Sweet Laurel Falls (18 page)

“That
is
an inconvenience. Can’t
you find a service to help you with that too?”

He was silent before he confessed to what he considered his
second biggest mistake, after leaving Maura alone and pregnant here in Hope’s
Crossing. “I was married once for about five minutes, before she decided she
wanted a little more out of a marriage than an empty chair at the dining room
table.”

He thought of Kari, elegant and lovely and completely the wrong
woman for him at a time when he had been totally focused on building his
business.

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Our divorce was amicable and easy. And almost
completely my fault, as you probably already assumed.”

“I don’t believe I said anything of the sort.”

He had chosen poorly to begin with, but he hadn’t handled their
difficulties at all well. “You don’t have to say it. I’ve said it enough myself.
I was a lousy husband. Selfish and thoughtless and focused only on my
ambitions.”

“Rather like your father?”

He stared at her, caught completely off guard by the
comparison. He wasn’t at all like Harry. His father had been a stone-cold
bastard.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “I always knew
your dreams were bigger than Hope’s Crossing. Even if not for your feud with
your father, I think I knew you still would have needed to leave in order to
reach them. I’m happy for you, Jack. It’s inspiring to see someone who nurtured
a dream as a young man and worked and struggled and fought to make it happen.
You must be pleased.”

Gut-check time. He sat back in his chair. Was he pleased at his
success? Yes, he enjoyed the awards and the recognition, but when was the last
time he remembered feeling excited about one of his projects? Whenever he
started a new project, when all the possibilities lay ahead of him, he welcomed
the challenge but he always wanted more.

Before he could figure out how to answer her, Sage came in
holding two thermoses. “Okay, the cocoa is finally ready. I made two kinds,
cinnamon and regular. Cinnamon’s my favorite, FYI.”

“Good to know.” Maybe he had passed that particular gene to
her. He was a sucker for cinnamon drops and cinnamon cookies. He even liked
cinnamon schnapps.

As he helped the women into their coats, he reflected on his
conversation with Maura. What would she say if he told her this project in
Silver Strike Canyon, where he had once built so many ideas in his head, was the
first thing in a long time to stir his blood and spark his creativity?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

M
AURA
FOUND
IT
FASCINATING
to watch Jack work.
Watching
Sage
take in everything Jack did with big
eyes and an eager expression was even more so. Sage followed him like Puck
followed her at home, writing down measurements and snapping pictures where he
directed her.

Her mother used to talk about how, when her older twin sisters
were learning to talk, they shared a language between them that only they seemed
to understand. By the time Maura came along a few years later, her sisters had
mostly outgrown it, but she could still remember they called juice
juba
for a long time and couldn’t eat a pancake for
years without calling it
cakee.

As she watched Jack and Sage discuss the site, she imagined
this was how her mother had felt watching her toddler daughters play—a little on
the outside of their private communication and not quite sure how she fit
in.

“Where is the north boundary?” Sage asked.

“Just there at the ridgeline, but beyond that it’s abutted by
Forest Service land,” he answered. “With proper covenants and usage permits, we
could possibly utilize that for a network of trails.”

They were so alike, it was almost painful to watch them
together, especially knowing she had kept them apart all these years.

“How big is the original property?” Sage asked.

“Three hundred acres, give or take an acre or two. It runs from
the streambed on the west to that fence line on the east, then from the road to
the ridgeline.”

Maura looked at the dimension of the lot, set perfectly in the
trees and with a stirring view of the ski resort, farther up the canyon. “And
Harry’s just
giving
it to the town?”

“As far as I understand. But don’t believe for a moment he’s
doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He doesn’t have one, remember? I’m
sure he’s looking for some kind of tax break.”

“Still. This is a prime building lot, don’t you think? Whatever
tax break he might receive, he could probably make twenty times that by building
condominiums here.”

“No doubt he has a hundred tangled ulterior motives. If memory
serves, he always did. Harry’s reasons don’t really matter to me, frankly. My
job, if I win the contract, is to design a recreation center that meets the
myriad needs of the community.”

From what little she had seen, especially that look of naked
longing she had spied in the old man’s eyes just before Harry fell in the
bookstore, she couldn’t help wondering if most of Harry Lange’s motivations had
to do with the man standing in front of her.

“Now that you’ve had a good look at the site, you’re welcome to
wait in the warm car. No need to freeze your feet off out here in the mud while
we finish surveying.” Jack must have clued in that she was feeling a little
excluded by all the lingo he and Sage were throwing back and forth.

