An Accidental Woman Page 16

  “No. I left them in town with the Winslows. They were having their faces painted with Emma and Ruth, and even Star was having fun. Rose invited them over for dinner and movies. She’d like to turn it into a sleepover, but I told her I’d have to check with you.”

  Turning away, he went to the sink. “Fine. They’ll be better off there. I’m not good for much.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Neither would Heather.”

  He turned, hands braced behind. “I can’t do a damn thing, Poppy. I don’t know a damn thing. I’ve been going over everything, thinking back.” Raising his arms, he pushed his fingers into his hair. “I’ve been digging, digging, digging, and I’m hitting rock.” He dropped his hands in defeat. “How can I know so little? We were close. She knew me inside out. She knew what I was thinking. I thought I knew what she was thinking, too.” He paused, eyes tormented. “I was a fool. A person doesn’t just . . . just appear out of nowhere at the age of nineteen with no history at all. Why didn’t I ask?”

  “Because it didn’t matter.”

  “Clearly it does. How could I not know any of it?”

  “Because she didn’t say.”

  “But why not? I’m her man. Why didn’t she say?”

  “If it was bad . . . if she was afraid . . .”

  “Of me? But I love her. She knew that. And besides, how can someone like Heather have done something so bad? She’s so good. She’s patient and kind and understanding. She’s generous. In all the time I’ve known her, there’s been nothing— nothing —she’s done that was bad. She doesn’t yell at the kids. Doesn’t yell at me. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. So what could she have done that was so bad?”

  “I don’t know,” Poppy said. “I wish I did.”

  “She never said anything to you, either?”

  “No.”

  Studying the floor now, he considered that news. His jaw flexed spasmodically. Finally, like a man condemned, he looked up. “Do you think she’s Lisa?”

  “No,” Poppy said. “No. I think it’s something else.”

  “If it’s something else, why can’t she say?”

  “Sometimes you just can’t.”

  “I’m sorry. That doesn’t work for me.”

  Poppy laced her fingers. They lay in her lap, on thighs that looked perfectly normal under flannel-lined jeans but weren’t good for much at all. Just then, she felt as useless as they were.

  But there was no one else to help Micah. She had to try. So she said, “Suppose something terrible happened to her—something so horrible that if she kept thinking about it, it would have driven her mad—something so upsetting that she couldn’t eat or sleep or think about anything else.”

  “She should have told me.”

  “But how do you survive something like that? How do you survive?”

  Micah remained silent and tense.

  “You push it out of your mind,” Poppy went on with the conviction of one who had been there. “You deny that it happened. I don’t know what Heather lived through. I do know what she’s like now, and it’s everything good that you say. So how to explain why she can’t talk about the other?”

  Micah didn’t answer.

  But Poppy was desperate that he understand. “She loves you, Micah.She loves the girls. If she can’t talk about the past, maybe it’s because she can’t let herself do it.” Oh boy, did she know about that, too. “Okay. So maybe you don’t work this way. But don’t you think it’s possible—just possible—that a person who has gone through something bad may need to let go of the past and become someone else in order to survive?”

  * * *

  Micah came close to opening the knapsack that night. He actually removed it from the woodpile and fingered the discolored buckle. He told himself that there was probably nothing inside—that it might well have been a gift from one of Heather’s parents, and therefore had sentimental value.But that didn’t explain why she’d kept it hidden in the closet these four years, rather than in a dresser drawer. He never went through her things. A dresser drawer would have been safe.

  But if she kept the pack for sentimental reasons, she would have showed it to him. He could appreciate sentimental value. Wasn’t that why he’d kept up the sugarhouse? Sugaring had been in his family for two generations before him. There was sentimental value in keeping it going.

  Actually, now, there was more. Thanks to Heather’s ability to see a larger picture, he was seeing a larger profit. That stood to be even truer this year.

  So. Heather had done good and, in that sense, opening the knapsack behind her back seemed like a betrayal.

  But that made no sense, not with her in jail, not with the kind of charges they were talking about.

  So why didn’t he open the knapsack? Was he afraid of finding nothing? Was he afraid of finding something?

