Always Emily

Cody finished the bun in two mouthfuls. Where Pearl’s features were delicate, Cody’s were strong, his jaw square, his trademark Jordan dark brown eyes beneath dark eyebrows and hair a replica of their father’s. Cody was well on his way to being a good-looking man, like their dad, and Uncle Gabe, and Uncle Tyler, all of whom converged on Emily for hugs. So did their wives. And their children.

Oh, those Jordan men could hug, could administer love and support and affection like no one else on earth.

It suffocated her, the bosom of her family too accepting of her at a time when she knew she shouldn’t take it.

Perceptive Pearl saw through her shaky smile, took Emily’s hand and led her down the hallway toward the stairs. She picked up Emily’s knapsack from the bottom step.

Emily retrieved her violin case and followed Pearl up two flights of stairs, to her small, private apartment under the eaves on the third floor. Dad had designed it for Emily when he’d built the house nineteen years ago just after Pearl’s birth.

It ran the full length, with the roof’s slanting edges cutting off height on the two long sides, and white wainscoting running under soft mauve walls.

Emily set her violin on a chair and glanced around. In the sitting area overlooking the garden, sketchpads and pencils were strewn over the sofa and coffee table and chintz armchair.

She picked up one of Pearl’s sketchbooks and thumbed through it. Her sister was good—very good—the scenes of small-town life accurate, unsentimental, and yet attractive. Pearl had also sketched life around Accord, the forests, farms and ranches of Colorado.

Emily turned the page...and there it was. The Cathedral. Her name for the Native American Heritage Center, because it seemed beautiful and holy to her. Salem’s Cathedral. Emily had first named it the Cathedral after it was built, and the name had stuck with everyone. Most people in town called it either the Cathedral or the Heritage Center.

Pearl had captured perfectly the lighting of a dying sunset as it glinted from glass walls. Longing expanded Emily’s chest, but Salem had told her to stay away, and so sadness replaced her yearning.

“I’m sorry. I spend too much time up here.” Pearl started to gather up her work, but Emily stopped her.

“This should be your room now. You’re old enough to have your own space.”

“Where would you stay when you come home?” Pearl dropped what she’d gathered onto the table.

Emily shrugged. Her head hurt too much for thinking right now. She took a tissue from a box on the bedside table and wiped sweat from her forehead. “How’s school?”

“Good. You know me. I’m keen. I like school. I like learning. I’m a nerd.”

A pretty nerd who the boys liked, no doubt.

“How’s the art going?”

Pearl’s face lit up. Even as the tiniest child, art had made her happy. “Great. I’ve had interest from a couple of advertising firms.”

“Finish school first,” Emily warned.

“I will.”

Dreams shone in Pearl’s eyes. Emily used to have dreams, too.

Pearl placed one of the pillows on the bed up against the headboard and leaned against it, curling her legs into the half-lotus yoga pose and laying another pillow across her knees.

She smiled and patted the pillow. Emily couldn’t help but return that serene smile. As a child, Pearl had spent many hours up here visiting Emily with her head in her sister’s lap.

Laura would come upstairs to find Pearl asleep and Emily reading a book while she stroked her baby sister’s hair.

Emily laid her head into the dip in the center of the pillow, where it rested on Pearl’s calves. The pupil had become the teacher.

Pearl touched her cheek. “Your skin is clammy. Are you cold?”

“Cold and hot.”

“You’re pale, but your cheeks are bright red.”

“I have fever and chills.”

“How long will it last?”

“Another day or so.”

“Tell me what’s wrong, Emily.”

Pearl didn’t mean the malaria. She was right. That was a surface thing. What was wrong with Emily went bone deep. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost herself.

“Everything.” She sighed.

Pearl stroked her hair. “You should sleep.”

“I wish I could.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

Emily thought about it. Solitude? Was that what she needed? She’d give it a try. “Yes.”

Pearl struggled out from beneath Emily, stood and kissed her forehead. “Love you, sis. See you in the morning.”

