Smoke River Family

“If he gets elected he can stay home nights, feeding those twins.”

Rita grinned. “Oh, he’ll get elected all right, Doc. I’m his campaign manager.”

Zane saluted her with his empty cup. Just as Rita lifted the pot to fill it, Zane froze. Good God, Winifred was entering the restaurant. The moment she spied him she frowned, wiped it off her face, then let it return and crossed the room to his table.

“Are those scrambled eggs?” she demanded.

He rose and invited her to sit down. “Rita, bring another plate, will you?”

“And some scrambled eggs, please,” Winifred added.

They stared across the table at each other for a long minute.

“Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?” he said at last. “Meeting here like this.”

“Maybe not so much. We’re probably both hungry after my disastrous attempt in the kitchen this morning.”

“Yes,” he said. “We are. Both hungry, I mean.” He wondered at himself the instant the suggestive word crossed his lips. Thank God she didn’t seem to hear.

Rita plopped a plate down in front of Winifred, and with an apologetic look at him, she lifted her fork. “This afternoon Sam is going to teach me how to scramble eggs.”

Zane stared at her. Celeste had never exchanged more than two sentences with Sam, and she’d certainly never asked him to teach her anything about cooking.

“But before my egg lesson,” Winifred continued, “there is something I’d like to discuss with you.”

Zane’s nerves went on alert. “Now?”

“No, not now. Later.”

“I’ll be at the hospital later.”

Very deliberately she laid her fork on the plate. “The truth is you don’t want to talk to me, do you? I can understand your not liking me, but—”

“I do like you.” Oh, God, had he really said that? He drew in a long breath. “I apologize. That came out wrong. What I mean is we have nothing to discuss.”

“It’s about Celeste.”

“Especially if it’s about Celeste. She wanted the piano and all her music books shipped back to you at the conservatory, and her clothes—”

“Her clothes are too small for me, Zane. And she loved the color pink. I detest pink.”

“I detest pink, too, but...” His voice thickened. “But I loved it on Celeste.”

Winifred nodded. “I don’t need the piano,” she said quietly. “It brings back painful memories.”

“Oh? What the hell do you think it does to me?” Instantly he regretted snapping at her. He waited, watching her coffee cup jiggle when she picked it up. Her fingers were trembling.

“Sorry. Guess I’m strung up a little tight these days.”

“Well, so am I.”

They stared at each other across the table for a long minute, and then Winifred dropped her eyes.

“Zane, when Cissy met you, she and I were about to go on tour. London, Paris, Vienna. Even Rome, which Cissy didn’t want to visit because she feared it would be too hot. Did you know about this?”

“No, I did not know. She never told me. All I know is that there was a piano recital one night at the medical college and Celeste was playing. She wore some kind of flowing pink gown, chiffon, I guess it’s called. And she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. I fell in love with her during her first piece. Chopin, I remember. An étude.”

“In A-flat,” Winifred supplied.

“Is that what you want to discuss—the music tour you and Celeste were planning?”

“No, it isn’t. It’s, well, something else.”

Their eyes met and held. Hers were distant. Troubled. He didn’t know what his eyes betrayed, but all at once she blinked and bit her lip.

“Zane, I am trying to understand about Celeste. She was so smitten she left everything we had planned to run away with you. I...” She swallowed. “I am trying hard to forgive her for leaving it all behind. And for dying,” she added, her voice pinched.

“I am trying, as well,” he said quietly. “Part of me is hurt and angry that she—that she is gone.” Another part of him, the part he could scarcely acknowledge to himself, much less share with Winifred Von Dannen, was his weariness. He was tired of the constant grinding pain. And he was hungry. Yes, that was the word, hungry for something else. The trouble was, he didn’t have the slightest idea what that might be.

Winifred sipped her coffee and looked at him over the rim of the cup. “It must be very hard,” she said at last.

For a moment he couldn’t speak over the ache in his throat. “It is hard,” he said at last. “You have no idea how hard.”

She looked at him with tears pooling in her eyes and all at once he could take no more. “I’ll be at the hospital.”

Without another word he shoved back his chair and strode out the door onto the street.

Winifred watched him through the front dining room window, his long-legged gait decisive, angry, his shoulders hunched forward as if warding off a chill wind. What wouldn’t she give to have met him before Cissy had.

Her coffee cup clanked onto the saucer. Where on earth had that thought come from?

