away and three years later and he could still feel the warm sun of a Midwest August on his face. He could see the corn standing tall in the rolling fields outside Tyler and the crowd gathered in the town square for a summer band concert. He could hear old Ellie Gates calling out the winner of the quilt raffle, to raise money for repairing the town clock. First prize was a hand-stitched quilt of intersecting circles. Byron later learned that its design was called Wisconsin Wedding, a variation on the traditional wedding ring design created by Tyler’s own quilting ladies.
And he could hear her laugh. Nora’s laugh. It wasn’t her fake spinsterish laugh he heard, but the laugh that was soft and free, unrestrained by the peculiar myths that dominated her life.
He’d gone to Tyler once and had almost destroyed Nora Gates. He’d almost destroyed himself. And his brother. How could he go back?
Please come….
Byron had waited for years to be invited back into his older brother’s life. There’d been Vietnam, Cambodia, a hospital in the Philippines, sporadic attempts at normality. And then nothing. For five years, nothing.
Now this strange invitation—out of the blue—to his brother’s wedding.
A woman named Alyssa Baron had helped the burned-out recluse make a home at an abandoned lodge on a lake outside town. Was Liza Baron her daughter?
So many questions, Byron thought.
And so many dangers. Too many, perhaps.
He picked up his last dart. If he or his mother—or both—just showed up in Tyler after all these years, what would Cliff do? What if their presence sent him back over the edge? Liza Baron might have good intentions, but did she know what she was doing in making this gesture to her fiancé’s estranged family?
But upsetting Cliff wasn’t Byron’s biggest fear. They were brothers. Cliff had gone away because of his love for and his loyalty to his family. That much Byron understood.
No, his biggest fear was of a slim, tawny-haired Tylerite who’d fancied herself a grand Victorian old maid at thirty, in an era when nobody believed in old maids. What would proper, pretty Nora Gates do if he showed up in her hometown again?
Byron sat up straight. “She’d come after you, my man.” He fired his dart. “With a blowtorch.”
The pointed tip of the dart penetrated the polished mahogany paneling with a loud thwack, missing Henry Murrow’s nose by a good eight inches.
The Nora Gates effect.
He was probably the only man on earth who knew that she wasn’t anything like the refined, soft-spoken spinster lady she pretended she was. For that, she hated his guts. Her parting words to him three years ago had been, “Then leave, you despicable cad.”
Only Nora.
But even worse, he suspected he was the only man who’d ever lied to her and gotten away with it. At least so far. When he’d left Tyler three years ago, Nora hadn’t realized he’d lied. And since she hadn’t come after him with a bucket of hot tar, he assumed she still didn’t realize he had.
If he returned to Tyler, however, she’d know for sure.
And then what?
* * *
“MISS GATES?”
Nora recognized the voice on the telephone—it was that of Mrs. Mickelson in china and housewares, around the corner from Nora’s office on the third floor. For a few months after Aunt Ellie’s death three years ago, the staff at Gates Department Store hadn’t quite known how to address the young Eleanora Gates. Most had been calling her Nora for years, but now that she was their boss that just wouldn’t do. And “Ms. Gates” simply didn’t sound right. So they settled, without any discussion that Nora knew about, on Miss Gates—the same thing they’d called her aunt. It was as if nothing had changed. And in many ways, nothing had.
“I have Liza Baron here,” Mrs. Mickelson said.
Nora settled back in the rosewood chair Aunt Ellie had bought in Milwaukee in 1925. “Oh?”
“She’s here to fill out her bridal registry, but…well, you know Miss Baron. She’s grumbling about feudalistic rituals. I’m afraid I just don’t know what to say.”
“Send her into my office,” Nora said, stifling a laugh. Despite her years away from Tyler, Liza Baron obviously hadn’t changed. “I’ll be glad to handle this one for you.”
Claudia Mickelson made no secret of her relief as she hung up. It wasn’t that Nora was any better equipped for the task of keeping Liza Baron happy. It was, simply, that should Liza screech out of town in a blue funk and get Cliff Forrester to elope with her, thus denying its grandest wedding since Chicago socialite Margaret Lindstrom married Tyler’s own Judson Ingalls some fifty years before, it would be on Nora’s head.
Five minutes later, Mrs. Mickelson and the unlikely bride burst into Nora’s sedate office. Mrs. Mickelson surrendered catalogs and the bridal registry book, wished Liza well and retreated. Liza plopped down on the caned chair in front of the elegant but functional rosewood desk. Wearing a multicolored serape over a bright orange oversize top and skinny black leggings, Liza Baron was as stunning and outrageous and completely herself as Nora remembered. That she’d fallen head over heels in love with the town’s recluse didn’t surprise Nora in the least. Liza Baron had always had a mind of her own. Anyway, love was like that. It was an emotion Nora didn’t necessarily trust.
“This was all my mother’s idea,” Liza announced.
“It usually is.” Nora, a veteran calmer of bridal jitters, smiled. “A bridal register makes life much easier for the mother of the bride. Otherwise, people continually call and ask her for suggestions of what to buy as a wedding gift. It gets tiresome, and if she gives the wrong advice, it’s all too easy for her to be blamed.”
Liza scowled. There was talk around town—not that Nora was one to give credence to talk—that Liza just might hop into her little white car and blow out of town as fast and suddenly as she’d blown in. Not because she didn’t love Cliff Forrester, but because she so obviously did. Only this morning Nora had overheard two members of her staff speculating on the potential effects on Liza’s unusual fiancé of a big wedding and marrying into one of Tyler’s first families. Would he be able to tolerate all the attention? Would he bolt? Would he go off the deep end?
“Well,” Liza said, “the whole thing strikes me as sexist and mercenary.”
Liza Baron had always been one to speak her mind, something Nora admired. She herself also valued directness, even if her own manner was somewhat more diplomatic. “You have a point, but I don’t think that’s the intent.”
“You don’t see anybody dragging Cliff down here to pick out china patterns, do you?”
“No, that wouldn’t be the custom.”
It was enough of a shock, Nora thought, to see Liza Baron with a catalog of Wedgwood designs in front of her. But if Liza was somewhat nontraditional, Cliff Forrester—Well, for years townspeople had wondered if they ought to fetch an expert in posttraumatic stress disorder from Milwaukee to have a look at him, make sure his gray matter was what it should be. He’d lived alone at Timberlake Lodge for at least five years, maybe longer.
