Leftover Love (3 page)

“Born and raised right here in these Sand Hills,” the older woman admitted with an air of pride.

“You wouldn’t happen to know a woman named Martha Turner, would you? She moved here about twenty years ago, and we’ve lost touch with her since then.” Even though it was a relatively small community, Layne knew it would be blind luck if she stumbled across someone who knew or had known her natural mother. Still, she had to ask.

“Twenty years ago?” An eyebrow was lifted in a skeptical arch. “That’s a long time.” But the waitress paused to think. “Martha, you say her name was.” She shook her head, as if the name was meaningless. “Who was she married to?”

“She wasn’t married.”

“Well, if she was here very long, that all changed. A woman doesn’t stay single in this town for long. I oughta know. I’ve been married twice.” She paused again. “Now if that’s the case, let’s see … there is Martha Atherton, but she was a Pitts girl before she got married. And Martha Hoverson, but she’s too young. Marge Blyson, but her given name is Margaret, not Martha. I just can’t think of anybody,” she said to Layne. “It could be she got married and moved away.”

“Yes,” Layne conceded.

“Hey, Susie! How about some more coffee and a piece of that chocolate pie?” a male customer called to the waitress from the opposite end of the counter.

“Be right there.” To Layne she said, “Good luck. Hope you find out what happened to her.”

“Thanks.”

After she had finished her coffee, Layne collected her check and worked her way to the line of customers waiting at the cash register to pay for their meals. Although fairly tall herself at six inches over five feet, she felt engulfed in the sea of hats crowning the heads of the men standing in line. Mixed in with the smell of tobacco smoke were the spicy scents of after-shave lotions and the smell of animals clinging to the woolen coats.

As she was digging out the correct change for her meal check, she was roughly jostled. Layne staggered a couple of steps sideways before she could recover her balance and stop short of a table full of men. By some miracle, she hadn’t dropped anything.

“Sorry, miss,” a deep and gravelly male voice said. “I guess I didn’t see you standing there.”

When Layne looked at the person who had bumped into her, her glance encountered a mountain of a man. Her eyes were on a level with his wide chest, the impression of bulk intensified by a thick, fleece-lined jacket. He was a long, lean bear of a man, well over six feet tall by three or four inches.

“No harm done.” As she offered the assurance, her gaze finally lifted its attention to his face.

With a build like that, she had expected to see some craggy male face that resembled the models in cigarette advertisements. A keen sense of shock registered for a split second. There was nothing remotely attractive about the blunt contours of his sun-leathered features. They were all lean and harsh, his eyes darkly hooded by brows that grew thickly together. A dark brown Stetson was pulled low on his forehead, the jutting brim shadowing most of his face. If he were a Hollywood actor, he would have been typecast as a bad guy or an outlaw, she thought.

The man seemed to sense her purely instinctive recoil from him. His lips came together in a severe line that only added to his uncomplimentary looks. Layne regretted that she hadn’t hid her reaction better. Broad, callused fingers gripped the pointed brim of his hat in a courteously respectful gesture as he made a place in line for her in front of him.

“Thank you,” she murmured as she stepped into the opening.

While she waited in line, she couldn’t help stealing looks at him. There was something oddly fascinating about a man so completely unattractive. Layne recalled her initial impression that he was a bear of a man. On reassessment, she discovered it was an appropriate comparison, because the man did possess a kind of animal appeal. He was a lonely male brute, Layne decided, then wondered why she thought of him as being lonely.

If he noticed her covertly eyeing him from time to time, he showed no awareness of it. But he kept well clear of her, making sure there was plenty of space around her, so there was no more accidental contact. Layne was just as glad, since the last brushing had nearly sent her sprawling.

After she’d paid for her lunch, Layne left the café. The blast of cold air drove out all thoughts of the man as she hurriedly buttoned her parka and dug her mittens out of her pocket. Despite the bright sunlight, the temperature was frigid.