The idea of a heater was not without merit, but she could see a
freshly groomed snowmobile trail that snaked off through the trees. Suddenly the
idea of stretching her legs a little seemed extraordinarily appealing.

“Since you’re busy here, I think I’ll take a little walk to
gain a different perspective of the site.” She gestured to the trail, clean and
enticing in the pale afternoon sunlight. “I should have a good view back this
way. Don’t worry. I won’t go far.”

Jack gave her an absent nod as he and Sage set up another
measurement. Neither of them seemed to pay much mind to her. She sighed a
little, reminded strongly of how Sage and Layla used to collude together in the
kitchen over spinach-mushroom quiche or sugar-drizzled pear cake.

She walked through the trees in a quiet hush broken only by the
river down below and the occasional throb of an engine on the roadway beyond
that. A few fresh inches of snow covered the packed snowmobile trail, but she
wore sturdy winter boots with good tread.

The sunshine filtered through the trees in lacy patterns, and
she was struck by the beauty of the bare, spindly red branches of the dogwoods
against the starkness of new snow. A few pine siskins flitted among the currant
bushes in search of any leftover berries, and she watched them for a moment
before continuing on her way.

She needed to get out more. Maybe she ought to ask Evie if she
could tag along on one of her cross-country ski excursions into the backcountry.
Every time she walked outside, she was reminded of her glorious surroundings and
her connection to Mother Earth.

The trail gained a little in elevation, making the way a little
more strenuous. She decided to walk only as far as an interesting-shaped pine
tree ahead, which made a V where two saplings had grown next to each other but
sprawled out to seek sunlight in opposite directions.

Much to her chagrin, she had to pause at the top to catch her
breath, even though the hill wasn’t very steep. Wow. She was really out of
shape. When was the last time she had gone to the gym? Before Christmas.
Probably even before Thanksgiving and the onset of the holiday rush. Apparently
she needed a new recreation center in town worse than anyone else.

She leaned against one of the angled trees—only for a moment,
she told herself—and gazed down at the silvery river trickling through mounds of
snow. Past it, she could see the roadway gleaming black in the sun.

A blue SUV came around the corner much too fast, but the driver
managed to regain control and speed on down his merry way. She watched it for a
moment, shaking her head at the heedless idiot.

When she turned back, her breath caught. Though it was probably
a few hundred yards away at a downward angle, she saw something she should have
noticed immediately.

A huge Douglas fir grew alone perhaps four feet off the roadway
and had been turned into a makeshift memorial. Purple-and-pink plastic ribbons
fluttered in the breeze. Around the base of the tree—just below a pale portion
of the tree trunk where the bark had been scraped away ten months earlier—she
could see stuffed animals, plastic flowers, a white cross, all protected from
the snow by a small awning someone had erected.

Blood rushed from her face and she braced against the bent tree
here to keep her balance. She hadn’t realized the recreation center site was so
close to the accident scene, down the canyon only a few hundred yards. She had
been here, of course. After the accident, she had asked Mary Ella to drive her
here, and the two of them had held each other and wept.

She drew in a breath now, unable to take her eyes away from
that benign-looking tree. Her brother Riley, who had studied the accident report
in great depth, had given her his solemn vow that Layla died immediately upon
being thrown from the vehicle, that she didn’t suffer. It was a comfort of
sorts, but she couldn’t help wondering if Layla had known even an instant’s fear
as the vehicle rolled out of control.

She didn’t know how long she stood there in the ankle-deep
snow, gazing across the road at the place where her world changed forever. She
couldn’t seem to make her feet move back down the little hill toward Jack and
Sage, and so she stood listening to the resilient song of the pine siskins and
the wind in the trees and the endless trickle of the river.

“Everything okay?”

She jerked her head around at the words and was shocked to see
Jack standing only a few feet away. Her feet were cold, she realized. Her face
was too.

“Yes. Fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You seemed lost in your own thoughts. I called out twice.”

The heat seeping into her cheeks was almost painful against the
cold. “Sorry. I was, uh, sort of meditating.” A wind had risen while she stood
on the hillside, and it knuckled its way under her coat. “Are you and Sage
finished?”

“We wrapped things up a few minutes ago. Sage headed back to
the SUV to get warm and I…came looking for you.”

“You didn’t need to do that. I was just about to turn back.”
Maybe. If she could have managed to wrench her gaze away from that makeshift
shrine.

“No big deal. I needed to stretch my legs anyway.” He looked
over her shoulder, his gaze following the direction she had been facing. “What
were you looking at?”

“Nothing.” She tried to distract him by starting to head back
down the trail, but Jack was no fool. Unfortunately for her.

