by Caron Todd
Thinking of teeth, claws or sharp, curving beaks, she tried to look inside. She turned her face away and pounded on the trunk. Nothing burst out, or attacked, so she put her hand in the hollow and felt around in the dark, her hand jumping when it touched something that wasn’t tree.
Plastic, like a bag. She tugged at it gently. Something hard inside plastic. Not heavy. She pulled it into the light.
A freezer bag secured with black electrical tape. The something hard was wrapped in cloth, part of a blue striped flannelette sheet.
She tucked the package into her waistband and climbed down before opening it. On firm ground, the tree at her back, she pulled off the tape, opened the bag and unwound the cloth.
It was a book, bound in green leather.
Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu. Something about the nature of fire.
Gabrielle-Emilie leTonnelier de Bretueil Du Châtelet.
She stared, disbelieving. Carefully, touching only the edge, she opened the cover.
Paris, 1744.
Oh, Dad. What did you do?
MATTHEW WAITED for her near the barn.
“Your mother said you went into the woods. Didn’t get enough of it up north?”
“I didn’t think she noticed.”
“What are you hiding?”
“Not a gold brick.”
He held out one hand. “May I see?”
“I think he did it.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I don’t want you to think I cry all the time.” Her voice wobbled.
“I don’t think that.”
“It was the boots. Uncle Will said there was a storm. A hydro line was down. So why would my father walk in a marshy spot after heavy rain without boots? On the way home it hit me…this tree we used to climb. It had a small hollow way up off the ground. You can’t climb a tree in rubber boots, right?”
“And you looked. What did you find?”
“I was afraid it would be gold. Or money from selling it.”
“And instead?”
She held out the package. Matthew took it, testing its weight, then he unwrapped it as carefully as she had.
“1744? That’s a first edition. A first edition of du Châtelet.” He sniffed the pages. “No mildew. That’s lucky. It’s not the recommended way to store rare books.” He looked at Emily. “I’m not sure I understand what this means. Your father bought the book for your mother but didn’t give it to her? Or he took it from your mother’s library and hid it in a tree…why?”
Emily shrugged. “Why not a safe-deposit box? Why not in the storehouse? Mom never goes out there. Did he think I wouldn’t climb that tree again?”
“The police can get a warrant to search a safe-deposit box. They’d never find it in a single tree among all those trees. They would in the storehouse. So would I.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out what to do.” She usually made a point of keeping things calm for her mother. “I guess I’ll give it to her.”
JULIA STROKED THE BOOK, turning it over, from front to back to front to back. “I knew it was too much.”
“What was too much, Mom?”
“He couldn’t sleep. He said he was going to lose the land. It was different if he lost it. I gave him the book to sell. 1744. Du Châtelet’s book about the nature of fire. I thought that should be worth a lot.”
“You gave it to him to sell?”
“For three years every fall after harvest he took a payment to the bank. After three years he brought me the mortgage papers. All paid. He said he was sorry. He said he would never, never risk the land again.”
“He pretty much had to,” Emily said. “Nearly everybody took the same risk. Expanded, or sold and left.”
“Come.” Julia hurried from the kitchen and through the living room to the front bedroom. Emily followed, with Matthew close behind. “Not him.”
“Yes, him.” Matthew deserved to know what was going on. Beyond that, she wanted him near her.
Julia scowled, but then she opened one of the archives boxes. It was the one with the file about Graham’s death. Handful by handful, she removed the folders. When the box was empty she dug her fingers down the sides and pulled out a hard piece of plastic. It looked as if it had been cut from another box and pressed over the bottom of this one.
She moved out of the way so Emily and Matthew could see. There were more files inside, lying flat. They were all labeled. Money.
“Mom?”
Julia flipped one open.
Money.
Wads of bills, hundred-dollar bills, the old kind, shades of brown and green with a picture of Sir Robert Borden, no raised dots to help the blind, no shiny holographic square to outwit counterfeiters.
“Is it real?” Emily asked.
“He thought we should keep it here. For emergencies. For the farm.” Julia looked toward Matthew, then away. “Will they arrest me?”
“No. For sure not. Did you know where Graham got the money?”
“I knew it was too much to get from selling my book. Then Daniel came and they argued. They stopped being friends. It was after the plane went down. I’m not stupid.”
“They won’t arrest you,” Matthew repeated. He looked from Julia to Emily. “We may never find definitive proof that the money came from the sale of the missing gold brick. Will we agree to assume that it does, that the brick was Graham’s payment for helping Frank?”
Both women nodded.
