could he put it?—the sort of woman who beckoned to him.
“I want your promise that nothing like this will happen again, Grand Feather,” he said sharply, in fluent Winnebago this time.
“I am old,” his grandfather answered softly. “It is time for me to go. I want to go to my people. I should not have to explain this to you.”
Michael took a deep breath. “You said there was a Winnebago graveyard here. Lieutenant Bauer looked for it. I looked for it. You looked for it! We could not find it.”
The old eyes bored into his. “That doesn’t mean it is not here.”
Michael threw up his hands, wondering what he’d do with this stubborn old man when he really did become senile. He hoped he’d spoken the truth to Renata when he’d insisted that the old man was not becoming irrational yet.
“You were lucky you pulled that stunt on land that belongs to a kind woman. If she’d been a different type of person you could have been shot or arrested.”
If she’d been a different type of person, I wouldn’t feel so ashamed, he added silently. He knew dozens of Winnebagos who would have responded the way Renata Meyer had, but very few white people. She’d gone out of her way to help an old man. She hadn’t accused him of trespassing. She hadn’t called him a dirty Indian. She hadn’t ordered him never to bother her again. She’d fed and cleaned him up and gotten him warm. And she’d smiled...oh, had she ever smiled....
Angrily he thrust away the memory of that smile. It was the sort of smile that could get a man in serious trouble if he dwelt on it.
Still, as he drove back to the Dells, Michael couldn’t seem to put Renata out of his mind. She was not the sort of white woman he dealt with impersonally every day at work. Most of his female customers were professional women who strove to keep their conversation light, and his co-worker, Maralys Johnson, was an aggressive career woman with a sharp tongue and a hard edge. Maralys wasn’t a bad sort, but she sometimes got on Michael’s nerves. Always jockeying her way to the top, she spoke the language of power and even dressed to look the part of a rising young executive.
There were no hard edges to Renata Meyer. She spoke her mind, but gently. She opened her home to the rain-soaked and wayward. She wore ratty jeans and a paint-speckled T-shirt, and her luscious blond hair cascaded unfettered to her trim waist. She wore no makeup, no jewelry, no power suit. Everything about her was natural and unpretentious.
And she was damn easy on the eyes to boot.
But it wasn’t really her appearance that had moved Michael. It was her honesty, her compassion, her warmth. She’d surely felt as awkward as he in their unusual situation, but she’d handled it a lot better than he had. She’d admitted her curiosity, but she hadn’t pressed. She’d tried to anticipate his needs and meet them. When he’d botched everything, she’d tried to make amends.
She was a rare woman, and he was sorry—as well as relieved—that he’d never see her again.
Oh, he could return the clothes to her house. He could even call ahead to make sure she’d be home when he got there. He had a hunch she’d be more flattered than distressed. But Michael Youngthunder was not a foolish man, and he knew trouble when it bit him on the kneecap. He’d been clever enough to crawl out of a shack and drag himself through college; he’d been clever enough to get three promotions in the past two years. He was certainly clever enough to remember how painfully he’d learned that he should never, ever, get romantically involved with a white woman.
He’d loved one once—surrendered himself body and soul—and he’d believed, with every ounce of his heart, that she had truly lived for him. When he’d proposed marriage, Sheila had accepted with what seemed like true joy. When she’d taken him home to meet her parents, she had seemed proud of him. But when he’d introduced Sheila to his grandfather and asked that her parents meet him, she’d told Michael gently, “Maybe some other time.” She’d been so gentle, in fact—so loving and ashamed—that it had taken Michael three full weeks to get the message.
But he’d learned his lesson in the end, and it was not one he could ever forget. He’d mail back those old clothes or leave them with Brick Bauer. He could not deny that he was drawn to Renata Meyer, but that only meant he’d move heaven and earth to make sure he never came face-to-face with her again.
* * *
BY THE TIME the two Indians left and Renata started into town, it was almost eleven, the hour the crafts-fair meeting was set to begin at Alyssa’s house. It was the first time Alyssa had ever asked her to serve on a committee, and Renata wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or put out. The fact that Alyssa wanted her artistic expertise meant that she didn’t see her as a child anymore, and that was good. But since she had plenty of multipurpose volunteers in Tyler, Alyssa most likely planned to turn to Renata for advice that nobody else could offer. Advice that was probably going to translate into boring civic duties that took a lot of time.
As Renata pulled up on the familiar street, she remembered that she had always thought the Ingallses’ old house was magnificent. It had trim white columns on the front porch and clusters of wisteria trailing from trellises below the windows. As a little girl Renata had read books about children who dreamed of living in a palace. She’d always dreamed of living like the Ingallses.
“Renata! How nice to see you,” Alyssa greeted her when she knocked on the door.
Alyssa was a willowy, elegant blonde in her late fifties who looked a good ten years younger. Today she was dressed as casually as Renata had ever seen her—in jeans and a T-shirt. But the jeans were spanking new with a designer label, and the T-shirt had shoulder pads and some sort of hand-painted design that would have gone for fifty or sixty dollars in Milwaukee. Renata hadn’t made a fraction of that when she’d painted some herself.
“You remember everybody, don’t you?” Alyssa asked.
I certainly hope so, Renata thought, knowing that all her parents’ friends would be offended if she forgot their names. As she glanced around the room, old faces pricked her memory. Dear Anna Kelsey, aging some but looking just as pragmatic as ever. Alyssa’s daughter Liza, the hellion, glowingly pregnant and—lo and behold!—proudly sporting a wedding ring. Nora Gates, whose name Renata had recently heard linked with Liza’s husband’s brother; she’d either married him or was planning to soon. And last but not least, Elise Ferguson, Tyler’s beloved spinster librarian.
Nobody ever thought of Elise and marriage in the same breath. Not that she wasn’t nice looking—she was tall and slender with a subtle, almost ethereal sort of beauty. Her smile was as sweet as her spirit. But she carried too many burdens on her slim shoulders to indulge herself in romantic fancy. Her sister, Bea, wheelchair-bound for years, demanded a great deal of care and even more attention. And Elise treated the library itself almost as though it were a living thing. It had become her child. For this Renata, along with the rest of the town, would always be grateful. She’d spent more happy hours than she could count poring over art books that Elise had special-ordered for her back in the days when nobody else had thought she had a lick of talent.
Proof of Alyssa’s father’s faith in Renata was that one of her first paintings, a product of her cubist phase, now hung on a wall in the Ingalles’ living room. It was a crush of blues and greens, with no discernible subject matter, though Renata recalled believing at the time that it represented heaven’s relationship with earth. Now it represented the fact that crusty Judson Ingalls had been the first person in the world to pay actual money for a Renata Meyer painting. For that reason alone she would
