Jeff ignored the remark. He hadn’t
encountered a smoother liar in all his life. “Anyway, Allie, I just
wanted to show you those birds. I found that nest of barn swallows
in there and I thought you’d like to see them.” He felt like a kid,
trying to explain an intended good deed that had turned into a
disastrous blunder.
She turned her head to look at him again.
“Birds?”
“
Yeah, I remembered that you liked to
feed the ones in the orchard. You like birds, don’t you?” He hadn’t
gotten that wrong, had he?
“
Yes, but I wouldn’t go into the barn
to look at them. Anyway, I didn’t see anything except
that—that— And if you didn’t put it there, who
did?”
“
If I knew we wouldn’t be sitting here
talking about it. I’d be kicking that bastard’s ass all the way to
the county line.” Allie said nothing, but the hurt he saw written
on her face hit him like a punch in the stomach. “I guess you don’t
have any reason to believe me. But I’m telling you the
truth.”
“
Don’t listen to him, Althea!” her
sister harangued, towering over them like one of the Furies calling
down the wind. “After what he did, you should order him off the
property now, this minute!” She narrowed her eyes. “Whatever would
Daddy say?”
Allie felt pummeled by the events and the
quarrelsome voices yammering around her. “Olivia, please, just go
back into the house. There’s no point in both of us being
upset.”
“
But—”
“
Please. We’ll talk about
this—later.”
“
Very well, Althea.” Straight-backed
and her nose in the air, Olivia flounced off through the wet grass
to the back porch.
Allie and Jeff both watched in silence until
she slammed the door.
Jeff sat across from her, cross-legged and
facing the barn. He gestured in its direction. “Allie, this might
not be the time to talk about it but Olivia did tell me to take you
in there. She said you’d want to see that bird’s nest.”
Allie gazed at her lap for a moment, so long
that Jeff began to fidget. “You might be telling the truth, Mr.
Hicks.” She said it with a half-hearted whisper, stealing a glance
at him and then looking away again. “But everyone in town knows my
mother hung herself. Are you telling me you didn’t?”
“
I never said that!” Jeff protested. “I
knew. But I swear to you, Allie, I didn’t know she hung herself in
the barn!”
With great effort Allie managed to draw
herself to her knees, making him think of a wounded doe, caught in
the open and frantic to find shelter in the woods. Plainly too weak
to run, she struggled to her feet with her shoulders hunched and
her arms wrapped around herself, as if waiting for the hunter’s
second, and fatal, shot. The image made his heart twist in his
chest. Her chin lifted a notch. Even as she made the effort, the
wind whipped at her heavy skirts, and she swayed slightly. “How
could you not know? I told you never to leave the barn door open.
That day I made you come down from the roof to close it—” She
lifted a hand to her throat, her eyes shining with tears. “Why else
would I have done that? Why else would I care? I would have closed
it myself.”
Jeff couldn’t think of an argument to that.
She had insisted that he climb down from the roof to closed the
damned barn door. At the time, he’d thought she was just being a
fussy old maid who wanted her own way. He hadn’t known about her
mother then, but in retrospect, she’d made her revulsion for the
barn very plain. A clear-thinking man would have figured out that
she was afraid of something in there, but his only concern had been
getting his next drink.
Now he realized that her mother had hung
herself from that very rafter. Well, Jeff Hicks didn’t need a house
to fall on him before he understood a point—no, sirree, it took a
whole damned barn. He kept remembering the look on Allie’s face
when she’d found herself in there, how she’d stared at the dummy
and then flown into a panic. Her mother. He may not have engineered
the prank, but he’d been the one to lead her in there, like a lamb
to the slaughter. The realization made him feel sick.
“
I won’t ask you to leave because I
need your help,” she said hollowly, “and because I want to be fair
to you. But I won’t hear you say anything bad about my
sister.”
She walked away then, unsteady but clearly
determined to get to the safety of her kitchen. Climbing the
stairs, she never once looked back at him or the barn.
