Pandora's Box
June 2008
A thin sliver of moon light filtered into the large bedroom, breaking through dense cloud cover, if only for just a second, to wash the space and its heavy, dark wood furnishings in cool blue and deep purple hues. The seething storm quickly moved back in, casting a near full moon behind its cover like an uninvited guest and plunging the room into almost complete darkness. Only the light from the previous night's fire remained, and it had long since ceased throwing off any heat; though the dying embers continued to peter and pop in the otherwise still room. In a shadowed corner, a small clock ticked off the passing seconds, minutes and finally chimed the hour. 4 AM.
Murdoch opened his eyes a second before the first soft bong. He'd learned long ago, there was no easier way to get out on the wrong side of the bed than to stay in it too long. Besides that, this first hour was his favorite time of the day and he didn't like to waste it. His eyes hadn't been open a full minute before he had thrown back the covers and swung his feet to the floor. Patting the bedside table for a box of matches, he lit the lamp, slipped his feet into his house shoes, and pushing his hands through his silver curls, left his bed behind for the day.
Moving stiffly about in the weak lamp light, he took care of his morning ablutions in short order, mostly by touch and memory, his mind turning back through the previous evening. It had been a good one, starting with the fact that they'd all managed to sit down to dinner together. Fall was always the busiest season but these last few weeks had been particularly crazy. Murdoch was never sure whether the kids were coming or going. Mere sightings had been a patchy business at best, though Maria was convinced that they had to be making it back to the house at some point because food kept disappearing.
They'd been down a pair of hands, so Scott had been working himself and his crew like a pack of hellions to get the fencing done ahead of another crew, already on the move, driving the portion of the herd not going to market up to winter pasture; Teresa was beginning to learn the run of the vineyard this year and so had been dividing her time between that, bedding down the beehives for the winter and managing her fall harvest. She and Scott both had been dragging themselves in at all sorts of dicey hours of the day and night, their schedules of late utterly defying Murdoch's ability to predict.
And Johnny—well, he'd come home a week ago, listless and splotchy and wondering what the heck the rash on his back was all about. Had he been stung? They'd all been willing to go along with the insect sting theory until he wouldn't eat dinner. That was when Maria got a hold of him, Scott's work load suddenly increased, and nobody had seen much of poor Johnny since; though rumor had it he was definitely on the mend from his little trouble with the chickenpox.
"You could fill a book with the things you don't know, Murdoch Lancer," he told his reflection and shook his head. Of all the damn things. It would never have even occurred to him to ask the boys if they had gone through all of those childhood maladies. Johnny, at nearly twenty years old, was just now getting around to this one and it had been a pretty rough case.
Lord, Maria had gone to war against this thing. Battalion aid headquarters, formerly known as the kitchen, had been transformed into a veritable sweat factory where Maria's militia, as they'd come to be known, spent their days grinding minerals and herbs and oats, concocting heaven only knew what kind of potions. And if they weren't dipping Johnny into various consistencies of the stuff then they were drowning the poor boy in the juice of boiled green peas, or coating his copious and sundry pox in honey. Messy business and probably not the least bit comfortable, but it was all supposed to sooth the terrible itch and save him from scarring in the end, Maria assured.
Not that anyone could see that it was going to make a difference at this point. He was finally at the end stages of this thing, truly the ugliest part of the whole ordeal. He'd shaken the last of his fever off yesterday afternoon—one less thing to worry about—and was able to stay awake for more than an hour or so at a stretch. A development Maria, in particular, was dubious as to the benefits of, especially after Johnny launched a counter campaign—a campaign for freedom. She'd finally relented, concluding that if he had enough energy to harass her then he could put some of it to good use and set the table.
If Teresa's melodramatic screams upon running into him unexpectedly in the hall hadn't done it, then Scott pretty much took the rest of the wind out of those freedom sails when he went to round Johnny up for his first proper meal since he'd gotten sick. "Have you looked in a mirror lately? You can't go out there!" Out of this nonsense their new favorite pass time was born. Uglier Than Thou, they called it, and the three of them played with feeling. Murdoch chuckled as he cleaned up his shaving things, a process that actually took more time than had scraping the beard off his face.
