“High school was a long time ago. Why don’t I tell you about my latest trip to Cambodia when I visited Angkor Wat?”
He described the ancient temple complex that had been unknown to the outside world until 1860, when a French botanist stumbled upon it. He was describing the nearby city of Angkor Thom when he looked down and saw her eyes were closed, her breathing regular.
He arranged a knit throw over her and slipped off her shoes, which didn’t elicit even a hint of a stir out of her. That she could fall asleep so instantaneously worried him and he hoped their short excursion outside hadn’t been too much for her.
He closed the door behind him just as he heard the bang of the screen door off the kitchen, then the thud of Easton’s boots on the tile.
Chester rose from his spot in a sunbeam and greeted her with delight, his tired old body wiggling with glee.
She stripped off her work gloves and patted him. “Sorry it took me a while. We were up repairing a fence in the west pasture.”
“I’m sorry I called you in for nothing. She seems to be resting now. But she was coughing like crazy earlier, leaving blood specks behind.”
Easton blew out a breath and swiped a strand of hair that had fallen out of her long ponytail. “She’s been doing that lately. Tess says it’s to be expected.”
“I’m sorry I bugged you for no reason.”
“I was ready to break for lunch. I would have been here in about fifteen minutes anyway. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have you here so I know someone is with her. I’m always within five minutes of the house but I can’t be here all the time. I hate when I have to leave her, but sometimes I can’t help it. The ranch doesn’t run itself.”
Though Winder Ranch wasn’t as huge an operation as the Daltons up the canyon a ways, it was still a big undertaking for one woman still in her twenties, even if she did have a couple ranch hands and a ranch foreman who had been with the Winders since Easton’s father died in a car accident that also killed his wife.
“Why don’t I fix you some lunch while you’re here?” he offered. “It’s my turn after last night, isn’t it?”
She sent him a sidelong look. “The CEO of Southerland Shipping making me a bologna sandwich? How can I resist an offer like that?”
“Turkey is my specialty but I suppose I can swing bologna.”
“Either one would be great. I’ll go check on Jo and be right back.”
She returned before he had even found all the ingredients.
“Still asleep?” he asked.
“Yes. She was smiling in her sleep and looked so at peace, I didn’t have the heart to wake her.”
“Sit down. I’ll be done here in a moment.”
She sat at the kitchen table with a tall glass of Pepsi and they chatted about the ranch and the upcoming roundup in the high country and the cost of beef futures while he fixed sandwiches for both of them.
He presented hers with a flourish and she accepted it gratefully.
“What time does the day nurse come again?” he asked.
“Depends on the nurse, but usually about 1:00 p.m. and then again at five or six o’clock.”
“And there are three nurses who rotate?”
“Yes. They’re all wonderful but Tess is Jo’s favorite.”
He paused to swallow a bite of his sandwich then tried to make his voice sound casual and uninterested. “What’s her story?” he asked.
“Who? Tess?”
“Jo said something about her that made me curious. She said Tess had it rough.”
“You could say that.”
He waited for Easton to elucidate but she remained frustratingly silent and he had to take a sip of soda to keep from grinding his back teeth together. The Winder women—and he definitely counted Easton among that number since her mother had been Guff’s sister—could drive him crazy with their reticence that they seemed to invoke only at the most inconvenient times.
“What’s been so rough?” he pressed. “When I knew Tess, she had everything a woman could want. Brains, beauty, money.”
“None of that helped her very much with everything that came after, did it?” Easton asked quietly.
“I have no idea. You haven’t told me what that was.”
He waited while Easton took another bite of her sandwich before continuing. “I guess you figured out she married Scott, right?”
He shrugged. “That was a foregone conclusion, wasn’t it? They dated all through high school.”
He had actually always liked Scott Claybourne. Tall and blond and athletic, Scott had been amiable to Quinn if not particularly friendly—until their senior year, when Scott had inexplicably beat the crap out of Quinn one warm April night, with veiled references to some supposed misconduct of Quinn’s toward Tess.
More of her lies, he had assumed, and had pitied the bastard for being so completely taken in by her.
“They were only married three or four months, still newlyweds, really,” Easton went on, “when he was in a bad car accident.”
He frowned. “Car accident? I thought Tess told me he died of pneumonia.”
“Technically, he did, just a couple of years ago. But he lived for several years after the accident, though he was permanently disabled from it. He had a brain injury and was in a pretty bad way.”
He stared at Easton, trying to make the jaggedly formed pieces of the puzzle fit together. Tess had stuck around Pine Gulch for years to deal with her husband’s brain injury? He couldn’t believe it, not of her.
“She cared for him tirelessly, all that time,” Easton said quietly. “From what I understand, he required total care. She had to feed him, dress him, bathe him. He was almost more like her kid than her husband, you know.”
“He never recovered from the brain injury?”
