The Fire of Home (A Powell Springs Novel) (10 page)

“Jessica, Jessica.” Granny shook her head. “You’re still young enough to see everything as either black or white. Sometimes things are gray.”

Mae must have mellowed, as well, Jess thought. When sh
e’d
first come back to Powell Springs, the old woman had been suspicious and resentful of her, a college-educated physician she eyed as an uppity smart aleck determined to make her look foolish. A lot had happened since those early days.

“I’ve heard talk around town—others are blackballing her, too.” Granny related the episode at Dilworth’s, as told to her by Sylvia. “Since I didn’t see it myself, I can’t swear to the truth of it. But that should give you some idea of how things are going for her. Sylvia was just
gloating
.”

“No one has said a word about Amy to me.”

“I don’t suppose they would.”

Jess toyed with the sugar dispenser. “I guess I could invite her to lunch . . .”

Granny Mae pushed out her chair as more customers began to file in. “Dinner would give you more time to talk.”

Jessica looked at the watch pinned to the bib of her apron. “All right, I’ll
think
about it. I’ve got clinic in fifteen minutes so
I’d
better go. Thanks, Granny.”

As she crossed the street to her office, Jessica tried to imagine how she would word such an invitation.

Hello, Amy. I see you’ve landed on your feet. Again.

Adam sat at the window and looked down at the street from his second-floor room in the recently constructed New Cascades Hotel. He had a perfect view of Main Street, but so far he hadn’t seen anyone he recognized since h
e’d
arrived in Powell Springs late last night, except for Milo Breninger. Adam had not imagined it would take the man almost a month to find Amy. H
e’d
all but given him a step-by-step map—her photograph, instructions on where to find her, and money. He realized that paying him so much up front had been a mistake, one that stalled the search while Breninger swaggered from one bar to another, buying women and drinks for his lowlife pals.

Early this morning, Adam had taken the train from Portland to meet Breninger in Twelve Mile, the next town over, to get better details. Breninger had expected to be paid the other six hundred seventy dollars and go his merry way, but Adam decided he might require the man’s help to accomplish his goal. He convinced him to string along for a while and act as his spy. He needed a person no one would recognize to keep tabs on Amy’s comings and goings. Breninger had been furious, but Adam persuaded him with flattery, vague hints of a bonus, and a veiled but cold-blooded threat. Milo was a tough bum, but Adam fancied that the man was afraid of him. That gave him great satisfaction—and an advantage.

The town had grown so much since h
e’d
last been here, he could scarcely believe it. New stores, offices, and restaurants lined the adjacent streets, and more autos and foot traffic made the once-quiet village more lively and vibrant. There was even a new moving-picture theater on Powell Springs Road, the main east-west thoroughfare in town.

Despite the increased population and busyness, he knew he dared not stay here long and risk the chance of being seen before he found Amy. H
e’d
come as soon as he could after receiving Breninger’s telegram at Porter’s Café. The wire told him she was back here, as h
e’d
suspected, living at the same boardinghouse where h
e’d
visited her during the last days of the war.

Letting the curtain fall into place, he sat at the small desk in the room, pondering his next move. H
e’d
learned a lot from the desk clerk by asking some casual questions and pretending to be a stranger to this place. With very little coaxing, the clerk, a chatty man with no discretion—something Adam noted for his own protection—had told him a number of helpful details about the past couple of years in Powell Springs. Marriages, births, deaths, arrests, even killings.

H
e’d
get Amy back. H
e’d
get his property back. After all, they both belonged to him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Amy had looked out the porch windows often enough to decide that she couldn’t ignore the state of the large backyard any longer. She took advantage of a stretch of clear weather to tend the roses growing in ragged, weed-filled beds. Wearing her last old dress, an apron, and a pair of gloves, she went outside with a couple of garden tools, a can of coffee grounds mixed with broken eggshells, and a watering can filled with a sulfur mixture for the roses. She wore her hair in a braid and it hung over her shoulder with a ribbon tied at the end. Sh
e’d
hired one of the neighbor boys to pull the weeds out here, but h
e’d
missed more than half of them. Still, it almost made her feel young again to kneel on a pad of old newspapers and dig in the soil with her trowel under the warmth of the mild spring sun. It was easy to forget, just for a while, the troubles sh
e’d
known for so long. Now there wasn’t much she couldn’t do. She didn’t have to like it, but sh
e’d
been forced to learn such basics to survive.

She was busy snipping off rose leaves withered from black spot when she heard someone at the gate. Alarmed, her back stiffened, she gripped the sharp-pointed shears and looked up, always expecting to see Adam. She feared that he would show up eventually . . . the how and when were what drove her to distraction. But it wasn’t him this time. She saw Bax come in and let the spring-loaded gate slam behind him.

