Collision of The Heart (8 page)

“That seems safe.”

And useless.

“Shall I tell you about an ancient parchment one of the other professors brought back from the Middle East?”

“You haven’t seen it yet.” She leaned forward to study the train wreckage. “I overheard your conversation on the pavement this morning.”

“I am sorry about that.” Ayden concentrated on guiding the horses through drifted snow, though instinct made him wish to touch Mia’s hand or arm or smooth cheek. “Finney has become insufferable since he became director of the Classics Department.”

“He was never a kind man.”

“But he liked you.”

“He liked my work until he learned you were courting me.” She hugged her portfolio against her side and gazed at the rug on her lap. “He never thought me good enough for you.”

Ayden hesitated, choosing his words with care to inject the right amount of jocularity into his tone. “I and my family thought I was good enough, and so did all your friends. What does it matter what a curmudgeon like that thinks?”

“A great deal when it comes to your career.” Green eyes flashed up at him. “But you knew that, did you not, when you chose to let me go east alone?”

“Mia, I thought we agreed—”

“Your father was nearly himself by the time we were to leave.” She raised her voice over his protest. “He could have hired someone to help. He said so himself.”

“Mia, stop it.” He reined in and forked his fingers into his hair as though he needed to keep his head from exploding. “We agreed to let this go.”

“It seems I cannot.” Her gloved fingers were creating half-moon indentations in the soft leather of her portfolio. “I should not have come with you today.”

“You should not have gone without me a year and a half ago.” If she wanted to have this out, then they would. “If anyone made the wrong decision, it was you. You could have found the individual work like you do now if you’d stayed here.”

“Not without the connections I have now. I had to go to Boston to have a chance at a real career in letters. But you chose not to understand that.”

“I understand that having a career is more important to you than I was.”

And after she’d gotten on that train, he had walked deep into the woods and cried like a child who had just lost his family. Even now, the memory of that day tightened his chest and brought moisture to his eyes—or perhaps the moisture came from the chill of the wind and not remembered anguish.

For a year, as he saw how strong his father was, how easily he could have hired someone to perform the tasks requiring heavy labor at the store, Ayden questioned the rightness of his decision. Then he met Charmaine, beautiful and somehow sad to be in Hillsdale instead of Philadelphia, a sadness he put down to the recent loss of her mother and her friends back East, and he thought perhaps he could forget about Mia.

“You could have stayed a little longer—long enough to give us time to work out our differences.” He spoke so softly he wasn’t certain she heard.

She sighed with a gust that sent a stream of vapor into the gray afternoon. “Of course I could stay here no longer. I had already taken money for an assignment in Boston.” She lifted a handkerchief to her nose.

“And I’d already turned down the Boston position and accepted the one here.” He spoke through a constricted throat.

“You made a major decision without consulting me.” Her voice remained calm, but beneath the handkerchief, her lower lip quivered ever so slightly.

He raised his hand, reached out, stopped himself from smoothing her mouth steady just in time.

She turned her face away. “I was expected to break my word and likely never have my own dreams fulfilled.”

“You could have fulfilled your dreams in other ways. That work was only—”

Mia’s hand clamped on his arm. “Do. Not. Say. It.” She released him as though his sleeve had turned into a flaming torch. “It wasn’t great work, but it was a start in the right direction. It’s gotten me further, whether you like it or not. And like it or not, we need to work together to find this child’s people.”

“And arguing here or in front of anyone will not do anyone any good.” He relaxed against the sleigh seat and began to look for railroad workers moving around the train. “I’d do anything not to upset my parents especially.”

“So would I. They were the closest thing to parents I ever had.”

For a moment, her indifferent mask slipped, revealing the sad, vulnerable girl who had moved to Hillsdale twelve years earlier to live with an aging relative who had never had children and did not, apparently, want them. She gave Mia shelter, the occasional meal when she thought of it, and nothing else. Mia didn’t seem to mind all that much. She had known little else in a vagabond life of being shunted from one relative after another, moving on to the next one when the previous one died.

