Riding alongside the buggy, Joseph escorted Amanda Hollister back to his place and sat in the kitchen while she made her precarious way along the hall to Darby’s room. The instant Darby saw her in the doorway, he said, “Come in and shut that door, girl. I don’t want everybody and his brother hearin’ what I’ve got to say.”
Esa glanced up from pouring Joseph a cup of coffee and whispered, “What’s this all about?”
“Love,” Joseph said with a broad grin.
“Love?” Esa came to sit at the table across from his brother. “They’re old people.”
“Just goes to show that love isn’t only for us young folks, I reckon.”
“He called her ‘girl.’ How crazy is that?”
Joseph thought about it for a moment. It was true that Amanda Hollister had left girlhood behind her well over a half century ago, but maybe in Darby’s eyes she was still as young and beautiful as she’d ever been.
Just then they heard Darby’s voice booming through the walls. “I never heard such a bunch of poppycock in all my born days! Unworthy? I oughta tan your fanny for even thinkin’ it. You’re the finest swatch of calico I ever clapped eyes on, and that’s a fact.”
“Don’t refer to me as a swatch of calico! I don’t like it, Darby McClintoch.”
“The prettiest thing I ever saw in a skirt, then.”
“There’s a lot more to me than this skirt.”
“Like I don’t know it? I loved you with all my heart, and damn it to hell, I still do!”
Amanda’s softer voice didn’t carry through the walls. All they could hear was a low murmur.
“All these years, I thought you didn’t love me back!”
Another murmur.
“And that was the only reason? Damn it, Amanda Grace, what were you thinkin’? You havin’ the child never mattered a whit to me. I loved you then, I love you now, and all I can think about is the wasted years.”
The front door opened just then and David stepped inside. “You got enough coffee to spare another cup?” he asked.
Esa swung to his feet. “Sure. Come take a load off. The entertainment’s above average.”
Darby’s voice rang out again. “Too old? The hell you say. I’m not takin’ no for an answer this time. As soon as I get back on my feet, I’m marryin’ you, and that’s my last word on the subject.”
Joseph chuckled. “Church bells are gonna be ringing in No Name.”
“We don’t have any church bells,” Esa pointed out.
“Then we’ll all ring cowbells,” Joseph retorted. “When two people wait this long to get hitched, they need bells to mark the occasion.”
David shoved his hat back to glare at his older brother. “Have you plum lost your mind? The woman may be a cold-blooded killer. If I can prove it, she may hang.”
Joseph shook his head. “Are you still stuck on that? You’re never going to prove it. Darby says you’re trying to tree the wrong coon, that she couldn’t possibly have done it. That’s good enough for me.”
“So why did Rachel scream when she saw Amanda?”
“I don’t know,” Joseph replied. “I’d venture a guess that Rachel doesn’t even know for sure. But I’m willing to wager every cent I’ve got that it wasn’t because Amanda Hollister committed the murders or was somehow involved.”
“You can’t be sure,” David shot back.
“Yes,” Joseph replied. “I’m as sure of it as I’ve ever been of anything.”
Chapter Thirteen
Rachel sat at the table with her chin propped on her fist, staring vacantly at nothing. Joseph had been gone for hours, and she felt lonely. Over the last five years, she’d become accustomed to being alone. But this was different. The silence that had become such a mainstay of her life suddenly seemed almost deafening. She missed the sound of Joseph’s voice. She yearned to hear his deep, silky laughter. Even Buddy had deserted her in favor of playing outdoors with his brother.
She had tried to read, but for the first time in her recent memory, her books brought little comfort. Crocheting and needlework held no appeal, either. In a very short time, she’d come to like—no, to need the company of others to make her world seem complete.
The realization frightened her. Darby was recovering nicely, and he’d soon come home. When he did, Joseph would leave. There would be no more laughter in her kitchen, no more guests for supper, no more reading aloud long into the evening. She would once again be alone with the silence. The thought made her feel almost claustrophobic, which might have been hilariously funny if it hadn’t been so sad. A claustrophobic agoraphobic?
