Loe raamatut: «Back to McGuffey's»

CHAPTER ONE

“TWENTY YEARS,” KATE Rafael lifted her glass and squinted at its contents. “I went to Schuyler and Lund straight out of high school. Just to work a year before college, you know, because I was going to be a nurse. A four-year-degree one—I could have learned to stop fainting at the sight of blood. Really I could. And then I was going to marry Ben and have four children. You know, two boys and two girls like you did only my boys were going to be older than the girls.”

Penny Elsbury listed to one side and sat up straight on the bar stool in her kitchen. “Is it just me or is it getting really tired in here?”

Kate frowned at Penny. “I’m not tired. It must just be you.”

“And they let you go why? Nobody ever bled there, so they didn’t know about your problem.” Penny squinted at her glass, too, then gave Kate a confused look that would have been funny if Kate had been sober. Which she wasn’t exactly.

“They said they couldn’t afford me.” Kate nodded sagely. “That poverty-level salary they were paying me for six-day weeks was more than the law firm of Shyster...Schuyler...Schuyler and Lund could stand.” She set down her glass. “I don’t know what to do. I never did go to college, you know. I meant to, but I didn’t.”

“I know.” Penny nodded sadly. “Me neither.”

“And I never married Ben and had babies.” Oh, no. Three glasses of very cheap wine weren’t enough to stop that particular pain. Kate had to concentrate on holding her mouth steady and keeping her eyes from tearing up. Not marrying Ben—she could live with that. But no babies? Not nearly so easy. She wouldn’t have been insistent on four—just a couple would have been enough. Even one.

“Me neither.” Penny nodded again. She was still tilting on her stool.

“You couldn’t. You married Dan and had his babies. He wouldn’t have liked it if you’d married Ben, too,” Kate said.

“Nah, he wouldn’ta cared if I married Ben. Would you, darlin’?” Penny smiled at Dan when he came into the kitchen and steadied her on her stool.

“Probably would have. Ben’s a family practice doctor and we have more need of an orthodontist.” He kissed the back of Penny’s neck and reached across the counter for Kate’s glass. “More, Katy?”

“Please.”

Dan poured the last drops of the wine into the women’s Shrek glasses and sat on the stool beside his wife’s. “You heard he’s moving back to town? At least for the summer.”

Kate blinked. “Who?”

“Ben.”

“But he left. He practices down in Boston.”

“He says spring just isn’t the same without Vermont mud.”

She thought—albeit not clearly—of Ben McGuffey and the last day he’d been her boyfriend. They’d sat on bar stools similar to these in his father’s tavern on her twenty-fourth birthday and he’d said he didn’t think he’d be able concentrate on both her and his residency and he needed to break up. For a while.

She’d sat there sipping diet cola with a maraschino cherry garnish and a shot of grenadine in it and wondered why he didn’t hear her heart breaking. Surely it made a splintering sound, didn’t it?

“I wonder why he really wants to come back. He doesn’t like spring. He only likes it on the mountain when he can ski.” Deciding the last little bit of wine might be crossing her own personal line, she slid off her seat and went to pour herself some coffee. She filled a cup halfway and returned to the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room.

Dan shrugged. “All I know is that he’s staying the summer.”

Penny frowned at him. “You bicycle and ski with him every time he comes back to see his folks. How can you not know?”

“It’s been months since the last time he was here. Christmastime, as a matter of fact.”

Kate didn’t like thinking about Ben, about what might have been, although she’d spent an uncomfortable amount of time doing just that.

Ben had gotten married after he joined a practice in an affluent Boston suburb—she’d even sent a gift—but he and the pretty socialite had been divorced a few years later.

Kate had been engaged for a time in her mid-twenties, but had given Tark Bridger’s ring back due to a mutual lack of interest. They’d broken up in the same bar as she and Ben had, talking over Maeve McGuffey’s potato soup about a future they didn’t want to share. The next time she saw Tark, she introduced him to the woman he married six months later.

She’d been busy in the way that people were. She’d worked, gained and lost the same twenty pounds several times over the years and been inordinately proud of Penny and Dan’s children as they arrived. When she passed thirty, she started to think maybe it was time for her to get married and start a family, but no one had been around to help complete the equation. As a thirty-seventh birthday gift, her gynecologist had said if she had childbearing in mind, she’d better get to it.

Kate tried not to hear that particular ticking clock. She didn’t like to think about the babies she’d wanted and never had.

