A Montana Homecoming

Chapter Four

The next day, Laurel took the bus back to Lucius from Billings after returning the rental car there. Keeping it longer was simply an excuse she couldn’t afford. But standing in the depot, she very nearly changed her mind about climbing on the bus.

Wouldn’t returning to Colorado be preferable to returning to Lucius?

She could find another teaching position. She did have good credentials, after all. She’d left her last school on good terms. Had even helped find her replacement. She’d been planning on marrying. Martin had wanted to travel. See the world. He was forty-five and more than financially able to take an early retirement. Giving up her job had been perfectly understandable, considering the circumstances.

There was no earthly reason why she had to return to Lucius. The junior choir would survive without her intervention. Mrs. Cuthwater could keep on substituting for third grade. Laurel could contact that attorney—Mr. Newsome—and put him in charge of disposing of her father’s house and personal effects.

She didn’t have to go back.

The worst memories of her life lived in Lucius.

But so did the very best memories.

When she went up the ramp of plywood that covered the perilous porch steps at her father’s house, she couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t chosen to return willingly.

None of it had anything to do with Shane, of course. Heavenly days, no. Where would be the sense in that?

Whether or not he admitted it, at worst the man thought she had a screw loose. At best he thought she needed coddling to make sure her screws didn’t come loose.

So she unlocked the flimsy lock and went inside, leaving the door open for the fresh summer air. Even after only a half a day of being closed up, the house felt stuffy and close.

In her marathon cleaning sessions before the funeral, she’d managed to rid the house of its suffocating layer of dust, but instead of making the house look better, she’d only managed to make its rundown condition more evident. Yes, the windows were clean and shining again, but the cracks only glistened more. Yes, the cobwebs were gone, but the walls and ceilings now screamed for fresh plaster and paint.

She dropped her suitcase on the couch. She knew she needed to get to work on the place. She’d done enough vacillating. Whether she fixed the house up to remain in it or fixed it up to sell it, either way the work needed to be done.

While in Billings, she’d called Martin and asked him to sell her car. It wasn’t worth much, but it had been reliable enough for her needs. Going all the way to Denver to retrieve it though seemed more effort and expense than it was worth. His son from his first marriage—a high school senior—had been begging for a car for a year. Now he’d have one. She’d hung up feeling better and worse. Better that she’d made a productive decision. Worse because Martin was simply too good. He hadn’t deserved her treatment, and she still felt badly about it.

But not badly enough to go through with a marriage that had put her in the worst panic attack she’d had since she’d been a patient at Fernwood

She’d left Denver. She had no intention of going back. She’d had friends, but no one—other than Martin—who’d been truly close. Aside from him, she’d spent nearly all of her time teaching. Teaching during the regular year. Teaching during the summers.

And dwelling on it all accomplished nothing.

Martin was sending her money for her car, and she’d find something economical in Lucius. On Monday she would open a bank account in town, have her funds transferred from Colorado. She’d have enough to tide her through the summer, hopefully enough to accomplish the most necessary repairs on the house, if she was careful. And then…and then, she would see.

Concrete plans. Achievable goals. Such behavior had gotten her through a lot of years. She could do this.

She would do this.

“Laurel?”

She started, pressing her hand to her heart when it jolted. She turned to the doorway. She hadn’t seen Shane since she’d gone to his office. “What do you want, Sheriff?”

She didn’t need to see his expression clearly through the screen to know he was irritated. The way he yanked open the door and stepped inside told her that quite well enough.

He swept off his dark-brown cowboy hat and tapped it against the side of his leg. “What are you doing here?”

“Where else would I be?”

“You left town this morning.”

“How’d you know that?”

“The grapevine is as active now as it was when you were a girl. More so, I ’spose, considering half the town has cell phones now. You drove out of town and word spread.”

“And I wasn’t allowed back?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

She felt herself flush when she realized she was staring at his legs, strong and long and clad in fading blue jeans that fit extremely well. He looked delectable and she looked…as if she’d just spent a few hours on a bus. “I had to return the rental car in Billings.”

