The Truth About Love and Lightning

by Susan McBride

  “Morning, Miss Bennie, Miss Trudy,” Frank said, ignoring Bennie’s sarcasm. “Sounds like you had a wild time out here yesterday what with the freak weather and Abby coming home for a visit. Did she bring her young man this time? What’s his name again? Neville? Norton?”

  “It’s Nathan,” Bennie corrected and put the kettle on the burner to heat. “And he didn’t travel with her. She’s come alone—”

  “Well, not entirely alone,” Trudy said with a sly grin, and the twins began to giggle.

  Sheriff Tilby wrinkled up his face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” Gretchen said, quickly stepping in. It wasn’t their business to tell anyone about Abby’s pregnancy, and she wasn’t about to let her giddy sisters spill the beans. “Abby took a few days off work is all. She was homesick.”

  “What rotten timing, her dropping in after the storm left things a mess out here,” the sheriff said, watching Gretchen so closely it made her uncomfortable.

  “Abby’s not the only one who dropped in out of the blue,” Bennie offered and, before Gretchen had a chance to shush her, she added, “We’ve got another unexpected guest, too. Gretchen found him in the grove and dragged him inside.”

  “He passed out before we could speak to him,” Trudy said as the teakettle began to whistle. “Poor man’s sleeping in the parlor right now—”

  “No, Trude, he isn’t,” Bennie interrupted as she pulled the china cups down from the cabinet. “Didn’t you hear the pipes whistling in the downstairs powder room? Since Abby’s still snoring away, and the rest of us are here, he must be taking a bath. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Trudy turned her guileless face toward Gretchen. “So then he’s up and about? Did you find out if he’s who we think he is?”

  Aw, crud, Gretchen mused, here it comes. She watched Frank Tilby’s face go from pink to bright red, his indignation puffing out his jowls so that he looked like an angry bulldog.

  “There’s a strange man in your bathtub?” The sheriff’s voice rumbled, sounding positively apoplectic as he turned his narrowed eyes on Gretchen. “He stayed overnight on your sofa? Unchaperoned?”

  Unchaperoned?

  Gretchen wrinkled her nose at the word. Did Frank Tilby think it was still the Victorian era? Or, more likely, did he disapprove because he still wanted to keep such close tabs on her, even after all these years?

  “He was injured,” she explained, not sure she wanted him to interfere. “He was lying in the grove with a goose egg on his head and no shoes on his feet. What was I supposed to do? Leave him on the ground, unconscious, while I twiddled my thumbs and waited for help since I couldn’t call out, or leave the property for that matter?”

  Frank walked right up to her, arms crossed over his barrel-like chest, leaning in so they were nose to nose. “You should have told me.”

  “How?” She snorted, wondering if he’d forgotten the snapped utility cables dangling near the fence line. “With a tin can on a string?”

  “I’ll take him back to town in the squad car. I’ll put him up in the bunk room at the jail,” the sheriff said, arms crossed below the badge on his chest, the frown on his face brooking no argument. “He can’t stay here.”

  “I beg to differ,” Gretchen countered, heat rushing to her cheeks. “He’s not well enough to go anywhere, and I don’t want him staying at the jail, for Pete’s sake. I spoke with him this morning, and he still can’t remember who he is and where he’s from, and he’s frightened,” she insisted, her pulse ratcheting up, not about to let Sam’s ghost out of her sight. “He needs more time to recover. He’s still weak and can’t remember a thing.”

  “But it’s not right for you women to keep a stranger in your midst when you’re so isolated,” the sheriff insisted, shaking his head with its careful pompadour. “No, ma’am, it’s not right at all.”

  Bennie set a teacup into a saucer with a purposeful rattle. “We’re not afraid of him, Sheriff,” she said crisply. “In fact, just the opposite. We’re not even sure he’s truly a stranger, not after the walnuts falling—”

  “And the scent of lemongrass,” Trudy added before she’d finished. “Abby sensed something familiar about him, too.”

  “Hush,” Gretchen hissed at them under her breath.

  “So which is he, familiar or a stranger?” Frank Tilby asked and stared accusingly at Gretchen. “Why do I feel like you’re talking riddles around me?”

