“So,” Liam went on as if conversing with the Almighty were an everyday thing, “I figured I’d ask God to send me a good idea for getting out of that. When Mr. Martin handed Tom and me the saw, I took it for the clear shot it was.” He spread his hands wide with a grin. “Don’t you see? God answered my prayer ’cuz here I am, right where I wanted.”
Mason had believed in prayer, once. He believed it worked for other folks on better terms with the Almighty than he. Even so, Mason was pretty sure Liam had things a bit twisted. “Praying for guidance is one thing. Thinking God hands you a saw to half sever your thumb to get out of a little work? That’s another thing all together.” Mason pushed himself off the desk and headed over to his files to round up some paperwork Liam could do with one hand. There were some receipts the boy could put in numerical order and a stack of notices he could sort by date.
“I like the idea of working here. You and I are the same sort.”
“How’s that?”
“Smart loners. Men who know our own mind.”
Mason could only smirk and shake his head. The kid was one of a kind, that was sure. No other eleven-year-old he had ever met would describe himself as a man who knew his own mind. “Is that so?”
“I still say God did right by me,” came Liam’s assured voice from behind him, “He knew how much I liked it here and fixed it so I could stay. He must’ve thought it a good idea, too. Miss Sterling always said God’s happy to give us what we ask for if it’s in His will.”
In His will? Mason turned to stare at the boy. The idea that Liam McLoughlin was sitting in his office at the will of the Almighty pickled his composure. “That’s ridiculous,” he blurted out. He caught himself, seeing Holly’s furrowed brow in the back of his mind. “You conniving out of work isn’t God’s plan. They’re not related. Not one bit. You ought to listen more carefully to what Miss Sanders and Miss Sterling are really trying to tell you instead of making up your own brand of sense.” He planted a stack of receipt slips on the table in front of Liam. “Can you count high enough to put these in order?”
The question had the intended effect. Liam looked completely put out by Mason’s underassessment of his smarts. “What kind of a fool question is that?”
“Mind your tongue, Liam. Just because we’re friends don’t mean you can mouth off at me.”
Mason hadn’t even realized what he’d said until the look in Liam’s eyes brought him up short. “We’re friends, you and I, huh?” Liam was trying to sound casual, but the glow in his expression gave him easily away.
“I reckon we are. That sit okay with you?”
Liam pretended to think about it, tapping the stack of papers into a neat pile. “That’s fine.”
“Well, good, then. It’s settled.” Mason busied himself with his key ring, unable to look at the boy.
They worked in companionable silence for half an hour or so, Liam sorting both piles of papers and Mason pushing through some correspondence with the county seat that was long overdue. It wasn’t a half-bad way to pass an afternoon. Liam had already proven he could be of use around the place. Sure, he talked too much, but he worked hard sweeping things out, boxing up things and running errands. Bucky could even take him down to the tracks on Thursday to pick up the registered mail. It’d be his boyish version of Holly’s return to the tracks—a chance to do something positive and regular in a place where he’d known fear and chaos. Liam deserved a chance to heal as much as Holly did.
Mason shook his head, annoyed that every train of thought seemed to find its way to Holly Sanders these days. Trying to keep her out of his thoughts only seemed to put her there twice as often.
“Why’d you do that?” Liam asked, putting down the notices he was sorting.
“Why’d I do what?”
“Say Miss Sanders’s name like that. Like she made you mad just now.”
Had he really spoken Holly’s name aloud? “I said no such thing.”
“You did. You just said Holly, and that’s her name. I hear Ma’am call her Holly all the time.”
“I said ‘Golly,’ as in ‘Golly but these shelves are dusty.’” It sounded absurd, but it was the only decoy he could think of.
Liam laughed, completely unconvinced. “You did not. You never talk like that. You said ‘Holly.’ I heard you. My hand is hurt but my ears work just fine.”
“Why would I say Miss Sanders’s name while writing letters? That makes no sense at all.”