One advantage of working as a reporter was that Layne was familiar with all the public information sources available to her. It was long, tedious work, checking through files and public lists. After a day and a half she had not come up with a single reference to a Martha Turner in any of the old records she’d checked.

It appeared more and more likely that the waitress had been right the other day when she’d suggested that Martha Turner might have gotten married and left the area. It was her only remaining alternative. On the off chance that the marriage might have taken place within Cherry County, Layne spent the morning of the third day going through the marriage license records from twenty years ago and forward.

It was always a nagging fear of hers that after going through so many documents and names, she might miss seeing the one she was looking for and skip over it without recognizing it. Yet when Layne finally did run across it, the name Martha Turner nearly leaped off the page at her.
Eighteen years ago she had married a man named John Gray, and both had listed rural Valentine, Nebraska, as their home. According to the ages given at the time, Martha was sixteen years her husband’s junior.

Layne jotted the information onto a sheet of her notebook. With her purse, coat, and knitted cap bundled under her arm, she carried the record ledgers back to the registrar’s counter. The male clerk didn’t appear to be much more than thirty years old, yet the top of his hair was thinning to the point of premature baldness.

“Did you find what you were looking for, miss?” He smiled his curiosity as Layne dumped the record books on his counter.

“Yes, thank you.” She caught the cuff of her ivory wool sweater with her fingers so the sleeve wouldn’t ride up her arm when she shrugged into her jacket. “Would you happen to know a man named John Gray?”

A slight frown creased the clerk’s forehead as he appeared to struggle with a recall of the name. “I think he was a rancher.” He smiled again, almost apologetically. “I was born and raised in town, so I’m not too well acquainted with people in the rural areas. Everything’s too spread out. But I seem to remember recording the death certificate of a man by that name when I first came to work here—that would be about four and a half years ago.”

“What about his widow? Is she still around?” Layne asked.

“Sorry.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Thanks anyway.” She headed out the door.

The next stop was the local newspaper office for a search of the obituary notices over the last five years. Layne knew she was close to the end of her search, and an underlying thread of excitement laced her nerves. The trail was no longer twenty years old; it was only five.

Not many people were interested in reading the back issues of the newspaper, so her request was regarded as unusual by the woman at the newspaper office. Layne was much too eager to get on with her search to pay much attention to the woman’s obvious but silent curiosity.

The newspaper had neither the finances nor the facilities to microfilm past issues, which meant that Layne had to go through each old copy. A small area was cleared for her on one of the worktables and the first batch of previous issues, dated five years ago, was brought out. Layne went through that stack and two more before she found the notice of John Gray’s death.

“‘… survived by his widow, Mattie.’ Mattie,” Layne repeated. Although her legal name was Martha, it was obvious that she was commonly known as Mattie. Which might also explain why no one had recognized the name Martha Turner. They had probably known her as Mattie Gray for too many years.

Layne read on. No children of the marriage were listed in the notice. Evidently she had no half brothers or sisters. Home was listed as the Ox-Yoke Ranch, with Creed Dawson named as the surviving partner in the operation. In a happy daze, Layne noted the facts on her tablet sheet. Even if her natural mother no longer lived on this ranch, someone would know where she had moved to. It was just a matter of time before Layne finally saw her, after waiting and looking for so long.

She was sailing on a high that knew no limit as she crossed the newspaper office to the front counter. The whole wonder of it still had her dazed when Layne pushed open the half-gate that separated the reception and work areas of the office. She wanted to laugh out loud, but the smile that wreathed her full mouth spoke volumes about the inner happiness that radiated from her.

“I’m all finished,” Layne said to the woman behind the counter, who had carted out the back issues of the paper.

With her head already in the clouds, that second’s distraction to speak to the woman prevented Layne from seeing the man who entered the newspaper office in time to avoid him. She careened off his solid shape as though she had bounced off a wall. A huge pair of hands caught and steadied her. When she looked up, she was gazing into a dusky pair of hooded brown eyes and the outlaw-tough features of the man from the café. It was a face not easily forgotten.

