The next morning, Tucker awoke to the sound of his new wife depositing last night’s dinner into the basin. He held her head until she had nothing left then brought a wet cloth to wipe her brow.
He repeated the same process three mornings in a row. On the last day of their honeymoon, when Tucker threatened to haul her off to Dr. Killbone, Elizabeth admitted the hotel cooking was not the source of her troubles. Rather, she was three months along with the child of a cowboy who had been run out of town on a rail by her father. Tucker had been good and truly suckered.
He walked out and stayed gone for two days. When he returned, he half hoped the fellow behind the desk at the hotel would tell him Mrs. Smith had hightailed it out of town in his absence.
Unfortunately, the man handed him the spare key, and when Tucker opened the door, Elizabeth struck up a conversation about the weather as if he’d only gone out for a brief stroll.
Walking past his wife, Tucker stood at the corner window and looked out over the bustling town of Goose Chase. The view of the harbor wasn’t as good as the one at the boardinghouse, but he could watch the trains roll in and out of the brand-new station down the road.
While Elizabeth reclined on the settee, a wet towel covering the top half of her face, Tucker watched the noon train pull out. He waited until the whistle stopped before turning around and facing his bride.
“I could end this marriage, and no one would blame me.” He clenched his fists. “I’ve certainly got the law on my side.”
Elizabeth peeled off the cloth and gave him a tired look. “You won’t do that, Tucker. You’re too honorable.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Why do you think that, Elizabeth?”
His bride struggled to sit upright, allowing the cloth to fall forgotten to the floor. “Because, Tucker Smith, you’ve enjoyed the marriage bed with me. You’ll not leave now. The same moral code that caused you to marry me will keep you from leaving. You’re just that kind. You always do the right thing.”
She was right, of course.
Tucker brought her home to the little cabin, then quickly agreed the place would never accommodate the two of them. His heart heavier with each passing day, Tucker woke up every morning and put on a smile, even after he acquiesced to his wife’s demand that they move into Goose Chase and take up residence in “a proper house.”
The house cost as much in gold as the marriage cost in pride, but he endured both with the unfailing hope that the Lord could redeem the situation through the grace He renewed each morning.
Sometime around the fourth week in town, Tucker landed a job with the railroad.
Life became almost good again. Not sweet as it had been in the days with Fiona or before then, when he and Meredith had been making their way as new residents of the frozen state.
Days were no longer filled with empty hours and a wife who paid him no more mind than the barn cats back home or the fellow who delivered the milk. Now Tucker left before daybreak and returned long after Elizabeth had retired for the night. The hours in between were spent chasing the one dream he had left: working on the railroad.
As Elizabeth’s belly grew, Tucker played the part of concerned husband. When the day came for her pains to begin, he walked over to Doc’s office to inform him, then found Wily and sent word of the impending birth to Meredith.
Meredith needn’t have hurried, as Elizabeth labored the rest of that day and through the night. By noon the following day, she’d given up trying and started begging Doc to put her out of her misery.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Doc explained to Tucker. “I can’t hurry something that the Lord’s in control of. Besides, the babe’s not supposed to come for another month, maybe two, considering you two only married up seven months ago, right?”
Meredith blushed and turned away, but Tucker stood his ground. “That’s right, Doc. What are you suggesting?”
Doc Killbone slapped Tucker on the shoulder and shook his head. “You’re a good man, Tucker Smith, and I’m not suggesting anything different. What I’m saying is if there’s a way to stop this baby from coming, I would have liked to do it.”
“There’s really nothing you can do?” Meredith asked.
The doctor studied the floor. “There’s times when medicine doesn’t work. That’s when I have to remember that I can still pray.” He swung his gaze to meet Meredith’s wide-eyed stare. “I suggest you two do the same. That girl in there’s not strong like you, Merry Rafferty. I don’t know how much longer she can go on. She’s lost a lot of blood, and…well, frankly, I don’t know that she’s got much more fight left in her.”
