Buch lesen: «When Love Walks In»

Chapter One

Life and unloving parents had conspired to arrange a different outcome.

It was approaching the dinner hour on a Friday evening in October as thirty-four-year-old Cate Anderson, now an English teacher at Beckwith Consolidated High School, ran off a stack of fliers on the school’s balky, outdated copy machine. A widow since the death of her husband, Larry, from complications of leukemia three years earlier, she wore a charcoal-gray sweater set, a Pendleton plain wool shirt she’d bought in a Minneapolis thrift shop when her teenage son, Brian, was still a toddler, and recently resoled penny loafers. The second pair she’d managed to ruin that week, her panty hose had a run in them.

Designed and produced with the principal’s blessing on behalf of a recently organized Save Our Jobs, Save Our Town committee, the fliers represented an effort to boost attendance at a rally that would take place in the town library on Monday evening. According to recent news stories, Mercator, the new corporate parent of Beckwith’s only industry, Beckwith Tool and Die, was in the process of deciding whether to expand the plant or close it.

Without it, this town will dry up and blow away, Cate thought. She was trying to imagine what her father, her mother-in-law, Beverly Anderson, and her best friend, Brenda Lawler, all of whom worked at Beckwith Tool and Die, would do for a living if the plant closed when Brenda abruptly knocked on the media room’s glass door.

Cate motioned for her to enter. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Come to think of it, how’d you get into the building? By now the outside doors are usually locked.”

Brenda’s expertly made-up hazel eyes glittered with excitement. “Hank Whittaker was mopping up in the front hall,” she answered. “I pounded on the glass…told him I had to talk to you right away.”

“From the look on your face, maybe I ought to sit down,” Cate suggested, trying to suppress the sudden apprehension she felt.

For once Brenda didn’t laugh or tell her she was exaggerating. “Actually,” she agreed, “that might be a good idea.”

Incredibly, her friend was serious. What on earth could she possibly say that might cause me to lose my balance? Cate wondered apprehensively, pulling up a stool.

“Is this about you and Dean?” she asked. “Please don’t tell me the two of you are getting back together! When I think of the black eye he gave you last month…”

Dean was Brenda’s soon-to-be ex-husband. Brenda shook her head. “It’s like I told you…I’m not going to take any more of his bullying. When he stopped by day before yesterday to pick up some of his things and suggested we fool around, I ordered him out of the house.”

“Then what’s this about?”

Brenda bit her lip. “Danny Finn’s back in town. I thought you’d rather hear it from me instead of some busybody gossip.”

Astonishment pierced Cate to the quick as a thousand images competed in her head—Danny pelting her with snowballs. Handing her a bouquet of wild flowers he’d picked in the woods. Kissing her senseless. Unaware of the gesture, she hugged herself as she thought about the way he’d held her during the homecoming dance her senior year while her classmates had whispered about them. The way they’d made love, in his car and at the mound, settling all the questions of the universe.…

It isn’t possible he’s back after so many years, she told herself. I must be dreaming this.

As always, whenever she imagined coming face-to-face with Danny again, she remembered the look he’d given her on the night they’d tried to elope, as her parents had ushered her out of the Clermont County Jail, past the interrogation room where one of the deputies was still questioning him. The prospect of seeing him again and cringing afresh at his unwarranted judgment of her was almost more than she could take.

No matter how many times he told me he loved me, he hated me that night, she thought, flinching as if from the misery of a scab being picked from a wound. Does he still? Or has what happened ceased to matter to him? What will he say or do if we run into each other?

Daunting as the prospect was, it was even more demoralizing to imagine how their lives might change if Danny met Brian and guessed the boy was his. The resemblance was striking if you looked for it. Maybe he wouldn’t. She could only hope. She groaned inwardly at the prospect of Danny making demands. Brian’s confusion and hostility. Her son’s custody becoming a war zone. The battle that could result would spread through Beckwith like a forest fire if one of the town gossips made the connection.

“It’s been seventeen years. What’s Danny doing here now?” she croaked.

“He’s the Mercator executive assigned to evaluate Beckwith Tool and Die,” Brenda answered, a world of sympathy in her voice. “Carl Fosse announced it at the plant this afternoon. There was a storm of talk over it, I can tell you. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that most of Beckwith looked down on the Finns. Now here’s Danny, returning as a corporate executive with the power to put everyone out on the street.” She paused. “When we heard the news, your dad looked like he was going to have a stroke.”

Maybe he will, Cate thought, hunching over on her stool. He’s never stopped hating Danny or condemning me for loving him. If he has to be polite, take orders from the man he believes led his daughter astray, it might actually kill him. The explosion that would occur if Danny fired him was almost beyond imagining.

