Her Sister's Children

“Good.” Claire pinned Jason with a determined look. “I’m starved, aren’t you?”

Reluctantly, Jason returned Igor to his cage, then followed Claire and the girls outside. She could hear his feet dragging through the crunchy gravel and his occasional, long-suffering sighs. He took the rear seat of the Windstar as always, where he slumped in stubborn silence.

Buckling her seat belt, Claire looked over her shoulder. “Want to go exploring when we get back? We might see some deer.”

Jason slid farther down in the seat and scowled. “I have homework,” he said flatly.

“The first week of school?”

“Lots of it. I’ll need to come straight—” he faltered over the word as if it tasted of vinegar “—home.”

“What do you think, Annie and Lissa?”

The little girls exchanged worried frowns. “Are there any bears?” Annie asked, wrapping a blond curl ever tighter around her finger. “Jason says there’s bears.”

“I haven’t seen one,” Claire said, her voice firm. “And if we do, I’ll chase that old bear away. I hereby declare Pine Cliff off-limits to anything that has sharp teeth and growls.”

“There are bears,” Jason muttered darkly. “Especially at night. I’ve heard them trying to get into the trash cans. And there are wolves, and foxes, and coyotes.”

“All at Pine Cliff? The place is busier than I thought. They’ll have to start making reservations.” The twins rewarded her with tentative smiles. Jason didn’t.

Driving down the long lane toward the highway, Claire resolved to make it through the fourth chapter of Parenting: The Challenge of a Lifetime before falling asleep tonight. There had to be some clue, some nugget of information in that book that would help her.

“It must be hard, moving away from all of your old friends,” Claire ventured as she pulled to a stop at the junction of the resort entrance and the highway. “Want to invite someone up from Minneapolis, Jason?”

“Who’d wanna come up here?”

“Your best friends?”

“Yeah, right.”

Lissa leaned forward in the middle seat. “Mother doesn‘t—didn’t allow that. ’Cause we’re too noisy.”

Claire’s hands stilled on the steering wheel. “Didn’t allow what, sweetie?”

“Friends over. ’Cept when just the nanny was there.”

The child sounded dead serious, but envisioning happy-go-lucky Brooke as a stern mother took more imagination than Claire could muster. She hid her surprise behind a teasing tone. “You guys aren’t noisy in the least. How about it, Jason, would you like to invite someone up for a weekend?”

At the boy’s stubborn look of indifference, Claire sighed, waited for a semi to pass, then pulled out onto the road. How did one reach a troubled, grieving teenager? She’d made some progress with the twins, but Jason rejected every effort she made. Time heals, she reminded herself. I won’t give up on him.

As she drove, she found herself watching the mailboxes along the highway. With luck, Logan’s would be much farther away than the scrawled address on his business card indicated. She breathed a sigh of relief as the numbers on the boxes rapidly descended past his. Neither his name nor house number appeared. Perhaps she’d misread his address.

It didn’t matter. The North Woods was a vast, rugged area. She and Logan might never run into each other.

One thing was for sure. If she noticed him first, they would never meet again.

Two HOURS LATER, Claire parked the minivan back at Pine Cliff. The children, stuffed on pepperoni pizza with double cheese, had been quiet all the way home.

“Who’s ready for a good hike?” she asked, automatically hitting the door locks after everyone clambered out of the vehicle.

She looked down at the key in her hand, then scanned the vast forest rimming the resort on three sides. The endless expanse of lake to the east. The quiet felt almost overwhelming. This wasn’t exactly New York, where thieves stripped cars in minutes, and an unlocked vehicle might as well bear an engraved invitation on its hood. Where the continual sound of traffic and anonymous crowds blended into the white noise of familiarity. Loneliness and a sense of unease streaked through her as she pocketed her car keys.

Then she focused on the single row of fifteen cozy cabins hugging the shore, each flanked by a guest’s car. Gulls cried overhead and waves splashed. It wasn’t quiet, not really. She glanced at the children. And she certainly wasn’t alone.

“Why did we have to come up here?” Jason muttered, kicking a chunk of gravel across the lane. His chin lifted in sudden challenge. “Why didn’t we go to New York?”

Because I’m going to save you three from the lonely childhood I had. You’re going to have a real family.

Claire’s own mother and father had abdicated their parental duties to domestic employees long before their divorce when she was twelve. Brooke, by then a college freshman, married young and never again came home. Claire had landed in an exclusive boarding school she’d hated from the first day.

And now, back in New York, her obstinate father was determined to see his only grandson follow that Worth family boarding school tradition, though Claire had already made her opposition clear. The battles ahead defied description, but a buffer of a thousand miles would at least limit most of those battles to phone and fax.

She searched for an excuse. “You couldn’t have kept your pets in New York, honey. No animals were allowed in my building.”

Jason’s chin went a notch higher. “Coulda snuck ’em in.”

“You don’t know the doorman.” Claire rolled her eyes. “He must have been a secret agent in a past life.”

“Minneapolis, then.”

Darting apprehensive glances at Jason, the twins edged closer to her. Claire could guess what they were thinking. Until Brooke and Randall’s will was located and their tangled estate settled, the children had stayed at their maternal grandmother’s gated property in Wayzata. They were probably remembering endless hours of proper behavior and dutiful silence in that cold and lonely place.

“We’ll have more fun living up here, don’t you think?” Claire asked. Conflicting emotions raced across Jason’s face. Fear? Surely not. She gave all three children a dazzling smile. “So, shall we go for that hike?”

With a snort of disgust, Jason turned on his heel and stalked to the house. After a moment of indecision, the girls each took one of Claire’s hands and they started down the lane.

There was a sharp nip in the September air, hinting at the change of season that was coming. Claire breathed deeply to inhale the crisp, sweet fragrance of pine. To the left, early-evening sunlight sparkled across the gentle waves of Lake Superior.

She laughed aloud with sheer delight. The twins looked up in surprise.

“Isn’t this beautiful?” She smiled down at them. “I’ve never seen a northern Minnesota fall. The Herald says we’ll be seeing the best autumn colors in years.”

Both girls nodded silently and walked beside her, kicking up puffs of dust with their matching pink Nikes. When they passed the last cabin, Claire dropped to one knee and gave them both a hug. They instinctively stiffened at her touch, but she held them close for a moment before rising to her feet.

“Well, girls, where should we go next—down the shoreline? Or toward the highway?” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “We might see some deer in the woods.”

Annie dug her toe into the gravel. “I never saw a deer, ’cept in a zoo.”

“Then let’s look, okay?” Claire reached down to take little hands once more.

They turned up the mile-long lane toward the highway. Ancient pines towered high above them at either side, leaving scant space for grasses and wildflowers at the edge of the road. Beneath the dense, dark skirts of the trees stretched an endless carpet of bronze and amber pine needles. The muted sunlight and heavy incense of evergreen reminded Claire of her favorite European cathedral, its vaulted expanses hushed into reverent silence.

“This is lovely. Do you like it here?” Claire asked.

The little girls tightened their hands on her own, but they didn’t reply. In their entire month with her, they’d never said a word about their parents’ deaths, or about the many changes in their lives since that awful night. She’d yet to see them display the grief they must be feeling.

Should she bring up painful topics? Wait until they did? She wanted nothing more than to help them in any way she could.