by Janet Dailey
“It’s possible, but I doubt it.” Now that she had gotten over her initial disappointment, Abbie could respond more naturally to the judge’s teasing remarks.
Her father stepped out of his private office. “I thought I heard you out here, Walter,” he accused, and crossed to exchange a back slapping handshake. “What are you doing, you old crook?”
“I came to take my favorite father-daughter pair to lunch,” the judge replied, then slid Abbie a glittering look. “That is, if your daughter doesn’t have a previous luncheon date?”
“I believe I have a vacancy in my social calendar today,” she replied, laughing.
“You could have been saving all your free time for that handsome new reverend,” the judge suggested. “When are you going to see him again?”
Abbie was beginning to lose her humor at his probing remarks. “Probably Sunday at church just like everyone else,” she retorted with a trace of coolness. “Just because I had lunch with him once, purely by accident, it doesn’t mean it’s going to become a regular event.”
“Drew, I think the girl’s sick,” the judge declared. “She’s trying to claim she’s not interested in this fellow.”
“I’m not,” Abbie protested, and wanted to bite her tongue for telling such an outright lie.
“What makes you different from all the rest of the women in town?” He challenged her with a disbelieving look. “Prom what I’ve heard, they’re falling all over themselves trying to get his attention.”
“Is that a fact?” her father inserted, siding with the judge to gang up on Abbie. “All the gossip manages to get funneled to you, Walter. Why don’t you let us in on it?”
“I understand that his cup runneth over. The older ladies are bringing him casseroles, cakes, salads, cookies, homemade bread, and just about anything else you care to mention. There isn’t a bare shelf in his refrigerator or cupboard.”
“I think that’s nice,” Abbie insisted in defense of the gifts. “It’s the neighborly thing to do when a newcomer moves in.”
“But those old ladies are wise.” The judge winked slyly. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Haven’t you heard?”
“Come to think of it, Alice baked him a green-apple pie just this last Tuesday,” Drew recalled. “Maybe I’d better keep a closer eye on my wife. She was at the parsonage for almost an hour.”
“Dad, you can’t be jealous of the reverend.” Abbie wasn’t sure if he was serious or just razzing her.
“I don’t mind if she looks … as long as that’s all she does,” he said, then laughed to show he wasn’t worried.
“It seems there are a lot of young wives who have suddenly discovered they have marital problems, which came as quite a surprise to their contented husbands …” the judge inserted. “… and now they’re going to the good reverend for his advice and understanding.”
Abbie had the uneasy feeling that Fran Bigsby was probably one of them. She saw the point the judge was making. It was all a ruse to get Seth’s undivided attention, to try to attract his interest.
“But it’s more than his sympathy they’re after,” her father added, confirming Abbie’s private thoughts.
“Women are volunteering right and left to help with anything from typing the church bulletins to doing his housekeeping.” The judge gave an exaggerated sigh and looked at her father. “And they say a bachelor’s life is a lonely one. One crook of his little finger and half the women in the county would come running. I’ll bet the church will be filled to the rafters next Sunday.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” her father agreed with this summation.
That’s when Abbie made the decision that she wouldn’t be one of them. She didn’t want Seth to get the impression she was chasing him just like all the other women in town seemed to be. She didn’t necessarily attend church every single Sunday, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for her to skip a couple of weeks.
She was very casual about it when she talked to her mother on Saturday and mentioned that she was going to visit Grandmother Klein on Sunday and skip church. Her mother took Abbie’s decision at face value. Her father gave her a strange look but said nothing.
On Monday morning, Abbie didn’t have a chance to make the first pot of coffee before the street door opened and the two Coltrain sisters came bustling in. They always seemed to wear outfits that clashed with what the other one was wearing. Esther had on a brightly flowered dress, predominantly grape-colored, while Isabel wore a gaudy, fushia-pink dress.
“There you are, Abbie!” Esther declared happily. The fluorescent lights in the office seemed to reflect the grape from her dress and cast a lavender tint on her curling white hair. “We thought we might find you here at your papa’s office.”
“Yes, I work here during the week,” Abbie explained, certain she had told them that before.
But neither of them had ever worked. They had been raised to believe women should stay in the home, married or not. Luckily the inheritance from their parents had left them with substantial annuities so they could.
Isabel opened her enormous black tapestry bag with its bold pink-rose design, and pulled out a stack of loose papers in assorted sizes and colors. A slim rubber band strained to hold them together.
“We were going to give you this yesterday at church but you didn’t come,” Isabel explained.
“What is it?” Abbie reached for it with a puzzled frown.
“Don’t you remember?” Esther looked stricken. “You said you’d type our manuscript for us.”
“Do you mean you’ve written it already?” Abbie looked up from the first piece of paper, filled with scrawly handwriting, to stare incredulously at the two sisters.
“Oh, goodness no!” Isabel laughed merrily at the thought. “We decided it would be easier if we gave you what we had finished as we went along.”
“Haven’t we gotten a lot done?” Esther asked excitedly. “We worked on it every single day, didn’t we, Isabel?”
“It was so much fun, Abbie,” Isabel declared, puffing up with proud satisfaction. “I’m so glad the reverend suggested it.”
