A Soft Place to Fall (38 page)

"You did what your heart told you to do.
Can't ask more than that of a person."

"You knew why I had to sell the house."

"Ay-up," said Warren. "I knew."

"And you lowered the price on this one to
help me out."

He scowled but the twinkle in his eyes gave
him away. "This dump? I was lucky anyone wanted it."

"I love this place," she said, then reached
for his hand. "Almost as much as I love you."

They went over the afternoon's events again
from beginning to end but still came up empty-handed. Warren
whipped out his cell phone and made a few calls to his attorneys
and a private investigator who kept track of comings and goings in
the area. "I want every scrap you can dig up on who these guys were
and where they were headed," he ordered, "and I want it
yesterday."

"Yesterday?" Annie arched a brow. "You've
been watching too much TV, Warren."

"If you don't tell them yesterday, you'll get
it a week from tomorrow," Warren said. "Now let's start again from
the beginning."

Annie had just begun to run through the
sequence of events when they heard Claudia's footsteps coming up
the walk.

Warren shook his head. "I don't know how such
a little woman can make so much noise."

Annie glanced around the room as if she were
looking for an escape hatch. "I'm not up for this," she said. "I
can't face a round of I-told-you-sos from Claudia."

"I'll keep her in line," Warren said. "Any
nonsense from her and I'll boot her narrow butt out the door."

Claudia knocked politely, waited a half
second, then said, "I know you're in there. I'll camp out here all
night if I have to."

Warren rolled his eyes as Annie got up to
open the door for her mother-in-law.

"How are you?" Claudia cupped Annie's face in
her hands and inspected her for signs of wear. "You look
exhausted."

"I'm okay," Annie said, "all things
considered." She motioned for Claudia to join them at the tiny
kitchen table.

"I should've known I'd find you here."
Claudia fixed Warren with a stern look. "Sticking your nose where
you don't belong."

"Put a sock in it, old woman," he said. "If
you don't have anything helpful to say, don't say anything."

"I'm here for Anne." Claudia claimed the
rocking chair Annie had pulled over to the table. "And I'll thank
you to keep a civil tongue in your head."

"If you two don't –" The room started to spin
and Annie grabbed the back of the rocker for support.

"Good God Almighty!" Warren was on his feet
in an instant. He put an arm around her waist and sat her down in
his chair. "The girl's about to faint."

Claudia leaped to her feet and pushed Warren
out of the way. She bent down and peered into Annie's eyes. "When
did you last eat?"

"I – I don't know."

"Make yourself useful," Claudia snapped at
Warren, "and get her some crackers and a glass of milk." She waited
until Warren hurried away then looked again into Annie's eyes.
"Your doctor visit this afternoon," she said in a much softer tone.
"It went well?"

Their history together filled the room.
Playing in the Galloways' big backyard when she was a little girl.
Helping Claudia carry out the giant pitchers of cold lemonade.
Learning how to make blueberry jam from her new mother-in-law.
Sharing her grief with the one person who loved Kevin as much as
she had. Working side by side with the strongest woman she had ever
known. It was all there in the room with them, every year, every
minute of it.

Annie nodded her head. "It went well," she
whispered. "Very well."

#

It only hurt for a moment. One exquisite,
blinding moment of pain so intense that Claudia thought she might
die from it. All those years of trying, the monthly heartbreak that
Annie and Kevin had tried to hide, and now this miracle. Annie, her
beloved Annie, was going to finally have her baby and the last link
remaining between them would be broken.

Life went on, no matter how hard you tried to
stop it in its tracks. Love bloomed where you least expected it and
that was part of what made life such a wonder to behold. Claudia
didn't have to understand Annie's need to build a new life of her
own; all she had to do was find it in her heart to send her on her
way.

It was the hardest thing she had ever been
asked to do and in some ways the easiest.

Claudia took Annie's hands in hers and
squeezed them tightly. "A baby," she whispered, her voice cracking
ever so slightly. "God's finest miracle."

