The Winter Road Page 5

  “Publications isn’t the right word. There wouldn’t have been actual publishers.”

  Unsure whether fondness or exasperation was her dominant emotion, Emily started for the library, barely listening as her mother explained about pharaohs and government ministers and clerks who knew how to write hieroglyphics. As soon as they stepped inside the building, Julia stopped talking and headed unswervingly for the reference section. Emily wandered off to find paperbacks suitable for long afternoons stretched out in the relative coolness of the porch.

  When she had a pile of books, enough that she could discard any that didn’t catch her interest when she settled down to read, she made her way to the checkout desk, past book carts in the aisle, people reading in chairs and a toddler half-asleep on the floor. The winding route took her almost to the door of the adjoining computer room. Feeling a pleasant little jolt, she stopped. Matthew was there, intent on the screen of a microfilm reader.

  She stood watching him, enjoying the focused stillness of his body. Most of the people she knew were solidly one way—-of course they had variations in their personalities—but she could say without hesitation that Aunt Edith fussed and Liz dreamed and Martin teased.

  Matthew seemed different. Cold and distant on one hand; warm and kind on the other. Analytical, with an air of professionalism, but physically strong, not bookish. In spite of the suit that had annoyed her for no good reason, she couldn’t picture him doing desk work.

  He was a puzzle. Maybe that was why Hamish didn’t trust him. Yesterday he’d lowered his head whenever Matthew had spoken to him and kept his tail still. The dog had met people he didn’t like before, very nice people. He wasn’t that keen on Aunt Edith. It made Emily wonder, though. Two days, and two versions of Matthew. Why assume the one she liked was more real than the one she didn’t?

  JULIA PILED the reference books she’d borrowed from the library onto the kitchen table. She shuffled through them a few times, rearranging them, then placed her catalogs and several sharpened pencils beside them.

  “I’ll just put my books away upstairs, Mom. Then I’m going out to the garden.” Emily wanted to pick radishes and green onion to add to the leftover fried chicken sandwiches she planned to make for lunch.

  There wasn’t much time before Matthew came, but she ended up staying outside longer to deal with some weeds. She had ignored them for the past few weeks, in the name of nice fingernails for the wedding. The cat sat next to her and watched as she pulled plantain and pineapple weed from between the carrots, sometimes batting a paw at a trailing root.

  “That’s it,” Emily said softly. “Kill that root! You’re such a hunter. Oh, dear.” She’d got a baby carrot by mistake. She rubbed it clean and ate it in two bites, then picked more, thinning the row. “We’ll take some to Mom. There’s nothing like baby carrots to cheer a person up.”

  “Talking to the cat now?”

  Emily jumped. Martin stood at the edge of the garden, his truck parked behind him. “You startled me!” She got up, brushing dirt from her knees.

  He climbed through the rails of the fence and stepped over the rhubarb to reach her. Every time she saw him he looked more strained. He and Liz’s brother, Tom, were working toward organic certification. It would be a few more years before they got there and in the meantime they were using grain profits to feed cattle they couldn’t sell. Given the date, she thought she knew why he’d come.

  “Is your mom still excited about her thief?”

  He grinned. “Oh, yeah, it was the best thief ever. You’re keeping your door locked, right?”

  “I always do, Martin.”

  “Like right now?”

  “Well, no…but I’m here, close by, and Mom’s in the house.”

  “You didn’t see me come. The dog didn’t bark. You should lock it during the day, too, Em, even if you’re home.” Changing pace abruptly, he smiled and patted the cloud of hair above her head. “You’ve got your Albert Einstein look goin’ on.”

  Emily pushed his hand away. “Quit it, you.”

  “Except you’re prettier and not quite as smart.”

  “Thanks for clarifying.”

  Martin’s tense smile faded. He shifted from one foot to the other and looked out at the road. “We were hoping this wasn’t going to happen again. We haven’t got the end-of-June check yet.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Not really.” He glanced her way. “It’s just the buildup of expenses. You and Aunt Julia shouldn’t get the short end of the stick, but if we don’t pay for feed they won’t give us any more—”

  “It really is all right.”

  “We might be moving a few heifers in the next week or two. Can you wait till then?”

  “Of course, Martin. On one condition—”

  He perked up at the mention of a condition. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

  “No more hair jokes.”

  “Aw, Em…”

  “I know it’s tough, but that’s the deal.”

  He gave her a quick kiss on the head, which under the circumstances she thought probably qualified as a hair joke, and went to his truck with a wave over his shoulder. The engine revved and with a spray of gravel he roared away.

  A WAIT OF A WEEK OR TWO wasn’t worth mentioning to her mother, not today, when she was just starting to settle down about the book from Egypt.

  Emily hurried through lunch, then showered and braided her wet hair the way Susannah did, making sure every piece was well secured. Her Einstein look? Martin made it sound like a regular thing.

  She came out of the bathroom feeling refreshed and polished, ready for company, and found her mother balanced on tiptoe on a chair, stretching to wash the highest bookshelf. Well away from potential drops of water, stacks of books blocked the path to the kitchen.