“How’d you get back to Lucius?”

“The bus.” Looking at his dark-blue pullover didn’t help her any, either, because the fabric did little to disguise the massively wide chest beneath.

She settled for focusing on the faint dent in his stubbornly square chin.

He tossed his hat and it landed unerringly on the corner of the coffee table, right next to a footed glass bowl of ugly plastic purple grapes. “For crissakes, Laurel. You could have called someone.”

She sank her teeth into her tongue for a moment. “Is it the bus you object to, or the fact that I didn’t remain out of town?”

“I never wanted you to leave town in the first place.”

“No, leaving was what you liked to do.” Her words seemed to hang in the air, giving her mortification plenty of time to set in good and deep.

If she’d wanted to prove that the brief past they’d shared was completely irrelevant to her now, she was doing a miserable job of it.

“Leaving is what I had to do,” he said finally. “If I’d have stayed, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my hands to myself again. Not after we’d—”

“Stop.” Heat filled her face. She had only herself to blame for opening up the matter, but she really didn’t want to go into those details. “It was a long time ago. No need to rehash it.”

“Maybe not for you. I always meant to tell you that I was—”

“Please, this isn’t—”

“Sorry.”

“—necessary.”

He frowned at her, looking very much as if he had plenty more to say. After a moment, though, he just raked one long-fingered hand through his hair, ruffling the deep gold into soft spikes. “So you really do mean to stay while you work on this house.”

She could feel her scalp tightening. “Yes.”

“Despite what happened here.”

There was no possibility of pretending she didn’t know what he referred to.

“Was Holly in the hospital when she died?” she asked.

His eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Hospice care?”

“She was at home.” His voice was clipped.

“With your father.”

“Yes.”

“Did he leave his house after? Sell it?”

A muscle flexed in his jaw. “No.”

“And you still visit your dad there. At the house where you and your brother and sisters grew up.”

“Apples and oranges, Laurel. My father didn’t—” His teeth snapped together. “God. What is it about you that pushes me right off the edge of reason?”

She crossed her arms, stung. “Why don’t you just finish it, Sheriff? Your father didn’t kill your mother. And you believe—just like your predecessor, Sheriff Wicks—that my father killed mine. Well, he didn’t. Her death was an accident.” She dropped her arms and stepped closer to him, forcing the words past her tight throat. “I may have been stuck in a straitjacket five-hundred miles away, but even I knew the charges against my father were dropped. Sheriff Wicks obviously changed his mind. So why can’t you?”

“You were never in a straitjacket.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I visited you there.”

Shock reared her back. “I…what?”

He stepped past her, pacing the close confines between the faded couch and the equally faded rocking chair. He rounded the back of the couch. Stopped. Closed his palms over the back of it. “Guess I don’t have to ask if you remember that.”

She stared at him. His fingertips were white where they sunk into the faded floral upholstery.

“You…saw me there. At Fernwood.”

“Three times a week for three months.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her lips parted, but she simply could not draw a breath. She sat down on the rocker and pressed her forehead to her hands.

Everything she’d thought about him for all these years tilted.

She finally dragged oxygen into her lungs. “I didn’t know.”

“There was a sunroom there. Plenty of windows. A lot of fake palm trees planted in pots.”

She didn’t even have to close her eyes to recall the room. To this day she preferred any tree other than a palm. “It overlooked a parking lot. The nurses tried to brighten it up with the plants.”

“Right.”

She remembered the room, remembered so much of Fernwood.

But not his visits.

Which meant he’d been there only at the first. She knew, because she’d been told, that she’d been moved to Fernwood within a month of her mother’s death. But the time between that and the wintry morning when she’d sat looking out at the falling snow and her mind had just…clicked on again…had been nearly six months.

“Your father told you I was at Fernwood, I suppose.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She knew Beau had been instrumental in getting her placed at Fernwood, a private mental health facility outside of Denver, where she received more care than she would have through the system in Lucius.

