Up at Butternut Lake: A Novel (5 page)

Walker felt a little jolt of surprise.
That
was unusual. Not that mothers of young children were in the habit of throwing themselves at him. They weren’t. Not usually, anyway. But they also weren’t completely immune to him either. His eyes skated, almost unconsciously, to her ring finger. There was a thin gold band on it. No surprise there. Young, single women were in short supply this far north. Not much excitement up here. Unless, of course, you were an avid fisherman.

He watched, as discreetly as possible, while she finished cutting her son’s pancakes and slid the plate back in front of him. He was a cute little boy, Walker thought. He wasn’t good at guessing ages, but he thought this kid looked like he was somewhere between four and six years old. He had a mop of curly brown hair, and a sweet but serious expression on his face.

Now, he wolfed down his pancakes hungrily, ignoring his mother’s mild protestations. Walker suppressed a smile. He couldn’t blame the kid. He’d had the blueberry pancakes before. They were beyond good.

“You look like you could use an extrastrong cup of coffee,” Caroline said, materializing in front of him with the coffeepot.

“That sounds good,” he said, tearing his eyes off the woman and her son.

“For here or to go?”

“To go,” Walker said, glancing down at his watch again.

“No breakfast?” Caroline asked, reaching for one of the paper cups stacked behind the counter, filling it up to the rim, and snapping a plastic lid on it.

“No breakfast,” Walker confirmed.

Caroline frowned a disapproving frown, but otherwise said nothing. In her own, no-nonsense way, Walker thought, she was as maternal with her customers as the woman down the counter from him was with her son. Caroline didn’t like it when one of her regulars left without a hearty breakfast under his or her belt. But after almost three years, she knew Walker well enough to know he couldn’t be browbeaten into ordering food he wasn’t in the mood to eat.

Walker laid a five-dollar bill on the counter and stood up to go.

“Not so fast,” Caroline said, sliding the cup over to him. “I want you to meet your new neighbors. It just so happens that they’re here this morning, too.”

“My new neighbors?” Walker repeated, blankly. “I don’t have any neighbors.”

“You do now,” Caroline said. She gestured to the mother and son sitting a few seats away from him.

“Allie, Wyatt,” she said, loudly enough to get their attention. “This is Walker Ford. Your closest neighbor. Unless, of course, you count the black bears. And I’m not counting them,” she added, winking at Wyatt.

Walker’s counter mate turned to look at him again. She didn’t look happy. In fact, she looked distinctly
unhappy
. Which was strange, Walker thought. He hadn’t given her a reason to dislike him yet, had he? He frowned. He wasn’t used to people, especially women, finding him uninteresting
or
unlikable.

But her good manners obviously won out. She slid off her stool and, gently pulling her son after her, came over to shake Walker’s hand. Her hand felt soft and smooth in his own work-roughened hand, and for a second, he felt at a loss for words. It didn’t help that she was standing so close to him, either, though it was no closer than was absolutely necessary to shake his hand. She made her son shake his hand, too.

“I’m Allie Beckett,” she said, smiling that noncommittal smile again. “And this is Wyatt. We just moved in last night, actually.”

“I saw the light on in your cabin,” Walker said, mesmerized by her hazel eyes. He saw, up close, that they were actually light brown with darker flecks of green in them.

“You must have been surprised,” Allie said. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s been there.”

“I
was
surprised,” Walker confessed. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know that cabin was actually habitable.”

Allie frowned, and he knew he’d said the wrong thing. Pink color rushed onto the gold of her cheeks, although whether from anger or embarrassment, he couldn’t tell. And he didn’t really care, either. Because the change in coloring only made her look more ridiculously pretty than she already looked.

“Well, it
is
habitable,” she said. “But it
does
need some work,” she agreed. “Which is where Wyatt and I come in. Right, kiddo?” she said, pulling the boy closer. He nodded solemnly. “Fortunately, we’re not afraid to get our hands dirty,” she added.

“Are you sure it wouldn’t be easier to just tear it down?” Walker asked, without thinking. He was having trouble thinking. Thinking clearly, anyway.

“Tear it down?” she repeated, aghast. More pinkness flooded her tawny cheeks. Even he could see that she was angry now. Very angry.

“My grandfather built that cabin himself,” she said. “And it was built to last. It’s not ostentatious, like some of the later cabins on the lake,” she added, pointedly. “But it’s not meant to be, either.”

Ouch,
thought Walker. It was impossible to miss that dig. He felt the tiniest flicker of embarrassment. Maybe because when he’d built his cabin he’d wondered himself if it was perhaps just a
tiny
bit pretentious to build something that big on that lake.

But he was reluctant to end the conversation on a sour note. They were, after all, neighbors now.

“Is your husband a fisherman?” he asked, changing the subject.

“My husband?” she asked, startled.

Walker checked her ring finger again. It was definitely a wedding ring. She followed his eyes to it and looked at it as if she were seeing it for the first time. Maybe he’d been wrong about it being a wedding ring, he thought. But if it wasn’t a wedding ring, she probably wouldn’t have worn it on the ring finger of her left hand.

“My husband’s not here,” she said, looking back up at him. And there was something about the way she said it that led him to believe their separation was permanent. He could relate to that, although, in his case, there hadn’t been a young child involved. That was bound to make things more complicated. He wondered if she wore the ring for her son’s sake. Maybe she thought taking it off would upset him.

“It was nice meeting you, Mr. Ford,” she said now, and Walker almost winced. She’d said it was nice meeting him the same way she might have said it was nice going to the dentist. He watched while she led her son back to his seat at the counter. Then he picked up his cup of coffee and headed out the door.

“
That
went well,” he muttered to himself, as he drove his pickup truck to the boatyard outside of town. He reminded himself that it didn’t matter whether the two of them liked each other or not. In fact, it was probably better if they didn’t. He didn’t want a neighbor, and, apparently, neither did she.

