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One side of town was dark and industrial, with warehouses and grain elevators that blocked the sunset to the west. The other side was postcard cute, with gingerbread trim on brightly painted cottages and the Texas flag hanging from nineteenth-century streetlamps.
Here she was, stopped at a tolling light in the middle of town. Not belonging to either side. Not belonging anywhere. At first, her traveling had been an adventure she thought she was born for, but lately it felt like drifting. Just wandering with no more direction than the leaves dancing along the gutters.
Sniffing, she managed a smile, remembering what her father used to tell her every time they packed. If you want to see the world, Jillie, you’ve got to rip off the rearview mirror and never look back.
Somehow, she doubted he’d been talking about Laurel Springs, Texas, when he’d said the world. She’d grown up moving with him. Alaska in the summers, the oil rigs off the coast of Texas in winters. Norway when she was eight. Australia at ten. Washington State when she reached her teens, and a dozen other places. Never the same. Never staying long enough to grow roots.
When she was eighteen, he’d left her at a dorm on a small college campus in Oklahoma and disappeared without a trace. She’d made it two semesters before her money ran out. She hadn’t bothered to look for him. Her father had spent her formative years teaching her how to live without leaving a footprint to follow.
Travel light, he’d once said. Pack nothing from the past, not even memories. And, finally, he’d left without packing her along. Deep down she’d known he would leave someday. Whenever he talked of her as grown, he never mentioned being in the picture.
Only now, a dozen years later, she longed for an anchor. One relative. One harbor. One place where she felt she might belong for a while.
The light changed. Jillian scrubbed her face with a napkin from McDonald’s, where she’d had lunch, and followed a sign advertising the town’s only historic bed-and-breakfast.
Papa’s rule: Never stay at a cheap motel. It marks you as a drifter.
A small bed-and-breakfast was cheaper if you considered the one meal a day could stretch into two if you picked up fruit on the way out, and the friendly staff usually offered a wealth of information. Innkeepers almost made Jillian feel like she had a friend in town.
She parked her car in one of the four Special Guest of Inn reserved spots.
When she climbed the steps of what looked like a miniature Tara mansion from Gone With the Wind, a tiny woman, in her late fifties, rushed out with a welcoming smile. Her chocolate-colored apron was neatly embroidered and read JOIN THE DARK SIDE. We have chocolate chips in our cookies.
“You must be Jillian James. I’m Mrs. Kelly, the innkeeper, but the locals call me Mrs. K. I’ve got your room all ready, dear. Did you have a nice drive? The internet didn’t give us a home address on you so I don’t know how long your journey was, but I hope it wasn’t too far. Don’t you just love our town?”
Papa’s rule: Never give out too much information. It’ll trip you up.
“I had a great drive and I love your beautiful home. You’ll have to tell me a bit of the history of this place.” Jillian smiled, thinking of one of her own rules. Never try to outtalk a talker.
“Of course, dear. This house is old enough to have not only a history, but a ghost, as well, though he’s quite shy.” The innkeeper handed her the key, then they climbed all the way up to Jillian’s room on the third floor. “I’ll tell you about Willie Flancher over coffee some cloudy morning. It’s the only time to talk about ghosts, you know. Folks in town talk about the house Flancher’s Folly because he built it for his fifth wife and died on their wedding night.”
Jillian didn’t care about ghost stories. All she wanted was a quiet, clean place to stay for a while. Third floor, back of the house. Usually least expensive and quietest.
Once Jillian circled the tiny room, she gave an admiring smile. This room would be perfect. Just what she needed.
The chubby innkeeper, who was very spry for her fifties, moved to the door and made her official announcement, “Breakfast at eight, if that’s all right. Soft drinks in the small fridge on the landing, and I put cookies out in the parlor after sunset for those who like a late snack.”
“Thank you.” Jillian pulled off her coat. “I think I’ll rest before I explore the town.”
“You do that, dear. There are maps in the foyer but you’re only a half block from Main, so you can park your car around back and walk if you like.” Mrs. Kelly’s head rocked back and forth as if ticking off an invisible list of what she needed to say. “I’ll see you in the morning. You’re the only one booked up here tonight. Both my other guests are on the first floor. No one wants to climb two flights of stairs these days.”
“I don’t mind.” Setting her suitcase and backpack down, Jillian grinned when she spotted the wide window. “It’s worth the climb for the view alone.”
Mrs. Kelly smiled as she backed out of the room. “I agree.”