Annie managed a small laugh. "Definitely a
miracle. I'm thirty-eight, Claude. I'm looking at fertility's last
outpost."

She looked into Annie's lovely blue eyes and
wished she could erase the years of fear and loneliness. How blind
she had been to the younger woman's pain. How devoted to polishing
Kevin's tarnished halo in the eyes of a town that knew better. It
all seemed such a tragic waste in the face of the new life inside
Annie's belly.

"I was going to tell Sam this afternoon,"
Annie said. "I know you don't like him but –"

"I was wrong." The words hurt less than she
would have imagined. She should have said them a long time ago. She
should have said so many things. "I saw him only as Kevin's
replacement and that wasn't fair to any of us. Sam has a good
heart, Annie, a generous heart, and he loves you."

"You can't possibly know that."

"Honey, everyone in this blessed town knows
how Sam Butler feels about you."

"Do they know how I feel about him?"

"I can't speak for the town, but I'm pretty
certain I know."
You love him, Annie Lacy Galloway. You always
did wear your heart on your sleeve.

She looked so young, like the girl she had
been just the day before yesterday. "One day I just might ask for
your blessing."

Claudia's eyes filled with tears. "As if you
needed such a thing! You were a good wife to my son, Annie. I know
it wasn't always easy. Maybe if the rest of us hadn't always looked
the other way –" She sighed deeply. "But that's the way it was
handled in our family." She pushed Annie slightly away and met her
eyes. "That's the way we handled it when I was the one with the
problem.".

"You?" She looked the way Claudia's youngest
had looked when she found out there was no Santa Claus. "I can't
believe this."

"I'm not proud of what I did," Claudia said,
"but I am proud that I managed to beat it. I had hoped Kevin would
be able to follow my example but it wasn't meant to be." Kevin had
been the dearest son a mother could have asked for, the gold
standard by which she had judged her other children and found them
wanting. If they hadn't all loved him just as much, she would be a
very lonely woman today.

"I tried, Claude," Annie said through her own
tears. "I did everything I could think of. I even told him I would
leave if he didn't get help."

"Shh," Claudia said, stroking her hair. "My
John threatened to leave me many times but it wasn't until I was
ready to change that the changes began to happen. We all loved
Kevin and we all helped keep his secrets. This whole town helped.
No wife could have done more than you did. Your mother would have
been very proud of the woman you've become." She hesitated a
moment, praying she still had the right. "The same way that I'm so
very proud of you."

Annie could feel both women's blessings
raining down on her, surrounding her with love. If love could keep
you safe from harm, she had it made.

#

The sleigh bed seemed empty without Sam there
with her. George and Gracie were curled up together near the foot
of the bed which left plenty of room for Max to join them but not
even his solid presence was enough to fool Annie into forgetting
Sam was gone.

She could hear Claudia and Warren chatting
softly while they played cards at her kitchen table. She had told
them it wasn't necessary for them to stay but they had insisted
and, to be honest, she was grateful for their company. It felt good
knowing they were out there bickering and laughing together. It
helped her to believe everything was going to work out the way it
should.

Keeping the truth from Claudia had been
impossible, and the three of them had spent a long time trying to
figure out why someone would want to kidnap Sam and they had all
come up empty.

"He's unemployed," Warren said, "which means
he has no power."

"And he has no money," Claudia added.

"But maybe he has something more important,"
Annie had said. "Maybe he has information."

She had never thought much about what he had
done for a living before he showed up in Shelter Rock Cove. He had
told her that he had worked for a big Wall Street firm but he might
as well have told her that he cracked coconuts for fun and profit
for all that it meant to her. The man she knew and loved was the
man who owned a big yellow Lab and drove around in a beat-up
Trooper just like her own. He lived in a borrowed house and he made
canoes for Warren's museum when he wasn't making love to her.

She couldn't imagine why anyone would want to
kidnap that man but the one who had worked on Wall Street just
might be another story.

