Beneath a Southern Sky Read online

  As Daria pulled into the driveway one sweltering June evening after an especially exhausting day at the clinic, she spotted her elderly landlady waving from the garden behind the house.

  “Yoo-hoo! Daria!”

  Daria cut the engine and removed the keys from the Toyota her father had found for her at auction. Going around to the passenger door, she released Natalie’s seat belt. Then scooping the little girl up from the car seat with one arm, she returned Dorothy Janek’s greeting.

  “Can you smile for Dorothy?” she asked Natalie. “Come on, give us a smile.” Smiling was a recently learned social skill, but one that she didn’t always perform on demand.

  Dorothy brushed the garden dirt from her hands and bustled over to the car. “Why don’t you have supper with us tonight, sweetheart? I’ve made a pot roast that is more than Kirk and I can ever eat ourselves.”

  Supper had become a frequent invitation and one that Daria usually accepted with deep gratitude and more than a little guilt.

  “Are you sure, Dorothy? You just fed us Monday night—”

  “Oh, nonsense,” Dorothy argued. “You work all day. You don’t want to come home and cook every night too, now do you?”

  “You’ve got a point there,” Daria told her, smiling. “Thank you, Dorothy. We’d love to. Wouldn’t we, Natalie?”

  The little girl rewarded them with a wide, toothless grin and a vigorous kicking of her pudgy feet.

  Dorothy laughed and clapped her hands together, delighted.

  With Kirk and Dorothy Janek living right below her, Daria felt completely safe in her little apartment. The elderly couple had adopted her and Natalie as family, and they were as proud of Natalie’s latest accomplishment as any grandparents would be.

  “Come down around six and help me set the table,” Dorothy’s voice brought her out of her reverie.

  Daria gave her landlady a quick hug, sandwiching Natalie between them. “Thanks. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Ah, you’d get along just fine and dandy! But since you do have me, you may as well take advantage of me,” the old woman added with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Natalie Joan!”

  Daria’s shriek brought her daughter to an abrupt halt at the edge of the stairway. Barely six months old, Natalie had recently mastered an odd belly-flop crawl that had her scooting across the apartment’s hardwood floors like a little lizard.

  Natalie glanced up at her mother, oblivious to the cause of Daria’s alarm. Daria dropped the basket of clean laundry she’d been carrying on her hip and flew across the room to rescue her daughter from certain disaster.

  Natalie immediately screamed to be let down, furious that her progress had been impeded. The child had a stubborn streak in her that Daria was certain had not come from her side of the family.

  She swung Natalie in the air, trying to distract her with her favorite acrobatics routine. “Nattie, Nattie,” she cooed. “What is Mommy going to do with you? Now we’re just going to have to make a Wal-Mart run and get a gate for those stairs.”

  Fortunately the staircase balusters were spaced closely enough to prevent her from slipping between them. A simple safety gate would keep her from tumbling down for now, but how she would cope when Natalie started walking—or heaven forbid, climbing—she couldn’t imagine.

  She sighed. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go get your shoes on.”

  Hearing her favorite word, Natalie bounced happily on Daria’s hip. To her, shoes meant they were going someplace.

  Twenty minutes later, Daria was trying to keep Natalie’s hands inside the shopping cart with one hand and attempting to inspect the selection of child safety gates with the other. She stooped to pick up Natalie’s stuffed bunny for the third time.

  “Natalie Camfield, this is not a fun game for Mommy!” Natalie gave her a toothless grin and tossed the bunny over the side of the cart again.

  Daria checked her watch. How would she ever get everything done? She had three loads of laundry waiting for her at the apartment, this gate had to be installed immediately if she didn’t want to spend the rest of the week carrying her daughter on her hip, and on top of all that she was behind on the billing at the clinic. She’d brought the laptop home from the office, hoping to get caught up tonight. The chances of that happening were looking slimmer by the minute.

