The Fire of Home (A Powell Springs Novel)

by Harrington, Alexis

  Where was Adam, anyway? She’d seen him that one time, and now he had an accomplice, an evil toady, spying on her.

  Amy sighed and pulled the covers up to her chin with both fists. Despite what she thought Milo might know or could be making up, she knew there was no question that he was watching her. Bax had seen him from a distance, and he knew things he could have learned only by watching them.

  And how long was she going to be able to get away with charging her current rate of room and board when the quality of the food had already begun to deteriorate? She had to find a way out of this—somehow. She’d hoped she’d at last escaped Adam’s tyranny, and had come all the way back to Powell Springs, endured the whispering and sidelong glances of her former neighbors, and taken over this boardinghouse for what? Only to live in terror too? To be run off from here again? Some secrets were necessary to keep. Others needed to be quelled by being shared.

  On the other side of the wall, she sensed Bax sleeping, struggling with none of the troubles that plagued her.

  It must be nice, she thought, to be able rest without carrying the weight of so many problems. She punched her pillow and tried to find that place.

  The sun has just cleared the eastern horizon the next morning when Bax came downstairs. Tom followed right behind him. Amy was at the stove again—or still—as if she’d never left it. She didn’t speak to either of them. Dawn sunlight streamed through the window over the sink.

  He couldn’t smell anything that resembled a decent breakfast, and wondered what mouthwatering delight was waiting for them this time. He came up behind Amy to look over her shoulder. He saw a big pot of oatmeal. No eggs cooking, no bacon, no ham or even potatoes. Just coffee perking and biscuits heaped on a plate in the warmer. He glanced at the kitchen table and saw the cream pitcher and the table set for three.

  “Take your seat, Bax. Breakfast is ready.” She hadn’t even looked at him. It was as if she had eyes in the back of her head, and she sounded like a schoolteacher.

  He did as he was told, and she flopped scoops of mush into everyone’s bowl, then poured coffee and brought the biscuits to the table. They ate in silence, but Bax got a good look at her face. Violet smudges underlined her eyes, and faint diagonal lines led away from them to make her look as if she hadn’t slept in a week. Her hair hung over one shoulder, pulled back with a piece of wrinkled ribbon, and she wore the same dress she’d had on the day before.

  Obviously sensing the tension, Tom glanced back and forth between them, but remained quiet and left as soon as he could. Bax stayed at the table and as Amy was about to get up to begin clearing the dishes, he stopped her.

  “How is Deirdre?”

  “I’m letting her sleep in this morning. She’s not doing very well.”

  He nodded. “Did you stay up all night taking care of her?”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “No—well, I checked on her once. Why?”

  “You look like you haven’t slept.”

  Her brows slammed together over the bridge of her nose, and he sat back, realizing too late that he’d lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite instead of a candle. “This isn’t a beauty pageant I’m running here, Baxter Duncan. I’ve got a sick woman upstairs, wash piling up, and more worries than finding moonshiners up in the hills! I’m sorry I don’t measure up to your notion of an ideal female. If you want something better, get a wife, one who meets your standards.”

  She pushed herself away from the table and prepared to stand. Bax shut his mouth with a clack of his teeth. He never would have dreamed that such a fiery hellcat was buried beneath all the apologies and mousy humility he’d seen in her.

  He jumped out of his chair and pushed her back down. “All right, all right, I’m sorry, I was just—I wasn’t insulting you.”

  “Oh, no? I’m not dressed well enough, I look tired, my cooking is bad—”

  “I didn’t say any of—”

  “—things around here aren’t perfect or even good enough, I’m not careful with money or—”

  He realized the vitriol pouring out of her had very little to do with what he’d said. Well, maybe he’d uttered what amounted to the last straw, but this was the result of her past, and now all that pent-up resentment boiled over.

  He leaned forward again and put his hand on her forearm. “Amy, Amy, take a breath.”

  She was like a runaway horse. “Well, let me tell you something. I didn’t invite an ex-convict into this house and it seems to me that you’re in no position to criticize, considering my sins don’t include spending time in prison!”

  His breath left him in a rush, as if he’d been kicked in the chest, and a quiet fury began percolating in him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re going on about.”

  Amy stared at his angry, still face, drained of color, and she realized what she’d done. She put her elbows on the table and pressed her forehead in her hands. “Oh, God.” She glanced at him and he was as fixed as a statue.

  “You’d better tell me what you mean.” It was a quiet command, but more frightening than shouting.

  With a sense of dreary resignation, she said, “A man came to the door two days ago. A man who said he knows you. I thought he wanted to rent a room.”

  Bax said nothing but drummed his index finger on the table and kept his smoky gaze on her, waiting for her to continue.

  “H-he wouldn’t tell me his name but referred to himself as Milo.”

  The drumming sped up.

  She hurried on to tell Bax what else the man had said. “He threatened to reveal everything if I didn’t pay him. He wanted a hundred dollars. All I had to give him was sixty.”

  “You believed him?”

