Free Kaki Warner by Miracle in New Hope Page A

miles in any direction.” The elderly fellow tipped his head at an angle and squinted at Daniel. “Why you want to know? If you’re with those other folks asking about the girl, I already told them all this.”
    “Just curious.” Tucking the bag of grain under his arm, he thanked the shopkeeper and left the store.
    At least now he knew where to go next.
    ***
    “How much longer we doing this?” Tom asked.
    Lacy looked across the campfire at her brother, saw the worry and frustration in his stern face, and wondered if she had aged as much as he had over the last year. Probably more so. She felt a hundred. Some days it took everything she had to pull herself out of bed, when all she wanted to do was drift away and leave this pain behind. She figured that after this latest disappointment, tomorrow would be one of those days.
    “This is the last time, Tom. I promise.”
    “You said that before, yet here we are. Because of him.” His frown deepened as he watched Daniel Hobart kneel by the creek, using grit to scour the dinner plates and cooking utensils. “I don’t trust him.”
    “You’ve made that abundantly clear.”
    “He watches you.”
    She was aware of that. She watched him, too. How could she not? He was a man of contradictions, Mr. Hobart. One side of his face uncommonly attractive, the other a checkerboard of puckered scars. A scowl that could send a man in retreat, but a smile that drew a woman closer. She sensed loss and heartache behind his melancholy eyes, yet saw no menace there. In another life, she might have called him friend. “He’s done nothing untoward.”
    “Yet.”
    Lacy sighed.
    “I’m just watching out for you, sis.”
    This has gone on long enough
. “I know, Tom, and I love you for it. But I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman. Past time I started watching out for myself.”
    Tom poked at the fire.
    “It’s been a year,” she reminded him. “Aren’t you and Harvey ready to go back to your own lives?”
    His silence told her all she needed to know.
    She suddenly realized how lonely the house would be without her brothers there to cook for, and argue with, and lean on when the grief was too much to bear. A momentary panic gripped her. But she countered it by focusing her mind on all the ways she could fill the empty days. Teach at the New Hope school—she had taught before she married Pete, and she could do it again. Take in sewing, join the church choir, cook meals for Doctor Halstead and those patients too ill to do for themselves. Despite her recent dependence on her brothers, she wasn’t helpless.
    Sparks scattered as Tom tossed more wood onto the coals. The sudden flare of light highlighted the furrows in his brow and the worry lines around his deep-set eyes, and she saw again the toll the last year had taken on him. He needed to move on. And she needed to let him.
    “The lumber mill won’t hold your jobs forever,” she reminded him.
    He looked up with a crooked smile that made him look younger than his thirty years. “You kicking us out, sister? With Christmas coming? Pretty heartless, don’t you think?”
    She laughed in spite of the tears pricking her eyes. “All right, you win. Stay until the first of the year, then off you go.”
    His gaze met hers across the fire, his eyes reflecting the orange of the flames.
    It’s time he has his own family. His own children to watch over.
    “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll write to the mill as soon as we get home.” He paused, then added in a hopeful voice, “That mean we’re done here? We head home first thing in the morning?”
    “I’d like to talk to Mr. Hobart, first.”
    “Damn.”
    “Just to be sure, Tom. This is the last time. I promise.”
    “I hope so.”
    Daniel Hobart was rinsing the last plate when she walked up. Once he got over his surprise—she had forgotten about his faulty hearing—he wiped his hands on his fleece-lined jacket and rose. “Can I help you with something, Mrs. Ellis?”
    She was