Page 2 of Whispers of Fortune (Golden State Treasure Book #1)

T WO

Annie came toward the back of the room.

Ellie flinched at the fire in her sister’s eyes. Annie liked order and ran things very tightly in her class. Ellie envied her that skill, one she herself did not possess.

Right now, the whole class was a flurry of whispering, with students of all ages standing and craning their necks, trying to see what was going on. Not a single one of those ten boys was studying, and Annie would have her hands full getting their minds back on their work.

Every orphan child, or so Ellie believed, dreamed of finding his family. Dreamed that someone out there, a ma or a pa, maybe even a brother, might now be searching for them. It was a wild dream without much hope behind it, yet it had just come true for the MacKenzie boys.

They had sure enough disrupted class. But Ellie could hardly fault the boys for their excitement.

Then Annie reached the door, looked out at the hugging trio, and her expression softened.

Ellie said quietly, “That’s Brody MacKenzie. He’s been hunting his little brothers.”

Nodding, but with the look Annie sometimes got when her motherly sentiment was awakened, she smiled and then pulled the door shut.

Ellie wished her luck with getting the class to settle down.

Josh picked Brody’s hat up off the floor, looked at it with disdain, then took charge of the MacKenzies. “Come on back to the house, and we’ll figure out what to do with you.”

Ellie bit back a smile. Her brother liked to take charge, maybe because he didn’t get much chance to do so. When their oldest brother, Zane, was around, he ran things—so long as he could move fast enough that his wife, Michelle, didn’t take over.

Annie Hart Lane was the oldest of the four Hart children. A widow and mother, she’d been on her own for several years before her husband was killed and she moved back home. No one could tell her what to do. Then came Josh, a mighty tall and tough former sailor who’d lived away from home for a long time and seen the world. It wasn’t exactly easy being a little brother.

That left Ellie, the youngest of them. Out of pity for the poor guy, Ellie did her best to mind her big brother, but honestly it was only to make him happy. She didn’t need anyone ordering her around.

The MacKenzies stopped hugging and started talking. Josh got them moving, but it was all stop-and-start with more talking and hugging interrupting their progress.

She caught snippets of the rapid talk. They were from New York, and she’d heard they were a fast-talking breed from back east.

“The journal told us California, but—”

“But then we jumped onto a train that was already rolling—”

“Real orphans could have found homes if you hadn’t—”

“How’s Pa?”

The three of them fell silent at Thayne’s question.

Brody looked at both of them. “You knew he was sick when you left.”

“Brown-bottle sick, not real sick.” Lochlan continued toward the house, where Josh was steering them.

Lochlan’s offhand quip about a brown bottle told Ellie a lot about their messed-up family situation.

“Pa died.”

Thayne and Lochlan stumbled to a stop and turned to stare at Brody.

Thayne broke the silence first. “B-because we left him alone?”

Lochlan reached out and caught Brody’s arm. “He was always yelling at us. Throwing us out of the house till we hardly lived there. We came home late at night to sleep. He didn’t cook for us, nor for himself.”

“We brought him a loaf of bread or whatever we could...” Thayne glanced at Ellie. “Uh, whatever we could find.”

She was quite sure he meant whatever he could steal .

Thayne went on. “He swore he was done with the journal for good. He meant it this time.”

“He always meant it,” Brody said quietly.

“But this time,” Lochlan said, sounding distraught, “he threw Grandpa’s journal into the stove.”

“He burned the journal?” Brody’s brows arched nearly to his hairline. “He must’ve really meant it then.”

“Stove wasn’t lit.” Lochlan shook his head in wonder, but at what? At his father throwing a journal away? Grandpa’s journal? What was in it? Ellie had never seen a journal. “He’d never done that before. Anyway, I fished it out of the stove.”

“He started screaming at us, Brody.” Thayne sounded grim as death. “He threw a chair at us. When it broke, he picked up a leg and threatened to use it on us. He as good as drove us out of the room and told us not to come back.”

Elle had the sudden sick feeling that she and Josh shouldn’t be listening to this. The MacKenzies were so caught up in their talk that they were saying things she suspected they’d rather not speak of in front of anyone else. The boys certainly hadn’t spoken like this up until now.

They’d come along when Michelle had found them at the Child of God Mission, giving her a sad tale of living in San Francisco all their lives, with no home since their pa had run off and their ma had died. Two boys almost too old to count as orphans, especially Thayne. Plenty of sixteen-year-old boys were on their own, doing a man’s work.

They ran off from the mission at least once a week, Sister Agatha had told Michelle. They had no change of clothes. Hungry and cold in the late spring. They’d been here two months now, midsummer in California, no mention of a brother or a father—who had clearly been alive when the boys left him.

