Yesterday's Embers Read online

  She finished in the bathroom, washed her hands, splashed some cold water on her face, and plodded downstairs.

  Dad and Mickey were sitting side by side at the kitchen table, looking like it was something a lot more serious than a piece of lint.

  She sat down across from them, propped her elbows on the table, and hooked her bare feet around the chair legs. “What’s wrong?”

  Kayeleigh.” Doug swallowed hard against a throat that felt like sandpaper. “We—I need to talk to you about something…ask you some questions.”

  Her eyes widened, and she sat up a little straighter on the chair. He didn’t want to scare her or make any accusations that would cause her to feel she couldn’t talk to him, but he needed to put his mind at ease. What Mickey said about Kayeleigh possibly being…intimate…with that Berger kid simply could not be true. Sitting here, looking into his daughter’s sleep-crusted eyes, her tousled hair flying every which way around her angel face, he knew Mickey had to be wrong.

  He felt Mickey’s presence beside him. Their chairs were butted side by side across the table from Kayeleigh, but by unspoken agreement, they were both careful not to let their bodies touch at any point. He risked a glance at her. Mickey widened her eyes, a signal, he knew, that he should get on with it.

  He glanced at the clock over the refrigerator. He didn’t have time for this in the first place. The harvest crew he’d hired was probably fueling up already, and they’d have to wait on him if he didn’t hustle. He took a deep breath and looked Kayeleigh in the eye. “I was ordering some parts on the computer last night and—I noticed that certain sites had been visited on the Internet.” He shook his head and frowned. “Stuff kids really don’t need to be looking at. You…you don’t know anything about that, do you?

  She opened her mouth to say something, but just as quickly clamped it shut. She leaned her forehead on the table, but the crooked part in her hair blazed pink.

  He had his answer. “Why were you looking up that stuff, honey?”

  She shook her head and mumbled something to the floor.

  “Kayeleigh. Look at me.”

  After a long minute she lifted her head. Her face was crimson, her mouth screwed into an angry pout.

  “Why were you searching those things on the Internet?” he asked again.

  She glared at him, then turned slowly to Mickey. “Why don’t you ask her?” She jabbed her chin in Mickey’s direction, punctuating her words.

  He looked to Mickey, questioning her with his eyes. She gave an almost imperceptible shrug. He and Mickey had gone up to the computer late last night and checked the history as far back as it went. They hadn’t found anything else.

  He turned back to Kayeleigh. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Ask her!” she shouted. “She’s the one you should be talking to. She’s the one that had that stupid thing!”

  Mickey leaned across the table. “Settle down, Kayeleigh. Tell us what you’re talking about.” She put a hand on Kayeleigh’s arm. “What ‘stupid thing’?”

  Kayeleigh yanked her arm away, her eyes narrowed to slits. “You don’t have to play dumb. You know what I’m talking about.”

  Doug scraped back his chair and grabbed her arm across the table. “You do not talk to Mickey that way, young lady!”

  Eyes wild with fury, Kayeleigh sucked her cheeks in and worked her tongue. She spit a spray of saliva between them. Mickey gave a little yelp and reared back on her chair, but a bubbly drop of spittle landed on Doug’s forearm, soaking into the sun-bleached hairs that peppered his leathery skin.

  He recoiled, wiping his arm off on the front of his shirt and raising his arm high into the air in one smooth motion. He pushed off the table and brought the back of his hand down across Kayeleigh’s mouth.

  She gasped, and he felt sharp teeth behind the cushion of her lip. He pulled his hand away, smarting.

  “Doug! Stop it!” Mickey’s shrill plea came from beside him while he watched a thin trail of blood trickle slowly down Kayeleigh’s chin.

  Kayeleigh stood motionless, eyes round. Twin droplets of blood appeared beneath her lower lip, bubbling up the same way his own rage had.

  “You hate me!” Kayeleigh screamed. “You hate me!”