#

"Your boyfriend sure knows how to grab the
headlines," Sweeney said when Annie walked through the door of
Annie's Flowers the next morning. Claudia stayed behind at the
cottage in case Sam called. "This is some story, kiddo."

"I'm afraid to look," Annie said, taking a
quick glance at the county daily which was probably a risky thing
to do with her stomach threatening to secede from her body every
morning. It was worse than she'd feared. There was the photo of
Annie and Sam from the Labor Day picnic and above it the headline
Local Shopkeeper's Friend Arrested at Gun Point.

They flipped on CNN Headline News just in
time to hear "Wall Street sting goes bust as former executive
disappears." The newsreader launched into a brief synopsis of a
developing story that included fraud at Mason, Marx, and Daniels,
the company where Sam had worked. Thousands of investors had been
bilked out of millions of dollars at the hands of top level
executives. A photo of Sam looking almost unrecognizable in a sleek
and pricey suit flashed on the screen just long enough to push
Annie into a bout of tears that sent Sweeney scurrying for some hot
peppermint tea with lots of sugar.

"They said he disappeared," Sweeney said as
she sugared her own cup of peppermint tea. "I thought you said he
was arrested."

"That's what it looked like," Annie said.
"What would you think if some guy whipped out a pair of
handcuffs?"

"Honey, you don't want to know what I'd
think."

Annie tried to call Agent Briscoe but reached
his voice mail instead. She phoned Warren who had been trying all
morning to glean information from various sources but he kept
butting his head against a brick wall of silence.

"Nothing new to report," Warren said.
"Considering the plane was registered to Marcella Dixon, my guess
is somebody from his old company saw that photo of Sam from the
Labor Day picnic and that's how they tracked him down."

"Tracked him down to do what?" Annie asked.
"You're scaring me, Warren."

"Don't mean to but they might try to buy his
silence with a ticket to Switzerland or some little Caribbean
island without a zip code."

"The news reports make it sound like he's
taken them up on it." Five minutes of CNN or MSNBC would convince
anyone that Sam was a high-flying financial type who would sell out
his mother to shore up his own bottom line. The idea that the whole
kidnapping had been a set-up, staged to whisk Sam out of the
government's reach, was getting more air play than Annie could cope
with..

"Don't give up on him," Warren said. "This
will all work out."

But the question of which side Sam was on
wouldn't go away. Had he been one of the executives accused of
stealing monies from clients or had he been working with the
government from the start to nab them? Was it possible to straddle
both sides of the fence and escape unscathed? She didn't want to
touch the ethics involved in that one.

A man who would take on the responsibility
for five brothers and sisters couldn't possibly be the kind of man
who took money from innocent people. Or could he? The financial
pressures on him must have been unbearable at times. Who could say
what you might do to get by when the futures of five innocent kids
rested on your shoulders and you were barely old enough to vote.
The world wasn't the black-and-white place of her childhood and she
knew the truth was often buried deep in shades of grey. It was true
of her own life and it was probably equally true of Sam's.

Everyone she had ever known or gone to school
with or even bumped into at Yankee Shopper found a reason to drop
into her flower shop that morning. Some of them at least had the
decency to buy a single rose or a half dozen daisies but the
majority didn't bother to sugarcoat the reason they were there.
They wanted gossip, some juicy tidbit of information that they
could pass around as first-hand information. The Virgin Widow's
fall from grace was the hot topic of the day in every home in
town.

"Go home and watch CNN," she snapped at poor
Mrs. McDougal from the library. "Then you'll know as much as I
do."

"The woman's eighty-five," Sweeney said, eyes
wide with shock. "You might've gone a little easier on the old
girl."

"I hate them all," Annie muttered as she
flipped the
Open
sign to
Closed
.

"Since when do we close for lunch?" Sweeney
asked.

"Since right now."

"That's not good for business, honey."

"Neither is assault and battery and that's
what I might do to the next person who asks me for the real
story."