Tears filled Rachel’s eyes, and the next thing she knew, she was weeping without really knowing why. She only knew that she felt desolate and absolutely forlorn. And trapped. She felt so trapped. Her kitchen, which had been her safe haven for so long, was now also her prison. She needed her walls in order to breathe, but Joseph’s intrusion into her life had awakened other needs within her, some of them needs she’d felt before, others completely new, mysterious, and indefinable, yet just as compelling.
She loved Darby. She truly did. And she looked forward to hearing his knocks on the wood safe again. But to go back to living her life around those three knocks a day? Rachel wasn’t sure she could do it again, not after having Joseph and Buddy there. They’d made her realize how barren her existence was, and now she wanted more, so very much more.
Rachel knew it was beyond silly to sit there in her dim kitchen, weeping over the things that were missing in her life, but that didn’t make her want them any less. Even more horrible was her certain knowledge that they were all things she could never have or experience. She would grow old without ever knowing what it was like to be loved by a man. She would never hold her own baby in her arms. She would never know the joy of watching her children grow up and become productive adults. And when she grew old, she would have no one with whom to share her memories. In truth, she wouldn’t even live a life worth remembering. The days and nights would blend together in a lantern-lighted, silent, empty blur.
And so she wept, her sobs bouncing back at her off the walls that she needed so desperately but had also come to hate.
When she heard Joseph talking to Ace out on the porch some time later, she dried her eyes, patted her cheeks, and leaped up from the chair to tidy her clothing and hair. He would come inside soon, and she didn’t want to look a fright. Nor did she want him to know that she’d been crying. He would ask why, and she wasn’t at all sure she could explain without bursting into tears again.
Joseph’s heart caught when he saw Rachel’s face. At a glance, he knew that she’d been crying. Strike that. She’d apparently been sobbing her heart out. Her eyelids were inflamed and puffy. Blotches of red stained her otherwise pale cheeks. Her mouth was swollen.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” He stepped into the kitchen, closed the archway door, and dropped the bar into place. “Did something happen?”
“No, no, nothing.” She flapped a slender hand and flashed an overly bright smile. “I just spilled the pepper, is all.”
“The pepper?”
Joseph stared after her as she scurried away to the kitchen area. Over the years, he’d held his sister Eden in his arms more times than he could count, trying to soothe away her tears, and he instinctively knew that spilled pepper hadn’t done that to Rachel’s face.
“Lands, yes. I’m allergic. If I get a sniff, I’m sneezing and tearing up for hours.”
Joseph didn’t buy it. As he moved farther into the kitchen, he remembered Darby’s description of Rachel right after the tragic loss of her family—a gaunt, terrified girl, hiding in the corner. Over time, she had put some weight back on and become a beautiful young woman, but in all the ways that counted, she was still hiding. Darby had just given her a much larger area to do it in.
“I have some wonderful news for you.”
She turned from the range. “Really? What’s that?”
He glanced behind her at the
stove. No simmering pot demanded her attention. In fact, judging by the ambient temperature of the room, the fire in the box was dead out. Busywork, he decided, a way to avoid talking about whatever it was that had upset her.
“Darby is looking fit as a fiddle,” he said. “Sitting up in bed, laughing, and—you won’t believe this one—talking almost nonstop.”
She smiled again, this time with a gladness and warmth that made her blotched cheeks glow. “That is wonderful news. Did you give him my best?”
“I did. But judging by his progress, I doubt it will be long before you can tell him yourself. Doc wants him to stay in bed for two weeks, but I won’t be surprised if Darby is up and about long before that.”
“That’s my Darby,” she said with a wet laugh. And then her eyes filled with sparkling tears.
Joseph moved toward her as if being tugged along by invisible strings. This wasn’t the reaction he had expected. He’d hoped the news would please her. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
She cupped a hand over her eyes and shook her head. “Nothing. I’m just being foolish.”