“Somethin’ wrong with your breakfast, ma’am?” Rita stood frowning at her elbow. “Never seen Doc bolt outta here like that.”

“Oh, no, Rita. The eggs were very good, just right in fact. Dr. Dougherty said he had to go to the hospital.”

“Huh,” the woman said. “That man’s working too hard, if ya ask me. Never takes a day off, up all hours of the day and night. Ever since his wife died it’s like he never stops runnin’.”

Winifred tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t work right. She clenched her lower lip between her teeth to stop its trembling. She was a silly, sentimental fool.

“I’ll jest put the meal on his account. Yours, too.”

Outside on the boardwalk she stood surveying the streets of the small town she found herself in, then on impulse started down a pretty maple-lined lane. Five houses from the corner an attractive yellow two-story house caught her eye. The white picket fence surrounding the property was thick with yellow roses, the same roses she’d found on Cissy’s grave yesterday.

Just as she drew abreast of the gate, the front door opened and a handsome gray-haired gentleman descended the steps. Clutched in his hand was a bouquet of the same yellow roses.

“Mornin’,” he said as he unlatched the gate. “Another fine day we’re havin’.”

Winifred stared at the man. “What? Oh, yes. Excuse me, but...forgive my asking, but what will you do with those roses?”

He dropped his gaze to the bouquet. “These? Why, I’m takin’ these to the graveyard where Miss Celeste—” He broke off and peered at her with startling blue eyes.

“Say, you must be her sister from the East.”

“Why, yes, I am. How did you guess that?”

“Weren’t hard, seein’ as how you look a lot like her. Name’s Rooney Cloudman, ma’am. I was an admirer of yer sister.”

She held out her hand. “Winifred Von Dannen.”

Mr. Cloudman shifted the roses to his left hand and grasped hers in a finger-crunching grip. “Miss Celeste, she liked roses, so I take some to her grave every day. Sure do miss her piano-playin’. Used to sneak up on Doc’s porch and set in the swing jest listenin’. Most beautiful music I ever heard.”

Winifred swallowed hard, unable to speak for a long moment. “Yes, she was quite gifted.”

“I never let on ’bout me listenin’. Figured Doc wouldn’t mind, but I was afeared she’d stop playin’ if she knew.”

“I am sure she would have been pleased, Mr. Cloudman.”

He gave her a wide smile. “Whyn’t you go on into the house and introduce yerself to Sarah Rose. She loved Miss Celeste’s music, too. Me, I’m off to the cemetery.” He tipped his battered wide-brimmed hat and ambled on down the street.

Winifred didn’t feel like talking to anyone, especially about Cissy, so she decided to return to the doctor’s house on the hill and take her cooking lesson from Sam. She snapped off a single yellow rose from the stems rambling along the fence, spun in place and marched back to the big hill and Dr. Dougherty’s beautiful white house.

* * *

In the hospital foyer, Zane was stopped by Samuel Graham, the physician whose name the hospital bore. The older man laid a gentle hand on Zane’s shoulder.

“How are you managing, son?”

“Well enough, I suppose.”

“Sorry I couldn’t be here when Sarah’s grandson took sick. I was called away to Gillette Springs for an emergency appendectomy.”

“Don’t give it a thought, Samuel. You know Sarah always brings one of her apple pies—that’s a large payment for a small favor.” He tried to accompany the statement with a smile but somehow this morning he couldn’t manage it.

The hand on his shoulder tightened. “Don’t mind my sayin’ so, Zane, but you look fatigued. And your eyes...you been drinking?”

“Some,” Zane admitted. More than “some” on the days Celeste’s death cut particularly deep. His medical partner had sharp eyes.

“Celeste’s sister is here from St. Louis.”

Doc Graham’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows rose. “That so? Must be why you’re frowning. Is she a trial?”

Zane sighed. “She is not.” Winifred was far from a trial, as Samuel put it. She was...he didn’t know what she was, just that he liked having her around.

“She’s older than Celeste. More...mature.”

The keen-eyed physician nodded. “I did rounds at eight this morning. Just leaving now to go back to the boardinghouse. Sarah serves lunch early on Sunday.”

Zane blinked. It was Sunday? Good God, he was losing track of the days again. “Anything new?”

“Mrs. Madsen’s leg ulcer looks better. I’d keep her in bed an extra day, give her some rest from that husband of hers. You’d think he had the only milk cows in the county the way he coddles them.”

“But not his wife,” Zane observed. “That how she fell, a cow knocked her down?”