  She babbled her explanation. “Some of it was almost right, and afterward I realized he must be the one who’s been watching me—us. He even knew you weren’t home and where you’d gone. Fairdale, he said. I wasn’t sure about the rest, but how could I know? I just heard that he knows Adam and you, and he said he’d tell Whit Gannon about your past, then blame me.” She closed her hands into one tight fist in her lap to keep from wringing them.

  “Goddamn it!” he barked.

  Amy cringed in her chair, worried about what would come next. In her experience, a slap or a punch could very well follow an angry outburst like that.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, hating the timid, fainthearted sound of her voice. Even hating the fact that she’d apologized. But she did it again. “I’m so sorry. There’s not much money left to feed us all.”

  Bax looked at the effect his remark had on her. He sighed then and his shoulders sagged. “It’s not your fault, Amy. Stop apologizing, for chrissakes. I’m the one who’s sorry. You have troubles of your own and I brought you more. I never thought Breninger would blackmail you.”

  Her jaw dropped. “You know him?”

  “Yeah. It’s our bad luck that he met your—husband—” He said the word as if it were the most foul of epithets. “And involved you too.” He gave her a rueful smile. “We’re two sorry lots, you and I. He tried to blackmail me about a month ago, when he first got to town. I told him to go ahead and tell Whit what he knows, because I don’t think he will. He doesn’t want the law’s attention.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “We were in the same outfit in France. We were both from Oregon.”

  “He said you were in prison—”

  “That’s not why I know him.”

  “Then how—”

  “But he was no war hero, that’s for sure. We all knew he joined the army because the law was after him in Portland.” He neatly deflected her questions. “He’s still living up to his lousy reputation, and now he’s involved with Jacobsen.”

  “I think he’s working for Adam. And if I know Adam, he hasn’t paid him.”

  “Oh-ho, so that’s it. It makes more sense now.” He got up an
d went to the stove to get the coffeepot. He poured them both warm-ups and put the pot on a folded dishtowel. “You know he won’t stop coming around now, don’t you? Paying him was like feeding a raccoon.”

  She drizzled so much cream in the coffee it looked like beige milk. “He already said he’d be back.” She gazed up at him with a pleading expression that begged for understanding. “But I didn’t know what else to do.”

  He was out of his chair again, pacing, and she saw his jaw muscle flex. “Great. Look, I have some savings put away. I’ll give you the sixty dollars so we can start having decent food again.” He took the creamer from her. “Then next time, I’ll be here.”

  “But—”

  He waved off her protest. “If I’d handled Breninger better from the beginning, he wouldn’t have had a chance to bother you.”

  “How will you know when he’s coming back, though?”

  “You let me worry about that.” He stopped in front of her and sat down again. “Amy, listen, I’ve been thinking about this. A lot. We need to get past our messes and salvage something of our lives for ourselves. We’ve both had a hard time over the years.” He reached for her hand. “Things are bad right now. But they won’t always be, and maybe you and I need to start thinking ahead instead of always looking over our shoulders at the past. We deserve that, don’t you think?”

  That pulled her up short. “You and I?”

  He released her hand and color crept up his neck to his forehead. “You want out from under this, don’t you? I mean we ought to get our lives sorted out.”

  Weariness, old hurts, and current circumstances brought out a cynical side of her. “Hah—wouldn’t that be something.” It was all she could offer because she couldn’t see anything right now except problems.

  After a repeated admonition to keep the doors locked and to stay aware of her surroundings when she went out, he put on his jacket, polished his deputy’s nickel badge with his sleeve, and left for work.

  It wasn’t until he was gone that Amy realized she still didn’t know if he’d spent time in prison. If he had, she didn’t know why.

  With a hedge cutter in one hand and a machete and crowbar in the other, Adam stood in spot in the woods along Butler Road, assessing the cabin that time and blackberries had tried to consume. Moss coated the roof like a bright-green carpet. Ivy, fir needles, wild rose brambles, and undergrowth wove a dense, tangled net over everything else. Against one side of the structure, a woodpile remained, just as mossy as the roof, but it should be all right.

  Just off the road was an old wreck of a car he’d bought from a berry farmer outside of Twelve Mile. The man’s son got it before he left for France and he had not survived the war. So the thing had sat in a field through five years of weather. Chickens had even roosted in it at one point. But the farmer let it go for thirty-five dollars. Once Adam was able to get it started, he drove it up here to look around. Then he’d gone back to the farm and bought some tools the old man had lying around to tackle this excavation. No one would notice, he didn’t think. The car was hidden by some brush that grew wild, and the cabin sat back far enough to escape all but the most careful scrutiny.

  He was no stranger to this place, but he was surprised it still stood. At one time, Emmaline Gannon—then Em Bauer—had lived up here and offered her services to men who knew how to find her. That bitch had been his downfall after her long-gone, half-witted husband reappeared while Adam was here. Bert Bauer had dragged the sheriff with him to have her arrested for moral turpitude, which he refused to do. The sheriff’s live-and-let-live liberality was an example of what was wrong with society. If he’d done his job and removed the temptation in the first place, Adam’s life would have taken a much different path. Instead, he had been revealed as one of her customers at a town council meeting, and then reviled by his parishioners as a sinner, the pack of hypocrites.