  As much as she adored being a mother, sometimes she longed to be relieved of the financial burden of being the sole provider, to be able to stay home with Natalie and have time to run a simple errand without throwing her whole schedule out of whack.

  Deciding on a safety gate, she balanced the unwieldy box across the top of her cart. She grabbed a package of disposable diapers and a few other items as she passed the baby department. By the time she got to the parking lot, packages were sliding everywhere. She made sure Natalie was safely strapped into the cart, then, using one hand to steady the bulky box that held the gate, she turned to open the trunk of her car.

  She had just managed to get the key into the lock when she felt the box sliding out from under her hand. She whirled around to grab it and came face to face with Cole Hunter.

  He held the box securely in his arms, smiling his boyish smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, but you looked like you could use some help.”

  Her heart started to beat faster. “Oh, hi Cole. I could use an extra pair of hands.”

  He balanced the box between one knee and an elbow and wiggled ten fingers at her. “One extra pair of hands, at your service.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  Cole helped her load the packages in the trunk, then went around to the front of the cart where Natalie sat in one of her rare patient moods, enthralled by the activity in the busy parking lot.

  “Hey, little girl! What’s up?” Cole cooed, leaning down to the baby’s eye level. “Is your mommy teaching you how to shop till you drop? Can’t get started on that skill soon enough, you know.” He glanced up at Daria with a wicked grin.

  “Very funny,” she said. But she couldn’t help smiling back.

  “Here,” he said, inspecting the straps that secured Natalie’s infant carrier to the shopping cart. “If you’ll show me how this works, I’ll help you get her in the car.”

  While Natalie jabbered loudly at them, they worked together to get her buckled into the backseat of Daria’s car.

  “All fingers safely out of the way?” he asked before he carefully shut the door. “I like your new car, by the way,” he told Daria.

  “Thanks. It’s not really new, but hey, it’s mine. Well, mine and the bank’s.”

  “Yeah, don’t I know how that goes.”

  After a moment of awkward silence, he said, “I’d better let you go.”

  “Thanks so much for coming to my rescue, Cole. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “My pleasure.” His mock salute turned into a full-fledged wave. “See you tomorrow.”

  “You too. Thanks again.”

  As she backed out of the parking space, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror and was embarrassed to realize that she was blushing. Good grief. I’m worse than Jennifer. She replayed her encounter with Cole over and over in her mind as she drove home. He was so sweet with Natalie. And so thoughtful to help her with her packages. The sound of his deep, gentle voice warmed her heart at the same time it made her ache for a voice she would never hear again.

  Sitting in the quiet of her living room that evening with crickets chirping outside the open windows, Natalie tucked safely in bed in her nursery, and the laptop open in front of her, Daria’s life in Colombia with Nate seemed an eternity ago.

  That first July anniversary passed quietly. The date of Nathan’s death. Sometimes it frightened her that she was forgetting him. She could still close her eyes and conjure up his face, but sometimes she knew that all she was seeing was the photograph on her nightstand. The camera had locked onto a tanned, blond man sporting a handsome cleft in his chin and flashing white
, even teeth. But she knew that the camera had failed to capture the split second before the shutter released, when Nate had hammed a goofy grin, or the moment after, when his expression had turned serious, trying to explain to her how to set the shutter speed. She felt panicked sometimes that she couldn’t see his face clearly in those daily memories anymore.

  And his voice. She was losing that, too. She knew there were some cassette recordings Nate had made in Colombia, documenting his findings about the dialect and customs—things he’d wished Evangeline Magrit, the former missionary to the Timoné, had left for him and Daria. The tapes were stored away with the few belongings she had brought back from Colombia, but she hadn’t had the courage to get them out and play them yet.

  She desperately needed to do that. Because sometimes, to her dismay, when she sat in the quiet of evening and her thoughts turned to Nathan, the voice that came from his lips in her memories was the voice of another man.

  She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but she knew to whom that voice belonged. Colson Hunter. And knowing made her feel like the worst kind of traitor.

