“Those men were looking for something, and we were intruding.” She looked down, plucking invisible lint or threads or something off her pretty dress. “They’ve probably already found it.”
“Maybe not. We might have scared them off, too. I’ll go hitch the horses.” He drained his cup of coffee as he strode back through the kitchen. “We’re off.”
“Be careful.” Ma met his gaze and held it long enough that he suspected she meant for him to be careful with more than the journey out to the wreck.
Be careful with Mia’s heart? Be careful with his own?
Mia seemed bent on pretending she hadn’t said anything about Charmaine the night before. She chattered in that sparkly, lively way he remembered too well, telling him about her morning’s work.
“I interviewed Genevieve and a few others earlier this morning, then I started to write about the women students and what I’ve gleaned so far, but then words about the wreck kept intruding, so I’ve been writing about that instead. I think the editor will love a story about how the town has come together to help everyone stranded. You know, it’s truly amazing. I’d forgotten how much people here care about one another.”
“Unlike in the city?”
“I wouldn’t say they don’t care in the city. They just don’t open their doors so trustingly. There are more people, so knowing whom to trust is more difficult. But here . . . you know which are the rotten apples right away.” She stared at the portfolio she clutched on her lap, smoothing her fingers back and forth on the battered leather cover. “I didn’t realize I missed it until I found myself back here, needing help.”
Ayden stared at those smoothing fingers, something swelling inside his chest. “No one was particularly good to you the first four years you were here.”
“People can’t be good to you if you don’t let them. The stationer offered to let me have all the pencils I wanted after that incident with Deputy Lambert catching me. But I wouldn’t take charity. I burned sticks in the fire and wrote with the charcoal ends instead.”
“Ah, Mia.” Ayden leaned his head against the back of the sleigh seat. “Is that why you’re so eager to get everything you have on your own? You’re still that ridiculously proud sixteen-year-old girl with more pride than sense?”
And no family left, as the aunt had died five years ago, and the others had sent her away long ago.
“I think,” she said by way of not responding to him, “that’s the car I was in.”
Ayden reined in and leaped out first this time, dropped the reins over a tree stump, and offered Mia a hand out of the sleigh. She set her portfolio on the seat, then clambered to the ground. Together, they strode through the drifts and hollows of snow to the abandoned car.
Ayden crouched at the edge of the car. “Let me lift you in.”
He did and wished she were less scrawny beneath her heavy clothes, because he didn’t want to worry about her taking good enough care of herself.
She hesitated in the doorway, then shook herself and led the way back through the car. “I was sitting here—ah, fifty cents.” She snatched up the quarters and dropped them into her pocket.
“And a comb.” Ayden fished it from beneath the seat.
They spent several minutes peering under and between the seats in search of dropped objects. They would take them to the church for passengers to collect. The rack above the seats appeared to be picked clean of luggage. Perhaps the passengers had taken it with them, good persons had collected it and taken it into town to be claimed, or thieves had been at work—likely a combination of all three.
“The wounded lady was back here.” Mia moved to the space in front of the car’s rear door. “I think she was coming after the child when the trains collided, and when she fell, she broke her leg.”
“Then how’d she get away?”
“Someone took her out the back?”
Their eyes met.
“Why?” Ayden asked.
“And without the boy.” Mia grasped the upper rack with her good hand and started to step onto a seat.
Ayden grasped her waist. “What are you doing?”
She froze. “Looking more thoroughly into the rack.”
“I’ll do it, but I’m tall enough to see there’s nothing there.”
“Not so much as a postage stamp?”
“Nothing.”
Mia drew away from him and dropped to the floor, which was coated in frozen mud. “One last look beneath . . . the . . . seat . . .” Her voice trailed off on a kind of squeak.
“Are you hurt?” Ayden reached for her.
She evaded him and rocked back on her heels, waving a grubby white envelope in the air. “Wedged between the seat and the wall but not fallen all the way through. Should we open it?”
