“I’ll help you, love, and I thank you,” he said, eyes crinkling in a web of wrinkles as he managed a smile.
“To think Thomas Yancy is dead at last, after all these years.” Sawyer stared into the middle distance as he spoke. “And killed by his own son’s hand. I recall Dredd. I would never have figured him for such an action. Fallon, for certain, but not Dredd.”
“Fallon is more dangerous than you could know.” My voice rasped over the words. All attention swung my direction.
“We know, believe me,” Boyd said. “I’ve had that bastard in my gun-sights. I’ve regretted not killing him many a time.” His observant eyes missed nothing; his voice softened as he said, “He’s the one burned up the Rawleys’ homestead, ain’t he?”
Lorie saw in my eyes that I could not handle speaking of it; without drama, she rose from her chair and skirted the table.
“You have traveled far and endured much. Never mind eating just now,” she murmured, leading me up a flight of steps to the hotel room where I had earlier bathed and changed clothes. This time, however, she remained behind. “I’ll sit with you a spell, dear one, if you’ve a mind to let me.”
I curled around my belly on the narrow, squeaky bed and panic assaulted, hard and merciless. I suddenly couldn’t remember what Marshall had been wearing when I saw him last – for a few horrible seconds I could not even conjure up his face. I sobbed, “He’s gone, he’s gone, oh God, he’s gone…this time he won’t be back and I can’t bear it…”
Lorie lay beside me and wrapped an arm over my ribs; she did not try to offer words of comfort as I wept, my body wracked by tremors, but she did not release her hold. At long last my breathing slowed, my blood calmed; the sun had shifted, tinting the white curtains the color of weak tea. She smoothed hair from my wet face and I pretended that she was Mom, somehow here to take care of me, her youngest; her lost daughter. It had been so long since I’d seen my mother. Lorie even smelled like her, just faintly of peaches.
“Stay,” I begged, even though she had not moved.
“Of course I will,” she whispered, and when I woke the next morning she was still holding me.
At least half a dozen people met the wagon as it rolled up to a massive wooden barn and a smaller, wood-framed house. I stared with wonder, despite everything, at the structures in the same clearing where my family’s cafe would one day exist. The shoreline was unchanged, though the barn and house had been constructed much further from the lake than Shore Leave would one day perch to face Flickertail with both porches. I let my gaze trace the imaginary path of the steps leading from the cafe to the water and then out over the dock, steps I had raced down a hundred thousand times to jump into the lake. No dock at the moment, only a floating, raft-like platform anchored about ten feet from shore.
Childish voices, high with excitement, rang through the air. Sawyer jumped down from the wagon seat and was mobbed by his children. He picked up a small boy and tossed him in the air, grinning widely. Upon catching his son, he tipped the boy forward and planted a kiss on his cheek.
“Daddy, who’s here?”
“Hi, Mama!”
“Daddy, can I ride into the barn with you?”
“Mama, Jemmy hit me!”
“I did not!”
Introductions were made, Lorie taking care to repeat each child’s name so that I retained a small hope of remembering them. Rose was the eldest, a somber girl of about fourteen with gossamer hair and golden-green eyes, just like Sawyer’s; she could have been a young version of my mother. Next in line were rowdy, blue-eyed twin boys, James and William, followed by a second fair-haired daughter, Ellie, and the youngest, a son also named Sawyer. I marveled at their faces and voices, these youngsters whose descendents would one day become my family. And just as quickly, horror assaulted; how vulnerable they were, how easily destroyed if Fallon should appear here to harm them.
No. It’s not up to you.
You failed Celia and Jacob.
You failed Marshall and your baby.
It’s time now to go.
The young woman in charge in Lorie’s absence was named Libby Miller, grown daughter of Jacob and Hannah Miller, whose family lived a few miles around the lake.
Miller…
As in, Dodge and Justin Miller?
Libby wore her long black hair in a single braid hanging nearly to her waist; tanned to a deep brown and with large, expressive dark eyes, her speech carried the sound of someone raised speaking more than one language.
“I brought everyone over after lunch, when they could wait no longer,” Libby informed Lorie, brandishing a hand at the excited brood of children. “They have been begging since sunrise to come home!”
“Did you behave for your aunt and uncle?” Lorie asked her children, hands on hips.
“Of course we did, Mama!”
Rose touched her mother’s elbow, a quiet request for attention; only because I was close enough did I hear her soft, beseeching question. “Did Malcolm come home with you, Mama?” The girl’s beautiful eyes contained an agony of hope, and certainty resounded in my head, a deep awareness of something beyond all of us; I recognized, She’s in love with him.
Lorie shook her head, resting a hand lightly to her daughter’s cheek.
I would wish, later, I remembered more about that evening. Awash in grief, I strayed to the periphery, caught up in studying the familiar lakeshore and imagining my childhood home more than seeking company or conversation. I had been introduced as Ruthann Rawley and the children, other than perhaps Rose, were young enough not to speculate too deeply about my presence. The assumption was that I
