Innkeeper's Daughter

“I don’t know, why aren’t they?”

Startled—because she’d believed herself to be alone—Alex gasped and swung around.

As she did so, she managed to knock the sign-in ledger onto the floor.

Wyatt bent to pick it up for her and placed the ledger back on the desk.

“You still sneak up on people,” Alex accused him, her eyebrows pulling together into a single, exasperated line.

Because it annoyed her—and he desperately needed the diversion—he smiled. “I still have that gift,” he confirmed. Seeing the trail of tears on her cheek for the first time, Wyatt reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief and held it out to her. “Here.”

She hesitated for a moment, then took the handkerchief gingerly and critically looked over the small, white square.

“Don’t worry,” Wyatt said, “I only wiped down one bathroom sink with it.”

She raised her eyes to his. Oh, come on. She had to know he was being sarcastic. Or, at least he assumed she had to know that. Still, she folded the handkerchief so that it was tiny, then used the surface she’d left exposed to slide quickly along her cheeks, drying them.

“Thanks,” Alex said, holding the handkerchief out to him again.

“Keep it,” he told her, pushing her hand back. “You might need it again.”

“No, I won’t,” she told him firmly. He still made no move to take the handkerchief back. Finally, Alex placed it on the counter and slid it along until it was directly in front of him. She never could let him have the final word.

“So, you figure you’ve used up your allotted amount of tears and won’t be needing that anymore?” he asked, unable to clamp down on his sarcasm.

“No tears,” she contradicted him, “just perspiration. And no, I won’t be needing it again.”

“Suit yourself.” Reaching into his inside pocket, Wyatt pulled out the handwritten list he’d put together and placed it in front of her. “These are the people I notified about the funeral service. And it’s okay to cry, you know,” he added out of the blue. “It doesn’t make you any less of a person. It might even make you stronger.”

Alex laughed dismissively. “That sounds like something you got out of a fortune cookie. You sure you’re Uncle Dan’s son? He had a fantastic way with words, with creating pictures out of them and getting right to the heart of matters. He put a person right into the thick of the action.”

“We have—had...” Wyatt corrected himself, still struggling to think of his father in anything but the present tense. “We had completely different styles.”

Because his father hadn’t been around much of the time he’d been growing up, it seemed natural not to see him. Natural to expect to encounter him sometime down the road, but not necessarily right now. Even before the divorce, his father would be gone for weeks, sometimes even a couple of months, at a time. And after the divorce, there were only summers with occasional quick visits in between.

And now, there would be no more visits at all. It wasn’t an easy thing to accept. He could feel his heart start to ache all over again. He struggled to rein himself in.

“Dad went to the heart of the action as it was happening. I prefer to study the history of the action and take it apart. Analyze it and find out what led to it. That’s why his last project really took me by surprise.”

There was that word again. Project. It occurred to Alex that she had no idea what Dan had been working on when he died. She just assumed—incorrectly it seemed—that it was another piece of war journalism.

“His last project?” she asked Wyatt now, waiting to be enlightened.

Wyatt nodded. “The one he was working on when...when he stopped working.”

It was a nice, antiseptic way to say it, wrapping the finality of death in words that implied a temporary break.

It wasn’t until Wyatt had said it that way that she realized that was the way she would prefer to deal with Uncle Dan’s passing, too. Antiseptically. The other word, the D-word, was far too raw and final for her to utter right now.

Pushing ahead, Alex focused on what Wyatt had begun to say. “What was he working on?”

Wyatt’s smile made her feel a little uneasy, although she couldn’t have explained why.

“My father was writing a history of the inn.”

That wasn’t the kind of story Dan usually worked on, she couldn’t help thinking. He wrote things that wound up on the front page, or of late, in a blog and sometimes in front of a camera. This sounded as if he was working on a book.

“What inn?” she asked, confused.

Was she serious? Wyatt wondered. So, she hadn’t known, either. That seemed rather strange. But then, his father had only told him last week—just before he’d extracted that promise from him.

“This inn.”

Alex stared at him. “This isn’t some practical joke, is it? Uncle Dan was just here a few weeks ago. He never mentioned this to me.... You’re serious?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because I didn’t know anything about it,” she snapped.

Ah, he thought. So that’s it. She’s upset because she knew everything that was going on at the inn at any given time.

And she hadn’t known about this.

Of course that would bother her almost as much as his surprising her with a funeral here without any advance warning. No matter what he did and for what reason, he upset her. Always had, and he didn’t see a way around it.

“He got all sorts of notes from your father when he got started,” Wyatt said, proving just how committed his father had been to the project. “Letters, files, photographs, copies of old ledgers...”

Her jaw dropped.

He hesitated before adding, “If you didn’t know about it, maybe it was supposed to be a surprise.” All he knew was that his father had asked him to finish it for him, and he’d said the publisher had given him a deadline, which he was to try to keep to.

“A surprise? For whom?” she asked incredulously.

Wyatt said the first thing that occurred to him. “For the rest of you. You and your sisters. I think he envisioned it as a sort of commemorative book on the bed-and-breakfast’s 120th anniversary next year.”

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