“Gus Hartmann lives in northern Virginia and is a very busy man, what with the oil company and the Alliance to oversee. We don’t see him here at the ranch as often as we would like. Amanda, too, although she comes more often than her brother.”
Jamie pointed to a picture of a gloriously handsome youth with unruly golden hair and a beautiful smile sitting on the top rail of a fence. “Is that Amanda’s son?”
The housekeeper closed her eyes momentarily as though dealing with a sudden sharp pain. “Yes, that is a picture of Sonny,” she said.
Jamie wanted to see other pictures of Sonny, to ask more questions about Amanda Hartmann’s only child, but Miss Montgomery turned abruptly and walked briskly from the room. Jamie hastened after her. “Does Gus Hartmann know that his sister has engaged a surrogate mother to have a child for her?”
“I am sure that he does,” Miss Montgomery said. “Gus and Amanda are very close.”
After they finished touring the ranch house, Miss Montgomery drove Jamie in a pickup truck over the mile or so of gravel road that separated the ranch-house compound from Hartmann City. In her suit and pumps, the housekeeper looked out of place behind the wheel of a truck, but she seemed no stranger to the vehicle and drove with a heavy foot, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.
“Do you live in Hartmann City?” Jamie asked as they sped along.
“No, I have an apartment in the ranch house,” Miss Montgomery explained. “I was raised in a two-story house that stood where the garage is now. When the south wing was built, Mary Millicent included a spacious apartment for me on the first floor.”
Miss Montgomery parked alongside the ranch store, which had gas pumps in front and offered a snack bar and a surprisingly wide range of merchandise, including groceries, household items, gardening tools, clothing, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, and even toys. As they walked by a mail drop and a bank of post-office boxes, Miss Montgomery said, “According to the contract you signed, any mail you send must go through me.”
“Yes, I realize that,” Jamie responded.
As they drove away from the store, Miss Montgomery pointed out a large building that housed the motor pool where Jamie’s car would be kept. Then they drove by the schoolhouse, power plant, and a trailer park with several dozen trailers, each with a small garden plot. Across the road from the trailer park, Miss Montgomery pointed out two bunkhouses where the single workers lived. Behind the bunkhouses was a long, narrow building that housed a two-lane bowling alley.
Miss Montgomery paused in front of a charming church with arched windows and a small bell tower. “Our people are very devout,” she noted with pride. “Amanda looks after their souls, and Gus takes care of their legal status. After they have been with us three years, they are allowed to bring their families here.”
“So, most of the employees are Mexican?” Jamie asked.
Miss Montgomery nodded. “At least two-thirds. The rest are homegrown. But we are one people in our love for the Lord and for Amanda Hartmann.”
Unable to think of an appropriate response, Jamie viewed the church in silence. The glare of the sunlight on its white exterior and polished windows was blinding.
Miss Montgomery slowed as she pointed out the medical clinic. “Our nurse, Freda Kohl, looks after folks who live here at the ranch and in the surrounding area.”
Miss Montgomery explained that Nurse Freda would be taking care of Jamie unless there were complications, in which case she would be taken to a hospital in Amarillo.
“What if I have to be inseminated a second or third time?” Jamie asked.
“If that becomes necessary, I will accompany you to Amarillo,” Miss Montgomery said.
Just beyond the cluster of buildings were a baseball diamond and basketball court, a huge silo, and a stable and corral. Amanda and her husband liked to ride, Miss Montgomery explained. And even though most of the cattle were now kept in feedlots located well away from Hartmann City and horses were no longer needed to work the herds, the ranch still kept quarter horses, mostly for recreational purposes, although they did come in handy during winter weather.
Before heading back to the ranch house, Miss Montgomery stopped at the greenhouse, where an elderly gardener helped Jamie select three small holly bushes for her balcony that he would transplant into terra-cotta pots and deliver later in the day.
“Thank you for showing me around,” Jamie told Miss Montgomery as the truck stopped in front of the ranch house.
“You’re welcome,” she said, her usual stern expression softening somewhat. “I know this must be quite an adjustment for you, and I do want to make things as comfortable as possible. But part of my job is to make sure that you uphold your end of the bargain you made with Amanda Hartmann and her husband.”
“I understand,” Jamie said.
After lunch, one of the gardeners helped Jamie unload the things she wanted from her car and carry them upstairs. He also helped her move the sofa and hang her great-grandmother’s mirror before he went back to his usual chores. Jamie placed her houseplants around the sitting room and put her address book, tablets, pencils, pens, and the like in the small desk, which was already stocked with two packages of typing paper. She unpacked a box of books-mostly textbooks and well-read favorites from her childhood-and arranged them on the shelves and put her grandmother’s sewing stand by the chair in the bedroom. She put pictures of her grandmother and her parents on the bedside table. Then she put away her clothing and looked around for a safe place to keep her grandmother’s garnet and pearl ring along with a spare set of car keys, her ATM card, and cash. After ruling out several locations, she removed a couple of the tacks from the sewing stand’s floral lining and slipped the items under it.
She considered other decorative touches she might add-throw pillows, a wall clock, another plant or two-but decided there was no point in spending money on a place that, no matter how homey she made it, would never really feel like home.
During her first week, Jamie quickly fell into a routine of walking her dog, swimming laps, and eating solitary meals either in front of the television or seated at the small round table with a book propped in front of her. When she walked, one of Kelly’s security guards walked with her. When she swam, one of them sat by the pool. By the end of the first week, Lester Thompson, the youngest member of the force, was usually the one sent to watch over her.
With little else to occupy her time, the daily walks grew longer. At first glance, the countryside was boring, but gradually Jamie began to see beauty in fields of wheat and native grasses waving gracefully in the wind and in the splashes of yellow, orange, red, and purple provided by wild-flowers. Often she spotted the various creatures that inhabited the high prairie-jackrabbits, prairie dogs, snakes, lizards, armadillos, deer, and antelopelike animals known as pronghorns. Using her grandmother’s well-worn guide to Texas birds, she began keeping a log of all the birds she saw during her walks. Already she had spotted prairie chickens, wild turkeys, Western kingbirds, a scissor-tailed flycatcher, red-tailed hawks, and a pair of horned larks.
And there were landmarks along the way. A wooden bridge over the creek. A large pond that a pair of heron called home. And atop a rise about a half mile from the ranch house was a tiny cemetery surrounded by a tall ironwork fence. She would have liked to take a closer look at the cemetery, but Lester had informed her that it was off limits.
Since the library off the great hall offered almost no current titles, Jamie selected books by the Brontë sisters, Edna Ferber, and Mark Twain to begin her reading program.