Back to McGuffey's. Liz Flaherty

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      Penny gave her a baleful look. “Michael is ten.” She brought the coffee carafe and the cake and sat at the island with the other two women.

      Marce came back into the kitchen. “Doesn’t take long to make beds when you only have two guests. It also helps that one of them is gone half the time and the other one made her own bed,” she grumbled. “Now I’ll have to eat some of this coffee cake so it won’t go to waste.”

      “I can take some with me,” Penny offered generously. “I’d be in good with the boys. Might even be able to get them to start cleaning their room. They wouldn’t finish, but starting would be real progress.”

      “No, that’s okay.” Marce got herself a cup and plate and came to sit down. She cut the remaining cake into four pieces and passed them around. “See? No problem.”

      “How busy is the inn, Marce?” asked Kate.

      The older woman sipped her coffee. “In mud season, it’s often slow. It’s not always full in summer, either, though trail cyclists are changing that. We have some nearly every weekend. In the fall and winter, you don’t have time to blow your nose, so don’t even think of getting a cold. I’ve never gotten rich, by any means, but like the old saying goes, it’s a living. In the off-season, it’s a party place. Teas and showers. Meetings now and then. The dining room and the two parlors run into each other and you can accommodate up to fifty if they don’t all want to sit down at the same time, not nearly so many if they do.”

      “How many guest rooms?” asked Joann.

      “Two suites—the one Kate’s in and the two-bedroom one over the garage, which also has a kitchenette—and three rooms. They all have private baths, phones, wireless internet and television. I fought Frank tooth and nail over television, saying the kind of clientele we’d attract wanted peace and quiet. He said they wanted to choose their own kind of peace, and he was right.” Marce’s eyes misted over. “It seems I’m looking for Frank every time I turn a corner. The truth is he’s not there, and I need to stop looking. Maybe a couple of months away would help me with that.”

      The women helped her load the dishwasher before saying their goodbyes and leaving the big Victorian. Joann returned to her office and Kate walked as far as Penny’s house with her before heading out on her own.

      At loose ends for the first time in longer than she could remember, she wasn’t sure where to go. It wasn’t as though Fionnegan, Vermont, presented many choices. There were two stoplights downtown and a caution light on Worship Street at the intersection with a church on every corner. There weren’t any strip malls or chain restaurants yet, nor was there much physical space for growth, the town being nestled into the Green Mountains the way it was. So people still shopped and ate downtown, and sat on the park benches the chamber of commerce placed in front of every business. Fionnegan was a good place to live, to raise children, to find, as Frank Comer had said, one’s own kind of peace.

      Before she knew it, she found herself walking along the path that meandered through dips and shallow valleys toward the more difficult trails that climbed Wish Mountain. Kate felt unaccustomed restlessness. What did she want to do? Did she want, for the first time in her thirty-seven years, to move away from the Northeast Kingdom to a place that offered longer summers, less mud and—and what? Something different. She could move to Tennessee, near the log home on Dale Hollow Lake where her parents were so happy, or the Nashville suburb to be near her sister.

      But she realized neither of those places would be home. The wanderlust that had made her family relocate and had put motor homes in their driveways had skipped her completely. Whatever she decided to do, it needed to be here.

      “Coming up behind!” The shout came just before something—or someone—knocked her right off her feet, pushing her not so neatly into the mud on the edge of the trail that led down to Tierney’s Creek.

      “I’m sorry,” said a familiar voice. “I know better, but I think I flunked looking where I was going in running school. Are you all right?”

      Hands, wide palmed but with long and slender fingers, helped her up.

      And Kate looked up into the eyes she’d once planned on looking into for the rest of her life.

      “Ben,” she said, “I’m way too old for you to sweep me off my feet again. And it’s just barely May—the creek’s still freezing.”

      He snorted. “Like it won’t still be freezing in July.” His voice was like a caress as he brushed her down, easing the sharp edges of her nerves even as a new—or maybe remembered—excitement thumped through her veins. “I heard about the fire. You all right?”

      She wondered if his blood pressure was fluctuating as much as hers was. His eyes were still deep and mossy green, his handsome face even more compelling at thirty-nine than it had been in high school. His legs below the baggy running shorts were lean and muscled, and if he’d added any weight to his six-feet-plus frame, it was in all the right places. His hair, wheat-blond and arrow-straight, still needed cutting, though it wasn’t long enough to pull back into a leather thong anymore. This was, she admitted to herself, exactly what she noticed about him every time she saw him, but something felt different today. Warmer. Intenser. Intenser? Was that a word or just a sensation that made her veins jump around like they had electrical charges in them?

      “My dad hated the ponytail.” She felt herself blush. Idiot. Her father’s opinion of her high school boyfriend’s hair hadn’t mattered twenty years ago—it mattered even less now. “But Mom said he was being a curmudgeon.”

      He pushed his hair back from his face. “Pop hated it, too, but it sure did keep it out of the way. And I thought I looked really cool.” He kept looking at her. “Oh, man.”

      “What?” She looked around. There were dogs farther up the trail, barking insistently. The leaves were coming on strong even though she could still see her breath in the late-morning air, but she didn’t see anything to have caused the frustration in his voice.

      “You look great, Katy,” he said. “You do.”

      She would congratulate herself later on whatever kind of willpower it was that kept her from putting a smoothing hand to her hair and tugging her sweatshirt down over her hips. Hips that had grown some in the past thirteen years. “Thank you,” she said. “So do you.” With a nod and a smile that even felt vague—she could only imagine how it looked—she started off again. “Take care, Ben.”

      “You, too.”

      But she was less than ten feet away when he said, “Hey!” and she stopped, feeling his nearness even before he came to stand beside her. “Where are you going?” he asked.

      “I don’t know.” Her smile felt rueful this time—she felt rueful. “I don’t have anywhere to go, which feels strange. I’m unemployed and homeless.”

      He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt the warmth immediately. It made her understand how Dirty Sally felt when she found the blanket with a heating pad under it on the inn’s porch swing.

      Ben turned her around briskly. “Nope,” he said, “I don’t see any signs that you’ve become a bag lady overnight.”

      “Appearances can be deceiving,” she said. “But, since we’re here, what’s this I hear about you coming back to Fionnegan? I thought Boston was your dream.”

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