Doc Graham nodded. “You might look in on Whitey Poletti. Keeps insisting he’s well and itching to get back to his barbershop. Testy, too, so watch yourself.”

Zane had had a bellyful of Whitey. With each haircut the man insisted Zane also needed a shave. He’d tried it once; Whitey had sent him home with some girly-smelling cologne that brought on Celeste’s asthma.

“And Zane,” the older man said. “Cut Nurse Sorensen some slack today, will you? It’s her birthday.”

Graham pivoted toward the hospital entrance and Zane watched his head disappear as he went down the front steps.

He checked on Mrs. Madsen’s leg ulcer, Whitey Poletti’s gall bladder incision and finally Sheriff Silver’s wife and the twins he’d delivered twenty-four hours ago.

“Good morning, Maddie. You ready to go home tomorrow?”

The sheriff’s wife grinned up at him from her hospital bed. “I am ready, Dr. Dougherty. I’m not sure about Jericho.”

“All new fathers feel somewhat overwhelmed. I know I did. I couldn’t quite believe such a tiny human being was my responsibility. And ever since Celeste—” He stopped short.

Maddie Silver gazed up at him with concerned eyes. “I am so sorry about your wife, Doc. I know I’ve said that before, but, well, you’ve been on my mind ever since the funeral.”

Zane took her small, capable hand in his. “And you’ve been on my mind, as well. It isn’t every day a doctor gets to deliver twins. Especially for a Pinkerton agent.”

He checked Maddie over, asked whether the twins were nursing regularly and left to seek out Elvira Sorensen. Elvira was the full-time nurse the hospital employed; Zinnia Langenfelder worked part-time as a nurse’s aide.

“Elvira, I want you to take the rest of the day and evening off.”

“What? But why? You know I always work the Sunday shift.”

“Zinnia can cover for you. You go on over to Uncle Charlie’s bakery for one of those lemon cakes you’re so fond of. Tell him to put it on my account.”

He planted a kiss on the older woman’s cheek. “Happy birthday, Elvira.” Then he strode out of the hospital and down the front steps.

“Well,” Elvira huffed, patting her hot cheeks. “I never did understand that man. But he’s a good ’un, I’d say.”

Chapter Five

The doorbell rang on and off all afternoon. By the time Zane returned from the hospital, patients lined the entry hall. First, Noralee Ness tearfully presented two itchy, splotchy forearms and an inflamed forehead. “I was scared to show Mama cuz I thought I had leprosy,” she wailed.

“Why, it’s nothing but poison oak,” Zane assured her. He sent her off to her father’s mercantile with a prescription for calamine lotion.

Next, burly Ike Bruhn unwrapped a torn and bloody thumb he’d smashed while building a chicken coop. Zane cleaned and bandaged the wound, dosed him with two aspirin and a shot of brandy for the pain and sent him off with strict instructions for keeping his thumb clean and dry.

His last patient was Sarah Rose, and he was surprised at her presence. “Oh, it’s not about my grandson, Mark,” the rosy-cheeked woman assured him. “It’s about me. Lately my heart’s been actin’ funny, kinda skittery, and I want to know if...if...well, maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about so much activity at my age.”

Zane had her undo the top buttons of her dress and laid his stethoscope against her chemise. “What do you mean, ‘so much activity’? You doing anything unusually strenuous lately?”

“Well, no. I mean not yet.”

Sarah’s heartbeat sounded strong and regular. “Not yet?”

The older woman’s cheeks grew even more rosy.

“Sarah, why come to me when Doc Graham lives at your boardinghouse?”

“That’s just it, you see. I didn’t want Doc to know I was worried. It’s kinda private.”

“Private? Just what is worrying you, Sarah?”

Sarah wet her lips. “Do you think my heart is strong enough to, well, engage in some, well, spooning?”

Zane sat back. “Spooning? You mean making love?”

“Doc, hush! Someone might hear.”

Zane lowered his voice. “What, exactly, are you contemplating?”

Sarah leaned forward. “Marriage,” she whispered. “I’m thinking about getting married.”

He must have misheard the woman. Marriage? At her age? She must be over sixty! And who—?

“Rooney’s asked me to marry him, Doc. I want to, but I wouldn’t dare accept him and then die of heart failure on our honeymoon. It’d make him mighty unhappy.”

Zane tried like hell to keep a straight face. “Sarah, you’re in no danger of dying anytime soon no matter what you do, honeymoon or otherwise.”

