A Stone Creek Collection, Volume 2

by Linda Lael Miller

  Abigail, though shy around him, had taken pains to get his room ready for occupancy—she’d put fresh sheets on the bed, dusted, aired the place out.

  The obnoxious rock-star posters, a reminder of his checkered youth, were still on the walls. The antiquated computer, which he’d built himself from scavenged components, remained on his desk, in front of the windows. Hockey sticks and baseball bats occupied every corner.

  The sight of it all swamped Jack, made him miss his mother more acutely than ever.

  And that was nothing compared to the way he missed Ashley.

  Bryce, soon to be an optometrist, appeared in the doorway. He was in his mid-twenties, but he looked younger to Jack.

  “You’re going to make it, Jack,” Bryce said, and he spoke in a man’s voice, not a boy’s.

  So many things had changed.

  So many hadn’t.

  “Thanks to you, maybe I will.”

  “No maybe about it,” Bryce argued.

  There was a brief, awkward pause. “What do you think of Abigail?” Jack asked, pulling back the chair at his desk and sitting down. He still tired too easily.

  Bryce closed the door, took a seat on the edge of Jack’s bed. Loosely interlaced his fingers and let his hands dangle between his blue-jeaned knees. “She’s been good for Dad. He was a real wreck after Mom died.”

  “I guess that must have been a hard time,” Jack ventured, turning his head to look out over the street lined with skeleton trees, waiting for spring.

  “It was pretty bad,” Bryce admitted. “Did Dad tell you the government is having your headstone removed from the cemetery at Arlington, and the empty box dug up?”

  “Guess they need the space,” Jack said, as an infinite sadness washed over him. Once, he’d been a hotshot. Now he was sick of guns and violence and war.

  “Yeah,” Bryce agreed quietly. “Who’s the woman?”

  Jack tensed. “What woman?”

  “The one you mentioned in the email you sent to Dad’s office.”

  Jack closed his eyes briefly, longing for Ashley. Wondering if she’d finally mastered the fine art of computing well enough to check out the Sent Messages folder.

  “I’m getting engaged on Valentine’s Day,” Bryce said, to fill the gap left by Jack’s studied silence. “Her name is Kathy. We went to college together.”

  “Congratulations,” Jack managed.

  “I wanted to be like you, you know,” Bryce went on. “Raise hell. Get sent away to military school. Maybe even bite the sand in Iraq.”

  Jack managed a tilt at one corner of his mouth, enough to pass for a grin—he hoped. “Thank God you changed your mind,” he said. “Mom and Dad—after I disappeared—how were they?”

  “Devastated,” Bryce answered.

  Jack shoved a hand through his hair. Sighed. What had he expected? That they’d go merrily on, as if nothing had happened? Oh, well, Jack’s gone, but we still have three sons left, don’t we, and they’re all going to graduate school.

  “I need to see Mom’s grave,” he said.

  “I’ll take you there,” Bryce responded immediately. “After my last class, of course.”

  Jack smiled. “Of course.”

  Bryce rose, made that leaving sound by huffing out his breath. “Be nice to Abigail, okay?” he said. “Dad loves her a lot, and she’s really trying to fit in without usurping Mom’s place.”

  “I haven’t been nice?”

  “You’ve been…reserved.”

  “Staying alive has been taking up all my time,” Jack answered. “Again, thanks to you, I’ve got a fighting chance. I’ll never forget what you did, Bryce. No two ways about it, donating marrow hurts.”

  Bryce cleared his throat, reached for the doorknob, but didn’t quite turn it. “It could take time,” he said, letting Jack’s comment pass. “All of us being a family again, I mean. But don’t give up on us, okay? Don’t just take off or something, because I can’t even tell you how hard that would be for Dad. He’s already lost so much.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Jack promised. “I might need that grave at Arlington after all, you know. Maybe they shouldn’t be too quick to lay the new resident to rest.”

  Bryce flushed. “Who’s the woman?” he asked again.

