Chapter 17
Cal stood next to one of the elms lining the road. He’d parked his Roadster there, instead of bringing it up the gravel drive the way other visitors to the farm did. It was as if he wanted to keep distance between himself and Young Acres.
Fern saw him as she came down the front steps, pulling the cardigan she’d thrown on tighter around her.
The breeze had picked up, and the bellies of the clouds overhead had darkened.
Even so, as Cal spotted her and tossed down his cigarette, grinding it out with his heel, Fern knew only warmth and brightness.
He started toward her, and she walked toward him, meeting him in the center of the front lawn.
The grass was green, soft, and thick, like a carpet, and smelled freshly clipped.
Cal tipped up the brim of his fedora and seemed to inspect her from crown to foot with one economical sweep of his eyes.
“You’re all right?” was the first thing he said.
“What are you doing here?” she blurted out before shaking her head to clear it. “Yes. I mean, yes, I’m all right.”
He looked past her shoulder, and when she turned, it was to see Lena feeling her way out the front door. She couldn’t see them, but listening would certainly appeal. Fern began walking toward the orchard, and Cal fell into step beside her.
She couldn’t hold her tongue; her mind fired off too many questions at once. “How did you know where I was? Why have you come? Your gunshot wounds…have they healed?”
Cal kept walking, fielding her rapid-fire questions with silence.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s fine. I was at Doc Levy’s,” he said. “Stitches needed taking out. Anyway, Hannah said you’d sent her a letter.”
So, that’s how he’d known. Fern had included the address for Young Acres, hoping Hannah might write back. Relief made her a little more lightheaded than she already was.
Fern tugged the cardigan closer, against a gust of wind. It blew the sweet scent of ripening apples in their direction.
“Is what I heard true?” he asked. “They dropped you here and just left?”
Her heels dug in, and she stared up at him. She hadn’t mentioned that to Hannah.
He gave an easy shrug of his shoulder. “I hear things. Margie? She’s got friends who’ve got friends.”
Oh. Again, relief slid through her, the quick flip of her stomach making her feel nauseous. Upended and a bit dizzy. They walked another dozen strides or so without talking.
“They think it’s best for me,” Fern said. Before he could reply to that, she added, “And maybe it is. I don’t have anywhere else I can go, and…well, my turret was getting a little small.”
She laughed softly, remembering how he’d called her a princess, high up and hidden away from the world. But he didn’t so much as crack a grin. He kept his hands in his pants pockets as they reached a row of Macoun apples.
“You actually want to be here?” he asked.
“Why have you come?” Fern was avoiding his question, though not very craftily. It had taken Mr. Carlson nearly all day to drive here. That Cal would make the same drive to see her… She didn’t know what to think. It made her pulse beat faster. It scared her.
Cal reached into the lower limbs of the apple tree and grasped an apple.
“You shouldn’t pick them before they’re ready,” she said, repeating what she’d been told the week before when she’d attempted the same thing. The skins were still too green.
He left the apple alone and kept walking. “Someone needed to come get you,” he answered after a minute.
Fern slowed again. A drop of rain landed on her cheek.
“But they don’t want me.” Only after the words were out did she hear them. Really, truly hear them. They sounded so small and pathetic. She sounded that way, and it was humiliating.
“I never said I was bringing you back to them.” He stopped and looked her in the eye. Fern saw it then—anger and frustration. Loathing. “You have more than just two options, Fern.”
She shook her head and turned to keep walking. “You don’t understand.”
He followed. “I guess I don’t.”
She’d disappointed him somehow, and that pricked, like a needle jabbing just beneath her skin.
Why did she care what he thought? Why did she care what he thought of her?
Frustration simmered and bubbled, and in a snap, all reluctant and secret delight to see him shifted to irritation.
How dare he come all this way to make her feel like she was doing something wrong? This hadn’t been her choice, after all.
“I don’t need you to take me anywhere. I’m working in the library here, earning a wage.”
A library that one or two residents visited every week.
It was a tomb for books, not a library. Mrs. Crane had asked her to devise an organizational system for books no one wanted to read.
Her work was a pointless, busywork job, though Fern couldn’t bear to tell Cal that.
She could hardly bear to admit it to herself.