  At the same time, Amy’s plan to steal her sister’s fiancé had been discovered. So they had run away together.

  Revealed and reviled, the both of them.

  And now Amy had run away from him.

  When he heard that Whit Gannon had actually married Em, well, he supposed there was no end to some men’s idiocy. At least Em’s change of circumstances worked to his advantage now.

  It was a significant decline in accommodations to move from the New Cascades to this dingy shack that was hardly more than a lean-to. God knew he’d lived in enough of them with Amy, although none of them had been this bad. From what he could see, the windows and the door had been boarded up, but he believed he could still use the place. He just had to hack through the brambles to pull off the boards. It wouldn’t be a huge job, but unfortunately he’d have to do the work himself. He couldn’t depend on someone else to keep this location secret or his presence in it. And Breninger was proving to be almost more trouble than he was worth. But Adam couldn’t be in more than one place at a time so he still needed the man. He’d been able to string him along with another three hundred dollars, and it was much easier than he’d expected. Apparently Breninger had figured out that Adam Jacobsen was an important man, one to be reckoned with. He’d thought Breninger already knew that, but now it was firmly established.

  So he pulled on a pair of work gloves, took the razor-sharp machete in hand, and began chopping his way through to the door with clumsy, unpracticed swings that could very well slice off a finger or a hand along with the berry vines. Brush flew in every direction, and in no time he was sweating and gasping like an old man.

  “Damn Amy,” he cursed under his breath. This was her fault. He wouldn’t be out here working like a field hand if she hadn’t defied him. But he’d fix that. By the time the spring shadows grew long and evening chill settled over the woods, he’d managed to uncover the windows and had pried off the last board blocking the entrance.

  Leaning against the weather-swollen door, he turned the knob and pushed hard. It barely budged. He put his full weight behind his shoulder and slammed into it three more times. Finally it scraped open grudgingly, and released a gust of dank, moldy breath.

  Inside, the iron bedstead was as he remembered it, the mattress rumpled and stained. The quilt and once-grayed sheets, now taupe with dust and time, had been pulled off, torn into strips, and thrown around. Two chairs were overturned and it looked as if Em had left in a hurry. A couple of jars of canned fruit stood on the shelves of a small pantry, their contents murky and inedible. Overhead, there was no ceiling, just bare rafters and dense clouds of cobwebs.

  He’d have to bring in some basic provisions and necessities until this job was finished. And that couldn’t happen soon enough.

  “You caught me just in time,” Granny Mae told Amy. Although it was just after four o’clock, she had already turned over the sign in her glass front door to read Closed. Her early dinner patrons, including widowers Mayor Cookson and Nathan Friedman, the jeweler, went back to their respective occupations. Fragrant aromas of roasting meat and baking bread still hung in the air, contrasting sharply with Amy’s menus of late. “I’m closing up to go give Jessica a hand. Susannah Grenfell is in labor and we’re going out to the farm to deliver her baby.” All the tables and chairs in the café were neatly cleared. Beside the door stood a wicker basket that held a clean apron and some odds and ends that Amy couldn’t immediately identify.

  “Oh—” The last time Amy had seen Susannah, she’d just been widowed and her last name was still Braddock. Amy didn’t like to think about when she and Susannah had been friends. It made her remember everything about those old days and added more weight to the load she carried on her heart. “I’m glad I got here before you left. Deirdre is out of that cough remedy you made for her and she swears by it.” She produced the empty bottle.

  “She should be well by now. Is she still coughing?” Granny asked, heading back to the kitchen. It still looked chaotic to Amy, with baskets of onions and potatoes on the floor,
a garlic braid hanging from the ceiling, and the huge, ever-stoked black stove crouching against a brick wall like some chained, living beast. But despite the overstuffed cupboards and shelves, Granny Mae seemed to know where everything was.

  “Yes, and I’m beginning to worry about her. She seemed to get better for just a bit, then relapsed. She’s losing weight and her skin looks, well, almost transparent. That goopy cough plagues her night and day. And it wakes up the rest of the house. I think it’s pneumonia.”

  Granny frowned as she plucked the recipe ingredients from her shelves, considering some and avoiding others. “I don’t like the sound of that. Does she have a fever?”

  “I’m not sure. She looks feverish sometimes. I was going to have Jessica examine her, but I guess not today.”

  “I’ll tell her about it. Maybe that baby will be in a hurry to get here and she’ll have some time tonight.” She rummaged through one shelf, muttering to herself, “Where on earth is that grain? Oh, here—”

  She followed the same procedure as before, crushing spices, herbs, and for all Amy knew, dragonfly wings and dried mouse tails, under her pestle. “What’s in that stuff, anyway?”

  “Just a bit of this and that,” she replied, as if it were some secret potion that Amy might steal. She glanced up. “You haven’t talked to your sister again, have you? She mentioned you didn’t come to dinner.”