A Vow to Keep. Cara Colter
me a chance to say goodbye to our old house, to pack a few of my own things. She sold the car, too.”
“The Mercedes?” Linda couldn’t be having financial problems. It was impossible. The company was in excellent health.
“Oh, she still has a Mercedes, but you’ll have to see it to believe it.” A dramatic sigh, and then, “Uncle Rick, she cut her hair. I think my mom is losing her mind.”
He wondered, troubled, if it was a genuine possibility. Linda Starr had survived a terrible tragedy in the loss of her husband thirteen months ago, now her only child was away at school. Could she be falling apart?
No, not Linda, always refined, always composed, always classy. Even in the middle of chaos, she had retained that almost regal refinement, as if she was untouchable, unmovable, a rock that the stormy sea washed around. Linda Starr seemed like the least likely person to be losing her mind.
“What is it you want me to do, Bobbi?”
“Go check on her!” This was said with a certain feminine impatience, as if he was supposed to know what to do.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll check on her, before work.”
From the heavy sigh, a little more was expected of him.
“You need to ask her to come back to work. She’s becoming reclusive and weird.”
He heard the reproach in her voice and knew it was at least partly deserved. “I’ve tried to talk to your mother, Bobbi. She doesn’t want to talk to me.” Let alone work with me. Besides, it had been at least fifteen years since Linda’d had any active involvement in the company.
“Give me a break! You could sell snake oil to a rattlesnake farmer, and you can’t talk my mother into getting her life back?”
He wanted to deflect the accusation by keeping it light. “Is there such a thing as a rattlesnake farmer?” he asked.
Bobbi was not about to be sidetracked. “You abandoned her after Daddy died. Everybody did.”
He wanted to say, She wanted to be abandoned, to defend himself, but suddenly his position seemed indefensible.
“And she was so good to you after you went through your divorce from Kathy. Is that seven years ago? Already?”
“Yes.”
Another memory, as tender as that of Bobbi on her trike, of her mother taking both his hands in the warmth of hers, looking into his eyes, saying, It will be all right, Rick. Maybe not today, but someday.
She had been right, too. When the pain, the humiliation of failure, had subsided, he had realized his divorce had freed him to do all the things he loved. He had bought a motorcycle first, and then, with his appetite for solitary adventures whetted, he had taken up traveling. Not the posh, resort kind of traveling his ex-wife would have enjoyed, but true exploring of a world so rich in diversity and culture he sometimes wondered if he would have time to discover and experience all the things he wanted to.
Still, he knew his contentment with his own lifestyle, combined with the wariness created by his divorce, had made him a solitary soul. Maybe, somewhere in the past seven years, he had even become a selfish, self-centered man.
What other excuse did he have for not being there for a friend? Though, when he thought of Linda, he thought their relationship might be a little more complicated than friendship.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly to her daughter.
“Her whole life was about me, and now I’m gone, too. Uncle Rick, she needs a purpose. Promise me you’ll find something at Star Chasers for her to do.”
A gauntlet laid down. It would be foolish to pick it up. What did he know about helping a woman whose dignity had been shredded and whose heart had been broken? On the other hand, he knew all about promises. Vows. He didn’t want to be that responsible for another human being’s happiness, ever again.
“She needs to be around people,” her daughter said with the absolute authority of one young enough to still believe she knew everything. “She needs to have something to do. She loves old houses. She still has pictures of some of the early ones that you and her and Dad restored together. That interest could be channeled constructively, before she sells off anything else.”
He heard himself saying, cautiously, “I can’t make your mother do anything she doesn’t want to do, Bobbi.”
“Promise me you’ll try.”
Maybe it was the hour of the morning that weakened him, or maybe it was the pleading in that tender young voice.
“Okay. I promise.”
“Thank you, Uncle Rick!” There was hope in her voice, as if she truly believed he could fix something so desperately fragile. But he already felt regret. He knew he shouldn’t get involved in this. Helping someone who was heart weary was like treading on sacred ground.
Still, he’d offer Linda a job, she’d say no and his duty would be done.
But the promise he’d just made implied more than a lackluster effort. That was the problem with promises. They required way more of a man than he was prepared to give.
Dumb to get involved, Rick thought, staring at the phone after he’d hung up, but what if Linda did need something? She would be too proud—and too angry—to ever ask him.
Anger he deserved, he reminded himself, rubbing the last of the sleep from his eyes. Anger he deserved because he had kept her husband Blair’s secrets from her.
And he kept one still.
What had he just let himself in for? He got out of bed, went to the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. One thing he knew, he was not going to face Linda Starr without a plan.
CHAPTER ONE
AT FIRST she thought he was not there.
Linda Starr laid low in the long September-gold grass and adjusted the binoculars on the reedy area of bulrushes just beyond the boundary of her picket fence–enclosed backyard.
The ground was gilded silver with frost, but she was only vaguely aware of the cold penetrating her pajamas as the morning light, cool and gray, seeped into the darkness, turned the river’s back eddy into a startling strand of light. Across the river, downtown Calgary hummed to life, headlights like strings of moving pearls joined the high-rise reflections in the still waters of this tiny, quiet inlet of the swift moving Bow River.
Unbelievable that she had seen him here, nearly in the heart of the city. It had been a gift, and she realized, resigned, it was one that might not be repeated.
She began to feel the cold and to notice the steady hum of life across the way, in stark contrast to the stillness where she lay shivering. She had turned on the coffeepot before she had come out, and now its scent drifted out her open back door, calling her back to the warmth of the tiny house she had only slept in for three nights.
She rose to her knees, groaned at the stiffness in them and then froze. She saw him, his silhouette that of a ghost taking solid form as the light deepened to rose on the river. Her breath caught in her throat as she witnessed alchemy, dawn turning white feathers to platinum. A whooping crane. Linda had read about him after her first sighting yesterday.
He was one of the rarest North American birds, and the tallest. His wingspan was seven and a half feet. Most people would never see such a bird in their lifetimes. She, startled at her own whimsy, took it as a sign that she had made the right decision to buy the tiny house behind her.
Her knees protested, and she shifted her weight ever so slightly but enough that the bird turned to her suddenly, the brilliant red of his face filling her binoculars, the yellow of his eye defiant. With a buglelike trumpet—ker-loo, ker-loo—he stretched his wings so that she could see the black-tipped undersides, witness how truly magnificent he was.
He