Moss indulged in a few choice and expressive words that made Cynthia grin. “Don’t let me hear you talking that way in front of your niece,” she pretended to scold.
She was thankful for the restored relationship she had with this older brother and for the genuine friendship between her and Lynne. Two years ago she would have been alone trying to protect her daughter.
They talked for another half hour and she felt herself settling into a calmer mood so that when they said goodnight, she felt that she might actually be able to sleep. But after Moss had gone to his room, she slipped on a coat and went out the kitchen door instead into the clear cold of the winter night and rounded the house to stroll down the lane that led to the road.
She heard coyotes crying in the distance, but had learned to almost enjoy the eerie sound. At the end of the drive, she unlocked the gate and, almost instinctively, headed for the big mailbox that stood on its post near the road.
Of course Lynne or Moss would have picked up the mail hours ago. She told herself that even as she opened the box and reached into the darkness inside. Somehow she wasn’t surprised when she felt the thin envelope.
Hurriedly locking the gate she jogged to the house and found herself shaking with cold by the time she got inside. She tiptoed through the house and in her own room, crawled under the coverlet still wearing her clothes, and began to read.
Dear Cynthia,
She gave a snort of laughter. When did ‘Mrs. Burden’ turn to ‘Cynthia’?
Help.
I know you hoped to never hear from me again, but I am in great need of sympathetic attention. Currently I am being detained in my room by my loving father, sweet daughter, and bossy housekeeper, and am deprived of books to read or any company other than family.
You see I have had the misfortune to contract that embarrassing childhood disease measles. It is, of course, quite beneath my dignity to be covered with red spots at my advanced age, but my father assures me that somehow I avoided the illness as a child. And so it is that I am in a period of forced inactivity unless a true emergency arises, in which case as I am the town’s only doctor, I will be allowed to lend assistance.
The point of this rambling communication is that I would much appreciate an occasional letter and would even be glad of your advice on the twin subjects of child raising and dark moods since having the measles has sent me into a particularly dark mood.
So, as a starter question for the anticipated written dialogue between us: Do you find sometimes that though your daughter is only eight, she still seems to think she is in charge of you rather than the other way around?”
I will be awaiting your reply with bated breath. (Right now I don’t have much else to occupy my time).
Yours
Evan
Cynthia couldn’t help smiling as she climbed from under the covers, her body warmed after the brief sojourn into the wintry outside world. She found a tablet of lined paper she’d bought in town when she and Betsy went shopping for clothes and other necessities. The paper meant for Betsy’s school work. She had a pen in her purse and Lynne always had business envelopes by the computer in the study.
Poor Evan suffering with the measles; she would write a return letter right now and mail it first thing in the morning.
Dear Evan,
Haven’t you heard of vaccinations? They’ve had a shot for measles for years now. Oops, I forgot that back in 1890 that hadn’t been invented yet. Ha!
Seriously you should listen to your daughter. She knows what she’s talking about. Measles for a man of your advanced years is no joke.
I find it hard to imagine that you’re having trouble with your eight-year-old. My Betsy is, of course, perfectly behaved. That’s meant to be another joke in case you didn’t know. Yes, somehow in the last year it seems that there are times when she’s the mother and I’m the kid. She’s trying out being grownup, but underneath she still needs the security of knowing that her mom is bigger and hopefully wiser and is looking out for her. Well, if not wiser, then at least more experienced.
We are visiting my brother and his wife once more because my ex-husband is giving us trouble again. I don’t want him to cause Betsy anymore pain. It’s hard to explain, but he tries to use her to get what he wants from me. She knows he’s a phony, but at the same time every little girl wants to feel that her dad truly loves her.
To get back to the subject of your Eddie. I’m sure it has occurred to you that she might be particularly protective of you because of having lost her mom. Deep underneath she may have a fear that she’ll lose you too.
Hope you get over the measles (assuming you actually have that ailment) quickly.
Yours,
Cynthia
After she’d finished her own letter, she looked at his again. He’d scrawled it in pencil instead of using the formal script he’d employed in previous letters. He’d written like a man who might actually be unwell and even feverish. Maybe he really did have the measles.
She undressed and went to bed, lying in the darkness and trying to puzzle out the enigma that was Evan Stephens.
Evan was feeling well enough to be miserable with his enforced confinement when Mrs. Myers brought him the letter. “Maybe I should read it to you,” the housekeeper suggestion, “to spare your eyes.”
“No! It’s private. It won’t strain my eyes just to read one little letter.” He glared at her cheerful face.
She chuckled. Thin and spare of build, Melissa Myers was the best cook in town. It was a tribute to both her culinary talents and her likable personality that she’d been pursued by the town’s older bachelors after the death of her husband about seven years ago when she was only sixty, but she’d said she liked her independence and instead taken on the job of looking after the Stephens family by day and working in her spectacular yard in her spare time.
Dad seemed to take her for granted, but to Evan with a one-year-old daughter to look after, she was a blessing for which he was daily grateful.
Now she studied him thoughtfully. “Got a lady friend?”
