As for what her mother might have said… She had worried over that question for weeks. Certainly a respectable woman did not chase after a man, not even if the man who needed chasing was her husband. She suspected her mother would have advised her to hold her head high and live out her days pretending that her husband would return at any moment.
Over the last nine months Juliette had done just that, but she couldn't follow that path any longer. Her bone-deep need to know gave her the daring to flout propriety and travel alone.
But, heaven above. The world beyond Linda Vista was alien and frightening, peopled with strangers who didn't know or care about Juliette March Villette.
The outside world wouldn't know that her needlepoint had won a blue ribbon at the fair last Fourth of July. Strangers wouldn't care that when she was twenty, she'd been chosen to carry one end of the memorial quilt in the Founder's Day parade. No one would give a fig that she kept the milkweed off her parents' graves or that every week she dutifully dropped fifty cents in the Cup for Charity.
Moving among strangers would shake her very foundation. How could she know who she was if no one around her knew?
For the occasion of Juliette's departure, Aunt Kibble wore her best at-home dress and powdered her nose.
Juliette touched gloved fingertips to her aunt's cheek while Aunt Kibble fussed with Juliette's traveling suit, straightening her collar, adjusting her hat, picking imaginary lint from her sleeve.
"Thank you for taking me in." Aunt Kibble had rescued her from the yellow fever epidemic that carried away her parents.
"You sound as if you'll never come back!"
"I don't know why I said that." Nerves made her hands shake. The instant she found Jean Jacques, she'd bring him home and use her own powers of persuasion to convince him to stay and never leave Linda Vista again.
"You know why I won't go with you. It's a matter of principle." Aunt Kibble drew a deep breath. "This is so unlike you. Why won't you send a representative?"
Juliette didn't trust a representative to keep her secrets if he discovered the worst. She had her pride after all. Not that she believed for a moment that Jean Jacques had abandoned her.
But just in case.
All things considered, it was better that she found him herself.
Aunt Kibble lifted a handkerchief to her eyes. "It isn't too late to change your mind," she said, shooting a glare toward the carriage driver.
"I have to do this," Juliette insisted.
"You don't even know where you're going!"
"I have a general idea." She'd consulted maps, plotted the route she guessed Jean Jacques had taken. He hadn't said anything about the Northern Pacific, so she wouldn't travel by train. He'd mentioned wonderful views of the ocean, so she would stay along the coast. The route was sheer speculation, but it was the best she could do.
"I'm going to miss you so much!" The admission appeared to surprise and annoy Aunt Kibble.
Juliette studied her aunt's dear face, committing to memory the stubborn jaw, the tiny lines, a sweep of silvery brown hair. Then she clung to Aunt Kibble in a fierce embrace, murmuring good-bye as if this were, indeed, the last time they would see one another.
The driver had to clear his throat a third time before Juliette wiped tears from her eyes and climbed into the carriage.
"This is my duty," she called, leaning out the window. "I must find him."
"Oh, Juliette." Aunt Kibble stood on the bottom porch step, twisting her handkerchief between her fingers and shaking her head as if Juliette had taken leave of her senses.
Juliette waved from the window until the carriage curved out of sight of the house, then she collapsed against the seat back and squeezed her eyes shut. The leave-taking had exhausted her—as did thinking about the journey ahead. Mr. Ralph would drive her to the coast, where she would spend the first night. In the morning, she would take the stage along the coast road to Oregon.
Her heart thudded painfully against her rib cage. Tonight she would sleep among strangers on a bed that others had slept in. She couldn't have been more apprehensive of what lay ahead if she'd known for a certainty that she traveled to her doom.
Abruptly it occurred to her that she had never really been tested on life's road. Until Jean Jacques vanished, nothing disastrous had happened in her adult life. All her bumps had been small ones, and she was thankful for that.
For one terrible disloyal moment, she stared down at her hands and burned with resentment that Jean Jacques was putting her to the test. She didn't want to be in this carriage traveling to heaven knew where. She detested the necessity of speaking to strangers and revealing that her husband had gone missing.