  Jack met his brother’s gaze. “Her name is Ashley O’Ballivan. She runs a bed-and-breakfast in Stone Creek, Arizona. Do me a favor, little brother. Don’t get any ideas about calling her up and telling her where I am.”

  “Why don’t you call her?”

  “Because I still don’t know if I’m going to live or die.”

  Bryce finally turned the knob, opened the door to go. “Maybe she’d like to hear from you, either way. Spend whatever time you have left—”

  “And maybe she’d like to get on with her life,” Jack broke in brusquely.

  After Bryce was gone, Jack booted up the ancient computer—or tried to, anyhow. The cheapest pay-as-you-go cell phone on the market probably had more power.

  Giving up on surfing the web, catching up on all he’d missed since Tombstone, he tried to interest himself in the pile of high school yearbooks stacked on a shelf in his closet.

  What a hotheaded little jerk he’d been, he thought. A throwback, especially in comparison to his brothers.

  He revisited his junior year, flipping pages until he found Molly Henshaw, the love of his adolescent life. Although he hadn’t been a praying man, Jack had begged God to let him marry Molly someday.

  Looking at her class picture, he remembered that she’d had acne, which she tried to cover with stuff closer to orange than flesh tone. Big hair, too. And a come-hither look in her raccoonlike eyes. Even in the photograph, he could see the clumps of mascara coating her lashes.

  Must have been the come hither, he decided.

  And thank God for unanswered prayers.

  Having come to that conclusion, Jack decided to go downstairs, where Abigail was undoubtedly flitting around the kitchen. Time to make a start at getting to know his father’s new wife, though their acquaintance might be a short one if his body rejected Bryce’s marrow.

  For his dad’s sake, because there were so many things he couldn’t make up for, he had to give it a shot. Ironically, he knew it was what his mother would have wanted.

  Later, he’d log on to his dad’s computer, in the den.

  See if Ashley’s website was up and running.

  With luck, there would be a picture of her, smiling like the welcoming hostess she was, dressed in something flowered, with her hair pulled back into that prim French braid he always wanted to undo.

  For now, that would have to be enough.

  Abigail was in the kitchen, the room where Jack had had so many conversations with his mother. Feminine and modestly pretty, Abigail wore a flowered apron, her hair was pinned up in a loose chignon at her nape, and her hands were white with flour.

  She smiled shyly at Jack. “Your father likes peach pie above all things,” she confided.

  “I’m pretty fond of it myself,” Jack answered, grinning. “You’re a baker, Abigail?”

  His stepmother shrugged. She couldn’t have been more different, physically anyway, from his mom. She’d been tall and full-figured, always lamenting humorously that she should have lived in the 1890s, when women with bosoms and hips were appreciated. Abigail was petite and trim; she probably gardened, maybe knitted and crocheted.

  His mother had loved to play golf and sail, and to Jack’s recollection, she’d never baked a pie or worn an apron in her life.

  “A baker and a few other things, too,” Abigail said, with a quirky little smile playing briefly on her mouth. “I retired from real estate a year before Bill and I met. Sold my company for a chunk of cash and decided to spend the rest of my life doing what
I love…baking, planting flowers, sewing. Oh, and fussing over my husband.”

  Jack swiped a slice of peach from the bowl waiting to be poured into the pie pan, and she didn’t slap his hand. “Married before?” he asked casually. “Any kids?”

  Abigail shook her head, and a few tendrils of her graying auburn hair escaped the chignon. “I was too busy with my career,” she said, without a hint of regret. “Besides, I always promised myself I’d wait for the right man, no matter how long it took. Turned out to be Bill McKenzie.”

  He’d underestimated Abigail, that much was clear. She was an independent woman, living the life she chose to live, not someone looking for an easy life married to a prosperous dentist. In fact, Abigail probably had a lot more money than his dad did, and that was saying something.

  “He’s happy, Abigail. Thank you for that.” Jack reached for a second slice, and this time, she did swat his hand, smiling and shaking her head.

  She took a cereal bowl from the cupboard, scooped in a generous portion of fruit with a soup spoon, and handed him the works.

