Chapter 1
June, 1887
Walker Creek, Texas
“May I go now, Miss Hagen? I’ve written what you wanted me to on the blackboard fifty times.”
Ingrid nodded. She felt so miserable that she’d been made to punish seven-year-old David Logan, but she hadn’t known what else to do.
The boy had seemed bent today upon cutting up in class, not reading his lessons, yanking the girls’ pigtails, and knocking other children’s books off the desks. Here she had started as a teacher’s assistant one week ago, and then Mrs. Jahn, the regular schoolteacher, had suddenly become ill. Ingrid had taken her place for the foreseeable future—and already she was faced with a discipline problem!
“Remember to tell your father why you’re late coming home,” Ingrid instructed David as he made his way to the front of the one-room limestone schoolhouse without so much as a backward glance. She thought she heard him murmur a “Yes, ma’am,” but she couldn’t be sure. As he bolted out the door, she sank with a sigh into her chair and stared at the handwriting on the blackboard.
I will not misbehave in school.
Five rows of ten sentences written in neat penmanship that seemed truly incongruous with David’s disorderly antics, making Ingrid shake her head.
She felt terrible, too, that his five-year-old sister, Emily, as sweet as an angel, had left the schoolhouse in tears without her brother, to be walked home by several of her solemn-faced classmates. Ingrid could just imagine what Sheriff Joshua Logan might think to see his young daughter in distress, but what was she to do? How was she to teach a schoolhouse filled with children of disparate ages when she couldn’t encourage one boy to sit at his desk and mind his lessons?
Feeling like an utter failure at the ripe old age of twenty, Ingrid contemplated locking up the schoolhouse to walk home herself where she might retire to her room for some welcome solitude. Well, it wasn’t really her home, but where she and her eighteen-year-old siblings, the twins Anita and Andreas, had taken up residence at the generous insistence of Caleb Walker, who had turned out to be their older sister Kari’s true father.
A big white house with a wraparound porch for sitting in the evenings and a bedroom for each of them, and a kindly older Mexican woman to cook their meals and several servants to do the chores. Never would Ingrid have thought when Kari left Faribault, Minnesota, at the end of April to deliver a sealed letter from their late mother, Lara, to Caleb—as he preferred to be called—that life would take such a startling turn, but so it had.
Arne Hagen, their beloved father who had died three years ago, hadn’t been Kari’s blood relation at all. It had taken only a glance to see Kari’s striking resemblance to Caleb when Ingrid, Andreas, and Anita had arrived at Walker Creek Ranch, confirming the news that had stunned them in Faribault. They had been so eager to attend Kari’s wedding that they thought would be to a different gentleman, a new surprise in store mere moments after their arrival when she accepted a marriage proposal from another man altogether!
Now Kari was blissfully wed to Seth Davis, Caleb’s adopted nephew and the foreman at the ranch. The two had taken up residence in the main house while a home was being built for them, and Ingrid and the twins had moved into town.
It had seemed almost overnight that Caleb had arranged for Ingrid to assist Mrs. Jahn at the schoolhouse rather than work as a seamstress, and he had set up Andreas at a local blacksmith with the promise of his own shop when he completed his apprenticeship. That had left Anita to happily occupy herself with singing and acting lessons at the town’s playhouse under the tutelage of Mrs. Gertrude Rose, a retired actress Caleb had brought from San Antonio fifty miles away.
Ingrid had thought about returning to Minnesota with the twins after Kari and Seth’s wedding two and a half weeks ago, but she couldn’t deny that Caleb had done everything he could to make them feel welcome in Walker Creek and to encourage them to stay. Kari was thrilled to have them nearby, too, which made Ingrid feel a little better right now just thinking about her big sister. She loved Kari so much, and Kari had said their mother had asked Caleb to protect all of her children if he found it within his heart to do so—and clearly, he had.
Ingrid sighed as she rose from the chair in a soft swish of periwinkle blue calico.
The schoolroom was growing quite warm in spite of a breeze wafting through the open windows, and her face felt flushed. The wall clock read half past four, and the rest of the children had left at three o’clock. She had learned that school in Walker Creek ran year-round, except for a break at planting season and then harvest, but ended earlier during the hotter months.
Now Ingrid understood why, which made her hope she wouldn’t have to stay late again to discipline a wayward child as she went around the room and closed the windows.
Her thoughts flew back to Kari and Caleb, who had both been so pleased for Ingrid to assist at the schoolhouse, just as she’d done in Faribault. Truly, she didn’t want to disappoint them. Yet she’d never been the teacher before, all by herself, even though that had been her long-held dream. She loved children and had always built a rapport with them in the past, her shyness all but forgotten amidst the chalk dust, books, and shining faces.
“Oh, David, what am I going to do with you?” Ingrid said under her breath, wondering what she could do to reach the boy.
She went to the blackboard and picked up an eraser to wipe away his painstaking work, her heart going out to him. Clearly he was well beyond his peers in penmanship, which evidenced a keen intelligence and eagerness to learn—
“Did you strike my son with the rod, Miss Hagen?”
Ingrid gasped and spun around to face Sheriff Logan, who stood so tall and somber-faced in the doorway that she swallowed, hard. Dressed in black from his wide-brimmed hat to his boots, a shiny tin star pinned to his chest, he looked every inch an uncompromising lawman as he kept his gaze fixed upon her.
“R-rod?” Her face flame hot with mortification, Ingrid shook her head. “No, no, I’ve never struck your son—nor any child! Who told you such a terrible thing?”
The sheriff didn’t answer as he strode into the room. Ingrid took a startled step backward, her back pressed against the chalkboard. Her heart pounding, she watched wide-eyed as he drew closer until he stopped on the opposite side of her desk to stare beyond her shoulder.
“That’s Davy’s handwriting.”
She bobbed her head, unable to speak, truly ready to burst into tears.
Did he think her a monster? A witch? His gaze fell to the eraser in her hand, which shook now at the emotion overwhelming her.
She had encountered the man only once before at Kari and Seth’s wedding, when her sister had so kindly plucked a pink rose from her bouquet to give to little Emily. Sheriff Logan had stared at Ingrid then, but in a gentlemanly sort of way, making her blush furiously. She had thought him handsome with his dark brown hair and steel gray eyes, but now he just looked—angry. He studied her as if he didn’t fully believe her vehement denial, though his taut stance had eased.