When the lock clicked, Jillian pulled out her ledger and curled up in a window seat that had three times more pillows than it needed. On a blank page she wrote the date and “Day 1” beside it, along with the cost of the night’s lodging: “Winter rate: sixty-three dollars.”
Papa’s rule: Always keep count or you might lose track of how long you stay and forget to leave.
She had to be very careful. Thanks to car trouble a month ago and two crummy bosses in a row, she was less than a thousand dollars away from having to sleep in her car—or worse, a shelter. In her ten years on the road, she’d ended up broke twice before. Once in California when someone had stolen her purse, and again in New York City when she’d been in a wreck. None of her belongings had made it to the hospital with her. Both times she’d lost not only her money, but also her identification.
Papa’s rule: Always keep copies of vital papers somewhere safe. Birth certificate, driver’s license, passport, social security card.
In New York, without money and looking like she’d been in a street fight, it had taken her three months to collect enough cash to buy a bus ticket to Oklahoma City. There, she’d found her stash, money, ID and the letter, still unopened, that she’d left for her father just in case he ever used the secret hiding place beneath a shelf in the basement of the downtown library. Both times she’d come back to the hiding place, her stash was still there and the letter was unopened.
If he’d dropped by, he’d left no sign, and she doubted when she circled past Oklahoma City again that anything would be different. All her papers and the mailbox she rarely checked showed her as from Oklahoma. When she’d asked her father if that were true, he’d simply said, “Oklahoma City is the center of the country and as good a place as any to be from.”
Jillian took a shower and changed into dress pants and a sweater. She was close enough to her stash now to relax. If she had to, she could make the drive northwest for more cash in a matter of hours, but somehow that would mean she’d failed.
She wasn’t running to or from anything. She wasn’t hiding out. She just wanted to continue drifting. It was all she knew. Maybe in a few more years, she’d come up with another plan. Maybe she’d drift forever. To do that, she had to get better—smarter—at managing.
As she always did, she unpacked her few belongings. Clothes on hangers in the closet. Underwear in the top drawer. Shoes and backpack in the bottom drawer. Her father’s tiny journals on the nightstand beside the bed. Everything in order.
Her billfold and her laptop slid into her shoulder bag. The laptop went everywhere with her. The backup drive always remained with her clothes tucked away in the back of a shelf or tucked into a pocket. Against her father’s advice, she kept details of everywhere she stopped, be it for one night or a few months. He might have jotted only zip codes and number of days stayed, but she liked to log in the history of each place, how it looked, how it might feel to live there.
Walking out of her room, she studied the polished old mahogany of the staircase. The faded wallpaper peeling free in places, reminding her of fragile lace. The house was beautiful and well cared for, like an aging queen, still standing on a street with abandoned and broken-down homes huddled near, as if hoping the memory of great days gone by might still live in reality’s shadow.
Slipping past the foyer, Jillian rushed down the front steps like an explorer hungry to begin digging. This town’s zip code, like dozens of others, had been listed in her father’s first journals. Maybe in his early years, he’d left a trace.
She told herself she’d feel it if he’d been here. If this was the place where he’d stopped wandering just long enough to care for someone.
But she felt only the cool winter wind whipping between buildings, whirling her around as if pushing her off any direct course.
A few blocks later, she was strolling down Main, her still-damp hair swinging in a ponytail. She blended in with the crowds, window-shopping, as if she had no direction. The smell of cinnamon and ginger drifted in the winter air, blending around pieces of conversations and laughter like icing melts into warm cake.
Jillian swore she could feel her heart slow. The very air in Laurel Springs seemed to welcome her.
Halfway down the block she found what she was looking for. A small help-wanted sign in the corner of a window.
Above hung a faded sign that read LAUREL SPRINGS DAILY.
She let out a breath through her smile. Newspaper work. She could handle that. Selling ads. Writing copy. No problem. Mentally, she made up her resume in her head. Nothing too fancy, nothing too bright. Nothing too easy to check.
As she pushed open the newspaper office door, she selected a new identity as easily as she might change a hat.
2 (#u3d987ccc-abdb-5344-9062-ec860c7eae48)
Connor Larady looked up from the copy machine he’d been trying to murder for an hour. “Morning,” he said as he set down his latest weapon of destruction, a screwdriver. “May I help you, miss?”
The woman clamoring through his office door was tall and slim enough to be a model. With hair in a ponytail and little makeup, she could have still been in her teens, but the wisdom in her big, rainy-day-colored eyes marked her as a good ten years older.
