A Homestead for Holly (A Prairie Christmas #3)

Chapter 1 The Letter

The letter arrived on a Tuesday in October, which was four days after Holly Vance had been informed by her employer that the position was being eliminated and two days after she had sat down to calculate, with the focused attention she brought to unpleasant arithmetic, exactly how long she could continue to pay her rent on her current savings.

The answer had been eleven weeks. The letter arrived on what would have been week nine of the eleven, which was either fortunate timing or the kind of coincidence that her father would have called providence and that Holly was not yet certain enough about to call anything.

It was from a lawyer in Denver. A Mr. Arthur Crane, whose name she did not recognize and whose stationery was respectable without being expensive, which she had found was generally the mark of a man who was competent and not trying to impress you with the competence. The letter said:

Dear Miss Vance, I write on behalf of the estate of your late uncle, Mr. Harold Vance, of Larimer County, Colorado, who passed from this life on the fourteenth of September last. Your uncle died without issue and, having no surviving spouse or children, left his property to his sole living blood relation, namely yourself.

The property consists of a homestead of one hundred and sixty acres in the Pinecrest valley, including a house, a barn, and outbuildings, and is known locally as the Vance place.

I have taken the liberty of maintaining the property in your name pending your decision regarding it.

Should you wish to sell, I can facilitate introductions to prospective buyers.

Should you wish to visit before deciding, the property is accessible by stage from Denver through Longmont.

I am available at your convenience. Yours respectfully, Arthur Crane, Attorney at Law.

Holly read this letter twice. Then she put it on the kitchen table of her single-room apartment in Kansas City, Missouri, and made herself a cup of tea, which was what she did when she needed to think carefully.

She had met Harold Vance exactly twice. The first time she was seven years old and he was the tall, reserved brother of her father who had come east for a visit and who had sat at the dinner table with the quality of a man enduring a landscape that was not his own, polite and present and clearly happier in the abstract.

The second time she was fourteen and he had come for her father's funeral, and he had held her hand at the graveside with a grip that was unexpectedly firm and unexpectedly kind, and he had said: if you ever need anything, you let me know.

He had not elaborated on what anything encompassed or how he would be reached, but she had remembered the grip and the quality of the offer.

She had not, in the seventeen years since, needed to test it.

She had managed. She was good at managing.

She had been managing since her father died, which had left her at fourteen with a mother who loved her and was not constitutionally suited to practical matters, and she had been the practical one since, and being the practical one was something she had decided to be good at rather than to resent, because resentment was not useful and usefulness was.

She drank her tea and looked at the letter.

One hundred and sixty acres in Colorado. A house and a barn and outbuildings. The Vance place.

She thought: I have eleven weeks of savings and no position and no particular reason to stay in Kansas City, where I have been for four years without accumulating the things that made a place a place — the friends who knew you, the routines that were yours, the sense of the specific neighborhood and its character.

She had been in Kansas City for four years and it had been adequate and she had managed and that was the sum of it.

She thought: Colorado is west. I have never been west.

She thought: a hundred and sixty acres.

She wrote back to Mr. Crane the following day. She told him she intended to come and see the property herself before deciding anything. She asked for directions from Longmont.

She gave notice on her apartment that afternoon.

* * *

The journey from Kansas City to Pinecrest took four days, which was three days by train to Denver, one night in Denver at a clean if modest hotel, and then a day by stage through Longmont and up into the mountains, and the mountains were the thing she had not been prepared for.

She had been told about the mountains. The letter from Mr. Crane had mentioned them in the way of someone noting a geographic fact.

The hotel clerk in Denver had mentioned them in the way of someone who had seen people encounter them for the first time and was watching for the reaction.

The stage driver had mentioned them in the way of someone who drove through them every week and found the mentioning of them almost but not entirely unnecessary.

None of these accounts had prepared her for the specific experience of watching the foothills flatten behind her and the real mountains arrive ahead — not growing larger gradually, the way hills approached, but appearing, as though they had decided to be visible rather than simply existing in the invisible form they had been occupying until now.

They were enormous and specific and utterly indifferent to her response to them, and she had sat in the stage with her carpetbag and her trunk riding behind and the mountains filling the forward view and she had thought: oh. That is what enormous means.

She arrived in Pinecrest on the first day of December, 1885, which was the same day that the previous year had produced the stage wheel event involving Mercy Horne (née Alcott) and the sheriff, which nobody was on the main street to mention and which she would learn about later.

The stage stopped on the main street. She got out.

The town was modest and specific and built low against the winter, the buildings practical and the street cold and the mountains visible on three sides in the way that meant you never forgot where you were, which was in a valley, which was in a mountain range, which was in something considerably larger than Kansas City.

Mr. Crane was waiting for her at the stage office, which she recognized from his description of himself: short, gray-haired, professional without display, with the specific waiting quality of a man who was reliable about appointments.

"Miss Vance," he said.

"Mr. Crane," she said.

"Welcome to Pinecrest," he said, with the warmth of a man who meant it. "Your uncle was a well-regarded man here. The valley is sorry for his loss."

She had not known Harold Vance well enough to be sorry in the personal sense, but she was sorry in the general sense, and she said so, and they walked to his office, which was on the main street between the barbershop and the general store.

She did not notice, on the walk, the man who was standing at the far end of the street watching the stage arrive with the quality of a man who had been doing this for several weeks and had not yet decided what to do with what he was watching for.

She noticed him later.