Touching Stars (43 page)

“I guess I’m trying to say that I appreciate you being there when I haven’t been. For the boys…and for Gayle.”

Travis slammed the door; then he leaned against it, his arms folded. “It’s no hardship being there for Gayle, Eric.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

“I don’t have to tell you how special she is.”

“I’m the guy who divorced her, remember?”

“Something she’s never forgotten.”

“This was meant to be a simple conversation.” But even as he said it, Eric realized he’d probably been pushing for more.

“We’ll keep it simple, then. For years Gayle’s made the best of a difficult situation. I don’t know another woman who could have raised three sons alone and run an inn while she was doing it. Somehow she managed to stay active in the community, the schools and her church, and make friends while she was at it. And all the while, she put her personal life on hold.”

“You’re saying that last part is my fault?”

“No. I’m saying that’s what she did.”

“But I hear an indictment.”

“Then maybe you’re hearing it through a load of your own guilt, I don’t know. But it’s not my role to point a finger or even to figure out where to point it. What I am getting to is this. She was hurt. Badly, although she’d never admit it out loud. She could be hurt again.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“Does it matter?”

Eric didn’t know.

Travis pushed away from the car and picked up a bucket. “She didn’t know what she was getting into when she invited you for the summer. But maybe it’s for the best. Because if you walk away again, this time it really will be over.”

Eric heard himself protesting, even though, considering the last real conversation he’d had with Gayle, it was stupid. “Look, we’ve been divorced for twelve years. That’s about as over as it gets.”

“Tell me how long you had to think about coming back when Gayle invited you. Did you sweat over it? Or did you feel like you were coming home?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“You have no idea how many more I’d like to ask.”

Eric lifted the second bucket and tucked a shovel under his arm. Travis hadn’t confirmed that he was in love with Gayle. It was possible his feelings were those of one loyal friend for another. But Eric still felt he ought to be straight about one thing.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Maybe I need to warn you.”

“You don’t. For the record, I think this whole thing may have been inevitable.”

They walked to the excavation unit in silence. Eric knew the river had risen higher from the rain, but he was surprised to see that water had sloshed into the site and crept toward the area where they had been working.

Eric glanced at his watch. It wasn’t even ten. “I have to be at the church by four to help oversee the party preparations. You’ll be there tonight?”

“Carin and I are coming together.” Travis was squatting on the ground to pull off the plastic sheeting that protected the unit, but he glanced up. “Does Gayle suspect?”

“I don’t think so.”

For a moment Travis looked as if he pitied Eric. “You’ve worked a miracle, putting it together so fast. She’ll see that.”

For the first time since he’d decided to make a real celebration out of Gayle’s fortieth, Eric had a moment of doubt. “I know she says she doesn’t like big parties, but she’ll like this one. It’s all about her.”

Travis peeled off the plastic and threw it to one side. “Let’s see what we can uncover. Then you can help me figure out what we should do. There’s more rain on the way, maybe even by late afternoon.”

“Do you think it’s going to flood?”

“The meteorologists tell us we’re going to get rain about ten times more often than we actually get it. They’re a local joke. So my fingers are crossed.”

Eric thought of Weather Woman and Ariel. He wondered if he would ever see a weather segment again without thinking of both of them.

B
eginning at noon, Gayle was banned from the kitchen. She saw the boys coming and going, but whatever they were preparing for her birthday dinner wasn’t simmering on the stove or the aroma would have filled the inn. There’d been plenty of banging around, though.

On a day like this one, she was particularly glad she had taught them to cook. She spent so much time in the kitchen, it had been natural for them to keep her company there and eventually to slide into assisting. Jared made a delicious spaghetti sauce, and Noah had a special recipe for stuffing a roasting hen with lemons and garlic cloves that was a family favorite. Dillon was their pastry chef, and she suspected today he would be in charge of her cake.

In the late afternoon she put on her favorite black lace skirt and a black scoop neck T-shirt to show their meal the respect it deserved. She slipped on gold sandals and a gold chain with charms of each of her son’s astrological signs, and rummaged for a gold barrette to clip in her hair.

At the bottom of her jewelry box she saw a familiar velveteen pouch. She stopped rummaging, and against her will she lifted the pouch, shook it open and gazed at the objects in her palm.

The two gold rings hadn’t graced her left hand for a dozen years. She and Eric had been young and anything but wealthy. But before proposing, he had scraped together the money to buy a lovely round diamond. A few months later, when they’d repeated their wedding vows, he had added a matching gold wedding band encrusted with six tiny stones.

When the marriage ended, Gayle hadn’t thrown the rings in the river, as a local friend had on the day her divorce was final. She hadn’t sold or pawned them, or returned the rings to Eric. She had removed them and stored the velveteen pouch at the bottom of her jewelry box.