He shoved his tools aside, walked over to the front desk and tried to find a scrap of paper to write on. No one ever came into a newspaper office without either wanting something written, or rewritten.
You’d think a writer would have a pen and pad handy. Only he wasn’t much of a writer, and this wasn’t much of an office. The Laurel Springs Daily had been whittled down to little more than a weekly flyer and a spotty blog of what was happening in town when he got around to it, but he kept up the office his father and grandfather had both run.
Considering himself a good judge of people, Connor had a premonition he’d be filling out a free obit form or a lost dog report, also free.
There were some days he’d thought of combining the two columns in the weekly paper. The header could read LEFT TOWN FOR PARTS UNKNOWN. The byline could be Those Recently Departed or Run Over.
The woman moved one small step closer. Connor had no idea if she was just shy or half-afraid of him. Maybe his grandmother and daughter were right: he was starting to look like the mug shots on the Dallas nightly news. Hair too long, this was the third day he’d worn the same old wrinkled shirt, and he hadn’t bothered to remove the raincoat his gram said only a vampire would wear.
He’d tried to tell them both that he didn’t have time to commit a crime. He was too busy running the town and keeping up with them. His grandmother had taken to wandering off alone, and his daughter was worse. She preferred wandering off with any pimpled-faced, oversexed boy who had a driver’s license. Between the two of them, his curly brown hair would be gray before he turned forty. That is, if it decided to stay around at all.
Connor shoved his worries aside and waited for the attractive stranger to say something. Anything. Or run back out the door. He didn’t much care which. He had more than enough to deal with this morning, and he didn’t want to hear a complaint. Everyone thought if you were the mayor, you loved listening in detail of what was wrong in town.
Maybe this stranger just wanted to talk, or ask directions?
Conversation wasn’t his strong point. Plus, she was just the kind of woman who made him nervous—pretty, and near his age. With his luck, any second she’d decide there was more to him than people could see and would start trying to remake him into marriage material.
Maybe he should wear a sign. TO ALL WOMEN: I AM MADE OF MUD. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MOLD ME INTO, WHEN IT RAINS, I’M BACK TO MUD. Save us both some time and move on to another project.
Raising her head, she studied him a moment, then said, without smiling, “I’m here about the job.”
“What job?” He hadn’t had a secretary for two years. That had been a disaster. He could go slowly bankrupt by himself without a helper continually suggesting they buy supplies or turn up the heater, or paint the place.
The attractive woman before him tilted her head, and he noticed her eyes weren’t quite blue or gray, but they were looking directly at him. “The help-wanted sign posted?”
She’d said the words slowly as if he might need time to absorb them. “I can write copy, proofread fairly fast, and I’m willing to try any type of reporting.”
He lifted an eyebrow, thinking maybe he should recite his resume to her if that was how she wanted to introduce herself. One degree in English, one in history, a master’s in anthropology. None of which had ever earned him a dime. Come to think of it, maybe he was slow? No one had bothered to tell him that he was wasting his time in school.
This stranger in town pointed at the faded note in the window and his brain clicked on. “Oh, that job’s not here at the paper. It’s across the street at the quilt shop.” He pointed out the window to A Stitch in Time, the shop directly across Main.
“It’s been so long since I put it there, I forgot about the sign.”
“Sorry to have bothered you.” She turned, obviously not a woman to waste time.
“Wait.” He hadn’t had a single bite for the job at the quilt shop in weeks. Everyone in town knew what it was and no one wanted it. But this outsider just might be dumb enough to take it. “It’s only a short-term job. Three or four months at the most, but it pays fifteen dollars an hour if you have the right skills.”
“What skills?”
She wasn’t running at the thought of working in a quilt shop. That was a good sign. “My grandmother has owned the town’s quilt shop for over fifty years. She’s closing down, but what we need done has to be accomplished carefully. Every quilt in the place has to be cataloged for the county museum. She holds the history of this town in there.”
Connor had no idea how to say what he needed to say, but he had to be honest. “Gram’s slipping a little. Beginning to forget things. Over the years she’s collected and made quilts that mean a great deal to the people of Laurel Springs. They’ll have to be treated with care. The history of each one logged and photographed.”
“Museum-quality preservation. I understand. I worked at the Southwest Collection on the Texas Tech campus while I was in college. My salary will be twenty an hour for that detailed kind of work.”
She stood her ground and he had no doubt she knew what to do. Which was more than he knew about the process. The county curator had been excited about the collection but offered no time or advice.
