She hesitated, then smiled, and Purvis felt his heart quiver a little. “O.K., Lawman,” she said, linking her arm with his and nodding once toward the neon-lit window of the diner. “Let’s go.”
Maggie took the long way around to the Station, a small suitcase in hand, Sadie springing along at her side. The stars were out, beaming down out of a black sky, and despite her personal concerns, Maggie was happy. Happy to be back in Springwater, among people she knew and loved, doing something that connected her to the several generations of McCaffrey women who had preceded her. While she’d enjoyed her job in Chicago, running a chain of small boutique-style hotels, the original owners had sold out to a major corporation a few years before and upper management had been intent on removing all semblance of beauty, grace, and personality from the inns ever since. Maggie’s life had become a grind. When her mother had written that there was talk of tearing down the old Springwater Station and replacing it with a small strip mall—Reece, who owned the property, had received a sound offer from some huge company with a dot-com after its name—Maggie had made a series of quick but hardly impulsive decisions. She’d insisted on matching the outsider’s price, sold her condo, transferred her stocks and bonds to a money market account, hired movers, packed her personal belongings and her dog into the Pathfinder, and headed for Montana. She hadn’t once regretted the decision, though there had been a few surprises: J. T. Wainwright, for one.
She stood in front of the Station for a few moments, looking over at the Hargreaves mansion where Daphne lived with her relatively new husband. She liked Ben; he was a good man, smart and funny, and he obviously adored Daphne. All points in his favor, especially the last.
As if conjured by Maggie’s thoughts of her, Daphne stepped out onto her porch, waving. “Hey, Maggie!” she called. “Come on over and have a cup of tea with me. Ben’s locked away in the study with his computer.”
Maggie was pleased by the prospect of a chat with her friend. Though she had been looking forward to a quiet night in the Station, sleeping in that beloved old bed, she’d missed Daphne very much during the years in Chicago, and it seemed that they still had a million things to catch up on, no matter how much time they spent together. “Sounds great,” she replied. “I’ll be there in just a second.” She carried her suitcase inside, then headed across the road, Sadie trotting along behind her.
Daphne was waiting on the step, elbows on her knees, chin cupped in her palms, just as Maggie had seen her a thousand times before. There was a mischievous glint in her eyes, and Maggie remembered her friend’s announcement earlier that she was ovulating and had to hurry home to meet Ben, in hopes of conceiving. She smiled to herself and shook her head.
“Hi,” Daphne said, reaching out to ruffle Sadie’s ears.
“Hi, yourself,” Maggie answered.
Daphne stood, grinning. “It’s so good to have you back in Springwater,” she said, beaming at Maggie. “Now, come inside, and let’s have that tea. I have something to tell you.”
“What?” Maggie asked, following Daphne into the grand entrance hall. The house was elegantly appointed inside, and contained many antiques that had been in the family since soon after Trey and Rachel Hargreaves were married.
Before Daphne could answer, Ben stepped out of the study, smiling. He was tall, with rich chestnut hair and warm eyes. “How’ve you been, Maggie?” he asked.
“Fine,” Maggie said, smiling back. “How about you?”
“Busy,” Ben said. Then he sighed. “I guess I’d better get back to my report,” he told her. “If I don’t buckle down, I’ll still be working at midnight.”
“You’d better not be,” Daphne said.
Ben chuckled and retreated back into the study.
“You said you had something to tell me,” Maggie reminded her friend, once they were alone in the kitchen. Sadie, that shameless flirt, had stayed behind, kissing up to Ben.
Daphne busied herself filling the teakettle, setting it on the stove to heat, getting out mugs and spoons. “I’m going to be a mother,” she said, almost breezily. “Well, sort of.”
Maggie frowned a little. “How can you ‘sort of’ be a mother?”
“Ben and I have decided to become foster parents,” Daphne answered. A shadow flickered in her eyes, was quickly gone. “At least I’ve decided—Ben is dragging his feet a little, but I know he’ll come around. I’m going to pick up the application papers tomorrow, over at the courthouse in Maple Creek.”
