Family Lessons

by Allie Pleiter

  “Robbers and killers are brought to justice, and that’s what happened.” Mason directed his answer straight to Patrick. “The men who hurt Mr. Arlington hurt other men and robbed other people. And men who do things like that over and over—especially those who kill—do get sentenced to hang.” It seemed somehow less savage to say they were sentenced to hang. But was there any point in trying to make little minds understand that the execution of justice was different than vengeance killing?

  And why should he, of all men, be making this point? He had killed—fiercely, gladly—when he found one of the men who’d killed Phoebe. They were robbers as well, even though he and Phoebe had had little of value. Certainly nothing worthy of murder, which made them all the more despicable in Mason’s eyes. He’d have killed them all if given the chance. Oh, he knew Holly would call it something safe like grace, but it was only dumb luck that another lawman had caught the others before Mason had. He’d stood outside their jail cells the night before their hanging, gun in hand, craving to be the very vengeance he’d just told these children was wrong. Justice hadn’t even come into his mind back then. He’d lost the ability to be “just” the night he’d failed in protecting his family. Now, Mason could only pretend at justice, and it clawed at the deepest part of his guilt to be sitting here, in front of Holly Sanders, in front of the children, claiming to know right from wrong.

  “Bad people must be punished to protect good people.” Mason grasped at the proper words, inadequacy licking at his heels. “My job as sheriff is to make sure the bad people get caught so they can be punished and good people can be safe.”

  “That’s why you tried to kill that robber,” Tom said.

  “I shot him,” Mason quickly corrected as the question struck too close to home, “because he was going to hurt Miss Sanders if I didn’t. I tried to wound him so we could stop him. I wasn’t trying to kill him.”

  “Why not?” Liam asked. “He’d just killed Mr. Arlington. I think he ought to die for what he did.”

  It stung deep to hear that coming out of the mouth of an eleven-year-old boy. Mason knew what rage was—but a young boy? Even a hard-luck kid like Liam? Maybe the only grace he could ever hope to reach would be the chance to set these youngsters straight. “We can’t think of it like that,” he said, looking right at Liam. “More killing won’t make anything better. That’s why we have laws and judges and such.”

  “But Mr. Arlington’s gone,” Galina said with sad eyes. Helen Regan placed a tender hand on her new little foster daughter’s shoulder.

  “He is, honey,” Holly consoled, “and that’s wrong and sad. Those men will pay for what they took from us and from Mr. Arlington’s family. We can’t change that. But you also have Mr. and Mrs. Regan to take care of you now because you needed to stop here in Evans Grove. So now you have good things to help you feel better about the bad things.”

  “You are safe here,” Miss Sterling cut in. “It’s Sheriff Wright’s job to see to that. The men who robbed the train—who tried to rob the train,” she corrected herself, “will pay for what they’ve done in whatever way the judge and the law think best.”

  “Our job now,” Holly continued, “is to be the best people we can be right here. You all,” she said as she motioned to the town children, “need to welcome new friends to our school.” She nodded toward the orphans. “You have new homes, new classmates and a new community to help you start lives right here. Reverend Turner, Miss Sterling, Sheriff Wright and I are going to do our very best to help with that. So if you have any questions or worries, I want you to come straight to one of us.”

  Mason had the sinking feeling he’d just been drafted onto a team not of his own choosing. Coddling children was not something he had any plans to do. He wasn’t even sure he liked children—they were loud, insistent, irritating and unreasonable.

  Come to think of it, except for the “loud,” he’d just described how he currently felt about Holly Sanders. The sweet smile she gave him at the end of her speech did nothing to squelch the annoyance rumbling in his gut. No, it didn’t matter at all that she was pretty and clever and tender, or that she had a soul too kind for this broken world. She was pushing him into places he didn’t want to go, into thoughts and feelings he couldn’t have ever again. Believing in her brand of endless grace would be his undoing if he wasn’t careful. His only choice was to keep his distance, focus on her irritating flaws, and remember she’d done nothing but send trouble his way.

