Issued to the Bride: One Soldier

by Cora Seton

  “Nice for Montana. I think.”

  “You have to give him that, Wye,” Sadie said mischievously.

  “Tell us about yourself, Emerson,” Cass said kindly. “Where were you born?”

  “Chicago.”

  Alice stopped with her hand outstretched to grab the salt shaker. “I didn’t know you were a city boy.”

  “I’m not. Spent most of my childhood in Nebraska.”

  Alice had the feeling there was more he wasn’t saying, and she stopped pestering him, afraid she’d hit a sore spot. Emerson focused on his plate, but a few moments later he went on. “My parents died in a car crash. My grandparents raised me. I’m grateful to them.”

  “Sorry for your loss,” Alice said. Jack had lost his parents, too. She and her sisters had lost their mother—and the General for a number of years. They’d all lacked for parental love.

  Still, they’d all survived. Thrived, even. Were here now.

  Although Lena didn’t look like she was thriving.

  “What’s got up your craw?” the General asked her when he noticed her glaring at him.

  She just shook her head, stabbed a baked potato from the bowl Logan had passed her and let it drop on her plate.

  “Didn’t anyone teach you any manners?” the General asked. “We have guests.”

  “Guests?” Lena parroted. “All I see is your honorary son and my future honorary sister-in-law.”

  Wyoming choked. Emerson turned crimson.

  “You always did want a boy,” Lena added pointedly.

  “Maybe I did. Maybe I thought I could have understood one better. Maybe with a boy I wouldn’t have screwed up every time I turned around. Maybe a boy would have loved m—” The General broke off, cut another bite of steak and popped it in his mouth.

  Alice held her breath. She noticed Jo touch the General’s arm. The General noticed it, too.

  “You’re lonely,” she pronounced.

  The General stood abruptly, swore, grabbed the table to steady himself until Emerson leaped up and supported him. “Office. Now. Bring my food,” the General managed. Emerson helped him out the room. A minute later he came back for his dishes.

  “Of course he’s lonely,” he hissed at them. “He’s always been lonely. And I’ve never tried to be his son—but if I did, I’d be a hell of a lot better at it than you all are at being his daughters.” He strode out of the room, leaving Alice and her sisters each in their private shame. Even Lena looked nonplussed.

  “Welcome home,” she whispered to herself wryly.

  Alice’s heart sank. Would there never be peace at Two Willows?

  Chapter Fourteen

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  “Are you going to work all day every day?” Jack asked when he found Alice still in her workshop at a quarter to two in the morning.

  “As long as it takes to get this done.” Alice didn’t even look up from her work. She was putting tiny tucks into a piece of peach cloth. Jack couldn’t guess where that would go.

  “If this contract doesn’t work out, there will be others. The quality of your work won’t be overlooked long,” he told her.

  “It’s not everyday someone makes a movie like this.”

  “Maybe not, but is it worth killing yourself over?”

  Alice finally turned his way. “Yes, it is. This is a chance, and whether I win out or not, I want to know I’ve tried my best.”

  He could understand that, but he hated to see her so tired and drawn. Her hair was piled on her head and pinned in place, but strands were coming down. She looked like she might simply fall asleep where she sat.

  “Anyway, the work isn’t stressing me out.”

  “Something else is?” He made a show of examining the blue gown worn by one of the dressmaker dummies, but he was listening intently.

  “Landon.”

  “He hitting on you again?”

  “No. But he called earlier. Was wondering who’d win a game tonight.”

  It took Jack a moment to catch up. “You predicted the Raiders game the other day.”

  “Exactly. Then I told him about the Celtics. I was right both times, of course. He called again a couple of hours ago looking for more predictions. He’s pretty excited.”

  Jack bit back a laugh. Excited about a parlor trick? “Two for two is pretty lucky, but—”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it.” Alice dropped her work on the table and stood to face him. “Jack, you have to understand this right now. Luck has nothing to do with it. If you don’t get that, you don’t understand anything about me. Jack, I see the future. Hell, I can show you the future—” She cut off abruptly. “But that’s not allowed.”

  She was trembling. She wasn’t making any sense. Jack’s heart sank. Alice was overworked, under too much pressure—

  “Damn it.” She shoved the chair out of her way and began to pace. “Cavaliers, Chicago, Raptors—are you writing this down?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Yes!” She scuffled among the things on the table, pulled out a pencil and a pad of paper and slid them his way. “Write them all down.” She started over and began to rattle off a list of teams that had Jack scrambling to keep up, starting with basketball, but moving to football, and then hockey and then curling, if he wasn’t mistaken.

  Jack had never followed curling.

  “Those are the winners for the week. You tell me if I know the future or not.” She grabbed the back of the chair she’d pushed away and leaned on it heavily, before wrenching it away from the table and sitting down hard.

  When she hugged her arms across her stomach and bent over, Jack dropped the pencil and rushed to her side. “Alice? You okay?”

  It took him a minute to realize she was crying. When he did, he felt like a heel. He’d done this. He’d disbelieved her, and now she was in tears.

  “Honey, I—”

  Alice pushed him away, covered her face with her hands and swayed with silent tears.

