Chapter Nine
By Friday morning, Charlotte Bellamy had decided waiting for a man to return a borrowed book was entirely different from waiting for any ordinary event.
Rain, for example, came or did not come without consulting her heart.
A kettle boiled at its own pace.
The mail arrived when the post managed it.
A borrowed book gave hope a due date. Lottie had hope in her heart.
Peterson had Tennyson and the botany volume. Both were written in the ledger in his careful, uneven hand. Both were due the following Tuesday. Lottie knew this because Delly had arranged the lending rules with enough severity to withstand war, flood, and careless bachelors.
Still, every time footsteps sounded on the boardwalk, Lottie looked up.
Every time the meeting hall door opened, her heart made a hopeful little fool of itself. Cornelia noticed by the second hour.
“You will wear a path in the floor from that table to the window.”
“I am not walking to the window.”
“You are looking at it so often it amounts to nearly the same thing.”
Lottie bent over the stack of primers. “I am observing traffic patterns for library placement.”
Cornelia made a thoughtful sound. “How scholarly.”
“Thank you.”
“How frequently does traffic resemble a tall logger?”
Lottie dropped a primer.
Cornelia laughed and stooped to retrieve it. “Forgive me. I could not resist.”
“You could have resisted. You chose not to.”
“That is true.” Cornelia handed back the book, her expression kind. “He may not come today.”
“I know.”
“If he does not, it may have nothing to do with you.”
“I know that too.”
Knowing, Lottie was discovering, did not always settle a heart into obedience.
The little library had gained another shelf that morning.
Mr. Stafford had sent over rough planks, and Mr. Olsen had installed them under Cornelia’s supervision and Delly’s written instructions.
The room was beginning to look less like a storage place for books and more like a promise learning to stand upright.
The nature section had claimed the end of the first shelf. It was not yet much of a section. One pressed camas lay drying between scrap papers beneath Shakespeare. A child had brought in a feather and then taken it home again because his sister cried.
A woman from the mercantile had donated two clean sheets of writing paper, and Mrs. Beck had promised ribbon, which Delly said was not a classification method no matter how cheerfully applied.
Lottie had labeled a folded sheet: Wild Rose Ridge Field Pages.
It sounded official.
It contained one flower, two empty pages, and a smudge where Mrs. Hanford had inspected the ink before it dried.
A boy came in near noon with a folded paper and a serious expression.
“Miss Bellamy?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Peterson said to give you this.”
Lottie stood so quickly her knee struck the table leg.
The boy handed over the paper, then looked toward the cookie tin. “Mrs. Beck said readers may have one.”
“Are you a reader?”
“I can be.”
“Then you may have one.”
He took two before she could correct him and fled.
Lottie looked down at the folded paper in her hand. It was rough-edged and creased once through the middle. Her name was written on the outside.
Miss Bellamy.
Not Lottie.
She told herself not to be disappointed. A written name was not the same as a spoken one. Perhaps Miss Bellamy was safer in ink.
Inside were three drawings.
Not fancy drawings. Nothing shaded or ornamental. But clear. A deer track, a raccoon print, and the small, neat shape of a squirrel’s foot. Under each, Peterson had written where one might find the track and how to tell it from something similar.
Deer: heart-shaped, sharp point if ground soft.
Raccoon: like small hands. Near water, mostly.
Squirrel: front feet smaller, hind feet longer. Trouble near sacks and roof beams.
Lottie smiled so hard her cheeks hurt.
Cornelia came to look over her shoulder. “Oh, he did draw them.”
“He said he might.”
“Peterson’s might is worth more than many men’s promise.”
Lottie touched the edge of the raccoon drawing. “He has careful eyes.”
“He does.”
“Peterson notices what things leave behind.”
Cornelia did not answer right away. When Lottie glanced at her, the schoolteacher was looking not at the drawing but at Lottie.
“That is a wise thing to know about a man,” Cornelia said.
Before Lottie could ask what she meant, the door opened. Peterson stood there with his hat in his left hand, Tennyson beneath one arm and the botany volume beneath the other.
The drawings were still in Lottie’s hand.
“Oh,” she said, with all the grace of a person who had forgotten language under pressure.
His gaze dropped to the paper. “The boy brought them?”
“Yes, he did. They are wonderful.”
“They are tracks.”
“Wonderfully drawn tracks.”
His mouth moved, but he subdued the smile before it could become obvious. “You asked for them.”
“You answered with pictures.”
“I was near the cookhouse at dawn. Squirrel tracks were fresh.”