She clasped his hand in both of hers. “Oh, thank you! I was so worried, you see. Thank you.” She rebuttoned her dress and stood up. “I brought an apple pie for you cuz you came to see Mark yesterday. I left it in the kitchen with Sam.”

“Sarah, I do love your apple pies, but you don’t owe me anything.” He squeezed her shoulder and walked her to the door of his office. When he heard the front door close he sank down behind his wide oak desk and poured himself a brandy.

So Sarah Rose wanted to marry again. Well, why not? She’d been widowed almost thirty years; she deserved some joy in life. A lot of joy, in fact. He had a particular soft spot for a woman who could run a boardinghouse year in, year out without becoming soured on humanity. He also had a soft spot for anyone willing to risk their heart in marriage. He’d sure as hell never do it again.

Losing Celeste had left his life so bleak that sometimes he didn’t want to go on. But he knew he had to, for Rosemarie.

He lifted his glass to Sarah Rose, downed the contents in one gulp and poured another. This one he nursed while idly leafing through the stack of medical journals on the corner of his desk. Nothing startling and nothing new. Sometimes he thought medicine back East would benefit from a dose of Out West Indian remedies.

He continued to sip and read until he heard the front door open and saw Winifred glide past his window. After a moment he heard the rhythmic creak-creak of the porch swing. She had wanted to speak with him about something, he remembered. Now would be as good a time as any. He gulped the last of the brandy and pushed away from the desk.

A breeze had come up, scented with pine and the honeysuckle that drooped from the porch posts. Celeste had loved the smell of honeysuckle, even though in the summer it made her sneeze. He sucked in a breath at the bolt of anguish that laced across his chest.

Winifred sat rocking in the swing with a sleeping Rosemarie cradled in her arms. She looked up when he closed the front door.

“May I join you?”

“Of course. It’s your porch, and your swing.”

Zane frowned. That sounded unusually crisp for Winifred. Or perhaps he just did not know her well. He settled an arm’s length away and they rocked in silence for a while. He hoped she couldn’t smell the brandy on his breath.

“At breakfast you said you wanted to talk to me about something?” He didn’t really want to talk, but whatever she had on her mind it was better to get it over with.

“Yes, I did. I wanted to... I want...”

Ah. She didn’t really want to talk, either. “We don’t have to talk, Winifred. We could just watch the sun go down behind the hills.” He didn’t like it when a woman “wanted to talk.”

“We do have to talk.” Her voice was oddly flat and a ripple of unease snaked up his spine.

“About?” he prompted.

She bent her head over his daughter, then raised it and looked straight into his eyes. “About Rosemarie. I—I want to take her back to St. Louis with me. I want to raise her.”

He stopped the swing so abruptly her neck jerked back.

“Are you crazy? What on earth makes you—?”

“Think this is a good idea?” she finished for him.

“For starters, yes.” Zane kept his tone civil, but inside he seethed. Suddenly he wished he had another shot of brandy in his hand.

“It is a good idea, Zane. I think Cissy might have wanted it.”

“You know nothing about what Celeste wanted.” His voice was low and angry, and he didn’t care.

“A child,” she continued. “Especially a girl, should have a mother. Cissy and I grew up without a mother, and it was like...like always feeling hungry for something.”

Zane wrapped one hand around the chain supporting the swing and clenched the other into a fist. “I am Rosemarie’s father, Winifred. She is mine. My daughter. My responsibility.”

“But I could give her advantages, living in the East. Good schools. Music lessons. You cannot offer such things out here so far from civilization.”

He counted to twenty to keep his temper from making him say something he’d regret. “What gives you the right to disparage the life I can offer my child? We have a school. I can hire music teachers or art lessons or anything else my daughter needs.” His voice shook with fury and something else. Fear. He could not face losing Rosemarie, too.

“But—”

He waited until she looked directly at him. “Dammit, Winifred, you waltz out here and expect me to give up my daughter to a citified stranger with expensive clothes and high-faluting conservatory training? What do you take me for?”

That hit home. He could see the hurt in her eyes, but he was too angry to soften his words.

“The answer is no,” he shot. “It will always be no. Rosemarie is all I have of Celeste, and I will never—”

“Zane, please listen to me.”

“Winifred, for God’s sake, I love my daughter more than anything on this earth. Nothing, nothing you or anyone else could offer her can make any difference.”

