Laura couldn’t have found a better way to upset her brother if she’d tried. Of course he wasn’t excited by the idea of Annie getting tangled up in solving another crime. He never was. Although Annie thought that was a trifle unfair of him, given that a number of the investigations she’d done over the years were the result of legal cases he’d been working on, cases where he’d asked for her help.
That was Laura for you.
She wasn’t going to worry about whether or not someone agreed with her. And it was one of the reasons Annie loved her. Nevertheless, Annie didn’t want the conversation to degenerate into one of Laura and Nate’s usual brother-sister wrangles. So, she said, “Thank you so much for going out on this cold night, Laura. Why don’t you run to your room and get a mug so I can pour you some of this tea? I will make sure your brother doesn’t eat all of the cookies.”
Laura lifted her right eyebrow, the identical expression her brother used when he felt he was being manipulated by Annie. Then she flashed a smile and ran off to do as instructed.
Annie turned to Nate and said, “Don’t you dare get into an argument with Laura. This matter is too serious. What I need is for both of you to suggest what other avenues to explore to make sure I am doing all I can to protect the dispensary. For example, I should be trying to find out where the information behind the snippet in the Chronicle came from. Has someone gone to a Chronicle reporter and made some sort of unfounded claims about the Pacific Dispensary? Do you think you could talk to Tim about this?”
Tim Newsome, a reporter for the Chronicle, was one of Nate’s oldest friends, and this wouldn’t be the first time Nate had gone to him for some background information. Annie thought if it turned out that Dr. Skerry or Richard Truscott had gone to the press, this would bolster her theory that they had motives for making Phoebe ill, if their motive was to use this illness as an excuse to attack the dispensary.
Nate held up a hand. “Annie, you need to slow down. I was all right with you doing this job for the dispensary when it was a regular accounting job that was going to be over in a week or two. And as far as I can tell, you’ve already done all you can…”
“It’s all right with you!” Annie shouted. Then, not wanting to wake Abigail who was sleeping next door, she lowered her voice and said, “Nate Dawson, when did I ever need permission from you to work?”
“Look, I misspoke. I meant that Dr. Brown would never have asked you to become involved if she had known about any of this. All she wanted was for you to try to untangle the financial mess.”
“She wanted me to try to forestall that wretched former treasurer from destroying the dispensary. It was Mrs. Branting who suggested that Dr. Brown and the other doctors were somehow responsible for both the financial problems and Richard Truscott’s threats. If Truscott or Dr. Skerry, or someone else, has convinced a reporter that there is some sort of scandal associated with the dispensary, then this will make it even easier for Mrs. Branting to sway the board to her point of view. However, if you are too busy to speak to Tim, I will go see him tomorrow myself.”
“That’s not what I meant. Of course I can talk to Tim. My point is that you have plenty to keep you busy, right here, and you don’t need to be running around town with vials of poison or having little chats with the police.”
Annie got up from the table and walked over to the fireplace, struggling to get her anger under control. She wanted him to hear her, really hear her, because she suddenly saw a chasm opening up in her relationship with her husband.
Turning around, she said, “What if it isn’t a case of what I need to do, but what I want to do? I want to do everything I can to help the dispensary survive. The staff there is doing such good work, work that no one else is doing in this city. If that means pursuing the question of who might want them to fail or, even more importantly, who might be trying to poison Phoebe Truscott, then I will do so.”
Nate shook his head. “But it isn’t simply a matter of what you want. You’re a mother now. You have responsibilities.”
“And I am fulfilling those responsibilities. I’m the one who got up this morning and fed Abigail, gave her a bath, had her playing at my feet as I got ready for my meeting with Miss Greenstock. I was the one who took her with me to that meeting, an outing that got her fresh air, and then had her home in time for her nap. And you know what? I was happy to do all those things because, for the first time in months, I had other things in my life to look forward to. I had interaction with adults, work to do that I was good at, problems I could try and solve, people I could help.”
Nate said, “I do understand, but…”
“No, you don’t understand, Nate. Even though I was very straightforward about my intentions before Abigail came, and you said you agreed, it’s become obvious you were lying to me. You thought that I would be a full-time mother and my work from now on would be just a hobby that I could take or leave.”
When Nate started to speak, Annie put up her hand to stop him and went on. “I shouldn’t be surprised, because that’s how I have been behaving. I finally realized last week, when I talked to Dr. Brown, that I was miserable. That doesn’t mean I don’t love my daughter. What it means is that I’ve discovered that if I am to be happy, mothering can’t be my full-time occupation. And, thank goodness, I have a houseful of women who are delighted to step in and help me be both a good mother and a woman who works.”
Nate’s face flushed, and Annie could see him struggling not to say anything that he would regret. He had so much more in common with his impetuous younger sister than he would ever admit.
Annie said quietly, “Do you honestly think your mother spent every waking hour with you when you were growing up? If she did, she’d never have gotten the dishes washed, the meals cooked, the house cleaned, the laundry done, or the vegetable garden planted. Sure, you toddled around behind her, but I would bet that she also handed you over to the ‘girl’ she hired to help out with the house work. In addition, once you were walking, I suspect your father started to step in to help…letting you toddle around after him, ‘helping’ with the livestock, taking you up on his horse. Didn’t he?”
