Wisconsin Wedding

Revisit this classic romance by New York Times bestselling author Carla Neggers

Welcome to Tyler, where wedding bells are ringing.

Liza and Cliff are getting married, and it’s set to be a grand affair. Happily, weddings bring family together, so Cliff’s brother Byron Forrester makes the trip for the big event. He’s visited the town of Tyler once before, and despite his uneasy relationship with Cliff, he’s glad of the opportunity to return.

Nora Gates, independent-minded owner of Tyler’s department store, fancies herself a spinster. One brief, passionate affair sated her curiosity. But Byron’s arrival shatters her tranquility…

“You lied to me, Byron!”

“I couldn’t think of any decent way to tell you.”

“Of course not. Decency isn’t your style.” She tilted her chin up, hanging on to the last shreds of her dignity. “Does Cliff know about us?”

“He knows you don’t like me.”

“But I never indicated…”

Byron grinned. “You aren’t as good at hiding your emotions as you think, Miss Gates. But you can relax. He doesn’t know why you dislike me so much. I haven’t told him anything.”

Nora exhaled at the blue autumn sky. “I could strangle you, Byron.” She looked back at him. “And that’s only the half of it.”

“I’m sure,” he said. His tone was neutral, but she saw the lust—the damned amusement—in his eyes.

“Don’t you get any ideas, Byron Sanders Whoever. You don’t mean any more to me than a bag of dried beans.”

“Remember your fairy tales, Nora.” Byron smiled. “Jack’s beans turned out to be magic.”

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Mills & Boon’s Tyler, a small Wisconsin town whose citizens we hope you’ll soon come to know and love. Like many of the innovative publishing concepts Mills & Boon has launched over the years, the idea for the Tyler series originated in response to our readers’ preferences. Your enthusiasm for sequels and continuing characters within many of the Mills & Boon lines has prompted us to create a twelve-book series of individual romances whose characters’ lives inevitably intertwine.

Tyler faces many challenges typical of small towns, but the fabric of this fictional community will be torn by the revelation of a long-ago murder, the details of which will evolve right through the series. This intriguing crime will profoundly affect the lives of the Ingallses, the Barons, the Forresters and the Wochecks.

Renovations have begun on the old Timberlake resort lodge as the series opens, and the lodge will also attract the attention of a prominent Chicago hotelier, a man with a personal interest in showing Tyler folks his financial clout.

Marge is waiting with some home-baked pie at her diner, and policeman Brick Bauer might direct you down Elm Street if it’s patriarch Judson Ingalls you’re after. Nora Gates will make sure you find everything you need at Gates Department Store. She’s helping Liza Baron prepare for her wedding, but is having great difficulty handling the unexpected arrival of the groom’s brother! So join us in Tyler, once a month for the next ten months, for a slice of small-town life that’s not as innocent or as quiet as you might expect, and for a sense of community that will capture your mind and your heart.

Marsha Zinberg

Editorial Coordinator, Tyler

Wisconsin Wedding
Carla Neggers

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

WITHIN THE SEDATE, mahogany-paneled president’s office of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers, Byron Forrester pitched a sharp-pointed dart at the arrogant face of his latest traitorous author. The dart nailed Henry V. Murrow smack in the middle of his neatly clipped beard. Byron grinned. He was getting pretty good at this! Now if Henry had been in the office in person instead of in the form of an eight-by-ten glossy publicity photo, Byron would have been a happy man. Only that morning Henry had called to notify him that he’d just signed a mega-deal with a big New York publisher.

“For what?” Byron had demanded.

“A technothriller.”

“What, do you have a dastardly villain threatening to blow up the world with a toaster? You don’t know anything about advanced technology. Henry, for God’s sake, you haven’t even figured out the telegraph yet.”

“Research, my boy. Research.”

Pierce & Rothchilde didn’t publish technothrillers. Its specialties were expensive-to-produce coffee-table books, mostly about art, geography and history, and so-called literary fiction. Some of the latter was deadly stuff. Byron found Henry’s books depressing as hell.

Technothrillers. From a man who’d been utterly defeated by the locks on Byron’s sports car. “How does one exit from this contraption?” he’d asked.

Now he was calling himself Hank Murrow and planning to make a bloody fortune. Probably had shaved his beard, burned his tweeds, packed his pipe away in mothballs and taken his golden retriever to the pound.

“I wonder how much the fink’s really getting.”

Byron aimed another dart. Henry—Hank—had said seven figures, but Byron didn’t believe him. He’d yet to meet a writer who didn’t lie about money.

A quiet tap on his solid mahogany door forced him to fold his fingers around the stem of the dart and not throw it. He really wanted to. Henry had offered to send him a copy of his completed manuscript. Byron had declined. “It’ll be more fun,” Henry had said, “than anything that’ll cross your desk this year.” A comment all the more irritating for its probable truth. Byron had wished the turncoat well and gotten out his darts.

Without so much as a by-your-leave from him, Fanny Redbacker strode into his office. Trying to catch him throwing darts, no doubt. She regularly made it clear that she didn’t think her new boss was any match for her old boss, the venerable Thorton Pierce. Byron considered that good news. His grandfather, whose father had cofounded Pierce & Rothchilde in 1894, had been a brilliant, scrawny old snob of a workaholic. He’d vowed never to retire and hadn’t. He’d died in that very office, behind that very desk, five years ago. Byron, although just thirty-eight, had no intention of suffering a similar fate.

“Yes, Mrs. Redbacker?” he said, trying to sound like the head of one of the country’s most prestigious publishing houses.

Mrs. Redbacker, of course, knew better. Stepping forward, she placed an envelope on his desk. Byron saw her eyes cut over to Henry Murrow’s dart-riddled face. Her mouth drew into a straight line of disapproval.

“It’s tacked to a cork dartboard,” Byron said. “I didn’t get a mark on the wood paneling.”

“What if you’d missed?”

“I never miss.”

She inhaled. “The letter’s a personal one addressed to you and Mrs. Forrester.” Meaning his mother. Byron wasn’t married. Mrs. Redbacker added pointedly, “The postmark is Tyler, Wisconsin.”

Byron almost stabbed his hand with the dart, so completely did her words catch him off guard. Regaining his composure, he set the thing on his desk. Fanny Redbacker sighed, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. It had been three months, and Byron still wasn’t Thorton Pierce. He didn’t even look like him. Where his cultured, imperious grandfather had been sandy-haired and blue-eyed and somewhat washed out in appearance, Byron took after the Forresters. He was tall, if not as tall as the Pierces, and thick-boned and dark, his hair and eyes as dark as his father’s had been. For a while everyone had thought that despite his rough-and-ready looks Byron would step neatly into his grandfather’s hand-tooled oxfords.

But that was before he’d ventured to Tyler, Wisconsin, three years ago. After that trip, all bets were off.

“Thank you, Mrs. Redbacker.”

She retreated without comment.

Byron had forgotten his annoyance with Henry Murrow. Now all he could think about was the letter on his desk. It was addressed to Mr. Byron Forrester and Mrs. Ann Forrester, c/o Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers. At a guess, the handwriting looked feminine. It certainly wasn’t Cliff’s.

“Oh, God,” Byron breathed.

Something had happened to Cliff, and now here was the letter informing his younger brother and mother of the bad news.

Nora… Nora Gates had found out who Byron was and had decided to write.

Not a chance. The letter wasn’t big enough to hold a bomb. And the scrawl was too undisciplined for precise, would-be spinster Eleanora Gates, owner of Gates Department Store in downtown Tyler, Wisconsin. She was the last person Byron wanted to think about now.

He tore open the envelope.

Inside was a simple printed card inviting him and his mother to the wedding of Clifton Pierce Forrester and Mary Elizabeth Baron the Saturday after this in Tyler.

A letter bomb would have surprised Byron less.

There was a note attached.

Cliff’s doing great and I know he wants to see you both. Please come. I think it would be best if you just showed up, don’t you?

Liza

A hoax? This Liza character had neglected to provide a return address or a phone number, and the invitation didn’t request a reply. The wedding was to take place at the Fellowship Lutheran Church. To find out more, presumably, Byron would have to head to Wisconsin.

Was that what Liza Baron wanted?

Who the hell was she?

Was Cliff getting married?

At a guess, Byron thought, his brother didn’t know that Miss Liza Baron had fired off an invitation to the sedate Providence offices of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers.

Byron leaned back in his leather chair and closed his eyes.

Tyler, Wisconsin.

A thousand miles away and three years later and he could still feel the warm sun of a Midwest August on his face. He could see the corn standing tall in the rolling fields outside Tyler and the crowd gathered in the town square for a summer band concert. He could hear old Ellie Gates calling out the winner of the quilt raffle, to raise money for repairing the town clock. First prize was a hand-stitched quilt of intersecting circles. Byron later learned that its design was called Wisconsin Wedding, a variation on the traditional wedding ring design created by Tyler’s own quilting ladies.

And he could hear her laugh. Nora’s laugh. It wasn’t her fake spinsterish laugh he heard, but the laugh that was soft and free, unrestrained by the peculiar myths that dominated her life.

He’d gone to Tyler once and had almost destroyed Nora Gates. He’d almost destroyed himself. And his brother. How could he go back?

