Duplicate Daughter

“What’s your problem?” she snapped, her voice a sharp whisper. “Your child needed comforting and so I—”

“Lily is—”

“Your daughter. I got that. This place is a nuthouse! How she turned out so endearing—”

“No one asked you to come here,” he said, his expression so intense it would probably start a blaze if directed on one spot long enough.

“You’re right,” she said, standing. “And trust me, as soon as I can figure out a way to leave, I’ll be out of your hair. You don’t know anything about your father, do you? I bet you don’t know anything about anyone, especially not yourself!”

“What the hell does that mean?” He kept his voice as low in volume as Katie did.

She glowered at him in response.

“I’m going to put Lily back in her bed. You stay here.”

As though she had anywhere else to go!

Chapter Four

Nick tucked Lily into her bed, kissed her cheek and closed the door, leaving it open just a crack in case she called out. Then he stood in the hall and ran his hand through his hair.

That blasted woman! Coming into his house, scaring away his housekeeper, waking his kid, acting as though she owned the place, as though she had rights, as though she was an invited guest and not an interloper and a troublemaker and a major pain in the neck.

He had to get rid of her.

Oh, hell, he knew in the back of his mind that Lily sometimes woke up during storms and wandered out to see if anything interesting was going on without her. He should be grateful that Katie was there to comfort his baby, that Lily had felt comfortable enough to go to her, to sit on her lap, to fall asleep in her arms, but he wasn’t grateful. He didn’t know for sure what he felt, but it wasn’t gratitude.

Taking a deep breath, he went back to the living room. Katie was still in the red chair. She looked up when he entered. “Your phone is dead,” she said.

“I know. I should have told you it went down early in the storm. Listen, what do you want to know?” he asked, claiming a matching chair to the left of hers. It was time to get this over with.

“There’s nothing you can tell me,” she said without looking at him. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, and snippets of things she’d said about herself over the past few hours suddenly came back to him. She hadn’t known her mother until recently? Her sister was in the hospital with a gunshot wound? And her limp. Why did she limp?

“Listen, let’s start over again,” he said.

She darted him a quick glance. “What’s the point? You resent my being here. You’re right, I foisted myself on you and your family. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve made everything worse instead of better and now I’m stuck.”

He chuckled. “You’re pretty good,” he said.

This earned him a longer look. “What do you mean?”

“Anger hasn’t worked. Buttering me up with a poignant little vignette featuring my kid didn’t do it. Now you’re going to try humility.”

He expected her to jump to her feet and strike out at him. Face it, it was the reaction he hoped for. Caring feelings toward this woman were impossible to entertain. She was trouble. Or to be more fair, she would bring trouble to his life and his family if given half a chance, so reason said push her far away using any method available.

He couldn’t throw her out of the house, because she’d freeze to death. With the county roads in their current snowed-in condition and with no one to watch Lily, he couldn’t even drive her back into Frostbite’s lone hotel though, now that he thought of it, why hadn’t he deposited her there instead of bringing her out here? He couldn’t call her a cab or send her off on a snowmobile. Physically, he was stuck with Katie Fields, so the only method to get rid of her was to anger her beyond reason so she’d stalk off to the guest room and leave him in peace.

But she didn’t jump up or turn nasty. “You really hate your father, don’t you?”

He stared right into her blue eyes and smiled. “I really do.”

She sighed. “First things first. Did you stand outside and look through that window over there a few minutes ago? Fifteen maybe, a half hour tops?”

“Absolutely not,” he said quickly.

“I didn’t think so.”

“You saw someone?”

“Yes. He looked right through the window but by the time I blinked he was gone. Then Lily showed up so I kept her in here with me. I’d like to say it was for her sake, but truthfully, I just didn’t want to be alone and she was so damn sweet and trusting—”

He held up a conciliatory hand. “I’ve fallen under her spell a time or two myself. Let’s get back to the man at the window. What did he look like?”

“He had dark eyes and a haggard, unshaven look. That’s all I could see. I think he was wearing a hood of some kind. He looked—intense, I guess. I went over to the door to check the chain and listen, but I couldn’t hear anything.”

Nick had walked to the door as Katie spoke. She was right behind him. Taking a lantern from the table, he unhooked the chain and pulled open the door, letting in a blast of cold air and a few snowflakes. He shone the light out into the dark, cold night.

It was still snowing. Four or five new inches had accumulated on the porch railing. The grounds were blanketed in white, broken by the tall shapes of waving trees and long lines of fences all obscured by the storm. The eight guest cabins hovered off to the left, dark and silent and empty.

“Tell me where you saw him,” he said, gesturing for Katie to join him on the porch.

She stepped outside, shivering, hugging herself. “The second window on the right,” she said through chattering teeth. The covered porch stopped shy of the window a foot or so and they stood at the edge, looking down into the snow below the window, searching for some sign a man had walked to the window, had stood below it and looked inside.

There was nothing to be seen, however. The area was littered with rocks and the branches of dormant plants that formed natural pockets and rifts. If someone had created footprints that evening, it was already too late to tell.

Nick peered through the snow. From what he could see, everything looked about the same as usual.

“Are you sure you saw someone?” he said.

She looked up at him, preoccupied. “I thought I did. Maybe the storm spooked me.”

“Let’s go back inside.”

He closed the door behind them, securing it once again with the chain. Katie immediately moved toward the fire, standing as close to the blaze as she could.

Nick didn’t know what to make of Katie’s story. The nearest neighbor was over a mile away and they were off in Florida for the winter. It was another mile to the Booths’ place and then another half mile to the Stewart cabin.

Katie struck him as a woman with a very active imagination. He could see no covert reason for her to make up such a story, so undoubtedly she’d seen something, just not a man. Snow, a branch blowing by, a shadow. Trying to get things back on an even keel, he said, “Tell me a little more about you and your sister and why you’re so sure there’s a problem with your mother and my father.”

She moved back to her chair, settling herself on the edge of the cushion, hands folded in her lap. “As you know, my mother married your father after knowing him only three weeks. My sister assures me this was very out of character for her. Was it out of character for him, too?”

“How would I know?”

“Nick, please, try.”

“Let me give you a little background,” he said warily. “My very young mother married an alcoholic. She stuck with him for several years until she developed breast cancer. He took off like a shot never to be seen again, well at least not for umpteen years. Mom got better, married the shoe salesman, raised me. Let’s see. I went into the Army. Fought in the Gulf War. Came home, stepdad died. I married Patricia, moved to Alaska, had Lily. Dad came for a heartwarming reunion, I turned him away, Patricia welcomed him with open arms. She died, he took off again—noticing a pattern?”

“So if something has happened to my mother—”