Stay a Little Longer (17 page)

Dancing across the stage and making a general fool of herself would have been just fine for Charlotte if it wasn’t for the
preening of Catherine Nichols. Three years older than she, Catherine had the lead part in the play, the farmer’s wife preparing
the bountiful dinner to be attended by the whole town. She had been crowing as loudly as any rooster about how she was the
star of the show and how everyone in town was coming to watch her.

Charlotte knew that all the girl wanted was attention, but she couldn’t stand her just the same. She desperately wished she
could tell everyone about what happened in the woods, about finding the stranger, just so that no one would pay any attention
to Catherine anymore; she would gain a lot of satisfaction from knocking the girl down a peg or two.

But all that would really do is upset Rachel!

Ever since Rachel had followed Charlotte out to the shack in the woods, she had taken a particularly strong interest in the
stranger, going often to the bedroom and looking at the man with a curious as well as impatient eye. Once, Charlotte had crept
up the staircase in the middle of the night, to find Rachel already inside the darkened room!

“Have you been talking to her?” Charlotte asked aloud.

“No… I’ve been sleeping…” a voice answered.

Charlotte’s eyes flew to the bed, where the stranger’s eyes fluttered, one hand rising weakly from the sheets to rub at the
sleep in his eyes. After days of uninterrupted rest, he was awake.

The stranger was finally awake!

Mason’s eyes fluttered as sleep finally released its grip on him. Slowly, he came out of a foggy dream of riding on the gently
rocking rails of a train as a cool wind rushed through the open door, ruffling his hair and carrying with it the scent of
freshly cut pine. For a moment, as the vision retreated from his mind, he had no idea where he was.

When he was finally able to see clearly, Mason’s gaze wandered over the tiny room in which he lay. The furnishings were meager:
a nightstand with an oil lantern stood next to the bed, there was a chipped dresser topped with a washbasin in the far corner,
and a coat tree leaned awkwardly just inside the door. Sunlight poured through the thin curtains of two windows, falling on
the golden hair of a little girl sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed.

Even as he struggled to awaken from his stupor, Mason found that there was something familiar about the girl. Much of the
child’s face was in the shadows, and most of what he could see was fixed in a frown of concentration, but there was something
there he knew that remained just out of reach. Absently, the girl pushed a checker piece across the black-and-red surface
of its board.

Suddenly, the memory of what he had been doing before he collapsed into a black darkness came back to Mason. He remembered
jumping off the speeding train outside Carlson, making his way to the house that he had shared with Alice and finding another
man and woman living there, running into Samuel Guthrie, and the illness that had nearly felled him where he stood. He recalled
making his way into the woods on the far side of Lake Carlson, finding the shack he had played in as a boy, and then… nothing.

I went out to the woods to be alone… What happened?

“Have you been talking to her?” the girl suddenly said, looking in his direction.

He wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but the simple sound of her voice was as welcome to his ears as the first birdcall
of spring. “No… I’ve been sleeping…” he managed.

The girl’s face rose in surprise to the sudden sound, her eyes lighting up with delight, and she rushed from her chair over
to the side of the bed. She was so excited that her small hands grabbed up fistfuls of blanket, clenching and unclenching
without pause. Her mouth opened and words poured out so rapidly that Mason couldn’t understand a single one of them.

“I need… I need some water,” he rasped.

The girl obliged, fetching him a glass from a pitcher next to his bed. She had to help him bring the tin cup to his mouth,
and water dribbled down his beard, but he drank greedily, doubting that he had ever been as thirsty in his life.

Up close, he was struck by just how much the girl resembled Alice. It wasn’t just the blonde hair, but also the sparkling
blueness of her eyes, the slightly upturned nose, and the way her smile curled a bit at the edges. Even her excitement at
his waking was similar; Alice had an infectiously optimistic way of seeing the best in everything and everyone. Once again,
he wondered where his wife was.

“Are you a hobo?” the girl asked when he had finished drinking.