  Jack decided he knew all he needed to know about Abigail—she loved his father, and that was as good as it got. Leaning in a little, he kissed her cheek.

  “Welcome aboard, Abigail,” he said hoarsely.

  She smiled. “Thanks,” she replied, and went back to building the pie.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Ms. O’Ballivan? My name is Bryce McKenzie and I—”

  Ashley shifted the telephone receiver from her left ear to her right, hunching one shoulder to hold it in place, busy rolling out pie dough on the butcher’s block next to the counter. “I’m sorry, Mr. McKenzie,” she said, distracted, “but we’re all booked up for Valentine’s Day—”

  The man replied with an oddly familiar chuckle. Something about the timbre of it struck a chord somewhere deep in Ashley’s core. “Excuse me?” he said.

  “The bed-and-breakfast—I guess I just assumed you were calling because of the publicity my website’s been getting—”

  Again, that sense of familiarity flittered, in the pit of Ashley’s stomach now.

  “I’m Jack McKenzie’s brother,” Bryce explained.

  McKenzie. The name finally registered in Ashley’s befuddled memory, the one Jack had admitted leaving behind so long ago. “Oh,” she said, stretching the phone cord taut so she could collapse into a kitchen chair. “Oh.”

  “I probably shouldn’t be calling you like this, but—well—”

  “Is Jack all right?”

  Bryce McKenzie sighed. “Yes and no,” he said carefully.

  Ashley put a floury hand to her heart, smearing her T-shirt with white finger marks. “Tell me about the ‘no’ part, Mr. McKenzie,” she said.

  “Bryce,” he corrected. And then, after clearing his throat, he explained that Jack had needed a bone marrow transplant. The patient was up and around, and he was taking antirejection drugs, but he didn’t seem to be recovering—or regressing—and his family was worried.

  They’d had a family meeting, Bryce concluded, one Jack hadn’t been privy to, and decided as a unit that seeing Ashley again might be the boost he needed to get better.

  Ashley listened with her eyes closed and her heart hammering.

  “Where is he now?” she asked, very quietly, when Bryce had finished.

  “We live in Chicago, so he’s here,” he answered. “There’s plenty of room at my dad’s place, if you wanted to stay there. I mean, if you even want to come in the first place, that is.”

  Ashley’s heart thrummed. Valentine’s Day was a week away and she had to be there to greet her guests, make them comfortable—didn’t she? This was her chance to take the business to a whole new level, make some progress, stay caught up on her payments to Brad and fortify her faltering savings.

  And none of that was as important as seeing Jack again.

  “I think,” she said shakily, “that if Jack wanted to see me, he would have called himself.”

  “He wants to make sure he’s going to live through this first,” Bryce answered candidly. Then, after sucking in an audible breath, he added, “Will you come? It could make all the difference in his recovery—or, at least, that’s what we’re hoping.”

  Ashley looked around her kitchen, cluttered now with the accoutrements of serious cooking. The freezer was full, the house was ready for the onslaught of lovers planning a romantic getaway.

  How could she leave now?

  How could she stay?

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can book a flight,” she heard herself say.

  “One of us will pick you up at O’Hare,” Bryce said, his voice light with relief. “Just call back with your flight number and arrival time.”

  Ashley wrote down the cell numbers he gave her and promised to get in touch with him as soon as she had the necessary information.

  “This is crazy,” she told Mrs. Wiggins, as soon as she’d hung up.

  “Meooow,” Mrs. Wiggins replied, curling against Ashley’s ankle.

  Having made the decision, Ashley was full of sudden energy. She made airline reservations for the next day, flying out of Flagstaff, connecting in Phoenix, and then going on to Chicago. When that was done, she called Bryce back.

  “You’re sure Jack wants to see me?” she asked, having second thoughts.

  “I’m sure,” Bryce said, with a smile in his voice.

  The next call was to Melissa, at her office, and Ashley was almost panicking by then. The moment Melissa greeted her with a curious “Hello”—Ashley never called her at work—the whole thing spilled out.