No mention of anything about their past. And no sign of a journal. They were talking about it now. They clearly had it, but they’d been very sneaky. If they’d ever looked at it, it’d been done in secret.

That was exactly like them. Bright, hardworking scamps right down to the bone. Lochlan, the younger of the two, was the worst. But Thayne was always ready to throw in with whatever Lochlan cooked up.

They’d run away twice now and been gone two days the first time, then four the next. Both disappearances had thrown the whole ranch into chaos as search parties spread out looking for them. Both times they hadn’t been found. They’d come home voluntarily. Near as Ellie could tell because they’d gotten hungry.

They all reached the house and went inside.

“Can we have something to eat, Miss Ellie? We’re starving.” Lochlan often did the talking for the two. And they were always starving. But it was near the end of the school day, and Annie always saw that they got a snack.

“I’ve got chicken in the icebox, and you can have bread and jelly.”

Lochlan leapt into the air, both arms high. “I love fried chicken. And can it be apple jelly please? Do you have any?”

Ellie looked at Brody over the tops of the boys’ heads. Though it was as well Thayne was a bit ahead because he was as tall as Brody.

He rolled his eyes.

She said, “Growing boys.” Then she got busy pulling out the chicken.

Josh came in a pace behind her and went straight to the coffeepot, which was simmering on the stove.

“Grab a seat. We need to talk.” Josh grabbed the heavy pottery cups. “Coffee, Brody, or do you want milk? You’re probably hungry.”

“Coffee sounds good.”

The MacKenzies sat with a great scraping of chairs.

“I’d take milk, please,” Thayne said with decent manners.

“Me too. I want milk.” Lochlan was always a little slower, but he came through when Ellie caught Brody glaring at him.

“Please.” Lochlan grinned at his brother. “It’s so great to see you, Brody. We gave up on you ever coming home.”

“I hadn’t had a letter the whole school year, and I wrote plenty.”

Lochlan and Thayne exchanged a look. “Ma died early last fall. She was the one who always wrote to you, I s’pose. Thayne and me got jobs.”

“You quit going to school?” Brody sounded dismayed.

Ellie was busy getting out the butter and jelly from the icebox and pulling bread out of the clever roll-top bread box. She got things set on the table and did her best not to miss a word or a frown or even a shrug. She sat at the foot of the table, Josh at the head. Brody sat across from his brothers. It seemed she was learning more about these boys in a few minutes than she had for months.

The boys were clearing the table of food at top speed, to the point Ellie got herself a cup of coffee, refilled Josh’s and Brody’s cups and didn’t even try to eat, for she was afraid she’d have to fight the boys for a single crumb.

“Let’s get you boys packed up. It’s a long hike to the nearest town, and I didn’t bring extra horses. But you can ride double on the one I rented. I’ll walk. If we head out now, we can be in town to—”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Ellie interrupted.

“We aren’t letting the boys walk off into the night.” Josh set his cup down with a loud click.

“What kind of brother are you?” Ellie rose from the table, glaring at Brody.

He got a mule-stubborn look in his eyes. Ellie had dealt with her brothers plenty of times, so she recognized it.

“I’m the kind who wants my family reunited. Thank you for taking care of them.” He sounded stilted and not all that thankful. “I’ve got a job waiting for me in Boston. I made some promises, and I have to return. I was planning to get you boys and Ma and move there. Now we’ll go without her.” Sadness crept into Brody’s voice. “I could have made all of your lives so much better. Now Ma won’t get that.” He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “Once we’re there, I’ll get the boys settled into school, then go to work and support us all.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

Ellie figured, based on that mule look, that they’d have a fight on their hands keeping the MacKenzies here, but then Lochlan said, “We like it here, Brody. We want to stay.”

Brody’s mulish face melted into hurt as his head snapped around to look at his younger brother. “You don’t want to go with me?”

Lochlan reached across the table and patted Brody clumsily on the hand as if trying to soften the rejection. He knocked his milk cup over, but it was empty now, and Josh caught it before it rolled onto the floor. “We’d be glad to get a visit from you now and then.”

Brody seemed frozen, gaping at his brothers. Finally, almost as if he were breaking ice, he turned his neck unsteadily, looked at Ellie, and said quietly, “Is there somewhere I can talk to my brothers alone?”

“This is your room?”

Lock smiled and sat on the bed so hard that he bounced. “Best room I’ve ever slept in, Brody.”

Thayne dropped onto his back on the bed. Both were bunkbeds, and his brothers were on the bottom bunks. Ellie had said they sometimes slept three or four to a room, but several of the boys had grown out of school and left to get jobs. His brothers had a room to themselves. There was a single desk and chair. Brody took the chair, dragged it to the foot of the beds, and sat so he could face his cheerful brothers.

