“I’d have told your mother not to serve that apfelstrudel you’re so fond of tonight.”
He laughed and took his cap from his rear pocket to settle it on his head. “You’re a tyrannical boss, Aunt Mariah.”
“Mariah!” A familiar male voice echoed through the high-ceilinged building. “Mariah Burrows!”
“Over here, Wilhelm,” she called. At twenty-two, he was her younger brother by two years. He used her full name at every opportunity. Among the hundred plus employees at the Spangler Brewery, hers was one of the few non-Bavarian or German names, and he lived to tease her about it. “What has you out of the office this morning?” she asked.
“Grandfather wants to see you right away.”
She fished for her pencil in the front pocket of the men’s trousers she wore that were her everyday garb. “I’ll be there as soon as I go over the inventory of last night’s bottling.”
“No, right now. He says it’s urgent.”
She tucked her ledger under her arm and rushed to join him. “Is John James all right?”
“Your son is fine.”
“Grandfather?”
“He’s just anxious to have you in the office for whatever reason.”
Relieved, she turned to wave at Roth. “I’ll be back. Go ahead and start stamping those crates near the conveyor. Seven weeks until opening day in Denver.”
Spangler Brewery spread over an acre located roughly two miles from Ruby Creek. The warehouses were situated with platforms a few scant feet from the railroad tracks, and the production buildings sat close to the cold-water streams that poured from the mountains into the wide creek for which the town was named. Three smoke stacks puffed billowy gray clouds into the bright Colorado sky. The mountains to the northeast were still capped with snow, but fireweed and forget-me-nots bloomed on the hillsides nearer. Mariah breathed in the pungent smell of fermented hops.
“I overheard Mama talking in the kitchen this morning.” Wilhelm’s tone was uncharacteristically solemn.
She glanced up at him as they passed the corner of the four-sided brick clock tower that stood in the center of the open yard.
“She said that sometimes Grandpa forgets what day it is for a moment.”
Mariah had noticed the same thing a time or two. Once he’d said something about an occurrence twenty years ago as if it had just happened. But the next moment he carried on with their business. “He seems perfectly healthy,” she said. “It’s almost like he takes a little trip into the past.”
“No harm there, I guess,” her brother said with a shrug.
Near the front entrance, they entered the four-story brick building that housed accounting offices as well as comfortable quarters for her grandfather. Their work shoes padded on the carpet runner that ran the length of the hall.
Mariah smiled a goodbye to Wilhelm and opened one of the carved walnut doors to enter Louis Spangler’s domain. She’d loved these rooms from the time she’d been a child, when he’d indulgently welcomed her to sit in one of the soft leather chairs that sat before a stone fireplace. She’d listened with rapt attention as he spoke of the old days back in Bavaria and his early days in this country, when he and his father and his uncles had built the brewery from the ground up.
He was the only one left from the old country. He and Grandma used to speak to each other in Old High German, a dialect of which their children and grandchildren could only understand bits and phrases. Mariah hadn’t heard it spoken for many years now.
“You must need something important,” she said. “You’ve spent the last three months cautioning me not to waste a minute until everything is ready for the Exposition.”
Louis moved from where he’d been standing at the wide window that looked out over foothills decorated in a dozen shades of verdant green to his desk. He cast her a tentative glance. “We have something important to discuss.”
“About the Exposition?”
“No. Nothing like that.” He waved her to a chair.
Mariah knew better than to rush him. He would come around to the point in his own good time. She made herself comfortable on a wing chair and waited. The concern in his vivid blue gaze unsettled her.
“I have some news. Something that’s going to affect you and John James.”
She sat a little straighter. Four years ago he’d given her a seat on the governing board, and for the first time in its nearly forty-year history, the brewery had a woman in a principal position. He’d always held Mariah in a place of favor. When her son had come along, Grandfather had given him his favor, as well. She anticipated that one day she would inherit her own share of their family holdings. “What is it?” she asked.
“Wes Burrows is coming here. In just a few weeks’ time.”
Mariah heard his spoken words immediately, but their meaning took longer to penetrate her haze of disbelief. They never spoke of the person he’d just mentioned because that person didn’t exist. Hearing it from him now was like hearing that foreign language her grandparents used to use. “Wha-what do you mean?”
“John James’s father is coming to see him.”
A buzz rang in her ears. “But that—that’s impossible.”
“I’m afraid it’s not. I’ve had communication with him, and he’s already left Juneau City. He should arrive early next month.”
Mariah’s first reaction was to stand. Bolt perhaps. But the room tilted at an odd angle, and she collapsed back onto the leather cushion before she fell. “Could you explain, please? How does a man you invented suddenly write and say he’s coming?”
“I didn’t invent Wes Burrows. The man exists.”
She overcame her light-headedness to stand and release the tension ratcheting her nerves by pacing a few feet away and back again. “I thought your old friend from Forchheim was writing those letters.”
“Otto died. I told you that.”
“No. No, you didn’t.” Just the other day she’d read a few of the letters her son had received recently, and there had been subtle differences in the penmanship and the sentence structures, but she hadn’t suspected a different writer.
Mariah placed a hand on either side of her head as though to keep it from flying off. Was her grandfather confused or was she hearing wrong? “If Otto is dead, who has been writing to—and who is traveling to—see John James?”
“I didn’t expect this,” he said apologetically. “Not in a hundred years. Sit back down and let me explain.”
He wouldn’t continue until she complied, so Mariah sat once again and gripped the arms of the chair. “I’m listening.”
“Otto Weiss had been living in Alaska for quite some time when I asked him to help us with the name of someone who rarely checked his postal box, someone whose name we could use and who would never find out.”
“I know that part.” Seven years ago, when she’d told him she was going to have a baby and had no plans for a husband, he’d sent her to Chicago for a year. She’d been surprised when she’d returned home with her baby and learned that her grandfather had invented a husband for her while she’d been away. The story had already been told throughout the family and in the nearby town of Ruby Creek. Supposedly she’d married in Chicago.
The tale continued that her new husband had gone off to the gold fields of the north, leaving her to wait for him, and because of that she’d chosen to move home to her family until his return.
Living with the stigma of a husband with gold fever had