  It was time to put an end to such nonsense. Cookies or no cookies, the second this meeting was over he was going to put every inch of space he could between himself and Holly Sanders, and keep it that way.

  Chapter Ten

  Rebecca put the last of the desk chairs back in its place. “How long?”

  Holly took a quick count of the children—town and orphan—playing together in the school yard and surveyed the rows of desks to be sure her newly expanded classroom had the right amount of seats. “How long what?”

  Rebecca came up beside her. At first Holly thought her smile was for the happy combination of old and new students, but Rebecca wasn’t looking out the window. “How long have you been sweet on Sheriff Wright?”

  Holly sucked in a shocked gulp of air, feeling the blood rush to her face. How embarrassing to be so bold with her feelings that a stranger could guess them easily! She let her breath out in a sigh and clasped her hands together. “Forever.”

  Rebecca turned from the window and leaned against the sill. No judgment twisted the corners of her smile; instead, the agent’s expression was warm and understanding. “He’s handsome, I’ll grant you that, but awfully prickly. You must surely see some other side of him I don’t.”

  “Oh, he keeps folks at a distance, that’s true. He likes to make himself out as prickly,” she said, using Rebecca’s too-true adjective, “but that’s not him. I’m sure he wasn’t always that way.”

  Rebecca shifted to peer out the window in the direction of Mason’s office. “Did something happen to him?”

  Holly craned her head to follow Rebecca’s gaze, knowing she wouldn’t see the lawman walking down the street. He’d looked as if the “civics lesson,” as he called it, couldn’t end quickly enough. For a man who had insisted on cookies, he’d bolted out of the classroom empty-handed. Mason kept people at a distance because of his self-enforced exile. It was as if he felt he didn’t deserve the love and support of good people, and she was just beginning to learn why. Phoebe’s death was part of it, but not the whole of it. Holly could see glimpses of Mason’s true nature, even if no one else could. He wasn’t prickly, he was desperately lonesome.

  Still, she wasn’t the kind of person to tell other people’s secrets, and while he’d never said as much, she knew Mason hadn’t told anyone else about the pain he carried. “He’s had a great loss.” It didn’t feel right to say more than that. She shrugged. “He’s not so much mean as he is sad, really. He lives with so much unnecessary pain.”

  Rebecca crossed her arms over her chest. “You surely sound like a woman who has lost her heart.” She raised a blond eyebrow. “Does he know?”

  Holly turned from the window to sink down onto one of the desk chairs. “Some days I’m sure he knows. As you can see, I’m not as clever as some at hiding my feelings. The other day he shocked me and I called him ‘Mason’ to his face!” She put a hand to her cheek, feeling the mortification rise up all over again. Oh, the look he had given her after that gaffe. It made her want to crawl inside a barrel and swoon at the same time.

  “Mason. It’s a strong name. And he seems a very brave man.”

  “I could tell you a dozen stories—small acts of kindness he does when he thinks no one is watching, or riding off in the middle of storms to find someone who’s missing or hurt. He has always been brave. But when the flood hit...when it looked as if the dam wouldn’t hold and the water kept rising...it was as if he knew what had to be done and never feared what it might cost him to do it.” She cast her g
aze away from Rebecca as the image of a soaked, bleeding Mason struggling up out of the creek with Josiah Norman’s young boy returned to her memory. “More than once I watched him walk into harm’s way to keep someone safe. And when he ran into the clearing to pull me away from that horrid man...” She didn’t want to speak any further than that. After all, those were terrible moments for Rebecca.

  “And what does the sheriff feel for you? Do you know?”

  “Quite honestly, I’m not even sure he knew I existed before the robbery. He’d never speak to me unless I asked him a question. And yet, every once in a while, I’d catch him looking at me. In a... certain way that would make my heart stop.” She rubbed the spot where he’d held her arm at the train tracks. “He’d look away right after, of course, but there was always this moment where...” Holly shut her eyes for a moment. “Where I suppose I was imagining things that might not be there.”

  Rebecca perched on the chair next to Holly. “Men are puzzles, that much is surely true. I’ve found they rarely say what they mean when it comes to women, and hardly ever act according to their true feelings. Men pay attention to women they don’t care for if they feel it might advance their position, and they’ll ignore a woman who catches their eye just because they can’t think what to do.”