Johnny's freedom trail led him straight to the couch after dinner, which was really all he wanted. He liked a great big fire and so Scott had built up some kind of unnecessary, raging inferno in the fireplace, to his brother's undying amusement and which Murdoch didn't have the heart to protest. Out came the cribbage board, and Teresa and Johnny played hand after vicious hand against each other before somehow managing to wheedle him and Scott into playing doubles against them, a mistake Murdoch planned to not make again in future; though he had to admit that he hadn't been above talking his fair share of bull and matching them tale for wild, ridiculously outlandish tale.
Probably the strangest family in the neighborhood, Teresa had commented off-hand. And half watching as she and Scott tried to chuck popped corn into each other's mouths while Johnny dozed in front of his bonfire, Murdoch found he couldn't exactly disagree. Lord knew the neighborhood had plenty to say on the subject. They'd traveled some rough trail these six months to get to last night, he reflected, and he wasn't so naïve as to think that they were through all of the worst of it, but it seemed like things were starting to settle down into some semblance of normalcy, whatever the hell that was; he was starting to trust in this feeling that maybe his odd ball family really wouldn't shake loose.
Murdoch dressed in the clothes he'd laid out for himself the night before, made a half-hearted gesture at straightening the bed covers, and headed out to start the coffee - as always, his first chore of the day. Maria would be in soon and she always appreciated having a fresh cup waiting for her. His thoughts turned to the day ahead as he made his way down the hall to the kitchen stairs, lighting wall sconces and shoving open a couple of windows along the way. The air was cool and damp, heavy with ozone; it felt like rain.
Rearranging the list of chore assignments he had running through his head, Murdoch rapped once and soundly on Teresa's bedroom door as he passed it by. Reveille – Phase One, Scott had dubbed it. There were some mutterings from the other side which he ignored, though if translated probably amounted to something like, "I'm up".
They had exactly one hour to put in an appearance after the knock, but by the time the aroma of fresh coffee had a chance to make its way upstairs - Phase Two of Murdoch's wake up call - that was usually all that was needed to drag their sluggardly butts the rest of the way out of bed. They'd learned early and quick not to push it to Phase Three, which involved their father coming back upstairs and, as Teresa has said with Johnny's whole-hearted agreement, things just got ugly from there. Smiling, Murdoch gave Scott's door an extra hearty knock. Number One Son had gotten a tad jolly with the wine last night. The smile faded into a frown at Johnny's room. His door was wide open and upon closer inspection, it looked like the room had gone largely unoccupied for the night. A mystery. He pulled the door to and continued on down stairs.
As he hit the kitchen landing his back spasmed violently, interrupting the supply list he was now compiling in his head. It was a few tense moments of gripping the handrail and cursing everything from the changing weather to his age, with gusto, if under his breath, before he felt confident enough to straighten up and test his body. Things seemed to be settling back down, so he let go the banister and opened the back door. It was still so dark that there was little to see beyond the back step and the pile of dirty boots accumulating on it, but the wind was picking up. There would be rain.
After rummaging around in the larder for the ground coffee, and then adding whole beans and sugar to the supply list, he stirred up the stove coals, threw in a couple pieces of fresh wood, and took the iron kettle down from its hook over the stove. Greasing the kitchen pump was soon added to Johnny's chores as Murdoch filled the pot. And just what did that boy get up to after they all went to bed, anyhow, he wondered as he set the pot on the stove and continued his morning's wander through his house, lighting lamps and opening more windows and doors along the way. Surely Johnny's vanity wouldn't have withstood him pulling something stupid like going into town. Passing through the rarely used formal dinning room, briefly splashing the space with the light of his lamp before plunging it back into darkness, Murdoch dismissed the thought entirely almost as soon as he had it and crossed the hall into the sitting room.
Well, that was one mystery solved, only to be replaced with another—Johnny was sitting in the large leather bound chair behind Murdoch's desk, unmoving, head bowed chin to chest, apparently having fallen asleep over the account books. He must have lost some kind of bet, Murdoch figured, because short of an actual fire under his ass, there was little else that he could think of which would drive Johnny into the account books.
As he came closer, the light from his lamp illuminated the desk, which the kids had taken to referring to jokingly as Planet Lancer or The Continent or (on Scott's more obnoxious days), the Paterfamiliar Seat. Murdoch wondered if a localized tornado hadn't hit the place. There were papers strewn all about the desk's vast top. Almost smiling, he smoothed a hand down his son's head as he passed on his way to open up the French doors. He stood on the threshold for a moment, taking in the rich smell of impending rain mixed with the rosemary growing a riot in Teresa's herb garden and the hibiscus in bloom closer to the house. The hibiscus had been his first wife's idea. "Run all of the cattle you can get your hands on, Mr. Lancer, but leave me the illusion that you're not running them through my house."