  He even went so far as to ask himself what the worst something could be. The worst was identification papers saying that Heather was Lisa. Coming in a close second, though, was documentation that Heather was married to another man. This would explain why she hadn’t been willing to marry Micah.

  So why hadn’t she gotten divorced?

  Maybe the guy had threatened to kill her. Maybe disappearing was the only thing she could do. Maybe that was what Poppy meant by becoming somebody else in order to survive.

  Or maybe she was Lisa. If so, she had committed murder and would go to jail.

  If she was Lisa, he wasn’t ready to know. So he put the knapsack back in its groove, piled the wood back to cover it up, and walked away.

  Chapter Nine

  It began to snow in the wee hours of Sunday morning. By the time day broke, a three-inch blanket lay on the ground. Feathery and light in the cold air, it turned the view from Poppy’s bed into frosted candy, but that didn’t help her mood. After spending most of the night drifting in and out of a troubled sleep, she awoke feeling weighted down.She stayed in bed later then usual. When she finally pulled herself up, she showered and, needing a lift, put on a lime green sweatsuit. Finger combing her hair, she went to the bank of phones to switch it on, then thought twice. Turning away again, she pulled the Sunday paper in from the front door and went to make a pot of coffee.

  She skimmed the front page and was relieved to see nothing about Heather. She skimmed the front pages of each section and tried to decide what she wanted to read. But when the coffee was ready, she set the paper aside and wheeled herself to the living room window.

  Sitting there, just . . . sitting, she watched another half inch of snow accumulate on the limbs of the hemlocks near her house. Bits of it fell to the ground under the tiny feet of a pair of cardinals as they flitted from one tree to the next. The male was a vivid red; against the snow, even the duller female stood out. They flew to her deck, where they left a trail of chicken-scratch prints on the fresh snow before flying off again.

  Pulling lotion from her side pack, she lathered her hands and absently scrubbed at the calluses on her palms while she followed the play of a pair of chickadees. She wondered about the freedom of flying, of taking off, soaring high, and disappearing—wondered what it would be like tostart fresh and unblemished—what it would be like to have hands that were soft and clean.

  It would be nice, she decided. It would be nice.

  The problem with dreams, of course, was the waking up to a reality that was, by contrast, far more onerous. She grappled with that a bit and finally turned on the phones, but they offered no escape. Not a button was blinking. The world of Lake Henry was either sitting in front of a fire and taking its own calls, or was in church, or over at the mountain, where Ice Days had shifted for ski races, snowboard contests, and toboggan runs.

  Putting the phones on audio, she returned to the window, which was where she was later when a truck came down the drive. It wasn’t the plow crew with its scrapes, stops, and backup beeps. This truck was Griffin’s. It moved slowly through what now looked on the back porch rail to be four inches of snow, and it stopped b
eside the Blazer.

  Poppy didn’t move. She didn’t know how she felt about his coming—couldn’t muster anger, or even a milder annoyance, unless it was aimed at the random little bits of anticipation that slipped past her guard. So she sat and listened.

  A door opened; there was a pause; the pause lingered; the door closed. She heard him clomping up the ramp through the snow—and suddenly wondered if he’d brought lunch. A hot treat from Charlie’s would be nice. Charlie did a great chili. She could go for some of that. His pulling a sack from the front seat would explain the pause.

  He stomped his feet at the front door. The mat there was just textured enough to take muck from Poppy’s wheels without hindering her movement. Apparently, it didn’t do the job he wanted. Watching him in her mind’s eye, she saw him backtrack to the post at the top of the ramp, whap his boots against it, then return to the door.

  He knocked. She said nothing. He knocked again, then turned the knob, opened the door, and called, “Anyone home?” Spotting her, he smiled. “Oh. Hi.” He slipped inside and closed the door. “How’re you doing?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. She was pleased to see him, but sorry that there was no paper bag. Charlie’s chili would have been nice. “You’re all bundled up.”

  He toed off his boots, pushing them aside, his jeans breaking over his wool socks. He pulled off his headband and shook it free of snow, then brushed off his hair. “It’s really coming down.”