“Holly told me. She came to visit me at seminary. Came to give me a piece of her mind, actually, for going for weeks on end without calling home. That’s when I learned what your father had done. What had happened…to you. After I’d dropped you off that evening, I picked up my suitcase from the house and kept driving. I didn’t know about any of it until Holly came to see me in California.”

She pressed her fingertips into her eye sockets. “My father didn’t do anything.”

“Then you remember that? You remember what happened that day, but not the hours you and I spent sitting in that bloody sunroom at Fernwood.”

“I remember enough!” She dropped her hands, staring at him. Wondering why the pain of it was as sharp as it was, when time was supposed to dull this sort of thing. “You slept with me in Calhoun’s barn, and then you dumped me, and after you drove me back to my house—insisted on it, in fact—I arrived in just enough time to see my mother accidentally fall down the stairs. I don’t care what everyone said. My father did not push her.”

“Because you remember it.”

Her eyes burned. The truth was that she didn’t remember anything beyond the sight of Shane driving away in that old pickup truck while she stood on the porch, silently crying. “My father wouldn’t have hurt my mother.”

“Did you ever talk to him after you left Lucius?”

The question came like a slap. “Yes.” Often, once she left Fernwood. Then over the years dwindling down to just once a year. On his birthday. Calling him more often might have been the right thing to do, but she hadn’t been able to bear the constant disappointment.

“And? What’d he say?”

“What does it matter to you? It wasn’t a confession, I promise you that.” She knew her father would never have made such a confession. Not to her. Not to anyone.

He had been a miserable man, but he hadn’t been an abusive one. No matter what the rumors around Lucius had said.

She ought to know.

She’d lived under his roof.

He’d often raised his voice, but he’d never once raised his hand.

That had been her mother’s particular domain.

“Laurel.” Shane’s voice went soft. Careful. Gentle. “I’m just trying to—”

Coddling.

She hated it.

“He told me not to come home to Lucius,” she said baldly. “So I didn’t. He never came to visit me. His actions were perfectly clear. He didn’t want to be around me. But now he’s gone and what he wanted doesn’t matter anymore. I’m here whether you like it or not.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

“There’s nothing in this house that can hurt me.”

“Hurt doesn’t have to be physical.”

She knew that as well as anyone.

And she was still grappling with the revelation that he’d visited her at Fernwood. “I’ll be fine.”

Something came and went in his eyes. “I guess I’ll be close enough by to make sure of it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He merely straightened and rounded the couch, stopping in front of her. “Come with me.”

Wariness edged in again. “Where?”

He held out his hand. “You’ll see.”

She swallowed. Eyed his palm. She could see the row of calluses, the signs of a man perfectly accustomed to physical labor, despite his position as sheriff. His fingers were long. Square-tipped. His wrist corded.

She swallowed and gingerly placed her hand in his.

And even though she’d braced herself, the contact felt electric.

If he noticed, he hid it a lot better than she did.

She rose.

He led her out the front door. The plywood vibrated under their feet as they went down it. There was no sign of Shane’s SUV. Instead, there was a small blue sedan parked at the curb.

It didn’t look at all like a car he’d ordinarily drive.

But then, what did she know?

She absently noticed that a breeze had cropped up. It felt welcoming, given the heat of the afternoon. Given the heat charging up her arm to her elbow to her shoulder and beyond…

He walked the length of the house, then around the southern side. Fifty yards behind the house, the land rose sharply. Growing up, she’d done a lot of sledding in the wintertime on that hill.

“I’ll be close by,” he said, letting go of her hand and pointing. “Because we’re neighbors.”

She stared.

The house on the hill was his.

The house that was so incredibly beautiful. She’d spent more than one night watching the wooden and stone structure sleep in the moonlight when she hadn’t been able to find any such rest. She’d admired the gleaming windows, the stone chimneys, the inviting porch. The house had been built while she’d been gone from Lucius, yet it didn’t reek of newness at all. It possessed only a timeless beauty.

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