The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online Page A

they went on to talk of other things.
    But, the ice being broken, they met again from time to time, when Henrietta was in New York or Kate in Boston. And then one spring day Kate, finding herself at Williams College and remembering that Henrietta’s country house, on whose lawn Caroline had appeared that long-ago afternoon, was nearby, telephoned on the chance that Henrietta might be there, might ask her to stop by.
    “Your sense of geography is rather wonderful,” Henrietta remarked. “I’m an hour at least away, and despite the careful directions I shall now give you, you will get lost. Stop and telephone again when you realize you’ve made a wrong turn. And plan to spend the night if you come at all.You’ll be far too late to drive anywhere today. I’m all alone, so there’s plenty of room. I’ll put you in the room where I was reading the day Caroline appeared.”
    Kate did get lost, did call again, did arrive as the day was darkening, the trees beginning to be outlined against the evening sky. Kate drove down the dirt road on which Henrietta’s house stood, was shown the bushes that lined the property at its sides, and the lawn where the badminton net had been. Beyond the lawn was woods. The silence was amazing to Kate.
    “Come in,” Henrietta said. “We’ll sit by the fire and lift a glass to Caroline.”
    “Has she been back here often?” Kate asked.
    “Oddly not; the Rayleys visited with her once, but they wouldn’t take their eyes off her. I think they feared she would wander off just as she had come, holding out her hands to someone else. It took them years to believe that Caroline was there to stay. They used to go into her room at night to be sure she hadn’t vanished into thin air. Eventually Caroline became a real little girl who could be trusted out on her own. Fortunately, she was small when they got her, so she had time to grow into independence and they had time to accept it. The Rayleys are very sound people, which was a great relief.”
    “You knew that when you called them that day?”
    “I knew them well, of course. But all I thought of that day was their longing for a child, and the child’s need of a home. I felt, even though I’d just met Caroline, an urgency that she find the right home, not just be adopted by people I’d never heard of, however worthy.”
    Kate started to ask another question, but restrained herself. The time for questions had passed; the time for answers might come, but only Henrietta could decide that.They sat with their drinks in front of the fire and let the evening darken altogether before they turned on the lights and thought about dinner.
    “I’ve a thick soup I made last night; it improves with age, like the best women. Will that do? There’s also homemade bread and decent wine.”
    “It sounds like the beginning of another fantasy,” Kate said. “I don’t get to the country much, and rarely am offered homemade soup and bread. Mostly I subsist on nouvelle cuisine and fish, neither of which I especially like. When we’re home we eat omelettes or Chinese food, delivered by an intense young person on a bicycle. This is a lovely change. Can we eat in front of the fire, looking like a scene from a made-for-television movie?”
    “We are, I fear, insufficiently rustic.”
    But nothing else was insufficient. One of those times, Kate thought, when it is all just right, and you never quite understand why, except that it was unplanned and in the highest degree unlikely ever to happen just that way again.
    Dinner over, they sat sipping their coffee by the fire, which was dying because Henrietta hesitated to throw on another log: it would commit them to a delayed bedtime. Kate was beyond the most minor decision. It had been a long day, but she was in that odd state of fatigue past weariness. She simply sat. And Henrietta, having, it seemed, decided, threw a large log on the fire.
    “I’d better tell you,” she said, sitting forward and staring at the