He nodded and walked toward her.

“Hi, Amy.”

She shaded her eyes. From this angle, his legs looked as long as telephone poles. Everything about him called to the woman in her, even though she resisted the feeling. His dark hair and lean torso. He crouched beside her, one elbow on his knee, and the small, raw flame she saw in his eyes almost took her breath away. It was a feeling sh
e’d
never known before, not even with Cole. Was he just a mysterious attraction because she knew so little about him? Still, she couldn’t forget that scene over the ironing board, and it made her wary.

“Hello, Bax.”

He nodded at the flower bed sh
e’d
been weeding, where her cleared area plainly ended with an abrupt edge. “This looks like a Winks Lamont job.”

“No, I paid the Newton boy to do it, and to chop wood for the stove.” Then she waved a dismissive hand and shook her head. “Either it didn’t hold his interest or he gave up.”

He gave her a wry smile. “The result is about the same. Tilly usually asks where the money comes from when Winks can afford to buy a drink. It’s free entertainment for the rest of his customers to hear the stories.”

Amy snipped another yellowed rose leaf. “
Entertainment?
Did you hear about him working with another man during the influenza epidemic? Fred Hustad—he’s got the furniture store and the undertaking business in the back of his place—he hired them to dig graves and bury the people who died. There were so many, he couldn’t keep up and they were stacked in coffins behind the high school.” She stopped for a moment, remembering those horrible, dark days. Her memory spun backward to her own experience of drifting in and out delirium while she lay in one of the beds of the makeshift infirmary Jessica had managed to set up in the school gymnasium. She sighed. “Bert Bauer, the other man, was married to Em Gannon before he abandoned her a few years before. He saw himself as the smart one of the two.” Idly, she pulled out a weed and shook the soil from its roots, then threw it on the pile sh
e’d
gathered. “Winks followed along, and before those people were buried, the
y’d
been stripped of anything valuable they were supposed to take to their graves—jewelry, watches, family keepsakes. God, I think even gold teeth.
He
bought drinks at Tilly’s.” Of all the wrongs she had seen committed, and committed herself, robbing dead people was the worst.

Bax plucked a blade of grass and spun it between his fingers. “Whit told me. It sounds like all kinds of things were going on back then. Bauer was shot and killed a couple of years ago.”

She stared at him. Deirdre hadn’t mentioned it. “I didn’t know that. This used to be a quiet, out-of-the-way place. But between the influenza outbreak and the war—” She paused to cast him a sidelong glance to see if the latter provoked a reaction, but his expression didn’t change. “Powell Springs has turned into a busy town. Was that you I saw sitting on the bench out here the other night?”

He looked off into the distance at the lushly timbered butte and hills south of town. “What if it was?”

Amy tugged hard on a dandelion that seemed to have a taproot that went down twenty feet. “I was just wondering. At first I thought maybe—I thought it might be a stranger or—or someone else.”

He sighed. “I didn’t think yo
u’d
want me drinking in the house. Besides, sometimes I’m not very good company and I just want to be alone.”

She nodded and let his answer stand, but only because she couldn’t bring herself to pry. A dozen questions bumped around in her mind. Then she pulled so hard on the stubborn weed that she lost her balance and fell backward when the thing finally gave way.

Bax sprang forward and grabbed her left wrist to pull her upright. She winced at the pain that lingered from a year-old fracture. Although it had been splinted by a doctor who asked no specific questions as to how sh
e’d
broken her arm, the bones hadn’t set properly. Adam had grabbed it so many times before and since, it throbbed with a dull ache most of the time. Her wrist bone jutted out at an odd angle, and she felt self-conscious about its appearance. Bax still held it in his hand. She looked up first and saw that he was studying her arm.

“Did
he
do this?” he asked, his voice low. There was no doubt about whom Bax referred to.

“Oh, no—I was careless and I-I—” She tried to pull away but he kept a gentle grip on it. She saw a faint pulse throbbing in his throat, pushing his blood through his veins and heating her own.

“He did, didn’t he?” Lightly, he rubbed his thumb over the prominent bump.

She swallowed and drew a deep breath but didn’t answer.

For an instant his expression darkened with the same fury sh
e’d
seen that day h
e’d
come home for a clean shirt. Then he did a most unexpected thing. He pressed a kiss to her maimed wrist. His touch was careful, hardly more than the brush of a moth’s wing, and her heart jumped inside its bony cage.