Please come….

Byron had waited for years to be invited back into his older brother’s life. There’d been Vietnam, Cambodia, a hospital in the Philippines, sporadic attempts at normality. And then nothing. For five years, nothing.

Now this strange invitation—out of the blue—to his brother’s wedding.

A woman named Alyssa Baron had helped the burned-out recluse make a home at an abandoned lodge on a lake outside town. Was Liza Baron her daughter?

So many questions, Byron thought.

And so many dangers. Too many, perhaps.

He picked up his last dart. If he or his mother—or both—just showed up in Tyler after all these years, what would Cliff do? What if their presence sent him back over the edge? Liza Baron might have good intentions, but did she know what she was doing in making this gesture to her fiancé’s estranged family?

But upsetting Cliff wasn’t Byron’s biggest fear. They were brothers. Cliff had gone away because of his love for and his loyalty to his family. That much Byron understood.

No, his biggest fear was of a slim, tawny-haired Tylerite who’d fancied herself a grand Victorian old maid at thirty, in an era when nobody believed in old maids. What would proper, pretty Nora Gates do if he showed up in her hometown again?

Byron sat up straight. “She’d come after you, my man.” He fired his dart. “With a blowtorch.”

The pointed tip of the dart penetrated the polished mahogany paneling with a loud thwack, missing Henry Murrow’s nose by a good eight inches.

The Nora Gates effect.

He was probably the only man on earth who knew that she wasn’t anything like the refined, soft-spoken spinster lady she pretended she was. For that, she hated his guts. Her parting words to him three years ago had been, “Then leave, you despicable cad.”

Only Nora.

But even worse, he suspected he was the only man who’d ever lied to her and gotten away with it. At least so far. When he’d left Tyler three years ago, Nora hadn’t realized he’d lied. And since she hadn’t come after him with a bucket of hot tar, he assumed she still didn’t realize he had.

If he returned to Tyler, however, she’d know for sure.

And then what?

* * *

“MISS GATES?”

Nora recognized the voice on the telephone—it was that of Mrs. Mickelson in china and housewares, around the corner from Nora’s office on the third floor. For a few months after Aunt Ellie’s death three years ago, the staff at Gates Department Store hadn’t quite known how to address the young Eleanora Gates. Most had been calling her Nora for years, but now that she was their boss that just wouldn’t do. And “Ms. Gates” simply didn’t sound right. So they settled, without any discussion that Nora knew about, on Miss Gates—the same thing they’d called her aunt. It was as if nothing had changed. And in many ways, nothing had.

“I have Liza Baron here,” Mrs. Mickelson said.

Nora settled back in the rosewood chair Aunt Ellie had bought in Milwaukee in 1925. “Oh?”

“She’s here to fill out her bridal registry, but…well, you know Miss Baron. She’s grumbling about feudalistic rituals. I’m afraid I just don’t know what to say.”

“Send her into my office,” Nora said, stifling a laugh. Despite her years away from Tyler, Liza Baron obviously hadn’t changed. “I’ll be glad to handle this one for you.”

Claudia Mickelson made no secret of her relief as she hung up. It wasn’t that Nora was any better equipped for the task of keeping Liza Baron happy. It was, simply, that should Liza screech out of town in a blue funk and get Cliff Forrester to elope with her, thus denying its grandest wedding since Chicago socialite Margaret Lindstrom married Tyler’s own Judson Ingalls some fifty years before, it would be on Nora’s head.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Mickelson and the unlikely bride burst into Nora’s sedate office. Mrs. Mickelson surrendered catalogs and the bridal registry book, wished Liza well and retreated. Liza plopped down on the caned chair in front of the elegant but functional rosewood desk. Wearing a multicolored serape over a bright orange oversize top and skinny black leggings, Liza Baron was as stunning and outrageous and completely herself as Nora remembered. That she’d fallen head over heels in love with the town’s recluse didn’t surprise Nora in the least. Liza Baron had always had a mind of her own. Anyway, love was like that. It was an emotion Nora didn’t necessarily trust.

“This was all my mother’s idea,” Liza announced.

“It usually is.” Nora, a veteran calmer of bridal jitters, smiled. “A bridal register makes life much easier for the mother of the bride. Otherwise, people continually call and ask her for suggestions of what to buy as a wedding gift. It gets tiresome, and if she gives the wrong advice, it’s all too easy for her to be blamed.”

Liza scowled. There was talk around town—not that Nora was one to give credence to talk—that Liza just might hop into her little white car and blow out of town as fast and suddenly as she’d blown in. Not because she didn’t love Cliff Forrester, but because she so obviously did. Only this morning Nora had overheard two members of her staff speculating on the potential effects on Liza’s unusual fiancé of a big wedding and marrying into one of Tyler’s first families. Would he be able to tolerate all the attention? Would he bolt? Would he go off the deep end?

“Well,” Liza said, “the whole thing strikes me as sexist and mercenary.”

Liza Baron had always been one to speak her mind, something Nora admired. She herself also valued directness, even if her own manner was somewhat more diplomatic. “You have a point, but I don’t think that’s the intent.”

“You don’t see anybody dragging Cliff down here to pick out china patterns, do you?”

“No, that wouldn’t be the custom.”

It was enough of a shock, Nora thought, to see Liza Baron with a catalog of Wedgwood designs in front of her. But if Liza was somewhat nontraditional, Cliff Forrester—Well, for years townspeople had wondered if they ought to fetch an expert in posttraumatic stress disorder from Milwaukee to have a look at him, make sure his gray matter was what it should be. He’d lived alone at Timberlake Lodge for at least five years, maybe longer. He’d kept to himself for the most part and, as far as anyone knew, had never hurt anyone. Nora had long ago decided that most of the talk about him was just that: talk. She figured he was a modern-day hermit pretty much as she was a modern-day spinster—by choice. It didn’t mean either of them had a screw loose. Cliff, of course, had met Liza Baron and chosen to end his isolation. Nora had no intention of ending hers.

“If I were in your place,” she went on, “I’d consider this a matter of practicality. Do you want to end up with three silver tea services?”

Liza shuddered. “I don’t want one silver tea service.”

Nora marked that down. “When people don’t know what the bride and groom want, they tend to buy what they would want. It’s human nature. It’s to be a big wedding, isn’t it?”

“Mother’s doing. She’s got half of Tyler coming. Cliff and I would have been happy getting married by a justice of the peace without any fanfare.”

That, Nora felt, wasn’t entirely true. Cliff no doubt dreaded facing a crowd, but would do it for Liza—and for her mother, too, who’d been his only real friend for years. But in Nora’s estimation, Liza Baron relished being the center of attention again in Tyler. It wasn’t that she was spoiled or snobby; she was still getting used to having finally come home to Tyler at all, never mind planning to marry and stay there. It was more that she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to act now that she was home again. She needed to find a way to weave herself into the fabric of the community on her own terms. The wedding was, in part, beautiful vivacious Liza’s way of welcoming the people of her small hometown back into her life. As far as Nora was concerned, it was perfectly natural that occasionally Liza would seem ambivalent, even hostile. In addition to the stress of a big church wedding, she was also coping with her once-tattered relationship with her mother, and all the gossip about the Ingalls and Baron families.

And that included the body that had turned up at the lake. But Nora wasn’t about to bring up that particular tidbit.

She discreetly glanced at the antique grandfather clock that occupied the corner behind Liza. Of the office furnishings, only the calendar, featuring birds of Wisconsin, had changed since Aunt Ellie’s day.

“Oh, all right,” Liza said with great drama, “I’m here. Let’s do this thing. The prospect of coping with stacks of plastic place mats with scenes of Wisconsin and a dozen gravy boats does give one pause.”

Gates carried both items Liza considered offensive. Nora herself owned a set of Wisconsin place mats. She used them for picnics and when the neighborhood children wandered into her kitchen for milk and cookies. Her favorite was the one featuring Tyler’s historic library. She didn’t tell Liza that she was bound to get at least one set of Wisconsin place mats. Inger Hansen, one of the quilting ladies, had bought Wisconsin place mats for every wedding she’d attended since they first came on the market in 1972. Nora had been in high school then, working at Gates part-time.

They got down to business. “Now,” Nora explained to her reluctant customer, “here’s how the bridal register works. You list your china, silverware and glassware patterns, any small appliances you want, sheets, towels, table linens. There are any number of variables, depending on what you and Cliff want.”

Liza wrinkled up her pretty face. She was, Nora saw, a terribly attractive woman. She herself was of average height and build, with a tendency to cuteness that she did her best to disguise with sophisticated—but not too chic—business clothes and makeup. She didn’t own a single article of clothing in pink, no flowered or heart-shaped anything, no polka dots, no T-shirts with pithy sayings, damned little lace. No serapes, no bright orange tops, no skinny black leggings. She preferred cool, subdued colors to offset her pale gray eyes and ash-blond hair, which she kept in a classic bob. Liza Baron, on the other hand, would look wild in anything. Cast them each in a commercial, and Judson Ingalls’s rebellious granddaughter would sell beer, Ellie Gates’s grandniece life insurance.

“Nora, Cliff doesn’t want anything. He’d be happy living in a damned cave.”