The creak of leather grabbed his attention and he turned back towards Johnny to find the young man staring at him, his eyes glittering strangely in the near dark. Murdoch returned to his desk to light the lamp. "Good morning, Son. Are you up late or are you up early?"
Frowning when Johnny did not answer, Murdoch moved closer to his son's side, reaching out a hand to his face. But Johnny flinched away.
"When were you plannin' on telling me about this, Old Man?" Johnny asked, his drawl thick and furious, holding up a black portfolio before punctuating his softly spoken question with the solid smack of the document hitting the desk top.
LLLLLLLLLL
Sweet Jesus. What was that horrible thud inside his head? Or was it out? Hard to tell. Barely sitting up, he cracked his eyes open for the first time that day, struggling to make out the clock through the gloom of his room, and groaned. Too dark. He collapsed back onto the pillows, nose wrinkling at his own breath, and ran his tongue experimentally over the sweaters that seemed to have been knitted around all of his teeth in the course of the night. Whatever time it was, surely it was too early.
He decided to take a moment to lay there and try to figure out what the hell happened to him. There were quite a few heated hands of cribbage, he remembered, at which he had fared poorly. Himself and Murdoch vs. Beauty and the Beast; a lop-sided pairing if ever there was, and one he vowed never to find himself up against again. Teresa and Johnny played cards like a couple of blood-thirsty cut-throats.
With a cranky little grunt he shimmied down deeper into the covers. He had made up for his losses by drinking up the better part of a bottle of wine and smoking Murdoch's Cubans, but if his sticky mouth and already dully aching head were any indication, Scott figured he was going to be paying dearly for last night's Lambrusco today.
Thanking the lord that he'd managed to string the whole north pasture, ahead of schedule no less, he flopped over irritably, in search of a cooler place on the sheets. Finding none, he gave up, balled his pillow and wedged it tightly between himself and the mattress, apparently to prevent its escape, and mumbled, "Fifteen more minutes."
Five minutes later he was rudely re-awakened by a loud clap of thunder, which was followed by the opening of the heavens.
"Hooray," he squawked tonelessly into the pillow. They'd been watching this storm system amass the last couple of days, expecting it to break anytime. Now it had and, as providence would have it, Murdoch had given him the day off; though he suspected that this was not wholly the gift of mercy and benevolence that it appeared to be on the surface.
Johnny's fever had only broken early yesterday morning and, according to Murdoch and Maria, by the afternoon he was already bucking to be let off the tether. Scott guessed that Johnny's plan had been to make such a pest of himself that they'd kicked him out of the house for the rest of the day. Scott snorted and then pressed his fingers to his eyes, which felt like they were trying to pulse out of their sockets.
Evidently, the M's guessed it too. The plan backfired. By the time Scott had dragged himself in from a day spent stringing what seemed to be, and no doubt was, miles of fence wire Johnny had apparently badgered them both into such a distraction that their father finally set him at the ranch's account books. This, of course, was much to Brother John's complete dismay. They'd given him options, Scott had been told; Johnny could have always tended to the ironing.
He couldn't help it. He snorted again.
There was no way little brother was getting out of the house in this downpour, Scott reflected, and flipped himself face up, covers pulled to his nose, and scratched his belly. It occurred to him, as he watched giant rain drops splash through his open window, that he probably ought to get up and close it; but that was all the progress made towards that end. Instead, he lay there a few minutes more, knowing that if he didn't make a move soon his father would be after him.
He grunted experimentally and shifted, rubbing a bit more sleep out of his eyes, when his bladder made its presence known.
Frowning, Scott contemplated waiting his bladder out, but only for a few seconds, before throwing back the covers and raking his fingers through his sleep tousled hair. He gingerly quit the bed, stepped into last night's pants where they sat on the floor, crumpled down to two foot holes, and made his way to the chifarobe. He fastened his pants on the way and, once done, snatched a clean undershirt off the shelf. Casting a parting glance at his boots, he left his room in stocking feet. Destination: water closet.