Unwittingly, however, the great-aunt in Hillsdale had given Mia one great gift—a house full of books. Mia had begun a systematic reading of those tomes.

Ayden’s gaze strayed to a now snow-clad hill on the far side of the railroad tracks where he had met Mia. She’d been sprawled on the grass with a book open before her. Her dress was so worn and faded its original color was impossible to guess, and the skirt was far too short for modesty. Her hair hung in tangles around her face, her skin was too brown for accepted beauty, but she looked him straight in the eye with those stunning, slanted green eyes, and said, “You’re Ayden Goswell, home from school in Boston. You can help me work out this bit in Greek that’s giving me trouble.”

She had taught herself ancient Greek because she had read all the English-language books in her great-aunt’s house.

Bowled over, Ayden had helped her with the translation, and they discussed Ptolemy’s theories of geography and astronomy for two hours. When the sun began to set, she sprang to her feet, panic etching her features, and sprinted away, her worn skirt sailing around her bare calves.

Ayden went home and told his parents they needed to find some way to get her an education. In three months, Mia was in college, and Ayden was in love.

He shook his head in an effort to clear it of memories and spotted a group of men in railway uniforms raking through the burned remains of a mail car. Before he reined in, Mia scrambled over the side of the sleigh and plowed across the field of snow trampled by people and vehicles from the night of the wreck.

“Sirs? Hello there, can you help us?” She waved her pencil in the air like a flag.

Ayden climbed down with more dignity. “We’re in search of some information,” he called.

The men glanced back and glared at them. “We aren’t giving out information any more’n we already have.”

“No, no, not about the wreck.” Mia gave the men a smile warm enough to melt a path through the snow. “Of course we’d all like to know what went wrong, and I know accidents happen, especially on stormy nights. But what we want to know is how we can reunite a little boy and his momma. They seem to have been separated from one another after the crash. Can you help?”

“Not likely,” one of the men growled.

“No? You look like you can.” She tilted her head and opened her eyes wide.

She was going to bat her long lashes any moment now.

Ayden didn’t know if he should laugh or toss her over his shoulder and haul her away before she gave these men the wrong idea about her character.

He moved closer to her, rested a possessive hand on her shoulder, and addressed the men. “The little boy was wandering down the aisle when the train wrecked. Miss Roper here picked him up—”

“I was thinking perhaps a passenger list would help?” She interrupted with brute force, casting him a quelling glance.

“If you want a passenger list, you’ll have to get it from headquarters.” The spokesman turned back to the burned-out car.

“And where is that?” Mia asked.

“Jackson.” The men returned their attention to the mangled wreckage.

Mia kicked a clump of frozen snow. “Even if we send a telegram, the answer could take days to get back to us.”

One of the railroad workers sneered at her. “Yeah, ’cause the mail ain’t gettin’ through.”

“Precisely. Which is why I am asking you gentlemen for aid.” Her smile did not falter.

The men glared.

Ayden laid his hand on her arm and scanned his gaze along the line of twisted, tilted, and surprisingly undamaged cars. “Do you want to risk looking in your car?”

“You’d do that with me?” She glanced up at him with her eyes gleaming and the first warm smile she’d granted him.

He’d do about anything for her at that moment.

They thanked the railroad men, who ignored them, then drove along the train.

Mia half turned on the sleigh seat to gaze at the wreckage. Some cars had burned when the boilers in the engine exploded. Some lay on their sides. Others tilted like weary men leaning against an invisible wall. Most, however, stood upright, as though all they needed were engines to haul them on down the line to their destination. But those mangled and burned cars toward the front sent the hairs on Ayden’s arms prickling.

A shudder ran through Mia powerful enough to shake the sleigh seat. “And I was annoyed I could only get a seat in a rear car. If I’d been closer to the front—” She hugged her arms across her middle.

Ayden slipped his arm around her. He intended it for comfort. The impact of feeling her narrow shoulders in the circle of his arm was like he’d just slammed face-first into that invisible wall. His arm shook with his wanting to draw her closer for comfort and for a way to erase the past hurt between them.

