“It’s a baby, Mack. A baby out of nowhere.” She looked at him. Even the great and powerful Mack Tanner had limitations. “How on earth are you going to keep this quiet?”
“At the moment, I have no idea. I’ve got all kinds of plans for all kinds of trouble, but this? This one has me stumped, that’s for sure. We’d best take our picnic home today, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.” In all the hubbub, she’d forgotten that they planned a picnic lunch for after church services today. It had been Mack’s suggestion, his idea of a peace offering, she supposed. It hardly seemed the solution to the problem that just presented itself, but he seemed untroubled. Truly concerned, supportive even, but barely even shocked.
She watched him as he finished shutting up the church for the afternoon, as if the day had been ordinary. She did not even come close to understanding this man. Despite years of acquaintance, they were strangers. She and Mack were so out of sync with each other, so poor at connecting, that their every effort to grow closer seemed to only make things worse.
It didn’t help that it seemed to Lana as though her husband was two different men: a darkly righteous judge and a generous protector. How could this man, who’d so quickly condemned Leo to Skaguay, accept a wild abandoned Indian baby story from a woman in town barely two weeks? She’d seen Mack had the capacity to be very kind. Not only in gestures like today’s picnic and his muddled attempts at gifts, but emotionally kind. She felt it in the way he treated her the day of their wedding, the times he’d let down his guard playing with Georgie. There had been moments in the last week when she would catch a split second of tremendous warmth in his eyes. Occasionally, he’d place his hand on the small of her back as they walked or stood, and the warmth of it would radiate everywhere. His rough hands would place her shawl over her shoulders with surprising tenderness. She’d felt his gaze more than once and turned to find him staring at her as if her company pleased him greatly. They were becoming true companions. She was no longer alone.
Still, she’d seen firsthand how cold and judgmental he could be. Did his powerful principles ever leave room for mercy? Would he be an overstrict father to Georgie? If she should ever fail to live up to his high standards, what would happen? She didn’t know the answer to any of those questions, and it frightened her.
Her tangled thoughts must have shown, for Mack remarked, “You’re quiet,” as he hoisted Georgie up on his shoulders on the walk home. He was trying to start up a conversation, but he’d chosen the worst possible moment. Try, Lana thought to herself. Try to connect. She looked around her, willing the scenery to shake the troublesome thoughts from her head. It was a stunning, brilliantly clear day—the kind of Alaskan afternoon that could fuel optimism and hope in the sorriest of souls, just by turning one’s face upward to the sun. The mountains jutted proudly to the sky, as if tucking tiny Treasure Creek close to their feet for protection. The water sparkled, and Georgie pointed and shouted to the flocks of birds that swooped and dove over the docks. It really was the perfect day for a picnic—or would have been.
“I suppose I am.” She couldn’t put her tumble of thoughts into words. Mack wouldn’t want to hear them if she could, anyhow.
“Worried about class tomorrow?” he tried again, the words sounding cumbersome and forced.
He couldn’t have brought up a more sore subject than school. How on earth should she resume classes after such a fiasco? Then again, did the children even know what Leo had done, since she’d discovered the theft after classes were finished? Of course, in a town as small as Treasure Creek, it seemed foolish to think everyone hadn’t known about every detail by now. Mack was far too optimistic if he thought he could keep a secret so dramatic as a Tlingit baby abandoned on a doorstep with a mysterious note and gold. Tomorrow’s lessons were supposed to be about weights and measures, but any creativity on the subject loomed as unreachable as the flocks of birds high up over the water. And she certainly couldn’t ask for help from Mack—he’d barely supported her efforts as it was.
She was lost in such thoughts until she felt Mack’s hand thrust across in front of her, silently blocking her path. “Of all the underhanded…” he growled out, stepping back and sliding Georgie from his shoulders with a “shh” to the boy. She realized with a start that they were about to turn the corner to their house, until Mack pushed her back.
