“No mother?” Widening her eyes, she’d splayed her red-painted-fingernails over her impressive bosom. “You found this dear child under a tobacco leaf?”
“She died. Maisie’s mother died.”
“How tragic.” She pouted prettily. “And you’ve not remarried yet, you poor thing. You really should, you know. A little girl needs a mother. Not to mention what a man needs,” she added with a waggle of her eyebrows. “You know, my younger sister, Ella-Louise—we call her Ella-Lou—turns eighteen in a month. You should meet her. She’d be perfect for you. She loves children—helps our mama look after our younger brothers and sisters. Seven of them. The youngest is still in diapers.”
Eighteen in a month. Meaning Ella-Lou was seventeen. A child. And not a child.
He’d been twenty-two at the time. Chronologically young. Yet he’d felt old. Ancient.
Ten months of sleeplessness and constant anxiety, wondering if he had made the right decision, had worn him out. So he blurted some feeble excuse about being late for work and hurried away. Two hours later, the sheriff show up at Sugar Hill on a child welfare check.
The second Mrs. Layton was fortunate that Ralph Barnston had been a good sheriff and a better father, with six children of his own, because Joe wasn’t sure what he’d have done if Barnston had decided to call in advocates from the Children’s Aid, who might have decided Maisie was better off with a married couple, or worse, in an institution for blind babies. But after interacting with Maisie for a half-hour while he discreetly questioned Miss Lisette’s predecessor, Miss Nora, Barnston had levered his long body out of the kitchen chair to take his leave. Hat in hand, he paused to smile fondly at Maisie, who was tied into her highchair, gnawing on a hard biscuit, and getting filthy in the process.
“I remember her mother and grandmother well,” he said, nodding. “Wild as the day is long, the both of them.” Then he’d clapped Joe hard on the shoulder, and smiled. “You’re a good man and a good father. I’ll make sure Mrs. Layton understands that.”
“Mr. Banner?”
Startled from his reverie, Joe turned around.
Abigail Lyons smiled. “I think I have everything I need, unless there’s something else you think I should know before I go?”
The senior Lyons raised a salted eyebrow at Joe as though questioning his commitment.
That sealed it.
“No,” Joe said. “That’s all I know.”
Miss Lyons’s smile widened. “I’d best get going, then. I don’t want to keep Mama waiting. We’re off to Atlanta to look at wedding dresses. But don’t worry, Mr. Banner. Your case is my priority. It so happens that some of my best contacts in helping locate missing persons are in Atlanta, so I’ll reach out to them as soon as I’m there.”
“No rush, Miss Lyons,” Joe said. “I didn’t realise you were getting married.”
“Not until next spring,” she said. “Though the way Mama is acting, you’d think the wedding was next week.”
“She’s excited?”
“Excited?” The senior Lyons barked a laugh. “She’s in rapture. Morning, afternoon, evening, it’s all she talks about: how her little girl is getting married and is going to give her grandbabies. Sorry, Abigail,” he added hastily when his daughter scowled at him. “I know that’s not first on your to-do list after the wedding. Abby wants to keep working, and her beau, Geoffrey, is more than amenable to the idea,” he confided to Joe, earning another searing glare from his daughter, which he blithely ignored. “Though don’t tell Mrs. Lyons that. Geoffrey has her convinced she’ll be a grandma nine months and a day after the wedding—”
“Papa!” Miss Lyons’s face blushed vermilion.
For the first time since she had entered the office, she reminded Joe of the girl from his memory.
She had blushed just as furiously the day they were introduced, the first time he ever stepped inside Lyons’s law office to ask him what he should do with the week-old infant in his arms.
Lyons had stared at him, then at the note Joe handed him, then at the fussing baby. Joe could almost see the words of protest forming over the then less-salt-and-more-pepper head of the litigator: I’m not a child welfare lawyer. I’m a criminal litigator.
Before Lyons could verbalise his thoughts, however, Abigail Lyons had slid out of one of the chairs facing his desk, where she’d been reading a law text, and asked to see the baby. Joe crouched, and eased aside the flannel to reveal the infant’s pinched red face.
