“I know a few drinking men who can’t find their way home at night,” Frank remarked, refusing to buy what she was selling.
“Somewhere inside, he knows,” she insisted. “He can’t forget his life forever.”
“Aw, hell.” The sheriff sighed and shook his head.
Gretchen gave him a long look. “If you’ve got a better way to rid a man of amnesia, let’s hear it.”
“Don’t get all huffy just because I’m concerned for you,” he said, and he meant it. He didn’t like that she was getting so caught up in this wild daydream about Sam Winston returning. Seemed like she’d spent her whole adult life pining for the man until she made him into something no real man could live up to. Now she’d concocted this fantasy that he was back. Worse still, it sounded like she’d gotten her sisters and daughter wrapped up in it, too. It couldn’t possibly be healthy. “Let me sit down with him alone,” Frank suggested. “Let me ask a few questions, feel him out.”
“I’m not leaving you alone with him! He doesn’t need threats.” Gretchen’s pale eyes narrowed. “You’ll just push him around like you and your buddies did when we were kids, and I figure he’s been through enough already.”
“I’m not going to push him around!” Frank huffed.
But she squared her chin and didn’t budge, clearly not convinced.
“All right, all right.” He threw up his hands. “How about this,” he said, realizing he had a very simple means to putting an end to any speculation. “I’ll go back to the station and get my field kit and, when I return, I’ll print him. If he’s got any kind of record, we’ll know it pretty quick.”
“Your field kit?” Gretchen repeated. “You want to fingerprint him? Like he’s a criminal?”
“Yes. I mean, no,” Frank scrambled for the right words, not wanting to get into any more hot water than he was already in. “If we run his prints through the system and they come out clean, we’ll know he hasn’t been charged with a crime, not hereabouts anyway. And if he’s ever held any kind of job where he’s been printed, we’ll find that out, too. One way or another, we’ll learn who he is, or at least who he’s not.”
“Unless he isn’t in the system at all.”
“How about we cross that bridge when we come to it?” Frank said. “And in the meantime, I’ll put out a BOLO locally for any signs of an abandoned car. Maybe we can see how he really rode into Walnut Ridge.”
“I already know how he got here,” Gretchen insisted, tightening the tuck of her arms beneath her breasts.
By hitching a ride on a tornado.
Okey dokey.
Frank sucked in his cheeks, not willing to touch that one. Gretchen had always been the fanciful type, prone to believe in fairy tales. “So if I leave without taking him with me, you won’t make a fuss when I come back to print him. Deal?” he asked and extended his hand.
Gretchen hesitated but a minute before she reached out to shake it. “All right,” she said as Frank held on to her smaller hand for several beats too long. “That sounds fair enough.”
“Give me a couple hours, okay? Then I’ll be back.” With that, he tipped his hat and headed toward the porch steps, pausing just long enough to add, “If you need my deputies, remember they’re just up the drive, cutting up that oak.”
“Thanks, but I won’t,” she replied in that gentle way of hers before she turned on her heels and disappeared inside.
Twelve
Abby always had the most vivid dreams when she came back to the farm, and this time was no different.
She was sitting on the back porch swing, gliding gently to and fro, humming a made-up lullaby, her arms cradling the engorged swell of her belly. She knew the baby inside her was a girl, and she marveled at the thought of pink bows and ballet slippers. “You’ll be a strong woman in a long line of strong women,” she whispered and rubbed a spot near her ribs where a tiny foot pressed hard against her. “No matter where you go, you’ll always find your way back. And you’ll believe in fairy tales, even if they don’t make sense.”
The baby kicked her again, as if agreeing, and she laughed.
Abby ceased rocking the swing and rose to her feet, holding her belly as she padded over to the whitewashed railing. From there, she could spy the red barn and the walnut groves beyond. She could see birds soar past, silhouetted by the fat clouds that lazily meandered across the sky.
