A Damaged Trust Read Free

should have been left unsaid. It was so good to be back, good to be visiting. She was afraid to admit just how badly she needed this visit.
    The tub sounded like it was getting full, so she pulled off her clothes and took her bathrobe from the closet. She sighed with a shivery pleasure as she slid into the steaming water. It was relaxing to just sit and soak out all of the weariness, and to just drift in thought.
    Dad was still the same. He would never change, would never be anything different from what he was right now. Big, gruff, tough, Cliff Metcalfe was the right kind of man to be in charge of a large ranch. He was just like the original cattle baron from the old west. He was blunt in his words, unsubtle and harsh, and he ruled his ranch and family with the proverbial iron fist. At least he ruled everyone except for me, she amended truthfully. It made for a smooth running household. Except for Carrie.
    She could just imagine Cliff Metcalfe’s perplexity when he had been told by a white-garbed nurse twenty-three years ago that offspring number three was a girl, not a boy.
    Cliff had never expected anything else but sons and he had no idea how to treat a small daughter. His wife, Janet, did her best to teach him. In fact, Carrie shuddered to think of how her childhood could have been without the feminine influence her mother had provided. Probably she would have ended up as gruff and rough as the rest of the Metcalfe clan.
    But at this thought, Carrie had to shake her head. No, that was the whole problem to begin with. Ralf and Steven were more or less like their father in every way. Indeed, she hardly had anything in common with her mother either, in spite of some feminine interests. In a family that resembled a pack of woolly bears, Carrie had been like a young kitten, lost and overwhelmed by her large and overbearing brothers and father, creeping around in corners and jumping like a rabbit whenever someone spoke to her. It was how things had been all through her childhood.
    Cliff had reacted with loud words and gruff actions. He was bewildered at the odd little fledgling he had sired and at a loss as to how to treat her. He would switch from treating her as if she had been made of finest glass porcelain to berating her on her “lack of spunk”. And, all the while, a small and rather bewildered little girl would watch him with large and wondering blue eyes. It was enough to drive the man crazy!
    Carrie climbed out of the tub and toweled herself dry, still lost in her own memories. Now all she could do was laugh as she remembered how the Metcalfe household had been rocked by her presence in its midst. Sometimes she would secretly wonder if, in the hospital all those years ago, some forgotten nurse had accidentally switched the real Metcalfe baby with that of another couple.
    It was an interesting speculation. The atmosphere had dramatically changed when Carrie hit adolescence. It was as if someone had litfire to a previously undiscovered fuse in Carrie’s personality for, as soon as she had encountered puberty, she exploded like a firecracker on the Fourth of July, and nothing was ever the same again. She had embarked into the age-old, dreaded stage of teenage rebellion, and rebel she did with style. She became argumentative, aggressive, erratic, and at odd times, tearful. Also, she became wildly creative.
    She would sketch everything under the sun, everything that was still or that would hold still for any length of time. Nothing would escape her eagle eye and charcoal pencil. Members of the household would sigh resignedly whenever they saw little Carrie trudging determinedly their way, a cowlick of hair falling in her eyes and a concentrated frown on her forehead. She managed to get Jack, grumble though he would, to pose for a half hour so that she could sketch him on his horse. It had been a rough drawing with dark lines and quickly penciled-in shadows, but it was the very roughness that captured the essence of the