“Aww,” Abigail had murmured. “She’s sweet. And so small. You’re going to keep her, right, mister?” She looked at Joe with such an earnest expression his heart had almost broken.
At that point, he hadn’t known what he was going to do. He had gone to bed a twenty-one-year-old without any expectations other than to get up, have his coffee, and go to work in the fields as he had done for five years at that point. He’d awoken in the wee hours to the frantic cries of a hungry and wet infant, whose mother had disappeared in the middle of the night.
“You gotta keep her, mister,” Abigail had persisted. “She needs someone to love her, isn’t that right, Daddy?” She’d looked at her father with that same loving adoration, raw pride, and all-encompassing trust Joe had noted a half-hour earlier. There was no question in her mind if she was loved and wanted. Or if the child in Joe’s arms deserved to be loved and wanted, too.
That had made him look at the tiny girl child in his arms, really look, and imagine her staring at a man that same way, with pure unadulterated adoration for the one who had raised her. Only he hadn’t been able to envision the man.
Abigail Lyons had.
“She needs you, mister.” She laid a hand on his shoulder and blushed when he turned to look at her. But she didn’t waver. “You’re her daddy.”
“But I’m not,” he remembered rasping.
Abigail’s brow had pinched then, her blue eyes darkening with doubt. “Then who is?”
“I don’t know,” he’d whispered. Though he thought he did.
“Well, then, she’s yours to keep, isn’t she?” Abigail reasoned with the matter-of-fact conviction of a child naive to the complicated ways of the adult world. “Besides,” she added, her tone as firm and authoritative as any seasoned adjudicator. “Her mama asked you to look after her. Right there in that note. That makes you her daddy.”
Look after her, Joe. Name her for my mother: Maisie Marie.
“Mr. Banner?”
Joe dragged himself back to the present. “Uh, thank you, Miss Lyons.” He willed a smile. “I appreciate your help.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Banner,” she said. “I’ll have my first report to you as soon as I come across something.”
“What’s in the box, Abs?”
She paused in the process of reaching for the door and looked at her father. He gestured to the box she’d left on the desk.
“Oh, yes.” She turned around. “I almost forgot. It’s why I came.” She set the file folder in her hand on the desk to open the box and lift out its contents. “I wanted to show you this.” She expanded the leather-wrapped square inside the box and uncapped a leather front to reveal a round piece of glass. “My new camera.” She held it up, smiling with proprietary fondness. “A Lilliput, from Germany. It’s foldable, and very convenient.”
Lyons and Joe each took a turn examining it.
It was in intriguing contraption, smaller than any camera Joe had seen before.
“It’ll make it easier to snap discreet photos,” she said in explanation when Joe handed it back to her, though neither he nor Lyons had asked her motivation in purchasing it. She tucked it back in the box, and after dropping a kiss on her father’s cheek, slim file folder under her arm and box in hand, she offered them each a murmured goodbye and left the office.
“You sure about this, Joe?” Lyons asked again when she was gone.
“About as sure as I was when I left your office after my very first consultation with you.”
Lyons frowned, and
then his expression lightened with awareness. “The day...”
Joe nodded. “The day you and Miss Abigail helped me decide my next step. I was scared spitless then, too. But things turned out all right. So far.”
Lyons looked sceptical. “What if she hasn’t changed?”
“Then I expect I have nothing to worry about.”
“And if she decides she wants her?”
Joe looked at him and felt something cold wrap around his heart. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”
Lyons narrowed his eyes. “Why poke a stick at a sleeping snake?”
“Because Maisie wants to know about her mother,” he said. “And she deserves to know her. To have a mother. Besides, I can’t keep lying to her. She’s bound to find out one day.”
“She could have a mother, Joe. If you married.”
“A stepmother?”
“Step, blood...Does it really matter, provided the woman loves her the way you love her? What about the girl you hired to look after her?”
“Miss Lisette?” Joe stared. “She’s her governess.”
“So? She cares for—”
“She works for me.”
“Is it because she’s Negro?”
Joe blinked and then scowled. “You know me better than that.” He glared. “I’ll raise her to adulthood alone if I have to. I won’t marry simply to give her a mother, especially since she has one, even if she doesn’t know her. Yet.”