She breathed in the sweetness of lemongrass as the wind picked up and tossed her dark hair, whipping strands across her face. She gripped the railing as it buffeted her body, and the baby suddenly began to kick more forcefully. A bird with the wingspan of a hawk swooped down upon her, coming near enough so she could see its yellow eyes before it flew off toward the grove, where it disappeared into the trees.
As the heavens rumbled, shaking the floorboards beneath her, a heavy wall of gray overtook the plump clouds until all the light had been smothered, like a fire being doused. As lightning cracked across the heavens and the rain began pouring down, she whispered, “It’s just a storm, it won’t hurt you. We’re safe here,” to comfort herself as much as the baby.
The air was so thick with the downpour that she couldn’t see a thing beyond the railing. Abigail, she heard someone say. Over here. But she felt blinded by the rain, and the noise of it hitting the roof made the voice too hard to hear.
Then it stopped. Just like that. The dark clouds scuttled off, making way for blue skies again. The baby settled down in her belly, and Abby leaned against the damp railing, spotting a figure emerging from the fog of the grove. The sun shone down upon him as he walked toward her and lifted a hand to wave.
She felt compelled to run to him, but she couldn’t; her legs wouldn’t move. And though he seemed to be heading her way, he got no closer. They were so far apart still, too far for her to clearly see his face.
“Daddy?” she called out as tears splashed down, wetting her cheeks more fiercely than the rain. “Daddy!”
Bam bam bam! “Gretchen Brink, are you in there?”
Noises and voices seeped into her subconscious, and Abby stirred, a sob catching in her throat as she awakened, opening her eyes, damp with tears. For a moment, she lay there, willing herself to calm down and clutching at her dream although it had already started to fade. The more she tried to remember, the more it slipped away. But she did recall one thing: the tiny girl grown so big inside her, moving and kicking.
Beneath the sheet, she snaked a hand toward her belly, resting her palm on its gentle curve. She wasn’t showing yet, but it wouldn’t be long before she was. Nate would notice first, before anyone else. He knew her body nearly as well as she did. How much longer could she wait to tell him?
“It would be wrong to keep him from you,” she whispered to the child who was little more than a cluster of cells and a tiny beating heart. “You don’t deserve to lose your daddy, too.”
She slowly got out of bed, leaving the covers in a tangle as she shed her pajamas and pulled on a clean sweater and her jeans from the day before. She shuffled into the upstairs hall bath long enough to squint at her bleary-eyed self in the mirror as she brushed her teeth and to draw her hair back with a headband.
Her steps quickened as she descended the stairs, thinking of the man on the parlor sofa, of how her mother had found him right after the storm, and she couldn’t help wondering again if her father had finally come back. She hoped he could remember more about himself this morning, perhaps even who he was. Then the mystery would be solved, one way or the other.
She stuck her head into the parlor, ready to say, “good morning,” only to find it empty. Even the quilt was folded up neatly and slung over the back of the couch.
Has something happened to him? she wondered, her heart pumping faster. Had he stolen away in the middle of the night, never to be seen again? Or was he merely part of the dream already lost to her?
She rushed into the kitchen, finding Trudy and Bennie sitting at the breakfast table, munching on buttered toast. The smell of
eggs hung in the air, and it made her stomach curdle.
“Where is he?” she asked, trying not to sound as frantic as she felt. “Please, tell me he didn’t leave already?” Then an even more frightening thought hit her, considering how exhausted she’d been when she’d arrived. “I didn’t just imagine him, did I?”
“Abby?” her aunts said, nearly in unison, but it was Bennie who’d picked up on her frantic tone. “You didn’t imagine anything,” she assured her.
“So where is he?” Abby’s mouth filled with the metallic taste of worry. “Is he all right?”
“Of course he’s all right,” Bennie told her. “Gretchen stayed up all night, watching over him like a mother hen.”
“She’s with him now,” Trudy said, brushing crumbs off her hands. “So relax, dear girl. Anxiety is seeping from your pores like ammonia, and it’s not good for either you or the baby.”
“Your mom’s got him outside,” Bennie told her, “breathing in the fresh air.”
Abby felt light-headed with relief. “So he’s alive and well?”
