An Accidental Woman

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Do you promise?” Missy repeated.

  “Yes,” Heather whispered. As she straightened, she pressed a kiss to the child’s head. She closed her eyes, and a look of anguish crossed her face. Micah imagined that she held the kiss a beat longer than she might have. Sure enough, as she came toward him, her eyes were filled with tears. When she was as close as she could be, she whispered, “Call Cassie.”

  Cassie Byrnes was one of Heather’s closest friends, and she was a lawyer.

  Micah took her hands, only to find that the sleeves of the bulky sweater concealed handcuffs nearly as cold as her skin. Furious, he turned on Pete, who raised a brow in warning and nodded toward Missy.

  “Call Cassie,” Heather repeated—which was certainly the right thing to say, certainly the practical thing to say, though not what Micah wanted to hear from her. He wanted her to profess utter confusion, to insist thata mistake had been made, to protest her innocence, even to cry and loudly declare that she had never in her life heard the name Lisa Matlock—all of which might well be the case, Micah told himself. But yes, Heather was a practical woman, and yes, given the circumstances, especially with the legality of the arrest warrant as vouched for by Pete, cooperating was the only thing to do.

  Still, the handcuffs offended him. A small person like Heather didn’t have a chance in hell of overpowering these three agents, plus however many were outside, even with both hands free. Not that his Heather would think of fighting. In the four years that they’d been together, he had never seen her lash out in anger at anything.

  When the two female agents ushered her toward the door, he followed closely. “Where are you taking her?”

  Mooney stepped in his path as the agents whisked Heather outside. “Concord. She’ll go before a magistrate there this morning. She needs an attorney.”

  Go before a magistrate. Micah’s eyes flew to Pete, who said, “They have to return the fugitive flight warrant.”

  “Is she being charged with murder?”

  “No. Not charged with anything yet. They return the warrant and ask for extradition. Heather can choose to waive an extradition hearing and go back with them, or she can fight it. They can’t take her back—can’t charge her with murder or anything else—until they make a solid enough case that the charges are legit.”

  Micah wanted to know the how, why, and where of everything Pete was talking about, but he had more immediate questions, and Mooney was leaving. Following the agent out the door, he trotted barefoot down the steps, oblivious to the crusted ice on the wood planks, the snow on the drive, and the subfreezing air on his near-naked body. “I’m coming with you,” he announced—a totally un practical thing to say, since he couldn’t take the girls with him and they couldn’t possibly stay here alone, but his words were driven by emotion, not logic.

  Mooney ignored him and kept on going.

  Pete became the practical one. “Not wise to do that right now.”

  Eyes on Heather, Micah watched her vanish into the back of a darkvan, the vehicle farthest from the house. At the same time, two other men materialized from the woods and slid into the van.

  Micah began to run. “I want to go with her.”

  Pete ran alongside him. “They won’t let you. You’d be better going down later with Cassie. Let these guys go without a fuss now. Get them out of here before the sun’s up. There’s less of a spectacle that way.”

  Micah hadn’t begun to think beyond the moment. Looking now, he saw that the sky had indeed begun to brighten. Pete had a point. But when the deputy pulled at Micah’s arm and tried to steer him back to the cabin, Micah tugged free and ran on. He stopped at the closed door of the van, bent down, and flattened a hand on the window. His eyes met Heather’s just as Mooney started the engine, and short of running alongside until the van gained enough speed to leave him behind, he had no choice but to stay. Straightening, he stared at the head that was turned and looking back at him. He held that gaze until the van rounded a bend and disappeared down the forest drive.

  She was gone.

  Suddenly, he felt cold inside and out. Turning fast, he started back toward the house. Of the two cars he’d heard earlier, only Pete’s Lake Henry cruiser was left.

  “Some friend you are,” he muttered as he stormed past the deputy.

  “Hell, Micah, what could we do?” Pete cried, following him. “They had the warrant for her arrest.”

