Love Sign

“Do I have time to run upstairs and get my walking shoes?”

“Sure. No hurry. Aren’t you forgetting something?” he called after her.

Shelby turned in the door and caught the tablet as he pitched it across the room. “You’re a tease, Jake.”

He crooked a brow and countered, “Here I thought you had eyes only for your story.”

“You noticed?”

“That you weren’t hanging on my every word? Of course I noticed. What man wouldn’t?”

He spoke in jest. And still it gave Shelby pause, for until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone but Patrick would find her preoccupation with her story objectionable. She mulled the thought as she climbed the stairs to freshen up. What good was a forward view if her future became a repeat of the same conflict she had had with Patrick? Hearing the phone ring, Shelby tucked away the thought with her tablet, splashed her face and combed her hair and returned downstairs.

“I thought she left with you,” she heard Jake say as she joined him in the living room. “No, she’s not here. Sure, I’ll send a carton with her if she turns up.”

“Who’s missing?” Shelby asked.

“Joy. She told her mom she would walk home. Paula thought maybe she could catch her before she left. She’s out of eggs.” He held the door for Shelby.

The air had cooled. It was fragrant with the neighbor’s freshly clipped grass and pine needles. A canopy of old trees shaded the crumbling sidewalk.

“Liberty Flats,” murmured Shelby when the silence grew heavy. “Kind of an odd name for rolling prairie, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is if you don’t know its story,” Jake replied. “The township was settled by abolitionist farmers from the east. Along with forty acres of land, each settler got a lot in a little town they called Liberty. Some men in the colony ran a station on the underground railroad. Thus, the name.”

Shelby listened as he explained that when the railroad bypassed Liberty a few years before the Civil War, the tiny village was doomed to return to the prairie.

“A guy by the name of Dan Flats came along and offered to sell the town fathers some land adjacent to the tracks, if they wanted to pull up stakes and relocate Liberty. He quoted a bargain rate with the stipulation that they name the new town for him,” Jake continued. “So when the ground was frozen, Liberty loaded their houses and sheds onto ox-driven sleds and moved east three miles. And Liberty Flats was born,”

“Interesting stuff,” Shelby said, silently appraising the easy pride he took in his hometown.

“It gets better,” Jake continued. “A few years went by, and come to find out Flats didn’t have clear title on the land he had sold. The public was put out enough at dapper Dan, they tried to change the town name.”

“To what?”

“That was the problem. They couldn’t agree. By then, Dan’s grown sons had put down roots in town. When it came to a vote, Liberty Flats got seven votes. The rest were split between a dozen other suggestions. So Liberty Flats carried the day,” explained Jake. “Dan was pleased enough, he nailed together a little hotel by the railroad tracks, and spent the rest of his life in Liberty Flats, trying to clear himself of any wrongdoing. Claimed he’d been taken in by a slick land agent.”

“Was that true?”

“According to Dan’s descendants, it is,” Jake said. But his grin left room for doubt.

Modern concrete gave way to quaint brick sidewalk. Flower beds dotted green lawns that unfolded toward the street. Jake paused beside a picket fence. “This is it. Wilt Wiseman’s place.”

Shelby stopped in front of the two-story clapboard of chipping paint and fading glory. The grass needed cutting, the newspapers were piling up and a garbage can at the back corner of the house was overflowing.

Shelby was about to walk on when she heard a clatter. Joy, still clad in her pink dress, darted into view without seeing them. She grabbed the garbage can by one handle and dragged it behind the house.

“Now what do you suppose she’s up to?” Jake opened the gate, took a beaten path skirting the house and disappeared around the far corner.

Chapter Five

Shelby’s nerves leapt as a young man came racing from the far side of the house. He was a dead ringer for the boy she had seen at noon in the alley by Jake’s sign building. As she stood watching, he jerked a bicycle out from beneath a bush, pedaled through the open gate, and tore down the street. A moment later, Jake returned with Joy, whining and dragging her feet.