by K. J. Emrick
It sounded like we had just officially made our duo a trio, is what it sounded like to me. However, I bit my tongue, and held onto Jess’s unicorn necklace, and waited for Alistair to leave after shaking James’s hand. The door closed, and I watched to be sure James locked it, and then I sighed out a deep breath. It was a good idea I reminded myself. It didn’t matter if it was Alistair who came up with it, or how much I wanted him to just go away and leave me and James alone. Right. Keep telling yourself that, Dell. Keep telling yourself that.
“What’s got you in a snit?” James asked me.
I gave him my best starched smile. “I’m trying, James. I’m really trying.”
Then he did one of those things that men will do every once in a while, to remind women they’re worth having around. He showed me that he actually does listen to me sometimes. Closing the distance between us he put his arms around me, cradling the back of my head with one of his strong hands while I rested my face against the slope of his shoulder. “Ah, Dell. I know this isn’t the break you were expecting. Me neither, if you can believe me. Still, we’re together, you and me. That’s what counts, right?”
It was the largest part of what mattered, yes. As I snuggled into him I felt so much weight lift off my shoulders. It was like I was learning to breathe all over again. Like I was getting lighter with each passing second, lifting up in James’s arms.
“Hold on. What’s that?”
James turned away from me, and I almost stumbled as his gentle support abruptly left me. I crashed down to Earth again with my feet never leaving the floor. The moment had passed. Of course it had. Why should I expect something like that to last for more than a precious few heartbeats? Wasn’t that the lesson I’d learned from losing my husband the way I did? Nothing lasts.
At least, nothing I’ve ever known.
James was frowning down at the rug by the front door. Something there had distracted him from holding me. Looking over his shoulder I found a single sheet of paper had been slid underneath our cabin door.
One of the handwritten sheets from Stevie’s manila envelope.
James was already bending down to pick it up. I could see enough of what was written to know it was a day where he had spent most of it at the Inn. With me. In my room.
Oh, snap.
His face slowly turned red. “This is… you see here where… she was… following me…”
“That’s what I tried to tell you earlier.” Several times, as a matter of fact.
Without warning he balled the page up in his fist and then threw open the door. He was outside before I could say anything against the idea, and I knew exactly where he was going.
The man who had taken such enjoyment out of reminding me that Stevie might just be armed with a gun if she really was a kidnapper, who had been so upset to learn that I’d gotten into Stevie’s apartment and almost been caught, now marched straight up to the front door of her cabin and stormed inside without hesitation.
The look on his face was screaming bloody murder and I doubt James was thinking about anything other than getting ahold of Stevie and shaking the truth out of her.
A part of me was gleefully happy to see him doing the same thing he’d ripped on me for. Another part of me was screaming that I needed to stop him before he did something completely stupid. Thankfully, that’s the part of me that won out.
“James, stop! Hold on!”
Too late. He was inside, and the shouting had started. I heard James. I heard Stevie. Then, I heard something crash. No time to call the manager for the cabins or the police or 000, even. With my heart up in my throat I raced in behind James.
I found him just inside, holding the crumpled page of paper up in his hand, shaking it in Stevie’s face. She was trembling, blurting out answers to his rapid fire questions that obviously weren’t doing anything to calm him down. Nothing she said was good enough. I heard him asking the same questions over and over and Stevie was still trying to back up even though she was already pressed up against the second bed with nowhere else to go. The girl had turned white as a ghost.
Yes, you heard me. I said it. That sort of deathly pallor had made Stevie’s face almost ashen.
“What are ya on about with this, then?” James nearly screamed in her face.
“I told you,” she countered. “I wrote down some things. What’s the crime in that?”
“Some things! This is me entire day. Start to bloody finish.” He hesitated when his finger jabbed at the last few entries, where he “finished.” That’s when he’d been up with me, in my rooms at the Inn. He remembered what we were doing up there just as clearly as I did. If it was possible, he managed to look even angrier. “You better tell me what your deal is now, little girl, else I’m gonna call the cops!”
“Well maybe I’ll call them first,” she told him, her voice gaining a little grit. “You two are the ones seem bound and determined to break into my room. How about we see what the cops say about that?”
“Listen here, girlie…!”
“James, wait,” I said, trying to step in between them. He wouldn’t move for me. His body had never seemed so solid and immovable as it did right now. Stevie looked at me with a pinched expression as if she was only now realizing I was here. “You’re not going to find out anything by bullying her. Just ease it back a bit, okay?”
“Tell me right now!” he yelled, shaking the paper again and totally ignoring me.
I was trying to drag his attention away from Stevie by forcefully yanking on his shoulder when I caught sight of the other person in the room. A pretty girl with long flowing hair that stirred in a breeze that wasn’t there, with a dirty white dress that was torn and spotted with blood. It was the woman from the car park. The one who had spoken to me and convinced me to stay.
The ghost.
She shook her head at me, and raised a finger to her lips. Be quiet, she was saying. Don’t talk. Just listen.