“Sort of,” he lied gently. It wasn’t that he wanted to deceive the girl, but more that the answer was too complex, far too
difficult for him to explain, including to himself.

“You were awfully sick.”

“I was,” Mason admitted.

“Jasper and I took care of you,” she said proudly.

“Who’s Jasper?”

His nails scratching against the wooden floor, a large black dog padded over to the bed and jumped up, placing his front paws
on the edge of the mattress. He barked once, as if he were saying hello, and the girl gave his thick neck a scratching as
he panted, his pink tongue lolling out of his mouth.

“I suppose… I should… thank you both.” Mason smiled. He raised a fragile hand to the dog, and Jasper gave it a gentle lick,
his wet tongue darting over outstretched fingers.

“That means he likes you,” the girl observed.

Suddenly, Mason was aware that he was wearing a nightshirt instead of his familiar clothing. A tremor of panic raced across
his heart, a fear that he had somehow misplaced his belongings, but most important, that he had lost his picture of Alice.

“I had some things… with me when… I got sick…”

“Don’t worry none about your stuff, it’s all there,” the girl said as she pointed at another chair Mason had not originally
seen. There, draped across his satchel, was his worn overcoat. Though he hadn’t laid eyes on it, he felt certain that the
photograph was safely inside.

“My uncle and Aunt Rachel brought you back,” the girl continued.

The mention of the name Rachel sent Mason’s mind to racing.
That’s the name of Alice’s sister!
Was it possible that the woman the little girl was talking about was the same person? If so, was he in Eliza Watkins’s house?
The room didn’t strike him as particularly familiar, but it had been so many long years since he had been there, it was possible
that he didn’t remember.

“Who’s Alice?” the girl asked, breaking his frantic thoughts.

“What?” he asked quickly.

“You called me Alice,” the girl explained.

Mason realized that the first thought he’d had upon looking at the girl, that she closely resembled Alice, must have been
the same reaction he’d had when encountering her in the woods. He must have been delirious, half out of his mind with fever,
and had imagined that he was being cared for by his loving wife, not some small girl.

“What is your name?” he asked, ignoring the girl’s question.

“Charlotte,” she replied.

“It’s nice to meet you, Charlotte,” Mason said warmly. “My name is…” he began before hesitating. With Rachel’s name having
been mentioned, he’d absolutely no choice but to think that he had been taken in by Alice’s sibling, his own sister-in-law.
Was this girl Rachel’s daughter? Since Charlotte had mentioned an uncle having been involved in taking him from the secluded
shack, he had to wonder if it was Otis Simmons, or…

Or was it Alice’s new husband…

Before Mason could give Charlotte any kind of answer, the door to the room opened and he found himself staring at Rachel Watkins.
As she strode inside, he tried desperately to hide his surprise; with his worries about her identity now confirmed, he felt
filled with a mixture of happiness at seeing her again after so many long years away and an impending dread at finally being
discovered.

Rachel had changed during the eight long years he had been gone. She was far more beautiful than he remembered; gone was the
attractive yet awkward younger girl. In her place was a woman with striking coal-black hair, piercing greenish-brown eyes,
and luxuriously full lips. Even though she had only been in the room for a moment, he also noticed that she carried herself
proudly. Forgotten was the bashful girl he remembered as Alice’s younger sister. Rachel appeared more confident, more certain
in her bearing than he remembered.

“I heard voices when I was passing by and I hoped that our guest might be awake,” she said with a smile that was more curious
than inviting. “It seems I was right.”

“I wasn’t bothering him!” Charlotte said defensively. “Honest!”

“She wasn’t,” Mason added, unsure of how he should mask his voice.

“Charlotte, will you leave us for a moment?” Rachel said, her eyes never leaving Mason. Even as he tried to remain calm, to
not betray his ever-growing anxiety, his heart thundered loudly in his chest. Even when he had been a soldier on the battlefield
or when he had escaped from a trainyard boss by the skin of his teeth, he had never felt so ill at ease.

“But he just woke up,” Charlotte whined.