“I didn’t say that,” he denied immediately.
“Well, it’s about time.”
“Is that kind of like the pot calling the kettle black?” he asked with considerable amusement.
“A man alone needs someone,” she insisted. “Men aren’t nearly as good at independence as women.”
He decided to let her continue in her illusion about his love life if it meant that he was to be allowed to read Cynthia’s letter by himself, though he smiled at the thought of he and Cynthia as a couple. He was just following Maud’s orders in writing to her granddaughter. Nothing else to it.
He opened the envelope and read, his smile turning into an actual laugh as he took in the words on the page, only sobering as he read the closing about Eddie’s being fearful that after losing her mom, she might lose her dad too.
He was accustomed to thinking about his daughter as a little girl, but she was growing up and no doubt fears stirred in her mind that he never expected. As a doctor’s daughter, too, she knew more about the reality of life and death than the average child.
How perceptive of Cynthia to perceive all this just from what little she knew about him. He frowned at the idea that she was actually afraid of her former husband. He must have been a really terrible person for Cynthia to end the marriage.
He would write and encourage her to stand her ground against this man and make sure her daughter remained in her keeping.
But when he slipped the pages back in the envelope, putting it under his pillow for a further reading, the thing that lingered in his mind was her sense of humor and her quick understanding of his attempts to be funny.
He was beginning to think it was a real shame that there was no chance in the world that he would ever meet this granddaughter of Maud’s.
Chapter Six
“Onion sandwiches!” Betsy scrunched her pretty face into a scowl. “That sounds awful.”
Cynthia t
ook another bite of the delicious enchiladas her brother had made for supper, reached for a second taco and considered. Betsy Ray’s dad always made onion sandwiches for Sunday night supper when his daughters brought their friends to the house in the Betsy-Tacy novels that were her childhood favorites. Well, to tell the truth she still liked to go back and re-read the ones about when the girls and their friends were in their teens. While she chewed, she pondered which book was her favorite, Heavens to Betsy! or Betsy and the Great World.
“Come on, Mom,” the Betsy who she had named for her favorite fictional character demanded. “Would you truly want to eat an onion sandwich?”
“Maybe if it was heaped with cheese and ham,” Moss suggested.
Cynthia considered. “She didn’t mention anything but onions as best I can remember. But she made them sound so good. And Betsy and her friends were always making fudge.”
“Now that I could live with,” Lynne contributed. “Though in my family we always baked brownies. Mom’s rule was if you make a mess, you have to clean up. That tended to restrain my efforts.”
Cynthia eyed her sister-in-law’s heart-shaped face with a degree of envy. “You grew up in a real family,” she charged.
“Hey,” Lynne responded with a grin, “and I have the scars to prove it.”
Cynthia and Moss exchanged glances. They knew how close Lynne was to her large family and would feel a sense of loss for the rest of their lives over the injustice of how their own family had been destroyed.
Betsy ignored the byplay among the adults. “I need a family,” she said.
Cynthia tensed, afraid she was going to bring up the subject of her absentee father. Michael, having discovered where they were, had taken to calling daughter every other day. Betsy was polite enough, but afterwards she was cross and jittery, anything but her usual balanced self.
Cynthia wasn’t certain that forbidding the conversations was the right thing to do.
Betsy surprised her. “I’d really like a sister,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” her Uncle Moss responded, “What’s wrong with a brother?”
Betsy’s answer was conclusive. “No, I want a sister. Then we can be best friends.”
“A brother can be a friend.”
“A brother is a boy,” Betsy told him with open scorn.
Moss looked at Cynthia in such a comical way that she couldn’t help laughing. “I am rather fond of my big brother,” she admitted.
“Would a cousin do?” Lynne asked.
It took a moment for Cynthia to take this in. Then she gasped, looking from Lynne’s shining eyes to Moss’s tender glance at his wife. “You’re not kidding?”
Moss shook his head. “You’re going to be an aunt, Cyn,” he said proudly.
“Wow!” Cynthia whispered. “Just wow!”
Betsy frowned at her mother. “What are you talking about?”
“We’re going to have a baby,” her uncle told her, “Lynne and me.”
Betsy considered. “A boy or a girl?”
Lynne laughed. “Either will be fine.”
“Will it come tomorrow?”
“Afraid not honey,” this time Moss took up the challenge. “It’ll take a little longer than that.”
“Oh.” With a disappointed look that indicated that anything in the far future was hardly worth talking about, Betsy went back to her supper, but for the adults the evening was one of celebration.
Moss and Lynne had been through so much. Cynthia was delighted for them, and for herself too. Her tiny family was going to be enlarged by one.
Winter was softening its stance, the days were varied, one day cold and the next almost spring-like. Today having been one of the spring days, the evening felt soft and dark around her as she strolled the pasture in the dark, leaving the rest of the family to watch a favorite television show.
She and Evan exchanged letters on a regular basis now. He’d been called back to work before he was completely recovered because of an accident involving a farmer, a horse and a broken leg—belonging to the farmer, not the horse. Otherwise it would have been the vet’s responsibility.