In his opinion, anything that had her so upset couldn’t be foolish. He grasped her wrist to draw her hand from her face. The pain that he saw in her blue eyes made him feel as if someone were driving a sharp blade straight through his heart. “Can’t you tell me? Whatever it is, maybe I can come up with a solution.”
“There is no solution.” Her mouth quivered and twisted. “I just felt lonely today while you and Buddy were gone. It made me realize that you’ll both be leaving soon, and then I’ll be lonely all the time.”
The blade through Joseph’s heart twisted viciously.
“You see? I told you it was foolish. I’ve been alone for years. It’s certainly nothing new. I can’t think why I’m suddenly dreading it so.”
Joseph had no problem figuring it out. He’d barged into her world and turned it topsy-turvy with a talking dog, dinner guests, a visiting toddler, poker games, and reading out loud. Rachel wasn’t a solitary person by nature. Her life choices had been forced upon her by illness. Now that she’d gotten a taste of sociality, of course it was hard for her to contemplate a return to absolute solitude.
He caught her small chin and tipped her face up. “Are you by any chance thinking that once Buddy and I leave, we’ll never come back?”
“Why would you want to? If I could leave, I’d never come back.”
The fact that she wanted to leave and couldn’t made his heart hurt even more for her.
“I’ll be back for some of your great cooking, for starters. I also greatly enjoy your company. Do you have any idea how far it is from my house to yours?”
“No,” she confessed thinly.
“Hardly more than a hop, skip, and jump. It’ll be a lot closer for me to come here to play poker than to go clear to town. And what about Tom and Huck? I’ll never find out what happens to those fool boys if I don’t come over in the evenings to read.”
“The books won’t last forever. By the time Darby comes back, we’ll probably have finished both of them.”
The stories wouldn’t last forever; that was true. But Joseph was coming to believe that the feelings he was developing for her might. “There are lots of other books for us to read, Rachel. Until you introduced me to novels, I never realized how entertaining they are. I’m totally hooked now, lady. I can’t imagine going back to never reading again.”
“Truly?”
In all his life, Joseph had never wanted to kiss a woman so badly, not as a prelude to lovemaking, which was usually his goal, but to chase her tears away and make her smile again.
“Oh, hey, you’ve made a reader out of me for sure, and David, too, I think. And then there’s Caitlin, who’ll be coming to visit. Now that she’s been here once, she’ll be pestering you all the time. Mark my words. Also, don’t be surprised if she asks you to watch after Little Ace now and again. She and Ace would like to go places without him sometimes—to have dinner in town or to a hoedown. David, Esa, and I watch him when we can, but we’re not always available.”
Joseph released her chin and stepped away before he gave in to his urge to kiss her. “Which reminds me. Bubba finished the ironwork to go over all your doors. There’s plenty of light left. I should get started installing it.”
“Oh, but I was hoping—”
“You were hoping what?” Joseph asked.
“Nothing. I was just hoping we might play cards or something.”
“Maybe we can do that this evening. For now, I should work on your doors.” He arched an eyebrow at her. “You can’t very well have guests coming and going all the time without the proper setup. Now can you?”
Guests coming and going all the time. The words remained with Rachel long after Joseph left the kitchen. She’d been wallowing in dark despair before he returned a while ago, and now, with only a few words from him, she felt buoyant. Visits from Caitlin? Looking after Little Ace? Oh, how she hoped. But what truly lifted her spirits was knowing that Joseph would come to see her often.
In a very short while, she’d become unaccountably fond of him. He was like a ray of sunshine in her dismal little world that chased away all the shadows.
In order to install the ironwork, he had to go in and out a lot. His frequent use of the archway door kept Rachel running back and forth to lift the bar and drop it again after he left. She’d hoped to make a custard pie for dessert that night, but with so many interruptions, accomplishing that was nearly impossible.