But, as Nora had anticipated, in the quiet and privacy of the third floor office, with its window overlooking the Tyler town square, Liza Baron warmed to her task. She briskly dismissed anything too cute or too simple and resisted the most expensive patterns Gates carried. She finally settled on an elegant and dramatic china pattern from England, American silver-plate flatware, a couple of small appliances, white linens all around, Brazilian knives and a special request to please discourage can openers. The stemware gave her the worst fits. Finally she admitted it was Waterford or nothing.

“Go for it,” Nora said, amused. She tried to picture Cliff Forrester drinking from a Waterford goblet and found—strangely—that she could. Had someone said he was from a prominent East Coast family? Like most people in Tyler, Nora knew next to nothing about the mysterious, quiet man who lived at run-down Timberlake Lodge.

Liza slumped back in the delicate caned chair. “Is it too late to elope?”

“People would still buy you gifts.”

Their work done, a silence fell between the two women. Despite her busy schedule, Nora was in no hurry to rush Liza out. The young woman had gone through a lot in the past weeks, and if the rumors circulating in the shops, restaurants and streets of Tyler were even remotely on target, she had more to endure. Falling in love with an outsider had certainly been enough to stimulate gossip, even undermine Liza’s beliefs about what she wanted out of her life. In Nora’s view, that right there was enough reason to steer clear of men: romance caused change.

It was as if Liza had read her mind. “You’ve never been married, have you, Nora?”

“No, I haven’t. I like my life just the way it is.”

Liza smiled. “Good for you. Have you ever been tempted?”

Nora’s hesitation, she was sure, was noticeable only to herself. “Nope.”

“Well, I certainly don’t believe a woman has to be married to be happy or complete.”

“But you’re happy with Cliff.”

“Yes.” Her smile broadened. “Yes, I am.”

Indeed, falling so completely in love with Cliff Forrester had already had an unmistakable effect on one of Tyler’s most rebellious citizens. Liza Baron, however, seemed much more willing to embrace change than Nora was. She seemed more at peace with herself than she had when she’d first blown back into town, if a little rattled at the prospect of a big Tyler wedding.

Nora shrugged. “Romance doesn’t have a positive effect on me, I’m afraid. It makes me crazy and silly…I lose control.”

Liza’s eyes widened in surprise, as if she’d never imagined Nora Gates having had anything approaching a romance, and she grinned. “Isn’t that the whole idea?”

“I suppose for some, but I—” Nora stopped herself in the nick of time. What was she saying? “Well, I’m speaking theoretically, of course. I’ve never…I’m not one for romantic notions.” A fast change of subject was in order. “How’re the renovations at the lodge coming?”

“Fabulously well. Better than I expected, really, given all that’s gone on. You should come out and take a look.”

“I’d love to,” Nora said, meaning it. As if marriage and her return to Tyler weren’t stressful enough, Liza had also come up with the idea of renovating Timberlake Lodge, a monumental project Nora personally found exciting. Unfortunately, the work had led to the discovery of a human skeleton on the premises. Not the sort of thing one wanted percolating on the back burner while planning one’s wedding.

“Anytime. And thank you, Nora.”

“Oh, you don’t need to thank me—”

Liza shook her head. “No, I’ve been acting like a big baby and you’ve been so nice about it. The store looks great, by the way. Your aunt would be proud, I’m sure. You’ve added your own touches, but retained the flavor and spirit everyone always remembers about Gates. When I think I’m living in the boondocks, I just walk past your windows and realize there is indeed taste and culture here in Tyler.” She hesitated a moment, something uncharacteristic of Judson Ingalls’s youngest grandchild. “Ellie Gates was quite a character. She’s still missed around here.”

“She is,” Nora agreed simply.

“Well, I should be off.” Liza rose with a sudden burst of energy. “I guess I’ll go through with this big fancy wedding. If nothing else, Tyler could use a good party right now.”

Now Liza Baron was sounding like herself. Nora swept to her feet. “You’re probably right about that. I suppose you haven’t heard anything more from the police?”

Liza shook her head. “Not a word.”

Without saying so outright, they both knew they were talking about what Nora had begun to refer to as the Body at the Lake. The Tyler Citizen reported every new and not-so-new development in the case, but the rumors were far more speculative. Given her ownership of Tyler’s only department store, her membership on the town council and her circumspect nature, Nora was privy to considerable amounts of local gossip, which she never repeated. Certainly anyone could have been buried at the long-abandoned lodge. Someone from out of town or out of state could have driven up, plucked a body out of the trunk, dug a hole and dropped it in. But townspeople’s imaginations were fired by the idea that the body was that of Tyler’s most famous—actually, it’s only—missing person, Margaret Alyssa Lindstrom Ingalls. People said Liza was a lot like her flamboyant grandmother. Bad enough, Nora thought, that Liza had to cope with having a dead body dug up in her yard. Worse that it could be that of her long-lost grandmother.

“I’ll continue to hope for the best,” Nora said diplomatically.

Liza’s smile this time was feeble. “Thank you.”

But before she left, she spun around one more time, serape flying. “Oh, I almost forgot. Cliff specifically wanted me to ask if you were coming to the wedding. You are, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes, I’d love to, but I’ve never even met Cliff—”

“Oh, he’s seen you around town and admires your devotion to Tyler and…how did he put it? Your balance, I think he said. He says if he has to endure a huge wedding, he should at least have a few people around who won’t make him feel uncomfortable.” Liza’s eyes misted, her expression softening. She looked like a woman in love. “God knows he’s trying. He’s still uneasy around people—I guess you could call this wedding a trial by fire. Not only will half of Tyler be there, but there’s a chance his family’ll come, too.”

“I didn’t realize he had any family.”

“A mother and a brother.” Liza bit the corner of her mouth, suddenly unsure of herself. “They’re from Providence.”

“Providence, Rhode Island?” Nora asked, her knees weakening.

“Umm. Real East Coast mucky-mucks.”

Byron Sanders, the one man who’d penetrated Nora’s defenses, had been from Providence, Rhode Island. But that had to be a coincidence. That wretched cad couldn’t have anything to do with a man like Cliff Forrester.

“Are they coming?” Nora asked.

Liza cleared her throat hesitantly. “Haven’t heard. From what I gather, our wedding’s pretty quick for a Forrester, so who knows?”

“Cliff must be anxious—”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. He hasn’t had much to do with his family since he moved out here. Nothing at all, in fact. He takes all the blame, but I don’t think that’s fair. He didn’t tell them where he was for a couple of years, but when he did finally let them know, he told them to leave him alone. But they could have bulldozed their way back into his life if they’d really wanted to.” She grinned. “Just like I did.”

“But Cliff did invite them?”

“Well, not exactly.”

Nora didn’t need a sledgehammer to get the point. “You mean you did? Without his knowledge?”

“Yep.”

Now that, Nora thought, could get interesting.

“I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes,” Liza added.

With a polite, dismissive comment, Nora promised Liza that she and her staff would steer people in the right direction when they came to Gates hunting for an appropriate wedding gift. Liza looked so relieved and happy when she left that Nora felt much better. Why on earth was she worrying about Byron Sanders, just because he and Cliff Forrester were from the same state? Rhode Island wasn’t that small. No, that weasel was just a black, secret chapter in her life.

She tucked the bridal register under her arm to return to Claudia Mickelson. She did love a wedding—as long as it wasn’t her own.

CHAPTER TWO

“I DON’T KNOW how Liza Baron can even think about getting married with this body business unresolved.”

Inger Hansen’s starchy words stopped Nora in her tracks. It was two days after Liza had sat in her office grumbling about feudalistic rituals while thumbing through a Waterford crystal catalog. As was her custom on Thursdays, when she gave piano lessons, Nora was moving toward Gates Department Store’s rear exit shortly before five. She usually didn’t leave until six.

Inger, the most imperious member of the Tyler Quilting Circle, went on indignantly, “That could be her grandmother they found out there.”

Martha Bauer held up two different shades of off-white thread. It was just a show; she’d been buying the same shade for thirty years. “Well, I do wish they’d tell us something soon,” she said with a sigh. “Don’t you think they’ve had that body up at the county long enough to know something?”

“I understand that the body’s a skeleton already,” Rose Atkins, one of the sweetest and most eccentric elderly women in Tyler, said. “Identification must be a difficult process under such circumstances. And it would be terrible if they made a mistake, don’t you think? I’d prefer them to take their time and get it right.”

Nora agreed, and found herself edging toward the fabric department’s counter. Stella, the fabric clerk and a woman known for her sewing expertise, was occupied sorting a new shipment of buttons. Nora didn’t blame her for not rushing to the quilting ladies’ assistance; they knew their way around the department and would likely chatter on until the store’s closing at six.

Inger Hansen sniffed. “In my opinion, the police are dragging their heels. No one wants to confront the real possibility that it’s Margaret Ingalls they found out at the lake.”

“Now, Inger,” Rose said patiently, “we don’t know for sure it’s Margaret. The body hasn’t even been identified yet as male or female.”

“Oh, it’s Margaret all right.”

Martha Bauer discarded the wrong shade of off-white thread. “And what if it is?” She looked uncomfortable and a little pale. “That could mean…”

Inger jumped right in. “It could mean Margaret Ingalls was murdered.”