By the time he'd taken care of business and reappeared on the upstairs landing Teresa had appeared in her door, yawning vastly, making absolutely no attempt to cover it, and shoving her arm through the sleeve of a jacket which she was pulling on over her nightshirt.
"Mornin'," she grunted, still half asleep.
"Or something." Scott scratched at the stubble on his face. "Where are you heading off to at this godless hour?" he asked, noting the heavy jacket and eyeing her booted feet.
"Barn chores," she grumbled, pulling a hair tie out of the pocket of her jacket as she followed Scott down the hall to the back stairs.
"I thought you just had barn chores the other day, didn't you?"
"Mm." Teresa yawned again. "But the boys said Johnny's pox were scaring the livestock. So, I told 'em I'd take care of it. Your eyes are all red."
Scott snorted, and then wished he hadn't. "That's the Lambrusco talking, sugar face."
Teresa smiled and nudged him lightly with an elbow. "Smell that?"
"Smells like Murdoch's coffee special to me."
"Come on, I'll buy you a cup."
"Make it two and if my head doesn't rolled off my shoulders, I'll give you a hand in the barn," Scott offered, throwing an arm across her shoulders, and they both made idle note of Johnny's open bedroom door as they passed it by.
"Think we might need a canoe to get out there, this rain doesn't sound like it's gonna let up any time soon," Teresa commented as they stepped down into the kitchen. Frowning, she went immediately to take the coffee off the fire as it was boiling over, spattering and quickly evaporating on the stove top. Scott threw her a dish towel which hit her in the face. Wrinkling her nose at him, she quickly arranged the towel and used it as a hot pad. They took a look about the room and then back at each other. Boiling-over coffee aside, everything appeared pretty normal. Shrugging, Teresa pulled two largish mugs down out of the cupboard and Scott disappeared into the larder.
She was tugging on the towel, now burnt to the bottom of the pot, sloshing as much coffee into the cups as on the counter and popping berries into her mouth when Scott re-emerged from the pantry, arms loaded with honey and butter and jam. She traded him his cup for the honey.
"Look it, Maria left a whole bowl full of berries," Teresa said and popped one into Scott's mouth.
"My head thanks you, darling girl," Scott said.
He began rooting around the counters by the stove, opening random bins and boxes housing all manner of mysterious powders and flakes, until he uncovered half a loaf of bread left over from dinner the night before. Scott sat his coffee down and ate a handful of the berries before pulling a knife out of the block and hacking off several thick slices. Chewing and taking a tentative sip of his piping hot coffee, he turned on Teresa. "Toast?"
"Yes." Teresa nodded as she hopped up on the counter top to fix up her coffee. Swinging her legs, the heels of her boots banging against the lower cabinet, she watched Scott toss the bread hunks directly onto the burners. "Oughta get Maria to do something about that mop on your head."
"Getting pretty long, huh?"
"Longest I've seen it." A small smile quirked a corner of her lips. "Probably give your grandfather fits."
"I think I'll keep it, in that case." Scott shot her a smile of his own and added in a warning. "Hey, with the boots."
"Gonna mistake you for that Custer guy in your pictures before long," Teresa observed, desisting with the leg swinging.
This time he laughed. "I'll take that as a compliment, young lady."
"Hm," she said, scissoring at the hair growing over his ears with her fingers. "We have the day off."
"Mostly. Pretty exciting, huh?"
"I sure wasn't going to turn it down. Hey, what would you be doing if you found yourself with this day off in Boston?"
"If I were in Boston?" Scott pretended to give the matter some thought. "Well, I certainly wouldn't be up yet."
"What time do folks get up in Boston?"
"Well, this folk generally didn't roll out of bed until about noon."
"Noon?" Teresa choked on a test sip of coffee.
"I know. Shocking, isn't it?" Scott said blandly, lobbing off another bread hunk. "And then, once up, I would find the most frivolous way to spend all of my time. Yup, the more inane the better."
Teresa giggled, mopping coffee dribbles off her chin.
"It's true. Don't tell Johnny though." He cast his eyes to the heavens. "I've got him believing a more industrious citizen never graced the streets of fair Boston."
Teresa was giggling wildly. "Now you're making stuff up!"
Scott's face clouded for a second then cleared just as quickly, he shrugged. "Maybe. But California Scott thinks he shall take this day to catch up on some reading. And what about you? Have you got big plans for your day, I mean besides mucking stalls?