Maggie didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, she thought it was a wonderful idea; Daphne certainly had a great deal to offer a child, even taking Ben’s reluctance into account. On the other, she knew such arrangements were usually temporary, and Daphne was bound to become deeply attached. How would she react when the baby either was returned to its birth family or moved on to another foster home? Daphne was bound to be devastated, and she’d already had more than enough sorrow in her life, losing her parents the way she had.
“Maggie?” Daphne prompted, when Maggie didn’t speak right away.
She swallowed, rummaged up a shaky smile. “That’s—that’s great.”
“Then why do I get the feeling that you want to talk me out of this?”
Maggie sighed. “It isn’t that,” she said gently.
“Lots of these children come up for adoption, you know,” Daphne put in.
“And lots of them don’t,” Maggie said.
The teakettle whistled, and Daphne filled the mugs and carried them to the table, small tags dangling over the rims. “This isn’t just about Ben and me,” she said. “It’s about a child in need of a home and family.”
Maggie reached out, touched her friend’s hand. “I know,” she said. “It’s just—”
“That you want me to be careful?”
Maggie hesitated, then nodded.
Daphne’s eyes filled with tears of emotion, though she was smiling. “Some things are worth taking a chance on, Mags,” she said.
They sipped their tea in companionable silence for a minute or so, and Maggie decided it was time to change the subject. “J.T. is coming to my place for supper tomorrow night,” she said.
Daphne’s whole face lit up with pleasure, in the space of an instant. “Really?”
Maggie nodded. “He sort of invited himself.”
“Heck, who cares?” Daphne replied, waving one hand. Then she paused. “Is he coming to the guest house, or the Station?”
“The Station,” Maggie said.
Daphne cheered. “Yes!” she whooped, punching the air with one fist.
Maggie just gazed at her, confused.
“Well,” Daphne enlarged, “he wouldn’t make a move on you in your parents’ guest house, now would he?”
“He’d better not make a move on me at all,” Maggie said primly.
“Whatever,” Daphne replied, with a note of friendly skepticism. Maggie rolled her eyes. “You,” she told her friend, “are an incurable romantic.”
Daphne laughed, and it was a wonderful, reassuring sound. Surely everything would be all right.
“Life,” Maggie mused, after another brief lapse in the conversation, “is way too complicated.”
Daphne nodded, cupping her hands around her teacup and smiling. “Indeed it is,” she agreed.
Maggie glanced at the clock on the kitchen mantel and sighed. “I’d better get out of here,” she said. “I’ve been trying to balance my checkbook all afternoon, and if I don’t find the error, I’ll lay awake all night staring at the ceiling.”
Daphne walked her to the front door, and Sadie padded out of the study, tags jingling cheerfully, to join her mistress.
“Good night,” Maggie smiled.
Daphne kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“Being my friend.”
“That’s the easy part,” Maggie replied, and then she and Sadie started for home.
After an hour spent grappling with her checkbook,
Maggie locked up the Station and retreated to the fairly modern bathroom adjoining her private quarters, where she showered, put on a nightgown, and brushed her teeth. Sadie, normally a dog who took liberties, seemed to know that beagles and antique quilts don’t mix, and curled up with a tired sigh on the hooked rug beside the bed.
Maggie had just crawled beneath the covers, book in hand, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, when the telephone rang. She reached for the receiver, spoke quickly, and maybe a little breathlessly. “Hello?”
J.T.’s chuckle wove its way through the wires and around her heart. “Sorry if I startled you, McCaffrey. I didn’t mean to do that.”
Maggie glanced at the windup clock on her nightstand. Eight-thirty. Not an unreasonable time to call. She was getting jumpy in her old age. “You didn’t,” she said, fudging a little. “I wasn’t expecting anybody to call me here, that’s all.” She waited, and the silence lengthened. “J.T.?”
“Umm?”
“You dialed my number, remember?”
He laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”
She caught herself smiling and stopped. “If you can’t make dinner tomorrow night, I’ll understand,” she said, suddenly unable to think of any other reason why he might have called.
“Nice try,” he replied, “but I’ll be there.”
“J.T.—”
“What?”
“What’s going on? You didn’t call to hear my voice.”
He sighed heavily. He was lonely and so, Maggie realized, was she. All the more reason to be careful. “Maybe I did,” he said. “Maggie, what happened? Between you and the doc, I mean?”
It was none of his business, but he’d asked so quietly, so sincerely, that Maggie lowered her defenses a little. Temporarily, at least. “Connor and I just couldn’t make things work. We tried, but you know how it is.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s old news, J.T. What about you? How did you happen to wind up a divorced father?”
There was a lazy and rather rueful smile in his voice. “I became a father in the usual way. As for the divorce, well, Annie couldn’t take being married to a cop. Especially a homicide cop.” He paused, and Maggie knew he was running a hand through that thick, dark hair of his. He’d always done that when he was thinking, even as a little boy. “It wasn’t her fault; I was a lousy husband, never home, always focused on the job. We finally decided to go our separate ways.”
“But you were still together when you were shot, right?”
She could almost see him shaking his head. “No, Annie was already remarried by then.”
“You faced an ordeal like that alone?”
“I had pals on the force. My mother even put in a brief appearance, between husbands.”
Maggie, raised in the heart of a loving family, with a large network of friends and acquaintances, was appalled. “Oh, J.T.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy here, McCaffrey.”
“What are you asking for, then?”
Once again, he sighed. His laugh was broken, rusty sounding. “God, I wish I knew. I really wish I knew.”
She made a soft sound.
“What?” J.T. prompted.
“I was thinking of that time we went skinny-dipping out at the springs,” she said.
He chuckled. “Purvis caught us and threatened to lock us up for indecent exposure. How old were we?”
“Eighteen,” Maggie replied, somewhat wistfully. A tear trickled down her cheek and dropped off into space. When, she wondered, had she started to cry? “I was just back from my first year at Northwestern.”
“Yeah,” J.T. reflected. “I wonder if Purvis could have made the charges stick? I can’t speak for myself, but there was nothing indecent about the way you looked that night, McCaffrey. You were a prime example of really righteous exposure.”
She dried her cheeks on the sleeve of her nightgown, still laughing, still crying.
“What happened, McCaffrey?” J.T. asked seriously. “Where did we mess up?”
She squeezed her eyes shut, literally unable to answer.
“Are you crying?” His voice was low. Tender.
“No,” Maggie sobbed.
He sighed eloquently.
“All right,” she said. “So maybe I am, just a little.”
“Why?”
“Because things might have been so different,” she answered. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut as a wave of pain and regret swept over her. She felt impossibly lonely, as though she had slipped into some inner void and become lost in her own heart.
“It’s not like we’re old and gray, McCaffrey. We could start over, you know.”
How could they start over? They were still as different from each other as two people could be, and as unsuited. “What do you suggest?” she asked stiffly, stalling.
She should have seen it coming.
“We could start by skinny-dipping,” he said.
5
Mags!” Daphne called from somewhere in the furthest reaches of the Station. “Come and see what we found!”
Maggie, seated at her computer in the small office off the kitchen and public area, tugged off her reading glasses and pushed back her chair to stand up and stretch. “What?” she called back, smiling at the note of pleasure she’d heard in Daphne’s voice and glad at the prospect of a break. She’d spent most of the morning making minor adjustments to the new Springwater Station Web site, designed for her by a friend in Chicago, and although the bed-and-breakfast wasn’t quite ready to open, several on-line reservations had already come in. All the guest rooms would be full during the weeklong celebration centered around Founder’s Day. Daphne had gone to Maple Creek as planned, and met with a social worker, and she’d been in high spirits ever since she’d returned.
Cindy appeared in the doorway of the office, all twinkling eyes and sunny smiles. The girl’s new best friend, the feckless Sadie, was at her heels. “Daphne says you’ll have to come and see for yourself,” she said.
