Wisconsin Wedding

“He’s a photographer,” she added quickly. “He did a series a few years back on Aunt Ellie. It was printed in one of the Chicago papers—”

“I’d like to see it.”

“Well, I have a copy in my library—”

“Get it.”

His words were millimeters shy of being an order, but there was a curious intensity to his tone, almost a desperation, that Nora detected but couldn’t explain. Cursing herself for having brought up that cretin’s name, she dashed to her study, dug out the scrapbook and ran back to the porch. Cliff Forrester hadn’t moved.

She showed him the spread Byron Sanders had done on Aunt Ellie just weeks before she died. Picking the winner of the quilt raffle. At her desk in her old-fashioned office. In her rose garden. In her rocking chair on her front porch. In front of the department store she’d started, on her own, in 1924. Nora had every photograph memorized. It was as if each shot captured a part of Aunt Ellie’s soul and together recreated the woman she’d been, made her come to life. Whatever his shortcomings as a man, Byron Sanders was unarguably a gifted photographer.

“This Byron Sanders,” Cliff Forrester said, tight-lipped. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“No!”

His eyes narrowed. “Did he hurt you?”

She shook her head. Through Byron Sanders, she’d managed to hurt herself. She took full responsibility for her own actions. Which didn’t mitigate her distaste for him. “No. I just remember he’s from Rhode Island and wondered if you knew him.”

“No,” Cliff said. “No, I don’t know Byron Sanders at all.”

* * *

THE WAY BYRON FIGURED it, he was dead meat. If Nora Gates didn’t kill him, his brother surely would. Slumped down in the nondescript car he’d rented in Milwaukee, he watched Cliff head toward the center of town. He looked grim. Byron felt pretty grim himself. His jaw had begun to ache from gritting his teeth. He forced his mouth open just enough to emit something between a sigh and a growl.

No, I don’t know any Byron Sanders at all….

It was all Byron had heard, but it was enough. His return to Tyler wasn’t going to be all sweetness and light. Nora was already on the lookout for him, and now his brother had to have figured out that he’d been to Tyler before. Not a good start. When Nora found out that he’d lied, he’d be lucky to get out of town with all his body parts intact. When Cliff found out he’d sneaked into Tyler three years ago to make sure he was all right and had lied, he’d be—

“You’re dead meat, my man,” he muttered to himself.

He took heart that Cliff didn’t fit any of the images that had haunted him for so long. He wasn’t scrawny, scraggly, bug-infested or crazy. He looked alive and well and, other than that crack about his younger brother, reasonably happy. For that, Byron was grateful.

He loosened his tight grip on the steering wheel. Coming to Tyler ten days early had been his mother’s idea. He’d phoned her in London, where she was visiting one of Pierce & Rothchilde’s most prominent, if not bestselling, authors, one who’d become a personal friend. Anne Forrester was a strong, kind woman who’d endured too much. She’d lost a husband and had all but lost a son.

“But this note,” she’d said, “leaves more questions unanswered than answered.”

“I know.”

“Do you suppose he really wants us there?”

“There’s no way of knowing.”

For years, Cliff had maintained that he didn’t dare be around his family for fear of inflicting more pain on them. He didn’t trust himself, not just with his brother and mother, but with anyone. So he’d left. Withdrawn from society. Turned into a recluse at an abandoned lodge on a faraway lake in Wisconsin. His absence, on top of her husband’s horrible captivity and death in Cambodia, had been particularly difficult for Anne Forrester, but she was made of stern stuff and disliked showing emotion. She blamed herself to some degree for having let Cliff go to Cambodia to try and do something for his father. Blamed herself for not being able to do something to ease the pain of his own ordeal in Southeast Asia.

“You have no idea who this Liza Baron is?” his mother had asked.

“The Barons are a prominent family in Tyler.” Byron had chosen his next words carefully. “I remember meeting an Alyssa Baron. She’s the woman who sort of took Cliff under her wing. Liza could be her daughter.”