  “They must love it at the mountain. I’m surprised you aren’t there.”

  “I was,” he said, though he didn’t move from the door. “I thought you’d be there, too. You seemed to be having a good time yesterday.”

  “Yesterday was on the lake,” she said. “Anyone could have a good time then. Today’s for skiing and all.” She wrinkled her nose in dismissal.

  “Have you ever skied?”

  “You don’t grow up here without skiing. I used to do it all the time.”

  “I mean, since the accident.”

  She was surprised that he asked. Most people didn’t. But then, Griffin, being Griffin, would ask questions. “No,” she said. “I have this slight . . . problem.”

  “Never tried a sit-ski?”

  She felt the same twinge of discomfort that she had felt once before. “What do you know about those?”

  “Only that they’re supposed to be fun.”

  “Ah. You’ve talked with people who’ve used them.”

  “Actually, yes,” he said and opened his parka several inches. She saw a red waffle-weave shirt in the vee and, from the bunching at his middle, guessed he had a fleece in there, too.

  So. He knew about sit-skis. She didn’t know how she felt about this, either. She tried to feel anger—some sense that her privacy had been violated—but it wouldn’t come. All she could do was ask a neutral, “Did you talk with people about sit-skis while you were boning up on my disability?”

  He didn’t flinch. Those blue eyes held hers without remorse. “I wouldn’t call it boning up. I was curious.”

  So was she. “What do you know about my injury?”

  “Only that it’s to the lower spine. It’s an ‘incomplete injury.’ ”

  “Which means,” she picked up, wanting it all out, “that I’m not as bad off as some, that my abdominal muscles function, so I have control of things that some paraplegics don’t, that I could probably get myself to walk, though it wouldn’t be smooth or practical, and it certainly wouldn’t be pretty. Someone here in town blabbed. Who was it?”

  “If I said, you’d never talk to him again.”

  “Him. Was it John? Charlie? My physical therapist? My masseuse?”

  “Whoa. A masseuse here in town? Any good?”

  “Griffin.”

  He held up his hands. “Let’s not argue. It’s just that you looked so pleased yesterday on the Arctic Cat that I was sure you’d be doing something like that on the mountain. Would you toboggan with me?”

  “No.”

  “Go on a snowmobile?”

  “No.”

  “Because of the accident?”

  “No,” she said, though of course it was a lie. Like skiing, snowmobiles had been a way of winter life when she was growing up, but she hadn’t been on one since the crash twelve years before.

  “Out of fear?” Griffin asked.

  She sighed. “Why are you harping on this?”

  “Because I know that you can do these things, and I want to do them with you.”

  “I told you I couldn’t,” Poppy reminded him, though, here too, she couldn’t feel anger—because she didn’t sense malice on his part. He was a nice guy. “I told you that last fall. If you got your hopes up, that’s your problem. I look at the positives—all that I am comfortable doing. I’m much more fortunate than some, and I’m grateful for that. I’m perfectly comfortable with my life.”

  “Okay,” he conceded with a self-deprecating smile. “You’re right. You did tell me last fall. So maybe it’s just that I’m desperate to be with a friend, because I’m feeling like a pariah around here. No one would talk to me at the lake yesterday. No one would talk to me at the mountain today. So I drove over to Charlie’s. The place was next to dead.”

  Poppy wasn’t surprised. “They’re all at the mountain.” She actually felt bad for him, and that made her feel better, like she was doing a good deed by talking with him when no one else would. It justified his being there, in a way.

  “Except for this one lady,” Griffin went on and launched into a story as he stood there at the door. “She says she’s not from Lake Henry, but thereshe was at Charlie’s, and we got to talking, and before I knew it, she was opening her shoulder bag and out came a cat.”

  “Ahh.” Poppy pictured the scene. It wasn’t new, wasn’t new at all. “Charlotte Badeau,” she said.

  He had taken a breath to go on, but held it a second too long. “How do you know?”