“Hey! You there!” Mack took off at a full sprint, barreling down the last feet of the block to tackle a pair of dirty-looking lads. Rascally boys of no more than twenty, who were, she realized, digging in her yard by the house’s foundation! Before she could take six steps, Mack had the pair of them up against the house, pinned by their own shovel.
“What are you up to? As if I didn’t know,” Mack growled as he forced the wooden handle up against their grimy collarbones.
The larger of them grumbled an unintelligible response. Mack pressed harder, sending the smaller of them into a coughing fit. “Answer me! Were you looking for gold?”
“Isn’t everyone?” the larger one wheezed.
“And you figured Sunday morning was a fine time to go prospecting in my yard, seeing as how I’d be leading church services down the block and all.” Lana watched Mack’s grip on the shovel handle tighten with anger. “Bringing your lowlife thieving to my family’s front door.”
“We heard Nicky Peacock talking in Skaguay ’bout how much gold you had hidden up here. Lots of it, but not in the banks. ’Course we thought it would be here.” The smaller one seemed to be under the very dangerous impression that Mack would find this complimentary.
In reality, Lana suspected Mack was clutching the last threads of his temper. Were Georgie not with her, it seemed very likely Mack would be taking their heads off with that shovel, rather than inching it up toward their necks as he was doing at the moment. She pushed Georgie behind her skirts instinctively anyway.
“There is no gold here,” Mack snarled. “You’ll leave now, go back to whatever crack in Skaguay you crawled out of and never set foot in Treasure Creek again. Am I clear?”
“So we won’t look for yours, then. We’ll look for the sixteen Russian nuggets instead. We won’t bother…” His retort was cut short by the application of the shovel to his neck. He managed a nod, and when Mack released the shovel the pair took off at a run toward the docks.
“Aren’t you going to go after them?” Lana thought he might personally deposit the pair into the freezing waters and tell them to swim to Skaguay.
“And leave you and Georgie unprotected? They’re not worth it.” He tossed the shovel to the ground in disgust. “I don’t know which are more dangerous, the clever ones or the stupid ones.”
“So, word of the new treasure has reached Skaguay.” Lana picked up the food basket she’d dropped and took Georgie’s hand. For the first time since that awful morning on the docks, Lana felt a genuine sense of danger. Bravado talk was one thing. Digging up her very house was quite another. “Nicky Peacock?” she ventured in low tones.
“Or others like him. Rumors here flow faster than the tide. I was counting on that, but not on it showing up on my doorstep.” His annoyance showed clearly on his face. She knew he’d meant the six nuggets to draw attention away from his family, not toward it, but it was clear the plan wasn’t working. Today announced that loud and clear. And the boy had said “sixteen,” not “six.” If word of the nuggets left with Goldie got out, how much worse would the chaos get?
Lana knew Mack thought the bankers little more than crooks, but still her heart sunk when he pulled the baby’s gold from his pocket the moment they were inside the house. Even before his coat was off Mack went to the fireplace mantel. Lana watched him shift the third stone from the left, gasping to herself as it slid aside to reveal a small tin box cemented into the fixture. A hiding place deliberately built into the house. He tucked the gold nuggets and the note from Goldie’s mysterious parent inside and slid the stone back. It made Lana wonder just how many more secret hiding places
there were. And what all Mack Tanner hid from the world.
Chapter Fourteen
Despite his distraction, Mack stuck to his original idea of a Sunday picnic, even though it had to be in the backyard, rather than out by the beautiful waterfall, as he’d planned. It wasn’t working well. The tense small talk he made with Lana felt falsely cheerful, fooling only Georgie as they spread lunch out in a sunny patch by the little garden. To her credit, Lana had leveraged Alaska’s long hours of summer daylight, already coaxing enthusiastic sprouts and buds out of the black soil.
“How’s the new General Store coming?” she said brightly, as she passed out slices of beef and the thick sourdough bread he’d smelled baking yesterday morning.
“Fine.”