“My heavens,” Martha breathed.

“I never did think she ran away,” Inger added, although in all the years Nora had known her she’d never given such an indication. “It just wasn’t like Margaret to slip out of town in the cloak of darkness.”

Rose Atkins inhaled, clearly upset by such talk, and moved to the counter with a small, rolled piece of purple calico she’d found on the bargain table. “Why, Nora, I didn’t see you. How are you?”

“Just fine, Mrs. Atkins. Here, let me take that for you.”

Off to their left, Martha Bauer and Inger Hansen continued their discussion of the Body at the Lake. “Now, you can think me catty,” Inger said, “but I, for one, have always wondered what Judson Ingalls knew about his wife’s disappearance. I’m not accusing him of anything untoward, of course, but I do think—and have thought for forty years—that it’s strange he’s hardly lifted a finger to find her in all this time. He could certainly afford to hire a dozen private detectives, but he hasn’t.”

“Oh, stop.” Martha snatched up a spool of plain white all-cotton thread in addition to her off-white. “Margaret left him a note saying she was leaving him. Why should he have put himself and Alyssa through the added turmoil of looking for a wife who’d made it plain she wanted nothing more to do with him? No, I think he did the right thing in putting the matter behind him and carrying on with his life. What else could he have done? And in my opinion, that’s not Margaret they found out at the lake.”

Inger tucked a big bag of cotton batting under one arm. “Of course, I don’t like to gossip, but whoever it was, I can’t see Liza Baron and that recluse getting married with this dark cloud hanging over their heads. You’d think they’d wait.”

“Oh, Inger,” Martha said, laughing all of a sudden. “Honestly. Why should Liza put her life on hold? Now, would you look at this lovely gabardine?” Deftly she changed the subject.

Nora took two dollars from Rose Atkins for her fabric scrap. As had been the custom at Gates since it opened its doors seventy years ago, Nora tucked the receipt and Rose’s money into a glass-and-brass tube, which she then tucked into a chute to be pneumatically sucked up to the third floor office. There the head clerk would log the sale and send back the receipt and any change. None of the salesclerks handled any cash, checks or credit cards. The system was remarkablely fast and efficient, contributing an old-fashioned charm to the store that its customers seemed to relish.

“Everybody’s gone to computers these days,” Rose commented. “It’s such a relief to come in here and not have anything beep at me. Have you seen those light wands that read price stickers?” She shuddered; the world had changed a lot in Rose Atkins’s long life. “You’ve no plans to switch to something like that, have you?”

“None at all.”

That much Nora could say with certainty. In her opinion, computers didn’t go with Gates’s original wood-and-glass display cases, its Tiffany ceilings, its sweeping staircases and brass elevators, its gleaming polished tile floors. Tradition and an unrivaled reputation for service were what set Gates apart from malls and discount department stores. As Aunt Ellie had before her, Nora relied on value, quality, convenience and style to compete. At Gates, Tyler’s elderly women could still find a good housedress, its children could buy their Brownie and Cub Scout uniforms, its parents could find sturdy, traditional children’s and baby clothes. The fabric department kept a wide range of calico fabrics for Tyler’s quilting ladies. There was an office-supply department for local businesses, a wide-ranging book section for local readers, a lunch counter for hungry shoppers. Nora prided herself on meeting the changing needs of her community. As far as she was concerned, tradition was not only elusive in a fast-paced world, it was also priceless.

The tube returned, and she slipped out Rose’s change and receipt.

“Have you seen much of Liza Baron since she’s come home?” Rose asked.

“She came in a couple of days ago to fill out her bridal registry,” Nora replied. “But other than that, no.”

Rose’s eyes widened, no doubt at the prospect of wild, rebellious Liza doing anything as expected of her as filling out a bridal registry, but, a discreet woman, she resisted comment.

Behind her, Inger Hansen did no such thing. “I can’t imagine Liza would want to do anything so normal. She’s so much like her grandmother. You don’t remember Margaret Ingalls, Nora, but she was just as wild and unpredictable as Liza Baron. It’s odd, though. Your great-aunt and Margaret managed to get along amazingly well. I have no idea why. They were complete opposites.”

“Ellie was always extremely tolerant of people,” Martha Bauer put in.

“Yes,” Inger said. Even tart-tongued Inger Hansen had respected and admired Ellie Gates.

“I’m sure it’ll be a wonderful wedding,” Nora said, half-wishing she hadn’t delayed her departure to serve the quilters. Liza Baron and Cliff Forrester’s upcoming wedding was indeed the talk of the town, but it was having an effect on Nora that she couldn’t figure out. Was it because Cliff was from Rhode Island?

No. She’d put Byron Sanders out of her mind months and months ago. If the wedding was unsettling her it had to be because of the ongoing mystery of the identity of the body found at Timberlake.

Stella scooted behind Nora. “Here, Miss Gates, let me help these customers.”

Nora backed off, and with Inger Hansen wondering aloud how Liza could have ended up with that “strange man living out at the lake,” ducked out the rear exit.

Even if Liza Baron had been a fly on the wall during the past fifteen minutes, she wouldn’t have cared one whit what the quilting ladies were saying about her and Cliff—she’d marry whenever and whoever she wanted. Liza had a thumb-your-nose-at-the-world quality that Nora appreciated. Nora wondered if she was ever the subject of local gossip. Not likely. Oh, her latest window display always received plenty of attention, and the time she’d added a wheelchair ramp to one of the entrances had gotten people talking about accessibility and such. And folks had talked when, after much soul-searching and calculating how few were sold, she’d ceased to stock men’s overalls. But nobody, she was quite certain, talked about her. Her personal life.

“That’s because it’s dull, dull, dull.”

But wasn’t that exactly what she wanted?

The crisp, clear autumn air lifted her spirits. It was getting dark; the streetlights were already on, casting a pale glow on the bright yellow leaves still clinging to the intrepid maples that lined the perimeter of the parking lot. The feeling that life was passing her by vanished as quickly as it had overtaken her. This was life, at least hers. Small-town Midwest America. So it wasn’t Providence, Rhode Island. So it wasn’t wandering place to place with an elitist East Coast photographer who neither understood her nor the community she cared about. She belonged in Tyler. It was her home, and if it was Byron Sanders’s idea of hell, then so be it.

He was a cretin anyway.

Coincidence or not, Cliff Forrester’s own Rhode Island origins had gotten her thinking about the rake who’d almost ruined her life. For two days running now. She couldn’t make herself stop.

Well, she had to. Rhode Island might be a small state, but the chances of Tyler’s town recluse and a sneaky photographer having any knowledge of each other were remote. And Byron Sanders wasn’t from any “mucky-muck” East Coast family.

He also knew to keep his size elevens out of Tyler, Wisconsin.

But he’d been her one love, and he remained her one secret. No one knew they’d been lovers. Not even Tisha Olsen over at the Hair Affair, who knew everything that went on in Tyler, or the quilting ladies, whose combined knowledge of the town’s social history went all the way back to its founding during the great German immigration to Wisconsin 140 years ago. As far as everyone in Tyler was concerned, Nora was just like her great-aunt, the memorable Ellie Gates.

Only she wasn’t. And she knew it.

So did Byron Sanders.

She was so preoccupied that she arrived at the doorstep of her 1920s house before she even realized she’d come to her tree-lined street. She’d inherited the house from Aunt Ellie. They’d lived together from the death of Nora’s parents in a boating accident on Lake Superior when she was thirteen until Aunt Ellie’s death three years ago, not long after Byron Sanders had moved on. In the house’s quiet rooms and in Aunt Ellie’s quiet life, Nora had found peace and stability and hope.

She’d had the wide clapboards repainted last summer in the same cream color Aunt Ellie had chosen back in 1926. The trim was pure white. It was almost Halloween, but the porch swing was still out, the flower boxes planted with bright yellow mums.

With the house having been shut up all day, Nora left the front door open to catch the afternoon breeze while she went back to the kitchen. It was still thirty minutes before her first student arrived. Time enough for a cup of tea.

She’d made a few changes to the interior of the house, softening some of Aunt Ellie’s relentless formality. She’d covered the furniture in pale neutrals and had added cotton throw rugs, Depression glass, quilted pastel wall hangings. There were two small bedrooms upstairs, one downstairs, a small library, a living room and a dining room that she’d converted into a music room, shoving the gateleg table up against the wall to make room for a new baby grand.

Nora, however, hadn’t changed a thing in the kitchen. Its white cabinets, pale gray-blue walls and yellow accents didn’t need changing so far as she could see. Her friends said she should get a microwave, but she hadn’t yet succumbed. Before she died, Aunt Ellie had purchased a toaster oven. It still worked fine.

After putting on the kettle for tea, Nora sat at the kitchen table and looked out at her darkening yard. The bright leaves of the sugar maple had already fallen to the ground. Lately, birds had taken to fattening themselves at her bird feeders. Soon it would be completely dark. Winter wasn’t far off.

She sighed. She loved autumn; she even loved winter. So why was she hovering on the edge of depression?

