Innkeeper's Daughter

Alex heard her sister muttering under her breath as she made her way to the kitchen.

The kitchen had, at Cris’s insistence, already been updated, upgraded and expanded so she could have elbow room. That included a couple of extra elbows, as well, during their busy season. Elbows attached to people who knew how to take orders and work together when preparing meals became a marathon event rather than the laid-back endeavor it had initially been when Cris had slowly eased herself into the position of the inn’s chef.

It’s too bad, thought Alex, the contractor who did the kitchen had proved unavailable for their expansion needs. Oh well, she’d find somebody.

With Cris in the kitchen, Dorothy upstairs tending to the bedrooms and their attached baths and her father, Andy and Stevi still back in his office with Wyatt—doing what they could to comfort him in their own way—that left her at the front desk. She was used to holding down the fort but not this ambush of emotions. Wave after wave of sadness kept washing over her, stealing away her heart.

Alex tried to remember the last time she’d seen the man who would soon be laid to eternal rest on the inn’s property. It had only been a little more than two weeks ago. She tried to think if she’d actually looked at him when they’d talked, or if she’d merely spoken to the image of the man she carried around in her brain.

But as closely as she could recall, Uncle Dan had seemed perfectly healthy at the time. Oh, maybe he’d seemed a little less robust, but he was all gung ho about what he’d referred to as his next project. She’d thought it strange at the time because he usually referred to his work as assignments, not projects, but she hadn’t asked him about it.

Now she wished she had. She wished she’d asked him more questions about his work, spent more time with him. She’d just assumed he’d go on forever, that he had a charmed life. He’d never been so much as wounded in all the years he’d spent covering stories in some of the world’s most dangerous hot spots.

Alex remembered one particular postcard he’d sent several years ago. Not to her, exclusively, but to all of them. It was a generic card with his byline logo on the front, and on the back Dan had written, “Miss you all, but don’t wish you were here. No one sleeps. Everyone’s waiting for the next attack to come. Gotta be a better way to earn a living. Love to you all, Uncle Dan.”

That was the way he saw himself, she thought. As their Uncle Dan. It wasn’t just a term affixed to parental friends and used strictly by small children. She and her sisters had no other relatives, so she had nothing to compare Dan Taylor to, but if they had had an uncle, she knew without hesitation that she would have wanted him to be exactly like the man who had taken to the honorary title without hesitation. Her father had also selected Dan to be her godfather.

They made for strange best friends, her father and Dan. Dan was as vital, as outgoing, as her father was soft-spoken and introverted.

She still couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t be seeing Dan walk through the inn’s tall front doors, bringing in sunlight and blue skies with him.

Alex felt a tear run down her cheek and looked around for something to wipe her eyes with. The box of pop-up tissues on the desk was very pretty and had been chosen because it matched the inn’s décor.

It was also very empty.

Frustrated, she tossed the box into the wastebasket behind the desk and used the back of her hand to wipe the tear away.

As soon as she did, another one slid down her cheek. Followed by a third.

This time, instead of her knuckles, Alex used the heel of her hand. She didn’t want to be seen crying by guests.

Besides, this was a private matter and she was a very private person. At bottom, she always had been.

“Why are things never the way they’re supposed to be?” she muttered, annoyed over the lack of tissues when she needed them. It was displacement and she knew it, but she used the excuse anyway.

“I don’t know, why aren’t they?”

Startled—because she’d believed herself to be alone—Alex gasped and swung around.

As she did so, she managed to knock the sign-in ledger onto the floor.

Wyatt bent to pick it up for her and placed the ledger back on the desk.

“You still sneak up on people,” Alex accused him, her eyebrows pulling together into a single, exasperated line.

Because it annoyed her—and he desperately needed the diversion—he smiled. “I still have that gift,” he confirmed. Seeing the trail of tears on her cheek for the first time, Wyatt reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief and held it out to her. “Here.”

She hesitated for a moment, then took the handkerchief gingerly and critically looked over the small, white square.

“Don’t worry,” Wyatt said, “I only wiped down one bathroom sink with it.”

She raised her eyes to his. Oh, come on. She had to know he was being sarcastic. Or, at least he assumed she had to know that. Still, she folded the handkerchief so that it was tiny, then used the surface she’d left exposed to slide quickly along her cheeks, drying them.

“Thanks,” Alex said, holding the handkerchief out to him again.

“Keep it,” he told her, pushing her hand back. “You might need it again.”

“No, I won’t,” she told him firmly. He still made no move to take the handkerchief back. Finally, Alex placed it on the counter and slid it along until it was directly in front of him. She never could let him have the final word.

“So, you figure you’ve used up your allotted amount of tears and won’t be needing that anymore?” he asked, unable to clamp down on his sarcasm.

“No tears,” she contradicted him, “just perspiration. And no, I won’t be needing it again.”

“Suit yourself.” Reaching into his inside pocket, Wyatt pulled out the handwritten list he’d put together and placed it in front of her. “These are the people I notified about the funeral service. And it’s okay to cry, you know,” he added out of the blue. “It doesn’t make you any less of a person. It might even make you stronger.”

Alex laughed dismissively. “That sounds like something you got out of a fortune cookie. You sure you’re Uncle Dan’s son? He had a fantastic way with words, with creating pictures out of them and getting right to the heart of matters. He put a person right into the thick of the action.”

“We have—had...” Wyatt corrected himself, still struggling to think of his father in anything but the present tense. “We had completely different styles.”

Because his father hadn’t been around much of the time he’d been growing up, it seemed natural not to see him. Natural to expect to encounter him sometime down the road, but not necessarily right now. Even before the divorce, his father would be gone for weeks, sometimes even a couple of months, at a time. And after the divorce, there were only summers with occasional quick visits in between.

And now, there would be no more visits at all. It wasn’t an easy thing to accept. He could feel his heart start to ache all over again. He struggled to rein himself in.

“Dad went to the heart of the action as it was happening. I prefer to study the history of the action and take it apart. Analyze it and find out what led to it. That’s why his last project really took me by surprise.”

There was that word again. Project. It occurred to Alex that she had no idea what Dan had been working on when he died. She just assumed—incorrectly it seemed—that it was another piece of war journalism.

“His last project?” she asked Wyatt now, waiting to be enlightened.

Wyatt nodded. “The one he was working on when...when he stopped working.”

It was a nice, antiseptic way to say it, wrapping the finality of death in words that implied a temporary break.

It wasn’t until Wyatt had said it that way that she realized that was the way she would prefer to deal with Uncle Dan’s passing, too. Antiseptically. The other word, the D-word, was far too raw and final for her to utter right now.

Pushing ahead, Alex focused on what Wyatt had begun to say. “What was he working on?”

Wyatt’s smile made her feel a little uneasy, although she couldn’t have explained why.

“My father was writing a history of the inn.”

That wasn’t the kind of story Dan usually worked on, she couldn’t help thinking. He wrote things that wound up on the front page, or of late, in a blog and sometimes in front of a camera. This sounded as if he was working on a book.

“What inn?” she asked, confused.

Was she serious? Wyatt wondered. So, she hadn’t known, either. That seemed rather strange. But then, his father had only told him last week—just before he’d extracted that promise from him.

“This inn.”