Loe raamatut: «Man of His Word»

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

KIMBERLY SLOWED THE car down to a crawl as she inched past the driveway. She didn’t take her eyes from the dented mailbox that was in the shape of a chicken—a chicken, of all things. Even though she squinted, she couldn’t make out a number or a name.

“Hey, Mom! There! This is it! See the number?”

Marissa’s finger was trembling with excitement as she guided Kimberly’s attention to a house number on the mailbox post itself, almost obscured by the thigh-high Bahia grass that had overtaken the shoulder of the narrow country road.

There it was—3332. Marissa was right. Relief sluiced over her. They had found it—she had found it, no thanks to the rather vague directions she’d been given. She gave her daughter a high five that smacked loudly within the confines of the car.

Kimberly glanced at the rearview mirror and saw it was clear behind her, then reversed the car a few feet in order to make the turn into the drive.

No house was visible. She wound along a rutted dirt track between pastures dotted with cows.

“Hey, Mom, are those chickens?” Marissa asked, pointing at the field on the other side of the road.

“I think—” Kimberly squinted. Yes. There was a whole pasture, empty of everything except a huge flock of rust-colored birds streaming out from some sort of shed. As she drove past, she could see the chickens, cheek to jowl, pecking and scratching. “Yep. Those are chickens, city girl.”

“I just didn’t expect to see them like that, roaming around like cows,” Marissa said. “How do they keep them from flying away? Or wandering off? I thought chickens stayed in a pen.”

Marissa didn’t sound as though she really needed an answer, so Kimberly turned her attention to the road ahead.

Now the chickens gave way to corn, slightly wilted from the hot late-May sun. The corn, in turn, gave way to a field of leafy green bushes—bush beans, maybe—that extended as far as the open pasture until it ended in a grove of thick dark trees.

The car dipped suddenly into a mud puddle, jouncing both her and Marissa. It was proof of their stretched, taut nerves that neither noted the big bump.

Then one last curve revealed a farmhouse. The house was green, with a steeply inclined metal roof a shade darker. The porch was wide with big curving beds of marigolds flanking the front steps.

Kimberly put the car in Park and glanced Marissa’s way. Her daughter was twining one long red-gold strand of hair around her index finger, her lips compressed in concentration as she scrutinized the house.

“Do you think anybody’s home?” Marissa asked.

“The captain at the fire station said this would be where we’d find the fire chief,” Kimberly pointed out.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” Marissa said. “It’s not as if they’re going to put on a welcome party for us, right, Mom?”

“Honey, there’s no need to be nervous.” Kimberly’s stomach, full of butterflies, belied her statement. She was nervous. But she shouldn’t let Marissa’s nerves be fueled by her own neurotic thoughts. “It isn’t as though we’re meeting your biological mother or father. This is just the guy who...”

She trailed off. In the silence that followed, she heard a low “roo-roo-roo,” the deep bark of what sounded like a decidedly large dog suddenly awakened from a midmorning nap.

“This is the guy who found me after my biological mom dumped me.” Marissa’s words were harsh and judgmental as only an eleven-year-old fixated on fairness and rules could be.

“Now, Marissa—” But before Kimberly could launch into her she-would-have-kept-you-if-she-could-have speech, a woman hurried around the side of the house, a large chocolate-brown dog at her heels.

“Hello, there!” she said as she wiped her hands on the dish towel she still held. The woman must have been in her sixties, but had a youthful appearance despite her salt-and-pepper hair, which was pulled back in a bun. Maybe it was the way she bounced as she walked, or the wide, welcoming smile on her face. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”

Kimberly had rolled down the window by now. “Uh, yes—I mean, no, I don’t think we’re lost. The captain on duty at the fire station told us we could find the chief here? That he was off today?”

“Daniel?” A frown marred the woman’s smooth, tanned face. “Yes. He’s here. I’m afraid he’s still picking butter beans for me on the back side of the property, but I can call him for you. It will be a little while, though.”

“Would you?” The doubt and anxiety that gnawed at Kimberly eased a little. “I would appreciate it. I’m Kimberly Singleton, and this is my daughter, Marissa.”

“Okay, let me just...” The woman started to leave, then turned back. “Would you—would you care to get out? Stretch your legs a bit?”

“Sure, that would be great!”

