Unexpected Son Page 17

  “It’s very late, Michael,” she said, resisting the urge to run to him, beg him to take her in his arms and never, ever let her go.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.” He stood up slowly, as though he had been sitting for a long time and was stiff from the cold.

  “You knew where I was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you come to the church?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that.”

  Three hours ago she would have said she didn’t know what he was talking about. Now, sadly, she did. “Michael, we have to stop these rumors.”

  “Which rumors?” he asked, his voice flat. He sounded tired, discouraged. “That I’m an arsonist or that I’m Ronald Baron’s bastard?”

  “I’m sorry the word got around town so quickly.”

  He shrugged. “I hadn’t expected Alyssa Wocheck to be in such a hurry to tell everyone.”

  “Alyssa?” Sarah shook her head. “You’re wrong, Michael. Alyssa has said nothing at all.”

  His head came up. “Then who?”

  “Judson Ingall’s fiancée, Tisha Olsen, for one. And Moira Schweinhagen’s husband, for another. He’s a terrible gossip.”

  “I see.”

  “They aren’t bad people, Michael. They just like to talk....”

  “They need a life,” he said sharply.

  “Perhaps.” She took another step closer, her feet moving with a will of their own. “Are you very upset by it?”

  He looked down at her without answering, his broad shoulders blocking out the moon. She could see his face now, read his expression, guarded though it was. It had hurt him to think that Alyssa Baron was the one who might have spread the news about who he was. He was relieved to learn it was someone else. Sarah took heart at the knowledge. He had come to care, at least a little, about the family he had found.

  “Michael, how do you feel about your family knowing who you are?” She shoved her hands into her pockets. It was cold, far below freezing, but she didn’t have the courage to invite Michael into the house. To have him there, where she’d dreamed of a future with him, was too hard to bear.

  “They aren’t my family. If Jeff Baron and Edward Wocheck have their way, they never will be.”

  She laid her hand on his arm, unable to resist touching him, offering comfort. “They are your family, however hard that might be for all of you to accept right now. They need time. You need time. How are you, Michael? Are you comfortable at the motel?”

  “How did you know I’m staying out there?” He moved a little closer. She had to tilt her head back slightly to see his face.

  “I—I drove by the other day. And your truck was parked out front. Are you comfortable there?” she asked again.

  Moonlight flared briefly in his dark eyes. “It’s a roof over my head and there’s hot water. Most of the time.”

  “Are—are you getting enough to eat?”

  “Mother hen,” he said softly, cajolingly.

  Blood surged into her cold cheeks, warming them momentarily. “I didn’t mean to sound like a mother hen.”

  “Believe me, I don’t think of you that way.” He reached out and tucked a stray wisp of hair back under her hat. His hand was trembling. “How are you getting along, Sarah?”

  She closed her eyes against the allure of his voice. “I’m okay. I’m doing okay.”

  “Getting ready for Christmas?” His fingers lingered a moment at her temple, traced the curve of her cheek before he pulled his hand away.

  “Yes. The bazaar is coming up soon. We were pricing items tonight.” She wasn’t about to be sidetracked. “Michael, they say there’s an arson investigator in town. They say he thinks the fire was deliberately set. If he does, and the insurance company refuses to settle the Ingallses’ claim...” She found she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “This town is going to want to find who set the fire. And damn soon. Is that what you were going to say, Sarah?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m the best candidate for the job.”

  Sarah reached out and wrapped her hands around his arm. She couldn’t stop herself. The need to touch him, to convince him to heed her advice was overwhelming. “You’ve got to let me tell them you were with me when the fire started.”

  “No.” She could feel the resistance in him even through the heavy fabric of his coat.

  “But, Michael, why? I’m not afraid to tell the truth. I’m not ashamed of what we were doing. Nothing will happen to me if I tell the truth.”

  He bracketed her face with his hands. He wasn’t wearing gloves, but his touch was warm against her skin. There was no anger in his face, only resignation. And deep in his blue-black eyes, so deep she knew he thought it was hidden, was a flash of pain.

  “You just got through telling me I was the main topic of conversation tonight. No one had a good word to say about me, did they?”

  “No, Michael. It wasn’t that way.”

  His mouth twisted in a rueful grin. “Okay. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. No one actually came right out and said I started the fire. But they wonder. And they’ll be thinking about it. And pretty soon it won’t seem far-fetched at all. And maybe Will Benson will remember a few more details about that figure he saw running away from the F and M. And damned if it won’t sound more and more like me.

  “It won’t be the first time, they’ll say. And, after all, I had a reason, didn’t I? A good reason. Getting back at Ronald Baron’s family, the man who knocked up my mother and then abandoned both of us.”

  “No, Michael.” She felt like crying. He made it all sound so plausible, so inevitable. “I won’t let it happen that way.”

  “You forget, Sarah. I’ve been down this road before.”

  “But you have an alibi. I’m your alibi.” She placed her hands on his shoulders. “They’ll believe me.”

