The Baby Quilt

She tended to speak in the singular. And she’d made no reference at all to her husband having anything to do with the handyman. But what struck him as truly odd, now that he thought about it, was that she’d exhibited no concern at all for a husband during or after the storm. The only person she’d expressed concern about needing shelter was him.

All things considered, he strongly suspected that Mr. Miller wasn’t even around anymore.

That she felt it necessary to keep up the pretense tugged hard at his conscience.

“Look,” he murmured, disturbed to know he made her that uncomfortable. He was accustomed to people with better defenses. Harder edges. Even when she was trying to protect herself, she was totally without artifice. “We all make bad judgments sometimes. Don’t let that stop you from turning the guy in. He’s just going to rip off someone else.”

“Even if what you say were true…which I don’t believe it is,” she hurriedly clarified, “I wouldn’t know what to do. I know nothing about your…about the law.”

“I do. I’m a lawyer. This isn’t my area of expertise,” he admitted, more concerned with her tolerance than her correction. “Criminal law, I mean. I handle corporate matters. But I’d be glad to tell the local sheriff what you’ve told me and ask him to come talk to you.”

She gave him a smile as soft as the sunshine breaking through the clouds. “I thank you for your offer. It’s very kind. But it’s possible that he could come back. If he does—when he does,” she corrected, turning her glance back to the horizon, “then I would have unjustly accused him. He will come back.” Her quiet voice grew quieter still. “I need to believe that.”

For a moment Justin said nothing. There was an odd anxiety in the way she spoke, a quiet sort of desperation. It was almost as if she didn’t want him to challenge her nebulous hope because hope was about all she had.

He had no idea why the thought struck him as it did. But he rarely questioned his instincts, and now those instincts were telling him he was right on the mark about this woman’s circumstances. He couldn’t fault her argument, though. He didn’t even want to. He could explain how brilliantly her handyman had duped her. He could point out how the guy had set her up to believe that if he was gone awhile it was because he was trying to help her save money—which would give him plenty of time to disappear. But the chances of recovering her cash at this point were somewhere between zip and nil—and there wasn’t any point in badgering her about something it was too late to do anything about.

“How long has your husband been gone?” he finally asked, gingerly rotating his aching arm.

Emily glanced at the man openly watching her, then promptly looked at the ground. “I didn’t say that he was.”

She didn’t like the suspicions Justin raised, even though she, too, had been wondering what was taking the handyman so long. She didn’t like the feeling either, that he sensed how ignorant she was of the ways she was trying to assimilate. There was so much she didn’t know. So much she didn’t understand. And she had no idea at all how he’d known Daniel was no longer there.

“No, you didn’t,” he agreed, his tone surprisingly mild. “And I can understand why you wouldn’t want a stranger to know you’re out here alone. But with this storm, if you had a husband around, you’d be wondering if he was all right. The only people you’ve mentioned are your neighbors.”

He’d moved closer when the road had become cluttered with the torn vegetation. She just hadn’t realized how close until she caught his clean, faintly spicy scent. The instant she breathed it in, she was hit with the memory of standing in his arms with her head buried against his rock-hard chest.

He wasn’t anything like the handyman who’d shown up looking for work a couple of weeks ago. The man who’d called himself Johnny Smith had seemed too shy to even make eye contact, much less make personal observations. And there was no way on God’s green earth he would have caused the odd heat that had just pooled in her stomach.

She ducked her head, disconcerted by that heat, determined to ignore it. “Are you always so good at drawing conclusions?”

“My record’s pretty decent.”

His lack of modesty came as no surprise.

“I suppose all lawyers must be good at such things. I’ve never met one before, but I’ve seen one. On Mrs. Clancy’s soap opera,” she explained, thinking of the commanding, demanding and powerful man who, according to Mrs. Clancy, had stolen the heart of every female character in the cast. “You have much of the same manner about you.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“It’s neither. It just is. But you’re right about Daniel,” she continued, assuming he was frowning because she’d yet to answer his question. “He is no longer here.”

His expression relaxed as it shifted from her to her child. “Has he been gone long?”