“I can imagine.” Abbie couldn’t recall when she had seen either sister so animated or so enthused. It was contagious. She felt herself catching their excitement too, and smiling right along with them.
“I do hope you won’t have any trouble reading it.” Isabel cupped a hand to her mouth to whisper secretively to Abbie. “Esther used to have such beautiful penmanship, but with her arthritis it’s sometimes not very legible.”
“I don’t think I’ll have any difficulty. But if I have any questions on a particular part, I’ll call and ask,” she promised.
“We aren’t telling anyone what we’re doing.” Esther put a protective hand over the uncompleted manuscript Abbie was holding. “You’re the only one who knows.”
“I won’t breathe a word.” Abbie crossed her heart in a child’s solemn promise. “In fact, I’ll put it in the bottom drawer of my desk right now.”
“You won’t lose it.” Isabel looked worried as Abbie walked to her desk to put the handwritten papers away.
“Call us as soon as you have it typed,” Esther advised. “We’ll have some more ready for you.” She took her sister’s arm. “Come, Isabel. Let’s go home so we can start on the next part.”
“Bye!” Abbie called as the two white-haired sisters bustled toward the door. “I’ll phone you when I’m through with this.”
That evening was the start of what became a nightly routine, with her portable typewriter sitting on the small dining-room table in her apartment and the pages of the manuscript setting out. The Coltrain sisters had used everything from yellow tablet paper to fancy stationery to write on. Abbie quickly discovered that the page numbers on the sheets were not necessarily correct. More often than not, they were out of sequence.
Before she could start typing, she had to decipher the handwriting and read and arrange the pages in their proper order. She ha
d expected the manuscript to be a collection of loosely connected anecdotes of their early years and stories of some of the area’s first citizens. Abbie was shocked to realize the sisters had fictionalized it into a story—a rather torrid, period romance set in Eureka Springs around the turn of the century.
Each night, Abbie sat down to the typewriter for three hours, correcting misspelled words, or finding the right one when a sister had fallen victim to malapropism, and inserting the right punctuation where none existed. It was a long, tedious process, made fascinating by the characters and stories she remembered the sisters telling as they became part of the plot. Just when she became used to reading Esther’s handwriting and could get some typing speed, the next part would be written by Isabel and she’d have to slow down again.
The typing gave her a perfect excuse to miss church that Sunday, and the sisters had more written when Abbie finished the first installment. She missed the following Sunday’s service as well.
The long days, working at the office and in her apartment on the nights and weekends, were beginning to wear on her. Abbie was dragging Monday morning when she arrived at the office. She was leaning on the table, waiting for the coffee to finish dripping. Her father walked out of his office, carrying his cup, just as she was in the middle of a large yawn.
“You can’t keep this up, Abbie.” He shook his head at her. “You need to get out and have some fun. I hear you hammering away at that typewriter every night.”
“I’ll take tonight off, Dad,” Abbie promised, and tried to swallow another yawn.
“Not just tonight,” he advised. “You take a couple or three nights off. Go to a movie—or ask some guy for a date. These are liberated times. You don’t have to wait for a Sadie Hawkins’ Day.”
“Yes, Dad.” She smiled wryly, because there wasn’t anyone she was interested in asking—except Seth. She shook away that thought. The red light blinked on to indicate the coffee was done. “Coffee’s ready.”
“I’ve just got time for a quick cup, then I have to get over to the courthouse,” he said with a quick glance at his watch.
By the time her father left, Abbie had drunk her first cup of coffee and felt that at least her eyes were open. She poured a second cup and sat down at her desk to see what dictation had been left for her to type. The more she thought about her father’s suggestion, the more convinced she became that he was right. It was to the point where she was typing in her dreams.
When she heard someone enter the office, Abbie tried to summon a suitably cheerful smile to greet him. But the “him” was Seth Talbot. Her hazel-green eyes widened in surprise, and she was suddenly very much awake.
In the past three weeks, she’d only had occasional glimpses of him behind the wheel of his dark green sports car. But here he was—in the flesh—and her pulse started fluttering crazily. As Seth approached her desk, so tall and lean and flashing her that white smile, Abbie felt weak at the knees. The whiteness of his clergyman’s collar contrasted sharply with his darkly tanned neck, but her senses didn’t have any respect for his attire. They were all reacting to his raw manliness, his roughly chiseled features, and deeply blue eyes.
“Hello, Reverend.” Abbie was amazed that she sounded so calm.
“Good morning.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, partially concealing the intensity of his scanning gaze as it swept over her. “How are you?”
“Fine.” She nodded. It seemed logical to assume it was her father he came to see, so Abbie explained. “I’m sorry but my father is out of the office just now. I expect him back around noon.”
“I’m not here on a legal matter.” Seth corrected her thinking. “I came by to see you.” He said it so casually, yet her reaction was anything but. A heady kind of excitement tingled through her nerves, while a breathlessness attacked her lungs.
“Oh?” She tipped her head to the side at an inquiring angle, her pale copper hair swinging free.
“I haven’t seen you in church lately,” he said. “I thought I would stop to see if there was anything wrong.”