Anne Forrester didn’t speak for the next two minutes. Although the call was overseas long distance, Byron hadn’t rushed her. She needed to regain her balance. Rational and not prone to jealousy, she nonetheless had had a difficult time facing the fact that Cliff had allowed another woman to at least try to help him, where he’d only run from her. Even if Alyssa Baron was on the periphery of Cliff’s life, she was at least in a small way part of it. His mother wasn’t. But that, Byron knew, was precisely the point: far away, Cliff couldn’t cause his mother—or his brother—further pain and suffering. Or so he thought.

“Maybe there’s hope yet,” she said finally, in a near whisper. “Oh, Byron, if he’s happy…if he’s trying…”

“I know, Mother.”

“I can’t get out of here until at least the first part of next week. What’s your schedule like? I’m not sure we should both barrel in on Cliff for the wedding if we’re not entirely certain he wants us there.” She was thinking out loud, Byron realized, and he didn’t interrupt or argue. “Unless there is no wedding and this is Cliff’s way…well, that would be ridiculous. Not like him at all. He’d never play a trick like that on us, would he?”

“No,” Byron had said with certainty.

“Would this Liza Baron?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“It’s just all so…sudden. What if someone’s using the wedding as a ploy to get us out there? You know, upset the applecart and see what happens?”

“It’s a possibility,” Byron had allowed, “but not a serious one, I would think.”

Anne Forrester sighed heavily. “Then he is getting married.”

In the end, Byron had agreed to go to Tyler ahead of time and play scout, find out what he and his mother would be walking into in ten days’ time. None of the myriad excuses Byron could think of to keep him in Providence would have worked, so he didn’t even bother to try. The truth was he’d do anything to see his brother again, even go up against Nora Gates. Hell, they were both adults. She’d just have to endure his presence in Tyler and trust him to keep quiet about their “tawdry affair” three years before.

She’d only, he recalled, talked like a defiled Victorian virgin when she was truly pissed off.

He’d half hoped she’d forgotten all about him.

Of course, she hadn’t. Eleanora Gates wouldn’t forget anything, least of all the man who’d “robbed” her of her virginity. She’d conveniently forgotten that she’d been a more than willing participant. And he hadn’t told her he’d thought he loved her.

He exhaled slowly, trying to look on the positive. The shattered man his brother had been for so long—too long—seemed mostly a bad memory. For that, Byron was thankful. But Nora…

Before he could change his mind, he popped open his seat belt and jumped out of the car. She’d already gone back inside. Except for the masses of yellow mums, the front porch was unchanged from his last visit, when Aunt Ellie had still reigned over Gates Department Store. She’d been a powerful force in Nora’s life. Maybe too powerful. Ellie had sensed that, articulating her fears to Byron.

“The store will be Nora’s,” she’d told him. “It’s all I have to give her. But I don’t want it to become a burden to her—it never was to me. If it had, I’d have done something. I never let my life be ruled by that store. Nora knows, I hope, that I won’t roll over in my grave if she decides to sell. The only thing that’ll make me come back to haunt her is if she tries to be anyone but herself. Including me.”

A perceptive woman, the elder Eleanora Gates. Byron remembered feeling distinctly uncomfortable, even sad, although he’d only known the eccentric Aunt Ellie little more than a week. “What’s all this talk about what will happen after you’re gone?”

Gripping his hand, she’d laughed her distinctive, almost cackling laugh. “Byron, my good friend, you and I both know I’m on Sunset Road.”

It was her self-awareness, her self-acceptance, that had drawn Byron to the proprietor of Gates Department Store—what he’d tried to capture in his photograph series on her. Aunt Ellie had been a rare woman. Her grandniece was like her—and yet she wasn’t.

The front door was open.

Byron’s heart pounded like a teenager’s. Three years ago, Ellie Gates had greeted him with ice cold, fresh-squeezed lemonade and a slice of sour-cherry pie. What could he expect from her grandniece?

A pitcher of lemonade over his head? A pie in his face? Nora Gates didn’t forget, and she didn’t forgive.

Hard to imagine, he thought, reaching for the screen door, that she hated him as much as she did. She didn’t even know who he was.

“Well, my man,” he said to himself, “here’s mud in your eye.”

And he pulled open the screen door, stuck in his head and called her name.

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