“Since last spring. He worked for Mr. Clancy,” she told him, her voice growing hushed. “Daniel was raised on a farm, but he didn’t know anything about the big machinery they use here. He was killed trying to repair a piece of equipment while Mr. Clancy wasn’t around.”

The movement of her hand over Anna’s little back was automatic, a soothing motion that gave her as much comfort as it did the baby snuggled against her. “I didn’t understand the talk of gears and tilling blades. But he had forgotten to set some sort of brake.”

There were times when it felt as if it had been only yesterday that she’d received that awful, numbing news. There were other times when she could hardly picture her husband’s boyish face. When she thought of Daniel, she tried to recall how happy they’d once been. But that had been almost too long ago to remember.

“I’m sorry,” she heard Justin say, his voice subdued.

“Me, too. Daniel was a good man.”

“How old is your baby?”

A small smile relieved the strain around her mouth. “Eight weeks yesterday.”

It was now mid-July, Justin thought. That meant she’d been alone when the baby had been born.

He didn’t like the way that bothered him. He didn’t much care for the way she confused him, either. He’d still been trying to figure out the soap-opera reference when she’d hit him with the reason her husband wasn’t around.

He’d figured the guy had simply taken a hike. He hadn’t expected her to be widowed. But that little jolt had just been replaced with a decidedly skeptical curiosity over how someone who’d farmed all of his life would know so little about farm equipment.

It wasn’t like him not to seek an answer when one was readily available. But he had no desire to chip any deeper at the brave front she wore. With her slender frame, her translucent skin, and that pale-as-cornsilk hair, she looked as delicate as spun glass. When he thought about how desperately she’d been trying to save her plants, and the work she had waiting for her when she returned to her house, he was quietly amazed that the front hadn’t already shattered.

Ignoring his curiosity had another advantage. He hated tears. Granted, the only women he’d ever seen cry had used them either to get something from him, or out of fury when they didn’t. And he suspected Emily to be far stronger than she looked. But he didn’t want to push any buttons that would crack her composure. He’d never been around a woman who honestly needed comfort before. He wasn’t sure he’d even know what to do.

“You can see the Clancy place up there,” she said, relieving him enormously when she shielded her eyes against the sun and looked up the road. “Oh, good.” She sighed, smiling at him. “It didn’t hit their house.”

It had hit something, though. Just ahead of them, an untouched section of cornfield opened up to a wide stretch of gravel and an overgrown sweep of lawn. From that same general direction came the deep-throated and distant bawl of something that sounded large and undoubtedly four-legged.

What the Clancy place lacked in architectural interest, it made up for in simple appeal. Approaching from the side, Justin scanned the boxy gray house with its lacy curtains and window planters overflowing with pink petunias. The deep green grass was dappled with the first rays of sunlight filtering through the cottonwoods. Standing sentinel over the home’s steeply pitched roof, a huge aluminum grain silo gleamed like a giant silver torpedo against the clearing sky.

The bawling grew louder as they headed toward the brick red barn. Damage was more evident here. So was the path of the storm. From atop the gentle rise, it looked as if a giant scythe had taken a swipe across the earth.

The tornado had sliced across a pasture, leaving a path of debris and flattening most of the windbreak on its way. It had wiped out a section of the big barn, uprooted a few more trees, taken out a huge section of fence, then veered right toward the bottom land, missing Emily’s place by little more than a couple of city blocks.

“There he is.” Emily headed for a gnomelike little man pulling at a pile of boards and scattered straw by the barn. “And there’s his wife,” she muttered, spotting a flash of movement by the hay bales to her left. “What is she doing out here?

“Mrs. Clancy?” she called, disapproval etched firmly in her brow. “You shouldn’t be outside. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling her,” the barrel-chested farmer shouted across the distance, tossing aside a board with a muffled clatter. “Get her back to the house for me, will you, Emily? I got me some animals trapped back here.”

The woman with a head full of pink-foam curlers in her salt-and-pepper hair balanced herself on a chrome cane and lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Her rose-print house dress flapped around the knees of her white pressure stockings, her expression bouncing between Emily and Justin in open curiosity.

“Are you all right, child?”

“We’re fine. I only lost a tree and door. And a porch post. No one got hurt.”