A scream sent the doctor running, and a few minutes later, Elizabeth Grace Meredith Smith made her entrance into the world. Meredith fussed over the baby while Doc Killbone saw to Elizabeth.
“Would you like to see the baby?” Meredith hurried over to offer Elizabeth a look at the squalling dark-haired girl.
Elizabeth turned to face the wall. “I can’t look at her.”
“She’s exhausted,” Meredith said quickly. “She’ll come around when she’s stronger.”
But she didn’t. Three weeks later, when Tucker came home from work, he found a note telling him his daughter was at Doc Killbone’s place.
In a panic, Tucker fairly flew down Broadway to the office. The doctor was holding the baby in the crook of his arm and stirring a pot of stew with the other.
“I only stepped out of the examining room for a moment,” Doc said as he handed the baby over to Tucker. “When I returned, your wife had disappeared.”
“She’ll be back.” Tucker took the baby home and waited. His daughter’s cries brought him back to the doctor’s office some hours later. Doc Killbone diagnosed her as being hungry. A substitute was found, and the baby went to live three houses away with the family of a woman who’d only recently lost a child.
Tucker told himself he could get by this way. That he could allow his daughter to grow fat and healthy with a woman who fed her but could not be her mother.
Two days later, he could stand the arrangement no more. Tucker rented out the house on Broadway and went back to his little cabin beside the river. There Meredith helped to feed, diaper, and generally raise the tiny, dark-haired girl she nicknamed Lizzie Grace.
Lizzie Grace’s size and sickly condition made mention of the early birth unnecessary, and her dark curls and blue eyes made questions of her parentage unwarranted, for she was the spitting image of her mother. Tucker suspected Meredith hadn’t been fooled, but he also knew the question would never be asked. He learned that Elizabeth had left Alaska by ship, and letters asking after her sent to his father-in-law went unanswered. Lizzie Grace assumed that her mother had died in childbirth, and no one told her otherwise.
Tucker existed happily for years in the secluded spot, and Lizzie Grace grew into a young girl with coltish long legs and a mane of dark hair that her father had learned to braid with surprising skill. She could run faster than any of her cousins, male or female, and to Tucker’s delight took to fishing as if she’d been born to it.
She and Douglas, the closest to her in age and temperament, practically grew up at the river’s bank with poles in their hands. When Lizzie Grace wasn’t fishing with Douglas, she was following the poor boy around, imitating his every move.
With his sister and her family nearby and his daughter strong and healthy, Tucker would have been content to live out his days watching his daughter grow in the little cabin. One day, however, Meredith came to him with a plea for Lizzie Grace.
“She’s a smart girl, Tucker,” Meredith said. “She needs to be in a proper school that will prepare her for whatever God’s got for her life, and she needs to be going to a real church. Ian and I have been talking about moving to town, and we want you to go with us.”
Just like that, Tucker returned to Goose Chase and the house on Broadway that he’d rented out for years. He also went back to the railroad and found that the man who had originally hired him now ran the show. He landed a job and went to work the same day.
Ian and Meredith and their three little ones moved in with Tucker and Lizzie Grace, and the house burst at the seams until Ian’s house next door was complete. Even though walls and a small stretch of yard separated the families, it was just as common to see a Rafferty child— usually Douglas—in the Smith household as to see Lizzie Grace spending time next door with the Rafferty clan.
Amy and Braden visited often. The pair were happily adding on to the cabin Amy’s father had given them and making a life with their children. Their occasional visits to town were met with celebration, and each time, Meredith begged Amy to consider staying for good.
Amy and Braden wouldn’t, and Tucker knew it. But he also understood Meredith’s need to have female members of the family around her. Occasionally he thought of Elizabeth and wondered where she was; more often his musings landed on the subject of Fiona.
She’d completed her schooling at the medical college with honors and gone to work at a hospital in Seattle. Last time the Rafferty clan got together, Meredith had taken a photograph that Tucker still hadn’t found the courage to look at.