“Absolutely. Make yourself at home. Y’all can wait on the porch if you’d like, and I’ll bring you out some lemonade. Come on, Rufus! They don’t want a big smelly dog jumping on them. C’mon, boy!”

Rufus hesitated, his tail flicking, then he obediently trailed the woman back around the house.

On the porch swing, Marissa extended one flip-flop-clad foot and grimaced at her pale white leg. “Mom, I’m still not tanned. I’ll bet I could get a tan superquick in a tanning bed. When we get back home, can you please, please, please—”

“No. You are the color nature intended you to be, and I don’t want to invite skin cancer on top of everything else you have going on. We don’t know anything—”

“About my biological family’s medical history. I know.” Marissa’s voice dwindled from a surge of anger to a tiny little whimper of self-pity. She jerked the swing with some violent rocking moves until she caught Kimberly’s warning look and settled into a more sedate gliding motion. “You think that’s his wife?” she asked.

“Maybe. I mean, I would think the chief would be older than the captain, and the captain was a bit older than me.”

Just then, the lady of the house opened the front door and brought out a big tray of lemonade and glasses. “Here you go.” She set the tray down on a table by the front window and with a tug pulled it close to them. “I talked to Daniel, and he said he’d be up here in about five minutes or so. And excuse me, I should have introduced myself—I’m Colleen Monroe. And I’m usually not this— Oh, was that a timer going off? My lunch is on the stove and a cake’s in the oven—I need to check it, and then I’ll be right back.”

In a flash, she was gone. Marissa didn’t have to be encouraged any further to serve herself a tall glass of the lemonade. She poured a generous serving from a fat-bellied pitcher into the two ice-filled glasses and handed one to Kimberly.

“Mmm...this is good, Mom! Why doesn’t our lemonade taste like this?” Marissa smacked her lips appreciatively.

“Because we use a mix?” The lemonade was good—not too sweet, not too tart, perfectly chilled. It tasted of fresh lemons.

A tall rangy man about Kimberly’s age in a dusty white T-shirt rounded the house. His hair was dark and rumpled, a hint of stubble along his jaw, his skin tanned, and he looked all sinew and bone and muscle in just the right proportions. The chief’s son, perhaps?

“Hey. I’m Daniel Monroe. Ma said you were looking for me?”

Kimberly scrambled up in surprise. This was the fire chief? Had to be about her age, maybe very late thirties.

“Uh, yes. I’m Kimberly Singleton. And this is my daughter, Marissa.” She swept her hand toward Marissa while nudging her to stand up with a carefully placed tap to the ankle. Likewise, Marissa rose to her feet.

Daniel Monroe’s face continued to show polite curiosity, salted with a little apprehension in eyes that were the exact color of the summer sky. “Yes?”

“Well, we’re sorry to bother you on your day off, but we’re hoping you can give us some information. My daughter, Marissa...”

This was harder than she’d thought. She hadn’t rehearsed it, and maybe she should have. She swallowed, feeling Marissa’s growing anxiety emanating in waves beside her. “She was left as a newborn at your fire station. And I believe you were the one who found her?”

It was as though she had sucker punched Daniel Monroe. He rocked back on his heels and regarded first her and then Marissa for a long, long moment.

“So. You kept your name.” The man’s words, directed at Marissa, were tinged with wonder. It was an odd reaction that Kimberly had not at all expected.

Marissa shrugged her shoulders, then hunched them with the shyness that made her so often close up around strangers, or whenever she found herself the center of attention. She appeared, to Kimberly at least, as though she wanted to fall through the porch floor, not daring to meet the eyes of the fire chief—her rescuer. “My mom named me,” she mumbled.

“The bracelet...” Kimberly’s words trailed off. She dug the tiny baby bracelet out of her pocket and handed it to the chief.

He turned it over in his big sturdy hands, the delicate filigree of the bracelet so out of scale in comparison. Did his fingers shake? Or was that a figment of Kimberly’s imagination? “I was afraid they wouldn’t get it to you. To whoever adopted her—Marissa, I mean.” He nodded in Marissa’s direction, then handed the bracelet back to Kimberly. “Yeah. That’s the one.”

“We were hoping you could give us some information,” Kimberly said.

She held her breath. Finally, finally, they were close to getting answers that could help Marissa’s doctors—why had Kimberly put this off? Why had she been so afraid to make this trip?