“Then let me sit down and take that baby so you can help Sam.” Her sharp hazel eyes cut to the man who slowed his stride, letting Emily hurry ahead of him. When Emily stopped beside her, the older woman’s voice dropped like a rock. “Who’s he?”

“A lawyer. He was fishing and needed a…jump. His car isn’t working. I said maybe he could use your telephone.”

The late-fifty-something Connie Clancy ran a considered glance from Justin’s meticulously cut dark hair to the tips of his expensive hiking boots. “You’d be welcome to use the phone,” she called out over the frantic bawling coming from the damaged building, “but the storm took it out.”

“I figured as much,” Justin replied, dubiously eyeing the pink things protruding from the woman’s head. He’d already noticed the phone and power lines dangling from the utility pole near the downed fence. Considering the damage, he wasn’t about to ask for help with his car.

He glanced toward the barn. At the near end, the siding had been peeled off as neatly as the skin from an apple. The far end looked rather like a bomb had gone off in it. Wires and roofing dangled over a gaping hole. Beams and posts slanted every which way. The man in coveralls wrestled one of those beams, his bulky body straining as he tugged and jerked on the unyielding timber. All the while a chorus of low-pitched and pitiful bawling pierced the air.

The cacophony was joined by a piercing squeal.

Even from forty feet away, the farmer’s sense of urgency was obvious. On either side of his back coverall straps, sweat stains darkened the man’s worn white T-shirt from the strain of lifting the heavy boards. His face was the color of the barn. With the extra thirty pounds the farmer was packing around the middle of his banty-legged frame, he looked like a heart attack waiting to happen.

Justin swore, softly and to himself, but the terse word pretty much summed up how he felt about the course the day had taken. He’d gone looking for escape and landed smack in the middle of Oz. If he’d wanted to deal with dilemmas, he could have stayed in Chicago and gone to the office.

“You stay here and take care of the lady,” he said to Emily. One crisis a day was enough. There was nothing to do but step in and make sure he wasn’t faced with another. “I’ll go help him.”

“There’s a cow and calf trapped inside,” Mrs. Clancy explained as Emily’s baby began to make little squeaking sounds. “The weaner’s in there, too.”

“The dog?” he asked, thinking ‘dachshund.’

Mrs. Clancy hesitated. “The pig,” she replied, looking as if she were speaking to the daft. “Dogs don’t sound like that.”

“I know what a dog sounds like. You call a pig a weaner?”

“You do one that’s recently been weaned from its sow.”

The baby squeaked again. Because she’d started getting fretful, her mom held her closer, moving with a gentle rocking motion. The movement wasn’t what she seemed to want. With her little head turning from side to side against her mother’s swollen breast, her face screwed up, transforming her features from cherubic to prunelike and her fussing into an impatient, hiccuping squall.

The older woman leaned more heavily on her cane. “I’d say she wants to nurse.”

“She does.”

“Well, I can’t help you there, dear.”

Emily’s voice was soft, her soothing tone lacking any trace of exasperation as she ducked her head toward her child’s. “She just wants her mom. But this isn’t the best time, you know, Anna? I need to help Mr. Clancy.”

“I said I’ll help your neighbor.” Justin took a step back, not entirely comfortable with the course of the conversation, trying not to look it. “You can take care of her now.”

“It sounds like the animals might be injured. You might need—”

“I’ll deal with it,” he insisted. “Stay here.”

Puzzlement entered Emily’s eyes with his terse order, but he turned before she could say another word and headed for the barn. Even if her baby hadn’t needed her just then, he didn’t like the idea of Emily climbing around the broken planks and timbers that blocked the end of the towering building. He was even less enthralled with the idea of her dealing with the animals he could hear battering the boards and bawling over the racket Mr. Clancy made when he pulled out a plank and the piece of wall it supported collapsed. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of dealing with them himself. What he knew about farm animals was pretty much limited to the meat counter at his local supermarket. But he was pretty sure a terrified animal was as unpredictable as it was dangerous. It was hard to tell how much damage one could do. Rather like a rejected woman.

The comparison balled a leaden knot in his gut. The last thing he needed to be thinking about right now was how to deal with his senior partner’s daughter. He hadn’t rejected Cameron Beck, anyway. Not yet. He was too busy avoiding the involvement her father was pushing on him to let her know he wasn’t in the market for marriage. Never had been. Never would be.