  He froze, a wool blanket of guilt wrapping itself around him. But he threw it off the way he threw off the quilts on a summer night when they couldn’t afford to run the air conditioner.

  The kid had it coming. Mouthy brat. He grabbed her arm and jerked her halfway across the table. “If you ever do that again—” The words came out in a spray of his own saliva. He licked his lips and started over, grinding out the words through clenched teeth. “If you ever do that again, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” The sheer terror in her eyes changed rapidly to rage. She sucked the blood off her lip. Her teeth turned a ghoulish red. “Why don’t you just kill me? You know you want to.” But the minute the words were out, the defiance drained from her eyes, and suddenly she looked like his little girl again. His precious baby girl.

  Her face crumpled, and she buried her head in the neckline of her pajama top. Tiny spots of blood soaked through where her mouth was. She collapsed into the chair, lay her head on the table, and began to sob.

  He sucked in a breath, remorse hitting him as hard as he’d hit his daughter. Oh, dear God… What had he done? What was wrong with him?

  “Doug?” There was a hint of horror in Mickey’s voice, and he knew he must have become a stranger before her eyes just now. But Mickey wasn’t his first concern right now. He had to make things right with Kayeleigh.

  He leapt from his chair and went around the table to her. He tried to get her to stand up, but she was a limp dishrag. He knelt beside her chair and put an arm around her, pulling her against his chest. She didn’t melt into his embrace the way she usually did, but fell limp against him, still hiding her face behind the collar of her pajamas.

  “Kayeleigh. I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Daddy never should have done that. Please forgive me.” His stomach churned, and he was afraid he might be sick. But he kept his arms around her, gently shushing her as if she were three years old again, and she’d fallen off her tricycle.

  He held her for several minutes until she calmed down and eased against him. He glanced at Mickey, who was still sitting across from them at the table, with her head in her hands. Her lips were moving silently as if she might be praying.

  Finally he peeled Kayeleigh off of him, still keeping a hand on her knee. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said again. “Will you forgive me?”

  Kayeleigh gave a brief nod, but her hand went to her lip. She swiped her fingers across her mouth, then checked them for blood. Her lip wasn’t bleeding anymore, but it was swollen.

  Doug went to the kitchen for an ice cube. He wrapped it in a clean dishcloth and brought it back, handing it to her without a word.

  “Mickey?”

  She met his eyes, a dazed look in her own.

  “I’m sorry for losing my temper, Mickey. That was inexcusable.”

  She stared at him, tight-lipped.

  “Will you forgive me?”

  “I forgive you,” she whispered, but her tremulous voice made him doubt she was quite ready to wholly forgive what she’d witnessed.

  He didn’t blame her. What he’d done was unconscionable. But he couldn’t just let things drop. “We still need to talk about this,” he said, looking from Mickey to Kayeleigh and back.

  He patted Kayeleigh’s knee, wanting to reassure her that he had his temper under control now. With a glance back at Mickey, he forged ahead. “Kayeleigh, why do you think Mickey should know what that stuff on the Internet is about?” Without waiting for her to answer, he turned to Mickey. “You don’t know, right?”

  She shook her head. “No. I really don’t, Kayeleigh.” She glanced at Doug, asking permission with her eyes.

  He nodded.

  Mickey spoke quietly. “Just so we know we’re talking about the same thing, what your
dad and I saw was a search for information about a pregnancy test. Are you the one who was looking at those Web sites?”

  Kayeleigh nodded.

  “Were you just curious, honey?” Mickey leaned across the table, her voice soothing. “Or was there a reason you needed to know about pregnancy tests?”

  Doug was relieved to have Mickey taking the lead. Why hadn’t he thought to ask this way? Mickey was handling it like—like Kaye would have handled it. The realization humbled him. Or maybe humiliated was the better word.

  “I found one of them…one of those tests,” she mumbled, still refusing to look directly at him.

  Relief flooded through him. She hadn’t been looking for herself. Praise God. But that didn’t explain—

  “Where? Where did you find one?” Mickey coaxed.