“I guess it’s my turn to apologize,” she said with a laugh, partly from self-consciousness but mostly from the inner good spirits that just wouldn’t be dampened. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“It’s okay.” There was a dismissive quality to the husky roughness of the man’s reply as he immediately released her and stepped back.

Her flesh tingled where he had gripped her arms, the circulation returning. It was an indication of the power in those hands. She was in too good a mood to be put off by his standoffish attitude. A smile lay too easily on her lips for her to care whether his hard-favored features cracked with one.

“We seem to be making a habit of running into each other,” she said. It was a lighthearted reference to the similar circumstances of their first meeting in the café, but the humor of it seemed to be lost on him.

“It isn’t likely to happen again.” There was a flatness to his steady gaze.

A little bit stung by such a cool rejection of her attempt at friendly banter, Layne redirected her attention to the woman behind the counter. This time she had to force her smile to broaden.

“Thanks again for your help,” she said.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Curiosity got the better of the woman as she tactfully tried to find out what it was Layne had been seeking. “You sure went through a bunch of old issues.”

“I know.” Since she had disrupted the woman’s work, Layne felt she was entitled to some sort of explanation. She settled on a half-truth. “Sometimes you have to go through a lot of old records to fill in the missing gaps in the family tree.”

“Oh, you’re tracing your roots, are you?” Curiosity vanished with the dawn of understanding. “I have a friend that’s into all that genealogy stuff.”

“It’s a challenge that only pays off if you’re persistent.” And she was closing in on her reward. The knowledge brought back the lightness of spirit. “Have a good day.” Layne smiled at the woman as she turned to leave, and let the smile linger in place to drift over the tall hulk of a man, standing with statuelike patience to one side. There was, predictably, no response.

The whole incident was forgotten when she stepped outside and faced the distinct possibility that soon she might be seeing her natural mother—the one who had given her the red lights in her hair and the olive-green color of her eyes. Anticipation was a heady thing, building excitement to a fever-pitch intensity. Obeying a need for privacy, Layne went straight from the newspaper office to her motel room.

The minute she entered it, her glance fell on the telephone directory. Like a magnet, it drew her across the room. She flipped through the much-worn pages until she reached the ‘G’ section. Near the bottom of the column of names, she found “Gray, M.” with a rural route address and the phone number. There weren’t any other choices.

Her hand was shaking as she reached for the phone.
Now that the moment was at hand, she was scared. Layne took a deep, controlled breath and tried to calm her jittery nerves. She made two unsuccessful attempts to dial the number before she got the digits in the right order. The sound of the phone ringing on the other end of the line seemed to set off the fluttering of a thousand butterfly wings in her stomach.

There was a click in mid-ring and a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Hello.” There was a frozen instant during which Layne clutched the phone tightly. “Who … who is this?” She was so nervous and scared that she was close to tears.

“Mattie Gray. Who is this?” There was an instant, responding demand.

A lightning thread of thoughts all weaved themselves together in a single second. There was no more need to look further for her natural mother. She’d found her. But she wanted no impersonal meeting with her over a telephone.

“Hello?” The woman’s voice questioned the silence.

“I’m sorry,” Layne blurted out. “I must have the wrong number.” She quickly hung up the telephone.

For long minutes she could only stand and stare at the phone. In a way it was all so crazy. She had not anticipated that she would experience such an emotional reaction at hearing the mere voice of the woman who’d given birth to her. Maybe she hadn’t outgrown all those childhood fantasies after all—the wonderings and the yearnings for this unknown person despite the constant outpouring of love from her adoptive parents. For so long she had convinced herself that this search was to satisfy her own curiosity regarding her personal family and background. It was vaguely startling to realize that her interest was not quite as detached from her feelings as she had once believed.

It took a few minutes for Layne to pull her scattered thoughts together. After that, deciding what to do next was a foregone conclusion. She left her motel room, retrieved the road map from the car, and went into the manager’s office to get directions to the Ox-Yoke Ranch.