Tabitha: Bride of Missouri (American Mail-Order Bride 24)

Tabitha: Bride of Missouri

by Amelia C. Adams

To my fantastic fans—your encouragement means more to me than you will ever know.

***

I’m so grateful for my beta readers—Bobbie Sue, Cissie, Erin, Jennifer, Mary, Tracy H., Tracy L., and my husband—you are all wonderful! And to my street team—you’re the best cheerleaders ever.

Table of Contents:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter One

Atwater, Missouri

September 1890

Tabitha Phillips stepped off the train in Atwater, Missouri, and looked around. Once upon a time, she’d told herself she’d never come back here, but that wasn’t the way fate had chosen to deal its hand. After two years of living on her own and taking care of herself, now she would have to rely on her relatives again—relatives she didn’t like, and who didn’t like her.

It wasn’t that Clara and Herbert Wilcox were bad people—no, they were the cream of the crop, the salt of the earth, and the pillars of their community. But Clara had always thought of her young cousin as a burden, and while she had taken Tabitha in out of Christian charity, she had never enjoyed the task. Chances were, she wouldn’t enjoy it this time, either.

The textile mill in Massachusetts had been an excellent place for Tabitha to work. The owner had always seemed odd, but Roberta, her manager, had been a fair and kind person, and grew to become one of Tabitha’s friends. She had bonded with Hope, Trinity, Lilly, and Isabella, the girls who worked alongside her, and she was happy living in a small boardinghouse. Her life hadn’t been elegant by any means, but it had been her own. With the fire that destroyed the mill, that independent life had been destroyed as well.

“Tabitha? Little Tabitha, is that you?”

With a smile pasted on her face, Tabitha turned to greet the older woman who had bustled up behind her on the train platform. “Hello, Mrs. Smith. It’s good to see you again.”

The woman tsked her tongue. “Look at you, all grown up. I almost didn’t recognize you, but then I thought to myself, that has to be Tabitha. No one else has such pretty hair. And sure enough, it
is
you! Why, I’m so glad you’ve come back. Our little town has missed you! In fact, I’m quite positive I know of several young men who have
especially
missed you.” She winked as though revealing a tremendous secret.

Tabitha didn’t want to hear about the young men. Before she left two years previously, it had been nothing but a long string of boys on the doorstep, and none of them could hold a decent conversation. One of them was annoyed that Clara didn’t keep a spittoon in the parlor, and another had the most irritating habit of constantly polishing his spectacles. No, the young men of Atwater didn’t hold Tabitha’s interest in the slightest, but that was all right. She wasn’t interested in marriage at this point in her life. If she were, maybe she would have become a mail-order bride, like her friends from the mill.

“So, you’ll be working at the post office with Clara, then?” Mrs. Smith went on. “I always thought you were especially good at it. Why, you could make something as mundane as sending a letter downright exciting!” She hooked her elbow through Tabitha’s confidingly and winked, her short eyelashes barely brushing her cheeks. “And I just know the young men will feel the same way!”

Tabitha needed to put an end to this immediately before the woman started filling out a dance card for her. “Mrs. Smith, I should let you in on a secret,” she said, patting the hand that lay on her arm. “I’m not interested in courting right now.”

Mrs. Smith blinked several times. “Not interested in courting? But my dear, you’re . . . let’s see. You’d be twenty by now, wouldn’t you? Isn’t it high time you found yourself a husband? I read the most interesting article the other day. It seems that frogs can live from ten to twelve years. Now, that’s quite good for an animal, but imagine—if we as humans only lived that long, we’d have to take getting married a lot more seriously! We wouldn’t have time to waste!”

Tabitha opened her mouth, but no words would come out. “Frogs?” she finally managed.

Mrs. Smith nodded vigorously. “That’s right. Fascinating, isn’t it? So, tell me, dear. Why this delay? You aren’t ill, are you?” She leaned in and whispered, “You don’t have some sort of deadly disease?”

