In His Wife's Name

Surely the fact that Rob hadn’t found her in sixteen months meant he likely never would. She and Samantha were safe.

As if knowing she was the object of her mother’s thoughts, nine-month-old Samantha gurgled and cooed with delight as her plump sweet fingers latched on to a bright red apple appliquéd to the green gingham skirt covering a nearby display table. A basket filled with vegetable-and fruit-shaped napkin rings nearly slid off the table as Samantha tugged on the tablecloth. Shannon expertly grabbed the basket to prevent it from crashing to the floor, then worked the gingham cloth from her daughter’s grasp.

“Oh, you silly girl!” she admonished gently. “The apple is so pretty and colorful, isn’t it?”

Samantha beamed up at Shannon from her stroller, her cap of silky dark hair mussed and her dark eyes glinting with smoky-gray and mottled-brown flecks of mischief. Eyes so like Rob’s, Shannon’s ex-husband, that they irrefutably confirmed the truth of Samantha’s sordid conception. Shannon prayed daily that her baby hadn’t also inherited her father’s tendency to fly into rages at the slightest provocation.

So far, Samantha’s temperament had been as meek as a lamb’s. Despite the terror and uncertainty that had hounded Shannon during the days and nights of her pregnancy, she loved her daughter more than life itself. Because of Samantha, Shannon had found a courage inside herself she hadn’t known she possessed. She’d taken risks, impossible risks, but they’d all been worth it. Rob would never be able to lay a hand on her again.

Her eyes stung with tears as she bent to kiss her daughter’s brow. Samantha deserved a safe and happy childhood. That was all that mattered.

“Not to worry, Mary,” Glorie assured Shannon, bustling up beside them and breaking Shannon’s train of thought. “I should have offered to get the door for you, but I just couldn’t take my eyes off that batch of birdhouses you just brought in. I promised to put one aside for a customer.”

Shannon could see by the genuine softening of Glorie’s careworn face that the gift-shop proprietor truly didn’t mind Samantha’s inquisitive fingers. Glorie’s heart was as generously proportioned as the body that housed it, and sometimes Shannon felt certain the residents of Blossom Valley would forgive her for assuming another woman’s identity. It wasn’t as if Shannon was doing Mary Calder any harm. She was just borrowing her name and her likeness.

Shannon eased Samantha’s stroller out of the aisle as Glorie pulled the door open. “Now don’t forget, Mary, you promised you’d drop off a dozen welcome signs and at least three letter boxes before the long weekend. I can’t keep them in stock. Your Garden Patch collection is just taking off.”

“And I couldn’t be happier,” Shannon replied with a sigh of contentment, feeling grateful that her new career fulfilled both her creative and her financial needs. She was making plans to buy additional tools and to hire someone with woodworking experience to cut the wooden pieces for her crafts so she could concentrate on the finishing and painting. Unfortunately the business loan she’d applied for at the bank to allow her to move her business out of the lakeside cottage she rented and into a larger place of her own had been denied, but Shannon was sure that had more to do with her short residency and lack of employment history. Her income was steadily improving. She just had to prove to the bank she was a good risk.

Promising Glorie she’d be back in a few days with her order, Shannon pushed Samantha’s stroller out onto the sidewalk. July sunshine bathed her face and bare arms with ovenlike warmth. The newspaper office was two doors down. She entered and made arrangements for her Help Wanted ad for a woodworker to be inserted in the upcoming Weekly Gazette. Now all she had to do was make a quick trip to the lumberyard for supplies, then head home to put Samantha down for her afternoon nap. Shannon did all her cutting while her daughter napped, looked after business details and sketched designs during the mornings, then painted at night after Samantha was in bed.

Her step quickened and she felt like singing with happiness as she pushed Samantha’s stroller toward the beat-up green pickup truck she’d embellished with decorative artwork advertising her Garden Patch collection. A billboard on wheels.

She’d fastened Samantha into her car seat and was climbing behind the steering wheel when she noticed the toy rattle tucked beneath the windshield wiper. What on earth?

Shannon climbed out of the truck and removed the pastel-pink bear-shaped rattle. She’d never seen it before in her life. It looked brand-new. Had someone found it on the sidewalk and assumed it belonged to her because they’d seen a car seat in the truck?

Shannon glanced up and down the street. There wasn’t a person in sight. So why, then, did she feel vaguely uneasy as she climbed back into the truck?

FROM A DISTANCE the woman leaving the newspaper office bore a striking resemblance to Mary—bare shoulders tanned a golden brown, the sun glinting off flaxen hair carelessly sweeping sculpted cheekbones. The exuberant bounce in her step as she pushed the stroller down the sidewalk seemed so bitingly familiar that Luke’s heart twisted with an impossible wish that the past sixteen months of his life had been some cruel hoax. But reason told him that Mary’s death was real. He’d identified her battered body.