Her eyes shone as though someone had lit gas lamps behind them.
Ayden took the envelope from her and turned it over. “It’s not sealed.” His fingers shook, and his insides vibrated. “It might be nothing more than a shopping list.”
“But you don’t think so.” She laughed. “Your eyes are sparkling.”
He felt like a child on his birthday as he pulled up the flap of the envelope and drew out a single half sheet of paper. His breath snagged in his throat, and the blood drained from his head.
“What is it, Ayden?” Mia’s face paled.
Ayden handed her the paper. “It looks like a ransom note.”
Chapter Nine
Mia braced her feet on the front board of the sleigh and grasped the seat with her good hand. Those precautions barely kept her from sliding onto the floor during their wild ride back to Hillsdale. When they found no deputies around the train, Ayden seemed to throw caution to the wind and urged the horses to fly along the runner ruts in the snow. Wind whipped into Mia’s face, stinging her cheeks. If she looked anything like Ayden, her face was as red as a freshly ripened strawberry. Long before they reached town, the stinging turned to numbness, and water from her eyes froze on her cheeks.
Broad Street, in the middle of the afternoon, had grown too crowded for speed. Grumbling about people afraid to drive their sleighs or wagons faster than a crawl, Ayden reined in the team to match the pace of the traffic.
“Shall I take you home first?” Those were the first words he had spoken to her since they agreed they needed to get the note to the sheriff as quickly as possible.
She glared at him. “Of course not. I’m a witness.”
“But after the last encounter with Fletcher, I thought—”
“I wouldn’t want to encounter any more arresting officers?” Her smile was stiff, brittle, the corners of her eyes tight. “I wasn’t a serious criminal, you know. I only took pencils and paper, nothing more costly.”
He drew up the horses. “Until you stole my heart.” He intended the remark to tease her, make her laugh.
She wrapped her arms around her portfolio as though it protected her heart from any invasion, and lifted her chin. “Like the pencils, I gave it back. If you no longer have it to give away, it’s none of my doing. Perhaps you lost it somewhere between breaking your word to me and your ambition.” She stepped from the sleigh and spun away, sending her skirts swirling around her like a cloud.
Ayden reached her in two strides and slipped his hand beneath her elbow. “I thought you believed I love Charmaine Finney.”
“I do. You do—with your head. That is still in excellent working condition and looking more handsome than ever. The two of you will make a fine pair at college socials and the faculty dinners.”
“Could we save this for the fencing floor?”
“Date and time?”
“Thursday morning on campus. I have two victims for your pen there.”
“I’ll be there. And right now, we need to be here.” She headed for the sheriff’s office.
Different people milled around the warmth of the stove, and a middle-aged deputy stood behind the desk. Otherwise, the office remained the same—stuffy and odorous. The deputy showed no
recognition of Mia but practically bowed to Ayden.
“How may I help you, Professor?”
“We need to speak to the sheriff right away.” Ayden stuffed his hands into his coat pockets, and the note crackled.
“He’s busy, but I’ll see if he’ll give you a minute.” The deputy pushed through a door behind him.
Mia arched one brow at Ayden.
“His son is in one of my classes.”
“Ah. I wondered at the reverence.”
“Don’t be absurd.” The corners of Ayden’s mouth twitched.
Mia looked away, her fingers pressed to her own lips as though doing so could shove back the memory of kissing him for the first time. The corners of his mouth had twitched then over something silly she’d said. Then, without warning, he leaned forward and—
“Professor Goswell, how may I help you?” The aging sheriff stood in the doorway to the back office.
“We need to talk in private.” Ayden glanced toward the watchful, listening people near the stove.
The sheriff nodded his understanding and led them into a back room with a stove and hot coffee and straight-backed chairs. Ayden introduced Mia, and the sheriff gave her a hard look. “I’ve heard of you, Miss Roper.”
