"I was so worried because November 10 came and went without a word from you. Sonora was three months old on that date, and you promised to call because it was her three months' birthday."
"Sonora," breathed Jane. "The baby. May I see her?"
Together the two of them tiptoed into the small nursery. It had, Jane realized, once been her own room. But her twin bed had been pushed into a corner and was piled with pillows like a couch, and Sonora's crib was where the bed used to be. And asleep in the crib was Sonora, sucking her thumb.
When they were back in the living room, Jane clutched Duncan's hand excitedly. "The nursery used to be my room, Duncan. I remembered it! And Sonora—she's beautiful, Moonglow. I helped deliver her, didn't I? You wanted a home birth, and I was the one who went to get the midwife."
"In a pouring rain," Moonglow agreed, finishing her sentence with that laugh of hers. "And you coached my breathing."
"It was why I moved in here, wasn't it? Your husband ran away with another woman, and you needed someone to help you pay expenses because you were going to have a baby. And I moved here from—" Jane faltered and couldn't remember any more.
"From one of the studio apartments over the general store. There was a waiting list for them, and we both thought it would be a good idea for you to live with me because it would make the studio available for someone else. As you said, I needed the help, and you were going to help me bring up the baby. You always loved babies, Celeste."
Jane grew suddenly quiet. "I can't get used to being called Celeste," she said.
"It's the only name I've ever known for you," Moonglow told her. "I remember when you came here, fresh out of a dead-end cubicle job and so eager to make a living with your weaving."
"Me? In an office job?" Jane could manage only a vague recollection of a huge office filled with cubicle after cubicle, and glaring fluorescent lights overhead, and people who spent their lunch hours speculating about the love lives of celebrities. She had never fitted in.
"Yes, and there was nothing to hold you there, no relatives except that old aunt of yours. She practically turned you out of her house when you told her that all those old newspapers piled up inside were a fire hazard and that she ought to get rid of them."
"Aunt Hildegarde," Jane said, calling to mind a sparrow-like woman who had insisted that Jane come to live with her after her parents died and then proceeded to make Jane's life miserable with her irrational outbursts.
"You got a letter from her doctor after you left here. I opened it because when I saw the doctor's name on the return address, I thought it might have something to do with your disappearance. She died in a nursing home. I didn't know how to let you know," Moonglow said.
Jane was silent for a moment, wishing that she could have done something to help her aunt, but they had parted on bad terms. That much she did remember.
"I'm sorry," Moonglow said softly.
Jane shook her head. "It's okay," she said with a sigh. For so long she'd wondered if she had any family, and it was a deep disappointment to know that Aunt Hildegarde was gone even though the two of them had never liked each other.
"Why didn't you report Jane missing?" Duncan asked.
Moonglow looked uncomfortable. "I did, but the local cops didn't take me seriously. They said that Celeste was a grown woman who left here of her own free will, and that if it was her choice to disappear, there was nothing to be done about it. The police have never had a high opinion of our community, I'm sorry to say. I think they thought I was another nut job like Fenton Murdock, who managed to get arrested for disturbing the peace on a couple of occasions." She took Jane's hand. "I looked for you on Facebook. I kept calling you on your phone. I texted and emailed but had no idea if the messages went through. I'm so sorry, dear friend. So, so sorry."
The two women embraced, holding each other for a long time, and by the time they separated, all three of them had tears in their eyes.
Moonglow blotted at her eyes. "Look at me," she said. "I'm forgetting my manners. I've baked fresh gingerbread. You'll have some, won't you? It will be good to talk some more."
They trooped into the kitchen, Jane and Moonglow arm in arm, and sat around a round oak table, eating as they pieced together Jane's story.
"What I can't figure out," Duncan said, "is how Jane got into Carlton Jones's field."
"I think she was somehow abducted on the road," Moonglow hypothesized. "Somebody hit her on the head and left her for dead."
"But why? And where is her van? It's hard to hide a big blue van," Duncan replied.
