Twice a Bride (2 page)

His wife, Naomi, awaited them at the open door. A paisley-print apron added a bright spot to her black broadcloth dress. “Please accept our condolences, Missus Raines.” The petite woman reached for Mother’s hands. “Mr. Raines was good to us. You both were, and I’ll never forget that.” Sincerity shone in her dark eyes.

“Thank you.” Mother glanced at Abraham. “We appreciate all you and your father did to keep the ice deliveries going when Mr. Will took sick.”

Nodding, Abraham twisted a floppy hat in his hands. “Ma’am, Mr. Will did have a big bark, but he never bit me.”

Tucker was the first to laugh, but Willow and Mother soon joined him.

Naomi didn’t laugh. She glared first at Otis, then at her son. “Abraham, you will apologize for your disrespect.”

Abraham’s brow crinkled. The boy obviously didn’t realize that what he’d said was, by some standards, inappropriate. He straightened nonetheless, his arms tucked into his sides in a contrite manner. “I apologize, Missus Raines. I didn’t mean any disrespect. I liked Mr. Will. He always gave me a penny for candy or gave me a Tootsie Roll—my favorite.”

Mother smiled. “He liked you too, Abraham.” She patted the child’s head, then looked at his mother. “Naomi, your son is right. My husband did sound off with quite a bark now and then.”

Willow remembered her father’s bark, and she already missed it.

Naomi opened her mouth to speak, but Mother beat her to it. “No harm done.”

“Thank you.” Naomi stepped away from the open door. “Lots of folks have come to pay their respects.”

They entered the cabin one after the other, Willow stepping into the front room last. Before she reached the food tables, a stout woman stepped in front of her.

“I’m Mrs. Henry.”

“Your husband drives one of the ice wagons.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Henry narrowed her hazel eyes, looking at Willow but not meeting her gaze. “According to everything I’ve read in Scripture, if your father is in heaven, he’s in a far better place.”

If?
Willow coughed as if she’d just swallowed something sour. She covered her mouth, more in an attempt to stifle her retort than as an act of propriety. Mrs. Henry had good intentions, didn’t she? Offering the woman the benefit of her doubt, Willow nodded, then glanced across the crowded room. Hattie Adams stood with Ida at the dessert table, and Willow suddenly had a hankering for something sweet—their company.

Her sister-in-law brushed a tear from her cheek. Tucker had found a good wife. Ida had a big heart and was mourning the loss of a man she barely knew. Hattie pulled a handkerchief from her apron pocket.

Willow regarded the stout woman still planted in front of her. “If you’ll excuse me.”

“Of course.” Mrs. Henry tugged the white collar on her black shirtwaist. “Just remember, it’s always darkest before the morning.”

And just before one woke up. Biting her lip, Willow started across the
room.
Don’t make eye contact. Don’t smile
. She didn’t want to be stopped by any more misguided well-wishers. She was a woman on a mission.

Flight. Straight into the sanctuary of Ida’s and Miss Hattie’s company.

Ida looked Willow’s way and extended an arm to her. Willow took Ida’s hand and glanced at the dessert table. She’d recognize her landlady’s three-layer carrot cake anywhere.

“I remembered.” Miss Hattie’s smile highlighted the laugh lines that framed her blue-gray eyes.

Hummingbirds and eagles were more closely related than Mrs. Henry and Miss Hattie.

Willow squeezed her sister-in-law’s hand. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Ida sniffled. “I was thinking about the baby.”

And the grandfather he or she would never meet. Willow nodded. The grandmother too. Ida’s mother had died more than a dozen years ago. The Sinclair sisters had expected their father to arrive in Cripple Creek this past spring, but so far they’d seen no sign of him.

Ida dabbed her face with a handkerchief. “I was about to grab a piece of carrot cake and take it out to the bench. Join me?”

Willow caught sight of a pinched-face woman in a black shirtwaist with a white collar. “I suppose that depends on whether or not we’re faster than Mrs. Henry and her trite expressions.”

That evening, Willow pressed a butterfly seal to the envelope on her dressing table. She’d written a letter to her friend at the Stockton State Asylum. Maria Lopez had taken good care of her even when she was in a stupor and wasn’t aware of the older woman’s tender care. When Willow had awoken and become aware, Maria brought her homemade tamales every Sunday.

Willow had buried her father today and still missed Sam something awful.
But she was a blessed woman. God had put people like Maria and others at the asylum in her path. She still had a brother, her mother, and an aunt who loved her. And now she had Ida.

Miss Hattie’s laughter winged its way to the second story. Mother and Aunt Rosemary were downstairs with her landlady.

Tucker was right about her being alone soon. Mother and Aunt Rosemary would board the train for Colorado Springs in three days. Tucker and Ida were busy with each other and their pursuits.

Willow had wasted two years of her life in the asylum. Two years she could’ve spent apprenticing with an established painter.

She returned her writing box to the bedside table. There had to be something she could do to support herself and her artistic ambitions. It’d be even better if she found purpose in it. Her landlady thrived on coming alongside others—especially young women experiencing a big change, as each of the Sinclair sisters had. Following Miss Hattie’s example, Willow decided to search until she found purpose.

But right now, her quilt-covered bed looked more inviting than the blank canvas propped in the corner. Yawning, she left her bedchamber and strolled down the staircase to the parlor to say good night.

Aunt Rosemary sat on the sofa beside Miss Hattie, chattering between sips of tea. Her mother looked up from where she sat on a Queen Anne chair and motioned for Willow to join them.

