Little Girl Lost. Marisa Carroll
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Peg?”
Peg glanced at her watch. “No cookies for me. I’m dieting as usual.” Peg was two inches taller than Faith and full-figured. She had their mother’s dark-brown eyes and rich auburn hair. She was five years older than Faith’s thirty-one, and had dropped out of college to raise her younger sister when their mother had died of kidney failure when Faith was fifteen. Their quiet, hardworking father had died just a few years later—of a broken heart, Faith often thought.
A year and a half earlier Peg and her two boys had moved to Ohio from upstate New York to be closer to Faith and Caitlin. At Christmas she’d married Steve Baden, who farmed Faith’s acreage for her, and whose large and close-knit family had taken all three of them under their wing.
Peg was also the only other person who knew that Caitlin was not Faith’s biological daughter.
They walked back into the kitchen, and Faith went to the cookie jar.
“Two cookies,” Caitlin demanded.
“I think I’m raising a Cookie Monster here,” Faith lamented, handing over the demanded treats.
“Are you kidding? She’s an angel compared to Jack and Guy at that age.” Peg rolled her eyes. Her boys were seven and nine and every bit as ornery as their mother proclaimed them to be.
Peg looked at her watch again. “I’d better be going. Steve’s cutting alfalfa at his uncle’s place, and I should be home when the boys get off the school bus, or they’ll trash the kitchen making snacks.”
“I really appreciate your watching Caitlin this afternoon.”
“I love watching my adorable niece.” Peg had never once let slip by word or action that Caitlin wasn’t Faith’s daughter. Despite her profound misgivings over Faith’s actions, she’d accepted Caitlin completely. “What’s on your agenda for the rest of the afternoon?”
“Caitlin and I are going to gather up the feeding dishes in the butterfly house to wash them for tomorrow, and then we’re going to walk up the lane to make sure the big cottage is ready for our new guest. He’s supposed to be checking in this evening.”
Peg’s eyebrows went up a fraction. “Is he by himself?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. Why do you ask?” But Faith thought she already knew the answer to that question. Peg worried about her.
“Just curious. You’re so isolated out here.”
“I’m not isolated. You spend too much time watching those women-in-jeopardy movies on the Lifetime channel. I’m as safe here as you are a mile down the road.”
“I have a husband. You’re alone.”
“But not lonely,” Faith said, firmly, if not altogether truthfully. She had loved Mark, and with that love she had given him faith and trust and honesty. She couldn’t envision a relationship that didn’t contain all those elements, and she could never be honest with a man again, not completely. She had a secret to keep. Now that Peg was married again it added another layer to Faith’s burden. Because of what she had done two and a half years ago, Peg could never be totally honest with her new husband—for her sister’s sake.
“Okay, I know when to change the subject.”
Faith shook off her heavy thoughts. “And if my guest puts one foot wrong I have a vicious watchdog to protect me don’t I, Addy?” At the mention of her name, the sheltie pricked up her ears and wagged her tail. She’d been pouting a little all afternoon because Faith had made her stay in the house while the schoolchildren were visiting. Not all of them appreciated being herded around the yard by a wet nose.
“Watchdog, my fanny. She’d let the devil himself inside if he called her a pretty girl,” Peg snorted. “Well, I’m off. I need to run into the IGA and pick up some bread and milk to feed the horde. Anything you need I can drop off on my way back out of town?”
“Not at the moment, but thanks for asking.”
“Bye-bye.” Caitlin, her mouth still full of cookie, hugged Peg’s plump thigh.
“Bye, sweetie. See you Friday.”
Caitlin ran to the breakfast nook’s bay window and watched Peg get in her pickup and drive off. “Watch Blue’s Clues now,” she announced as the sound of the rough-running engine faded away.
“I have a better idea. Want to go see the butterflies?”
“Yes.” Caitlin clapped her hands and nodded so hard one of the little butterfly-shaped clips in her hair came loose and the silken strands floated around her face. Faith sold the clips in the gift shop in a myriad of sparkling colors. They were very popular with the little girls who visited. “See ’flies.”
Faith smoothed Caitlin’s hair back from her face and secured it with the retrieved clip. “Come on, then. We’ll go before any more customers drive up the lane. We’ll have them all to ourselves.” She carried Caitlin outside and into the greenhouse, then placed her in the lightweight folding stroller she kept just for this purpose. Caitlin loved the butterflies, but the insects were far too fragile for the toddler to be let loose among them.
They crossed through the greenhouse and Faith opened the first door to the butterfly sanctuary, automatically glancing to the left into her tiny cubbyhole of a breeding room. An array of gray-and-brown chrysalises hung from a foam board in an alcove, carefully suspended from a pin with a head color coded to the species waiting to emerge. To a casual observer they appeared wizened and dead, but inside they pulsed with life and in a few days a new batch of jewel-winged butterflies would be ready to release into the habitat.
This was her second shipment of tropical and ornamental butterflies this season. Their life spans were short, and she needed to restock the habitat every few weeks with specimens she ordered from a breeder in New Jersey. Someday she would like to raise the exotic forms of the species herself, but she would need a much larger operation and more disposable income to house and winter over the specific plants each species needed to breed.
Caitlin chuckled as the gentle puff of air from the specially designed door—which blew air back into the habitat so that the butterflies couldn’t escape—lifted the fine strands of her hair. It was very warm in the glass house, more humid than the outside air, at least for the time being. Faith turned on the exhaust fan in the far gable of the building. The opening was covered with fine netting so none of the butterflies could be sucked outside.
“Pretty!” Caitlin squealed, reaching for a huge blue morpho as it glided swiftly by. The spectacularly colored tropical butterfly was one of the visitor’s favorites.
“Daddy liked them, too,” Faith said. To everyone else, Mark was Caitlin’s father, just as Faith was her mother, and it wouldn’t be natural not to talk to her about him. Above all else Faith wanted everything she did for Caitlin to seem natural.
She glanced through the chrysalis-room window that gave a view of the parking lot. It was empty. She’d probably have a spate of customers again in the early evening if it didn’t rain, but now the two of them were alone.
She picked Caitlin up and sat down on one of the rustic wooden benches that were scattered throughout the habitat. She’d made the butterfly house as near to a tropical garden as she could manage. There were paving stone pathways, raised beds of verbena, impatiens, butterflyweed, rudbeckia. The plants all in shades of pink and blue, purple and yellow that butterflies loved. She’d added large specimen plants, ferns, small trees and host plants like dill and parsley, Queen Anne’s lace and African milkweed, to encourage the laying of eggs and as food for emerging caterpillars.
Steve and Peg had helped her build two waterfalls of lightweight landscaping rock—it was how they’d first met—a small one directly across from the door, and a much larger one that climbed almost to the ceiling in the farthest corner of the house so that the sound of falling water was everywhere. She loved this place, and Mark would have loved it, too. If he’d lived.
But if Mark