Still he took time to write his brief, but witty letters and she was almost beginning to feel she knew this man with his laidback sense of humor and his tolerance for the variety of personalities who lived in his little town. His cantankerous father, the no-nonsense housekeeper, and especially tomboy Eddie who tried to look after her dad were all as real to her as the people in the household where she currently lived.
She didn’t spend much time anymore wondering if Lavender, Texas was a real place. Oh, she’d done several more searches and hadn’t found a town by that name in the area of Texas where Evan said he lived. He said his Lavender was about seventy miles northeast of Dallas.
She could see the town in her mind, rambling across wooded hills, populated with streets mixed with cottages and the occasional big old Victorian mansion. Evan said he lived in one of the Victorians, but that it had been built only a few years ago by his dad. Forrest Stephens liked to show off a bit, Evan had commented, to show how he’d become a success in the world even though he wasn’t a doctor like his dad.
She supposed she’d pasted a vision from the lifestyle in the Betsy-Tacy books on to Evan’s Lavender, Texas. That way she could imagine church suppers, families singing around the piano together, holidays where everybody got together for neighborhood parties.
Though in Maud Lovelace’s books, of course, the happenings were in Minnesota and given to snow and ice skating and things like that. She’d have to think more in terms of swimming in ponds and wienie roasts.
It couldn’t be real, of course, Evan was painting a picture of a time in which she wished she’d lived. Back then a Victorian house could be newly built because Queen Victoria was still on the throne in England and doctors still make house calls on their patients.
She stopped to study the sliver of a wintery moon and let her thoughts slide back into reality. As a last recourse she’d hoped to be able to take Betsy to live in some obscure place where Michael couldn’t find them. Their passports had been in hand, reservations were being made, but before she could make a move, he slapped her with an injunction to prevent her from taking Betsy out of the country.
Through her lawyers, she’d offered more money, but he’d turned her down. All he wanted, he said, was his daughter.
His daughter and the money he would be able to gain over the years as the custodial parent. In fact, the way things stood right now, if she died tomorrow, Betsy would inherit her estate and her wish to declare her brother and his wife as guardians might be set aside in Michael’s favor. He would have everything then.
Her court date came up next week in California and he was appealing for full custody based on his wife’s ‘unstable mental condition.’ She couldn’t help being frightened, though Moss and Lynne tried to assure her that nobody would take Betsy away from her.
They didn’t know Michael the way she did. They hadn’t experienced how he could make people believe him. And she didn’t trust the legal system. Just look what had happened to Moss back when he was just a kid. It had taken years for that injustice to be recognized.
She sighed. Time to go back in and spend some time with Betsy before she had to go to bed, but right now she wished for an escape hatch. If only Evan’s make-believe Lavender was a real place and she could take Betsy back to 1890 where her father would never be able to harm her.
She sat down to write a sweet, wistful letter about what it would be like to live in an earlier, better time.
Chapter Seven
Mrs. Myers had more than enough to do looking after Eddie and the house, even though these days she had the assistance of a granddaughter to help with the cleaning, but still with her green fingers she couldn’t just allow the grounds of Forrest Stephen’s big house to be left to the gardener who came in occasionally to keep the yard from being all weeds and overgrown grass.
So it was that Evan came home one Sa
turday evening to find the spring scented with honeysuckle, wisteria and lilacs and to see bright blooms popping up in the flower beds.
It had been a mixed kind of day with a variety of spring colds, a little late influenza and two births, both of healthy baby boys. Old Mrs. Carnes, who was well past eighty, was fading away before his eyes, however, and he never knew when the latest visit to her cottage would be the last. Her daughters took turns dropping in to see to her needs, though she scolded fiercely that she was perfectly capable of looking after herself.
She was one of those special people that the community would sorely miss. She made him think of Maud, who seemed to have given up on visiting his dreams lately. Maybe she felt she’d done all she could for him now that he was in a regular correspondence with her granddaughter.
He’d recovered well enough from his untimely case of measles, though he still tired easily and had to keep pushing on no matter how he felt to see to the needs of his patients. The illness had stirred up an old fear of what would happen to the townspeople when he passed on. No young person with an interest in studying medicine had yet stepped up, though he kept out a constant lookout for just such an individual.
Well, no doubt he was worrying prematurely. He was still in his thirties and Grandpa had practiced until he was older than most people lived to be. But there was always the danger of an accident of some sort. Hell, he could have died of the blasted measles. He needed a backup plan and couldn’t seem to come up with one.
Lavender was a beautiful little town at this time of year, its greening lawns and spring blooms decorated the yards of homes along streets that wound through the low hills. This part of Crockett Street was paved with bricks. Funds had been raised by residents back when Grandpa was the only doctor in town and were much admired, though the wide dirt streets that adorned the more modest area of town had their own beauty, Evan sometimes thought. As a physician, he was familiar with every inch of the little town and if he sometimes longed to visit more exciting places like Paris, London or even not so faraway Dallas, he kept those feelings to himself.
Letters From Another Town: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series Book 2) Page 4