Daniel didn’t reply at first. Instead, he crossed the short distance to a chair and pulled it around to face the swing and the table. “Why don’t we all have a seat?” he suggested, before he collapsed into the chair as though his legs wouldn’t hold him any longer. “I’ve been picking beans since sunup, and I’m worn out. I see Ma got y’all some of her famous lemonade.”

Kimberly and Marissa sat back down as well, the swing rocking under them. “It’s very good, Chief Monroe,” Kimberly told him. “Please give your mother my compliments.”

But she couldn’t ease back in the swing, not even if Daniel Monroe had sagged back against his chair and was downing a glass of lemonade.

He might have all the time in the world, but she didn’t.

He placed the glass on the table with a thud. “Call me Daniel. I’m so new at the job that when I hear Chief, I think of my old boss, who recently retired, and when I hear Chief Monroe, I think they’re talking about my dad. He was chief for years, but that...”

Daniel paused, his face shutting down for a moment. It left Kimberly pondering whether his father had pulled some strings to get his son the job. That would explain why Daniel was relatively young and yet had such a position of responsibility.

But he still hadn’t offered any details about finding Marissa. Instead, he sat there, looking at them, his foot tapping restlessly on the porch floor, a pensive expression on his face.

“What—” Kimberly started to ask, but Marissa jumped in.

She blurted out, “So you found me? Where she dumped me?”

Kimberly winced. “She didn’t—”

Marissa started to roll her eyes, then stopped because she must have been sure Kimberly would nail her on it. “Mom, you can dress it up any way you want, but the facts are the facts—she dumped me. She didn’t want me, and she dumped me.”

Daniel frowned. It erased the boyishness Kimberly had seen earlier in his face. “She brought you to a place where you’d be safe. She thought that’s what she was doing—that fire stations were safe havens for newborns.”

“You talked with her, then?” Excitement bubbled up in Kimberly as she leaned toward Daniel, nearly knocking over her half-empty lemonade glass. She hadn’t dared to hope for anything as promising as this. All the court documents showed was that the baby had been left at the fire station.

“Yes.” Daniel’s response was clipped. “Briefly.”

“You knew my birth mother?” Despite her earlier hostility, Marissa leaned forward, as well. Gone was her fading-into-the-woodwork reaction, and Kimberly realized for the first time how deeply Marissa wanted to know about the woman—girl, really—who had brought her into the world.

“No. I didn’t know her. I guess you could say I met her. That would be accurate.”

“And she just drove up and handed me to you and left?” Marissa asked.

“No. Not exactly.”

Even Kimberly found herself more than a little exasperated with Daniel’s cagey answers. Am I going to have to drag it out of him bit by bit? I only have the summer! I have to find this woman, have to know if she can tell us anything that will help Marissa. “What can you tell us?” she asked.

He closed his eyes. For a few beats, he said nothing, only sat there, his arms folded across his chest.

Kimberly fought the urge to strangle him in frustration at his long silence. Finally he opened his eyes and gazed at her with a directness that jolted her. He compressed his lips and gave her a small, almost undetectable nod.

But his next words?

“Not much. I can’t tell you much at all.”

Then her heart did a double beat as he leaned forward and asked, “But how about I show you?”

CHAPTER TWO

DANIEL PARKED HIS pickup in the slot marked Chief and glanced in the rearview mirror. Yep. There was the little Toyota, with the mom and the daughter, pulling up behind him. They’d tailgated him the whole ride back into town from the farm.

He rubbed at a head that ached from too little sleep and too much sun. Between the new job and harvest time just gearing up, he felt as if he’d been run ragged.

And now this.

Blowing out a long breath, he opened the door. Gravel crunched under his foot, and behind him he heard the flags clanking against the pole. Wind was coming in from the west today, hot and dry. Unbidden, he found himself hoping there’d be no car fires on the interstate with such a stiff breeze.

Slamming the door, he saw that the girl and the woman had gotten out, as well. What was the mom’s name? Kimberly? Yeah, Kimberly. She wasn’t what he’d expected. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Adoptive parents didn’t have to look like their kids.

And Kimberly and Marissa didn’t match at all. Marissa had taken after Miriam, who’d been tall and had given Marissa her strawberry blond hair. Kimberly was slimmer and darker and much more petite. And she looked almost too young to be Marissa’s mother.