Still, from the moment he’d spotted her double leaving the cottage at nine-fifteen this morning, the back of her truck loaded with boxes, this woman with the baby—whoever she was—affected him like a channel surfer punching the remote control of his emotions. Luke experienced flashes of white-hot rage, stomach-knotting confusion and sharp pangs of unsettled longing as he tracked her movements to three different gift shops in the area. Was it mere coincidence that she shared his wife’s name and likeness? Had the credit bureau made a bureaucratic error? Or was something else going on? How many Mary Tatiana Calders with the same birth date could there be in one country?

He was going to call Ottawa on his cell phone and have her license plate run when he got back to the motel. He dropped a tip on the coffee-shop table where he’d sat the past half hour conducting his surveillance and hustled outside to his rental car. The woman in faded jeans and a white sleeveless cotton blouse was just starting the engine of a brightly painted pickup that made following her child’s play.

Before he’d been granted emergency leave and hopped the first flight he could to Penticton, the Okanagan city nearest Blossom Valley with an airport, Luke had called Detective Sergeant Zach Vaughn, the lead investigator in Mary’s murder, to inform him what was up. Vaughn had tried to dissuade him from checking out the lead. Department policy discouraged officers from investigating cases involving family members. But since they both knew Luke had a right as a citizen to investigate his own case, Vaughn had agreed, with certain conditions. Luke was an informant traveling on his own time, with his own funds—though he still had a badge that could grant him certain privileges with the local police. Luke was to keep in constant touch with Vaughn. The minute Luke found any evidence linking this woman to Mary Calder’s murder Vaughn would call in the local police to take over the investigation.

After Luke had agreed to the conditions, Vaughn had checked the police computer and found out the woman had a British Columbia driver’s license, which gave Luke the street address the credit bureau hadn’t been able to provide.

Luke eased into the traffic behind a dusty black coupe with a dented right fender. This Mary Tatiana Calder didn’t go far, just to the hardware store on the west end of town. Luke pulled into the parking lot a good two minutes behind her, then sauntered into the store while she was wrestling the stroller out of the bed of the truck.

He planted himself near the book display just inside the entrance, fanned open the pages of a how-to book on wiring and waited. Suddenly the automatic doors swung inward and Luke heard the woman’s muted voice talking to the infant. But he lost track of the words as his gaze took in the baby girl propped up in the stroller and wearing a pink sundress that reminded Luke of cotton candy and all things feminine. Her full round cheeks, dark silken hair and wide gooey smile caught him like an arrow to the heart.

Once upon a time he and Mary had dreamed about having children. Planned for it. They’d even had names picked out. Nothing too fanciful like Tatiana, which Mary had hated as a child. Simple solid names like Ryan and Laura.

Pain Luke thought he’d banished clawed at his throat as his gaze trailed upward toward the baby’s mother. The shape of her oval face enhanced her startling resemblance to Mary, but only superficially. Even as his body registered the woman’s beauty, his brain logically picked out subtle differences—the nose that was longer and delicately pointed, the smattering of freckles across her cheeks, the smile that was wider. Eyes that were more hazel than blue. And from his vantage point he could see the telltale traces of natural-brown roots in her dyed blond hair.

He ducked his head behind the pages of the wiring book as the woman’s gaze swiveled past him. Instead of moving directly into the maze of plumbing and electrical-parts aisles, she turned toward the customer-service desk. Luke watched as she stopped in front of a bulletin board mounted on the wall near the desk and removed from her denim purse a piece of paper, which she posted on the board.

She seemed to be scanning the board with interest, then with a sigh, turned and headed right past him into the store, close enough for him to become acquainted with the exotic scent of her perfume, which made him think of hot summer nights and jasmine. Luke hid his face behind the book until he was certain she’d passed, then casually moved over to the bulletin board.

The Help Wanted notice she’d posted gave him all the excuse he needed to make the woman’s acquaintance.

AWARE OF THE TIME, Shannon hurriedly buckled her daughter into her car seat as the yard clerk loaded her lumber order into the back of her truck. It had taken longer than she’d anticipated to select and purchase the knot-free planks she needed; now she was worried Samantha might fall asleep before they got home. Taking a nap in the car, even a short nap, usually screwed up her daughter’s sleeping schedule, and Shannon needed to start cutting the pieces for the signs and the letter boxes today if she was going to fill Glorie’s order as promised.

Shannon climbed into the cab, slamming the door behind her. The engine ground for a second, then sputtered into life. She breathed a sigh of relief and popped a children’s cassette into the tape player, hoping a sing-along would keep her daughter awake and entertained for the next twenty minutes.

Cheerfully warbling a silly ditty about lost little ducks, Shannon turned onto the highway. Blossom Valley, located in close proximity to Canada’s arid desert region of Osoyoos, was framed by rugged hills covered with sagebrush and antelope-bush and the occasional stand of ponderosa pine and cottonwood. Orchards of ripening peach, apricot, apple and cherry trees lined the highway, and vineyards crept up the hills, irrigated by the many crystal-blue lakes that abounded in the Okanagan.