When their eyes met, she noticed his dark lashes, and the faint weathering of horizontal lines that crossed his wide brow. He seemed to be studying her, trying to figure out what she was hiding. In his face, she saw shadows and salvation, troubles and tenderness. Finally, she realized she was staring back and tore her gaze away, her face hot with embarrassment. Goose bumps crawled over the rest of her body.

All the romantic gestures and trappings of courtship—candy, bouquets of flowers pilfered from neighbors’ yards, the promises of happiness and a bright future together, all the sugared words that Adam had heaped upon her—she had believed them. She had not loved him, but sh
e’d
envisioned a life of companionship and evenings spent twirling around the floor of their eventual home while a Victrola played scratchy Strauss waltzes. His promises had evaporated shortly after he married her and never emerged again. They were gone for good, and when that happened, Amy began to dislike him. Eventually, she came to despise him.

Now, here was Bax, a man like neither of the others in her past, with a vague history, slow-burning moods, and an undercurrent of compassion, and she didn’t know what to think of him.

He released her arm and rose to his feet. “Well, I didn’t mean to take up your time. I just wanted to give you this. I saw it on the front porch when I passed it just now.” He extended a letter to her. “It was tucked under a corner of the doormat.”

She glanced at it and felt a catch in her chest. “Th-thank you. Dinner will be ready soon.”

He nodded at her again. “Oh, and in exchange for my laundry, I’ll chop the wood for the stove from now on.” He walked toward the back porch, careful to scrape the dirt off the soles of his boots at the bottom of the stairs.

Married. She’s
married
, Bax reminded himself as he watched Amy from his bedroom window, his forehead pressed to the frame just below the lock. Her husband was a no-good, sadistic bastard—but she was legally bound to him. To top it off, she came with a load of other problems, more than Bax supposed he even knew about. Despite all that, something drew him to her, something so strong he resented her for it and tried to keep his distance. The sight of her small wrist, though, like a sparrow’s cruelly broken wing, had sliced through his heart. And there was a light in her clear, green eyes, beyond the fear and weariness, that made him believe, against his will, she could save him from himself and the empty shell of a man he had become. A man could fall into those eyes. Whenever he thought about her, desire and yearning for a better life pulled at him. Even though it might be foolish on his part, he realized that she gave him hope, and he sure didn’t know why. Her history was enough to scare off any man. But his was no better, only different.

In the yard below, she gathered up her tools and walked toward the back door. Her slight figure cast a long shadow in the grass, and the ribbon tied at the end of her braid had come loose. Its tails fluttered in the breeze stirred up by the last of the afternoon sun.

The door slammed downstairs in the kitchen and shook him from his reverie. If like attracted like, maybe that’s what pulled him to her—she was wounded and an outcast, just like him.

Just before he turned away from the window, his attention snagged on a lone figure standing at the far edge of the back fence. He gripped the window frame, instantly alert. Was it Breninger? Someone else? Bax wasn’t sure. He didn’t recognize the man from here—there was just enough distance between them to distort his features, and daylight was fading. A dark, wooded space behind him blurred the definition of his outline—but the stranger made him uncomfortable. And damn it, he realized the lousy creep had been watching Amy. She seemed not to notice.

Bax didn’t envision himself as a guardian angel. Now h
e’d
have to keep an eye out for this stranger. He had a strong hunch that he had something to do with the man wh
o’d
broken Amy’s arm. Bax didn’t know what he was up to, but it couldn’t be good.

After dinner, Amy moved around the kitchen, putting dishes in the cupboard, drying the silverware with a tea towel, always circling the kitchen table and letting her eyes stray to the letter.

Sh
e’d
put it there, leaving it unopened. It was addressed to her in Jessica’s hand, a beautiful Spenserian script that, as far as Amy knew, was her only artistic accomplishment. Her sister’s interests had always leaned toward the scientific. Sh
e’d
loved peering into their father’s microscope and grubbing around under rocks, looking for specimens and following other unfeminine pursuits. But she had elegant handwriting.

Finally, when all the dishes had been washed, all the flat surfaces scrubbed, and the towel folded precisely, she knew there was no more avoiding it. Deirdre, recovered from her cold, was in the living room with some mending. Tom was in there too, watching while she stitched a couple of buttons back onto one of his shirts. Their conversation reached her in low murmurs but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. Bax was upstairs. Amy knew she wouldn’t be disturbed for a few minutes. She pulled out a chair and sat, then opened the envelope. Smoothing out the sharply creased paper, she read the brief letter.

Dear Amy,

Although we did not part well, four years have passed and we are still family. I am concerned for your welfare and I’m hoping we can at least reach a meeting of the minds. If you long for this as well, please come to the New Cascades Hotel for dinner Wednesday evening at six o’clock. I’ll wait for you in the dining room.