“What about Mrs. Sweeney?”
“Are you mad? I work for her.”
Lyons raised his brows. “When did that ever stop anyone?”
Joe sucked in a breath, fighting to calm himself and ignore the part of him wondering if Lyons had sensed his attraction to his widowed employer. “I have some pride, you know,” he said stiffly.
“Too much, if you ask me,” Lyons muttered. “There are at least a half-dozen women in this town who’d marry you tomorrow if you gave them a half a chance. As it is, you barely give them the time of day.”
“I have responsibilities, Lyons. I don’t have time to go cavorting with every woman in town.”
“I’m not suggesting you cavort.” The old fox scowled. “Nor am I suggesting you take up with every woman that shows interest. I am suggesting, however, that amidst all your many responsibilities is one you seem to have overlooked.”
“Overlooked? What? Maisie’s well fed and clothed—"
“You, Joe,” Lyons interjected softly. “Your responsibility to yourself, not only as a father to Maisie and overseer of Sugar Hill, but to you as a man. A man not only deserving but in need of love and companionship. And don’t tell me you have Maisie, because that’s not fair to her. One day, like my little girl, she’s going to be a woman, and she’s going to fall in love herself. Maybe want to get married. But if she feels in any way that you need her—that her leaving will leave you lonely, she’s going to have a hard time. She might not go, Joe, and she needs to. Just like my Abby needs to go.”
Lyons shook his head. “It’s breaking my heart,” he went on, his voice hoarse with sentiment, “listening to her plan her wedding, knowing she’s off the next few days to find the perfect dress. I’ve got nine months. Nine months that she’ll still be my Abby, my little girl, and then she’ll be Geoff’s wife, and, one day, God willing for my wife’s sanity, she’ll be somebody’s mother. And I’ll be a grandpa.”
He swallowed, his bristly eyebrows dipping as though the action pained him. “That’s my consolation, Joe, becoming a grandpa. What I lose in being a little girl’s daddy I gain in becoming her babies’ granddaddy. And that’s something you’re going to miss out on if you don’t get smart, and quick.”
“And by get smart, you mean get married?” The ache in Joe’s chest made it hard to breathe, forcing him to thrust the words out before the pain closed his throat.
“By get smart”—Lyons stabbed his index finger on to the top of his desk—“I mean think of what’s best for Maisie. Truly best. And before you jump all over me, try jumping on the future train for a minute. Because it’s coming, Joe. The future is coming, and it’ll get here faster than you want to believe. Trust me. It feels like little more than a month ago you shuffled in here with that crying baby in your arms, asking me what to do, which means it’ll be another month, and Maisie will be my Abby’s age, and potentially on the hunt for her own wedding dress if she’s not already married. I’d better have at least one grandchild by then,” he added grimly, with a glance at his wife’s portrait on his desk. “Or I’ll need to bring home a whole litter of kittens to keep the peace.”
He shifted his gaze back to Joe. “And you’d better be prepared to do the same—adopt a cat or dog, or both—so you can let Maisie go without conditions. For her sake. For your sake,” he added, glowering, “I hope you don’t need animal companionship because you have someone like my Gayle to fill the silence. Because as much as I grumble about her fussing over Abby and this wedding and harping on wanting grandbabies, I wouldn’t trade away a single minute with her for an additional year at the end of my life. She keeps me sane, Joe. Makes my days less lonely and my nights less cold.”
His stern gaze softened. “You deserve no less.”
Chapter 18
Last Will and Testament
ONE ON TOP LOOKS IMPORTANT, Mrs. Sweeney,” Miss Alma said the following Monday morning as she set a stack of mail on the desk. “Stamped with Ascott, Griffiths, and Gowdy’s seal.”
The law firm of one Mr. Barrister Griffiths. How delightful.
Margaret offered Miss Alma a smile as she closed the ledger she’d been reviewing and set it aside.
“Thank you, Miss Alma. And thank you again for delivering my lunch. I’ve never tasted plantain before, and find I quite enjoyed it.”