When Nate didn’t answer, Annie said, “But what about you? Is being a father going to be just a hobby for you? Something you do occasionally for a minute or two…if you get home before Abigail’s in bed? I hope not, because I believe Abigail deserves two parents. Don’t you?”
Nate stood in the nursery. He’d left Laura and Annie speculating about the whole question of poison, knowing that he had a lot to think about after his conversation with his wife. Looking at his sleeping daughter, he felt his pulse slow. Abigail’s night dress had gotten pushed up so that her little diapered bottom stuck up in the air. He pulled the quilted blanket up to cover her, and she murmured something unintelligible.
Annie said she had said, “Mamma,” again yesterday. And that she had crawled over to the desk chair in the office and pulled herself up to stand for a brief moment. He’d missed it all, because, as his wife just pointed out, he was up before his daughter woke up, and she was usually asleep before he got home.
Was that why he’d not urged Annie to move their daughter over to the nursery in the evenings? Of course he’d noticed the difficulty Annie had been having getting a good night’s sleep. But he had coveted his brief glimpses of his daughter, lying in the crib at the foot of the bed when he got home at night. He loved looking at Abigail’s tousled hair as she nursed at Annie’s breast when he said good-bye in the morning. When he awoke in the night, he found the sound of his daughter’s breathing as she lay in her crib comforting. So he’d not wanted anything to change.
How selfish could I be?
Annie, as usual, was right about him having this fantasy idea of family life. He’d go off every day to do important legal work, while she would manage the boardinghouse, take care of their child, and yes, dabble occasionally in work by giving rich women financial advice. In his mind, she would be more than content with this as the sum total of her life until Abigail was old enough to go off to school.
He’d ignored the fact that it became more and more obvious that the only way this fantasy would work was if he managed to make more money. This meant taking more cases, which meant working longer hours, which meant seeing much less of his wife and his daughter.
He thought about what Annie said about his own childhood. He remembered how his mother would put his sister Laura in a basket when she was about Abigail’s age, just starting to crawl, so she wouldn’t be under foot. He certainly remembered how Gertie, the hired girl, entertained him with games when he was young.
And then there was his father, who would take him and Billy with him to do “chores.” Nate had been so proud to be helping out. As an adult, he knew that taking two boys along with him—boys who were always fighting—made those chores twice as difficult to do. What his father probably had been doing was getting them off his mother’s hands so she could make dinner in peace.
And there was his memory of those dinners. Sitting at the table with his mother and father and siblings. Listening to his parents talk, about the weather, the crops, the war…the war his older brothers were fighting in. After dinner, after the evening chores were done, both of his parents were there in the hours before bedtime. His father teaching him how to work the leather on the team’s harness to keep it soft or how to carve a small top for his little brother Billy. And he saw, with clarity, his father, with his big strong hands, rocking his infant sister Laura, while his mother would read out loud to them all.
She would look tired but happy.
But, as Laura would point out, their mother chose to be a rancher’s wife, just as Violet, his brother Billy’s wife, chose that life. Annie didn’t.
Annie chose a life where she could use the business skills her father taught her and her extraordinary ability to solve other people’s problems to make their lives better. That was the woman he fell in love with. That was the woman he’d married. That was the woman who would be…was…a wonderful mother.
But for these last nine months, at the end of each day, she had looked so tired. But not happy. And he’d known it but not wanted to let go of the fantasy.
Things needed to change. He needed to change.
Abigail grunted and pushed herself forward until she bumped up against the end of the wooden crib. Then she began to cry. He bent over to pull her to the center of the crib and immediately noticed the soggy diaper. He grimaced and stepped back to go over and pull the cord to summon Kathleen. But the growing strength of his daughter’s cries stopped him.
He grabbed one of the numerous small blankets that hung over the side of the crib and used it to shield his dressing gown as he scooped Abigail up onto his shoulder. She gurgled in surprise, and he took her over to the chest of drawers so he could remove the pins and drop the unpleasant mess into the bucket on the floor.
He’d only done this once or twice, and his daughter seemed to think the whole process was some sort of new game—kicking her legs and squirming. Embarrassingly, it took him several failed attempts before he successfully got her cleaned up and re-diapered. Thank goodness, his daughter was patient.
Finally, he pulled Abigail’s night dress down, took one more new, clean blanket and wrapped her in it, and took her on his shoulder. He did know that he should see if he could get her back to sleep before trying to put her back down. She pushed back on his chest with her arms, arching away from him, as if she wanted to get a good look at his face in the dim light. Then she smiled and let herself lie against his shoulder with a thump.
He couldn’t believe what that smile and the warmth of her small body in his arms was doing to his heart. He went to the window that looked out over the side garden, noticing that the sky had cleared enough so that there was a shaft of moonlight hitting the stone-paved path along the house.
As he stood there, gently rocking his daughter, he heard the soft whisper of someone coming into the nursery, followed by the spicy scent that was Annie’s very own. As she put her arms around his waist, he sighed with his own brand of contentment.