  When she was safely on the floor Emily said, “I thought you’d be diving right into your library books. Did you forget Matthew’s coming?”

  The cloth dipped vigorously in and out of a bucket of water.

  “Mom—”

  “I didn’t forget.” Julia climbed back up on the chair.

  Emily tilted her head to see which books were piled on the floor. Prehistory and ancient history. Under a book about cave paintings were a few about the origins of the universe. Those moved back and forth regularly, from the very first spots on the shelf to a much later shelf devoted to modern science. Julia wanted her collection to run seamlessly from the beginning of all things to the present moment in time. The fact that the present moment kept changing complicated her plans. What Emily found endearing was that right near the end, included with all the books in the world that her mother thought were important, were the children’s books Liz had written and illustrated.

  A bit of a mess didn’t matter. Emily wanted to help Matthew with his research, not impress him with her spotless house. It would be easier to remember that if he didn’t have such an air of spotlessness himself.

  “Here he is.” She felt a lift when she saw his car, another when he stepped out of it.

  Hamish got to him before she did and circled him warily. Matthew wore khakis again and another button-up shirt, a more casual cotton blend, as if he was noticing how people dressed in Three Creeks. Maybe by the time he left he’d be wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

  “Another hot day,” he said.

  “And in spite of it, my mother’s climbing up and down scrubbing book shelves.”

  “Will it disturb her if we look around?”

  “If you imagine a boundary around the books on the floor and don’t cross it, we’ll be fine.” They walked to the kitchen door. “Our house was built a generation later than the Rutherford place. I’m not sure how a tour will help.”

  “I thought I’d soak up atmosphere.”

  “You mean the overall creaky floor, crooked walls, cobwebs in the corners kind of atmosphere?”

  He smiled. “If that’s what you’ve got, that’s what I want.”

  Emily began in the
living room, pointing out the characteristic lumber used at the turn of the twentieth century, three-inch strips of tongue-and-groove British Columbia fir, applied vertically up to a chair rail and then horizontally. Julia continued to clean, ignoring them.

  “My great-great-grandfather gave parcels of land to his children when they married, so there’s the original place, where my grandmother lives now, and a number of houses built for his children, like this one. My cousin Tom and his wife Pam built their own place.” She smiled. “Pam didn’t want to soak up anybody else’s atmosphere.”

  “The houses have changed hands by inheritance?”

  “Sometimes. My grandfather bought this place for my parents from his sister—”

  She stopped. Matthew had stepped over Julia’s barricade of books and was examining the shelves. After one startled glance, Julia stared at the book she was holding as if she had discovered mold on its cover.

  He tapped the backboard. “That’s not the original wall, is it? It’s not tongue-and-groove like the rest of the room.”

  It was the one thing Emily had asked—that he respect her mother’s territory. “My dad built it out a few inches. He didn’t think the books should rest against an exterior wall.”

  “Temperature differences, condensation?”

  “You never know.”

  “He did a nice job.” Matthew ran his hand along one of the shelves, feeling the tight joins where boards met boards, apparently unaware of the disapproval around him. “Beautiful work.”

  Stiffly, Julia said, “My husband liked carpentry.”

  “I can tell. Did he put the shelves up in stages as your library grew?”

  “All at once.”

  “He had an idea you’d want a whole room full, did he? The wood’s dried out. He must have done this a long time ago.”

  “In the fall of 1980. After harvest.”

  “It’s a big job for one person to take care of a library of this size.”

  “You can’t let the books get dusty,” Julia said. She still frowned at the one she was holding, but she had relaxed. “You have to give them air. You have to think of an organization that makes sense, so you can find what you want.”

  She began telling Matthew about Sinuhe, everything she had learned at the library that morning. That it came from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom—1940 to 1640 BC—and that Sinuhe was the name of a clerk or scribe who worked in a palace. He ran away during a time of conflict and spent his life in exile until his king pardoned him. It was pieced together from papyrus fragments and carvings on limestone, and it was the reason she was cleaning—to make room for a section of books about and from Egypt.

  When she ran out of facts she fell silent. Matthew rejoined Emily outside the circle of books.

  “I wasn’t supposed to do that, was I?” he said quietly, as if he had just remembered.

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “I’m sorry. Your place is so different from where I grew up. My parents liked the minimalist look.”

  She opened a door at the front of the house. “This is our only minimalist room. It’s supposed to be for company.”

  There was no bed, no furniture at all. Only rows of plastic containers piled on top of one another. “I call it the Robb-Moore Archives,” she said lightly. “At first my mother kept everything in cardboard boxes, but I put my foot down. Too much of a fire hazard.”

  Matthew read one label out loud. “‘School reports, Emily Moore, grade 1-12.’ It’s nice that your mom wants to keep things like that.”

  “Until you know she wants to keep everything. Wedding invitations, birth announcements, obituaries, sales receipts, newspaper clippings, livestock papers…”

  His gaze deepened into something she was afraid might be sympathy so she quickly added, “Which is great. If someone in your family had done this you could have found all the information you wanted in a day.”

  She backed out of the room and led Matthew to the second floor. When they reached the landing he looked at a trapdoor overhead.