  “You could have said it was wrong. You could’ve said they made a mistake.”

  “We did. But, Christ, they’re FBI. It was already a federal issue. What could we do?”

  “Call us. Warn us.”

  “How would that’ve helped? Would you have run off, like you were guilty of something? This was the only way, Micah.”

  Micah took the front steps in twos, energized by anger.

  “Look at it this way,” Pete said. “They have to prove she is who they say. You think anyone here’s going to say she’s someone else? No way. So they’re going to have to dig up other people. That’ll take some time, don’t you think?”

  What Micah thought was that any amount of time he was separated from Heather was bad. He wanted her with him, and not just for the girls’ sake. He had come to depend on her gentleness, her sureness, and—yes—her practicality. He was a nuts-and-bolts guy who sometimes was so focused on the small details that he didn’t see the larger picture. Heather did. She was his helpmate when it came to being human. She was also his partner when it came to maple sugaring, and the season was about to start.

  But she wasn’t here. And he did need to see the larger picture. In this instance, that meant calling Cassie.

  Striding into the house, he shut the door before Pete could follow, then promptly forgot about Cassie. Missy stood in the middle of the living room looking crushed, and though there was no sign of Star, Micah was sure she was near. He looked around the living room, behind and under the sofa, the chairs, the large square coffee table that he had built at Heather’s direction, but it wasn’t until he looked behind him at the bookshelves flanking the front door that he spotted her. She was on the bottom shelf, tucked in beside a stack of National Geographic magazines that were a stark yellow against the pale green of her nightie. Her knees were drawn up and held close by her small arms. Her hair, dark like his but long, straight, and fine, lay over her shoulders like a shawl. Her eyes were woefully sad and knowing, and they were watching him.

  His heart lurched. It wasn’t that he had stronger feelings for Star, just that he worried more. She was a more serious child than Melissa. And introverted. Whereas Missy said what she thought, Star was quieter. She had been an infant when her mother had left—“left” being the word he used in place of “skidded off the road, went down a ravine, and burned up in the cab of her truck.” He knew that Star couldn’t possibly remember Marcy, still he was convinced that she sensed the loss. Heather was wonderful with Star. Heather was wonderful with both of his girls. And now Heather had left, too.

  Hunkering down, he caught up the child. Her arms and legs went around him as he straightened.

  Not knowing where to begin, he simply said, “Everything’s okay, baby,” as he carried her down the hall to the room the girls shared. He sether on her bed. Like Missy’s, it was a mess of gingham sheets, pillow, and down—Missy’s pink, Star’s green—all of which, again, was Heather’s doing. “And everything’s going to be okay. But you can help me out now, baby. I need you and your sister to get dressed while I make some calls. Then we’ll have breakfast together.”

  “We won’t wait for Momma,” the child said in a sure little voice.

  “No. She’ll have breakfast in town.”

  “What’ll she eat?”

  He thought for a minute. “Eggs? Waffles? If we eat the same thing, it’ll be like she’s with us. What do you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oatmeal,” Missy announced from close by. “Oatmeal’s her favorite. She’d be having that. But I can only eat it if it has lots o
f maple sugar on it.”

  “Well, we have lots of maple sugar, so we’re golden. Help your sister dress?” Micah said and, with a return of the urgency he had felt when the FBI van disappeared with Heather inside, he headed for the kitchen. Halfway there, he did an about-face and went back down the hall, this time to the room opposite the girls’. He had added this room soon after Heather moved in, hoping it would be for a child they would have together, but they’d been too busy, it seemed, growing the girls, growing the business. The floor of the room was covered with the dollhouse village he’d made for the girls and which they had arranged during a recent spate of snowy days. He had to step over the town hall and the library to reach the closet, then had to push spare clothes aside to get to the shelves built in behind.