“Oh, no, I’m fine.” Tabitha smiled, trying to look reassuring, but she was still rather startled by the mention of frogs. It had been so long since she’d seen Mrs. Smith that she’d all but forgotten that woman’s ability to ramble on about the strangest things in the world. “I just need a little time to decide what to do next. Losing my job in Massachusetts came as rather a shock, and I’m at a loss.”

“Sometimes fate is like a slingshot and snaps us in the behind when we need to get a move on,” Mrs. Smith said with a giggle. “Who’s to say that you aren’t supposed to be right here in Atwater? Maybe losing your job was a blessing in disguise to bring you home.”

“I don’t know. I suppose it might be,” Tabitha replied, although she’d never considered Atwater her home, and couldn’t imagine doing it now.

“I have just the cure for you, young lady. What you need is a kiss.”

Tabitha blinked. “I . . . beg your pardon?”
“A kiss! Surely you know what a kiss is.”

“Of course I do, but how would a kiss solve my problem?”

Mrs. Smith shook her head. “I can see that this is going to take a lot more work than I thought. You start by finding a tall, strapping fellow, maybe one with blue eyes, and then you let him plant a kiss on you. If that doesn’t cure what ails you, well, you’ve got one foot in the grave and there’s nothing to be done with you.”

Tabitha chuckled. “It’s always going to come right back to courting, isn’t it, Mrs. Smith? But what if that’s not what I need? Surely it can’t be the answer to everything.”

Mrs. Smith gave her a knowing look. “I rather think it is. I’ll make you a bargain, missy. You go find one of those men, you get one of those kisses, and you see for yourself just what magic it can do. And if it doesn’t work, come tell me.”

“And just where do I find one of those men, Mrs. Smith? I already know all the boys in town.”

“You’ve been gone for two years! You don’t think everything here stayed the same while you were gone, do you? Dear me, no. We have a lumber yard now, some new ranches on the outskirts of town, and more trains coming through than ever. We’ve restocked our man pool, dear, and it’s time you went fishing. Now, I’ve kept you too long. Be on your way, or Clara will have my hide for keeping you.”

Tabitha hid her amusement until Mrs. Smith was out of sight. Then she smiled and shook her head. Oh, gracious.

She needed to ask the station manager to have her trunk delivered to the post office. Spinning on her heel to go do just that, she stopped abruptly when she collided with a young man who had been crossing the platform behind her. He reached out and steadied her shoulders before she could topple over.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she gasped. “I should have been watching where I was going.”

He chuckled. “No harm done, miss.”

His voice was warm and mellow, and when she looked up, her breath caught. What had she just been saying to Mrs. Smith about not being interested in romance? That all seemed very silly now. This young man was possibly the most handsome one she’d ever seen. He had dark, wavy hair, green eyes, and a little dimple in his cheek. He was grinning at her, and she nearly forgot her name.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Oh. Oh, yes, I’m quite all right. Thank you.”

He dropped his hands from her shoulders and took a step back. “Have a good day,” he said, touching the brim of his cap before moving off into the crowd. She watched him as he approached the train and began pulling logs off one of the freight cars. He must work at the lumber mill.

After a moment, she pulled herself back to reality and spoke to the station master about her trunk, then picked up her skirts and began her walk to the post office. It wasn’t far from the train station—just far enough to gather her thoughts and practice saying hello to her cousin.

Should she be light and breezy? Or perhaps humble and penitent? Oh, what was the use—Clara would be unhappy to see her regardless. Tabitha didn’t know why she tried as hard as she did to win her cousin’s approval. It was a wasted effort.

Up ahead, she saw Clara sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch of the post office. They must be having a slow afternoon—Tabitha wouldn’t let herself think that her cousin might have been glad to get her telegram and would actually be waiting to welcome her. She glanced down at the dirt road beneath her feet, hoping she wasn’t kicking too much of the dust up onto her petticoats. She wanted to make the best possible impression after being away for so long.

“So, you’ve come back,” Clara said as Tabitha climbed the steps of the porch. “Couldn’t make a go of it back east, eh?”

“Hello, Clara. It’s good to see you.” Tabitha took in the woman’s knitted shawl, lined face, cotton dress—it seemed as though time had stood still here in Atwater. “Yes, the mill where I was working burned down.”

