The House Near the River (12 page)

She kept chattering as she always did when she was excited or nervous so Angie tuned her out, sitting David on his feet and looking him over for injury. Other than scrapes on his knees where he’d hit the ground, he seemed in good shape. She looked at Amanda whose mouth still moved though Angie had tuned out the sound. What could she say to explain David’s presence?

The answer was obvious. Nothing. How could she explain a brother who had not aged after being missing for fifteen years
?
She had her own theory that he’d been in some kind of stasis until a few days ago when he showed up at the Harpers
, but she wasn’t about to suggest that wild idea to Amanda
.

“How long have I been gone, Amanda? “

“
Nearly two weeks,” her cousin responded. “Twelve days and part of another to be exact. When I got your message the next morning after we were supposed to meet, I came straight out and found your car. I thought you’d been kidnapped
and maybe even murdered.” Her excitable cousin sighed gustily. “Thank God, you weren’t murdered.

“Anyhow,” she continued. “I called the sheriff’s office and they came out to do a search, though they didn’t have any better luck than I
’d
had. Then we called your dad and he came right out.”

“Who’s looking after the Prairie
House
?” Angie questioned immediately. She and Dad couldn’t both be away from the
b
ed and
b
reakfast at the same time.

Amanda shrugged. “Who cares? It didn’t matter. We were only thinking about you.”

“You shouldn’t have told Dad,” Angie accused angrily.

Amanda stared at her. “Have you lost your mind? I’m not supposed to tell your dad you’d gone missing?” She studied her cousin seriously, then her gaze fell once more on David. “You still haven’t told me who that little boy is.”

She didn’t see any way around the truth. “He’s David.”

“David!” Amanda glared at her.

“My brother.”

“Angie, David disappeared over fifteen years ago. He’d be eighteen.”

“He’s David,” it was the one point Angie would insist on in the questioning that lay ahead. She wouldn’t explain. She couldn’t defend. But he had to be David if she and Dad and Grandma were going to keep him. And a frightened little boy must be with his family.

She looked around. Her car was gone, but a big red pickup was parked in the drive. “Are the police here now?”

“No, I just came out, hoping . . .” Amanda stopped her explanation. “Honey, I promised to get you to your dad right away. He’s at my house. But what do we do about this little boy? I don’t want to be accused of kidnapping.”

“He’s David,” Angie insisted firmly.

David frowned at her. “Manda,” he said after a lo
ng look. As with his sister, he
was facing a familiar face many years older than the one he remembered, but he still saw the familiar person within. He’d stopped crying, though he clung to Angie’s hand.
“

We’re going to see Dad,” she told him.

“Daddy,” he affirmed, looking pleased. “Mommy?”

That hurt. She would leave that to her father to explain.

Amanda took them to her pickup without further argument. The vehicle had an extended cab with luxurious back and front seats, but Angie placed David between them on the front seat, fastening seat belts self-consciously.

“Zoom, zoom,” the little boy said with a grin.

“You bet,”
Amanda
agreed, starting the pickup with an unnecessarily loud roar that make the child laugh. “He sure looks like David,” she said.

“He is.”

Ama
nda roared down the drive and to the paved highway. “Angie, my two little girls are older than this child.”

Angie just looked at her, her mouth set in a firm line.

It was late in the day, approximately the same time of day in which she’d gotten out of the Nash she’d rode home from the refuge in and, though she wasn’t certain, she felt that the amount of time she’d been missing according to Amanda
might be the
actual time she’d spent with the Harper family in 1946.

But David was still three after being missing all those years. Things didn’t fit together.

Amanda took them to her home on an attractive
residential street
in nearby Elk City, a town both girls had frequently visited as children. Angie didn’t pay much attention until they climbed from the pickup and she saw her father and other people waiting in the doorway.

“Dad,” she said, running to him, but still holding on to David’s hand. She threw herself into his arms for a fierce hug, then stepped back, making no introductions as she watched David’s  face.

She had to remind herself that for her brother only days had passed while once again he faced a relative unaccountably aged. Clarence Ward looked more like this child’s grandfather than his father.

Tears rolled silently down his face as he waited for the boy to make the first move.

It didn’t take David long. “Daddy,” he said and stepped up to be lifted and hugged. His small arms twined around the man’s neck.

“David,” his father whispered hoarsely.

For long moments only the three of them stood within that circle. Then when a man’s voice said, “Are you saying this child is your son, Mr. Ward?” she stepped back to take stock.

She wasn’t well acquainted  with her cousin’s husband, a nice looking man in glasses, and she hardly knew her two small daughters, who looked close in age, perhaps four and six. Two other men, both of them in uniform, were present. One wore  the uniform of a state trooper, the other’s badge marked him as sheriff. He was a slim, aging man who looked nothing like Clemmie’s friend Tobe, who had been sheriff last she noticed.

The sheriff was the one who had spoken. “Sir,” he said again, “You claim this child is your son.”

Angie looked accusingly at Amanda, who must have been texting these officials even as she drove them in.

Dad looked at Angie. She shrugged and he smiled ever so slightly. “I will swear anywhere you like, Sheriff, that this boy is my son and this young woman is my daughter who has been missing. I will even take a polygraph test if you wish. “

“That might be necessary,” the sheriff was unbending. “In the meantime, I will need to take the boy into custody and place  him in temporary foster care.”