No, it wasn’t. It was the furthest thing from fine, but he wasn’t about to admit that to her now. God had designed wives to be helpmates, he understood that. But this wasn’t that kind of marriage. He couldn’t unload his mounting troubles on her still-grieving heart. How can she be a helpmate to me, Lord? How are we ever going to make this work? We’re both stumbling through this, drowning in mistakes. It would surely be a mistake to admit how things were spinning out of his control lately. Shipments were coming in wrong, there had been six different problems with the counter he and Ed had built yesterday and he was just coming to see how impossible it was going to be to wear General Store manager and mayor hats at the same time. “Busy, but fine.” Busy was true. Contrary to his original thoughts, it had changed things to be mayor. For the worse. Everyone came to him with every problem now. Every need—logistic and civic—was laid at his feet. Instead of becoming more educated, the stampeders coming through town seemed more and more hoodwinked. Young fools with too many dreams and nowhere near enough equipment. Not to mention nowhere near enough cash—the demands for store credit were practically making him a bank rather than an outfitter. His nightly walks though town used to be times of prayer and praise, giving thanks for Treasure Creek’s immense possibilities. Now they were long lamentations, groaning out to God with a list of problems that expanded with every day.
Now this baby business? It was the last kind of complication he needed. And where had Viola Goddard come? Straight to him. Asking for protection he wasn’t at all sure how to give.
Lana leaned back against a porch column, the strong sunlight casting gold shimmers into her yellow hair. She licked jam off one finger like a pleased schoolgirl. “Have you thought about how to celebrate the opening?”
“Celebrate it?” Mack leaned back himself. “I figured we’d just open the doors and be done with it.”
She huffed. “That’s the trouble with you men. No sense of how to celebrate an accomplishment. I suppose you’d find a party a useless frivolity.” He watched her back straighten, the way it did when she got an idea. And as he’d discovered, Lana with an idea was one of God’s most relentless creatures.
“I would,” he said, the uselessness of that objection uncurling an apprehension in his now full stomach.
“And you’d be wrong.” She looked at him, eyes narrowed, no sign of the fear that was there a minute ago.
“I would?”
She turned to face him now, pointing at him with her napkin. “People need celebrations. They need to mark their achievements. Towns do, too. Treasure Creek needs a celebration.”
“Stores have opened before and no one’s thrown a party. Accomplishments speak for themselves, Lana. No one needs to tout them.”
“But you’re mayor now. It’s up to you to give the town what it needs. And it needs a celebration. The opening of Tanner’s General Store just happens to provide the opportunity.”
So it was Tanner’s General Store now, was it? Well, folks called the existing business Tanner’s Outfitting Post and this new building was more than that. If forced to name it he probably would have defaulted to Tanner’s General Store. Which didn’t explain why it bothered him so that Lana already had.
“Tanner’s General Store?”
“Well, I assume you were going to name it something. What else would you call it but Tanner’s General Store?”
Mack didn’t want to answer that. He merely grunted, hoping that would signal the end of this absurd conversation.
“I’d do it, you know.”
She cocked her head to one side eyes wide in that persuasive manner he’d come to recognize. He could see it coming, knew the result, but found himself powerless against it. “Do what?”
“Plan the party for you. My first official act as…is there a title for the mayor’s wife?”
“The mayor’s wife.” He chose not to hide the smile creeping across his face. He knew by the set of his shoulders and the sliding sensation in his heart that there would be a party—a big party—and there wouldn’t be a thing he could do to stop it. And oddly enough, there was not very much he wanted to do to stop it. How had the great and stoic Mack Tanner fallen so easily to a woman’s persuasion?
“You know—” he was certain victory lit up the corners of her eyes as she said it “—there’s another reason to have this party.”
“It will require a shopping trip to Skaguay for new dresses?” Mack couldn’t remember the last time he’d teased someone. It rather surprised him that he still possessed a sense of humor.
She tossed her napkin at him, and he found himself enjoying the mock scowl on her delicate features. “No. Although I suspect that could be a pleasant consequence. I was talking about a distraction.”