“You’ll have plenty of time to talk his ear off later. Right now, I want to check his temperature.”

The young girl groaned but nonetheless stomped out of the room, Jasper in tow. When the door had clicked shut behind her,
Mason said, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done for—”

“All I want out of you is the truth,” she said, silencing him.

“I don’t… think I understand…” Mason offered as a feeble answer, but he did understand. The time had come. He owed her an
explanation.

Rachel stepped forward. “I think you do.” She gripped the oaken foot of the bed, her eyes full of determination. “It’s really
you, isn’t it?” she said softly. “Mason Tucker has come back from the dead. But eight years too late.”

M
ASON, IT’S YOU
, isn’t it?” Rachel asked, her voice nearly as soft as a whisper.
Has Mason Tucker come back from the dead?

Rachel’s gaze held the man where he lay in the bed in the tiny room at the head of the stairs. Intently, she watched for some
reaction, anything that might betray his response to her accusation, but he only looked back at her curiously. With his unruly
mop of dark hair, equally unkempt beard, and penetrating eyes, he had the appearance of a vagrant, a hobo, whose life was
spent aimlessly traveling the rails. But she felt certain that it was only a façade, a curtain hiding who he really was.

During the two days that he had spent in their care, Rachel had taken great pains to nurse him back to health. After making
sure that he was finally resting comfortably, she’d washed the rest of the dirt and grime from his body. Though he wasn’t
alert enough to eat, she had managed to coax him to take some water she squeezed from a cloth into his mouth.

While the stranger’s well-being was important, she tended to him not entirely from the goodness of her heart; what she really
wanted was the truth. From the moment he had spoken to her in the darkness of the cabin, calling her by her name, Rachel had
longed to know his true identity. Even as she cared for him, she found her curiosity often getting the better of her. In the
middle of the night, while everyone else in the boardinghouse slept, she had come into his room to silently watch him. Her
eyes had raced over his features again and again, hoping to find something that would convince her that she wasn’t imagining
things, that he was who she believed him to be.

But she could never be certain. Either too much time had passed since she had watched him leave on the train for France, clouding
her memories beyond recovery, or Mason had physically changed and no longer resembled the man that she had known, her sister’s
husband. Still, the thought that she was right incessantly nagged her, refusing to let go.

And that’s why I’m here… to finally learn the truth!

“I’m… afraid that I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man finally answered.

Refusing to allow him a chance to so much as catch his breath, Rachel rushed from the foot of the bed to the man’s side, her
fists balled tightly in a growing sense of frustration. When she spoke, the words flew from her mouth like arrows.

“What about what happened out in the cabin?” she prodded, her voice rising with every word. “Why did you call Charlotte by
Alice’s name? How do you know me? How did you know my name?”

Her sudden barrage of questions seemed to utterly unsettle the stranger. His eyes darted quickly from Rachel to the open window,
then to the door, and finally back to the window before settling upon a spot at the base of the bed. Clearing his throat,
he hemmed and hawed, started and stopped, all without giving any sort of meaningful reply.

Rachel knew she was being unfair; accosting this man while he was still recovering from a severe illness was almost certainly
treatment that he didn’t deserve. But she also knew that she didn’t have much of a choice. She needed answers, answers to
the questions she’d been asking herself over the last two days, the very same questions she’d been tortured by for the last
eight years.

And by God, I will have them!

“How did you know my name?” she prodded again.

While he still seemed unsettled, the stranger sighed and said, “I’m not… not entirely sure, the sickness has muddled my head
so that I can’t think straight, although I seem to remember meeting a man when I was in the army, when I was a soldier in
France, who said he was from a town in eastern Minnesota named Carlson. He often talked about two women he cared for, two
sisters named Alice and Rachel.

“It sounded like such a wonderful place that… I suppose I wanted to see it for myself,” he continued, an easy smile crossing
his face. “But when I got here, whatever sickness I contracted finally got the better of me. I suppose that when you found
me, I was half delirious with fever and those two names were the only thing roaming around in my head.”