“I think Frank had arranged for Easton to handle the whole shipment. Then only one bar turned up.”
Emily thought of Daniel’s bruised face. “He must have felt like the gold was already his. No wonder he was so aggressive.”
“Julia, you’ll have to return what’s left of the money,” Matthew said. “It’ll be minus the two hundred thousand Graham paid to the bank and minus whatever he paid to have the brick smuggled and sold. There’ll be a lot to make up.”
Julia held her book out to Emily, offering it.
“Keep it, Mom. After twenty-six years in a hollow tree, that book deserves its place on your shelf. I think Dad wanted you to have it back one day. After a perfect summer and a perfect fall when the crops were wonderful and prices were good. So you wouldn’t be hurt by any of it.”
THE AUGUST LONG WEEKEND, with the Fair that had seemed so far away, came and went, and Susannah and Alex left for Alberta. Aunt Edith couldn’t believe it.
Emily sat beside her on the kitchen steps. “You thought Susannah would have the baby here?”
“Why not? They stayed this long. I tried to make it nice for them.”
“You made it very nice.”
“I don’t want to be silly.” Aunt Edith’s mouth trembled. “I know it’s wrong, but I want my children near me, and my grandchildren.”
“It isn’t wrong.”
“Keeping on about it is.”
Emily couldn’t deny that.
Aunt Edith’s voice cracked. “It isn’t just the dinosaurs, I realize that. It isn’t Alex’s fault, either. Susannah simply doesn’t want to stay close to home. I’d understand if she wanted city life, but she still lives in the country.”
“Not everyone’s a homebody.”
“Like you. Your mother is so fortunate. It isn’t even as if she was a good mother. She hardly raised you at all. The rest of us raised you! But here you are, the two of you, companions, part of each other’s daily lives.”
Edith broke off, staring at her niece. “Emily? Oh, dear. You’re upset. It’s your father, I suppose, and that business with the gold.” She put an arm around Emily’s shoulders and squeezed. “So he was a criminal. The main thing is, he saved the farm.”
SOON AFTER, new bookshelves complete, Matthew was gone, too. The night before Emily needed to pull out a blanket for the first time since April. When she got up Daniel called to say Matthew had left for the airport.
He hadn’t said goodbye. Well, he had in a way. He had hammered the last nail into the last ble
ached and painted board from the storehouse and said, “There you go,” to Julia and “See you,” to Emily.
She kept thinking of his last touch, that light, remembering touch to her cheek when they stood near Grey Lake waiting for the divers. She knew she had touched things the same way. Irish crystal goblets that made rainbows on the wall, dolls that spoke, pink-and-white lady’s slippers in a field. She touched them like that and then left them in their place. No. Not quite the same way. His touch had promised a whole life. And she had said no.
Emily closed her eyes and hunched over, arms around her middle, around the sudden jolting empty ache inside.
ON THE LAST DAY of August Emily leaned a birth announcement against the teapot on the top shelf of the hutch cupboard. “It’s an unusual name. Cassiopeia.”
Julia was bent over her brand-new copy of Sinuhe, her nose inches from the text as if it was in its original hieroglyphics and nearly impossible to decipher. “Cassiopeia is a constellation. Or a Greek heroine.”
Susannah had always liked sky-watching, so the constellation was the most likely inspiration. “Maybe their second child will be called Big Dipper.”
A huffing sound came from Julia. She was amused.
“I wish we’d thought of Cassiopeia for the cat before Susannah and Alex used it. Don’t you think it would be a good cat name?”
“The cat has a name.”
“It does? Since when?”
“Since it got here.”
“And neither of you told me.” Emily waited, but her mother had leaned closer to Sinuhe and didn’t reply. “Is it a secret?” With an impatient sound, Julia picked up her book and left the room.
Emily looked at the cat. “Is your name Rapunzel?” It stared unblinkingly. She lifted it, gently tapping its paw to remind it not to embed its claws in her shirt, and carried it to the window so they could both see outside. “There’s a yellowy tint to the poplars. Fall’s coming.”
When she’d taken a walk that morning she’d come across the first of the fringed gentians. They were a September flower. In a few days Liz and Jack would be home. School would start and life would be exactly as it had always been.
Emily liked the beginning of the school year. New books, sharp pencils, children who were, however briefly, glad to be back. Then there would be a blur of harvest and Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas.
She loved all those holidays, but thinking about them, her mood sagged. The New Year would come next, with hopes and resolutions, and the whole thing would start all over again. Not looking forward to that was ungrateful. Wasn’t it what everyone wanted? Year after year of good health and loving family and as little upheaval as possible.