“You know what makes no sense at all?” Liam planted his hands on his elbows, looking like he was about to reveal the decade’s biggest secret.
Mason’s gut dropped to the bottom of his boots. “What?”
“Why you kissed Miss Sanders the way you did and then don’t hardly say a word to her now.”
Chapter Sixteen
Mason wheeled around in his chair to face Liam. “What did you just say?” Grown men hadn’t shocked him as much as this boy just had.
“I saw.” Liam had enough sense to be leery of what he’d just revealed. This would have been the wrong time to get cocky. Mason wanted to slap the boy into a cell as it was.
Keeping his voice very steady, Mason put down his pen and asked, “Saw what?”
“I saw you kissing Miss Sanders something fierce. I knew you liked her and all, and she likes you. What I can’t figure is how the two of you have been mad at each other ever since. I didn’t think it worked that way.”
There were twelve different reasons why Liam had no business saying what he just did. He ought to be taken to task on every one of them, but Mason found himself stumped on where to start. He pulled his hand down his face both to hide his surprise and to give him a moment to think. Then he asked, “You mind telling me how you saw what you think you saw?”
Liam gave him a jaded look that said You’re not gonna try and deny it, are you?, but was smart enough not to voice the remark. He stuck with a safer response. “I got eyes, you know. I told you, I notice things.”
“Noticing something like that—if it happened at all, which I’m not saying it did—would put those eyes out on Liberty Street near midnight.” Mason leaned in on his elbows, interrogation style. “Midnight on the night Beatrice Ward’s gate disappeared.”
“I ain’t got nothing to do with that,” Liam defended. “Honest.”
“You just happened to be out counting stars?”
“Okay, I snuck out. Miss Sterling nods off pretty quick. That place is making me loopy, I tell you. I’m not used to being cooped up like that. Someone’s always standing over me in there. I had to get out and around nobody else, that’s all.”
“You snuck out.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t kiss nobody.”
Mason wasn’t going to let him get away with that deflection. “You snuck out, nobody saw where you were and things started going missing. That’s a heap of trouble from where I’m sitting.”
Liam fidgeted in his chair. “I didn’t take that stupid gate. And I didn’t take the wheelbarrow, neither. I swear!”
Liam might not have stolen the gate, but there was something he was hiding. “Now would be a real good time to tell me the truth. All of it.” He kept his voice low and steady, his eyes drilling into the squirming boy.
“Honest! I didn’t take anything. Why’d I do something like that when I want to stay here? I saw the gate was still there when I went by Miss Ward’s house. I know cause it squeaks in the wind and I heard it.”
“Why were you going by Miss Ward’s house in the first place?” When the boy sunk down, Mason pressed him. “Fess up, Liam.”
“I knew she wasn’t living there on account of the roof and I thought it might make a good place to hide. And I thought about throwing a rock through one of her windows. She’s awful mean. Only I didn’t, okay? I just looked to see how I might get inside.” His bottom lip actually quavered, and he pulled his knees up under his chin. “Ain’t you ever just needed someplace to hide from everyone?”
All the time, Mason tho
ught but didn’t say. “There are better ways. You just gave Miss Ward good reason to think the worst of you.”
“Well, I don’t think too highly of her, neither. She’s always frowning at us, while pretending to say nice things we all know she don’t mean. She doesn’t want us here, even I can see that. We’re gonna end up in Greenville, and if no one wants us there then it’s back to New York—right where we started, ’cept this time we’ll know for sure that we’re orphans because no one wants us.” He swiped his good hand across his eyes. “I hate sleeping in a corner of the schoolhouse. I hate learning subtraction. I hate Patrick and I hate how Mr. Arlington’s gone.”
A lot of hate for so small a set of shoulders. Who wouldn’t want to hide from all that? Mason got up from his desk and came around to squat next to Liam, who’d folded himself up into a tight little ball in the chair. “There’s a cave down by the creek behind Mr. Miller’s smithy shop. It’s dark and cool and quiet even when the sun is scorching. I go there when there’re too many folks around me. Maybe you and I can go some time. There’s good fishing there, too. Anyone ever take you fishing?”