Shannon had picked this area because her aunt Jayne, who lived in Halifax and knew the bleak cold rain of the Maritimes, had toured the region with a friend several years ago and had come home raving about the dry climate.

A few minutes outside of town, the highway climbed, winding between a lake and a ridge of mountains. The curves were sharper. Shannon felt an insistent tug on the steering wheel as it seemed to resist her efforts to stay in her lane. What was going on? With fear mounting that they might plunge off the road, she reduced her speed and gripped the wheel tightly.

The truck continued to lean to the right, and it took Shannon a full minute before she realized she probably had a flat tire. There was no shoulder here where she could safely pull over, but she knew there was a lookout over the lake not far ahead. Knuckles white with fear, Shannon slowly negotiated the curves, feeling as if she was trying to coax a recalcitrant bull into submission. By the time she pulled safely into the lookout, her heart was pounding and her face was damp with perspiration.

Now what? She didn’t belong to an auto club that gave roadside service. And she’d never changed a tire in her life. Shannon slowly climbed out of the truck and examined the deflated right front tire. There were many things she’d never contemplated doing before Rob had assaulted her. Changing a tire should be a piece of cake.

“NEED SOME HELP?”

Shannon looked back over her shoulder in alarm at the driver of the blue sedan that had pulled up behind her. She’d been so intent on figuring out how the jack worked and at the same time soothing Samantha, who was mewling with growing indignation at being confined to her car seat, that she hadn’t heard a car approach.

She gazed up warily at the brown-haired man who’d offered his assistance. He had a hard dangerous look to his face, or what she could see of his face beneath the reflective sunglasses concealing his eyes. Something about the sharply chiseled nose and the shadow of stubble clinging to his jaw made her throat go dry as she rose from her crouched position. “Thank you for offering,” she said firmly over the sound of Samantha’s distressed cries, “but I’m sure I can manage. It’s the twenty-first century. Women change tires. I’m setting a good example for my daughter.”

The man laughed dryly and removed his sunglasses, clipping them onto the ribbed neck of his navy T-shirt. “She’s a little young, wouldn’t you say? It’d really be no trouble to help you, ma’am. The least I could do is drive into town and call someone to assist you. My name’s Luke Mathews.” Quiet intense gray-blue eyes gazed back at her. Pulled at her in a curious way Shannon didn’t understand.

“Thank you, but it’d be faster to change the tire than wait for a tow—” she broke off as Samantha let out an eardrum-piercing wail. Shannon instinctively turned toward the truck and her daughter. Samantha’s face was red and tear-streaked. Shannon reached through the open window and stroked her sticky cheek. “Oh, Samantha, it’s all right, baby. We’ll be home soon.”

Samantha’s mouth opened, her little pink tonsils quivering, and her eyes squeezed tight as another pitiful wail erupted from her tiny body.

Shannon’s heart clutched at her daughter’s obvious discomfort. Over the noise of her daughter’s cries, she heard the engine of the sedan suddenly extinguish and a car door open. She looked back over her shoulder, alarmed to see Luke Mathews striding purposefully toward her truck.

“Ma’am,” he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his lean mouth. His eyes were lit with a deference that inexplicably soothed her apprehension at his approach. “It looks to me like you’ve already got your hands full. Why don’t you take your baby out of your vehicle—it’s safer and she’ll be cooler—while I change the tire? It’ll only take me a few minutes. Have you already set the emergency brake?”

Shannon decided Samantha’s women’s-lib training could take place another time. Right now her baby needed to be held and comforted. And her instincts were telling her that Luke Mathews didn’t mean her or her daughter any harm. Not with those eyes.

“Yes, I set the brake,” she replied as she jerked the door open to unbuckle Samantha’s car seat. Her usually meek daughter’s arms and legs waved in a fury as Shannon pulled her into her arms. Shannon grabbed her keys and her purse—just in case her instincts about Luke were wrong.

Shannon rocked Samantha in her arms as Luke popped the hubcap off the wheel and used some weird-looking tool to loosen the nuts slightly. Then he put the jack in place and began pumping the tire iron with practiced ease. The front right corner of the truck rose steadily off the ground.

“Are you a mechanic?” she asked, watching the smooth play of muscles rippling beneath his T-shirt. He wore faded jeans and scuffed running shoes.

“No, I’ve worked in construction mostly…well, until recently.”

That explained the muscles that bulged in his arms like rocks. “Recently?”

“I was working for my brother-in-law’s company in Vancouver. But he and my sister are going through a bitter divorce, and I didn’t like being caught in the middle. He was cheating on her.”

Shannon didn’t know what to say except, “I’m sorry.”