“Come in, dear. I was hoping you’d come down before you retired.” Mother nibbled a lemon bar and then glanced at the plate of nuts and red grapes. “I couldn’t eat at the house. Not right after … with all those people.”

Willow seated herself in a rocker on the other side of the table that held her mother’s teacup. “I couldn’t either.” But sitting by the creek between the two willow trees Tucker had planted, she’d managed a generous slice of carrot cake just fine.

“I was beginning to think you’d gone to bed.” Mother pulled the napkin
from her lap and wiped her mouth. “What were you doing up there for so long?”

“I wrote a letter to Maria, my favorite attendant at the asylum.”

Mother popped two grapes into her mouth. Willow gnawed her bottom lip. Her stay there—the very fact that she needed to be tucked away—was still a hush-hush topic.

“Would you like something to eat, dear?” Miss Hattie pointed to the tray of sliced ham and cheese, and lemon bars.

“No, thank you.” She’d be ready for a big breakfast, but right now she wanted her pillow. “I came down to say good night.”

“You do look tired, dear.” Aunt Rosemary added a slice of ham to her plate, along with a dinner roll.

Mother picked up her cup and saucer. “Before you go back upstairs, I have something to tell you.”

Willow squirmed in the rocker. Mother’s statement usually preceded a serious announcement or declaration.

“I had a chance to speak to Ida when she came back from the creek.”

“About your grandchild?”

“About you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Ida said she couldn’t offer you full-time work, but she’d welcome your help in the icebox showroom.”

“You didn’t.” It came out louder than Willow would’ve preferred.

Mother’s teacup rattled in its cradle. “Indeed, I did. And you should be grateful. Rosemary and I will be leaving soon, and as lovely as this boardinghouse is, you can’t just sit around. It wouldn’t be good for you. You need something productive to do.”

She did need something productive to do. But selling iceboxes?

T
renton Van Der Veer stood at the worktable just outside his darkroom and leveraged a pry bar at one corner of a crate. A delivery wagon had hauled the two crates from the morning train—his first big order since he’d opened the studio two months ago. He applied pressure to the iron bar until the nails gave way with a shriek, then carefully lifted a paper-wrapped flask from the wooden box. He set it on the table and smoothed out the sheet of parchment paper. Repeating the process with bottles of fixer and flasks of developer, he stacked the paper he could use to protect his finished prints. After he’d emptied the first crate, he set the bottles in neat rows on one of the new shelves he’d built in the darkroom. He lined up the chemicals according to their role in the developing process—developers on the left, washes and fixers on the right.

Trenton pulled two new glass plates from the crate and examined them. Obviously, the train offered a smoother track than the rural road he’d maneuvered in Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographic van, a glorified and enclosed buckwagon. No matter how well he’d wrapped the plates, at least one would crack on most trips. He tucked the new plates into one of the shallow wooden boxes on the shelf below the counter. The metal slides went into the next box over, and he placed five cans of negative emulsion into the third box.

This new shipment alone was twice the bulk of supplies that would have fit in the wagon. But working as an apprentice traveling photographer was his past. He was thirty-seven years old, and he’d grown tired of living out of a
van. It was time he settled down; time that his clients came to him. That was why he’d opened the Photography Studio, although Colorado hadn’t been where he’d expected to hang his shingle. He’d spent some time in New York during his traveling years and had been set to return there with an ambitious wife to photograph the cream of society—magazine editors, newspaper moguls, and the latest songbirds of the opera.

Trenton’s eyelid twitched, and he reached up to still it. He’d expected to return to New York with a wife, but then—

The bell on the outer door jangled. He had company.

Opening his mouth to speak, Trenton contested the persistent cramp in his tongue. “B-be … r-right there.” After adding the last sheet of parchment paper to the stack, he stepped into the office and closed the door to the darkroom behind him. Mollie Kathleen Gortner stood at the counter in a navy blue suit. An angled hat eclipsed the mine owner’s narrow face.

“G-good day, m-ma’am.”

“And to you, Mr. Van Der Veer.” She stared at the leather apron he’d donned to unpack the boxes. “You telephoned. My print is ready?”

He’d telephoned Monday and had expected her to come by yesterday. As he opened his mouth to speak, he felt the muscles on the right side of his face contract. “Y-yes. Right here.” He lifted the portrait from a stack of prints beneath the counter and laid it in front of the businesswoman. She’d brought in a mine-claim certificate and a feathered fountain pen for her sitting.

She examined the sepia image. “Nicely done, Mr. Van Der Veer.”

“I’m g-glad you approve.” He’d like the image better if Mrs. Gortner hadn’t looked so serious. Perhaps women in Kansas weren’t alone in taking themselves too seriously. He shrugged. If only shrugging were enough to rid him of the memories.

Mrs. Gortner pulled a fan from her reticule and flipped it open. “Has Mrs. Hattie Adams spoken with you yet?”

No more than a handful of women had visited his shop. Mostly businessmen.
Miss Mollie O’Bryan and Mrs. Gortner being the exceptions. “No. Sh-should I ex … pect her?”

“Mrs. Adams is a widow and the owner of Miss Hattie’s Boardinghouse over on Golden Avenue. She’s been in town for at least a dozen years and is a good woman to know.” Mrs. Gortner fanned herself. A strand of red-brown hair streaked across her forehead. “As the co-chairwoman of the Women for the Betterment of Cripple Creek, I mentioned you and your photographic services at our meeting last Friday. Several of the women seemed taken with the idea of scheduling a sitting, Hattie Adams in particular.”