“Even better, he took a bath,” Trudy said.
“Thank God,” Abby breathed, tugging at the cuffs of her sweater. “I was so afraid he’d be gone before I had a chance to find out if he really could be Sam.”
“Sweetheart, you need to take a deep breath and slow down,” Trudy advised, clucking softly. “We’ve all been jumping to conclusions since the fellow appeared out of nowhere, probably because we’d like to have a happy ending to a story that never had any real ending at all.”
“But we can’t make something be that isn’t so,” Bennie added, sounding perfectly reasonable, although Abby was hardly feeling very reasonable herself these days.
“You’re right, of course,” she agreed, though it didn’t keep her from wanting a happy ending to this particular tale. “If he isn’t Sam, he isn’t Sam. Wishing won’t make it so.”
Her aunts beamed at her as they had so often when she was a girl and had done even the smallest thing to please them. Yes, Abs, you have a wonderful ear! That is a cardinal’s chirp. Good girl, of course, that’s a honeysuckle vine, which has the most glorious, sweet scent.
But identifying flowers and bird calls was easy. A honeysuckle was always a honeysuckle. A cardinal’s chirp, a cardinal’s chirp. Other things in life weren’t so readily definable. Like the artwork she sold in the Lincoln Park gallery. Whether a painting was good or not was completely subjective. One patron might adore a collage and another might call it “trash.” And what about love? The very subject that had caused such trouble between her and Nate. She knew what it meant for her—commitment and a real promise of a future together—but it appeared to mean something else entirely to him.
Not everything that was real came with proof. Sometimes, believing had to be enough.
“Abigail, are you sure you’re okay? I can hear you grinding your teeth,” Bennie said, her head cocked like a bird.
Abby breathed in deeply, relaxing her jaw. “Really, I’m okay.”
“Would you like breakfast?” Trudy asked, getting up from her chair and dropping her napkin to the table. “You shouldn’t have coffee though, should you? The caffeine wouldn’t be good for the wee one. How about toast and eggs with juice? Remember, you’re eating for two.”
“Maybe some toast in a bit,” she said, the thought of food making her queasy. “I couldn’t swallow a thing right this minute.”
“Morning sickness?” Bennie asked, and a knowing grin played upon her lips.
“A little,” she admitted.
“Aha!” Trudy threw her hands in the air as she made her way toward Abby. “Your mother had it, too, for months and months.” Her sensible shoes squeaked as she stopped and reached out for her niece, softly patting her arm. “Once she felt better, she had the strangest cravings, for peanut butter and cottage cheese and oranges.”
“And fried chicken,” Bennie added. “She ate that for dinner every night for weeks so the whole house reeked of it.”
“Oh, and mashed potatoes.” Trudy grinned. “We could hardly make enough!”
All the talk of food set Abby’s stomach to lurching. She felt bile wash up the back of her throat and put a hand to her mouth.
“Excuse me,” she murmured as she made a beeline for the mudroom, pausing long enough to throw on a windbreaker and slip her bare feet into a pair of gardening clogs before she scurried out into the cool morning.
She let the screen door bang behind her as she stepped out onto the porch, gulping in air to quell the queasiness. She bent over, hands on her knees until she felt less like something was going to come up. Once she could stand again, she eased toward the railing, gazing out toward the barn. That was when she heard her mother’s voice mingled with the deeper tones of a man coming from just around the bend.
“ . . . don’t worry about him,” Gretchen was saying. “He might growl like a bulldog, but he’s completely harmless.”
“He figures I’m up to no good, is that it?”
Gretchen sniffed. “He thinks everyone’s up to no good.”
Abby walked toward the sound of their conversation, rounding the corner of the house, the clomp of garden clogs on the porch planks inordinately loud against the quiet of the morning.
Gretchen glanced up from where she perched in a white wicker chair. She was still in her nightgown with a thick cardigan wrapped around her, not exactly high fashion when paired with her knee-high rubber boots.
“Hey, you’re up!” her mom said, tucking messy strands of ash-blond behind her ears. “Did you eat breakfast yet?”
