Truly Daddy

He pulled through the whole town in about fifteen seconds. She saw an old general store and a service station, both closed. Golden light from several regal-looking old houses washed out across snowy yards. The town could have easily posed for Christmas cards. She wished for her camera.

Several seconds later, he turned the car up a dark lane lined with snow-laden trees.

“Christmas trees,” she couldn’t help saying.

He snorted. “Fir trees don’t grow this high up. Spruce. Lodgepole pine. Balsam.”

She slid him a look. If she was ever in a plane crash over the wilderness, he was the one she wanted with her.

The lane forked, and headlights glanced off a large tin Quonset building before illuminating a little log cabin. It stood on a rock foundation, pretty as a picture, with the snow surrounding it, drifting off the roof, capping the rock chimney. The covered porch held a rocking chair—no, two rocking chairs—one big and one small, and a neat pile of chopped wood.

It, too, would have made a beautiful photograph if it wasn’t so wrapped in darkness.

“Go in,” he said. “The door’s not locked. Bathroom’s on the right.”

She shot up the shoveled stone-lined pathway to the house. No little wife waiting to give him a kiss? Where was the baby?

It was very cold out, but despite that, she paused just for one moment, stooped and touched the snow. It was deliciously cold, and she scooped a handful and tasted it cautiously. It tingled in the most marvelous way, then turned to nothing on her tongue.

She became aware he was watching her over the open trunk of the car, and her behavior in the snow embarrassed her. She hurried up the few steps, across the porch and into the house. She groped for a switch and found it to the right of the door.

She had entered directly into the living room, and once again she itched for her camera. Hardwood floors and log walls gleamed golden. A river-rock fireplace dominated the cozy room.

Signs of a child were everywhere. A tub full of toys, a big rubber ball, a floppy dog with one button eye, a hamper full of clothes that needed folding.

But no sign of a woman. The furniture was placed at military angles. There were no curtains on the windows, no lace doilies, no pictures on the walls, none of those little things that spoke of a woman’s touch.

“He has a wife,” she told herself firmly.

She found the bathroom easily enough and again couldn’t help but notice a lack of feminine influence. No rug, no tank cover, no frilly shower curtain with matching priscillas at the window.

One toothbrush. No, two toothbrushes. One big and black and masculine. The other small and pink with a picture of the Tasmanian Devil dancing on the handle.

He was divorced. Obviously. Maybe his kid came to visit him on weekends.

She would have loved to take a quick snoop through the medicine cabinet, but she had given up that brand of voyeurism at a party where the hosts had filled up their bathroom cabinet with marbles. To this day, she was grateful that she hadn’t been the one to set off that particular avalanche.

“In here,” he called when she came out of the bathroom.

She followed his voice back into the living room and through a rounded archway into the dining room and the kitchen adjoining it. It was a small area, the hardwood floors and log walls again giving an illusion of coziness where there really was none.

No tablecloth over a scarred oak table. No tea cozy over a plain white pot. No oven mitts with pictures of cows hanging above a sparkling clean oven. No turnip and carrot magnets on the fridge.

Again the word “military” entered her mind. The room was spotless, and everything precisely in its place. The potential was incredible.

“This is a lovely home,” she said, noticing the French panes on the windows.

“Sit,” he ordered her.

He was feeding logs into a small black stove. He had left his jean jacket somewhere and was wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt that showed beautiful arm muscles that rippled effortlessly with each piece of wood he added to the fire.

“Is this how you heat?” she asked in amazement.

He looked at her as if she was from another world.

She was.

“Primitive,” she murmured under her breath. Watching the muscles play under his shirt as he hefted another log into the fire, she felt a pretty primitive feeling of her own.

“Well?” he said when he was done. He sat back on his haunches and folded strong arms over the hard wall of his chest.

She took a deep breath and started by introducing herself and telling him where she was from and how she had come to be in Vancouver. She told him all about Martin Ying and then her chancing upon the little jewelry shop.

She liked the way he listened, his head cocked slightly toward her, his eyes narrowing in all the right places, stopping her every now and then and asking a quick question that showed keen intelligence and good observation skills.

You like the way he listens. Oh, brother, she chided herself.

He closed the door of the stove and she could hear the fire crackling. He moved to the sink and filled a kettle.

And all the time she felt his focus never shift from her.

At the end of her narrative, she rummaged through her bag. For an awful moment, she thought the ring, which could prove her story, was gone. But there it was right at the bottom.

She set it on the table and then, as an afterthought, one of her business cards, too.

He came over and picked up the ring, turned it over in his hand. Strong hands, short, well-manicured nails.

Sexy hands. What about this man wasn’t breathtakingly sexy?

“Anyway,” she said, beginning to feel as awkward as a teenager in braces on her first date, “I’ve troubled you quite enough. I’ll just hop on a bus and be out of your hair. I don’t suppose there’s a plane leaving here, is there?”

“I’m calling the police.”

“There’s really no point involving yourself. I can call them when I get back to my hotel.”

She was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling that she had to get out of this place. That the whole fabric of her life that she’d been weaving had just been wrenched from her control and if she did not grab it back now it would be too late.

She had experienced something like this only once before. She’d been seventeen. And the doctor had looked at her with sad eyes and given his head a small shake. Her mother dead, life as she’d known it was over.

She stood up abruptly. “The bus station?”

“I’m making coffee. Sit down.”

The kettle whistled.

“I don’t drink coffee.”

‘Hot chocolate, then.”