Now she wondered why. Even if she’d had a daughter, the rings were not heirlooms, and her sons would never want to start their own marriages with mementos of their parents’ failure. She supposed she simply hadn’t known what to do. She hadn’t felt vindictive, just terribly sad. And the thought of the rings ending up in a pawn shop? She hadn’t been able to stomach it.

Now she wondered if she had simply waited all these years to restore the rings to their rightful place. Somewhere deep inside, had she hoped the day would come when Eric recovered from his addiction to excitement and came home at last?

She slipped the rings into the pouch and tucked them back where they had waited all these years. She didn’t know what the future held, but if she and Eric worked out their relationship, she would wear these rings again and be glad she had kept them. If they didn’t, she would give them back. Eric could decide what to do with them, but she no longer wanted reminders in her jewelry box.

In the bathroom, she put on a little makeup and combed her hair. Gazing in the mirror, she decided she didn’t look a day over thirty-nine. She was more worried about where all the years had gone than the ones that were coming. But this birthday would soon be over, and with it, all the anxiety of entry into a new decade. She would slip back into her routine….

Or begin a new one with Eric.

Just as her stomach knotted, someone knocked. Glad for the interruption, she crossed the room and flung open the door. She hadn’t seen Eric since breakfast. Now she saw that in honor of the occasion he had dressed up, too. He wore a navy shirt unbuttoned at the throat and a tan blazer, and when he saw her, he gave a wolf whistle.

“You look great,” he said.

“It still happens occasionally.”

“A lot more than that.”

It was a good day for compliments. She smiled to let him know this one had been appreciated.

“The boys will be happy you got dressed up for their dinner.”

“How are things coming?”

“Terrific, only they want to eat here at the house. They’re afraid guests will wander through if we eat in the dining room at the inn.”

“They’re right about that.”

“So they asked me to take you for a drive while they set up. They want you out of here.”

Knowing her sons, she suspected the setup would be done at the speed of light. “We can’t just go for a walk?”

“Well, we can if you want, but you haven’t been out in my Mustang. We can put the top down, unless it starts to rain. It’s da bomb.”

“What?”

“Da bomb. That’s what one of the campers told me. Apparently that’s good.”

“I suddenly feel even older.”

“I had the same reaction.”

They headed outside, and Eric opened her car door, then put the top down. There was still no sign of the boys, but she supposed they were in the inn’s kitchen, using every pot and pan she owned. She wished she could watch.

The sky was the color of pewter, but no rain had fallen since morning. For now, they could enjoy the convertible.

“How did the dig go?” she asked once they were on the road.

“Exciting. At least an acre of mud, the river rushing by carrying branches and debris, kids popping over to show their parents where they’d been digging.”

“The campers were supposed to provide tours this morning when their parents picked them up. Too bad the rain changed that.”

“Those who still wanted one got one. But the most exciting part was what Travis and I may have found.”

“More artifacts?”

“It looks like the Duncans, one or both of them, used the foundation of the old cabin as a place to hide things. They entered from what was then the root cellar, then either removed loose stones and hid whatever they needed to behind them, or just edged things into openings and covered the evidence with smaller stones. You know Travis found a fork?”

“Has he been able to figure out how old it is?”

“I don’t think he’s had time. But today we found a serving spoon.”

“This sounds like a treasure hunt.” Silverware was a significant find, but hardly worth the sparkle in Eric’s eyes. The fact that the spoon had probably been hidden during the Civil War made it more interesting, but she suspected there was more to his excitement.

“It’s what we haven’t found, or at least haven’t unearthed, that’s particularly interesting.”

She noticed that they were driving in the direction of the Shenandoah Community Church. “Eric, you’re headed toward our church. Would you like to drive by and at least see it from the road before we turn around?”

“Good idea. Where do I go?”

She gave directions, then settled back to hear the rest of the story. “So what haven’t you found but want to?”

“We got to the edge of the unit, and toward the bottom of the area we’d excavated, it looked like some of the stones were out of line. That’s not really that odd, since the foundation is centuries old. But Travis shined a light into the corner, and we saw metal. There’s something behind those stones, and he thinks, from our limited view, that it resembles a lockbox of some sort.”

“Wow, I’m surprised you could tear yourselves away.”

“It was already late by then. We had to leave, but there’s always tomorrow.”

“So you’re going to continue? You’re not going to leave it for next summer’s camp?”

“Travis says that unit is so close to the river that if it floods, we could lose whatever’s there. He says under the circumstances, and with evidence from family stories, we probably ought to at least see what we can find.”

“You don’t really think this is something Robby put there, do you?”

“What are the chances? We’ll probably find Confederate money or moldy family photographs. Whatever Miranda’s family noted was missing before she died. And the Blackjack story is a huge leap, anyway. Who knows if any of it is true?”