“Yes, sir. I went to the college with your son.”
“Ah, yes, good of you to return to us, though not here, I expect.”
“No, it’s not good.” Mia perched on the edge of the chair and told the chief about finding the little boy right before the wreck.
He nodded as she spoke. “Mr. Goswell told me about it the other morning. I’ve put the word out here in town, but no one’s come forward to claim him.”
“We’re here,” Ayden said, “because we think we’ve found out why they haven’t.” He handed the sheriff the ransom note.
The man studied the half sheet of cheap paper, the block letters formed with what seemed to be a bit of coal for they smudged at the merest touch. Nonetheless, the message was clear: Fifty thousand dollars if you want to see Jamie again.
“Hmm.” The sheriff laid the note on his desk and steepled his hands beneath his stubbly chin. “So how did you come across this?”
They told their stories again. The chief listened, nodded, and at the end, shook his head.
“You have no reason to believe this was tied to that child you found. After all, the ransom note was in the same train car. What good would it do there?”
“I expect whoever took him intended to mail it along the route to divert any hunters off the track,” Mia suggested. “And it may be the reason someone shot at us the other day. They could have been looking for it.”
The sheriff gave her a condescending smile. “That sounds like the sort of far-fetched idea a writer would come up with.”
Mia stiffened. “I write true stories, sir, not fiction.”
“Sir,” Ayden said, rather too quickly, “this does add up, you know. An abandoned child, a ransom note found in the same area, a woman who has disappeared.”
“Yes, indeed it does add up.” The sheriff rose, grinning. “It adds up to a lot of melodrama for which I do not have time.”
“Perhaps you should make time,” Mia said through her teeth.
The sheriff’s head jerked back as though she had slapped him. “Maybe I can send out some telegrams to my colleagues in other cities. But if a child had been abducted early enough to be on that train, you’d think we would have heard something before Thursday night, now wouldn’t we, Miss Roper?”
Shoulders slumping, she nodded.
“Nonetheless”—the sheriff smiled—“I’ll keep this just the same.” He tucked the note into his desk, shook their hands, and escorted them back to the frigid afternoon air.
“The audacity.” Mia quivered with her effort not to scream in frustration. “How dare he belittle me that way. It’s all nonsense because I’m a writer. I’ve never written an untruth in my life. I’m a serious journalist who thinks falsifying stories is unethical and—”
Ayden laid a gloved finger across her lips. “You’re drawing a crowd. Let’s get back to my house, and we can discuss it.”
They climbed into the sleigh and drove the few blocks to the Goswell house. But once they arrived, discussing anything seemed impossible. First Ayden needed to see to the horses, and in the house, Rosalie sat in the middle of the front parlor, lining up toy soldiers for the toddler. Charmaine sat on a sofa with a child on either side of her as she read fairy tales to them, and Mrs. Goswell, along with half a dozen other middle-aged women, stirred pots on the stove, rolled out pastry dough, and filled the circles of crust with meat and potato filling, creating the pasties Mrs. Goswell learned to make from her Cornish grandmother.
“Pasties.” Mia spoke the word with awe. “I haven’t had a pasty like these since I left here.”
“Then you shouldn’t have left us.” Mrs. Goswell all but pushed her into a chair and set a steaming meat pie in front of her. “We’re making these for the stranded passengers, so you deserve one. Did you eat lunch?”
“Not yet.”
“And you barely touched any breakfast. Ayden, sit.” She spoke as he entered the back door.
He paused in the doorway. “I see Charmaine is here. I should talk to her.”
“She’s occupied with the children right now.” Mrs. Goswell dusted flour off the second kitchen chair. “Sit and tell us what you’ve been about all day.”
Between bites of the succulent pastry, they told Ayden’s mother and the other ladies about their hunt for the baby’s people. They did not tell them about the ransom note. By silent agreement, they kept that information to themselves. No sense in alarming people or letting gossip spread through town and warn the kidnappers, if they were still around.