A part of Maggie urged her to stay at the computer, finish the job, but she resisted. In Chicago, she’d worked twelve-and fifteen-hour days, taking only the rare weekend off, but this was Springwater. She was determined to shift gears and slow down—even if it killed her.
She followed Cindy and the dog back to the storeroom, which had been added onto the Station around 1925 or so. Maggie had been thinking of converting the space into a small museum, displaying some of the community’s rich history, such as June-bug’s old recipe books—“receipts,” she’d called them—and Jacob’s careful accounts of income and expenditures. There were a number of other treasures, too, rescued from the ancient stables out back before they finally collapsed a few years ago: harnesses, saddles and other tack, cooking implements, old tools, and the like. Reece and Kathleen had a small collection of photographs from Springwater’s heyday as well, and were willing to lend them for the project.
Daphne was kneeling in front of a tattered storage trunk, the kind with thumb latches, and the lid was raised, revealing a lining of carefully pasted bits of ephemera, including letters, newspaper clippings, and the like. Her eyes were shining as she turned and met Maggie’s curious gaze. “Look,” she said, almost reverently and, as carefully as if she were uncovering a sleeping infant, she folded back several layers of old cloth to reveal what appeared to be a wedding dress, an exquisitely made Victorian concoction of silk and lace and seed pearls.
Maggie’s breath caught. She took one step forward, then another, spellbound.
“It’s almost perfectly preserved,” Daphne mused, running a hand across the pearl-studded bodice. “Who do you suppose it belonged to?”
Maggie didn’t need to speculate; she knew. She’d seen the dress in more than one of the photographs in the McCaffrey collection—it had belonged, originally, to Olivia and Will McCaffrey’s daughter, Sarah, and stitched, according to the notes in the family album, by the regular attendees of the Springwater quilting bee, who had p
resented the gown as a wedding gift. June-bug had been among those industrious women, as had Olivia, Rachel Hargreaves, Jessica Calloway, Savannah Parrish, Miranda Kildare, and Evangeline Wainwright. Two of Sarah’s daughters had worn the dress eventually, and so had Maggie’s paternal grandmother and two of her aunts. Then, mysteriously, it had been lost; Maggie had been deeply disappointed that she couldn’t wear the gown when she married Connor.
“In a way,” Maggie breathed, kneeling beside Daphne to touch the delicate dress with fingertips that trembled a little, “it belongs to all of us.” She explained what she knew of the gown’s history, and there were tears of wonder in Daphne’s eyes long before the brief tale ended.
“Amazing,” she said.
“Totally awesome,” Cindy added.
Sadie trotted over to give the dress a sniff, immediately lost interest, and went off to pursue personal objectives.
“It’s a pity there’s no one to wear it,” Maggie reflected.
“What we need is a bride,” Daphne agreed. Slowly, she got to her feet, and so did Maggie. They stood side by side, the glorious creation suspended before them, Maggie holding one shoulder of the garment, Daphne the other. “Isn’t it magnificent?” Daphne breathed. “I almost feel as though one of us could put it on and go back in time.”
Cindy stared raptly at the gown, then extended one slightly tremulous hand to touch the antique fabric. “I used to look at dresses like that in the Spiegel catalog, over at the library,” she murmured. “I actually thought I’d get to wear one someday.” She made a rueful, self-deprecating sound, meant, Maggie was sure, as a nonchalant little laugh. “Me, Odell Hough’s daughter.” Her voice broke, and she turned and hurried out of the storeroom, leaving Maggie and Daphne looking after her.
“That poor kid,” Daphne said quietly, her eyes luminous with sympathy.
Maggie simply shook her head, saddened to think of a little girl huddled in the library poring over unattainable wedding dresses.
Bouncing back, Daphne held the lacy marvel up to her chest and looked down at its flowing folds. There had to be ten yards of silk in the skirts alone; she and Maggie might have been kids again, playing dress-up in somebody’s attic. “Those women were awfully small.”
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