Salvation in the Sheriff's Kiss(29)

She stood in the doorway and let her gaze roam the main room. Some of the furniture was slightly out of place, or had she simply remembered wrong? The bed where she had slept was tucked into a corner against the wall opposite the large stone fireplace, though the mice had chewed at the mattress and straw now poked out haphazardly in several directions. The quilt her mama had sewn was gone from the bed, and the chest where she stored her belongings was now situated at the footboard instead of against the wall. Maybe Bertram had sent someone to clean the interior—it did look rather tidier than she recalled.

The small kitchen lined another wall, the table where they’d eaten doing double duty as counter space. Pa had always promised to build Mama a larger cabin with a kitchen fit for a queen once his fortunes turned, but he’d never been given that opportunity. Vernon Donovan had made certain of that, thwarting every effort her father made to find proper work to support his family. They’d talked about leaving from time to time, starting over somewhere else, but they had both loved the little town where they’d fallen in love and neither wanted to be chased out of it conceding defeat.

So they had stayed, and they had struggled. And they had loved and laughed and dreamed of better days. Those days never came. Her mother fell ill and Pa was arrested for rustling cattle from the Diamond D Ranch. Despite needing money for her mother’s medicine, Meredith never once believed her father had returned to a life of crime. He’d made a promise to his wife he would never walk that path again, and Abbott Connolly was a man who’d put a lot of stock in promises.

For all the good it did him. He’d lost everything in the end anyway. His wife, his freedom, his home, and eventually his life. Even through the worst of it though, their little family stayed strong. But then Mama died, Pa was taken away and the ties that bound them frayed and broke.

There was no going back. No chance to redo all that had been done.

Bitterness welled up in Meredith’s chest with such force she thought it would burst. She crossed the room to the trunk at the end of her narrow bed and knelt next to it. The top creaked as she opened it, the hinges rusty from disuse. The chessboard her father had made rested on top of her mother’s quilt. Someone had put it in the chest for safekeeping. She reached inside and pulled the chessboard out, along with the cloth bag that held the pieces.

Pa had crafted it himself out of a thick slab of oak. She remembered the hours he spent next to the fire, whittling away until the pieces took shape, then staining one half red with a paint Mama had made from berries and such. It was nothing fancy, but it meant the world to her. She’d forgotten it when she’d left, hustled out of her own home and shipped off to Boston, to a new life.

She turned the smooth oak box with its checkerboard top over in her hands. The painted squares had faded a bit with time until they appeared more brown than red. Pa had hollowed out the inside of the thick slab of oak with the intent of housing the pieces there, but the space had not been large enough. Mama sewed up a cloth bag instead while her father looked on, a sheepish grin on his face.

She stood and hugged the board to her chest to hold the memory close, Pa’s voice drifting back to her with one of his riddles he loved so much.

Two kings and two queens standing still as stone, their subjects all like ice; one move and only one is needed to start the fight. Where is the battleground, Merry? Her father had smiled, his bright eyes twinkling in the firelight. He pointed a finger down at his newest creation. On the chessboard. And chess, Merry, is all about strategy, one move at a time. But you need to think ahead, get inside the mind of your opponent. Figure out what they’ll do before they actually do it.

She’d been small at the time, but his words had stuck with her. As did his smile and the way his eyes danced with delight as he taught her the game. She missed him so much her heart broke anew with every sunrise. She would never see him again, never hear the laughter in his voice, or be subject to his riddles and rhymes. It was too much.

Memories pummeled her from every angle and robbed her strength. She sank back to her knees on the dusty floor. Once again, the tears she had tried so hard to hold off had their way and she let them come. She’d prided herself on being strong, on leaving the tears to others, but Heaven’s bells, she’d cried more since arriving back in Salvation Falls than she had in the entire seven years she’d been gone. She couldn’t seem to help herself.

Being back made all she’d lost feel like a fresh wound. In Boston, she could imagine things were fine. Pa was not in prison, Mama was still alive and they carried on with their lives. No one had died; no one had been torn away from her, leaving her all alone in the world. One day, she would go home and rejoin them. Boston was just temporary. It helped her make it through, helped stave off the loneliness. But it wasn’t reality. This empty cabin was reality. The two grave markers resting beneath the shady branches of the old oak tree were reality.