  The knapsack was on a shelf out of reach of the girls and far to the right, well hidden by clothes and boxes of Christmas decorations that had only recently been taken down. A drab brown thing, the knapsack was small and worn. Micah didn’t know whether it had belonged to Heather herself or to someone else. To his knowledge, it was the only relic she had of her pre–Lake Henry days.

  He pulled the knapsack from the shelf and shifted the boxes on either side to fill the space. Tucking the sack under his arm—and refusing to consider what was inside—he went through the kitchen to the back hall.Jackets of various sizes hung from hooks at all heights, as did hats, lanterns, picks, and shovels, as well as a coil of plastic tubing that Micah was repairing. An assortment of footwear was lined against the wall, crowded in by the snowshoes that they’d been using each day when they trekked up the hill to the sugarbush to clear away winter litter and to check the mainline for damage in anticipation of sugaring time.

  But he wasn’t going to the sugarbush now. Stepping into the largest boots in the pile, he pulled on a jacket and stuffed the knapsack inside. For good measure, lest anyone be watching from the woods, he grabbed the plastic tubing and went out, down the back steps and over the well-packed snow on an oft-trodden path. The sugarhouse stood several hundred feet up the hill from the house. It was a long stone building with a large cupola atop, through which steam from the evaporator escaped when the sap was being boiled down.

  Nothing escaped it now. There was no sweet scent, no air of anticipation. The sugarhouse and woods alike were cold and still.

  Feeling only dread, Micah slipped inside and shut the door behind him. He went through the main room, past yards of stainless steel equipment, into the newly finished addition that still smelled of fresh lumber. This room was part kitchen, with a huge stove, rows of cabinets and shelves, and worktables for making candy from syrup, and part office, with Heather’s computer on a desk and file cabinets nearby. Along an unoccupied wall of the kitchen half of the room, Micah set the tubing on a pile of other repaired coils.

  Returning to the main room, he went to the far end where sugar wood was stacked high and deep. The wood here was a fraction of what he would use when the season began. The rest lay outside, beyond the large double doors that opened to allow an iron flatcar to bring wood in from outside along rails embedded in the floor. Back by those doors, at the rear end of the inside stack, he pulled off three logs at a time. When he found one with a significant curve, he tucked the tattered bag into the pile, put that log back, then the rest. Brushing his hands off on his jacket, he left the shed.

  Back in the kitchen, he called Cassie Byrnes.

  * * *

  Cassie rarely slept late. Five hours a night was all she needed, which was a blessing. She would never be able to do what she did without those extra usable hours. Add on the fact that her husband and their three children were all excellent sleepers, and she could regularly count on the late night and early morning hours for work.This particular morning, she was doing town business. With the annual election newly done, she had been renamed chairman of the Lake Henry Committee for the fifth year in a row—which should have been shocking, since she was a woman and barely thirty-six, in both regards distinctly different from the older men who had traditionally run the town. But times had begun to change, and Cassie was a major doer. A lifelong resident who was articulate and effective, she was also on the correct side of the environmental issues that were the Committee’s major concern. Most often, these had to do with the loons that arrived each April, nested, and raised their young well into November. They were gone for the winter now, flown east to fish blissfully in unfrozen seacoast waters, unaware that Cassie’s current concern dealt not only with them, but with humans as well. There were many in town who, fearing for the integrity of the lake, wanted to add security in the form of three police officers, one cruiser, and the appropriate testing equipment to steadily monitor the condition of the lake. Unfortunately, these additions cost money. Cassie was currently trying to determine exactly how much, so that the strongest case could be made for increasing the real estate tax at Town Meeting in late March.

  The telephone rang. Eyes flying to the clock, she caught up the receiver. It was six-thirty in the morning. This was no pleasure call.

  “This is Cassie,” she said quietly.

  The voice on the other end was low and tight. “It’s Micah. They arrested Heather. We need your help.”

  Cassie drew a blank. The words “Heather” and “arrest” were not compatible. “What are you talking about? Who arrested her?”

