There and Now

by Linda Lael Miller

  But she laughed with Trista as they filled the basket with brown eggs. Surprisingly, considering the threat of a storm, Vera appeared, riding her pony and carrying a virtually hairless doll. After settling the horse in the barn, the two children retreated to Trista’s room to play.

  Elisabeth joined Ellen in the kitchen and volunteered to take a turn at pressing Jonathan’s shirts. The cumbersome flatirons were heated on the stove, and it looked like an exhausting task.

  “You just sit down and have a nice cup of tea,” Ellen ordered with a shake of her head. “It wasn’t that long ago that you were sick and dying, you know.”

  There was a kind of grudging affection in Ellen’s words, and Elisabeth was pleased. She was also enlightened; obviously, her disappearance had been easily explained. Jonathan had probably said she was lying in bed and mustn’t be disturbed for any reason. “I’m better now,” she allowed.

  Ellen stopped ironing the crisp white shirts long enough to get the china teapot down from a shelf and spoon loose tea leaves into it. She added hot water from the kettle and brought the teapot and a cup and saucer to the table. “I guess you and the doctor will be getting married straight away.”

  Elisabeth nodded. “Yes.”

  The housekeeper frowned, but her expression showed curiosity rather than antagonism. “I can’t quite work out what it is, but there’s something different about you,” she mused, touching the tip of her index finger to her tongue and then to the iron.

  The resultant sizzle made Elisabeth wince. “I’m—from another place,” she said, making an effort at cordiality.

  Ellen ironed with a vehemence. “I know. Boston. But you don’t talk much like she did.”

  By “she,” Elisabeth knew Ellen meant Barbara Fortner, who was supposed to be Elisabeth’s sister. Unfortunately, the situation left Elisabeth with no real choice but to lie. Sort of. “Well, I’ve lived in Seattle most of my adult life.”

  The housekeeper rearranged a shirt on the wooden ironing board and began pressing the yoke, and a pleasant, mingled scent of steam and starch rose in the air. “She never talked about you,” the woman reflected. “Didn’t keep your photograph around, neither.”

  Elisabeth swallowed, contemplating the tangled web that stretched before her. “We weren’t close,” she answered, and that was true, though not for the reasons Ellen would probably invent on her own. Elisabeth took a sip of tea and then boldly inquired, “Did you like her?”

  “No,” Ellen answered with a surprising lack of hesitation. “The first Mrs. Fortner was always full of herself. What kind of a woman would go away for months and leave her own child behind?”

  Elisabeth wasn’t about to touch that one. After all, she’d made a few unscheduled departures herself, and it hadn’t been because she didn’t care about Trista. “Maybe she was homesick, being so far from her family.”

  The housekeeper didn’t look up from her work, but her reply was vibrant, like a dart quivering in a bull’s eye. “She had you, right close in Seattle. Seems like that should have helped.”

  There was nothing Elisabeth could say to that. She carried her cup and saucer to the sink and set them carefully inside. Beyond the window, with its pristine, white lace curtains, the gloomy sky waited to remind her that there were forces in the universe that operated by laws she didn’t begin to understand. Far off on the horizon, she saw lightning plunge from the clouds in jagged spikes.

  If only the rain would start, she fretted silently. Perhaps that would alleviate the dreadful tension that pervaded her every thought and move.

  “I’d like to leave early today, if it’s all the same to you,” Ellen said, startling Elisabeth a little. “Don’t want to get caught in the rain.”

  Elisabeth caught herself before she would have offered to drive Ellen home in her car. If she hadn’t felt so anxious, she would have smiled at the near lapse. “Maybe you’d better leave now,” she said, hoping Ellen didn’t have far to go.

  Agreeing quickly, the housekeeper put away the ironing board and the flatirons and took Jonathan’s clean shirts upstairs. Soon she was gone, but there was still no rain and no sign of Jonathan.

  Elisabeth was more uneasy than ever.

  She climbed the small stairway that led up to Trista’s room and knocked lightly.

  “Come in,” a youthful voice chimed.