But Mia shrugged her shoulders and slipped from beneath his hold. “I believe,” she said without looking at him, “you gave up the right to touch me in August of fifty-four.” Then she leaped from the sleigh, sliding a bit on the frozen top crust of the snow, and sped toward the train. “Sir, sir, wait.”

Ayden hadn’t noticed the man in a railway uniform until Mia called to him. He paused in the doorway of one of the tilted cars. Unlike the other workers, who were armed with relatively harmless rakes and picks, this man carried a gun on his hip.

Chapter Seven

A
t sight of the man’s gun, Mia slid to a stop, clutching her portfolio to her chest like a shield. If she hadn’t been holding the notebook, she would have raised her hands in a gesture of surrender.

The railroad man dropped his hand—to the butt of his gun. “What do you folks want?”

Mia summoned her best smile. “We came to look for something in the car in which I was—”

The man cut her off with a brusque shake of his head. “No, ma’am. No one goes in the cars until they’ve all been searched. We won’t have looting on my watch.”

“We aren’t looters,” Mia and Ayden protested together.

Snow crunched behind Mia, and the man drew his gun from its holster. “Stay where you are, sir.”

“I’m Ayden Goswell, history professor at the college.” Ayden’s voice was tight and too far behind Mia for her comfort.

She slid one foot back. “And I’m Euphemia Roper, a reporter for—”

“The professor I might believe, but a lady reporter?” The man threw back his head and laughed. The gun wavered. “You’ll have to come up with something better than that one, missy, if you want me to let you in any of the cars. Now get going back the way you came.”

“This has to do with a lost child,” Mia tried again. “We’re trying to find . . . his . . . people. I found him wandering—”

The gun ceased wavering. The muzzle, surely as wide as a blunderbuss barrel, was pointed directly at her chest. “Get out of here, or I will—”

Snow crunched like a hundred eggshells underfoot, and Ayden’s arms closed around her, dragging her backward, down beneath the bullet whining overhead like a bee out of season.

Her head on her drawn-up knees, Mia trembled and gasped and gabbled nonsense exclamations and a few prayers. Ayden crouched beside her, his hand on her head, murmuring soothing, incomprehensible words of comfort. And all the while, the echo of the shot reverberated across the snow-laden landscape and gentle hills.

“He’s gone now.” Ayden grasped Mia’s arms and lifted her to her feet. “And we should be as well.”

“To the sheriff, I expect.” While Ayden sprinted to the horses’ heads, Mia stumbled to the sleigh and collapsed onto the seat.

It rocked with the agitation of horses too well trained and old to have bolted but still restive in their traces. Mia’s stomach shifted in the opposite direction, and if she’d eaten any breakfast or lunch, she would have been sick right there in front of Ayden. She scooped up a handful of clean, white snow and held it to her brow. “What was that all about? Shooting looters on sight?”

“Possibly, but we weren’t looting. And he didn’t fire until you mentioned the child.” The horses calmed, and Ayden returned to the sleigh. “I don’t think he actually shot at us.”

“He aimed at me.” Mia faced him on the narrow seat.

At one time, he was too close and too far away. If he had slipped an arm around her then, she would have succumbed to the longing to be held and rested her head on his shoulder, where she could hear the strong, even rhythm of his heart and inhale his fresh, clean scent from exposure to the winter air. But with them, closeness too easily led to cuddling, and cuddling led to kissing, and only a courting couple intending to wed had a right to that sort of nearness. She couldn’t even hold his hand.

In that moment, with Ayden mere inches away, Mia missed him more than she had when she was nearly a thousand miles away. They hadn’t just lost their future together; they had lost their friendship from the past.

Her eyes burned. Her lips quivered. She pressed her snowy glove to her mouth and closed her eyes to hold in the tears.

“Let’s get to the sheriff.” Ayden’s voice was rough.

Mia tucked herself into the far corner of the sleigh and drew the lap rug to her chin despite the pain doing so brought to her left wrist. “Perhaps we should stop and tell the other workers or ask them if they know who he is.”

“If he’s from the railroad, I’ll be surprised.” Ayden’s jaw looked as hard as the railroad ties. “Even a train guard wouldn’t shoot without cause.”

