An Accidental Woman (2 page)

Missy smiled and released his hand. In the few seconds it took for her to step back and flatten herself to the wall, her expression turned defiant.

“Missy,” Micah warned, waving her back down the hall, but before she could refuse, Heather emerged from the bedroom with the two female agents. She was dressed in jeans and a heavy sweater, the sheer bulk of which made her look lost. Her expression mirrored that. When she
caught sight of Missy, she stopped short. Her eyes met Micah's for a single, alarmed second before returning to the child.

Missy was looking at the two agents. “Who're
they?”

Micah said, “More friends of Pete's. Go on back in with Star, Missy. I need you to help.”

Missy stayed pressed against the wall.

Heather knelt by her side. “Daddy's right, sweetie,” she said in a gentle voice. “Go in with Star. She needs you.”

Defiance gone, replaced by worry, Missy slipped an arm around Heather's shoulder. “Where are you going?”

“Into town.”

“When'll you be back?”

“A little later.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Do you promise?”

Waiting for the answer himself—hanging his future on it much as the child was—Micah saw Heather swallow. But that was the only beat she missed. In the same soft voice, she said, “I'll do my best to be here when you get home from school.”

“Do you
promise?”
Missy repeated.

“Yes,” Heather whispered. As she straightened, she pressed a kiss to the child's head. She closed her eyes, and a look of anguish crossed her face. Micah imagined that she held the kiss a beat longer than she might have. Sure enough, as she came toward him, her eyes were filled with tears. When she was as close as she could be, she whispered, “Call Cassie.”

Cassie Byrnes was one of Heather's closest friends, and she was a lawyer.

Micah took her hands, only to find that the sleeves of the bulky sweater concealed handcuffs nearly as cold as her skin. Furious, he turned on Pete, who raised a brow in warning and nodded toward Missy.

“Call Cassie,” Heather repeated—which was certainly the right thing to say, certainly the
practical
thing to say, though not what Micah wanted to hear from her. He wanted her to profess utter confusion, to insist that
a mistake had been made, to protest her innocence, even to cry and loudly declare that she had never in her life heard the name Lisa Matlock—all of which might well be the case, Micah told himself. But yes, Heather was a practical woman, and yes, given the circumstances, especially with the legality of the arrest warrant as vouched for by Pete, cooperating was the only thing to do.

Still, the handcuffs offended him. A small person like Heather didn't have a chance in hell of overpowering these three agents, plus however many were outside, even with both hands free. Not that his Heather would think of fighting. In the four years that they'd been together, he had never seen her lash out in anger at anything.

When the two female agents ushered her toward the door, he followed closely. “Where are you taking her?”

Mooney stepped in his path as the agents whisked Heather outside. “Concord. She'll go before a magistrate there this morning. She needs an attorney.”

Go before a magistrate.
Micah's eyes flew to Pete, who said, “They have to return the fugitive flight warrant.”

“Is she being charged with murder?”

“No. Not charged with anything yet. They return the warrant and ask for extradition. Heather can choose to waive an extradition hearing and go back with them, or she can fight it. They can't take her back—can't charge her with murder or anything else—until they make a solid enough case that the charges are legit.”

Micah wanted to know the how, why, and where of everything Pete was talking about, but he had more immediate questions, and Mooney was leaving. Following the agent out the door, he trotted barefoot down the steps, oblivious to the crusted ice on the wood planks, the snow on the drive, and the subfreezing air on his near-naked body. “I'm coming with you,” he announced—a totally
un
practical thing to say, since he couldn't take the girls with him and they couldn't possibly stay here alone, but his words were driven by emotion, not logic.

Mooney ignored him and kept on going.

Pete became the practical one. “Not wise to do that right now.”

Eyes on Heather, Micah watched her vanish into the back of a dark
van, the vehicle farthest from the house. At the same time, two other men materialized from the woods and slid into the van.

Micah began to run. “I want to go with her.”

Pete ran alongside him. “They won't let you. You'd be better going down later with Cassie. Let these guys go without a fuss now. Get them out of here before the sun's up. There's less of a spectacle that way.”

Micah hadn't begun to think beyond the moment. Looking now, he saw that the sky had indeed begun to brighten. Pete had a point. But when the deputy pulled at Micah's arm and tried to steer him back to the cabin, Micah tugged free and ran on. He stopped at the closed door of the van, bent down, and flattened a hand on the window. His eyes met Heather's just as Mooney started the engine, and short of running alongside until the van gained enough speed to leave him behind, he had no choice but to stay. Straightening, he stared at the head that was turned and looking back at him. He held that gaze until the van rounded a bend and disappeared down the forest drive.

She was gone.

Suddenly, he felt cold inside and out. Turning fast, he started back toward the house. Of the two cars he'd heard earlier, only Pete's Lake Henry cruiser was left.

