Until Spring (30 page)

"I didn't like that man—what was his name? He had a beard and I used to joke that he looked like a pirate," Jane said, recalling him with a shudder. He had tried to make her life miserable here, she recalled. She'd led the group that opposed him.

"His name was Fenton Murdock, and I'm happy to say that we voted him out of the village council shortly after you left," Moonglow told her. "In fact, he and most of his followers left. He's driving a cab in Newark these days, I hear."

Both she and Jane laughed, and Jane's heart warmed to Moonglow's familiar, throaty laughter.

"Anyway, Fenton used to assign you to work extra hours in the village co-op's store, and when you objected and told him that serving additional hours meant you had less time to spend at your loom, he called you a troublemaker. You were outraged and appeared before the village council, calling for equitable scheduling. That made Fenton really mad, and when some of those handbags you used to make disappeared from the store and turned up in a boutique in Urbana, you suspected that he'd stolen them and passed them off as his own, pocketing money that should have been yours."

"I
remember
," Jane said excitedly. "One of the boutique's owners called here and asked to speak to the person who made those big woven handbags, and when I called her back I realized what had happened. The man she described as the creator of them was Fenton Murdock!"

"You and Fenton had a big argument, and you said you couldn't work here anymore. You said you knew of a colony of weavers in Ohio where you could work in peace and where there was a ready market for your work. So that very night—you wouldn't even wait until morning—you sat here and took your loom apart, and you packed it and everything you owned into the back of that blue van of yours, and you rode away, promising to let me know where I could reach you. And that was the last I saw of you." Moonglow's eyes brimmed with tears again.

"A loom! That's what was in the back of my blue van, Duncan! I was so worried about it that night, the night the Coke spilled!"

"The Coke spilled?" Moonglow looked confused.

Quickly Jane told her about the brief memory of Coke spilling on the carpet of her van and how she recalled trying to clean it up and being worried about the things stowed in back.

"Of course I would have been concerned about my loom," she said. "It was my livelihood. I was afraid that if something happened to it, I wouldn't be able to support myself."

"Can you remember when I left here?" Jane asked Moonglow.

Moonglow thought a moment. "It would have been in November of that year," she said.

"I was found in the ditch on November 3," Jane told her.

"I was so worried because November 10 came and went without a word from you. Sonora was three months old on that date, and you promised to call because it was her three months' birthday."

"Sonora," breathed Jane. "The baby. May I see her?"

Together the two of them tiptoed into the small nursery. It had, Jane realized, once been her own room. But her twin bed had been pushed into a corner and was piled with pillows like a couch, and Sonora's crib was where the bed used to be. And asleep in the crib was Sonora, sucking her thumb.

When they were back in the living room, Jane clutched Duncan's hand excitedly. "The nursery used to be my room, Duncan. I remembered it! And Sonora—she's beautiful, Moonglow. I helped deliver her, didn't I? You wanted a home birth, and I was the one who went to get the midwife."

"In a pouring rain," Moonglow agreed, finishing her sentence with that laugh of hers. "And you coached my breathing."

"It was why I moved in here, wasn't it? Your husband ran away with another woman, and you needed someone to help you pay expenses because you were going to have a baby. And I moved here from—" Jane faltered and couldn't remember any more.

"From one of the studio apartments over the general store. There was a waiting list for them, and we both thought it would be a good idea for you to live with me because it would make the studio available for someone else. As you said, I needed the help, and you were going to help me bring up the baby. You always loved babies, Celeste."

Jane grew suddenly quiet. "I can't get used to being called Celeste," she said.

"It's the only name I've ever known for you," Moonglow told her. "I remember when you came here, fresh out of a dead-end cubicle job and so eager to make a living with your weaving."

"Me? In an office job?" Jane could manage only a vague recollection of a huge office filled with cubicle after cubicle, and glaring fluorescent lights overhead, and people who spent their lunch hours speculating about the love lives of celebrities. She had never fitted in.

"Yes, and there was nothing to hold you there, no relatives except that old aunt of yours. She practically turned you out of her house when you told her that all those old newspapers piled up inside were a fire hazard and that she ought to get rid of them."

"Aunt Hildegarde," Jane said, calling to mind a sparrow-like woman who had insisted that Jane come to live with her after her parents died and then proceeded to make Jane's life miserable with her irrational outbursts.

"You got a letter from her doctor after you left here. I opened it because when I saw the doctor's name on the return address, I thought it might have something to do with your disappearance. She died in a nursing home. I didn't know how to let you know," Moonglow said.

Jane was silent for a moment, wishing that she could have done something to help her aunt, but they had parted on bad terms. That much she did remember.

"I'm sorry," Moonglow said softly.

Jane shook her head. "It's okay," she said with a sigh. For so long she'd wondered if she had any family, and it was a deep disappointment to know that Aunt Hildegarde was gone even though the two of them had never liked each other.

"Why didn't you report Jane missing?" Duncan asked.

Moonglow looked uncomfortable. "I did, but the local cops didn't take me seriously. They said that Celeste was a grown woman who left here of her own free will, and that if it was her choice to disappear, there was nothing to be done about it. The police have never had a high opinion of our community, I'm sorry to say. I think they thought I was another nut job like Fenton Murdock, who managed to get arrested for disturbing the peace on a couple of occasions." She took Jane's hand. "I looked for you on Facebook. I kept calling you on your phone. I texted and emailed but had no idea if the messages went through. I'm so sorry, dear friend. So, so sorry."

The two women embraced, holding each other for a long time, and by the time they separated, all three of them had tears in their eyes.

Moonglow blotted at her eyes. "Look at me," she said. "I'm forgetting my manners. I've baked fresh gingerbread. You'll have some, won't you? It will be good to talk some more."