I did, but all I heard was shouting.
“Tell me!”
“I can’t… you don’t understand…” Stevie was gripping the edge of the mattress for balance as James pressed her closer. “I can’t!”
“You’d better. My Dell told me you were up to something and I didn’t want to believe her but here’s the proof right here in me own hot little hand! Now tell me!”
“I can’t!”
James shoved his face at hers. “Answer the bloody question!”
“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because…!”
I held my breath. There was something coming. Something she was about to say that would change… everything. I could feel it.
In her eyes, I saw something. I hadn’t really paid her much mind before, but now I did. Now I saw it. Those eyes.
I looked over at my ghost—the only one I’d seen in Port Arthur so far—and she gave me a wisp of a smile that faded away with the rest of her until she was just a trick of lights and shadows.
“James,” I tried again.
“Not now, Dell.”
Stevie was beginning to cry. Tears poured over the curves of her cheeks, and down the line of that chin that I should have recognized right away.
“Just leave me alone,” she pleaded with James.
“Not until you answer me. Why are spying on me?”
“I can’t tell you!”
“Why not!”
“Because you’re my father!” she exploded, grabbing the page out of his hand so violently that it ripped. “Okay? Are you happy? Are you! You’re my father, you bloody git!”
James stared at her blankly. Then he looked down at the bit of paper in his hand, and then at the one in hers. Two pieces of the same page, separated from each other.
I could see the blunt look of disbelief in his eyes. Those eyes that were the same color as Stevie’s, and vice versa. That’s what I had suddenly realized a few seconds back. I should have realized why they looked so familiar. I’d stared into James’s eyes often enough.
I should have seen the family resemblance right off.
He took a step back from her, just enough to not be menacing anymore but not enough to allow her to escape without doing some sort of Cirque de Soleil backflip over the bed behind her. “You’re wrong,” he told her. “You’re lying. I don’t have kids.”
“Yeah… no,” she told him. “I’m yours. Was looking for the right way to tell you. Guess this’ll have to do. Surprise.”
Chapter 6
“I’m just saying,” I said to James as he and I sat in the chairs by the little table in Stevie’s cabin. “You told me it was dangerous to break in here and then what do you go and do?”
He tossed his hands in the air. “Whatever. It’s done now. When I saw that paper and realized everything ya told me was true, I just flipped. What d’ya think she’s doing in there?”
Stevie had asked us to sit, and after a moment to compose herself she’d gone off to the closet where I’d found her luggage and the incriminating envelope of papers earlier. “Maybe she’s taking her gun out of its secret hiding place,” I quipped. “She’s probably going to show us how bullets go through these walls.”
“Ha, ha,” he laughed without any humor. “Very funny. Dell, I’m serious. I don’t have kids. Never did. I wouldn’t lie to ya ‘bout something like that.”
“Did you look at her?” I asked, holding onto my unicorn necklace very tightly. I really needed the comfort and peace of mind it usually afforded me. “I mean, really look at her? She’s got your chin. She’s got your blue eyes—”
I had to clamp down on my tongue to stop me from talking. It was just too much to take in. James, the man I had found love with, the man I had opened my heart to after years of keeping it walled off from every man to ever saunter his way through Lakeshore, had a secret family. Had he been lying to me? No. At least, I didn’t think so, and he promised he wasn’t. He seemed so upset and angry and, well, mystified. This girl had essentially dropped herself out of the sky and into his lap, and now here we were.
“Here we are,” Stevie said as she came back into the main room, echoing my own thoughts. She sat down on the bed opposite us in our chairs, and fiddled with something in her hand before she gave it over to James. “This is from my mother. Spectra Hamilton.”
I had the greatest urge to laugh out loud when I heard that name. Who names their daughter Spectra? I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.
The serious look on James’s face stopped me.
His hands were shaking as he took the paper from Stevie. The rest of him was so unnaturally still. Like the blood had frozen in his veins. I’d never seen him this unnerved.
From where I stood, I could see that the paper was a letter, handwritten, and signed with the fancy script of a woman’s hand. Cursive writing, which was a dying art among today’s youth. Definitely a grown-up’s letter. The paper was wrinkly, and a piece of tape was fixing a tear that started from the top and went halfway down the page, as if someone had started to tear the letter in two and then thought better of it.
After another moment of silently absorbing the words on the page James put the letter aside with a single word.
“Well.”
“James?” This was getting a little surreal. “What is it?”
“I can tell you what it is,” Stevie said to me. “But why not let James explain it. James here sure knows, don’t you?”
Carefully, James laid the letter out on the table between us and smoothed it flat with his hand. “Spectra was a girlfriend of mine, about a hundred years back.” He chuckled at the joke but it was a sour sort of sound. “This here’s a letter she wrote to me. After the birth of her daughter.”
“That’d be me,” Stevie chimed in.
James nodded. “Right. Well. Says here that she made a decision to raise her daughter on her own. No help from anyone. Also says she wanted her daughter to know who her father was, when the time was right.”