  “He’s a bit of a riddle to us all,” Gretchen admitted, which didn’t seem to soften up the sheriff an iota.

  “How about you just tell this fellow to come out so I can meet him.” Frank Tilby pulled out a chair and took a seat at the kitchen table. “Matter of fact, I’ll settle in and wait until he’s free.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Gretchen started to say, but she was cut off by the groan of floorboards and the soft pad of footsteps as the Man Who Might Be Sam walked into the kitchen with a towel slung over his shoulders and another tucked around his lean hips.

  His hair was dripping wet and his face was freshly shaven, his chin newly nicked with tiny bits of toilet paper sticking to it. His battered clothing dangled from his outstretched hand.

  Above him, the lights that had flickered and dimmed in Frank Tilby’s presence suddenly grew brighter.

  The towel-clad fellow glanced around the crowded room, not saying a word to anyone before his gaze settled on Gretchen. “Forgive me,” he apologized, “I didn’t realize you had company. But you don’t happen to have anything else I can wear, do you? I’m not sure these torn clothes are even good for rags.”

  Eleven

  Frank Tilby gawked like a startled teenager as he watched Gretchen shepherd the man in the bath towel from the kitchen, all the while assuring him she had some clean things that would suit him well enough.

  Unbelievable, Frank mused, shaking his head. What in the hell is she thinking?

  He wanted to go after her and tell her this was nonsense. What woman with any common sense let a stranger into her house and put him up overnight? If he could have shaken her, he would’ve done it. But he knew that Gretchen Brink was about as stubborn as they came. Maybe she’d inherited a chromosome or two of crazy from her mother. Everyone in town who’d even briefly encountered the artistic and temperamental Annika had believed she was more than a little bit tetched.

  While he waited for Gretchen’s return, he paced the worn pine boards, the angry creaking beneath his footsteps attesting to his impatience.

  “ . . . she kept so many things, even his father’s clothes and shoes, isn’t that right, Trudy?” Bennie was saying across the table to her sister, quite loudly enough for Frank to hear if he cared to listen.

  “She wouldn’t get rid of them. Said it wasn’t her place,” Trudy agreed, and they both sipped their morning tea, as if having a half-naked stranger pop into the room wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. “I think part of her always believed he’d come back so she hung on to them just in case.”

  “Whose things? Who’s come back?” Frank finally stopped pacing to ask. “Well, aren’t you going to tell me, or should we play twenty questions?”

  For a long moment, neither twin reacted to his query. They merely gazed at each other with their milky eyes, teacups held so similarly in their right hands, pinkies crooked. Until finally Bennie—whom Frank had always found to be the more direct of the two—cocked her head in his direction and informed him, “It’s not our business to tell you anything more, Sheriff Tilby. If Gretchen wants you to know, she should be the one to do it.”

  “Lord help me, but this is ridiculous,” he mumbled, tugging his hat back on his head. Why was it like pulling teeth to get information from some females? “I’ll be out on the porch, and I’m not going to leave till I have a word with Gretchen. Tell her that, won’t you?”

  “Will do.” Bennie jerked her chin.

  “So long, Sheriff,” Trudy said, and then the pair bent their heads together, whispering i
n tones too soft for him to hear.

  And he hadn’t even left the room.

  Frank made it a point to stomp out of the kitchen, grumbling to himself all the way to the door. When he yanked it wide, he nearly tripped over that damned skinny cat of Trudy’s, which made a point of hissing up at him before it dashed through his legs and outside.

  “And a good morning to you, too,” he grumbled as the feline scampered down the porch steps and away.

  Frank took a deep breath once he’d escaped, filling his lungs with crisp morning air. The whir of chain saws floated toward him from half a mile up the drive, and he nodded to himself, figuring the fallen oak would be little more than kindling soon enough. Then Gretchen would have no excuse but to let him ferry that gray-haired fellow away from the farm, and he could deposit the man a safe distance from the Brink womenfolk. Not that he thought the stranger posed a real threat. Hell, he looked nearly old enough to be Abby’s grandfather. Mostly skin and bones, too, and slow on his feet like he barely had enough strength to stand upright. But if there was one thing Frank had learned from all his years as a second-generation lawman, it was that people were unpredictable and it never took much to make them snap.