She was finding that a few glasses of wine made that a little difficult. More than a little.

She and Ben had seen each other often over the years. They always smiled, talked and exchanged looks that were at once familiar and bemused. They danced together at weddings and avoided each other’s eyes at christenings, or at least Kate avoided his. They held hands at funerals in a way that was comforting but lacking the chemistry of their youth. She thought maybe magic wasn’t meant for her at all.

“I’m a spinster, and the fact that I even use that word in conversation means I spend too much time reading historical novels.” She made the announcement to the contents of her coffee cup, overwhelmed by sadness. “And now I’m unemployed on top of it. What else can happen?”

“Now there’s a loaded question.” Penny shook her head at her. “I think the last time Dan asked that was when I told him I was pregnant for the fourth time. The washing machine heard me say it and broke down immediately.”

Kate snorted. “Washing machines don’t have ears. They might sense things, but they don’t hear them.”

“It really worries me,” said Dan, “that not only do I listen to the conversations you two have, sometimes they almost make sense to me.”

“Aunt Kate?” Dan and Penny’s second daughter, Mary Kate, stood in the kitchen doorway, the cordless phone clutched to the flat chest of the Denver Broncos pajamas she wore to upset her Patriots-fan father. Her eyes were wide and horrified. “The fire department buzzed in on call waiting. They called here figuring Mom and Dad would know where you were. I guess the lady who lived in the other half of your duplex fell asleep while she was cooking and the whole place burned down.”

Kate stared at her goddaughter, not quite comprehending. “Burned down? My house? Are you sure?”

“Yes, ma’am. They said it twice.”

“Come on.” Dan tossed Kate her coat and put Penny’s around her shoulders. “I’ll drive you over.”

A few minutes later, they stood at the charred remains of the saltbox house Kate had bought ten years ago. Firefighters, their faces streaked with soot, were checking the site for new flames shooting out of places still glowing hot in the darkness. The yard was a mire of mud and hopelessness.

Neighbors in pajamas hugged her, relieved to see her in one piece. The tenant who’d lived in the other half of the house had left with friends. She’d left carrying the plastic bowl of cookies something had compelled her to rescue.

Kate stood unmoving as near the rubble as the firefighters allowed. Her cat leaped from her next-door neighbor’s arms and came to stand against her legs as though to protect her.

She felt as though a block of lead was lodged in her chest. It wasn’t exactly heartbreak—everyone was safe, after all—but the sense of loss was overwhelming. Loss and loneliness. Her parents and sister lived in Tennessee, and she always missed them, but never this much.

“Do you have insurance?” Dan stood between Kate and Penny with an arm around each.

“Yes.” Her precious laptop computer was in her car. Family pictures and important legal papers had been reproduced on computer disks by her electronically savvy brother-in-law. No one had been hurt. Even Dirty Sally, the ancient one-eyed cat who stood sentinel against her legs, hadn’t been in the house. That was what mattered. Really it was.

Except that she had no job, no home and no clothing. Not even a nightgown or a pair of shoes without swooshes on the sides. She was thirty-seven years old, her roots were showing and she didn’t want to start over. She didn’t think she could. It was just too hard.

She borrowed Penny’s cell phone—her own had been on its charger in the kitchen—to call her family to tell them she was all right even though she was technically homeless. “Could you drop me off under a bridge somewhere?” she asked Dan, her voice wobbly.

He tugged at her hair. “Try not to be an idiot. It doesn’t look good on you. You’ll come home with us.”

Kate knew their house was already full to overflowing with three of their four offspring, a foster child and numerous and sundry pets. “Just loan me something to wear and take me over to Kingdom Comer. The insurance company will put me up. It probably won’t be full this time of year.”

“You sure?” Penny stood close beside her, her arm around her waist. “You know the kids love it when you stay. You always do their chores and then pretend you didn’t.”

“I’m sure.”

They drove her the few blocks to the big Victorian, Dan calling ahead so that the owner was waiting at the front door in her bathrobe.

As Kate had predicted, there was room at the inn. The bed-and-breakfast, named after its owners and the Northeast Kingdom, was empty except for the apartment over the garage. “That’s rented for the summer, but you can have the suite at the back of the house. Sally can stay in the three-season room with the dog. Lucy always likes company,” Marce Comer told Kate. “The suite is the quietest and will be more comfortable if you stay till you know what you’re going to do.”