  He pulled her close, gently lifting her stubborn chin with his warm fingers. Her hat fell off and her hair came free. “No, Sarah. I’ll deny everything if you tell them we were together that night.”

  “Why?” The question was a broken whisper. Her breath came in quick little gasps that eddied like smoke between them.

  “This town needs a scapegoat and right now I’m it. What do you think they’ll do to me if they find out I’m sleeping with the preacher lady?”

  Sarah’s heart ached at his words, at the anger that was so deep inside him. Was it possible he could never learn to trust another human being? Had he been damaged that severely by his past? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he wasn’t capable of letting it go. Maybe he wasn’t capable of love.

  “We didn’t do anything wrong. I love you....” She couldn’t stop herself from saying it.

  “Sarah, don’t.” There was anguish in his voice. “Don’t say it. It won’t work between us. I was a blind fool to ever believe it could. Once a con, always a con. Once a bastard, always a bastard. We have to accept that. We’re from two different worlds. Worlds that can only collide.”

  “They’ll believe me.” She made the words a prayer.

  The anger left his face, drained out of him like sand from an hourglass. He pulled her close and laid his cheek against her hair. “Oh, Sarah, you have the courage of a dozen angels. But it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll still deny it if you say we were together.”

  “Michael, why?” Her voice broke on the word.

  “It’s the only way I have of protecting your reputation.”

  “I don’t care—”

  He stopped her words with a quick hard kiss. “I care. Let me do this my way. If things get too hot to handle, I’ll just disappear. I’ve done it before.”

  “You can’t do that—”

  “Sarah, please.”

  “All right
.” She’d say anything to keep him from leaving, from ruining whatever chance he had of proving his innocence. She stepped out of his arms, brushed her fingers across his cheek. “If you want me to stay quiet, I will. For now.” If she told her story and he denied it, it would only make him seem more guilty. And worst of all, he might carry out his threat to disappear. She would stay silent, for now, but she had no intention of letting Michael be blamed for a crime he hadn’t committed. She would come forward when the time was right, even if it meant losing her pulpit as well as the man she loved.

  “Michael, promise me one thing.”

  “What, Sarah?” He moved a few feet away from her, bent to pick up her hat from the frozen ground. He handed it back to her and she took it, careful not to let their fingers touch.

  “Don’t leave Tyler without telling me.”

  Moonlight flared briefly in his dark eyes. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat. “No, Sarah. I care too much for you to do that. When I go, you’ll be the first to know.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MICHAEL LEFT HIS pickup parked at the motel and walked the half mile to the Tyler cemetery. The burial ground was located on a small rise above town. Here, former residents of Tyler slept behind a wrought-iron fence, shaded by a canopy of oak and maple and big, old pine trees that sighed mournfully in the cold wind whistling down from Canada.

  A Tyler patrol car passed by on the street as he turned into the open gates. He barely noticed it or the late-model blue sedan parked along the curb. It was late in the afternoon. Most people were hurrying home from work to warm houses and hot meals. No one was visiting the dead. He had the place to himself.

  The urge to leave Tyler, to run from the trouble and the heartache, as he’d done so often in his life, was growing stronger by the day. But this time some part of him resisted the impulse to pull up stakes and head for parts unknown, to start over in a new place, among new faces. This time the gossamer strings of love and caring that Sarah had woven around his heart held him fast.

  If he wrenched them free he knew they would bleed, long and hard.

  Once inside the cemetery gates the noises of the outside world fell away. He could hear the soft rustling of pine boughs and the scratchy rattle of stubborn oak leaves, still clinging to the branches, refusing to fall. His footsteps loud in the silence, he walked along the gravel path, not quite certain where to go to find what he was looking for.

  He headed up the hill. The red and gray granite stones nearest the street carried dates from the forties and fifties. Here and there a bronze insignia of a branch of the armed forces adorned a grave—of a Tyler boy who hadn’t made it back from France or Italy or some tiny coral dot in the Pacific. Farther up the hill, the gravestones were older, more weathered. Some had angels and sleeping lambs standing guard—children’s graves from a time when sickness and disease claimed too many young lives.

  Then, below the crest of the rise, he found what he was looking for—the newest section of the cemetery. The trees here were small, newly planted, the paths laid out in geometric grids, the graves raw-looking, less settled, less at peace with their surroundings. The stones were new, also, the names sharply etched and easy to read. But he was no longer alone. A tall, slightly stooped man stood before a large, red-granite stone.

  Judson Ingalls raised his head and looked in Michael’s direction. For a moment Michael considered turning on his heel and walking back the way he had come. But something held him there, a curiosity stronger than his reluctance to meet up with this formidable old man.

  “Come on down, son,” Judson Ingalls called, settling his hat, a beat-up old fedora, on his head. He was wearing a red-and-black-checked wool coat that was at least as old as the hat and a wool scarf with tattered ends wrapped around his throat. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

  Michael did as he was bidden. He glanced at the name on the stone. Margaret Ingalls. Judson’s dead wife. Alyssa’s mother.