“Most criminals don’t shoot without cause.”

Ayden cast her a sharp glance through a veil of newly falling snow. “How would you know that?”

“I’ve done some reporting on crime.”

“Mia, how could you? That’s dangerous.”

“It can also pay well.” She looked past him as he turned the sleigh back the way they’d come. “The men aren’t there any longer.”

The burned mail car where they had been raking through the debris now lay abandoned beneath the dusting of fresh snow—snow filling in footprints around the tracks and cars.

“Frightened off, like us?” Mia asked.

“Or counterfeit train workers, like the man with the gun.” Ayden clucked to the horses and snapped the reins, encouraging them to increase their pace. “I’ll take you home, then go on to the sheriff.”

Mia stiffened. “You will do no such thing. I’m as much a witness to what happened as you are.”

“Yes, but the sheriff won’t take you as seriously.”

“Oh, will he not?” Mia clenched her fists and gasped as pain shot through her left wrist. “Are you telling me that even with the college here with brilliant female students, the law officers do not take the word of a woman as seriously as the word of a man?”

“The women don’t vote.”

“Which also needs to be rectified. Do you know that New Jersey’s original constitution gave women the right to vote if they owned—stop laughing at me, Ayden Benaiah Goswell. I am completely serious. The only bad thing that came out of it was that some men realized the error and changed the wording to say that only
men
owning property could vote.”

“I know. I know.” Ayden wiped snow and mirth tears from his lashes. “I was the one who shared that tidbit of history with you.”

“Of course you did. I forgot.”

“I’m surprised. You don’t seem to forget anything.”

“Not as much as I’d like to forget.”

Such as how his deep-blue eyes sparkled like faceted sapphires when he laughed. Such as the richness of that laughter. Such as how much she loved the sound of his voice.

“You seem to have forgotten about me well enough.” Ayden stepped from the sleigh to guide the horses around in the tight ruts buried beneath drifted snow.

Mia watched him, flicking glances toward the train for the man with the gun, then back to Ayden. He was too tall, too broad a target for her to feel secure about him walking in front of the team.

He was also too tall, too broad to look like a professor of classics, history, Latin, and Greek. He was too handsome by far to resemble what people thought of scholars. He resembled a man who hauled freight or rescued maidens in distress.

He had rescued her from a life of poverty and potential crime. He had recognized her as more than that ragged Roper girl simply because she had been reading Greek when he encountered her.

“I have forgotten most of the Greek I knew.” The remark was inane. She wasn’t even certain he heard it as he strode back to the sleigh and slid in beside her.

“You probably haven’t had much cause to use Greek.” He gathered the reins and clucked to the horses.

They headed off along the tracks. Ayden and Mia stared at the train. They saw no one.

“Do you remember your Italian?” Ayden asked.

Mia relaxed with the change in topic and the passing of the wreck behind them. “I refreshed my knowledge when I wrote an article about a lady’s fencing club a few months ago.”

“I would like to see one of those here.” Ayden urged the team to greater speed. “If you stayed around here, you could start one.”

“Fencing with ladies was boring after—” She slapped her fingers across her mouth, but the damage was done.

Ayden flashed her a grin. “After fencing with me?”

She said nothing.

“Are you sure you don’t want a match?”

“Dr. Finney wouldn’t like it.”

But she would. Suddenly, she wanted to do nothing more than to clash blades with Ayden.

“Dr. Finney does not rule my life.” Ayden’s hands jerked, and the horses sped up.

They swung onto Broad Street at a faster clip than necessary. The sleigh rocked onto one runner, and someone shouted at him to have a care.

He didn’t. He kept up the pace until they reached the sheriff’s office. In front of the door, he leaped out and hitched the horses, then rounded the sleigh to assist Mia to the pavement.

“I warned you how they’ll view your word in here, so mind your tongue. I don’t want you arrested for assaulting an officer with that blade you sheathe behind your teeth.”

Mia laughed. She couldn’t help herself. The gurgle of amusement rose from her chest and burbled from her lips. And with it, the rocky shell she’d built to protect her heart cracked just enough for her to see how much she had loved this man, how much she could still love him.