"Yeah, I was thinking about doing some studying after I go check on the grapes."
"You're going down there on you day off and in all of this driving rain?" Scott shot her a knowing look. "I think you just want to make sure you have an out from all the canning that Maria's about to start."
"Well—yeah." Teresa conceded. "But life doesn't stop just 'cause it's raining, Scott." She pushed back her jacket sleeves so as to get better purchase on the coffee mug. "Rain is life."
"You really like working in the vineyard, don't you?"
Teresa suddenly beamed him a smile and nodded. "There's still so much to learn, you know?"
"It's a lot of work." Scott used his fingers to turn the bread over.
"Once all my grapes come in, that's when the real fun begins. Things should start to settle for you boys after the drive is done. But that vintner is going to keep me busy straight through the winter."
"The ranch settles in for a long winter's nap, the cattle and the bees and the flowers and the trees; all except for Little T, in her catacombs, concocting red and white elixirs, while the rest is covered in a blanket of snow."
"A little snow up in the high country," Teresa said, feeding Scott another berry. "Mostly rain down here. Lots of rain."
Scott smiled as he bit down on the berry, thoroughly enjoying the burst of tart blended with sweet. "Rain is life."
"Now you're gettin' it." She returned the smile and touched the tip of a finger to his nose which he wrinkled. "Wonder where's Murdoch."
"I'm guessing he's wandering around here somewhere, coffee in hand," Scott said, catching Teresa's eye and then dropping his gaze to the honey jar which she was showing no signs of tipping back up.
"You know," she ignored the look entirely, "I'm thinking that he didn't give us this day off as a reward for our good behavior."
Scot barked in appreciative laughter. "Then you're thinking what I'm thinking."
"Give Johnny some company."
"Keep him from kicking up another ruckus like yesterday, driving the M's crazy."
Teresa managed to laughed and simultaneously throw him an impish look, daring Scott to say something as she let the honey drizzle a little longer. A warmish gust of wind whooshed through the room, flickering the wicks of the lamps, followed by a door banging shut on the other side of the house and a sobering, very irritated bark of "Damn it, I said that is enough!"
They both leaned and craned, unsuccessfully trying to get a look through the kitchen door and deeper into the house before looking at each other again. Scott frowned and returned his attentions to breakfast, using his fingers again to snatch and flip the toasting pieces of bread. "Well. There's Murdoch."
Teresa snorted as she shoved a wayward lock of hair out of her face and began butter-and-jamming the first toasts off the burner.
"You got no right!"
"And there—is Johnny," she said as his voice filtered back to them on the counter-current. "Where'd you pick up a word like ruckus, anyway?"
"Somewhere between you and Brother, no doubt," Scott said, garnering an appreciative smirk from Teresa before she posed a question she herself clearly did not believe in.
"Think he went off after we all went to bed last night?"
"With that face?" Scott cut his eyes at the doorway and shook his head before taking a bite of the toast Teresa had just handed him. "Doubt it."
"Well, I don't do Dust-Up and Commotion until I've at least had my breakfast," she said, wiping a smear of jam off Scott's cheek before she dropped off the counter, her boots making a dull clump on the tiles as her feet hit the floor. "Whatever the heck he got up to, I'm staying well out of it."
"Ditto." Scott followed her to the table with the plate loaded down with toast and changed the subjected altogether. "If you want, after you go make sure the grapes haven't drowned, I could help you with your studies," he suggested, thumbing through one of the text books that had begun to accumulate on the kitchen table as Teresa started gearing up for her college entrance exams. "I might actually go down there with you. We could apply the whole wine operation to your mathematics studies. Take it out of the abstract and make it all a bit more fun."
"You know, you're a pretty smart cookie, Scott Lancer." Teresa shook a corner of toast at him.
"Well, thank you." Scott lifted his coffee cup in salute.
They nibbled on breakfast for a while in companionable silence, ignoring the occasional angry snippet that reached them from the Great Room.
"Think Murdoch maybe perked some of the perk out of this coffee." Teresa rubbed at her eyes, sounding rather put out. "It's not working."
"That's just because it's three parts honey and only one part coffee," Scott teased
Teresa ignored this shot at her taste in coffee. "Maybe we can spring Johnny and all go down."