Given a choice, he’d rather take on the cow.

“That looks pretty heavy there. Let me help you with it.”

The old farmer glanced over his shoulder, his ham-hock fists grasping the end of a beam. Beneath the shadowing brim of a green cap embroidered with the word Pioneer, his spiky gray eyebrows knitted in a worried slash.

“Thanks. Need to get a path cleared,” the man said, his need for haste battling curiosity over who was offering the unexpected assistance. “Brought my animals in to get ’em out of the storm. Now they’re trapped in their pens. They’re going to collapse that wall the way they keep knocking into it.”

He hauled on the beam, dust billowing.

Judiciously avoiding a protruding nail, Justin reached for a door on top of the pile. The tines of a pitchfork were imbedded in its frame. Incredibly, so were stick-straight pieces of straw.

Not Oz, he thought. It was more like a rabbit hole.

Vaguely aware of two pairs of female eyes on his back, not pleased at all to find himself comparing his life to children’s stories, he pulled the door upright. Wincing at the pain in his shoulder, he tossed the door aside and added to the cloud of dust himself.

“You say he was fishing?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Bet he’s staying at that fancy bed-and-breakfast in Hancock that young couple from Des Moines opened last year. He looks like one of those yuppie-types, or whatever it is they call themselves nowadays. Can’t imagine who else would wear one of those designer shirts to go fishing. I’ll bet you can get three shirts from the JCPenney catalogue for what he paid for the one he’s wearing.”

“I suppose.”

“Did he say where he was from?”

As frantic as she’d been at the time, Emily was surprised she even remembered. “Chicago.”

Mrs. Clancy gave a nod. “Thought he looked like big city.”

Speculation brightened Mrs. Clancy’s pleasantly rounded features as she sat on the hay bale she’d selected for a chair. Emily sat on a bale beside her while Anna nursed, the cotton diaper she used for a burp cloth modestly shielding her from the men working beyond them.

“I’d say he’s used to getting his way, too,” the older woman observed, watching the man under discussion shoulder a heavy beam. “I wonder if he’s a firstborn? I can’t remember if I saw it on Sally or Oprah. Or maybe it was Extra,” she considered, pondering, “but someone had a birth-order expert on a while back. A psychologist, I think. She said firstborns are the responsible ones. Used to being in charge and all.

“Junior is like that,” she confided, lowering her voice as if someone might overhear her disparaging her own oldest, and only, child. “Stubborn as the day is long. Just like his father.” Settling back, Mrs. Clancy gave a sharp nod. “As insistent as that lawyer was about you staying put, I’d say that he’s just as set in his ways.”

“I don’t know about birth order,” Emily admitted. She’d never heard of such a thing before, but Mrs. Clancy watched all the talk shows and she was very informed. “But he does seem quite sure of himself. Except with Anna,” she mused, contemplating his broad back. “When he held her, he acted like she was going to slip right out of his hands.”

“Now, why would you be letting a strange man hold your baby?”

“So I could get out of the cellar after the storm passed.” Her voice gentled, her expression turning pensive as she stroked her baby’s downy little arm. The thought that she could have lost Anna tightened her chest, hinted at pain that went far deeper than any she’d felt before—and simply couldn’t bear to consider. “He helped us, Mrs. Clancy. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t come along.”

For a moment, the older woman said nothing. She just pinched her lips and patted Emily on the arm.

“Well, he did come along,” Mrs. Clancy allowed, looking as if she were thinking of the day help had come too late for Emily’s husband. “And you and the baby are fine, so just push those thoughts right out of your head.

“I’ll admit he did seem a little anxious when Anna started fussing,” she observed, deftly changing the subject back to the man Emily was openly watching. “It could be that he’s just never been around young ones before.” She cocked her head full of pink curlers, her interest taking another turn. “I didn’t notice a ring on him.”

“A ring? Oh, you mean a wedding ring.” Emily’s glance automatically cut to the pretty little diamonds glittering on the woman’s left hand. The custom of exchanging rings hadn’t existed in her old community. In it, when a man married, he grew a beard which he never shaved. No one had worn any jewelry at all. “I didn’t notice, either.”