Snapping down the window shade, she leaned back and pressed her fingertips to her temples.
She would find him. It was unthinkable that she would endure this ordeal without being rewarded. And when she was once again in the arms of her husband, she would find the courage to ask if he'd married her only for the money. Then he would look astonished and assure her that he loved her, and that he had never given her inheritance a single thought. Jean Jacques loved her. It wasn't the money.
* * *
Chapter 2
Peterson's coast-road stage was late today, so Clara had time to dash upstairs and inspect the rooms. On the floor near the bed in number four she found a lady's hairpin and tucked it into her pocket. The curtains were not aligned properly in number six, and a pot of ivy was dying for lack of water in room number seven.
Here was proof of the very thing she had feared from the moment she decided to sell the inn. The new owners would run the place into the ground. Mrs. Callison would never have overlooked the hairpin or the curtains or the ivy—no, sir. But the new owners had insisted that Clara dismiss her regular help and hire new employees before they arrived to take possession of the property. They wanted employees whose loyalties were to them, not to Clara or to her late father.
Well, it wasn't easy to hire good help. Clara had interviewed five applicants before settling on Miss Reeves, who was the best of a bad lot.
If it were up to her—if Miss Reeves had been her employee—Clara would have torn into the girl, given her what-for, waved the hairpin under her nose, then dismissed her without a reference. But the new owners expected the inn to be fully staffed when they arrived. So the slatternly Miss Reeves was their problem. That is, if they considered haphazardly cleaned rooms a problem. She had her suspicions about that.
Biting her lip and refusing to feel guilty about selling, she hurried downstairs to the kitchen to make sure dinner would hold until the stage arrived. An inn could offer the most comfortable beds in creation, but if the food was mediocre or served late or less than stove-hot, guests would not return. Repeat business paid the major bills.
"Get out of my kitchen," Herr Bosch shouted as Clara rushed into a haze of fragrant steam.
"Guten Tag to you, too," Clara called cheerfully. She dipped a spoon into a simmering meat broth that was almost ready for liver dumplings. "Perfect," she breathed with a sigh of pleasure.
The new owners weren't entirely crackbrained. They had kept Herr Hugo Bosch and, at his insistence, his two assistants and the potboy. For tonight's meal, they prepared Wiener schnitzel, roasted potatoes, and red cabbage slow-cooked with apple slices and caraway seed. The baked bread and strudel hot out of the oven rilled the kitchen with the scents of heaven.
Herr Bosch took the spoon from Clara's hand and made a shooing motion. "Out, out, out." But his voice expressed no pleasure with their customary banter. "I cannot bear that you are leaving tomorrow," he added in a low tone meant for her ears alone. Absently, he patted the pockets of the starched white tunic he wore over white trousers. "I've been waiting for you. Come outside with me."
To her knowledge, Herr Bosch had never left the kitchen this close to serving time.
They stepped outside the back door, walked around the kitchen garden, then stood beneath the shade of a spreading maple, where they could
see the road and the stage when it arrived.
Herr Bosch lit a cigar and waved out the match. "You're making a mistake, Clara."
"What's done is done," she said with a shrug. "I know Papa wouldn't have approved, but the time is right to sell. The railroad passed us by, and if you ask me, I think horseless carriages will eventually put the stage out of business. Then where will the guests come from?"
"You know that isn't what I meant," he said, glaring at the end of his cigar. "I meant him. It's a mistake to leave everything behind and go running off after that husband of yours. He isn't treating you right. Not a single letter since he's been gone? Is this how a man treats his new bride?"
"I haven't written to him," she answered lightly. Even if she knew where to address a letter, she wasn't much for writing. Clearly, her husband wasn't either.
"I'll never understand why you chose him. Together you and I could have built the inn into an attraction so grand it wouldn't matter about the railroad or the stage."