“A little but not completely. He was in a wheelchair and lost the ability to talk from the injury. It was so sad. I just remember how nice he used to be to us younger kids. I don’t know how much was going on inside his head but Tess talked to him just like normal and she seemed to understand what sounded like grunts and moans to me.”
The girl he had known in high school had been only interested in wearing her makeup just so and buying the latest fashion accessories. And making his life miserable, of course.
He couldn’t quite make sense of what Easton was telling him.
“I saw them once at the grocery store when he had a seizure, right there in frozen foods,” Easton went on. “It scared the daylights out of me, let me tell you, but Tess just acted like it was a normal thing. She was so calm and collected through the whole thing.”
“That’s rough.”
She nodded. “A lot of women might have shoved away from the table when they saw the lousy hand they’d been dealt, would have just walked away right then. Tess was young, just out of nursing school. She had enough medical experience that I have to think she could guess perfectly well what was ahead for them, but she stuck it out all those years.”
He didn’t like the compassion trickling through him for her. Somehow things seemed more safe, more ordered, before he had learned that perhaps she hadn’t spent the past dozen years figuring out more ways to make him loathe her.
“People in town grew to respect and admire her for the loving care she gave Scott, even up to the end. When she moves to Portland in a few weeks, she’s going to leave a real void in Pine Gulch. I’m not the only one who will miss her.”
“She’s leaving?”
He again tried to be casual with the question, but Easton had known him since he was fourteen. She sent him a quick, sidelong look.
“She’s selling her house and taking a job at a hospital there. I can’t blame her. Around here, she’ll always be the sweet girl who took care of her sick husband for so long. Saint Te
ss. That’s what people call her.”
He nearly fell off his chair at that one. Tess Jamison Claybourne was a saint like he played center field for the Mariners.
Easton pushed back from the table. “I’d better check on Jo one more time, then get back to work.” She paused. “You know, if you have more questions about Tess, you could ask her. She should be back tonight.”
He didn’t want to know more about Tess. He didn’t want anything to do with her. He wanted to go back to the safety of ignorance. Despising her was much easier when he could keep her frozen in his mind as the manipulative little witch she had been at seventeen.
Chapter Five
“You haven’t heard a single word I’ve said for the past ten minutes, have you?”
Tess jerked her attention back to her mother as they worked side by side in Ed Hardy’s yard. Her mother knelt in the mulchy layer of fallen leaves, snipping and digging to ready Dorothy Hardy’s flower garden for the winter, while Tess was theoretically supposed to be raking leaves. Her pile hadn’t grown much, she had to admit.
“I heard some of it.” She managed a rueful smile. “The occasional word here and there.”
Maura Jamison raised one delicately shaped eyebrow beneath her floppy gardening hat. “I’m sorry my stories are so dull. I can go back to telling them to the cat, when he’ll deign to listen.”
She winced. “It’s not your story that’s to blame. I’m just...distracted today. But I’ll listen now. Sorry about that.”
Her mother gave her a careful look. “I think it’s my turn to listen. What’s on your mind, honey? Scott?”
Tess blinked at the realization that except for those few moments when Quinn had asked her about Scott the night before, she hadn’t thought about her husband in several days.
A tiny measure of guilt niggled at her but she pushed it away. She refused to feel guilty for that. Scott would have wanted her to move on with her life and she had no guilt for her dealings with her husband.
Still, she didn’t think she could tell her mother she was obsessing about Quinn Southerland.
“Mom, was I a terrible person in high school?” she asked instead.
Maura’s eyes widened with surprise and Tess sent a tiny prayer to heaven, not for the first time, that she could age as gracefully as her mother. At sixty-five, Maura was active and vibrant and still as lovely as ever, even in gardening clothes and her floppy hat. The auburn curls Tess had inherited were shot through with gray but it didn’t make Maura look old, only exotic and interesting, somehow.
Maura pursed her lips. “As I remember, you were a very good person. Not perfect, certainly, but who is, at that age?”
“I thought I was. Perfect, I mean. I thought I was doing everything right. Why wouldn’t I? I had 4.0 grades, I was the head cheerleader, the student body president. I volunteered at the hospital in Idaho Falls and went to church on Sundays and was generally kind to children and small pets.”
“What’s happened to make you think about those days?”
She sighed, remembering the antipathy in a certain pair of silvery blue eyes. “Quinn Southerland is back in town.”
Her mother’s brow furrowed for a moment, then smoothed again. “Oh, right. He was one of Jo and Guff’s foster boys, wasn’t he? Which one is he?”
“Not the army officer or the adventurer. He’s the businessman. The one who runs a shipping company out of Seattle.”
“Oh, yes. I remember him. He was the dark, brooding, cute one, right?”
“Mother!”
Maura gave her an innocent sort of look. “What did I say? He was cute, wasn’t he? I always thought he looked a little like James Dean around the eyes. Something in that smoldering look of his.”
Oh, yes, Tess remembered it well.
