Hummingbird Lake

FOURTEEN





Sage gave him a ten-minute head start. The talk about wanting to sit on the public fishing pier and think about her sister was bunk. First, if she wanted to sit on a pier, she’d do it on the one she shared with the Landrys. It was one of her favorite places to think. Second, she couldn’t think about Dr. Rose Anderson even if she wanted to because her mind was filled with Dr. Colt Rafferty of Eternity Springs.

I think I might be falling in love with you.

Her knees felt a little shaky as she began the walk home. She’d made this same trek often, so she didn’t need to pay attention as she went along, which was a good thing since she was so busy looking inward.

What was wrong with her? Colt Rafferty was a great guy. Intelligent, dedicated, swoon-worthy handsome, and a master in bed. He was kind, creative, and generous. Because of Colt, she had Snowdrop.

I think I might be falling in love with you.

Why did he frighten her so much? Because he was intelligent and dedicated. Perceptive. Persistent. He’d push and poke and prod without ceasing until he rooted out all of her secrets.

Would she even realize it? How was it that he managed to get her to tell him more than she’d even admitted to herself?

And then what? It was bad enough that she’d shared as much as she had. What would happen if he learned the rest of it? Would that admiration in his eyes transform into disgust? Would he say the same things to her that her father had said when she went to him for absolution? Maybe. Probably. Her father had been a great guy, a generous man. He had loved her, too.

“And look what that got me,” she muttered aloud, stooping to pick up Snowdrop, not because the dog signaled she’d grown tired, but because Sage needed the comfort of holding her.

At home, she brought her overnight bag in from the car and unpacked. She put a load of laundry into the washer, then read her mail and paid a few bills. She realized she’d inadvertently left her cellphone in her car, and after debating the matter for a few minutes, she went out to get it. She’d missed two calls, neither of which was from Colt or Rose.

Rose. Sage couldn’t believe she’d come to Eternity Springs. What in the world was she going to do about her sister?

Maybe it was time she faced that dragon.

Sage eyed Colt’s bottle of wine and thought, What the heck. She opened it and poured herself a glass while noting that Snowdrop lay curled up asleep in her bed in the living room. Grabbing a sweater, she opened her back door and stepped outside. She might as well walk down to the tip of the point and the fishing pier. After all, what better place to reflect on the misery of her family life than Reflection Point?

A few puffy clouds dotted the sky and the breeze had strengthened as the afternoon grew long. The air blowing in off the lake had a chill to it, so she slipped into her sweater before taking her usual seat at the end of the pier, her feet dangling above the water, her glass of wine sitting on the wooden pier beside her. Sunlight sparkled off the surface of the lake like diamonds, and she allowed her gaze to drift along the shoreline before settling on a leaf that floated on the water beneath her feet.

Rose.

Sage blew out a breath, watched the current spin the leaf in a very slow circle, and remembered.

Her apartment above the garage was dark, the blinds and curtains blocking out all but the ambient light. She lay curled in a ball amidst tangled sheets. The TV was on, though the sound was turned off. The hum of the window unit drowned out any sounds from outdoors, and inside, the only noise to be heard was the buzz of the fly that persisted in circling around her head.

Maybe he thinks I’m dead.

The image of flies landing on the bloody body of little Aba Ballo flashed through her mind.

Too bad I’m not.

Beside her bed, the phone began to ring. Once again she ignored it. She realized that she was thirsty, and she considered getting up to get a drink. No. That took too much effort. She drifted back to sleep.

How long she slept, she didn’t know, but she awoke to a new sound. Something different. Thump. Thump. Thump. Someone was pounding on her door.

Sage grabbed her pillow and pulled it over her head, muffling the sound, though not blocking it out entirely. The pounding finally quit, and she relaxed back into sleep.

Until a loud bang bang crash brought her sitting up in bed.

Her front door flew open. Her sister swept inside like an avenging angel. Sage sat on her bed and stared. She’d kicked in the door. Rose had kicked in her door!

“So you are here,” her sister said, her tone scathing and accusatory. “Brandon said he saw a car in the driveway, but I didn’t believe him. I told him you wouldn’t be so selfish and disrespectful. I told him you wouldn’t let me down this way. Let Dad down this way.”

She stormed across the room and wrenched back the curtains. Light flooded into the room. Sage grimaced and shielded her eyes.

“Are you drunk?” Rose demanded, her gaze zeroing in on the empty vodka bottle on Sage’s nightstand.

The bottle had been there for at least two weeks, maybe three. She’d brought it with her when she came home, drank it in the first week, then never roused herself to go out for more.

“What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” she repeated before saying it once more in a rising screech. “What am I doing here?”

She advanced on Sage, her face red with fury, her eyes a little wild. “When I got hold of you in New York, you said you’d come. I called and called and called, but you didn’t answer your phone. I waited for you for two weeks, Sage. Two weeks.”

She glanced around the room, took in the suitcase, the handbag. The plane ticket. She picked it up and read the date.