“I don’t know how much Carin made up, but I’m glad I heard it. What if some—or even most—of it really happened? Can you imagine what it was like to live here during the war? The incredible waste? The horror of having troops from both sides moving through, helping themselves to everything they could, then Sheridan burning crops and barns and mills? I don’t think we can understand how that feels.”

“I can understand.”

She was instantly contrite. “You’ve seen too many wars up close, haven’t you? The story probably sounded too familiar.”

“It’s one thing to report a war, then come home and leave the worst of it behind. But a lot of families are having Iraq and Afghanistan brought right to their doorstep. They’re burying the people they love and grieving the way Miranda did.”

“I feel sorry for Cray’s mother now that he’s going to be a marine. If we lose a son or a daughter, politics fade into the background. Our children still aren’t coming home.”

“We’ve lost a lot of journalists in the Mideast. More than people realize. But we choose to go and do our jobs, and we can leave when we know we’re in over our heads.”

“You almost didn’t get out.”

“I’d still rather do what I was doing than man traffic stops or search buildings.”

She wondered how they had gotten on this subject, and she wanted to leave it behind. They were coming up on the church now, and she pointed it out. It looked like many throughout the South, white with a tin roof and graceful steeple. “That’s Shenandoah Community over there.”

“It looks busy tonight.”

She was surprised, because she kept up with activities and didn’t remember anything going on. But he was right; there were a number of cars parked outside.

“It must be a rental group. There’s nothing on the church calendar.”

Eric put on his turn signal and made a right into the lot. He parked at the end of a row and removed his keys from the ignition. “Can we take a tour anyway?”

She put her hand on his arm. “I just wanted to drive by so you could see it. The boys must be all set up by now. I think we ought to go home and leave these folks in peace.”

“Really? I’d like to see the chapel.”

“Then come to church with us sometime.”

“This is more my speed. In and out?”

“I don’t know…. That’s Sam’s SUV in the minister’s parking spot. I don’t want to intrude.”

“You won’t be.”

As everything fell into place, she suddenly understood. The reason no tantalizing smells had wafted from the kitchen. The trumped-up excuse to get her out of the house. The reason that Eric, who’d had no real need to, had dressed up.

“You didn’t.”

He turned on the Fortman grin. “Nobody should celebrate a fortieth birthday alone, Gayle. Your friends are here to celebrate with you.”

She closed her eyes. For a moment she imagined wrenching the keys from his hand and driving home to barricade herself in the carriage house. The joy she’d felt at a simple family party was gone. She felt like a captive running the gauntlet.

“Gayle?”

She opened her eyes and managed a smile. “Well, it’s really a surprise, that’s for sure. I don’t know how you pulled it all together.”

“I had a ball. And it was meant to be. Everything just fell into place.” He put the top up and opened his door. She had only seconds to lecture herself about how hard he had worked and how happy this had made him.

She squared her shoulders. She would go inside, make sure everyone knew how glad she was to see them, thank them for turning out in her honor, pretend she enjoyed being the center of attention, then go home when it was over, exhausted and drained and sorrier than ever that she’d been forced to turn forty today. But somehow she would pull it off.

He helped her out of the car; then, impulsively, he pulled her close and kissed her. “Happy birthday, Gayle. You’re still a beautiful, desirable woman. I’m glad you’re in my life.”

Although their bodies were nestled together and his arms held her tight, she felt a chasm between them. When the kiss ended, she forced another smile, but at the moment, she couldn’t say she was glad Eric was in hers. This evening, Afghanistan was not far enough away for her ex-husband. Even Mars wouldn’t suffice.

Then, as if it were a new thought and not one she’d toyed with many years ago, she wondered if the only reason their marriage had lasted as long as it had was that Eric had been away so much. Just how long would it have lasted if they hadn’t had constant vacations from each other?

“Are you ready to go inside?” he asked.

She wanted to stay in the parking lot and finish the conversation with herself. She wanted to flee. But with a smile locked in place, she nodded and went to greet her friends.

Eric was delighted at the turnout. In fact, he was delighted with everything about the party. The rain had held off until almost everyone arrived. The food—New Orleans–style jambalaya served with a variety of salads—was surprisingly authentic. The bluegrass band was better than he’d expected. The birthday cake was sinfully rich, and the local vintners had done themselves proud.

Virginia might not be the Napa Valley, but its white wines were good. He wondered if he ought to look into land near the inn, where he could put in a few acres of grapes. Even as he considered it, the thought of doing the same things, pruning, fertilizing, harvesting, for seasons on end, depressed him.

“Eric?”

He looked up from his second helping of jambalaya to see a young woman with curly brown hair who looked vaguely familiar. As she held out her hand, he struggled to place her.