  “Stop it.” She beat her palms against her forehead. “Stop. Stop it!”

  “Alice!” Cass appeared in the doorway suddenly, giving Jack a turn. He hadn’t heard her coming. Hadn’t expected anyone else to be awake this time of night. She wore a winter jacket over her pajamas, her feet shoved into a pair of boots. “I got up to use the bathroom, and I saw the lights out here. Wondered if everything was okay.”

  “It’s not. She—” Jack gestured to Alice, who was still beating her palms against her forehead.

  “Alice.” Cass rushed across the room, fell to her knees beside her sister and gathered her in her arms. “Alice, what’s happening?”

  “I can see—too much—there’s too much!”

  Cass turned on Jack. “What did you do to her?”

  “Me? Nothing!”

  “What happened right before I came?”

  Cass’s tone brooked no defiance, and Jack found himself answering. “She was telling me the winners of all the games—for the week.”

  Cass gaped at him. “For the week? She can’t be that specific. She gets flashes, not—that’s like Mom.” She turned back to Alice. “Sweetheart, what happened?”

  Alice had her eyes shut, the heels of her hands jammed against her face. She was concentrating hard. Wrapped up in some inner struggle. All Jack could do was watch along with Cass. It seemed like hours before Alice slumped forward and Cass caught her.

  “Help me,” Cass cried, but Jack was already there, scooping Alice into his arms. “Let’s get her back to the house.”

  “She needs to go to the hospital.”

  “No, she just needs rest. This used to happen to Mom once in a while.” Cass led the way. A few minutes later they tucked Alice under the covers in her room. Cass went to fetch tea. Jack sat on the bed and smoothed the hair back from Alice’s forehead.

  When she opened her eyes and took him in, she struggled to sit up, but Jack shushed her. “Rest. You’re tired.”

  “The dresses—”

  “You need sleep first.”<
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  Cass hurried back in and set a cup of tea on the bedside table. “You scared me, Alice. Jack said you told him all the winners in upcoming games. That’s not like you.”

  Alice made a little sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. “I just… got so mad. I lost control of it, Cass. It’s like my mind cracked open, and I could see everything—”

  “Shh. It’s okay now.”

  “He doesn’t believe me.”

  The look Cass turned on Jack could have melted lead, and he decided this was his cue to leave. “Rest up, Alice. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She let her head drop on the pillow and closed her eyes.

  Back in his room he heard the sisters’ voices murmuring for hours.

  “It’s not opening to it that’s the problem. It’s trying to block the flow,” Amelia was saying when Alice woke up. She grasped at the fragments of the dream—sitting on the back porch on a summer’s day with her mother, a glass of lemonade in her hand so cold, droplets of water condensed on the outside.

  Opening. Flow.

  Alice lost the context. Couldn’t remember what her mother had been saying. It was important—but then all the dreams she’d been having about Amelia lately seemed important. If only she could remember what her mother was trying to tell her.

  She’d evaded Jack as much as she could yesterday and spent almost every waking moment in her studio. Last night she’d locked her door so he couldn’t invade her room. She missed his visits more than she could say. It was agony keeping away from him, but she didn’t have time to sort out her feelings for Jack, or what to do about them. The dresses were almost done—again. This time she was sure Landon would like them—and if he didn’t, at least she’d know she’d done the best she could.

  She sat up and looked at the phone on her nightstand. Almost time to get up, but for the moment the house was quiet. She slid out of bed, pulled on her thick, old terry-cloth bathrobe and went down to the kitchen, glad to be alone to greet the day. She needed to get back to her workshop. But first she needed to eat.

  This late in November, the sky was pitch black, the stars still out at this time in the morning. Soon Cass would be down to rustle up breakfast. The rest of her family would get ready to start their chores. She was blessed to have so many people around her who loved her.

  That didn’t make her ache for her mother any less. Amelia would have helped her negotiate the maze of growing up with a gift like hers.

  Alice carefully avoided thinking too closely about what had happened last night when she’d collapsed in her workroom. She’d opened the floodgates of her mind wide, greedy to give Jack every proof she could that she wasn’t lying. She’d never opened to her intuition like that. Had never given out such clear information.

  Hadn’t known she could.

  She’d thought her foresight was a weak, uncertain thing in comparison to Amelia’s.

  Now she knew better.

  It wasn’t comforting.

  Was it her anger that had made her gift more powerful? Or was it Jack’s presence? Or something else entirely?

  “Alice?” Jack prowled into the kitchen and turned on the lights, finding her staring out the window into the darkness. “Everything okay?”

  “Everyone keeps asking me that, and the answer is never yes.” That sounded defeatist. “I’m fine.”

  “Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

  “You find everything hard to believe.”

  He nodded. “But I also know how important it is to be believed.”

  She took this in. Crossed the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water, and then decided to start a pot of coffee.

  “I was seven when my parents were killed.”

  She stilled. He’d said that before, but she had a feeling more was to come. Jack came and took over the process of making coffee, moving around the kitchen with ease. He was feeling at home here, she realized. She moved to the table and sat down.

  “I was hiding under the bed, like you said. I wasn’t a coward; I was following directions. My father had ordered me to hide in the spare room.”

