have the Bach down by next week. Promise. It’s just hard with it being football season.”
“I understand. It’s not easy being both a talented musician and a football player at this time of year. But you’ve had a good lesson, Rick. It’s not you. I’m just…well, it’s been a long day.” She rose from her chair beside the piano. “I’ll see you next week.”
“Sure thing, Miss Gates.”
With Rick gone, the house seemed deadly quiet. Foregoing Bach and Beethoven, Nora put on an early Bruce Springsteen tape and tried to exorcise Byron Sanders from her mind.
She couldn’t.
She hadn’t forgotten a single thing about him. He was as tall as she remembered. As strongly built and lithe, and every bit as darkly good-looking. His eyes were still as blue and piercing and unpredictable—and as dangerously enticing—as the Atlantic Ocean.
It would have been easier, she thought, if there’d been things she’d forgotten. The dark hairs on his forearms, for example, or his long, blunt-nailed fingers. But she’d remembered everything—the warmth of his eyes, the breadth of his shoulders, the way he had of forcing her not to take herself too seriously, even how irritating he could be. Especially how irritating he could be.
How had he learned about Cliff and Liza’s wedding? It wasn’t a secret, but how had an East Coast photographer heard that a Wisconsin couple was getting married? Maybe he did know Cliff—but Cliff had said he didn’t know a Byron Sanders. Perhaps Byron knew the Forresters, the mother and brother Liza had taken the liberty of inviting. Nora wondered if she should warn Liza about Byron.
Singing aloud with Bruce, she made herself another pot of tea and dug in her refrigerator for some leftovers for supper. If Sanders had shown up before Cliff had, she’d have pressed Liza’s reticent fiancé a little harder about his fellow Rhode Islander.
Well, she thought, pulling a bit of brown rice and chicken from the fridge, someone was lying.
She made a tossed salad and warmed up her dinner. Really, what a terrific old maid she’d make. A pity the term was démodé.
The Spinster Gates.
It sounded deliciously forbidding. She turned off Bruce and tried to put her former lover—arrgh, why couldn’t he be less appealing?—out of her mind. Sitting at her kitchen table, she found herself staring at her hands. They were ringless, still soft and pale. She remembered Aunt Ellie’s hands in her final days: old, spotted, gnarled. Yet they’d possessed a delicacy and beauty that suggested she was a woman who’d lived her life on her own terms, a life that had been full and happy. She’d relished her family, she’d had many friends. She’d been generous and spirited and frugal, a model of independence and responsibility.
Once, over a similar supper of leftovers, Nora had asked Aunt Ellie if she ever got lonely. “Of course,” she’d replied immediately, in her blunt, unswerving way. “Everyone does. I’m no different.”
“But…I meant, did you ever wished you’d married?”
She’d shrugged, not backing away from so personal a question. “At times I’ve wondered what it might have been like, but I’ve no doubt a married woman at times wonders what would have become of her if she hadn’t married. But I have no regrets, any more than your mother had regrets about having married your father. I know and have known many wonderful men. I just didn’t care to marry any of them.”
“What about children?” Nora had asked.
Aunt Ellie had laughed. “My word, Tyler’s filled with children. Always has been. You know, I believe sometimes when you don’t have children of your own you’re better able to appreciate other people’s. You can do things for them and with them that their parents simply can’t. You can enrich their lives. You don’t worry about the same things. To be honest, Nora, I’ve never had the urge to bear children myself. I know that’s hard for some people to believe, but it’s the truth. But I’ve enjoyed having children in my life.”
Indeed she had. Even before she’d come to live with Aunt Ellie when she was thirteen, Nora had loved her visits to the twenties house a few blocks from Gates Department Store. They’d bake cookies, go to museums, arts and crafts festivals, libraries. Aunt Ellie had taught her how to manage money and had instilled in her a sense of independence and confidence that continued to stand her in good stead.
She was stronger than she’d been three years ago, Nora reminded herself. She’d had time to adjust to the loss of Aunt Ellie and to becoming sole owner of Gates. She knew herself better. She knew that if Aunt Ellie had never yearned in any real way for marriage and children, she herself occasionally would. Every now and then, a man would even come along who tempted her.
She would survive Byron’s reappearance in Tyler.
Once, of course, she’d figured out what he was up to.
Feeling a little like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Nora finished her supper and made her plans.
* * *
AFTER HASTILY REMOVING himself from Nora’s house, Byron parked in the town square, put a quarter in the meter—which miraculously allowed him a full hour to mosey around—and found his way to the Tyler Public Library. It was located in a particularly beautiful, if run-down, turn-of-the century home. Given his own upbringing in a Federal-period town house and a center-chimney cottage on Nantucket Island, Byron found the preponderance of Victorian, Craftsman and Prairie architecture in Tyler refreshing.
Inside the library, which was old-fashioned and in desperate need of renovation, he tried not to draw attention to himself as he made his way to a stack of recent copies of the Tyler Citizen. He sat at an oak table in a poorly lit corner. Deliberately and patiently, he skimmed each edition of the daily paper, backtracking several weeks until he found the front-page article announcing the discovery of a skeleton at Judson Ingall’s Timberlake Lodge. The grisly discovery had been made when local construction chief Joe Santori and his crew struck the body with a backhoe while doing some excavation work; Cliff Forrester, the lodge caretaker, was called onto the scene. Apparently Liza Baron, Judson’s granddaughter, was also up at the lodge at the time. According to the paper, Judson himself hadn’t stepped foot on the property since his wife left him more than forty years ago.
Liza Baron.
Byron rolled the name around on his tongue and tried to remember. But no, he didn’t recall a Liza Baron from his first visit to Tyler. He remembered Judson Ingalls, though. A taciturn, hardworking man, he was one of Tyler’s leading citizens, owner of Ingalls Farm and Machinery. As Byron recalled, Judson’s wife had been a Chicago socialite, unhappy in a small Wisconsin town.
Now why had he remembered that little tidbit of Tyler lore?
“Aunt Ellie,” he whispered to himself.
In their long talks on her front porch, Ellie Gates had told Byron countless tales of the legions of friends she’d had over her long, full life. She’d mentioned Judson Ingalls’s wife. “Margaret was a fish out of water here in Tyler, but we became friends, although she was somewhat younger than I. I’m afraid she didn’t have too many friends here in town. A pity. She was such a lively woman. Of course, some of that was her own doing—but it wasn’t all her own doing. In a small town, it’s easy for people to develop a wariness of strangers, of outsiders.” And she’d paused to give him a pointed look, as if she knew he was another outsider who’d fallen for a Tyler resident.