The boy looked up and rolled his eyes. “Nobody fishes in New York.”
Mason found himself acting shocked, playing along just to pull the boy’s spirits up. “So you’re telling me you’re nearly twelve and never been fishing? Is that legal?”
He watched a little bit of the weight come off the boy’s shoulders. “How would I know? You’re the sheriff.”
“Oh, that’s right. We’ve still got a formality to do here.” Mason stood up. “Only I can’t deputize someone who’s stolen from anyone in Evans Grove. You absolutely sure you’re telling me the truth? Honest?”
Liam straightened up. “Honest.”
Somehow, Mason realized this scrap of a boy had probably never been believed since his parents were gone. He’d spent the last few years having the whole world assume the worst of him. And yet he’d still managed to believe he’d somehow come out on top—the exact opposite of the bitterness that always seemed to seep over Mason. “I believe you.”
The words transformed Liam’s tense features, and for a frightening moment Mason feared the boy would throw himself into his arms. “Thanks,” Liam said roughly, cocking his head to one side and leaning toward Mason but not moving out of the chair.
“Okay, then.” Mason went around his desk and pulled open a drawer. He suspected he was breaking half a dozen rules in doing so, but a kind of defiance surged up from somewhere under his ribs as he pulled a star badge out from the box in the back of the drawer. When he held up the “Deputy” badge, Liam’s eyes bulged wide. “Stand up, young man.”
Liam shot out of the chair to stand soldier-straight. He whipped his hat off as an afterthought, as if this were an official ceremony, and Mason felt a smile curl up out of his gut and spread across his face. “By the authority vested in me by the state of Nebraska, I deputize you as...” he fished for a suitably important-sounding title, yearning for Holly’s fancy vocabulary, “Interim Assistant Junior Sheriff.”
The boy’s chest swelled with pride, and Mason fought a surprising lump in his throat. “First order of business, Interim Assistant Junior Sheriff McLoughlin, is a very serious one.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy fairly beamed—a complete turnaround from how he’d entered the office.
“Fishing.”
* * *
Holly was walking back from her rare afternoon off, taking advantage of the volunteer chore team leaders keeping the children occupied to go down by herself to the creek to gather wildflowers for pressing. It felt like she hadn’t had an hour to herself since Newfield, and her spirit needed time in God’s creation to untangle all the knots the past two weeks had put there. She’d let Mason’s actions put those tangles in her spirit, and expecting Mason to untangle them was like asking the creek to rise up and apologize for flooding the town. Clearly she was looking for restoration in the wrong place.
She picked her way through the woods behind the creek, following the trail she always used, the one that ran past the tiny cave where the schoolchildren always imagined pirates to hide out. Pirates in Nebraska! How wonderfully illogical a child’s imagination could be, free of all grown-up sensibility.
“No, over there,” came a man’s voice. “Cast your line in right in front of that rock where the patch of shade falls. Yes, right there. You’re a natural.” It was Mason’s voice. And then again, not. The voice belonged to Mason Wright, but it had a tone she’d never heard from him before.
“I still don’t think this’ll work.” Liam’s voice made Holly stop and crouch down in the bushes. “Who’d ever want to eat a worm?”
“A hungry fish, that’s who.” With a start, Holly realized the sound she was hearing was Mason Wright laughing. She’d never heard him laugh, ever. She’d actually wondered from time to time if he was able to show that kind of happiness.
“My pa used to promise me a fishing trip. Back before he got sick, back before...everything.” Liam’s voice was so matter-of-fact, Holly nearly gasped. That poor boy spoke as if dead fathers were as common as fallen leaves. Then again, to an orphan, weren’t they? Father, grant these boys homes here in Evans Grove! her soul pleaded silently to Heaven. Moving slowly, she pushed aside a branch so that she could see the pair.