  Holly looked up at the regal woman, looking elegant even in an undersized school chair. Rebecca seemed so well versed in society. Surely she’d entertained dozens of suitors with her looks and charms. It felt silly to talk about Mason to her here, like this, as if he were some schoolgirl infatuation. What she felt for Mason was so big and complicated—not childish at all. Still, she was aching to talk over her confusing emotions with someone. “I can’t say Mason—” she surprised herself by using his given name out loud “—is at a loss for what to do. He seems quite sure of himself. There are days I think he goes out of his way to avoid me, where he says things he knows will hurt me. It’s clear he doesn’t want me to like him. I don’t think he wants much of anyone to like him.”

  “A broken heart can build a very tall wall around a person. Some hearts bear such wounds that they’ll shut out even good things rather than chance pain again.”

  Holly turned to face Rebecca, caught by the pain reflected in the woman’s words. Miss Sterling had a broken heart, that much was clear. Only she was starting to heal; the children had seen to that. Healing was exactly what she wanted to give to Mason. “That’s just it. He’s wounded. I can see so clearly why he’s behaving the way he is, why he thinks he has to be alone.” Holly found her speaking the words as much to Rebecca as to Mason. “He’s wrong. No one has to be alone. No hurt is so deep it can’t be healed. Surely,” she added, feeling as though she might have ventured too far, “as people of faith, we understand that.”

  “The sheriff has no faith?”

  “I think he does. Or did. But now he sees himself as so unworthy of love—anyone’s, even God’s—that he doesn’t think it possible that God or anyone else could care for him.” Holly stood up and shook her head, walking to the bookshelf where a copy of King Arthur sat tilted to one side. “He’s so brave, so honorable, it seems like such a waste to have a man like that exile himself. It’s like he’s built a great, deep moat of guilt around himself. He pretends as if I’ve no hope with him, and then he does something kind and my heart...” She swallowed the rest of that thought as she righted the book.

  Rebecca tucked a loose tendril behind her delicate ear. “One could always build a drawbridge over that moat.”

  Someone like Rebecca Sterling could, yes. “Not me. I’ve not that kind of boldness.”

  Miss Sterling rose, tall and grand. “Nonsense. You’re as brave as he. I’ve watched you at the meetings. You know how to stand your ground. You won’t let Miss Ward get away with unkindnesses toward others. So why do you stand by and let Mason Wright be cruel to himself?”

  “I’ve never thought of it that way, that he believes he must be cruel to himself.” The way he spoke to her on the return trip to the train tracks, the way he’d cast himself as the worst kind of man, it made even more sense now.

  “You said he saved your life.”

  “He saved all our lives, Rebecca.”

  The smile that crossed her face surely caught a thousand men’s hearts back in New York. “So go save his.”

  She made it sound so effortless. “How? With what?”

  “With whatever it is God knows he needs.”

  Holly blinked. In all her lamenting over Mason Wright, had she ever asked God to show her how to serve him? How to point his wounded soul toward the healing of salvation? Not once, and that had to change.

  * * *

  An hour after his fiasco in the schoolhouse, Mason looked up from repairing his office door to see Liam watching him from across the street. He’d been there yesterday, too, until Beatrice Ward had shooed him away for no good reason—as if he had less right to walk down the street than one of Evans Grove’s more permanent citizens. Just to show Beatrice, Mason had called the boy over and sent him on an errand for more nails from Gavin’s General Store. The extra nickel he’d given the lad for a piece of licorice, well, that was just to show Liam that not everyone in town found him a nuisance.

  Liam was back again today. Evidently, Mason was growing a little redheaded shadow. No sense in not putting him to work. For a stretch of time the boy had swept off the office steps, beaten dust out of the jail cell cots, and generally kept Mason’s company. He was a nuisance, but hang it all if that smirk of his didn’t pull a smile out of Mason every once in a while.