She fixed a proper tea: Earl Grey tea leaves, her English porcelain pot, her matching cup and saucer, milk in a tiny milk glass pitcher. A sterling silver spoon. Homemade butter cookies from her favorite bakery. She put everything on a teak tray, which she carried out to the music room.

And nearly dropped it all on the floor.

Moving with the speed and silence of a panther, Cliff Forrester took the tray from her and set it one-handed on the gateleg table. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.

In his five years in Tyler, those were the first words Nora remembered his ever saying to her. She’d bumped into him on occasion at the hardware store, but Liza Baron’s fiancé had made clear he didn’t want to be disturbed at Timberlake Lodge. He wanted to be left alone. To heal his wounds and chase his demons or do whatever it was he did. Nora had heard all the rumors and possibilities. He was a tall, dark man. He didn’t look like…how had Liza put it? Like his family were East Coast mucky-mucks.

“It’s quite all right,” she said, sounding stuffy even to herself. “I was expecting a piano student.”

“You play?”

“Mmm, yes.”

His brow furrowed. “I didn’t know.”

How could he have known? They’d never even officially met until now. “Would you care for a cup of tea? I made more than enough. I always end up having to throw out half the pot.”

He shook his head. “No thanks.”

And then he smiled. Nora found it an unsettling experience, but she couldn’t pinpoint why. She felt no attraction to Liza’s lover. It wasn’t that at all. Then what? Men in general, she thought, disgusted with herself. Tall, dark men from Rhode Island in particular.

Too darned much thinking, she added to herself.

“Are you all right?” Cliff Forrester asked.

She nodded. “Perfectly.”

“I gather you know who I am.”

“Cliff Forrester. Yes, I think everyone in town knows.”

The corners of his mouth twitched in an ironic smile. “I guess so. Look, I won’t keep you, Miss Gates.”

“Nora,” she corrected.

“Nora, then.” His dark eyes probed her a moment. “I came by because of Liza. She was grateful for the way you treated her the other day.”

“I’d do the same for any of my customers, Mr.—”

“Cliff. And I think you would. Liza and I are…” He paused, seeming awkward, even pained. “We want this to work.”

Nora thought she understood what he was trying to say. The Body at the Lake, the wedding, Alyssa Baron, Judson Ingalls, Liza’s return to Tyler, the incessant gossip, long-lost Margaret Ingalls—it was a lot. And then there was Cliff Forrester himself. A recluse. A man uncomfortable around even small crowds. A man, it was said, afraid that something, someone, would trigger a bad memory and he’d crack. Hurt himself. Worse yet, hurt someone he cared about.

“Is there anything I can do?” Nora asked, instinctively wanting to help.

He seemed to relax, at least slightly. “If there’s anything you can think of to help Liza through this thing, I’d appreciate it. She doesn’t want to alienate anyone. She’s trying.”

Wasn’t that what Liza herself had said about him? Nora found their concern for each other touching. This, she thought, was what love and romance were about. Two people coming together as individuals, not asking the other to change, not demanding perfection, not expecting fantasies to come true. Just loving and accepting each other and perhaps growing together.

“I wouldn’t be interfering?”

“No.”

He was, she thought, a man who knew his own mind. “Then I’ll see what I can do.”

His smile was back, or what passed for one. “Thank you.”

“No need. It won’t be long before Liza feels at home again in Tyler. She has family and friends, Cliff. They’ll be here for her.”

“I’m glad you already are,” he said, and before she could respond, he was out the door.

Nora debated a whole two seconds, then went after him, catching him on the front porch. “Cliff?”

He turned, and there was something about him as he stood against the dark night—something both dangerous and sensitive—that hinted at his pain and complexity. Liza Baron hadn’t solved all his problems. Nora suddenly wished she’d just sat down and drunk her tea instead of following him out. But what to do about it now?

She licked her lips. “Um—Liza mentioned that you’re from Rhode Island originally. I was…well, I knew someone from Rhode Island once.” She sounded ridiculous! “It was a while ago, but I—”

“Who?”

She swallowed. She’d never said his name aloud, not in public. “A guy by the name of Sanders. Byron Sanders.”

Cliff Forrester remained stock-still on her porch step, staring at her through dark eyes that had become slits. Nora chose not to dwell on all the more lurid rumors about him.

“He’s a photographer,” she added quickly. “He did a series a few years back on Aunt Ellie. It was printed in one of the Chicago papers—”

“I’d like to see it.”

“Well, I have a copy in my library—”

“Get it.”

His words were millimeters shy of being an order, but there was a curious intensity to his tone, almost a desperation, that Nora detected but couldn’t explain. Cursing herself for having brought up that cretin’s name, she dashed to her study, dug out the scrapbook and ran back to the porch. Cliff Forrester hadn’t moved.

She showed him the spread Byron Sanders had done on Aunt Ellie just weeks before she died. Picking the winner of the quilt raffle. At her desk in her old-fashioned office. In her rose garden. In her rocking chair on her front porch. In front of the department store she’d started, on her own, in 1924. Nora had every photograph memorized. It was as if each shot captured a part of Aunt Ellie’s soul and together recreated the woman she’d been, made her come to life. Whatever his shortcomings as a man, Byron Sanders was unarguably a gifted photographer.

“This Byron Sanders,” Cliff Forrester said, tight-lipped. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“No!”

His eyes narrowed. “Did he hurt you?”

She shook her head. Through Byron Sanders, she’d managed to hurt herself. She took full responsibility for her own actions. Which didn’t mitigate her distaste for him. “No. I just remember he’s from Rhode Island and wondered if you knew him.”

“No,” Cliff said. “No, I don’t know Byron Sanders at all.”

* * *

THE WAY BYRON FIGURED it, he was dead meat. If Nora Gates didn’t kill him, his brother surely would. Slumped down in the nondescript car he’d rented in Milwaukee, he watched Cliff head toward the center of town. He looked grim. Byron felt pretty grim himself. His jaw had begun to ache from gritting his teeth. He forced his mouth open just enough to emit something between a sigh and a growl.

No, I don’t know any Byron Sanders at all….

It was all Byron had heard, but it was enough. His return to Tyler wasn’t going to be all sweetness and light. Nora was already on the lookout for him, and now his brother had to have figured out that he’d been to Tyler before. Not a good start. When Nora found out that he’d lied, he’d be lucky to get out of town with all his body parts intact. When Cliff found out he’d sneaked into Tyler three years ago to make sure he was all right and had lied, he’d be—

“You’re dead meat, my man,” he muttered to himself.

He took heart that Cliff didn’t fit any of the images that had haunted him for so long. He wasn’t scrawny, scraggly, bug-infested or crazy. He looked alive and well and, other than that crack about his younger brother, reasonably happy. For that, Byron was grateful.

He loosened his tight grip on the steering wheel. Coming to Tyler ten days early had been his mother’s idea. He’d phoned her in London, where she was visiting one of Pierce & Rothchilde’s most prominent, if not bestselling, authors, one who’d become a personal friend. Anne Forrester was a strong, kind woman who’d endured too much. She’d lost a husband and had all but lost a son.

“But this note,” she’d said, “leaves more questions unanswered than answered.”

“I know.”

“Do you suppose he really wants us there?”

“There’s no way of knowing.”

For years, Cliff had maintained that he didn’t dare be around his family for fear of inflicting more pain on them. He didn’t trust himself, not just with his brother and mother, but with anyone. So he’d left. Withdrawn from society. Turned into a recluse at an abandoned lodge on a faraway lake in Wisconsin. His absence, on top of her husband’s horrible captivity and death in Cambodia, had been particularly difficult for Anne Forrester, but she was made of stern stuff and disliked showing emotion. She blamed herself to some degree for having let Cliff go to Cambodia to try and do something for his father. Blamed herself for not being able to do something to ease the pain of his own ordeal in Southeast Asia.

“You have no idea who this Liza Baron is?” his mother had asked.

“The Barons are a prominent family in Tyler.” Byron had chosen his next words carefully. “I remember meeting an Alyssa Baron. She’s the woman who sort of took Cliff under her wing. Liza could be her daughter.”

Anne Forrester didn’t speak for the next two minutes. Although the call was overseas long distance, Byron hadn’t rushed her. She needed to regain her balance. Rational and not prone to jealousy, she nonetheless had had a difficult time facing the fact that Cliff had allowed another woman to at least try to help him, where he’d only run from her. Even if Alyssa Baron was on the periphery of Cliff’s life, she was at least in a small way part of it. His mother wasn’t. But that, Byron knew, was precisely the point: far away, Cliff couldn’t cause his mother—or his brother—further pain and suffering. Or so he thought.

“Maybe there’s hope yet,” she said finally, in a near whisper. “Oh, Byron, if he’s happy…if he’s trying…”

“I know, Mother.”

“I can’t get out of here until at least the first part of next week. What’s your schedule like? I’m not sure we should both barrel in on Cliff for the wedding if we’re not entirely certain he wants us there.” She was thinking out loud, Byron realized, and he didn’t interrupt or argue. “Unless there is no wedding and this is Cliff’s way…well, that would be ridiculous. Not like him at all. He’d never play a trick like that on us, would he?”

“No,” Byron had said with certainty.

“Would this Liza Baron?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“It’s just all so…sudden. What if someone’s using the wedding as a ploy to get us out there? You know, upset the applecart and see what happens?”

