My Way Home (St.Gabriel Series Book 1) (St. Gabriel Series) (42 page)

I was trying to mind my own business, but finally, I snapped. Sara and I were making lunch for the work crew and Dawn came into the kitchen and asked, “Where’s Frank? I need to go into town to pick up a few things.”

“We’re trying to get some work done here, Dawn. Why don’t you strap on an apron and earn your keep. Frank is here to help, not to be your personal chauffer and whatever else.”

I had thought Dawn’s armor was impenetrable, but she got a sincerely wounded look on her face and her eyes filled with tears. “I know you think I’m a joke, Cammy, but I love Frank. And I know you want Frank to be with Sara, but it’s not up to you.”

“Actually, Dawn, I don’t want him to be with either of you.”

Then Sara blurted it out, “I’m pregnant.”

“What?” I felt the blood drain from my face.

“Cam, I’m pregnant.”

“Frank?”

Sara nodded.

Dawn clenched her jaw and then said, “Oh, well, that’s convenient, now isn’t it? Whatever it takes, huh, Sara?”

“Don’t worry, Dawn, I’m not going to have it.”

“Sara?” I looked at her, and she looked so frightened.

Dawn burst into tears, pushed a chair into the table and stormed out of the room.

I sat Sara down, and she dropped her head to the table and cried.

“Sara, does Frank know?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t you want a baby?”

Sara sat up and sobbed. “I did when I was married.”

“You were married?”

She nodded. “After two years I told Chris, my husband, I was ready to start a family, and he told me he didn’t want children, never really had. We went round and round about it for another year. Finally, we decided we wanted different things, and we split up. That’s when I came to the island to work for the summer.”

“Sara, why haven’t you ever told me?”

“It was a long time ago. I don’t even feel like it was my life or that person was me. Cammy, I tried to get pregnant during the last year of my marriage. I was so stupid, what a mess I would have been in, huh? Kinda like now. I had really come to believe I couldn’t have a baby. Wrong again.”

“You don’t want a baby?”

“No, not now and not like this.”

“You have to tell Frank, Sara.”

“I can’t, he’ll think I want something from him. I don’t.”

“You’ll tell him you don’t. I’ll tell him. But he has a right to know.”

Dawn walked back into the kitchen. Without saying a word, she took Sara by the hand, led her into the dining room and shut the door. They were in there for over an hour. When they came out, Sara didn’t talk anymore about ending her pregnancy and Dawn packed her bags, asked Marni to take her to the island airport and she left.

Another week went by and Sara hadn’t told Frank. He was packing to go back to Alaska the next morning, and I asked her, “Are you going to tell him?”

“Would you?”

“I will, Sara, but I think you should.”

Sara told Frank that night and he still left in the morning. She didn’t tell me how Frank reacted to the news or how she felt that Frank had left, but I know she was devastated. I think she would have talked to me about it if he hadn’t been my brother.

I was really mad at Frank. There had been times when I had been disappointed in him, I didn’t always understand him, but I had never been ashamed of my brother.

Sara had said she didn’t want anything from Frank. When she said it, I knew she didn’t mean it. She wanted everything from him—love, commitment, and she wanted him to want their baby. I wanted Sara’s pregnancy to be filled with the happiness and wonder I had felt when I had Paul and Janie growing inside me, but she just felt abandoned and alone.

“Race and I are going to help you. We’ve been ready for grandchildren since Janie graduated from high school. We both love babies.” I set my hand on her belly. “And this baby is going to be so loved, Sara.”

During those first weeks after learning of Sara’s pregnancy, we kept busy getting the lodge ready to reopen. We celebrated Sara’s and Race’s birthdays, but nothing had the joy it should have.

I went with Sara to her first doctor’s visit, and we heard the baby’s heartbeat. It was a turning point. Sara and Marni began researching names, and when I showed Sara a modified plan to turn the attic into a small apartment with a nursery, she hugged me and said, “No baby will ever have a better view.”

We reopened the lodge
in late September and decided to keep it open until the end of October to recoup some of our loss of income. Sara and I were setting up the breakfast buffet one morning when Frank walked into the dining room. He stopped just inside the doorway and looked at Sara.

“I’ve got this,” I told her.

I finished serving breakfast with tears rolling down my cheeks. “I tear like crazy when I cut onions. It just wipes me out,” I told the guests, which is true.

That night Sara and Frank knocked on the door of the cottage and told us their plans. They sat on the sofa, and Frank was holding Sara’s hands and looking at her, then at us, and back at her. “We'll stay on the island until the season is over, and then we’ll go to Washington for the winter and then back to Alaska in the summer. I’ve already arranged to be based out of Seattle for a while.”

I looked at Sara. “That’s what you want?”

She nodded.

And selfish me, my sadness that I would not be with Sara when she had the baby and we would not have a little one around in the spring, overshadowed the happiness I should have been feeling for two of my favorite people. And I was disappointed when I found out they weren’t getting married.

“He asked me to marry him. I said no,” Sara told me when I asked her about it.

“Sara, why?”

“Because I don’t want him marrying me because he feels he has to.”

“I know Frank, Sara. He doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

“He wants me and the baby. He says he loves me. I really believe he does, Cammy. That’s enough for me.”

I call that time my season of letting go.
Let it go, let it go
, became my new mantra. We found out Paul had a girlfriend we hadn’t met, and he didn’t seem to be too anxious about introducing her to us. Janie hadn’t said too much when she found out Jeremy was working at the lodge, but I think it made her feel pressured. She called one night after he had left for school, and even though we were separated by hundreds of miles, I could feel her holding my face in her hands.