Jane tried in vain to remember driving away from Shanti Village in the van. She tried to recall if she had stopped anywhere along the way. It was no use. She couldn't recall anything about the trip.
"If I was going to Ohio, I was a long way from there when they found me outside Tyree, Illinois," she reminded them.
"Whoever kidnapped you headed in that direction," Moonglow offered. "That makes sense."
"If only I could remember," Jane said. Her memory loss was even more frustrating now that she could recall so many other things. She wondered if she would ever find out exactly what had happened in the time between the moment she left Shanti Village and the morning that Carlton and Ollie Jones found her in the ditch.
One thing she did know after talking with Moonglow. She was not now nor had she ever been married.
"You almost got engaged once," Moonglow told her. "It was to a guy who worked in that office with you. He didn't have any appreciation of your weaving, and you finally decided that you couldn't spend your life with someone who admitted that the highlight of his year was watching the Super Bowl. That was one of the reasons you sought us out at Shanti Village."
Jane glanced at Duncan. He had gone limp with relief. She smiled at him, and he rewarded her with a wide grin. He reached over beneath the table and squeezed her hand.
Moonglow wouldn't hear of their going out for dinner. Instead she prepared a vegetarian meal in a wok, and even though Duncan had misgivings about eating it, he managed to down two full plates.
Later Jane played with Sonora, marveling over all the words she could say, and Sonora, now a bouncing twenty months old, brought all of her favorite toys out of the closet and laid them one by one in Jane's lap until Jane was almost hidden under a heap of rubber duckies and fluffy stuffed animals. Duncan thought how lovely Jane looked with her face pressed against the baby's silky hair, the tiny clutching fingers wrapped around her thumb.
At that moment he was supremely thankful that Jane had no husband and children to whom she must return because he, he wanted to be the one to give her children. He could imagine it—little replicas of Jane and himself leading llamas around the ranch. That reminded him that he was supposed to call Rooney. He went out to the car, where he'd left his cell phone.
Duncan's conversation with Rooney left him worried. Rooney sounded overwhelmed by dealing with the problems of running the ranch as well as holding the headstrong Mary Kate in check. It was, he knew, time to go home, and he made reservations for the next day on a flight to Cheyenne.
Jane and Moonglow parted tearfully after Jane promised to stay in touch, leaving the Placid Valley Ranch address, phone number, and Duncan's email address in case Moonglow needed to reach her.
"I'll be there until spring," Jane promised Moonglow.
And beyond, Duncan thought to himself, imagining Jane in summer, with her hair bound back by a bright satin ribbon, riding along beside him on Diggory, the horse that he'd decided should be hers. He tried to catch Jane's eye, but she was handing Sonora back to her mother and didn't see. He couldn't wait until they could be alone.
Duncan found an upscale hotel in Terre Haute where he checked them into the best room in the house and, still hungry after his experimental foray into vegetarianism, ordered a steak from room service. He ordered one for Jane, too, thinking to celebrate the end of their search. But when they sat at the table across from each other, the candle that the waiter had
lighted with such a flourish casting a golden glow on their faces, she appeared distant, thoughtful. She seems, he thought with a certain amount of disbelief, like someone I don't know very well.
The thought, once it wormed its way into his consciousness, wouldn't go away. Maybe it was because today he had seen Jane in a place that was totally different from the surroundings—his ranch—where he had first come to know her. Shanti Village was a rarefied kind of environment, a place for artsy-craftsy people, the kind of people with whom he had never associated. In fact, all that talk about Fenton Murdock and selling handbags to boutiques seemed to have little to do with the Jane Rhodes he knew.
The Celeste Norton whom he knew, he corrected himself. Only he didn't think he would ever be able to call her by that name. To him she would always be Jane. Dear, sweet, wonderful Jane. He smiled at her across the table, a little light-headed from the champagne he'd ordered. But she wasn't smiling. Now she was talking animatedly about the day's events, hardly noticing his own silence.