But Pearl had only just closed the door at the bottom of the stairs when Emily missed her already. So...solitude wasn’t the answer.

Neither was rest. As exhausted as she was, she knew she wouldn’t sleep, not with the problem of the prayer book turning her inside out. She retrieved her laptop from its pocket in her backpack and set it up on her desk.

A moment later, she had her email open. It exploded with messages from the past two days, the tone of all of them, from friends and colleagues, frantic.

Where are you?

What have you done?

You stole an artifact??? That is so not you!

No one believes what Jean-Marc is saying.

What was Jean-Marc saying? She could only imagine.

She opened her Twitter account, and that’s when it sank in—how much Jean-Marc wanted to hurt her and exactly how much he’d succeeded.

The whole archeological world thought she had been stealing artifacts from the dig. He hinted that there had been a series of objects that had gone missing. There had? Whether or not it was true, Jean-Marc had succeeded in implicating her, in tarnishing her reputation. He’d done it with just the right amount of innuendo, with no real accusation she could take as slander and use against him in court.

Furious that she hadn’t been caught at the airport, he’d pulled out all of the stops in social media. Bully. Traitor.

The wash of shame that heated her chest was old, familiar, an enemy she’d fought before in a battle she had never wanted to revisit. She had thought she’d gotten over those old demons. Hadn’t she worked her butt off to leave all of that behind, including leaving her home literally to travel the world? Now this. Jean-Marc brought it back to the surface with a few strokes of a keyboard and an enter key. She’d traded one set of bullies for another.

No. She wouldn’t let him destroy her. People had tried in the past. She’d been too young to know how to fight back then, but now she did. With maturity came perspective and strength. Maybe not enough, though. This bloody malaria was killing her.

She, and only she, knew who the real culprit was. The question was, would they come after her? And who would they be? Her own government? Would they come here and search her father’s home?

No way was she going to wait to get caught. She’d done nothing wrong. She wouldn’t give Jean-Marc the satisfaction of seeing her hurt. But how could she protect herself? And her family?

Where could she go? What could she do? She shouldn’t have come here. She would only bring them pain.

Her panicked glance fell on Pearl’s sketchbook, on the exquisite drawing of the Cathedral. She wanted to be there, in that place that brought her peace.

She had to get there, but she couldn’t leave through the front or back doors. Too many people downstairs. They wouldn’t let her go. They would worry, and rightly so.

Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she worried, too. She looked like hell, her hair a mass of tangled curls. Pearl was right. In spite of her deathly pallor, two red spots rode her cheekbones like clown’s paint, the look unnatural. Unhealthy.

Even so, now that she’d thought of the Cathedral, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, stop herself.

She had rejected Jean-Marc’s ultimatum. Stay or I’ll ruin you. And she had accepted Salem’s. Don’t contact me. Leave me alone. That didn’t mean she couldn’t visit the Cathedral.

She took the prayer book out of the baggy and wrapped it tightly in plastic she found in the wastebasket. It looked as if it came from Pearl’s sketchbook. She put the wrapped artifact back into the baggy and made sure it was zipped firmly against moisture, and then tucked the whole thing into her bra.

Grabbing her jacket, she buttoned it to protect the book before opening the door to the tiny back balcony. She closed it behind her and peered over the railing. Her father had never trimmed the maple tree she used to climb down to sneak out during high school.

She slung a leg over the railing to reach the nearest limb. Dizziness swamped her. She hung over the gap, robbed of breath, the ground far below wavering in her vision. She gripped the slippery wood until the nausea passed. Heights. She hated heights. But she could do this.

When her head felt steady enough, and her pulse had calmed, she grasped the branch and pulled herself into the tree. She climbed down, branch by branch, a trip that should have taken five minutes taking ten in her weakened state.

Or maybe it was age. She felt old these days when she should feel young and vibrant. She worked hard on the digs. She was in good shape.

On the ground, she rummaged through the garden shed until she found what she needed. A trowel. She crept around the side of the house and out onto the road.

A brisk wind gusted. A Roman legion of rain clouds advanced on the horizon, heavy with menace.