  The old man caught him staring.

  “I come to see her, now and then,” he said. “She was alone and lonely for a lot of years out at Timberlake. Margaret hated to be alone. I like to think she enjoys the attention.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Judson cocked his head, eyeing Michael closely. “I don’t suppose you’re up here just walking for your health. You came to find your father’s grave, didn’t you, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ronald’s buried right over here. My father bought this whole section back in forty-five. Getting too crowded for all of us up there on the hill plot.” He pointed a bony, gloved finger off to the left. “There. Ronald’s is the gray one, third stone over. Just past my aunt Esther and my uncle Lars.”

  Michael’s feet felt like lead weights as he followed the old man’s directions. He stared quietly for a moment at his father’s grave. There was nothing there, beyond the dates of his birth and death, to tell him about his father. No clue as to what kind of man he’d been, why he had done the things he had.

  A cold, empty hole opened up somewhere deep in Michael’s middle. There were no answers here. Maybe there were no answers in Tyler at all. Maybe he would never know who Ronald Baron had been. Who he himself was and where he came from.

  His hands balled into fists. He turned away. It was time to go.

  Judson Ingalls was still there, watching.

  “Thanks for pointing out his grave,” Michael said automatically.

  “My Alyssa says you didn’t know anything about your father except his name and where he came from.”

  “That’s all.” Michael wanted out of there. It was cold and getting dark. The shadows were long and blue tinged, the wind stronger, the moaning of the trees louder, as though they suffered from the cold.

  “Why did you come here? To try to get money from my daughter’s family?”

  “Hell, no. I don’t want anything from any of you.”

  “They say you’re an arsonist.” Judson leaned his weight on the cane he’d been carrying, but so far hadn’t used. He looked as if he intended to stay just where he was for quite a spell.

  “That’s what I went to prison for.” Michael wasn’t about to let his guard down. Judson Ingalls might be nearly three times his age, but he wasn’t a man to fool with.

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “I didn’t burn down your factory, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “I didn’t think you did. I wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation with you if I did. I’d be down at the police station, giving Brick Bauer hell for not hauling you in.”

  Michael almost smiled; he couldn’t help himself. “Fair enough,” he said.

  “Well, if you are after money, I’m here to tell you there isn’t any. Ronald died penniless. That’s why he killed himself. He couldn’t take the shame after his business went bankrupt.”

  “What kind of business was he in?”

  “He owned the grain elevators here in town. It was bad times for farmers in the early eighties. Ronald got caught in the squeeze. He couldn’t cope with the strain.”

  “So he took the easy way out?”

  “Putting a bullet through your skull ain’t exactly the easy way out.”

  “Maybe not. But leaving everyone else to deal with your problems is.”

  Judson nodded. “That’s true. Ronald was a weak man but he wasn’t a bad man.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never met him.”

  Judson straightened, his gaze narrowed. “Ronald Baron was married to my daughter for almost twenty years. Like I said, he had his faults, bad ones.” His face darkened. “My daughter wasn’t happy in her marriage. But Ronald was a good father to his children. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If he had known you were alive, he would have done the right thing by you.”

/>   “You really believe that, sir?” Michael wasn’t convinced. He had hated his unknown father for so long. Hated him for what he had done to his mother. Hated him for all the times he had not been there when Michael needed him. Hated him the most for dying before he could find him and confront him with all the wrongs of the past.

  Now this wily old man was painting a different picture of him—of Ronald Baron as just a man. A man who got up every morning and went to work. A man who loved his kids. A man who had made mistakes and, in the end, paid for them with his life. He wasn’t a monster, he was just a ghost, pale and insubstantial, and not worth the effort to hate.

  “I’d like to hear more about him someday,” Michael said, realizing as he spoke that he had made some commitment to himself, a promise to stay and ride this out, to make some effort to establish a relationship with his half brother and sisters.

  “I’d be happy to talk with you. Walk me to my car. I always leave it on the street. Figure the noise might upset the ‘old-timers.’” He chuckled at his own small joke.

  Judson held out his hand. Michael took it. Judson’s grip was strong and firm. “Now,” he said, waving his cane in the direction of the top of the hill, “let’s get out of here. It’s damned cold and I want my supper.”

  They walked in companionable silence toward the gate. Now and then Judson would point out a tombstone, old and moss covered, ghostly white in the fading daylight, that sheltered the remains of one of Tyler’s founding fathers. Schwiebert. Hansen. Wilhelm. Ingalls. Solid German and Swedish names, of hardworking people who had tamed the land and wrested a town and homes from the vast forests of the wilderness.

  For Michael it was all so different from the life he’d known growing up in Miami. He and his grandmother and his mother had moved from apartment to rented house to apartment, always one step ahead of eviction, one welfare check away from being homeless. Some of the people here in Tyler had lived in the same house all their lives, farmed the same ground for four generations back. They belonged. They had roots.