“That makes it even better.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Now I know the first field pages were not invented from memory. They were gathered.”
Peterson shifted the books against his side. “You make things sound finer than they are.”
“No. I make them sound as fine as they are. People are often careless about naming ordinary beauty.”
He looked at her then with attention that made the room feel both brighter and harder to breathe in. Lottie had learned not to look away from him too quickly. If she wanted him to believe she meant her courage, she had to let him see it, even when her own cheeks warmed.
Cornelia picked up the inkpot from the table. “I need to check whether Mrs. Schulte has located the promised paper from the church office.”
Lottie did not look at her. “Do you?”
“I do.”
“Convenient.”
“Very. Good day, Mr. Peterson.” Cornelia left by the side door, though Lottie suspected the church office did not require ink and Mrs. Schulte had found nothing of the sort.
Peterson watched her go, then looked back at Lottie. “Mrs. Montgomery is subtle.”
“She thinks she is.”
“Does she realize she is not?”
“No.”
That small, shared truth eased them both. Lottie laid the drawings carefully on the table.
“May we put these in the field pages?”
“I think that’s a good idea.”
She smoothed the deer track with one finger. “Will you help me add more?”
His left thumb moved once along the spine of the botany book. “When I can.”
That was more than might.
She accepted it with a grateful smile.
“I found three problems with your eastern book,” he said.
“Only three? You are generous.”
“Likely more. I stopped counting because I had work to do.”
Lottie bit back a laugh. “Show me?”
He set the botany volume on the table and opened it with his left hand.
The motion was becoming more familiar now, though still careful.
He had marked two pages with narrow strips of scrap paper.
One page showed a flowering plant he claimed was misnamed in the book.
Another gave a habitat description that, according to Peterson, would mislead a person into standing knee-deep in a marsh for no Christian reason.
Lottie listened with growing delight.
Peterson’s voice changed when he spoke of the ridge.
It did not grow soft exactly, but it lost some of its guarded edge.
He knew which slopes dried first after rain, where the best huckleberries would ripen later in the summer, and which plants children ought to be warned away from, even if the blossoms looked harmless.
“How do you know all this?” she asked.
He looked down at the page. “By staying alive.”
“That cannot be the whole of it.”
“No.”
She waited. His fingers rested on the book’s margin, close to a printed flower that did not quite match the surrounding territory.
“My mother noticed growing things,” he said at last. “She had a habit of naming them aloud, whether a person asked or not.”
Questions arose in her at once—where his mother had learned the names, whether she had taken him walking, whether he had loved those lessons as a boy. Lottie didn’t pry. He had said, my mother, and his thumb had gone still on the page.
“She sounds lovely.”
“She was.”
He did not say more.
Lottie looked down at the book to give him somewhere else to rest his eyes.
“I remember my mother sang while she mended,” she said. “Not well. Delly would say not accurately either, but I loved it.”
Peterson’s gaze flicked to her face.
“She died when I was twelve,” Lottie added. “My father eleven days later.”
His hand closed slightly on the book.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” She traced the edge of the page. “I think sometimes I remember her most clearly in bits. A teapot. A hymn. The way she folded the sheets. Nothing large enough to feel like a proper memory until all at once it does.”
Peterson looked toward the open door, where the summer light lay warm across the threshold. “Aye.”
Lottie took a slow breath. “Would you show me the meadow? The one where the camas grows?”
His head turned back. “Now?”
“Not if you need to return to camp.”
“I need to return soon.”
“Perhaps another time.”
He looked at the doorway again, then at the botany book, then at the field pages waiting on the table. Lottie did not press. She was learning Peterson did not like doors pushed open. He had to decide for himself whether to step through.
After a moment, he picked up his hat. “The meadow is above the churchyard. It isn’t far.”
Her heart lifted. “May I bring paper?”
“Bring the book, too. If you mean to prove it wrong, you’ll want evidence.”
“I would never gloat over a book’s errors.” His brows rose. “Not unkindly,” she amended.
He almost smiled again.
They left the meeting hall together in full view of Main Street, which meant within three minutes Mrs. Beck saw them from the bakery window and waved with excessive delight. Lottie waved back. Peterson did not.
“You could wave,” she said.
“I could.”
“You won’t.”
“I have chosen not to.”
“On principle?”
“Self-preservation.”
Lottie laughed. “You make Mrs. Beck sound dangerous.”
“She once sent a man to camp with a basket, three notes, and instructions for courtship.”