that every night, Dad. She never shuts off her lights.”
* * *
THE NIGHT BECAME still after the storm had passed, almost too still, and Tess couldn’t bring herself to go upstairs to sleep. She remained in the chair, dozing fitfully and waking the next morning stiff from having finally fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position. When she pushed the blanket off her lap and got up out of the chair, Blossom shot to her feet, but Mac was slower to rise. When he finally did get to his feet, he held his injured foot a good three or four inches off the floor.
“Let’s see that leg,” Tess said, crouching in front of the dog. She reached out to gently touch it and Mac yelped, drawing it back, but not before Tess felt how hot it was. This was a problem.
Ten minutes later, after a short internet search, Tess called a vet in Wesley, the larger town an hour’s drive to the south. As she’d feared, since Dr. Hyatt was the only vet within sixty miles, no appointments were available until the following week, but the vet tech promised to let her know if something opened up.
“His leg is hot,” Tess said after receiving the bad news. “I’m afraid of infection.”
“It’s probably just inflammation,” the tech said, “but to play it safe, I’ll phone Ann at the mercantile about some medications you can give him until the doctor can see him.”
“Really? The mercantile here?”
“Yeah. The merc is kind of our branch pharmacy.”
“I had no idea. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Tess had shopped at the mercantile three times so far, and each time she’d been the only person in the store except for the tough-looking elderly woman behind the counter who’d gruffly introduced herself as Ann. Tess had not made a friend when she’d refused to offer her name in return.
When Tess parked in front of the store a half hour after talking to the vet, she was in luck again. Not a single car in the small lot. List in hand, she crossed the old wooden porch and pulled the door open, only to stop abruptly on the threshold, facing five sets of curious eyes.
Tess automatically dropped her chin, hiding her face as she quickly walked past the women who stood in a tight group near the checkout counter, and grabbed a basket off the stack at the end of the first aisle.
“Well, hello,” one of the women called after her, “are you the new tenant of the Anderson place?”
“Hi,” Tess replied, not answering the question and not looking back as she escaped down the aisle closest to her.
She stopped at the end of the aisle, out of sight of the group, and faced the cooler as she gathered her composure, convinced herself that this was not a big deal...just unexpected.
The mercantile was roughly the size of a large convenience store, stacked to the ceiling with a wild variety of merchandise, much of which Tess didn’t recognize. Good cover until the ladies left. But the ladies started talking again and Tess soon realized that they had no intention of leaving.
Deciding she couldn’t hide forever, she opened the cooler door and pulled out butter, milk and eggs before moving on to the rather sad-looking produce. If she hadn’t felt cornered she might have worked at choosing the best fruit and vegetables, but as it was, she dumped carrots, oranges and apples into her basket, put three loaves of bread on top—one to eat, two to freeze. Then she peeked around the corner of a display.
The women were still there, clustered in the exact spot Tess wanted to be. Well, she couldn’t hide out here forever and when Ann, the proprietress, caught sight of her and frowned, Tess sucked up her courage and headed for the checkout counter.
She was instantly surrounded by women—or so it felt.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” one of the ladies said. Tess didn’t know which one because she didn’t look at them. “Do you quilt?”
“No.” Tess set the basket on the counter where Ann stood with a hand poised over the keys of the cash register, waiting for Tess to unload her basket. “Has Dr. Hyatt phoned in an order for me?” Tess asked her as she pulled the bread out of the basket.
“If you’re Tess O’Neil he has,” the woman said in a tone that told Tess she hadn’t forgotten her refusal to state her name on her first visit.
“I am,” Tess said in a low voice.
Ann pulled a stapled paper bag from under the counter and started ringing up the items in Tess’s basket. And then the women started closing in again from behind.
“We’re always looking for new members for our club,” another woman, who for some reason was not taking a very blatant hint, declared from close to Tess’s right shoulder. “And quilting is very easy to learn.”
“Thank you very much, but I’m not interested.” Tess sensed an exchange of glances as she pulled three twenties out of her very plain purse and handed them across the counter. The drawer of the old-fashioned cash register popped open as Tess quickly loaded her purchases into the recyclable tote she’d brought. A couple bucks’ worth of change and she was good to go.
Except that she had to walk past the group of women and the shortest one was now studying her face with a thoroughness that unnerved her—to the point that Tess half expected her to say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Maybe her disguise wasn’t as good as she’d hoped. Maybe she should have gone with a wig or something. Or never left the house.
“Excuse me,” she said, refusing to make eye contact as she squeezed past the women and opened the door. Okay. She was coming off as cold and rude. Tough. These ladies needed to understand that she didn’t want to join their quilting bees or whatever.
“Such a nice young woman,” she heard one of the women say sarcastically.
“I swear...I know her from somewhere.”
The last words came just as the door swung shut, making Tess’s blood freeze. She rushed to the car and got inside, slamming the door harder than necessary and then dumping the grocery tote on the seat beside her as the dogs nuzzled her hair. What if they figured out who she was?
CHAPTER FIVE
TESS’S HEAD POUNDED with a stress-induced headache by the time she turned her car into her long driveway. Realistically, what were the chances that the inquisitive ladies in the mercantile would connect her, a scarred woman with dark brown bobbed hair and horn-rimmed glasses, to photoshopped magazine ads featuring a redheaded model? Slim. Very slim.
But she still felt ill.
After putting away her few groceries, Tess tricked Mac into taking an antibiotic pill by wrapping it in cheese, then went out to the barn to put the final coat of finish on the oak table.
She swept the barn floor in the area around the table, trying not to think about the women. Trying not to obsess.
There was no breeze to stir the dust she hadn’t been able to bring up out of the rough floorboards, so Tess left the barn door rolled open. The dogs soon settled in the sun outside the door and Tess began applying the clear finish over the golden oak stain, focusing on her brushstrokes,