  Smiling, Elisabeth opened the door and stepped inside. Her expression was instantly serious, however, when her gaze went straight to the pendant Vera was wearing around her neck. It took all her personal control not to lunge at the child in horror and snatch away the necklace before it could work its treacherous magic.

  Vera preened and smiled broadly, showing a giant vacant space where her front teeth should have been. “Don’t you think I look pretty?” she asked, obviously expecting an affirmative answer. It was certainly no mystery that her children had grown up to be adventurous; they would inherit Vera’s innate self-confidence.

  “I think you look very pretty,” Elisabeth said shakily, easing toward the middle of the room, where the two little girls sat playing dolls on the hooked rug. She sank to her knees beside them, her movements awkward because of her long skirts.

  Vera beamed into Elisabeth’s stricken face. “I guess I shouldn’t have tried it on without asking you,” she said, reaching back to work the clasp. Clearly, she was giving no real weight to the idea that Elisabeth might have objections to sharing personal belongings. “Here.”

  Elisabeth’s hand trembled slightly as she reached out to let Vera drop the chain and pendant into her palm. Rather than make a major case out of the incident, she decided she would simply put the necklace away somewhere, out of harm’s way. “Where did you find this?” she asked moderately, her attention on Trista.

  Her future stepdaughter looked distinctly uncomfortable. “It was on top of Papa’s dresser,” she said.

  Elisabeth simply arched an eyebrow, as if inviting Trista to explain what she’d been doing going through someone else’s things, and the child averted her eyes.

  Dropping the necklace into the pocket of her skirt, Elisabeth announced, “It’s about to rain. Vera, I think you’d better hurry on home.”

  Trista looked disappointed, but she didn’t offer a protest. She simply put away her doll and followed Vera out of the room and down the stairs.

  Afraid to cross the threshold leading into the main hallway with the necklace anywhere on her person, Elisabeth tossed it over. Only as she was bending to pick the piece of jewelry up off the floor did it occur to her that she might have consigned it to a permanent limbo, never to be seen again.

  She carried the necklace back to the spare room and dropped it onto her bureau, then went downstairs and out onto the porch to scan the road for Jonathan’s horse and buggy. Instead, she saw the intrepid Vera galloping off toward home, while Trista swung forlornly on the gate.

  “There was supposed to be a wedding today,” she said, her lower lip jutting out just slightly.

  Elisabeth smiled and laid a hand on a small seersucker-clad shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed, honey. If it helps any, so am I.”

  “I wish Papa would come home,” Trista said. She was gazing toward town, and the warm wind made tendrils of dark hair float around her face. “I think there’s going to be a hurricane or something.”

  Despite her own uneasiness and her yearning to see Jonathan, Elisabeth laughed. “There won’t be a hurricane, Trista. The mountains make a natural barrier.”

  As if to mock her statement, lightning struck behind the house in that instant, and both Trista and Elisabeth cried out in shock and dashed around to make sure the chicken house or the woodshed hadn’t been struck.

  Elisabeth’s heart hammered painfully against her breast-bone when she saw the wounded tree at the edge of the orchard. Its trunk had been split from top to bottom, and its naked core was blackened and still smoldering. In the barn, Jonathan’s horses neighed, sensing something, perhaps smelling the damaged wood.


  And for all of it, the air was still bone-dry and charged with some invisible force that seemed to buzz ominously beneath the other sounds.

  “We’d better get inside,” Elisabeth said.

  Trista turned worried eyes to her face. “What about Vera? What if she doesn’t get home safely?”

  It was on the tip of Elisabeth’s tongue to say they’d phone to make sure, but she averted the slip in time. She wished she knew how to hitch up a wagon and drive a team, but she didn’t, and she doubted that Trista did, either.

  She could ride, though not well. “Let’s get out the tamest horse you own,” she said. “I’ll ride over to Vera’s place and make sure she got home okay.”

  “Okay?” Trista echoed, crinkling her nose at the unfamiliar word.

