Matthew rejoined Emily outside the circle of books.
“I wasn’t supposed to do that, was I?” he said quietly, as if he had just remembered.
“No, you weren’t.”
“I’m sorry. Your place is so different from where I grew up. My parents liked the minimalist look.”
She opened a door at the front of the house. “This is our only minimalist room. It’s supposed to be for company.”
There was no bed, no furniture at all. Only rows of plastic containers piled on top of one another. “I call it the Robb-Moore Archives,” she said lightly. “At first my mother kept everything in cardboard boxes, but I put my foot down. Too much of a fire hazard.”
Matthew read one label out loud. “‘School reports, Emily Moore, grade 1-12.’ It’s nice that your mom wants to keep things like that.”
“Until you know she wants to keep everything. Wedding invitations, birth announcements, obituaries, sales receipts, newspaper clippings, livestock papers…”
His gaze deepened into something she was afraid might be sympathy so she quickly added, “Which is great. If someone in your family had done this you could have found all the information you wanted in a day.”
She backed out of the room and led Matthew to the second floor. When they reached the landing he looked at a trapdoor overhead.
“An attic?”
“Not a usable one. It’s rafters and cobwebs and the odd chipmunk.”
He reached up, easily touching the door. “Could I take a look?”
“There’s nothing to see. The last time I opened it a whole load of dust and little bits of gray insulation poured down.” She wasn’t going to clean that up again.
Her mother’s room was on the left, with the door shut, and hers was on the right, overlooking the front yard. As soon as she saw her twin bed, so childish under the window, she wished they had stayed downstairs.
Matthew took in the bed, the photos of horses and dogs, the books and the dolls and teddy bears left out because they had too much personality to be shut away. “Cozy.”
“But not very helpful for your family history.” “It is. Really. I’ve never been in a big old prairie house.” He knocked on the wall. “When I was a kid I always thought old houses had secret rooms.”
“Hang on.” Emily pushed her bed to one side. Behind it was a small door held shut by a block of wood. She turned the block on its nail and the door swung open. “It doesn’t qualify as a room, and it isn’t a secret. It’s just so we can access the space under the half-roof.”
Matthew knelt beside her and peered in. “Great place for hide and seek.”
“My father was firm about that.” It was one of the few things Emily remembered about him, he’d warned her so often. “He told me I’d crash right through to the room below.”
“Scary thought.”
“I hid things, though. Notes to Susannah and Liz. Or Halloween candy once. That was a mistake. A whole family of chipmunks moved in that time.”
Matthew laughed, and she immediately wanted it to happen again. It made his face so warm and open.
“Mind if I take a closer look?”
“It’ll be dusty.”
Brushing past her, he leaned deeper into the crawl space. It was a long time since she’d been so close to a man who wasn’t a relative. How did her body know? There was quite a divide between its point of view and her own. It was always tingling and softening and perking up when he was around. She couldn’t seem to impress on it how short a week was, and how quickly it was passing, or the fact that she didn’t know anything about him, not even if she liked him.
No, she knew that much. The question was whether she should like him.
As his head and shoulders came back into the light his knee knocked against hers. She edged away. He was out of place in her room, with her old teddy bears staring from the shelf. Through the warm air grate in the floor she could hear her mother working. What she was feeling didn’t belong here. John had called it her nun’s cell.
She stood up quickly. “You wanted to see outside? The barn, you said? The outbuildings?”
“If you don’t mind.” He went around to the other side of the bed and pushed it back into place.
BETWEEN THE TIME he stuck his head under the roof and pulled it back out, something had changed Emily’s mood. Did thinking about her father upset her? Or was she worried about having someone snoop around the house?
As helpfully distancing as the name was he hadn’t been able to think of her as Ms. Robb for very long. Only until the third or fourth time her mother had asked which relative had made the quiche or the salad or the chicken and she’d looked as if one word of appreciation would go a long way. Then she’d become Emily in his mind.
He followed her downstairs and out the kitchen door. The dog, back in the shade of the hedge, gave him another baleful stare. No growling or biting so far. That was good.
The yard was like a forest. It looked as if long ago someone had felled just enough trees to make room for a house and left the rest. Emily and her mother barely kept up with it. A closer inspection was confirming yesterday’s first impression. Inside and out, there was no sign of big spending—except for the books and not even those if the collecting was spread over the years.
No gems, no Group of Seven paintings, she’d said. It was the kind of joke people might make when they were covering something. He didn’t think that was the case here. Liars usually gave themselves away with tics and avoidance gestures or expressions so blankly innocent alarm bells went off. Emily had been five or six when the gold had disappeared. Not involved, obviously. That didn’t mean she wasn’t drawn in later. He had to remember that.
THE OUTBUILDINGS WERE all well past their prime, with moss on their shingles and scampering sounds overhead. There was a single-car garage to check, a pump house, a henhouse, a storehouse, a granary and a barn.
“I suppose all this would have been typical of the Rutherford place.” Emily was still looking for connections to Matthew’s family history. He had been quiet since they’d come outside and she wondered if he was losing interest in the tour. “Working farms have updated their buildings.”
“This isn’t a working farm?”
“Not since my father died. Martin and Tom—two of my cousins—use the land for grazing.”
Matthew swung the storehouse door back and forth. “No lock. You don’t care if your friendly neighborhood thief comes in?”
“He’d be welcome to anything he found in here.”
She led him between moldy saddles and dusty buckets and out the back door into a meadow. One step, and they were knee-high in prairie grasses. Here and there were spots of color—deep-yellow black-eyed Susans and pale-yellow buttercups, orange tiger lilies and purple Russian thistles. Beyond