  Ashley held her breath, after the spate of words, awaiting Melissa’s response.

  “I see,” Melissa said cautiously.

  “I might be back before Valentine’s Day,” Ashley blurted, anxious to assuage her sister’s misgivings about Jack, “but I can’t be absolutely sure, and I need you to cover for me if necessary.”

  “I don’t know beans about running a bed-and-breakfast,” Melissa said gamely, “much less cooking. But I’ll be there, Ash. Get your bags packed.”

  Tears burned Ashley’s eyes. She could always count on Melissa, on any member of her family, to come through in a pinch. Why had she doubted that, even for a moment? “Thanks, Melissa.”

  “You’ll have to send the cat to Olivia’s place,” Melissa warned, though her tone was good-natured. “You know how my allergies flare up when I’m around anything with fur.”

  “I know,” Ashley said sweetly, “that you’re a hypochondriac. But I love you anyway.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Melissa replied. “No cat,” she clarified firmly. “The deal’s off if Olivia won’t take him.”

  “Her,” Ashley said, smiling. “How many male cats do you know with the name ‘Mrs. Wiggins’?”

  “I don’t know any cats, whatever the gender,” Melissa answered, “and I don’t want to, either.”

  Ashley grinned to herself. “I’m sure Olivia will cat-sit,” she conceded. “One more thing. Could you serve punch at the Valentine’s Day dance? I promised and I did all this baking and I’m not sure I’ll be back in time—”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Melissa said. “Yes, if it comes to that, but you’d better do your darnedest to be home before the first guests arrive. I mean well, but we’re taking a risk here. I’m not the least bit domestic, remember, and I could put you out of business without half trying.”

  Ashley laughed, sniffled once. “I promise I’ll do my O’Ballivan best,” she said. “Have you seen Dan yet?”

  “No,” Melissa said, “and don’t mention his name again, if you don’t mind.”

  After the call ended, Ashley wrestled her one and only suitcase down from the attic—she rarely traveled—and set it on her bed, open.

  Mrs. Wi
ggins immediately climbed into it, as though determined to make the journey with her mistress.

  “Not this time,” Ashley said, gently removing the furball.

  The next dilemma was, what did a person pack for a trip to Chicago in the middle of winter?

  She decided on her trademark broomstick skirts, lightweight tunic sweaters, and some jeans, for good measure.

  When she called Starcross Ranch, hoping to speak to Olivia, Tanner answered instead. Ashley asked if Mrs. Wiggins could bunk in for a few days.

  “Sure,” Tanner said, as Ashley had known he would. But he also wanted an explanation. “Where are you off to, in such a hurry?”

  Tanner was Jack’s friend, and he’d surely been as worried about him as Ashley had. Although it was possible that the two men had been in touch, her instincts told her they hadn’t.

  Ashley drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, and hoped she was doing the right thing by telling Tanner. And by jetting off to Chicago when Jack hadn’t asked her to come.

  “Jack’s in Chicago,” she said. “He’s had a bone marrow transplant—something to do with the toxin—and his family is worried about him. He’s not getting worse, but he’s not getting better, either.”

  Tanner murmured an exclamation. “I see,” he said. “Jack didn’t call you himself?”

  “No,” Ashley admitted, her shoulders sagging a little.

  Tanner considered that, must have decided against giving an opinion, one way or the other. “You’ll keep me in the loop?” he asked presently.

  “Yes,” Ashley said.

  “I’ll be there to get the cat sometime this afternoon. Do you want a ride to the airport?”

  “I’ve got that covered,” Ashley replied. “Thanks, Tanner. I really appreciate this.”

  “We’re family,” Tanner pointed out. “Brad could probably charter a jet—”

  “I don’t need a jet,” Ashley interrupted, though gently. “And I’m not really ready to discuss any of this with Brad. Not just yet, anyhow.”

  “Is there a plan?” Tanner asked. “And if so, what is it?”

  Ashley smiled, even though her eyes were burning again. “No plan,” she said. “I’m not even sure Jack wants me there. But I have to see him, Tanner.”