  “It means ‘all right,’” Elisabeth told her, picking up her skirts and heading toward the barn. Between the two of them, she and Trista managed to put a bridle on the recalcitrant Estella, Trista’s aging, swaybacked mare. Elisabeth asked for brief directions and set off down the road, toward the schoolhouse.

  Overhead, black clouds roiled and rolled in on each other, and thunder reverberated off the sides of distant hills. Elisabeth thought of the splintered apple tree and shivered.

  As she reached the road, she waved at the man who lived in an earlier incarnation of the house the Buzbee sisters shared. Heedless of the threatened storm, he was busy hammering a new rail onto his fence.

  Just around the bend from the schoolhouse, Elisabeth found Vera sitting beside the road, her face streaked with dust, sobbing. The pony was galloping off toward a barn on a grassy knoll nearby.

  “Are you hurt?” Elisabeth asked. She didn’t want to get down from the horse if she could help it, because getting back on would be almost impossible, dressed as she was. It was bad enough riding with her skirts hiked up to show her bare legs.

  Vera gulped and got to her feet, dragging one suntanned arm across her dirty face. Evidently, the sight of Elisabeth riding astride in a dress had been enough of a shock to distract her a little from the pain and indignity of being thrown. “I scraped my elbow,” she said with a voluble sniffle.

  Elisabeth rode closer and squinted at the wound. “That looks pretty sore, all right. Would you like a ride home?”

  Vera gestured toward the sturdy-looking, weathered farmhouse five hundred yards from the barn. “I live close,” she said. It appeared she’d had enough of horses for one day, and Elisabeth didn’t blame her.

  “I’ll just ride alongside you then,” she said gently as lightning ripped the fabric of the sky again and made her skittish mount toss its head and whinny.

  Vera nodded and dried her face again, this time with the skirt of her calico pinafore. “I don’t usually cry like this,” she said as she walked along the grassy roadside, Elisabeth and the horse keeping pace with her. “I’m as tough as my brother.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Elisabeth agreed, hiding a smile.

  Vera’s mother came out of the house and waved, smiling, apparently unruffled to see her daughter approaching on foot instead of on the back of her fat little pony. “It’s good to see you’re feeling better, Elisabeth,” she called over the roar of distant thunder. “You’re welcome to come in for pie and coffee if you have the time.”

  “I’d better get back to Trista,” Elisabeth answered, truly sorry that she couldn’t stay and get to know this woman better. “And I suppose the storm is going to break any minute now.”

  The neighbor nodded her head pleasantly, shepherding Vera into the house, and Elisabeth reined the mare toward home and rode at the fastest pace she dared, given her inexperience. As it was, she needn’t have hurried, for even after she’d put Trista’s horse back in the barn and inspected the unfortunate tree that had been struck by lightning earlier, there was no rain.

  She muttered as she climbed the back steps and opened the kitchen door. The forlorn notes of Trista’s piano plunked and plodded through the heavy air.

  The rest of the afternoon passed, and then the evening, and there was still no word from Jonathan. The sky remained as black and irritable as ever, but not so much as a drop of rain touched the thirsty ground.

  After a light supper of leftover chicken, Elisabeth and Trista took turns reading aloud from Gulliver’s Travels, the book they’d begun when Trista had fallen ill. When they tired of that, they played four games of checkers, all of which Trista won with smug ease.

  And Jonathan did not come through the door, tired and hungry, longing for the love and light of his home.

  Elisabeth was beginning to fear that something had happened to him. Perhaps there had been an accident, or he’d had a heart attack from overwork, or some drunken cowboy had shot him….

  Trista, who had already put on her nightgown, scrubbed her face and washed her teeth, was surprisingly philosophical—and perceptive—for an eight-year-old. “You keep going to the window and looking for Papa,” she said. “Sometimes he’s gone a long time when there’s a baby on its way or somebody’s real sick.”

  Self-consciously, Elisabeth let the curtain above the sink fall back into place. “What if you’d been here alone?” she asked, frowning.

  Trista shrugged. “Ellen would probably have taken me home with her.” She beamed. “I like going to her house because there’s so much noise.”