“We’ll see you tomorrow.” Penny hugged her, her cheek wet against Kate’s.

“Things’ll look better then.” Dan pulled her hair again. “I’m a cop. We know these things.”

“She’ll be fine.” Marce locked the door behind them. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll make tea.”

Once there, seated at the big island in the middle of the room, Kate scrabbled for her checkbook, grateful she’d had her purse with her at Penny’s house, but Marce waved a hand. “I’ll just bill your insurance company. Is Joann your agent?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Here you go.” Forty, widowed and pleasantly round, Marce handed Kate a steaming cup of tea. “It’ll look better in the morning. It always does, though you surely don’t know how it will.”

“How are you doing, Marce?” It had been over a year since the innkeeper’s husband had sat down to watch the six-o’clock news and quietly died. His funeral had been the last time Kate had seen Ben. They had sat together. She’d felt the deep, silent shock of losing a friend who was way too young. When Ben had taken her hand without even looking at her and held it all the way through the service, she’d known he felt the same grief.

For a moment, the other woman’s clear eyes looked bewildered, like those of a child who doesn’t understand why she’s being punished, but then they cleared. “All right,” she said. She looked around the big kitchen of the B and B, her expression sad. “Yes, really, all right.” Her mother was British, and some of the crispness of that heritage stiffened Marce’s voice. “But I’m not sure what to do with myself. This was our dream and we realized it, but it doesn’t mean as much without him to share it. The twins are at university. I’d like to go, too. I never finished, and I’d like to.” She grinned. “I could get my degree in time to teach algebra to Josh and Michael. I only have about a year to go.”

Kate could relate to not knowing what to do with herself. Right now, her options seemed pretty limited. She smiled at Marce, afraid her skin would snap in little places from the effort. “Well, that should make you reconsider your choices.”

The women laughed together. Penny’s ten-and eleven-year-old sons were what was euphemistically referred to as a handful. They were also hilarious and loving in a way only young boys could be.

Upstairs, Marce handed Kate a cosmetics bag and a white cotton nightgown. “It’s just the necessities. Toothbrush and stuff. I keep a few around in case a guest forgets to pack them. I got the nightgown for Christmas from my mum, who thinks I should be a nun since I’m a widow. She also thinks I’m a size bigger even than what I am. You’ll swim in it, but your virtue will be protected for all time.”

Kate hugged her. “Bless you, Marce.”

She took a bath, feeling small and forlorn in the big claw-foot tub. She washed her hair under the faucet, sniffed it and washed it again. The smell of smoke was pervasive, seeming to have seeped into her very pores as she stood on her muddy lawn and witnessed the end of yet another dream.

The rose scent of the lotion in the silk pouch of necessities seemed almost incongruous, but she breathed in deeply, thinking maybe in the greater scheme of things, inner peace smelled of roses.

She hadn’t thought she’d be able to sleep, but she laid her still-damp head on one goose-down pillow and hugged another to the chest of the borrowed gown and fell into an instant dream about Ben McGuffey and Tark Bridger. They were fighting over her, with Ben wearing a lab coat with his skis and Tark dressed in a gray three-piece suit and red canvas high-tops. His wife stood to one side holding his briefcase.

* * *

WHEN KATE WOKE, with her caramel-colored hair standing straight up on one side of her head where she’d slept on it, she felt rested and unafraid despite the headache that scratched along the edges. She was also obscurely pleased that the man she had loved to distraction and the one she hadn’t loved enough had cared enough to fight over her. The only problem was she didn’t know who’d won. Dreams were that way, ending ambiguously.

Looking in the framed mirror over the bathroom sink, she thought of her house with its flower boxes and pretty shutters. Sometimes dreams just ended sadly. One thing you could count on, though, was that they did indeed always end. A soft fleece robe lay across the foot of her bed. She drew it on over the voluminous gown and went downstairs, trailing her hand along the worn-smooth wood of the curving banister. The dining room was empty, so she pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen.

“Sleep okay?” The innkeeper handed her a cup and gestured toward the double-carafe coffeemaker. “Coffee’s ready and water’s hot if you’d rather have tea.” She smiled. “No wine before dinner if you had in mind to continue your wicked ways from last night.”

Ah, that explained the niggling headache—it wasn’t a product of fires or dreams but of three glasses of supermarket wine. “Coffee works.”

The brew was half gone when she lowered the cup from her mouth. Yes, it certainly did work.