"For Operation Grape Patrol?" Scott looked toward the great room dubiously. "We'll see about that. Let me go grab a jacket and my boots anyway and then we should maybe go," he said as he got up from the table and made for the back doorstep and its resident pile of boots. "Horses aren't going to feed themselves."
LLLLLLLLLL
After stamping into yesterday's dirty boots out on the porch and then pouring himself fresh coffee, Scott returned to the kitchen to find Teresa leaning in the doorway off the formal dining room. Coffee cup held at her side, gripped by the rim, she nibbled absently on her toast, a deep frown of concentrated listening on her face.
"First of all, Maria's going to kill you for dropping crumbs all over the floor," he said, pushing gently at her head so that she followed it all the way into the dining room. "And then, Murdoch's going to do you in for dropping eaves."
Teresa quickly regained her footing and shushed him. "I think it's really bad," she whispered.
"What, Murdoch and Johnny?" he asked, his own voice subdued as he tried to pass her. "They won't even know we came through. Let's go."
"Wait," she hissed. "Wait!"
"You'll do well to keep a civil tongue in your head, boy," Murdoch could be heard warning from the next room, above the din of rain and rolling thunder and the curtains snapping at the open dining room windows.
Her eyes widened, grandiloquentlycommunicating an 'I told you so…', and they both stopped to listen.
"Or what," Johnny challenged.
"Or we have nothing to say to each other. You're trying to push this into a fight I'm just not having with you."
His skeptical look doing nothing to inspire confidence, Scott turned back to Teresa. "Maybe it'll burn itself out."
"Now we can talk about this like two adults," Murdoch was saying when Johnny cut him off.
"What's to talk about? It's all in there, isn't it?"
"Johnny, son, you need to settle down and listen to me."
"Don't tell me to settle down. And don't you dare call me son. I know you never really wanted me in the first place. What are you gonna do with a rotten sonuvabitch for a kid anyway."
"Or maybe not," Teresa said, her heart sinking, right along with Scott's shoulders, in bitter resignation.
"That's it," Scott said, and it sounded suspiciously like a promise, as he made his way purposefully toward the opposite door.
"Scott!" Teresa hissed, dogging his heals. "What ever happened to staying out of it?"
Her coffee forgotten next to his on the dining table, and her gnawed on toast also forgotten but still in hand, Teresa almost ran into Scott's back as he stopped abruptly right inside the great room. Annoyed at having to regain her footing for the second time in almost as many minutes, she grabbed a piece of his jacket to steady herself and almost began to protest but the words expired in her throat as she looked up.
Scott would later swear that he actually witnessed quite a few shreds of his father's patience blow to smithereens as almost in one swift motion, Murdoch backed Johnny all the way up to the lead glass window behind the Paterfamilial Seat and snatched his brother up by the arm. "Don't you ever dare let me catch you talking about your mother like that again, boy."
"Why not?" Johnny snapped, though real uncertainty clouded his face, if only for a split second, even as he struggled to free himself. "You obviously didn't think much more of her."
Wondering vaguely how she hadn't just fainted dead away from the frisson of shock and fear etching its way through her nervous system, Teresa's grip on that handful of Scott's jacket tightened into something vice-like and she held on as if for dear life. Scott grabbed a piece of the door frame as if for same as his father shook Johnny once, solidly, demanding, "Just what in hell are you driving at?"
Scott and Teresa, knowing just exactly what the hell Johnny was driving at, sprang to life and into the room, their voices a confusion of pleas and warnings but Johnny's broke over the din, his eyes never leaving his father's, and shut them both up.
"Why did you kick me and my mother out?"
It seemed the air had literally been sucked out of the room as another set of French door banged shut. Johnny hurled the accusation at his father, shoved the words out of himself like a poison, a poison so toxic it dissolved the very earth beneath all of their feet. Teresa would remember the next handful of moments like a free fall; falling, falling into a great black chasm with only the drumming of the rain on the terra cotta roof tiles for comfort. And Scott.
He got a bracing arm around her as she sagged into him, stunned. They looked on, horrified and helpless, as all of Johnny's defenses suddenly dropped. And for one terrifying second it was all there. All of it. Every inch of bitterness, anger, and hurt confusion that had ravaged most of his life. His face almost crumpled from the weight. But just as quickly he sucked it back down so only the anger remained on top.