Of course they must be. Getting anywhere since the wreck would be difficult with the snow and blocked train tracks unless they managed to hire a sleigh or heavy wagon.
Finished with his pasty and the report of their activities, Ayden excused himself and left the kitchen. A few moments later, his compelling voice rippled from the parlor. He would be talking to Charmaine, perhaps making plans to take her out in the sleigh with no leather portfolio or past pain between them, only a bright future before them.
The meat pie dried in Mia’s mouth. She took a long draft of milk to wash it down and nearly choked on the lump blocking her esophagus.
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Goswell leaned over the table and spoke in an undertone. “Do you need to lie down?”
Mia shook her head. Lying down would merely give her time alone to think of Ayden with Charmaine Finney, holding her hand, kissing her, perhaps. It would only give her too much time alone to remember the myriad details of the day that reminded her why she had fallen in love with Ayden.
She pushed back her chair. “I should do something useful, like finish writing up my notes in a legible form, unless, of course, I can be of use here?”
“We’re almost done.” Mrs. Goswell studied Mia with her brows knitted. “You may wish to wait a while before going into the sitting room. I banked the fire after you left, and it’s got to be pretty cold in there.”
“I’ll be all right.” Better off than she would be in the same room with Ayden and Charmaine.
Mia started for the door.
“Oh, wait,” Mrs. Goswell called. “I also forgot to tell you that the laundry came back today, and we found embroidery inside that little boy’s clothes. Probably his initials.”
Mia gripped the doorframe and turned back slowly. “What are they?” She posed the question in a strained whisper.
All the ladies stopped rolling and stirring to stare at her.
“It’s JMY,” Mrs. Goswell said. “Worked in fine stitching on every piece of his clothes.”
“JMY,” Mia repeated, her blood roaring through her ears. “Jamie.”
With no consideration for good manners, she shoved through the kitchen door, allowing it to bang shut behind her, then raced down the hall to the pa
rlor and flung open the door. “Jamie?”
Ayden looked up from the book he read to the children, his eyes a deep, sharp blue. Charmaine raised perfectly arched golden brows in query. The two older children’s mouths dropped open. Giving a start, Rosalie knocked over the row of soldiers.
“Jamie.” Mia dropped to her knees on the rug. “Will you come to Aunt Mia, Jamie?”
A grin spreading across his face, the abandoned little boy from the train toddled toward Mia.
Chapter Ten
Ayden surged to his feet. “What did you just call him?”
“Jamie.” Mia crouched and held her uninjured hand out to the little boy.
He wobbled toward her on chubby legs, reaching out to her with that grin. “Momma.”
She gathered him against her. “Not yet, but we will find her soon, little one.”
“How did you ever discover his name?” Charmaine looked dubious.
“His initials.” Mia held Ayden’s gaze, her eyes wide and intense. “JMY. It’s sewn on all his clothes.”
“But it could have been anything else.” Rosalie stood. “Jack, Jacob, Joseph . . . I’m sure there are a lot more names. But you pick Jamie, and it’s the right one.”
“It seems,” Charmaine murmured, “Miss Roper has special talents.”
“Not particularly. With the y and all . . .” She still looked straight at Ayden, as though expecting him to say something.
Saying nothing seemed like the best course to him—nothing about the ransom note, in any event. The fewer people who knew of the abduction, the better.
“Momma,” the baby said again.
“That’s the first thing he’s said,” Ellie cried.
Roy’s lower lip protruded. “I hope nothing terrible happened to her.”
“I don’t think it has,” Ayden said. “It’s likely that the woman with the broken leg was a neglectful nursemaid who’s afraid to come forward now.”
A nursemaid hired by the criminals?
“Are you all right taking care of him, Mia, Rosalie?” Ayden asked. “That is, neither of you has any experience with small children.”
Collision of The Heart Page 11