Bosch, like all her suitors, had really wanted to marry the inn. She was merely the workhorse who came with the inventory.
Curious, she closed her eyes and lifted her face. "What color are my eyes?"
"What?"
"My eyes. What color are they?"
"They're… black?"
She knew he was annoyed and frowning before she looked at him again. "Light brown." An unusual shade, near the color of coffee with cream. Certainly not black.
Her husband would have answered correctly and without hesitation because he was the only man who had looked at her and seen a woman instead of the owner of a prosperous inn.
The first thing Jean Jacques had said when he approached the registration counter was, "Mon Dieu! Never have I seen such beautiful skin!"
No one had ever said anything remotely similar to Clara Klaus. The compliment was so amazing, so enthralling, that she didn't care that it was delivered in a French accent. In fact, she had secretly yearned to meet a Frenchman. Her German parents had despised the French so much that anything French seemed mysterious, exotic, thrillingly forbidden. And suddenly, a handsome Frenchman was standing before her, admiring her skin and looking at her in a way that made her feel hot and funny inside, looking at her as if she were the most dazzling creature ever to appear before his eyes.
"It was his idea to sell the inn, wasn't it?"
Distracted by memories of that first meeting, Clara shook her head and tried to recall when she had originally considered selling the inn. She didn't remember now who first had made the suggestion, Jean Jacques or herself. But she did recall long discussions about the booming town of Seattle, Washington. So many men poured into the area bound for the gold fields in Alaska that there weren't enough hotels and boardinghouses to accommodate them. Jean Jacques told her that men slept on boardwalks and lawns with newspapers for blankets. Not because they couldn't afford a bed, but because few beds were available.
Clara recognized opportunity when it came knocking at her door. She'd sent Jean Jacques to Seattle with her nest egg and instructions to purchase a place that could be converted into a boardinghouse.
"We made the decision to sell together, but it was my decision to sell the inn now instead of waiting." Jean Jacques would probably be annoyed that she hadn't delayed the sale until he wrote that he'd purchased a new place. That was how they had agreed to handle things. But it was taking him so long to find the right property that she'd grown impatient. She missed him more than she could possibly have imagined and wanted to be in his arms again.
Hugo Bosch looked shocked. "You're a married woman now. You should not have made such a decision, much less acted upon it, without your husband's knowledge! If he's half a man, he'll beat you for disobedience."
Uh-huh. She saw now that if she had married Hugo Bosch, they would have spent the next fifty years plotting to kill each other.
"Seattle is a big city. You do know where Villette is staying, don't you?"
Well, no. But she would find him. She and her Jean Jacques were like two magnets exerting an irresistible attraction that would sweep aside all obstacles. Theirs was a joyous, exuberant marriage welded by two people wildly, madly, passionately in love. If they were in the same hemisphere, she had no doubt they could find each other.
Like most redheads, Clara blushed easily and violently. When Herr Bosch stared at her with raised eyebrows, she turned away from his gaze.
"Well. Here comes the stage."
"Clara, I beg you. Divorce this Frenchman."
"Divorce?" She considered herself a modern woman, but she wasn't modern enough to consider divorce. The idea horrified her.
"I could make you happy. I would feed you tortes and strudels, paprika noodles. Sauerbraten." His eyes glowed as he continued to list her favorite foods and desserts.
Clara sighed. She was big, but not as big as she would be if Hugo Bosch had his way. She was big shouldered, big breasted, big hipped, and she had big hands. But she curved in where she should and out where she should; she wasn't fat. Her papa had said she was a good German girl, big boned and a beauty. But, as far as she knew, no one else had thought her a beauty until Jean Jacques Villette.
"I have to meet the stage," she said gently, placing her hand on Hugo's sleeve. He meant well, she knew that. And who could say? Maybe if Jean Jacques hadn't swept her off her feet… maybe she would eventually have married the best strudel she'd ever tasted and Hugo Bosch would have married her inn. Maybe she would have persuaded herself that it didn't matter that he couldn't recall her eye color or that he thought wives deserved an occasional beating.