Tears now sheened her cheeks, and while he felt a small hiccup of regret inside his chest, he couldn’t respond. Very slowly she placed Rosemarie in his lap and, keeping her face averted, slipped out of the swing and stepped quickly into the house.

Zane finished two more brandies before Sam called him to supper. Winifred did not appear, and he sent the houseboy upstairs to check on her.

“Lady say she not hungry, Boss.”

“Take her a chicken sandwich and some tea,” he ordered.

Sam folded his hands at his waist. “She not eat it.”

“Take it up anyway, dammit!”

He found he wasn’t hungry, either. His head began to pound with the familiar ache he’d felt ever since Celeste died, and after sitting and staring for an hour at the plate of food before him he stalked into the kitchen, grabbed the warmed baby bottle out of Sam’s hand and plodded up the stairs to feed his daughter.

* * *

The next morning when Winifred entered the dining room, Sam poured her coffee and shook his head. “Eyes look red, missy.”

Winifred brushed her fingers over her swollen eyelids. She had wept most of the night and slept little. “It’s—it’s my hay fever, I expect.” She lifted the cup to her lips.

Sam bent at the waist and tipped his head to peer into her face. “Maybe so,” he pronounced. “Boss eyes look funny, too.”

The houseboy’s keen black eyes glinted.

Winifred took a swallow of coffee. “You don’t miss much, do you, Sam?”

“Miss not much,” he agreed with a grin. “Boss never fool me.”

Nor, Winifred reflected, had she. She huffed out a sigh. Knowing that Zane was distressed did not ease her own anguish. She’d done more than make a mess of her offer to raise Rosemarie; she’d alienated the doctor, perhaps even made him resent her. Lord’s sake, would he prevent her from visiting her niece in the future? She couldn’t bear that.

She clamped her mouth shut and pushed away the plate of eggs and toast Sam laid before her. She couldn’t eat. If she opened her mouth she knew a sob would erupt.

“Must eat, missy. Good fight need full belly.”

She blinked at Sam in surprise. A good fight?

He planted his slippered feet at her side and propped his hands on his hips. “You eat,” he ordered. “Then I teach how to make biscuit.”

“Biscuits!”

Sam nodded. “Next lesson after tumbled eggs.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. All right, she’d eat something.

Sam was as stubborn as Zane.

“Doctor leave early,” the houseboy volunteered. “Go on horse to make home calls. You watch baby, I do washing of diapers.”

After breakfast, Winifred settled in the library to read, keeping her eye on Rosemarie where she slept beside her in a pink flannel-lined laundry basket. When the baby woke, she sat on the floor beside her and let her play with her forefinger. “Oh, you darling, perfect child, do you know how exquisite you are? You have eyes just like my sister’s, yes, you do.”

She picked the baby up and buried her nose against the child’s soft neck. “And you smell so sweet, like...like a little rose.”

She rocked the soft bundle in her arms until a faint cry signaled the baby was hungry. Before she could stir, Sam laid a warm bottle of milk in her free hand and padded quietly away.

By evening, after she had changed and fed Rosemarie again, Zane still had not returned. After a supper of thick potato soup and hunks of fresh-baked bread, Winifred moved the wheeled bassinet from Zane’s room into her own. If the baby woke during the night, Winifred could tend to her. She hoped he wouldn’t mind.

She lay awake reading the volume of Wordsworth poems by candlelight until long past moonrise, then puffed out the light and closed her still-swollen eyes.

For the next two days she did not catch even a glimpse of the doctor. She knew he came in from the hospital late at night because Sam reported on his activities. And he left the house before she was awake.

To pass the time each afternoon she talked to Rosemarie and let her play with her fingers, fed her and rocked her for hours with a fullness in her throat. Whenever she lifted the baby into her arms, an absurd bolt of joy bloomed inside her chest, and when Rosemarie opened her extraordinary eyes and looked at her one evening Winifred knew she had fallen head over heels in love with her niece.

When the baby was fussy Winifred found herself humming half-remembered lullabies, and when she couldn’t remember the words, she simply made them up. Mornings, while Rosemarie slept, she spent time in the kitchen with Sam. In two days she mastered not only biscuits but pancakes and bread and even piecrust. Piecrust! Just imagine. She might be the only concert pianist in the country who could roll out a piecrust! She couldn’t wait for the next basket of blueberries or blackberries a patient brought for the doctor; she would bake the most delicious pie he ever ate.