Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (25 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Iris missed Nolan. Every day, she missed him a little more, and her worry for his safety dug a little deeper into her heart.

Often, she called his number, knowing that his personal phone was turned off and stowed in a drawer in Cory’s kitchen, just so that she could hear the brief outgoing message:
It’s Nolan. Leave a message. If you want to hear back, make it short and sweet.

Each day, she left a message, short and sweet, the same one each time: “I love you. Come home.”

She wondered if his voice mail would be full before he made it home.

It was strange to simply be going on about her life, when she had no idea where he was, or if he was okay. But her only alternative was…there was no other alternative. She had no way to look for him, or to contact him. The club did; her father at least knew more than she did, but he wasn’t saying, other than to say that ‘as far as he knew,’ Nolan was okay.

All Iris could do was wait, and if she simply leaned on the windowsill and waited, she’d be mental in a matter of hours. So she went on about her life. She went to work. She hung out with her family. She snuggled Austin, her new nephew. She lived.

And it was a good life, even with the big, Nolan-shaped hole in its middle. Signal Bend was her home. Now more than ever, she felt that. Everywhere she went in town, she was at home. Even people who’d officially lived in Signal Bend longer, recently, than she had were coming to see her as an ‘Original.’

That was how families like the Lundens and the Ryans, the Bakkes and the Olsens, the Nesses and the Wahlbergs, the Mortensens and the Freys, to name some of the most prominent, were known now: the ‘Original Families.’ Iris thought it made them all sound like vampires or something.

Historically speaking, most of the Original Families did, in fact, predate the town charter. But the term was used in reference to any family that had been established before Signal Bend’s big resurgence. Iris found the dynamic fascinating, a sort of ‘big brother/little brother’ feel, where newcomers—some of whom had lived in Signal Bend for a decade—went to the Originals to get support for their ideas before they brought them up at town meetings.

It was more than asking for help—the people of this town had always gone to the Horde for that, and most of the Horde were Originals, too—it was asking for
validation
. Iris had attended several town meetings since she’d come to stay, and the families that had been there for generations were the ones who, ultimately, made the decisions. The role of the Mayor had always, as far as Iris knew, been mainly decorative; the town council made most of the policy, and the Horde made the law. The townspeople made their opinions known, but the Originals had the real say.

Town meetings were often loud and even exciting, where everybody talked, sometimes all at once, and the council heard it all and explained their votes. Ever since she was a girl, she’d liked sitting in the middle of that mess. But now, with the lens of her studies sharpening her vision, she also saw how much power the Originals wielded.

For all Signal Bend’s changes, it was, at its heart, the same small town it had always been. And it was her home. Living here again, Iris realized that she hadn’t ever really had a home since she’d been taken from this one as a little girl.

When Nolan came home, they would make a home together here, where they both belonged.

~oOo~

Iris hadn’t spoken to Nolan in more than a week. According to the little any of the Horde would tell her, he’d left the same day that they’d last spoken—and with that, she knew, beyond all doubt, that their last call had been the thing which had pushed him off his increasingly unstable base.

If he was hurt or killed, it would be her fault. At least in part. In the moments that she let herself be quiet and still—at night, lying in bed, in the tiny bedroom that used to be her sister Daisy’s, while she hugged her ratty teddy bear—her mind and heart beat each other up over that fact. She’d gotten wrapped up in her own problems and forgotten that Nolan needed saving, and now he was gone.

She’d been home for five days and back at work for two. Nothing had changed at home, or at work, or in town, except that Nolan wasn’t there.

Late in the morning on her second day back at work, she was alone in the shop while Geoff met with a collector in Rolla. Usually, she liked these days best: a weekday, so not too much traffic through the store. A night rain had brought in cooler weather, a break in an otherwise hot, muggy summer. Iris had the front door open and some funky new finds displayed on the boardwalk. Those shoppers who had the middle of the week at their leisure strolled contently along the walks and ate their lunch at tables the cafés had set outside.

Alone for most of the day, she meant to play around, maybe move some things about and make up some new displays or something. Now that she knew their full inventory and understood the aesthetic of the shop, Geoff gave her a lot of latitude to change things up. After returning from her personal hell in Little Rock, a little changing up seemed like a good idea, something to focus her mind away from Nolan.

She had taken all the knickknacks off a country kitchen hutch that Geoff had stained a unique shade, something like teal, almost iridescent. Iris knew it was literally unique, because Geoff mixed his own stains. He’d done this one with a light finish, so that the wear of the century-old piece showed through. The color had inspired her, and she thought she’d pull curiosities from the side rooms and do something color-themed with the display.

The gargoyle bell tinkled while she was shoving her back against the piece, which was hard to move even on the little coaster things they put under the feet of especially heavy pieces to move them. She stopped, ready with her shopkeeper smile, and saw Gia Lunden standing in the doorway with her hands in her jeans pockets.

“Hi, Gia! You shopping?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders. “My mom’s talking to the mayor about something, and it’s taking forever. We’re supposed to go to Jack’s Tack after and get my saddle fixed. I’m just killing time until she’s done. I saw you in the window. You need help?”

