With Wesley working beside him, and Eddie on the south side of the barn doing the same without being asked, which was a thing Eddie did now, noticed what needed doing without waiting to be told. The first rain came just before dark. By 8:00 in the evening, it was a full storm, the kind that made the ranch windows shake in their frames and turned the road between the property and Red Hollow into something between mud and moving water. By 9:00, the temperature had dropped hard. Calder had gotten the fire built up and the children settled, most of them in various arrangements around the main room because the bedrooms were colder and the storm was louder and nobody wanted to be alone in it.
Benny was asleep against Eddie's shoulder on the seti. The twins were on the floor near the fireplace with a quilt between them. Jonah sat near the window with his knees up, watching the rain hit the glass, not sleeping, but not wanting company either. Clara was in the kitchen with the lamp on, ostensibly checking the morning's bread dough, but really just not ready to sleep. Nelly had already been asleep for an hour in the bedroom, the only one who had been unbothered by the storm from the beginning.
And Maisie was fine. That was the thing Calder would think about later, how thoroughly fine she had been all evening. She'd had her supper and played with Button the rabbit, and asked Wesley three times whether the horses were okay in the barn, and accepted his three assurances with diminishing satisfaction, which was typical Maisie. She'd been put to bed at her usual time, and had gone without protest. That should have been the end of the evening's concerns.
At 10:15, Clara called from the bedroom in a voice that Calder had never heard from her before. Not loud, not panicked, but tight in a way that made every person awake in the house turned toward it immediately. Something's wrong with Maisie. He was through the doorway in 4 seconds. Maisie was in the bed with both arms at her sides and her eyes open and her face the wrong color.
Not the color of sleep or of waking, but something in between that was not right. And when Calder put his hand on her forehead, the heat of it hit him like something physical. "How long has she been like this? " he said. "I don't know. " Clara's voice was still tight. "I checked her an hour ago, and she was fine.
I just came in to check the blanket, and she Maisie turned her head toward Calder's voice. Her eyes found his face. "Ph," she said. It came out scraped and thin. "I'm here. " He kept his hand on her forehead.
The fever was high. How high he couldn't say without a thermometer, which he did not have. Maisy, does anything hurt? She blinked. My head, she said.
And cold. I know. We're going to fix that. He looked up at Clara. Get every blanket in the house.