She hadn’t looked at his hands. She’d only felt them. Watching him heft another board, studying the strong lines of his back and long legs, she realized she’d actually felt a considerable amount of his beautifully muscled body. He’d felt very warm, very…hard.

At the thought, her glance faltered, warmth touching her cheeks.

“I’d say you noticed something,” her too observant neighbor murmured. “Of course, a woman would have to be drawing her last breath not to notice a man like that. But you can never be too careful around that sort, you know.

“You remember me telling you about that lawyer on The Tame and The Wild?” she continued, carrying the conversation the way she always did. “Handsome devil, that one. Charmed the sweet young niece of a client right into his bed. Seduced her in five episodes, then dumped her for his secretary’s mother. I’m not saying this fella’s like that and I’m not one to judge,” she claimed, doing just that. “I mean he did offer you and my Sam a hand and I have to say that speaks well of him. But he is a lawyer. And he is from the city,” she stressed, sounding as if the combination somehow diluted his more redeeming behavior.

“Sheltered as you’ve been, I know you haven’t come up against his type. Smooth and sophisticated, I mean. And arrogant,” she muttered, her expression turning to a glower as her thoughts shifted course. “Like those no-conscience weasels from SoyCo who spout statutes and clauses and time allowances instead of fixing the drainage problem by our land. We have crops being flooded because of their negligence and they keep telling us how much time they have to look into the problem. I can tell ’em what the problem is. That new drain tile they put in when they bought the Eiger farm is draining straight onto our land. All they’ve got to do is dig—”

“Mrs. Clancy,” Emily murmured. A vein bulged by the pink tape holding a curl in place at the woman’s temple. “Remember your blood pressure.”

Connie Clancy glared at Justin’s back for another moment then huffed a breath. “Well, I am of a mind to think they haven’t a feeling bone in their bodies,” she muttered, nowhere near ready to give up the subject now that she’d started on it. “They live their highfalutin lives and don’t give a whit about common folk’s livelihoods. Did this Sloan fella say what kind of lawyer he was?”

Actually, Emily thought, he had. He’d said he was ‘corporate’ which didn’t bode at all well for ending the present course of conversation.

“A good one,” she replied, because he’d certainly implied it.

“Sounds just like ’em.”

The terse statement drew Emily’s brow in a faint frown. The thought that Justin could be as coldhearted and presumptuous as the men Mrs. Clancy was so upset about disturbed her. For a twenty-four-year-old woman, she knew she was woefully unsophisticated, but that hadn’t been her impression of him at all.

Dismissing the thought, and knowing the woman would go on forever if she didn’t change the subject herself, Emily edged back the diaper to see how her little girl was doing. The nagging thought that maybe she was just being naive gave way to a more profound concern.

“Do you think Anna’s grown any since you saw her last week?”

Bated exasperation softened the disgruntled woman’s expression. It softened a bit more when she looked over to where the pink-cheeked infant had fallen asleep at her mother’s breast. “Emily Miller, I know new mothers worry, but I’ve never heard of one worrying the way you do.”

“But she doesn’t seem to be getting any bigger.”

“That’s because you’re with her every minute of the day. She’s only a couple of months old. How big do you think she’s supposed to be?” She shook her head, looking vaguely amused. “She’s not some strapping boy like Paula Ferguson’s grandson, you know. Why, that child must have put on a pound a week to be as big as he is now. Of course his mother isn’t exactly dainty herself,” she confided.

She pulled a deep breath, preparing to head off on yet another tangent, but the commotion from the barn had her clamping her mouth shut before she could even get started. A calf shot out of the rubble, its rust-colored rump bouncing as it headed for the flattened cornfield. Over the clatter of boards inside the barn, the bovine bellowing grew more insistent.

The men were nowhere to be seen.

Mrs. Clancy’s hand flattened over her heart. “What in the world…?”

Pulling the diaper from Emily’s shoulder, she tossed it over her own and reached her weathered hands toward Anna. Even as she did, Emily was buttoning herself up and trying not to panic at the thought of what might have happened to Mr. Clancy—or to the man who knew far less than her husband had about the hazards on a farm.