They trooped into the kitchen, Jane and Moonglow arm in arm, and sat around a round oak table, eating as they pieced together Jane's story.

"What I can't figure out," Duncan said, "is how Jane got into Carlton Jones's field."

"I think she was somehow abducted on the road," Moonglow hypothesized. "Somebody hit her on the head and left her for dead."

"But why? And where is her van? It's hard to hide a big blue van," Duncan replied.

Jane tried in vain to remember driving away from Shanti Village in the van. She tried to recall if she had stopped anywhere along the way. It was no use. She couldn't recall anything about the trip.

"If I was going to Ohio, I was a long way from there when they found me outside Tyree, Illinois," she reminded them.

"Whoever kidnapped you headed in that direction," Moonglow offered. "That makes sense."

"If only I could
remember
," Jane said. Her memory loss was even more frustrating now that she could recall so many other things. She wondered if she would ever find out exactly what had happened in the time between the moment she left Shanti Village and the morning that Carlton and Ollie Jones found her in the ditch.

One thing she did know after talking with Moonglow. She was not now nor had she ever been married.

"You almost got engaged once," Moonglow told her. "It was to a guy who worked in that office with you. He didn't have any appreciation of your weaving, and you finally decided that you couldn't spend your life with someone who admitted that the highlight of his year was watching the Super Bowl. That was one of the reasons you sought us out at Shanti Village."

Jane glanced at Duncan. He had gone limp with relief. She smiled at him, and he rewarded her with a wide grin. He reached over beneath the table and squeezed her hand.

Moonglow wouldn't hear of their going out for dinner. Instead she prepared a vegetarian meal in a wok, and even though Duncan had misgivings about eating it, he managed to down two full plates.

Later Jane played with Sonora, marveling over all the words she could say, and Sonora, now a bouncing twenty months old, brought all of her favorite toys out of the closet and laid them one by one in Jane's lap until Jane was almost hidden under a heap of rubber duckies and fluffy stuffed animals. Duncan thought how lovely Jane looked with her face pressed against the baby's silky hair, the tiny clutching fingers wrapped around her thumb.

At that moment he was supremely thankful that Jane had no husband and children to whom she must return because he,
he
wanted to be the one to give her children. He could imagine it—little replicas of Jane and himself leading llamas around the ranch. That reminded him that he was supposed to call Rooney. He went out to the car, where he'd left his cell phone.

Duncan's conversation with Rooney left him worried. Rooney sounded overwhelmed by dealing with the problems of running the ranch as well as holding the headstrong Mary Kate in check. It was, he knew, time to go home, and he made reservations for the next day on a flight to Cheyenne.

Jane and Moonglow parted tearfully after Jane promised to stay in touch, leaving the Placid Valley Ranch address, phone number, and Duncan's email address in case Moonglow needed to reach her.

"I'll be there until spring," Jane promised Moonglow.

And beyond,
Duncan thought to himself, imagining Jane in summer, with her hair bound back by a bright satin ribbon, riding along beside him on Diggory, the horse that he'd decided should be hers. He tried to catch Jane's eye, but she was handing Sonora back to her mother and didn't see. He couldn't wait until they could be alone.

Duncan found an upscale hotel in Terre Haute where he checked them into the best room in the house and, still hungry after his experimental foray into vegetarianism, ordered a steak from room service. He ordered one for Jane, too, thinking to celebrate the end of their search. But when they sat at the table across from each other, the candle that the waiter had lighted with such a flourish casting a golden glow on their faces, she appeared distant, thoughtful.
She seems,
he thought with a certain amount of disbelief,
like someone I don't know very well.

The thought, once it wormed its way into his consciousness, wouldn't go away. Maybe it was because today he had seen Jane in a place that was totally different from the surroundings—his ranch—where he had first come to know her. Shanti Village was a rarefied kind of environment, a place for artsy-craftsy people, the kind of people with whom he had never associated. In fact, all that talk about Fenton Murdock and selling handbags to boutiques seemed to have little to do with the Jane Rhodes he knew.

The
Celeste Norton whom he knew, he corrected himself. Only he didn't think he would ever be able to call her by that name. To him she would always be Jane. Dear, sweet, wonderful Jane. He smiled at her across the table, a little light-headed from the champagne he'd ordered. But she wasn't smiling. Now she was talking animatedly about the day's events, hardly noticing his own silence.

"After all this time, it's amazing to find the place where I belong. It felt so right sitting there in Moonglow's house and playing with her baby," she said, alight with excitement. "I loved living there when I was a member of that community, and I'm so sorry I've missed this much of Sonora's life." Her face was earnest, and he had never seen her so animated.

Duncan stopped in midchew and forced himself to swallow. Jane's affinity for these people and that lifestyle was a development for which he hadn't prepared himself. "You don't have any urge to return to Shanti Village, do you?" he asked, the words catching in his throat. He had to ask.

"I don't know," she said. "It's all so new."

The faraway light came back to her eyes, her mind clearly drifting elsewhere. All her tension seemed to be vibrating at a new and higher frequency. Her sensibilities were focused on Shanti Village, he could tell. While they were there and visiting with her old friend, he hadn't realized that the place had such a strong attraction for her.

Suddenly Duncan couldn't eat any more. "You're coming back to the ranch with me tomorrow, aren't you?" he asked abruptly.

The air fell deadly quiet, and it seemed like an eternity until her eyes lifted to his.

"I don't know," she said again, a forlorn note creeping into her tone. "I just don't know."

Duncan set down his fork and pushed back his chair from the table. He missed the barn, his usual refuge when things weren't going right, and he felt as though he might be sick. Things had been going well, and he'd felt terrific about their future. Now he felt a tremendous letdown.