  The old clock on the shelf ticked ponderously, emphasizing the quiet. And it occurred to Elisabeth that Trista had been very lonely, with no brothers and sisters and no mother. “You like noise, do you?” Elisabeth teased. And then she bolted toward Trista, her hands raised, fingers curled, like a bear’s claws.

  Trista squealed with delight and ran through the dining room to the parlor and up the front stairway, probably because that was the long way and the pursuit could be drawn out until the last possible moment.

  In her room, Trista collapsed giggling on the bed, and Elisabeth tickled her for a few moments, then kissed her soundly on the cheek, listened to her prayers and tucked her into bed.

  Later, in the parlor, she sat down at the piano and began to play soft and soothing songs, tunes Rue would have described as cocktail-party music. All the while, Elisabeth listened with one ear for the sound of Jonathan’s footsteps.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The touch of Jonathan’s lips on her forehead brought Elisabeth flailing up from the depths of an uneasy sleep. The muscles in her arms and legs ached from her attempt to curl around Trista in a protective crescent.

  For a moment, wild fear seized her, closing off her throat, stealing her breath. Then she realized that except for the rumble of distant thunder, the world was quiet. She and Trista were safe, and Jonathan was back from his wanderings.

  She started to rise, but he pressed her gently back to the mattress and, in the thin light of the hallway lamp, she saw him touch his lips with an index finger.

  “We’ll talk in the morning,” he promised, his low voice hoarse with weariness. “I trust you’re still inclined to become my wife?”

  Elisabeth stretched, smiled and nodded.

  “Good.” He bent and kissed her forehead again. “Tomorrow night you’ll sleep where you belong—in my bed.”

  A pleasant shiver went through Elisabeth at the thought of the pleasures Jonathan had taught her to enjoy. She nodded again and then snuggled in and went contentedly back to sleep, this time without tension, without fear.

  Jonathan couldn’t remember being more tired than he was at that moment—not even in medical school, when he’d worked and studied until he was almost blind with fatigue. He’d spent most of the past twenty-four hours struggling to save the lives of a mother and her twins, losing the woman and one of the infants. The remaining child was hanging on to life by the thinnest of threads, and there was simply nothing more Jonathan could do at this point.

  In his room, he poured tepid water from the pitcher into the basin, removed his shirt and washed, trying to scrub away the smell of sickness and despair. When he could at least stand
the scent of himself, he turned toward the bed.

  God knew, he was so exhausted, he couldn’t have made love to Elisabeth even if the act somehow averted war or plague, but just having her lie beside him would have been the sweetest imaginable comfort. He ached to extend a hand and touch her, to breathe deeply and fill his lungs with her fragrance.

  Wearily, Jonathan made his way toward his bed and then stopped, knowing he would lapse into virtual unconsciousness once he stretched out. Before he did that, he had to know Elisabeth wouldn’t get it into her head to vanish again.

  Picking up a small kerosene lamp, he forced himself out into the hallway and along the runner to the door of the spare room, where she normally slept. The necklace, left carelessly on top of the bureau, seemed to sparkle in the night, drawing Jonathan to it by some inexplicable magic.

  Although he knew he would be ashamed of the action in the morning, he scooped the pendant into his hand and went back to his own room, where he blew out the lamp and sank into bed.

  Even in sleep, his fingers were locked around the necklace, and the hot, thunderous hours laid upon him like a weight.

  Somewhere in the blackest folds of that starless night, Elisabeth awakened with a wrench. She had to go to the bathroom, and that meant a trip to the outhouse if she didn’t want to use a chamber pot—which she most assuredly didn’t.

  Yawning, she rose and pulled on a robe—Ellen and Trista always spoke of the garment as a wrapper—and, after her eyes had adjusted, made her way toward the inner door and down the back steps to the kitchen.

  There was no wind, she noticed when she stepped out onto the back step, and certainly no rain. The air was ominously heavy, and it seemed to reverberate with unspoken threats. With a little shiver, Elisabeth forced herself down the darkened path and around behind the woodshed to the privy.