“Marce—” she went back to the coffee, refilling the cup “—are you really thinking about leaving the inn?”

“Only for the summer,” said Marce. “I need to be away from it for a bit, but I want it to come home to. I can run the inn and still go to school.”

The knock at the back door announced the arrival of Joann Demotte, Penny’s older sister, carrying Kate’s insurance policy and a bulging briefcase. “Coffee?” she pleaded, before sitting down and diving into her bag to emerge with a laptop and a yellow legal pad.

After a few minutes and a cup and a half of Marce’s breakfast blend, Joann looked over the top of her purple-framed reading glasses at Kate. “The good news is that you weren’t underinsured the way a lot of people are, and the cause of the fire was cut-and-dried.”

Kate tensed. “And the bad news?” Not more. Please not more.

“The house is a total loss. Nothing was saved that can be restored. But you knew that.”

Kate drew a deep breath. The lead was back in her chest. She thought of the heirloom quilts that had covered the beds and the Blue Onion and Blue Willow dishes she’d collected one by one at garage sales, and she nearly wept. They hadn’t been family treasures—her mother and grandmothers would have eaten glass before they’d have sewn or kept old dishes—but she’d enjoyed them. They’d kept her warm and made her poky little house into a place of welcome and comfort.

She remembered the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the den. She’d filled them with well-read paperbacks, not worth much in the used-book trade, but priceless to her. Her knuckles turned white where she gripped her cup in both hands. But then she remembered the contents of the safe-deposit box, the laptop on the seat of the car and the fact that no one had been hurt.

Even Dirty Sally had been visiting the Siamese next door at the time of the fire. Sally had never had kittens, but she was totally captivated by the neighbor’s litters. Kate knew exactly how she felt.

“It’s all right,” she said. She took a deep breath. And another. “Yes, it is.” Or it will be. I’ve made a life without babies or Ben McGuffey—I can make one without my house. Or handmade quilts or dishes that are blurry blue and beautiful.

“You can have the lot cleared as soon as it cools down.” Joann’s voice was brisk, bringing Kate out of the tunnel grief was taking her into. “The fire marshal and my adjuster have promised to release their reports ASAP. This, by the way, is unheard-of—normally they don’t do it until I’ve called at least five or six times, begging and weeping and threatening to do dire things to them. Are you dating anyone interesting?”

“No. Not even anyone boring.”

“Too bad, I was looking for some good gossip to spread around the tavern at lunch.” Joann’s eyes widened when Marce set a huge slice of coffee cake in front of her. “Oh, Marce, you shouldn’t have.”

“It’s your reward for taking care of Kate,” said Marce airily. “If there’s nothing else I can do for you two, I’m off to make the beds.”

Kate watched the woman leave the kitchen. “How much money will I get?” She turned her attention back to Joann.

“Lessee....” The agent put on her glasses and clicked computer keys, pausing to frown, ask questions and shake her head at Kate’s answers.

Several computer screens later, Joann gave her a number. “That’s ballpark. We don’t know how much your contents will be yet, so it will probably be more. Plus we’ll put you up here for thirty days—longer if you need it. Your car wasn’t damaged, was it?”

“No, it’s in Penny’s driveway. Dan always says it won’t run when I’ve been drinking.”

Joann smiled fondly. “Dan Elsbury is a nice man, isn’t he?”

“He is,” said Kate. “Of course, he’s also a cop. He knows Penny wouldn’t like it if he arrested me. Especially at their house.”

“So.” Joann shuffled the papers into a folder and turned off her laptop. She closed it and slipped it back into her briefcase. “Any ideas? You’re not going to rebuild, are you?”

“Probably not.” Kate’s street had gone from being beginner-home-cozy to a row of buildings that mostly contained small businesses with second-story office or living space. The single-family dwellings and duplexes that were left didn’t seem to belong anymore. While it still wasn’t a bad place to live, she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life there, either. At least, she didn’t think she did.

The back door opened and Penny came in, wearing a ragged sweater over jeans and a T-shirt with a slogan proclaiming it had been stolen from the Fionnegan Police Department. “You’re all right?” She took Joann’s cup from her hand and sipped, looking at Kate over its rim.

Joann took back the mug. “She’s fine. Get your own cup and see if Marce has any more of that coffee cake. For me, not you. You’re still trying to lose baby weight.”

Penny gave her a baleful look. “Michael is ten.” She brought the coffee carafe and the cake and sat at the island with the other two women.