Maybe a heavier jacket would have been a good idea.

Fifteen minutes later, she arrived at the Accord Golf and Cross-Country Ski Resort. Her father’s pride and joy.

The hotel, sleek in glass and wood and shining like a Christmas tree, held no interest for her. Through the windows, guests lounged around a huge stone fireplace. Looked as if the place was fully booked, even in May. Good for Dad. A drop of rain plopped onto her forehead.

As though wading through mud, she trudged to the clearing in the woods behind the resort, leaf mold and pine needles crunching underfoot and kicking up a damp, mossy scent that reminded her of childhood.

She plodded through the darkening woods, aware that there wasn’t a dry bone or sand dune in sight, nothing beige or desiccated here. Only vibrant, green life. Her spirits lifted, even if her body couldn’t. More drops of rain hit her face, anointing her spirit with hope, but also chilling her body.

The Cathedral stood in the middle of tall Rocky Mountain Douglas firs. When her father had wanted to build the resort twenty years ago, construction had been held up by Salem and his fellow band members. They’d staged a demonstration and had refused to move until her father had given in to their demands to research the land. Despite being so young, Salem had been chosen as their spokesperson. Emily remembered him being quiet, but articulate and passionate about the land and its history. Parts of these lands used to be migratory routes for their ancestors. A nomadic tribe, Utes had buried their dead where they fell, so Emily’s father couldn’t build without going through the proper channels first, even though his family had owned the land for a few generations.

With the help of local elders, and professors who taught and studied Native American affairs, they had determined that the routes ran through another portion of land, so the construction wasn’t likely to disturb any burial sites.

To appease the elders, and to thank them, her father had given Salem this piece of land and had paid to build the Native American Heritage Center, which had become a tourist attraction for the resort. Her father, recognizing Salem’s passion and uncommon maturity, had asked Salem to set up the exhibits and to care for the collections. It hadn’t taken long for her dad to stop supervising Salem and give him free rein. Salem had proven her father’s trust in him to be well deserved.

As curator, Salem had helped to design the building and had turned it into one of the best museums in the state, and as beautiful as Emily remembered.

A crystal in a sea of green, three stories of glass and brushed steel with a polished wooden column running up the center that housed the elevator and washrooms, it shone like an oasis in the desert of her life.

The hallowed beauty of both the woods and the building had given her peace over the years.

Small spotlights on the first floor highlighted the artwork on a full-size teepee in the foyer. The architect had created a twenty-foot ceiling to accommodate it. Her breath caught in her throat. Lord, the place was gorgeous, glowing from within.

Since it was Saturday and the museum was closed for the evening, the public areas were dark.

On the third floor, a single yellow light shone in Salem’s office. Why was he here on a Saturday night? He should be home with his family. Or maybe a better question was why he wasn’t at her father’s birthday party. He was a friend of the family. He and her father had buckets of respect for each other. She should have noticed that he wasn’t at the house when she’d arrived.

Salem is here. The hell with his order to stay away. She needed him.

So close and yet so far away. She needed Salem, his calming energy and his quiet efficiency. Salem could handle anything thrown at him, and Emily was running on empty. She needed a friend.

She had to get up there, to him, if only her shaky legs would cooperate. He might be upset with her, but could he really turn a sick person away? She planned to take advantage of his innate decency.

First, though, she had to hide the prayer book.

A good forty yards from the back door of the Heritage Center, she dug a hole at the edge of the woods then placed the plastic-wrapped relic reverently in its new burial site.

“Just for now,” she whispered as though it were alive. “Until I figure out what to do with you. I’ll get you home somehow.”

She covered the package with soil and leaves and branches, and lastly, a large rock she pushed and pulled into place until her arms burned. Glancing around, she tried to memorize her position so she would know where to dig when she came back to retrieve it, but the rain, dusk and her fever messed with her eyesight. What if she made a mistake and wasn’t able to find it again? She would never forgive herself. She hung the trowel from the remainder of a broken tree branch where it sat against the trunk of the tree, above the new grave to mark the spot. No one would notice it here.