Lock lay down as if he were ready for a nap.

Brody heard thundering footsteps outside the door.

“School is out.” Thayne folded his hands behind his head. “There’s always food after class—besides breakfast, dinner, and supper. A snack after supper, too, if we want it. Bread and butter and milk. Sometimes cookies. But we’ve just eaten, so let’s stay in here and talk awhile.”

“Is this an orphanage?” Brody didn’t quite understand what the Harts were up to.

“It’s sort of an orphanage, I guess. It’s honestly more like a boarding school. They work with several orphanages in San Francisco to give street kids a warm place to stay with plenty of food.” Thayne added sheepishly, “I think they’re mad at us a little for claiming to be orphans when we had a family.”

“Tell us about Pa.” Lock wanted to change the subject away from their lies, but Brody was sure they wanted to know what had happened back in New York.

“He was alive when I got home. I was frantic with worry for you two, but I had to stay and care for him. Then bury him.”

Thayne flushed and moved his hands so they were clutched over his belly. “We couldn’t stay, Brody. He wouldn’t let us. He as good as drove us out of the place.”

Lock swung his feet off the bed and sat up. The bunk overhead was just a bit low, so he had to lean forward to not conk himself in the head. He rested his forearms on his knees and clasped his hands together. “We could have gone back. He was drinking and out of his head. But he’d’ve passed out, and we could have gone back. We’d done it plenty of times before.”

Brody hated thinking of how hard Pa had made the boys’ lives.

“But by then we were good at living on the street.” Thayne thudded his hands on his belly, slowly, steadily. “Finding food as best we could. We were alone after Ma died for a month or two, before Pa came back. So we’d been living like that for a while. We could find work sometimes, carrying packages and holding carriage horses for freighters. With the money you sent, we kept the rent paid and had enough food to survive. We knew you were coming home in the spring and thought we’d just hang on until you got there. We’d met some of the boys who lived on their own on the streets and teamed up with them.”

“They taught us how to get by. Which diners tossed out food.” Lock paused, looked at Brody too long, then shrugged and said, “How to pick pockets and steal a bit from street vendors and such places. Talking to them is how we found out about the orphan train, and we wanted to go west, see if we could make sense of Grandpa’s journal.”

Body’s jaw tensed, but he didn’t speak of the lies and thieving and the mad run to California. Didn’t scold them. “I should have come home. I knew when Ma stopped writing, something had happened. But I was so close to done, and Ma always wanted me to finish. I sent money—”

“We got it, Brody, and it made the difference in keeping the room and getting by till Pa came home. Then he got it.”

“And spent it on drinking.” Brody rubbed his forehead.

Neither of them responded, but they didn’t need to.

“Pa was alive when you got there?” Thayne asked.

“Yep, but barely,” Brody said. “He could hardly get out of bed. I knew enough from my schooling that I figured he had pneumonia and was sure he didn’t have long. I couldn’t just leave him. I should have come after you right away. I did search for you and heard about the orphan train. You were on their list of children that had been sent west.”

“We used our real names. But we didn’t tell Pa or leave word anywhere. We didn’t know how to do that. We figured if you got home and wondered about us, you might track us down.”

“An orphan train? And you ran from it?”

“Sure, we had no interest in being adopted. We climbed off the train in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We were told if no one adopted us there, we’d have to go back to New York. The lady riding with us, Miss Tilda, was nice and real worried about how no one would adopt us.” Lock shook his head. “We picked just the right moment and then slipped into the baggage car. And off we went. We hid from the conductors all the way to California. That’s where the journal told us to go.”

“That stupid journal.”

Lock surged to his feet, lifted the mattress on the top bunk, and pulled out the journal. An old thing, leather-covered. Inside it were pages and pages of their grandfather’s scrawled notes.

“We made it to San Francisco and heard...” Lock glanced at the door behind Brody and lowered his voice. “We heard about a family who takes in street kids, brings them to their ranch, teaches them and cares for them and helps them get a good start in life. And it was halfway across the state of California.”

Lock shook the journal at Brody’s face. “Real close to where Grandpa MacKenzie’s journal says to go.”

“That’s where you ran off to the two times you disappeared? You’re trying to follow the notes Grandpa left?”

Lock, his light brown eyes sparkling with excitement, nodded. Lock was the image of Pa, from his blond good looks to his restless, reckless heart.

Thayne, blue-eyed and dark-haired like Brody and Ma, was calmer but no less determined. They’d been raised on stories of the lost MacKenzie’s Treasure.