But like Miriam, Kimberly possessed courage of a sort. Miriam had ginned up the courage and the fortitude to escape a dangerous situation, and he figured Kimberly had shown a similar bravery to tackle the red tape required to adopt a baby.

“So it was here?” Kimberly asked him.

Daniel tore his mind away from the razor-sharp memories of that day—ten years ago? No, eleven. Almost twelve, actually, this coming July Fourth.

“Yes.” He found himself guarding his words. What could he tell them? What should he? Legally, he was in a bind, because Miriam was covered under Georgia’s safe-haven law. But more than that, he remembered the girl’s abject terror of her boyfriend’s parents finding out about Marissa.

He’d given Miriam his word. And it was up to him to keep it.

Beckoning for them to follow him, he walked out to the patch of lawn between the firehouse and the street. One of the crew had just mowed the grass, and it smelled fresh and green. Unlike that summer day, there was no redolent smell of charcoal and sizzling burgers from a July Fourth cookout by the crew, no shrieks from kids playing tag under sprinklers on the side yard.

“She pulled up here,” Daniel told them. “She was driving an old four-door. I was standing...” He pivoted, replaying the day in his head. “There, leaned against the side of the building. Everybody else had gone inside to eat.”

It was all fresh—the grief he’d felt over his dad not being with them on that day, the fact that he had angered and worried Ma with his sudden move to follow in his father’s footsteps as a firefighter, the last time his father had held his hand—his dad swathed in bandages, a mummy of a man in the burn unit.

Take care of your brothers and your sisters and Ma.

Keep your word, Danny, keep your word, no matter the cost.

The last words his father had spoken to him, an entreaty wrung out of a man in agony, a man needing assurance that his eldest son would take his place as the family’s leader.

And Daniel had promised his father that he would.

On that July Fourth, he’d been bent on escaping the day’s festivities, and that was why he’d been the one to see Miriam.

“What...sort of car?” Kimberly asked, behind him.

The question pulled him away from his own tangled emotions of that day and into the present. “You know, it was old. Like a 1970s Nova? I remember it had about four different colors of paint on it.”

Daniel turned back to face Marissa. Yes, she had Miriam’s red-gold hair, and it looked as though she was well on her way to achieving her biological mother’s height. Funny how they both twirled their long strawberry blond hair around their index fingers.

Funny how he could remember that small habit of Miriam’s at all.

“Is that why she dump—” Marissa broke off, apparently taking in the same look of exasperation that Daniel saw on Kimberly’s face. “Is that why she gave me up? Because she was poor?” Her words trembled with emotion.

“She gave you up because she cared about you. Because she couldn’t figure out a way to keep you safe and still keep you, so she decided that keeping you safe was the better choice.” Daniel fought a strange sense of protectiveness for Miriam, as though even the little he’d shared somehow violated his promise to her. “I honestly don’t know if she was rich or poor or even if the car was hers. All I can say for a fact is that you were born here, in this spot, on July 4, 2003.”

“I was born here? Right here? I thought...”

“You were born on the Fourth, right?” Now Daniel worried that maybe they’d gotten confused, that maybe this wasn’t the same Marissa after all. No. No she was definitely Miriam’s child.

“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir. People call me a firecracker baby. Because of my hair and being born on the Fourth and all...” Her face wrinkled as she said this, and her fingers settled for a moment on her hair and again twisted a strand of it. She didn’t sound too enthused about the moniker.

Kimberly spoke up. “I didn’t know she was born here, either. The court papers said Marissa’s birth mother had tried to surrender her here at the fire station, and you were the firefighter who’d helped her. So...what can you tell us?” Kimberly asked. “What all do you remember? About that day?”

This Daniel could do. He smiled. “I was out here, minding my own business, and then this car comes roaring up, and I go to check it out...” He closed his eyes. The memory was still so sharp he could smell the charcoal. “And there you were, Marissa. Busy getting born, all on your own. You didn’t even wait for the EMTs, and they were inside.” He jabbed a finger over his shoulder to indicate the firehouse.

Again memories flooded him: the sweet weight of Marissa in his arms, the goofy feeling that swamped him as he held her.

The agony of having to turn her over to the child-welfare folks. At the hospital, he’d asked if he could keep her for a while, just in case Miriam changed her mind and came back for her daughter, but they said no, certainly not.

The “certainly not” had stuck in his craw. Miriam had trusted him. Why couldn’t they?