Jeff watched her go, that gut-punched feeling
back on him, stronger than ever.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Over the next few days, Allie maintained her
distance from Jeff. She still left his meals on the back porch, but
she had no encounters with him. At least he seemed to realize that
she wanted nothing to do with him and he stayed away from the
house. In fact, sometimes the only evidence of his presence was the
empty dishes she collected after he ate.
Her initial anger at him faded to
disappointment. Whenever she thought about what he’d done to her,
intentional or not, her eyes burned with tears. Not only had he
given her the second biggest scare of her life, he had dredged up
unbearable memories that she had tried hard to keep in the back of
her mind.
Could she have been wrong about the man? The
tenderness she’d detected in him, the compassion—if what Olivia
told her was true, he’d been very good at deceiving her. Olivia was
after her night and day, reminding Allie that she hadn’t trusted
him from day one. Allie was not as quick to judge, but she felt
like a fool for believing in him, trusting him, falling in love
with him. Love—it had crept up and taken her heart, foolish
spinster that she was, she thought bitterly. But what did she
really know about men or love, anyway? Nothing.
Within an hour of the barn incident, Olivia,
who’d stunned Allie with a strength she had never suspected,
returned to her girlish, doll-like self. She had been tight-lipped
and disapproving when Allie explained that she couldn’t run Jeff
off. Her sister had reminded her, in vivid and exacting detail, of
the terrible deed Jeff had committed. But they still needed his
help, and as she’d told him, there was no one else to ask. When
Allie had promised to have as little to do with him as possible,
Olivia seemed satisfied.
Now she played her piano every afternoon and
often wore a complacent smile. But the image of her sister charging
out to the barn, dressed only in her nightgown and wrapper to
avenge Allie, gave her new insight into the person she always
thought of as a child.
Allie had almost quit thinking about the
heart-stopping terror of that morning every moment of the day.
Almost. There was something familiar about the dummy, more than
what it represented, that nagged at her waking hours but she could
never put her finger on what it was.
The gruesome thing still visited her dreams,
though, sometimes with a pillow-ticking face, sometimes with her
mother’s. It would reach out to her with the arms of a skeleton and
point a bony finger at her in mute accusation. No matter how she
tried, she couldn’t get out of that barn. No matter how loud she
called and cried, or how hard she pushed on the door. She was
trapped, the door locked from the outside. Just the way it had
happened so long ago. In her dream, though, always, always, someone
would come to rescue her, a kind, courageous champion who feared
nothing and released her into the sunlight, but whose face remained
in the shadows. She’d jerk to wakefulness without learning her
protector’s identity, shivering in cold perspiration and wishing
that someone was with her to chase away the demons that plagued her
sleep. To her distress, the someone she imagined usually took the
form of Jefferson Hicks.
Though Allie had no direct contact with Jeff,
she kept her eye on him and the progress of his work. Once, on his
way to the lean-to, he’d turned suddenly, as though he felt her
watching him from the kitchen window. He’d stared back at her with
a steady, unflinching gaze, like a man who had nothing to be
ashamed of. She thought that he looked nearly as haggard as he had
when he first came to the farm, and it seemed as if he even wore a
wistful, troubled expression on his drawn features. Hearing
footsteps that signaled Olivia’s approach, she had jumped away from
the window, as guilt-stricken as a child stealing a piece of
candy.
At least the kitchen garden, the source of
her other great worry, had been planted. She’d stood at her bedroom
window upstairs, watching as Jeff sowed the field with the restored
seeder. The rows were as straight and orderly as she could have
asked, and the under the warm sun of late June, seedlings were
beginning to pop up.
Eager for a closer look, one bright afternoon
while Olivia was napping and bread dough was rising in the warm
kitchen, Allie slipped out the back door to inspect the garden. It
gave her the perfect opportunity to learn for herself exactly what
work Jeff had done. He was in the front yard, cutting the high,
fast-growing grass with a scythe. She saw him from the parlor
window, swinging the blade with long, smooth strokes that made her
pause to watch, peeping at him from the shelter of the curtains.