  Eight

  Daria hung up her jacket and went around behind the reception desk to put her purse under the counter. “Good morning,” she sang cheerfully to the staff gathered around the coffeepot.

  Carla Eldridge and Travis Carruthers returned her greeting, but their response was subdued. Colson Hunter, who stood reading a chart in the doorway between the office and the reception room, ignored them all and started back toward his office. Daria noticed that he had a stubble of beard and heavy circles under his eyes. She wondered if he’d been called out for an emergency during the night. Maybe they’d had to euthanize a family pet. That always tended to sober this usually lively group.

  She looked at Carla for an explanation, but couldn’t catch the technician’s eye. Halfway down the hall, Cole’s footsteps halted, and he barked to no one in particular, “I’ve got to have that vaccine this morning! Has anyone called the supplier? Daria, what time is Avery Knudsen bringing those hogs in?”

  She scanned the columns in the appointment book that lay open in front of her. “I have him down for ten,” she told him.

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” he growled. “Call him and reschedule.” The back door slammed behind him before she could ask him what time he wanted to reschedule for.

  Bewildered, Daria watched out the window as Cole trudged toward the barn, head down, shoulders hunched inside the upturned collar of his jacket. Without comment, Travis followed him out.

  Daria turned to Carla, incredulous. “What is wrong with him?” She’d never seen her boss so surly. If it hadn’t been so unlike Cole, she would have been angry at his rudeness.

  Carla came to stand beside Daria at the window that overlooked the barn and corral. “You’ve got me,” she shrugged, obviously as puzzled as Daria. “He’s been going at it since he walked in the door this morning. He doesn’t usually get that way unless he’s been up all night. But he didn’t mention getting called out. And the surgery room is just like I left it yesterday.”

  Daria shook her head. “Boy, that’s a side of him I haven’t seen before. I don’t think I like it very much.”

  “Me neither,” Carla agreed. “Maybe today is one of those anniversary dates or something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, maybe it’s Bridgette’s birthday, or it would have been their anniversary or something like that.”

  A small knot started in Daria’s stomach. “Bridgette? His wife?”

  Carla nodded.

  “Did you know her?”

  Carla shook her head. “She died before Cole came here. Back in Colorado, I think.”

  “He doesn’t talk about it much, does he?”

  “No. It must be tough for him. I would guess he probably still has some ghosts to deal with,” Carla said thoughtfully as she walked out to the coffeepot and poured herself a cup.

  Daria tagged behind her. “What do you mean, ‘ghosts’?”

  “Well, I have a feeling he blames himself for her death,” Carla said over her shoulder.

  “Why?” Daria was taken aback by the comment. “Was he driving?”

  Carla stopped stirring her coffee and turned to look at Daria as though she’d gone mad. “Driving? What are you talking about?”

  Daria shook her head in confusion. “The accident.”

  “What accident?”

  “Cole…said she was killed in an accident. I-I guess I just assumed it was a car accident. It wasn’t?”

  “You seriously don’t know what happened?”

  Daria shook her head, wanting desperately to hear the story but feeling guilty that they were talking about Cole behind his back.

  Carla walked back to the office and set her stained, chipped coffee mug on the counter in front of them. She cocked her head and studied Daria as if deciding whether she should continue. Finally she shrugged. “It wasn’t that kind of car accident.”

  Daria waited, her brows knit together.

  “Cole found her in their car. Carbon monoxide poisoning. They ruled it accidental,” Carla said, emphasizing the word accidental. “It might just be rumors,” she added quickly, “but I’ve heard she was pretty messed up in the head. It’s hard for me to picture Cole with someone like that. But, like I said, this all happened before he came to Bristol.”

  Daria was stunned. Cole had mentioned his wife’s death that first day she’d come to work, but he’d never hinted that it was anything like this. He’d never talked about it since. Now she understood why. No wonder he always seemed so uncomfortable whenever she inched too close to the subject of widowhood.