“Some friend you are,” he muttered as he stormed past the deputy.

“Hell, Micah, what could we do?” Pete cried, following him. “They had the warrant for her arrest.”

“You could have said it was wrong. You could've said they made a mistake.”

“We
did.
But, Christ, they're FBI. It was already a federal issue. What could we do?”

“Call us. Warn us.”

“How would that've helped? Would you have run off, like you were guilty of something? This was the only way, Micah.”

Micah took the front steps in twos, energized by anger.

“Look at it this way,” Pete said. “They have to
prove
she is who they say. You think anyone here's going to say she's someone else? No way. So they're going to have to dig up other people. That'll take some time, don't you think?”

What Micah thought was that
any
amount of time he was separated from Heather was bad. He wanted her with him, and not just for the girls' sake. He had come to depend on her gentleness, her sureness, and—yes—her practicality. He was a nuts-and-bolts guy who sometimes was so focused on the small details that he didn't see the larger picture. Heather did. She was his helpmate when it came to being human. She was also his partner when it came to maple sugaring, and the season was about to start.

But she wasn't here. And he did need to see the larger picture. In this instance, that meant calling Cassie.

Striding into the house, he shut the door before Pete could follow, then promptly forgot about Cassie. Missy stood in the middle of the living room looking crushed, and though there was no sign of Star, Micah was sure she was near. He looked around the living room, behind and under the sofa, the chairs, the large square coffee table that he had built at Heather's direction, but it wasn't until he looked behind him at the bookshelves flanking the front door that he spotted her. She was on the bottom shelf, tucked in beside a stack of
National Geographic
magazines that were a stark yellow against the pale green of her nightie. Her knees were drawn up and held close by her small arms. Her hair, dark like his but long, straight, and fine, lay over her shoulders like a shawl. Her eyes were woefully sad and knowing, and they were watching him.

His heart lurched. It wasn't that he had stronger feelings for Star, just that he worried more. She was a more serious child than Melissa. And introverted. Whereas Missy said what she thought, Star was quieter. She had been an infant when her mother had left—“left” being the word he used in place of “skidded off the road, went down a ravine, and burned up in the cab of her truck.” He knew that Star couldn't possibly remember Marcy, still he was convinced that she sensed the loss. Heather was wonderful with Star. Heather was wonderful with both of his girls. And now Heather had left, too.

Hunkering down, he caught up the child. Her arms and legs went around him as he straightened.

Not knowing where to begin, he simply said, “Everything's okay, baby,” as he carried her down the hall to the room the girls shared. He set
her on her bed. Like Missy's, it was a mess of gingham sheets, pillow, and down—Missy's pink, Star's green—all of which, again, was Heather's doing. “And everything's
going
to be okay. But you can help me out now, baby. I need you and your sister to get dressed while I make some calls. Then we'll have breakfast together.”

“We won't wait for Momma,” the child said in a sure little voice.

“No. She'll have breakfast in town.”

“What'll she eat?”

He thought for a minute. “Eggs? Waffles? If we eat the same thing, it'll be like she's with us. What do you think?”

“Maybe.”

“Oatmeal,” Missy announced from close by. “Oatmeal's her favorite. She'd be having that. But I can only eat it if it has lots of maple sugar on it.”

“Well, we have lots of maple sugar, so we're golden. Help your sister dress?” Micah said and, with a return of the urgency he had felt when the FBI van disappeared with Heather inside, he headed for the kitchen. Halfway there, he did an about-face and went back down the hall, this time to the room opposite the girls'. He had added this room soon after Heather moved in, hoping it would be for a child they would have together, but they'd been too busy, it seemed, growing the girls, growing the business. The floor of the room was covered with the dollhouse village he'd made for the girls and which they had arranged during a recent spate of snowy days. He had to step over the town hall and the library to reach the closet, then had to push spare clothes aside to get to the shelves built in behind.

The knapsack was on a shelf out of reach of the girls and far to the right, well hidden by clothes and boxes of Christmas decorations that had only recently been taken down. A drab brown thing, the knapsack was small and worn. Micah didn't know whether it had belonged to Heather herself or to someone else. To his knowledge, it was the only relic she had of her pre–Lake Henry days.

He pulled the knapsack from the shelf and shifted the boxes on either side to fill the space. Tucking the sack under his arm—and refusing to consider what was inside—he went through the kitchen to the back hall.
Jackets of various sizes hung from hooks at all heights, as did hats, lanterns, picks, and shovels, as well as a coil of plastic tubing that Micah was repairing. An assortment of footwear was lined against the wall, crowded in by the snowshoes that they'd been using each day when they trekked up the hill to the sugarbush to clear away winter litter and to check the mainline for damage in anticipation of sugaring time.