"John." Murdoch was firm. And calm; and though his grip on his son had loosened, he hadn't let Johnny go. "I think you know better than that," he said and then turned on Scott and Teresa. "Both of you, out. Your brother and I have some things to discuss and we don't need an audience."
They stood there for a moment, blinking at Murdoch like a couple of stunned owls, and some of the tetchy irritation at not being instantly obeyed came into his voice. "I'm not going to ask you again," he snapped.
Galvanized, his arm still around Teresa's shoulders, Scott turned them as one and they made their way back across the hall, through the formal dining room; he grabbed up their mugs on the way to the kitchen.
"I feel sick," Teresa said, throwing herself down in a chair at the breakfast table.
"My head hurts," Scott said, sitting down next to her and sliding a fresh cup of coffee her way. "I take that back. My head hurts worse."
"Not the way to start the day."
"Decidedly," Scott agreed. "How can you eat that?" He enquired of what by now had to be some pretty cold toast which Teresa was alternately nibbling vacantly on and eyeing with no small amount of disgust.
"I keep hoping it's gonna get better," she said glumly and put the cold dead toast down on the table and began absently nudging it around the designs of the placemat, periodically glancing over her shoulder toward the great room. "I wonder what the heck brought all of that on."
"I shudder to imagine what brought all of that on," Scott muttered, dropping his face tiredly into both of his hands.
"Scott…"
"Hm?"
"You don't think…"
Scott looked up at the strange wobble in her voice, caught her swiping impatiently at her eyes. "What is it?"
"He's not gonna… Like before…"
Scott sighed, pulled her to him. "Johnny's not going away again."
"But what if…"
Scott cut her off. "Murdoch isn't going to let him go anywhere." Remembering the look of calm determination on his father's face, he add a firm, "Count on it."
"Ah! There are my two fantasmas!"
"Good Morning, Maria." Scott planted a quick kiss on top of Teresa's head and he tried to smile, though it came off as more or less a grimace, then jumped up and went to help the older woman divest herself of the wet poncho. Teresa pried herself up out of her chair and relieved Maria of the overfull basket of eggs in her arms.
"Either I am very late," Maria paused to let Scott help her out of a sleeve of her slicker, "or you two are up very early—thank you, Mijo." She interrupted herself as he hung her coat on a hook. "Gracias, Niña," she thanked Teresa as her girl thrust a hot cup of coffee into her hands. "And I know I am not late. Hand me that towel, girl."
Maria dried her face and wrung her hair out in the towel before taking a good look around the kitchen. "I see someone has already been at my stove."
"And considering that the whole place hasn't been blown to Kingdom Come, I think you can safely assume that someone wasn't Teresa."
Teresa whacked him on the arm.
"Oh, be nice Escocito," Maria chuckled.
"I thought I was," Scott protested as he took the damp towel from her and hung it to dry on the sink ledge.
"Where is Juanito?" Maria asked.
"Uh…" Scott flushed clear up to his scalp, as though he'd just been caught red-handed; though at what exactly was not entirely clear. He looked to Teresa for some support. "Johnny's uh…"
"Why don't you go to hell, Old Man!" Johnny shouted just then, his voice heard clearly through the house, even over the rolling thunder, and drawing all of Maria's attention. "Oh, you wanna throw things? Well, I can throw things too!" Murdoch growled back, and it was followed by some ominous thudding sounds. They tracked the noise with their eyes. Apparently Murdoch and Johnny were on the move and for one heart-stopping moment they seemed to be heading toward the kitchen before they detoured and headed back the way they had come.
"Well, I guess he's kinda…" Teresa winced at the sound of breaking glass. "I mean, the thing is…"
Maria dragged her own eyes from the ceiling to look from one and then the other of them before holding up a hand. "Stop," she said, shaking her head and sparing Teresa's get-up a disapproving frown. "Just stop. God hates liars, and I need to get breakfast on the table. Los dos de ustedes fuera mi cocina," she ordered, shooing Scott and Teresa out her kitchen.
Having been thrown out of just about every room in the house at this point, Scott figured there was nothing left to do but those barn chores. Wordlessly, thankfully, he and Teresa ducked out the back door and made for the barn, relieved that they had been spared the awful ordeal of trying to explain something they didn't fully understand themselves. Maria's voice floated after them. She was muttering something about Teresa and if she hadn't been around to see to her anyone would think that the girl had been raised by a pack of wolves.
tbc