  “She’s the cat lady. She shows up whenever she thinks there’ll be a crowd, and there’ll be one at Charlie’s later, that’s for sure. She takes in strays and is always trying to find them homes. There were probably half a dozen in her car.” Poppy had a sudden thought. “You didn’t.” She studied the bulge of his parka. He was a lean man. Fleece or no fleece, that was quite a bulge. “You didn’t. ” When he didn’t deny it, she felt a wave of absurd affection. On its heels came a warning. “You’re a city boy. Do you have any pets—cats, dogs, gerbils?”

  “No, but this little one—she’s so sweet.”

  “You took it? You really did?”

  He cradled the bundle. “Tell me you’re allergic.”

  “I am not.”

  “Then you hate cats?”

  “I love cats. We had them around all the time when I was a kid. It’s just that Charlotte is insidious. She assumes that anyone and everyone can and should have a cat, but that isn’t true. I’ve seen her send cats home with kids from the Ridge who can barely afford to feed them, much less have them fixed, so suddenly there’s one litter, then a second, and before you know it the fisher cats are coming out of the woods in droves. Ever seen a fisher cat?” Griffin shook his head. “They’re big, wild, weasily things that are ferocious and strong. They feast on these poor kittens, leaving bits of bodies around. It isn’t a happy thing, either for the kitties or for all those kids with broken hearts.”

  Sober now, Griffin promised, “That won’t happen with this one. She’s an indoor cat, and she’s already fixed. Besides, I’m a responsible guy. I bought everything I needed at Charlie’s. I don’t see any problem.”

  “I see two,” Poppy said, because he was so sweet and sincere that the perverse part of her needed to show he hadn’t thought this through. “A, cats want warmth, and the cabin out on Little Bear isn’t warm unlessyou’re there to feed the fire, which means you’ll have to take her along with you if you’re planning to be gone for any length of time, certainly when you’re driving back home to Princeton, New Jersey, which leads to problem B. C
ats hate cars.”

  He peered down inside his coat. “She didn’t seem to mind the ride here. She slept most of the way. She’s still sound asleep— oh,” he caught himself up with an excited whisper, “no, she’s waking up.” His voice jumped an octave. “Hi, baby.”

  Poppy was thinking that the man was adorable, when she saw a tuft of orange fur against that red waffle-weave. Excited in spite of herself, she asked, “Is it a baby?”

  “Not really. The cat lady says she’s two, which she says is adult for a cat. But this one’s small.”

  “Let me see.”

  Crossing the room in his stockinged feet, he opened the jacket enough so that the cat’s upper half was exposed. Holding her rump with an arm, he squatted by Poppy’s chair.

  There wasn’t just a tuft of orange fur, Poppy saw. The cat was entirely orange. “She’s a redhead, like you,” Poppy said in delight as she stroked the cat’s warm little head. Granted, Griffin was more auburn than orange. But he had said that his family nickname was “Red.” “Look at those closed eyes. She’s still sleepy.” The head had turned at the sound of her voice, and at her touch, the nose began sniffing her hand. Looking closer, Poppy caught her breath. “Oh my.”

  “Yeah,” Griffin confirmed, “so how could I say no? Apparently, she was born sighted, but then something happened. Whoever had her couldn’t deal, so they abandoned her on the side of the road. She was picked up and treated, but it was too late to save her sight. The cat lady’s had her for a couple of months and would have kept her if she didn’t have so many others.”

  “Were the others abusive to this one?”

  “No. She said they were totally respectful, protective even. But this one wants a lap, and the cat lady isn’t still for long.”

  “Are you?” Poppy asked.

  “Sure am, when I work.”

  Poppy let the cat sniff her hands, then, unable to resist, she lifted her out of his parka and drew her close. “Well, hello,” she cooed. She continued to stroke the cat’s head while the cat sniffed her sweatsuit. “You’re such a pretty little lady, such a warm little lady.” The cat braced a paw on Poppy’s shoulder, while she sniffed her neck, her ear, her face. “What do you smell? Hmmm? The cologne is by Ralph Lauren. Do you like that?” The cat butted Poppy’s cheek en route to nuzzling a spot under her ear.