Dance Away with Me(25)

“Yes, you could be.” He headed for the front door and grabbed his jacket. “I’ve hardly ignored her. You’re here, aren’t you?” The door closed behind him.

She gazed into Wren’s unhappy face—wrinkled forehead, nose flattened, tiny tongue curled like a potato chip as she howled. Was Tess’s intuition right? But if Ian weren’t Wren’s father, why had he allowed himself to be listed that way on her birth certificate? And if he were her father . . . ?

Too many unanswered questions. Cradling Wren’s fragile spine, she hesitated and then made her way to Bianca’s bedroom. She opened the door and stepped inside.

The room was a womb of sorrow. She couldn’t believe a man who painted with this much emotion was capable of so coldly rejecting his own child. Unless she was thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe all that emotion explained why he refused to get close to her.

Wren had begun to quiet. Tess gazed down at her little frog-face. “I’m not your mother, sweetheart.” But right now, this orphaned baby knew Tess’s touch the best. Tess drew her closer. She had years of practice at professional detachment, and she was too clear-eyed to get attached to this child who wasn’t hers. But whose was she?

“I’m doing my best, Bianca,” she whispered to the empty room. “I promise. I’m doing my best.”

*

Ian needed to get away from this house, from her. The Widow Hartsong saw too much. He strode toward the trail that led up the mountain. For someone who’d grown up in the city, he was most at home outdoors. He’d hiked part of the Appalachian Trail, climbed Mount Whitney in a winter snowstorm, and thru-hiked the John Muir. He’d hiked in Europe, too, with nothing much in his backpack but a change of underwear and whatever drugs he’d been able to get his hands on at the time.

A gust of raw March wind made him wish he’d grabbed a heavier jacket, but he wasn’t ready to turn back. The old fire tower rose off to the east. He’d climbed it a couple of times, but today he needed his feet planted firmly on the ground.

A white-tailed deer loped across the path in front of him. He veered off the trail to follow it toward the creek. As he got nearer he heard a different sound from the usual noise of rushing water. Something like a wail coming from what was left of an old moonshine still.

He quickened his step. He’d discovered the still on one of his first hikes, identifying it for what it was by the telltale U-shaped arrangement of creek rocks that marked the location of an abandoned furnace. A corroded fifty-five-gallon drum lay on its side, along with an old galvanized bucket missing a bottom and some broken mason jars cloudy with dirt. But it was the remains of the old boiler that caught his attention, the rusty slabs of sheet metal etched with ax marks left by long-ago revenuers. Now a kid was trapped underneath.

“It hurts!”

The boy’s leg was caught under the heaviest section of the deteriorated boiler. Ian hurried over. “Hold still, Eli.”

The kid looked up at him, tears, dirt, and snot smearing his face. He had brown eyes the size of buckeyes and thick, dark hair with straight bangs that covered his eyebrows. “It fell on me.”

“I see that.” Ian had run across Eli before. In modern parlance, Eli was a free-range kid, roaming the woods with a lack of supervision urban eight-year-olds couldn’t imagine.

Eight and a half, Eli had told him.

Despite his perpetually dirty face and homegrown haircut the kid seemed to be well cared for, with a sturdy body and no more bruises than the average boy. “This isn’t the best place for you to be poking around.” The jagged metal piece was heavier than it looked with murderously sharp edges, and Ian took care lifting it. As he moved it aside, the long gash visible through a rip in the leg of Eli’s jeans gushed fresh blood. Too much of it. Ian threw off his jacket and unbuttoned his flannel shirt. “That’s got to hurt.”

“I’m—I’m tough.” Another tear made a fresh road in the dirt map of his face.

“Sure you are.” He stripped off his shirt, leaving himself in only a T-shirt, and tightened one long sleeve around the wound to stanch the flow of blood. “Promise me you’ll stay away from here from now on.”

“I guess.”

He bunched the rest of the shirt on Eli’s chest and carefully picked him up. Eli whimpered. “Hurts.”

“Sure it does. Let’s get you home.”

Eli leaned into Ian’s chest. “You don’t have to carry me like I’m a baby.”

“I know that. But I’m training for the Ironman. I need to work on my endurance.”

“You’re training for the Ironman?”

“I might.” Or might not. Running and swimming were one thing, but 112 miles on a bike was a deal breaker for someone who liked to have direct contact with the earth.

Eli’s parents were homesteaders. Ian had seen the tin roof of their house below the ridgeline off to the west. He slowed his pace as the boy’s face contorted with pain. “How’s your mother doing?” he said to distract him.

“She’s still sad.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” In their last conversation, Eli had revealed that his mother was going to have a baby but that “something went wrong and now she cries a lot.”

Eli gripped Ian’s neck tighter. “My dad says she’ll get better soon.”