There. She’d done as much as she could tonight.

Her breath whooshing in and out of her, she leaned against the tree for a moment to regain enough strength to get into the Cathedral and up those stairs to Salem.

She managed to make it to the building and stepped out of the rain that was coming down harder now. If nothing had changed in the years she’d been gone, she should be able to avoid banging into display cases and follow that sole yellow lamp shining on the third floor.

Beside the door, she found the felt slippers that all visitors donned to protect the glass floors and stairs from grit and dirt. She slid her old hiking boots into the oversize slippers.

When she pressed the elevator button, nothing happened. Shut down for the night, she guessed.

She climbed the stairs gingerly, but her headache still worsened with every step.

The second floor, she knew, housed displays of gorgeous beaded and quilled moccasins as well as artifacts the Jordan land had yielded to both professional and student archaeologists.

At the moment she didn’t care. She’d spent too much time in the past and not enough paying attention to the present, to her self slipping away from her so slowly and subtly she’d been stripped bare without knowing it, left skinned and vulnerable with nowhere to turn but here.

So dizzy her stomach roiled, she clung to the banister. Her hands shook again, this time more from greed than illness.

I want...

She wasn’t sure what.

She knew only that she was exhausted with the struggle to keep herself in one piece.

She forced one foot in front of the other. On the second-floor landing, she stopped to catch her breath, like an old woman on her last legs, so close to finally achieving...what?

On the landing on the third floor, she stopped and stared at Salem through glass walls.

He bent over his desk, over a book, his attention focused and disciplined, as was his way. His dark straight hair hung in a braid down the center of his back.

This close to him, peace enveloped her. It settled over her with the softness of a flannel blanket. She watched him. This, he, was exactly who she needed. She wanted to lay her head and her troubles on his broad chest.

When she swayed, it alerted him to her presence.

His jaw fell, his expression equal parts shock and anger. She knew she’d flitted into and out of his life too many times. Oh, Salem, I’m home. For good.

He stood, dropping the book onto the desk.

His simple male beauty stunned her. Why had she stayed away when perfection had been here all along?

He came to the door. “Emily?” His deepening frown reminded her of their argument.

When are you going to stop running, Emily?

Now, she thought. I’m not going anywhere anymore. Honest.

She felt herself slipping, falling.

“Emily!” He caught her before she hit the floor, his arms strong and dependable and oh so welcome.

“Salem,” she whispered. “I’m sick.”

Salem lifted her and carried her off. Her head fell against his solid shoulder. She didn’t know where he took her. It didn’t matter.

She’d made it home.

* * *

EMILY. LIKE FIREWORKS, or shooting stars, Emily was here one moment, but gone the next. What was she doing here now?

God or the devil or both had a wicked sense of humor. Why did they keep sending her back to him? It messed with the balance he strived so hard for in his life.

He’d told her to stay away. After first asking her to stay here with you. After nearly asking her to marry you.

A moment of temporary insanity, of wanting life to go my way, even briefly. Of needing an end to the loneliness.

That night in the moonlight, Emily had looked like heaven.

He loved his daughters and respected the daylights out of his father, but missed having a woman around. Worse, he missed Emily. He’d married one woman while he’d wanted another, and had spent his married life suppressing his desire and trying to be a good husband. He had paid a price, and the currency had been longing, yearning and too much time spent alone.

He’d spent his married years tamping his emotions into a hard brick of denial, constantly controlling everything he said to his wife, and everything he did with Emily.

Then Annie had died.

That night last year, he’d gotten this crazy thought. There had been a long period of mourning, out of respect for the mother of his children. That time had passed. Now he and Emily could be together.

He had thought she would return his feelings and want to be with him, but despite telling her how he felt, she’d left anyway.

He’d blurted his heart’s desire. Thank the Lord, she’d said no. He’d dodged a bullet.

In his smarter moments, he knew it would never work between them. Emily loved adventure.

Salem glanced longingly at the book he’d been studying. Reason, intellect and learned discussion were his gods.