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t see it, and I didn’t hear much, either. There were too many of them for my father to fight. He tried—he really tried, but they knew the layout of the house. They came in from several directions at once. My dad got a couple of shots off. He winged one guy, we found out later, but they killed him. Killed my mom. They looked in my bedroom. I heard swearing when they didn’t find me. They checked a couple of other rooms and decided I must be staying somewhere else. They got sloppy there. Too greedy to get to the cash they knew my dad had on hand to pay his hired help the next day. They knew where the safe was—one of them was the nephew of a woman who came to clean our house every week. He’d tagged along with her once to help dig a new garden bed for my mom. That’s how I remembered—” He broke off. “They blew the safe open. Took everything and got out of there. It was a big ranch,” he added, seeing Alice’s confusion. “A big payroll.”

  “They were caught?” She liked watching him move around the kitchen, but the pain in his voice was palpable. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for a little boy to keep hidden while all that was happening. To hear his parents die—to wonder if he was next. She ached to take Jack in her arms, as if she could comfort the child he’d once been. That was impossible, as she knew too well. You took pain like that into your very cells, and it never went away.

  He nodded again. “Almost weren’t. The first idiots who questioned me didn’t believe a word I said. Didn’t think a little kid like me could keep calm enough to know any of the details. Didn’t listen to me when I told them who did it.”

  “You recognized their voices?”

  “I recognized the sound of the engine of the truck they drove in. I’d heard it once before.”

  “Once?”

  He chuckled grimly. “Yeah, once—when the cleaning lady’s nephew came to dig the garden. I remember things like that.”

  Alice considered his words. “You have a photographic memory?”

  “More than that. It isn’t just images—it’s sounds, smells, details. It’s like I know things I shouldn’t know, because I piece details together other people don’t notice.”

  “It isn’t like that for me.” She knew what he was doing. Trying to find common ground between them. A rational explanation for her foresight.

  There was no rational explanation.

  As close as she’d felt to Jack a moment ago, now the differences between them yawned like a chasm.

  “What I’m trying to say is I know how it feels to be different. I want to believe you. It’s just—” He shrugged and took out two mugs for the coffee.

  “It doesn’t fit with your rational worldview.” She could see how that rationality was important to a man like Jack. “Someone must have believed you eventually.”

  “My adopted father, Richard. Works in intelligence. I didn’t tell you that, though.” He grinned, but the grin slipped away fast as he poured out coffee for both of them. “He saw the potential in me right quick. Made sure I developed it.”

  Alice got the sense this was a touchy area. “He pushed you?” she hazarded.

  His expression became inscrutable. “Yeah, he pushed me. He’s a good man,” Jack asserted.

  “Of course.”

  “Didn’t your mother ever push you to be the best you could be?” He set one of the cups down in front of her and joined her at the table.

  Alice thought about that. Amelia had taught her many things, of course, and she still shone as a beacon in Alice’s mind as the example of what a mother should be, but when it came to her hunches, Amelia had never pushed her.

  “She always said I would come into my own at the right time.”

  When Jack’s shoulders drooped a quarter of an inch, she knew he’d been searching for a connection again—and she hadn’t played along. “Do you feel like your father pushed you too hard?”


  “I don’t know.” Jack blew on his coffee, and she could sense that he was sorting through memories. Judging them. “Maybe he pushed me more than most men would. He prizes excellence. I’m excellent at what I do.” He sent her a sheepish smile. “You’re one of the few people who’s ever figured out I bugged them.”

  “I’ve got an unfair advantage.” She could tell Jack didn’t know what she meant. “That day in the restaurant I could sense you listening. Drove me crazy until I found the bugs. I sensed it again in the hotel room.”

  “That’s… impossible. You know that, right?”

  “And yet it’s true.”

  “I’m trying to accept what you say, Alice, but it’s hard.”

  “I think that’s how most people feel about me.”

  “But they tell you they believe you?”

  Alice searched for a way to discuss this without triggering Jack’s sarcasm or her own insecurities. If their roles were reversed, she’d want answers, and she wouldn’t want to play games.

  “They do believe me,” she said quietly, “because unlike you, they’ve witnessed it. And I’m not the only one in town like this. You haven’t met Rose Johnson, the sheriff’s wife. She owns Thayer’s Jewelers. She has a knack, too.”

  “A knack?”

  “Not quite what I’ve got, and nothing like my mom had. A sixth sense. If she holds your engagement ring, she gets a feeling about whether you’ll stay together or not. It’s not a very comfortable ability—they never are—and she doesn’t tell many people about it, but everyone knows in town. Sadie can sense what growing things need to flourish. Jo can sense animals’—and people’s—emotions when she touches them.”

  He remembered the way Jo had touched the General’s arm—and pronounced him lonely. “That’s… bizarre.”

  “Here’s the thing,” she said, losing patience. “You can either trust me now that I’m telling you the truth, or you can look up that list of sports teams I gave you and prove it to yourself. It’s up to you.”

  “You’re asking—”

  “For you to be my friend.” Alice wasn’t interested in a conditional relationship. “Do you want to be my friend?” She took a sip of her coffee.