  Only two nights ago, he’d been called to a meeting of the Ladies' Civic Improvement League when Amanda Solomon and Hattie Daniels had nearly gotten into fisticuffs over what flowers to plant in front of the community center this season.

  Still, he wished Gretchen had used her head. Taking in a stray cat was one thing, he mused, but this?

  Until he’d settled down, Frank paced the porch and took lots of deep breaths, glancing out at broken branches littering the lawn, listening to a host of birds twittering high above him. He noticed the jumble of wicker furniture, tossed into a pile against the far railing, and he busied himself righting it all. By the time Gretchen finally appeared—her stocking feet jammed into her knee-high rubber boots—Frank was drying off a chair with his handkerchief.

  “Ah, there you are,” he said and patted the freshly wiped seat. He would stay calm if it killed him. “Sit down, why don’t you, and let’s chat.”

  “Can you make it quick, Sheriff?” she said, waving off his suggestion. “I’d like to get breakfast started before Abby wakes up.”

  Frank didn’t want to make it quick. He liked to suck every moment that he could out of any encounter with Gretchen. Even as she frowned at him, he couldn’t help but think how fresh and freckled her face seemed in the morning light. When he looked at her like this, he didn’t see the fine lines that close to sixty years had etched into her skin; he saw the girl he used to know, a girl he still missed.

  Because Frank Tilby had always been sweet on Gretchen Brink. He’d had so many dreams about her in his life that he’d lost count of them. They were as common to him as some folks’ dreams of flying or being back in high school, taking a test for which they hadn’t studied.

  She’d never been conventionally beautiful but slender and fair, often smiling, with a complexion he’d heard referred to as peaches and cream. Every time she’d ever said hello to him, her pale eyes had radiated warmth and her nose had crinkled the tiniest bit. Gretchen was a lot like the sun, he decided. She seemed to glow from within, even now when she scowled at him.

  Before he could stop them, words spilled out of his mouth. “You look good, even this early in the day,” he said, even though he shouldn’t have. He was a married man who knew better than to flirt with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Still, he couldn’t seem to resist. When he was around her, something odd happened to him. He felt like a teenager all over again. “You’re blessed, you know. Every day that passes, you’re an even more handsome woman, and you were already a good-looking one to begin with.”

  “Frank, please!” She blushed and touched her hair, once flaxen like a field of wheat and now more ashen, still thick enough that he imagined his fingers would get caught up in it good if he tried to run them through it. “I’m not sure any girl likes being called ‘handsome,’ you know, nor do we like to be reminded we’re not exactly spring chickens,” she told him, deflecting his compliment, looking back at the door like she wanted to bolt.

  His stomach pitched. “I meant to flatter you, Gretchen. I’m sorry if I offended you instead. So handsome is a bad word? I need to make note of that.” He pulled his tiny notepad and pencil from his uniform pocket, pretending to jot in it just for show, but it did the trick.

  A smile settled on her lips, albeit a tense one. “It’s that we don’t want to think we look more like men the older we get. We want to feel like we can still turn a head every now and then, even if the plump’s left our cheeks and gone straight to our ass.”

  “Is that so?” Frank couldn’t help it when his eyes dipped toward the curve of her hip, the way even the bulky sweater and flannel nightgown couldn’t disguise that she was very much a woman. She had a mighty handsome ass, he mused, but he wouldn’t tell her that, even though he was sorely tempted.

  She stepped forward to slap his shoulder. “Quit staring at me like that,” she said. “What would Millie think if she knew you were standing on my porch right now, spooning out all kinds of sugar? And it’s barely eight o’clock in the morning.”

  Frank was fairly sure that, if Millie had overheard, she wouldn’t be too surprised. A man who talked in his sleep couldn’t hide all that much from his wife.

