Hearts Divided (Cedar Cove #5.5)(57)
And this summer’s new hardcover, Caroline’s Journal, also to be published in August, is set in my own hometown, Seattle.
I hope you enjoy The Apple Orchard and, if the spirit moves you, the other books. Please drop by my Web site—www.katherinestone.com—anytime. I’d love to hear from you, too. My mailing address is Katherine Stone, P.O. Box 758, Mukilteo, WA 98275.
Thanks for spending time with Clara, Elizabeth and Nick.
With all best wishes,
To those who serve, and those who love them
Prologue
Sarah’s Orchard, Oregon
December 18
Twenty-seven years ago
His mom’s boyfriend, Dennis, was going to be really mad. So would Marianne, his mom. Dennis would take Nick’s being late out on her, too.
How many times, Dennis would shout, had he made it clear that if Nick wasn’t home from school by three-thirty, the house would be locked, the burglar alarm set, and Nick would have to wait outside until his mom and Dennis returned from work at 1:00 a.m.?
It wasn’t an idle threat. Since September, when Marianne and Nick had moved to Sarah’s Orchard to live with Dennis, Nick had spent five nights outside. Dennis didn’t care that Nick had an excuse for his tardiness. In each instance, the entire second-grade class—Nick’s class—at Orchard Elementary had been dismissed late. It wasn’t because of bad behavior, Nick had tried to explain. All five times there’d been something to celebrate.
Today’s celebration, a Christmas party, was worth whatever punishment Dennis chose to inflict. It didn’t matter how cold Nick would be by the time Dennis and Marianne returned. Nick’s teacher had played the piano, and all the second-graders had gathered round to sing carols. The students took turns singing verses. No one laughed when words were forgotten or the tune was off key.
Nick wasn’t sure his classmates even detected the discordant notes. He did. He couldn’t help it. According to his teacher, he had perfect pitch. He hadn’t known it before enrolling at Orchard Elementary. In fact, seven-year-old Nicholas Lawton hadn’t even realized he could sing.
But he could, and he loved it.
He’d sing carols tonight, he decided as he ran toward the house—two miles away—where Dennis was probably shouting already. He’d sing as he froze on the porch. His carols would be sung quietly and in the shadows. The neighbors mustn’t know he was alone every evening, Dennis had warned, whether he was guarding Dennis’s house from the outside or within.
That was Nick’s job, to make certain no one tried to break in while Dennis and Marianne were at the tavern where cocktail waitress Marianne served the drinks that bartender Dennis poured. Dennis made drugs in the basement of the dilapidated house on Center Street. Nick had never seen the lab. The door was always locked.
If not for his illegal enterprise, Dennis wouldn’t have cared when Nick got home from school. It wasn’t Nick’s comfort—food, shelter, warmth—that made him furious when Nick was so late Dennis had to leave before he arrived. Dennis wanted Nick inside, awake and watchful, ready to call the tavern should anyone approach.
Nick had made a number of such calls. Dennis had never thanked him, but he’d come home right away. He’d yelled at the uninvited visitors, and on two occasions, he’d waved his gun around until they left. Even when he’d stopped yelling long enough to sell drugs to the intruders, he’d warned them that any future transactions would take place only at the bar.
Dennis could’ve given Nick the code for the burglar alarm. That way, Nick could let himself in on the afternoons he was late, reset the alarm once inside and be close to the phone if he needed it. Nick wasn’t tall enough to reach the alarm panel. But if Dennis put a chair beneath it…
Nick made the mistake of suggesting to Dennis that he give him the code. Dennis laughed in a mean way, laughing at Nick for being so stupid as to imagine he’d trust him to begin with, much less trust that once he had the code, he wouldn’t simply leave the house and spend the evening elsewhere instead of “earning his keep.”
Nick was doing his best to make it home before Dennis locked him out. He was running as fast as he could. He didn’t even slow his pace as he neared the apple orchard for which the town had been named.
Nick knew the town’s history. All Orchard Elementary second-graders did. Their teacher believed it was important for them to know, and told the story in a fairy-tale way. Nick loved this story; he’d memorized its every detail.
Many years ago, the tale began, Dr. James Keeling and his wife, Sarah, moved from the big city, Portland, to what was then the farming community of Riverville.
The Keelings had an apple tree in Portland. Sarah treasured the tree and its apples. The tree was too large to be transplanted, but the cuttings Sarah took flourished on the small piece of Riverville farmland the town’s new doctor had purchased.
Apples hadn’t been grown in Riverville until Sarah planted her orchard. But they became the crop of Riverville, which was renamed Sarah’s Orchard in honor of the doctor’s wife. Sarah’s husband left a legacy, too. The Keeling Clinic. Renowned for its exceptional staff and unsurpassed expertise in any number of medical specialties, the clinic was a referral center for patients from coast to coast.
Sarah’s acre of apples had been a family orchard, not a working one, and that was how it stayed.
All the town’s orchards were beautiful when the apples were ripening and the leaves were green. But Nick thought the orchard that had been Sarah’s remained beautiful even after the fruit was plucked and the branches were bare.