“It’s a possibility,” Byron had allowed, “but not a serious one, I would think.”

Anne Forrester sighed heavily. “Then he is getting married.”

In the end, Byron had agreed to go to Tyler ahead of time and play scout, find out what he and his mother would be walking into in ten days’ time. None of the myriad excuses Byron could think of to keep him in Providence would have worked, so he didn’t even bother to try. The truth was he’d do anything to see his brother again, even go up against Nora Gates. Hell, they were both adults. She’d just have to endure his presence in Tyler and trust him to keep quiet about their “tawdry affair” three years before.

She’d only, he recalled, talked like a defiled Victorian virgin when she was truly pissed off.

He’d half hoped she’d forgotten all about him.

Of course, she hadn’t. Eleanora Gates wouldn’t forget anything, least of all the man who’d “robbed” her of her virginity. She’d conveniently forgotten that she’d been a more than willing participant. And he hadn’t told her he’d thought he loved her.

He exhaled slowly, trying to look on the positive. The shattered man his brother had been for so long—too long—seemed mostly a bad memory. For that, Byron was thankful. But Nora…

Before he could change his mind, he popped open his seat belt and jumped out of the car. She’d already gone back inside. Except for the masses of yellow mums, the front porch was unchanged from his last visit, when Aunt Ellie had still reigned over Gates Department Store. She’d been a powerful force in Nora’s life. Maybe too powerful. Ellie had sensed that, articulating her fears to Byron.

“The store will be Nora’s,” she’d told him. “It’s all I have to give her. But I don’t want it to become a burden to her—it never was to me. If it had, I’d have done something. I never let my life be ruled by that store. Nora knows, I hope, that I won’t roll over in my grave if she decides to sell. The only thing that’ll make me come back to haunt her is if she tries to be anyone but herself. Including me.”

A perceptive woman, the elder Eleanora Gates. Byron remembered feeling distinctly uncomfortable, even sad, although he’d only known the eccentric Aunt Ellie little more than a week. “What’s all this talk about what will happen after you’re gone?”

Gripping his hand, she’d laughed her distinctive, almost cackling laugh. “Byron, my good friend, you and I both know I’m on Sunset Road.”

It was her self-awareness, her self-acceptance, that had drawn Byron to the proprietor of Gates Department Store—what he’d tried to capture in his photograph series on her. Aunt Ellie had been a rare woman. Her grandniece was like her—and yet she wasn’t.

The front door was open.

Byron’s heart pounded like a teenager’s. Three years ago, Ellie Gates had greeted him with ice cold, fresh-squeezed lemonade and a slice of sour-cherry pie. What could he expect from her grandniece?

A pitcher of lemonade over his head? A pie in his face? Nora Gates didn’t forget, and she didn’t forgive.

Hard to imagine, he thought, reaching for the screen door, that she hated him as much as she did. She didn’t even know who he was.

“Well, my man,” he said to himself, “here’s mud in your eye.”

And he pulled open the screen door, stuck in his head and called her name.

CHAPTER THREE

“NORA,” HE CALLED softly, only half-fearful for his life now that he was putting it on the line. “Nora, it’s Byron.”

He left off the Sanders and judiciously didn’t add the Forrester. First things first. Remembering the screen door had a tendency to bang shut, he closed it behind him. Nora didn’t come screaming out of some dark corner. So far, so good.

The small entry hadn’t changed. To his right, the cream-colored stairs wound up to the second floor under the eaves. Three steps up, where the stairs made a right-angle turn, a window seat was piled with chintz-covered pillows, musty-looking library books and a well-used afghan. It was the sort of spot where Nora would like to curl up with a murder mystery on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Her idea of bliss. Until he’d come around, anyway. Then, for a little while, she’d preferred to curl up with him.

Calling her name again, Byron moved carefully into the living room, which had changed. The neutral colors, the informality, the American art—they were Nora’s touches. Aunt Ellie’s tastes had been more Victorian. She’d have been comfortable in the formal parlor of the Pierce family’s Providence town house. Nora would have been stifled, even if the late-eighteenth-century mansion had been in Tyler. Of course, Byron had learned early on not to point out the differences between Eleanora Gates the older and Eleanora Gates the younger. Nora much preferred to hear of similarities.

The living room was separated from the dining room by a curved archway. There Nora had added a baby grand piano, definitely her own touch. He vividly recalled Aunt Ellie’s happy amazement that her grandniece had any musical ability whatever. “Didn’t get that from me. Do you play piano, Byron?”

He did. So did Cliff. There’d been years of required lessons. He hadn’t touched a piano in ages. Wondering if he were completely mad instead of just half, he played a C-major scale, right-handed, one octave. As he’d expected, the piano was perfectly in tune. He added his left hand and went up another octave, then down two octaves, chromatically. All that drilling when he was a kid came back to him.

“Ricky?”

It was her voice. Even as his heart lurched, Byron snatched his fingers from the keyboard and readied himself for skewering.

“You really have been practicing, haven’t you?” She sounded pleased and delighted, a mood due to end as soon as she caught sight of who was playing scales in her dining room. “That was wonderful! You’re lagging a bit in the left hand, but—” She stood under the archway. “Oh, no.”

Short of a knife at the throat, it was the sort of greeting Byron had expected. He moved back from the piano. “Hello, Nora.”

If she’d changed, he couldn’t see it. She was still as trim and quietly beautiful as she’d been three years ago, her hot, secret temper smoldering behind her pale gray eyes. She must have been upstairs changing. She had on purple tennis shoes, narrow, straight-legged jeans and an oversize purple sweatshirt—neat and casual, but nothing she’d ever wear to the store. She was, he thought, a very sexy woman, all the more so because she didn’t try to be.

He didn’t fail to notice how she’d balled up her hands into tight fists. Apparently he still possessed the uncanny knack for bringing out the aggressive side of her nature—which she’d deny.

And he didn’t fail—couldn’t fail—to remember how very much this woman had once meant to him.

“You really are a bloodsucker,” she said through clenched teeth. “Did you come here to photograph us small-town folk all aflutter over the Body at the Lake?”

“The what? Nora, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Always so ignorant and innocent, aren’t you, Byron?” If her voice had been a knife, he’d have been cut to thin slices. But that was her way, at least with him, of repressing emotions she distrusted even more than anger—emotions like fear, love, passion. “Well, this time I happen to believe you. I think you’re here for an even more despicable reason: Liza Baron and Cliff Forrester’s wedding.”

Byron almost choked. So she’d figured it out. She knew who he was. Now there’d be no explaining, no chance to plead his case…just his marching orders. Get out and don’t ever come back. Damned without a trial.

But Nora went on in her chilly voice, “Another Rhode Island boy’s getting married, and with his being a recluse from a big East Coast family, you thought you’d nose around. You’re a leech, Byron Sanders. Pure and simple.”

A bloodsucker and a leech. He was getting the point. First, she hadn’t forgotten him. Second, she hadn’t forgiven him. Third, she didn’t know his photography days were over and he was president of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers. And fourth, she didn’t know he was Cliff’s brother. He had a chance—if a slim one—of getting out of Nora’s house intact after all.

And an even slimmer chance of making her understand why he’d done what he had three years ago.

“Nora, I’d like to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”

“I don’t have a second for you, Byron Sanders. If you think you can march into Tyler and into my life and expect anything but a frosty welcome, you’ve got your head screwed on upside down. Now get out before I…” She inhaled deeply, and her eyes flooded—which had to irritate her—and he could see the pain he’d caused her. “God, Byron, how could you come back here?”

Might as well get started by coming clean. “I was invited to Cliff’s wedding.”

“You were invited? By whom? Why?”

She was looking at him as if he’d just told her Cliff and Liza had invited a gorilla to their wedding. Byron didn’t appreciate her incredulity, but he realized he’d set himself up three years ago to have Nora hate him. He could have told her everything. About Cliff, their father, his own demons—he hadn’t done enough, hadn’t saved his father, hadn’t saved his brother, hadn’t been able to stop his mother’s suffering. Probably Nora would have been sympathetic. But she’d had her own problems—Aunt Ellie’s impending death, what to do about the store, and about staying in Tyler. And there’d been Cliff. Three years ago staying in Tyler hadn’t been a option for Byron, any more than leaving it had been one for Nora. He’d come uninvited into a world where his brother had finally found stability. Byron couldn’t destroy that stability. It wasn’t the only reason he’d left, but it was an important one.

Still, he hadn’t explained any of this to Nora. He’d told her he was moving on, let her think he was nothing more than an itinerant photographer, a bit irresponsible, wont to loving and leaving women. So she’d called him a cad, a bloodsucker, a leech and the rest. Because at the time that had been easier—for him and for her—than admitting they’d broken each other’s hearts. Three years later, he’d chased away the worst of his demons, but he wasn’t about to risk hurting Nora Gates again. If she needed him to be a cad, fine.

“This is just a courtesy call, Nora. I’m trying to be nice—”

“The hell you are.”

“You know,” he said calmly, “for a woman who prides herself on being something of a Victorian lady, you have a sharp tongue.”

She raised her chin. “I want you out of my house.”