Now Connor was sure he was the one afraid of her. “All right. I’ll walk you over and let you meet my grandmother. If you last an hour, you’re on the payroll. She’ll be the boss. Some days you’ll be working at her pace.”
Nodding, she passed through the front door he held open. When they started across the street, she hesitated. “Aren’t you going to lock your office door?”
“What, and hamper anyone trying to steal my copier? No way.”
The woman was giving him that look again. She’d obviously decided he was missing critical brain cells.
“I’m Jillian James.” She held out her hand, palm up as if to say, your turn next.
“Connor Larady.” He grinned. “I’m the town mayor.”
She didn’t look impressed. She’d probably heard he’d run unopposed.
Without another word, they stepped inside the quilt shop. He didn’t miss her slight gasp as she looked up at the size of the place. It widened out from the small storefront windows in a pie-slice shape, with two stories opening to an antique tin ceiling. Massive fans turned slowly, so far above he couldn’t feel the air move.
Every inch of the twenty-foot-high walls was covered in colorful quilts; a collage of fabric rainbows.
Deep shelves lined the wall behind the wide front counter. Folded quilts were stacked five deep for a dozen rows.
“This may take longer than three months,” she whispered.
“I’ll help,” he offered. “But I should tell you, Gram is in charge here. This is her world, so whatever she wants goes. I don’t want the cataloging to cause her any stress.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not sure you do.” He looked at her closely, wondering how much to tell a stranger. “We’re working against a ticking clock and it’s in Gram’s head. The cataloging, the inventory, may not always be her priority. You may have to gently guide her back to the task.”
Her intelligent eyes looked straight at him, and he guessed she was one of those rare people who listened, really listened.
“I can put in overtime and will work Saturdays, but I can’t promise you I’ll stay in town more than three months. If you think I can complete the job by then, I’ll give it my best shot.”
“I understand,” he said, even though he didn’t. Why couldn’t she stay longer? Who moves to a town for three months? Someone just killing time, he reasoned.
A mix of conversation and laughter came from the back of the shop where the ceiling lowered to eight feet, allowing room for a storage room above and a meeting room below.
Connor took the lead. Unlike the stranger, he knew exactly what he was walking into. The twice-a-week quilting bee. An old frame hung from the beams, allowing just enough room for chairs to circle the quilt being hand-stitched together. It might be a lost art in most places, but here, the women seemed to love not only the project, but the company.
The moment the ladies saw him their voices rose in greeting. All eight of them seemed to be talking to him at once. As soon as he greeted each one, he introduced Jillian James to them. “I’ve hired Jillian to help catalog my grandmother’s collection. Gram’s got a great treasure here in her shop.”
The ladies agreed with his plan, but two reminded him that it would be a long time before his gram retired.
His grandmother, Eugenia Ann Freeman Larady, slowly stood and offered her hand to Jillian. Where Connor had been told his eyes were Mississippi River brown, his gram’s had faded to the pale blue of shallow water. Every year she’d aged he’d grown more protective of her, but today he needed to take a step backward and see how she got along with a stranger brought in to work with her.
Gram winked at Jillian as if she already counted her as a friend. “Call me Gram if you like. All Connor’s friends do.”
“Gram,” Jillian said with a genuine smile.
“I’ve decided.” The willowy old dear cleared her throat before continuing. “I’ll probably be working on a quilt when the good Lord calls me home and I’ll have to say, ‘Just give me time to finish the binding, then I’ll come dancing through the Pearly Gates.’”
He’d heard her say those words a thousand times over the years. Now, most of what she said were old sayings like that. New ideas, new thoughts, were rare.
“Gram,” he said gently. “Jillian wants to help you get these quilts all in order so someday they’ll be on display in the county museum.”
His grandmother nodded as she looked around the shop, every inch of its wall space covered in quilts. Gram smiled. “I’d like that. I’ll even get out my pioneer quilts. The ones brought here in covered wagons. Some are worn. They were used, you know, but then, that’s what quilts are made for, too. Plain or fancy, they wrap us in our families’ warmth.”
“She’ll write down the details and take pictures so you can show them all off at once to your friends,” Connor pressed, hoping Gram understood.
Eugenia had lost interest in talking to him. She took Jillian’s hand and tugged her to the only empty chair around the six-foot square of material pulled so tightly on the quilting frame it could almost have served as a table. “Before we start, we have to work on this quilt. Dixie pieced it for her niece, and the wedding is in two weeks. Hand quilting takes time.”