Marce came back into the kitchen. “Doesn’t take long to make beds when you only have two guests. It also helps that one of them is gone half the time and the other one made her own bed,” she grumbled. “Now I’ll have to eat some of this coffee cake so it won’t go to waste.”

“I can take some with me,” Penny offered generously. “I’d be in good with the boys. Might even be able to get them to start cleaning their room. They wouldn’t finish, but starting would be real progress.”

“No, that’s okay.” Marce got herself a cup and plate and came to sit down. She cut the remaining cake into four pieces and passed them around. “See? No problem.”

“How busy is the inn, Marce?” asked Kate.

The older woman sipped her coffee. “In mud season, it’s often slow. It’s not always full in summer, either, though trail cyclists are changing that. We have some nearly every weekend. In the fall and winter, you don’t have time to blow your nose, so don’t even think of getting a cold. I’ve never gotten rich, by any means, but like the old saying goes, it’s a living. In the off-season, it’s a party place. Teas and showers. Meetings now and then. The dining room and the two parlors run into each other and you can accommodate up to fifty if they don’t all want to sit down at the same time, not nearly so many if they do.”

“How many guest rooms?” asked Joann.

“Two suites—the one Kate’s in and the two-bedroom one over the garage, which also has a kitchenette—and three rooms. They all have private baths, phones, wireless internet and television. I fought Frank tooth and nail over television, saying the kind of clientele we’d attract wanted peace and quiet. He said they wanted to choose their own kind of peace, and he was right.” Marce’s eyes misted over. “It seems I’m looking for Frank every time I turn a corner. The truth is he’s not there, and I need to stop looking. Maybe a couple of months away would help me with that.”

The women helped her load the dishwasher before saying their goodbyes and leaving the big Victorian. Joann returned to her office and Kate walked as far as Penny’s house with her before heading out on her own.

At loose ends for the first time in longer than she could remember, she wasn’t sure where to go. It wasn’t as though Fionnegan, Vermont, presented many choices. There were two stoplights downtown and a caution light on Worship Street at the intersection with a church on every corner. There weren’t any strip malls or chain restaurants yet, nor was there much physical space for growth, the town being nestled into the Green Mountains the way it was. So people still shopped and ate downtown, and sat on the park benches the chamber of commerce placed in front of every business. Fionnegan was a good place to live, to raise children, to find, as Frank Comer had said, one’s own kind of peace.

Before she knew it, she found herself walking along the path that meandered through dips and shallow valleys toward the more difficult trails that climbed Wish Mountain. Kate felt unaccustomed restlessness. What did she want to do? Did she want, for the first time in her thirty-seven years, to move away from the Northeast Kingdom to a place that offered longer summers, less mud and—and what? Something different. She could move to Tennessee, near the log home on Dale Hollow Lake where her parents were so happy, or the Nashville suburb to be near her sister.

But she realized neither of those places would be home. The wanderlust that had made her family relocate and had put motor homes in their driveways had skipped her completely. Whatever she decided to do, it needed to be here.

“Coming up behind!” The shout came just before something—or someone—knocked her right off her feet, pushing her not so neatly into the mud on the edge of the trail that led down to Tierney’s Creek.

“I’m sorry,” said a familiar voice. “I know better, but I think I flunked looking where I was going in running school. Are you all right?”

Hands, wide palmed but with long and slender fingers, helped her up.

And Kate looked up into the eyes she’d once planned on looking into for the rest of her life.

“Ben,” she said, “I’m way too old for you to sweep me off my feet again. And it’s just barely May—the creek’s still freezing.”

He snorted. “Like it won’t still be freezing in July.” His voice was like a caress as he brushed her down, easing the sharp edges of her nerves even as a new—or maybe remembered—excitement thumped through her veins. “I heard about the fire. You all right?”

She wondered if his blood pressure was fluctuating as much as hers was. His eyes were still deep and mossy green, his handsome face even more compelling at thirty-nine than it had been in high school. His legs below the baggy running shorts were lean and muscled, and if he’d added any weight to his six-feet-plus frame, it was in all the right places. His hair, wheat-blond and arrow-straight, still needed cutting, though it wasn’t long enough to pull back into a leather thong anymore. This was, she admitted to herself, exactly what she noticed about him every time she saw him, but something felt different today. Warmer. Intenser. Intenser? Was that a word or just a sensation that made her veins jump around like they had electrical charges in them?