  “Look, Gretchen, I don’t want to beat around the bush here, but—”

  He bit his tongue before he said more. How he wanted to tell her then what he’d been holding in since high school, that if he’d had his druthers she would be sharing his bed, not Mildred. But all those years ago when he’d heard that Gretchen was pregnant and the baby was Sam Winston’s, it had curdled his stomach. He’d felt betrayed, although there’d been no cause. Gretchen had never been his. She hadn’t belonged to anyone back then, not really.

  He’d had a knee-jerk reaction—that being asking Millie to marry him when he knew he didn’t love her—and he’d been paying for it the four decades since. Not that Millie wasn’t as loyal and kind as a cocker spaniel; she was, in fact, a most dutiful spouse. She just wasn’t Gretchen. Sometimes, though, Frank found himself wondering if choosing a woman who wasn’t Gretchen Brink hadn’t inadvertently saved him from a deeper suffering. There were some in Walnut Ridge who saw the Brink women as completely unsuitable. “Consider that crazy Annika,” they would say, “so blunt she drove her husband into the arms of a school librarian. Then Gretchen let Sam go off to Africa despite the child in her belly, and the twins never settled down despite having their fair share of suitors. No, some women are just better off alone.”

  “Whatever you’ve got on your mind, Frank, spit it out,” Gretchen said, drawing him into the present, pulling his gaze back to her anxious face.

  Instead of troubling himself even more by delving into the past, he merely groused at her, “Like I said, I don’t appreciate that you’ve got a strange man staying here with you women. It’s not seemly.”

  “He’s completely harmless, I assure you,” Gretchen said with a sigh. “I sat up with him all night. He was dead to the world till this morning.”

  “What did your sisters mean when they said you’d saved his father’s clothes and that you’d hoped he’d come back?” As Frank repeated what he’d overheard, it suddenly dawned on him. He blinked, taken aback. “Aw, hell. You don’t think that man’s Sam? You can’t possibly believe that.”

  But he could tell by the set of her jaw that she did.

  “If I told you he has Sam’s eyes, would you understand? I’ve never met another man with irises the color of a stormy sky.”

  Frank snorted. “He has Sam’s eyes? Is that your only proof? Did you find his wallet or anything with a name on it?”

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t spot a car anywhere about, like the tornado tossed the thing around with him in it before it shook him out?”

  “No.”

  Frank scratched behind his ear. “
Call me a cynic, but it sounds awfully fishy. How do you know he isn’t some con man, come to take advantage of your situation?”

  “A con man?” Gretchen’s mouth fell open before she snapped it shut again. She set her hands on her hips, and her nostrils flared as she challenged him. “And what situation do you figure he’s ripe to take advantage of? You think he wants to steal the farm? You imagine he wants a grove filled with walnut trees that haven’t produced in as long as Abby’s been alive? Or that he’s come to steal the tiny profit we eke out from the gallery, which covers utilities and food and little else?”

  Instead of sniping back at her, Frank lifted his arms in surrender. “Okay, okay, I see your point. So let’s say he’s a helpless victim, not someone out to swindle the land from under your feet.”

  “Yes, let’s say that,” she answered with an irritated glare.

  Frank sensed he’d lost the battle already. “So you honestly figure Sam Winston was somehow resurrected and a twister dumped him into your grove, is that it?” He found the idea so hard to swallow that it was tough to get the words out. “Though you’ve got nothing to confirm he’s Sam but his eyes, since he doesn’t recall his own name and looks a decade older than he should?”

  “We don’t know what happened to him all that time in Africa,” Gretchen crisply replied. “We don’t know what was done to him, how he survived. A lot of folks who’ve been through trauma age more rapidly than the rest of us.”

  “Since he apparently rose from the grave, I guess he could look a whole lot worse,” Frank cracked wise, but Gretchen hardly seemed to find that amusing. He cleared his throat, shifting on his boots. “So what if he’s not who you think he is? What if he’s a stranger, pure and simple? Would you still want to keep him in the house with your blind sisters and your only daughter?”

  “Whether he’s Sam or not, he’s got to remember who he is soon enough,” Gretchen insisted. “And if, by the grace of God, it is Sam, he can’t be in this place where he was born and where his parents died and not recall his past.” She waved her arms. “There’s too much of him here. A man never forgets where he comes from.”