Her jaw dropped. Her voice went faint and disbelieving. “You’ve been here all this time.” She looked up, stared at Sage. “You were here. Ten minutes away from us. I don’t believe this. How could you, Sage? How could you do this to Dad? How could you do it to me? You left me to do this on my own!”

Sage closed her eyes, the pressure in her chest so heavy she wasn’t certain she could fill her lungs with air. What could she say? How could she possibly explain? What was she going to do? Tell Rose what their father had said to her?

She’d rather slit her wrists.

So she did nothing. Said nothing. Tried desperately to feel nothing.

Rose let out a little mewl of pain, and Sage looked at her. Her big sister was crying. Big, fat tears spilled down her cheeks.

In that moment, Sage was jealous, furiously jealous that Rose could cry. Her chin came up and she said, “Go away. Just go away.”

Rose gasped audibly. For a long moment she stood frozen, not moving so much as an eyelash. Then she snapped her mouth shut, marched over to the bed, drew back her hand, and slapped Sage’s face. “I came to tell you that your father is dead. I pulled the plug on him this morning.”

Then she was gone.

Three days later, Sage attempted to attend her father’s funeral. Rose’s boyfriend met her at the door to the church and told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t welcome there. She didn’t see Rose to confirm the fact, but she didn’t have the heart to force the issue. It had taken everything she had to get dressed and make the trip to the church. She had nothing left.

Two weeks after the funeral, Sage managed to drag her brooding self to the grocery store. Paying little attention to her surroundings, she stepped out in front of a moving car—an accident, she insisted, not sure if deep down inside she believed it. She bounced off the hood and onto the pavement, conking her head. The world had faded to black.

She awakened in the emergency room of a civilian hospital near the army base where Rose practiced medicine. She gave her sister’s name as next of kin and asked the ER nurse to notify her sister.

When she returned a half hour later, the nurse was frowning. “I’m not sure your sister understood our message, Ms. Anderson. Her response doesn’t make sense.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that if you wanted medical care, you should call and make an appointment.”

Her head pounding, her heart broken, Sage closed her eyes and drifted away.

Now, almost five years later, she watched as the leaf floating on the surface of Hummingbird Lake grew waterlogged and sank.

Heaving a sigh, Sage leaned back on her elbows and lifted her face to the sky. What was she going to do? What did she want to do?

She missed her sister.

She missed her family. And yet she’d made a new family here in Eternity Springs. Nic and Sarah and Celeste. Ali, too. Over the past few months, she’d grown especially close to Ali, despite—or perhaps due to—the fact that she lived in Denver. Email offered a certain intimacy that had allowed them both to share things they might not have said in person, she believed. Part of it, too, might be that Ali and Rose were close in age. Ali had slipped into that big-sister role so easily.

Sage didn’t need Rose in her life. Shoot, Ali and the rest scolded as enthusiastically as Rose ever had. Sage had lost one sister and found four others. Well, three others. Celeste wasn’t exactly a sister figure. Not exactly a mother figure, either. She was a combination mother, sister, confessor, conscience, girlfriend, best friend, cheerleader, and more. Sage had filled in all the roles Rose had occupied with other people. She was doing fine in her life without Rose, thank you very much.

And still, she missed her. Maybe because one other aspect of sisterhood did exist and no one else could fill it. Rose was the only one on earth who shared her history. No one else knew what it was like to live in the Anderson family. No one else knew what it was like to have the Colonel as a father. No one else on the planet had known Sage since the day she’d been born.

All that meant that no one else had the power to hurt Sage as much as Rose. She’d certainly exercised that power, hadn’t she?

And now she was here.

And Sage still didn’t have a clue what she wanted to do about it.


Colt stewed the whole eight-minute drive back to town.

Whether she liked it or not, Sage Anderson was a big part of his decision to return to Eternity Springs, and he’d never been one to let a little bump in the path make him take a different road. So what if she wasn’t thrilled with his news? His timing had been bad. She’d been preoccupied with her sister’s sudden appearance.

A sister. Another mystery.

Colt made a quick stop at the Trading Post for more steaks. He rapped on the door at Sarah Reese’s house and offered up a sheepish grin when she opened the door. “Have you already had your dinner?”

“No, why?”

“I struck out with Sage. I have beef and need advice, and Shadow would love to play with Daisy and Duke.”

“Hmm …” She folded her arms. “I’m your second choice, huh? What a blow to my ego.”

“Hey, you blew your chance to be my number one when you refused to go parking with me when I was a sophomore in high school.”

“One of my life’s great regrets … not. You were in your dad’s minivan.” She stepped back and waved him inside. “C’mon in and feed me, then you can tell me all about it.”

Colt carried his grocery sack into Sarah’s kitchen, where he found Lori painting her grandmother’s nails. Ellen Reese was a lovely woman, an older version of Sarah, with middle-stage Alzheimer’s disease. She remembered his family from their summers in Eternity and asked Lori three times in five minutes the name of the color the teenager had put on her nails. While Sarah put away the hamburger she’d been preparing to cook, he shared his news about his move.

“Wow. Big changes,” Sarah said. Curiosity gleamed in her eyes, but he took the hint when she added, “I can’t wait to hear more about it after dinner.”