She knew that, whatever form her father’s outrage took, he’d make her pay. So would her mother. They always did. Meanwhile Brian and her in-laws stood to get hurt.

Her forehead lined with sympathy, Brenda put her arms around Cate. “Sorry I had to be the one to tell you,” she apologized. “But you were bound to hear about it from somebody. You need to prepare yourself for the possibility of meeting him. At least with me you don’t have to pretend…put on an act about your feelings.”

Cate nodded in agreement. “Where’s he staying?” she asked. “In one of the motels out on Route 32?”

Brenda shook her head. “According to his old boss, Zeb Miller, who pumped gas for him this evening, he plans to stay at his grandmother’s place. One of the part-time checkers at Clingers’ Market said she saw his fancy car in the driveway out there on her way in to work. Apparently, he phoned ahead and had the electricity turned on, because there were lights in some of the windows. Funny, isn’t it, considering he’s been gone so long and the way he always felt about that wreck of a place, that he’d go straight home to roost?”

Cate had to admit it was. Meanwhile, it seemed that the news about Danny’s return was getting around. Imagining him at his grandmother’s farmhouse, thinking about the past and listening to the crickets, made her want to weep. He was so achingly close. Part of her wanted to run to him, let him absorb the pain his absence in her life had produced.

She wouldn’t do it, of course. They were strangers now, as foreign to each other as if they’d grown up on opposite sides of the planet. Her knowledge of him was seventeen years out of date.

“Do you think he’s come back to punish Beckwith for the way it treated him and his family?” she asked. “That he’ll close the plant without listening to a word anyone might say in its defense?”

Brenda shrugged. “I don’t know. I overheard people asking each other that question. And you have to admit Danny’s got plenty of reason to be less than charitable to the folks around here. Yet somehow I can’t picture…”

Cate knew what she meant. The Danny she’d known and loved would have based his decision on concern for the ordinary people whose lives would be affected, not just his employer’s bottom line, though naturally that would be an important factor. He wouldn’t have been inclined to seek retribution for retribution’s sake. Still, a lot of water had passed under Brush Creek Bridge since they’d been close. She couldn’t be sure how he’d react.

He might be very changed, hardened by the circumstances of his departure and the rigors of climbing the corporate ladder. It struck her that maybe she hadn’t really known him. She would have bet her life, the night they’d run away to Clermont County to get married, that he would never have walked out on her. Yet, in the days following her forced return home with her parents, no letter had come. He hadn’t phoned. The man she’d loved and trusted so deeply had vanished without a trace.

A painful question surfaced. “Have you heard…whether or not Danny’s married?” she asked in a small voice, forcing herself to face the likelihood that he had a wife and children. “I realize his personal life is none of my affair. I’d, um, just like to know the lay of the land before we run into each other.”

Brenda’s sympathy was clear. “If he is no one’s said anything to me about it,” she avowed.

A widowed, working mom who supported herself and her son on a modest teacher’s salary, Cate realized she couldn’t hold a candle to Danny’s achievements, at least insofar as the world would value them. If he was happily married, the father of several children who just happened to be Brian’s half-sisters and brothers in addition to his corporate success, the disparity between their lives would break her heart.

She felt as if it had been broken already. Aching to see Danny, yet dreading it, she struggled to pull herself together. And succeeded to a point. It was only then that she noticed the bruise on Brenda’s cheek, shadowy beneath her makeup.

“Dean did that…didn’t he?” she exclaimed, demanding a closer look.

Brenda’s take-charge expression crumpled. “He didn’t just go, the other night,” she confessed. “He hit me first.”

By now, dusk was falling, causing the exterior windows at the far end of the office to blacken and reflect the room. Putting aside her own tangle of emotions, Cate focused on her friend’s safety and well-being.

“If he threatens you again, I want you to call me,” she insisted. “I’ll come over, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. If necessary, call the police. I’m not afraid of Dean and his threats. And I’m not intimidated by the fact that he’s a sheriff’s deputy. In my opinion, he’s the kind of coward who’ll back off if there’s a witness present.”

At the same time as Cate was locking up the school office and walking Brenda to her car, Danny was seated on the front porch of his grandmother’s house, stirring its dilapidated wooden swing with one desultory foot. He hadn’t been “home,” if he could call it that, for almost seventeen years. Ignoring the emblem of his most recent promotion, a shiny black Infiniti he’d parked in the weed-choked drive, he sipped at a beer, turned his gaze inward and tried to deal with his ghosts.