“And you’re the father,” I said, my voice flat. I didn’t know what I was feeling in that moment. Stevie wasn’t a kidnapper. She wasn’t stalking James so she could hurt him. She was a woman trying to work up the courage to meet the father she’d never known.
The man I loved suddenly had a grown up daughter. I had no reason to doubt that was exactly who Stevie was. If having James’s eyes and his chin weren’t enough, this letter proved it. James’s life—and by extension my own—was being turned upside down.
As if things weren’t complicated enough between us.
“Mom left me that letter,” Stevie told us, “in her will. It was to be delivered to me on my twenty-first birthday. At first I didn’t know what to think. Mom had always said that it didn’t matter who my father was. I was my own woman, she said. Had to make my own life. I just figured she didn’t know who my dad was. Well. She did know, and she kept it from me. Then I find out in that crummy letter?”
She shook her head, and took another breath. “Was a few years before I worked up enough steam to come find you, James Callahan. When I did, I still couldn’t face the truth. News like that does things to a girl. So, I watched you. Collected stories you wrote from the paper. I wanted to learn everything I could first.”
“And?” James said, still sitting very still. “What’d ya find out?”
“That you’re a good man. That you’re in love with a woman who seems to attract trouble.”
I couldn’t argue that one.
“And,” Stevie continued, “that James Callahan has completely forgotten about Spectra Hamilton.”
“No,” James said at once. “That’s not true. I never forgot your mother, Stevie. She just… that was a long time back, is all.”
Stevie crossed her legs, and her arms, and her face hardened before my eyes. “So ya just knocked Mom up and then took off? Never looked back once?”
James rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“Not to me it isn’t,” she promised.
I had a few questions of my own. Oh, so many questions. “Stevie, what did your mom say about all of this? She must’ve had something to say. Especially after you received that letter.”
“I’ll never know,” was her answer. “Mom died when I was twelve.”
“She… died?” James said, his voice all raspy and soft. It was obvious that this Spectra woman meant a lot to him.
Would I mean that much to him when I died? Did I mean that much to him now?
These are the questions that trouble a woman’s mind when a man’s past comes back to haunt them both.
“Yes,” Stevie hissed at James. “Mom died. Not that you were there to worry over it. I grieved, I moved on, and then this bloody letter came. It opened everything back up again. Only, with a twist. Now, I get to live with the fact Mom knew exactly who my dad was and just didn’t want to tell me. Not to mention I get to wonder why a good man like James Callahan doesn’t want a girl like Stevie Hamilton around.”
“That’s not true,” James said. “I mean, that’s not the way of it. I didn’t know. Stevie, I just didn’t know.”
She regarded him for a very long time. Then, slowly, she uncrossed her arms. “I’ve been following you for a few weeks now. From that mess back in Lakeshore with Dell’s husband, to here, and everything in between. Just looking for the right moment to walk up to you and say, ‘G’Day, I’m the girl you put in my mother. How’s about we go have a pint and discuss it all?’ Yeah… no. Don’t think you’d’ve given me the time of day after that speech.”
“But… you were in our cabin. With a pizza for the love of God! Ya didn’t think that was a great time to tell me hey, happy Father’s Day?”
Stevie sat further back on the bed, her eyes drifting away to the floor. “I don’t actually deliver pizza. I don’t even work in this flyspeck of a town. I live over in Glendevie. Grew up near there. When I found out you two were coming here I rented this cabin so I could be near you. Cost most’ve what I earn in a month by the way.”
She laughed bitterly. “No. I was, um, watching from my room when the pizza guy showed up. I paid him for the pizza and his cute little hat and stepped right up your door, Dell, so I’d have a reason to talk to you. I wanted to know what you thought of James… I mean, my Dad.”
I remembered all the questions she’d asked me. About me, and about James, and about the two of us together. I remembered how very happy she’d seemed when I told her I thought she was a nice girl. Just the sort of affirmation a girl looked for from her father’s girlfriend. Now I understood why those simple words had meant so much to her.
That did not mean I felt sympathy for her.
“I really thought you were a delivery person. The baseball cap was a nice touch.”
She shrugged with one shoulder.
“I don’t understand this,” James suddenly said. “You can’t be me daughter. There’s no way. Me and Spectra… we had something special.” He stopped, and his eyes darted to me, and then away again. “But that was over before it ever really began. I never heard from her after… you know. After.”
“It only takes once,” Stevie snarked. “Maybe you shoulda taken the time to check up on her.”
I could see the anger in her eyes. All her life she’d been told her father didn’t matter. That it wasn’t anything she would ever need to concern herself with. Then that letter came to her and suddenly not only did she have a father but she knew exactly who he was and she could only wonder why he never tried to be part of her life.
I could see the pain and confusion in James’s eyes, nearly the same as what I saw in Stevie’s. The two of them had been intentionally kept in the dark about his role in her life. This was so unfair. So wrong that James’s ex-girlfriend would withhold this kind of information from him, and then spring it on their daughter in a letter!