Not as long as he was still married to Elizabeth. He couldn’t. Instead, he concentrated on doing the right thing and pushing away any hope of a life with Fiona Rafferty.
Seemingly while he watched, his daughter grew and thrived. Meredith proved correct in her estimation that Lizzie Grace needed a proper education and a real church to attend. Under the tutelage of the teachers at Goose Chase School, she proved to possess an intelligence far superior to that of her old dad. And in Sunday school classes, she grew in her love for the Lord, often asking questions Tucker had to go deep into the Bible to answer.
Life was good. Then, three days after Lizzie’s thirteenth birthday, a letter arrived. The official document told him that his daughter, Elizabeth Smith, was the sole heir of the Bentley estate, which consisted of three hundred acres that ironically had once been Smith land. The rest, the attorney’s letter went on to state, had been spent for back taxes and funeral expenses. Attached to the document were the papers Tucker had signed the week before his wedding.
“Surely he meant this to go to your wife,” Ian said after reading the documents.
Tucker sent a letter to the attorney, letting him know that there was another Elizabeth Smith out there somewhere, and some months later, another letter arrived. It included a death certificate and a yellowed clipping from a newspaper in San Antonio that told the sordid tale of the murder of a Texas belle named Elizabeth Bentley Smith at the hands of a cowboy.
Tucker lit a match and tossed the paper into the fire. The death certificate he placed alongside his marriage documents in the trunk up in the attic.
A weight fell off Tucker’s shoulders even as he grieved for the woman Elizabeth had become. He wondered far too often if he could have done something different, if he might have prevented the tragedy and saved Lizzie’s mother.
A year went by, then another, and eventually peace returned. Still, something nagged at Tucker. Some not-so-small piece of the puzzle eluded him, and his prayers failed to reveal what that something was.
One day while riding a long stretch of rail, Tucker had a revelation. The missing piece was a red-haired woman who, by now, had surely forgotten the feelings she had for him so long ago.
Right there in the caboose, with snow-covered mountains slipping past and Skagway behind him, Tucker wrote Fiona Rafferty a note on the only paper he could find: a train schedule. Surely true love cared not for the stationery the sentiment was expressed on.
While Tucker did not know Fiona’s address, he felt sure Ian or Meredith did. He practiced the words he would say to them, but when he stopped by Ian’s home, the words flew away. He handed the letter to his brother-in-law in silence.
Ian looked Tucker in the eye and nodded, and then slipped the letter into his pocket.
Months went by and no response came from Fiona, so he wrote again and delivered the letter to Ian to send south. Eventually, Tucker concluded that Fiona wanted no part of him.
Not that he could blame her. That’s when he tucked his memories away and promised himself he’d live just fine without them. More important, he wouldn’t subject Lizzie Grace to the pain, either.
Some things—and certain people—were better left alone.
So he worked hard at the job he loved, and he made it his life’s work to finish raising his beloved daughter and to enjoy his old age with any grandchildren she might one day bring him. The years flew by, and the little girl grew into a quite lively young woman who was as much his daughter as if she were made from the same genes.
Lizzie Grace made him laugh and caused him to shed more than a few tears with her childlike faith in him and in the Lord. From the moment he became her sole parent, Tucker had vowed before God that he would be the kind of papa his own father had not been. It made him proud over the years that, while he hadn’t done a perfect job, he’d certainly come close more times than not.
The pain in his heart, however, never completely went away. Whenever a thought of Fiona Rafferty intruded into the present, Tucker stopped what he was doing and said a prayer that the woman God never intended him to be with was safe and happy.
That generally worked to channel his thoughts elsewhere. Once he started praying for exasperating females, he naturally went from Fiona to his daughter.
Lizzie Grace had celebrated her seventeenth birthday by doing two things: declaring that from that day forward she would only answer to the more adult name of Grace and begging her father for permission to take a part-time job with, of all people, old Doc Killbone.
Tucker agreed to the first and completely refused to allow the second. The last thing he needed was to lose another woman he loved to the medical profession.