"After all this time, it's amazing to find the place where I belong. It felt so right sitting there in Moonglow's house and playing with her baby," she said, alight with excitement. "I loved living there when I was a member of that community, and I'm so sorry I've missed this much of Sonora's life." Her face was earnest, and he had never seen her so animated.
Duncan stopped in midchew and forced himself to swallow. Jane's affinity for these people and that lifestyle was a development for which he hadn't prepared himself. "You don't have any urge to return to Shanti Village, do you?" he asked, the words catching in his throat. He had to ask.
"I don't know," she said. "It's all so new."
The faraway light came back to her eyes, her mind clearly drifting elsewhere. All her tension seemed to be vibrating at a new and higher frequency. Her sensibilities were focused on Shanti Village, he could tell. While they were there and visiting with her old friend, he hadn't realized that the place had such a strong attraction for her.
Suddenly Duncan couldn't eat any more. "You're coming back to the ranch with me tomorrow, aren't you?" he asked abruptly.
The air fell deadly quiet, and it seemed like an eternity until her eyes lifted to his.
"I don't know," she said again, a forlorn note creeping into her tone. "I just don't know."
Duncan set down his fork and pushed back his chair from the table. He missed the barn, his usual refuge when things weren't going right, and he felt as though he might be sick. Things had been going well, and he'd felt terrific about their future. Now he felt a tremendous letdown.
He went to the window and stared out. They had left the draperies open, and the lights of the town twinkled up at him. Car headlights crawled along the length of the bridge across the Wabash River. His own reflection stared back at him, and he blinked.
Jane's reflection slid into place behind him on the darkened window. She wore a bleak expression, and for once he was tired of it. Tired of always putting her first, tired of constantly thinking of her well-being, tired of the pressure they had both been under for days, even weeks. What about his needs? He loved her. He loved her! And he needed her. They all did, Rooney and Mary Kate and him, they had become a family, and now she was ruining it.
"Duncan," she said, touching his arm.
If they had been at the ranch, he would probably have slammed out of the house and walked over to the barn to cool off. But they weren't at the ranch. They were having a late supper in a pricey hotel room in Terre Haute, Indiana, with a table set with gleaming silver and a rose in a silver bud vase, and a candle flickering mellow light over all of it. A candle for Pete's sake, and it was supposed to be romantic, but it wasn't! That made him angry.
"Damn," he swore softly under his breath.
"Duncan, I just don't know," Jane said brokenly.
"Well," he said, "just when will you 'know'?"
She responded to the unexpected sarcasm in his tone by drawing back as though he had struck her, and uncertainty flickered in her eyes.
"What I mean is, now we've found out all the information you wanted, whether you have a home and a family, who you are, where you lived, even right down to old Aunt Hildegarde, and you don't know. What else is there to find out, Jane?"
"I—"
"Let me answer that," he said, turning around to face her. He took in the eyes widened in surprise and hurt, the fingernails bitten to the quick, and hardened his heart. He had waited long enough. He'd been patient, and what he wanted now was commitment.
"I'll tell you what there is to find out," he went on. "Just one thing. And that is if you love me or not."
He watched as color suffused her face. The hurt in her eyes almost broke his resolve because he hated to see her suffering. He worked to control his emotions.
"Of course I love you, Duncan, but it's all so hard to deal with. Finding out that I have a real name, that I apparently had a satisfying life at Shanti Village, that I'm fully capable of earning my own living as a weaver—it's a shock." She stopped when she saw the vein pulsing at his temple, then drew a deep breath and went on.
"And the ranch—naturally I'm grateful to you for letting me stay there and helping me get on my feet and for believing in me when no one else did. You and Rooney and Mary Kate have treated me so well. I love all of you. But just because I've found out who I am and where I once lived doesn't mean that the quest is all over for me. I'm still searching. Trying to figure out where I fit in. If I go back to the ranch with you now, you'll be on my mind every second, I'll live only for you. I'd always wonder if I could have made it here on my own and if my previous life was the one I should have chosen." Her chest heaved, and her hands were clenched into tight little fists at her sides.