“I care about Jeremy, Mom. I really like him, I do, but I don’t feel about him the way he feels about me. I know that. I hope you and Daddy are not disappointed.”

“Janie, don’t you ever give away your heart to please someone else.”

“Even if it means I’ll be with David?”

“Yes,” I told her and then told myself,
Let it go, let it go.

A Basket of Rhubarb

A logical explanation exists for everything and if you wait long enough, it will eventually be revealed. The fire in the lodge, which exposed our ghosts for who they really were, was a prime example of this. And when something doesn’t make sense, there is something you don’t know. And there was plenty I didn’t know.

I was in the garden, basically feeling sorry for myself. Sara and Frank would be moving in a few weeks, and I was going to miss the birth of my niece or nephew and miss my friend. Marni was going back to her job in California, and Jeremy was back at school. It would just be George, Race and me again for the winter.

George, my mind wandered. What about George? Lucy was the reason he would leave the lodge the previous winter and not tell us where he was going. He went to be with her during the big storms, but what about him and Celia Alexander, and what about the lodge?

George knew why the owners of the lodge sold to me for less than half of what Stephen Alexander had offered them. He had to know.

I was feeling a bit ornery and hungry for some answers, so I pulled out some large stalks of rhubarb, cut off the leaves and filled a basket full. I carried it to George’s front door and knocked. His door wasn’t closed tight, so I pushed it open a crack and called, “George, George, its Cammy, George.”

No answer.

I would set the rhubarb on his kitchen table and leave, maybe look at the place as I walked through. George’s place was laid out just like Rhubarb Cottage. I entered into the room with a small eat-in-kitchen and a small living room with a stone fireplace. A short hall led to a bedroom, which I did not go into.

The home was tidy and simply furnished. In the kitchen a small table and three chairs sat in the corner. In the sitting area a sofa, chair, and a coffee table were arranged in front of a window on the front wall. Against the far wall was a narrow table that was lined with photographs.

I scanned the faces in the frames. They were mostly black and whites but there was a color photo of George and Lucy that looked like it had been taken in front of her cottage and one of Lucy when she was probably twenty years younger. She was wearing the same straw hat.

There were two photos of young girls, teenagers, both black and whites. One was a stunning dark haired young woman with dark eyes and Celia Alexander’s smile. The other girl was beautiful too. She had long blonde hair, light eyes, Lucy’s eyes but they were different. Next to these was a black-and-white photo that stopped me cold. It was of a woman who looked like me. She looked like Janie, and she looked like me. Her head was tilted to the side, her long dark hair hung in loose waves over one shoulder, and she flashed a movie star smile. I picked it up and stared at the eyes.

“UhHmm.”

The sound startled me. I dropped the frame and it landed in the basket of rhubarb I had hanging on my arm. I turned around, and George was standing in the doorway.

“Oh, George, you scared me. I’m sorry to have just come in, but I was here to see if you wanted some rhubarb. The door wasn’t closed. I was going to take it to the kitchen and leave it for you and…” I took the frame from the basket and held it up. “George, who is this?”

He didn’t answer.

“George, who is it?” I felt an intense impatience well up inside me, and it took away any guilt I might have felt for snooping. “Okay, George, I’m trying not to be disrespectful, but I want to know who this is and why you won’t to tell me who it is.”

He still just stood there.

I set the basket of rhubarb on the floor and dropped my butt onto the sofa. “George, I’m not leaving here until you tell me who this is.”

Still nothing, he was tenacious.

“I hope you want a roommate. I’m not kidding. I’m staying right here until you tell me.”

“Stay here,” he said.

That’s just what I told you I was going to do,
I thought.
Is he trying to work some kind of reverse psychology on me?
And then he left.

After a while I was wondering,
Did he mean stay here on the sofa or stay here at the lodge? Where did he go? And who is the woman in the photo that I’m staring at?

With his hands gripped on the doorframe, Race leaned into the room and said, “There you are. I’ve been looking for you. Sara wants to know if you need anything else from Kipsey. She and Frank are getting ready to take off.”

Then it seemed to hit him that it was a wee bit unusual for me to be sitting on George’s sofa. We had been living on the property for over a year and neither of us had ever been in George’s house.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure.” I held the photo out to him.

He stepped into the room, took it from me, and studied it. “Who is this?”

“That’s what I wanted to know.”

“Back up here a minute. What are you doing here, and where did you get this photo?”

“I came over here to talk to George about the lodge. I decided I was going to find out once and for all why the owners of the lodge sold to me for less than what Stephen Alexander had offered them. I knocked and he didn’t answer. His door wasn’t shut tight, so I came in.”

“Cammy.”

“I had some rhubarb and I was going to leave it for him. I just thought I’d set it inside and then I saw this picture on the table. When George came in, I asked him about it. He wouldn’t tell me anything and then he said, ‘Stay here’ and he left.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long ago was that?”

I looked at my watch. “A little over an hour.”

“And you’ve been sitting here, waiting?”

“He said stay here.” I pointed to the picture Race was holding. “Look at her, Race.”

Race held his hand out to me. “Come on, when he comes back, we’ll ask him about it.”

“No.” I gripped the edge of the sofa cushions as if Race was going to drag me out of the room. If I left, I was sure George would just go on his merry way and not answer yet another question. “I’m staying here.”

Race sat on the sofa next to me. “You’re shaking. Are you okay?”