She put him in charge of her charcoal grill, and Lori accompanied him outdoors, asking him questions about living in Texas. “I can’t believe you’re old enough to be going off to college. When do you leave?”

“Mid-August. Right after the summer arts festival.”

“Are you excited?”

“Yes. And scared. I’m told it’s harder to get into vet school than medical school, and I want to be a vet so badly. What if I can’t do the work? What if I screw it up? You were a college professor, right? Do you have any tips for me?”

“I do.” With the fire ready, he spread the steaks upon the grill. As the juices hit the coals and sizzled, he said, “You do this one thing and I guarantee you’ll be fine.”

He paused, waited until she met his gaze, then told her, “Be true to yourself, Lori. If you’re true to yourself in everything you do, every decision you make, you’ll be fine and you’ll achieve your goals.”

“Wow. That’s profound.” Lori beamed a smile at him. “Thanks, Dr. Rafferty. I’ll bet you were a great professor.”

“I tried.”

Her eyes glinted impishly as she added, “I’ll bet the girls in your classes called you Dr. Hottie.”

He frowned professorially. “Brat. You are your mother’s daughter, aren’t you?”

She laughed, then picked up a tennis ball from a basket of dog toys and stepped down into the backyard to play with the dogs.

Colt enjoyed the meal and the company, but he was glad when dinner was over and the dishes done and Sarah said, “I need to do a couple things at the store. Want to walk over there with me? Shadow will be fine with my dogs.”

“Sure.”

At the Trading Post, Sarah removed a set of keys from her pocket and opened the door. In another couple of weeks the store would switch to summer hours, but for now the place was empty and quiet and offered the perfect spot for its owner to turn on him and say, “Spill it. What happened?”

“I’m hoping you can tell me.”

“You go first. You went out to see Sage?”

“Yeah.” He summarized the exchange with Sage, short of sharing the fact that he’d floated the L-word, and ended it by saying, “I thought I knew what was going on with her. Now I’m wondering if I didn’t have it all wrong.”

“Our girl Sage is in many ways a mystery.”

“Yes, one I need to solve. I’m not asking you to betray any confidences, but what’s the deal with her sister?”

Sarah lifted her shoulders. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know she had a sister until today.”

Okay, then. A secret sister was one big fat clue. Colt had thought that the trouble in Africa was the source of Sage’s grief. Had he been wrong? Had he missed the mark entirely?

Family, he thought with an inward sigh. A good family was such a gift, but a bad family could do infinite harm.

“Did Sage tell you anything about her?”

Sarah went around behind the checkout counter and pulled out a manila file folder stuffed with papers. “Not really. She said they’d had a falling out, and then the two of them had that little snarky exchange that you saw. Then Sage drove around the block until she made sure that Rose—that’s her name—had gone. I tried to get her to spill the beans about the estrangement, but no go. She’s always been tight-lipped, Colt, and that didn’t change today.”

“That’s frustrating.”

“Ya think?” Sarah wrinkled her nose. “I love Sage. I truly do. But the woman has issues with a capital I. That’s something I’ve learned to accept.”

If all he wanted from Sage was friendship, he’d probably take the same route. But he wanted more than friendship. He wanted more from Sage.

“She’s going to try to shut me out and keep me out.”

“Maybe. If she feels like you are a threat in some way. Are you?”

“No. Maybe. I guess that depends upon the context.” When Sarah gave him a sharp look, he explained. “I’m not out to hurt her. She means something to me, Sarah. She’s important. But I won’t let her push me away.”

“Good luck with that. She’s a stubborn woman.”

“Yeah, but I’m persistent. I’ll wear her down.”

“With more gifts?”

“No,” he replied, thinking it through.

Colt was a minor student of military history, and as such, he knew something about campaigns and sieges. It had taken the allied Greek forces ten years to conquer Troy. The British held Gibraltar against Spanish and French forces for more than three and a half years. It had taken General Grant seven months to conquer Vicksburg.

Colt hoped that winning Sage wouldn’t take nearly that long.

“She’s going to have to deal with me in some way every day. I’m not going away.”

“Won’t you be traveling with your new job?”

“I don’t have to be in Eternity Springs for her to deal with me.”

“Wow. You are determined, aren’t you? You know, that is pretty romantic.” She chewed on her lower lip a second before adding, “I want to ask one thing of you, though, Colt. Make sure you are doing this because it’s real, not because you want to win the contest. You could hurt her.”

“She could hurt me, too. That’s a risk of being in a relationship. It’s not a contest, Sarah, but there is a prize. I do want the happily ever after. I think I could find it with Sage. Time will tell.”

“Dang it.” Sarah picked up the folder and tucked it under her arm. “I’m beginning to think that I’m the one who missed the chance. Maybe I should have gone parking with you in your minivan after all.”

She walked out from behind the counter, went up on her tiptoes, and kissed his cheek. “Good luck, Dr. Rafferty. I’ll be rooting for you.”

“Thanks.”

“But fair warning—if you hurt her, I’ll make you pay.”

“I’ve known you for half my life, Sarah Reese. That goes without saying.”