So why, he wondered, did their meeting only add to his irritability? He had no idea. But it did. And not only that, but for the rest of the day, when he should have been thinking about work, he found himself thinking instead about Allie Beckett and her son. There was something strangely unsettling about his meeting with them.

Maybe Reid was right. Maybe he did have cabin fever. He needed to get away from Butternut, he decided. He’d go to Minneapolis on Friday. A couple of days in the city would do him good. Clear his head. And, with any luck, help him forget about the nightgown he’d found in the closet. Because, as ridiculous as it seemed, Walker couldn’t help thinking that his finding it was a bad omen, a harbinger of more trouble to come.

CHAPTER 5

B
y five o’clock that evening, Allie’s earlier optimism had completely evaporated. She and Wyatt were sitting on the cabin’s lopsided front steps. Wyatt was playing with his Hot Wheels, and she was swatting listlessly at the mosquitoes and wondering what on earth had possessed her to move here. She was already nostalgic for the snug ranch house they’d left behind, especially when another shingle fell, unceremoniously, off the roof of the cabin, barely missing the front steps they were sitting on.

It brought to mind what her new neighbor, Walker Ford, had said about the cabin that morning.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just tear it down?
She’d bristled at that remark, but the man had a point. Because while the cabin had a certain ramshackle charm, it was beginning to dawn on her that when it came to actually living with it, charm might be an overrated commodity.

Wyatt, at least, seemed content. He was propelling a bright red car along one of the cabin’s warped front steps, supplying the sound effects for it whenever he thought it necessary.

Soon, she knew, it would be time to make his dinner. Run his bath. Read him a bedtime story. And otherwise pretend that it was business as usual, and that she hadn’t made a terrible mistake in uprooting their suburban lives and bringing them here, to what suddenly felt like the end of the earth.

Wyatt stopped playing now and looked up. Something had caught his attention. In the next moment, Allie realized what it was. It was the sound of a truck, coming up the long gravel driveway to the cabin.

She couldn’t imagine who it might be. She didn’t know anyone here. And the few people she did know now—Caroline Keegan and Walker Ford—seemed unlikely candidates for a visit. But in the next moment, a red pickup truck coasted into view and stopped, and a petite woman swung open the driver’s-side door and jumped lightly out.

“Jax?” Allie said in astonishment, standing up and going to meet her halfway. She hadn’t seen Jax since the summer they were sixteen years old, but as far as Allie could tell, she still looked exactly the same. She’d been tiny then, and she was tiny now. Barely five feet tall and just a shade under a hundred pounds, as Allie recalled. She still wore her jet black hair in a ponytail, and her eyes, fringed by dark lashes, were still a vivid blue. She even had the same spray of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose that she’d had when they were teenagers.

But when Jax came over to hug her, Allie saw, and then felt, that there was one difference between the Jax then and the Jax now. This Jax was pregnant.
Quite
pregnant.

“It is so good to see you,” Allie said, hugging her. And when the firm roundness of Jax’s belly intruded between them, Allie laughed and held her at arm’s length to look at her. “When are you due?” she asked.

“Not for three more months, if you can believe it,” Jax said with a sigh. “It’s because I’m so small,” she explained. “The pregnancy weight doesn’t have anywhere else to go, so it all goes right here,” she added, pointing to her swollen belly.

“Well, that may be,” Allie said, “but other than being pregnant, you don’t look any different than the last time I saw you.”

Jax shrugged. “I’m thirty now, the same as you, Allie. But I know how young I look. I know because whenever I take the kids to the Kmart out on Highway 53, all the grandmothers there give me dirty looks. You know, ‘children having children.’ That kind of thing.”

Allie laughed. Those grandmothers must have been shocked to see a woman who looked barely old enough to drive a car with three children in tow, and a fourth on the way.

“Speaking of children,” Jax said, approaching Wyatt, “this must be Wyatt. Caroline told me you are a world-class pancake eater.” Her blue eyes were dancing.

Wyatt looked shyly down, but he didn’t say anything, and Allie felt her heart contract. She remembered Wyatt as a toddler. He’d been positively gregarious. When had he started to change? But that was a silly question. She knew exactly when he’d started to change.

Jax, though, was undaunted by his shyness. “You know, Wyatt,” she said, lowering herself onto the step beside him, “I have three daughters at home. Joy is twelve, Josie is nine, and Jade is six.”

Wyatt frowned. “That’s a lot of girls,” he said softly. He looked worried.

Jax laughed, but then her expression turned serious. “That
is
a lot of girls,” she agreed. “And, just between you and me, there’s going to be at least one more,” she said, running a hand over her belly. “Because this baby is going to be a girl, too.”

Wyatt had nothing to say to that, but the worry lines on his forehead deepened.

“I should tell you though, Wyatt,” Jax said, her tone still serious, “the three girls we already have are no ordinary girls. Their father has taught each one of them how to hit a fastball.” That got Wyatt’s attention. He looked up, interested.

Jax leaned closer and lowered her voice. “And if the truth be told, Wyatt, I think their father would like to keep going until we have enough daughters for our own baseball team. That would be nine in all.” She smiled and brushed his cheek lightly with her fingertips, and Allie was relieved to see that Wyatt didn’t recoil under her touch. Instead, he stared expectantly at her, waiting to hear what she would say next.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said, jumping up. “I brought you two something.” She went back to her truck and reached into the backseat. Then she lifted out a whole flat of strawberries, six quarts in all.

“Let me help you,” Allie said, coming over to her, but Jax waved her away.

“I picked these from our garden this morning,” she explained. “You’ll probably want them in the refrigerator,” she added, heading up the front steps of the cabin.