AT LUNCH TIME on the first day of school she sat at her desk and closed her eyes, breathing in the quiet. Even when the grade ones swarmed all over talking in what they believed to be their indoor voices, Emily found the library peaceful. When she was alone, it felt almost like a church. Quiet, cool and holding something more than she could understand.
“Hi, Miss Robb!”
It was Stephen Cook, wearing what seemed to be his one and only shirt, an oversize Edmonton Oilers jersey.
“You grew this summer, Stephen! That shirt is going to fit you one day soon.” She added, “You always call me Miss Robb. That’s not my name, you know.”
“I forgot.”
“It’s Moore.”
“Oh, right.” He looked at her leerily, as if she was a stranger. “I’m supposed to read a book.”
“Already, on your first day? That’s not fair.”
Stephen smiled sheepishly. “About anything I want, the teacher said.”
Hoping to expand his horizons a little from the steady diet of NHL biographies he had read the year before, Emily handed him an older book, Scrubs on Skates by Scott Young. Cautiously interested, he signed it out and disappeared down the hall.
The grade one class had been in the library just before lunch, always a wild time of day, between hunger and eagerness to get out to the playground. The books were a mess, Ms shelved with As and half of them upside down or spines toward the wall. She needed to clean things up before the grade twos came in at one-thirty and did the same thing. On her knees reshelving, Emily started to laugh. Give her some gray hair and she’d look exactly like her mother.
“Books are no laughing matter, Ms. Moore.”
Emily sat back on her heels without turning around, Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain on her lap.
“Such a mess,” he said, his voice soft, and now right beside her ear. He reached past her to turn The Runaway Pony right-side up. “That’s no way to treat a book.”
This time she would say yes. If he asked. If he didn’t, she would ask him. Her mother would understand what he meant to her. She’d try her best to adjust. They would help her.
Emily blinked to clear her vision. Matthew was holding something in front of her. She took the small, rectangular card and read the centered lines.
Rutherford Investigations
Insurance Fraud, Theft, Lost Articles Recovered
Three Creeks, Manitoba
“Matthew.” He couldn’t.
“I’d need to do a lot of traveling, but this would be my base. It’s going to be a family business.”
“Matthew—”
“How long have we known each other?”
“Not counting while you’ve been away?” He had arrived during the first week of July and left in the middle of August. “It’s either a very long time, or five weeks.”
He smiled. “With any reasonable definition of love I don’t see how it can happen at first sight. But there sure can be something at first sight. There was a click. We clicked into place.”
Emily nodded. Even the first week when so much of what he’d said was a lie, she had trusted him, and not, after all, because she was gullible. It was because she could. Hamish might not have thought so, but his joints were beginning to ache and his outlook on the world was increasingly grouchy. Poor old thing.
“So I think we belong together,” he said. “We don’t need to date and see how things go. We can spend the next fifty years learning all the interesting details.”
She blinked back tears. Since they’d met, she had got tears in her eyes more often than during the whole rest of her life. “I’ll go with you to Ottawa, though. I was going to tell you that.”
He waved the business card. “It’s all arranged. Daniel and I have done the paperwork, my apartment’s sublet, my gear’s in a moving truck right now, somewhere on the Trans-Canada.”
“You were sure of yourself.”
“I took a leap.”
“You mean you evaluated the situation, did a risk analysis and then leapt?”
“Just leapt, Em.”
“And all this has been going on in secret! I guess that’s why Daniel’s been winking at me every time I see him.”
“He’s been winking?”
“Actual, full-fledged winking.”
She moved closer, much too close for two people in a school library. “Are you sure, Matthew? Can you really work from here?”
He brushed his lips over her forehead. “You want me to evaluate? All right. Here’s the situation. Three Creeks has a bit of untouched forest here and there, it’s got relatively unpolluted creeks with not particularly tasty fish, and it has this very beautiful, kind and brave woman—”
She leaned her head against him and muttered against his neck, “My grandmother? Yes, she’s wonderful. I don’t know if you should pull up roots for her, though.”
Matthew laughed. “So, you’ll marry me?”
“Absolutely. Anytime, anywhere. Richer, poorer. Sickness, health. Forsaking all others.”
“You know the words.”
“Well, I was just at a wedding a couple of months ago.”
“You didn’t mention the part about forever.”
“Oh, of course forever.”
He kissed her then, although the bell had rung, and the books were st
ill out of place.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-2465-0
THE WINTER ROAD
Copyright © 2005 by Caron Hart.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
www.eHarlequin.com