Mack highly doubted Treasure Creek’s rampant greed could be solved by a party. “Men are not distracted by parties.”
“That may be true, but women are very much distracted by parties. And men are very much distracted by women.”
Now there was a fact he was coming to know entirely too well lately.
It was almost two o’clock in the morning. The night made only a halfhearted attempt at darkness up here at the height of summer. Lana still couldn’t quite get used to the overload of daylight. It robbed her sleep and tangled her sense of time. The house was quiet, the single lamp she’d lit throwing gold and shadows across the room. She’d only now just begun to feel comfortable with the combination of furnishings—things of hers sitting among Mack’s things. The new and familiar thrust together jumbled her thoughts as much as the overlong days.
Sleeplessness during the “midnight sun” was a common ailment, but sleep eluded her tonight for a number of reasons. Mack had tried to hide it, but she knew he was highly disturbed at finding that pair of miscreants digging around their house. Goodness, what if he had gone on to Viola’s to deal with that baby business and left her and Georgie to walk home on their own? What would have happened then? She’d just begun to allow herself to relax, to ease into the protection her marriage to Mack afforded—to permit the man’s strength to loosen the stranglehold of survival that had clutched at her for too long. After this afternoon, that worm of worry had begun to return. What if someone chose to try and get to Mack through Georgie, now that he was his stepfather? She’d heard of kidnappings going on in Skaguay and other towns, but had dismissed them as tall tales.
She couldn’t dismiss them now, and she resented the return of her fears and worries. How, Lord? Lana surprised herself with the challenging prayer. How could You let this happen? This is no answer, no stability, no safe haven. If You really do care about how much I need those things, how much Georgie needs them, where is Your provision? I can’t see it.
It felt wrong to whine to God—which was essentially what she was doing—but Lana felt it would be worse to say thankful, pious prayers she didn’t mean. According to the commandments Mack preached on this morning, God didn’t want His people to steal and covet, to kill each other for gold. Or, she suspected, to leave helpless babies on doorsteps where anything could happen to them. If she was worried about people breaking commandments and hurting her, it seemed only right to take her fears directly to the Almighty, who didn’t like such things, either. Mack’s prayers were never caref
ully crafted poetic things, they were heartfelt and intimate conversations with a close and trustworthy God. Admirable as that was, Lana didn’t see how the tiny shred of faith she still had could come anywhere near that kind of relationship.
Could it?
She ran her hands across the worn leather cover of Mack’s Bible, her finger tracing the remnants of his initials in one corner. This must have been a fine, fancy Bible at one point—the whisper-thin pages had bits of the shiny edges still left on them, and the leather was high quality. It reminded her of the man himself—one could still see the fine and fancy man underneath the ruggedness Alaska demanded. He was such an honorable man. He’d do anything to protect her and Georgie. How on earth could that not be enough?
She hadn’t opened a Bible since she’d picked a psalm to read at Jed’s funeral. It felt frightening—dangerous even—to open it now. Still, there was a time when she could take comfort from its verses, even if that did feel like decades ago. With trepidation, Lana placed the volume on her lap and opened it.
“I always start with Psalms when I can’t sleep,” came Mack’s voice from the door of his room. How long had he been standing there? She had the illogical panic that he’d heard her rantings to God, even though she was quite sure she’d never said them aloud.
“Did I wake you?” It was a foolish question, but he’d startled the composure right out of her.
“No.” He walked into the circle of lamplight, looking mussed and even a bit sad. She hadn’t seen this side of him. Even at that dark hour when he came down the mountain with the horrible shrouded bundle on the sled behind him, he’d looked in control. Not a shirt button out of place. Now his shirt was barely buttoned, the tawny muscles of his chest exposed. Mack looked rugged and vulnerable at the same time. As if all kinds of emotional currents ran in the depths of his blue eyes, humming in her chest with every breath. “I’ve not been able to get a moment’s shuteye tonight, either.”
ALASKAN BRIDES 01: Yukon Wedding Page 11