“My stomach isn’t exactly ready for it,” Abby replied as she went to kiss her mother’s cheek. When she straightened, she turned toward the fellow swaying to and fro on the swing. “Hi,” she said to him. “I’m Abby, the prodigal daughter from Chicago.”
“Hello, Abby from Chicago,” he replied and gave her a slow nod. He had his arms draped across the wood-slatted back and his legs extended as he rocked. “Your mother and I were just talking about the sheriff, who happened by a little earlier. I don’t think he likes the fact that she’s got a stranger hanging around.”
“Frank Tilby’s always been hot for my mom,” Abby said, because it was the truth and had been forever. “So he doesn’t like any man hanging around her.”
“Abs!” Gretchen blushed, but she laughed just the same.
“Well, then it’s a good thing he didn’t haul me away in handcuffs.” The fellow nodded and kept gliding, the chains creaking with the motion.
The sound was strangely comforting. It reminded Abby of all the spring and summer nights Gretchen had sat there beside her. Their bellies full from supper, they’d swayed back and forth, waiting for the sun to set or watching fireflies light up the dusk. Abby wondered how it would have been to have had Sam share in those moments with them. Even if she could get all that time back, it wouldn’t be enough.
“You seem better this morning,” she remarked and took a step forward, trying to look at him and figure him out without being too obvious. “Are you feeling okay?” She stopped shy of the swing. “I’m figuring you are ’cause you aren’t unconscious and that bruise on your forehead has calmed down. It’s no longer eggplant purple.”
“Yes, I’m better, just plenty confused.” His gray eyes squinted at her, like he was taking her in the same way she was him.
“That makes sense,” Abby said, and she couldn’t help adding, “Being dropped on a farm by a tornado would be pretty confusing, I’d wager, unless it’s something you’ve done a lot before.”
“Ah, so you figure I’m a professional tornado wrangler.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.
“You never know,” she replied, feeling the weight of his gaze. A shiver raced up her spine, despite the windbreaker. She hugged her arms to warm herself. “I grew up hearing stories about a man who could talk to the sky and make it rain.”
“Is that so?” The fellow glanced at Gretchen, who hastily e
xplained, “Abby’s great-grandfather was something of a magician.”
That wasn’t exactly what Abby had referred to and Gretchen knew it, but Abby’s mother had a knack for bending the truth. Sometimes it’s best to say what people need to hear instead of making them uncomfortable, she’d once defended herself when Abby had called her on it.
As if afraid Abby might test the waters even further, Gretchen began nattering on about climate change and last summer’s drought, asking the man if he was cold or hungry, whether he had thick enough socks with the borrowed shoes or if the shirt wasn’t too big, all sorts of things to keep from tackling the elephant in the room. Namely, was he or was he not Sam Winston?
With a resigned sigh, Abby settled into the nearest wicker chair. She found herself watching the man, searching his face, looking for recognizable traits, bits of herself he’d passed on to her, things she couldn’t discern in a decades-old picture. Like the way he cocked his head or scratched his nose. He’d cleaned up, she noticed, shaving off the rest of his beard, although his hair was still too long and shaggy. He had deep grooves at his mouth and eyes, making him seem older than he should have been. But forty years away was a lot, and who knows where he’d been or what he’d gone through.
He reminded Abby of the grandfather she’d barely known, perhaps because he was wearing the obnoxious red-and-green plaid shirt that had belonged to Cooper Winston, one he’d worn on the first and last Christmas Abby had celebrated with him, preserved in Gretchen’s treasured photographs. Her mom must have dug the shirt out of the cedar chest—along with a battered pair of Levi’s and some navy blue Chris-Craft duck shoes—and Abby wondered if the clothes smelled of lavender and mothballs like everything old her mother tucked away.
Abruptly, the man stopped the swing’s motion, rising slowly to his feet. “I think it’s time I stretched my legs a bit, maybe took a little walk to see if I remember anything about how I got here.”
The Truth About Love and Lightning Page 12