But there were laws and regulations and he knew that he really couldn’t raise Marissa on his own. So he’d made them promise that she would be placed in a good home.

Daniel had kissed the top of Marissa’s little red head and handed her over, and that was the last time he’d seen her.

Until now.

And the mom they’d picked out for Marissa did look like a pretty good mom. Kimberly was pretty, and seemed caring. He noticed the furrow in her brow as she fretted silently over Marissa. She was worried. But she wasn’t saying anything, just giving Marissa time to absorb what Daniel had told her.

“Really? You remember?” Marissa asked. Again, there was a tremor in her voice.

“As if it was yesterday.”

He tore his gaze away from the girl’s face, her expression so unreadable that he couldn’t be sure if what he was saying was helping or hurting. Daniel turned to look at Kimberly.

Now, she was an open book. Her eyes, that curious blue, were bright with unshed tears. Her throat was working, and he could tell she was moved by the moment.

Had to be hard, helping her adopted daughter revisit the day she came into the world. Did Kimberly envy that mother? Envy the chance to have given birth to Marissa herself? Or was she afraid that Marissa would leave her in search of her birth mom?

“I have a picture,” he said, his voice husky.

“A picture?” The words exploded from both Marissa and Kimberly. They stared at each other, their eyes wide with excitement.

“Can we see it?” Kimberly asked.

“Yeah. Sure. Come on. It’s in my office.”

Inside, Marissa glanced around the tiny office, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Kimberly was more patient, and he noticed how she laid a light hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Its fluttering movement seemed to comfort the clearly anxious Marissa.

He grabbed up the photo of him and Marissa and extended it to her. “See? I told you that you were tiny.”

She stared down. “Oh.” Disappointment was plain on her face. “I thought...I thought it would be of me and my birth mom.”

But Kimberly had taken the photo from Marissa and was staring down at it. She traced her finger over the image, her mouth softly parted. A tear snaked down her cheek, and Daniel liked the way she let it be.

She looked up at Daniel. “This is you. With Marissa.”

“Yeah. The guys took it. Right before I had to hand her over. DFCS said they’d find her a good home. Looks as if they did. I mean, I asked if I could keep you,” he blurted out to Marissa, “but I mean, who was I kidding. I was a twenty-five-year-old unmarried guy, a rookie firefighter. Who was gonna trust me with a kid, huh?”

Marissa’s eyebrows skyrocketed. “My mom was twenty-five when she adopted me. And she was single.”

Something about that twisted in him. He shot a questioning look toward Kimberly, and she nodded. “Yeah, but, Marissa, at first I was just a foster parent. Besides, I’d already gone through all the foster-care paperwork and the classes, and they’d done a home study. Plus...you were listed as a special-needs baby. They needed somebody who would take you, no questions asked.”

“Yeah. I forgot about all that.” She leaned over her mother’s shoulder and studied the photo. “Hey, I was kinda cute. I thought babies were ugly.”

“You were beautiful. Tiny. But beautiful. Except...” Daniel scratched his head as he recalled the bruises he’d left on her pale pink skin. Other bruises, that the EMTs shrugged off, had started popping up, as well. Part of the birthing process, they’d assured him.

Just then the “ennnh” of the fire alarm’s buzzer reverberated through the building, and the radio crackled to life. He listened, took in the bare facts: multicar accident on the interstate, gas-tank leak, trapped driver.

“Sorry,” he told Kimberly and Marissa. “This will have to wait.”

And then he was out the door, trying to focus on the fire call, the person trapped in the vehicle, that dry westerly breeze that could make fires on the interstate get out of hand with hair-raising speed.

But as he pulled on the last of his turnout gear and swung into the station’s extended cab pickup with his captain at the wheel, he caught sight of Kimberly and Marissa’s faces.

His gaze fixed on their expressions as Dave, his captain, peeled out behind the fire engine.

Marissa’s was typical tweenager, like his nieces and nephews, her eyes alive with curiosity and excitement.

Kimberly? Her fingers went to her mouth, her brow creased ever so slightly and her eyes were dark with worry as they locked with his. She knew the life. The risks. The fact that even with routine calls, there were never any guarantees.

He didn’t know how Kimberly knew, but her eyes held that same look that Ma’s had every time his dad had left the table to answer a call.

And he didn’t know how he felt about having someone he’d barely met worrying that much about him.