Excerpt from You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You want the job?" he asked.

Sammy nodded.

"How old are you?"

She hesitated, and he guessed she was deciding whether or not to lie. "Sixteen."

This seemed close enough to the truth. "You're not some kind of runaway are you? You should tell me so I can decide if I want the trouble."

"No one's coming to look for me."

"Where're your folks?"

"Wyoming."

"What do they do there?"

"Chickens."

"They won't have the cops after me for kidnapping?" Trying to set her at ease, Mr. Otterbausch chuckled. The girl did not smile.

"No sir."

"Just a joke," Mr. Otterbausch said. "Just joking."

Sammy lived in the lodge until Mr. Otterbausch had a cottage built for her in a stand of trees off the east porch, on the far side from the guest cabins and the bunkhouse. He'd hoped when she was transplanted to another building she would be less on his mind, but no such luck. All day he was mindful that she might be watching him and considered each movement before he made it, choreographing for her eyes a performance of strength while he moved bales of hay or of grace as he rode out on Sleepy Jean in the evening. He tried to stop himself from wringing his hands while he talked to her because an old girlfriend had told him the habit was annoying. Every night his imagination projected flickering films of Sammy Boone onto his bedroom ceiling: Sammy riding, always riding, across fields and hills and exotic fantasy deserts, always on beautiful horses, horses that Mr. Otterbausch certainly didn't own. He liked to imagine what her hair might look like out of its braid, what it would feel like in his fingers.

Sometimes he allowed himself to imagine making love to Sammy, but he did so in a state of distracting discomfort. The bottom line was that she was too young, and he wasn't about to mess around with a girl who had nowhere else to go, even though she had a stillness to her that made her seem older, old even. He told himself he loved her the way he loved the wind and the mountains and the horses, and it would be a crime to damage her spirit. Plus, she showed no interest. She treated Mr. Otterbausch and the wranglers with a detached man-to-man courtesy. Sometimes she could even be coarse. She called the stuck latch on a paddock gate a "cocksucker," and she told a table of breakfasting dudes that the stallion had "gone out fucking" one Sunday in breeding season. When she ran into Mr. Otterbausch, she never talked about anything beyond solid concerns of trees, rocks, water, and animals. If he tried to ask her about herself, she gave the shortest answer possible and then made herself scarce.

"You have any brothers or sisters?"

"Some brothers."

"Where are they?"

"Don't know. Got to check on Big Bob's abscess. Night, boss."

Ten years passed this way. Sammy stayed skinny but muscled up some. She started to go a little bowlegged, and her forearms turned brown and wiry. The dude business worked out well. Mr. Otterbausch made enough money to keep improving the ranch a bit at a time and also to put some away every year. Out on a ride he found a hot spring bubbling beside a creek, and he dug the pool out bigger, lined it with rocks, and put in a cedar platform for the dudes to sit on. Dudes, it turned out, loved to sit in hot water, and the sulfurous pond drew enough new business that he added three more cabins and built a shelter way out on the property's north edge for use on overnight treks. The guests called Sammy a tough cookie, which irked Mr. Otterbausch, as when anyone said the distant, magnificent mountains were like a postcard.

Since the beginning, Sammy'd had the job of taking the best old horses up to a hillside spot called the Pearly Gates when their times came and shooting them in the head. The place was named for two clusters of white-barked aspens that flanked the trail where it opened out into a clearing. Mr. Otterbausch guessed that Sammy got on better with horses than people, and he figured she gave them a proper goodbye. When the wranglers saw Sammy come walking back down from the hills, they knew to keep out of her way for a while. She left each carcass alone until it was picked clean enough, and then she went back and nailed up the skull on one of the pines around the clearing if it hadn't been dragged away somewhere. Not many horses were lucky enough to go to the Pearly Gates. Most of the ones who came in from winter pasture lame and rickety were sold at auction and ended up going down to Mexico in silver trucks with cheese-grater sides, bound for dog food. But worthy horses came and went over the years, and their skulls circled the clearing past the Pearly Gates like a council of wise men.

Excerpted from You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead. Copyright © 2022 by Maggie Shipstead. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.