“Just answer one question. One question, and I’ll quit asking,” he said. His voice was a little farther behind her now. He’d put some distance between them. “Do you want to be here?”
Fern stopped walking and stood, facing the gusty wind, arms crossed against her chest. She could lie. Cal would hear it, of course. He’d hear it, and he’d accept it and walk away. The truth, as difficult as it was, was also somehow easier.
“No,” she whispered.
He ambled up beside her, taking time with his strides. As if there wasn’t a rainstorm about to catch them out in the open.
“Then, what are you still doing here?” His voice was as soft as hers had been.
This answer, at least, was simple. “I have no money yet. Nowhere to go.”
“You’re gonna let that stop you?”
She gawked at him. “Money is essential, Cal.”
“I can float you some dough. And I know a guy at the Central Library over on Michigan. I could talk to him. If, you know, you like books.”
Wind drove into them, rustling his jacket and playing with the stiff brim of his fedora.
“Why would you do that?”
He cut his dark eyes from hers and fished into his pocket for his cigarette case. “You saved my hide that day outside the factory. You could’ve run after I was hit, but you didn’t.”
Was that how he remembered it? That she’d saved his hide? He’d thrown himself on top of her. And afterward, when he’d been bleeding…
“I couldn’t have left you like that.”
He lit the tip of his cigarette and pocketed the silver lighter. He took a drag and held her stare. “I guess I can’t leave you like this.”
“I’m not bleeding,” she joked.
This time, the corner of his lips twitched. “Nah, but this place will kill you slowly. Go on. Get your stuff.”
Her stomach twisted. “I…well, Mrs. Crane, she…”
Fern wasn’t a prisoner here. There were no guards. Her room and board were paid for the remainder of the year, but she hadn’t been committed, not exactly. This was a place where people chose to stay. And she could choose not to. Fern looked up at the brick-and-stone main house.
Cal waited. Rain drops darkened his hat and shoulders. She hadn’t even felt them falling until right then. She nodded, breathless even though she’d yet to move.
“Give me ten minutes.”
The rain whipped through fast, like a few great shakes of a blanket—hectic for a moment, then quiet as the dust and dirt settled.
The Roadster’s wipers squealed across the windshield in a steady rhythm, clearing the last speckles of rain.
Cal drove northwest, the rolling plains spread out before them.
A few autos had pulled to the side of the country road to wait out the storm, but Cal didn’t let his foot up off the gas.
Mrs. Crane had been alerted to Cal’s presence while Fern was packing her valise.
She couldn’t take everything that Margie had sent to Young Acres, so she chose only what she would need and figured the rest could be mailed back to her mother.
She’d taken a few extra minutes to say goodbye to Caroline, who’d been sad to see Fern go but also enthralled by the idea of a handsome man coming to take her away. Lena, it appeared, had spread the word.
The superintendent had been anything but enthralled. She’d promised to call the police since Cal was not a family member. Mrs. Crane had only been worried, of course, but to be on the safe side, Cal and Fern hadn’t lingered.
So far, no police lights had appeared on the horizon behind them.
“You’re quiet,” Cal said. He rolled down his window now that the storm had passed. She did the same, and the cool breeze shuttled down her collar and over her scalp. Fern breathed in the rain-scented asphalt and fields. There was something relentlessly alive and electric about that scent.
“I suppose I don’t know what to say.”
A torrent of half-formed thoughts had been cutting hectic paths through her mind since leaving Young Acres.
She couldn’t think straight. What would her parents say when Mrs. Crane alerted them?
Did she really care? They’d finished with her, of their own accord, so why shouldn’t she be finished with them?
Fern tried to envision working at a real library and living on her own.
She considered the complications of borrowing money from Cal to set herself up and what his driving all the way to Zionsville meant.
If he expected anything from her in return wasn’t clear, but her gut feeling said he didn’t. That wasn’t him.
He glanced across the bench seat. “I got a stop to make on the way back. Shouldn’t take long.”
There was mostly just farmland out here. Fern pushed aside a loose strand of hair that the wind kept tossing into her eyes. “Where?”
His attention was back on the road. She thought she saw him take a deep breath, but with the wind coming in through the windows, ruffling his hair and clothes, she couldn’t be sure.
“I need to check in on a pal.”
His flat tone and the barest shift of his jaw hinted that the visit wasn’t something he looked forward to.