  Or a groan. Liam was still in the office later that afternoon when Beatrice showed up again. “It’s my opinion that the entire Selection Committee ought to be present during services tomorrow. If we’re to officially welcome these...” she paused, casting a look at Liam that Mason would never describe as churchlike “...unfortunate souls into our congregation, then the committee should be there.”

  It wasn’t to his credit that Mason gave the same reluctant moan that escaped Liam’s mouth. “I’m not much of a churchgoing man, Miss Ward.”

  “Nor I,” Liam said too quickly, and Mason shot the boy a look.

  “I’m entirely aware of that, Sheriff.” Miss Ward looked straight at Mason, her words fairly dripping with disapproval. “Nevertheless,” she said as she turned to include the boy as if it were an act of charity to bestow her judgment on both of them equally, “I’ll expect to see you—both of you—in church. Front pew.”

  Mason felt such sympathy for the lad—who looked as if he dreaded the long, fussy service as much as Mason himself did—that he bought a pair of sandwiches at the hotel for them to share back at the office.

  “School? Do I have to?” Liam moaned with a mouth full of ham.

  “Yes, you do. You can’t hang around with me all day, and we know better than to leave you to your own devices.”

  The boy licked a smear of mustard from his lip. “I’m not much for book learnin’. Besides, I like it here with you.”

  “Quieter than the schoolhouse?”

  “I’ll say. Even with the three girls gone.” It wasn’t hard to catch the hitch in the boy’s voice at being passed over for placement. All the boys had been doubly squirrelly since that meeting, and Mason couldn’t blame them. “Patrick’s broken a desk already and Tom coughs all night so’s none of us can sleep a wink.” He patted his stomach as if he’d just finished a feast, then produced a loud yawn as further evidence. Without so much as a “by your leave,” the boy then walked over and launched himself onto one of the cell cots with a bounce hard enough to squeak the springs. “I could catch a Sunday nap right here on this cot, I could.”

  Mason yawned himself—he hadn’t been sleeping well lately and he had an invitation to supper at the Wylers’ house tonight. “What’s stopping you?”

  “You might lock me up when I wasn’t looking, that’s what.”

  Mason swiveled in his chair. “That’s what you take me for? A man who fattens child
ren with ham sandwiches and then locks them up while they sleep?”

  Liam settled back in against the wall, sliding his ever-present newsboy cap down over his eyes. “Not good children, not town children, but some ‘guttersnipe’ of an orphan? Why wouldn’t you? Plenty’a folks in this town probably think a jail cell’s just ’zactly where I belong.”

  Mason cleared away the remains of the meal. “Not everybody thinks like that.”

  Liam scrunched down a bit farther in the cot, wiggling himself into a comfortable position. “Don’t have to be everybody, does it? If that Miss Ward keeps up, us boys’ll be on our way before you know it. Greenville won’t be no different, neither. New York’ll be worse. Trust me, there ain’t nothin’ good at the end of this line for someone like me.”

  Standing up and coming to the cell doorway, Mason stared. The boy spoke entirely too casually. Did he realize what he was saying?

  “Miss Ward’s only one person. Other folks want you to stay. I’ll tell you, when Miss Sanders gets it in her mind to help someone, not even bossy old Beatrice Ward can get in her way.” He knew firsthand how stubborn Holly Sanders could be, didn’t he? The woman’s will was as fierce as her heart was kind—he knew that best of all. “You’ll find a family here, just you wait and see.”

  Liam gave an incredulous “Yeah,” before rolling onto his back. “Only a matter of time before someone scoops up a prize like me.”

  Mason hated the jaded edge in Liam’s words. “I know for a fact that Miss Sanders thinks you’re smart.”

  “Well, she thinks you’re noble or something, so we all know how misguided she can be.” The boy pushed his cap down over his eyes and sighed.

  Mason was ready to take him to task over his smart mouth but stopped, his curiosity overriding his annoyance. “And how do you know that?”

  “Oh, she’s always going on and on about you. ‘Sheriff Wright this’ and ‘Sheriff Wright that’ and ‘we should all be grateful for how he saved our lives and all.’” He crossed one foot jauntily over the other, making the cot springs squeak again. “You’re her hero.”