Silk and Stone (41 page)

She turned swiftly and walked out. The sheriff flailed his hat at thin air and followed her, his hands out. The front door slammed. Seconds later came the rumble of car engines.

The house seemed to be holding its breath.

Jake felt Samantha’s hand gripping his shirt in back again. She didn’t realize how much that contact affected him. Besides the obvious—that strong but shivering hold on him—he felt her shock and relief. All that mattered was not letting Samantha down the way it seemed just about everybody else in her life had.

Everyone stood without moving. Jake pretended to listen to the sound of the sheriff’s car following Alexandra’s up the long driveway to the Cove road. But he was secretly fixated on the ragged cadence of Samantha’s breathing.

“Are we safe?” Charlotte asked. “Can we really live here?”

“Yes,” Father answered. He took Mother’s raised fists and caressed them. She swallowed roughly. “She always had it. And she thought she’d always keep it.”

She placed the ruby in his grasp and he studied it, frowning. “I’ve come to hate this. But it’s finally served the purpose it was intended for. To bring people together.”

“It’s a medicine stone,” Ellie said quietly. “It finds its way back where it belongs.”

“It’s yours,” Mother added. Jake flinched. He never wanted to touch the ruby again, and he didn’t want Ellie to touch it either. “It’s yours,” Mother repeated, and went to Ellie. “It should have been yours on your twenty-first birthday. From mother to daughter. I’m a year late, but I intend for the tradition to be kept from now on. Just as it always was, before Alexandra.”

Her eyes gleaming, Ellie held out a hand. Mother placed the stone in her palm. Jake met her eyes. Pride. Confidence. She was not afraid of the stone anymore. He told himself that meant something. If there had been a curse, it was over. They had won. He had to believe that.

He turned around slowly. Samantha looked up at him with incredulous hope that slowly changed to grief. “She really did steal the ruby,” Sam said in a hoarse whisper. “You were right.”

“I don’t care. I only care that you’re with me. If … that’s what you still want.”

She nodded. Fatigue and weeks of shattering grief clouded her eyes. He touched her cheek and knew she needed time to pull all the pieces together. Time to come back to herself. Time to believe she could be with him without terrible consequences. He fumbled with his shirt pocket and produced her necklace. Its ruby didn’t gleam like the Pandora stone. It had no value to anyone but him and her. Her eyes filled with appreciation when she saw it. Jake carefully slipped the tarnished chain over her head. “Welcome home,” he said.

Mother gave her and her sister one of the upstairs bedrooms, and reported wistfully over the next few snowbound days that they slept together, fully dressed, as if they expected to flee again at any second. Mother took a dim view of Jake venturing upstairs to check on Samantha himself; no matter how gallant his intentions, Mother suddenly bristled with rules about bedrooms. She
needed to prove all the chaperoning skills he and Ellie had deprived her of testing when they were younger.

Mother, Father, and Ellie discussed the ruby and Alexandra endlessly. Ellie huddled in her bedroom with the ruby in her hands, confiding only to Jake that she felt the history of at least a dozen ancestors who’d conjured medicine with it, and that she was sure, now, that it was a good talisman in her possession.

Jake forced himself to hold it but felt nothing, and the blankness was so foreign and unpleasant, he returned it to Ellie quickly. He had misused it once, and it would not forgive him any more than he forgave himself.

But it had protected Samantha and Charlotte for him, so maybe there was some pattern he could not yet understand. Having Samantha was all that mattered to him.

She seemed reluctant to set foot outside the house, not even to admire enormous icicles hanging from the rough log eaves or the aura of sunlight reflected from tree limbs covered in crystal gloves. Jake watched her from a troubled distance. She was too practical to admit it, but she was afraid she’d break the spell.

“What do you expect?” Ellie asked him. “She lost her mother a couple of months ago, she’s been through hell, and she came here with nothing but the clothes on her back and what she could carry in a bag. And frankly, dear ol’ socially inept brother of mine, you’re always watching her like you want to carry her off to your lair. Lighten up. She loves you. I feel it like a big warm blanket every time I’m around her. But she needs to get her bearings.”

Jake retreated. He and Samantha were suddenly awkward with each other, a shyness he’d never expected. Father cautioned him needlessly about the natural aftereffects of stress and grief; her fragile emotions were no mystery to Jake. He was content to sit with her in the company of her sister and his family. Mother found her anxiously scrutinizing a torn quilt as if it were wounded. Samantha was soon ensconced on the living room couch, Mother’s sewing kit beside her
and the quilt in her expert hands. She had found her therapy.

Charlotte prowled the kitchen, watching Mother cook until Ellie sensed her wistfulness and whispered to Mother that Charlotte needed something to do. The moment Mother handed her a spatula, Charlotte brightened, and from then on the kitchen was her sanctuary.

Jake disappeared the morning the ice began melting and the roads were passable. He returned late that afternoon with the knuckles of his right hand raw and swollen.

Samantha saw him before anyone else, and immediately noticed. “What did you do?” she asked, and for the first time since the night she’d arrived, she took his hand.