  “In the trash. In your room.”

  Doug looked to Mickey.

  She shook her head, and Doug felt certain she was being honest.

  “In the trash can in…the master bathroom?” Mickey pointed down the hall that led to the bedroom they shared.

  Kayeleigh nodded. “Are you…are you going to have a baby?” She blurted the words as if they were hot coals on her tongue.

  Mickey’s eyes widened, and she started shaking her head. “No, Kayeleigh. I’m not. Is…is that what you thought?”

  Kayeleigh tilted her head and eyed her. “Why did you have one of those tests, then?”

  Doug stared at Kayeleigh. The test didn’t belong to either of them? There was only one other possibility. He sank back into the chair, his legs suddenly turning to jelly. “When…when exactly did you find it?”

  Kayeleigh shrugged. “That day you made us clean the house really good because she”—she nodded toward Mickey—“griped that it wasn’t clean enough. It must have fallen out of the trash. It was kind of stuck in the corner in the back of the cabinet.”

  Mickey closed her eyes. “It must have been—” She cut off her sentence, apparently guessing the truth at the same moment he did.

  The test had been Kaye’s. Kaye must have thought she was pregnant. She’d taken the test and thrown it away, but apparently it missed the trash can and nobody had bothered to clean the cupboard under the sink. Until Kayeleigh found it.

  Had Kaye been pregnant? The thought left him stunned. Had she been planning, even on the Thanksgiving Day she died, some special way to break the news to him? She’d not wanted to kiss him that morning, telling him she thought she was coming down with the flu Rachel had. He’d always looked back and thought it was the carbon monoxide already working, but now he wondered.

  “I…I still have it,” Kayeleigh offered. “The test…”

  Doug caught his breath. “You do? Where?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  He and Mickey nodded in unison, and Kayeleigh scooted her chair away from the table and padded up the stairs.

  Doug watched her go and thought she moved like a ninety-year-old woman. A lump rose to his throat. Would his sweet daughter ever recover from this morning? Would she ever be able to forgive what he’d done?

  His shoulders slumped as he realized that even if she could someday forgive him, she would never forget. As long as she lived, she would remember the day her daddy had hit her. Hit her hard enough to make her mouth bleed. He wanted to weep.

  Mickey touched his arm with a feather stroke. “Doug?”

  He struggled through the gloomy thoughts. “It must have been Kaye’s? The test…”

  She nodded. “That has to be it.” She started to say something else, but they heard Kayeleigh on the stairs, and Mickey shook her head.

  Kayeleigh appeared at the table with a tissue in her hand. She unfolded it to reveal the familiar e.p.t. device, identical to those Kaye had used on numerous occasions.

  Kayeleigh held it out to him. “It has a plus sign on it, Daddy. That means…pregnant, doesn’t it?”

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at it. He managed to nod. He had to remind himself to take a breath.

  “Are you sure it’s not yours?” Kayeleigh asked Mickey.

  Mickey shot him a look of desperation.

  Doug made a decision. She was almost thirteen. She deserved to know the truth. “No, honey. It…it must have been your mom’s.”

  Comprehension came to Kayeleigh’s eyes. “Mom was…?”

  Doug shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked to Mickey, hoping she knew more than he did about this type of thing.

  She shook her head and shrugged.

  “If Mom was going to have a baby, she hadn’t told me. We may never know, honey. I don’t know if a plus sign is accurate…after this long. It might not mean anything….”

  “But what if Mom was going to have a baby?” Her voice broke on a sob.

  He choked down the rock in his throat. “Then you have a little brother or sister in heaven.” Another sister in heaven, he thought.

  Mickey reached to put a hand on each of their arms. “I’m sorry.”

  He sat, stunned, unable to move, to even acknowledge her tender words.

  Had those invisible, fatal fumes taken even more from him than he knew? Despite his and Kaye’s decision that six was enough, despite the precautions they’d taken, had Kaye been pregnant with their seventh child that day? She hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t even mentioned she suspected as much.