After leaning the rake against a tree, she knelt beside her mother and began pulling up the dead stalks of cosmos. Every time she worked with her hands in the dirt, she couldn’t help thinking how very much her existence the past eight years was like a flower garden in winter, waiting, waiting, for life to spring forth.
“I was horrible to him, Mom. Really awful.”
“You? I can’t believe that.”
“Believe it. He just... He brought out the absolute worst in me.”
Her mother sat back on her heels, the gardening forgotten. “Whatever did you do to the poor boy?”
She didn’t want to correct her mother, but to her mind Quinn had never seemed like a boy. At least not like the other boys in Pine Gulch.
“I don’t even like to think about it all,” she admitted. “Basically I did whatever I could to set him down a peg or two. I did my best to turn people against him. I would make snide comments to him and about him and started unsubstantiated rumors about him. I played devil’s advocate, just for the sake of argument, whenever he would express any kind of opinion in a class.”
Her mother looked baffled. “What on earth did he do to you to make you act in such a way?”
“Nothing. That’s the worst part. I thought he was arrogant and disrespectful and I didn’t like him but I was...fascinated by him.”
Which quite accurately summed up her interaction with him in the early hours of the morning, but she decided not to tell her mother that.
“He was a handsome boy,” Maura said. “I imagine many of the girls at school had the same fascination.”
“They did.” She grabbed the garden shears and started cutting back Dorothy’s day lily foliage. “You know how it is whenever someone new moves into town. He seems infinitely better-looking, more interesting, more everything than the boys around town that you’ve grown up with since kindergarten.”
She had been just as intrigued as the other girls, fascinated by this surly, angry, rough-edged boy. Rumors had swirled around when he first arrived that he had been involved in some kind of murder investigation. She still didn’t know if any of them were true—she really couldn’t credit Jo and Guff bringing someone with that kind of a past into their home.
But back then, that hint of danger only made him seem more appealing. She just knew Quinn made her feel different than any other boy in town.
Tess had tried to charm him, as she had been effortlessly doing with every male who entered her orbit since she was old enough to bat her eyelashes. He had at first ignored her efforts and then actively rebuffed them.
She hadn’t taken with grace and dignity his rejection or his grim amusement at her continued efforts to draw his attention. She flushed, remembering.
“He wasn’t interested in any of us, especially not me. I couldn’t understand why he had to be so contrary. I hated it. You know how I was. I wanted everything in my life to go exactly how I arranged it.”
“You’re like your father that way,” Maura said with a soft smile for her husband of thirty-five years whom they both missed dearly.
“I guess. I just know I was petty and spiteful to Quinn when he wouldn’t fall into line with the way I wanted things to go. I was awful to him. Really awful. Whenever I was around him, I felt like this alien life force had invaded my body, this manipulative, conniving witch. Scarlett O’Hara with pom-poms.”
Her mother laughed. “You’re much prettier than that Vivien Leigh ever was.”
“But every bit as vindictive and self-absorbed as her character in the movie.”
For several moments, she busied herself with garden shears. Maura seemed content with the silence and her introspection, which had always been one of the things Tess loved best about her mother.
“I don’t even want to tell you all the things I did,” she finally said. “The worst thing is, I got him kicked off the baseball team when he was a senior and I was a junior.”
“Tessa Marie. What on earth did you do?”
She burned with shame at the memory. “W
e had advanced placement history together. Amaryllis Wentworth.”
“Oh, I remember her,” her mother exclaimed. “Bitter and mean and suspicious old bat. I don’t know why the school board didn’t fire her twenty-five years before you were even in school. You would think someone who chooses teaching as an avocation would at least enjoy the company of young people.”
“Right. And the only thing she hated worse than teenage girls was teenage boys.”
“What happened?”
She wished she could block the memory out but it was depressingly clear, from the chalkboard smell in Wentworth’s room to the afternoon spring sunlight filtering through the tall school windows.
“We both happened to have missed school on the same day, which happened to be one of her brutal pop quizzes, so we had to take a makeup. We were the only ones in the classroom except for Miss Wentworth.”
Careful to avoid her mother’s gaze, she picked up an armload of garden refuse and carried it to the wheelbarrow. “I knew the material but I was curious about whether Quinn did so I looked at his test answers. He got everything right except a question about the Teapot Dome scandal. I don’t know why I did it. Pure maliciousness on my part. But I changed my answer, which I knew was right, to the same wrong one he had put down.”
“Honey!”
“I know, right? It was awful of me. One of the worst things I’ve ever done. Of course, Miss Wentworth accused him of cheating. It was his word against mine. The juvenile delinquent with the questionable attitude or the student body president, a junior who already had offers of a full-ride scholarship to nursing school. Who do you think everybody wanted to believe?”
“Oh, Tess.”
“My only defense is that I never expected things to go that far. I thought maybe Miss Wentworth would just yell at him, but when she went right to the principal, I didn’t know how to make it right. I should have stepped forward when he was kicked off the baseball team but I...was too much of a coward.”
Safe Harbor: A Cold Creek Homecoming Page 24