“Sure, that’d be great.” Gia came over, and Iris moved to make room. “I’m trying to move it to the wall by the sales desk. Don’t push too hard, or it’ll come off the little slide pad thingies.”

Working together, they got the hutch in place. Gia stood back. “We have something like this in the kitchen. It’s just white, though.”

“I think lots of people around here have these things, and they’ve probably been used like they were meant to be used forever. This one would be more of a…I don’t know…collector piece, I guess.”

“The color’s weird.”

“Yeah, but I like it. I’m going to dig around the shop and find stuff that’s the same color, or close to it, or maybe contrasty. You want to help?”

Gia turned and looked out the front window. Then she dug into her pocket for her phone. After she tapped out a text, she turned back to Iris with a small smile. “Yeah, that’d be cool.

“Did you tell your mom where you were?”

“Yeah.” She waved her phone at Iris and then slid it back into her pocket.

“Okay, well, we’re on the hunt for anything kinda weird that is a similar color to the hutch.”

“Everything in here’s kinda weird.”

“I know, right? Isn’t it great? Why don’t you take the curiosities room, and I’ll go to the back. The deal is, we want it to look good on the hutch.”

They worked for about half an hour, until they had a good assortment of options scattered on and around the hutch, ranging from a few frames of pinned butterflies to a 1920s-era masquerade mask with peacock feathers, from glass paperweights to an abalone cigar box.

Iris set down the last piece she’d found, and Gia picked it up immediately. “Oof. It’s heavy. What is it?”

“It’s a doorknocker. See?” She took the cast-iron piece, thick with patina, from Gia’s hands and held it up straight. Lifting the knocker an inch or so from its base, she released it, and it made a dull
thunk
. “It would sound a lot better on a door, of course.”

Gia took it back and studied it closely. “That’s the world,” she said, tracing a finger over the ball striker. “It’s a globe.”

“You’re right.” The knocker looked, at first glance, to be an arm and hand holding simply a ball. But Gia was right—the ball was actually carved with the features of a globe. The hand was God’s hand—or
a
god’s hand, anyway.

“That’s so rad. My dad totally needs it for his shop door.” Gia grinned. “Is it expensive?”

“Two hundred and thirty dollars.”

“Oh.” The grin ebbed away. “Yeah, then. It is.”

“I tell you what. This was in the back room. I’ll tuck it in a corner somewhere so maybe it doesn’t get bought, and then you can save up for it. Plus, we can cut you a deal, too. When’s your dad’s birthday?” She supposed she should know it, since Gia’s dad was Iris’s family, too, her Uncle Isaac, but details like that were things she’d missed, being mostly away for so many years.

“It was in March. I was thinking Father’s Day, but…”

Father’s Day was the coming Sunday. Iris made an executive decision—risky, but she knew how Geoff worked, so there was a decent chance he’d have done it himself. “Do you have income coming in, Gia?” She wasn’t even fifteen yet. As Iris recalled, her birthday was in July. That one she more or less knew; she’d been around enough in summer to have been to a few of Gia’s birthday parties.

“Yeah. I babysit, and I muck stalls and work the horses at Uncle Len and Aunt Tasha’s.”

Iris carried the doorknocker over to the sales desk. “How long do you think it would take you to pay back…say”—she checked the ledger to see what Geoff had listed as a bottom price—“a hundred and fifty dollars?”

Clearly excited by the chance Iris was hinting at, Gia turned her eyes up, thinking. “Um…like, to the end of July. Unless I get money for my birthday in a couple of weeks. I probably will. The uncles like to give money.”

Iris laughed; she knew that one herself. A fold of twenties was an easier gift for the uncles to manage, especially for a girl. “Let’s make an agreement that you’ll pay this off by the end of August. That way you don’t have to go around broke half the summer.”

“Really?” Gia’s smile shone like a beacon. “Thank you! Thank you!”

Geoff didn’t do layaway or store credit, but Gia was Isaac Lunden’s daughter, so Iris was making a bet that he’d have made an exception. If not, well, then she’d just pay for the knocker herself.

It just seemed the right thing to do. She was enjoying Gia’s happiness about it, and she felt, for the first time since she’d gotten the call to go to Little Rock, legitimately happy herself.

When Lilli finally came in to collect her daughter, the knocker was boxed and wrapped and ready for giving. Gia nearly floated out of the store, carrying the package in both her hands.

Iris waved at Gia and her mom as they left.

Alone in the store again, she felt lonely. She pull her phone from her pocket and dialed Nolan’s number.

~oOo~

“There is nothing that smells better than this.” Nuzzling the back of baby Austin’s neck, Iris took another deep whiff. “I can’t even tell you what that smell is, but wow. Somebody should bottle it.”

Adrienne laughed. “Eau de Motherhood. Pretty sure it’s a chemical thing to make sure we love on our babies. But yeah, you could get high on the way babies smell—most of the time. It’s not always so awesome, trust me.”

Iris settled the sleeping baby more snugly to her chest. “You would know. Dad says you’re a one-woman population explosion.” She grinned. “He also says I’m not supposed to tell you he says that.”

Austin was Adrienne and Badger’s fifth child, and Henry, their first, was only eight years old. The youngest four had all been born in a bit more than five years. It seemed like her stepsister had been pregnant most of the time Iris had known her.