Clara shook her head. “I always thought it was foolish, chasing off after some crazy dream like that. Maybe now you’ll see for yourself. Life isn’t all about silver buttons and fancy doodads.”

Tabitha’s dress did have silver buttons on it, but she hardly considered them fancy doodads. She forced a smile onto her face. “Where’s Herbert?”

“Getting the mail from the train. It’s what we do here, if you recall. Or maybe you’ve been gone too long and forgot.” Clara dug the toes of her shoes into the floor of the porch and began rocking again, back and forth, slow and rhythmic. “Your room’s right where you left it.”

“Thank you, Clara. It’s good to be back.” Tabitha managed another smile before entering the post office and slipping through the door that separated the business from the living quarters. That had gone just about as well as she had expected.

She went up the stairs, noticing that the pictures that hung along the wall as she climbed hadn’t been changed. There was the painting her mother had done when she was twelve—a simple thing, showing an apple tree with a flock of geese under it. The geese almost looked more like small dogs, but this was one of her mother’s first attempts, so Tabitha supposed she shouldn’t be too critical.

A few steps up brought her to eye level with a photograph of her grandparents that was taken a year or two before her grandfather passed from a heart condition, his wife to follow six months later from consumption. The two looked very solemn in the picture, but Tabitha remembered them as kind and fun-loving people who put their hearts into raising their two daughters, Tabitha’s mother and Clara’s mother. As she crested the last stair, she wondered—not for the first time—what had happened in Clara’s life to make her so bitter.

A right turn at the head of the stairs brought Tabitha to the doorway of her old room. She paused, giving herself a moment before stepping back in time. She had first come to this room as a ten-year-old orphan, unable to understand why her parents were suddenly gone and why Clara must now raise her. The words “carriage accident” and “into the river” didn’t sink in for weeks—she refused to believe it because it was too horrible.

She crossed the room and touched the pink-and-white quilt that had been on her bed the first time she ever entered this room. It was a bit faded, but comforting and familiar. She remembered crying herself to sleep under this quilt far too many times, clutching the corner of it to her chest.

There was the window seat where she used to sit and watch the boys pass back and forth down below on the street. There was only one boy in town she cared anything about—Benjamin Brocklehurst—and her heart would skip a beat whenever she saw him coming. There was something so suave about the way he walked, something that made all the girls look. His dark brown hair swooped across his forehead like a bird’s wing, and his hazel eyes sparkled. But he never paid any attention to Tabitha whatsoever, and then his family moved to St. Louis. She had cried herself to sleep that night, too.

Tabitha chuckled. Gracious—all these sad memories. There was no need to be so gloomy; she had plenty of happy memories here too. Those might be a little harder to dredge up, but she’d find them. She wasn’t going to be a slave to her past. She had learned to be happy while in Massachusetts, and she would find some joy here in Missouri, too.

Just then, she heard men’s voices coming from downstairs. “You can bring it this way.”

Her trunk must have arrived from the train station. She walked over to the doorway to see Frank Giles hefting it up the stairs, his face turning red from the exertion. For some reason, Herbert wasn’t helping him, but was standing in the hallway like a landmark.

“Thank you, Frank,” Tabitha said as he set the trunk in her room. She tried to hand him a tip, but he waved it off.

“Glad to have you back in town, Tabitha.” He paused. “Although, with you so grown up now, maybe I should be calling you Miss Phillips.”

She laughed. “Oh, please no. We’re friends, and that’s how it shall always be. Calling me ‘miss’ would make me feel like a stranger.”

“Well, how about this—I call you Tabitha, and you stop trying to tip me. Friends carry things for friends, don’t they?” He raised an eyebrow.

“You’re right, and I’m sorry. I just didn’t want to presume . . .”

He waved again. “Never you mind. So, have you heard about the fall festival?”

Tabitha shook her head. “What’s that?”

“Well, this next Saturday night, there’s gonna be a dance and a dinner in the town square, and they’re gonna crown a Miss Atwater. Now that you’re back in town, you’re a shoo-in.”

“Miss Atwater? What on earth is that?”