  Maybe Kaye had been suffering from morning sickness before the carbon monoxide snuffed out her life. And the life of their unborn child? It was too much to take in.

  Who would this baby have been? Would this have been the brother Landon had always begged them for? Or another little angel like Harley? Or Rachel? Sweet Rachel…

  He couldn’t let his thoughts go there. Not now. It was too much.

  Forcing himself to stand, he pulled Kayeleigh into a hug, and she let him, hugged him back. “You go get dressed now, okay?”

  Tears spilled onto her cheeks. “Do I have to go to the daycare today? Please, Daddy. I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to have to talk to anybody.” Desperation was in her voice.

  He looked to Mickey, feeling desperate himself.

  “Listen,” she said. “Why don’t I call and see if I can get one of the college girls to cover for me today. I’ll stay home with all the kids. It’d be nice if they could sleep in for once this summer.”

  Doug nodded, and his heart filled with gratitude. “Thanks,” he mouthed to Mickey.

  But Kayeleigh spoke the words aloud, her tone meek and earnest. “Thank you, Mickey.”

  He knew he needed to share some of the things he’d discovered with Mickey. Things that might not be easy for her to hear.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Mickey set a plate of goulash and biscuits in front of Doug. He looked exhausted. Wheat harvest was in full swing, and he’d only been in long enough to take a quick shower and plop down at the table. The sun was quickly sinking below the hedgerow west of the house, and the clock over the refrigerator said 9:55. He’d been working since five thirty this morning, in the field most of that time.

  Growing up in Clayburn, Mickey had always known harvest was a pivotal time of year, but she’d never realized what hard work it was to bring in the crops. Since the first day the wheat was ripe enough to cut, Doug had been out the door before dawn and didn’t come home until it was dark.

  “You want iced tea or a Coke?”

  He ran a hand through his still-damp hair. “Tea, please. But I can get it.” He started to push back his chair.

  “Don’t be silly. Stay put.” She fixed his drink and brought it to the table, then went back to the sink.

  “The kids are all in bed?”

  She nodded.

  They’d barely seen him for three days. If she hadn’t taken them out to the field last night, he wouldn’t have seen them at all yesterday. But she and the kids had stopped at Dairy Barn on their way home from the daycare and ordered chocolate malts for him and the crew.

  “How’s Kayeleigh?”

&n
bsp; Dishrag still in hand, she turned from the sink and leaned the small of her back against the counter. “She seems okay. She really does. She asked about you.”

  He looked up and talked over a mouthful of goulash. “What do you mean?”

  She twisted the dishrag. “When we got home from daycare, she asked when you’d be in. When I told her it would be late, she asked me to wake her up before you left the house tomorrow.”

  “You think something’s wrong?”

  “I asked her. She said no. I think she’s just worried about you. I don’t know—” Mickey hesitated, not sure if Doug was in the right frame of mind to discuss what had happened the other morning. But harvest or not, they couldn’t just sweep things under the rug.

  He took a swig of tea and looked up at her. “Go on…what were you going to say?”

  “Kayeleigh seems like a different girl since…everything that happened. She’s been really sweet to me.” Her voice broke and she teared up. “I think she just wants reassurance that things are okay between you and her.”

  Doug didn’t trust his own voice, but he nodded. Mickey was right. He would be sure and wake Kayeleigh in the morning. He hoped her new demeanor meant she was handling everything okay. There was a lot for her to process—the terrible thing he’d done in striking her, then he and Mickey practically accusing her of being pregnant. And of course, their discovery about Kaye.

  He still didn’t know if it was true or not. Maybe they would never know. But he and Mickey had gone online and found numerous references to positive pregnancy results that remained readable many months or even years after the initial test.

  Somehow, he felt certain in his heart that it was true. That Kaye had been expecting a baby. Knowing her, she’d probably had a plan up her sleeve to tell him in some clever, romantic way.