money. But then Kate realized that her wanting or needing help with the boys had very little to do with it. It was Mrs. Hansen who needed the help. She had been taking care of Suzanne Canfield, the adopted boys’ sick mother, when Suzanne had been killed in a fire that also burned their house to the ground. The boys had barely escaped with their lives and then only because Max had braved the flames to go in and get them. Mrs. Hansen’s grief and guilt at not having been there when the fire broke out had apparently been overwhelming, and Maria had deliberately given her perhaps the only thing that would ease her mind a little—the task of helping to take care of the little boys whom the fire had orphaned.
Kate picked up the wooden horse and put it into her pocket, smiling as she did so because Robbie’s teething marks were all over it. He was such a dear little boy—indeed, they all were. Joe. Jake. Robbie.
Harrison.
“No,” she said quietly. She wasn’t ready to think about him just yet, not in the deep and intense way she wanted to.
She pulled the door firmly closed, and she saw the man immediately when she turned around. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his coat was still snowcovered, likely because it wasn’t warm enough inside for it to have melted. Incredibly, he had taken the liberty of lighting not one but two of the kitchen lamps.
“Who are you?” he asked bluntly and with all the authority of someone whose business it was to know.
If her presence in the house had been authorized, she wouldn’t have been so taken aback by the question, but as it was, she didn’t reply. They stared at each other, Kate trying all the while to decide whether or not she was afraid.
“Why is the house so cold?” he asked next. He reached out as if to steady himself, but there was nothing in the hallway for him to grab onto. “There’s plenty of wood...in the...box.”
Kate eased backward, intending to make a run for the front door, snowstorm or no snowstorm. But she had the lamp. She couldn’t run with it and she couldn’t set it down without the man realizing her intent. The last thing she wanted was to light her unsuspecting brother’s house ablaze.
“My apologies, miss,” he said with some effort but in a slightly more genial tone. She tried to identify his accent. It was Southern, and yet it wasn’t.
He took a few steps in her direction. “I didn’t think...the questions were...that difficult.”
“Who are you?” she asked finally, recovering at least a modicum of the snobbishness that was hers by birthright if not personality.
He took a few more steps, and she realized suddenly that something was indeed wrong. He was clearly unsteady on his feet now, and he seemed to want to say something but couldn’t.
Drunk? Ill? She couldn’t tell.
He suddenly pitched forward. She gave a small cry and jumped back in an effort to keep him from colliding with her and the lit oil lamp. He went sprawling face first on the parquet floor, his head hitting the bare wood hard.
“Sir,” she said, keeping her distance. “Sir!”
He didn’t move. She set the oil lamp on the floor and came as close to him as she dared. He was so still.
Someone rapped sharply on the front door, making her jump, and whoever it was didn’t wait to be admitted. Sergeant Major Perkins, her brother’s extremely competent orderly, came striding into the foyer and down the hallway, bringing much of the winter storm in with him.
“Miss Kate! I wondered why there were lamps burning— Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said, bending down to look at him again. He was still motionless.
“You didn’t go and shoot him, did you?”
“No, I did not shoot him, Sergeant Major.”
“What is he doing in here?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“Then what are you doing in here? Colonel Woodard didn’t say you were going to be on the premises.”
“My brother doesn’t know everything,” she said obscurely.
“Well, you just go right on thinking that if you want to, Miss Kate, but if you want my advice, you’ll revise that opinion, the sooner, the better. Don’t much get by that brother of yours. Every soldier in this town can tell you that.”
“Could we just address this first?” Kate said, waving her hand over the man still lying on the floor.
“That we can. Move the lamp so I can roll him over. I’m going to hang on to him. You see what’s in his pockets.”
Kate hesitated.
“We want to hurry this along, Miss Kate,” he said pointedly. “While he’s unaware.”
“Yes,” she decided, seeing the wisdom of that plan. She slid the lamp out of the way and knelt down by him again.
“He’s not dead, is he?” it occurred to her to ask.
“If he was dead, we wouldn’t need to be hurrying. Go ahead now. Look.”
Far from reassured, she reached tentatively and not very deeply into a coat pocket.
“I don’t reckon he’s got anything in there that bites,” Perkins said mildly.
She gave him a look and began to search in earnest. He didn’t seem to be carrying anything at all.
“You let him in?” Perkins asked.
“No,” Kate said pointedly, moving to another pocket. “He was just...here.”
“Kind of like you are, I guess,” he said. He was clearly suspicious about the situation, and he wasn’t doing much to try to hide it. “You miss your train?”
“I didn’t ‘miss’ it. I didn’t get on.”
“Colonel Woodard know about the...change in plans?”
“He does not.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“There is nothing for you to worry about, Sergeant.”
“And yet here I am. Down on the floor with an unconscious and unknown man, helping you riffle through his pockets.”
“The riffling was your idea,” Kate reminded him.
“So it was,” he agreed. “Anybody else here?”
“Just him—as far as I know.”
“You’re not sick or anything, are you?” he persisted, the question impertinent at best.
She didn’t answer. Her fingers closed around a small book in the man’s other coat pocket—a well-worn Bible, she saw as she pulled it free. She opened it. There was some kind of...card between the pages. The texture felt like a carte de visite. She moved closer