She tried to stuff a wad of angry memories into the breach to keep the tender feelings safely inside. “I’ll be good, Professor Goswell.”

“All right.” He offered her his arm and led her into the office.

Heat and the odors of wet wool, old coffee, and bodies not as clean as they should be filled the room. Half a dozen people steamed around the stove, and a vaguely familiar-looking young man with curly red hair and tired blue eyes stood behind a tall desk.

Ayden’s arm stiffened beneath Mia’s hand. “At least he’s here and not at my house,” he grumbled.

The deputy glanced their way. “What do you want, Goswell? If it’s about your sister—”

“It’s official business,” Ayden said.

“I see that.” The deputy looked at Mia, and a jolt of recognition shot through her. “Did you catch her stealing again?”

The chatter around the stove ceased.

Mia flinched and yanked her hand from Ayden’s arm. She gripped her portfolio with both hands as though it were a lifeline keeping her from sliding off a tilting deck. Or, in this case, racing out the door. “I never stole a thing worth more than a penny or two, Deputy Lambert.”

“I think I’m missing something here.” Ayden stared from one of them to the other. “You know Fletcher Lambert?”

“Fletcher? He’s Rosalie’s Fletcher?” Mia felt light-headed. “I didn’t know his Christian name, but we had the misfortune of meeting about ten years ago.”

Lambert grinned. “She was my first arrest. Caught her stealing pencils from the stationer’s shop.”

“You arrested her over a pencil?” Ayden gritted his teeth. “That does it, you know, Lambert. A man that unkind doesn’t deserve my sister.”

“He was only doing his duty.” Mia cast her gaze at the mud-streaked floor tiles. “I was wrong to take anything. I took pencils and paper from wherever I could.” Her cheeks burned. “I have paid their owners all back since.”

“But you never told me.”

Mia pressed her cold, damp gloves to her hot cheeks. “I didn’t want you to think ill of me.”

“I wouldn’t have—” Ayden glanced at the people near the stove, then back to Lambert. “Never mind that now. We need to talk to the sheriff.”

“He’s not here. I’m the only one on station duty.”

“Then may we write out a report for you to give to the sheriff?” Ayden spoke with exaggerated patience.

“Of course.” Lambert removed paper, ink, and pens from behind his desk. “Do you want to tell it to me, or do you want to write it out yourself? I need to know as many specific details as possible—time, place, incident, who was involved.” He paused. “What are you reporting besides that lost child?”

“A shooting.” Ayden smiled.

Lambert paled. “You should have said. Is anyone hurt?”

“No one is hurt,” Ayden said, “but someone is impersonating a railroad worker, or perhaps four men are.”

Mia and Ayden wrote out separate reports. When they finished, Deputy Lambert laid them out before him, reading first one, then the other, then the first again.

“Did the two of you plan ahead what you’d say?” He frowned at them.

They had studiously avoided talking about the incident.

“Your stories are nearly word for word the same,” Lambert continued. “Very peculiar. And so is the incident. We’ll send someone out there as soon as we can. Meanwhile, stay away from the train.”

“It’s snowing too hard to go back now.” Ayden crossed the room and opened the door, allowing a blast of snow-laden wind to sweep into the station. “Mia—Miss Roper?”

Mia preceded him out the door. Ayden drew it shut behind them, but not before Lambert called, “Better get that one home before the other one yanks on the bit.”

“And that one needs to keep his mouth shut if he wants to continue courting my sister.” Ayden jerked the reins from the hitching post.

Mia’s lips twitched. “He likes baiting you, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, and I swallow the hook too easily.” He waited for Mia to clamber into the sleigh, then rounded the vehicle to his side. “I wish she would look elsewhere for a beau.”

“Why don’t you like him? He seems conscientious about his work. And isn’t he likely to be sheriff one day?”

“Probably the next election.” Ayden guided the sleigh into the nearly deserted street. “And his father left him a fine house, so they will be more than comfortably off. But he encourages her to want nothing more than to be a wife and mother.”