“I’m sorry,” he said as she let him into the kitchen again. “I don’t mean to be a pest. Working on both sides of the wall like this is a bugger.”
He’d chosen to install ironwork over the porch door first, and Rachel knew that he had to climb in and out the window each time he came or went. “You, a pest? I’m the bothersome one. The job would be much simpler if you could just open the porch door and step outside.”
He chucked her under the chin as he walked by. “If just opening the door was an option, you wouldn’t be needing the bars.”
He crouched down next to the exterior door and set to work, drilling through the wall with a handheld auger fitted with a one-inch bit. With each turn of the crank, the muscles across his shoulders and along each side of his spine bunched and flexed under his blue chambray shirt.
As Rachel went back to the table to roll out her piecrust, she found it difficult to keep her eyes off him. Hunkered down as he was, his thighs supported much of his weight, and with each shift of his body, she could see bulges of strength beneath the faded blue denim of his jeans. For such a powerfully built man, he moved with incredible grace, dropping easily into a crouch, leaning sideways with perfect balance, and then pushing effortlessly to his feet.
Watching him brought butterflies fluttering up from her stomach into her throat. She wanted to place the flat of her hand on his back to feel that wondrous play of tendon and muscle beneath her palm. She also yearned to trace the contours of his arms. Her own body was mostly soft except for where her bones poked out, so everything about his fascinated her. When he wasn’t watching, she studied the sturdy thickness of his fingers, the width of his wrists, the distended veins on his sun-browned forearms, the breadth of his shoulders, and the way his torso tapered like a wedge down to his narrow hips.
As Rachel poured the custard into the pie dish, she found herself recalling how lovely it felt when he kissed her, and her cheeks went unaccountably warm. She tried to tell herself it was heat from the oven that had her face burning, but she knew better. It was looking at Joseph that was making her feel warm all over. She also felt deliciously excited, as if something wondrous were about to happen.
“I need to go out and shove the carriage bolts through,” he told her as he strode to the archway door. “You want to come drop the bar behind me?”
As Rachel followed him to the archway, even his loose-hipped stride drew her gaze.
“I’ll only be gone a minute.” He flashed her a grin as he slipp
ed out into the dining room. “When I finish tightening those bolts down on the inside of the wall, I’ll get to work on the ironwork over the front door and here. Then you’ll be set.”
As Rachel dropped the bar, she wished that he would forget the silly ironwork and just kiss her again.
When Joseph finished installing all the ironwork, he insisted on Rachel’s coming to see Bubba’s gift to her. When he opened the archway door, she could barely speak. A sturdy crisscross of bars now covered the opening into the dining room.
“Nobody will get past those without a key or hacksaw,” he assured her. “Bubba has Pierce Jackson, the local locksmith, make all his locks. They’re the same kind they use at the jail.”
“Oh, Joseph, it’s beautiful.”
He chuckled. “I wouldn’t go that far. I gave it a scrub and touched it up with some stove black yesterday. It’s made of scrap iron, like I said, and the pile has been sitting out in the weather for going on two years. All the bars were rusty.”
She reached out a hand to touch the metal. “Thank you so much.”
“Don’t thank me, darlin’. Bubba did most of the work.”
“And I deeply appreciate all his efforts. But it was your idea.” She laughed incredulously. “I can’t believe I’m standing here, Joseph. I can see into the dining room, and it doesn’t frighten me at all.”
His voice sounded oddly thick when he replied, “If it helps, that’s all the thanks I need.”
“Oh, yes,” Rachel assured him, and she meant it with all her heart. “I feel as if I’ve been let out of jail.” She no sooner spoke than the absurdity of the comment struck her. “Out of jail, but behind bars. How does that make sense?”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you.”
Rachel turned to look at him. In that moment, she felt certain that she would never forget a single line of his face. “Thank you so much, Joseph. Looking out and not feeling afraid is a fabulous feeling, absolutely fabulous.”