  “But why?” she finally managed to ask Carla. “How could that have happened? Do they really think she, you know…”

  Carla shrugged. “Offed herself? Who knows. Like I said, it happened before he moved here. I can’t believe you haven’t heard this before, Daria.”

  Daria put her hands to her face. “Oh, Carla, that’s just awful! But”—she wrinkled her brow—“I’m sure Cole told me that she was killed in an accident.”

  “Maybe it’s just easier to tell it that way. You have to admit the real story is pretty shocking.”

  “I can’t believe my parents never mentioned it.”

  “People in town really like Cole, and everyone knows he doesn’t like to talk about her.”

  Daria thought for a moment. “It’s more likely that they didn’t want to upset me. My parents have been pretty protective since I came back from Colombia.”

  Carla gave her a sympathetic smile and leaned back against the counter. “They probably figure you have enough problems of your own.”

  Daria opened her mouth to reply, but the slam of the back door stopped her. She heard the distinctive thud of Cole’s work boots on the tile floor and felt her face grow warm. She hoped he hadn’t overheard them talking about him.

  “Carla?” he hollered before he reached the front office.

  Carla threw Daria a here-goes-nothing look, jumped up, and met him in the doorway. “Yes?”

  He appeared to be in a better mood, and his manner was polite and almost friendly now. “Can you help me out in the barn for a minute? I think I’m looking at a C-section with this mare, and Travis is up to his ears doing blood tests on Meyerses’ hogs.”

  “Sure. Let me get my coat on.”

  Carla grabbed her lab coat and headed down the hall toward the back door. Cole started to follow, then turned abruptly. Hanging on the doorjamb, he swung around and stuck his head through the doorway of the office, looking contrite and boyish in spite of his day-old beard.

  “Good morning, Daria.” He gave her a quick smile and greeted her as though he was seeing her for the first time that morning. Just as quickly he was out the back door again.

  “Good morning, Cole.” She waved to the empty air, baffled by his sudden change of mood.

  She sighed heavily, dumped the dregs of her coffee in the
sink, and headed back to the kennel to feed the dogs. The conversation she’d just had with Carla gnawed at her. The things Carla had related about the way Bridgette Hunter died didn’t fit with the information Cole had given her. She didn’t like the way that fact made her feel.

  When Daria went to pick Natalie up at her parents’ house that night, she asked her mother about the rumor concerning Bridgette Hunter.

  “Yes, I did hear that she committed suicide. But you know how people in this town talk, Daria.”

  “Mom! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Margo perched on a high barstool at the kitchen counter where Daria was seated. She gave her daughter a searching look. “Why, would it have mattered, Daria?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just—I don’t know, it just seems strange. Cole is so easygoing and happy all the time. It just doesn’t fit.” She picked up a pencil from the counter and started scribbling on a scrap of paper, retracing her lines over and over until the lead shone against the white page. “You don’t know why, do you?”

  “Why she killed herself?”

  Daria nodded, not looking up.

  “Honey, who knows why anyone ever does something like that?” A strange timbre had come into her voice, the tone that told her that her mother understood more than Daria had intended to reveal. “This really has you upset, doesn’t it?” Margo said.

  “I-I was just surprised, that’s all.”

  “Look at me, Daria.”

  Daria lifted her head, trying not to look as sheepish as she felt.

  “You really like Dr. Hunter, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “I do, Mom. Is that awful?”

  “Honey, why would that be awful?”

  “Well, for starters he’s my boss. And—” The lump in her throat took her by surprise, and she felt tears well behind her eyelids. “Mom, Nate’s only been gone a little more than a year. I-I feel like such a traitor.”

  Margo put a warm hand over Daria’s. “Daria Lynn Haydon, what are you talking about?”

  Daria smiled, but her mother seemed not to notice her subconscious use of Daria’s maiden name. “You have just been through the worst year of your life. It’s about time you had some happiness. I’m thrilled for you!”