“You frown too much,” her colleague, Marie Locklear murmured dryly as she approached her. Marie was half Cherokee and a graduate of Duke University. She was the museum’s comptroller, and a precious asset.
“I smile when I’m alone,” Phoebe confessed. “I wouldn’t want to upset the staff.”
“My cousin Drake Stewart’s coming by at lunch, again,” she said, naming the deputy sheriff who patrolled the area. “I asked him to bring us a couple of those spicy chicken salads from the new fast-food joint.” Marie added, “He’s sweet on you.”
Phoebe winced. “I’m off men.”
“Drake’s thirty and drop-dead gorgeous,” Marie reminded her. “He’s got just enough Cherokee blood to make him sexy,” she added. “If he wasn’t my first cousin, I’d marry him myself!”
“He’s also a deputy sheriff.”
“That’s right. I forgot. You’re down on lawmen.”
Phoebe went into her office, with Marie right behind. “I’m down on men, period,” she replied.
“Why?”
Phoebe ignored the question. Dragging up the past was just too painful.
“Can we afford to fix that hole in the parking lot?” Phoebe asked. “We’re getting complaints.”
“If we forego fixing the roof, we can,” Marie said demurely.
“Not another leak!” Phoebe groaned. “Where is it?”
“In the men’s bathroom,” Marie replied. “There’s a puddle in front of the sinks.”
Phoebe sat down at her desk and put her head in her hands. “And it’s November already. We’ll have snow and sleet soon and the roof will just collapse under the weight. Why did I take this job? Why?”
“Because nobody else wanted it?”
Phoebe actually chuckled. Marie was incorrigible. She grinned at the younger woman. “No, actually because nobody else wanted me,” she corrected.
“I can’t believe that. You graduated in the top one percent of your class, and you did a great job with your master’s degree, which you completed in record time,” Marie recalled. “I read your curriculum vitae,” she added when Phoebe looked surprised.
“Credentials aren’t everything,” Phoebe replied.
“Yes, but your area of expertise is forensic anthropology,” came the reply. “There must be a lot of jobs going in that area, because it’s so specialized.”
“There were none when I needed one,” she said quietly, pulling a file toward her. “I wanted to get away from my family, from everything. This is an area where I didn’t know anyone, and where I wasn’t likely to run into…” She was going to say Cortez, but she bit her tongue. Marie perched her ample figure on the edge of the desk, pushing back her long, thick straight hair. “I know you don’t talk about it,” she said, “but I think you’re better now, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “Yes. I think I’m over it.”
“You will be when you rush out to Drake’s car and kiss him blind and beg him to take you on a date,” Marie said with a wicked grin.
Phoebe glared at her. “From what you’ve already told me, Drake’s got a girl on every street corner,” she said. “He loves women, all shapes and sizes and ages, and they love him. I don’t want an overused man.”
Marie’s eyes popped.
Phoebe realized what she’d said and burst out laughing. “Well, hypothetically speaking,” she murmured, flushing. “And don’t you dare tell Drake I said that!”
Marie touched her ample bosom. “Would I do that?”
“In a heartbeat,” Phoebe agreed. “Get to work. Find me a way to budget roof repair and pothole repair into our fiscal year.”
“We could go over to the Yonah Reservation and talk to Fred Fourkiller,” she replied. “He can make medicine. Maybe he can influence the board of directors to give us a bigger budget!” Medicine reminded her of Cortez, who was descended from a long line of medicine men. Involuntarily her hand rested on her middle desk drawer. She jerked it back.
“We may have to try that if all else fails,” Phoebe said, turning on her computer. “I’d better get my paperwork done before the school crowd arrives,” she added. “We have another busload at eleven, from the middle school.” She glanced at Marie wistfully. “When I first came here, we were lucky to get two tourists a month. Now it’s busloads of kids every week.”
“A lot of people around here have Cherokee blood, because we’re so close to the reservation,” Marie reminded her with a smile. “They want to learn about their heritage, so history classes like to come here.”
“It’s nice revenue, like all those regional books on local history that we sell in the souvenir shop,” Phoebe had to admit. “I only wish we had a patron.”
“It’s early days yet,” Marie said with a smile. “I’ll get to work.”
She went out, closing the door behind her. Phoebe’s one assistant on staff, Harriett White, was taking the classes through the exhibits. Harriett was widowed, and in her fifties. She’d once been a professor of history at Duke University, but she didn’t want to go back to a full-time job. She’d applied at the museum without any real expectation of acceptance, and Phoebe had phoned her the minute she read the application. At first, she couldn’t understand why someone with Harriett’s credentials would be applying for an assistant’s job, but she learned that Harriett wanted a less demanding position that enabled her to continue in the field she loved. The woman turned out to be a hard worker and much appreciated.
PHOEBE HESITATED for a minute before she opened her middle drawer and took out a small prayer wheel dangling a feather—not an eagle feather, or she’d have been in trouble. It was an odd little gift. Cortez had mailed it to her the week after her graduation. It was one of only two letters she ever had from him. It contained this prayer wheel, wrapped in rawhide, with the feather attached and a blade of sweetgrass woven into the center. Cortez had said that his father wanted her to have it, and to keep it close. She wasn’t superstitious, but it was something of his family…and precious. She was never far away from it.
Next to it was another letter, very thin, with her name and address scrawled in the same hand that had addressed the letter with the prayer wheel. She touched it as if it were a poisonous snake, even after three years. Gritting her teeth, she made herself take out the small newspaper clipping it contained—nothing else had been in the envelope—and look at it. It reminded her not to get sentimental about Cortez.
She read nothing except the small headline—Jeremiah Cortez Weds Mary Baker. There was no photo of the happy couple, just their names and the date of the wedding. Phoebe never forgot that. It was three weeks to the day from her graduation from college.
She tucked the clipping back into the envelope, pushing back the anguish of the day she’d received it. She kept it beside the prayer wheel always, to remind her not to get too nostalgic about her brief romance. It kept her single. She never wanted to take a chance like that again. She’d thrown her heart away, for nothing. She would never understand why Cortez had given her hope of a shared future and then sent her nothing more than a cold clipping about his marriage. No note, no apology, no explanation. Nothing.
She would have written to him, if for no other reason than to ask why he hadn’t told her he was engaged.