Jule Mcbride - Secret Baby Spencer

“City people,” grunted Tillie Phelps grumpily, cocking her head and taking in the quilt’s royal blue border. “I figure we’ve got enough excitement with Quinn Spencer stopping by to chat with us all the time, and with that woman, Caroline Benning, coming to town.”

Everyone fell silent, considering the new waitress at Marge’s Diner. The young woman’s stay at the Kelsey Boarding House had been uneventful, but just last week she’d been found tangled in the rose bushes outside Elias Spencer’s house. She’d sworn she was chasing a stray cat she wanted to take to a vet, but no cat was ever found and now most people figured she’d been spying on the Spencers.

“Well,” Bea finally said as she continued stitching one of the group’s sought-after quilts that were so popular around Tyler, “in addition to Caroline Benning’s being here, all the Spencer boys have come home. Caroline was probably trying to peek at Quinn through the window of Elias’s place, don’t you think?”

“Probably,” Martha agreed. “Quinn is awfully cute.”

“All those Spencer boys are good looking,” Emma Finklebaum mused, nodding as the Cadillac lurched past the stop sign, into the intersection. “Hey, what if that woman knows the Spencers? She does look like she’s from a city, and the Spencers came from New York, remember?”

“Who could forget?” murmured Martha, and for a moment the quilting circle fell respectfully silent again since no one intended to discuss the scandal that had followed the Spencer family to Tyler twenty-three years ago.

“Poor boys,” Lydia finally said, thinking of how her new beau, Elias, had brought his New York society family here to start a life years ago—only to have his wife run off with her New York lover. Lydia and Elias had only been on a few dates, but Lydia liked him and was beginning to fear he wouldn’t learn to love again, no more than his sons probably would.

“Tragic, what Violet Spencer’s leaving Tyler did to those boys,” Emma continued in a hushed, sympathetic tone. “Seth was the oldest, but he was only fourteen at the time. Of course they’re not boys anymore, they’re full-grown men, but you can bet none of them will ever trust a woman.”

“Much less marry one,” Martha agreed with a sad sigh as the gold Cadillac vanished from sight, pulling into Tyler proper and around the town square, prompting a worried Cooper Night Hawk to stare from inside the police station, instinctively double-checking for his gun and badge.

“Ten to one, there’s no current inspection on a vehicle that sounds as bad as that,” Cooper muttered in disgust. At least the driver was a woman, which meant she wasn’t the armed male felon Cooper had just heard about on the dispatch radio. Cooper continued staring through the window, running a hand through his long dark hair, his dark eyes narrowing. Even without seeing the license plate, he now recognized the Cadillac as registered to the rent-a-wreck business at the Madison airport. Whoever the stranger was, she’d flown into Wisconsin.

Sighing, Cooper watched the car continue around the town square. It was dark outside, the gunmetal gray, late October sky both windy and carrying the first whipping sting of winter. As the car passed under a streetlamp, the interior was illuminated and Cooper’s hawklike eyes made out the driver’s delicate features. Striking, he decided. She had a birdlike face with a thin, straight nose and sculpted cheekbones; the artfully cut, jagged ends of her jaw-length hair spiked against a creamy jaw, then feathered down, sweeping her neck. She was a volcano, he decided. Secretly seething and possibly volatile, at least according to his sixth sense. “But what’s a woman who looks like that doing here?” Tyler was hardly a hub. And she wasn’t alone, either. She had a baby in the back seat.

Whatever the case, she and the baby weren’t posing any threat to Tyler’s peace, so the lawman finally turned toward his desk, just as Nora Gates Forrester glanced through the windows of her department store. She’d been rearranging a Halloween display, and as she gawked at the out-of-place gold Cadillac, her well-manicured hand continued fluffing the green wig atop a mannequin dressed as a witch. “I bet that’s a friend of those Spencer boys,” Nora murmured on a premonition as the car rounded the tree-filled square, passing the town hall, dry cleaners and drug store. “Or maybe not,” Nora amended, frowning when the sedan didn’t stop at the corner, or in front of the Spencer-owned bank, the Tyler Savings & Loan, but instead continued toward The Hair Affair, where Marge Phelps, owner of Tyler’s favorite eatery, Marge’s Diner, popped her head out from under a hair dryer. “Now there’s a hairstyle,” she declared, peering through the window at the passing car. “Get a gander, everybody.”

“Your daughter’s acting on Broadway in New York,” chided Sandy Stirling who’d come in for a trim after leaving her job at the town’s most successful homegrown business, Yes! Yogurt. “And you go to New York all the time, Marge. You, of all people, should be used to seeing weird hair.”

“Maybe, but there’s a wedding dress and a baby in the back seat of that car,” countered Marge.

“A baby? Oh, good! For a minute, I was worried,” confessed Molly Blake who, despite the expense, had run in to get her nails done. “I thought it might be that artist…you know, that friend of Seth Spencer’s who agreed to come to town to design the logo, invitations and menus for the bed-and-breakfast I want to open. She said she wouldn’t be here until tomorrow, so I’m not ready to meet her, but if that woman’s got a baby…”

“Then it can’t be her,” finished Tisha, who owned The Hair Affair. “That artist—uh, Jenna Robinson’s her name, right?—she didn’t say she had a baby, did she, Molly?”

Molly swallowed hard. “No, but now that I think about it, I guess she might. How would I know?” Molly still couldn’t decide what to make of the call she’d received from Jenna, who’d introduced herself as an old friend of Seth Spencer’s. Molly had figured she was in luck. If a good friend of the local bankers was designing the menus for the bed-and-breakfast Molly wanted to open, he’d be more likely to give Molly a loan, wouldn’t he? Still, why would an artist call Molly all the way from New York, offer to pay her own traveling expenses to Wisconsin, then agree to do the artwork so cheaply? Even more suspiciously, Jenna had made Molly swear not to tell Seth Spencer she was coming to town, saying she wanted to surprise him.

Dear Lord…what if the woman in the Cadillac is Jenna Robinson? What if she’s come to Tyler with a baby of Seth Spencer’s…a baby Seth doesn’t even know exists?

There goes my loan.

Molly squelched the thought. Yes, she’d definitely started reading too much romance fiction in the lonely times after her husband died. In real life, women didn’t putter into small, uneventful towns like Tyler, driving old gold Cadillacs and wielding babies they’d kept secret from banker daddies. Frowning, Molly stared down at her drying, passion-pink nails, trying to assure herself that tomorrow’s interview with Seth Spencer would go well. Surely, her uneasiness about Jenna’s arrival was unfounded. As soon as possible, maybe even tomorrow, Jenna and Seth would be jointly surveying Molly’s Victorian home. On the phone, Jenna had been responsive to Molly’s ideas for transforming the place into a romantic hideaway; now Molly was hoping Jenna’s artistic excitement would help convince Seth to fork over the start-up capital.

No, Molly decided with finality, the wild-looking woman in the Cadillac with the wedding dress and baby couldn’t be Jenna Robinson. Fate simply wasn’t that unkind. Nevertheless, Molly was still exhaling a worried sigh as the car halted, idling outside Eden Frazier’s flower shop, The Garden of Eden. Inside, Eden brushed back her brown hair, lifted a watering can and stepped around a bucket of eucalyptus. As she inhaled the deep, sweet scent of some nearby roses, her violet eyes squinted, taking in the ancient gold tank. A whimsical smile stretched her lips when she saw the wild-looking woman inside the car who was staring toward the Savings & Loan. “Where did she come from?” Eden whispered.