The worry on Miss Alma’s face vanished with her pleased smile as she gathered Margaret’s luncheon dishes off the desk with careful efficiency, stacking plate, bowl, and utensils with barely audible tings.
“I’m so glad you liked it, Mrs. Sweeney,” she said. “Not everyone does, but you seem to enjoy food more than some—not that I mean you eat too much,” she added with an appraising glance. “If I had my way, I’d see you eat a whole lot more and put a little meat to those bones before you fade away on us. What I mean is, you’re not picky like some. You’re willing to try just about anything I whip up. Not like your late husband, bless his soul. Good man, but not very adventurous. Eggs and bacon for breakfast. Ham sandwich for lunch. Chicken, beef, or ham for dinner, hold the greens, unless they were peas. He loved his peas, did Mr. Sweeney. And carrots and corn. Beets, too, provided they came swimming in butter.”
“I remember.” She held her smile despite a wistful throb in her chest. “His strongest aversion was to any food from the sea. He never said why, but he absolutely refused to try a single bite of any of the fine dishes I enjoyed during our time in Florida. Lobster bisque, shrimp cocktail, seafood chowder...He refused even the smallest taste.”
“Oh, that probably goes back to his days on the fishing boat with Mr. Banner’s daddy. That’s how Master George and Mr. Banner came to be friends, when Master George decided he was going to make his own way in the world. He was twenty-one when he marched off to Florida looking for work and ended up on Mr. Banner’s daddy’s boat.”
“Oh?” She managed to sound only casually interested though her heart sped up at mention of Mr. Banner.
She hadn’t seen him for a few days. He’d been busy overseeing a crew digging a hole to bury the cottage debris in addition to the crew he had working to bring fallow fields into production. Then, of course, there was his everyday oversight of existing fields, and Maisie, though she wasn’t sure how much time he was investing in his daughter considering he was up and out of the house before dawn and not back inside it until after dark. She knew that because she and Maisie had dined alone Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings, after which Maisie had gone with Miss Lisette to the guest wing and she to her study. He’d not shown up on
her terrace either night.
“Poor Master George was sicker than a hound that’d ate a whole rotted alligator to itself,” Miss Alma explained. “Greener than alligator, too, to hear Mr. Banner tell it. Mr. Banner was younger than Miss Maisie is now, back then, but he was out working alongside his daddy and brothers. They all tried to help Master George find his sea legs, but weeks with nothing but sky and ocean and red snapper to distract him from his curdled insides...Soon as Master George stepped on land again, he never stepped off. Signed up for university and never looked back. When he come home to visit, I couldn’t bring a fish or crustacean onto the grounds without him rushing off to get sick. And when his daddy died and he took over, he forbade me to have anything born of the sea in this house. Just the smell of it turned his stomach.”
“Really?” Margaret said, fascinated, and mildly chagrined, by how little she had known of her husband. Or how far back his association with Mr. Banner went.
Miss Alma nodded. “I’m not surprised he didn’t tell you why he wouldn’t share your food. He was traumatised. He’d gone against his daddy’s wishes going to Florida, and when he come back, tail tucked and gills green, his daddy made his life hell. Especially after he realised that poor boy couldn’t stomach anything what smelt of fish. Had me cook nothing but, every meal for a week straight. Poor Master George lost ten pounds, and would have lost more if not for the ham sandwiches I’d sneak him when his daddy wasn’t looking. Real piece of work he was.” Her expression hardened as she glanced over at Cyril Sweeney’s portrait. “That man was just like his daddy, ol’ Terrence. Cruel as the day is long, the both of them. Wasn’t no one happier for Master George than me when that boy went off to school. Four whole years away from here and the evil in this house. It always amazed me how he managed to grow up such a gentle soul. Now Ms. Esther...” She brought her gaze back to Margaret. “She was just as awful as her daddy and granddaddy almost from the moment she was placed in the cradle. I never could understand what Mr. Griffiths saw in her. After Master George, he was about the nicest man alive in these parts. That would make you think, if any boy had a chance of growing up halfways decent around here, it’d be Barrister. But no, Esther carried on what her granddaddy started and raised up another Devil’s seed.”
My One True Love Page 17