The only one who still mattered to him was Cate. In truth, he’d volunteered for the Beckwith Tool and Die assignment out of a gnawing wish to see her again. As he’d driven down from Chicago via Interstates 65 and 74, exiting onto Ohio Route 32 at Mount Carmel, just east of Cincinnati, he’d let memories he’d tried to bury for years resurface and catch him by the throat.

Accepting the pain they’d brought, he’d allowed himself to remember the sound of her laughter. Her inherent kindness. The delicious warmth of her as she’d nestled close. She’d been the best thing in his life. In point of fact, the only thing. Losing her as they’d stood poised on the brink of having a life together had scooped the heart right out of him.

Why’d she leave the Clermont County Jail that night without even glancing in my direction, he asked himself for perhaps the thousandth time as the swing creaked softly with his movements. Sure…her parents had her by the scruff of the neck. She was their prisoner, in effect. And we were in a very humiliating situation. Yet she could have looked at me. Let me know without saying a word that the setback to our plans was only temporary.

The way things had turned out, it hadn’t been, of course. They hadn’t set eyes on each other again.

As the moon rose, gilding the saplings and weeds that choked the overgrown property he’d inherited, he found himself asking the same old questions. First and foremost, he wanted to know why Cate hadn’t answered his letters. Clearly, she’d gotten them. Signed in her familiar handwriting, the annulment papers had reached him at his new address.

Painful as her silence had been, neither it nor the arrival of the annulment notice had overthrown his hopes. She was underage and her parents were calling the shots. He would simply wait them out—return to Beckwith for her on her eighteenth birthday.

A phone conversation with his grandmother two months after his departure had changed his plans. When he’d asked about Cate, the old woman had responded that she’d married Larry Anderson, a Beckwith High School graduate several years Danny’s senior, who’d worked full-time in her father’s store. Following the ceremony, she’d added, Cate and her new husband had left for Minneapolis.

“You mean they’re—” he’d choked off the words “on their honeymoon.”

“Supposedly the Anderson boy got himself a job up there,” Geraldine Finn had answered sourly.

For Danny the news had been like a kick in the stomach. Initially his mind had refused to register it. Cate…married…to Larry? he’d thought in disbelief. It’s only been a few months since we spoke our marriage vows!

True, the towheaded former basketball player for Beckwith High had always had a thing for Cate. Secure in her love, Danny hadn’t minded. He doubted if she’d even realized it. For one thing she’d hardly ever talked to him—just murmured the kind of pleasantries people do when their only connection is the fact that one of them works for the other’s parents.

She can’t possibly love him, he’d told himself. Not so soon after me. There has to be some mistake. The thought of another man touching her had made him want to go ballistic.

A mean-spirited comment from his grandmother had only made matters worse. “Good riddance if you ask me,” she’d observed when he didn’t speak. “You’ll find somebody else. The girl’s like her parents…thinks she’s too fine for the likes of us.”

If so, he’d never seen any sign of it.

Cutting the call short, he’d punched a fist through one of the flimsy walls in his shabby Chicago apartment as he’d sought an explanation. And failed to come up with one. Cate was still underage, still a senior in high school. He couldn’t imagine her parents letting her drop out to marry anyone, not even Larry with his sterling reputation. They’d wanted her to attend college, be somebody.

Unless…unless…

What if she’s pregnant, he’d thought suddenly, and doesn’t know how to find me? That she accepted Larry’s proposal out of desperation?

They’d been so careful…only slipped up once. Somehow he’d forced himself to calm down and phone Terry Pobanz, one of his high school buddies.

The affable Terry had sounded as puzzled as he felt. “Nobody around here gets it,” he’d admitted. “They never dated. Then suddenly they’re married and headed for Minneapolis. I always thought you guys…”

“Yeah,” Danny had replied gruffly. “So did I. They didn’t…have to, did they? Get married, I mean.”

Terry’s surprise at the question had echoed in his voice. “Not that I know of,” he’d answered. “I haven’t heard anything like that.”

Bidding Terry goodbye before his friend could ask too many painful questions, Danny had buried his face in his hands. The following day he’d grimly set about making a separate life for himself.

To his surprise he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, at least in a business sense. He had a penthouse apartment on Lake Shore Drive now, though no one permanent to share it with him. Stocks, bonds and an amazing sum of money in the bank. A top-notch salary complete with profit sharing. Already the promotion that had occasioned his purchase of the Infiniti was ancient history. Shortly before he’d left for Beckwith, Mercator’s CEO had invited him into the company’s inner sanctum and offered him an even juicier plum. When he returned to Chicago, he would put his penthouse up for sale and head for Northern California, to plan, build and take control of a stunning new Mercator complex. It was slated to become the company’s headquarters west of the Mississippi. And he’d be in charge of it. Henceforth, he’d be a Mercator vice president.