“That’s where your daughter was killed.”

She sighed. At least her face probably wasn’t blotchy and red
and tearstained. She had cried so much these past months, she figured she had
worn out her tear ducts. “Yes. I hadn’t realized how close it was to the
building site until I reached this spot. I…didn’t come looking for it out of
some morbid obsession, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

His blue eyes seemed softer, somehow. “I wasn’t thinking that
at all. Even if you had come for that reason, I would find it perfectly
understandable.”

“Is it?” She paused. “I keep thinking I’m making progress, you
know, putting my life back together. But I still feel like I’m paralyzed. Like
my feet have been frozen in the snow for months and everyone else just keeps
moving on around me.”

He reached a hand out and briefly brushed her fingers, then
dropped his hand again as if he wasn’t sure whether he had the right to offer
comfort. She wanted to grab his arm and hold on to the warmth as tightly as she
could. “I can’t even imagine the depth of your pain and what you’ve been through
this last year.”

For once, she felt comforted by someone’s compassion instead of
asphyxiated. “It sucks, if you want the truth. It really, really sucks. I keep
expecting the pain to ease a little bit. I don’t want it to, you understand,
everybody has just been telling me it will. Once in a while I’ll have a day that
almost feels normal, you know? I’ll find myself looking forward to something,
and then I have to stop and remind myself Layla isn’t here and I shouldn’t be
looking forward to anything. How terrible is that? Sometimes I have to remind
myself.”

He was silent and the cold wind ruffled the edges of his hair a
little. “Call me crazy, but I can’t imagine that a daughter who got up early
with her sister to surprise you with breakfast would have wanted you to feel
guilty for trudging forward with your life.”

Okay, she was wrong. Her tear ducts still worked, apparently.
She could feel a hot tear trickle out and she quickly brushed it away with the
finger of her glove.

“Intellectually, I know you’re right. Layla was life and
laughter and joy. If she could see me like this, she would have dumped a handful
of snow down my back and told me to get over myself. Either that, or she would
have dragged me down beside her on the couch with a pen and paper and made me
sit there until we came up with ten or twenty nice things we could do for
someone else to shake me out of my funk.”

“She sounds wonderful. I’m sorry I didn’t know her.”

“You would have liked her. Everyone did. She probably would
have asked you where the hell you’ve been all these years and how you could
possibly think you were good enough to be Sage’s father, but eventually I think
she would have liked you too.”

She offered him a smile—shaky and a little lopsided, but it was
the best she could manage without bursting into sobs. He gazed at her for a
moment and then he muttered an oath. Before she realized what he intended, he
reached out and wrapped his arms around her, tugging her against him.

She should probably resist. The thought penetrated somewhere in
the recesses of her brain but, quite simply, she didn’t want to. Unlikely though
it might be, Jack offered warmth and strength and comfort and she wanted to soak
up every drop.

She nestled her head under his chin, her arms around his waist,
and he did nothing else but hold her.

Twenty years ago, she had turned to Jack for safety and comfort
as well, during that crazy time after her father had walked out. He had been
grieving after his poor mother had committed suicide and they had turned to each
other, two lost souls looking for a little peace together. She had shared
everything
with him and had trusted him with her
deepest pain.

The years since had taught her to be much more wary with that
trust.

Though she wanted to stay right here soaking up the comfort of
his embrace, she forced her arms from around his waist and took a step back, and
then another. “I think I’m okay now. Thank you.”

He studied her, those blue eyes intense and unreadable. “You’re
a strong woman, Maura,” he finally said.

Strong? Ha. “I don’t feel like it most of the time, but thank
you for saying it and for allowing me to vent. Apparently I needed it. But we
should probably head back to Sage.”

He looked as if he wanted to say more, but he finally nodded
and led the way back down the trail toward where he had parked. The wind now
whistled a mournful cry through the trees and blew some of the powdery snow in
cold crystals against her face.

“Did you find what you needed at the site?” she asked when the
silence between them began to feel awkward.

“I think so. My brain is already spinning with ideas. There are
definitely a few challenges to contend with, but that’s one of the things I love
most about what I do—figuring out how to work around all the obstacles to attain
the vision the client and I would like for the site.”

“What are some of the challenges?” she asked, mostly to hear
more of his passion for his work.

He seemed only too willing to talk about it and, as they walked
through the trees, he talked to her about drainage problems and the unwieldy
grade of the site.

“How will you address the issues?” she asked.

“No idea,” he admitted. “But I’m sure I’ll come up with
something.”

“Of course you will,” she said, earning a look of surprised
gratification from him.