Byron sighed, leaning one hip against the edge of her piano. “Nora, you have an attitude.”

“Byron,” she mimicked, “you have a nerve barging into my house after what you did to me.”

“What I did to you?” he repeated mildly.

She got the point and flushed clear to her hairline, almost making him believe she was a maiden lady. “What we did to ourselves,” she corrected. “Now get out.”

He switched tactics. Not that he wanted to prolong this scene and have her attempt to forcibly remove him, but he did have a nonrefundable return ticket to Providence for the Sunday morning after the wedding. If he was to survive until then, he needed to neutralize Nora Gates as a potentially explosive force.

Of course, the truth wasn’t going to help that process. “Look, Nora, I know it must seem presumptuous of me to walk in here after all this time, but I knew if I rang the doorbell you’d never let me in.”

“I never said you were stupid.”

So far, reason wasn’t working with the woman. “Then we’d have ended up having this discussion on the porch,” he added, “which I know you wouldn’t want. As I recall, you’d prefer to be a receiver of gossip than a subject of gossip—”

It was a low blow. He could see his words scratch right up her spine. “Leave, Byron. Slither out of my house and out of Tyler the same way you slithered in. I can’t imagine that Cliff Forrester needs a friend like you.”

Probably he didn’t, but they were brothers, and that was something neither of them could change. “I haven’t seen him in five years.”

That wasn’t strictly true. He’d seen Cliff three years ago. From afar. They hadn’t talked. Byron had sensed that Cliff wasn’t ready yet, might never be, and for his brother’s sake he’d left.

Nora’s clear, incisive gray eyes focused on him in a way that brought back memories, too many memories. Of her passion, of her anger. Of how damned much they’d lost when he’d left Tyler. “Did he invite you?” she asked, her tone accusatory.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? No—no, don’t tell me.” She dropped her hands to her sides, then pointed with one finger toward the front door. Her precious self-control had abandoned her. “Out, Byron. Right now. You’re worse than a cad. I don’t know what your game is, but I’m not going to let you crash Cliff and Liza’s wedding. Cliff’s pulled himself together after an ordeal probably none of us in Tyler can imagine. He’s happy, Byron. You are not going to play games with the man’s head. You both might be from Rhode Island and maybe you do know his family or something, but you’re not his friend. I know you’re not. Cliff didn’t even invite his own mother and brother to his wedding—Liza did. He doesn’t even know about it, and if you tell him…” She gulped for air. “By God, I’ll come after you myself. So you go on and leave him alone.” She took a breath. “And leave me alone, too.”

Byron had debated interrupting three or four times, but had kept his mouth shut. “Nora,” he began reasonably, “you don’t understand. I…”

“Out!”

“I didn’t come here to bother you or Cliff.”

“Now, Byron. Now, or I swear I’ll—”

She didn’t finish, but instead grabbed a huge book of Beethoven sonatas from the gateleg table. She heaved it at him. Byron ducked. The book crashed into the piano, banging down on the keys, making a discordant racket. Nora was red-faced.

Clearly this was no time for revelations destined only to make her madder. Byron grinned at her. “Bet you haven’t lost your temper like that since I was last in Tyler.”

“You’re damned right I haven’t!”

Then a big blond kid was filling up the doorway behind her. “This guy bothering you, Miss Gates?”

Byron could see her debating whether to sic the kid on him. Yeah—throw him in the oven, will you? But she shook her head tightly, and said even more tightly, “Not anymore.”

This time, Byron took the hint. As he walked past Nora and through the living room, he heard the kid make the mistake of laughing. “Gee, Miss Gates, I guess you’re stronger than you look. That book’s heavy.”

“Chromatic scale, Mr. Travis. Four octaves, ascending and descending. Presto.”

Byron decided not to hang around. But he had no intention of leaving Tyler. There was his brother to see, Cliff’s fiancée to meet, a body at a lake to learn more about. And there was Nora Gates herself. Piano player, department store owner, would-be Victorian old maid. She was a woman of contradictions and spirit, and as he walked back to his rented car, it occurred to Byron that the past three years had been but a pause—a little gulp—in their relationship. It wasn’t finished. There’d been no resolution. No final chord.

At least, he thought, not yet.

* * *

NORA DIDN’T CHARGE Ricky Travis for his lesson. In fact, for the first time since she’d had pneumonia six years ago, she cut a lesson short.

“You okay, Miss Gates?” Rick asked.

“I’m fine, just a little distracted.”

“That guy—”

“I’m not worried about him. Don’t you be, either.”

He shrugged. “If you say so. I’ll have the Bach down by next week. Promise. It’s just hard with it being football season.”

“I understand. It’s not easy being both a talented musician and a football player at this time of year. But you’ve had a good lesson, Rick. It’s not you. I’m just…well, it’s been a long day.” She rose from her chair beside the piano. “I’ll see you next week.”

“Sure thing, Miss Gates.”

With Rick gone, the house seemed deadly quiet. Foregoing Bach and Beethoven, Nora put on an early Bruce Springsteen tape and tried to exorcise Byron Sanders from her mind.

She couldn’t.

She hadn’t forgotten a single thing about him. He was as tall as she remembered. As strongly built and lithe, and every bit as darkly good-looking. His eyes were still as blue and piercing and unpredictable—and as dangerously enticing—as the Atlantic Ocean.

It would have been easier, she thought, if there’d been things she’d forgotten. The dark hairs on his forearms, for example, or his long, blunt-nailed fingers. But she’d remembered everything—the warmth of his eyes, the breadth of his shoulders, the way he had of forcing her not to take herself too seriously, even how irritating he could be. Especially how irritating he could be.

How had he learned about Cliff and Liza’s wedding? It wasn’t a secret, but how had an East Coast photographer heard that a Wisconsin couple was getting married? Maybe he did know Cliff—but Cliff had said he didn’t know a Byron Sanders. Perhaps Byron knew the Forresters, the mother and brother Liza had taken the liberty of inviting. Nora wondered if she should warn Liza about Byron.

Singing aloud with Bruce, she made herself another pot of tea and dug in her refrigerator for some leftovers for supper. If Sanders had shown up before Cliff had, she’d have pressed Liza’s reticent fiancé a little harder about his fellow Rhode Islander.

Well, she thought, pulling a bit of brown rice and chicken from the fridge, someone was lying.

She made a tossed salad and warmed up her dinner. Really, what a terrific old maid she’d make. A pity the term was démodé.

The Spinster Gates.

It sounded deliciously forbidding. She turned off Bruce and tried to put her former lover—arrgh, why couldn’t he be less appealing?—out of her mind. Sitting at her kitchen table, she found herself staring at her hands. They were ringless, still soft and pale. She remembered Aunt Ellie’s hands in her final days: old, spotted, gnarled. Yet they’d possessed a delicacy and beauty that suggested she was a woman who’d lived her life on her own terms, a life that had been full and happy. She’d relished her family, she’d had many friends. She’d been generous and spirited and frugal, a model of independence and responsibility.

Once, over a similar supper of leftovers, Nora had asked Aunt Ellie if she ever got lonely. “Of course,” she’d replied immediately, in her blunt, unswerving way. “Everyone does. I’m no different.”

“But…I meant, did you ever wished you’d married?”

She’d shrugged, not backing away from so personal a question. “At times I’ve wondered what it might have been like, but I’ve no doubt a married woman at times wonders what would have become of her if she hadn’t married. But I have no regrets, any more than your mother had regrets about having married your father. I know and have known many wonderful men. I just didn’t care to marry any of them.”

“What about children?” Nora had asked.

Aunt Ellie had laughed. “My word, Tyler’s filled with children. Always has been. You know, I believe sometimes when you don’t have children of your own you’re better able to appreciate other people’s. You can do things for them and with them that their parents simply can’t. You can enrich their lives. You don’t worry about the same things. To be honest, Nora, I’ve never had the urge to bear children myself. I know that’s hard for some people to believe, but it’s the truth. But I’ve enjoyed having children in my life.”

Indeed she had. Even before she’d come to live with Aunt Ellie when she was thirteen, Nora had loved her visits to the twenties house a few blocks from Gates Department Store. They’d bake cookies, go to museums, arts and crafts festivals, libraries. Aunt Ellie had taught her how to manage money and had instilled in her a sense of independence and confidence that continued to stand her in good stead.

She was stronger than she’d been three years ago, Nora reminded herself. She’d had time to adjust to the loss of Aunt Ellie and to becoming sole owner of Gates. She knew herself better. She knew that if Aunt Ellie had never yearned in any real way for marriage and children, she herself occasionally would. Every now and then, a man would even come along who tempted her.

She would survive Byron’s reappearance in Tyler.

Once, of course, she’d figured out what he was up to.

Feeling a little like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Nora finished her supper and made her plans.

* * *

AFTER HASTILY REMOVING himself from Nora’s house, Byron parked in the town square, put a quarter in the meter—which miraculously allowed him a full hour to mosey around—and found his way to the Tyler Public Library. It was located in a particularly beautiful, if run-down, turn-of-the century home. Given his own upbringing in a Federal-period town house and a center-chimney cottage on Nantucket Island, Byron found the preponderance of Victorian, Craftsman and Prairie architecture in Tyler refreshing.