The muscles in his raw-boned arms swelled with the effort, and when
he turned to face the house, she saw that his ill-fitting shirt was
completely unbuttoned. Apparently, he still wouldn’t wear the shirt
she’d made for him, and now she felt like an idiot for having taken
the time to do it. But that thought faded as she looked his torso
gleaming with sweat. A breeze came up to catch the loose tails of
his shirt, revealing the smooth, hypnotic motion of flesh and rib
and sinew. The damp waistband of his jeans hung low on a belly that
looked as firm and ridged as her washboard.
Allie’s breathing sped up to keep time with
the tireless to-and-fro swing of the scythe while she watched the
grass surrender to the blade. Back and forth, rhythmic, powerful.
She gripped the curtain in her fist and swallowed. It was not a
particularly hot day but she felt restless and edgy in the parlor
that had suddenly grown too warm and close. Her high collar seemed
too tight, and her hair too heavy at the back of her head. When she
realized that she was staring, she tore herself away from the
window. Imagine, gawking at that dreadful man who was responsible
for her latest round of nightmares! He was beneath contempt, and he
certainly did not warrant the kind of attention she’d paid him.
Allie struggled to force her mind back to the
task at hand. The task at hand—what was it? Of course, the garden.
With a last backward glance at Jeff, she left the parlor and went
to the back door. She was reasonably certain that she would be able
to avoid him if she circled around the other side of the house.
As she walked along the path between the
house and the fields, she heard the birds twittering in the orchard
but it was the grounds that held her attention. Although a lot of
work had yet to be done, here and there the farm was actually
beginning to look better. True, shrubbery and blackberry brambles
grew wild over the spring house and toolshed, and the house still
needed painting. But the shutters, which had bracketed the windows
at precarious angles, were now straight and secure again. The woven
wire fence that ran along one side of the road, the one that had
become as bowed as a canvas sail in a hard wind, now stood upright
and taut. The bushes growing around the house had been trimmed so
that Allie no longer had to stand on tiptoe to see out windows.
They hadn’t merely been hacked down, either. Jeff had followed the
natural line of the plants so that they really looked nice. She was
a capable woman, but these were tasks that she could not have
accomplished alone.
When she reached the field, she breathed in
the scent of newly-turned earth as she inspected each row. Spinach
and cabbage were already sending tender green shoots toward the
summer sun, a fact for which Allie was profoundly glad. They’d
gotten a late start but now she had real hope that there would be a
decent harvest to can in the fall. She walked between the rows that
bore onions and garlic, stooping to pluck the occasional weed as
went. When she reached the top edge of the field she found an
orderly line of plants that bore no resemblance to any vegetable
she was familiar with. As she examined them more closely, she saw a
rich purple bloom emerging from the dark green foliage. She reached
down to touch its velvety petals.
Violets. They grew wild all over the farm.
Jeff had transplanted violets and put them here. Violets, with
their soft, velvety petals and delicate hue, had stolen her
attention that day so many years ago.
Allie lifted her head and looked across the
field again. She could find no fault in Jeff’s work, but she found
plenty in the man. What kind of person would plant a border of
violets in a garden just for their beauty, and then arrange to
scare ten years off a woman’s life? It didn’t make any sense.
She chided herself for asking the question,
but despite every common-sense reason her mind could conceive, it
lurked in her heart. She gripped her arms as if the summer breeze
had turned suddenly chill. In time, the horror of that morning
would probably fade a bit, but she felt as if the hurt never
would.
Walking back along the path, she reached the
low fence that enclosed her parents graves. As she passed, she
spied a bright yellow dandelion in full bloom right in front of her
mother’s headstone. Its foliage spread wide and audacious on the
otherwise manicured spot. Hurrying inside the enclosure, she
dropped to her knees to get a firm grip on the weed. Dandelions had
long roots and if she couldn’t get the whole of this one, the plant
would keep coming back. But she succeeded in only stripping off the
leaves and breaking the stem of the flower, staining her hand green
in the bargain. The thing was securely fixed, almost as if
something held its other end in a tug of war. She glanced up at the
headstone.