“Ah.” Abbie nodded her head in bitter understanding. “The shepherd is out looking for the sheep that strayed from his flock, is that it?”
There was a slight narrowing of his gaze at the bite in her voice. “Something like that, yes,” Seth admitted. “I miss having an honest critic in the congregation. If I say or do something you don’t like, I know you’ll tell me about it. You aren’t the type to flatter my ego.”
But he was flattering hers by trying to make her believe it mattered to him whether she was there or not. Except that was his job, to persuade members to attend church regularly.
“I’m sure you know how it is.” Abbie shrugged. “A person goes to bed on Saturday night with the best intentions but somehow doesn’t make it up in time for church the next day.” The wryness in her smile was caused by many things. “I warned you I wasn’t one of the truly faithful.”
“And I warned you that I’d bring you back into the fold,” Seth reminded her with a crooked slant to his mouth.
“So you did. Okay, I promise to be at church this Sunday. Is that good enough?” She didn’t want him to do any arm twisting. If she spent too much time in his company, she was afraid he might guess that she was no different from any of the other women in town, attracted to him as a man.
“That was easy.” He appeared to regard her quick capitulation with a degree of curiosity.
“‘Ask and ye shall receive,’” Abbie quoted.
“That’s an offer I’m not going to turn down,” Seth replied as the corners of his mouth deepened in a faint smile. “Would you be willing to do some typing for me?”
“I understood you had a lot of volunteers,” she countered.
“Ah, but not necessarily volunteers who can type,” he explained with a mocking look. “Or maybe I should say—who can type with more than one finger.”
“I’d like to help you out but I’ve already agreed to type a manuscript for—someone else.” She kept the Coltrain sisters’ authorship to herself, as they had requested. “Between doing that at nights and working here during the day, I don’t have time to do any more.”
“It sounds like all work and no play.”
“It has been hectic,” Abbie admitted, but refused to feel sorry for herself. “But I’m treating myself to a night off this evening.”
“Do you have a date?”
In a small community like this, there was no point in lying. If she claimed to have a date, she’d have to produce one or be caught out. “No,” she answered indifferently to show it didn’t matter.
“Good. Then how about having dinner with me?” Seth invited, and leaned both hands on the front of her desk.
It was the last thing Abbie had expected. She was so tempted to accept but—she shook her head. “Thanks but I was really planning to have a quiet evening and an early night.”
“That’s no problem. We’ll have dinner and I’ll bring you straight home so you can have a restful evening,” he reasoned. “What do you like? Mexican food? Pizza? Steak?”
It was so hard to refuse. “I don’t think you heard me,” she said weakly.
“I’ll wear my collar tonight—just for you,” Seth mocked.
Abbie took a deep breath and held it a second. “You don’t understand what it’s like living in a small community like this, Reverend.” She sighed. “If I had dinner with you tonight, by tomorrow morning, rumor would have it all over town that we’re having an affair.”
“So?” he challenged.
She wished he wasn’t so close. Even with the desk separating them, the way he was leaning on it brought him much nearer. She could even smell the tangy fragrance of his after-shave lotion.
“So—you’re a minister.” Abbie wondered why she was reminding him. “And a bachelor. You can’t afford to have that kind of talk going around.”
“Empty talk can’t hurt me.” He hunched his shoulders in an indifferent shrug without changing his position
. “It doesn’t bother me, so you shouldn’t let it bother you.”
Abbie had run out of arguments. “It doesn’t.”
“Then you’ll have dinner with me,” Seth concluded.
“Pizza.” The atmosphere at a pizza parlor would be more casual, invite less intimacy. Plus there wouldn’t be any lingering after the meal. It seemed the safest choice all around.
“I’ll pick you up at six-thirty. Is that all right?”
“Yes, that’s fine.” Abbie nodded, certain that she had lost her senses completely. “Do you know where I live?”
“Yes. Your address is in the membership files,” he said, indicating he’d already checked. Deliberately or just as a matter of course, Abbie didn’t know.
“It’s probably my parents’ address that’s listed. I live in the apartment above the garage,” she explained.
Seth straightened from her desk. “I lived in a garret when I was attending the seminary. My friends and I had some good times there.”
“I like it,” Abbie murmured in response.
“I won’t keep you from your work any longer,” he said. “I don’t want to get into any more trouble with your father over that.” But he was smiling in a way that belied his expression of concern. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Yes.” Abbie just hoped that she knew what she was doing.
Chapter Five
At ten after five that afternoon, Abbie was clearing her desk to leave. Her father stepped out of his office, a pair of reading glasses sitting low on his nose and a letter in his hand.
“I’ve changed my mind about the way I want this letter worded, Abbie. I’ll need to have you retype it,” he said, hardly paying any attention to what she was doing.
“You don’t have to have it yet this afternoon, do you?” she asked hopefully. “It’s already after five.”
He bent his wrist to look at his watch. “I hadn’t realized it was that late already. You don’t mind staying a few more minutes while I reword this. There’s no reason for you to rush home.”
“As a matter of fact there is,” Abbie admitted. “I have a date.”