“Did you talk to Pa? Did he try to throw you out, too, or did he just hate us?” Thayne, always more thoughtful than Lock, frowned until his brow furrowed. “Never could figure out why Pa took us in such dislike—he wasn’t like that before.”

“He wasn’t thinking right. His mind was addled. He didn’t seem to know who I was at first. He didn’t throw me out, but then he didn’t have the strength to do such a thing. Once I got home, he quit getting out of bed. As if now that he had help, there was no need for him to do a single thing for himself.”

“We told him Ma died. Maybe that set him against us.” Lock couldn’t keep the grief out of his voice. Pa had always favored him over Brody and Thayne. To the extent Pa cared about anyone, he cared about Lock, probably because his youngest son listened to his tales of treasure with rapt attention.

As if Pa abandoning them, leaving his wife and sons to provide for the family, made him a great hero instead of absolutely worthless.

Brody didn’t know what to say. His pa had been terrible when Brody got home. Furious and hateful toward his sons, Brody included. But it was all jumbled, and part of the time he was raging at Ma, who’d been dead for months.

Pa had been brought so low, he allowed himself to be cared for. He demanded that Brody buy him liquor, and Brody refused, which made the ranting worse. But even if he’d been so inclined, Brody had no money. With Pa to care for, he couldn’t work. He’d borrowed money from the doc tor, who’d given him a job on the promise that Brody would return and work the money off. Brody had been very careful with that bit of cash, kept a roof over their heads until Pa was dead and buried. He’d written to Dr. Tibbles in Boston that he’d be delayed, then set out to find his brothers.

“I want you boys to come away with me. I have to go back. Like I said before, I made promises. I owe a very kind doctor money. I gave my word I’d collect my family and be back. He knew it might take some time, but he had no idea I’d come from New York City to Boston by way of California. I’ve written to him and told him I might be delayed for a long time, but I would be back.”

“Brody, no, we’re the closest we’ve ever been to MacKenzie’s Treasure.”

He saw the mutinous expression on Lock’s face. Thayne left off lying around, sat up, his chin jutted out in a stubborn scowl. “We’re close. I know it.”

“It’s all just a dream, Thayne. Pa searched for years and never found a trace of the gold. And Grandpa’s writing is strange, like he was confused—”

“Not confused, Brody. He was deliberately being secretive. He wrote down enough, but it’s in a sort of code.”

“No, Lock, it isn’t. We’ve all read that book.” Brody admitted to himself that he’d barely looked through it, and that was years ago. He believed the journal had ruined Ma’s life and led to Brody’s little sister Theresa’s death. He’d always hated it. “It’s nonsense. There are tales of gold hoards lost all over the Rocky Mountains. Not one of them is true. I have to go back, and you gotta go with me. I want you to stop living in Pa’s feverish dreams.”

“We want to stay here.”

Brody rolled over Lock’s protests. “You can go to school—”

“We’re not—”

A firm knock on the door cut off Lock’s angry refusal to cooperate.

“It’s Ellie. Please join us in the house for the evening meal. It’s ready in just a few minutes, and we’d like to talk more with you.”

All three of them clamped their mouths shut. They didn’t have to tell the whole world what was behind their foolish run across the country.

Lock tucked the journal back under his mattress. He moved so fast, Brody was sure he’d done it many times before.

Brody approved of not speaking of it because it was an embarrassment. But as for Lock and Thayne, he knew they didn’t want anyone to know their secret.

Brody stood from his chair, which nearly blocked the door, then opened it to see that Ellie had changed from the earlier yellow calico to a better dress, bright blue with lace at her neck and wrists. The blue matched her eyes and made them shine.

“We appreciate that, Miss Hart.” He wasn’t sure what he’d called her earlier. Had he even said her name? He’d been so angry, then so relieved, it was all a bit muddled.

“Please, everyone in the house is named Hart. My name is Beth Ellen, but I prefer Ellie, and I’m trying to train my family to say it. Call me Ellie.”

“And a lot of MacKenzies in here. Call me Brody.” Brody caught himself smiling at her and wondered how long it’d been since a single moment in his life had inspired a smile.

Ellie stretched her neck to look around him. “Ready to eat, boys? It’s a bit early, but Josh, Annie, and I feel we should have a nice long talk with all three of you and then decide what happens next.”

There was nothing to decide. Brody was taking his brothers and leaving. So the talk wouldn’t be long, and it probably wouldn’t be nice.

His brothers pushed past him, as if they hadn’t eaten since dawn, and they probably still had crumbs on their faces.

“It looks like the answer is yes, Ellie. Thank you.” Brody pulled the door shut behind him and walked alongside Ellie toward the house.

The boys were flat-out running. When had they ever not been starving?