Inside the library, which was old-fashioned and in desperate need of renovation, he tried not to draw attention to himself as he made his way to a stack of recent copies of the Tyler Citizen. He sat at an oak table in a poorly lit corner. Deliberately and patiently, he skimmed each edition of the daily paper, backtracking several weeks until he found the front-page article announcing the discovery of a skeleton at Judson Ingall’s Timberlake Lodge. The grisly discovery had been made when local construction chief Joe Santori and his crew struck the body with a backhoe while doing some excavation work; Cliff Forrester, the lodge caretaker, was called onto the scene. Apparently Liza Baron, Judson’s granddaughter, was also up at the lodge at the time. According to the paper, Judson himself hadn’t stepped foot on the property since his wife left him more than forty years ago.

Liza Baron.

Byron rolled the name around on his tongue and tried to remember. But no, he didn’t recall a Liza Baron from his first visit to Tyler. He remembered Judson Ingalls, though. A taciturn, hardworking man, he was one of Tyler’s leading citizens, owner of Ingalls Farm and Machinery. As Byron recalled, Judson’s wife had been a Chicago socialite, unhappy in a small Wisconsin town.

Now why had he remembered that little tidbit of Tyler lore?

“Aunt Ellie,” he whispered to himself.

In their long talks on her front porch, Ellie Gates had told Byron countless tales of the legions of friends she’d had over her long, full life. She’d mentioned Judson Ingalls’s wife. “Margaret was a fish out of water here in Tyler, but we became friends, although she was somewhat younger than I. I’m afraid she didn’t have too many friends here in town. A pity. She was such a lively woman. Of course, some of that was her own doing—but it wasn’t all her own doing. In a small town, it’s easy for people to develop a wariness of strangers, of outsiders.” And she’d paused to give him a pointed look, as if she knew he was another outsider who’d fallen for a Tyler resident. “It’s also easy for out-of-towners to act on their prejudices and figure a small town has nothing to offer, including friends.”

Ellie Gates had believed in tolerance. She’d been an opinionated woman herself and forthright in stating her views, but she appreciated fresh thinking, a good argument and people’s right, as she liked to put it, “to be wrong.”

Her grandniece and sole heir was a good deal more stiffnecked. Nora Gates much preferred to deal with people who agreed with her.

Flipping back through the newspapers, Byron caught up with all the current Tyler news, as well as fresh developments regarding the body. He gathered that its presence at Timberlake Lodge had fueled much speculation in town. Without directly stating as much, the paper gave the clear impression that some townspeople believed the body was that of Margaret Alyssa Lindstrom Ingalls herself. Now all the authorities had to do was get busy and confirm that fact, and prove how she’d ended up buried at her husband’s lodge.

So for the past five years, Byron thought, his one and only brother had been living right on top of Tyler’s greatest unsolved mystery. Given all the horrors Cliff had witnessed in Southeast Asia, how had he reacted to finding a dead body under his feet? He’d come to Tyler to escape death and destruction.

He’d fallen in love, was what he’d done.

Byron shrugged. There was a certain logic in that, he supposed.

At one point, the Citizen had printed a grainy picture of Liza Baron, for no solid reason Byron could figure out except that she was Judson Ingall’s granddaughter and had finally come home. So this was the woman his brother planned to marry. She was attractive in a dramatic, grab-you-by-the-short-hairs way. Byron guessed that she would be bold and direct with her loves and hates.

A few days later, the paper had dredged up an old photograph of Margaret Ingalls. Apparently she’d been quite the party animal. Putting the two photos side by side, Byron saw a strong resemblance between grandmother and granddaughter.

There was no picture of Cliff. No quotes from him, as there had been from Joe Santori, about having discovered the body. “Cliff Forrester couldn’t be reached for comment,” the paper said. Which might have meant anything from they couldn’t find him to he’d chased them off with a shotgun.

Byron suddenly wished he hadn’t agreed to sneak into Tyler and play scout for his mother—or for himself. He’d done that once, completely on his own, with disastrous results. There were too many unknowns. Cliff’s being involved with a Tyler woman Byron had anticipated. And he’d have to have been a complete idiot not to know he was in for a fight with Nora Gates. But a dead body? A dead body that could belong to the grandmother of his future sister-in-law?

Best, he thought, to hold off for a bit before phoning his mother in London and reporting the news.

But that wasn’t what was really eating at Byron and he knew it.

He was bothered by the big unknown, the one that had gnawed at him for three long years. How would he react if he ever saw Nora Gates again?

He shoved the newspapers back where he’d found them and left the library, walking quickly to his car. It was fully dark now. Cold. There was a stiff breeze. The square was quiet. Byron already had his car door open, but he shut it softly. He had another five minutes on his meter.

After crossing the street, he walked down to Gates Department Store, a fixture on Tyler’s square since Ellie Gates had opened the three-story building in the Roaring Twenties, using an unexpected inheritance from an uncle back East. People had been surprised she’d risked her money on a business venture instead of putting it safely in the bank so she could lead a ladylike life. They’d doubted she’d be able to stay in business, never mind make enough profit to fill three floors with merchandise, or attract enough customers from Tyler and surrounding communities to support a full department store. But she’d proved them wrong, her sense of style, service and tradition finding a large and loyal following.

Gates closed at six o’clock, except for Thursdays and Fridays when it stayed open until nine. Its widow displays were often mentioned in Wisconsin travel guides, regional magazines and newspapers, a “must see” in Tyler. They were Nora’s brainchild. Aunt Ellie had done the usual perfunctory displays, but not her grandniece. Nora’s were elaborate and creative, playing on the history and charms of her corner of the Midwest.

The current display featured Halloween, complete with witches, pumpkins, black cats and skeletons, but also a touch of whimsy: two figures, a boy and girl, dressed as children of Swedish immigrants, bobbing for apples in a wooden bucket; a puppy stealing a caramel popcorn ball from an overflowing bowl; a cheerful-looking ghost peering out of a closet. It was a montage of scenes that were warm, nostalgic, funny, spooky. Busy owner of Gates or not, Byron thought, Nora had to have been personally responsible for such an imaginative window.

A gust of Canadian air went right through his slouchy jacket and chamois shirt. But instead of moving along the street, Byron remained in front of the department store window, staring at the children bobbing for apples, trying not to remember….

A hot, muggy August afternoon, his first in Tyler. Byron hadn’t come to Wisconsin to take pictures. For him, then, photography was only a hobby. He’d come to see his brother. Cliff had retreated from society two years before and Byron wanted to reassure himself that his brother was alive, functioning, living a life he needed to live, on his own terms. For Cliff’s sake, Byron had come to Tyler un-announced, on the sly, without fanfare. He didn’t want to do anything—anything—to upset the precarious balance his brother had established for himself. But if Cliff needed him, if he was in any danger of hurting himself or anyone else, Byron felt he had to know. If necessary, he would have intervened.

His first stop in Tyler had been the square, his first stop on the square, Gates Department Store. He’d wanted to get a feel for the town in which his brother had taken up residence, if as a recluse.

Nora had been in the window, working on a back-to-school display that featured Tyler’s original settlers heading across the fields to their one-room schoolhouse. Already Byron had been feeling a little better about where his brother had landed. Tyler, Wisconsin, wasn’t a weird, gritty, hole-in-the-wall town where he’d find Cliff living in some gutter. It was picturesque and homey, a real community, with farms, businesses, schools, a hospital, a sense of history and pride. The people ran the gamut from the working poor to the well-to-do; it wasn’t just an upper-class or a working-class town. Those things mattered to Byron, although, even now, he couldn’t have said why.

Nora had worn her hair longer then. With a thick braid trailing down her back, and wisps of ash-blond hair poking out, she’d looked as old-fashioned and fresh-faced as her nineteenth-century figures.

She’d spotted him and smiled politely. He could tell she’d already pegged him as a stranger.

That night, pretending to be a free-lance photographer, he’d had dinner with her and Aunt Ellie at their twenties house a couple of blocks from the square. Things had snowballed from there. Although still technically the sole owner of Gates Department Store, Ellie Gates was ninety and in failing health, and left most of the day-to-day management up to her grandniece. And, to his delight, Byron had discovered that Nora was hardly an eighteen-year-old kid. In fact, she was thirty, unmarried and determined to stay that way. He’d admired her independence, her spirit, her energy, her devotion to her hometown and her sense of humor and tolerance. He hadn’t, however, expected to fall in love with her.

He hadn’t guessed she was a virgin. And she hadn’t told him until the last moment, in the tent at the lake outside town where he’d camped. Afterward, she’d insisted she had no regrets. It might not even have been a conscious lie. Byron’s own regrets had nothing to do with making love to Nora Gates, of having loved her and dreamed of having a life with her, but everything to do with having himself been so damned blind to what was going on in her life. He’d been preoccupied with his own problems—Cliff, their father, his own pain and guilt over their suffering. He hadn’t seen, until it was too late, that Nora Gates was letting go of the last person she had in the world, a woman who’d meant everything to her. That Aunt Ellie was ninety and had never pretended she’d live forever wasn’t the consolation Byron, in his blindness, had anticipated. She had been a force in Nora’s life, and Nora had been trying to find a way to carry on without her.

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