“I won’t be gone long, Mama.” She bent to kiss the smooth, cool cheek and patted her mother’s hand. “You find a nice poem by Mr. Tennyson to read out loud after our supper, you hear?”
“You speak to your father before you leave, Jane Charlotte. Ah don’t know what he’ll say to your goin’ out unchaperoned….”
Jane bit her bottom lip. Papa’s dead, she wanted to scream. Don’t you understand? He’s gone! But such an outburst would serve no purpose; Mama would forget it within half a minute, and Jane’s throat would hurt for hours from screaming. Her mother refused to accept unpleasantness; she simply pretended it didn’t exist. Maybe she should thank the Lord her mother preferred the past; it kept her from being frightened of the present, and Jane was frightened enough for both of them.
She straightened her spine, smoothed down the folds of the dark blue sateen skirt she had made over from a ball gown of her mother’s, and moved to the front door. The paint around the lock plate was flaking off, revealing the bare wood beneath. It needed fixing.
Everything needed fixing—the house. Their lives. Even herself. It had been ten years since she’d first delved into her mother’s clothes trunk; how much longer could a few outdated ball gowns last? And the house—it had gone to wrack and ruin since her mother’s health began to fail.
“’Bye, Mama. I’ll be home in time to make your tea.”
“Jane Charlotte, tell your father…” The small, clear voice faded as Jane descended the porch steps.
Tell your father. She gritted her teeth. She’d like to tell him a thing or two, like to shout the truth at him: Papa, you dragged us away from everything we knew, everything we loved, and you didn’t take care of us, Mama and me, nor our property, and…and now you up and die and we’re practically starving!
Hush up, now! No well-bred Southern lady rails at a dead parent no matter what they’d done, leastways not in public. And certainly not among Yankees! She marched down the path to the front gate, groaning aloud at the sight of the weed-infested border of sunwithered Sweet William and the overgrown roses massed along the fence. Well, great heavens, she couldn’t keep up the cooking and the cleaning and the pruning and lovingly dribble wash water on the roots like Mama did before she took sick.
Oh, Papa, whatever am I to do? A sick, hard knot formed in her midsection. She didn’t feel like herself anymore. At that, she gave a choked laugh. Be truthful, Jane. For months and months, even before Papa died, she had felt like a fledgling sparrow who’d fallen out of its nest. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t fly back in.
Well, fly you must, ready or no. She swung the gate shut, wincing at the screak of the rusty hinge—one more thing to attend to—and twitched her skirt free of the fencepost. It took all her willpower to steady her breathing. She felt for all the world like David girding himself to meet Goliath.
Only this was worse. She snapped open her mother’s best black silk parasol. At the bottom of their dusty, sun-baked hill lay the town, and there waited The Enemy. Goliath was a Yankee.
She straightened her hat and ordered her feet to carry her forward. I am sorry, Papa, but you left me no choice.
“She’s comin’, Dell! Miz Jane. Walkin’ up the street lookin’ jes’ like a queen.”
Rydell Wilder’s entire world spun to a stop. “You sure about that, Lefty?”
“Dad blame-it, my eyesight’s good as it ever was. Ever since you started this here bank ’stead of ridin’ shotgun for me, you never b’lieve one thing I say. I tell you it’s her.”
Rydell stood up and stared into the old man’s face. Lefty Springer was the only person in the entire world he’d ever confided in. He’d trust the man with his life if it came down to it; after all, Lefty had trusted him with thousands of dollars in payroll shipments from the time he turned sixteen.
Barton Springer—Lefty, to those few who knew how he’d lost his right arm at Shiloh—never spoke a word unless he had to. The old man had been the first customer at the bank Rydell had established in town when he was a week shy of twenty-three, and he was the only patron allowed to use the private side entrance to his office. Rydell waited for the details.
Lefty looked at him expectantly, and Rydell chuckled. He didn’t believe for one minute that Miss Jane Charlotte Davis was heading for his bank. Not unless hell was freezing over. But the old man’s sharp blue eyes sparkled, and then his gaze narrowed.
“Got over it, didja?”
“Sure thing, Lefty.” He grinned at the lie. “Another ten years or so and I won’t care about breathing, either.”
“Thought so. Dell, I came to warn ya—she looks like she’s made up her mind to somethin’.”
Rydell shook his head as a queer pain stabbed into his heart. “Jane Davis hasn’t been allowed any kind of life to make up her mind about. Her folks pretty much saw to that. Offhand I’d say she’s just visited the mercantile and is headed toward home.”
“She’s comin’ this way, I tell ya.” The old man twirled one branch of his drooping gray mustache with his left forefinger. “Thought ya might like to be prepared, is all.”
Rydell grasped the older man’s shoulder. “Thanks, Lefty. Buy you a beer later.”
When he was alone, Rydell tipped his chair back, propped his boots on the desk, and closed his eyes.
Jane.
All these years he’d carried her name and the memory of the shy, frightened girl who’d treated him with kindness when he’d chased a group of bullies out of the schoolyard. She was new in town, from the South he gathered from her speech. Maybe fourteen or fifteen, and she looked…different. Her clothes were too fussy for a small town like Dixon Falls, her manners too formal. The other students surrounded her as she walked home, tossing rocks and chanting. “Queen Jane, Queen Jane, she’s got no brain. She’s stuck-up, too, and awful plain.”
The taunt made him mad. They’d bedeviled him, too, but he could fight. Jane could not, so when it came down to it, he’d done it for her. When it was over, she put her small, soft hand on his and whispered two simple words. Thank you.
He’d been fifteen. She didn’t come back to the school; he heard later that her folks taught her at home. Rydell had finished his schooling, rode shotgun for Lefty Springer, and watched from a distance as wide as two oceans while Jane grew up in the big yellow house on Dixon Road.
He’d tried hard to forget her.
Wilder’s Bank sat at the far end of the town of Dixon Falls, an imposing two-story white-painted building, the only structure along the main street that looked strong enough to withstand the winter snows and the hot, dry July wind without the roof sagging and the paint peeling off. Jane hesitated a moment, then stepped onto the board sidewalk.
A silver-dollar-sized spot of sunlight seared her chin. Peering upward, she noted the hole in the faded black parasol and groaned aloud. She could patch it with a scrap of silk from Mama’s trunk. Or she could live with it. What she’d like to do was toss the blasted contraption into the horse trough in front of the Excelsior Hotel, but she knew there wasn’t enough money to purchase another. That sad fact was what brought her into town in the first place.
She would manage with the damaged parasol. She needed something much more important than that, Jane thought with a shudder. And it was waiting inside the bank—her last hope for survival. For the hundredth time in the last three days, she wondered how she could live through the humiliation.
Inside the bank it was mercifully cool and quiet. The gray-painted window shutters were closed against the midday heat. It was, she noted, the only building in town that had shutters. In the dim light she drew in a slow, careful breath and walked resolutely to the counter.