"I never dreamed that you might want to stay here," he responded, devastated by her words. He'd had such high hopes, and now they were fading one by one
Her voice fell into a gentler cadence. She laid a hand on his arm. "Would you rather I pretended that everything is okay? That would be as bad as lying, and you know how I feel about doing any more of that."
For once Duncan wished that she'd never developed her penchant for telling the truth. Lies could be so much simpler—for a while, at least.
"Duncan?" she said, waiting for him to speak.
Duncan's anger subsided suddenly. He saw her point. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. The anger had been replaced by an ache in the vicinity of his heart.
"I was going to make love to you tonight," he said heavily. "It wouldn't be such a good idea, would it?" He risked a look at her agonized face.
She looked as though she might cry, and he hoped she wouldn't. His jaw clenched in resistance. If she cried, he'd want to comfort her, and that would lead to something more, and all at once he yearned to feel her cool hand against the back of his neck, her soft lips against his.
Although he stood motionless and, he liked to think, stolidly, she reached up and put her arms around him. He forced himself to think of something else, anything else, anything but her small body pressed against his.
But then she pulled his head down. His arms involuntarily circled her and tightened so that she drew even closer, and as she found his lips with hers, his detachment dissolved entirely.
She began to unbutton his shirt, and for a moment his hand stayed hers, but she brushed him away impatiently and kept unbuttoning. He kissed her more deeply, a long, passionate kiss, and by the time it was over he was completely undressed and she was feathering her fingers across his back, something that always excited him.
Somehow he managed to get her clothes off, she was telling him over and over that she loved him, and they fell back onto the bed.
They had shared a bed before, but never like this, throwing back the bed covers, tangling in them, expressing all their pent-up passion. Her ardor surprised him, and he was amazed at the way she abandoned herself to pleasurable sensation. He touched her breast, reverently at first, then cupping it to his mouth so that she moaned and t
hen sighed his name. And when he lifted his head she was smiling at him, a smile full of love. Then he knew that it was real, that she really did love him, and that he loved her more than he had even admitted to himself.
If he had thought she would have said yes, he would have asked her to marry him there and then. For that was what he wanted, to live with her forever at Placid Valley Ranch, and there was no doubt in his mind that it was meant to be. But he had done all he could to help her, and if she wasn't sure what she wanted now, perhaps she would never know. And, as she had once said about his relationship with his wife, it was better to have had something than nothing. Now they would have this night.
The light from the bedside lamp was shining full into his eyes, and she reached over to turn it out, the vulnerable slender white underside of her arm brushing his face for a brief moment. When it was dark he tumbled her over and slid his thigh between the gentle softness of hers.
As his eyes adjusted to the glow from the candle on the table, she seemed to float beneath him, light and buoyant, and then he was part of her, being absorbed into her body, knowing her, knowing.
Now it didn't matter if there were things that she still didn't know, that there were uncertainties, because for all time he would know, would know this. And for the moment, it was all he wanted.
* * *
He drove her to Shanti Village the next morning. She sat close beside him, her face pale and drawn, her lips swollen from their lovemaking the night before.
"I'll call you," she promised as they stood on Moonglow's doorstep beside her suitcase.
"I wish you'd come with me," he told her. He had misgivings about leaving her here even though he knew she would be safe with a friend who cared about her.
She tried to smile. "I know," she answered, and bent to lift the suitcase.
"I'll stop by Mrs. Beasley's store and pick up the dress to take to Mary Kate," he told her, wanting to postpone his leave-taking as long as he could.
"Thank you, Duncan. For everything," she added. She wished she knew what else to say. She was more grateful than he could know, but she was on a journey of self-discovery. He couldn't follow her, nor would she have wanted that.
Until Spring Page 21