She left him standing under the maple tree biting on his cigar and hurried inside to remove her apron, smooth her skirts, and pat down her flyaway hair. Then she arranged a smile on her lips and stepped out on the front veranda to greet her guests.
Only one woman climbed down from the stage, which made Clara decide that she had sold the inn not a moment too soon. In her papa's time, the stage had arrived twice daily and deposited a half dozen guests on the inn's doorstep at each stop.
Suppressing a sigh, she examined the slender woman who had turned to look beyond the inn toward a sweeping view of the sea. The woman impressed Clara as anxious and nervous, but she didn't know why. Her guest was smartly turned out in a well-cut traveling suit that appeared to defy wrinkles. Beneath a small, neat hat, every hair was perfectly in place, her gloves were immaculate, and she didn't fidget.
"She's the only one?" Clara asked Ole Peterson after he'd placed the woman's tapestry bags on the veranda.
"The rest of the passengers are continuing on," Ole said. He sounded apologetic.
Clara nodded and wished him a safe trip, hesitated, then walked across the lawn to join her guest. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" she asked pleasantly, glancing toward the ocean.
"It's amazing. Wonderful. Magnificent. Words fail me." She glanced at Clara, then back at the ocean. "The colors are so vivid here in Oregon. The blues aren't as blue nor the greens as green in California, I'm sure of it. And the ocean! My husband promised I would love the sea, but I never imagined it would be so big, so overwhelming, or so fascinating."
As the Pacific had always been in Clara's backyard, she tended to take it for granted. Seeing the landscape anew through her guests' eyes was always a refreshing experience.
"This must be your first trip to the coast."
The woman's slender figure stiffened, and her spine pulled ramrod straight. She folded her gloved hands one over the other at her waist and frowned straight ahead.
Clara had seen this before. Stuffy little women who mistook friendliness for prying because the silly books on etiquette said a person didn't discuss personal matters with strangers, didn't reveal anything of themselves.
"Well," Clara said, watching dots of color burning on the woman's cheeks. "Please come inside. I have a room I think you'll find to your liking. Dinner will be served in the dining room promptly at seven. You'll have time to freshen up."
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br /> "You are the proprietor?"
"Yes." Until tomorrow when the new owners arrived. She paused on the veranda to collect the woman's tapestry bags.
"Shouldn't you call someone to handle the bags?"
"There's no need," Clara said brightly. "I'm not a little thing like you." She could almost hear Papa saying: My Clara, she's as strong as an ox. He'd been gone for almost two years, but she still missed him. She wished they could sit down together over steins of beer and she could explain why she'd sold the inn.
She led the way past Papa's cuckoo clocks and Mama's collection of tiny china cups into a homey lobby where she set down the tapestry bags and stepped behind the counter.
Apparently the woman from the stage hadn't arranged her own accommodations often enough to be comfortable with the process. She blushed deeply and didn't meet Clara's gaze.
"I wonder…" The color deepened in the woman's cheeks, and she blinked rapidly, her words coming in an anguished rush. "I know this will sound like a strange request, but I wonder if I might examine your guest book from nine months ago. You see, there's someone who might have stayed at your inn. It would be helpful to me to know if he did stay here."
All was explained. Clara would have wagered the money in the cash drawer that the woman's husband had left her and that she was attempting to find him. She had heard this sad tale before. There wasn't much that she had not seen while growing up in the hostelry business.
Sympathy softened her gaze. The poor soul wasn't a beauty, but who was? She was pretty in a cautious sort of way, as if she felt it more virtuous not to turn men's heads. Clara thought the woman's eyes were her best feature. She had lovely, heavily lashed gray eyes—one might even say soulful eyes. Certainly she had a sense of style. Her traveling ensemble was well coordinated and the quality of workmanship was good. But Clara sensed her guest's timidity and discomfort. This woman traveled alone out of necessity, not by choice. And asking after her husband was clearly agony for her.
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