  “The FBI. They say she has a whole other identity and that she killedsomeone before she moved here. Flight to avoid prosecution—that’s what they’re charging her with. Then there’s murder. And extortion. They handcuffed her, Cassie. Handcuffed her. And Pete was with them, saying the whole thing was legal.”

  Cassie remained numb for a minute. Heather Malone was her friend. They had been together the day before, barely twelve hours ago. Heather was the last person in town whom Cassie would have thought ever to be in trouble with the law. But Micah’s distress couldn’t be ignored, particularly if the local police were involved.

  Setting aside her personal thoughts along with the work she’d been doing, she reached for her briefcase. “It may be legal, but that doesn’t mean the allegations are true. I know Heather.” She was on her feet, turning off the desk light. “Where have they taken her?”

  “Concord, I think. They said there’d be a hearing this morning.”

  “Not until I’m there to represent her,” Cassie declared with a certain indignation. “Let me find out for sure where she is, then you and I will take a ride. Pick me up in fifteen minutes?”

  “Yup.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes didn’t give Micah much time to get his life in order. He and Heather had been a family long enough that he hadn’t had to worry about who would take care of the girls before and after school. Thinking about his predicament now, he could conjure up only one name, one face for the job. Of all of the people whom he and Heather called friends, this was the one he trusted most.

  Chapter Two

  Poppy Blake had been awake for some time, lying on her side facing the wall of windows. Anyone looking in would have thought she was watching dawn creep over the lake, because it was surely a breathtaking sight. Snow lay pristine over ice eighteen inches thick. Tall hemlocks and pines formed a shadowed skyscape on the islands that dotted the lake and the east shore beyond. As day arrived, a swath of brightening light climbed behind their limbs, allowing for the weakest, most delicate shards of pale yellow light to filter through. During any other season, with maples, beeches, and birch in leaf, the light would have been blocked. In winter, though, when sun was most needed, it positively twinkled.Poppy saw none of it. Her mind was miles away, in a dream place where one could erase mistakes of the past and start fresh. In that place, she wasn’t lying in bed alone. Nor was her house on one level, or the room that might have held children filled instead with equipment necessary to keep her upper body strong and her lower from atrophy. Nor, in her dream place, was there a wheelchair by the bed.

  Poppy’s legs didn’t work. They hadn’t since
a snowmobile accident twelve years before. In those twelve years, she had learned everything there was to know about life as a paraplegic—the most important lesson being that she couldn’t turn back the clock and undo things. Only by accepting them could she lead a satisfying life.

  Still, there were times when she dreamed. This morning the fantasy involved a man she had seen only a handful of times. He was five foot ten, had red hair, blue eyes, and a sexy baritone that she had heard manymore times than she’d seen the man in the flesh. He called her regularly—or used to, until she put him off one time too many. But what choice did she have? She couldn’t keep up with him from a wheelchair. Apparently he had come to agree. He hadn’t called in a month.

  The phone on her bed stand rang now—a single line, far removed from the complex system in the other room that Poppy used for business. She ran a telephone answering service for Lake Henry and the neighboring towns, and sat for much of the day before a large bank of buttons, directing calls from one place to the next, taking messages for the townsfolk, chatting with callers, passing on information. The phone on the bed stand was her personal line, and while family and friends frequently used it, they never called this early. It was barely seven in the morning. That was cause for alarm.

  In the seconds that it took to push pillows aside, turn herself over, and reach the receiver, she had horrid visions of her mother being ill. But the number illuminated on the handset wasn’t from Florida, where Maida was spending January, February, and March. It was a local number. Heather’s.

  “Hey?” she said, half greeting, half asking, wondering why her friend would be calling so early when they’d been together just the night before. But Heather wasn’t on the other end. The voice was urgent and deep.

  “It’s Micah. There’s trouble.” His next words blurred—made no sense to her at all—until he said, “I need someone to get the girls to school. Can you do it? I’m worried about Star.”