“No!” Angie and Clarence Ward said the word together.

“My attorney,” Clarence Ward asserted, “is on his way right  now. You will take no action until he arrives.”

For an instant, Angie wondered who he was talking about, then recalled that both her parents had grown up out here and their contacts  went deep. No doubt some lawyer who was also a boyhood friend had been  summoned.

She just hoped it did some good. David didn’t need the trauma of being sent to strangers.  The boy seemed oddly comfortable now that he was back in  his father’s arms. “Daddy,” he said now.
“
I’m hungry.”

Clarence grinned. “How about a peanut butter sandwich with raspberry jam,” he said.

David grinned back, leaning confidently against his father.  “My favorite.”

Ignoring the others Clarence went in the doorway of his niece’s house. Amanda followed, “I don’t think I have any raspberry, David. Would blackberry do as well?
My mother made it.
”

On shaking legs, Angie followed them, turning before she closed the door to summon the others inside.

Several weeks passed before they were allowed to go home. Clarence Ward passed a polygraph test, though his daughter did not submit to one. The most convincing evidence was that of DNA. Though nobody understood it, the evidence was that the small boy found at the old Ward farm was the son of his father, grandson of his grandmother and cousin of his cousins.

Neither Angie or her father made any explanations other than the claim that David belonged to them and, of course, Angie could make no DNA claim since she had  joined the family not by birth, but by adoption.

Nobody else stepped forward to claim the child. No trace of such a missing child was found, so watchfully, cautiously Clarence was allowed to return home with his daughter and son.

Angie had a fair idea of just how much they would be under the eye of officialdom for a while, but supposed that those persons had developed their own ideas about what had happened and they had to do with dad having fathered a second, much more recent son than David. She couldn’t much blame them. Human nature demanded a believable explanation.

They drove to Texas with a feeling of release, nevertheless, passing along the northern top of the state from Wichita Falls through numerous small towns, stopping briefly at the assisted living center in the small border city of Sherman where Grandma lived now in a comfortable assisted living center.

Naturally they had talked by phone
and Grandma had been told about David, but it wasn’t until the tall, thin old lady looked up and saw them approaching that she said with obvious conviction, “but it is David.”

The boy, who seemed accustomed now to the unexplainable aging of his relatives, went readily into her arms. He had been Grandma’s pet and was ready enough to take up that role again.

Angie was disturbed to see that her grandmother showed the strain of the past weeks and guessed that having a missing granddaughter had not contributed to her good health. She took her turn at being hugged and patted and felt almost that she was back home
again. The inward ache at the absence of her other family, so hopelessly lost in the past was stilled for a moment.

This was where she belonged, where she was meant to be.

They hated to break off the visit with Grandma, but finally they went on to the
b
ed and
b
reakfast that had been home and business to their family since they’d had to rebuild their lives after the loss of David.
It was late in the day and the child was visibly tired. He sat huddled in his father’s lap while Angie drove them home, thinking that it was odd that neither her father or her grandmother had asked her many questions.

They seemed to think that getting David back was answer enough for everything, but she couldn’t understand how they could be so lacking in curiosity.

The Prairie
House
, the
b
ed and
b
reakfast her family owned and operated, had once been a country school house. Made of red brick by the WPA during the 30s, it had been large enough to house a good-sized populace of young
st
ers through eighth grade and been closed down in the late 80s when the children were bused into the nearby town of Van Alstyne for school.

The building had been basically sound, but very shabby when her parents bought it. Mom had still been lackluster, all her fire and energy gone, but Dad had at least pretended to enthusiasm as they refurbished the building for commercial purposes and rebuilt their own lives.

“It’ll be like a visit to the farm for city families,” Dad had told her. Accordingly when the building was mostly finished, he’d purchased a Jersey cow, two goats and a flock of hens and adverti
s
ed the place as the Prairie
House
, a visit back in time. At first business had been slow, but had built gradually and these days it was rare not to have fairly regular guests, most of them with small children particularly interested in the farm animals and the old equipment Clarence had acquired in an attempt to portray farming the way it had been when his grandfather was a boy.

When Mom died,
Angie had feared that her father would soon follow. She’d given up her job in Dallas and moved back out to help with the running of the bed and breakfast. To her surprise she hadn’t much missed her featureless cubicle
among
a batch of
systems engineers
, though she had felt some loss of the
excellent
salary that was hardly replaced by her income from the bed and breakfast. She liked being her own boss and planning her own days.

Now she was eager to be back home again and was sure that
Ivy and Edie,
two
sisters
who assisted them, would be as glad to be relieved of some of their duties.

“This is home
now
, David,” Dad said.

The little boy blinked sleepily. “Momm
y
here?” he asked.

He still continued to asked for his mother though Clarence had told him that Mommy was in Heaven and wouldn’t come back. Angie supposed that idea was too much to take in for a little boy who had lost so much. Sometimes he asked for Clemmie or one of the children and when he suffered some small hurt, he begged for Matthew as though he was the only one who could provide safety and healing.

Each experience was heart-breaking to Clarence who daily mourned the fact that his wife was not there to share his delight at David’s return, and for Angie, who had not only lost her mother, but those who were hopelessly anchored in a past she could not reach. With each mile they’d driven from western Oklahoma she was more distant from Matthew and his family.