  “An attic?”

  “Not a usable one. It’s rafters and cobwebs and the odd chipmunk.”

  He reached up, easily touching the door. “Could I take a look?”

  “There’s nothing to see. The last time I opened it a whole load of dust and little bits of gray insulation poured down.” She wasn’t going to clean that up again.

  Her mother’s room was on the left, with the door shut, and hers was on the right, overlooking the front yard. As soon as she saw her twin bed, so childish under the window, she wished they had stayed downstairs.

  Matthew took in the bed, the photos of horses and dogs, the books and the dolls and teddy bears left out because they had too much personality to be shut away. “Cozy.”

  “But not very helpful for your family history.”

  “It is. Really. I’ve never been in a big old prairie house.” He knocked on the wall. “When I was a kid I always thought old houses had secret rooms.”

  “Hang on.” Emily pushed her bed to one side. Behind it was a small door held shut by a block of wood. She turned the block on its nail and the door swung open. “It doesn’t qualify as a room, and it isn’t a secret. It’s just so we can access the space under the half-roof.”

  Matthew knelt beside her and peered in. “Great place for hide and seek.”

  “My father was firm about that.” It was one of the few things Emily remembered about him, he’d warned her so often. “He told me I’d crash right through to the room below.”

  “Scary thought.”

  “I hid things, though. Notes to Susannah and Liz. Or Halloween candy once. That was a mistake. A whole family of chipmunks moved in that time.”

  Matthew laughed, and she immediately wanted it to happen again. It made his face so warm and open.

  “Mind if I take a closer look?”

  “It’ll be dusty.”

  Brushing past her, he leaned deeper into the crawl space. It was a long time since she’d been so close to a man who wasn’t a relative. How did her body know? There was quite a divide between its point of view and her own. It was always tingling and softening and perking up when he was around. She couldn’t seem to impress on it how short a week was, and how quickly it was passing, or the fact that she didn’t know anything about him, not even if she liked him.

  No, she knew that much. The question was whether she should like him.

  As his head and shoulders came back into the light his knee knocked against hers. She edged away. He was out of place in her room, with her old teddy bears staring from the shelf. Through the warm air grate in the floor she could hear her mother working. What she was feeling didn’t belong here. John had called it her nun’s cell.

  She stood up quickly. “You wanted to see outside? The barn, you said? The outbuildings?”

  “If you don’t mind.” He went around to the other side of the bed and pushed it back into place.

  BETWEEN THE TIME he stuck his head under the roof and pulled it back out, something had changed Emily’s mood. Did thinking about her father upset her? Or was she worried about having someone snoop around the house?

  As helpfully distancing as the name was he hadn’t been able to think of her as Ms. Robb for very long. Only until the third or fourth time her mother had asked which relative had made the quiche or the salad or the chicken and she’d looked as if one word of appreciation would go a long way. Then she’d become Emily in his mind.

  He followed her downstairs and out the kitchen door. The dog, back in the shade of the hedge, gave him another baleful stare. No growling or biting so far. That was good.

  The yard was like a forest. It looked as if long ago someone had felled just enough trees to make room for a house and left the rest. Emily and her mother barely kept up with it. A closer inspection was confirming yesterday’s first impression. Inside and out, there was no sign of big spending—except for the books and not even those if the collecting was spread over the years.

 
No gems, no Group of Seven paintings, she’d said. It was the kind of joke people might make when they were covering something. He didn’t think that was the case here. Liars usually gave themselves away with tics and avoidance gestures or expressions so blankly innocent alarm bells went off. Emily had been five or six when the gold had disappeared. Not involved, obviously. That didn’t mean she wasn’t drawn in later. He had to remember that.

  THE OUTBUILDINGS WERE all well past their prime, with moss on their shingles and scampering sounds overhead. There was a single-car garage to check, a pump house, a henhouse, a storehouse, a granary and a barn.

  “I suppose all this would have been typical of the Rutherford place.” Emily was still looking for connections to Matthew’s family history. He had been quiet since they’d come outside and she wondered if he was losing interest in the tour. “Working farms have updated their buildings.”

  “This isn’t a working farm?”

  “Not since my father died. Martin and Tom—two of my cousins—use the land for grazing.”

  Matthew swung the storehouse door back and forth. “No lock. You don’t care if your friendly neighborhood thief comes in?”

  “He’d be welcome to anything he found in here.”

  She led him between moldy saddles and dusty buckets and out the back door into a meadow. One step, and they were knee-high in prairie grasses. Here and there were spots of color—deep-yellow black-eyed Susans and pale-yellow buttercups, orange tiger lilies and purple Russian thistles. Beyond the meadow were poplar woods dotted with darker green oak and spruce.

  “Do you mind a walk? There’s a spot I’d like to show you.”

  “Good. I was hoping to see the woods.”

  “We can take a roundabout path to the place we’re going, or a shortcut through a marshy area.” As soon as she mentioned the marsh she knew she didn’t want to go that way. “It wouldn’t be wet now and the woods on the other side are beautiful, almost all oaks and elms.”

  “Whatever you prefer is fine with me.”