missed it.

  She tried to remain still, so as not to wake him, afraid the almost magical moment would end, proving that it really was an illusion. And it was. She knew that. But it was an illusion she wanted to cling to.

  Her breathing must have changed.

  “You were dreaming,” he murmured near her ear. “It didn’t sound happy. Sorry if I woke you.”

  She wasn’t, but she couldn’t say so. “I don’t remember any dream.”

  “It didn’t sound like one you’d want to remember. Go back to sleep.”

  “It must be my turn to keep watch.”

  “No. I’m not at all sleepy yet.” A moment of silence, then, “I can move away.”

  “No. Please.” So many empty, worried, frightened, lonely nights lay behind her. The last thing she wanted right now was to add yet another one.

  He gave her a little squeeze and continued to hold her, almost as if he was feeling the same way: too many lonely nights haunted him.

  What a pair, she thought. He was afraid of connections because life had taught him, probably more often than he had told her about, that he was unwelcome because of his heritage. And then there she was, afraid of the same thing, for probably the same reasons. Because if she were to be honest about it, the idea of putting her whole life on hold until Colleen grew up was kind of ridiculous. The only valid reason she could have for that kind of decision was fear that she might fall for someone who wasn’t good for Colleen. Beyond that…

  Beyond that she’d been hiding. Because she was afraid. Because her heart had been ripped out once, and she didn’t want to risk it again.

  At least, she told herself, be honest about what you’re doing.

  And much to her surprise, she heard herself say, before she was even aware of the thought, �
��Do you date?”

  She thought she felt him stiffen a little, but she couldn’t be certain. Then he said, “Not often.”

  “Me neither. I was just thinking that I’m afraid.”

  “Of dating?”

  “Of caring.”

  “I can sure see why.”

  “Ditto.”

  “Ouch.” But he said it without any real emphasis, as if he knew perfectly well that he was hiding from pain.

  She gave him marks for that. “Unfortunately,” she said quietly, “I think I’ve been making Colleen my excuse.”

  “How so?”

  “Too busy. She needs me, and I can’t divide my time that way. Oh, there’s probably a whole list of reasons that are buried in my subconscious.”

  “Probably. That’s only human.”

  “But for you it’s different. Why don’t you just go home and find some nice young woman who won’t kick you and call you names?”

  A long silence answered her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said presently. “None of my business.”

  “No, I was just thinking it over. The trouble is, I’m not sure why. Maybe because I worked so hard to get away, to walk into this world and be accepted, at least partly, for my skills. Maybe I ran away from the past.”

  “Another common human thing to do,” she murmured. “We all have our ways of hiding.”

  “Too true.” He was quiet for a while and shifted his hold on her, bringing her closer until the back of her head rested comfortably in the hollow of his shoulder. “I don’t have a lot of people left at home that I would consider close. No real reason to go back. I did a pretty good job of separating myself. Maybe it was the stupidity of youth.”

  “I don’t know that I would call it stupidity. A lot of us grow up wanting to escape whatever rut we think we’re in.”

  “True. And we rebel against expectations, and traditions. I don’t know. I do know that when I go back to visit it feels like I have to look at the same old questions over and over again.”

  “Which questions?”

  “About who I am. What I am. And how I fit.”