But now here she was, despite him telling her to never return, and everything inside him rebelled against turning her away sick. Em was smart. She would have known that when she came here. He disliked being used. But he couldn’t let her go.

He tamped down the emotions twisting in his belly like warring snakes, because she looked like hell. He didn’t want to worry about this woman who weighed next to nothing, but he did. She angered and frustrated him, but he couldn’t turn her away.

He laid her on the sofa in his office, where she had spent so many hours over the years when she came home from her digs sitting and pouring out her heart about Jean-Marc and his latest escapades. He’d heard her anger and pain, but he’d never interfered. Back then, he could never say, Leave him and come to me.

On all of her visits, he’d held a chunk of himself back—to protect both his peace of mind and his marriage. He might not have been in love with his wife, but he had been committed to her.

And so, restraint had become his middle name, and the act a habit, but sometimes these days, the restraints chafed and he wanted to bust out so badly.

When he finally did ask Emily to be with him, she’d said no. End of story.

“What’s wrong, Emily?”

When he tried to let her go, she grasped his shirt.

Even through her clothing, her skin burned. Just like Emily to come here like this, to bring mayhem into his well-ordered existence. She liked drama. He liked peace. She liked chaos. He needed order.

“Emily,” he said, keeping his voice low to soothe her as he would a skittish animal. “I need to get water.”

She nodded. “Yes. Water.”

Even so, she didn’t ease her grip.

“Let go.” He became stern. “I’ll come back.”

“Promise?” Her insecurity tore at him. Trouble roiled in her witchy blue-hazel eyes.

Where was his confident, brash Emily? What happened to you?

“I’m always here for you, Emily. You know that.” Even when it was hard, and even when he had vowed to break away from her, to sever all ties. She called to a part of him he had trouble denying.

She smiled so sweetly it broke his heart. Yes, he was always here for her, but she wasn’t always available for him.

He cut off the anger and bitterness. Now wasn’t the time.

At this moment, she needed him, and that was all that mattered. He would get rid of her when she was well.

She released him and he retrieved water and damp towels from the washroom. Just before he left the room, he noticed muddy handprints on his shirt where Emily had gripped it. Strange.

When he returned, he asked, “What is it? The flu?”

She shook her head. “Malaria.”

“Malaria?” He stilled his panic long enough to swab her face. “Isn’t that bad?”

She lifted a shaky finger to smooth the frown from his forehead, the smattering of freckles across her nose stark against her sickly white skin. “It’s okay. I’ve seen a doctor.”

“And?”

“And there’s nothing to do but wait. I felt a bit better for a while, but I shouldn’t have walked over here in the rain.”

“You walked here? Sick? From your dad’s?”

She nodded.

A flush of violence coursed through his blood. “So help me, Emily,” he muttered, swabbing her face too hard, “you are infuriating.”

She smiled, and it was weak, but sweet. “Wanted to see you.” He fought the urge to wrap his arms around her and never let go. No one could make him feel warm and fuzzy as Emily could, even while he wanted to shake her.

Why didn’t she take care of herself? Why hadn’t she learned to control her impulses?

“When did you get home?”

“About an hour ago.”

“And you rushed over here? Why not wait until morning?”

When his glance fell on her hands, the warm fuzzies came to a screeching halt. He grasped one. Mud caked her fingers. “What have you been up to?” Her nails were crammed with dirt. Digging? In the rain? Where? On this land?

Wanted to see me, my ass.

She pulled her hand out of his grasp.

“What did you do?” he asked, recrimination riding his tone like acid.

Her gaze slid away from his and she stared at the wall. “Nothing,” she said, voice small but defiant nonetheless.

“Tell me,” he insisted.

“I can’t. It’s better if you don’t know.” He recognized the stubborn set of her jaw, so particular to Emily. There was no fighting her when she dug in her heels.

“I’m not getting any more out of you, am I?”

She shook her head.

“So I’m good enough to come to when you need your forehead wiped, but not good enough to trust. Is that it?”

She didn’t answer.