“I drove to Durham and found Tim. I hit him only once, but I think I broke his jaw. I told him I’d kill him if he did anything to either of you again.”

She didn’t look surprised. She studied him, frowning mildly. He knew she was measuring him against the image she loved, trying to decide how much the two overlapped. “You should have taken me with you,” she said finally.

Concern blanked out his intuition. For a second he couldn’t judge her feelings. “So you could have stopped me?” he asked wearily. “I’m not good with people. I wouldn’t have known how to get my point across with words. But I’ll try to do better.”

“No. I mean so you could have held his arms while I hit him.”

She raised his hand to her face and carefully pressed her cheek to his bruised knuckles, looked up at him tenderly, then quickly released his hand and moved away.

Jake was speechless—not an uncommon circumstance for him—but he realized suddenly that the awkward times were only a phase in getting acquainted like regular people, like digging patiently through rocky earth because eventually the pure, sweet prize would find its way into your hands.

They were going to be all right with each other.

Chapter
            Eighteen
 

E
verything had its place, its harmony, and Jake was wrong to think he could ignore it. Clara muttered darkly as she sprinkled dried horse manure like a tonic among the sleepy green shoots of her spring flower beds.

Clara was mad at him, so during the two months since Sammie’s arrival in the Cove she’d stayed away. But others in Cawatie didn’t. They were too curious about the Raincrows’ crazy behavior, awed by the idea that anyone would openly snatch Alexandra’s nieces away from her. How had they managed it? No one knew. Secrets were like new spring plants—people fertilized them with gossip and hoped they’d bloom.

Clara had sorted through the chatter for small, trustworthy clues to the situation. Sarah Raincrow showed off new curtains and drapes Samantha had made for her and
proudly said there wasn’t an unmended shirt, sheet, quilt, or tablecloth in her house. She said she never had to cook another meal, not with Charlotte in her kitchen. She said she’d never seen two girls more determined not to be dependent on anyone.

Sammie Ryder knows that anything they give her just draws the family deeper into trouble
, Clara had decided.
Jake thought she’d move right in and forget my warnings
.

Clara had also heard Sammie had been trying for two months to find a job at the shops in Pandora, but no one would hire her. They gave excuses, but the truth was as clear to Clara as the creek that flowed past her garden.

Alexandra had put the word out. No one in town dared hire her runaway niece.

What had Jake expected—that none of Clara’s warnings mattered? That he could thumb his nose at a ravenmocker and then go happily on his way?

She flung the last of the manure on her flower bed.

The world had been put right as far as Sarah was concerned. The tradition that had meant so much to the Vanderveers and Raincrows had survived despite Alexandra; the ruby belonged to Ellie, as it should, and Ellie had taken it back to the university, wearing it in a small leather pouch around her neck.

Charlotte was finishing up the academic year at Pandora’s high school, and seemed to have settled happily under Sarah’s wing. Sarah liked fussing over her; Charlotte was a typical teenager—full of questions and self-doubt, eager for guidance in ways neither Jake or Ellie, with their unusual aplomb, had never needed Sarah.

And Sammie—Sammie was a strong, quiet, inordinately wise young woman, and if Sarah had had any doubt that Sammie deserved Jake’s devotion, getting to know Sammie had erased it.

Sarah wedged the phone between her ear and shoulder and anxiously drummed the tip of a paintbrush on
her easel. “Hi. Have they been by the office? Have they called yet?”

“They’re buying a used car, not negotiating the federal budget,” Hugh answered drolly.

“It’s more than a car. It’s another twig in their nest.”

“If they were buying it together, I might agree with you. But it’s Sammie’s car, bought from her own savings. I’m afraid I haven’t seen much sign of nest-building in the past two months.”

Sarah huffed into the phone. “What do you think they do during those long walks they take every day? My dear old boy, do you recall what
we
did when we were dating? We didn’t just walk.”

“My dear old girl, I have very vivid memories of what we did. And that’s why I grilled our son about their nature hikes just the other day.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Father-son business,” he answered gruffly. “Confidential.”

“Well?”

“They just talk. Believe it or not.”

“Now, look, I know they’re both as prim as old maids, but I’ve watched them trade too many moon-eyed looks to think they haven’t—”

“He says she’s still in mourning. That it wouldn’t feel right, at the moment, to do more than talk.”

“I know how Sammie thinks. She admitted to me that she suspects Alexandra is behind the cold shoulder she’s gotten from every shopowner in town. Damn Alexandra’s time. I’m telling you, Sammie isn’t just in mourning for her mother—she’s afraid she’ll be a burden around Jake’s neck.”

“Good Lord, she’s got no reason to feel like a charity case. She’s mended every piece of clothing we own. She’s made new curtains for every window of our house—and Jake’s too. She made Charlotte a whole new wardrobe to replace what they left at Alexandra’s. She gives Charlotte an allowance and insists on giving you money for groceries.” He paused. “You’ve got to keep Charlotte from
cooking for us. It may be good therapy for her, but I’ve gained ten pounds.”