Pamela Browning - That's Our Baby!

Surely the river wouldn’t freeze in September—or would it? As the wife of a pilot and as a former flight attendant, she knew enough about bizarre weather patterns to be wary. While she folded blueberries into the flapjack batter, she wondered what was taking Sam so long. If he’d only gone to the shed, he should be back by this time. She wished he’d hurry. She wanted to use the shed herself. Pressure on her bladder from the growing baby made frequent trips to the facilities absolutely necessary.

She tossed strips of bacon in a skillet and wrinkled her nose at the greasy odor, which was unfortunately making her stomach feel unsteady. Still no Sam; where was he? Her stomach was churning. She kept swallowing, willing the nausea to stop, and finally she munched on a couple more saltines.

After she’d laid the cooked bacon to drain on a bed of folded paper towels, she didn’t think she could stand the bacon odor any longer so she wrapped herself in her shawl and ventured out into the breezeway. The morning felt cold and crisp, and the sun reflected off billowing drifts of snow deposited by the storm of the night before. When she knocked at the door of the shed, Sam didn’t answer. Then she saw his footprints leading off through the new snow toward the river. So she was free to use the shed, which she did with much relief.

Back in the cabin, she walked through to the front door and opened it to let fresh air blow some of the bacon odor out. A stand of birches stood between her and the river, and she saw a startled deer dart back into the forested slope at the foot of the mountain. She often saw wildlife at Silverthorne; it was one of the many things she loved about the place. But this morning, the only wildlife she wanted to see was Sam Harbeck. He had been gone too long, to her way of thinking.

SAM HAD LEFT to give Kerry privacy. And to give himself a chance to think things over. That pouch containing the incriminating papers was burning a hole in his pocket.

A rocky moraine, left long ago as Williwaw Glacier retreated, covered the bank of the river. The water, opaque with glacial till, was cold, but still moving freely. So maybe there was hope that the river wouldn’t freeze after all, despite the shelf of ice that now lined the bank. Yet he knew all too well that freeze-up could occur very quickly. First small wrinkles of scum ice would appear on the water’s surface, then more wrinkles, then the wrinkles would join and become hard. He’d seen it happen in a matter of hours.

He made himself stop thinking about it and stood for a moment, bowled over as always by the grandeur of the towering mountaintops and the craggy ice wall of the glacier. The glacier’s passage had crushed centuries’-old trees against the rocks and boulders along the glacier’s banks, pulverizing them as it ground relentlessly forward, and he marveled at how much the ice had moved since his last visit. Well, so had they all—Doug was gone, Kerry was a widow, and at the moment he was missing his friend very much.

“Halloo! Sam!” The sound of his name startled him out of his reverie.

He saw her through the trees, a small figure wearing bright colors.

Kerry.

What was going on between him and this woman? Her voice put him in mind of things he’d rather not contemplate. Or that he would like to contemplate. He was contemplating them even now, and why? His hormones had surged into overdrive from the first minute she’d hauled off and brained him with her pillow.

He felt a grin spreading over his face as he thought about how funny she’d looked, all spooked, but feisty. Kerry got her back up much too easily, but he had to admit she was an interesting woman. Most women weren’t, at least not to him. And his response to Kerry was totally unexpected. Unnecessary. And unforgivable. He had no business getting the hots for his best buddy’s wife.

Widow, he reminded himself, for all the good it did.

“Sam?”

“I’m on my way,” he said, turning around and plowing back up the bank toward the cabin.

Kerry waited outside for him, fully dressed in jeans and a lumberjack’s red plaid jacket, her hair in two braids tied with incongruous blue satin ribbons. She looked…different. Not like the Kerry who had been Doug’s disapproving wife, not like the wounded Kerry he’d found here yesterday.

“I made breakfast,” she said without preamble.

“Good,” he said, stepping past her into the cabin, forgetting to knock the snow off his boots. Too late he remembered, but by that time she was sweeping past him and asking if he’d like scrambled eggs along with the flapjacks and bacon reposing on a large platter near the stove.

“Not fresh eggs,” she hastened to add. “They’re powdered. I’ve learned to do a pretty good job with them, though.”

“Eggs would be good,” he said. “We need to bolster ourselves for a long walk and a lot of hard work.”

She didn’t say anything, but busied herself at the stove. He saw that she’d already brought in the slop bucket that he’d emptied earlier. It impressed him that she was so efficient, and he admired the way she moved around the kitchen, graceful but focused on her task. When the eggs were ready, she carried them over to the table, where he sat drinking coffee from a big cracked blue mug that had always been his when he stayed here.

“You make good coffee,” he said.

“Doug taught me how.”

“No way. Yours is much better. Doug’s coffee always tasted like runoff from a moose wallow.”

She looked like she wanted to smile. Instead she set the platter of eggs down.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked sharply.

“I—well, I ate something earlier,” she said. She shoveled flapjacks from the platter to his plate—six of them.

He looked at the large stack of flapjacks in front of him. “Blueberry flapjacks,” he said, pleased. “My favorite.”

“It was a good summer for blueberries. The patch behind the lodge was full of them.”

She busied herself at the stove while he got down to the business of eating. “You should have eggs,” he said conversationally as he wolfed them down. He’d certainly eaten worse powdered eggs, and this surprised him. Kerry had never seemed like the kind of woman who would enjoy roughing it, much less know how to navigate her way around a kitchen.

“More bacon?” He looked up to see a strange and unfathomable expression cross Kerry’s face even as she held the bacon toward him.

“Thanks, this is a great breakfast,” he said as she all but dropped the platter on the table. Her face had a peculiar color to it, a greenish tinge.

“Are you—” he began, knowing in that moment that something was wrong. But he’d hardly uttered the words when she blurted, “Excuse me,” and darted quick as all get-out out the back door. She didn’t shut it after her, either. He heard the shed door slam and got up to push the back door shut, thinking in his annoyance that only a fool cheechako would fail to shut a door in this kind of cold without regard to how much cabin heat she was wasting.

The sounds coming from the shed were unmistakable. Kerry was upchucking with great fervor.

The realization totally unnerved Sam, and he stepped outside into the cold air. He didn’t know whether to make his presence outside the shed known or if he should speak to Kerry or what exactly his behavior should be. She might prefer to be private about this. He was sure that she’d be embarrassed to know he was listening, but she sounded really sick.

He settled on clearing his throat, although he doubted she could hear him.

But Kerry, mortified, did hear him, and that didn’t make this any easier. Morning sickness was the one thing about having a baby that she hated, burdened as she’d been with the symptom almost since the first week of her pregnancy. Now Sam Harbeck, the last person to whom she wanted to show any weakness, was shifting from one foot to the other only a door away while she reversed a breakfast of five saltines and a flapjack.