They made an idyllic picture, sitting against a tree by the creek with a pair of fishing poles. Mason had his hat off, giving her a good look at his handsome face. She’d never seen him relaxed like that—he always looked to be twisted tight with some struggle she couldn’t see. What would his unguarded smile look like? What did he look like asleep? Holly hated how these thoughts popped up like improper daisies, troublesome and unwelcome in her efforts to put Mason out of her heart.
“Do you miss your pa much?” Mason asked.
“Some days it’s awful. Most days I just try to be glad I knew him at all. Lots of the other kids have no folks that they can recall, so I suppose what I remember is better than nothing at all.” Holly leaned her cheek against the branch, feeling her heart break for Liam’s terrible gratitude.
“I know some folks in Evans Grove who could learn a lot from you,” Mason said, rebaiting his hook. “Bitter, nasty types who can only see the bad that’s happened to them. You’re smarter than they are; don’t forget that.”
Holly wondered if he saw the irony in his own words. As far as she could tell, there weren’t too many souls carrying more bitterness that Mason Wright.
“Come on, now, Sheriff, there ain’t nobody thinks highly of me back there. You and I both know that.” Liam said it as if such a thing were completely acceptable.
“You’re wrong on that count.” Holly would have preferred Mason shout that instead of saying it quietly like he did.
Liam jiggled his line in the water. “‘Don’t matter. The girls? When we were on the train, they needed to believe all that fairy-tale stuff, all those finding good homes stories Ma’am and Mr. Arlington fed ’em. And maybe it’ll really work out—kinda has, ’specially for little Sasha and the others. But me, I know what’s what. I got too many scrapes and scratches on me to ever clean up cute and homey. I done things. Not here, but you and I both know I weren’t no angel in New York. That sort of thing follows a man wherever he goes.”
Mason shifted to face the boy. “Liam, you talk like you’re ninety years old instead of eleven. You got your whole life ahead of you to make something of yourself. Men have started off with less than you and made great things of themselves. Mostly ’cause they were smart, and by gum, you’re smart as a whip.”
“Not if you look at my last mathematics paper. Or if you ask that lady who keeps trying to make me sit still in church.”
Mason laughed again. “Mrs. Turner? She’s the pastor’s wife; she has to do that. Come to think of it, she’s still trying to make me sit still in church. Hasn’t worked yet.”
Holly tried to swallow her giggle at that, but she ended up coughing instead.
�
��Who’s there?” Mason’s voice was back to the sharp bark she knew, and his gaze snapped to the branches that moved as she pulled back.
There was no use. He was probably already on his feet, maybe even with his gun drawn. Holly stood up. “Me.”
“Miss Sanders!” Liam’s surprise had a funny, too-knowing twist to it. As if he’d suspected her of being there the entire time. “What are you doing way out here?”
Mason’s eyes narrowed as Holly stepped into the clearing. “I was just about to ask the same thing.”
Holly held out her basket meekly. “Picking flowers for pressing. Forget-me-nots grow up over there.”
The sheriff’s dark eyebrow lifted in a “how long have you been eavesdropping?” arch, broadcasting his doubt. “Flowers.”
“The children do study botany, you know.” Holly hated how she could feel her cheeks reddening. “But mostly, I like them for decoration.”
“Girls,” Liam lamented. Holly found herself half glad he didn’t say “Women.” “Sheriff Wright’s showing me how to fish. Says I’m a natural, only I think if I’m so great I ought to have a fish by now.”
Mason’s eyes darted everywhere, annoyed and exposed. He was most certainly a man who did not care to be snuck up on by anyone, least of all her. He set down his pole, but didn’t say anything.
“Seems to me fishing isn’t always about catching fish,” Holly offered. “My pa said it was as much about thinking time as anything else.”
Liam ran his good hand down the length of his pole. “I could see that. A man needs time to think.”
Holly managed a nervous laugh. “You really do talk like a ninety-year-old man sometimes, Liam.” She regretted the remark, for Mason’s scowl told her it revealed how long she’d been spying. She tried to switch the subject. “How’s your thumb?”
Family Lessons Page 17